Ramp-Up to Attacking Iran

December 28, 2007

JOE MILLER

Despite their spin about pursuing diplomatic solutions, Bush, Cheney and their allies continue in their relentless push to create a "justification" for an attack upon Iran -- an attack that would be irrational, immoral, criminal. Below find several powerful articles describing this escalating drumbeat to war.

John Isaacs' (1) article provides an excellent overview of the way the campaign to attack Iran is being orchestrated in Congress. Isaacs also describes the role of "Freedom Watch," a group formed in August, 2007, to support the "surge" in Iraq and now an attack upon Iran. For more on "Freedom Watch" see the profile (2) on the International Relations Center's (IRC) Right Web website. Right Web (3) tracks "the main players, organizations, corporate supporters, foundations, educational institutions," etc. in and outside of government (primarily on the right, but also "liberal hawks") that influence US "foreign, military, and homeland security policies."

1. John Isaacs: Congress and Iran - The New Iraq? 10/31/07
   http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/4693
2. Right Web Profile: Freedom's Watch
   http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/4512
3. About Right Web
   http://rightweb.irc-online.org/about.php

Marjorie Cohn (4) provides an incisive rebuttal of the Bush-Cheney campaign to attack Iran. The next five paragraphs are directly from her analysis:

"As Bush and Cheney try to whip us into a frenzy about the dangers Iran poses, their argument comes up short. They say Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says there is "no evidence" of this. They say Iran is sending deadly weapons into Iraq to kill U.S. troops, but those devices can be manufactured in any Iraqi machine shop. Now the New York Times reports most of the foreign fighters in Iraq come, not from Iran, but from two Bush allies - Saudi Arabia and Libya. An estimated 90 percent of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters. And senior U.S. military officials believe the financial support for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia comes primarily from Saudi Arabia." ...

"Like Bush's invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran would violate international and U.S. law. The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council. Iran, which has not attacked any country for 2,000 years, hasn't threatened to invade the United States or Israel. Rather than protecting Israel, U.S. or Israeli military force against Iran will endanger Israel, which would invariably suffer a retaliatory attack.

In making its case against Iran, the administration points to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's alleged comment that Israel should be wiped off the map. But this is an erroneous translation of what he said. According to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole and Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, who said the "regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Cole said this "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all." Journalist Diana Johnstone points out the quote is not aimed at the Israeli people, but at the Zionist "regime" occupying Jerusalem. "Coming from a Muslim religious leader," Johnstone wrote, "this opinion is doubtless based on objection to Jewish monopoly of a city considered holy by all three of the Abramic monotheisms."

It seems significant that support for Ahmadinejad may be waning among the real power brokers in Iran, particularly the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Jomhouri Eslami daily in Iran, which has close ties to Khamenei, has denounced Ahmadinejad's characterization of those opposed to his nuclear program as traitors.

If the United States attacks Iran, the results would be catastrophic. Three Europeans, including former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and Yehuda Atai, a member of the Israeli Committee for a Middle East without Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in Libération, "We are being warned about it from all sides: The United States is at the brink of war, ready to bombard Iran. The only thing lacking is the presidential order." Drawing parallels with the U.S. war in Iraq, they caution, "An attack against Iran, whatever its targets, its methods and its initial scope, will significantly aggravate the situation, achieving similar results, without even talking about the disastrous impact on the global economy." They add, "It would be still worse if the insane idea of using tactical nuclear weapons - which exist - to prevent Iran from building, in spite of its denials, the nuclear weapons that recent IAEA inspections have found no trace of, were implemented."

4. Marjorie Cohn: Preventing the Impending War on Iran 11/25/07
   http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/25/5414/

Chris Hedges' comments (5) capture the gravity of the situation. Hedges' asserts:

"... an attack on Iran--which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election--will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d'état that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.

Let us hope sanity prevails. But sanity is a rare commodity in a White House that has twisted Trotsky's concept of permanent revolution into a policy of permanent war with nefarious aims--to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to strip citizens of their constitutional rights." ...

"George W. Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. He has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Conventions and human rights law in the treatment of detainees. Most egregious, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. He seeks to do the same in Iran.

President is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the "crime of aggression." And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for this crime, if we do not actively defy this government, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation--largely put in place by the United States--and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. We must as citizens make sacrifices to defend a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation and the law are respected. If we allow these international legal systems to unravel, we will destroy the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies."

5. Chris Hedges: Hands Off Iran 11/21/07
   http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071210/hedges

Some Positive News

I'm guessing that you're as exhausted as I am. Here's a bit of positive news. "The National Lawyers Guild (6) voted unanimously and enthusiastically for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at its national convention in Washington, DC" on Nov. 5. The resolution lists more than a dozen high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush and Cheney administration and "calls upon the U.S. House of Representatives to immediately initiate impeachment proceedings, to investigate the charges, and if the investigation supports the charges, to vote to impeach George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney as provided in the Constitution of the United States of America." The full text of the resolution is available at link number 7.

6. National Lawyers Guild Votes for Impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney
   http://nlg.org/news/index.php?entry=entry071106-092734
7. Resolution on Impeachment of Bush and Cheney
   http://nlg.org/convention/2007%20Resolutions/Impeachment%20resolution.pdf

For more on the progress of various impeachment initiatives, see the After Downing Street website (8) and National Impeachment Resource Center subpage (9).

8. After Downing Street Coalition
   http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/
9. National Impeachment Resource Center
   http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/resourcecenter

####

Joseph Miller
Department of Psychology
51 Madeleva
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556

---

St. Joe Valley Greens, South Bend, IN