The pious old hypocrite wants to gin up a war with Iran
by Justin Raimondo
While the American people pine for peace, our leaders are intent on war: that’s the anomaly of American “democracy,” one that speaks ill of the effort to export our system at gunpoint. Adopt “democracy,” and you, too, can be ruled by a warmongering oligarchy.
Americans oppose an attack on Iran 2-to-1. By almost every measure, they want negotiations, rather than confrontation, with Tehran. Yet the House of Representatives recently passed legislation that, in effect, fires the first shot at the Iranians, imposing draconian sanctions similar to those enacted against Iraq in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of that country. Similarly, this new sanctions regime sets the stage for the coming war with Iran.
The http://www.aipac.org/Publications/AIPACAnalysesBillSummaries/Bill_Summary_-_Iran_Counter-Proliferation_Act_-_H.R._1400.pdf [.pdf, so-called, doesn’t bother targeting goods and services that Iran might put to military use. Instead, it takes a broad-brush approach and openly seeks to strangle Iran economically. The legislation, written by champion warmonger Tom Lantos, would prohibit the import of any and all items from Iran, ban dealings with Iranian banks, stop the export of items having to do with civil aviation, and ratchet up the pressure on other countries to impose similar restrictions. Furthermore, Lantos wants a report from the White House every six months on the “progress” being made to tighten the chokehold on Iran. Looking at this from the Iranian side, it is clearly an act of war, especially in the context of the Iran Freedom and Support Act, which provided millions to fund “regime change” in the land of the mullahs The Lantos bill is a naked provocation that stops just short of an all-out attack – and paves the way for military action, in spite of a proviso that reads “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as authorizing the use of force or the use of the United States Armed Forces against Iran.” Having already declared our intention to bring down the regime by funding opposition groups, this latest vow by the U.S. Congress to destroy the Iranian economy is the equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the West skywriting “Surrender Dorothy” in the skies above Tehran.
With Lantos and the anti-Iran Democrats leading the charge on the political front, the Bush administration is moving on the military front. Recent developments are ominous: namely, the http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=4334 of another aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, to the two already looming off the Iranian coast. (Yes, I know that last link is to Debka.com, hardly a fountainhead of journalistic accuracy, but this Newsweek report prefigured it.) What amounts to a Republican-Democratic pincer movement is evidence that a real consensus has developed in our nation’s capital that war with Iran is inevitable.
True, there are some minor disagreements along the way, with the Democrats, led by the sickening hypocrite Lantos, demanding these draconian sanctions, and the White House opposing them on the grounds that new sanctions undermine our multilateral diplomatic effort to isolate Tehran. Lantos, that pious old fraud, inserted language in his bill that pays minimal lip service to the idea of resolving this dispute through diplomacy – while the rest of his bill is clearly designed to sink diplomatic initiatives that are bound to run aground on the rocks of sanctions.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11204