Simply put, a vote for John McCain is a vote for war with Iran. McCain the presumptive Republican nominee for president, recently spoke at a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with disturbingly apocalyptic rhetoric in regard to Iran. There McCain outlined his Iranian Containment Policy (title mine) which from the sounds of it could become the centerpiece of his foreign policy were he to inexplicably become president. McCain says that, "Tehran's continued pursuit of nuclear weapons poses an unacceptable risk, a danger we cannot allow" and that an Iranian nuclear weapon poses an "existential threat to...Israel" (http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/Read.aspx?guid=97b08426-d9ad-4046-9c05-1ded14fc0b
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Simply put, a vote for John McCain is a vote for war with Iran. McCain the presumptive Republican nominee for president, recently spoke at a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with disturbingly apocalyptic rhetoric in regard to Iran. There McCain outlined his Iranian Containment Policy (title mine) which from the sounds of it could become the centerpiece of his foreign policy were he to inexplicably become president. McCain says that, "Tehran's continued pursuit of nuclear weapons poses an unacceptable risk, a danger we cannot allow" and that an Iranian nuclear weapon poses an "existential threat to...Israel" (http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/Read.aspx?guid=97b08426-d9ad-4046-9c05-1ded14fc0b
8a).
McCain’s argument that Tehran poses a threat to Israel rests on the claim that the "Iranian president has called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map.’" Of course what undermines this is the fact the head of the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Manouchehr Mottakithat has repudiated any such perceptions and this is in addition to claims that Ahmadinejad’s remarks were mistranslated and he never meant anything of the sort to begin with. Furthermore, I have also heard that Ayatollah Khamenei, the real leader of Iran (as former US intelligence analysts Leverett and Mann tried to point out in a redacted article in the New York Times titled "What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran"), has accepted the possibility of a normalization of relations with Israel.
McCain’s Iranian Containment Policy is designed to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program or giving nuclear materiel to terrorist networks and to just generally keep Iran from becoming an extra-regional power. In order to accomplish this McCain advocates imposing a sanctions program on Iran similar to that utilized against the former Iraqi regime. McCain says that a multilateral effort should be conducted to impose "targeted sanctions" on Iran by "denial of visas and freezing of assets" and adds that additional measures by the US should be taken to "impose financial sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran." He would also like to "restrict Iran’s ability to import refined petroleum products."
McCain is apparently overlooking the distinct possibility that aggressive foreign policy toward Iran would likely embolden the hardliners. The onerous sanctions against Iran that McCain calls for would only force the people of Iran, including moderates, to have greater reliance upon the Iranian state as did aggressive sanctions against Iraq. In fact McCain takes a diametrically opposing view to this logic. At the AIPAC meeting McCain took shots at Obama for saying he would talk with Ahmadinejad, though a majority of the American public favors diplomatic negotiations with Tehran according to a Reuters poll (http://elections.us.reuters.com/top/news/usnN27288539.html). McCain said open talks with Tehran, which he refers to as a "spectacle" would "harm Iranian moderates" and embolden hardliners.
McCain implies that Iran is inclined to violate the non-proliferation treaties and that Iranian action to acquire an atomic weapon would "induce" other West Asian nations into an "arms race." He says this despite the fact that the US National Intelligence Estimate stated with "high confidence" that Iran ceased pursuit of a nuclear weapons project in 2003 (which still implies of course that Iran had a nuclear weapons program) (http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf).
All of this rhetoric is similar to that used against Iraq in the buildup to the Iraq war. McCain and his allies appear as committed to war with Iran as the Bush administration was to war with Iraq. McCain supported the Lieberman-Kyle amendment designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization responsible for killing American troops in Iraq." To declare the IRG as terrorists is essentially to declare Iran’s defense establishment as terrorists and is a clear attempt to build a pretext for war.
Joschka Fischer, Germany's former foreign minister and vice chancellor, wrote in an article titled "As things look, Israel may well attack Iran soon" that Iran has been "catapulted into regional hegemony" by US actions (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9144). It is undeniable that the US’s invasion of Iraq and the consequent empowerment of the Shia majority only strengthened Iran’s position as a regional power. Fischer goes on to say that lack of sufficient international reaction to Israel’s attack on Syria the last year may have steeled Israel’s resolve to attack Iran, but that "political window of opportunity to attack is now" while the Bush administration is still in power. This foreshadows a potential attack in the very near future.
All this hawkish sentiment toward Iran from coalitions in the US and Israel ignores the fact that it is inconceivable that Iran poses a serious military threat to the US or Israel. The Iranians are a threat politically, but all of the actions the Bush administration and their close ally John McCain have taken and advocate (invasion of Iraq, sanctions programs, &tc.) will only serve to exacerbate that political threat. The US’s position against Iran is, to borrow phraseology from Dulles’ New Look policy, reinforced by the deterrent of massive retaliatory power. Any attempt by Iran to use a nuclear weapon against Israel either directly or by proxy though a terrorist network would be met with overwhelming retaliatory force which would destroy Iran as a sovereign power and perhaps as an historical entity altogether. If the Iranian regime’s principal decision-makers are at all rational actors it would be unthinkable for them to launch such an attack.
I personally do not want to see a nuclear-armed Iran. I also do not want to see any threats to the US, our close ally Israel, or global security prevail. However I don’t think that aggression is the correct solution to this problem. Perhaps I am wrong. Direct diplomacy is the preferred solution of the doves and direct diplomacy may be the best course to world peace. Let’s hope we have enough historical memory to learn from recent events and avoid unnecessary wars.