The War Conspiracy
Recently by Justin Raimondo: The
Ron Paul Precedent
With all eyes
focused on Iowa, what is happening
in the Persian Gulf escapes most everyone’s notice. The babble of
competing voices – the nattering nabobs of the mainstream media,
the “spin”-doctors, the lobbyists and special interests currently
inundating the airwaves with propaganda – drowns out everything
else. Nothing short of a major terrorist attack could possibly compete
with the Iowa story – and yet what happens in the Gulf, or doesn’t
happen, will reshape the American political landscape and may well
determine the course of the presidential election.
As the aircraft
carrier the USS John Stennis retreated in the face of Iranian
naval
exercises, the Iranian chief of staff gloated:
“I recommend
and emphasize to the American carrier not to return to the Persian
Gulf. I advise, recommend and warn them (the Americans) over the
return of this carrier to the Persian Gulf because we are not in
the habit of warning more than once.”
Bold words,
backed up by very little. It turns out those supposedly “long range”
missiles they test-fired to top off their recent military exercises
couldn’t even reach Bahrain, let alone Israel – and were entirely
the creation
of Photoshop. This posturing is for domestic consumption: as
the sanctions continue to bite, the regime seeks to divert popular
anger over the country’s worsening economic
crisis and put the full blame on the Americans (and, as always,
the Brits).
The war of
words also serves the purposes of our domestic demagogues. US presidential
candidate Rick Santorum responded to the Iranians’ meaningless chest-beating
with practiced cluelessness,
announcing he wouldn’t hesitate to bomb Iran for fear of rendering
America a “paper tiger.” The Pentagon, for its part, had a more
measured response, as Ha’aretz reports:
“Asked later
Tuesday if the U.S. intends to send naval reinforcements to the
Gulf in response to Iranian talk of closing the Strait of Hormuz,
Pentagon spokesperson George Little did not answer directly but
said, ‘No one in this government seeks confrontation over the Strait
of Hormuz. It’s important to lower the temperature.'”
A significant
faction within the US military is opposed to the War Party’s latest
crusade: you’ll recall Admiral William Fallon’s very
public dissent from the bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran crowd in 2008, leading
to his resignation as chief of the US Central Command. Among the
top officer corps, Fallon is far
from alone.
This dissent,
however, comes a little too late, since we are already at war with
Iran: the economic
sanctions we’ve imposed are in themselves acts of war, and the
latest
version – sanctions on banks that do business with Iran – are
already having their effect: a
drop in the value of Iranian currency.
It is rank
hypocrisy
for the US to point to the Iranian threat to close the Strait of
Hormuz when Washington is seeking to block commerce traversing the
Strait by imposing sanctions on Iranian oil. The Iranians know very
well that the sanctions cannot be enforced without a military blockade
– and that is the next logical step on the
road to war.
January
10, 2012
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2012 Antiwar.com