June
24th 2008
Posted under Interventionism & Iran
This Bill is making its way through Congress. More belligerence against Iran. I guess one unjust, unnecessary and unconstitutional quagmire is not enough for some people.
Call your Senators and Representative. My suggestion is to identify yourself as a non-interventionist CONSERVATIVE to distinguish your protest from the protests of the left. If you are a Republican, emphasize that.
RonL on 25 Jun 2008 at 12:34 am #
Do you support any punishing measures for a regime that is killing American soldiers and developing WMD’s to destroy the US?
Filmer on 25 Jun 2008 at 1:46 am #
Ron, one problem with the Administration’s lies and intel manipulation leading up to the Iraq War is that it has made it impossible to accept at face value anything they say that could be viewed as intended to agitate for another war. I know the Administration maintains that Iran is “killing American soldiers,” but I will have to hear it from another source before I will be convinced.
But if true, this is an inherent problem with interventionism. They are killing our soldiers only because of proximity. They feel they have an interest in the outcome in Iraq. (Pro-Sunni) Were we not in Iraq there would be no Iranians killing our soldiers.
Didn’t the Chinese aid the North Koreans? Actually they did quite directly. Should we have declared war on China? (MacArthur wanted to.) These sort of proxy wars are the direct result of interventionism.
When America supported the Contras, was that an “act of war†against Nicaragua? Should Nicaragua have declared war against the US?
Without interventionism you don’t have to deal with these issues.
It is certainly not clear that Iran is working on military nukes. I don’t doubt they would like to have them, but our own intel report said they aren’t and are a long way off from having them even if they are. But even if they were working on military nukes, we could not justly go to war to prevent that. Preemptive war is not just. If they had nukes they couldn’t deliver them by conventional means, and it would be suicidal to try.
Here is the threat as the pro-war crowd sees it. Iran is near getting nukes. Once they get them they intend to use them. Since they can’t deliver them conventionally, they will either deliver them unconventionally as a state or, more likely, facilitate some non-state actors delivering them. And they would do this knowing it would mean their country would be immediately reduced to ashes. To what end? This requires believing that Iran is run entirely by suicidal maniacs. There are no rational people in leadership in Iran?
This threat is derivative at best. It does not warrant preemptive war.
Dave K on 25 Jun 2008 at 4:04 am #
If the Iranians leaders are the suicidal religious fanatics they are portrayed to be, why do they need nukes? Couldn’t they just make a mad rush at their enemies on horses with scimitars? Then, they could all meet their eternal reward as martyred heros and be done with it! This talk is all nonsense. The one thing I an absolutely sure of is that the US government is incapable of being truthful about war. Haven’t we all learned that lesson by now?
Andrew T. on 25 Jun 2008 at 4:15 pm #
“Do you support any punishing measures for a regime that is killing American soldiers and developing WMD’s to destroy the US?”
I support getting our troops the hell out of harm’s way, and I also support having the sanity and to frankness of reason to realize that there’s no way that Iran’s regime would be EVER be stupid enough to use its puny stock of nuclear weaponry against the most militarily powerful country in the world (the U.S.) or even the most powerful military in the Middle East (Israel). Iran even threatening to use nuclear weaponry against any country would equal the end of Iran.
Looks like someone’s never learned anything from something called the Cold War.
Filmer on 25 Jun 2008 at 5:59 pm #
Andrew, I think Ron and some others actually do believe that Iran would use their nuclear weapons against us, and rather quickly so. In the belief that they would be ushering in Armageddon. That is why I said that part of the issue here is a difference in our assessment of the threat. My point is that Iran is a very derivative threat. The threat is based on assumptions and hunches. It is certainly not grounds to initiate a preemptive or preventative war.
Every country is at least a theoretical threat. Theoretically Canada could invade us to end the injustice of our lack of universal health care. But at some point the threat is so small as to be insignificant, as it is with my Canada example. If we tolerate no risk then we would just level every other country on the planet. There is a middle ground. A scenario is conceivable where a sworn enemy acquiring a WMD would be an intolerable threat and would warrant strategic and measured intervention. It is harder to imagine a scenario where it would warrant total war although the measured measure could lead to that. The Cuban Missile Crisis is an imperfect example. The Russians placing nukes in Cuba was perceived to be an intolerable provocative threat, although it was clearly in response to our placement of nukes in Turkey which Russia perceived as an intolerable threat.
