AUF DER MAUER STAND MIT KREIDE:
Sie wollen Krieg.
Der es geschrieben hat
Ist schon gefallen.
(ON THE WALL WAS CHALKED:
They want war.
The man who wrote it
Has already fallen.)from Bertolt Brecht - Deutsche Kriegsfibel
We are witnessing today a slow motion replay of the hysteria that brought us the Iraq War debacle, only now the stakes are much higher and the danger much greater. In the twisted logic of the neoconservative mindset, the only way to prevent a war is to launch a pre-emptive war. The neocons had their perfect dupe with President Bush, and they got their war. But the scale of the destruction and killing in Iraq is somehow not satisfactory. They dream of a war on a much larger scale - this time against a nation of 70 million people, and this time it will take a nuclear pre-emptive strikes in order to prevent a nuclear war. We are being told on a daily basis now that Iran is "months" away from creating a nuclear bomb. We are being told that diplomacy has failed, and the military option is our only recourse. We are being told that those who oppose a war with Iraq are dangerous appeasers, who have only the "terrorists'" interest at heart. And always we are told that the Europeans are weak, they failed, and America once again has to go it alone.
Today in the Boston Globe the columnist Jeff Jacoby adds his voice to the neoconservative war chorus, and heaps scorn on German foreign minister Steinmeier in the process:
Not to be outdone by Great Britain in the going-wobbly department, Germany's foreign minister assured a television audience Sunday that Berlin ''will refrain from anything that brings us a step closer" to military action against Iran. Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned against ''a militarization of thinking" on how to keep one of the world's worst regimes from acquiring the bomb. ''Rather, we should see that we use and exhaust to the best of our powers the diplomatic solutions that remain available." Fortunately, not everyone is off in Cloud Cuckoo Land when it comes to dealing with Tehran.
In Germany the voices of hysteria can be found in the Bush-Blogs, but also in Die Welt, which hosts an English-language blog The Free West. Here the Dutch novelist Leon DeWinter writes daily posts that spread anti-Muslim hate and urge military attacks on Iran (I guess this is more fun and lucrative than writing mediocre novels). Here is a typical remark from DeWinter:
It is really what it is, and there is no escape from this. We have to deal with this reality, one way or the other. We are still in the middle of mass denial in the West, we don't want to face a world that is torn apart by confrontation, religious lunacy, violence, but all of that is waiting for us unavoidably, and wishing it will go away is only bringing us closer to the abyss.
The hysteria is of course nonsense: Iran is hardly a threat today, and conservative analysis (provided also by the Defense Intelligence Agency) estimates it will take a minimumc of 5-10 years before Iran would have the ability to enrich uranium for a bomb or fuel. Airstrikes against the known facilities would no doubt hasten the development and enrage the other countries in the region. The other day I expressed some pessimism about a proposal put forward by Prof.Mohssen Massarrat in Germany to create a nuclear-weapons free zone in the region. But Flynt Leverett of the Brookings Institute elaborated on this idea in an excellent op/ed piece in the New York Times:
Last week, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, suggested a way out of this impasse - one that might also help address other pressing challenges in the Persian Gulf. The Saudi prince noted that if Iranian nuclear weapons were deployed against Israel, they would kill Palestinians, and if they missed Israel, they would hit Arab countries. And so he urged Iran "to accept the position that we have taken to make the Gulf, as part of the Middle East, nuclear free and free of weapons of mass destruction."
Leverett proposes establishing a Gulf Security Council as the key to a peaceful resolution of the conflict:
The United States and its partners should build on this idea and support the creation of a Gulf Security Council that would include Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states in the Gulf, as well as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
Leverett's piece is important in that he also outlines the failures of the Bush administration in its Iraq policy which have contributed to the current impasse. But creating a Gulf Security Council comprised of Muslim states would prevent Iran from potraying itself to the world as the last bulwark of Islam against Western aggression. I can only hope that the Saudi proposal finds other supporters and we can begin to ignore DeWinter, Jacoby, Krauthammer, et. al.
UPDATE: Meteor Blades has an excellent analysis of the catastrophic consequences of a "limited" nuclear attack on Iran. The US would most likely deploy the "bunker busting" Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator to destroy the hardened underground facilities.
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