The Case for Bombing Iran.

I include here part of an article suggesting that Iran should be bombed and then another one by a Canadian suggesting the same. The whole article of Leupp can be found at Counterpunch.
Poddy's Crazy Prayer
Bomb Iran: For Israel and America!
By GARY LEUPP

Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary magazine and (with Irving Kristol) one of the grandfathers of the neoconservative movement, recently published an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal that literally constitutes a prayer for President Bush to attack Iraq. Unsubtly titled "The Case for Bombing Iran: I hope and pray that President Bush will do it," it is a work of eloquently simplistic and hysterical propaganda, truly a model of the genre. I recommend it as a seminal document of the Bush era, prior to what may well be its crowning disaster. It's lengthy but worth reading closely as a concentrated statement of the argument we will probably hear in ever shriller pitch in the coming months.

Iran, Podhoretz declares, betraying no trace of self-doubt, wants to acquire nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly and unequivocally" announced Iran's intention to "wipe Israel off the map." Not only that, Podhoretz avers (perhaps to deflect any suggestion that he's narrowly concerned with Israel): Ahmadinejad cherishes "a larger dream of extending the power and influence of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war." "Islamization," analogous to Finlandization, is already well-advanced in Europe. This will only get worse, Podhoretz charges (citing fellow neocon John Bolton) with "Iranian nuclear blackmail." Moreover, Ahmadinejad wants a "world without America." Thus the Iranian president and regime and nuclear program must be eliminated through the deployment of U.S. power.

Podhoretz has faith that this will happen, predicting that Bush will "within the next 21 months. . . order air strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities from the three U.S. aircraft carriers already sitting nearby. . ." Since Podhoretz has the ear of very powerful people, this prophesy should set off alarm bells. (Notice how the day after Podhoretz's piece appeared, International Atomic Energy Agency director IAEA chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei referred to "new crazies who say 'let's go and bomb Iran,'" adding that he did not want to see another war like the one in Iraq.) But the attack supplicant confesses some uncertainty on the point, expressing concern that "the respectable tool of diplomacy" (which he equates with craven appeasement) might win out over the bombing option he urges. Sanctions alone, he emphasizes, will not bring down the Iranian regime, and in any case, "there is simply no chance of getting Russia and China, or the Europeans for that matter, to agree to the kind of sanctions that are the necessary precondition" for regime change

He suggests hopefully however (quoting yet another fellow neocon, Robert Kagan) that in his less bellicose approaches to Iran Bush is merely "giving futility its chance." (Several recent reports suggest that Cheney is contemptuous of the limited diplomatic process favored by Condi Rice and strongly backs a plan now in effect to disseminate propaganda and disinformation about Iran, and sabotage some of its currency and international financial transactions, preparatory to the bombing plan the neocons have long favored and which remains on track.)

In the background of Podhoretz's discussion is an elegantly misleading periodization of recent history, borrowed from Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins professor of Strategic Studies, who has been called "the most influential neoconservative in academe." (Ominously, Cohen was recently appointed by Condoleezza Rice as the new Counselor of the State Department.) Over the last century there have been four world wars. In World War II the U.S. fought against fascism. In World War III (the term some neocons use for the Cold War) the U.S. fought against communism. We are now in World War IV, fighting against "Islamofascism." (Podhoretz does not define the "ism" at issue during World War I, which might affect the model. I'd say it was imperialism on both sides, neither of them worth supporting, and that imperialism's been at the root of all these wars. )

Islamofascism, Podheretz proclaims, is "yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism." Podhoretz does not identify the historical norm that became diseased and generated these pathologies, but presumably it is the bourgeois democracy that some see as the "end of History" to which all humankind, cured of these diseases, will ultimately gravitate.

The term "Islamofascism" has been around for a few decades, and no doubt has some degree of analytical utility in some contexts. But the neocons, and occasionally President Bush, have used it to refer to Muslim targets as varied as the Syrian and Iraqi secular Baathist states, the Iranian Shiite mullocracy, al-Qaeda cells, Palestinian militias---few of which offer a good match for any mainstream academic definition of fascism. The term is merely applied as an epithet, to conflate disparate phenomena, and to validate the "war on terrorism" as something analogous to World War II.

This is by David Harris who is a lawyer associated with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies. I guess the way to spread democracy is to bomb Iran. There is of course nothing in this about the US intervention in Iran to overthrow Mossadegh or the US approved Shah's SAVAK who probably could show the present secret police any number of new dirty tricks.


The case for bombing Iran
June 5, 2007, 10:12 am





The U.S. and its allies face terrible consequences from a military attack on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear facilities, but the alternative is worse

by David Harris*

When the United States strikes Iran — as it will — the result will be a disaster, but a disaster that cannot be avoided.

