Don’t bet the ranch on it
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4832
by Justin Raimondo
If you want to know what the future holds in store, just take a look at what John McCain said recently to the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4816:
“Rather than sitting down unconditionally with the Iranian president or supreme leader in the hope that we can talk sense into them, we must create the real-world pressures that will peacefully but decisively change the path they are on. Essential to this strategy is the UN Security Council, which should impose progressively tougher political and economic sanctions. Should the Security Council continue to delay in this responsibility, the United States must lead like-minded countries in imposing multilateral sanctions outside the UN framework. I am proud to have been a leader on these issues for years, having coauthored the 1992 Iran-Iraq Arms Non-Proliferation Act. Over a year ago I proposed applying sanctions to restrict Iran’s ability to import refined petroleum products, on which it is highly dependent, and the time has come for an international campaign to do just that. A severe limit on Iranian imports of gasoline woul d create immediate pressure on Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to change course, and to cease in the pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
In short, a military blockade that would amount to having Iran in a death-grip, precisely what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did to the Japanese in order to provoke them into attacking. What the War Party is hoping for is another Pearl Harbor, a rationalization to launch a new world war.
Barack Obama’s response has been appeasement – not of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but of the Republicans here at home. Which is why the charge of appeaser, coming from the GOP, will tend to stick.Senator McCain’s major talking point before the AIPAC crowd was that Obama voted against the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, which designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a branch of the Iranian government, as a terrorist organization, giving U.S. forces carte blanche to attack. The response of the Obama camp was to say that they really had no problem with the fundamental aim of Kyl-Lieberman, just the resolution’s implication that American troops in Iraq would now be tasked with countering Iranian influence.
In short, Obama’s answer amounted to yes, the Revolutionary Guard, and the government that directs them, are terrorists, but we shouldn’t go after them in Iraq. Or,as Denis McDonough, who heads up the campaign’s foreign policy shop, put it, “The debate last fall was about the broader implications and other parts of that amendment, giving the soldiers an additional mission in Iraq.”
Weasel words, if ever they were spoken.
The fact of the matter is that Obama didn’t vote on Kyl-Lieberman. He then attacked Hillary Clinton over it, saying it was yet another milestone on our road to war with Iran, and everybody knew it at the time. AIPAC and its allies in both parties have been agitating for a military confrontation with the Iranians since well before the Iraqi disaster jelled in the public consciousness, and everybody knows that, too. Does Obama really think he’s deceiving anyone with a non-response that gives new meaning to the word “disingenuous”?
In an interview with Fox News, Obama countered criticism of his willingness to talk to the Iranians by declaring:
“Iran is stronger now than when George Bush took office. And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons.”
Yet it means no such thing, as our own national intelligence estimate [.pdf on the matter states quite plainly. Iran, like prewar Iraq, abandoned its nuclear weapons program some time ago. McCain’s blockade is all about regime-change, and has nothing to do with “weapons of mass destruction.” As Yogi Berra once put it, “It’s déjà vu all over again!” Isn’t this the same progression of alleged motivations we saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? In Bizarro World, history repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second as tragedy.
McCain is signaling his support for the long-rumored war Bush is said to be planning as his bloody “legacy” – a legacy of horror, to be sure, one that will long be remembered as the act of a monster.
What Obama is signaling is nothing. Seeking to avoid the impression of weakness, he succeeds only in projecting it. As I write, he has yet to actually deliver his much-awaited speech to the AIPAC conclave, but there is little doubt Obama’s appeasement of the Lobby will continue. He shares with John McCain the view that the U.S. government cannot and should not take an attack on Iran “off the table,” to repeat the phraseology invariably utilized by politicians and pundits when this subject comes up. As if the Iranian people, who will suffer enormously in the course of an attack, are mere cards in a deck shuffled by U.S. policymakers. And you wonder why they hate us.
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12942