Since the release (most probably by the U.S.) of detained Iranian Second Secretary Jalal Sharafi on April 4th and Iran's subsequent release of the 15 captured British sailors and marines, there have been a few more encouraging public signs that the U.S. may be standing down from preparations to launch an air campaign against Iran.
Here is a list of the encouraging developments.
The USS Reagan Carrier Strike Force seems now to be headed back to San Diego after its "surge deployment," which began in January. Here is a link: http://www.reagan.na...
Some observers, including Scott Ritter, had been concerned that the Reagan Strike Force could be deployed to the Gulf to join two or three other strike forces to launch massive strikes against Iran.
Admiral Michael Mullen, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, has been visiting Karachi, Pakistan. This Monday he denied that the U.S. was planning to launch any kind of attack against Iran. At least this is a change from the White House's preferred mode of saber-rattling. Here is a link: http://en.rian.ru/wo...
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived in Jordan this Monday. He will also visit Israel and Egypt. It appears as though he is trying to lower the level of rhetoric regarding Iran, while at the same time convincing Israel that it is in the interest of regional stability to improve the weaponry in the arsenals of Arab states neighboring Iraq. It continues to appear that Gates is providing a steadying hand to an otherwise out-of-touch Bush Administration. It also appears that he is filling the vacuum created by Secretary of State Rice's lack of credibility and effectiveness. Here is a link: http://www.latimes.c...
It would not be surprising if Secretary Gates were to stop in Turkey before returning to the U.S. Turkish military chief Gen. Yasar Bukunyit appears to be itching to launch an incursion into Kurdistan against Kurdish separatist safe havens. Secretary Gates would presumably seek to restrain the Turks. Here is a link: http://www.newsmax.c...
Another strong signal will come at the very end of April or the first couple of days of May, when the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Force is due to arrive in the Gulf/Arabian Sea area--ostensibly to relieve the USS Eisenhower Carrier Strike Force. The link below asserts that there is no plan to overlap the Eisenhower with the Nimitz. Such an overlap, along with the Stennis Carrier Strike Force, would put three potent strike forces in the Gulf at the same time. Here is a link: http://www.newsmax.c...
If there is no threatening overlap between the Nimitz and the Eisenhower, we can probably conclude that at least for now, sane adults have their hands at the tiller and do not wish to initiate a major conflict with Iran.
My guess is that Robert Gates deserves much of the credit for diverting the U.S. from a course that seemed to be heading toward catastrophe. Speaker Pelosi and her delegation also probably helped tamp down the tensions by visiting the area. Senators Webb and Hagel seemed to be working the issue on the Hill. Perhaps the lucid analysis and warnings of genuine strategic thinkers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski are finally managing to drown out the wholly discredited, delusional, invariably wrong blusterings of the diehard neocons.
In the reality-based universe there is another critically important factor at work. Despite endless happy talk from the White House, Senator McCain, Fox News, and various lesser enablers and transmission belts, day by day in Iraq the chaos, both political and military, deepens. Secretary Gates seems to understand that the "surge" in Baghdad is futile and doomed, and he seems to be trying to cobble together some diplomatic and security firebreaks to prevent a regional conflagration, even if Iraq were to crumble completely.
Footnote: I wonder whether we shall eventually see a trade of the five Iranian officials seized by the U.S. in Irbil in January for ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, who has disappeared in Iran. It would not be surprising if the Iranians were holding Levinson to trade for their detained officials. Just today the Iranians released two Swedes who had been held on charges of espionage for allegedly having photographed Iranian military installations, so it appears that Iran is trying to build some international support to secure the release of its five officials.
I still think this atack will come: Bush/Rove still wants to revenge the Ayatollah's taking of the hostage taking between '79 and '81. This event triggered the Reagan rise. This attack could come as Bush's Last Hurrah and will goose up Romney in the polls, who's rhetoric is getting increasing fascistic and could quite possibly bring America into a full-blown war against global Islam. If that happens, and right now it is well possible, the civilized world will leave us behind once and for all.
*"U.S To Attack Iran April 6?"
*"Iran is Hot, and is Going to Get Hotter!"
*"George W. Bush Is Going To Bomb Iran"
*"Screw lran Realism, Let's Have a War!"
*"Why War with Iran? Dollar dropped in Iran asset move"
That's just a miniscule sampling of the literally thousands of diaries variously asserting that there would be war with Iran imminently, and almost without any doubt. As I said, this could take all day.
The first one has a question mark in the very title, and it's a one paragraph report that says an "unreliable source" claims an "imminent attack." So, the person who wrote the diary is questioning whether there will be an attack. Hardly hysteria.
The second one is also questioning whether there will be an attack (sorry, I don't know how to make block quotes here):
"This [article] can be taken a couple of ways, but it appears as if the State Dept. is trying to warn these folks to stay out of Iran due to imminent action (ie an attack).
