Whatever happened to Iran?
Thu Nov 09, 2006 at 02:17:06 PM PDT
Strange isn't it? But ever since the mid-term elections started, and especially since the announcement of the results, Iran seems to have dropped out of the solar system. Not a peep about Iran from anyone or anywhere... Yet wasn't Iran just a few days back the biggest threat to the world since Hussein's Iraq?
With a cacophonous crescendo Iran was being represented as the greatest threat to world peace since Attila the Hun and to American security since the British burned Washington. We all know why: Iran is supposed to be building WMDs, especially lots of potential mushroom clouds; to be in league with Al-Qaeda and all other sorts of nefarious terrorists; to be clamoring for the wiping out of one or more of its neighbors; and, most probably, to have been (ultimately) behind 9/11... (Sounds familiar?)
Yet, now, not a peep - the word 'Iran' hasn't crossed Bushian lips at all, at all, since the elections. Not even our centrist, triangulating Democrats in Congress - the warmongering worms eating away at the core of the Party - have anything to say, silence on all sides. Perhaps our triangulating-centrists have just been catching their breaths, after all their stomping in favor of officially-endorsed Democratic nominees... Perhaps they've just realized that endless war (like the Third Reich or the Soviet Union) is terminally ill and has suddenly become out of fashion...
Whatever the case, now that we have a majority in both the House and the Senate, let's hope that there will be a lot of thinking and planning before we take it upon ourselves to attack other countries. A little reflection on the morality and legality of preemptive strikes might also not go astray.
The immediate issue is that of our ambassador to the United Nations, a post currently filled by presidential fiat during a Congress recess by one John Bolton. Let's hope that we'll now fill that vital post with a thinking and capable diplomat rather than a hit-man who has always sought to incite rather than avoid the use of violence.
Furthermore, let's hope that we can end, once and for all, the biggest of Bushco's slights-of-hand, the conflation of the (largely mythical) "war on terra" with the invasion and occupation of countries that pose no imminent threat to us but are replete with oil. Somebody ought to tell the President to cut out his facile and empty rhetoric (aka BS) whereby we must attain victory in Iraq (whatever that might mean in practice, if anything) because the war (occupation?) in Iraq is (supposedly) the principal front in the "war on terra". The occupation of Iraq is no such thing, and if it were such it would be solely and precisely because of our illegal and immoral (as well as totally unnecessary) invasion and occupation. What was needed after 9/11 - when we had the whole world on our side - was effective international anti-terrorist police action, not the gratuitous attack on countries that (as Rummy put it) furnished good targets, especially when rich with oil.
Let's hope that if anything comes out of a Democratic-controlled Congress it will be a refusal to continue with this murderous policy whereby bombing the shit out of (oil-rich) countries has replaced diplomacy... Then, perhaps, America might just regain the status that it always had for the entire world as a beacon of justice and morality, as opposed to its current reputation as the world's principal "rogue nation".
John Bolton has to go...
Permalink | 11 comments