SINCE '63 US STARTED WAR EVERY 40 MONTHS

FROM JUAN COLE'S INFORMED COMMENT

Is Iran out of the US War Queue? The Twilight of the Hawks

Posted on 09/28/2013 by Juan Cole

The short telephone conversation between US President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Friday may or may not lead to a successful diplomatic resolution of US-Iranian conflicts, especially over Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program. But if it does, how will the hawks in Washington survive?

The US is an unusually war-like country. Since 1963 it has launched a military action on average every 40 months. It is to the extent that the US is still at war in Afghanistan after 12 years, and many Americans may not even realize it.

Washington hawks always have a war queue, knowing that their campaign supporters in the war industries expect it of them. Iraq was in the war queue in the 1990s. Since the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Iran has been the number one state in the war queue. This is so even though Iran is not a superpower or even a regional power. It hasn’t invaded another country in at least a century and a half. Its annual military budget is on the order of Singapore and Norway. It has a population slightly larger than France.

The point of having an enemies’ list is only in part in order to curb an enemy. It serves to scare the public and rally them around the politicians and make them willing to give up personal liberties or forget about being upset at being ruled on behalf of a handful of large corporations.

Putting a country in the war queue requires demonizing its leader, twisting his words to make him seem aggressive, and exaggerating his capabilities versus the US. Even Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced Stalin’s crimes, was depicted in the US as a menace who pledged, “We will bury you!” What Khrushchev actually had said was, “We’ll still be here when your capitalist system is dead and buried.” He was wrong but he wasn’t threatening to bury anyone. The Soviet Union’s economy was never more than half that of the US, and its military was no match for the American, but Americans were taught to be mortally afraid of the Soviets, what with their challenge to … gasp … the supremacy of private property.

Likewise, former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s quotation of an old statement by Ruhollah Khomeini that “The occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” — a hope that Zionism would collapse the way Communism had in 1991, was transformed by American “journalism” into an aggressive threat to wipe Israel off the map. This, despite repeated Iranian assertions that they had a no first strike policy, and that they would never slaughter noncombatants, and despite the laughable character of the proposition that a weak country very distant from Israel could menace it despite Tel Aviv’s stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons, and its poison gas and other weapons capabilities. Iran does not have an atomic bomb or chemical weapons.

The significance of Friday’s phone call is that Iran may be removed from the war queue. Current president Hassan Rouhani is harder to demonize than his quirky, populist predecessor. Twenty years of breathless allegations that Iran is 6 months from having an atomic bomb have raised questions about why the Israelis and the American hawks keep being wrong (not to mention, why the kettle is calling the oven black– Israel and the US are nuclear powers but Iran is not).

The Israeli hawks have been promoting Iran as among the top challenges to the West since the early 1990s, aware that the loss of the Soviet Union and then Iraq left them nothing with which to frighten the American public. The Israel lobbies are horrified that they might now lose the Iran bogeyman.Likewise, the US war industries that back right wing senators and congressional representatives are putting their sock puppets such as Lindsey Graham up to seeking authorization for a war on Iran.

The unacknowledged elephant in the room is that Iran was queued because of petroleum, and to a lesser extent because it is among the few remaining rejectionist states toward Israel. But as the US moves to wind and solar electricity and electric and hybrid plug-in cars, petroleum’s value will plummet over the next 20 years. The US is going to be energy independent in 20-30 years, but not via fracked gas and oil, which are relatively expensive. Oil certainly won’t be worth going to war over. The Congressional refusal to authorize a strike on Syria is the writing on the wall here.

Some hawks want to put China in the war queue as a booby prize, but China is a tough sell. It has a nuclear arsenal and so the US can’t just go to war with it. US-China trade is huge and the US needs China. What would Walmart sell if it couldn’t load up on the products of Communist China? Even just alienating Beijing by talking about it as an enemy is difficult in today’s world.

Without a demonized enemy number 1, how will hawks win election campaigns? How will they scare the public into letting them suspend the constitution and our civil liberties? How will they convince the public to let Congress spend billions on their industrial cronies? Maybe they won’t be able to.

