VauxhallVelcraux

People have begun referring to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran, as a dictator. Which is funny, because he was elected, the same way his more moderate predecessor was. Adding to that the list of non-elected leaders whom this country supports (Pervez Musharraf, for one) as vital allies in the "war" on "terrorism" (in the course of which we have of course contributed absolutely no terrorizing acts ourselves), the term 'dictator' is elastic to the point of meaninglessness.

But it still possesses a charge, and the Neocon Imagineers are gradually positioning Iran as the 'real thing,' or maybe the 'country we should have attacked in the first place but the Nazi-Russia like evilness of Saddam was just so glaring we were distracted. Saddam, Saddam, Saddam. But, really this time, Iran!'

I don't believe Karl Rove will use airstrikes as some kind of October surprise. It's too theatrical and obvious; he gets more covert and relies on auxiliaries the closer an election gets. But the timeline of the political calendar and that of the neoconservative failure caucus that's wondering What Is To Be Done? parallel one another very eerily. They're like sorority sisters who've begun ovulating in synch.

And in a political system where in spite of our leaders fucking almost everything up, torture and how best to employ it are still somehow up for debate among serious minds--even as our catastrophe in Iraq has conclusively begun generating more future terrorists than if we had not pre-emptively invaded--a third war just can't be ruled out. Even if al-Qaeda's strategy all along was to see us bankrupt ourselves in frivolous wars as our innate paranoia, weakness and decadence impels us to, we're not going to refuse that tantalizing possibility of fighting and losing in three adjacent countries.

How could we possibly fight and win in Iran, unless we just withdraw from Iraq and/or Afghanistan? (I think we should withdraw from Iraq, but that's largely because we shouldn't be fighting non-essential wars at all, especially with an exhausted military that conservatives don't care to finance properly). Bush's WWII analogy is dangerously dis/ingenuous, because as the British showed last month in foiling another airline attack, fighting terrorism ought to involve police and surveillance--although not spying without warrants, and not by yoking intelligence-gathering to pre-decided future wars. It shouldn't take a chattering hippie to realize that war is not the answer.

Especially now, when hopefully people will recognize that there really has been a fundamental shift in war. Wars between countries are increasingly rare; civil wars and insurgencies--i.e. the harder kind, the ones which drag on forever because tanks and missiles don't crush political resistance--are common, and with belligerents like us at the helm, will possibly grow to be more so. Given the dynamics of Islamist terrorism and the ambiguously Christian West, future wars will simply breed the need for more wars. That's fine if you're Raytheon or Kellogg, Brown and Root, or a Republican congressional representative from a conservative district, but bad for the rest of us.

Especially because in the case of Iran, what exactly is Iran doing that's so terrible? Developing nuclear weapons is not an act of aggression. We have them (and we used them!) and so do eight other nations, including the one actually ruled by a dictator and constantly teetering on the precipice of Saudi-Arabification, Pakistan. Not only that, but the US is fighting a war just to the east and the west of Iran. If al-Qaeda or the USSR or Imperial Japan were pummeling Canada and Mexico, do you think the US would just abide it?

Oh, but they burn flags and hate Israel! Hating Israel is an ingenious political trick promulgated by semi-legitimate Arab governments which are rich in oil and corruption and poor in jobs, literacy and civil rights. They can foist the blame for the problems they create on a tiny apartheid-state (which, in all fairness, hands Arab propagandists no small amount of fodder, with its ghastly war crimes, unconscionable treatment of Palestinians, and supremely ignoble and immoral destruction of Lebanon). Israel is the eternally convenient distraction used by its incompetent, impoverished neighbors whose rulers are largely secular and cloak themselves in legitimacy by allowing fiery clerics to rant on and on about the Zionist Satan. You never hear about how there-is-no-God-but-death-to-Israel in Indonesia, India, Bosnia, Morocco or other nations with large Muslim populations. It only happens where it's politically useful. And face it: Israel isn't going anywhere.

Iran will not launch nuclear weapons on Israel because they would kill a shitload of Palestinians and also annihilate a number of holy sites and shrines, possibly including the Dome of the Rock. Not only that, but Iran is a democratic state attempting to soften the inevitable change from its 1979 revolutionary fervor to a wealthy, influential power. It has pretensions and aspirations to be a regional hegemon, not a global pariah. If anything will further empower Iran, it's not 'appeasement,' but 'staying the course,' which has allowed Shiite militias to run harum-scarum, willy-nilly and pell-mell through Sadr City and much of Baghdad. Heck of a job, United States.