COMMENT Shout 'No!' to war with
Iran By Adil E Shamoo
Israel and the United States have waged a
campaign of cyberwarfare and covert operations
against Iran for the past several years. If Iran
had taken similar actions toward Israel or the
United States, we would have considered it a
declaration of open war.
Iran is working
hard to develop nuclear capability - if not an
actual weapon - despite its repeated denials.
After all, Iran is surrounded by the US military
might, and its primary regional rival - Israel -
has possessed a sizable nuclear arsenal for
decades. Nuclear proliferation is never desirable,
but for Iran it could fit with a perfectly
rational strategic calculus.
Recent US and
Israeli wars in the region drive this point home
emphatically. In fact,
these conflicts - variously pitting the strongest
military in the world and the strongest in the
Middle East against a host of weaker rivals -
cannot rightly be called wars. They are massacres.
The kill ratio of the powerful versus the weak
fluctuates from 10 to 1 to over one 100 to 1. Take
the most glaring example, the 2008-2009 Israeli
invasion of Gaza. Gazans suffered 1,500 deaths and
5,000 wounded compared to just 12 Israeli deaths.
Elsewhere, Americans were coerced into war
with Iraq by the myth of a mushroom cloud and the
farcical notion of eliminating terrorists in
Afghanistan. These manufactured reasons for war
increased anti-American hatred and strengthened
the terrorists' reach.
In Israel, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has changed the
conversation in the past year or so from UN
sanctions against Iran to war with Iran. He wants
a deadline for Iran's noncompliance in stopping
any uranium enrichment for any purpose - a
violation of Iran's rights under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, which permits peaceful
enrichment. If the election-season statements of
both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are any
indication, Netanyahu has succeeded in changing
the US conversation on Iran as well to put
military action on the front burner.
Netanyahu is still not satisfied and wants
military action now, not eventually. Netanyahu
surrogate Danny Danon, Deputy Speaker of the
Israeli Knesset, is using the recent senseless
killing of the US ambassador in Libya and the
demonstrations in Cairo against a film insulting
the prophet Muhammad as another reason why we
should attack Iran. This is what my Jewish friends
call chutzpah.
Given the threats to
regional peace posed by US-Israeli dominance in
the Middle East, some scholars have even suggested
that a stronger Iran could preserve stability in
the region by counterbalancing the aggressive
Washington-Tel Aviv axis.
Kenneth N Waltz,
a respected professor of political science at
Columbia University, argues in Foreign Affairs
that Iran's nuclearization could improve its
behavior as an international actor. Waltz refutes
the common characterization of the "mad mullahs"
who run the country and cites how Pakistan, India,
and China became more responsible once they
acquired the bomb. Meir Dagan, the former head of
the Israeli Mossad and architect of Israel's
covert war on Iran, told CBS that Iran's leaders
are rational international actors and famously
called attacking the country a "stupid idea".
It would serve this country well to listen
to rational voices apart from the drumbeat of war
from Israeli leaders and US neoconservatives, who
hope to reshape the Middle East through Iran and
Syria after failing to do so in Iraq. The United
States has already suffered two decade-long wars
that brought this country to financial catastrophe
and military exhaustion. We cannot afford another
war.
A US or Israeli war on Iran could
spark a regional conflagration that would cause
untold suffering across the Muslim world and spark
deadly blowback for decades to come. Such a war
must be prevented, and this starts with shouting
"No!"
Adil E Shamo is an
associate fellow of the Institute for Policy
Studies, a senior analyst for Foreign Policy in
Focus, and the author of Equal Worth - When
Humanity Will Have Peace. He can be reached at
ashamoo@som.umaryland.edu.
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