Israel's current military actions against Gaza and Lebanon, whatever the justifications theoretical or real may be, are genuine problems for the United States. I'm certainly going to continue to follow the news on those, because they affect the position of the United States forces in Iraq, American interests in the Middle East, the "global war on terrorism" and other things, as well.
My biggest concern right now is that after some months in which it began to appear that the Cheney-Bush administration was pulling back from any consideration of attacking Iran, Bush seems to be using the Israel-Lebanon War to build a justification for just such an attack.
Glenn Greenwald makes a good but disturbing point in Is Bill Kristol writing George Bush's Middle East speeches? Unclaimed Territory blog 07/31/06:
George Bush's radio address yesterday on the Israel-Lebanon war preaches pure neoconservative gospel. Every point the President made would fit very comfortably into a Bill Kristol Weekly Standard column or a Michael Ledeen Corner item. This speech leaves no doubt that, at least rhetorically, the President is still a full-fledged adherent to the tenets of neoconservatism, and thus considers the Israel-Lebanon war to be "our war" in every sense, merely another front in the Epic Global War of Civilizations (a/k/a The Long War, World War III/IV, etc.) ...
Much the same could be said of his somewhat incoherent press conference on Friday with Tony Blair.
Of course, the talk of attacking Iran doesn't preclude an attack on Syria, either.
I'm not completely comfortable with the way Justin Raimondo frames his analysis. But he's got reason for his basic argument in The Return of the Neocons Antiwar.com 07/30/06
War with Iran under current conditions would be a number of things: a war crime, a sin, a horror, a hideous mistake, an extremely foolish risk. The US Army - you know, the mightiest fighting forces in the history of the world, etc., etc. - haven't been able to secure the city of Baghdad in what's coming up on three and a half years of fighting. And we're going to widen the war to Iran? And maybe Syria?
Look at a map of the Middle East. If the US goes to war with Syria and Iran, American forces will be fighting active wars from the coast of the Mediterranean Sea (Syria) to the border of Pakistan (Afghanistan). And the only way the Army has been able to maintain the current of troops in Iraq has been to raise the age of enlistment for the reserves to 42, stretch the reserves themselves to a point that it will take them years to recover their normal functionality, and accepting characters like the psychopathic killer accused of raping and murdering that 14-year-old Iraqi girl and thugs associated with neo-Nazi groups.
No, trolls, I'm not characterizing the entire Army that way, so bite me. But the pressure to maintain the current 130,000 or so troops (and growing) in Iraq really has led to that kind of serious deterioration in standards. I very much supported the War in Afghanistan in 2001. But what sense the US or NATO presences really have there now escapes me.
Getting out of Iraq is beyond the conceptual powers of the Cheney-Bush administration. But that and much more may be largely out of their hands if the expand the war to Iran, or to Iran and Syria.
And currently, the entire world sees the United States as the only backer of Israel as it blows up dozens of women and children in Qana - except of course for the ever-more-pathetic Tony Blair, who seems doomed to be remembered in history and little more than Bush's poodle.
We can recite the wrongs of Hizbullah, and there are no shortage of wrongs to recite. We can makes excuses for Israeli strikes in civilian areas, and we can moralize about how no one in the Arab (or Persian) worlds have any right to criticize America and our Christian values and civilization. Karen Hughes can pump out a few more "America hearts Muslims" ads, and we can pay off a few more Iraqi journalists to write phony stories about the "good news".
But the message that most of the Arab and Muslim worlds are getting about American values is what Israel is doing in places like Qana. And since the Cheney-Bush team has backed Israel on the Lebanon war to the degree it has, in this case the Muslim world are not being entirely irrational to see the US and Israel acting as almost one entity. There is plenty of anti-Semitism and wild conspiracy theories in the Arab world, and that s*** makes me sick.
But it's also a fact that Israel's action and the Cheney-Bush policies towards them have a major effect on America's perception and political position in the world, however much we might dislike that fact. Iraqis already refer to American soldiers there generically as "the Jews". It is not in America's interests to be identified so closely with Israel's actions in the occupied territories and in Lebanon.
And it is very definitely not in American interests right now to go to war with Iran or Syria.
Helena Cobban, a journalist with extensive experience in Middle East affairs, wrote in June about The incredible shrinking U.S. Salon 06/09/06. She looks at the effects of the lost war in Iraq on America's standing, and on the risks of doing other things equally or more foolish:
We can see now, indeed, that none of the optimistic scenarios that President Bush and his advisors have spun for Iraq in the past 39 months can be realized within any kind of politically feasible time frame. The White House will likely try to reduce the U.S. troop numbers to below 100,000 before the November midterms, but the tortured security situation inside Iraq is unlikely to improve. (And there are also many scenarios in which developments in Iraq could spin out of control very rapidly indeed.)
