Why All of Our Efforts Won’t Stop an Attack on Iran

Why All of Our Efforts Won’t Stop an Attack on Iran

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May 12, 2008
The Limits of Exposure
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

http://counterpunch.org/leupp05122008.html
By GARY LEUPP

May 9. I read tonight a brief article by Philip Giraldi posted on the
American Conservative website: “War with Iran Might Be Closer than You
Think.”

“There is considerable speculation,” writes the former CIA officer,
“and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security
Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an
Iranian al-Qods [Revolutionary Guards]-run camp that is believed to be
training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of
several located near Tehran.”

Giraldi provides details. He reports that the meeting came as “the
direct result” of Hizbollah advances in Lebanon in recent days.
(Recall that the U.S. State Department lists the Shiite organization
Hizbollah as “terrorist” and as a tool of both Iran and Baathist
Syria. In fact it is probably the country’s largest and most popular
political party and has built significant ties with some Christian and
Sunni groups. Hizbollah’s rapid seizure of the Muslim sections of
Beirut, accomplished with little resistance, may have been
deliberately provoked by the U.S.-backed quasi-government of Lebanon
when the latter shut down the party’s private communications
network.)

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, according to Giraldi, was the only
senior official present urging delay. That suggests that the military
is not enthusiastic about a widened war in Southwest Asia, but that
the other regular members of the NSC (Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, National Security Advisor
Stephen Hadley as well as President Bush and Vice President Cheney)
are willing to provoke just that.

They will do what they do with the solid backing of Congress, the
presidential candidates, and the mainstream press which if history is
our guide will for a time shape shockingly malleable public opinion.
Yes, I fear that we (most of us) will be fooled again.

The Congress has passed near-unanimous resolutions against Iran,
endorsing the administration’s unprecedented designation of a
component of a nation’s military as a “terrorist organization.” House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be on board the program. Recall how after
the Democratic victory two years ago she capitulated to AIPAC by
stripping from a military spending bill the requirement that Bush seek
Congressional approval before attacking Iran. (That was after she’d
pointedly declared that Bush-Cheney impeachment hearings were “off the
table.” And after Rep. John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary
Committee and sometimes maverick, bitterly disappointed those pinning
their hopes on him by going along with the Democratic leadership’s
line. And after the Democrats had made it clear they weren’t serious
about ending the war they’d been elected to end---showing us how very
well the democratic system works in this country.)

John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton (all of whom agree that
an attack on Iran is “on the table”) will publicly approve. The media
will call upon the same “military analysts”/military industry
consultants who have been disseminating Pentagon propaganda for pay
since 2002 to explain why the attack is justified and necessary. The
main talking-point has been decided: “Iran is killing American
soldiers in Iraq.” Public opinion polls will show the public divided,
but a majority in support of the action because, regardless of their
feelings about the war in Iraq, they want to “support our troops” and
after all, Iran was asking for it by interfering in Iraq and attacking
us.

All the “exposure” that so many journalists and academics have tried
to provide for years will have failed to prevent another illegal
attack on a sovereign nation based on lies and bound to produce more
outrage against the U.S. throughout the world. A cruise missile strike
on an alleged training camp site won’t end there. It will be designed
to provoke an Iranian response and legitimate further U.S. attacks,
not only on Iran but Syria and Lebanon, probably in coordination with
Israel. Some in Israel badly want the U.S. to behead all their main
enemies in the region before their good friend George Bush leaves the
White House. If that means regional chaos---clashes between Iranian
and U.S. forces, the fall of the Maliki puppet regime in Baghdad
(which actually is friendly with Tehran and says it’s playing a
positive role in Iraq), the collapse of Shiite cooperation with the
U.S. occupation, Iran-Iraq border clashes, U.S. forays into Iranian
territory, the closing of ranks in fractious Iran against the
imperialist assault on their country---so be it!

