The push to attack Iran has been on for so long that entire categories of arguments for it (such as that the Iranians are fueling the Iraqi resistance) have come and gone. At DontAttackIran.org we've been collecting the arguments for and against attacking Iran for years. We've campaigned against an attack, but never been able to claim a success, because decisions not to launch wars are never announced, because those pushing for wars never give up, and because those believing what their government tells them think the Pentagon never campaigns for wars but is forced into them defensively on short notice by attacks from evildoers.
While Iran has not attacked any other country in centuries, the
United States has not done so well by Iran. Remember (or, like most U.S.
citizens, learn for the first time): the United States overthrew
Iran's democracy in 1953 and installed a dictator. Then the United
States aided Iraq in the 1980s in attacking Iran, providing Iraq with
some of the weapons (including chemical weapons) that were used on
Iranians and that would be used in 2002-2003 (when they no longer
existed) as an excuse for attacking Iraq. For the past decade, the
United States has labeled Iran an evil nation, attacked and destroyed the other non-nuclear nation on the list of evil nations, designated part of Iran's military a terrorist organization, falsely accused Iran of crimes including the attacks of 9-11, murdered Iranian scientists, funded opposition groups in Iran (including some the U.S. also designates as terrorist), flown drones over Iran, openly and illegally threatened to attack Iran, and built up military forces all around Iran's borders, while imposing cruel sanctions on the country.
The roots of a Washington push for a new war on Iran can be found in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, the 1996 paper called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the 2000 Rebuilding America's Defenses, and in a 2001 Pentagon memo described by Wesley Clark as listing these nations for attack: Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. In 2010, Tony Blair included
Iran on a similar list of countries that he said Dick Cheney had aimed
to overthrow. The line among the powerful in Washington in 2003 was that
Iraq would be a cakewalk but that real men go to Tehran.
The arguments in these old forgotten memos were not what the war makers
tell the public, but much closer to what they tell each other. The
concerns here are those of dominating regions rich in resources,
intimidating others, and establishing bases from which to maintain
control of puppet governments.
Of course the reason why "real men
go to Tehran" is that Iran is not the impoverished disarmed nation that
one might find in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq, or even the disarmed
nation recently found in Libya. Iran is much bigger and much better
armed. Whether the United States launches a major assault on Iran or
Israel does, Iran will retaliate against U.S. troops and probably Israel and possibly the United States itself
as well. And the United States will without any doube re-retaliate for
that. Iran cannot be unaware that the U.S. government's pressure on the
Israeli government not to attack Iran consists of reassuring
the Israelis that the United States will attack when needed, and does
not include even threatening to stop funding Israel's military or to
stop vetoing measures of accountability for Israeli crimes at the United
Nations. In other words, any U.S. pretense of having seriously wanted
to prevent an attack is not credible. Of course, many in the U.S.
government and military oppose attacking Iran, although key figures like
Admiral William Fallon have been moved out of the way. Much of the
Israeli military is opposed
as well, not to mention the Israeli and U.S. people. But war is not
clean or precise. If the people we allow to run our nations attack
another, we are all put at risk.
Most at risk, of course, are the
people of Iran, people as peaceful as any other, or perhaps more so. As
in any country, no matter what its government, the people of Iran are
fundamentally good, decent, peaceful, just, and fundamentally like you
and me. I've met people from Iran. You may have met people from Iran.
They look like this. They're not a different species. They're not evil. A "surgical strike" against a "facility" in their country would cause
a great many of them to die very painful and horrible deaths. Even if
you imagine that Iran would not retaliate for such attacks, this is what
the attacks would in themselves consist of: mass murder. And what would
that accomplish? It would unite the people of Iran and much of the
world against the United States. It would justify in the eyes of much of
the world an underground Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons, a
program that probably does not exist at present, except to the extent
that legal nuclear energy programs move a country closer to weapons
development. The environmental damage would be tremendous, the precedent
set incredibly dangerous, all talk of cutting the U.S. military budget
would be buried in a wave of war frenzy, civil liberties and
representative government would be flushed down the Potomac, a nuclear
arms race would spread to additional countries, and any momentary
sadistic glee would be outweighed by accelerating home foreclosures,
mounting student debt, and accumulating layers of cultural stupidity.
Strategically,
legally, and morally weapons possession is not grounds for war, and
neither is pursuit of weapons possession. And neither, I might add, with
Iraq in mind, is theoretically possible pursuit of weapons never acted
upon. Israel has nuclear weapons. The United States has more nuclear
weapons than any other country. There can be no justification for
attacking the United States, Israel, or any other country. The pretense
that Iran has or will soon have nuclear weapons is, in any case, just a
pretense, one that has been revived, debunked,
and revived again like a zombie for years and years. But that's not the
really absurd part of this false claim for something that amounts to no
justification for war whatsoever. The really absurd part is that it was
the United States in 1976 that pushed nuclear energy on Iran. In 2000
the CIA gave
the Iranian government (slightly flawed) plans to build a nuclear bomb.
In 2003, Iran proposed negotiations with the United States with
everything on the table, including its nuclear technology, and the
United States refused. Shortly thereafter, the United States started
angling for a war. Meanwhile, U.S.-led sanctions prevent Iran from developing wind energy, while the Koch brothers are allowed to trade with Iran without penalty.
Another area of ongoing lie debunking, one that almost exactly parallels the buildup to the 2003 attack on Iraq, is the relentless false claim, including by candidates for U.S. President, that Iran has not allowed inspectors into its country or given them access to its sites. Iran has, in fact, voluntarily accepted
stricter standards than the IAEA requires. And of course a separate
line of propaganda, albeit a contradictory one, holds that the IAEA has
discovered a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Under the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty (NPT), Iran was not required
to declare all of its installations, and early last decade it chose not
to, as the United States violated that same treaty by blocking Germany,
China, and others from providing nuclear energy equipment to Iran.
While Iran remains in compliance with the NPT, India and Pakistan and
Israel have not signed it and North Korea has withdrawn from it, while
the United States and other nuclear powers continuously violate it by
failing to reduce arms, by providing arms to other countries such as
India, and by developing new nuclear weapons.
This is what the empire of U.S. military bases looks like to Iran. Try to imagine if you lived there, what you would think of this.
Who is threatening whom?
Here are the sizes of national militaries:
Who is the greater danger to whom? The point is not that Iran should be free to attack the United States or anyone else because its military is smaller. The point is that doing so would be national suicide. It would also be something Iran has not done for centuries. But it would be typical U.S. behavior.
Are you ready for an even more absurd twist? This is on the same scale as Bush's comment about not really giving much thought to Osama bin Laden. Are you ready? The proponents of attacking Iran themselves admit that if Iran had nukes it would not use them. This is from the American Enterprise Institute:
"The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it's Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don't do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, 'See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn't getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.' ... And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem."
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