Iran Delenda Est
Re-posted in it’s entirety here by kind permission of Lurch of Main and Central. If you don’t have M&C on your reading list already now is a good time to start.
Du
The Third Punic War
The Third Punic War was a brief, tawdry affair, unworthy of the heroism of the previous conflicts. If ever there was a war that could be called unnecessary, this one would qualify.
Despite all the penalties and all the impediments, Carthage recovered economically. Rome had taken away her empire and the financial burden that went with it, but had left her free to pursue trade as she willed. Carthage paid off her war indemnity and by the middle of the second century, was flourishing.
This did not set well with many Roman senators. Rome had acquired a good deal of fertile land along the coast of North Africa, and a number of senators had invested in olives and grain there. But these were goods in which Carthage traded as well, and Carthage was rather better at it.
A faction within the Senate, led by Cato the Elder, began to agitate against Carthage. Was it right, they asked, that Carthage should prosper while Romans toiled? Was Carthage’s new prosperity not potentially dangerous? After all, the city had twice troubled Rome. And, in any case, Carthage was harming Roman mercantile interests.
Cato took the lead in these arguments. He was a prestigious statesman with a prestigious reputation. He was the classic virtuous Roman and he didn’t mind that others knew it. His public career was spotless, his marriage was perfect, his oratory was compelling, his values were conservative, and all in all he got on some people’s nerves.
Cato began to urge that the only sure defense against a resurgent Carthage was to destroy it. Rome would never be safe so long as Carthage stood. He made a campaign of it: Carthago delenda est! — Carthage must be destroyed!
The Senate passed a bill yesterday instructing the militry [sic] to give it more details on what it calls Iran’s intolerable acts of hostility towards the US. As Agonist readers know the drumbeat that Iran is behind attacks on the US in Iraq (indeed, that next to al-Qaeda it is the primary actor) has been going on for months now. (Al-Qaeda, of course, is not the primary insurgency movement in Iraq, and the evidence on Iran is sketchy and beside the point in any case. Thank goodness the USSR didn’t nuke the US into the ground for supplying the mujahideen with weaponry, which is simply a matter of public record, not of conjecture.)
This is part of the drumbeat for war with Iran. The bill passed 97-0 and while authorization for military action was stripped out of it (for now), does anyone doubt that the military will report anything but that Iran is deeply involved in giving support to everyone in Iraq, including Sunni insurgency groups it makes no sense for Iran to work with? They certainly have in the past, and while the evidence has bordered on non-existent, there’s no reason to believe they won’t continue to do so.
I don’t think people will quickly grasp how truly disastrous this piece of Senatorial foolishness really is. There are so many potentials for world catastrophe in this that it’s hard to even enumerate them. The effects on the US economy can be more destructive than the post WWI depression ever was.
When the first bomb falls, the oil tankers will stop moving. I know the military will assure us that they know where every Silkworm missile is, where every fast gunboat is housed, and they can guarantee that shipping will be safe. Maritime insurers won’t care. They’ll shut down their underwriting immediately. Or, if we’re lucky, they quintuple their rates. I suppose it’s human nature, but I suspect the tanker owners won’t feel too obligated to risk their bottoms just to deliver oil to keep Americans in (relatively) cheap gas. Again human, nature, but suppose they ordered their captains to sail anyway? A lot of those tankers sail under foreign flags, for the convenience of lower costs. If you were a Greek captain running a VLCC with an Indonesian crew would you want to risk your life to keep Americans driving their SUVs to work on 40 or 50 mile round trips? Would you consider it a moral imperative to risk your life sailing in order to assure food deliveries to Kansas City? What would the ship owners do? Cancel your contract and get another captain? There are a finite number of captains qualified to sail these ships.
Let’s briefly recap: just about everything in the US runs on the internal combustion engine. People moved into the suburbs to get away from the awful, crowded cities, but many drive 30 to 50 miles a day to work. Unless you work in a major city like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Philadelphia, you don’t have a truly reliable public transportation system to rely on.
Most of our food is carried by semi-trailers. Are you ready for chicken at $8 or $9 a pound? Lettuce at $7 a head? $7.50 for a gallon of milk?
Americans are being played. They are being played exactly the way they were played in the run-up to the Iraq war. Every piece of evidence that Iran has been attacking the US has been dubious, unsourced or so vague as to be meaningless. Even if Iran was supplying some weaponry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is supplying some to the US’s allies in the Badr brigades, for example, ask yourself very clearly if you’re willing to go to war over that and if you think that supplying weapons to a group resisting an occupation is really a causus [sic] belli. Because the US has done it, itself, more than once.