What do you think? Are they just trying to steer business away from Iran, or are they warning the oil industry that the war with Iran is a go?"
The third one received a total of 51 comments, many having nothing to do with the topic, and the diarist gave links to why they thought the president could attack Iran.
I would hardly call this hysteria, more accurately it would be described as grave concern. Let's just hope for everyone's sake that we don't attack Iran or any other country unnecessarily.
Let's also hope that the Iranian nuclear program doesn't spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, as the New York Times reported on its front page the other day. Now THAT is a scary thought!
OF COURSE going to war with Iran is insane and OF COURSE if cooler heads prevail, we won't. But going to war with Iraq was insane and cooler heads did not prevail. "Hysteria" is what was needed to wake people up; otherwise, we'll be in exactly the same position we were in with Iraq.
The logic that it was something other than people standing up and screaming about it that has slowed this effort to go to war is completely flawed. You can say you don't think that was what did it, fine. But all the activities came together and we have made some progress slowing down (at least apparently slowing down) the rush to war.
Why is Gates in there? He's in there because Rummy was fired the day after the Dems took over Congress. Part of the reason the Dems were able to take over Congress is because a fraction (albeit small) was terrified we were going to be led into yet another war.
We can't let up now because we've made some progress. We have to stay vigilent. This administration WANTS to go to war with Iran. If we let up on them, they'll try sneaking up on it again.
"Hysteria" serves a purpose. Why? Because this administration has PROVEN it can't be trusted to make decisions based on logic. This administration uses its own generated hysteria to get the American public to ignore history, the Constitution, and common sense.
All this "hysteria" about a potential war with Iran was a logical plan to prevent the opposite hysteria that the Bush administration was planting--the point was to head them off at the pass, to stop them from doing what they did with Iraq. And perhaps, just perhaps, this time OUR plan is working.
The diarist states facts that show that Bush is not very likely to attack Iran now. That's good. And it may just be true. It doesn't mean it was true 2 months ago. Cooler heads have prevailed because they were given an opportunity to prevail. And I'll add, not because Lowell has said differently but because it's necessary whenever one says progress is being made, that the pressure must be kept up. Those sneaky neocon b*stards will take any opporutnity to push forth their fear meme.
(To some extent, I'm teasing Lowell on that, but not completely... so I'd like to expand on that a little). The battle over public perception seems to have stages. We've perhaps won the stage where people who are paying attention argue over an issue. Most people (those who aren't supremely arrogant), will stop if they lose at that stage. But Bush has proven he'll just boar right on regardless of whether he loses at that stage. Most people stop because if you take it to the next stage and lose after having lost at that earlier stage, it's hugely damaging. But Bush is so arrogant, that he doesn't care. He may just try to move right on to the next stage where it's all about spin and can be won solely on fear. We're still very much at risk that he could move on to the public at large and he could still win the battle of public perception. He might also lose that battle, but one terrorist event could turn the tide. So we have to keep the pressure on--smart, focused and forceful (to borrow Lowell's eloquent wording).
Whether the attack on Iran was or is imminent, we don't know. However, Wes Clark would be in a very good position to know what the noise is coming out of the Pentagon. So would the other generals, some Iraq War veterans, who have recently joined with Jon Soltz and VoteVets. These guys aren't just out there beating this drum about war for the hell of it. They know something that we don't. And they know that Bush has to be stopped.
For those who say that Bush and Cheney won't listen to anyone--you're right. They won't. But the last war they started was done by injecting a huge measure of fear into the citizens of this country with talk of mushroom clouds. And most did not question their scary words. Instead, many swallowed them, hook, line and sinker (just like Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards to name a few). That is precisely the reason that Clark is trying to get the word out there as widely as possible this time. If the public opens their collective eyes and ears and realizes that this is the tactic that Bush uses to push whatever he wants off on us, then they can stand up, speak out to their elected representatives (who did a really poor job of questioning Bush last time) and tell them to STOPIRANWAR this time before its started.
If you haven't signed the petition, or sent a letter to your elected official (besides Webb...we know where he stands) then by all means, click here http://ga4.org/wespa... and use my advocacy page to sign. No hysteria...just steady progress toward enlightening the public.
I am still concerned that these desperate, increasingly embattled and isolated Boys in the Bunker might yet drum up a conflict with Iran in an effort to boost their popularity and continue to pursue their neocon agenda. But at least for now, there seems to be enough adult supervision in Washington and in other capitals to keep under control the worst instincts of this rapidly collapsing White House.
--Bush's wartime role model is President Harry Truman. On Friday he opened a meeting with congressional leaders by noting that Truman's Korean War leadership was scorned late in his presidency, but vindicated by history.--
My inexact and sloppy note on "popularity" was shorthand for a short-term political calculus.
