Next stop, Iran?Despite the similarity in names, Iran is a different breed of cat from Iraq? |
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By Bryan Zepp Jamieson Iran is next. Like a serial rapist who can't control himself, even as he knows the police are closing in, Putsch has selected his next target. (Like most serial rapists, he selects a certain "type" of victim; backwards, Arabic-speaking, Moslem...). Rummy today accused Iran of intruding on Iraqi soil. Right. Like Rummy never did that. Rummy reportedly told the Senate Armed Forces subcommittee that there were recent reports that Iran had moved some border posts several kilometers into Iraq. Unsurprisingly, he deemed this 'not acceptable.' Rummy felt this showed disrespect for Iraq's sovereignty. I'm not kidding. He really said that. With his bare face hanging out. And of course, the admin is swearing up and down that Iran has weapons of mass destruction, or will develop them any day now, or has spent a beery evening talking about getting weapons of mass destruction and drawing a few ideas out on the backs of soggy cocktail napkins. In any case, the official line will be that America is in great and immediate danger, and George must reluctantly start considering options now, before the Iranians attack and convert Salt Lake City to fundamentalist Islam. (This would be a change in what way, exactly?) Iran probably does have a lot beefier military than Iraq did (about six times beefier, according to reports by Jane's) and I shouldn't wonder if they either have or plan to have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq and North Korea provided lessons to the world: if you disarm, America goes ahead and attacks anyway. If you brandish a nuke or two, George will slink away and try and pretend you don't exist. Iran has been having an interesting time of it the past few years. They kicked out the Shah, and formed an Islamic Republic in 1979. There was that little misunderstanding about the American embassy and some Americans that they sort of 'borrowed' for a year and a half. This annoyed Washington, and so when Iran got into a scrape with neighboring Iraq, Washington was happy to give Iraq's Saddam Hussein all sorts of nasty weapons in the hopes he would use them on Iran and Washington could see if they worked as well as their contractors said they would. (They worked as advertised on some unlucky Kurds who crossed Saddam's path, at any rate.) The war finally ground to a halt in 1988 because both sides were too exhausted to fight any more. After that, while Iraq was going immediately into another war over Kuwait and then being ground to a nub by sanctions, Iran slowly rebuilt. Not well; this was, after all, a theocracy, and was thus prone to the corruptions and inefficiences common to such forms of government, but they did rebuild. Over the past few years, as has been widely reported, the theocratic regime has been facing an ever-more restive population, to the extent where open demonstrations and adverse voting results (curiously, they are a Democracy) are showing up. All of which means that Iran is not Iraq, let alone the rubble of Afghanistan. According to the CIA almanac, it has 66 million people (more than double what California has) in an area slightly larger than Alaska. And while it has a broad high plateau where most of the people and cities are, it is mostly mountainous or desert, or both. The administration has already learned that it's far harder to hold a country than it is to invade it in the first place; American control of Afghanistan is essentially a fiction outside of Kabul and Khanduhar, and the mounting problems in Iraq are the stuff of daily headlines. The administration has a problem beyond the mere logistics of taking on Iran while colonizing two unfriendly subjugated lands. Public awareness that the administration lied about Iraq's capabilities and intents is becoming widespread, and combined with growing unease over the occupation of Iraq, which makes for a public that is unreceptive to more administration cries of "Wolf!" Last spring, the admin claimed that Iraq had biochemical weapons, a claim nearly everyone believed. I did, and wrote that Iraq probably DID have such weapons, but doubted it posed any threat, imminent or otherwise, to America. The admin also claimed Iraq had, or was about to develop nuclear weapons, a claim that only the far right morons of the GOP believed. The nuclear lie has collapsed utterly, putting a big dent in Putsch's undeserved credibility. The chem-bio claims are falling apart rapidly, since it's now clear that Saddam didn't have any for rapid deployment, and may not have had any at all. Now the admin is trying to say the same things about Iran, but there are differences. Few people believe that Iran has chemical or biological weapons in significant quantities, but nearly everyone believes they have nuclear capability and may, in fact, have nuclear weapons. We know they are claiming they do, and we also know they have a medium-range missile which could lob a nuke into Tel Aviv or Baghdad. It's the character of this administration that the only evidence we'll get as to whether they believe what they are claiming or not will be if they attack or not. As noted above, George isn't about to attack anyone who could inflict significant damage in return. There's an excellent article in Salon Magazine by Mark Follman (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/10/nuclear_iran/print.html) that I strongly recommend to everyone. He discusses why the US would want to attack Iran, what the consequences of an Iran with nuclear missiles would be (Follman doesn't say this, but my own take on it is that it would create a "balance of terror" with Israel in the region), and strongly doubts anyone can take out the Iranian nuclear program. Follman points out that when Iraq worked on one a generation ago, it was all at one plant at Osirak, which Israel easily destroyed. Iran went public with their nuclear program last week, and pointed to two major plants that, to the consternation of the administration, American intelligence apparently did not know existed prior to that moment. Which leaves everyone wondering if the intelligence failure was really that colossal, or if the Iranians are just that good at misdirection, whether in concealing plants, or creating phony ones to confuse the issue, or both. George doubtlessly wants a war. Quite aside from the high ratings he could expect from the wag the dog phenomenon, it would further distract from the ongoing failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, a successful invasion of Iran would give the US control over a majority of the world's oil. But Iran is a far more dangerous foe than was Iraq. (Indeed, Follman points out that attacking the Shi'ite government of Iran would cost us what few allies we still have in Iraq.) That's even without the spectre of nuclear weapons being used. By the start of this year, it was clear to everyone that George was going to invade Iraq, no matter what. Events showed this to be the case. But Iran is a cat of a different color. This cat has claws. 7/10/03
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