Leaving aside all considerations of morality and of the US’s foreign reputation, a war against Iran right now is military insanity. The US is currently losing two wars already and Iran is in a position to shut off the majority of Middle Eastern oil supplies. Trust me, a few weeks, even, of over $200 or $300 a barrel oil, absolute shortages throughout the world, and no US citizen will be safe anywhere outside US sovereign soil because everyone, even Europeans, will be paying for America’s splendid little war.
Senators were played in the run up to the Iraq war. They’re being played again right now, and so are Americans. The drumbeat of propaganda against Iran is never ending, mostly false (or at least unverifiable, and the US has no credibility on these questions) and planted in all the same places as the propaganda against Iraq was.
Fool me once – shame on you.
Fool me twice – shame on me.
If you like gasoline at $3 a gallon, you’re going to love it at $8 $13 when the oil tankers stop sailing.
Text of the Lieberman demand for war against Iran.
Crooks and Liars has the video of our Democratic Senator, Carl Levin, giving his sloppy wet kiss of love to Joe Lieberman (R-Tel Aviv).
FDL has the list of text and phone numbers to register your disapproval.
By the way, a sensible man could probably assume that this bit of errant propaganda is “no longer operative” as lying scumbuckets say. By all means read this unsourced story though, because The Sun has always been a reliable outlet for Republican Party propaganda.
Yesterday, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy, Lieutenant Bashon Mann, said the arrival of the USS Enterprise should not be understood as an escalation in the Gulf. “That is not going to happen,” he said. “The Enterprise is doing a one-for-one swap with the Nimitz. They are big ships, they are traveling with their strike groups, they cannot turn on a dime so to speak, but there won’t be an overlap. People will say there will be these overlaps. That means there will be three carriers, but that is incorrect.” The Drudge Report yesterday featured a story from Reuters announcing the arrival of the third carrier group.
Another Defense Department spokesman who asked for anonymity confirmed yesterday that by the end the summer, the Navy will have only one carrier in the Gulf.
A cynical man might think no one told the Navy that Joe Lieberman just might own a lot of ExxonMobil stock.
Hello I was too stupid to check the comment policy here on Gorilla’s Guides and that especially idiotic or offensive comments are trexed instead of just deleted. I am also too stupid to realise that Dubhaltach is a professional military officer who spent quite a lot of his childhood in Irak and even more of his childhood in Lebanon and is a dear friend to most of us. As if that were not dim enough I am also too stupid to realise that Du is the son of another professional military officer (markfromireland). Of course even a minimal amount of reading here would have made that clear to anybody with more than two neurons to spare.
Alas all my neuronic capacity beyond that needed for respiration and elimination is too taken up with being pleased with myself and my ooooh so clever friends to notice such things. To compound my stupidity I didn’t bother to check who edits and writes this site. Or perhaps it’s that I didn’t care that it’s a group blog written by Irakis all of them known personally to markfromireland who works with them closely as colleagues. Amn’t I dim not to have spottted that?
Oh well who cares … it’s all about me me me me me me me and my dimwitted friends after all. It’s my right to make a complete fool of myself and no sand nigger Iraki can stop me.
I came here from another site utterly unrelated to this one because I didn’t like the fact that somebody who does actually know Irak and who is fluent in the language and has just come back from spending several months in Irak called bullshit on yet another idiotic American fool who doesn’t know even the slightest thing about Irak, or Islam, but who does think that typing messages
makes him some sort of radical or at least makes him something other than an ill mannered and ignorant twit.
So why did I come here? I came here because I didn’t like having my equally numbskulled friend’s bullshit being called as follows:
Which is a comletely accurate description of what Irakis think and feel. Of course being a self absorbed twit I took that as a personal threat and came here determined to be as offensive as possible. Because after all it’s all about me me me me me me me isn’t it?
Despite the fact that it is my country and its troops busy killing as many sand niggers as they can possibly manage I like to lie to myself that this is not “my war”. That’s because I really hate the idea of the proverb that we Americans love to quote about how a country get’s the government it deserves coming true in America.
Finally I would like to thank Nur Hussein Ghazali for telling Mohammed Ibn Laith to put all future comments from me and my equally numbwitted and egotistical friends on the spam list which means that I can come here and massage my ego by typing as much nonsense as I like secure in the knowledge that the moment I hit the “submit comment” button that the server will simply delete everything I type automatically.