As the dust begins to settle from the
mid-term elections, popular thinking is that, over
the next two years, the Democrats will force the
Bush administration to edge away from the
unilateral militarism that has entrapped the
nation in two open-ended wars. Don't bet the rent
on it.
Indeed, if you are putting down a
wager, the odds are better than
even
that the United States will attack Iran in the
next two years, and the assault will have a great
deal of support from both sides of the aisle.
The political decision to take on Iran
depends on a number of factors. Washington
continues to focus on extracting US troops from
Iraq. And a resolution of the Iraq debacle
requires some regional approach that includes
dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict. The
Democrats, in other words, have a choice. They can
get sucked into the war that the administration
wants with Iran. Or they can put forward a bold
alternative that can not only prepare for US
withdrawal from Iraq but restabilize the Middle
East as well.
Iran in the crosshairs
The Bush administration's bombast on Iran
is well known. US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice says the United States "may face no greater
challenge from a single country than from Iran",
and administration officials have called it
everything from "the nexus of weapons of mass
destruction and terrorism" to a "threat to world
peace".
Sam Gardiner, a retired air force
colonel and strategy teacher at the National War
College, the Naval War College and the Air Force
War College, says President George W Bush is
determined to attack Iran. Gardiner says Bush
compares himself to Winston Churchill and "talks
about the Middle East in messianic terms, and is
said to have told those close to him that he has
got to attack Iran because even if a Republican
succeeds him ... he will not have the same freedom
of action that Bush enjoys".
According to
Seymour Hersh, during a recent discussion on
national security, Cheney said that the November 7
mid-term election "would not stop the
administration from pursuing a military option
with Iran".
Neo-con supporters of the
administration are already revving their engines.
Joshua Muravchik, writing in a Foreign Policy
memo, puts an attack on Tehran at the top of the
neo-con to-do list for the administration's next
two years.
Similar comments have come from
leading Israeli officials. An Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF) spokesperson told the Jerusalem Post
that “only a military strike by the United States
and its allies will stop Iran obtaining nuclear
weapons", while Israeli Defense Minister Ephraim
Sneh openly threatened to attack Iran's nuclear
sites. Danny Ayalon, outgoing Israeli ambassador
to the United States, said that he is confident
that Bush “will not hesitate to use force against
Iran in order to halt its nuclear program”.
The Democrats' dilemma Some of
this US and Israeli rhetoric has been echoed by
Democrats, particularly incoming Speaker of the
House, Representative Nancy Pelosi. In 2005, she
told a meeting of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that "the greatest
threat to Israel's right to exist ... now comes
from Iran". AIPAC has long been associated with
some of the more extreme sectors of the Israeli
political spectrum. The organization has been
particularly aggressive in lobbying for war with
Iran, a war that polls show the US public strongly
opposes.
The Democrats' close ties with
AIPAC and the Israeli government are already
causing problems. The Democrats won the election
on a platform of getting the United States out of
Iraq, but AIPAC and the current Kadima-Labor
government strongly support that war.
Following an hour-long meeting with Bush
recently, Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert told
the press: "We in the Middle East have been
following the American policy in Iraq for a long
time, and we are very much impressed and
encouraged by the stability" that the war in Iraq
has brought to the Middle East.
US
Democrat Representative Gary Ackerman, a reliable
supporter of Israel, retorted that Olmert's
comment was "a very unrealistic observation. Most
of us here understand that our policy has been a
thorough and total disaster for the United States:
we have blundered ineptly into an area that our
administration does not understand, and for which
it has no plan on how to extract us."
Although several other Democrats were
similarly angered by the comments, Pelosi so far
has remained quiet.
For all their
rhetoric, the vast majority of Democrats do not
want war with Iran, but under the US system of
government, the president has enormous powers.
According to Rice, the administration has already
been authorized to attack Iran under powers given
it by the congressional legislation on the "war on
terror".
Iraq and Palestine The
problem for the Democrats is how to extract the US
from Iraq, and few observers think that can be
done without addressing the
