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Tag Archives: Iran
The Bin Laden-Bush Consensus
When it comes to Iran, the President and the Qaeda leader appear to be on the same page Continue reading
Bush and Israel’s Alamo
Sobriety remains elusive in Bush’s Middle East policy as he tells the Knesset, “Masada will never fall again!” — as in, “Remember the Alamo!” Having visited the iconic site at which Jewish Jihadists of yore are said to have committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans, Bush was plainly moved to substitute war cries for serious policy. Long on the vacuous militancy that has characterized his entire tenure, Bush reprised the infantile posturing that compared talking to Hamas with appeasing the Nazis (uh, is that what Olmert is doing by negotiating a cease-fire with it via Egypt?), branding Iran the fount of global terrorism and warning that “Permitting the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations,” Bush told the Israeli parliament to mark its 60th birthday. “For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
Don’t talk to Hamas or Iran, don’t allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, etc. etc. But what exactly is he offering? Is he going to bomb Iran? And then what? There’s no policy here, just testoterone. Continue reading
The Perils of a Banker’s War on Iran
Unable to secure meaningful sanctions through the U.N. and other government-to-government channels, the Bush Administration has made an end-run around the diplomatic process and moved to enforce a credit blockade on Tehran — via the U.S. Treasury, and its ability to intimidate foreign banks into doing U.S. bidding for fear of being shut out of U.S. financial markets. Smart move, from the narrow perspective of the neocons. But if the strategy actually works, Iran is likely to respond by inflicting pain where it is able, by bloodying U.S. forces in Iraq and by cranking up global oil prices. And the potential for chaos raises another question: How long are the foreign banks (and their governments) to which the U.S. owes hundreds of billions of dollars going to tolerate being bullied, via the banking system, into going along with unpopular geopolitical ventures? Continue reading
A Teachable Moment in Basra
It should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s disastrous offensive against the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr in Basra has had the exact opposite effect of that intended — strengthening rather than weakening Sadr, and making clear that he, and the Iranians, have far greater influence of Iraq’s future than does the Iraqi government or the U.S. That’s because Maliki’s shared the fate of pretty much every similar initiative by the Bush Administration and its allies and proxies since the onset of the “war on terror.”
The pattern is all too common: The U.S. or an ally or proxy launches a military offensive against a politically popular “enemy” group; Bush and his minions welcome the violence as “clarifying” matters, demonstrating “resolve”, or, in the most grotesque rhetorical flourish of all, the “birth pangs” of a brave new world. Each time, the “enemy” proves far more resilient than expected, largely because Bush and his allies have failed to recognize that each adversary’s power should be measured in political support rather than firepower; and the net effect of the offensive invariably leaves the enemy strengthened and the U.S. and its allies even weaker than before they launched the offensive. Continue reading
Iraq, an American ‘Nakbah’
American Taliban council of war
Five years into the catastrophe (for millions of Iraqis, and ultimately, for millions of Americans) in Iraq, has the media really asked itself how it enabled this war. Not only was it patently obvious that there was no evidence to back up the case for war, there was no questioning of its basic premise, i.e. that certain categories of weapons in the hands of a rival regime forced the U.S. to “preemptively” invade another country without provocation Continue reading