While much of this is really just a measured, non-insane Trump Derangement Syndrome, the NY Times Editorial Board does have a point
Attacking Iran Is Congress’s Call
From the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 to the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, maritime incidents, shrouded in the fog of uncertainty, have lured the United States into wars on foreign shoals. Which is why cooler heads must prevail — and Congress must be consulted — as American and Iranian forces inch closer to open conflict in and around the Strait of Hormuz.
The downing of an unmanned American surveillance aircraft on Thursday by an Iranian surface-to-air missile is another worrying click of the ratchet between the Trump administration, which unilaterally abandoned the 2015 nuclear accord for a campaign of “maximum pressure,†and an Iranian government suffering from tighter economic sanctions. Thursday night brought news that President Trump had approved a retaliatory strike, then abruptly called it off.
The United States has blamed Iran for recent attacks on shipping and pipelines in the Persian Gulf; Iran says it was not responsible. The United States has responded to the tensions by building up forces in the region.
See, Iran is the one bombing ships, shooting down drones, blowing off it’s nuclear materials deal (even though Trump pulled out, all the other countries are still in it), but, the U.S., meaning Trump, of course, has been mean by building up forces and stuff.
With opposing military forces in such proximity, with accusations and munitions flying and with the White House facing a trust deficit, the danger of open conflict increases by the day. Which is why, if Mr. Trump and the Warhawk Caucus — led by the national security adviser, John Bolton; the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; and Senator Tom Cotton — want a wider military conflict with Iran, they first need to persuade Congress and receive its approval.
Actually, I think this is a great idea. Let’s put members of Congress on the record. Most Republicans will have no problem taking the side of the United States. Democrats, on the other hand, will tie themselves in knots attempting to rationalize their defense of Iran over the U.S. (meaning the U.S. with Trump as president). And there will be those few who simply take Iran’s side.
As the old saying goes “the NYTEB should be careful what they wish for; they might get it.” Much like any debate on Israel, the Democrats will show their true colors when it comes to Iran. They did this when Obama was giving away the house, and lots of money, to Iran with his worthless nuclear deal. Now they’ll show it on an Iran debate.
Just as in Iraq, aggressors are using illegitimate pretexts to beat the drums of war.
Just as in Iraq, our media is taking these claims at face value.
Just as in Iraq, children will die, American lives will be lost, and the world will be less safe. #NoWarWithIran
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) June 20, 2019
Of course she has to play the Iraq card, and the “claims” thing is mean to show that her Islamic radical buddies in Iran are innocent. That was retweeted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among other elected Democrats
This administration needs to put down its saber and pick up a phone.
Diplomacy is what grants us peace and stability – not war. #NoWarOnIran https://t.co/NZtifF3eki
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 21, 2019
See? Trump is rattling his saber. I guess we shot down our own drone in her feeble mind.
“From the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 to the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, maritime incidents, shrouded in the fog of uncertainty, have lured the United States into wars on foreign shoals. Which is why cooler heads must prevail”
Haha. That’s what you get when you learn “history” in the Journalism department in college.
It was the “cooler heads” that put us into those wars. Wars are always a choice, not something that just happens.
“It was the “cooler heads†that put us into those wars. Wars are always a choice, not something that just happens.”
Really? What was America’s “choice” after Pearl Harbor? Surrender?
Of course. or ignore it. Saddam Hussein was shooting at American airplanes for 10 years, every day. We ignored it until 2003. Iran has been in a declared state of war against us since 1979. Including sending troops to fight against us in Iraq for 6 years. We ignored them. You never Have to go to war. It’s always a choice. In Japan’s case, we could have even negotiated with them about the Pacific so that they didn’t see us as a rival in the region. You can always choose to weather an unprovoked attack and then NOT declare war after. Wars are choices that you normally enter into because you think the outcome will be favorable to your position (a choice by the politicians, not the nation as a whole).
WRT Pearl Harbor, I suspect that the world was already at war and the Roosevelt administration wanted to be a part of it. It is widely known that he legitimately feared impeachment if he dragged us into “another European conflict”. Pearl harbor gave him the excuse he needed.
