Page 2 of
2 Dogs of
war bark in the US By Jeremiah
Goulka
There are also two organizations,
much attended to on the right, whose sole goal is
regime change. There's the Emergency Committee for
Israel, a militantly pro-Israel group founded by
Bill Kristol and Gary Bauer that links the
Christian right with the neocons and the Israel
lobby. It insists that "Iran continues its pursuit
of a nuclear weapon," and it's pushing hard for
bombing and regime change.
No less
important is the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an
Iranian dissident cult group that was recently,
amid much controversy, removed from the official
US list of foreign terrorist organizations. The
MEK brought Israeli intelligence about Iran's
then-active nuclear weapons program into the
public eye at a Washington
press conference in 2002.
Since then, it has peppered the public with tales
of Iranian nuclear chicanery, and it ran a major
lobbying campaign, paying dozens of former US
anti-terrorism officials - several of whom are now
in the defense industry - to sing its praises.
It wants regime change because it hopes
that the US will install its "president-elect" and
"parliament-in-exile" in power in Tehran. (Think
of Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress,
who played a similar role with the Bush
administration in the run-up to the invasion of
Iraq. They even have some of the same boosters.)
And then there are the groups who want war
with Iran for religious reasons. Take Christians
United For Israel (CUFI), an End-Times
politico-religious organization run by John Hagee,
pastor of the Cornerstone megachurch in San
Antonio. As scholar Nicholas Guyatt shows in his
book Have a Nice Doomsday, Hagee's
organization promotes the belief, common among
fundamentalist Christians, that a war between
Israel and Iran will trigger the Rapture.
Hagee's own book, Countdown
Jerusalem, suggests that Iran already has
nuclear weapons and the ability to use them, and
he aggressively advocates an attack on that
country. To many mainstream Americans, Hagee, his
followers, and others with similar religious views
may seem a bit nutty, but he is not to be
discounted: his book was a bestseller.
The supporting
cast Republican-friendly media have joined
the game, running blustery TV segments on the
subject and cooking the books to assure survey
majorities that favor military action. Take this
question from a March poll commissioned by Fox
News: "Do you think Iran can be stopped from
continuing to work on a nuclear weapons program
through diplomacy and sanctions alone, or will it
take military force to stop Iran from working on
nuclear weapons?" Absent priming like this, a
majority of Americans actually prefer diplomacy,
81% supporting direct talks between Washington and
Tehran.
And don't forget the
military-industrial complex, for which the fear of
a nuclear-armed Iran means opportunity. They use
it to justify that perennial cash cow and
Republican favorite: missile defense (which the
Romney campaign dutifully promotes on its "Iran:
An American Century" webpage). It gives the
Pentagon a chance to ask for new bunker busting
bombs and to justify the two new classes of pricey
littoral combat ships.
If the US were to
bomb Iranian facilities - and inevitably get drawn
into a more prolonged conflict - the cash spigot
is likely to open full flood. And don't forget the
potential LOGCAP, construction, and private
security contracts that might flow over the years
(even if there isn't an occupation) to the KBRs,
SAICs, DynCorps, Halliburtons, Bechtels,
Wackenhuts, Triple Canopies, and
Blackwater/Academis of the world. (Too bad there
aren't meaningful transparency laws that would let
us know how much these companies and their
employees have contributed, directly or
indirectly, to Romney's campaign or to the think
tanks that pay and promote the convenient views of
professional ideologues.)
The problem
With Romney All of this means that the
public has been primed for war with Iran. With
constant media attention, the Republican
candidates have driven home the notion that Iran
has or will soon have nuclear weapons, that
Iranian nukes present an immediate and existential
threat to Israel and the US, and that diplomacy is
for sissies. If Obama wins, he will have to work
even harder to prevent war. If Romney wins, war
will be all the easier. And for his team, that's a
good thing.
The problem with Romney, you
see, is that he hangs out with the wrong crowd -
the regime-change brigade, many of whom steered
the ship of state toward Iraq for George W Bush.
And keep in mind that he, like Romney (and Obama),
was an empty vessel on foreign affairs when he
entered the Oval Office. Even if Iran has been
nothing more than a political tool for Romney,
regime change is a deep-seated goal for the people
around him. They actually want to bomb Iran.
They've said so themselves.
Take Robert
Kagan. His main perch is at the non-partisan
Brookings Institution, but he has also been a
leader of the neocon Project for a New American
Century and its successor organization, the
Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). "Regime change in
Tehran," he has written, "is the best
nonproliferation policy."
Kagan's fellow
directors at the FPI are also on Romney's team:
Bill Kristol, Eric Edelman (former staffer to
Cheney and Douglas Feith's successor at the
Pentagon), and former Coalition Provisional
Authority spokesman Dan Senor, who has become
Romney's most trusted foreign policy advisor and a
rumored contender for national security advisor.
The FPI's position? "It is time to take military
action against the Iranian government elements
that support terrorism and its nuclear program.
More diplomacy is not an adequate response."
Or how about John Bolton, Bush's UN
ambassador and a frequent speaker on behalf of the
MEK, who has said, "The better way to prevent Iran
from getting nuclear weapons is to attack its
nuclear weapons program directly and break their
control over the nuclear fuel cycle," and that "we
should be prepared to take down the regime in
Tehran."
And the list goes on.
It
is, of course, theoretically possible that a
President Romney would ignore his neocon team's
advice, just as George W. Bush famously ignored
the moderate Republican advice of his father's
team. Still, it's hard to imagine him giving the
cold shoulder to the sages of the previous
administration: Cheney, former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Indeed,
Romney is said to turn to the "Cheney-ites" when
he seeks counsel, while giving the more moderate
Republican internationalists the cold shoulder.
And Cheney wanted to bomb Iran.
In a
Romney administration, expect this gang to lobby
him hard to finish the job and take out Iran's
nuclear facilities, or at least to give Israel the
green light to do so. Expect them to close their
eyes to what we have learned in Iraq and
Afghanistan when it comes to "blood and treasure."
Expect them to say that bombing alone will do the
trick "surgically." Expect them to claim that the
military high command is "soft," "bureaucratic,"
and "risk-averse" when it hesitates to get
involved in what will inevitably become a regional
nightmare. Expect the message to be: this time
we'll get it right.
Kenneling the dogs
of war No one likes the idea of Iran
getting nukes, but should the regime decide to
pursue them, they don't present an existential
threat to anyone. Tehran's leaders know that a
mushroom cloud in Tel Aviv, no less Washington,
would turn their country into a parking lot.
Should the mullahs ever pursue nuclear
weapons again, it would be for deterrence, for the
ability to stand up to the United States and say,
"Piss off." While that might present a challenge
for American foreign policy interests - especially
those related to oil - it has nothing to do with
the physical safety of Israel or the United
States.
War with Iran is an incredibly bad
idea, yet it's a real threat. President Obama has
come close to teeing it up. Even talk of a
preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear
facilities is delusional, because, as just about
every analyst points out, we wouldn't know if it
had worked (which it probably wouldn't) and it
would be an act of war that Iran wouldn't absorb
with a smile. In its wake, a lot of people would
be likely to die.
But Romney's guys don't
think it's a bad idea. They think it's a good one,
and they are ready to take a swing.
Jeremiah Goulka, a TomDispatch
regular, writes about American politics and
culture, focusing on security, race, and the
Republican Party. He was formerly an analyst at
the RAND Corporation, a Hurricane Katrina recovery
worker, and an attorney at the US Department of
Justice. You can follow him on Twitter
@jeremiahgoulka or contact him through his website
jeremiahgoulka.com.
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