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Posted in Iran | 30 Comments | Print

• rob clement

  
  

  09/28/2013 at 4:13 am

  It’s the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower warned about its influence and power back in 1961. link to coursesa.matrix.msu.edu

  Reply
• Michael Turton

  
  

  09/28/2013 at 4:23 am

  +++Some hawks want to put China in the war queue as a booby prize, but China is a tough sell. It has a nuclear arsenal and so the US can’t just go to war with it. US-China trade is huge and the US needs China. What would Walmart sell if it couldn’t load up on the products of Communist China? Even just alienating Beijing by talking about it as an enemy is difficult in today’s world.+++

  Juan, you need to turn your eagle eye to what’s happening in Asia. This kind of writing is maddening; it shows how the outdated Cold War mentality on the Left, still dead on when talking about the Middle East or Russia, is hindering understanding of what’s happening in Asia. The situation is really the opposite of what you’re saying. Two things need to be understood

  1. US elites adore China and want to make money off it. Beijing has a massive influence over US policy, since so many commentators, observers, analysts, and government officials have links to the China treasury chest. See Silverstein’s 2008 article “The Mandarins” in Harpers. In the Obama Administration at least a half dozen high ranking officials, including Obama’s Asia guy, Jeff Bader, the vice WH chief of staff Mona Sutphen, and others, came out of the very quiet firm Stonebridge, which has massive consulting interests in China. Chas Freeman, who got in so much trouble over his Israel positions and thankfully missed his NIE directorship, has long-term business and personal links to China. See also things like the Sanya Initiative, and certain commentators who are famous for their stands on human rights and rule of law in China, items which cost Beijing nothing, but strangely never criticize its territorial expansion, its desire to annex Taiwan, and its links to US corporate power. Why? Well, they have consulting and law offices in China…. Hence the US government is, if anything, downplaying the China threat.

  2. Despite this, China is doing its level best to foment war on its borders. All of the claims it is currently arguing go back centuries are actually post 1940, Taiwan was not claimed until the early 1940s, the claim to the Senkaku Islands did not appear until 1971, the claim to the South China Sea was first made in 1947, the claim to India’s Arunachal Pradesh has a similar pedigree. They are purely modern expansionist claims and have no basis in history, the result of modern China trying to inflate itself out to the old Qing borders — exactly as if Ankara claimed it owned Bulgaria, Jordan, and Algeria because the Ottomans once did.

  THUS: Many US elites would like to sell out Taiwan and Japan to make love to Beijing and snarf up its trade and money-making opportunities and enrich themselves. But Beijing, frequently compared to WWI Germany (with the US as the UK) is more like 17th century France, an empire struggling to become a state and to “rectify” its borders by expanding them (France too invented bogus claims to its neighbors’ territories). Beijing’s nationalism and expansionism isn’t going to let those elites loot China the way they looted the US, and appears through its massive military expansion to be bent on war with Japan over the Senkakus, with the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia over the South China Sea, and with India over Arunachal Pradesh. Taiwan will probably be first but Beijing does seem rather bent on war with Japan. Note that the US is Taiwan’s protector and has formal defense treaties with Japan and Manila. Note also that Japan’s air defense zones extend south past Taiwan, because it owns so many islands in the area. It will be difficult for Beijing to hit Taiwan w/o involving Japan.

  Hence despite the fact that so many American elites are Beijing-owned, Beijing’s own expansionist policy is undercutting their desire to sell out Asia to China for big consulting and trade bucks. This situation has led to an odd reversal of roles — its the conservatives and hawks and neocons who are right on China — recall that many neocons started out as Asia hands — and the dems, liberals, and progressives who, weirdly, support Beijing. As a progressive, I am constantly embarrassed by the flow of utterly stupid articles on China and Taiwan in, say The Nation (like Eli Clifton’s recent “The Secret Foreign Donor…” or Bob Scheer’s inexcusable “Taiwan Declares Peace on China”), and even more mortified by the fact that democratic Taiwan has simply dropped off American progressive radar screens (my neocon friends laugh knowingly at my attempts to get progressives to wake up to Taiwan).

  And if you don’t think China is serious about this, you can explain that to the Tibetans and Uighurs.

  Michael
  The View from Taiwan