Ted Cruz says the Iran deal would “either allow Iran to have nuclear weapons or use military force to prevent it”–and assumes the latter choice is inevitable. (Huffington Post, 5/5/15)
On August 5, US President Barack Obama compared the rhetoric employed by opponents of the P5+1/Iran nuclear negotiations to that used by the Bush administration during the run-up to America’s catastrophic war in Iraq, noting (Washington Post, 8/5/15) that “many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.”
Indeed, opposition to the Iran deal has been all but apocalyptic, with Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee going so far as to claim (Business Insider, 7/26/15) the agreement will “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Similarly, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas—also a Republican presidential hopeful—asserted (Huffington Post, 5/5/05) that “this deal makes war a certainty.” Huckabee and Cruz’s attitudes echo the position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned (Times of Israel, 7/20/15) that “they say this agreement pushes war away but in fact it brings war closer.”
Yet Obama’s own rhetoric in defense of the Iran deal shares more in common with his opposition than he might like to admit. In the same speech (Washington Post, 8/5/15) during which he criticized Iraq War proponents for opposing the Iran deal, Obama stated that, “absent a diplomatic resolution, the result could be war with major disruptions to the global economy, and even greater instability in the Middle East.”
Obama’s rhetorical tactic illuminates the new reality of American foreign policy discourse: For nearly all commentators, regardless of their position, war is the only alternative to that position.
This situation is little different in corporate US media. The New York Times (7/14/15) ran an editorial favoring the negotiations on their likelihood to curtail Iranian nuclear ambitions, titled “An Iran Nuclear Deal That Reduces the Chance of War.” Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s GPS, similarly argued in support of the negotiations in his weekly Washington Post column (4/2/15) that, short of the proposed deal or continued sanctions against Iran (which he views as unlikely), “the United States would effectively have to go to war.”
Philip Gordon of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote for Politico (8/11/15), in an article titled “War Actually Is an Alternative to Iran Deal,” that “to walk away from this good nuclear deal with Iran based on the hope that it will behave differently would be to take an enormously dangerous risk.” CBS’s Face the Nation (The Hill, 8/9/15) ran an interview with Vermont senator and Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders in which he said: “The alternative of not reaching an agreement, you know what it is? It’s war.”
Dick Cheney on Hannity: Iran agreement will “put us closer to the actual use of nuclear weapons than we’ve been at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (Fox News Insider, 7/14/15)
The other side of the coin is aired in traditionally conservative news outlets. On the day the draft agreement was announced, Sean Hannity hosted former Vice President Dick Cheney on his Fox News program (7/14/15), during which Cheney ominously warned that the world is now “closer to the actual use of nuclear weapons than we’ve been at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.” In an op-ed published in the Washington Times (8/10/15), Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation wrote that supporters of the deal
shouldn’t fall for the administration’s rhetoric to the effect that this agreement is all that stands between us and war…. The deal actually makes war more likely.
The specter of war in American foreign policy discourse has thus produced a rather troubling framework: Advocates of diplomacy with Iran cite war as the inevitable alternative, while critics of diplomacy cite war as its inevitable outcome. No matter which side you choose, it seems, you are choosing war.
What can account for this foreboding simplicity through which politicians and the popular media analyze foreign policy issues? On the one hand, it naturally arises from a society that has been on a constant war footing since September 2001. In his 1999 book Capturing the Complexity of Conflict, Dennis Sandole of George Mason University suggests:
A situation characterized by increases in the frequency of war at increasing rates would probably involve the socialization of actors into aggressive cognitive sets whereby they continually expected to wage war, always prepared for it, and, indeed, always found reasons for waging it.
This rings true for American foreign policy in the new millennium, bizarrely culminating in Obama promoting peace with Iran by brandishing his war credentials (Intercept, 8/6/15). Despite running on a campaign to wind down America’s wars and his ongoing rhetoric advocating such an end, Obama has paradoxically expanded the US war front to half a dozen countries in the Middle East.
Compounding the aggressive cognitive set that seems to have developed in 21st century America is the codification of George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war, on which the dire predictions of both advocates and critics of the Iran deal are founded. One might think the disaster that became of Operation Iraqi Freedom would be enough to thoroughly discredit this concept, yet both Obama and his critics envision a preemptive war with Iran as the inevitable outcome of the respective alternative.
On the other hand, this discourse represents a profound lack of imagination with regard to the set of possibilities presented by foreign relations. The either-this-or-war binary with which both sides of the debate analyze the Iran deal ignores the historical reality that failures in nuclear nonproliferation have produced a variety of outcomes.
