War with Iran?
There has been growing speculation recently of the possibility that the White House is making plans and readying military resources to attack Iran. The Huffington Post suggests that the recent arrests of members of the Iranian Energy Ministry by US troops was an attempt to provoke Iran. Further, the Bush administration has labeled Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorists, making them targets of the "war on terror". The DailyKos reported yesterday that a US Navy LSO has told them that they are preparing their carriers for a large-scale attack on Iran. And many people have started noticing eerie similarities between current Fox News reports on Iran and prewar reports on Iraq.
I don't like sounding alarmist, and this is all a bit speculative. But just today, both the Sunday Telegraph and the London Times are reporting they they have gotten wind of plans of a strike on Iran. Even Fox News is linking to the story.
At 5:11 PM on September 20, 2007, Alberto said,
note: english not my native lang.
Whenever we deal with the Middle East, we western denizens, reared in the self analytical and self critical culture of Voltaire and of the Enlightenment and of Freud, are all too inclined to judge power as dangerous only as long as it is ours.
The fact that over centuries our middle classes, paying dearly in blood sweat and tears, grew able to build for ourselves a decent society, stable enough, based on the instituzionalization of conflict, has become a way to consider our mileu as safe, and safely exposed to our criticism.
It is amazing how conveniently we overlook that elsewhere it's not the land of Alice in wonderland. We have a tendency to speak of talibans as a ppor set of innocent guys - after all, they only buried alive homosexuals and cut the throats, on the public square, to qoen that dared go to a hairdresser, and executed guys because they played music (considered daemonic).
We western denizens often argue: but we supported the taliban regime in the past. First of all, this is not true: we supported guerrilla with the Soviet Union. But then, the west was also allied with the RED ARMY of Stalin to defeat Hitler: what did it mean, that since we were allied then, we lost our right to criticize soviet Gulags later, or to win a cold war against Stalin?
We argue that Saddam was a poor guy and that when Saddam was there it was better: and all the while we forget that who kills 100 guys a day in Iraq currently, is not Usa soldiers against iraquis, but it is muslims that wantonly slaughter other muslims.
We speak of Iran and we say it's sorta poor country that did nothing wrong - that it executes hundreds of political opponents even without trial every year letting them hang from lamp street, is something we don't even consider.
That is: we only criticize what the Cnn lets us see, but the Cnn only goes where a government is fre enough so that the Cnn can operate freely.
We say that we are in Iraq for oil, because we couldn't be for "democracy" - and we forget that if it isn't for democracy it can't be for oil too: because the west has always bought its oil, and the price of the barrel is determined by an OPEC cartel where texans have no say.
The truth is that the world out there, the workld that is not western world, is an incredibly dangerous place where masses rally around to chant for killing lampoonists and where palestinians, as soon as they are let for once at their own devices, act exactly as Hitler did: first win the elections, and later burn the parliament, the Reichstag. See the coup in Gaza, where Israel played no role, simply.
The Middle East is a powerhouse bound to explode. As long as we don't acknowledge that, we will keep focusing on the route ti took to end up with the blast it was going to end up anyway.
Iran today or tomorrow, for this or that reason, makes no difference. The only thing written in facts is that, sooner or later, we will have a MAJOR conflict in ME because you can't just go on with a place where muslims bomb muslims in iraq, muslims assassinate political muslims in Syria, and muslims in Iran say that Israel must be wiped off the map. It's jyust a dirty mess that keeps beckining to a self destruction it has been devotely coveting for over 50 years of restless and yet constantly unfruitful diplomatic efforts from administrations of every color.