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U.S. Surreal On Iran
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The discussion in the U.S. about attacking Iran is surreal. The public debate is between those who want to "nuke" Iran and those who just want to bomb it with depleated uranium ammunition.
Nobody calls them out for this insanity. The media is playing along, fascinated this or that haircut or cleavege. Noone is refutiating Bush’s lies. The voices of realists (old fashioned rightwingers) seem to be restricted to blog posts.
How can one reintroduce some sanity into this?
Some quotes below the fold …
KARZAI: We have had very, very good, very, very close relations, thanks in part also to an understanding of the United States in this regard, and an environment of understanding between the two, the Iranian government and the United States government, in Afghanistan.
We will continue to have good relations with Iran. We will continue to resolve issues, if there are any, to arise.
BLITZER: Well, is Iran a problem or a solution as far as you are concerned? Are they helping you or hurting you?
KARZAI: Well, so far Iran has been a helper and a solution.
CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER, August 5, 2007
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BUSH: Now, the President will have to talk to you about Afghanistan. But I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence there in Afghanistan is a positive force — and therefore, it’s going to be up to them to prove to us and prove to the government that they are.
[…]
But because of the actions of this government, this country is isolated. And we will continue to work to isolate it, because they’re not a force for good, as far as we can see. They’re a destabilizing influence wherever they are.
Bush Karzai Press Availability, August 6, 2007
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On Wednesday evening, Mr Maliki met Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iranian media said that after the meeting Mr Maliki expressed appreciation for Iran’s positive and constructive stance on Iraq, including providing security and fighting against what he described as terrorism.
BBC, August 9, 2007
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Q: .. Reports out of Iran today, out of Iran, say that Prime Minister Maliki told President Ahmadinejad that he appreciated Iran’s positive and constructive stance. The pictures from the visit are very warm. ..
THE PRESIDENT: .. Now if the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend, the Prime Minister, because I don’t believe they are constructive. ..
Bush Press Conference, August 9, 2007
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Fourteen months after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered to talk to Iran, the failure of carrot-and-stick diplomacy to block Tehran’s nuclear and regional ambitions is producing a new drumbeat for bolder action, including the possible use of force.
[…]
A possible timetable has emerged as well. "The consensus I’m hearing is to give the [U.N.] Security Council process more time but not unlimited time, and, at some point in the spring of 2008, there has to be a good hard look at whether that process should continue and whether other options should then be considered," said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert for the Congressional Research Service.
In the Debate Over Iran, More Calls for a Tougher U.S. Stance, Robin Wright, WaPo, August 9, 2007
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Here are some of the examples Wright provides of the drumbeat: Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute; Kori Schake in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review; the Heritage Foundation Web site and Norman Podhoretz in Commentary.
The article does not include any quotes from the wide range of experts — essentially, almost everyone who’s not a neoconservative — who believe a U.S. attack on Iran would backfire even more spectacularly than the Iraq war has.
White House Watch, August 9, 2007
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It is quite egregious for the Jacobins to argue that Iran has not responded to a diplomatic effort in which carrots and sticks have been offered. What carrots? Whenever Rice or Satterfield talk about diplomacy on Television we are treated to a vision of glowering bluster demanding Iranian compliance in Iraq. Period!!!
Our "negotiating" strategy toward Iran is nothing but a demand for their surrender. Period!!
[…]
This is log-rolling. Don’t be rolled.
Pat Lang, August 9, 2007
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Q: .. [About Iran] ..
THE PRESIDENT: Should I be concerned of a picture — should the
American people be concerned about Iran? Yes, we ought to be very
concerned about Iran. They’re a destabilizing influence. ..
.. when Ahmadinejad has announced that the destruction of Israel is part of its foreign policy.
That’s something, obviously, we cannot live with. ..
[…]
.. Iran can do better. The government is isolating its people. The
government has caused America and other nations, rational nations, to
say, we will work together to do everything we can to deny you economic opportunity because of the decisions you are making. ..
Bush Press Conference, August 9, 2007
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Here is my nightmare. The Cheneyites succeed in creating a situation in which Bush does decide to bomb Iran. Iran retaliates, as they openly threaten to do, with terrorist attacks against us on U.S. soil. That tilts the election. I can imagine a Karl Rove political calculation that would buttress a Cheney-Addington national security calculation, probably with Eliot Abrams’ support.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, August 8, 2007
b @ 1: To add to the chaos: U.S. Seeks U.N. Help With Talks On Iraq
Unfortunately there’s a little problem:
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 8 (IPS) – The U.N. Staff Council, representing 25,000 staff members, unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday calling on Secretary General Ban Ki-moon not to deploy any additional staff members to Iraq and to remove those currently serving at the duty station in Baghdad.
