Simon Tisdall
writes:
The drumbeat of war with Iran grows steadily more intense. Each day brings more defiant rhetoric from Tehran, another failed UN nuclear inspection, reports of western military preparations, an assassination, a missile test, or a dire warning that, once again, the world is sliding towards catastrophe. If this all feels familiar, that's because it is. For Iran, read Iraq in the countdown to the 2003 invasion.
A decisive moment may arrive when Barack Obama meets Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in Washington on 5 March. "The meeting … will be definitive," said Ari Shavit in Haaretz. "If the US president wants to prevent a disaster, he must give Netanyahu iron-clad guarantees the US will stop Iran in any way necessary and at any price after the 2012 [US] elections. If Obama doesn't do this, he will obligate Netanyahu to act before the 2012 elections."
If accurate, this is not much of a choice. It suggests military action by the US or Israel or both is unavoidable, the only question being one of timing. Objectively speaking, this is not actually the position. All concerned still have choices. The case against Iran's nuclear programme is far from proven. It is widely agreed that limited military strikes will not work; a more extensive, longer-lasting campaign would be required. And Obama in particular, having striven to end the Iraq and Afghan wars, is loath to start another.
But as with Iraq in 2003, the sense that war is inevitable and unstoppable is being energetically encouraged by political hardliners and their media accomplices on all sides, producing a momentum that even the un-bellicose Obama may find hard to resist. [...]
In contrast to the splits over Iraq, the main western powers are united in their determination to bring Iran to heel. As well as Netanyahu, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama have all declared an Iranian bomb unacceptable. Their inflexibility thus makes war more rather than less likely should Iran refuse to back down.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:
Arrgh!
During his debate with Dean, Perle says this at minute marker 21:19:
I'm sometimes asked now that we know there were not weapons of mass destruction in Iraq shouldn't we re-evatulate the decisions to go to war and that seems to me a little bit like deciding at the end of the year not that it was foolish to have purchased insurance becuase your house didn't burn down.
Yeah, going to war is like buying insurance. $300 billion and counting, 1,500 dead and over 10,000 maimed American soldiers, Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians either dead, maimed, or suffering the loss of their loved ones... but good thing we paid that "insurance premium", because just imagine -- Iraq might've had weapons of mass destruction!!! WTF?
The more apt analogy, if Perle wants to go there, is purposefully torching your house at the end of the year, otherwise your insurance money might've gone to waste.
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