So Pipes wants a war on Iran. I'm sure he's not the only one among the true believers. But:
The rescue team sent to free those hostages in April 1980 suffered eight fatalities, making them the first of militant Islam's many American casualties
This is ridiculous. The rescue team's casualties were an accident that the Iranians had absolutely no involvement in. None of the "America held hostage" hostages were harmed, but that set off a chain of events that lead to the US backing Saddam and Iraq in his stupid war on Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, pretty much concurrently, the US and Saudis were organizing the "moral equivalent of the founding fathers" in Afghanistan, and everybody knows how that turned out, or maybe they'd like to forget. A million people killed there, and an international convocation and training ground for Jihadists with bin Laden helpfully in the midst of them all.
You can construct "liability" however you want to, and the neocons are nothing if not skilled at the careful selection and use of exactly the precise "facts" and "logic" that justify the next war they want. If you take a somewhat more conventional view of facts and logic, though, it becomes much, much murkier. Personally, I thing the neocons ought to be liable for cleaning up Iraq before they're allowed to start another war, and I don't mean via a feel-good PR campaign either. |
