After the shiny, happy people feeling you got from reading my last post, now I’m going to bring you down.
Over at Juan Cole‘s shop, former University of Chicago professor William Polk reads the tea leaves and pronounces the War With Iran to be at go time.
To last week’s US News warning he adds the personal recollection that Dick Cheney also made a trip to Saudi Arabia in March 2002 — ostensibly diplomatic but (we now know) his warning, and assurance, that Saddam Hussein was a dead man.
The article contains the tantalizing possibility that Israel’s recent attack on Syria was just a test of its radar and anti-missile defenses, but Polk then adds news that there has been an unprecedented build-up of U.S. Navy assets in the Persian Gulf:
Of course, deploying forces along Iran’s frontier does not necessarily
mean using them. At least that is what the Administration says.
However, as a historian and former participant in government, I believe
that having troops and weapons on the spot makes their use more likely
than not.
Instead such forces create a "climate of war" like the one which set off The Guns of August and World War I, a climate which both Bush the Wiser and Bush the Dumber have given in to before. He adds that the rationale for war is contained in the 2005 National Defense Strategy, which asserted America’s right to engage in first-strike warfare anytime, and anywhere, it chose.
What can halt the march to war? Just one thing.
You.
We, the People, those whom the Vice President chooses so blithely to ignore, need to make this point very, very clear to him, as serious as a heart attack.
This is a line you dare not cross. Despite your rationalizations this is a War Crime. Compare our forces to those Iran can put on the field and it’s Germany vs. Poland in 1939, Mr. Cheney, and you’re Hitler.
Cross this line and you will be treated as such. There can be no pardon from this, no statute of limitations, no way back. Go to war against Iran without provocation and you go to war against the whole world. You bring the whole temple down on your head — on our heads — and more than your life becomes forfeit.
We will kill you, we will kill your whole family. We will kill that milquetoast you call Mr. President, and his family. We will seize your assets, and those of all your friends or allies. We will drive out all those who were proven to have collaborated with you, and pass laws which deny the right of your supporters to speak forevermore.
You give us a Holocaust, and we will give you Nuremberg.
Only when we, the people make this clear will Mr. Cheney desist. Only when he is in fear for his life, his own personal life, and those lives closest to him, might he truly consider the consequences of his war gaming.
You act as Hitler, and you become Hitler. You deserve Hitler’s fate, and you will get it. Mark our words. We don’t take to tyranny.
We’re Americans.
I heard a talking head say, “the number one voter concern has changed from Iraq to the economy,” recently. Are people really so stupid that they don’t see the main thing wrong with the economy is our occupation of Iraq (it’s hardly a war if all you are fighting are insurgents)? Yes, housing is causing problems, but that has nothing to do with the weak dollar and stagnating salaries. The rest of the world is selling dollars because they see us squandering their investment. Federal monies that could be spent on improving infrastructure (eg rural broadband) are being spent like water in the Middle East. Getting out of Iraq and fixing the economy are hardly separate issues. A war with Iran would certainly be the straw that breaks the economy’s back.
I heard a talking head say, “the number one voter concern has changed from Iraq to the economy,” recently. Are people really so stupid that they don’t see the main thing wrong with the economy is our occupation of Iraq (it’s hardly a war if all you are fighting are insurgents)? Yes, housing is causing problems, but that has nothing to do with the weak dollar and stagnating salaries. The rest of the world is selling dollars because they see us squandering their investment. Federal monies that could be spent on improving infrastructure (eg rural broadband) are being spent like water in the Middle East. Getting out of Iraq and fixing the economy are hardly separate issues. A war with Iran would certainly be the straw that breaks the economy’s back.