If it means renewed war in Lebanon including Israeli invasion, an
Iranian shift from supporting U.S. puppet Karzai to Iran’s longtime
enemy the Taliban in Afghanistan, active Syrian support for Sunni
forces in Iraq, the disintegration of the fragile Sunni-“Coalition”
alliance against al-Qaeda in western Iraq as the region descends into
a Shiite-Sunni war---so be it! If it means the use of nuclear weapons
against Iran to try to cow its leaders and people into accepting a
U.S.-Israeli blueprint for the region---so be it! If it means the
unthinkable in the U.S.—a return to the draft---so be it! All of this
will at least have prevented the “nuclear holocaust” that the neocons,
Cheney and Bush have been insisting the Iranians plan to inflict on
the Jewish state unless they are stopped now. (No matter that all the
U.S. intelligence agencies in their National Intelligence Estimate on
Iran published late last year agreed that Iran does not now have a
nuclear weapons program. And no matter that the Ahmadinejad quote
about “wiping Israel off the map” has been exposed as a lie by Juan
Cole and others.)

If Benjamin Netanyahu is Israeli prime minister at the time of the
planned attack on Iran, a time of apocalyptic confusion might be the
perfect opportunity to empty the West Bank of its Palestinians. This
NSC agreement “in principle” to attack Iran is an agreement to risk
all these ramifications, confident that the press and politicians will
cooperate.

* * * * *

So often in recent months I’ve started to write a column exposing some
recent lie (or at least some report pertaining to Iran or Syria that
strikes me as obvious neocon-generated disinformation) only to give up
midway through. Not because of writer’s block, fatigue, or even the
thought that “Someone else has already written this, or someone like
Alex Cockburn or Justin Raimondo or Scott Ritter or Gordon Prather
will in the next day or so.” It’s more a matter of despairing at how
much exposure can accomplish.

A friend of mine was saying last month, “People are ‘exposured’ out.
They’re “Chomskyed” out.” He was speaking about young antiwar
activists mainly, but his point was that people who know what’s going
on are eager to act on the knowledge. To paraphrase Marx, the point is
not to expose the world, or have it further exposed to you, but to
change it.

The readership of sites like Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and
Antiwar.com know the main points. They know that Dick Cheney, the most
powerful vice president in history (and the most secrecy-obsessed
among powerful figures in U.S. history), has made his office the hub
of a cabal of neocons hell-bent of effecting “regime change”
throughout Southwest Asia by the end of Bush’s second term. They know
that the Office of Special Plans fabricated “intelligence” to terrify
the masses and gain support for the invasion of Iraq. They know that
U.S. intelligence has actually concluded that Iran has no nuclear
weapons program, and that the UN’s IAEA scientists have found no
evidence for one. But they also know that Cheney insists that he knows
there’s one, just as the neocons such as Norman Podhoretz and Michael
Ledeen know there’s one. Just as top Israeli officials know there’s
one as they demand U.S. action against Iran. They know there’s a huge
anti-Iran propaganda campaign underway very similar to the one that
preceded the lie campaign leading up to the Iraq War now in its
disastrous sixth year. They know that the U.S. is funding terrorist
groups to carry out attacks in Iran. They know that the
administration’s allegations about a Syrian nuclear program are highly
dubious.

They know that there are conflicts between the traditional
intelligence community and the neocons, and that the latter draw upon
a coherent (Straussian) philosophy that justifies the “noble lie” in
order to induce the foolish masses to support what the “wise”---who
must conceal their real objectives---want them to support. They
distrust anything the administration says about Lebanon, Somalia,
Sudan…

Yes, they’re “Chomskyed out.”


Maybe we need to shift the focus of exposure a bit. From the
particular to the general. From nasty individuals to nasty
institutions. From the symptoms to the system.

What’s worse? Cheney and his attorney David Addington crafting a
document in November 2001, bypassing routine staff review before
receiving Bush’s signature, which denied “foreign terrorist” suspects
in the U.S. access to any courts and allowing for their indefinite
detention? (This was exposed by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker in the
Washington Post last summer.) Or the failure of the elected officials
in Congress to even start impeachment proceedings against Cheney and
Bush?

What’s worse? John Yoo writing up his torture memos in 2002 as a
Justice Department employee, as eventually exposed in the mainstream
press? Or the decision of the trustees of the University of
California, Berkeley to hire him as a law professor in 2003?

