April 8, 2006
Rep. Waxman & Sen. Boxer & Feinstein,
Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the New Yorker, is reporting that the Bush administration is planning pre-emptive air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Whatever Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, or weapons they have, they are not and will not be a threat to us given our arsenal of 10,000 nuclear warheads. It is nearly as unlikely that they would strike Israel given their arsenal of 200 or more and our close relationship with them. Anyone smart enough to gain political power in any country would remember MAD, mutually assured destruction, from the Cold War, and would know that the calculus would be even worse for anyone who used a nuke on us or gave a nuke to a terrorist group that used it on us—the country that did that would know he may harm us, but before the mushroom cloud cleared here, his country would no longer exist.
Last summer, Russia, China, and several former Soviet republics asked us when we were going to finish up our military operations in Asia and leave. I doubt that they would sit idly by while we invade another major oil producing country, effectively controlling the spigot for the whole world.
Before the Iraq War, in addition to the embarrassing, childish lies about ties to 9/11, WMD, and spreading democracy, a quieter argument was made that controlling Iraq’s oil was a way to break the back of OPEC, and lower the price of oil. Now BBC journalist Greg Palast has received State Department documents that indicate the purpose was to prop up the price of oil and keep Saddam from pumping more when the sanctions came off. This was verified in a portion of one of the Downing Street Memos recently that said Bush sent reassurances to Russia’s Putin that our invasion of Iraq would NOT drive down the price of oil.
So it appears that even that figleaf of a national security argument is a lie. We killed over a hundred thousand Iraqis and wasted the lives of our soldiers to pad the profits of oil companies, the defense industry, and a handful of other corporations.
America should not have to sacrifice so much of our blood and tax dollars so that so very, very few can profit.
As an elected representative of the people of California, you must do whatever you can to stop this. A good start would be telling America plainly why we invaded Iraq in the first place without referring to the insulting PR firm lies the Bush administration has fed us. Jack Murtha has done an admirable job telling us the truth about what’s going on in Iraq today. Now we need a Murtha to tell us how we got there.
You must stop Bush from attacking Iran.
Sincerely,
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2 comments:
I share your concern about Bush's plan to nuke Iran. And while people remember MAD, that's no guarantee that some nutcase might decide to go ahead anyway, or that a bomb might find its way into terrorist hands without the approval of the government at all (think of all the "loose nukes" in Russia that Bush has failed to secure). So your proposed solution, to incinerate any country that we think was involved in using a nuclear weapon against us, is a moral nightmare. The people of the countries most likely to commit such acts are living in countries where the people are most removed from being able to influence their government's decisions. They are innocents, and they are innocent. To destroy a country of innocent people because of the acts of one or a few madmen is morally indefensible. We don't have to talk about the laws of war here. If we were to respond to a nuclear attack by nuking urban areas in another country, we will have descended to the monstruous level of those who attacked us. If we are going to deal effectively with the problem of nuclear terrorism, and still have a shred of moral dignity left, we have to come up with better solutions than a nuclear counter-strike.
Anyone smart enough to gain political power in any country would remember MAD, mutually assured destruction, from the Cold War, and would know that the calculus would be even worse for anyone who used a nuke on us or gave a nuke to a terrorist group that used it on us—the country that did that would know he may harm us, but before the mushroom cloud cleared here, his country would no longer exist.
I wasn't proposing incinerating our enemies, merely stating that it has been an axiom of nuclear warfare for a couple of decades.
We had a good set up for dealing with loose nukes that didn't involve incinerating anyone, but the Bush administration's aggression in Iraq probably makes that program of selling nukes to us to destroy look foolish to Russia now.
The problem with the current bunch in the White House is they aren't looking to solve the issues they bring up--they are looking to use those issues, nukes, WMD, terrorism, even spreading democracy, as an excuse to wage war and steal the resources of countries that they covet for their corporate friends.
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