What Should A Poor Warmongering Neoconservative Do?
An Israeli Attack on Iran would reduce Barack Obama to a One-Term President
By Juan Cole
Juan Cole's Blog: August 13, 2010
What should a poor warmongering Neoconservative do? This political grouping
includes WASPS such as former CIA director James Woolsey and former UN
ambassor John Bolton, but at its core is politically active and extremely
wealthy Jewish former Democrats who broke with their party in the 1980s to
become war hawks in Republican administrations, and most of whom are rooted
in Rightwing Zionism as exemplified in the thought of prominent fascist
theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky. (They are almost mirror opposites of the
general American Jewish community, 79 percent of which voted for Barack
Obama, which is skittish about foreign wars and liberal on social issues).
The Neoconservative faction is in the political wilderness in the United
States. Eager to play the role in Iran that the enormous floods have played
in Pakistan, of paralyzing and destroying much of a thriving country, eager
to reduce the shining city of Isfahan to rubble and displace its population
into massive tent cities, they find their path blocked at every turn.
Always much happier when the militant and aggressive Likud Party is in power
in Israel, they are nevertheless impatient with what they see as the
timidity of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, compared to the reckless
warmongering of the previous Kadima Party and its Labor ally (who managed to
set back the Lebanese economy a decade in 2006 and to reduce the large penal
camp of Gaza to further misery and rubble).
Despite being willing to stop in at an occasional cocktail party, President
Obama could not care less what the Neoconservatives say, want or do. Few
have been appointed from their ranks to high and influential positions in
the Obama administration, in contrast to W.'s, where they held the 8 key
positions that allowed them to help push the US into a decade of rampaging
wars. The American public, having been tricked by their fallacious arguments
and cynical propaganda into the Iraq War, does not want to hear from them.
They no longer get much television time. Their main project of today, an
aggressive war on Iran, is a non-starter with the current White House, its
generals, intelligence officials, and most importantly with a public already
unemployed, beggared and indebted to the tune of $13 trillion, in part
because of the Neocons earlier mad adventures- a public that has also lost
over 4000 dead and tens of thousands wounded and permanently disabled
warriors over a pack of Neocon lies.
But being a Neocon means never having to say you are sorry, or that you were
wrong, and it means never giving up on the dressing up of illegal and
aggressive wars as Necessary and Right and Bright Shining Cities on a Hill
that will Make the World Safe for "Democracy" and more importantly for
Apartheid Israel.
Thus, in 1998 at the height of their impotence, the Neocons got up a hawkish
letter with the support of the Republicans in Congress, insisting that
President Clinton go to war against Iraq. It was absurd and monstrous. Iraq
had been reduced to a poor weak fourth-rate power, its economy devastated,
its children dying in droves, by US and UN sanctions pushed by the Neocons
and their allies. Only five years later, under a different administration,
they got their wish.
The Neocons' life experience, then, is that aggressive warfare is never
really off the table. Even a liberal internationalist like Obama can be
pressured, and if he will not yield, be weakened and wounded and the way
paved for a leader more pliable to their plans. A war that they pine for the
way a teenager pines for a first love, a mass grave they dream of the way a
retiree dreams of a Hawaiian resort, an orgy of destruction visited on
ancient wonders that they dream of the way a world-class architect dreams of
constructing a new city- all these things are really at most just 5 years
away if the right political moves are made.
They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have perhaps half
of America's 400 billionaires on their side. They have the enormous
military-industrial complex on their side. They have the Yahoo complex of
besieged lower middle class White America on their side. They have the
Israel lobbies on their side. They have important segments of the Oil and
Gas lobbies on their side. They have the whole American tradition of
permanent war on their side. They should not be underestimated.
It is not so hard to get up a war. You position the war as inevitable. As
Right. As Necessary. You reimagine the poor weak ramshackle enemy as a
science fictional superpower, months away from possession of a Neutron Bomb
that could Destroy the Universe. It has to be done. We are in danger.
Although not exactly himself a Neocon (he says he is for a two-state
solution and says he is on the fence about an Iran war), Cpl. Jeffrey
Goldberg of the Israeli army, where he was a prison camp guard during the
first Intifada or Palestinian uprising, and who masquerades as a journalist
over at the Atlantic, has fired a shot in the building campaign for
destroying Iran. This war propagandist deliberately spread the bald-faced
lie that Saddam had close ties to al-Qaeda, and goes on insisting that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction capabilities in the face of mountains of
evidence to the contrary. He is either dishonest or so blindered by ideology
that it comes to the same thing. Goldberg says he is "ambivalent" about an
"American" attack on Iran in "2010." But these are weasel words. What would
be different in 2011? In fact, this way of speaking puts a time limit on
"ambivalence," after which conviction presumably kicks in. His ambivalence,
he says, extends to whether Israel should attack Iran unilaterally, though
he is convinced by his 'interviewing' that it likely will. It reminds me of
all the caveats and ambivalences in Ken Pollack's book 'Gathering Storm,'
which was used by warmongers nevertheless to help get up the Iraq War.
Goldberg knows that Obama is not actually going to war against Iran. Despite
what he says, Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is for all his
bluster far too personally indecisive to take such a major step (and
certainly not without an American green light; Bibi thinks Clinton had him
undermined and moved out of office for obstructing the Oslo accords, and
does not want to risk the same fate for causing trouble for Obama in Iraq
and Afghanistan). How Goldberg could miss this truism in Israeli politics is
beyond me.
Goldberg is trying to make an Iran war seem highly likely if not inevitable,
if not now then in the near future (say, within 5 years?).
But contrary to Goldberg's conclusions, Gareth Porter finds that high
Israeli intelligence and military figures entertain the severest doubts
about a war on Iran. Could Goldberg really not find these voices that Porter
dug up so effortlessly?
The Iran war hawks also almost certainly underestimate Iran's conventional
weapons capability of foiling any Israeli air strike.
There is no room for 'ambivalence' here, especially of the Pollack sort that
actually leads straight to war. The stupidity of an air raid on Iran is easy
for the clear-eyed to see. There is no evidence Iran has a nuclear weapons
program as opposed to a civilian nuclear energy program. The centrifuge
technology being used can be dispersed and an air strike is likely to be
only a minor setback in the program. And, Iran is a major country of 70
million with extensive petroleum and gas resources. It has means of replying
to any attack that can be subtle and effective. Mahan Abedin showed here
recently how there can be no 'limited war' against Iran.
Obama's plans for a decisive and timely withdrawal from Iraq would be
completely ruined by an attack on Iran, which would reactivate the Shiite
militias at a time when the US military is weak and open to attack. Obama
would not have that achievement to run on in 2012. The Iranians can behind
the scenes be major spoilers for the Afghanistan War, which already is not
going well for Obama.
A Netanyahu attack on Iran would reduce Barack Obama to a one-term
president, which may be what Goldberg and his fellow conspirators are really
aiming for. That success would after all allow them to keep to the 5-year
timetable for another Asian land war.
Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at
the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the
relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context.
www.juancole.com
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