Designed Failure

Yes, it's significant that Iranian proxy group Hizbollah moved into Israel on the same day that Western leaders decided to move the Iranian nuclear situation into the UN Security Council. It's also significant that the referral came on the heels of a story sounding upbeat about the ongoing talks:

The European Union said on Friday it expected a "substantial response" from Iran at talks next week on a package of incentives to end a nuclear standoff, describing an initial meeting as constructive.

"It's a good start for what we expect will be a positive meeting on July 11," Cristina Gallach, spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said of his meeting late on Thursday with Iran chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani.

"We expect on Tuesday that they will be able to give us a substantial response," she said by telephone on Friday of a second round of July 11 talks on a package of technology, trade and other incentives for Iran to halt uranium enrichment.

What happened between July 7 and July 11? That'd be a good question by an enterprising journalist. And I'd direct it to the United States. Because, as the great Arthur Silber noted in a recent post, diplomatic failure would not be seen as a setback by many in the White House, but a great victory.

1. As (Seymour) Hersh points out and has been obvious since it began, this latest effort at diplomacy directed by the U.S. is designed to fail. We are demanding that the Iranians concede the major point in dispute -- Iran's right to enrich uranium -- before the negotiations even begin. This isn't diplomacy. This is issuing an ultimatum: "You will do exactly as we say -- or else."

2. No one could legitimately expect this diplomacy to succeed, so what's the point? The point is precisely the same one achieved by the U.S.'s phony dance with the U.N. in the leadup to the Iraq invasion: to provide cover for a decision that has already been made. When the U.S. begins bombing Iran, Bush will say: "We tried diplomacy. No one wants war, which is always the last resort. But they refused to engage in diplomacy, so they left us no choice. After 9/11, we cannot permit threats to our country to grow unchecked. I will not allow the American people to be attacked again. An Iran with nuclear weapons was too great a danger, and it had to be stopped." At that point, as devastation begins to spread through the Middle East and Iraq explodes into even greater violence, no one will remember that we made it impossible for Iran to engage with us diplomatically, and that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons and won't have any for at least five to 10 years -- and our media will never remind us of what actually happened.

3. Consider the unreality of what's happening here. Iran is fully entitled to pursue the non-military enrichment of uranium under the terms of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty -- to which it is a signatory. We make exceptions and give enormously valuable aid to countries like India that are not signatories to the treaty -- while we demand that Iran give up rights it indisputably has under the same treaty. Given the stakes involved, it doesn't even begin to capture the madness involved in this approach to describe it as incoherent and self-contradictory. As we stand on the brink of a military catastrophe -- one that we will have begun for no reason at all -- this is simply insane.

4. The overall pattern at work here is exactly the same one utilized for Iraq: phony diplomacy, then U.N. action which will similarly make compliance by Iran impossible, then a few speeches accusing Iran of defying the will of the "civilized world" and of being too great a threat to be tolerated -- and then the bombing. And almost no one will be heard to say that the "crisis" was created out of thin air, and that in fact no crisis exists at all. As I have pointed out a number of times, all of this is calculated to reach its climax sometime in the fall -- precisely so that it will have the greatest possible impact on the coming elections.

5. Note this sentence in the news story: "Western powers suspect Tehran has a secret programme to build nuclear weapons." As the Hersh article makes clear in detail, no one has any intelligence about Iran's nuclear program at all. Suspicions are all we have -- and they are suspicions based on precisely nothing.

Let us state the final conclusion boldly and unmistakably, so we may appreciate its full horror: the Bush administration has already decided, and probably decided some time ago, that it will attack Iran. They want a wider war. Everything that is now going on is simply the cover for the moment when the bombing begins, intended to provide what will be accepted as "justification" for the attack by the American public and the world.

We're certainly being set up for this scenario to play out again. Many have seen it before and understand what needs to be done to combat it: Harry Reid's resolution to force the President to back up any intelligence claims with evidence is a good start. But it is especially significant to understand what's happening, especially since the Israeli-Lebanese conflict going on right now is a parallel situation, and may be used to permit a strike on Iran without US involvement, though with a wink and a nod. The military, as Sy Hersh notes, is balking at an American attack on Tehran. That won't stop the neocons, who are of the same mind as the Israelis on this score anyway. Thus they get to have their cake and eat it too: a strike against Iran without putting American lives at risk. At least not initially.