A Letter to Anti-Obama People

Dear Anti-Obama people,

While I appreciate all of your enthusiasm and rigor as it pertains to the upcoming election, I respectfully have to disagree with some, a lot, okay all of your statements regarding the presumptive democratic nominee. If recent political history has taught us anything, it’s that braggadocio, big-stick unilateralist foreign policy has only emboldened our enemies. I will readily admit that Mr. Obama’s complete and utter lack of foreign policy–i.e., how he barely attends meetings on the subcommittee on European Affairs that he chairs–is quite worrisome, uneasy as we are with the prevalence of nuclear proliferation and rogue states. His dearth in international affairs experience is precisely why I initially supported Joe Biden and blogged for him. Now, Obama’s lacking foreign policy bona fides is why Joe Biden was the number one name on Jim Johnson’s short list.

Iran’s quest for the bomb is pragmatic and nationalistic; with the power vacuum created by the ouster of Pan-Arabist strong man Saddam Hussein, Iran aggressively seeks to assert itself as not only a regional hegemon, but a world power. While I don’t believe that the NIE report that came out late last year in which indicated that Iran had "halted its development of nuclear (not ‘nucular’) weapons" should not mean we act complacent in the face of this rising fundamentalist power, but I strongly believe that the neocon hawks are intentionally exaggerating Ahmadinejad’s significance. Look, a comparative analysis will show you that Iran has a thriving young, highly westernized population and technocratic class, which became more viable during the reformist years of Khatami. The Iranians, much like their American counterparts, greatly distrust their government and are quite weary of its bravado and hubris. It should probably be noted that Iran’s president has little if any real power; furthermore, he is nothing more than a titular figurehead. Following the Islamic revolution, the Iranian constitution was set up to give the Guardian council and supreme religious leader (ayatollah) the ultimate authority. The election of Ahmadinutjob was indelible proof that our foreign policy was bankrupted I that region. Instead of working closely with Iran’s secular opposition movement, we chose to secretly plan a military coup de tat in the MEK (a radical anti-ran militant group) all the while maligning it as a sponsor of terrorism (The U.S. State Department lists the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq as a terrorist organization for its association with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime until the dictator’s ouster by the U.S.led invasion in 2003.)

The argument that Iran acquiring a bomb will create a new ace for the bomb completely lacks merit on face value, as South Africa and Brazil have been itching for the same capabilities prior to the Iraq invasion and Iran’s subsequent ascendancy. A scenario that’s intellectually plausible is the following: The Saudis have gone nuclear (The us government recently provided them with billions of dollars in nuclear deal). So have the Egyptians. Both countries had been signatories to the NPT (Non-proliferation Treaty), but that accord has now disintegrated. Riyadh and Cairo acquired their nuclear weapons from Pakistan, a Sunni ally, in response to the nuclear threat poised by Iran–a new MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) in the era of religious fundamentalism. At the same time, Iraq continues to explode, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from settled, and Iranian proxies remain ensconced within Lebanon’s incendiary sectarian mix–a mix that pits Sunni against Shia and just so happens to exist along the Israeli border. A rested and renergized Al-queda–thanks to Bush pursuing a petty vendetta in Iraq– now have a new breeding ground within which to launch its terrorist operations. In short, all the key players in the Middle East–Sunni, Shia, Israeli–now has nuclear weapons at a moment when the simmering and, and in some cases, quite open conflicts between regions’ states, sects, and ethnicities are too innumerable to count.

That is a scenario in which radical pre-millennial dispensationalists in the bush camp as well as Lieberman and John McCain are praying to their invisible space ghost in the sky for. These radical neocons seek perpetual asymmetrical warfare as a golden opportunity to finally realize their apocalyptic agenda of perpetual warfare, fought not by conventional armies or Israel, but rather mercenary private contractors (IE, blackwater). McCain understands that he cannot get elected without the support of Bush’s dirty defense contractor buddies so he will do anything and say anything to get these Machiavellian lunatics on his side, hopefully pursuing a rational anti-bush agenda upon being elected.

Another rattle-sabering, fear-based argument with which we are so frequently bombarded is that Iran will wipe Israel off the map with its new found nuclear capabilities. What we aren’t bombarded with is the fact that Israel has several weapons of its own.

According to the Guardian, After decades in which Israel has stuck to a doctrine of nuclear ambiguity, Mr. Olmert let slip during an interview in Germany that Israel did indeed have weapons of mass destruction.

He told Germany’s Sat.1 channel on Monday evening: "Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly, threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel and Russia?"

In case you missed that, Israel is a full blown nuclear state. Even though Iran’s religious leaders subscribe to Twelver Shia Islam–an ideology in which inspires its followers to instigate the apocalypse and bring about the return the 12th Imam–they would be crazier than Shiite house to underestimate Israel’s second strike capabilities. The entire cold war was prefaced on the idea of deterrence being used to thwart one state from obliterating the other; hence, it would appear as though Iran would exercise the same caution as its soviet friends did. After all, Iran ended its brutal 8-year war with neighboring Iraq after Saddam used chemical weapons on Iran which, ironically enough, were supplied to him by the US–facilitated by Donald Rumsfeld.

In short, the rise of Iran is a constant reminder of Bush’s failed Iraq invasion and why the rule of unintended consequences matters. Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons should most definitely be thwarted, only with aggressive diplomacy and not with military action, as McCain, Lieberman, and the other conservative hawks would have it. Lieberman and McCain are way too smart to be playing this scary game. I guess this is just one issue where we’ll have to agree to disagree

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