Are we being lead unjustifiably to war with Iran?

 

There are reasons to believe we are being lead to war with Iran…for no good reason. That is, we have a military-industrial complex of corporations which would like to see a war with Iran, not because Iran is a danger to the United States, but because those corporations would gain profits from providing war materials to the U.S. military during  such a war. In order to maintain corporate profitability, our military has adopted the idea that our country is safe if we dominate the world militarily. With this strategy in mind, Iran becomes a threat to the United States because it does not play well with our corporate leaders.  Our military-industrial  corporations do not make money from the Iranian military.

Are there reasons to question the wisdom of our current strategic thinking about national security? Do we have to be the world’s bully to be safe in our homes?

The following videos discuss the issues.

 

From this video,

JAY: So before we dig into the numbers, let's just look at the big picture. Do these cuts in any way take away from this mission of being able to fight at least two wars at the same time, and more importantly this idea of overwhelming military global superiority?

LUTZ: No, the big picture hasn't changed strategically. They're still—the Pentagon and the Obama administration are still trying to position the U.S. military as the force which can do it all and be everywhere 24-7 to try and monitor and manage or control events. And so I think that hasn't changed. The budget itself has some decrease that's going to occur, but this is quite small. When you control for inflation, it will be on the order of 4 percent over the next five years in comparison with last five. And this is the estimate of Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives.

JAY: Now, you've done a lot of work on the issue of bases, and that's certainly one of the major pieces of this full-spectrum superiority strategy. Is this—how is this going to affect basing in terms of overall cost, but also in terms of where the bases are going to be? And does—again, does this in any way change the basic strategy?

LUTZ: No, the basic strategy remains to have U.S. service members and equipment out and around many places around the world. And there's going to be a slight reconfiguring, where the bases in Europe are going to be drawn down, and bases in Asia, the Asia Pacific region, are going to be built up. And that's really, you know, again, a part of this World War II / post-World War II strategy of, again, keeping, at this point, about 1,000 military bases open and running around the world.

JAY: And in terms of the strategy, what is the objective of so many bases? I mean, one of the things we've seen is how you can say ineffective all of this is when an actual struggle breaks out. For example, if one of the objectives of these bases is to defend regimes, friendly regimes, it's not much you can do when a population decides they want a regime gone. On the other hand, if you do want to change a regime, you're going to have to have troops on the ground the way they did in Iraq, and apparently some of these cuts is to move away from the Army more to Navy and Air Force. How do they rationalize all this?

LUTZ: Well, I think one of the problems here is that we have grown so used to thinking of the world's problems in military terms that we can't imagine any other way to accomplish a set of national and global goods or aims. So—and it's kind of like the old saw about the hammer and a nail: if all you buy for yourself are hammers, everything looks like a nail. So we've been buying military equipment, military—setting up military bases, and hoping that this is the route to security. But, of course, as we saw over the last ten years, a massive investment in military might and, again, drawing on all this basing structure from around the Middle East and Europe to do the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we still did not accomplish what was—the aim was. And there, too, again, even the CIA had estimated that the war in Iraq made Americans less secure in—again, in security terms, in physical military terms. But certainly a lot of Americans feel that there is, again, another kind of security that the government should be providing in the form of safe food and employment, unemployment benefits, and so on. So that's where the trade-offs have obviously been made in great degree.

JAY: Yeah. I mean, I guess the critics of the social safety net don't mind the stimulus if the stimulus is coming through the military. They don't like it on the other side. But if you go back to what they hope to accomplish, I guess their argument—"their" being those people including the leadership of the Democratic Party, and certainly the leadership of the Republican Party (not the Ron Paul wing of it, but the leadership)—their argument will be: if America doesn't project this power around the world, then regimes which they consider, quote-unquote, "democratic" would be subject to pressure from other powers (and I guess the unspoken word these days is China—or maybe it is now being more spoken), that without this projection of American military power, these regimes won't last. Is there any evidence that's true? And is that still their thinking?

LUTZ: I think, you know, the idea that American military power is something that shapes the political world of states and that—you know, really, where is the evidence of that? If it were the case, then we would be asking ourselves right—we wouldn't be talking about Iran right now, we wouldn't be talking about North Korea. The U.S. has massed for decades military force south of the border in South Korea, and yet you have, again, the North Korean situation the way it is. So I think we really don't have a lot of evidence that the projection of power, the image of power is as effective as lots of other methods of achieving things like nonproliferation and regime changes, which we've seen happen across the Middle East in nonmilitary grassroots ways.http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=7794

 

From this video:

JAY: The press has been focused mostly on the Iran issue. So talk a little bit about what you think the press coverage has been in the last day or two.

MCGOVERN: Well, it's really quite amazing. Here's The New York Times. We have not only two large front-page stories, one of which talks about the sharp distress over a nuclear Iran, but the jump page--ah, there you go: Ahmadinejad, surrounded by a whole bunch of evil-looking people. And then, the next page, 10-11, you get the whole deal here: arsenal with aid of North Korea; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia says, well, we have to cut the head off the snake. It's a canard, Paul. It's a canard. And I'm an intelligence officer, or I used to be, okay? I was for 27 years. Sometimes we take painstaking efforts to get something right. And to my great relief, somebody did that in 2007, and he came to the conclusion that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in the fall of 2003.

JAY: You've chaired previous estimates. And if I understand it correctly, it's like, what, 17 or 18 agencies?

MCGOVERN: Sixteen now.

JAY: Sixteen agencies.

MCGOVERN: It used to be 14 when I was on duty, so to speak.

JAY: Who all give their point of view on the question. And the question here was: is there a weapons program in Iran? The majority of the agencies come up with--.

MCGOVERN: It wasn't a majority. It was unanimous, Paul.

JAY: Unanimous.

MCGOVERN: Yeah.

JAY: There are no weapons program that we know of in Iran.

MCGOVERN: It was an incredibly sensitive estimate, because the president and vice president were going around the world saying Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon. And what happened when Tom Fingar came in, from the State Department, he did a bottom-up assessment and found out that there was dubious evidence all along, even before 2003, but for sure in 2003, they had made a decision to stop making the nuclear warhead [inaudible]

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=5945

And then there is the fact that Ron Paul is the only credible anti-war candidate.

The ad discussed by Cenk is here:

 

Ron Paul is the only candidate to oppose the military industrial complex, much as Eisenhower would have been, and so too, is our only credible anti-war candidate.

What has the Democratic Party come to when the Republicans have a better candidate on the military industrial complex, on foreign policy, and our unjustified wars?

Comments

[Mainecoonfan]

This is just the latest version of "But we've always been at war with East Asia." It's generally a sound election-year strategy to distract the voters from domestic problems by creating a new international ruckus of some kind.

[Rick]

interesting information. there is something to think about