Both sanctions and diplomacy failed to inhibit nuclear development in North Korea, yet, while tensions remain high, there has been no war as a result. Pakistan and India developed nuclear weapons in the face of fierce opposition from the West, and now the United States conducts positive diplomatic relations with both countries. And of course Israel itself is known to possess nuclear weapons in defiance of international treaties, likely as the result of collaboration with the United States, and politicians on both sides of the aisle enthusiastically proclaim the two countries to share an “unbreakable” bond.
Perhaps the most poignant counter-example, however, is the recent rapprochement with Cuba, a nation that briefly harbored Soviet nuclear warheads only a hundred or so miles from the US mainland. The nuclear threat was abated through rapid diplomacy with America’s chief enemies in Moscow, but relations with Cuba continued to be acrimonious for another half-century. Yet, aside from the Bay of Pigs debacle orchestrated by the CIA in 1961, there has been no resultant war with Cuba, and formal diplomatic relations have finally resumed.
US attitudes toward war became markedly more positive after the 9/11 attacks. (cc photo: Wally Gobetz)
A pair of psychologists from Iowa State University, Nicholas Carnagey and Craig A. Anderson, published a study in 2007 titled Changes in Attitudes Towards War and Violence After September 11, 2001, demonstrating that positive attitudes towards war in the United States increased markedly after the 9/11 attacks. The authors commented that, preceding the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, “the initial framing of the attacks (by the president and a wide range of news services) heavily emphasized war themes” and that “such salient framing effects are important determinants of attitudes and attitude change.”
One has to wonder at the extent of the mainstream media’s continued influence on foreign policy discussions fourteen years later. From Fox News’ annual coverage of the “war on Christmas” to MSNBC’s frequent transmissions from the “war on women,” even domestic ideological debates are framed in terms of armed conflict. Fareed Zakaria brought up the Iran deal on GPS again this week (CNN, 8/16/15), during which Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, told him that “Iran has been at war with America for 36 years.” Zakaria went on to discuss Russia’s “war on cheese” later in the show.
In fact, in the 1980s, during its metaphorical “war” with the United States, Iran experienced a much more real and devastating 8-year war with Iraq—there are numerous monuments to the war throughout the Islamic Republic, including, notably, one commemorating its Jewish soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice (Haaretz, 12/18/14).
Saba Torabian and Marina Abalakina, another team of psychologists whose study is titled Attitudes Toward War in the United States and Iran, speculate that this war could account for the difference in attitudes they found between college-age adults in Iran and the United States in 2012. “Our results revealed that Iranian students who experienced the Iran/Iraq War had more negative general attitudes toward war,” they explained, and “the cross-national comparison showed that American college students had more positive attitudes toward war than Iranian college students.”
With voters under 30 comprising one-third of the total electorate in Iran, there’s little doubt that the younger generation played an instrumental role in President Hassan Rouhani’s election, as their American counterparts did in Obama’s (Al-Monitor, 6/24/13).
The paradox in the United States is that, although it has been constantly at war since September 14, 2001, and has conducted military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Syria, the number of Americans who have had direct contact with these wars remains very small as a percentage of the country’s total population. Thus predisposed to have more positive attitudes toward conflict, one could imagine that the unrelenting talk of war from both sides of seemingly every debate aired in the US media stands to intensify the aggressive cognitive sets Sandole predicted in 1999 and the psychologists at Iowa State found in late 2001.
The threat of war is real: A supporter of the deal has already introduced legislation in the House authorizing military force against Iran (Congress.gov, H.J.Res.62). But history shows us that peace is almost always an alternative, notwithstanding the variety of possible scenarios that could confront American foreign policy. The specter of war in US media belies this truth, and all sides of the debate bear responsibility for its current pervasiveness in the context of Iran.
Regardless of the outcome of the nuclear deal, peace will remain among the possibilities going forward. Those of us who are exhausted with war might hope that, as the deadline for congressional action on the agreement approaches, more imaginative commentary might finally be given a voice.
John C. O’Day is a graduate philosophy student at Texas A&M.
For most Yanks, war is a video game
Where no real blood spatters the screen
I’m at a loss to understand what Iran has supposedly done that would, in any rational way, support the US using force against the country. Israel and its hundreds of nuclear weapons seems to be writing the script for the warmongers of both parties.
