Countdown for Iran: When Commonsense is Nonsense

By Ramzy Baroud

"......Considering these difficult questions, one must assume that any attack on Iraq is both irrational from a military viewpoint and self-defeating from a political one. However, the quandary with any political analysis of this subject that consults reason or even Machiavellian realpolitik is that it fails to consider history, and in this case, recent history which taught us that the Bush administration functions in a vacuum, separate from commonsense or any other kind of sense. It was around this time, some four years ago, that many hoped that the American military buildup in the Gulf region was aimed at strengthening the US political position against Iraq, to simply convey to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that the US ‘means business’. It was clear from the outset to any even-headed observer that a war against Iraq would destabilise the region and harm the United States’ overall interests in the Middle East. I stated that numerous times on American radio programmes, receiving all sorts of censure for being anti-American and unpatriotic.

Now, we stand at the same critical junction, four years later, as US news networks are readying for another awesome fireworks show, this time over Tehran; dehumanisation of the Iranians has already begun; the public is being fed with all kinds of half-truths and all sorts of rubbish about the Islamic Republic and its people; insanity has returned and the voices of reasons are again, labelled, shunned and marginalised. But for obvious reasons, this time around, war is an evident mistake, a fact that should irk and make every sensible American, every Congressman, every commentator question the wisdom of a new war while the country is on the verge of defeat in another.

Such a reality suggests that the Bush administration is working against the interests of his own people and makes Pilger’s analysis the more poignant; indeed, as irrational as it may seem, the US could very much be on its way to war with Iran.

But as explained by Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998-2005, “getting into Iraq and defeating Saddam was easy. But today, America is stuck there and knows neither how to win, nor how to get out.” Fischer writes: “A mistake is not corrected by repeating it over and over again. Perseverance in error does not correct the error; it merely exacerbates it.”

But this is exactly the key trait that has defined the current Bush administration since its early years in office. It’s committed to duplicating failures; instead of abandoning the Iraqi ship, it insists on setting sail in the same tumultuous sea, another defected one......"