Iranian ironies

It's August, and Beltway-minded people are still going nuts about the Iran "threat." The venerable Georgie Anne Geyer weighs in on the issue with a fairly sophisticated analysis. She is quite frightened that with Bush in Crawford, Cheney's in charge (but the Prez doesn't have to be out of town for that to be the case, does it?) and she properly takes the Bush Administration to task for the idiocy in Iraq. But her piece shares a number of presumptions that, if not just plain wrong, are a little racist and demonizing and frankly creep me out. Her critique and others from Democrat-identified pundits and pols make me realize that "the opposition" would not necessarily stand in the way of a war on Iran.

Thus, the Iranians were able to simply stand back while their archenemy, Saddam, fell at the Americans' hands and at no cost to themselves. Should it be any surprise that they should move, as ruthlessly as always, to achieve their goals?

Geyer identifies the incoming Iranian president as "a rank conservative." (Hm. Which definition of the word "rank" could she mean here? highly fertile? Strong and offensive in odor or flavor? would she use that word to describe an American conservative?) She also repeats the almost certain falsehood that "Ahmadinejad ... was probably one of the American hostages' captors in 1979."

Anyway, this appears to be the best mainstream pundits can offer. Most won't even say, or bury, the most obvious point, expressed in the Herald Tribune by Thomas Fuller. Under tremendous pressure from Cheney/Bush, European leaders are pouring a furious amount of enegy into "trying to stop Tehran from doing something that is technically not illegal."

A terrific piece that puts it all into perspective appeared in yesterday's TomDispatch. Michael Schwartz explores myriad Iranian ironies. This one, I think, takes the prize:

Now, we're back to a potential face-off with a country that at least has an actual nuclear program, if not (unlike the North Koreans) a weapon to go with it. The nuclear world as imagined by the Bush administration is, in fact, a jaggedly uneven place. On the one hand, you have Iran, considered (like Saddam's Iraq) an imminent proliferation threat (even while that proliferator-in-chief of a nation Pakistan remains our bosom buddy); and yet Iran has, for at least 17 years (yes, Virginia, that's years, not months!), had a secret nuclear program (as well as an above-board one) aimed (possibly) at creating the means to create nuclear weapons. A new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (the first on Iran since 2001) was just leaked to the press .... [The leaked NIEE] evidently claims that Iran may need another ten years or so to create the means to make nuclear weapons (not even to have the weapons in hand). If that's accurate, then we have a 27-year-plus-long effort to create one bomb. That—to my untutored mind—is not exactly an overwhelming stat when it comes to threat deployment.

Read the whole article (highly recommended)...