The Folly of War with Iran
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\nBy Stanley Heller
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\nThe feeble Democratic leadership has given up on legislation to require the President to seek approval from Congress before attacking Iran.\u00a0 It stripped the language from the Iraq Supplemental Appropriation Bill.\u00a0 Reportedly convervative Democrats didn\u2019t want to \u201ctie the President\u2019s hands\u201d.\u00a0 While the President\u2019s hands were left free no doubt many in Congress found their arms twisted by over 1,000 lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who descended on Washington\u00a0recently to spread hysteria about Iran.
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\nDespite a recent working meeting between U.S. and Iranian officials the threat of U.S.\/Israel attack remains very high.\u00a0 The papers are reporting that Israel is arranging safe passage for its jets to bomb Iran.\u00a0 The Israeli paper Ha\u2019aretz states that a Kuwaiti paper is claiming that Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have given their permission for the planes to overfly those countries.\u00a0 The British paper The Telegraph quotes a senior unnamed Israeli defense official who says Israel is bargaining with the US for an \u201cair corridor\u201d over Iraq. \u00a0A US carrier strike group sits off the coast of Iran with another one approaching.\u00a0 The Administration continues to ratchet up the rhetoric.\u00a0 It now blames Iran for the Iraq insurgency.\u00a0
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\nWill Americans be fooled again?\u00a0 Three presidents and Congress said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and were a threat \u201cto the world\u201d. He had VX and smallpox. He had a nuclear program.\u00a0 He was in league with al-Qaeda.\u00a0 The U.S. launched ten years of sanctions and four years of all out war yet none of the charges were true.
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\nThe regime in Tehran is\u00a0 a grim theocracy that came to power by murdering the Iraqi Left..\u00a0 It\u2019s \u201cHolocaust Conference\u201d was a sick joke.\u00a0 But Iran hasn\u2019t started a war in 200 years and there\u2019s no evidence that it\u2019s suicidally planning a war against the U.S. or Israel. Yet the drumbeats for another shock and awe assault are getting louder.
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\nIran is indeed enriching uranium, but it\u2019s all under the eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency and there hasn\u2019t been any report that any of the material has been engineered to the point where it could be used in a bomb.\u00a0 Scott Ritter, the former Marine intelligence officer and UN arms inspector, who got it right about Iraq\u2019s lack of WMD, has been saying for years that Iran has no nuclear weapons program only a nuclear energy program. It was started by the late Shah of Iran with US approval.\u00a0 Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning New Yorker journalist spoke at Yale on January 31.\u00a0 He said the CIA has informed the Administration that it can find \u201cno evidence of a parallel program\u201d in Iran to secretly make nuclear bombs. Yet even if Ritter and Hersh are wrong and Iran makes some nuclear bombs how is that a serious threat to the US or to Israel?\u00a0 Both countries could each reduce Iran to a radioactive cinder in a few hours.
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\nThe charge that Iran is fueling the insurgency in Iraq is ludicrous.\u00a0 Iran is Shia. The Shia in Iraq have not fought the US troops except in two battles in 2004.\u00a0\u00a0 The Iraqi government is dominated by the Shia pro-Iran parties.\u00a0 They are collaborating, not fighting the US.\u00a0 The supposedly new high-tech \u201cshaped charge\u201d weapons are nothing of the sort.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been used for decades and are well known to Iraqi army veterans.\u00a0
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\nIncredibly it\u2019s quite possible that a U.S.\/Israeli attack on Iran could involve nuclear weapons.\u00a0 Last month the Times of London reported that Israel is practicing bombing runs simulating attacks using \u201ctactical\u201d nuclear weapons.\u00a0 Its ultra-right wing government \u00a0is spreading hysteria. The Israeli media trumpets stories from politicians and historians saying that Iran is planning a new Holocaust.\u00a0 It\u2019s whipping up the public to approve an atomic attack.\u00a0 U.S. politicians make no criticism explaining that this \u201coption\u201d must be left on the table.
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\nThat an unprovoked attack on Iran would be a grave violation of international law is of no consequence to the Administration, but consider what the effect of an attack would be on the U.S. and on our troops.\u00a0 \u00a0Iran could suspend its oil sales.\u00a0 It could rocket the oil sheikdoms that gave Israel safe passage. It might be able to block oil transport through the Straits of Hormuz. Are we ready for $100 barrel oil?\u00a0 Are we ready to have our troops in Iraq become sitting ducks for Iranian missiles?\u00a0 And what if the Iraqi Shia do start to mount their own insurgency?
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\nEven the goal of slowing alleged Iranian production of nuclear bombs might be endangered by an attack.\u00a0 That\u2019s the conclusion of British nuclear weapons scientist Frank Barnaby in a report for the Oxford Research Group.\u00a0 He reasons that its unlikely that even a massive bombing campaign could destroy all of Iran\u2019s nuclear capability and that Iran would most likely do what Iraq did after its nuclear facility was destroyed by Israel in \u201981\u2026go ahead a with a full scale covert program to build the bombs.
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\nIs there hope of avoiding the disaster of an attack on Iran?.\u00a0 Some may think that the various sanctions resolutions are an alternative to war.\u00a0 That was the view of many in 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait.\u00a0 Yet, what it did then was\u00a0to help\u00a0demonize Iraq in the eyes of Americans and grease the slide to war.\u00a0It also\u00a0gave the U.N.\/U.S. the “legal” basis for the decade of sanctions that killed\u00a0 a million Iraqi civilians.
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\nThe politicians are pathetic.\u00a0\u00a0Only Dennis Kucinich has\u00a0come out forthrightly saying there\u2019s no need for war with Iran.\u00a0 According to the London Times some US generals are prepared to quit if Bush gives an order for an attack on Iran, but that would come too late.\u00a0 The people have to speak out angrily and massively and denounce the folly of war on Iran.\u00a0Teach-ins, letters, op-eds, pickets of warmongers.\u00a0 \u00a0Our\u00a0message is simple, \u201cNo Sanctions or Attack on Iran!\u201d
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Stanley Heller is Chairperson of the Middle East Crisis Committee.\u00a0 He can be reached at mail@TheStruggle.org or MECC, Box 3626, Woodbridge, CT 06525.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Folly of War with Iran \u00a0 By Stanley Heller \u00a0 The feeble Democratic leadership has given up on legislation to require the President to seek approval from Congress before attacking Iran.\u00a0 It stripped the language from the Iraq Supplemental Appropriation Bill.\u00a0 Reportedly convervative Democrats didn\u2019t want to \u201ctie the President\u2019s hands\u201d.\u00a0 While the President\u2019s… Continue reading The Folly of War with Iran<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}