Aw, you missed me? How sweet.
I tried posting something a few days ago, but Blogger was down and I got frustrated and gave up. Till today. Not that I have a whole lot to report at this hour. I still want to share what I tried to put up the other day, which is that Dick Cheney said the following during the course of the interview with Don Imus in which he laid the rhetorical groundwork for an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites: "We don't want a war in the Middle East, if we can avoid it."
Yeah, God forbid. Asshole.
From Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece and some other things that have come to light from the mouth of our benevolent government itself, it seems Iran is in fact in the crosshairs. I have to say that I'm a bit surprised. I consider myself as cynical as the next guy, but I really thought that the reality of a conflict with Iran would put a crimp in the current wave of neocon messianism. But now Cheney has given Israel a backhanded ok in a public forum (as if they needed it) to take a whack at Iran, and the US is basically just waiting for European nuclear negotiations with Tehran to fail, plus the defense apparatus is saying the CIA isn't capable of doing enough sketchy covert shit around the world (cogitate on that for a minute). It doesn't bode well.
In light of all this, the liberal antiwar movement needs to take stock of itself. The outpouring of opposition to the Iraq war was heartening and impressive, but it didn't slow the Bush team down by one second. (Meanwhile, on Monday Bush praised anti-abortion protesters in DC for turning out in the cold to support a "culture of life." Seriously, if Orwell were alive . . . dude would be raking it in as a talking head for CNN.) It's safe to assume that the administration is currently in the early stages of paving public acceptance of the idea of an attack on Iran, just as they did with Iraq in 2002. I don't think that means that such an attack is a foregone conclusion at all; the waters are much muddier here than they were with Iraq for all kinds of reasons. But if it comes to the point were polls start to sway in support of covert ops or "surgical" bombings in Iran, antiwarriors need to stop and think before they go apply for their standard mass march permits. It didn't work with Iraq and it won't work with Iran.
Part of the issue is the unique obstinacy of the Bushies. But the other part of it, which ought to hit close to home for most liberals, is that the "big government" they usually praise has turned into a "fucking enormous government" that doesn't require any degree of public consensus to carry out major confrontational actions. Now, obviously this is the case with most governments most of the time - if they wanna do it, they can probably get away with it. The difference here is a government that can do almost anything its devious little leaders can dream up, and one that has seriously escalated and consolidated its internal security systems. Protesters in the Vietnam era were a) fighting a government that was only one half of a bipolar global power structure, b) aided by the confluence of multiple domestic resistance movements that crested at roughly the same time, and c) with all due respect to the Fred Hamptons and the Kent Staters and the like, opposing a government with weaker, less militarized mechanisms for supressing dissent. I write this not to sound like a nostalgic romantic pining for the good 'ol days of fighting the system, but rather as someone who would like to stop the government from throwing its next haymaker at the Middle East but who realizes that 200,000 people marching around "peacefully" is not going to get the job done.
In the meantime, you can email your thoughts to recyclebin@whitehouse.gov.
Yeah, God forbid. Asshole.
From Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece and some other things that have come to light from the mouth of our benevolent government itself, it seems Iran is in fact in the crosshairs. I have to say that I'm a bit surprised. I consider myself as cynical as the next guy, but I really thought that the reality of a conflict with Iran would put a crimp in the current wave of neocon messianism. But now Cheney has given Israel a backhanded ok in a public forum (as if they needed it) to take a whack at Iran, and the US is basically just waiting for European nuclear negotiations with Tehran to fail, plus the defense apparatus is saying the CIA isn't capable of doing enough sketchy covert shit around the world (cogitate on that for a minute). It doesn't bode well.
In light of all this, the liberal antiwar movement needs to take stock of itself. The outpouring of opposition to the Iraq war was heartening and impressive, but it didn't slow the Bush team down by one second. (Meanwhile, on Monday Bush praised anti-abortion protesters in DC for turning out in the cold to support a "culture of life." Seriously, if Orwell were alive . . . dude would be raking it in as a talking head for CNN.) It's safe to assume that the administration is currently in the early stages of paving public acceptance of the idea of an attack on Iran, just as they did with Iraq in 2002. I don't think that means that such an attack is a foregone conclusion at all; the waters are much muddier here than they were with Iraq for all kinds of reasons. But if it comes to the point were polls start to sway in support of covert ops or "surgical" bombings in Iran, antiwarriors need to stop and think before they go apply for their standard mass march permits. It didn't work with Iraq and it won't work with Iran.
Part of the issue is the unique obstinacy of the Bushies. But the other part of it, which ought to hit close to home for most liberals, is that the "big government" they usually praise has turned into a "fucking enormous government" that doesn't require any degree of public consensus to carry out major confrontational actions. Now, obviously this is the case with most governments most of the time - if they wanna do it, they can probably get away with it. The difference here is a government that can do almost anything its devious little leaders can dream up, and one that has seriously escalated and consolidated its internal security systems. Protesters in the Vietnam era were a) fighting a government that was only one half of a bipolar global power structure, b) aided by the confluence of multiple domestic resistance movements that crested at roughly the same time, and c) with all due respect to the Fred Hamptons and the Kent Staters and the like, opposing a government with weaker, less militarized mechanisms for supressing dissent. I write this not to sound like a nostalgic romantic pining for the good 'ol days of fighting the system, but rather as someone who would like to stop the government from throwing its next haymaker at the Middle East but who realizes that 200,000 people marching around "peacefully" is not going to get the job done.
In the meantime, you can email your thoughts to recyclebin@whitehouse.gov.
2 Comments:
no way will it happen. EVERY general at the pentagon would have to be suicidal, not just 4 or 5 of them. iran has got the best army this side of israel, and enough restless 20-somethings to supply it and guerrilla forces for as long as it takes. plus iran is 100x more important to russia et al than iraq was; i think at least one of them might even threaten retaliation. lastly, bush would have to do one of two things to staff an iran invasion: 1. withdraw from both iraq and afghanistan entirely or 2. reinstate the draft, quickly. and we know what happens if the latter option comes down: ex-weathermen make more money on the lecture circuit!
-a
Well, that's what I'd been thinking for quite a while. And a ground war still seems out of the question. But I think there might be a line where tough talk gives way to something more; at the very least, tacit acceptance of Israeli action, which could have serious repercussions. One can't help noticing similarities between the rhetorical drumbeat that's been initiated recently and the way the Iraq war was talked up to the point where it seemed "reasonable" to enough people.
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