POLITICS: UN Staff Oppose Proposed Iraq Resolution
Or from the Guardian:
Staff vote against plans to increase presence
The UN security council is set to agree a resolution today to expand its role in Iraq despite overwhelming opposition from its staff.
Although the organisation often goes into extremely dangerous situations, the UN staff association, which represents 6,000 people in New York and 18,000 involved in peacekeeping and other operations overseas, voted unanimously on Tuesday against deployment in Iraq because of the high risks. It also called for the removal of existing staff. The UN insisted yesterday that it can go ahead in spite of staff opposition and would be able to find people to fill the new posts.
The US president, George Bush, is pressing the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to beef up the UN operation in Iraq, which it scaled back in 2003 after a bomb killed its envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 other staff at its Baghdad headquarters.
[snip]
The staff association voted “not to deploy any additional staff members to Iraq and to remove those currently serving at the duty station in Baghdad until such time as the security situation and environment improves”. They noted “the unacceptably high level of risk to the safety and security of UN personnel currently serving in Iraq and that the breakdown of law and order in Iraq has created a place where aid workers have become targets and pawns.”
The security council draft resolution is sponsored by the US and Britain. Mr Bush was initially cool about involvement of the UN in the immediate postwar period but now, amid all the anarchy, has been persuaded that it could play a useful role.
The previous secretary general, Kofi Annan, had also been reluctant to become involved in Iraq, viewing it as a mess of Mr Bush’s making.
The draft resolution proposes that the UN’s present limited remit be changed to allow its special envoy, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, of Pakistan, to “advise, support and assist” the Iraqi government in political, economic, electoral, legal, constitutional, refugee and human rights matters. Mr Qazi is due to stand down in October.
Staff vote against plans to increase presence | Iraq | Guardian Unlimited
There’s a reason why it’s not safe for U.N. personnel in Irak and it’s they’re not seen even remotely as neutral. They’re seen as a tool of the U.S.A and Irakis have neither forgotten nor forgiven the atrocious behaviour of U.N. staff in Irak during the sanctions era. You have no idea of how hated they are.
Posted by: markfromireland | Aug 10 2007 12:01 utc | 6
@markfromireland:
I accept your apology, and I do largely agree, as does Chomsky, with your conclusions of the irrelevance of the antiwar/antiimperialist left in the west.
That still doesn’t explain why you then take precious time to post here. I guess my contention was that if you post here, you should care what the others who read your posts think — otherwise why post? Are you trying to influence people whose beliefs are “irrelevant?”
My belief is this:
A world in which there is an opposing power center to Western elites, as during the time of the Soviet Union, was marginally more just, especially to the semi-peripheral countries of the world. But such a World System, even if the SCO can eventually unite and grow to be a counter to western imperialism, is neither just, nor sustainable. Nor is the entire world system’s approach to the planet: so completely commodifed that rewards and survival itself are scaled to increasing the rate of growth, resource extraction, and corporate control of life; the more you actively aid this unsustainable, violent and destructive system, the more the system values you, and the more secure you are within an inherently immoral and insecure system itself. This logic leads to one wave of extinction after another, as the system “rationalizes” itself, and becomes more “efficient”: Indigenous people, followed by tribal people; nomads followed by the settled; small farmers followed by large non-corporate farmers; small dialects followed by whole languages; folkways followed by whole cultures; small retailers followed by large chains; small libraries followed by whole civilizations — all of this must be continually fed, at ever increasing rates, into the great maw of progress. It is the opposite of the vagina which gives birth to us all; it is the black hole, the vagina “dentata,” the fallen-God Shiva, which voraciously consumes all without surfeit. Of course, under this Regime of Rationalization, there is no problem with “The Final Solution,” “The Vietnamese Solution,” “The Iraqi Solution,” “The Long War Against Muslim Extremism,” “The Solution to the Indian Problem,” “The Solution to the Immigration Problem,” nor any other “solution” we see enacted upon the world stage; no problem with Nazism or with Capitalism. Logic is logic is logic, as Gertrude Stein might say (although to those who understood her code she was poking a hole in what she was affirming).