I’m aware of the ignorance of the general population in regard to the ugly history of US intervention in the government of Iran in the second half of the twentieth century, but are the Congress and White House equally clueless? Have the last rational adults left the leadership of the duopoly? Can someone name the Iranian crime for which Obama and the rest are prescribing war as the only alternative to congressional approval of this negotiated deal?
Have we lost our collective mind?
I’m sure we should allow the Neo-Cons to guide us. Their methodology on Iraq was so sound.
Just imagine if the CIA had never interfered with internal Iranian affairs to begin with in the 1950s. The CIA doesn’t act in the best interests of the American people, ever.
The CIA couldn’t allow regular Iranian citizens to benefit from their oil at the expense of BP. This seems to be a guiding principle of the CIA ever since—look out for corporate interests, democracy and fairness be damned.
Unless action is taken to wrest the earth from the oil companies that now control it, global warming will exterminate the human race within a few decades. The extinction of other species has already begun, and if mankind is to survive, all countries must cooperate in reducing world-wide fossil-fuel emissions. Accordingly, war is no longer an option.
” “The paradox in the United States is that, although it has been constantly at war since September 14, 2001, and has conducted military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Syria, the number of Americans who have had direct contact with these wars remains very small as a percentage of the country’s total population. Thus predisposed to have more positive attitudes toward conflict, one could imagine that the unrelenting talk of war from both sides of seemingly every debate aired in the US media stands to intensify the aggressive cognitive sets Sandole predicted in 1999 and the psychologists at Iowa State found in late 2001.” ”
The reality is that the U.S. has been in some sort of conflict since before it was founded: Military history of the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States
1 Colonial wars (1620–1774)
2 War of Independence (1775–83)
2.1 George Washington
3 Early national period (1783–1812)
3.1 Barbary Wars
4 War of 1812
5 War with Mexico (1846–48)
6 American Civil War (1861–1865)
7 Post-Civil War era (1865–1917)
7.1 Indian Wars (1865–1891)
7.2 Spanish–American War (1898)
7.3 Philippine–American War (1899–1902)
8 Modernization
9 Banana Wars (1898–1935)
10 Moro Rebellion (1899–1913)
11 Mexico (1910–1919)
12 World War I (1917–1918)
13 Russian Revolution (1918–1919)
14 1920s: Naval disarmament
15 1930s: Neutrality Acts
16 World War II (1941–1945)
17 Cold War era (1945–1991)
17.1 Postwar Military Reorganization (1947)
17.2 Korean War (1950–1953)
17.3 Lebanon crisis of 1958
17.4 Dominican Intervention
17.5 Vietnam War (1964–1975)
17.6 Grenada
17.7 Beirut
17.8 Libya
17.9 Panama
18 Post–Cold War era (1991–2001)
18.1 Persian Gulf War (1990–1991)
18.2 Somalia
18.3 Haiti
18.4 Yugoslavia
19 War on Terrorism (2001–present)
19.1 Afghanistan
19.2 Philippines
19.3 Syrian and Iraqi intervention
and the list will go on. America Seems to think that is the policeman of the world, and that we must somehow fight everyone war for them. So it is little surprise that our congress is made of a majority of Chicken-Hawks, who will never see battle, nor will their children, but they will ensure that the unwashed masses will suffer for them.
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Chapter III. War is Peace.
…
In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth centuury have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.
…. and so it goes.
The push for the war in US domestic politics benefits hedge funds and war profiteers who back the Republicans, although I figure the Republican base is slightly more pacifist than its leaders, close to one in five towards questioning war with ISIS.
The elites in every country in the US orbit have a natural synchronicity with any people threatened, or said to be threatened, by Iran. It’s more common to hear “Assad’s barrel bombs” and “Hamas’s rockets” but not “Likud’s fighter jets” or “General Dynamics inc mortars.”
With the Arab Spring mostly squashed or diverted into the hands of violent thugs, Israel can be ignored. Essentially Israel’s job is the same as Egypt, to be “victimized” by war so as to justify US intervention. With an apparent IMF and Saudi favorite, President Sisi, in power, there’s little reason to invite much more chaos to the region. So the extreme hawks, even Sisi I suppose, are expected to cool it, and they don’t like the cognitive dissonance.
Israel’s intransigence toward nuclear nonproliferation was documented in 1987 when they flatly refused to let in IAEA inspectors to confirm or deny if nuclear weapons had been created with material provided by Norway, France and the US (New York Times. 5/26/1987). Israel was treated very gently. The push for inspections from Norway came from a lot of hard work grassroots anti-proliferation group in a nearly egalitarian government. But it yielded only partial results, and simply was taken over by the US and US-led groups who have mostly idled it. In fact, early in his term Bush II blocked inspections of our chemical stockpiles in the US.
