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Neocons in Waiting: Iran, Obama, and the Next Asian Land War

An Israeli Attack on Iran would reduce Barack Obama to a One-Term President

What should a poor warmongering Neoconservative do? This political
grouping includes WASPS such as former CIA director James Woolsey and
former UN ambassor John Bolton, but at its core is politically active
and extremely wealthy Jewish former Democrats who broke with their party
in the 1980s to become war hawks in Republican administrations, and
most of whom are rooted in Rightwing Zionism as exemplified in the
thought of prominent fascist theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky. (They are
almost mirror images of the general American Jewish community, 79
percent of which voted for Barack Obama, which is skittish about foreign
wars and liberal on social issues).
The Neoconservative faction is in the political wilderness in the United
States. Eager to play the role in Iran that the enormous floods have
played in Pakistan, of paralyzing and destroying much of a thriving
country, eager to reduce the shining city of Isfahan to rubble and
displace its population into massive tent cities, they find their path
blocked at every turn.

Always much happier when the militant and aggressive Likud Party is
in power in Israel, they are nevertheless impatient with what they see
as the timidity of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, compared to the
reckless warmongering of the previous Kadima Party and its Labor ally
(who managed to set back the Lebanese economy a decade in 2006 and to
reduce the large penal camp of Gaza to further misery and rubble).

Despite being willing to stop in at an occasional cocktail party,
President Obama could not care less what the Neoconservatives say, want
or do. Few have been appointed from their ranks to high and influential
positions in the Obama administration, in contrast to W.'s, where they
held the 8 key positions that allowed them to help push the US into a
decade of rampaging wars. The American public, having been tricked by
their fallacious arguments and cynical propaganda into the Iraq War,
does not want to hear from them. They no longer get much television
time. Their main project of today, an aggressive war on Iran, is a
non-starter with the current White House, its generals, intelligence
officials, and most importantly with a public already unemployed,
beggared and indebted to the tune of $13 trillion, in part because of
the Neocons earlier mad adventures- a public that has also lost over
4000 dead and tens of thousands wounded and permanently disabled
warriors over a pack of Neocon lies.

But being a Neocon means never having to say you are sorry, or that
you were wrong, and it means never giving up on the dressing up of
illegal and aggressive wars as Necessary and Right and Bright Shining
Cities on a Hill that will Make the World Safe for "Democracy" and more
importantly for Apartheid Israel.

Thus, in 1998 at the height of their impotence, the Neocons got up a
hawkish letter with the support of the Republicans in Congress,
insisting that President Clinton go to war against Iraq. It was absurd
and monstrous. Iraq had been reduced to a poor weak fourth-rate power,
its economy devastated, its children dying in droves, by US and UN
sanctions pushed by the Neocons and their allies. Only five years
later, under a different administration, they got their wish.

The Neocons' life experience, then, is that aggressive warfare is
never really off the table. Even a liberal internationalist like Obama
can be pressured, and if he will not yield, be weakened and wounded and
the way paved for a leader more pliable to their plans. A war that they
pine for the way a teenager pines for a first love, a mass grave they
dream of the way a retiree dreams of a Hawaiian resort, an orgy of
destruction visited on ancient wonders that they dream of the way a
world-class architect dreams of constructing a new city- all these
things are really at most just 5 years away if the right political moves
are made.

They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have
perhaps half of America's 400 billionaires on their side. They have the
enormous military-industrial complex on their side. They have the
Yahoo complex of besieged lower middle class White America on their
side. They have the Israel lobbies on their side. They have important
segments of the Oil and Gas lobbies on their side. They have the whole American tradition of permanent war on their side. They should not be underestimated.

It is not so hard to get up a war. You position the war as
inevitable. As Right. As Necessary. You reimagine the poor weak
ramshackle enemy as a science fictional superpower, months away from
possession of a Neutron Bomb that could Destroy the Universe. It has to
be done. We are in danger.

Although not exactly himself a Neocon (he says he is for a two-state
solution and says he is on the fence about an Iran war), Cpl. Jeffrey
Goldberg of the Israeli army, where he was a prison camp guard during
the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising, and who masquerades as a
journalist over at the Atlantic, has fired a shot in the building campaign for destroying Iran.
This war propagandist deliberately spread the bald-faced lie that
Saddam had close ties to al-Qaeda, and goes on insisting that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction capabilities in the face of mountains of
evidence to the contrary. He is either dishonest or so blindered by
ideology that it comes to the same thing. Goldberg says he is "ambivalent" about an "American" attack on Iran in "2010."
But these are weasel words. What would be different in 2011? In
fact, this way of speaking puts a time limit on "ambivalence," after
which conviction presumably kicks in. His ambivalence, he says, extends
to whether Israel should attack Iran unilaterally, though he is
convinced by his 'interviewing' that it likely will. It reminds me of
all the caveats and ambivalences in Ken Pollack's book 'Gathering
Storm,' which was used by warmongers nevertheless to help get up the
Iraq War.

Goldberg knows that Obama is not actually going to war against Iran.
Despite what he says, Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is
for all his bluster far too personally indecisive to take such a major
step (and certainly not without an American green light; Bibi thinks
Clinton had him undermined and moved out of office for obstructing the
Oslo accords, and does not want to risk the same fate for causing
trouble for Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan). How Goldberg could miss
this truism in Israeli politics is beyond me.

Goldberg is trying to make an Iran war seem highly likely if not
inevitable, if not now then in the near future (say, within 5 years?).

But contrary to Goldberg's conclusions, Gareth Porter finds that high Israeli intelligence and military figures entertain the severest doubts about a war on Iran. Could Goldberg really not find these voices that Porter dug up so effortlessly?

The Iran war hawks also almost certainly underestimate Iran's conventional weapons capability of foiling any Israeli air strike.

There is no room for 'ambivalence' here, especially of the Pollack
sort that actually leads straight to war. The stupidity of an air raid
on Iran is easy for the clear-eyed to see. There is no evidence Iran
has a nuclear weapons program as opposed to a civilian nuclear energy
program. The centrifuge technology being used can be dispersed and an
air strike is likely to be only a minor setback in the program. And,
Iran is a major country of 70 million with extensive petroleum and gas
resources. It has means of replying to any attack that can be subtle
and effective. Mahan Abedin showed here recently how there can be no 'limited war' against Iran.

Obama's plans for a decisive and timely withdrawal from Iraq would be
completely ruined by an attack on Iran, which would reactivate the
Shiite militias at a time when the US military is weak and open to
attack. Obama would not have that achievement to run on in 2012. The
Iranians can behind the scenes be major spoilers for the Afghanistan
War, which already is not going well for Obama.

A Netanyahu attack on Iran would reduce Barack Obama to a one-term
president, which may be what Goldberg and his fellow conspirators are
really aiming for. That success would after all allow them to keep to
the 5-year timetable for another Asian land war.

© 2023 Juan Cole