How should we prepare for the possibility that the current administration proceeds to attack Iran in some fashion, as Seymour Hersh has warned us? When the Iraq attack was incipient many of us marched, wrote letters to our (presumptive) representatives, visited their offices, protested in the streets during the UN debates and thereafter-- all to no avail. Were we too tame given the circumstances?
Now we are apparently faced with the same situation regarding the US government's approach to Iran, a country we have wronged in the past and which we seem to be on the way to wronging again.
Our collective hopes right now have been placed in the following scenarios:
a. a more reasonable and resistant Congress would be in place by 2007 and intervention would not occur before that time.
b. the Pentagon is aware that a preemptive strike on Iran doesn't make strategic or tactical sense given the present situation in the Middle East-- and would successfully oppose such action.
c. the public reaction in the US and abroad would be so severe as to preclude or quickly end intervention.
These are thin threads on which to hang an alternative to the catastrophic intervention scenario which seems now to be unfolding, and which must at all costs be stopped. If Herblock were still alive he would draw a cartoon that would show the absurdity of the juggernaut that is careening down the road with nuclear weapons in the cart, smirking at finally getting their way. That might make the wishful Straussian thinkers in downtown DC think twice before plunging ahead. Alas, Herblock is not with us any longer and the Washington Post is not what it used to be. We need a plan, a strategy, that falls within the rules of civilized behavior, that works to alert our country to the peril ahead. Perhaps we need to follow the example of Nepal, since we too apparently have a monarch out of control. How should we respond? A general strike, perhaps? Civil disobedience on a massive scale? Withdrawal and transfer of all liquid assets? Leave the country? What would Thoreau, Jesus, Gandhi, etc. do?
