Don’t Bomb Iran – Blog It

A Roadmap for Peace in Persia

There is a very uneasy feeling among those who closely watch the current events in Iran. For many years now, relations between America and Iran have been infamously sour. However, right now many Foreign Policy experts are staring into the abyss. At the same time as the fear of Iran’s nuclear program is colliding with the repression of the Green Opposition Movement, American warmongers are beginning to contemplate wading into disaster: a preemptive strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Before June of 2009, I was excited at the prospect that the progressive youth of Iran might beat Ahmadinejad in the presidential election. They were enthusiastic, open-minded, and dedicated to making Iran a peaceful neighbor and a beacon of light in the Near East. Thos hopes were dimmed by the rigged June 12th election, but were quickly rekindled when the people of Iran took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands. Despite recent setbacks, that hope still burns within many of us who follow the Green Movement closely. Change in Iran is going to take a lot longer than many would like, but that isn’t what has darkened my mood today.

This is:

As Fareed Zakaria noted in his Newsweek article, “Don’t Scramble the Jets: Why Iran’s dictators can be deterred,” the United States can contain Iran without a preemptive military strike (Zakaria also points out the Pat Buchanan’s article is BADLY misread by Palin in this interview, as Buchanan is opposed to the notion). However, it isn’t just Palin. Conservatives, hawks, neocons, objectivists, and the crazies (who have even described plans for a preemptive strike against Iran as the “Neda Doctrine”) have begun to line up behind the “Bomb Iran” platform. For those of us who paid close attention during the formative years of the “Project for a New American Century,” this is the same way that the preenptive invasion of Iraq started, long before 9/11. Well friends, that gives us all reason to be gloomy.

There are many reasons why war with Iran is a very bad idea. First of all, there are many other options. Also, I could argue about how strong the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is, how they have soldiers who could strike U.S. assets in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and beyond. I could point out that Iran sponsors Hezbollah AND Hamas, and that these organizations could make Al Qaeda look like Girl Scouts if Iran declared open war against the U.S. or Israel. I could tell you that most of America’s top brass have warned against open warfare against Iran, as war games and experts have discovered unintended consequences, stretched resources, and uncertain victory. I could try to explain that removing the Iranian regime would unleash hidden ethnic tensions in Iran , and I could also argue from the point of view that history is NOT on our side if any of this comes to pass.

I will leave these arguments until I have to make them, which I hope never happens. Instead, I will make this observation: Our attempts to harbor cooperation or weaken the regime from the outside have failed since 1979. The people of Iran are finally at the point that they are as tired of the Islamic Revolution as the rest of the world is. And those same people, the people who best represent the hope for change in Iran, don’t want us to directly interfere. How can we even consider the ultimately arrogant decision to overthrow the regime by force when the people of Iran, who are being held hostage by that regime more so than the rest of the world is, don’t want us there?

We can’t. There are other ways to help the Green Revolution, but military preemptive strikes are not the answer. I agree with Fareed Zakaria; containment will work.