I made myself a promise not to get too politically heated in future months and rant, as I'm prone to doing from time to time...but...and here's the thing...I need to say they are all completely barking nuts, completely fucking crazy. Oh, and evil beyond redemption. A blanket statement, sure, but I don’t know how else to put it, and put it, I think we all have a responsibility to do….
.....living on planet earth as I do, this stuff really scares the living daylights out of me.
There, in the political nerve centre of the United States, in Washington DC, inside that thing they so proudly call the Beltway, there is a serious and ongoing debate between the hawks and the slightly less hawkish, on whether to go to war with Iran, or at the very least to drop large amounts of ordinance on it and it’s people. This, of course, most of us already well know. We read it almost everyday, the words appear on newspaper pages and websites and our eyes stroll over them to the next story. Pieces about applied or threatened sanctions, and reports by the IAEA to the UN find their way every week or two onto the various cable news networks. All of which runs past us in this quite bizarre world we now find ourselves in.
But one needs to take step back and reflect and the reality of all this. These people, having this allegedly responsible discussion at at the highest levels of government are the same people who have the blood of some half a million plus people on their hands, who dragged not only their country, but the world into a massive and unnecessary misadventure in the Middle East, and got away with it. They might be barking mad, but they are barking mad and terrifying serious. And they have their finger on the trigger which could, some say is likely, to plunge all of us into an abyss that would make the current Iraqi fiasco look like a pleasant tramp in the Waitakeres.
That all the US Presidential Candidates have opined that military action against Iran is a viable option must be a reasonable pointer towards the fact such a position there is totally centrist, and researches as such. A flexing of muscles it may be, and a refusal to take anything off the table, but that such a stance, and the action it implies can be taken seriously by the enfranchised mass in the USA is horrifying.
We are told by the American hard right, and I’m talking, all the way up that Vice President that Iran presents a greater threat to us all than Hitler. Really? And which countries has the Islamic Republic of Iran invaded, not just recently, but ever? I guess such talk goes down well with Bubba, after all they overwhelmingly bought the 9/11 – Saddam link and the WMDs bullshit without questioning. And a third of these people still do. And overwhelmingly are really only pissed off with the current fuck up in Iraq because, they’re…uhhhh…fucked (excuse the language but the expression is required) any which way they move. They still haven’t worked out, or at least they pretending not to understand in the Beltway, that surge or no surge, the USA are little more than unwilling passengers in Iraq now….nobody in Washington is making the real decisions that matter…the insurgents or whatever you want to call them are calling the shots.
I have trouble understanding how the US government can still get away with blaming Iran for every foreign policy disaster they’ve walked into, and can only imagine how the US would react if Iran was actually actively putting agents in the US to destablise their government, rather than the other way around.
I know who I'm more scared of, who is more of a threat to the way my family and I live, and its not Iran.
Yep, they’re all barking mad, GOP or Democrat, and at least ElBaradei called them out, as does this brutally honest and bang on op/ed in, of all places, Murdoch’s Times (and will Americans stop calling it The London Times please…this is The Times…it predates the NY and LA versions by a hundred years), from Anatole Kaletsky, who is hardly a bleeding heart lefty, although you'd think he was Lenin meets Satan personified from the US sourced hate comments below the piece.
I say this with growing despair, because I too have returned from a fact-finding tour, to America. Viewed from across the Atlantic it is clear that the parochial British obsession with WMD and “sexed-up dossiers” bears no relationship to the catastrophes now unfolding in the Middle East and beyond – not only in Iraq, but also in Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan, and soon maybe Syria, Iran and Pakistan. What people are talking about in America is not whether the invasion of Iraq was legally or morally justified but why it went so disastrously wrong and whether the same blundering fanatics will launch another catastrophic military adventure, most likely a bombing campaign against Iran, to distract attention from failure in Iraq. After all, the neoconservative ideologues who still run the Bush Administration have nothing left to lose politically – and in their fevered imaginations they still think they could inflict military defeat on the “Islamofascists” in what they now see as an even greater historical confrontation than the Cold War.
Viewed from virtually anywhere outside the USA, or Israel, the concept of attacking Iran or even the perceived threat from the Islamic Republic seems so far for anything we call reasonable reality, that it can only be called delusional. There is simply no logic to any of it, and it must be assumed it goes back, like the Cuban thing, to a festering sore head at having had their noses rubbed it twenty eight years ago. That’s all it is, but the war threat and the perception that more people need to die to resolve this is absolutely centrist in the USA. The common wisdom around the world, no matter your politics, unless you exist in a fringe minority is that an attack on Iran is utterly, and without question uncalled for and criminally insane.
But not Stateside….scroll through those letters at the bottom of the Times piece, read the likes of Coulter (these nutters ARE mainstream in the USA), read the half baked stories in the New York Times (demolished by Greenwald…remember what a drum beater the NYT was for Iraq), listen to the Presidential candidates, or to half baked, but elected nutters like Joe Lieberman….to not advocate more bloodshed in Iran, or at least threaten it, with all its inevitable repercussions is, to the enfranchised mass, fringe, almost traitorous.
What a damn mess…
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