Israel’s role as a client state in the US “friend” system is the same as it was when laid out by Henry Kissinger. I don’t know if Herzl knew he was inviting this much authoritarianism but that’s what he in effect did. They have to be permanently opposed to diplomacy. The method to Kissinger’s madness can be put together by seeing the statesmen he influenced. In an interview with an Egyptian newspaper, Egyptian President Sadat said Kissinger gave him a back-channel signal to begin the war with Israel, temporarily boosting his emotional control over his country (FOIA on CIA website, PDF name: FBIS197710). In a phone call with the first female prime minister Golda Meir, Henry Kissinger had consoled her with the phrase “we’re not going to rape you” but the “tragedy” is there will “never be peace,” period.
The Israeli-US friendship is the ugly result of Herzl’s desperate dream of an international trade somehow financing an independent utopia, only half of which came true.
The US has a history of deposing any elected government that is based upon municipal socialism which is, roughly, the provision of basic necessities. Decades ago, when Moseddegh nationalized the oil and deprived England the benefits, the CIA and Britain took him out. How dare a country stand up to imperialistic use of a nation’s natural resources?
The US does not bring democracy to the world. It brings imperialism via war. US citizens had to be given a 9/11 fear lesson to make them more malleable to war and convince that we were are constant danger …which, by now, may be true.
We are upping our drone attacks to protect investments that benefit the 1% and killing families and destroying infrastructures. Then there is Israel that has its own issues and many of our politicians are afraid to buck Israeli wishes and risk losing Jewish voters, even though many Jewish voters are concerned about Palestinian rights.
Prostitutes, vacations, media control, pay offs, gifts, and re-election support is how the military industrial fascists control our government. Pogo was right. the enemy is ourselves.
Only one presidential candidate has spoken out against our policies and that is Bernie Sanders. But you won’t hear his name often, and if you do, like on late night shows, it will be as the butt of a joke. Over 60% of our voters didn’t vote last election. We can change things. As Bernie says, electing him won’t make the difference. Tsk Tsking won’t do it either. Write letters. Campaign and let people know the issues. Fight for change. Don’t vote for somebody because you think they will win. Let candidates know why you won’t vote for them even if they are the only candidate. Listen to Bernie’s South Carolina speech, Aug 21, 2015 on CSPAN. “Try it Mikey, You’ll like it!”
The phrase “specter of war” sounds like old days and times gone by.
When I see a photograph of our international war criminal the dick Cheney, I want to vomit since he is a reincarnation of Adolph Eichmann. For Fox to give him a sounding board tells the world more about the broadcasting company than anything that Cheney could say. In Germany the Nazi Party is outlawed; how can the Republican Party remain viable after stealing two elections in which our president and vice-president tortured, rendered, and murdered prisoners of war and are still under indictment in Spain for these international crimes?
Hi!, Patrons Of FAIR Et. Al.:
“In the last days there will be wars and rumors of wars but the end is not yet!”….JESUS He was addressing His disciples plea to know the signs of the end of the world which has always dominated men’s inquisitiveness. Like will we live or die? He initially preached that it is OUR Heavenly Father’s good pleasure to provide His children His Kingdom who were under subjugation to the Holy Roman Empire but then He offered them another positive outcome; when He announced that everyone should ask to receive; that their joy would be full. Can wars where people loose their loved ones ever bring joy? If not then they must one way or another stop, in order to suppress anger, rebellions, grief, retributions, hatreds, bickering, etc. and all the other diseases that lead men into wars, rebellions, revolutions etc.? The masses are suppose to bow to loosing their loved ones in wars but still put on the face of joy? Isn’t obvious that, until we trade in grief for joy that the END IS NOT YET? How else can this be said dear reader?
RUSS SMITH, CA. (One Of Our Broke, Fiat Money Corrupt States)
resmith1942@gmail.com
The information on this page should be shouted from the news media, so I am putting it on facep=book, as it will never see the light of day in the most of our media-since 5 conglomerates (look up the owners and who they donate the most to-) control over 80+% of all written, televised media, as well as film and radio. People still do not understand that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/ll., Rather, that the majority of perpetrators came from Saudi Arabia and were funded from there. Why did we not attack that country? Because they have been in business with the Bush family for years, and they own a goodly portion of some major USA cities and closely allied with Cheney and Halliburton.