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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/14/22

The Hard Work of Creating a Last Resort War on Iran

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Where do all the Lockheed Martin executives vacation?

At the Last Resort!

Joe Biden and Israel are planning to attack Iran as a Last Resort.

Weapons dealers love nothing better than last resorts. Invading Ukraine was a last resort according to Russia. Shipping endless weapons into Ukraine is a last resort according to the U.S.

Win-win! Just pay no attention to the relentless and deliberate escalation of the past decades. Erase how the Baltics kicked out the Soviets 30 years go. Dude, they're giving out free drinks and beach chairs at the Last Resort!

War supporters said the U.S. urgently needed to attack Iran in 2007. It was the last possible resort. The U.S. did not attack. The claims turned out to be lies. Even a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 pushed back and admitted that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. Nothing bad resulted from not using the Last Resort. Again in 2015, the last resort was attacking Iran. The U.S. did not attack Iran. Nothing bad happened.

You'd think the endless false claims of "last resort" would matter. You might even think that the endless possibilities that anyone can think of trying instead of war would render the very idea of organized mass murder ever being a last resort incoherent. However, polling shows that as long as you don't explicitly advertise a war as NOT being a last resort, everyone simply assumes that each war is going to be the first ever honest-to-goodness war of Last Resort.

There has of course, for decades, been a strong case that there is simply no need to attack Iran, as a first resort, a last resort, or a discount vacation black site prison camp.

Having a nuclear weapons program is not a justification for war, legally, morally, or practically. The United States has nuclear weapons and no one would be justified in attacking the United States.

Dick and Liz Cheney's book, Exceptional, tell us we must see a "moral difference between an Iranian nuclear weapon and an American one." Must we, really? Either risks further proliferation, accidental use, use by a crazed leader, mass death and destruction, environmental disaster, retaliatory escalation, and apocalypse. One of those two nations has nuclear weapons, has used nuclear weapons, has provided the other with plans for nuclear weapons, has a policy of first-use of nuclear weapons, has leadership that sanctions the possession of nuclear weapons, keeps nuclear weapons in six other countries and the seas and skies of the Earth, and has frequently threated to use nuclear weapons. I don't think those facts would make a nuclear weapon in the hands of the other country the least bit moral, but also not the least bit more immoral. Let's focus on seeing an empirical difference between an Iranian nuclear weapon and an American one. One exists. The other doesn't.

If you're wondering, U.S. presidents who have made specific public or secret nuclear threats to other nations, that we know of, as documented in Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, have included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, while others, including Barack Obama, have frequently said things like "All options are on the table" in relation to Iran or another country.

In 2015, as mentioned, war supporters said the U.S. urgently needed to attack Iran. It did not attack. The claims turned out to be lies. Even the claims of supporters of the nuclear agreement reinforced the lie that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in need of containment. There is no evidence that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program.

The long history of the United States lying about Iranian nuclear weapons is chronicled by Gareth Porter's book Manufactured Crisis.

Proponents of war or steps toward war (sanctions was a step toward war on Iraq) may say we urgently need a war now, but they will have no argument for urgency, and their claims are, thus far, transparent lies.

If Iran is guilty of any crime, and there is evidence to support that claim, the United States and the world should seek its prosecution. Instead, the United States is isolating itself by tearing down the rule of law. It is destroying its credibility by tearing up treaties and threatening last resortism. In a Gallup poll in 2013 and a Pew poll in 2017 the majority of nations polled had the United States receive the most votes as the greatest threat to peace on earth. In the Gallup poll, people within the U.S. chose Iran as the top threat to peace on earth " Iran which had not attacked another nation in centuries and spent less than 1% of what the U.S. spent on militarism. These views are clearly a function of what people are told through news media.

The history of U.S./Iranian relations matters here. The U.S. overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator / weapons customer.

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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