I heartily agree with Daniel Halper's statement, made in his April 9 column installment, "A defiant act of war": "The best-case scenario for the Islamic Republic of Iran is for the Iranians to take matters in their own hands, express their dissatisfaction and overthrow the oppressive regime." It is in fact a brutal, misogynist, religious-fundamentalist regime deserving (like analogous regimes) overthrow by its own people. But I find Halper's saber-rattling rhetoric troubling as the Bush-Cheney administration actively seeks pretexts for an attack on Iran.
Halper's piece, apparently penned before the release of the 15 detained British sailors, echoes President Bush in calling the detention a "hostage situation." Funny that the British government never publicly called it such. Nor did the U.S. client-government in Iraq, which has indeed (with much of the world) protested the illegal and provocative U.S. detention of Iranian diplomats in Irbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in January. And no one to my knowledge aside from Halper has called it "an act of war." Certainly not the Brits.
What Halper sees as simple and obvious seems in fact ambiguous and complex. While Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted that the British were seized in Iraqi waters, Iraqi Brigadier General Hakim Jassim, in charge of guarding the Shatt al-Arab waterway (who as an officer of the puppet state has no special reason to lie) told AP the day after the March 23 incident: "We were informed [about the arrests] by Iraqi fishermen, after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control. We don't know why they were there."
British experts were inclined to see the incident as a predictable consequence of an unmarked maritime border. Craig Murray, once head of the British Foreign Office's maritime section, wrote that Blair was "being fatuous" in stating that he was "utterly certain" the ship was seized within Iraqi territorial limits. "There is no agreed boundary in the Northern Gulf ..." wrote Murray. "The Iran-Iraq border has been agreed inside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, because there it is also the land border. But that agreement does not extend beyond the low tide line of the coast. Even that very limited agreement is arguably no longer in force. Since it was reached in 1975, a war has been fought over it, and ten-year reviews - necessary because waters and sandbanks in this region move about dramatically - have never been carried out." Commodore Peter Lockwood of the Royal Australian Navy, commanding the Coalition task force in the waterway last October, states matter-of-factly, "No maritime border has been agreed upon by the countries."
Halper wants us to see this incident as something akin to the 1979-81 "hostage crisis." This event followed the overthrow of the hugely unpopular Shah (placed in power by the CIA in 1953) by a broad popular movement, the Shah's flight to the United States, and the U.S. refusal to return him to Iran to stand trial for crimes.
Halper credits the end of that situation to "a true political leader, Ronald Reagan," inaugurated the day the Iranians released the hostages (in return for U.S. concessions). But the causal relationship he draws is dubious, the historical parallel tendentious.
Halper wants a hard line against Iran because Iran is "promising ... to build a nuclear program, even though the world opposes this." I always find it amusing when advocates of the most unpopular regime on earth tell us what "the world" thinks or opposes. That rhetorical device is wearing thin these days when polls show that Germans are much more frightened by the United States than by Iran.
Yes, Iran, like many nations is developing a nuclear power program. It started doing so with the encouragement of U.S. administrations and assistance from General Electric in the 1970s. The IAEA has found no evidence for a military program. But Dick Cheney (not a nuclear inspector or scientist) knows there's a weapons program, and he keeps saying Iran with all its petrol resources can only have military objectives in mind. (He also still insists that Saddam was working with al-Qaeda, and pursuing a nuclear weapons program back in 2003. U.S. intelligence itself has thoroughly debunked these allegations.)
Anyway, Halper wants the Iranians to rise up in rebellion, something that (again) I'd welcome too (although of course it would depend on the nature of the rebellion). But he quickly adds, "If [Iranian rebels] fail, the rest of the world [read: the United States] will come to their assistance" and "a revolution must be initiated" (by whom?) to prevent the Iranian government from gaining "leverage" through the now-concluded coastal episode. He quotes Bush as having ("bravely") said after Sept. 11 that "Our War on Terror ... will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated," - as though these words were somehow relevant to Iran or justify an attack on that country, which, like Iraq, had nothing to do with Sept. 11.
Halper conflates diverse Muslim targets as "Islamic fascists." I'd suggest that as a recently declared major in political science he study the scholarly literature on fascism and determine whether it accurately applies to phenomena as varied as al-Qaeda's Salafist extremism, Baathist secularism and Iran's political Shiism, or is instead just an emotion-laden epithet introduced into the president's rhetoric by neoconservative propagandists.
Such people have no interest in nuance or mere facts, but great interest in justifying "regime change" throughout Southwest Asia, exploiting ignorance, fear and bigotry, employing the "Big Lie" at every step. If Halper wants a fascist parallel, there it is.
A recent Harris poll showed that 50 percent of Americans oppose an attack on Iran, while 32 percent would support it. Given the incessant anti-Iranian propaganda, and efforts to tar numerous disparate Middle Eastern "regime change" targets with the simplistic "Islamofascist" brush, I'm surprised pro-aggression sentiment is that low.
But it's unfortunate, especially given the historical pattern of Americans rallying to wars based on disinformation - only to realize too late how misled they'd been - that a Daily columnist lends his voice to the propaganda effort.
