P U L S E

Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, and Secretary of State Clinton were in the Middle East in the last few days informing Israel that it had better not attack Iran. Israel is a fan­tas­ti­cally terrified garrison state, eager to bomb the smithereens out of Iran–Haggai Ram writes of the “exag­ger­ated or misplaced anxieties” which have succeeded only in scaring the Israeli public “out of its wits.” A witless terrified country reacts with violence, unless told to do otherwise by its financier.

See, hatred and fear of Iran is a bi-partisan near-consensus, but the means through which policymakers will act on that hatred and fear are the object of at least a little bit of debate. Given the power dif­fer­en­tial between the United States and Israel, America’s orders to Israel for a stay of bom­bard­ment shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing except to those who advocate a mono-causal analysis of the Empire’s foreign policy. In this case, American policy-makers understand, I suspect, the dangers of war but are getting twitchy about the prospect of pummeling some more people in the Middle East, an essential pre-requisite for being an American statesmen. The Lobby is one force pushing for war, but far from the only one.

Lobby aside, American policy is head­strong and blind. Head­strong because it can not tolerate an inde­pen­dent Iran that refuses to vet its foreign policy with the empire, which includes the ability to be nuclear-capable without being nuclear-armed, probably Iran’s goal. And blind because it thinks that the regime is weak enough that desta­bi­liza­tion will uproot it from the society within which it is embedded. Not a chance, say the Leveretts. Even those in the midst of reverie and with con­sid­er­ably less grounded visions of what the green movement is and isn’t, like Farhang Jahanpour, note that

a definite segment of Iranian society — members of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the basij militia, intran­si­gent clerics and their circles, the devout lower classes — do have a major stake in the system and think that they have nowhere else to turn.

…

A foreign assault, which would unite all Iranians behind a power they hate, could yet give it an infusion of strength

Ahmadine­jad has declared that the Iranian gov­ern­ment will survive any assault. Violence can take the form of missiles. And it can also take the form of hardened economic sanctions that force the immis­er­ated pop­u­la­tion onto reliance on the strongest and most resilient segments of societal power. “Targeted sanctions” are high-quality mental mas­tur­ba­tion for the tech­nocrats and bureau­crats who won’t be living under them. In the real world, they don’t exist. They always harm the pop­u­la­tion, and there’s no reason to think they will work in the case of Iran con­sid­er­ing the near-consensus on its right to atomic energy. As Kayhan Barzegar writes,

Yet, from the per­spec­tive of Iran’s elite, any nego­ti­a­tions between Tehran and Wash­ing­ton
which might cause Iran to deviate from the long-term project of an inde­pen­dent nuclear fuel cycle would be an untenable strategic mistake.

Trans­la­tion: Threats won’t work. Anyway, there is always room for more nego­ti­a­tions before resorting to economic warfare. But since America has no intention of allowing Iran to get within reach of nuclear weaponry, it probably will put in place harder sanctions. And barring a soci­o­log­i­cal miracle in American politics–wise leadership–sanctions could escalate to warfare, having nothing to do with the Lobby and every­thing to do with the fumbling foreign policy of a clumsily inept Empire. Failure of imperial means almost never incites re-assessment of imperial ends until the means start to cost us too much, or start to have truly genocidal costs amongst the victims, which is when American liberals start to get a little queasy. As Madeline Albright stun­ningly put it, “the price–we think the price is worth it.” 500,000 brown corpses? No one said Empire doesn’t entail a boom in the mortuary business in the global South. But a couple million bodies gets uncouth.

The question is not if the Iranian estab­lish­ment will cede control over the pos­si­bil­ity of having nuclear capa­bil­ity to the West. The question is if the West will come to its senses. Not likely. At best.

Tagged: Iran, nuclear waste