I understand we are on the same side on the war here, but I think there is a categorical difference between the arguments advanced by the neocons and the arguments advanced by what I call “safety and security†conservatives. In my more cynical moments I call them the “just kill ‘em all†conservatives. They both perceive a grave threat, but beyond that they diverge. I think a lot of paleos have made the mistake of believing that all pro-war conservatives are neocons, but this doesn’t help our cause because the arguments we make against neocons (you can’t just plunk down American style democracy anywhere in the world, for example) do not apply to Ron. He has no interest in plunking down democracy. His concern is eliminating threats. He would be as skeptical of the arguments of Dr. D. and Courtney as we are.
So the argument has to be that Iran is not enough of a threat to warrant a preemptive strike, a threshold which should be very high in my estimation and is according to Just War Theory. And that our interventionism actually makes us less safe, not safer. I think neocon rhetoric sounds high-minded and is refreshing to some and is easy to parrot, but I am not sure that the average rank-and-file conservative war supporter ever supported the War and interventionism primarily because they bought totally into neocon rational. As Christopher Roach, the now out of the closet “paleo†war apologist, observed whether or not Iraq is a democracy is low on their priority list. They, mistakenly in our opinion, believed that the threat from “islamo-fascism†was/is grave and that aggression was/is the best way to address it and make us safer. (Most mainstream conservative parrot at least some neocon rhetoric. It is as if they can’t help themselves because it has become so ubiquitous. But it is a matter of degree and emphasis. Most primarily want to “get the bad guys.â€) Countering that mindset is in many ways a fundamentally different argument than we have with the neocons.
RonL on 26 Jun 2008 at 12:38 am #
Filmer,
Of course our intervention in Iraq led to Iran’s proxy war against us. That does not mean that we should ignore the Iranian troops caught in Iraq or the Iranian weapons captured there.
Fighting a war with China directly was not an option because of the USSR’s threat of nuclear intervention. We were not going to start World War 3 over Korea, and thus limited our attacks. We even pretended that the “honchos” (ie enemy aces) flying Mig-15s were not Soviets.
But Iran is not the USSR. It does not yet have nuclear weapons. And if it did I don’t think that it would follow the same rules of game theory some presume that it must, because their political theory demands it.
“Ron, one problem with the Administration’s lies and intel manipulation leading up to the Iraq War is that it has made it impossible to accept at face value anything they say that could be viewed as intended to agitate for another war”
I don’t take anything from Jorge Arbusto’s mouth at face value. But, when you have the Europeans and all of Iran’s neighbors talking about the threat, it is not to be ignored. Besides, even the Iranian reformers are admitting that the “civilian program” can quickly be transformed.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/021525.php
“It is certainly not clear that Iran is working on military nukes. I don’t doubt they would like to have them, but our own intel report said they aren’t and are a long way off from having them even if they are.”
That’s not what it said. The executive blurb was highly politicized and contradicted the report which mentions that Iran is building excess refining capability, turned down free refined uranium, and is pouring money into its ICBM program. Only the geniuses who missed the Russian, Indian and Pakistani nuclear program add this up and can’t see nuclear weapons.
“ere is the threat as the pro-war crowd sees it. Iran is near getting nukes. Once they get them they intend to use them. Since they can’t deliver them conventionally, they will either deliver them unconventionally as a state or, more likely, facilitate some non-state actors delivering them. And they would do this knowing it would mean their country would be immediately reduced to ashes. To what end? This requires believing that Iran is run entirely by suicidal maniacs. There are no rational people in leadership in Iran?
This threat is derivative at best. It does not warrant preemptive war.
”
Rational people might think that if a third party nukes America and we lacked courtroom worthy proof, we would not retaliate.
Perfectly rational people have made dumber misjudgments in the past.
(Japan’s strategy of knocking us out of the war comes to mind.)
As for the rest, we are dealing with a society that creates suicide bombers.
Andrew T
The Soviets followed a religion with no afterlife. These people think they get 70 virgins. The Soviets believed that a nuclear exchange would end the Marxist dream. The Iranian theocrats believe that it would bring the Mahdi. It is a different dynamic.
Given their propensity to violence, I consider it foolhardy not to believe their threats.