February 15, 2007
IRAN: Confronting the prospect of collective suicide
by Stephanie Hiller
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created. -- Albert Einstein
The situation vis-à-vis Iran continues to swing uncertainly from powerful evidence of a build up towards war to firm denials by government officials that there is any such plan afoot. Clearly the hesitation, if it is real, on the part of US officials has to do with the extreme repercussions that may be expected if indeed a war against Iran takes place.
The main repercussion is nuclear.
Even without the use of nuclear missiles, an attack on the nuclear facilities in Iran will release quantities of radioactive fallout, which, according to the Federation of American Scientists, would spread as far as western India.
Worse, the battle plan includes the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons by the US. These weapons run from about one third to several times the size of the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. That is still plenty of fallout, and with 1500 targets projected, the use of nuclear weapons against some of them could certainly have a devastating effect on the country and on the region.
It is clear that the US is preparing for the eventuality of war. One naval fleet is in the Persian Gulf and another is due to arrive by the end of the month; Newsweek reports this week that it has received word that yet a third fleet will be dispatched. These are big ships sent at considerable express destined to cause considerable congestion in the narrow, 20-mile wide Strait of Hormuz. The ships are loaded with nuclear missiles. In addition, minesweepers have been dispatched to the Gulf.
Patriot missiles have been dispensed to Romania and Bulgaria, and all of Iran's borders are covered. The 20,000-member troop surge to Iraq can be intended to assist on the Iraqi-Iranian border where Shias on both sides would line up to fight for Iran. More troops are also being sent to Afghanistan. It looks very bad.
Meanwhile, Israel has been clamoring for an attack on Iran, asserting that it will carry out an attack if the US fails to do so. Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister who may yet return to power in Israel, asserted during a CNN interview in November that "Iran is German, and it's 1938. Except that this Nazi regime that is in Iran . . . wants to dominate the world, annihilate the Jews, but also annihilate America." Given Iran's third-world status (despite its oil wells, Iran remains a poor country lacking oil refineries to produce its own gasoline), demonizing this country's capacity for large scale annihilation seems more a mirror of Israel's profound trauma than an accurate assessment of what's at stake here. Certainly Ahmadinejhad has shown himself to be virulently anti-Semitic (in the true sense of the word, not as it is generally used against those who criticize Israeli policies), though even there, his genocidal impulses have been exaggerated by mistranslations of what he has said, the most infamous of them his statement that Israel "should be wiped off the map" when what he really said was that the Zionist leadership should be swept away.
All wars are born of trauma, and the Jewish people, Hitler's most tortured victims, have had plenty of trauma. It desperately needs to be healed, but projecting the collective wound upon another collective will not accomplish that healing, and the complex of reasons and justifications that cover over the guilt of what one has done in "self defense" become armor against the needed healing. And so it goes, throughout the world, one trauma creating another.
What Israel and its supporters tend to forget is that Muslim countries have very good reason to dislike Israel, the uninvited guest, whose tragedies they did not create, an interloper which proceeded to torture and exile the Palestinians off their homeland (they viewed the land of Palestine as "the land without a people for the people without a land"), who chipped away at the small amount of land allotted to them when the state of Israel was created, and who, armed by their European and American allies, made war on its neighbors. With some provocation as well, it must be acknowledged; but this is a long-standing conflict, not one with black-and-white values.
And that, indeed, is exactly the problem with the whole picture of the Middle East that has been emerging since 9-11, in which Israel is portrayed as the good, the democratic, the advanced country and Muslems in the surrounding countries are religious fanatics, terrorists, and barbarians. Such is not the reality.
Iran, despite its cries against the "Great Satan," has in fact assisted the US in its fight to capture Al Qaeda from the Taliban; and as was reported earlier this month, in 2003 made an offer to strike a "grand bargain" with us whereby it offered to assist us in Iraq. The offer was dismissed without discussion. (Cheney reportedly said he did not "talk with evil.") Iran was not involved in the attacks on the Twin Towers and, according to the Newsweek article, the Ayatollah Ali Khameini, although deeply suspicious of the American government, was "repulsed" by the terrorist acts and "truly sad about the loss of the civilian lives in America." Barbarians, anyone?
But we require an enemy. We have always lived in a world of warfare, at least that is what we have learned from our study of recorded history, a tale of war after war with a few intermissions of peace. War has been the dominant condition of our lives, the ghastly shadow that hangs over our heads, and it has traumatized us, winners and losers alike, for where losers suffer the wound they enjoy the virtue of righteousness whilst the victors suffer the guilt of murder.
In America it is the white elite that suffers that guilt for the deaths of so many African slaves, the murder of so many Indians and finally the bombing of Hiroshima. We need a new war, a blood purge, a conquest, to realize our idealistic vision and founding principles, or to dispense with our vast machinery of war and maintain our industries; whether for oil or to spread freedom, the masters of war are yearning for a victory over those we would imagine to be the doers of evil. For the elites do not understand, cannot envisage or imagine, another way to maintain their power.
Yet war has not always been the way of the world. The work of Marija Gimbutas has unearthed prehistoric Eastern European cultures in which no weapons were found. No weapons. If we told this to Bush or Cheney, he would not believe us. The artifacts that Gimbutas discovered (thousands of them) strongly indicate that these cultures also worshipped the Mother Goddess. It appears that peaceful ways and ways that honor the female go together; and that is certainly more than Bush or Cheney could stand.
They are not alone. The average educated person -- and the average uneducated person as well -- tends to believe that war is an unavoidable part of the human condition. Men believe it more than women but they persuade women that they are naïve. This is the way the world is, our men tell us sagely; nothing can be done.
