I learned something else new this weekend: audioblogging. If you click on the arrow next to the right of the label that says "Play this audio post", you can let me know how it sounds.
The audioblog is about the prospects that the Cheney-Bush administration might go to war with Iran. And, yes, that picture at the top is me.
Below is a photo of Mia Maestro. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the audio blog:
A transcript of the audio blog appears below the fold.
Transcript:
This is my first attempt at audioblogging. So I thought I would use it to address the question of going to war with Iran.
I'll start by describing my concerns about this situation. I really do believe, as both John Kerry and our Dear Leader Bush said in one of their Presidential debates in 2004, that nuclear nonproliferation should be the most important foreign policy priority for the United States. So the fact that Iran is moving toward the capability to build a nuclear weapon is a serious concern. The current effort by the European Union, the United States and the UN to get Iran to abandon any such goal is a very important one.
Understanding this whole issue is difficult because in matters of nuclear physics, 99.99% of us or more really are lay people. It's complicated by the fact that there are clearly Republicans, like Pete Hoekstra's House Intelligence Subcommittee, who are willing to deliberately deceive us about the status of Iran's nuclear program.
I made a blog post here at The Blue Voice on Thursday, September the 14th, that talked about how Gregory Schulte, the US Ambassador to the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, used a claim that that Iran had constructed 164 new centrifuges as a scare tactic. Actually, as I explained there, this means that Iran is still far away from the ability to produce enough uranium for even one nuclear bomb.
And there's no evidence as yet that Iran is producing any weapons-grade uranium at all. The United States shouldn't be making foreign policy based on panicky, worst-case assessments of problems.
But my other big concern with Iran, besides the nonproliferation challenge, is that the Cheney-Bush administration may use Iran's nuclear program as an excuse to launch military strikes on that country. Because that would be a disaster.
Whether someone supports a strike on Iran or not, there's no excuse for not being realistic about likely consequences of such an attack.
Let's start with the fact that it would be a preventive war, which is flat-out illegal in international law. As we've seen again this past week with this thoroughly shameful debate over torture taking place in the Republican-dominated Congress, neither Dick Cheney nor George Bush nor most Republican members of Congress have anything but contempt for international law. But launching such a preventive war against Iran wouldt have significant and far-reaching consequences that are likely to damage American interests. And anyone who believes otherwise is probably taking too much OxyContin.
Next, we have 147,000 American troops in Iraq, at last count, supporting the pro-Iranian, majority-Shi'a government there. If the Cheney-Bush administration bombs Iran, Iran would have maximum incentive to attack the American troops in Iraq and to press their Shi'a allies running the Iraqi government to join them in attacking the Americans.
Another factor is the increased risk of terrorism against American targets. It's difficult these days to tell which "expert on terrorism" to believe the most. But most of them seem to think that Lebanese Hizbullah has a signficant ability to commit terrorist acts worldwide, including in the United States. Hizbullah is a Shi'a organization closely allied with Iran.
The final risk I'll mention here of an American attack on Iran is closely related to the first. If Iranian regulars enter Iraq to fight American troops, other neighboring countries like Turkey and Syria are also more likely to invade to protect their own perceived interests in Iraq. That's not just a theoretical possibility. It's been reported in the press that Turkey has been conducting limited military operations in northern Iraq against the Kurdish PKK guerrilla group already.
There are three major degrees of disaster the United States could encounter in Iraq. One is an insurgency. Another is a civil war. The third is a regional war. We've had the insurgency basically since the invasion began in March 2003. The civil war has been going on at least since the second half of 2005. An American attack on Iran would likely bring on the regional war.
Attacking Iran is a very, very bad idea. For American citizens, we can at least try not to be bamboozled the way virtually all Republicans were over the phony claims of WMDs in Iraq prior to beginning that war. So were far too many Democrats deceived in the same way.
A transcript of the audio blog appears below the fold.