I can conceive of the Boys in the Bunker concluding that by demonizing Iran, creating a pretext for air strikes, and then actually initiating a conflict with Iran, they could rally the MSM enablers and a majority of the Gallup-polled public to support their action. They would also try to put the Senate and House in a bind by braying: "What? You refuse to support our troops against the existential threat of Iran?" That calculus worked well for them in Iraq between 2002 and 2005. In fact, they are still using the same old argument on the war funding supplemental resolution. They may well consider attempting to dust it off yet again for a rerun against Iran.
In the midst of daily political defections and almost hourly additional exposures of their administration's corruption and criminality, Bush and Cheney just might judge that striking Iran would buy them enough time to ride out the gathering domestic political storm until they can complete their elected term in office.
As for their harboring actual convictions that they are doing good for the country, for the world, and for history, I think, as Borat would say, "not so much." Perhaps at some level they retain their intractable and discredited neocon delusions, but their major focus at the moment seems to be to survive politically and avoid being evicted for cause from the White House by the landlords, the American people.
We don't normally deploy two carrier strike groups to the Persian Gulf just because we don't know where else to park our boats.
We don't normally put an Admiral in charge of Centcom to direct a ground war.
We don't need defensive Patriot missiles in Iraq to protect our forces from Iraqi insurgents, but earlier this year we decided that we needed to have them there.
Someone in the military communicated to me a year ago, in read-between-the-lines fashion, that specific training was taking place for missions in a country we are not currently at war with.
You know Bush and Cheney want to "do" Iran. Congress approved funds for regime change there quite some time ago. We're supporting an anti-Iranian terrorist group inside Iran. Russian intelligence has been reporting the US buildup on the Iranian borders in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
What actually appears to have happened with the peaceful resolution of the captured British sailor crisis (and they had to tell Bush to STFU and stay out of it) is that we were robbed of an opportunity to start lobbing missiles at Tehran. That doesn't mean we aren't chomping at the bit for more opportunities. It gets boring when you're on a carrier in the Persian Gulf waiting for the order to "bring it on."
What the hell do people think our military is FOR? My fear is that if people don't get thir Pollyannish heads out of the sand, we'll be having another round of hand wringing, and apologies for "if only we had known then what we know now."
There's a crying NEED for information that isn't getting through the MSM filters to be widely disseminated so that those citizens who are asleep at the switch can wake up to a better picture of what our elected government is doing in our names. It's a disservice to brand concern about Iran as "hysteria" and thus shame people about being concerned. So why are you doing it?
"My issue was simply with the absolute certainty many people wrote about an "imminent" or "inevitable" attack on Iraq." AGREE
"As I said above, I believe that a military confrontation with Iran is a 50/50 shot within the next 3-5 years." AGREE
"Definitely, we should all keep following this, writing about it, and talking to our elected representatives about how we feel on the subject." AGREE
...thus, "completely."
As far as the diary, standing alone, it's very informative. And perhaps if one must opine on the "meaning" of it all, it's better not to denigrate people's concern as "misguided," but to applaud it for shining a bright light on the cockroaches in this administration and making them back into the shadows.
BUT KEEP THAT LIGHT ON!
What you did say was that the people who said war was imminent were wrong. Just because it appears to be less imminent now does not mean that it wasn't imminent two months ago.
It's all together possible that all this "hysteria" as you like to call it, had an effect. The WHOLE reason we went to war with Iraq is because GWB and his ilk got in there and scared the shit out of people before they put their brains in gear. The whole point of the anti-iran-war effort was to get people's brains in gear before Bush scared them. And it worked.
Had this diary (or rather your comments about it) been about how we were making some progress against a war in Iran--that it's not imminent NOW, then I wouldn't have any problem with it.
But you've made an assumption that the talk of an imminent war with Iran did not help prevent it. It's the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle. We couldn't publicly observe their rush to war without changing their rush to war. That's a GOOD thing. We HAD an effect. (And I'll say we need to KEEP having an effect not to imply that you think otherwise, but to prevent the conclusion that some may naturally have that now that we've had an effect, we can rest.)
For the record, I don't gauge public opinion by what I read on selected blogs and Yahoo groups. I live in the real world.
And I don't analyze the buzz in the cyber world in lieu of factual information from authoritative sources as best as it can be determined.
What I'm seeing and hearing tells me to keep watching those SOB's in DC, and let them know they're being watched.
And that's prudence, not hysteria.
One thing that the blogosphere can try to do is to put the lie to any campaign of distortions, half-truths, and outright fabrications that the White House neocons may use to provide public justification for launching a new conflict against Iran.
