Increasingly Hard-Line, Anti-Iran, Lunacy from U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta — Experience Appears Not to Affect American Policy

01 February 2012

Aggressively hostile diplomacy suddenly isn’t just manipulative blather any more — Secretary Panetta signaled America’s intent to go to war with Iran

Scott Pelley, of 60 Minutes, interviewed Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, on Sunday last.

Secretary Panetta made a couple of statements that were eerily reminiscent of the beginning of misguided American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (the second time around).

Citation

Henry Schuster and Scott Pelley, The Defense Secretary: An interview with Leon Panetta, 60 Minutes - CBS News (29 January 2012) (video segment)

What Secretary Panetta said

Leon Panetta said, in response to Scott Pelley’s questions about Iran:

The United States, and the president's made this clear, does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us. And it's a red line obviously for the Israelis so we share a common goal here. If we have to do it, we will do it.

If they proceed and we get intelligence that they're proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon then we will take whatever steps are necessary to stop it.

There are no options that are off the table.

Focus on the gist of Panetta’s message

“Whatever steps are necessary to stop it.”

What aggressively unintelligent bone-head came up with that way to word a negotiation?

Or is this a fiat from Imperial Rome?

Two premises

The following analysis is based on two premises:

The psychological problem with self-destructive stupidity is that it creeps up on us. Suddenly, we are caught up in disastrous situations of our own making, with no cheaply easy ways out.

Serial brain-dead-ness characterized American war-making in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. Each war was built on a poorly examined foundation of accumulated rationalizations. The pile eventually left us unable to think realistically and objectively about what we were getting into or continuing to do.

First, a caveat — I’m not writing for testosterone-poisoned “shoot first-ers”

This essay is not for the “shoot first, ask questions afterward” mentality that so often characterizes our thinking.

Our troops, and the collateral human damage of war, deserve better than that.

What follows is meant for people who know History and understand the intellectual, moral, and pragmatic elusiveness of achieving effective geopolitical action.

The problem with the Obama Administration’s perspective on Iran

There are four problems with the Administration’s aggressive behavior toward Iran:

(1) A nuclear-armed Iran is not a threat to the United States.

(2) War with Iran would not achieve workable geopolitical gains of any kind.

(3) It would globally expose the hypocrisy of America’s simultaneous toleration of Pakistan and North Korea as nuclear powers.

(4) And war with Iran would further tie U.S. policy to a Zionist Israel that increasingly seems determined to drag the United States into a Middle East conflagration that neither nation can win.

First, a nuclear-armed Iran is not a threat to the United States

The most obvious problem with the Administration’s thinking is that even a nuclear-armed Iran is not a significant threat to the United States.

This is so exceedingly obvious, I often wonder why the public lets the Military-Industrial Complex, including the President, get away with pretending that it is.

Even if Iran had a way of delivering nuclear weapons to the United States, our nuclear retaliation would destroy most of Iran.

The doctrine of mutually assured destruction cannot possibly be lost on Iranians, who have repeatedly proven to be sophisticated players on the international scene.

Citation

Haviland Smith, What's wrong with attacking Iran? Better to ask: What's right?, Nieman Watchdog (17 January 2012)

Second, war with Iran would not achieve workable geopolitical objectives of any kind

This is the one that we Americans, in our insular arrogance, repeatedly forget.

What gives the United States ethical justification for telling sovereign nations what they can do, when those objectives pose no genuinely imminent threat to other nations?

Given that Iran cannot possibly pose an existential threat to the United States, why should Iranians put up with Uncle Sam telling them what they can do with their own energy and military policies?

When seen that way, it should be clear that preemptively attacking Iran is not going to sit well with at least some other people(s) in the same position.

Militaristic American aggressiveness gets us into more trouble, historically, than it solves.

At a personal level, you can imagine how you would react to a neighbor who threatened to lord it over you. Wouldn’t you embark on your own weapons-building program, so as to defend yourself?

Now think about Iran’s religious neighborhood and who is “buds” with whom:

Shiite Iran has co-religionists throughout the Middle East. They constitute 36.3% of entire regional population and 38.6% of the regional Muslim population.

The Shiite majority countries are Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain, homeport of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Shiite Muslims constitute significant portions (20% or more) of the population in Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

How is predominantly Christian America attacking Shia Islam going to go over with the above list of folks?

Will affected governments, even in places with Shiite minorities, be happy with a United States seemingly determined to stir up trouble inside their borders?

Do we really think that that the sectarian divide between Shia and Sunni Islam is going to persuade Sunnis to tolerate the perceived “Christian” attack on its sovereign Shiite colleagues?

Note

Here, I disregard the undercurrent of anti-Iran feeling among the region’s autocracies, which legitimately fear a nuclear-armed Iran.

Authoritarian governments do not reliably speak for their publics. And I suspect that anti-American Islamic feeling would overwhelm whatever political support such nations gave the United States under the table.

If other nations fear Iran, they can do their own dirty work. This is not our fight.

Attacking Iran is a prescription for a couple of generations (at least) of geopolitical disaster.

Third — obvious hypocrisy diminishes America’s “soft power” as example to other nations

In regard to hypocrisy, consider U.S. treatment of Pakistan and North Korea.

The United States turned a blind and helpful eye to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons-building. Despite the fact that Pakistan:

(i) is a borderline failed nation (thanks to Western machinations in its creation),

(ii) actively opposes American policy in Afghanistan,

(iii) knowingly harbored Osama bin Laden,

and

(iv) intentionally or inadvertently is likely to export its nuclear technology to other enemies of the United States.

