Senate Neocons Provoke Iran

Listen up. Can you hear the drums beating for a third war?

The neocons are in a bubbling rage over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University. The pro-surge propagandists at Freedom Watch labeled the Iranian leader a "terrorist" in--of all places--a New York Times ad. Neocon godfather, Giuliani advisor and "World War IV" author Norman Podharetz went to the White House recently to urge President Bush to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.

And now Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman, who's already advocated attacking the country, are introducing a sense of the Senate resolution, possibly up for a vote today, that accuses Iran of fighting "a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq." The resolution states that "it is a vital national interest of the United States" to prevent Iran from turning Iraq's Shiite militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" and says that US policy should "combat, contain and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies." To accomplish this task, Kyl and Lieberman advocate "the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq." Finally, the resolution dubs Iran's largest military branch, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, "a foreign terrorist organization."

It's clear where this resolution is going. The Council for a Livable World, one of the more astute peace groups in Washington, says it "could wind up being another in a long line of blank checks provided to the Executive Branch in the mold of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the authorization to use force in Iraq." The line advocating the "prudent and calibrated" use of US power is "a loophole is big enough to drive an aircraft carrier or a fleet of planes through."

Moreover, the case for the next war is as shaky as the last one. "The Kyl-Lieberman amendment is a resolution based almost entirely on false premises," the Council states. "The resolution only quotes questionable and unsubstantiated assertions provided by the US military about Iranian involvement in Iraq."

The Council warns that actions like these from the US Senate, while still only symbolic, could lead to serious blowback of the worst kind. "Provocative measures such as the Kyl-Lieberman amendment can lead to a tit-for-tat escalation resulting in military confrontation between the US and Iran. There are no good military options for solving our disagreements with Iran. Military action would only result in disastrous and unintended consequences for U.S. and Israeli interests. If we have learned nothing else from Iraq, it is that there are limitations to the use of military force."

The only thing that neocons have learned from Iraq is that Joe Lieberman should be secretary of state.

Ari Berman, based in Washington, DC, is a contributing writer for The Nation, a contributor to The Notion and a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at The Nation Institute.

(c) 2007 The Nation