By the same logic, there is no discrete war in Iraq, just as ultimately there was no discrete war in Vietnam. War is a way of being. War is a red dye which spreads to cover us all, victim and victimizer, from head to toe. There is, as breal so diligently documents, a war against Africa (one little part of which, The Congo, is responsible for far more deaths and dislocations than the entire war in Iraq — but silently, stealthily; outside the range of media cameras and op-ed moralists’ limited purviews); there is the war against the Americas (one little part of which, Colombia, is responsible for the deaths of fully half the labor leaders and union organizers worldwide); there is the gladio-war against Europe, and anyone who dares to change the systems there (whose social welfare states’ funds are entirely dependent upon propping up the groaning US death/debt machine, as we saw by the unprecedented European Central Bank infusion of $150B into that self-same machine this week); there is the war against the insufficiently rapacious people of the west, too, those guilty in not showing enough zeal-in-slaughter, as Uncle $cam tirelessly documents (for that is the one true crime which the system cannot let go unpunished); there is the war in Palestine, as Bea documents; there is the war against the indigenous, as DebsIsDead reminds us; there is nothing but war, war, war, until the whole carcass of the planet rots from within, one great Hieronymous Bosch creaking, and groaning, and shrieking dynamo nightmare; there is even the war against animal life, whereby we are taught not to consume happy animals who have led an animal life, but only tortured, penned, drugged, fattened, cancerous, cadaverous creatures, who have successfully navigated the concentration torture camps we call “animal husbandry.” Yes, there is nothing but the War of the all against the all.
In short, human life on this planet does not ultimately make sense for the planet, nor does it make much ultimate sense for us humans as a species, or even as enlightened individuals. But we are still here; there is not yet a mass movement to run full-speed off the edge of cliffs (speaking literally here, not metaphorically, where the opposite is quite demonstrably true) like lemmings. So the problem of existence remains.
And it remains, as perhaps it always has for an enlightened individual who questions everything and does not hew blindly to the prejudices of their time. As philosopher EM Cioran once said, “We are, each of us, deep in a private hell, every second of which is a miracle.” Once we are here and really open our eyes, life sucks — but the alternative is far worse.
So back to you and me, Mark. You were born in a western imperialist outpost. Surely you, as all of us, has to come to terms with this and the basic problem of life. To the extent that you believe that you have answered this problem successfully is the extent to which you believe hope and a solution can come from the west. Surely you cannot deny your own self and life story.
Nor can any of us here at MoA. We are all proverbial “pigs in a poke,” stuck on the barbed wire of human existence. We are all sentient beings, from all walks of life, and all over this globe, in various stages of waking up, giving up, uniting, and taking action. It hurts, it sucks, it is unfair, it is painful. (Although not nearly as painful as what our victims go through; we are merely the hunted, the pursued, not the entrapped and ensnared; we are slowly being consumed, not having limbs and organs chopped off, lopped off, and exploratorily drilled into.)
But this episode, this conflict, is different than Vietnam, this one is global in scale, in nature, and in the extent of the crisis; this one won’t end until the bloodletting results in either a complete “rationalization,” a nihilistic nullity, or, perhaps, just perhaps, a slightly better way of being. The elite can hide out behind their medieval gated communities for perhaps a generation or two, but eventually those walls will be overrun, breached, as they always are, by those locked outside.
So who is to say, who has the foreknowledge to authoritarily proclaim that our small efforts here at MoA are for naught? Who knows for sure where our efforts will take us, what talents might be nurtured here, what will come out of this, or any other experiment? Surely, this blog provides us with a sense of community and belonging, with a way to get through the day without being led away in the looney van in total disassociation. And surely what we are doing here is less destructive than drag racing or paintball fighting. All we are doing is burning a few electrons in community. Maybe we haven’t all laid our lives on the line to fight the beast — yet. Maybe ultimately some of us will and some of us won’t; maybe the majority of us will just tighten our belts and belly ache. Who really knows, and who is to judge?
So this is an experiment, the blog. Just that and nothing more. Maybe Bernhard is evil Kos’ cousin and is a member of the German version of the CIA, hosting this blog just to monitor us, and keep us busy and quiescent with stupid posts. Does it really matter? What other options exist in the world; we can take up a hobby, such as web design or woodworking, and buy more “stuff” in the process; we can sink into quiescence, meditating and waiting for the Dalai Lama, or some other CIA-funded enlightened being to arise and save us. Or we can belly-ache and grouse around our pen here, share ideas for survival and perhaps a drink or two (we KNOW that won’t be made illegal again), and some of us may, even by your high standards, eventually become part of the solution, not the problem.
Finally, just because your audience lies beyond the closest clutches of empire, does not mean that your audience is any different than us: largely middle-class web-connected professionals, artists, and paper-shufflers. As Michael Alpert calls our class, the co-ordinator class — those without which the elite could not continue their crimes of death and avarice, even in the semi-peripheral countries which compose your target audience, because we are the ones who oil the machinery of society, helping it to function, and providing anodynes for the excluded and angry. Surely, Mark, you are bright enough to know that History has warned us not to look here for the revolution.
The revolution will not be blogged and Photoshopped, Mark –so why blog at all? No, History has taught us not to look there for the revolution. Even someone as full of himself as you must concede that.
But what does History know? Neither you, nor History, has the right to judge and decide the value of what our community does here on this blog.
Just a few thoughts on a sunny day when I really should be out doing something useful, like getting skin cancer.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 11 2007 16:52 utc | 43
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