This inability to conceive of peace and to believe humans are capable of achieving it makes it impossible for us ever to create peace, succumbing instead to the old miserable pattern, the self-fulfilling prophecy: the inevitability of war. Over the centuries, these wars have grown ever more heinous, more torturous and cruel, with fewer warriors confronting one another face to face, and many more women and children slaughtered on the sidelines while men lost their minds on the grisly battlefield whilst bombs fell on city and town, with more fiendish and effective weapons used, and dreadful environmental devastation, until warfare finally achieved its overweening achievement, its pinnacle and simultaneously its demise, in the creation of a weapon capable of destroying the entire world, or at least the human experiment upon it. That weapon epitomized the ultimate negativity within the human shadow, where the brilliance of highly civilized individuals in a highly civilized society turned against itself to produce the end of that civilization in a colossal collective suicide, nuclear war.
The scientists were the first to realize what they had done. Niels Bohr was a major contributor to quantum mechanics and atomic physics. Even before the bomb was used, he tried to persuade Churchill and Roosevelt that the only was to control the demon they were about to unleash was international cooperation in an atmosphere of open communication and trust. Leo Szilard, who helped achieve the first nuclear chain reaction, became alarmed by the arms race that followed the development of the bomb and campaigned nationwide to stop it, creating the Council for Abolishing War, which later became the Council for a Livable World. Even Oppenheimer, whose attitude toward the bomb he helped create was ambivalent at best, was finally so horrified by the bombing of Nagasaki following upon Hiroshima that he did everything he could to prevent the creation of the hydrogen bomb (the "super") and to stop the arms race. And Einstein spent the rest of his life after World War II working for disarmament and peace in the belief that a world government was the only solution to the problem of war.
What these men hoped or saw was that the nightmare of nuclear war could be the catalyst for an evolutionary leap for mankind [sic], an opportunity to end war forever; and indeed, it might have been so, had "mankind" been capable of grasping the concept. Alas, the scientists' vision was ahead of its time. The United States was wrapped up in its apprehension of communism, intent on the race to possess bigger and better bombs as the only way to secure its own survival. It was a pattern that had been set in place at the inception of Manhattan Project, created to build the bomb before Hitler built it, and this idea of preventing attack with ever more menacing weapons has become the pattern of our age. Like Netanyahu, we are haunted by Hitler's ghost; we are convinced that if such an evil one as he could once rise to dominance, it can happen again. If it is not Saddam Hussein then it may be Muhammad Ahminejad, and we always must be the one to draw our pistols before the other guy can walk across the dusty plaza. Our national policy is created out of the fear that another nation will get what we want before we get it, and as resources dwindle, and population grows, our desperation can only increase. Competition, based on the apprehension that the enemy will develop a newer, more effective weapon, drives the machine; and denial is the cushion on which the driver rests his butt. In other words, all kinds of justifications are summoned to rationalize a game of unprecedented stupidity. The theory of deterrence -- the belief that having nuclear weapons is what maintains the peace -- and language about a war on terror being fought to create democracy in the Middle East are all sugar coatings on a very bitter pill. The truth is, the military machine is "wagging the dog." Men are driven to keep the game in motion regardless of consequences because they participate in a self-perpetuating, self-justifying group mindset and they can't question it lest they lose their jobs.
In 1949, years before Eisenhower's famous statement that the military industrial complex would soon run the country, Einstein saw what was ahead:
'I believe America may totally succumb to the fearful militarization which engulfed Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. There is real danger that political power and the power to influence the minds of people will pass increasingly into the hands of the military, which is used to approaching all political problems from the point of view of military expediency. Because of America's supremacy, the military point of view is forced upon the world.'
With Bush and the Neoconservatives, this mindset of "peace through strength" has come unabashedly to the forefront. Where previous presidents, afraid of being pushed into what might become a nuclear confrontation, tried to maintain power by making backroom deals, selling arms to buy allegiance and dismantling foreign governments that did not accept American rules -- tactics that were basically sly, deceitful, and cowardly -- these new conservatives push the president to step front and center with a big fist that cannot be ignored. Anything less is appeasement in their book, and you all remember where appeasement got us in 1938, right?
This is international power politics for men with real balls, and men with balls are not afraid to use nuclear weapons, because by jiminy if the good lord didn't want us to use nuclear weapons then he wouldn't have given them to us (basically what Harry Truman believed when he used the bomb against Japan). And thank goodness He gave all this power to the worthy and the good, to this great Christian nation dedicated to effectuating His will.
All Neocons do not think alike, of course. I doubt if Cheney believes in God. Cheney believes in money and my guess is that's about it. But Bush probably does believe that he is doing good by doing God's will; at least that's what I think. I think Bush is completely -- if naively -- sincere in what he says, that America's intention in this war against evil is to bring democracy to the Middle East and by any means. A reading of the Old Testament will surely confirm that violent means are perfectly acceptable to this God.
Bush has brought into the clear light of day the inevitable consequences of the mindset he holds dear. Unless Iran just caves in (which is possible, given the dimensions of the threat), stops developing its nuclear capability and accepts whatever handouts the US is prepared to offer, bombs are going to fly from the Straits of Hormuz, and the consequences could be horrific for all of us.
Whatever happens, assuming we survive, the problem of changing this mindset will still be before us. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem with the same tools that you used to create it. You have to look at the whole situation from another level, and that's what we will do in the next essay.
Meanwhile, we need to hold this truth to be self-evident: A WORLD WITHOUT WAR IS POSSIBLE.
Stephanie Hiller is the editor of Awakened Woman. This is the third in a series of articles about Making Peace in the War on Terrorism. The previous two articles are:
Machismo: Why the US Won't Pull Out of Iraq
The Forms of Denial are Many, and the Violence Goes On
The fourth and final article will appear next week.