Just a few quick comments on Iran. What the hell – why should this week be any different from all the others?

The rhetoric on Iran is heating up. This is beginning to feel like 2002 all over again – I hope with a different ending, our having benefitted from a bad experience, but I have my doubts. The Israeli government has gone into overdrive in an apparent attempt to prompt into more aggressive action against Iran. Their threat to bomb the place is not an idle one – this is what they do and what they have done, in Syria and in Iraq, not to mention various assaults on Lebanon, though not related to nuclear arms programs. We’re hearing the same kind of trope we heard about Saddam Hussein. They’re creating a “nuclear arms capability”! They’ve got missiles that can reach the United States! Be afraid!

Of course, we all know how this story ends. What became of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons ambitions about which “there can be no doubt”? It was just as defector Hussein Kemal described it in the mid 1990s, in interviews that were well circulated before the Iraq war: Iraq had never gotten beyond the theoretical stage in weapons development, and what technology they had relating to uranium enrichment was broken up and buried after the Gulf War. And their missile technologies? We all know about the aluminum tube hoax. Then there were the deadly drones – basically model planes bound together with duct tape. This is why the current claims about Iran shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Frankly, if we were intentionally trying to encourage Iran to build nuclear weapons, we couldn’t have come up with a better scenario than has occurred over the past ten years. For one thing, they have a nuclear state – Israel – constantly threatening them with attack. They have the sole remaining superpower – us – doing very much the same thing. We included them in an “axis of evil”, one nation of which – their neighbor Iraq – was invaded and destroyed. The one that wasn’t invaded… had nuclear weapons. What lesson would we expect them to draw from that? Also, the nation that capitulated to the U.S. and gave up its nuclear ambitions – Libya – was later attacked and overthrown. More incentive to negotiate. Is anyone surprised that they would want to keep their options open?

The fact is, with the wind down of the Iraq and Afghan wars, we now have a hand free. That, no doubt, will put a lot of countries on high alert, Iran amongst them. If you don’t want another war, tell your congressional representatives, your president, your neighbors: We don’t need this.

luv u,

jp