Well I was pretty fired up about the impending War On Iran for awhile - was getting all sorts of flashbacks to the build-up to the war on Iraq, the saber-rattling, shoddily distorted exagerations and denials coming out of the White House, a seething buzz of righteous viciousness coming from the Far Right, and so on.
What bothered me most during the buildup to Iraq was that even I, a humble netsurfer, was able to inform myself better than the WH, the DOD, and the CIA, as to the dubious merits of the case for war - the White House subsequently acknowledged that it was shocked, shocked! to discover that the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs was so wildly off-the-mark, but that was pretty obvious at the time. They danced a prettier dance on the topic of Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda, and have kept on dancing since, while acknowledging that they never explicitly connected the two...Spin spin sugar, y'all got headf***ed, now sign this $106.5 billion emergency spending bill...
And so on, and so forth. So based on what I've seen of the current buzz on Iran, an imminent attack with nukes seemed imminent. Because I know how they play now, and they've definitely got the street creds to pull something as stupid as nuking Iran off. It's somewhat entertaining to shift through the different possible perspectives, when analyzing the motives behind the WH initiating such an attack - bubble-based idiocy? Christian Fundamentalist Pre-Apocalyptic manoeuvering? Nuclear brinksmanship to preempt the Iran Oil Bourse from moving to the Euro? Round 672 in the Great Game? Bush' oil buddies trying to force oil prices up dramatically? Preemptive action to preempt a preemptive action by Israel?
The list goes on. At a certain point, it doesn't matter anymore. It's a waste of time, to speculate on why the Bush Administration is trying to do something. It's a tar baby - however hard you punch at it, you're just going to get pulled in further, stuck in harder. Br'er Rabbit's mistake was in presuming humanity, in what was actually just an inert mass of stickiness. Cold dark indifferent stickiness.
I was flipping through one of the "Star Wars" books recently - it's wierd, because they're about as schlocky as the "Left Behind" Series, but actually have a lot more depth than the movies. There was a discussion in this one about how the best Jedi Trap was to engineer a distractive event, crucial enough to inspire a Jedi to participate in that event, in order to "fix" it, or trigger a successful outcome.
The trap being, that while the Jedi is involved in that event, the Emperor Palatine is free to engineer some other event, without having to worry about intrusion. An absurdly simple tactic, reliant on the righteous distractiveness of Jedi. Hmmm, so what does this have to do with Iran?
The Bush Administration can benefit from talking the talk, but not walking the walk, apropos Iran, in many ways:
1-Bluff tactic to win concessions from Tehran on the involvment in Iraq, their oil market...
2-Splinter tactic, to open up fault lines within Iran - politics there are much more complex than has been portrayed in the media...
3-Pushing the envelope on nuclear weapons - the Bush Administration has pushed hard to abandon current laws governing nuclear weapons research/testing in order to develop a "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" (google on it! it's exciting!). Inflating Iran's nuclear menace could help tilt the debate in their favor, and lubricate a push for this research, even though the merits of it are highly questionable.
4-Distraction. Attacking Iran isn't rational, from a tactical, diplomatic/political, or economic perspective. The US military is already overstretched, tactical strikes on Iran's facilities are likely to be ineffective stalling tactics at best, and using nukes would trigger devastating fallout, politically radioactive, if you will.
So why rhetorically flourish on such an irresponsible plan? The far right "nuke 'em all / let God sort 'em out" get to ecstatically writhe and gambol, while the left earnestly marshals up rational analyses of why and wherefore and whatnot. Bush eventually gets credit for not doing something devastatingly self-destructive, and gains a few free weeks where discussion is diverted away from more damaging topics, like the War in Iraq, Abramoff, Plamegate, and so on.
I could go further into why invading Iran is rationally insane, even for the Bush Administration; what benefits bluffing on Nuking Iran offer the Bush Administration; and the various interreactionary intimacies currently ongoing as a result of the debate. But again, it's just a tarbaby, a Jedi trap.
At this point, I should probably be offering solutions, inspirational enthusiasms, calls to actions, and suchlike. I don't have any. Sometimes, I recognize that people in my life are so inherently vicious, self-absorbed, and destructive, that there isn't any good reason for me to stay involved with them. A Bush Administration that threatens nuclear strikes, whether as a manipulatively rhetorical flourish, or as a deliberate action that they're willing to follow through on, is past my ability to have any kind of relationship with.
The Bush Administration may have rejected the UN, Kyoto, the IAEA, the Geneva conventions, global warming, conservation, and so on. But I haven't. And I won't. Participating in the framework constructed by the Bush Administration is to willingly submit tp their little headfuckery game. And I won't.
