what is true about the united states at the moment is that you have an administration in power that is plumbing new depths in terms of collapsing public support.
what is true about the united states is that the republicans are in serious danger of losing control of congress in the midterm elections, which will no doubt spell disaster for the bush squad.
what is true about the bush administration is that it has squandered any crediblity that it might have had, particularly in a situation like this because it is clear that they are trying to set up a reversion to form-- doctoring intel to suit its political purposes--with one result being that even if the claims about iran are true, this administration is not in a position to do anything about them.
what seems also to be true is that the political situation facing these people is dire enough that nothing short of another war would work to enable it to regain traction--which of course simply plays directly into the circle outlined above.
this administration has backed itself into a thoroughly untenable corner. such are the wages of a wholesale squandering of credibility.
what is true about iran is that it is as logical a target for arbitrary assertions of american imperial illusions as was iraq, this as a function of the revolution itself.
what is true about iran is that the americans have systematically demonized the country since 1979. this has created a readymade idoeological context that i see the administration trying to figure out ways to exploit for its own purposes.
what is also true about iran is that its present administration acts in ways that are the mirror image of the bush administration----what is true about iran and the united states is that the present administrations in both places appear to be hoping to gain some degree of legitimacy by playing chicken with each other.
i think that host's post above poses real problems. i do not see anything approaching a coherent counter to it from either mojo or ustwo.
at least mojo's is coherent, however: it attempts to shift the problems onto different terrain than they really are, in that he would prefer to bracket the disaster that is the bush administration, the entire internal political logic that makes it a real and present danger to all of us, and think instead, for some reason, that the questionable intel on iran's nuclear program is accurate (i do not see the basis for this) and then to outline an argument for unilateral american action based on a series of arbitrary (to my mind) assertions about organizations like the iaec. these assertions are arbitrary even if you take the iraq war as an example--what was faulty was not the iaec's assessment of iraqi nuclear capabilities----rather what was faulty turned out to be was positions like his that rooted themselves in a level of credulity with reference to bushclaims that those claims obviuosly did not merit.
normally i am not interested in what arthur schlesinger has to say, but the edito from this morning's washington post speaks to these same issues and seems to me germaine:
Quote:
Bush's Thousand Days
By Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Monday, April 24, 2006; A17
The Hundred Days is indelibly associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Thousand Days with John F. Kennedy. But as of this week, a thousand days remain of President Bush's last term -- days filled with ominous preparations for and dark rumors of a preventive war against Iran.
The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.' "
This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don't . However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin's attempt to dominate Europe. And in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba.
It was lucky that JFK was determined to get the missiles out peacefully, because only decades later did we discover that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and orders to use them to repel a U.S. invasion. This would have meant a nuclear exchange. Instead, JFK used his own thousand days to give the American University speech, a powerful plea to Americans as well as to Russians to reexamine "our own attitude -- as individuals and as a nation -- for our attitude is as essential as theirs." This was followed by the limited test ban treaty. It was compatible with the George Kennan formula -- containment plus deterrence -- that worked effectively to avoid a nuclear clash.
The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, there probably would have been nuclear war. It is certain that nuclear weapons will be used again. Henry Adams, the most brilliant of American historians, wrote during our Civil War, "Some day science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race shall commit suicide by blowing up the world."
But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula of containment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalating it into a nuclear war. Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent of preventive war. In 2003, owing to the collapse of the Democratic opposition, Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy from containment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don't. Observers describe Bush as "messianic" in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, "The Almighty has His own purposes."
There stretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own. He might use them to start the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war (based on fantasy, deception and self-deception), the Iran war (also fantasy, deception and self-deception). There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.
Maybe President Bush, who seems a humane man, might be moved by daily sorrows of death and destruction to forgo solo preventive war and return to cooperation with other countries in the interest of collective security. Abraham Lincoln would rejoice.
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source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...042301014.html