With eyes fixated on the horror of Iraq, it is hard for our minds to grasp the greater pending horror of Iran, but our government is still stuck on a collision course for disaster with that ancient nation. America attacking Iraq may have opened Pandora’s Box, but ahead in Tehran lays Pandora’s Trunk. Like a highly potent but lethal perfume, just a rumor of the scent of WMD brought our military flocking to Baghdad’s door. For neocon militarists, the allure of possible Mideast nukes budding beckons them rentlessly on. The buildup to the next war has been going on for years; the war plans have long been drawn, and Special Opps teams almost certainly have penetrated Iran.
Bush’s White House stance toward Iran is a bullying posture, and we have seen its swagger before: "There can be no direct talks with Iran while they insist on continuing down a belligerent counter productive path." It sounds so familiar now that it almost sounds sane, just like the minimally challenged early build up to war with Iraq seemed reasonable enough to many back in 2002. It forces me to wonder; why have so many activists forgotten that the best time to stop a war is before it begins?
Our attention is fixed on the current movement of troops, into or out of Iraq as the case may be. Stop them from entering. Force them to leave. Understandably so, since it’s the war we have now that we now need to end. And so we focus on changing troop levels. And so, of course does George W. Bush. We all are, more or less, talking about the number of troops, and the war inside Iraq, that they should or shouldn’t now be fighting.
I believe the days of those seeking victory in Iraq are numbered by the days remaining in Bush’s term. But they are likewise numbered for those who want the U.S. totally out of Iraq, because some U.S. troops will stay in Iraq as long as Bush stays in the White House. For now the two struggles will continue; the war inside Iraq and our fight to end it. But the war we will face tomorrow is the one we can stop today. We can still keep the lid on Pandora’s Trunk.
How? The same way any war is avoided, either through deterrence or through diplomacy, except that, with Iran, deterrence has already failed; if nothing else our quagmire inside Iraq has accomplished that much, and the U.S. refusal to engage in serious diplomacy puts us on today’s collision course. We can not both stay that course and avoid the next war, but compared to the outcry over “staying the course” in Iraq, where is the resistance to staying the course with Iran, now, before that course reaches its logical deadly end?
It sometimes seems, for most activists, that it is easier to fight against war than it is to advocate for peace. War is black and white. Either bombs explode or they do not. When the bombs are stopped the war is over. Peace is more complex, because peace takes spanning wide divides to reach actual agreements; our diplomats, not our soldiers, are our special forces of peace. Though peace is harder to “start” than war, wars are harder to stop, since violence will always beget more violence. While we struggle to stop a war in Iraq, a question remains unanswered; can we still start peace with Iran? Perhaps the more fundamental question is; can a Time for Peace emerge from a Time for War?
The answer I believe is that it has to. Stopping the war in Iraq, and preventing a war with Iran, are two strands woven in a common cloth. That cloth blankets today’s Middle East, and those strands can not be separated without tearing the entire fabric. The Bush Administration sees the linkages. In fact it had one time been their stated goal to tear apart that fabric to reprocess the yarn, from which to weave a new democratic (and compliant) Middle East. That vision for the Middle East, like the cloth of the region itself, now lies tattered. It was always a military driven vision, and not a diplomatic one
This is the juncture we all have reached, on every side of the Iraq question; will we continue to shortchange diplomacy while we struggle with a war? Wes Clark repeatedly emphasizes that there is no military solution possible in Iraq, while he pushes for comprehensive regional diplomacy to deal with and defuse what he sees as a region wide crisis with dire global implications. Sometimes lost in activist arguments over Iraq is the need for a new diplomatic U.S. opening with Iran, but never to Clark. To my mind that forms the corner stone of his Iraq policy recommendations. Does Clark advocate for U.S. dialog with Iran as part of a larger solution for Iraq? He does. Is that all that is really at stake here? Clark, forcefully, thinks not.
I saw Clark speak in New Hampshire in October and later blogged some of it elsewhere, which I am including again here now below. I note that he made these comments BEFORE Democrats retook Congress in November, which Clark was then passionately arguing that we had to do everything in our power to make happen. The threat Clark describes is thereby slightly reduced now, but in no way eliminated. I start with Clark speaking, transcribed from my recording:
"I think that we're in a very dangerous position because not only is the clock ticking in North Korea, but the clock is ticking in Iran. The President has basically lined up his statements so that he can not live with the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and he has made a half hearted effort at diplomacy. We're not talking with Iran directly. He's made a half hearted effort at diplomacy, I believe, so that diplomacy will fail. And then, his plan is, sometime in the Spring of 2007, which is not so far away, he's going to come on Television, he's going to say:
'My fellow Americans. For 5 years we've watched the evil empire of Iran struggle to prepare nuclear weapons. Although our intelligence is not perfect, we have enough information to assure us that they're making progress.
As I told, and promised you, we will not allow the worst weapons to fall into the hands of the worst people. Iran is a state that supports Terrorists. For the good of humanity they can not be permitted to have nuclear weapons. We've asked our Allies to help, we've gone to the United Nations, we've asked the Iranians to forbear, nothing has worked. There is no option remaining, but to use America's military superiority to address this growing and gathering threat.
As I speak to you tonight, the first bombers are over Tehran. We will not falter, we will not fail, we will not be denied, and America will prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons.
Thank You my fellow Americans'
This was the second time out of the five events that we attended with Wes Clark, where Wes delivered a mock George W. Bush speech declaring the commencement of military operations against Iran. The first time was at a small meeting of very active local Democrats in Goffstown NH, the previous afternoon. It wasn't word for word the same, but both times the fake speech was chilling to hear. If anything the version Wes Clark gave the prior day was more realistic, and in that smaller setting the gasps it evoked were even more obvious than some visceral groans I heard come from the crowd the Henniker.
In Goffstown, Clark quickly broke false character, flashed a wan smile and said, "Pretty good, huh?" in acknowledgment of how realistic the fake Presidential announcement had seemed to everyone. Janet turned to me in Goffstown and commented that, if she didn't already know Wes Clark, hearing him make Bush's case for War so emphatically could have unnerved her. As it was, simply knowing that Wes Clark believed there was a good chance that we would all actually hear an address very much like that come from George W. Bush sometime in the next 8 months was more than frightening enough for everyone gathered. This night, in Henniker, Clark returned to his own voice and continued:
"Now that's the speech, OK, that's what's going to happen. I'd say 50, 60, 70% likelihood after the first of the year, IF we don't get Democrats in Congress. Now when that happens, it will be very hard for Democrats to stand and say; 'Oh stop the bombing, we like it when Iran has nuclear weapons.' No we don't, we'll be back on the defensive again. That's why we've got to start speaking out now. We're being set up again, just like we were with Iraq, and what I've found in my life is, generally that if you want a war, you can have one.
Most people are about equally brave, most people will fight. Most people love their families, they love their homes, they believe that whatever they believe in is the single one way to truth, reconciliation and the after life, and most people will fight for it. Most people are not philosophical about it, and whether you're walking into a bar in New York City after the Red Sox have played the Yankees, or whether you're dealing with the Bosnians and the Serbs, or whether you're talking about Christians and Iranians. People will fight for what they believe in. So if we want a war with a billion Muslims, we can probably have one. I don't think we want one, we certainly don't need one, and we should do everything we can to prevent it. And that means this election is the crucial moment for doing that."
OK, I’m back to the present blogging now and thank God yes, Democrats retook Congress in the mid terms, but the threat of war with Iran is not over because the underlying dynamic that is driving us toward that conflict is still in place. On November 30th, on C-SPANS’s Washington Journal, Clark made these comments about America’s (lack of) relationship with Iran:
"You know, from the beginning, there've been factions in the White House that, that saw the invasion of Iraq as just the first step, and then they'd move on to Syria, and then get Lebanon under control, and then eventually sweep back and get regime change in Tehran. But I think what people in the White House may not have fully appreciated is that these countries have enduring interests. It's not a matter of regime change in Iran. It's the fact that Iran is a major power - 70 million people. They've got enormous wealth in their petrochemical industry. They've got a culture. They, they have sought regional dominance there for years and years and years, even before Ahmadinejad became the power. They want to be consulted and we've frozen them out now since the late 1970s. It, it's time to open a dialog with Iran. We may not agree with them, but even during the Cold War, we talked to nations we didn't agree with, like the Soviet Union, when we had missiles aimed at each other."
http://securingamerica.com/node/1998 This has been a constant message of Wes Clark’s now for almost three years. Some anti-war activists may have their differences with some of Clark’s views about how the Iraq war should be dealt with now, but the peace movement, as is too often the case, remains behind the curve on Iran, just like they were with Iraq. Clark was warning against ill founded U.S. military plans for the Middle East back in the summer of 2002. Now he is warning against frozen U.S. hostility toward Iran. Diss Wes Clark over timelines for Iraq withdrawal if you must, but for God's sake don't ignore his warnings this time. Support the urgent call for diplomacy with Iran.
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