The short answer according to Pat Buchanan: “Who is pushing for attacks on Iran? Israel and its lobby: Cheney and Lieberman”. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps are a strategic and hypocritical excuse. Sensational intelligence is irrelevant. If we go to war, it will be based on Cheney’s whim.
Who is pushing for attacks on Iran? Israel and its lobby. Vice President Cheney. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has been calling for air strikes on al Quds camps for months. And a War Party facing lasting disgrace for having lied the country into an unnecessary war and for having assured the American people it would be a “cakewalk.”
The arguments for war on Iran are both strategic and political.
Israel is terrified Iran will end its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and wants an all-out U.S. war on Iran to prevent it. The War Party fears Iran may acquire a nuclear weapon, which would inhibit U.S. freedom of action in the Gulf and convince the Arab states that the United States is yesterday, and they must appease Iran or go nuclear themselves.
If you recall from a previous article on Irrelevant Intelligence, a war with Iran requires no basis in intelligence. According to Gabriel Kolko:
The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century.
We have made the strategic decision to label Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization for “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq”. This gives the illusion of a just war, since we are “technically” (read: semantically) at war with all terrorist organizations. Such are the wonders of a vague war on terrorism - a vague noun, incidentally.
But there is no good reason to go to war with Iran. If you recall the recent capture of British soldiers at the edge of Iranian waters, it seems that Iranian forces had more legitimacy in that area than the British soldiers did. After all, it is Iran’s neighborhood. If Iran was patrolling the border of American waters, you can be sure we’d capture and question the offending soldiers. Better yet (and I mean this in all sarcasm) we’d place them in a tripled Guantanamo and tested ‘enhanced interrogation’.
While there is no excuse for Iran’s actions, it is hypocritical to be outraged by them. And equally hypocritical is our use of Iran’s little proxy war - allegedly supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents - as they are trying to protect their sphere of influence. According to Pat Buchanan, we did the same when we aided France during the Pastry War in 1846.
It’s only natural to want to maintain the status quo or influence in your neighborhood. This is not an good excuse to go to war with Iran.
Don’t pay attention to new sensational intelligence; it won’t make a difference in the long run. Cheney has incessantly pushed for a war with Iran, and any future problems we have with Iran can be solved by (1) ceasing our needless intervention and (2) looking for other options. If the law of averages - the tendency for a variable to remain stable in the long term - is any indicator, there is no need to be afraid of Iran. Only Cheney and Lieberman’s trigger-happy mindset.
You may have read a great article by Arthur Silber pointing out that, You, Too, Can and Should Be an “Intelligence Analyst”. The basic premise is the intelligence community has little more access than you do to critical information, and that privileged information becomes irrelevant too quickly to be a major factor in foreign policy decisions.
Thus, the decision to go to war has less to do with military intelligence than it has to do with whims and irrational internal politics (read: whatever is convenient for the people in power). After all, you have an essentially unlimited number of choices from everything to what you will wear, to what you will have for breakfast, and just how you’ll get your work done today. Why is foreign policy any different? The choices aren’t only “war” and “cut and run” as this administration would have you believe. Did we have to give Saddam Hussein an ultimatum (leave the country or prepare for war) even if he had WMDs?
Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained-as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained-by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
You’d have to believe your government is incompetent if our only choice was to invade Iraq. Or maybe you’d believe it anyway. But our intelligence agencies aren’t incompetent. The problem is, as Arthur Silber points out, intelligence is irrelevant.
Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of “secret information.” Such “secret information” is almost always wrong — and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.
The second you start arguing about intelligence, you’ve given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a “grave” and “growing” threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you’re debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin.
Gabriel Kolko explains:
It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so.
Because when intelligence doesn’t support your goals, you can just dismiss it and revise history:
What’s next? On to Iran
Since we are labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization for “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq” and since we are already over there, why not? It appears that the main reason for going to Iraq in the first place was to maintain a foothold in the Middle East and secure the region for our perpetually-muddled “ally” Israel. If the door starts to close because our military is spreading thin (as shown in the video above) the only way to keep it open (and transfer some of the responsibility for the war to the next lucky administration) is to engage Iran militarily (but it’s not really Iran, it’s the terroristic Revolutionary Guard! Oh, the wonders of the vague war on terrorism!) Of course, this is irrational, because we don’t belong in Iraq in the first place, and second, if Iran had invaded Canada or Mexico, you can be sure our government would be supplying Iran’s enemies with weapons, to maintain some control over our neighboring terroritory and protect ourselves passively by proxy.