Why We Must Break with the American Crazies (Sunday Times UK, via CommonDreams)

[marmar]

Published on Sunday, June 17, 2007 by the Sunday Times/UK

Why We Must Break with the American Crazies
by Anatole Kaletsky

When Gordon Brown returned from his fact-finding tour of Iraq on Monday, he proclaimed the importance of learning from our mistakes but also of looking forward instead of backward. Did this admission hint at a shift in Britain’s foreign policy when Mr Brown takes over in ten days’ time? To judge by the announcement he made in the next sentence - a restructuring of the British security apparatus to guard against future intelligence failures such as the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction - the answer is “no”. Mr Brown’s foreign policy will remain as backward-looking and self-deluding as Tony Blair’s.

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.

While Mr Brown and the British media are still fretting about who said what to whom about WMD intelligence, the talk in American policy circles is about an article, The Case for Bombing Iran, published two weeks ago in Commentary and The Wall Street Journal and cited approvingly to anyone who cares to listen by officials close to Dick Cheney. Its author, Norman Podhoretz, is an intellectual mentor to the people who took America into Iraq. His self-explanatory message is that Iran today is more dangerous than Hitler’s Germany, since it could soon have nuclear weapons - and that Israel’s very existence is menaced now as never before.

It is significant that Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, travelled to Washington at about the same time as the article was published to plead with congressmen “not to tie President Bush’s hands over Iran”. Also that John McCain, the only unequivocally pro-war presidential candidate, endorsed Podhoretz’s argument, stating that “the only thing more dangerous than attacking Iran is allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons” - and that Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, came out with a strikingly undiplomatic public statement, giving warning that “crazies in Washington” now seemed to be planning to repeat the Iraq disaster by attacking Iran.

To their credit, well-informed Americans, some even inside the Bush Administration, are now looking forward instead of backward, debating not what happened five years ago, but how to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and, even more urgently, how to prevent “the crazies” from starting another war. Instead of obsessively returning to now-irrelevant WMD and intelligence issues, Americans understand that the greatest scandal of the Iraq war was not its alleged justification but its conduct and the lack of preparation for the chaos that the invasion unleashed. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/17/1938/

[rodeodance]

1. It is imperative that we do both--as we can not let the losers walk free!