Democrats appear to be standing on firm political ground, as they work toward a final bill. A Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1,141 adults, conducted April 12-15, found that 58 percent trusted the Democrats in Congress to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq, compared with 33 percent who trusted Bush.http://www.washingto...The president has taken advantage of Congress's spring recess to pound Democrats over their legislation, which would impose benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet; create strict rules for resting, equipping and training combat troops; and set a 2008 date for the final withdrawal of U.S. troops. Despite those efforts, Bush has lost a little ground to Democrats, who in February were trusted by 54 percent to set Iraq policy.
Pessimism about the war has continued to grow. For the first time, a narrow majority of Americans, 51 percent, said the United States will lose the battle, compared with 35 percent who said the United States will win.
It's not about what Bush and Cheney think.
It's about innoculating the American public against the fear they're selling.
It's also important (with the tide of public opinion) to apply pressure to Congress (or perhaps reinforce their spines, if you want to look at it that way) to behave as a co-equal branch and clip this out-of-control executive's wings. And some of that is beginning. Can they keep it up and prevail? I hope so. Some of them are consummate politicians with feet of clay. But people like Jim Webb will stand like a stone wall.
We live in interesting times.
The shift came to the U.S. in 2006, and it seems even to be accelerating in 2007. In the last week or so, it appears that even some elements of the corporatist MSM have begun to see the nakedness of the Emperor and Vice-Emperor. Even corporatists do not want a completely dysfunctional government.
Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca has come out with a devastating attack ("Where Have all the Leaders Gone?") on the Bush Administration, as well as on other failing U.S. power centers. Here is a link to an early review of the book with a few excerpts:
http://www.detnews.c...
Those Democrats and Republicans who perceive reality will increasingly distance themselves from the failures of the Bush Administration, especially the failure in Iraq. Many of those Republicans (and "Blue Dog" Democrats) who are unable to perceive reality will need to find another line of work by early 2009.
We are having an effect. And that's a good thing. We're making progress. That's a good thing. And perhaps, for the moment, war is no longer "imminent." But, that would all depend on your definition of "imminent."
Or, perhaps more importantly, it depends on your definition of "inevitible." My take on the whole Iran situation is that the Bush administration has been coming closer and closer to making it "inevitible" long before the war itself it's "imminent." In other words, it's imminently becoming inevitible.
The neocons have been working very hard at planting the idea in people's heads that we must go to war if we can't stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. At the same time, they've been doing absolutely nothing to stop them from getting nuclear weapons. So, while the eventual war may be on a 3-5 year time frame (or shorter if Bush can up the tempo), it's certainly "imminent" that it becomes "inevitible" because if we don't do something now to create a dialog with Iran that stops their nuclear development, we won't stop it, and we WILL be going to war.
So, at the moment, thanks to the efforts of many, the war itself may not be imminent. But I think it's still imminently becoming inevitible. We're still not doing anything to talk Iran out of nukes. And we're still not making progress convincing anyone that it's not worth going to war with them if it's the "only way" to prevent it.
"Dialogue" ain't all its cracked up to be with pathological extremists. On 29th September, 1938, Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini signed the Munich Agreement which transferred to Germany the Sudetenland, a fortified frontier region that contained a large German-speaking population. When Eduard Benes, Czechoslovakia's head of state, who had not been invited to Munich, protested at this decision, Chamberlain told him that Britain would be unwilling to go to war over the issue of the Sudetenland. The Munich Agreement was popular with most people in Britain because it appeared to have prevented a war with Germany. So much for "dialogue." Chamberlain will, in perpetuity, forever be associated with the word "appeasement" as a result. If anyone actually thinks "talking" with the current gaggle of Mullahs running Iraq and their lead whacko (who doesn't seem to own a neck tie), then perhaps the lessons of history are lost on them?
There are many factions in Iran not happy with their own government. Those are the people we need to be supporting and I'm convinced there's a lot of back channel communications with them already going on. Since their penalty for speaking up is a public death, I doubt we see an Iranian version of Lech Walesa emerge any time soon.
Nevertheless, the concept of a war with Iran is still out there because of the America's current policies and strategic framework. The policy of never accepting an Iran with a nuclear weapon coupled with a policy of refusing to talk to them is a policy bound land us in a heap of trouble. Yes, Iran will talk to the Europeans; however, it is not the Europeans that have labeled the Iranians as a bona fide member of the Axis of Evil. We need to talk to both the region and the Iranians. There are options to the path we are on, and only the US is in a position to make the necessary changes.
Our strategic framework which drives the weapons we buy, the bases we keep, and thus, our foreign policy (a dangerous situation) is now geared for the "Long War" and that includes Iran. Eventually, Iran will progress along the road to a nuke, and since we are "staying" the Long War course, we will find ourselves crashing into yet another war. This not some crystal-ball news accounts are what demands our attention.
So don't get hysterical, I'm not, but I would caution ignoring the warning signs just because we are not at war today. What the world needs, and we most certainly need, is a change in policy. I'm using this time to write and call those who can effect that change, I'm hoping you will join me.