"The spirit of this country is
totally adverse to a large military force." ---Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826,) 3rd American president
"Force is the vital principle
and immediate parent of despotism." --Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
3rd American president
"If there is one principle more
deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing
to do with conquest." --Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd American
president
"I fully understand that they [the
Congress] could try to stop me from doing it. But I�ve made my decision. And
we�re going forward." --President George W. Bush (in an interview
broadcast on CBS 60 Minutes, Jan. 14, 2007)
Obviously, President George W. Bush is busily looking for a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident
in order to further escalate the war in Iraq and to start a fresh one with
Iran.
Let us remember that when the administration of President
Lyndon B. Johnson, another Texan, wanted to escalate the war against North
Vietnam, in 1964, it fabricated a tale about a maritime incident in the Gulf of
Tonkin, which many historians believe never happened. Congress was then
steamrolled into passing the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, which was used by the Johnson administration, and later by the
Nixon administration, to escalate U.S. military involvement in Indochina. Tens
of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died as
a consequence of this resolution.
And the same scenario is repeating
itself today. Politicians, when facing a quagmire of their own making and
feeling powerless and under attack, will spend
unlimited amounts of public money and will sacrifice unlimited numbers of other
people's lives, in order to save face. �Anxious to provoke Iran into a military
confrontation, George W. Bush authorized,
in early January, an attack on an Iranian consulate in the town of Irbil, in
Iraq, capturing five staff members. This was an act of war, because it was
carried out on a diplomatic compound. The Iraqi and Iranian governments have
both called for the men's release.
This aggression came after the Bush-Cheney administration
sent two large nuclear aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D.
Eisenhower and the USS John C. Stennis,
each accompanied by guided-missile cruisers,
destroyers, frigates, submarine escorts and supply ships, to the Persian Gulf.As a consequence, the Persian Gulf is teeming
with American military gear.
In this relatively small sea, such a concentration of
military equipment is bound to result in accidents. Indeed, around January 8, a
U.S. nuclear submarine hit a Japanese oil tanker in
the Strait of Hormuz near the Arabian Sea. The Strait of Hormuz connects the
Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea and is a most strategic shipping lane for
transporting oil products from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.
All this military gear is
deployed in order to blockade two Iranian oil ports on the Persian Gulf
and to start bombing Iran, possibly with nuclear weapons, as soon as
Bush can invent a pretext to launch a war against Iran. It seems the only thing
this politician knows how to do is to launch wars.
Countries such as Israel and the Gulf states are being
equipped with advanced Patriot missile systems, in preparation
for missile counter-attacks that Iran is expected to launch, after it has been
bombed.
As soon as some 'Persian Gulf incident' can be orchestrated,
the table will be set for starting a bombing campaign of Iran, possibly,
according to some observers, sometime in April(2007). As the
neocon plan calls for, such a war is designed to create
"a new power balance" in the Middle East, beneficial both to Israel's
strategic interests and to American oil interests. In fact, what the
Bush-Cheney administration and its neocon advisors ideally would hope to
accomplish is to repeat the 1953 CIA coup that ousted from power the democratically elected prime
minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, after the latter nationalized the oil
industry. The result was a concentration of all power in a puppet, the Shah of
Iran.
What can be expected from another illegal war in the Middle
East? First, politically, it will further weaken the United Nations, a long
held goal of the neocons, because it is most unlikely that the Security Council
will go along with a war of aggression. Such wars are against the U.N. Charter,
which calls for the maintenance of international peace and security, not for
initiating wars of aggression. Second,
economically, the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would automatically stop the flow of oil from Iran, one of the world's major
petroleum exporting nations, and will precipitate an international oil crisis. This in turn is likely to provoke a worldwide stock
market crash and initiate an international economic recession. But Bush doesn't
care. Saving face has no price in his mind. Besides, he enjoys playing war with
America's large stocks of military gear, like kids like to play cowboys.
Most Americans disapprove of the
way he is governing and they told him so democratically in the November 2006
election.Bush's approval rating has fallen to 30 percent, but he doesn't care what the
American people think. He couldn't care less for democracy.
The same infamous
think tank, the American Enterprise Institute,
which was directly instrumental in pushing Bush II into escalating the Iraq war
in early January, is also deeply involved in the push for a larger war of
aggression against Iran. Its so-called 'fellows' have been laying out the case for war
by hyping the threat that a nuclear Iran would pose to Israel and other Gulf
states. The neocons say that the Iranian
clerics' atomic weapons program must be destroyed because the mullahs see the
world through a 'good-versus-evil' lens. How ironic that this also seems to be
the perspective on the world that permeates Bush's White House!
As for Iran, it
doesn't matter that this country is in breach of no international agreement,
since the Non-Proliferation Treaty
allows signing nations to develop nuclear technology for their own energy
needs. It doesn't matter either that even if Iran, in a more or less remote
future, were to opt out of the treaty and acquire defensive nuclear armaments,
it would only be joining a club of regional countries that already have nuclear
arms, i.e. Israel, Pakistan and India.
In fact, the main
impetus for many nations today to acquire a nuclear capacity is to gain some
protection against unlawful states that feel justified in attacking non-nuclear
states at will. That is why North Korea went nuclear, (and has been left alone
since), and other countries such as Brazil and even Australia are considering
doing the same. The truth is that nuclear armaments may be the only way for a
country to protect its sovereignty in a world where international law seems to have
collapsed. In this sense, a government that does not take all the necessary
steps to protect its sovereignty may be considered in dereliction of duty.
This is an issue
that the new U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon should place high on
his agenda and on the United Nations General Assembly's agenda.
As for Bush's neocon
escalation plan for Iraq, it is not only illegal according to American law,
being in violation of the 1973 War Powers Act,
but it is profoundly anti-democratic since only 12 percent of Americans
support it. When you come down to 10 percent approval in any democracy, you are
usually left with the support of only the lunatic fringe.
In these
circumstances, and to confront the surrounding hypocrisy,
U.S. representatives and senators who really believe in democracy and in the
rule of law may want to sign on to Republican Representative Walter Jones'
resolution HJR 14that
upholds the right of the elected Congress to prevent a warmongering president
from initiating wars of aggression of his own volition.
Rodrigue Tremblay
lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com.
He is the author of the book 'The
New American Empire.' Visit his blog site at thenewamericanempire.com/blog.