The United States has also tolerated North Korea’s nuclear weaponization. Despite the facts that:

(i) the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea fought a major war with America not so long ago,

(ii) has a proven propensity for threatening insane behavior in world affairs,

(iii) is actively developing a nuclear missile delivery system,

and

(iii) has the conventional military forces necessary to impose its expansionist ambitions on the Korean Peninsula.

Iran is an American target, not because it is a more significant threat than these two arguably more dangerous nations. It is a target because it is geopolitically easier to pick on, is the world’s fourth largest oil producer, and powerful factions in Israel (and the United States) support an attack.

Fourth — the problem posed by the increasingly isolating weight of expansionist Zionism

Aggressive Zionists here and in Israel would support an American effort to forcibly divest Iran of its ability to nuclearize.

But militarily there is no way to do this over the long-term, without engaging in overt imperialism that occupies Iran. We saw how well that went in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

As former National Security Advisor Dr. Zbigniew Brezinski (1977-1981) warned — in this recent video clip — the United States and Israel are dangerously isolating themselves from the rest of the world by engaging in short-sighted, enemy-creating, and self-destructive policies in the Middle East.

Why would President Obama engage in such a foolishly aggressive Iran policy?

Given Secretary Panetta’s statements and the undiplomatic phrasing with which he delivered them — it appears that President Obama has decided that he would prefer the costs of war with Iran to taking a leader-like (and geopolitically intelligent) stand against war-hawks in both political parties.

The coming 2012 presidential election has apparently influenced the President’s Iran policy. Just as the 2010 mid-term elections almost certainly influenced him into injecting increased numbers of troops into the hopeless mire that Afghanistan had so obviously been for years.

Embattled political leaders like to divert attention from domestic problems by creating ones abroad

President Obama is an astute politician, but he is not a politically courageous leader.

Therefore, it does not surprise me that the President would continue the militaristic tactics that he pursues whenever politically expedient. For example:

(a) recently in Libya — chronologically linked, for the historically minded, here, here, here, here, and here —

and today,

(b) in drumming up aggressively minded hostility toward Iran through Secretary of Defense Panetta’s statements on 60 Minutes.

Weak or weakened political leaders have historically caused trouble abroad, when in difficulty at home. Patriotism is reelection’s grab bag for success.

A parallel observation about the President’s recently acquired populist domestic orientation

Not content with firing up diversionary and jingoistic patriotism, President Obama has also decided to ignite the domestic populism that he ran away from throughout the first three years of his presidency.

For example, within this last week, the President appointed New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to co-chair a federal mortgage crisis unit to investigate the mortgage meltdown. That was the real estate crash, which created the recession we’re in:

Lorraine Woellert and David McLaughlin, Obama Creates Unit With States to Investigate Mortgage Misconduct by Banks, Bloomberg Law (25 January 2012)

From the standpoint of honorable leadership, the President’s timing is suspicious.

The mortgage crisis hit very visibly in 2008. Millions of Americans suffered at the banks’ arguably criminal lending and securities-packaging tactics.

So, why did it take three years for this plutocratically oriented President to pretend to do something about the banks’ excesses?

The New York Times shares my distrust of the President’s newly acquired facade:

There is good reason to be skeptical. To date, federal civil suits over mortgage wrongdoing have been narrowly focused and, at best, ended with settlements and fines that are a fraction of the profits made during the bubble.

There have been no criminal prosecutions against major players. Justice Department officials say that it reflects the difficulty of proving fraud — and not a lack of prosecutorial zeal.

That is hard to swallow, given the scale of the crisis and the evidence of wrongdoing from private litigation, academic research and other sources.

The Times went on to point out that the Administration had actually “pushed back” against Attorney General Schneiderman’s earlier state attempts to hold the banks accountable.

When in doubt, hire your “enemies” and put them to work in a pretend job.

The President’s Schneiderman strategy is tactically similar to his earlier pretense that he would take the recommendations of his 2010 Bowles-Simpson National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility seriously. Of course, he didn’t. The Commission was purely a political stalling gambit.

Not a laudable leader

In difficult times, there is a big difference between an astute vote-getter and a laudable leader. The former is a slippery squirmer. The latter, an authentic demonstration of a determined spine.

Guess where President Obama falls on that spectrum of behavior?

Especially not an admirable leader, when he sacrifices other people’s lives and well-being to his political ambition

The President appears to be satisfied by prolonging or starting wars, when politically convenient. He ends them when that, too, becomes politically expedient.

The President is not, from what I have seen, a man of principle. Nor one, I suspect, with developed geopolitical or even moral insight.

Unlike President George H. W. Bush, President Obama’s self-indulgent and easily overwhelmed professional integrity is not honorably worthy of his responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief.

The moral? — preemptively attacking Iran is a very bad idea

Even pretending that the United States is willing to attack Iran, for anti-proliferation diplomatic purposes, is unwise.

Such a threat from the planet’s arguably one Super-Bully Power creates fear and hostility among too many of the world’s peoples to benefit our allegedly peace-loving nation.

There may be profit in starting a war with Iran for the Military-Industrial Complex. But there is no honor and no morality in it.

PeteFree.com

Increasingly Hard-Line, Anti-Iran, Lunacy from U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta — Experience Appears Not to Affect American Policy