War Drums, Four Reasons Why War With Iran May Happen After All

For some time now I have been arguing that the US and Israeli sabre rattling about attacking Iran was nothing to get alarmed about. I argued that the USA and Israel had ample geopolitical reasons for demonizing Iran, and excellent reasons to draw the line at demonizing and not actually engaging in outright war. And here we are once again, with the USA claiming that Iran is building a bomb, and Israel and the USA making veiled and not so veiled threats about attacking Iran. Same ol same ol, right? All threat, no hamster?

Sadly, things may have changed. While the reasons for not attacking Iran remain, there are now some new reasons for attacking Iran that may have pushed the case for war over the line. With no further ado, the four reasons why war with Iran has ramped up in likelihood:

1. The world economy. Or more accurately, the deficit spending (debt) crisis that is threatening both the European and the American economies. What better than a war to both justify continued military spending … and ramming through speeding cuts and austerity measures? Sorry, we need your pension/social security to keep Iran from getting the bomb … and anyone that disagrees is a traitor!

2. Palestinian statehood. The Palestinians have decided to pursue statehood without negotiations with Israel, and are actually making some progress. This has the Israeli government running scared, and they may calculate that a wider war, especially if they can get Hamas to join in, may give them the cover they need to expel the Palestinians from the occupied territories once and for all. At the very least, they may be able t use Iran as a pretense to once again quash the Palestinian’s hopes for a state.

3. Domestic US politics. Both OWS and the upcoming election give the Obama administration reason to support or join a war on Iran. To both outdo the hawks in the Republican presidential race, and create a reason to suppress the OWS movement by force.

4. The USA has demanded that Iran respond to the recent IAEA report about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This is maybe the scariest of all, since it’s akin to the USA’s demands on Iraq in the run up to the US attack on Iraq. Giving a chosen enemy an ultimatum they can’t meet is a classic USA justification for war. There’s no way Iran can prove a negative, so no matter what Iran says, the USA can just dismiss their claims as lies and make further demands.

Am I being alarmist? I don’t know. Unfortunately the world has become a lot less predictable lately as both political and economic storms ravage the planet. Wars are more likely in unstable times, and I think it’s safe to say that current times qualify as unstable. And if such a war happens, what will be the results? It will be as predictable as the end results of World War One and Two were, in other words, no one has a clue. This is why wars are insane, they almost always have horrible unintended consequences. Still, for politicians, war profiteers, and the like, wars can be enormously profitable on all sorts of levels. That’s why we have so many of them. Heck, the USA is now at constant war, it’s a war profiteers wet dream.

One last note, Iran’s so called “nuclear weapons program.” I didn’t mention it in my calculations, because it is no more a reality than Saddam’s WMDs, IE scary stories to fool the credulous with. The evidence that Iran is producing nuclear weapons doesn’t pass the laugh test, and even if they did, their arsenal would be peanuts compared to Israel and the USA’s vast array of nuclear weapons and attendant delivery systems. The only “real” aspect to it is that if Iran had nuclear arms, it would be able to defend itself against an attack. Um, so what?

Sleep tight everyone.

(The above image is public domain under US copyright law so much as I could ascertain. It’s a freighter being attacked in the Persian Gulf during the Tanker War that took place in the Iran-Iraq War.)