[NYTr] Listen up. Can you hear the drums beating for a third war?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation - Sep 25, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=236481


Senate Neocons Provoke Iran

by Ari Berman

Listen up. Can you hear the drums beating for a third war?

The neocons are in a bubbling rage over Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University. The pro-surge propagandists
at Freedom Watch labeled the Iranian leader a "terrorist" in--of all
places--a New York Times ad. Neocon godfather, Giuliani advisor and
"World War IV" author Norman Podharetz went to the White House recently
to urge President Bush to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.

And now Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman, who's already advocated
attacking the country, are introducing a sense of the Senate
resolution, possibly up for a vote today, that accuses Iran of fighting
"a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq." The
resolution states that "it is a vital national interest of the United
States" to prevent Iran from turning Iraq's Shiite militias into a
"Hezbollah-like force" and says that US policy should "combat, contain
and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside
Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign
facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi
proxies." To accomplish this task, Kyl and Lieberman advocate "the
prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national
power in Iraq." Finally, the resolution dubs Iran's largest military
branch, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, "a foreign terrorist
organization."

It's clear where this resolution is going. The Council for a Livable
World, one of the more astute peace groups in Washington, says it
"could wind up being another in a long line of blank checks provided to
the Executive Branch in the mold of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and
the authorization to use force in Iraq." The line advocating the
"prudent and calibrated" use of US power is "a loophole is big enough
to drive an aircraft carrier or a fleet of planes through."

Moreover, the case for the next war is as shaky as the last one. "The
Kyl-Lieberman amendment is a resolution based almost entirely on false
premises," the Council states. "The resolution only quotes questionable
and unsubstantiated assertions provided by the US military about
Iranian involvement in Iraq."

The Council warns that actions like these from the US Senate, while
still only symbolic, could lead to serious blowback of the worst kind.
"Provocative measures such as the Kyl-Lieberman amendment can lead to a
tit-for-tat escalation resulting in military confrontation between the
US and Iran. There are no good military options for solving our
disagreements with Iran. Military action would only result in
disastrous and unintended consequences for U.S. and Israeli interests.
If we have learned nothing else from Iraq, it is that there are
limitations to the use of military force."

The only thing that neocons have learned from Iraq is that Joe
Lieberman should be secretary of state.