That wasn't even two months ago, and the idea that there's any possibility of reducing the US troop levels in Iraq to under 100,000 seems hopelessly outdated. Sort of a sudden debacle that forces a more rapid withdrawal, of course.
Her article is well worth reading. She talks about the effects of the Iraq War on Iran, Al Qaida and the GWOT, and Israel/Palestine. In her conclusion, she raises something that is unthinkable to the blowhard white guys who can't wait to have more wars for somebody else to fight and die in. But it's something that's well worth considering. That is, just how wonderful is it to be the "hegemon" of the world and seemingly obliged to mire our armed forces into hideous messes like the Iraq War? She writes:
Coming out of Iraq, the balance of power between Washington and the rest of the world will likely be quite different.
So as the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, there may be some developments in international politics that will strengthen global stability. The U.S. may lose the ability it has had for so long to block any resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute that does not conform to Israel's wishes. The U.S. and the other world powers may finally get serious about trying to stabilize Afghanistan (and other long-neglected parts of the world like Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Darfur), rather than leaving them to fester and thus incubate new al-Qaidas or other, as-yet-unseen networks of stakeless international troublemakers. And crucially, the gross power imbalance between the U.S.'s 300 million people and the 6 billion humans who are not U.S. citizens may finally shift toward a more egalitarian, and therefore more just and stable, position. But alongside these possible "gains" from the point of view of building a more just world, we also need to tally up the losses inflicted by the whole brutal Bush project in Iraq: primarily, the massive losses inflicted on Iraq's people, but also the losses of American lives and treasure.
I realize there are many Americans who are not as ready as I am to welcome the prospect of a diminishment (or, as I would say, a rectification) of the disproportionate amount of power our nation has been able to wield in world affairs over the past 60 years. Many Americans today - like many British or French citizens 80 years ago -- think it is somehow "natural" that their nation intervene in the doings of other nations around the world and act as the crucial arbiter in international affairs. (And yes, throughout history nearly all such interventions have always come dressed in "salvationist" garb: Very few nations ever knowingly undertake a war or any other foreign intervention that its people clearly understand to be unjust at the time. If such understanding comes at all, it does so only later.)
Why does U.S. hegemonism in the world seem "natural" to so many Americans? Plumbing the roots of that particular wrinkle on the broader conceit of American exceptionalism would take a long time! Suffice it to note here that after 9/11 the attacks of that day laid their own potent overlay of shock, fear and anger onto the bedrock of those older American attitudes. For roughly 30 months after 9/11, feelings of vengefulness, and of the righteousness of American anger (and of all the actions that flowed therefrom), seemed still to dominate the consciousness of a broad political elite in the U.S. It was only after the revelations of Abu Ghraib in April 2004 that the country's mainstream discourse on the war, and on what their vengefulness had caused the U.S. to become, became more self-aware and open to self-criticism.
Today, a clear majority of Americans judge that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. A similarly clear majority say the administration should set a timetable for withdrawal. This willingness to challenge the Bush people's spin on the situation in Iraq is a welcome sign of increased public understanding, but it does not signal any automatic readiness to challenge the principle of U.S. exceptionalism more broadly. Grappling with that issue is, I believe, our next great challenge as a citizenry; and it is a challenge that the events of the next few years will almost certainly force us to confront head-on. (my emphasis)
Widening the war to Iran will make confronting that development a much more urgent and difficult matter.
And if you think Helena Cobban is just some ditzy hippie, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in Do not attack Iran the International Herald Tribune 04/26/06 about several of the major risks involved in attacking Iran, not least of them this one:
Likely Iranian reactions would significantly compound ongoing U.S. difficulties in Iraq and in Afghanistan, perhaps precipitate new violence by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in all probability cause the United States to become bogged down in regional violence for a decade or more to come. Iran is a country of some 70 million people and a conflict with it would make the misadventure in Iraq look trivial. (my emphasis)
And he writes:
It follows that an attack on Iran would be an act of political folly, setting in motion a progressive upheaval in world affairs. With America increasingly the object of widespread hostility, the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end.
While America is clearly preponderant in the world, it does not have the power - nor the domestic inclination - to both impose and then to sustain its will in the face of protracted and costly resistance. That certainly is the lesson taught both by its Vietnamese and Iraqi experiences.
Moreover, persistent hints by official spokesmen that "the military option is on the table" impedes the kind of negotiations that could make that option redundant. Such threats unite Iranian nationalism with Shiite fundamentalism. They also reinforce growing international suspicions that the United States is even deliberately encouraging greater Iranian intransigence.
Sadly, one has to wonder whether in fact such suspicions may not be partially justified. (my emphasis)
Unfortunately, the developments since July 12 have given us new reason to worry about the Cheney-Bush administration starting a war with Iran. With no good reason and without the troops or the competence to pull off what they attempt.
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