David Seaton's News Links We may have been too busy watching the French elections or the US congress and the president haggling over the bill for Iraq to pay much attention to the possibility of war with Iran... The AIPAC and the neocons like professor Beres of Purdue (writing in the most moderate of newspapers) haven't lost their focus however.
People who might think that Bush, Cheney, the neocons and the Israeli right are incapable of doing anything worse, much, much worse than Iraq are intellectually challenged. DS
The case for strikes against Iran - Christian Science Monitor Abstract: Iran's latest defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency says it all: Further diplomacy has no chance of stopping Iran's nuclear program. Neither will UN sanctions have any effect. Unless there is a timely defensive first strike at pertinent elements of Iran's expanding nuclear infrastructures, it will acquire nuclear weapons. The consequences would be intolerable and unprecedented.(...) Ideally, a diplomatic settlement with Iran could be taken seriously. But in the real world, we must compare the price of prompt preemptive action against Iran with the costs of both: (1) inaction; and (2) delayed military action. To be sure, all available options are apt to be injurious. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad maintains that his country's nuclear program is intended only to produce electricity, but there is no plausible argument or evidence to support this claim. Meanwhile, Mr. Ahmadinejad's genocidal intentions toward Israel are abundantly clear. Iran must be stopped immediately from acquiring atomic arms, and this can only be accomplished through "anticipatory self-defense." Precise defensive attacks against Iran's nuclear assets would be effective – and they would be entirely legal. They would be effective because the US has at its disposal the "McInerney Plan" (after Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, USAF/ret.). It calls, in part, for an immediate strike force to hit Iran's nuclear development facilities, command and control centers, integrated air defenses, selected Air Force and Navy units, and its Shahab-3 missiles, using more than 2,500 aim points. Operationally, the United States Air Force is best configured for such a complex task, but it would not necessarily be impossible for the Israeli Air Force to execute. It would be lawful because the US and/or Israel would be acting in appropriate self-defense. Both countries could act on behalf of the international community and could do so lawfully without wider approval. The right of self-defense by forestalling an attack has a long and authoritative history in international law. In the 1625 classic "On the Law of War and Peace," Hugo Grotius expresses the enduring principle: "It be lawful to kill him who is preparing to kill…." Today, some scholars say that Article 51 of the UN Charter overrides that right. But international law is not a suicide pact. READ IT ALL
1 comment:
By now the Iranians will have taken delivery of the Tor M1 anti-aircraft system. Throw in their Silkworm anti-ship capabilities, and any attack on Iran is far from a risk-free venture.
I don't doubt that the neo-cons would like to widen their war; but corporate elites in the U.S., like other criminal enterprises, prefer low risk/high reward scenarios. Iraq sure seemed to fit the criteria, and look how that has turned out.
Democrat or Republican, it doesn't signify, the political will for an attack is certainly there, but I don't know that conditions allow for it.
International law is not enforcable, so obviously it doesn't matter in the slightest what it happens to say. The babble of neo-con 'scholars' like Louis Rene Beres is of about the same importance. Push comes to shove, the politicians and pundits will just do what they did with Iraq, and lie.
Of course, the Americans and/or Israelis have the capacity to annihlate Iran entirely, so anything is possible.
My point here is not to read too much into words.
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