The drums of war with Iran will be beating loudly in the three months leading up to AIPAC's policy conference early next March. The Republican candidates for president (with the exception of Rep. Ron Paul) will try to outdo each other in professing devotion to Israel coupled with calls to inflict more "crippling sanctions" on Iran while pledging to keep the war option "on the table."
The White House will dispatch deputies throughout the country to assure Democratic donors that the president is as hawkish on Iran as any Republican and that the war option is on his table, too.
The AIPAC conference itself, with more than half the Congress in attendance, plus the president, will be all about the Iranian threat. Speaker after speaker will claim that Iran is on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons that would be used to finish the work Hitler began. (See this typical AIPAC speech by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor which hits heavily on the Iran/Holocaust theme).
As I noted in a column a few weeks ago, the Iran war claque is comprised almost entirely of neoconservatives/right-wing "pro-Israel" activists and opinion leaders (from AIPAC and its associated organizations) joined by politicians seeking campaign contributions.
For a politician, being an Iran hawk can be very lucrative while favoring diplomacy is a sure ticket to AIPAC purgatory. (Every candidate for the House and Senate must fill out an AIPAC questionnaire on attitudes toward Iran and the Palestinians. Providing the "wrong" answers or not responding means trouble).
Writing in Salon last week, Gary Kamiya, long-time executive editor of the publication, noted that the people promoting war with Iran are many of the same people who led the charge into Iraq.
Kamiya asks how it is that anyone would pay any attention at all to people who not only were wrong about Iraq but fixed the intelligence (e.g, Undersecretary of State Douglas Feith) to get the bloody result they wanted. Of course, Kamiya knows the answer.
If American politics did not contain an enormous blind spot, no one would pay any attention to what these discredited ideologues have to say. The Iraq war they championed turned out to be one of the biggest foreign-policy disasters in U.S. history. Their ignorant and Islamophobic view of the Middle East is as breathtaking as their bland willingness to commit America to yet another ruinous war against a Muslim country, this time one four times larger than Iraq and with more than twice as many people. They have a demonstrated track record of complete failure.
Yet these incompetent militarists are still taken seriously. And the reason is simple: They purport to be supporters of Israel. In American politics, you can get away with even the most cracked war-mongering as long as you claim to be "pro-Israel." And the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for anything having to do with Israel is the Holocaust.
Kamiya also addresses the awful irony in the pro-war claques' using fear of a second Holocaust as a rationalization for war. That is because there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran's development of a nuclear arsenal would physically jeopardize Israel while a regional war sparked by an attack on Iran almost certainly would.
After all, no country in history has ever committed suicide in order to destroy another. And Israel, with 200 nuclear weapons and air, sea and land launchers, could easily destroy Iran if it was attacked.
Listening to Prime Minister Netanyahu's rhetoric and watching the mysterious explosions that keep occurring near Iran's nuclear sites, it has to be clear to the Iranian leadership that a nuclear attack on Israel would destroy Persian culture forever, not to mention the lives of tens of millions of innocent Iranian people. Against that is the absurd argument by neocons that Iranians are innately suicidal, driven mad by their faith.
The Holocaust argument is absurd and offensive. Israel is here to stay and Iran knows it. It also knows, as we need to learn, that Israel's ostensible fear of an Iranian nuclear attack is simply the understanding that a nuclear armed Iran would limit Israel's regional hegemony. At the moment, Israel has a free hand to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants to (like kill Iranian scientists with impunity or blow up suspected nuclear sites). But it would not be able to do all of these things, at least not as easily, if Iran has a nuclear arsenal.
As for a Holocaust, the main threat to Israel from Iran would come from the regional war that would inevitably follow any Israeli (or U.S.) attack on Iran. Every major Israeli city is within range of Hezbollah's missiles and it has tens of thousands of them. How many innocent Israelis would die in a missile onslaught produced by Netanyahu and Barak's obsession with maintaining Israeli hegemony? How many is it worth?
A war with Iran would end any possibility of Israel ever achieving either peace with the Muslim world or any semblance of security. Forever. The dream of a secure Jewish homeland, a dream that took 1900 years to achieve, would be over.
It is hard to imagine that any Jew would wish that on Israel. But clearly some do.
I'll let Kamiya conclude this piece:
It is understandable that a people who suffered one of the most horrific genocides in human history would commemorate it, and vow never to allow it to happen again. But history is filled with ugly ironies, and sometimes the reaction to a trauma ensures that it keeps happening again.A young Polish Jew named Ruth Grunkraut and her mother were shipped to Bergen-Belsen. Grunkraut's mother died just six days before the Allies liberated the camp. Before she died, she told her daughter, "You must live. You must live for me."
The annals of the Holocaust are filled with this same message: You must live.
An attack on Iran will be carried out in the name of the victims of the Holocaust. But that attack, rather than saving the Jewish state, will sound the death knell for it. Israel and its American supporters owe more to the millions of human beings whose last prayer, before their deaths, was that their children live.
In the name of the victims of the Holocaust and, even more, of their descendants, this war must be prevented.
Follow MJ Rosenberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mjayrosenberg
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Problems of Middle East started with the great game (look it up on google) and division of Middle East post WWI by France and England and their divide and conqure strategy and giving other peoples land to Jewish Immigrants post WWII, and take over of US as the hegemon in the 1950s.
This is the new "Holocaust" and Americans are simply too self-serving to address it honestly.
Who cares about the Hittite holocaust? Seen a Girgashite around lately? How about a Jebusite? Does anyone wonder *why* the Arab and Persian countries might be just a little worried about a nuclear power who think that their deity's idea of a victory in war is to "doom them to destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter"?
That isn't to say it's assured that the iranian regime would nuke israel, but it's foolish to state with assurance that this regime would never sacrifice a portion of its citizenry to destroy israel. Their words and past actions make it a realistic, if horrifying scenario. .
b) No they havent
b) also no, they havent, not for "victory" but for "survival" from the mechanised onslaught and poison gases of well equipped Mr Saddam Hussein. Now where did he get that equipment from hmm?
b) Are you aware that israel armed iran in that war? They are natural allies, and israel thought that at some level, iran wasn't as irrational and religiously genocidal as they appeared to be. Iran took their arms too.
I don't imagine this to be Israel's activity alone - but NATO's - and the US and UK in particular.
Precedent for actions spanning decades needs a view of context of decades. For instance, health threat infrastructure effects of How the U.S. intentiionally destroyed Iraq's water supply http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0808-07.htm
This should be viewed in context with Water Warfare. Some ideas
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-wealth-power.html
Info relating to the NPT TRAP feeds into this scenario, which affects North Korea as well.
because it would be the same chit as iraq
I have yet to read a single opinion from this author about Cuban lobby in regards to U.S. Cuban policies of Irish American friendship organizations which supported various militant Irish causes or for that matter CAIR war-mongering against Israel or fund raising for various Islamist, Salafist and Jihadist causes in U.S.
It is a far different experience starting and controlling a war with movements of a pen then standing on the front lines.
"(A) passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation." (Emphasis added)
“war does not determine who is right, only who is left.” (B. Russell)
where things stand Bibi and company are the bigger suicidal lot as they are the one openly calling for an attack....and at the same time play the faux perpetual victimhood victim...
That was sarcasm, if you aren't following the statements of the current dictatorial regime.