Congress pushes for war with
Iran By Stephen Zunes
In another resolution apparently designed
to prepare for war against Iran, the US House of
Representatives, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan
401-11 vote, has passed a resolution (HR 568)
urging the president to oppose any policy toward
Iran "that would rely on containment as an option
in response to the Iranian nuclear threat."
With its earlier decision to pass a bill
that effectively sought to ban any negotiations
between the United States and Iran, a huge
bipartisan majority of Congress has essentially
told the president that nothing short of war or
the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed,
the rush to pass this bill appears to have been
designed to undermine the ongoing international
negotiations on Iran's nuclear program. According
to Iranian-American analyst Jamal Abdi, a
prominent critic of both the Iranian regime and US
policy, the motivation for the resolution may be
to "poison those
talks by signaling to
Iran that the president is weak, domestically
isolated, and unable to deliver at the negotiating
table because a hawkish congress will overrule
him."
President Barack Obama's "red line"
on Iran - the point at which his administration
would consider taking military action against the
country - has been the reactionary regime's actual
procurement of nuclear weapons. The language of
this resolution, however, significantly lowers the
bar by declaring it unacceptable for Iran simply
to have "nuclear weapons capability" - not
necessarily any actual weapons or an active
nuclear weapons program. Some members of congress
have argued that since Iranians have the expertise
and technological capacity to develop nuclear
weapons, they already have "nuclear weapons
capability." The hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman
(I-CT) has argued that "everybody will determine
for themselves what [capability] means".
In case there was any doubt about the
intent of congress in using this language, when
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) offered a clarifying
amendment to a similar clause in a recent senate
resolution - declaring that "nothing in the Act
shall be construed as a declaration of war or an
authorization of the use of force against Iran" -
both its Republican and Democratic sponsors
summarily rejected the amendment.
Colonel
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for
Secretary of State Colin Powell, noted how "this
resolution reads like the same sheet of music that
got us into the Iraq war, and could be the
precursor for a war with Iran. It's effectively a
thinly-disguised effort to bless war."
As
the liberal Zionist group Americans for Peace Now
observed, the legislation suggests that "unless
sanctions imminently result in Iran voluntarily
shutting down its entire nuclear program (and
somehow deleting the nuclear know-how from the
brains of its scientists), military force will be
the only option available to the Obama
administration and will be inevitable in the near
term."
Though it is not legally binding,
the resolution does limit the president's options
politically. As pundit and former Capitol Hill
staffer MJ Rosenberg has noted, the bill was
"designed to tie the president's hands on Iran
policy". And, as with the case of Iraq, the
language of such non-binding resolutions can
easily be incorporated into binding legislation,
citing the precedent of what had been passed
previously.
The end of
containment There is enormous significance
to the resolution's insistence that containment,
which has been the basis of US defense policy for
decades, should no longer be US policy in dealing
with potential threats. Although deterrence may
have been an acceptable policy in response to the
thousands of powerful Soviet nuclear weapons
mounted on intercontinental ballistic missile
systems aimed at the United States, the view today
is that deterrence is somehow inadequate for
dealing with a developing country capable of
developing small and crude nuclear devices but
lacking long-range delivery systems.
Indeed, this broad bipartisan consensus
against deterrence marks the triumph of the
neo-conservative first-strike policy, once
considered on the extreme fringes when first
articulated in the 1980s.
This dangerous
embrace of neo-conservative military policy is now
so widely accepted by both parties in Congress
that the vote on the resolution was taken under a
procedure known as "suspension of the rules,"
which is designed for non-controversial bills
passed quickly with little debate. Indeed, given
the serious implications of this legislation, it
is striking that there was not a single
congressional hearing prior to the vote.
The resolution also demonstrates that the
vast majority of Democrats, like Republicans, have
embraced the concept of "full-spectrum dominance,"
the Bush-era doctrine that not only should the
United States prevent the emergence of another
rival global superpower such as China, but it
should also resist the emergence of even a
regional power, such as Iran, that could
potentially deter unilateral US military actions
or other projections of American domination.
Limiting the president It is
unprecedented for congress to so vigorously seek
to limit a president's non-military options in
foreign policy. For example, in 1962, even the
most right-wing Republicans in Congress did not
push for legislation insisting that President
Kennedy rule out options other than attacking Cuba
or the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile
crisis. What might be motivating Congress is the
fact that, in electing Barack Obama in 2008, the
American people brought into the White House an
outspoken opponent of the US invasion of Iraq who
not only withdrew US combat forces from that
country but promised to "change the mindset" - the
idea that the United States could unilaterally
make war against oil-rich Middle Eastern countries
that did not accept US domination - that made the
Iraq war possible. Both Democratic and Republican
hawks, therefore, appear determined to force this
moderate president to accept their
neo-conservative agenda.
Deterrence, when
dealing with a nuclear-armed party, is indeed a
risky strategy. The international community does
have an interest in preventing Iran from
developing nuclear weapons, as well as in forcing
India, Pakistan, and Israel to disarm their
already-existing arsenals. All reasonable
diplomatic means should be pursued to create and
maintain a nuclear-free zone in that volatile
region.
However, the idea that deterrence
against Iran would not work because the country's
clerical leadership, which controls the armed
forces, would decide to launch an unprovoked
nuclear attack against Israel or the United States
- and therefore invite massive nuclear retaliation
that would cause the physical destruction of their
entire country - is utterly ridiculous. The far
more realistic risk to worry about is the enormous
devastation that would result from a US war on
Iran.
The real "threat" from Iran is if
that country achieves nuclear capability, it would
then have a deterrent to a US attack that was
unavailable to its immediate neighbors to the east
(Afghanistan) and west (Iraq), both of which were
invaded by US-led forces. Both Democrats and
Republicans appear to be united in their belief
that no country should stand in the way of the
unilateral projection of military force by the
United States or its allies.
Indeed, this
resolution is not about the national security of
the United States, nor is it about the security of
Israel. It is about continuing US hegemony over
the world's most oil-rich region.
Stephen Zunes is a
contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and a
professor of politics at the University of San
Francisco.
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