Same S**t, Different War

By Cernig

There are two stories in the London Times which have rightwing "War party" pundits frothed up today. One alledges that British hostages taken in Iraq are being held in Iran by the Revolutionary Guard. The other says that North Korea has built a James-Bond-Villain supersecret base under a mountain as protection against US airstrikes which might be launched in the aftermath of the White House's allegations about Nork co-operation on a reactor in Syria. The main body of the story, oddly, is more about Syria's alleged perfidy than the alleged Nork's base.

Reactions from the extreme pants-wetting Right to both stories are identical - it's time to start bombing! Never mind who is getting bombed or why - bomb them all!

Both stories come from the typewriter of Uzi Mahnaimiin, a yellow journalism reporter who always relies - as these stories do - on anonymous "leaks" as his authority. The trouble is that Mahnaimiin is a "serial liar", as Pajamas Media's Meryl Yourish has described him. In a race crowded with Mike Ledeens and Amir Taheris, he may be the biggest war-shill in Middle east journalism.

He's claimed several times that Israel or the U.S. was about to attack Iran inside a certain timeframe - none have come to pass. He's claimed that Israeli commandos siezed nuclear material from that Syrian reactor before it was bombed, and also that it wasn't a reactor but an actual bomb factory - in direct contradiction of even the Bush administration's CGI version which says there was no such material there. He's even claimed that Israel was developing an "ethnic bomb" that would target only Arab genes. Yourish writes: " The truth is out there, but I don�t think it�s in the Sunday Times, no matter how many co-authors they give our man Mahnaimi. Once a liar, always a liar."

In other words -- same s**t, different war. That's an accurate description of the narrative being constructed by rightwing media, think-tankers and governments to push the West towards a renewed confrontation with the Axis of Evil. The current Axis contains Iran, North Korea and Syria and those who believe that war defines and enhances a nation aren't particularly bothered by which of those "gets it". But the enemy de jour is Iran, for various reasons to do with perceived challenges to their confused and juvenile notions of national manhood. It's all so very "Iraq 03".

Reactions from those who aren't on the "Bomb them all" bandwagon are also very Iraq 03. The mainstream press, who were so supine in the run-up to the Iraqi invasion, have made some mutterings about there being lingering questions, for instance on the scope of Iranian involvement in Iraq, but don't even begin to scratch the surface of those doubts. In the main, their scepticism has been faint and pro-forma, before they turn back to accepting the catapulted propaganda out of fear of losing their precious access.

Then there are the left-of-center "serious" pundits who should know better. Matt Yglesias, for instance, wrote yesterday that "the real questions in play here are about strategy rather than about the details of Iranian involvement in Iraq." That's almost exactly wrong in that it concedes all the ground of shaky evidence to the war-pushers and instead focusses on what should be done about it. Matt's hardly the only blogger or pundit who has done so and the trend dates back at least as far as the infamous Baghdad Briefing back in February last year. Then, those who consider themselves and their colleagues "serious" foreign policy wonks were only too ready to accept the Bush administration's evidence and argue instead about what it revealed - if anything - about Iranian leadership intentions and should be done next. Only after other, more "shrill" and less "serious", writers produced some real questions about the chain of evidence and noted under-reported scepticism from the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs did they allow themselves to wonder out loud if the whole briefing had been a crock as heinious as Powell's dramatic UN presentation.

Still under-reported, though, is the revelation by noted neocon shill Ken Timmerman last year that confessions from "Iranian agents" and "Special Forces proxies" in Iraq have been elicited at the tender hands of Mujahedeen e-Kalq interrogators - presumably with "hands off" U.S. involvent so that "enhanced techniques" disallowed by the Army Field Manual. The MeK are the neocon's favorite terrorist group, and have a vested interest in the U.S. attacking Iran - namely that they expect to end up in charge of the nation. If the physical evidence is questionable in itself and ties to Iran for that evidence are based entirely on the results of such confessions, where does that leave the notion that the only real questions are about strategy?

One has to wonder why, when it comes to questioning evidence forwarded by an administration with an entirely unreliable record of truthfulness, they (to borrow from Matt's book-blurb) "sound more like Republicans than like the actual Democratic citizens they claim to represent? Are they simply ducking for cover from the with-us-or-against-us Republican onslaught?" I don't think so - but I do think that there's still a strong element of neo-liberal interventionism in the Democratic Party (as evidenced by Hilary Clinton's recent nuclear sabre-rattling) and that many of the bigger names in left-of-center foreign policy writing are a little too afraid of losing their "serious" credentials. That leads to some fence-sitting and to some narrative-swallowing, unfortunately - especially unfortunate when the narrative is driven by the shrillest elements of the Right.

Lastly, even when only strategic questions are considered there are "serious" pundits who fail to live up to their own past work. The accepted strategic reality is that the U.S. isn't going to attack Iran anytime soon, for reasons to do with perceived blowback against forces in Iraq and the hardening of Iranian attitudes that would surely follow. Those same pundits have previously written, on many occasions, about the Bush administration's ability to believe its own version of events and act on them even when they have no relation to reality. What inspires them to think that won't happen again? In the minds of the Right's shrill shills, the main local insurgent threat to U.S. forces consequent on striking Iran has already been dealt with when Maliki led his heroic push against the Sadrist movement. Without Sadr's Iranian-backed minions, U.S. supply lines are surely safe and without Sadr's infuence Iraqi Shiites will back their ally against their old national enemy. There's plenty of excess capacity in the Air Force and Navy (and Robert Farley tells me that Naval deployments in the Gulf area might be reaching a useful peak soon). In any case, air strikes on Iran will cause the people of that nation to rise up and overturn the Mullahs, firing rose petals and candy rather than high explosive from Silkworms and SAMs.

This is the subjective reality that underlies the administration's strategic thinking - a willingness to believe and act upon their own spin and agitprop. Given that, it's amazing to me that anyone feels they have to fencesit against accusations of being shrill from the Right. I'd rather be called shrill than enable another war based on the same s**t, myself.