No subject

in Mickey Spillane's "I the Jury". (Though Spillane really was fifth-rate in
compared to a consistent artist like Hammett in the pulp field, I am pretty
sure he is underrated by the cognoscenti of today.) Anyway, in the last
paragraphs he shoots his lover with whom he was intensely involved but turns
out to be a bad egg. "How could you?" she asks with her last breath. "It was
easy," Spillane's Mike Hammer responds. When I was in high school, I thought
this tough-guy stuff was the bee's knees.

Cole assumes that the interests of the United States government and Britain,
etc. are the same as that of the Iranian opposition and the latter are in
all-around agreement with them. Unhesitatingly, they will surrender control
of Iran's nuclear power industry to the imperialists, including by way of
Russia. 

As devoted friends who always put America first, they want nothing to do
with supporting the equality struggle of the Shia in Lebanon or other
countries where this issue is destabilizing for Washngton, and, of course,
they will be glad to let Hamas and the Palestinians in general twist in the
wind while the US and Israeli rulers extract (in one form or another) more
land from them.

I have seen no sign that the victory of the opposition would have solved any
of these questions for the US rulers, and I see no sign that the US rulers
(as opposed to liberal fantasists like Cole and Dreyfuss) have operated on
the assumption that the election of the opposition would have simply placed
Iran in the US camp.  And their propaganda on this theme was hardly
unhelpful (I believe unintentionally, but not illogically) to those who
argued that the opposition had to be repressed allegedly to protect national
sovereignty.  And the fact that this claim was demagogy does not prove that
Iranian sovereignty is not under imperialist attack.

How could the US political system and media re-demonize Iran, to the extent
that this has been undermined (and not just by the election)? All they would
have to do under current circumstances, is to convince people that the
Islamic Republic actually has a serious mass base of support, which can be
done with facts. I am pretty sure that the fact that the
Khamenei-Ahmadinejad leadership has consciously de-emphasized mass
mobilization on their own sides, after a couple fairly impressive efforts.
The appearance of millions on the streets in one of the opposition protests
convinced them that repression and imposed silence, not mobilization and
counter-mobilization was the way to handle this problem.

After all, if they had sought a pattern of broad progovernment
demonstrations, would they have ended up suggesting satisfaction with the
state of things as they are, or would they have ended up suggesting the
opposite? Would even successful mobilization of their own supporters not
have become an outlet for dissent? A deeply dissatisfied population which is
looking for ways to express itself and escape repression.

The idea that the existence of such a debate, conflict, polarization, and
limited upsurge among the masses should persuade the imperialists that there
is no need for war against Iran is wishful thinking. The wing of the
bourgeoisie that is convinced that it is Iran and not Washington that must
give ground has no reason to trust the current opposition more than the
Pentagon as the solution to US imperialism's Iran problem

But this does not mean that the political situation presented by the
existence of the mass opposition is an aid to an intervention. Coupled with
the repression as a primary tool, it can play the role of a tool of military
intervention. 

But the liberals who line up for regime change, sanctions, and no dealings
with Iran (except maybe bullying about nuclear weapons) as an expression of
solidarity with the Iranian opposition are pursuing the war drive (whatever
they kid themselves into thinking they are doing) and not the concerns of
the Iranian masses, tens of millions of whom have broad common interests in
more rights and a better social life across the factional divide in the
clerical leadership.
Fred Feldman




 


July 6, 2009
Biden Suggests U.S. Not Standing in Israel's Way on Iran 
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
WASHINGTON - Plunging squarely into one of the most sensitive issues in the
Middle East, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. suggested on Sunday that the
United States would not stand in the way of Israeli military action aimed at
the Iranian nuclear program.

The United States, Mr. Biden said in an interview broadcast on ABC's "This
Week," "cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot
do."

"Israel can determine for itself - it's a sovereign nation - what's in their
interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else," he
said, in an interview taped in Baghdad at the end of a visit there.

The remarks went beyond at least the spirit of any public utterances by
President Barack Obama, who has said that diplomatic efforts to halt Iran's
nuclear program should be given to the end of the year. But the president
has also said that he is "not reconciled" to the possibility of Iran
possessing a nuclear weapon - a goal Tehran denies.

Mr. Biden's comments came at a particularly sensitive time, amid the
continuing tumult over the disputed Iranian elections, and seemed to risk
handing a besieged President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a new tool with which to
fan nationalist sentiments in Iran.

What was not immediately clear was whether Mr. Biden, who has a
long-standing reputation for speaking volubly - and sometimes going too far
in the heat of the moment - was sending an officially sanctioned message.

The Obama administration has said, and Mr. Biden reaffirmed this, that it
remains open to negotiations with Tehran, even after the bitterly contested
election that returned Mr. Ahmadinejad to the presidency.

"If the Iranians respond to the offer of engagement, we will engage," Mr.
Biden said. "The offer's on the table."

But separately, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
warned of the costs of any military strike against Iran. 

"It could be very destabilizing, and it is the unintended consequences of
that which aren't predictable," he said on "Fox News Sunday." 

Still, he added, "I think it's very important, as we deal with Iran, that we
don't take any options, including military options, off the table."

Earlier in his interview with ABC, Mr. Biden had seemed sensitive to the
risk of handing Mr. Ahmadinejad and the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah
Khamenei, a propaganda edge by criticizing the elections too forcefully and
allowing them to claim that "the reason why there was unrest is outside
influence."

He called Mr. Obama's original condemnations, which some criticized as
overly cautious, "absolutely pitch-perfect."

If Mr. Biden's comments on Israel and Iran were perhaps off the cuff, he did
not back away from them when given a chance to do so.

George Stephanopoulos, the program's host, asked: "But just to be clear
here, if the Israelis decide Iran is an existential threat, they have to
take out the nuclear program, militarily the United States will not stand in
the way?"

And Mr. Biden replied: "Look, we cannot dictate to another sovereign nation
what they can and cannot do when they make a determination - if they make a
determination - that they're existentially threatened and their survival is
threatened by another country."

The Israeli government has said that it hopes to see the Iranian nuclear
program halted through diplomacy, but it has not ruled out a military
strike. Talk of such a strike flared episodically during the Bush
presidency. 

Such a strike is considered highly problematic, both for the unpredictable
shock waves it would send coursing through the region and because of the
technical difficulty of destroying nuclear facilities that are scattered
around Iran, some of them deep underground.

Still, the disputed Iranian election result has raised concerns in Israel.
Officials there say that the victory by Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has called for
the destruction of Israel, underscored the Iranian threat and bolstered the
argument for tough action.

In May, Mr. Obama told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel during a
meeting at the White House that "we're not going to have talks forever" with
Iran; in the absence of cooperation from Tehran, he said, the administration
would not rule out "a range of steps."

But the two sides have seemed in discord about what those steps might be.