The distinguished professor wrote:
“Negotiated with them about the Pacific so that they didn’t see us as a rival in the region,” huh? I s’pose that, technically, that’s true, and one congresswench, Jeannette Rankin (R-MT), voted against the declaration of war.
Miss Rankin was the first woman elected to federal office, as a Representative from Montana in 1916, and was one of only fifty Representatives to vote against American entry into World War I. Her vote was held as proof that women were simply not fit to take important decisions, and she served but that single term.
Then in 1940, she ran again, and wound up the only representative who voted against the declaration of war against Japan, which further proved feminine unfitness for office.
In 1979, President Carter proved his unfitness for office, when Iran committed an act of war against the United States. Had Mr Carter had any balls, he would have simply and calmly stated that if Iran did not return our captured citizens within 72 hours, we would regret their deaths, and praise them as the American heroes who unfortunately perished in the nuclear attacks which destroyed Tehran and Qom. Mr Carter would then have won re-election in a landslide.
President Carter’s minions did negotiate the release of our people, but only after Ronald Reagan won the 1980 elections; the Ayatollah Khoumeini understood that we had elected a man with balls to replace one without them, and things would not work out in their favor if they didn’t release the hostages before he took office.
By surrendering to provocations by pipsqueak nations, a nation not only loses respect, but other tinpot dictators wind up encouraged to prove themselves against the paper tiger.
We don’t need to go to war against Iran for this. A simple, covert strike that destroys their oil fields and their port facilities and thus their primary source of income is all that is needed. Lower-level forms of retaliation might also work, but something that causes them pain and treasure needs to be done.
A covert mission to assassinate the controlling clerics would also be a good thing; why punish the Iranian people if you can take out the leadership?
The good professor, and, I would guess, the esteemed Mr Dowd will be horrified by such a suggestion, but it is rational and sensible. While using der Führer as an example is always an extreme form of argument, one would doubt that either of those two fine gentlemen would have thought it a bad idea if British intelligence had managed to send Adolf Hitler to his eternal reward in early 1939. We have the benefit of hindsight in that, but hindsight can focus concentration of potential future consequences.
Peace is a good thing, but peace at any price often is not. When Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, when he annexed Austria, when he threatened Czechoslovakia, the British and French were in position to take action and put an end to his adventurism. The French, cheese-eating surrender monkeys that we think them today, were actually prepared to take action, but Neville Chamberlain talked them out of it, and surrendered to Hitler’s demands. Der Führer never believed that the United Kingdom and France would ever follow through on their threats to declare war if the Third Reich invaded Poland, because they had proven themselves so pussified after the previous provocations. He finally guessed wrong. And had he not guessed wrong again in attacking the Soviet Union, Germany would probably have won the war in Europe, and might still be its master today.
“The good professor, and, I would guess, the esteemed Mr Dowd will be horrified by such a suggestion…”
Not at all. I find the death of national leaders a much more moral and rational alternative than the slaughter of a million of their closest friends, whose only sin is the bad fortune of being born into that same country. It is a sad circumstance that national leaders have, since forever, placed a higher value on their own survival than on the lives of their citizens. The only real utility of keeping a national leader alive is having someone credible to offer surrender. It caused some confusion in WW2 Europe when the Germans tried to surrender because they thought Hitler was dead, but he wasn’t… yet. So he killed the traitors who surrendered too soon, then killed himself and survivors looked at each other wondering who the idiot would be that would try to surrender again.
Hind sighting history is a popular form of entertainment, but not really very useful until we invent a time machine. Or maybe we already did and the future people watched in horror as something even worse than Hitler happened… like Communism sweeping across Europe. So the future time travelers put things back the way we remember them and then destroyed the time travel technology and killed the babies who would grow up to invent it.
One of may favorites is the premise, “what would have happened if Joe Kennedy Jr had survived WW2”? And my answer is that in the real time line he did, and he became president and launched nuclear obliteration that killed 80% of the human population and turned the rest into mutants. So they invented time travel and “killed” him to give us all the “future” we remember today.
