Prime Minister Olmert is
hinting about strikes on Iran and will meet with President Bush today. Israel still wants the United States to attack Iran, regardless of the interests of the American people or the
peaceful intentions of Iran itself:
Houston Chronicle
"Our big worry is that they will wait too long to act, after it is too late to stop the Iranians from gaining the knowledge to build a bomb," said one senior Israeli official
Saddam had achieved almost universal adult literacy and Baghdadi meant "wealthy"in Arabic slang when his administration became a target for devastating sanctions and war. Lebanon had rebuilt a vibrant economy, drawing large numbers of sophisticated young professionals, when it was bombed back to the stone age this summer. Iran's educational progress and economic scale now invite our wrath and destruction.
Iran must be attacked soon to prevent it becoming an examplar of economic progress and a regional power, and the plan is to permanently impoverish Iranians by stealing their oil wealth.
Certainly Iran is not an ideal state, but it is no where near as bad as many others. The example of Iran as a paradigm for regional development is the real threat.
The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.
~Major Ralph Peters, US Military and PNAC
Iran has invested its oil wealth in universal education, healthcare, infrastructure bringing clean water and electricity to more than 98 percent of its people, and economic progress. Military spending is a paltry $91 per capita compared to more than $1,500 per capita in the United States and Israel. The social and economic achievements of the revolutionary regime in Iran in the past 25 years look quite progressive in reducing poverty and social inequalities, and as the society liberalises toward a more secular democratic regime, even better progress can be expected in the future. Compared to rising inequality in the United States and Israel, ranked numbers one and two for social inequality among developed nations, the Iranians look pretty damn good.
That, of course, is the problem. If Iran, rather like Venezuela, becomes a regional leader and examplar of social democracy, it becomes a threat to the corporatist and militarist elites that dominate the political classes of Washington and Tel Aviv and exploit the mineral and oil wealth of underdeveloped nations.
Education and successful economic development are a bigger threat than any weaponry if you are a corporatist kleptocrat. And that is why Iran must be bombed, like Iraq and like Lebanon. It has succeeded, and must be bombed back to failure.
Now, the usual crowd can be expected to comment on women, gays and political dissidents as being targets for repression in Iran. Without minimising the issues, I'm not convinced that the case isn't overstated and that the repression isn't outweighed by wider social advances. Women and children rarely suffer the isolation, poverty and violence in Iran that so many suffer from family breakdown in America. Women in Iran are now universally educated, taking 65 percent of university places, marrying later, having fewer children, and driving social change. Even Iran has a vibrant gay subculture. The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than Iran (or any other nation) does, and that proportion continues to rise despite falling crime rates. Every society is different, and our values are not their values in some ways, but which government best serves the interests of its people is an open question in my mind given that the vast majority of Iranians have benefitted from the social and economic progress of the past 25 years.
Many may also assert that Iran wants to destroy Israel. I don't believe this for a moment, but rather - along with Juan Cole - interpret comments by Ahmadinejad as the comments of the descendant of a race that can proudly trace its national history for 5,000 years to a country he perceives as upstart thief of land that has less than 80 years of disputed possession. Many in the Middle East believe that demographic, economic and geopolitical shifts will mean that Israel fades away into historical oblivion over the next hundred years. They may well be right, as painful as that prospect is to those who ferverently believe in a Jewish state, but that serious prospect only makes the determined zionists currently holding sway more dangerous.
The Enterprise Carrier Strike Group is today in Lisbon, Portugal. As it moves closer to port in Virginia, I gain confidence that a strike on Iran is not imminent. Nonetheless, the pressure remains strong to follow through on the PNAC plan revealed by Ralph Peters in the Armed Forces Journal this summer. As long as the corporatist kleptocrats who run our nation feel threatened by educational and social progress in resource rich nations, Iran can expect the same treatment as Iraq and Lebanon.
