Running Into the Flames. Rather than seek an escape from the Iraq mess, the right wing is trying desperately to get the U.S. to attack two more countries, Syria to Iraq's west, Iran on Iraq's east, all as part of the supposed drive to democratize the Middle East and bring "freedom" to oppressed Moslems. But we all know what it is really all about: Israel.
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The New York Post today contains two opinion pieces about the 'dangers' Iran poses. One hilites a statement by the new President of Iran.

In a speech Wednesday, Ahmadinejad described Israel as "a stain of shame that has sullied the purity of Islam," and promised that it would be "cleansed very soon." All nations that establish ties with Israel, he warned, would burn "in the fires of our Islamic rage."

Ahmadinejad was not simply carried away by his rhetoric: He was inaugurating "A World Without Zionism" — a week of special events in thousands of mosques, schools, factories, offices and public squares, dedicated to mobilizing popular energies against the Jewish state.

A world without Zionism! Can you imagine? How much better the world would be today if the insane project of re-establishing a country that had vanished more than 2,000 years ago had never been implemented!
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Tho it should be plain that Israel is the real focus of Moslem rage in the Middle East, and the U.S. is hated only because it protects Israel, rightwing commentators don't want us to think that. No, the Jews are not responsible. Moslems hate "the West", and are preparing for a "clash of civilizations" against the West because of the nature of the West, not because of U.S. support of Zionism. What a load of crap.
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Amir Taheri, the Post's Moslem 'house nigga' lapdog for Zionism,* claims:

But the real reason for Ahmadinejad's Jihadist outburst may well be his deep conviction that it is the historic mission of the Islamic Republic to lead the Muslim world in a "war of civilization" against the West led by the United States. One of the first battlegrounds of such a war would be Israel.

See? Israel's not to blame. It is an innocent victim, a bystander who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when militant Islam is trying to destroy the West, or at the very least, drive Western values out of the Middle East, and the poor, long-suffering Jews are caught in the crossfire. One more time: what a load of crap.
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On the very same day, Ralph Peters says cheerfully:

Meeting with a lively group of American businessmen on Tuesday, I was asked how we'd know when Tehran was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear capability. "You'll see Israeli planes in the sky over Iran," I said with a smile masking my seriousness.

But it won't be as easy as Israel's 1981 destruction of Iraq's French-built Osirak reactor. This time, Israel will need more than attack aircraft (and better refueling means). It may take a combination of aircraft, missiles, special-ops teams and clandestine resources to interrupt Iran's nuclear program if the world fails to act. The effort would look more like the opening of the 1967 war than a pin-point strike. * * *

Even for the military power of the United States, shattering Iran's nuclear-weapons program would be complicated.

Read between the lines: Israel can't do it. The U.S. will have to do it for Israel. Lest we reach that obvious conclusion, Peters introduces a new notion to an American public skeptical about the wisdom of yet another war in the Middle East:

Yet, for all of the concern that Israel, the United States and blithely irresponsible Europe should feel about Tehran's quest for nuclear weapons, the Sunni Muslims of the Middle East and Pakistan should be more worried still.

The likeliest future nuclear exchange in the Middle East may not be between Israel and Iran, after all, but between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims.

So, you see, we need to protect our beloved Moslem friends in Iraq and elsewhere by destroying Iran's nuclear program, even if that means we have to launch a massive invasion of a country of 70 million people 8,000 miles from our nearest shore! After all, the current war against a country of 25 million 7,000 miles away is going so well!
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These same columnists and other rightwingers have repeatedly tried to persuade us that we cannot win the war against the Iraq insurgency without destroying the current government of Syria, because that government is supposedly not just ineffective at stopping infiltration across the Syrian-Iraq border (contrast the brilliant effectiveness of the U.S. Government in stopping infiltration of illegal aliens across our Mexican border) but actually sympathetic to the insurgents and perhaps even helping them! So we need "regime change" in Syria just as we needed "regime change" in Iraq. Ergo, the United States needs to attack two other countries to 'make the Middle East safe for democracy'.
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Remember World War I? — the War to End War. The U.S. needed to intervene in a war in which we had absolutely no legitimate national interest. As President Wilson said so high-mindedly in his war message to Congress in April 1917:

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.

That went well, didn't it? War was ended and the world was made safe for democracy. Never again would tyrants endanger the peace of the world. Oh. Wait. Actually, WWI, which killed 10 million people, produced World War II, which killed at least 48 million. Overthrowing the Kaiser produced the Fuhrer. Hmm. Maybe war isn't the solution to every problem. Maybe it even makes things worse.
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But we already know that from the case of Iraq, don't we? Our news programs have shown ordinary Iraqis saying that 'at least under Saddam we had electricity and clean water, and car bombs weren't going off every day.' Now large areas of Iraq have unreliable, intermittent electricity, undrinkable water, and mass death. Iraqis take their lives in their hands every time they go to a public market. We have done them such a favor in "saving" them from Saddam. How much bigger a favor might we do them and their peers across the region in saving the whole Moslem world from Iran and its client, Syria?
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I emailed the following short letter to the editor of the Post:

The Post's resident bloodthirsty psychopath, Ralph Peters, is plainly trying to prepare the United States for full-scale war against Iran by pretending that we would be fiting Moslems not for Israel (which is the only reason the U.S. attacks anyone in the Middle East) but for Moslems: that is, we are to kill Moslems for their own good, not because Zionists control the U.S. Government and media. It won't wash. We are not going to war against Iran for Israel, nor against Syria for Israel, nor against any other country of the Middle East for Israel, no matter the pretense. One catastrophic war in the Middle East is already one too many for Americans, and we want out of that one. We don't want to go into two more.

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* For those of you who don't understand the concept of "house nigga" or "house nigger", here's an explanation by L.S. Butts, a blogger:

I really didn’t know the meaning of house nigger, so [a black friend] explained. A house nigger [is a historical reference to a slave who works indoors and who] always keeps his mouth shut because he gets to stay in the master’s house. He gets to wear nice clothes and eat in the master’s kitchen. A house nigger doesn’t have to work in the fields and he gets treated with respect. No smart house nigger would ever risk losing his good life by opening his mouth! And finally, my friend looked at me and said, "Whether you are in the house or in the field, if you don’t stand up the to master and speak the truth, you will always be just his nigger".

The term is thus not really about race but about a member of any disapproved minority currying favor by saying what s/he thinks the majority wants to hear.

(Responsive to "Nukes for Allah" by Ralph Peters and "Iran's New Anti-Israel 'Rage'" by Amir Taheri in the New York Post, October 28, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,009.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:48 AM