America's itch to brawl has a new target – but bombs can't conquer Iran

[malaise]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/03/america-itch-brawl-new-target-iran
<snip>
A post-imperial virus has infected foreign policy. We've been here before, we know the human cost, and now we must stop

This time there will be no excuses. Plans for British support for an American assault on Iran, revealed in today's Guardian, are appalling. They would risk what even the "wars of 9/11" did not bring: a Christian-Muslim armageddon engulfing the region. This time no one should say they were not warned, that minds were elsewhere, that we were told it would be swift and surgical. Nobody should say that.

Total war on Iran would be a catastrophe. Every politician involved in this business should be locked in a room and forced to read the cuttings on Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade. Ahmadinejad may delight audiences with his bloodthirsty language about the west. But the rest of the world would ask by what right are two nuclear powers using violence to stop someone else joining their weirdly exclusive club. We would have no UN support for such a venture. No one seriously supposes that Iran, under whatever ruler, would seek to wipe out Israel – and anyway that is Israel's business.

A virus seems to be running through the upper echelons of Washington and London, that of a moral duty to wage war against perceived evil wherever it offers a bombing target. Anyone watching last month's Republican primary debate in Las Vegas will have been shocked at the belligerence shown by the six candidates towards the outside world. It was a display of what the historian Robert D Kaplan called "the warrior politics … of an imperial reality that dominates our foreign policy", a fidgety search for reasons to go brawling round the globe, at any cost in resulting anarchy. The spectacle was frightening and depressing.

British friends of America can see all the signs of another country in the throes of "losing an empire and not finding a role", of a paranoid nervous breakdown. Britain has been there before. It should never go back. It has been warned.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Multple prior posts

[redqueen]

2. Any thinking person sees the only sane route is diplomacy.

But thinking people have less influence than the MIC and their toadies.

[quinnox]

3. K&R, time for the USA to concentrate at home, god knows

we have made enough of a mess of it in this country to keep the attention on our numerous problems for a change.

The world will survive without us trying to control everyone elses every move.

[baldguy]

4. Very few fanatical GOP morans have orgasmic fantasies about attacking Iran.

Rational people don't.