America's itch to brawl has a new target – but bombs can't conquer Iran

[marmar]

America's itch to brawl has a new target – but bombs can't conquer Iran
A post-imperial virus has infected foreign policy. We've been here before, we know the human cost, and now we must stop

Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 November 2011


This time there will be no excuses. Plans for British support for an American assault on Iran, revealed in today's Guardian, are appalling. They would risk what even the "wars of 9/11" did not bring: a Christian-Muslim armageddon engulfing the region. This time no one should say they were not warned, that minds were elsewhere, that we were told it would be swift and surgical. Nobody should say that.

To western strategists, Iran today is exactly where Iraq was in 2002. The country posed no threat to the west. Yet "weapons of mass destruction" were said to be primed and had to be urgently eliminated. The offending regime could be subjugated by air power or, if not, by regime change. The cause was noble, and the outcome sure.

There any comparison ends. Iran is not a one-man, two-bit dictatorship, but a nation of 70 million people, an ancient and proud civilisation with a developed civil society and a modicum of pluralist democracy. Certainly its insecure leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants a weapons-ready nuclear enrichment programme, as next week's United Nations report by the International Atomic Energy Authority is expected to repeat. But he leads a country which, like Pakistan, Britain or Israel, craves status, prestige and the vague security that these unusable weapons seem to convey.

Nuclear dissemination is deplorable, but massively overhyped. Warheads cost a fortune to develop and keep in service. Modern anti-western aggression finds it cheaper and more effective to plan terrorist outrages. Nuclear bombs have not made Israel more secure. They have been useless to Pakistan in confronting India, and to North Korea against the south. They did not save apartheid in South Africa, or the Soviet Union from itself. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/03/america-itch-brawl-new-target-iran

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Duplicate thread yesterday

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=636228&mesg_id=636229

[marmar]

2. Editorials & Other Articles - different forum......

Do you have a problem with discussion of this topic?

[xchrom]

3. recommend

[closeupready]

4. The fourth paragraph is not true, though I wish it were true.

As many, many observers have noted, we have done nothing militarily against North Korea because, obviously, they do have the bomb. That is not overhype, it's a reality.

And if you look at the comments to the article, onomatepoia points this out there, as well.

[Name removed]

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