Why Kyl-Lieberman Sucks- And so do its supporters

Designating the Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard and four state-owned Iranian banks as supporters of terrorism gives Bush the cover he needs to declare unilateral war against Iran.

This is simple. The Bush administration has proven itself incapable of rational diplomacy to begin with. They've been foaming at the mouth to go to war with Iran for at least a year. Supporters of Kyl-Lieberman just provided them with the cover. But that's not all...

As Jim Web noted on the Senate floor:  "the proposal is Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream." Webb cautioned that the "cleverly-worded sense of the Congress" could be "interpreted" to "declare war" on Iran. He continued:

Those who regret their vote five years ago to authorize military action in Iraq should think hard before supporting this approach. Because, in my view, it has the same potential to do harm where many are seeking to do good.

Webb said that amendment’s attempt to categorize the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp as "a foreign terrorist organization" would, for all practical purposes, "mandate" the military option against Iran.

"It could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war. What do we do with terrorist organizations? If they are involved against us, we attack them."

In some ways it really is that simple, in other ways it's possibly worse. The fact is, NONE of this has to do with any actual threat from Iran. Start there, then think through what's going on and why.

The analogy for a new war with Iran vis a vis the Iraqi war used to be the drunk teenage boy who's already wrecked the car once.

He shows up, still drunk, and asks for the keys again.

But that's really a faulty analogy because it presumes a certain accidental quality to the build up and execution of the Iraqi war. It's false because there was nothing accidental about it. It was all preplanned. I wonder if the  Kyl-Lieberman supporters forgot Andrew Card's brilliant insight about the release of a new product? Or forgot to read the PNAC documentation readily available on their site, telling everyone exactly how this was going to go down?

Almost the same exact thing is happening now with regard to Iran--it's being set up for war. Everyone knows it and all the signs point to it. Even the glaringly obvious movement of the casus belli. Maybe we can't stick Iran with the horrors of WMD development, so we'll designate them a 'terrorists' outfit and pin our failure in Iraq on them, to boot. Right.

But. But. But. Many of the rightwingers will whine, not only does Iran support the insurgency which is killing our troops they are also supporting terrorists like Hizbullah and Hamas! As Juan Cole notes, this, too, is a fine bit of hypocrisy:

The Kurds based in American Iraq have done much worse things to Turkey in the past month than Hizbullah did to Israel in June of 2006. Yet when Israel launched a brutal and wideranging war on all of Lebanon, destroying precious infrastructure and dumping enormous amounts of oil into the Mediterranean, damaging Beirut airport, destroying essential bridges in Christian areas, and then releasing a million cluster bomblets on civilian areas in the last 3 days of the war-- when Israel did all that, Bush and Cheney applauded and argued against a 'premature' cease-fire! Yet they are trying to convince Turkey just to put up stoically with the PKK terrorists who have killed dozens of Turkish troops recently and kidnapped 8 (again, more than the number of Iraeli troops that were kidnapped). Bush's coddling of the PKK in Iraq is not different from Iran's support for Hizbullah, except that the PKK is a more dangerous and brutal organization than Hizbullah.

Bingo.

Iran's so called 'threat' is a convenient excuse. Even if it weren't , the best way to ensure it doesn't BECOME a problem is through engagement--that begins with recognition of the government--without any formal or informal designation of their military or portions of their military.

Consider this: how willing would the U.S. be to proceed with diplomatic negotiations with a country that formally declared our Special Ops forces "terrorists" because of their activities in Latin America or the Philipines? Give you indigestion? It should. Yet, it's certainly just as valid as the designation supported in the Kyl-Lieberman bill(in fact, this perverse tit for tat is exactly what took place shortly after the Kyl-Lieberman bill passed and Iran’s parliament approved a nonbinding resolution to label the CIA and the U.S. Army "terrorist organizations.").

The truth is, it wouldn't be a bad idea to apologize for the years we made the Iranians suffer under the Shah of Iran. I know most of America may have forgotten the 10,000 or so victims of the vicious SAVAK police terrorists who learned their trade from the U.S. and Israel. I can assure you, the Iranians have not.

But, for the moment, let's begin with facts on ground. Initially, when Bush/Cheney tried to roll out the new war with Iran, it was predicated on the idea that Iran could arm itself with nuclear weapons. But almost everyone admits Iran is at least 10 years away from any 'nuclear' bomb capability-- and even that time frame is probably exaggerated.

A 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate stated that Iran was ten years from making a nuclear weapon.
but....
In 2006 Ernst Uhrlau, the head of German intelligence service, said Tehran would not be able to produce enough material for a nuclear bomb before 2010 and would only be able to make it into a weapon by about 2015.

So, having failed at building a case for war based on their ability to terrorize the world with WMD, the Bush/Cheney team turn to the Iranians 'support' of the insurgency in Iraq. ( Cheney's plan to attack Iran )

High-ranking US generals have accused Iran of waging a "proxy war" against the United States through its support of Shiite militias in Iraq.
[...]
Gary Sick is an expert on Iran who served as a military adviser under three presidents. He believes that such preparations mark a significant shift in the government's strategy. "Since August," says Sick, "the emphasis is no longer on the Iranian nuclear threat," but on Iran's support for terrorism in Iraq. "This is a complete change and is potentially dangerous."

And the last entities who could reasonably be expected to responsibly handle such a threat is the current administration. To give them the tools at this point to commit another war of aggression in the region under this gross caricature of an effort at diplomacy is purely  criminal.

Yet more than a handful of pitiful and cowardly Democrats played right along. Even the Democratic front runner, Hillary Clinton voted for this rotten bill. Why? Because she needs to appear 'tough' and is frankly too cowardly to vote any way that will give her political opponents an opportinunity to accuse her of being 'soft' on terrorism.

We need to write a new book for some of our Democrats: Profiles in Cowardice.

What's worse is the vote, though a mild palliative for domestic consumption, could prove a disaster if used by Bush to fire up another war. Then it's not just 'Cowardice'; it's a vote AGAINST our national interests in a pretty obvious fashion. A war with Iran would be a disaster for the United States and her interests all over the world.

Rice and her cohorts all favor diplomacy, partly because they know the military is under strain. After four years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US lacks manpower for another major war, especially one against a relatively well-prepared adversary. "For many senior people at the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department, a war would be sheer lunacy," says security expert Sick.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, agrees. A war against Tehran would be "a disaster for the entire world," says Riedel, who worries about a "battlefield extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent." Nevertheless, he believes there is a "realistic risk of a military conflict," because both sides look willing to carry things to the brink.

Indeed, preparations are quite evident from the movement of the Fleet to the  U.S. military base in Iraq less than 10 kilometers (about six miles) from Iran's border.

The facility, known as Combat Outpost Shocker, is meant for American soldiers preventing Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. But it's also rumored that Bush authorized US intelligence agencies in April to run sabotage missions against the mullah regime on Iranian soil.

Of course, such sabotage operations could have the ancillary benefit of drawing Iranian troops across the border to retaliate. Then Bush can point to the dead Iranians soldiers and get his war on.

If the Kyl Lieberman bill ultimately doesn't lead us into a catastrophic war with Iran, I won't be surprised--but I won't be anymore sanguine regarding those who supported it. Given the historical context, they are either ambitious and deeply cynical politicians, hack Republicans,  morons or bloody minded war mongers. Whatever they are, if a war is started and our troops start dying and our economy goes South--as it very likely will --one wonders if they will still have the audacity and hubris to claim the mantle of 'patriotism'. If so, we should call them out, because their support of this bill could lead directly to the needless loss of U.S. lives, and the needless destruction of many essential U.S. interests around the world.