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It Ain’t So, Joe August 13, 2009 Poor Joe Lieberman. His crazed crusade to bomb Iran has suffered another setback. On August 6, Steven Aftergood, a researcher with the Federation of American Scientists, posted a document he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act on his blog Secrecy News. The report was submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February. It concluded that Iran was not likely to have the “functional ability” to produce highly enriched uranium -- the stuff of nuclear bombs -- before 2013. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair added that there was “no evidence that Iran has yet made the decision to produce highly enriched uranium,” and that “Iran is unlikely to make such a decision for at least as long as international scrutiny and pressure persist.” What a bummer -- at least for Lieberman and his fellow neocon nutbars. They’ve been lobbying for an attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure for years. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in April, Connecticut’s junior senator trotted out the boilerplate: “[T]he possession of nuclear weapons capability by [Iran] constitutes … a uniquely dangerous and transformational threat to America’s vital national interests, and those of our closest allies in the Middle East.” Iran isn’t at war with the United States. It’s located thousands of miles from North America, and the mullahs’ rocketeers aren’t even close to being able to deliver a nuke to New York or Los Angeles. So much for the “threat” to the nation. As for our Middle East “allies” … who would they be? Saudi Arabia produced a majority of the 9/11 hijackers. Most Iraqis, ungrateful for their “liberation,” want the U.S. out of Mesopotamia. Israel gets billions of dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies, and returns the favor by spying on America’s industry and government. The U.S. has experienced nothing but blood-drenched hardships since Washington’s post-World War II decision to meddle in the snakepit that is the Middle East. But that doesn’t trouble Lieberman and advocates of American “benevolent global hegemony.” It’s too simple to pin their desire to confront Iran on a deadly affinity for Israel. No, neocons’ interventionism comes from a place far deeper. Lieberman offered a glimpse into their thinking during a 2008 speech. At a fundraiser for the journal Commentary, he explained that his patriotism was “rooted not in arbitrary attachment to our country’s land or its borders.” No, Joe has a twisted take on American exceptionalism: “[T]he values that were present at the creation of America and animate it still -- the values of freedom and justice and opportunity -- are not just our own national values; they are universal and eternal values, which are right and true not only for us in our own time, but for all people in every time.” Not enthralled by free enterprise and the Bill of Rights? Neocons will change your mind -- by force, if necessary. As writer George Szamuely put it, Lieberman “has never come across a United States military intervention that he was not willing to fund to the hilt or to pop on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to defend with his usual sanctimony.” Which brings us back to Iran. The Islamic Republic’s rulers are, to put it mildly, thugs. Their human-rights record is atrocious. The mullahs sponsor terrorism, too -- although not Al Qaeda, which as a Sunni-run operation, hates Shiites. Laptop warriors in Manhattan and Georgetown want to strike Iran’s nuclear-power facilities, yesterday. But foreign-policy realists understand that such an attack would be disastrous. The Iranian regime is unpopular at home, but people have a habit of rallying behind their nation’s leaders when bombs start falling. There are plenty of nearby targets for Iran to retaliate against -- the U.S. has troops to the east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq). Wreaking destruction on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf is another option. How does $10-a-gallon gasoline sound? Even under the worst-case scenario -- an Iranian decision to cobble together a few nuclear weapons after 2013 -- there’s a proven response: deterrence. Remember that Mao and Stalin, the worst mass murderers in history, had the bomb, and didn’t use it against the United States. (Neither Mao nor Brezhnev went nuclear during the clash along the Russian-Chinese border in the late ‘60s.) The India-Pakistan conflict has involved atomic brinkmanship since the late ‘90s, and peace has been preserved. The fact-free campaign Lieberman and other media-savvy neocons launched to push the invasion of Iraq led to the squandering of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Their next war could be far costlier. D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com. # # # # #
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