How would an attack on Iran be sustained when America's forces are already stretched by the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? That answer was recently provided in a detailed plan published by Arthur Herman in Commentary. The plan calls for airstrikes on Iranian military sites and civilian infrastructure (following the example of Israel's massive attacks on civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon) to destablise the civilian population and impede a military response. At the same time, American marines would occupy all of Iran's offshore oil platforms, the Kargh Island oil export terminus, and the small area of land called Khuzestan that holds 90 percent of Iran's oil reserves adjacent to the Basra region of Iraq. By impoverishing Iran of its principal source of income, blockading their imports of food and fuel, America would deprive Iran of any means to oppose the theft of its oil.
First, it would accomplish much more than air strikes alone on Iran's elusive nuclear sites. Whereas such action might retard the uranium-enrichment program by some years, this one in effect would put Iran's theocracy out of business by depriving it of the very weapon that the critics of air strikes most fear. It would do so, moreover, with minimal means. This would be a naval and air war, not a land campaign. Requiring no draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq, it would involve one or two carrier strike groups, an airborne brigade, and a Marine brigade. Since the entire operation would take place offshore, there would be no need to engage the Iranian army. It and the Revolutionary Guards would be left stranded, out of action and out of gas.
In fact, there is little Iran could do in the face of relentless military pressure at its most vulnerable point. Today, not only are key elements of the Iranian military in worse shape than in the 1980's, but even the oil weapon is less formidable than imagined. Currently Iran exports an estimated 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Yet according to a recent report in Forbes, quoting the oil-industry analyst Michael Lynch, new sources of oil around the world will have boosted total production by 2 million barrels a day in this year alone, and next year by three million barrels a day. In short, other producers (including Iranian platforms in American hands) can take up some if not all of the slack. The real loser would be Iran itself. Pumping crude oil is its only industry, making up 85 percent of its exports and providing 65 percent of the state budget. With its wells held hostage, the country's economy could enter free fall.
So even though the PNAC crowd recognise the weakness of the Iranian military, they are determined to attack and seize Iranian resources. The areas to be seized are small and geographically separated from Iran's principal landmass by mountain ranges.
A journalist recently returned from Lebanon told me that all the cluster bombs dropped on Lebanon in the final hours of this summer's war were very old, confusing the disposal experts operating to clear the region. We speculated that the newer munitions might have been saved to carpet the mountains encircling Khuzestan and the Persian Gulf coast with billions of cluster bombs, sealing the seized regions from Iranian attempts at retaking the territory and cost-effectively securing their occupation for decades to come.
The PNAC end state sought by the Bush administration and Israel is revealed in the map below from the Ralph Peters article in the June 2006 Armed Forces Journal:
Redrawing the map of the Middle East along tribal blood and religious lines would ensure that there would be sufficient strife, ill will and warfare to forestall economic, social and political progress for many decades to come. Whenever a state became too successful, a secret US-backed militia could go in and blow up a mosque or two, or assassinate a moderate compromiser like Hariri, to get the strife rolling again.
Naturally, nothing will go quite to plan. Russia and China may decide to intervene, and may well prove the biggest winners as America and Israel become more hated and isolated. The Arab states may finally see through the sham of American diplomacy and rally to restore sovereignty to Iran and Iraq. European and unaligned nations may force the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Commission to negotiate with Iran to address regional security issues peacefully (as Tony Blair will suggest in a speech later tonight). Many possible scenarios can be envisioned to stymy the PNAC planners.
In the meanwhile the American people are the sure losers. Our Democratic appeasers in Congress - led by Lieberman, Schumer and Clinton - will rally to an attack on Iran as they will to the conclusions of the Iraq Survey Group that Iraq be partitioned into three smaller, weaker states. They will back more horrific sacrifices by the middle class, more abridgements of our civil liberties, and connive to prevent any real progressive agenda from gaining credibility in American politics.
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honours, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
- James Madison, 4th US President, from "Political Observations", April 20, 1795