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Renewed Pressures
Clearly, those pressures have again grown during the first 13 months of the Obama administration. Today, it appears that Mullen has replaced Fallon as the principal military obstacle to exercising the war option against Iran.
From his recent demeanor, as well as his many statements since he became the country's most senior officer in October 2007, it is apparent that Mullen does not believe that a "preventive war" against Iran would be worth the horrendous cost.
Washington rhetoric, echoed by the stenographers of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) over the past eight years, has brought a veneer of respectability to the international crime of aggressive war, as long as it is launched or sanctioned by the United States. With nodding approval from the FCM, Bush and Cheney sold the notion that such attacks can be justified to "prevent" some future hypothetical threat to the United States or its allies. This provided a thin, fig-leaf rationale for invading Iraq seven years ago this month.
The Obama administration has not fully backed away from such thinking.
While in Qatar on Feb. 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern over what she called "accumulating evidence" of an Iranian attempt to pursue a nuclear weapon, not because it "directly threaten[s] the United States, but [because] it directly threatens a lot of our friends" -- read Israel.
Mullen, for his part, seems acutely aware that the Constitution he has sworn to defend makes no provision for the kind of war he might be sucked into in order to defend Israel. When he studied at the Naval Academy, his professors were still teaching that the Constitution's Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that treaties ratified by the Senate become the "supreme law of the land."
It would be, pure and simple, a flagrant violation of a supreme law of the land, the Senate-ratified United Nations Charter, for the United States to join in an unprovoked assault on Iran without the approval of the U.N. Security Council, which surely would not go along--just as it did not go along on attacking Iraq.
Moreover, Adm. Mullen appears to be one of the few Americans aware that there is no mutual defense treaty between the United States and Israel and, thus, the U.S. has no legal obligation to jump to Israel's defense if it ignites war with Iran. In other words, in a strictly juridical sense, Israel is not our "ally."
Sorry, you can't create an ally by just repeating the word over and over.
Now you may scoff. "Everyone knows," you will say, that political realities in America dictate that the U.S. military must defend Israel no matter who started a conflict.
Still, there was a time after the 1967 Israeli-Arab war when Israel first occupied the Palestinian territories that the U.S. did take soundings regarding the possibility of a mutual defense treaty, in the expectation that this might introduce more calm into the area by giving the Israelis a greater sense of security.
But the Israelis turned the overture down cold. Such treaties, you see, require internationally recognized boundaries and Israel did not want any part of parting with the territories it had just seized militarily.
Besides, mutual defense treaties usually impose on both parties an obligation to inform the other if one decides to attack a third country. Israel wanted no part of that either.
This virtually unknown background helps to explain why the lack of a treaty of mutual defense is more than a picayune academic point.
Why Is Mullen Worried?
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