Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films produced a video which illustrates a point I was making in the comments of an earlier post.
Here’s what the reader Martin Sims wrote in part:
Here we are once again considering the terrorist nation of Iran. A nation that controls Palestine through Hamas, Lebanon and Syria though Hezbollah, and Iraq through the Mahdi army, untold numbers of insurgency and militant organizations and even Al Qaeda. Iran is closing in quickly on the ability to mass produce nuclear weapons while our politicians are arguing over whether or not they are even a threat to the region, and our own nation. Israel, as I have said before, does not have the luxury of debating this issue until the day it is confirmed that the Iranian nuclear program has in fact produced it’s first reliable weapon. Israel has nuclear weapons but will they use them? It is a strongly held belief that only the United States can deliver a conventional strike devastating enough to impact the Iranian nuclear program, however, if the United States does not do that and soon, Israel will be forced to consider the nuclear option as it’s only reliable means of ensuring it’s continued existence.
…
If the United States is unable or unwilling to confront Iran militarily within the next 12 months, world war three is almost a certainty. Because if Iran is able to get all their pieces in place before they are directly attacked, this chess game is over and no country in the world will be safe from the terrorist army they have been building up arming and training for over 30 years. China, Russia, Venezuela and many other countries have already chosen their allies in this struggle by supporting, supplying and defending Iran in it’s quest for nuclear weapons and undying support of terrorism in all it’s horrific forms and manifestations.
Here’s my response which, I feel, is buoyed by the excellent video embedded above.
It is truly mind boggling how little you actually know about the way the Middle East works, the actual relationship between Iran and paramilitary elements in the Middle East, the foreign policy objectives of Iran, and the U.S. airstrike (and Israeli for that matter) capability.
Some people may “strongly” hold beliefs that the U.S. is the only nation capable of decimating the Iranian ability to build nuclear weapons but that doesn’t make it true. In fact, there is quite a bit of disagreement in the intel community over the efficacy of airstrikes at all. This isn’t the early 1980’s. Iran is conducting its programs mostly underground and there’s simply no good information on what would happen if we hit them even with our best weapons at those locations, or even if we know where all of the underground facilities are located.
And again, the talk about the airstrikes neatly sidesteps these issues by saying that the point of these attacks would be to put Iran in its place and make them pay for supposedly mucking up Iraq. Not to mention the fact that the intel over that assertion is in question. Much of the sourcing from that intel has come from a particular subversive Iranian group operating in Iraq and hoping to get the U.S. to weaken the Iranian government. Now where have we fallen for that sort of thing before?
But the claims of influence over the Mahdi Army has been wildly exaggerated. Sure, people in Iran are responsible for sending money and weapons. But we’re not talking about government officials giving aid and instructions to the Mahdi Army. The Shiites in Iraq are notoriously independent and leery of Iran. If anything, we have been driving some Shiite militias into the arms of Iran because of our inability to provide basic security and social services.
None of this stuff is difficult to understand or find in many, many open source materials. One should learn to read and evaluate the source of what one reads before swallowing it completely. In respect to Iran, it’s important to be more than a little skeptical of sources provided by and steming from the Bush Administration. It was only four to five years ago, after all, when we heard similar imminent danger arguments about Iraq. And we all know how that turned out.
Or do we?
