A very interesting read. Maybe attacking Iran is good maybe not. I am not smart enough to make the call. I do have a very heavy dislike for war and for economic terrorism such as putting the Shah in power in Iran in the 50's and the blow back it has caused but......
Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler
Comment on current events by the author of "The Long Emergency"
Thinkable and Otherwise
April 10, 2006
A new meme twanging around the chatscape this week says that the only political group with the will to conceive of having to do something other than nothing about Iran are the fundamentalist rednecks who would like to get their beloved Armageddon underway. This is in the wake of rumors and stories that G. W. Bush & Co. are hatching a plan to do something rather drastic involving nuclear "bunker-buster" bombs to take out Iran's uranium processing labs.
That would be pretty severe -- but so would the outcome if Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad did exactly what he said he would do: wipe Israel off the map, and develop the capability to lob nukes into Europe. The striking thing is that the American leadership classes are so spooked by the nation's precarious position in the world that strategic planning itself is now considered beyond the pale. By its nature, strategic planning must include some unappetizing scenarios, including thinking the unthinkable. But that doesn't mean it can be avoided. The alternatives are denial and / or just doing nothing.
Iran enjoys the advantage of America having already shot its wad on "weapons of mass destruction" with Iraq. Any accusation by America now will be written off as utterly hysterical and also suspected of having the ulterior motive to enrich Dick Cheney's friends at Haliburton.
The difference this time is that there is unanimity between US and European intelligence about Iran's intentions -- that they intend to create atomic bombs. The Europeans, with Britain leading negotiations, are trying desperately to reach a diplomatic solution. And the Iranians appear to be transparently jerking them off, playing for time. There is much at stake for Europe, perhaps more even than for the US, since Europe could be within striking distance of Iran's nuclear-armed missiles as well as facing a cut-off of Middle East oil if the shipping lanes around the Persian Gulf and Red Sea were shut down due to hostilities.
Then there is the additional factor that Israel is not likely to do nothing about a state that has vowed to destroy it and appears to be making operational plans to that end. If Europe and America do nothing, Israel will not do nothing. Somebody is going to have to do something, and so not thinking about doing something is not an option.
The consequences of all the options are very disturbing. It seems unlikely that Mr. Ahmedinejad will just go away anytime soon. He's not the Shah. There's no revolutionary guard looking to overthrow him. And he was only just elected a year ago.
Mr. Ahmedinejad is making several moves at once with this nuclear threat. He is asserting a determination to lead the Muslim jihad; he is asserting a shi'ite dominance over the sunnis and others; and he is trying to add to the pressures that would shove America out of the region altogether -- or prompt a demoralized American public to demand withdrawal, which would lead to a major realignment of global relations.
If anybody were to act militarily against Iran, the result could easily be to throw the entire Middle East into turmoil. It could lead to the overthrow of the al Saud family or to the destruction of oil production facilities or just to terrible trouble in the oil markets. It could spell the end of the West's sixty-year-long dependency relationship with Mideast oil -- and that would probably leave the West's industrial economies in ruins. That may be a gamble that the Iranians like, given the seeming verve of China and India lately -- but I would not expect these nations to thrive if the West was hung out to dry. After all, Mr. Ahmedinejad gives every sign of being a true maniac of the type that the world produces every four decades or so, and the strategic fantasies of such maniacs often end up being very self-destructive.
It is even within the realm of the possible that a US military operation could successfully disarm Iran without starting World War Three. Given the other possibilities, this is not necessarily the worst one. From a tactical point of view, there is probably some value in the Iranians taking this into account. So, thinking out loud strategically is not necessarily the worst thing that the US can do.
Postscript: Happenstance led me to take a trip on the Washington DC beltway in a rent-a-car last week, when some putz graduate student from the U. of Maryland failed to pick me up at the airport. It was a navigational challenge for a stranger to get from Northern Virginia to the campus up in College Park, MD. And it was impressive to see how ghastly the suburban build-out has gotten in recent years there. One could not fail to be conscious of how the viability of all that stuff -- including hundreds of millions of dollars of beltway widenings and new ramps I encountered under construction -- depended utterly on a continued stream of Middle East oil imports. And you had to wonder whether any of the senators, congressmen, or executive officials saw a link between this tragic clusterfuck of car dependency that they live in day in and day out and our troubles out in the world.
Post-postscript: There are many depressing elements in the current uproar over immigration policy. There is plenty of political blame to go around. But for me, one of the worst is the deliberate obfuscation of who is here legally and who is not. Once again my own party (the Democrats) takes the lead on that, especially the disingenuous tactic of referring to illegal aliens as "undocumented" -- as if the only problem were some sort of procedural error rather than the fact that actual law is involved. I suspect a lot of funding for this month's demonstrations around the country is coming from the Mexican government itself, which is eager to outsource as much of its poverty as rapidly as possible. I think before long we will have a public response to this that will surprise the authorities with its angry vehemence.
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