I posted a longer version of this diary a couple of days ago, to no comment. To me, though, it's important and explains a great deal about the unstated logic behind the Iran situation. It's worth the effort, if you have a moment to spare.
As Jerome and others have said, an attack on Iran is idiotic (that is, if your ostensible goal is to win). It would damage our credibility, undermine stability, press our already exhausted treasury and military, leave us vulnerable to terrorism, and probably exacerbate the nuclear threat. So why attack Iran? The good George Orwell, who in so many ways has prophesied what's becoming of modern America, offers what seems to me the most reasonable explanation.
There is only one primary reason we're at war, and will continue to be until something brings down what Orwell calls "the machine:"
The primary aim of modern warfare...is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.
The Oceania of 1984, governed by Big Brother and "the Party" was a place, like Stalinist Russia, that suffered continual shortage of basic consumer goods. Our society did not follow that course, because until the Cold War and the rise of mega-corporations and the "military industrial complex," we had a functioning democracy. But today, our society has surplus, and we've achieved the glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel that Oceania did not become. We have, or had, a healthy middle class. Although there was an American aristocracy of sorts, it was penetrable. This, of course, does not do for your modern Republican/corporate oligarch, which seeks a restoration, essentially, of a wealthy ruling elite, the elimination of the middle class, and the creation of a dispossessed and disenfranchised underclass of worker/consumer units. To accomplish this, the surplus generated by our heretofore democratic and mobile society must be expended. Why? Read on.
From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Sound familiar? Except that the prosperity (for those lucky enough to be a citizen of the empire rather than a barbarian at the gate) lasted until about the end of the 20th century...
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
Hence the current effort to undermine or destroy the public institutions that seek to eliminate poverty and ignorance, such as public education, affordable health care, social security & welfare, and shift those resources to the ruling elite, who expend it in war and its corollary: a media apparatus and system of public mis-education that serve to catapult its propaganda.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
I doubt whether Orwell could have predicted the way in which material comfort could be used to anesthetize a population such as ours, but then he probably never counted on the fact that such prosperity would even occur. Even so, such material prosperity would, over the long run, erode the ruling elite's ability to operate freely, since some of that wealth would naturally enrich public institutions and progressive agendas, which, indeed, it has.
Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed...In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
And today, the members of the "Inner Party," that 10% of the population that makes over 200k a year, is -- as is our nation as a whole -- up to its ears in debt. It exists always at the brink of hardship, its consumption continuously outpacing its ability to pay. Though they live among the trappings and ostentation of wealth, they are in fact, living at the edge. It is only that .01%, the millionaires and billionaires, the oligarchs if you will, that hope to derive ultimate benefit from the economy, and so they must create the illusion of prosperity which masks an impoverished reality for all but that .01%.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way...the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
And there you have it, folks, modern America in summary.
Instead of a quasi-fascist "Party" in Orwell's dystopic future, what we have nascent (or even dominant) in American politics today is a corporate oligarchy. On its face it shares qualities with fascism, but it's far more insidious and harder to pin down. Essentially, the corporate oligarchy has assumed power by leveraging its financial power to buy out the democratic process. The wars the Bush administration is engaged in have little to do, as we all know, with preventing terrorism. They are mechanisms by which the corporate oligarchy can continue to consolidate wealth while generating enough of a surplus to give the economy the appearance of health, then exhausting the surplus in wars which, in part, acquire the fuel (read: cheap oil) on which the oligarchy depends.
It must have been some brilliantly evil ironist in the administration who suggested renaming the GWOT the "Long War." Sustained and endless war is precisely what the "machine" needs to perpetuate itself. And if we as a population not only accept the war but support it because we -- like the citizens of Oceania in Orwell's novel -- fear phantom terrorists (in 1984, a character named -Goldberg- Goldstein served this function), then so much the better for the oligarchs.