Monday, October 01, 2007

Of Democrats and twisted hopes

Oct.1, 2007

Of Democrats and twisted hopes

by pv vivekanand

IT was with great jubiliation and fanfare that many within the US and around the world greeted the Democratic victory in last year's mid-term congressional elections in which the party gained "control" of both houses of the US legislature. They expected the Democrats to move swiftly to put an end to the US military presence in Iraq if only to avoid further loss of American lives and resources in the chaotic country — essentially ending the war.
Today, nearly one year later, we find not only that the Democrats have failed to end the war in Iraq but also that they have set the ground for a new war in the region, this time targeting Iran.
That is what the Democrats led by senators like Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer did when they voted in favour of the "Kyl-Lieberman Iran Amendment" which in effect is the forerunner of a declaration of war against Iran disguised as a congressional move.
The amendment calls on the administration to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as a "foreign terrorist organisation . . . and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists."
The amendment clears the way for placing sanctions on individual Iranian officials, but more significantly, it would gives the president extraordinary leeway in going after the Revolutionary Guards Corps militarily. It implictly authorises him to unilaterally wage war with Iran without seeking any further congressional authorisation. The operative argument here is that the amendment already grants the president the authority to go after "terrorists."
The "authorisation" goes hand-in-hand with the behind-the-scene build-up to war against Iran that seems to have reached an advanced stage.
According to Newsweek, David Wurmser, a former senior adviser to US Vice-President Dick Cheney, had told fellow neo-conservatives that Cheney had considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz. The intention, it was said, would be to provoke a reaction from Tehran that would help justify wider US air strikes, according to Newsweek.
On the diplomatic front, the Sunday Telegraph reported this week that the Bush adminstration has told its diplomats at the UN to begin "searching for things that Iran has done wrong." The order is remniscent of the build-up to the war against Iraq, and one could easily expect intelligence reports to be tailored to suit the purpose of strengthening the call for military action against Iran.
The administration has also shifted gears. Its argument for action against Iran was Tehran's controversial nuclear programme, but the focus is now shifted to alleged Iranian support — training, arming and financing — for insurgents killing US soldiers in Iraq. Obviously, the administration has realised that the American people are not convinced that a nuclear Iran poses a threat to mainland America, and the argument that the US has to take action against any party or country killing American soldiers is a relatively easier sell to the public.
Surely, the Democrats must be aware of what is happening in the military and diplomatic corridors and realise that the US is edging closer to yet another catastrophe in the Middle East.
It might be easier to understand why the Democrats could not really make a difference to the Bush administration's determination to pursue a non-existent military option in Iraq. The Democrats have a simple majority in both houses of congress but that is not enough to counter administration decisions and the presidential veto power.
However, it is strange that the Democrats, having closely watched the way the US got drawn deep into the Iraq quagmire after a war that was launched on deceptive grounds, could allow themselves to be party to authorising another war that promises to be all the more ferocious with unpredictable consequences.
The only explanation is that the reach of the powerful neoconservative camp is not limited to the Republicans. Equally important is the Israeli element in the US-Iran equation. The US Congress, whether Republican- or Democrat-led, has always been an ardent Israel supporter.
All it takes is a quick glance at how emphatically Senator Joseph R. Biden, a Democrat from Delware, stated his commitment to Israel, calling the country "the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East."
"I am a Zionist," he said. "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist."
Conventional wisdom dictates that the US would not want to get involved in yet another military conflict in the Middle East while it grapples with the Iraq crisis and the elusive hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan. It has 155,000 soldiers in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan, and the bulk of them are vulnerable — if not sitting ducks — for Iranian retaliation for any military strike, whether Israeli or US.
The repurcussions of a military conflict involving Iran would be too serious for the international oil market to handle and the consequences of a record shoot-up of oil prices would be devastating to the American currency and thus the US economy.
There are many other dreadful scenarios pursuant to a US-led military strike against Iran, and no one in the region wants even to think of them.
However, the Bush administration's track record shows that it cannot be expected to apply conventional wisdom, and that means military action against Iran regardless of the consequences.
The Democrats must but be aware of all these considerations and still they went ahead with granting the administration the green signal for military action against Iran.
But then, that line of thought is based on the assumption that the Democrats must be opposed to the Iraq war. The rug is pulled from under that assumption when we note how the three main presidential hopefuls replied to a question during a recent public debate among themselves.
The question put to the Democratic presidential hopefuls — including frontrunners Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and John Edwards — by moderator Tim Russert was whether they were committed to withdrawing American soldiers from Iraq: "Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term more than five years from now, there will be no US troops in Iraq?"
Well, none of the three would undertake that pledge. They argued that it was difficult to predict what could happen in the next four or five years.
That much for our assumption that the Democrats are a committed anti-war party, and out through the window goes our hope that a "regime change" in Washington through the 2008 presidential elections would lead to an end to the crisis in Iraq and a major positive shift in the belligerent American posture and approach that we have seen since the day George W Bush Junior entered the White House in 2001.