It is unconscionable that a matter as important to potentially global war and peace is being subjected to the partisan football as the predominantly Republican detractors of the negotiated Iran deal are causing it to become.
But to grasp the significance of this, it is vitally important to recognize that behind the partisan veneer of it all, as with most things in government, has been the horny hand of a non-partisan “military and industrial complex” which has expanded since the days when President Eisenhower warned against it to include the preponderance of forces on Wall Street.
Collectively these are the “dogs of war,” and their influence is pervasive through this entire debate.
In this context, Republicans are not Republicans, but effectively “lapdogs of war,” as most are, and Democrats who oppose the deal are likewise, not Democrats but “lapdogs of war.” In this context, as well, Israel is not Israel, but under right wing Prime Minister Netanyahu, fully aligned with those “dogs of war.”
There should be no doubt who are the dogs and who are their tails. No tail is wagging these dogs in this case: The most powerful war industries in the world are calling these shots, and everyone else functions as political mouthpieces.
Netanyahu, for example, exposed himself totally aligned with this faction by his divisive action to bypass the President Obama to insist on addressing a joint session of Congress earlier this year. In the longer term, this was a grievous strategic error by Netanyahu and his controllers, because it revealed to the U.S. population in a way that hadn’t been so evident before that Israel is not the innocent and eternally grateful recipient of U.S. aid and security, but is as partisan in its pretensions to intercede in the U.S. political process as any Tea Party Republican senator.
Netanyahu’s “telling off” first of Obama and then the entire U.S. Congress has not set well with the American public, even if he was given plenty of cover by our many dogs of war. Simply put, in the minds of most Americans, it is no longer “Israel right or wrong.”
When Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee are now trying to “out-Trump Trump” with scandalous remarks, it is also making the American jewish community very nervous. When Huckabee claimed the Iran deal would “take the Israelis and march them to the doors of the ovens,” the Anti-Defamation League called his remarks “completely out of line and unacceptable,” and other pro-Israeli groups concurred.
The Iran deal, as this week’s Congressional hearings are making more plain, is epochal and, as such, total anathema to the “dogs of war,” who are chewing many a rug now with borderline hysteria. The fact that the coalition of nations involved in developing this plan is so formidable underscores its importance, most particularly Russia.
These “dogs of war” (with apologies for my redundancy) circled themselves into a lobbying group that took the name the “Project for a New American Century” that arose in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War among those right wing policy wonks and their allies who unsuccessfully pressured President Bush Senior to follow Saddam Hussein all the day to Baghdad during that war. Bush Senior thought they were lunatics and he was right.
But among the first to sign on to this new menace to world peace was Florida Governor Jeb Bush. This group subsequently was welcomed into the White House after the U.S. Supreme Court handed Bush’s brother George the 2000 election.
The result is history, and such a fiasco ensued in both the military and financial spheres that Americans rushed their first African-American president to take charge, tasked with beginning to clean up eight years of unadulterated U.S. administrative chaos.
Had another “dog of war” won that 2008 election, or the 2012 one, then the world would surely now be on the brink of a global conflagration.
If Iraq wasn’t enough to convince us of the horrible miscalculations that were involved in their thinking, then consider the mess that would have been created from an equally ill-advised invasion of Iran.