What’s worse? Judith Miller’s willingness to funnel disinformation to
the American people through her NYT articles before and after the Iraq
invasion? Or the Time’s willingness to publish them, and now those of
her sometimes co-author Michael Gordon, cheerleading the coming Iran
attack?

The Congress, the Justice Department, academia, and the press are all
complicit in imperialist war and attacks on the Constitution. Does
this mean the system isn’t working, or that it’s working all too
well?

Is the system supposed to expose itself, through congressional
hearings, investigative reporting, war crimes trials? Or is it,
serving the small minority it’s designed to serve, supposed to simply
tolerate exposure (in the name of freedom of the press) while
saturating citizens with propaganda? (If the exposure ever gets widely
enough disseminated, and threatens to undermine its objectives, it can
always “kill the messenger”---or at least accuse the writer of
undermining national security, abetting terrorism, etc.)

Voting for “antiwar” Democrats two years ago didn’t end the war. Even
millions in the streets, peacefully demonstrating as the system
encourages, didn’t prevent the assault on Iraq over five years ago.
Now there’s no feasible political recourse to stop an attack on Iran.
And little time to mobilize mass demonstrations against it. It will
come as a thief in the night, presented to the American people as a
fait accompli. As the Bush-Cheney cowboys ride off into the sunset,
smirkin’ and grinnin’ and slapping each other’s backs, the people will
start to pay.

A character in Bertolt Brecht’s The Beggar’s Opera asks what’s worse---
robbing a bank, or owning a bank? The system itself, that is to say,
is the criminal product of wrongly acquired wealth, much of it
obtained through imperialist war. Exposure alone, no matter how
voluminous, eloquent and persuasive, will not change it.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct
Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and
Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women,
1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless
chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial
Crusades.

He can be reached at:


-------------------------------------------------

That excellent panel discussion about the Middle East with Chris
Hedges (which includes the question/comment about Mearsheimer/Walt
book - www.israellobbybook.com - in the 'Q & A') airs this Sunday (May
18th, 2008) on C-SPAN 2/Book TV:

http://www.booktv.org/schedule.aspx

The following will broadcast on C-SPAN 2/Book TV this weekend (see
www.booktv.org) as such can be viewed via the streaming video link for
C-SPAN 2 at www.c-span.org as well:


Sunday (May 18th, 2008)
9:00 AM ET (6 AM PT) 1 hr Politics
The Revolution: A Manifesto
Author: Ron Paul

11:00 PM ET (8 PM PT) 1 hr 2008 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books:
Contentious Ground: The Middle East (includes question/comment about
Mearsheimer/Walt book included in the 'Q & A'):
Authors: Reza Aslan; Chris Hedges; Moderator: Zachary Karabell; Amy
Wilentz


7:00 PM PT (4 PM PT) 1 hr, 56 min Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of
Rachel Corrie
Author: Rachel Corrie


10:00 PM (7 PM PT) 59 min 2008 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books:
Defining American Character
Authors: Howard Fineman; Amy Goodman; Tom Hayden; Hugh Hewitt;
Moderator: Jon Wiener


http://NEOCONZIONISTTHREAT.BLOGSPOT.COM

On May 13, 1:04 pm, the boy who cried found
out how much we cared:
http://content.ytmnd.com/content/c/e...d35e6bd3ef.jpg

If 70 million Iranians don't care enough about their country to stop the
mullahs from painting a big red X on their backs I don't see why anyone else
should care about the Iranians. The Iranians know the good guys from the
bad guys, they know the culturally significant sites, they know Europe and
the US have said they will not accept a nuclear armed Iran. The Iranian
people have the most to lose and they have had a revolution before. The
best option is for the Iranains to take out the mullahs by any means
necessary. If they won't do it, I don't care what happens to them, it's
their neck on the line, they should act like they want to keep it. The
Iranians I kow are great people, but if they won't stop this train coming at
them, it shouldn't make the rest of us afraid to do what needs to be done.

--

Scott
Who better to heal America's political and racial divisions that a corrupt,
racist radical?

"eyeball" wrote in message
...
On May 13, 1:04 pm, the boy who cried found
out how much we cared:
http://content.ytmnd.com/content/c/e...d35e6bd3ef.jpg