Today, Iran’s radical Islamist military, security and intelligence machine reflects the extremism of its history and entrenched masters. It has made Iran an engine of global instability and menace. For Iran today is on the verge of grasping the nuclear club, even as it remains an ungovernable influence in the international community.

Iran’s extremist and uncontrollable nature has been well defined through action.


Start with reports of early post-revolutionary Iran. Massacres of Baha’is and other minorities. Razor-blade removal of lipsticked lips. Thumbtacks affixing veils to reluctant women. Adolescent gays hanged from construction cranes. Human waves of nine-year-olds attacking Iraqi forces.

The performance abroad has been as shocking.

For years, Iranian dissidents around the world have been hunted down and butchered by joint teams from Iran’s foreign intelligence service and the country’s other virulent creation, Hezbollah. By the late 1990s, German prosecutors stated that the highest Iranian officials authorized assassinations abroad through a “Committee for Special Affairs.”

The Germans went on to prove that the Islamic Republic murdered people in its notorious “Mykonos” operation in Berlin. South American investigators fix the mullahs with responsibility for a mass-casualty bombing in Argentina. And, of course, writer Salman Rushdie lives under the multimillion-dollar bounty offered by a quasi-governmental Iranian foundation.

Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime, Iran’s religious supremacists call for the destruction of Jews, Christians, Israel, the United States, the West. No surprise, considering founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s helpful elaboration of the “11 things which are impure” — everything from “urine, excrement,” “the sweat of the excrement-eating camel,” to “dogs, pigs, (and) non-Muslim men and women.”



So hatreds like anti-Semitism blend comfortably with the regime’s racist threats to capture “a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers” and “feed them to our fighting cocks.” And this, before the recent detention of British naval service personnel.

Unfortunately, such virulence is nothing compared to the frightening nuclear implications of this regime’s delusional and apocalyptic fixations. Mr. Ahmadinejad is convinced a green halo hovered above his head while he addressed the United Nations — and that his words paralysed all delegates for the duration of his speech. He assures anyone who will listen that he is Allah’s handyman.

In this spirit, Mr. Ahmadinejad writes letters to the Twelfth Imam, who is said to have inhabited a well for the past few centuries. The president believes he can bring back the long-lost imam — the Mahdi — by precipitating the apocalypse, something his doctrine tells him will trigger a Second Coming, and paradise. Mojtaba Samare Hashemi, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s eminence grise and suitably fanatic former Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps intelligence agent, helps his boss place fellow Mahdi-cultists in security, defence and other powerful positions.

All of this means that an Iranian bomb would be under control of nuclear triggermen who regards atomic annihilation as an incentive, rather than a deterrent. In short order, Canada and the rest of the world would face the mullahs’ diktat.

The alternative? Nuclear catastrophe through either Shahab missiles, or warheads smuggled into our countries by sympathetic terrorists. This is why the United States and its allies have no choice but to act militarily against Iranian nuclear facilities.

But the price will be steep and long lasting.

After the attack, Iran’s Hezbollah agents, its foreign-intelligence sleepers — known in Farsi as “submarines” — and suicide-corps infiltrators will likely go into action throughout the West. President Ahmadinejad has told us as much. The suicide corps alone is so aggressive that a commander of Iran’s regular armed forces has complained about its uncontrollable nature — if not about its ultimate aims and purpose.

With or without a nuclear warhead, the atomic program’s longstanding nature means Iranians must hold vast stocks of radiological material. This is the feedstock of dirty bombs whose contamination can bar use of target zones for generations. As the clock ticks down to the inevitable airstrikes, all countries must have civil defence plans ready to do what they can against the radiological threat — and chemical and biological ones, too.



Political leadership, security intelligence and our armed forces must be aggressive in preparing our defence. Pressure must be put on Germany, Russia and other of Iran’s commercial, technological and military suppliers to embargo the atomic ayatollahs. Russia’s shameless exports of anti-defence missiles to the mullahs, and similar behaviour by China, must draw economic penalties.

At a time when Iran is installing sleeper agents and combatants abroad, only those Iranians demonstrably fleeing the regime can be allowed to enter Canada.

Above all, citizens of the west must be realistic. Retribution inflicted upon us by Mr. Ahmadinejad and other Islamic extremists — including disruptive oil prices — must not cause us to buy enemy propagandists’ continuing attempts to divide us from the United States and other allies. We must steadfastly recognize that the cost of attacks on Iran is the price we must pay to forestall the advent of a new form of slavery — and many millions of nuclear dead, besides.

David Harris is a lawyer, senior fellow for national security at the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD) and former Canadian Security Intelligence Service chief of strategic planning. He is counsel to the CCD, which is intervening in the Air India Inquiry.