President Obama Is Now Leading the Charge for War with Iran — Have Our Geopolitically Foolish and Amoral Leaders Learned Nothing from American Strategic Failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?

© 2012 Peter Free

 

06 March 2012

 

 

Denial, combined with an ignorance of history, makes us even more self-destructively idiotic than we already are

 

Last month, I wrote that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had articulated an American willingness to start a war with Iran over its nuclear program.

 

Two days ago, President Obama reiterated what Secretary Panetta had said.  He was pandering to The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC):

 

Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

 

And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.

 

President Obama at 2012 AIPAC Policy Conference, White House (04 March 2012) (quoted segment beings 28:15 minutes into the video)

 

 

Transcript of the war-mongering speech

 

The transcript of the President’s speech is here (click on the "Read the Transcript" link to right of the video).

 

The above quote is the sixth paragraph from the bottom of the page.

 

 

What does AIPAC do?

 

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is the most influential Zionist lobby in the United States.

 

 

Notice the wording of what the Commander-in-Chief said

 

The President’s two above-quoted sentences clearly indicate that he has expanded the already reckless, immoral, illegal, and American history-defying Bush Doctrine of preemptive war.

 

President Obama’s reformulation allows the United States to attack whomever it wishes, whenever it appears to be convenient.  Consistency is not required — as in treating North Korea and Pakistan with white velvet gloves, but trash-talking Iran.

 

 

This is geostrategic and moral lunacy

 

As I laid out in a previous essay, Iran is not an existential threat to the United States.  Nor, properly analyzed, is it one to Israel.

 

The successful policy of containment that the United States initiated against the Soviet Union, during the 1950s and beyond, has the same strategic merit and probability of success, if it is implemented in regard to Iran.

 

Consequently, the President — who is connivingly brilliant — is knowingly playing a dangerous game with his war-mongering talk.  He is cynically turning the United States into the World’s Number One Bully, in order to defend himself from political attacks by the mouth-frothing lunatics of the political Right Wing in the United States and Israel.

 

In early 2012, it appears that waging perpetual war and inflicting interminable death are not only accepted ways to America’s future, but that both should be increased above current levels.

 

Gone is any sense of past American morality in the conduct of geopolitical strategy.  Absent, too, is the United States’ previously arguable claim to leading the world by shining example.

 

 

A mistake, even when examined less idealistically

 

I deliberately used the word “pandering” to describe the President’s speech to the Committee.

 

The United States should not be aligning its broad national interests with the narrowly self-destructive ones that Israel currently pursues.

 

On the current course, both nations are isolating themselves:

 

(a) out of existence, in Israel’s case,

 

and

 

(b) out of geopolitical effectiveness, in the United States’.

 

 

The moral? — It’s easy to start wars, when other people are going to do the fighting and dying

 

The only way out of the United States’ infatuation with attacking other people is to reinstitute the draft.

 

That would quiet things down.  There is nothing like the possibility of personal death and suffering to return Reality and ethics back into one’s calculations.