Well Professor, when you put it like that then there always IS a choice. On a few occasions I can see a large power ignoring a small power’s nonsense, but when the alternative to war is surrender, capitulation and perhaps even slavery the choice becomes moot. That becomes less of a choice and more of a resignation to one’s fate.
As the robot overlords in the Matrix said, “there are levels of survival we are willing to accept”.
It is very important to have a strong military, not so that they get used, but so that their mere presence make military adventures against us too costly for foreign leaders to choose. All bets are off when those leaders are either insane (see North Korea) or believe with good reason that the USA will not take action (See Africa, Iran, Syria, Libya, Taliban Afghanistan).
This is why our nuclear arsenal has become impotent. No one believes we will ever use them again, for any reason. So they aren’t a deterrent. We seem to keep them now just in case we get invaded by aliens from space just so we can demonstrate that “nukes are not the answer”.
Nothing is a deterrent if the antagonist thinks you won’t use it. At the end of the last century America ran out of the mileage we got from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Up until Jimmy Carter (as Dana pointed out) refused to nuke Tehran we had been feared. Carter ended that. I agree with Dana, I would have nuked the shit out of Iran and there never would have been a 9/11.
And there is the difference between civility and barbarism. The USA has a weapon we will not use. Iran wants a weapon that they already promised they will use. Nukes are no longer useful parts of the arsenal, because we no longer need to destroy a city to send a message. It is unimaginably immoral to destroy a city of 8.5 million people just to persuade a few thousand mullahs to change their bad behavior. On top of that, it’s just wasteful. The world is relatively peaceful now because the major powers that have them have too much to lose if they are ever used. That includes us. But use on on Iran and then they have nothing to lose.
Nor do we need nukes. We have plenty of other ways to crush anyone we see as an enemy. We can project ground forces to anywhere on the planet. We can bomb them to rubble with conventional high explosives. We can cut them off from the modern world with near total isolation from banking and travel. In lots of cases, you don’t even need to bomb the bad guys. Just letting them know you can will change their behaviors. In the 2nd Iraq war, we started bombing Saddam’s palaces to let him know we were OK with killing him and his family. That effectively took him out of national leadership and decapitated his government on the eve of war. In Bosnia, we just sent emails to politically connected people that we intended to bomb their factories and investments. They then called their leaders and convinced them to cooperate with us.
The choice to go to war is not a binary where the enemy gets to flip your switch by doing some provocation. The goal is to achieve your positive outcome. Sadly, this almost always means for the President, Top cabinet officials and congressional leaders, “what’s in it for me”.
I would have given the Iranians the option: return our people or get to meet Allah face to face. Had President Carter any balls, they’d have released the hostages.
The Iranians did have a perfect right to break relations with the United States, but the way you break relations is to tell the ambassador to take his staff and clear out. Seizing our embassy as they did was quite literally an act of war.
First of all if ANYBODY has nukes we need to have nukes. To be nukeless in world where others have them is not smart when you’re a major power. Secondly, you think destroying cities is immoral, I think losing is immoral. We won total victory in WWII because we destroyed their cities, not because we defeated their armies. Both Germany’s and Japan’s army’s knew they were losing as early as 1942-43 yet it wasn’t until their cities were made to rubble that they surrendered.
Think how much worse it will be fighting Mohammadans who believe they are fighting and dying for allah. They will kill anyone and destroy everything for their satanic god.
The Axis powers lost because we had not only beaten them militarily, but destroyed their industrial plant, and industrial workers, to the point where they simply couldn’t be supplied with the war materiel needed to continue the fight.
But they were also running out of fighting aged men. The last defenders of Berlin were old men and boys.
” but destroyed their industrial plant, and industrial workers”
Yep. That’s called going to war to win. Destroying their industry and its workers means razing cities and wiping out civilians. If you want to win kill and break everything.
Trump 2020 KAG