Sunday, April 16, 2006

The Conventional Wisdom of Warmonger William Arkin

William Arkin, a regular guest on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, is gung-ho about the United States threatening Iran with invasion if Iran does not follow Washington’s orders.

Arkin, the U.S. Left’s favorite military analyst, writes in today’s Washington Post that “the diplomatic effort directed at Iran would be mightily enhanced if that country understood that the United States is so serious about deterring the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons that it would be willing to go to war to stop that quest from reaching fruition.”

Arkin, who used to work for the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, argues that “Iran needs to understand that the United States isn’t hamstrung by a lack of options. It needs to realize that it can’t just stonewall and evade its international obligations, that it can’t burrow further underground in hopes that it will ‘win’ merely because war is messy.”

Arkin, formerly of Greenpeace, believes the U.S. military should let Iran know it’s “dead serious” about attacking the nation if it pursues nuclear weapons. Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon “should acknowledge that the United States is preparing war plans for Iran” in response to “that country’s illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons, its meddling in Iraq and its support for international terrorism,” says Arkin, who previously worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

As with the left-of-center’s support of the NATO/U.S. attack on Yugoslavia in the 1990s, many of these same liberals and leftists appear to be buying into how the U.S. government/mass media are framing the Iran issue. When Arkin writes about Iran’s “illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons” and “its meddling in Iraq,” he does so without even a hint of irony or recognition of the U.S. government’s ongoing extreme makeover of Iraq.

An outlaw nation like the United States, in its current constitution, must never be allowed to call the shots on any international issue.

In today’s world, we have the United States, with the explicit support of much of Europe, attacking various nation-states (militarily, covertly and economically) and threatening others with attack if they don’t do as it tells them. We can assume that when Arkin uses the modifier “illegal” to refer to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, he’s referring to where Iran stands vis-à-vis the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an international treaty that gives the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China and France the right to own nuclear weapons but no one else – and an international treaty that the United States has violated many times over the past 30 years.

Because the United States has been given carte blanche by the “international community” to do as it pleases in the world, the NPT should be viewed as null and void and a document dripping with double standards, especially with regard to Iran. If the pursuit of nuclear weapons is indeed on Iran’s agenda, Iran should be accorded the right to defend itself because the United States has dramatically ramped up the rhetoric against Iran and because the United States, through its occupation and destruction of next-door neighbor Iraq, represents a clear and present danger to Iran.

(Arkin’s comments about Iran’s “meddling in Iraq” and its “support for international terrorism” doesn’t deserve a serious response, given the absurdity of making such claims when the United States is occupying and destroying Iraq and is the world’s leading terrorist entity.)

But what if Iran really is seeking to build solely a nuclear energy program (even if it does have huge oil and gas reserves that could be exploited and used to generate electric power), rather than a nuclear weapons arsenal? Why is the U.S. mass media automatically assuming that Iran’s intentions are biased in favor of nuclear weapons?

Eli Stephens of Left I on the News has performed an admirable job covering Iran’s intentions. He writes:

Literally every word I have heard from every talking head on TV, before or since his speech, simply assumes that Iran is embarked on a course of developing nuclear weapons, and that the only questions are “how far away are they” and “how can ‘we’ stop them”? I have literally not heard a single person or a single word which challenged that conventional “wisdom.” …

I have to follow this transcript with just a few words about my favorite subject, “peace,” because following Ahmadinejad’s speech, C-SPAN broadcast a Washington Journal interview with Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International “Peace.” This man of “peace,” while clearly arguing against an attack on Iran, or at least, an immediate one, was bound up by conventional “wisdom” lock, stock, and barrel. On the subject of of Iran’s intentions, he, like everyone else, simply went on the assumption that nuclear weapons were a question of when, not if. After the host played Rumsfeld’s quote (the one where AP changed “weapons of mass destruction” to “nuclear technology"), he didn’t react at all, didn’t point out that what Rumsfeld said was a blatant lie. And when it came to “stopping Iran,” his proposal was that the U.S. should offer not to attack Iran or overthrow its government in return for Iran’s stopping its nuclear program! Shouldn’t someone who claims to be associated with “peace” be for the U.S. unilaterally saying it won’t attack any country or overthrow the government of any country unless it is attacked and is responding in accordance with international law? As the old saying goes, with advocates for “peace” like that, who needs advocates for war?

The likes of William Arkin and Joseph Cirincione may occasionally produce valuable work, but no one should mistake either as an opponent of American imperialism or as a defender of international justice. Arkin’s role in imperial Washington is accented by his regular contributions to the Washington Post, the leading proponent of an interventionist and destructive U.S. foreign policy.

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