roachboy

i dont know what to tell you, lebell: your position works at a level of generality that i find bewildering, and amounts to a kind of arbitrary "history" that would appear to have been constructed around a political position you decided was correct before the history entered into it.

first, i do not understand why you would invoke the history of israel and its conflicts with palestinians and allies to demonstrate your concern about iran without mentioning anything about the shifting position israel has occupied---the israel of the 6 day war is not that of 2005--israel is a regional superpower--no combination of surrounding countries would be in a position to destroy it militarily.
i dont know what sense it makes to see israel as a victimized state at this point.
i also do nto understand how your politics relative to israel manages to erase the plight of the palestinians from the equation.
it seems that you would prefer israel be understood as the victim of irrational hatred rather than being a state whose policies toward the palestinans are the primary driver of continued conflict in the region.

one of the arguments iran has floated to justify their demand for nuclear weapons is that they feel threatened by israel. because of the israeli nuclear weapons programmes. why is that fear erased from your assessment of the situation?


yours is basically samuel huntington's position--the "clash of civilizations" line---grafted onto a general history of arab-israeli conflicts that treat those conflicts in a completely ahistorical manner.
and i think that the problems you seem to have in mapping your historical argument onto the case at hand (iran) follow from this general logic--so your position amounts to a demonstration of what is wrong with this huntingtonesque logic.

for the record, let me repeat: i would treat iran with some caution were i in a position of some power, but i see nothing to justify hysteria and its evil twin, saber rattling, on the part of the united states.

but i think contemplating an invasion is crazy: useless strategically (the americans could not do it right now if there was a real need for it even, given the brilliant success of their iraq fiasco), ridiculous politically (even if the underlying motive for considering such an invasion is to make a second-order argument for the necessity of george w. bush style policy and the mayberry machiavellian assumptions that underpin it), based on a readings of the present and of the past so arbitrary as to almost not be readings at all of either the present or the past.

i suspect this talk of invading iraq is more coherent when passed through the lens of american domestic politics at the moment--a kind of displaced revenge fantasy indulged by conservatives who find themselves in a curious place as they watch their boy bush and his administration crash into walls of its own making, functions of deceit, arrogance and incompetence...maybe within this somewhere is a grain of accurate analysis as well: things are so bad for bush and his adminstration that only another war would save them...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite