War with Iran is Insane and Pointless
Israel has pulled the United States into a (so far) aerial campaign against Iranian nuclear sites. The potential for full-scale war is obvious, with Trump and his acolytes speaking hopefully of possible regime change in Iran.
The argument goes that: Iran is a theocratic, antisemitic state that has pledged to destroy the state of Israel, has armed Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi rebels, and that such a state cannot be allowed to gain the nuclear weapons it has been trying to acquire for decades.
What is wrong with this argument?
President Obama signed a nuclear deal with Iran, the JCPOA, in 2015. The deal effectively limited Iran’s nuclear development to the point that it could only be used for peaceful energy purposes.
Conservatives argued that this deal stripped down the amount of monitoring that Iran’s nuclear program underwent.
This is a lie. According to the IAEA’s website, under the deal more cameras were installed and more inspectors posted to regularly check on Iran’s program. JCPOA substantially increased the level of instpection of Iran’s program. For all the talk of “bringing Iran to the table,” the United States did bring Iran to the table, and then scuppered the resulting deal in 2018.
Then there’s the talk that the United States “gave” Iran billions of dollars as part of the Iran nuclear treaty. False. The United States unfroze Iranian assets that were stored in overseas banks. We effectively returned Iran’s money that we had seized, which did not belong to the US in the frist place.
What’s more, even Obama’s pressure campaign to bring Iran to the JCPOA was overkill. According to our own Director of National Intelligence, Iran gave up trying to acquire a nuclear weapon as far back as 2003. The sanctions regime during the Obama years effectively destroyed Iran’s economy as punishment for a non-existent nuclear weapons program. After Iran agreed to a regime of instrusive safeguards to reassure the United States, and the sanctions were lifted, Trump reimposed those sanctions for no reason other than JCPOA was not his deal.
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, and under the terms of that treaty all of its enrichment sites are accounted for. Iran does not possess a nuclear weapon. By contrast, Israel, a country whose military has cut off food, water, and electricity to 2 million people for months, bombed civilian infrastructure like water treatment plants and bakeries, routinely sniped children in the head and murdered Palestinian doctors – this country is one of five countries on earth that are not signatories of the Non Proliferation Treaty. Israel has anywhere from 90 to 400 nuclear weapons that are kept secret and are not accounted for by the IAEA’s inspectors.
A country that is committing a genocide, and has a secret nuclear arsenal, is obviously a greater threat than one that openly accounts for its nuclear enrichment sites and is not committing a genocide.
War with Iran has been a fantasy for homicidal pigs like Liz Cheney and John Bolton for decades. They thought that the War with Iraq was a great success and want to do it again, and are reading from the same WMD playbook as last time. Don’t let them get away with it.