Despite the occasional bleat that no one wants war and that we are not seeking conflict in the Gulf, the United States continues to move closer and closer to some kind of clash with Iran. Administration officials are blaming the Iranian government for attacks against tankers owned by nations who still do business with Iran, citing non-existent evidence of sabotage by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – evidence contradicted by the owners of the Japanese ship that was attacked. Right wing blowhards like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas are advocating for strikes against Iran, and this is treated as a serious policy proposal. Various spokespeople for the administration’s ever-emerging policy even raised the possibility of the U.S. providing naval escorts for commercial ships in the Gulf, modeling it on the tanker war phase of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
This last bit fascinated me. It’s so unusual for our leaders to even mention the Iran-Iraq war, I suspect largely because we had a dog in that fight … and the dog was named Saddam Hussein. (Also, one of the ships we sent to the Gulf on that particular mission was the U.S.S. Vincennes, which on July 3, 1988 shot down Iran Air flight 655, killing all 290 passengers on board, 60 of whom were children.) If this is the mark of a successful policy to be imitated, god help us. Few Americans will recall that Saddam Hussein started that war, in 1980, using chemical weapons liberally against the Iranians – weapons whose primary components were purchased from (West) Germany, I believe. One of the principal outcomes of the Iran-Iraq war was the invasion of Kuwait, subsequent Gulf War, then the 12-year strangulation and ultimate invasion of Iraq by the U.S.
This is to say that war can sometimes sound a lot simpler than it actually turns out to be. People like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, of course, are driven by ideology and really don’t care if their war with Iran turns out to be a disaster. But aside from the very crucial questions of whether the policy is right or legal, I think it’s fair to say that this administration’s deliberate push from functional diplomacy to the brink of armed conflict is reckless and potentially catastrophic, given the current state of international affairs. We are desperately in need of action on the ensuing climate crisis, and these nutjobs are driving us into another pointless war, damn the consequences.
I strongly suggest you contact your congressional representatives and urge them to oppose this policy. The switchboard is 202-224-3121. You may also want to use the Stance app, which is very easy to use when phoning your house member and senators. Right now, it’s our best chance at heading off this madness.
luv u,
jp
Immigration. Beyond the same lies, distortions, and barely concealed bigotry that usually erupt from his festering maw, Trump used the well-worn SOTU practice of using guests as rhetorical human shields in his argument for the Wall, greater immigration enforcement, and so on. This time it was family members of a U.S. citizen victim murdered by an MS13 member. Of course, Trump could bring in dozens of such cases if he can find them, and it would no more prove his case than this sorry demonstration. People get murdered in America, including a relatively small number at the hands of immigrants. Crucially, his “get tough” policy makes these victims less safe. By rounding up undocumented aliens by the thousands, Trump’s agents are creating a strong disincentive for members of that community to call the cops when they either witness or become victimized by gang activity. Just more evidence that bigotry is not only wrong and immoral – it’s just effing dumb.
One such story is the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). which I have mentioned previously in the blog over the years. This, in my opinion, is one of those seminal conflicts that set the stage for much that followed in this unfortunate region. The United States and U.S. allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf (particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE) played a central role in this horrendous war, a role which has virtually been expunged from pop culture history. One example is the
I think it’s worth saying at the outset that I have no idea of what our military’s mission is in Syria. I keep hearing that it’s essentially the same as the one we’re pursuing in Afghanistan – training and equipping a local force to fight the war for us – but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. It is, in fact, a formula for another unending deployment, one that has the support of most of the foreign policy voices in the media. Much of the criticism of Trump’s abrupt decision has been from a right militarist perspective, though one that is broadly shared, much like the criticism of his Korea policy. The only argument that has merit, in my view, is that we will be leaving the Syrian Kurds twisting in the wind – something we have done to the Kurds in past decades as well (ask Kissinger). Maybe that is worth keeping 2,000 plus U.S. troops in Syria, if protecting Kurdish fighters is in fact what they’re doing, but as always, we are pondering policy stacked on top of bad policy decades in the making.
Why? Is it just oil? Well, that’s a complicated issue. Sure, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have been the center of attention for so long if their chief export had been nutmeg. Their ample supply of easy-to-extract, cheap-to-process crude oil was famously described by our policymakers as a source of enormous strategic power and perhaps the greatest material prize in the history of the world. But it’s that “strategic power” that is the key, as I’ve mentioned previously in these pages. We didn’t need Saudi oil in the 1950s and we don’t need it today, but we do need to have influence and a potential veto over it to maintain our leverage over other nations.
Of course, this principle gets violated all the time without consequence, particularly by our own leaders and those of our allied nations. Not sure how, exactly, this prohibition made its way into this document back in the day when the United States was the sole remaining power and the first-ever superpower in world history. We had an enormous hand in erecting this international order, putting ourselves at the very top of the global power structure in as much as we were the only nation to have emerged from the ravages of World War II stronger than before. Why would we include this principle only to violate it consistently for the next seventy years?
It’s a war that Bibi doesn’t want to fight, and with good reason. Sure, they have undeclared nuclear weapons – hundreds of them – but those are pretty much useless beyond their value as an end-of-the-world threat. The fact is, Israel can’t win a conventional war with Iran, and they know it. Iran would be a difficult adversary, as well as a vast territory to subdue and occupy – it has “strategic depth”, as Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has pointed out. But honestly, when was the last time Israel won an actual war? 1973? Don’t say Lebanon – sure, they drove the PLO out of Beirut (at an enormous cost to the population), but by no means did that end positively for them. Their armed forces have suffered from too much colonial population control – thugging the Palestinians, in essence. But they still want to overthrow the Iranian regime. That’s where we come in.
It’s not hard to see why Trump is on the same page as practically every political leader in America in treating Iran like a muck room rug. Israel wants us to attack them. Saudi wants us to attack them. The UAE wants us to attack them. And the majority of Americans are under the spell of the propaganda campaign about the incomparable evils of Iran. We’ve been fed this with a fire hose since the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution and the “hostage crisis” – basically my entire adult life. It has been reinforced over the intervening decades, through the Iran-Iraq war years (recall the “hostages” in Lebanon), the confrontations in the 90s, their inclusion in the “Axis of Evil”, and so on. Trump is a product of the same smear campaign.