America's itch to brawl has a new target – but bombs can't conquer Iran

[The Northerner]

A post-imperial virus has infected foreign policy. We've been here before, we know the human cost, and now we must stop

This time there will be no excuses. Plans for British support for an American assault on Iran, revealed in today's Guardian, are appalling. They would risk what even the "wars of 9/11" did not bring: a Christian-Muslim Armageddon engulfing the region. This time no one should say they were not warned, that minds were elsewhere, that we were told it would be swift and surgical. Nobody should say that.

To western strategists, Iran today is exactly where Iraq was in 2002. The country posed no threat to the west. Yet "weapons of mass destruction" were said to be primed and had to be urgently eliminated. The offending regime could be subjugated by air power or, if not, by regime change. The cause was noble, and the outcome sure.

There any comparison ends. Iran is not a one-man, two-bit dictatorship, but a nation of 70 million people, an ancient and proud civilisation with a developed civil society and a modicum of pluralist democracy. Certainly its insecure leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants a weapons-ready nuclear enrichment programme, as next week's United Nations report by the International Atomic Energy Authority is expected to repeat. But he leads a country which, like Pakistan, Britain or Israel, craves status, prestige and the vague security that these unusable weapons seem to convey.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/03/america-itch-brawl-new-target-iran

[Initech]

1. Holy crap was Bill Hicks right: we're the bullies of the globe.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Empires in decline do this...like clockwork.

[valerief]

3. Can PNAC be killed? nt