War with Iran is inevitable. While you’re swallowing that, if you haven’t concluded the same for yourself, let’s connect some dots.
We have a righteous nation with a proud history on one side, and a cabal of evangelical Islamic thugs bent on the destruction of the West and regional nuclear hegemony on the other. The kicker is, they’re the same country. The Iranians are living under a government that isn’t going along with the plans of the Anglo-American Establishment and, through its clandestine nuclear program, is barking up the wrong tree. It’s also sitting next to a country that has pledged to attack it if sanctions are not in place before Hanukkah - er, Christmas.
We have a nation in economic disarray with a currency on life support. A conflict-weary nation in the midst of two TV wars and who knows how many furtive ones. A nation hung from tethers attached to multinational corporations, sprawling offshore banks, and elite think tanks with members of geopolitical and corporate influence ubiquitously stocking the halls of its government. It’s the US of A we’re talking about, and its people are just as disfranchised as the Iranians - don’t doubt that for a second.
Third, we have a President who is an empty suit. He is a naked emperor. Through no fault of his own, he is the marionette held up by the threads of finance capital and the military-industrial complex, trotting along the world stage with the kind of flimsy gait that would fool only a child (or those whose rational thinking skills do not outmatch one). He is, by all measures, the archetypal post-lucid American president.
There is no denying that there is little the regime would not sacrifice to become a full-fledged nuclear power. There is no denying the tyrannical and apocalyptic underpinnings of the Tehran gang, who oversee “Death to America” chants and refer to the United States as “the Great Satan.” There is no denying the oppressive authoritarianism of the current government and its blatant human rights abuses against homosexuals and women. There is no denying the nation’s sponsorship of groups hostile to the cause of liberty, religious freedom, and basic human rights.
But we cannot afford to have our republic’s name etched onto the bombs that drop on Iran. We might as well drop them on ourselves.
There is no surgical strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. There is no military “operation.” There is war, and only war, as some elected representatives are calling for a balls-to-the-wall all-or-nothing strategy against Iran. Lindsey Graham even went so far as to say that we “should destroy their ability to make conventional war. They should have no planes that can fly and no ships that can float.” We aren’t talking about a foreign invasion, a foreign occupation, a catalyzed coup, or a nation building operation. Iran is not Iraq. She will retaliate in kind, and the result will be a potentially nuclear war on an enormous scale.
Sanctions don’t work. Talks don’t work. We lost the chance to curb their ambitions years and years ago, and this is arguably the result of 50 years of hard-headed, corrupt, and subversive policy toward the Middle East. You thought 9/11 was blowback? Just wait until the bombs start to fall at Natanz. Innocent Americans will not be the only ones to perish in an “all-or-nothing” war with Iran - the liberties we have so taken for granted will vanish as well. Iran will not be a war that Americans go home to watch on television. It will not be a war about which we have extended policy debates and anti-war rallies wherever municipal ordinances permit us. It will not be a war that will stretch for 8 years without daily mention in the national press.
The problem of terrorism will actually be a reality, and the American intifada will begin. The CIA and FBI, like the double-edged swords that they are, have broken up several large scale terrorist plots against targets in the United States that took huge amounts of planning and resources. But what happens after the first Islamist thug opens fire on a school bus? What happens when the first grenade is thrown down the frozen food aisle? What happens when Jihadis-for-hire and Iranian-backed Hezbollah operatives start daily self-detonation in malls and restaurants?
What happens? The Constitution is detonated along with them, and worse yet, at the request of the very citizens whose rights it was drafted protect. War makes a lot of money for certain people, and unfortunately those people are in control. I hate to present doomsday scenarios, but this particular one keeps me up at night, because it appears to be an inevitable one.
In the words of Martin Luther King, war is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
NteFah said this on 