With an Iran nuclear deal within striking distance in the P5+1 talks, John McCain is horrified to see the possibility of his longed-for US attack on Iran slowly slipping away. So, to retaliate, he took to the Senate Floor last week to urge Israel to undermine his own country’s diplomatic efforts and “go rogue” on Iran.
Said the Senator from Arizona:
The Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance. On the Iranian nuclear deal, they may have to go rogue. Let’s hope their warnings have not been mere bluffs.
His meaning was clear: the Senator hopes decades of Israeli threats to wipe Iran of the face of the earth were not mere bluffs. He urges Israel to launch a pre-emptive war against an Iran that even the Mossad does not believe is pursuing nuclear weapons.
But the Senator is no dummy. Along with his sidekick Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and the indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (R-NJ), McCain has planted a few little magic pills into recent legislation calling on the US to support Israel if it happens to heed McCain’s calls to attack Iran. As Jon Rainwater points out in the Huffington Post today, Senate Res. 65 — the “Backdoor to War” bill — was drafted to say:
[Congress] urges that, if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.
The language was later diluted, but the marker was laid down. The seed was planted. That is how Congress works.
While McCain winks and hints to Israel that they should attack Iran soon if they want to really scuttle the nuclear talks, the lunatic fringe of the neocon movement like John Bolton can still get ample space in the New York Times to call for the US to just go ahead and “bomb Iran.” In the dialectics of the neoconservative universe, a call for US bombs on Iran will be compromised back to an outright rejection of any nuclear deal and — what the heck — perhaps some more sanctions. Define the extremes as extreme as possible so that the “compromise” pushes the argument inexorably toward conflict.
The “free press” in the US is of course a mouthpiece of the neocons and interventionists, and in the case of John Bolton’s article the New York Times is an accessory to the commission of a criminal threat against the Iranian people. Don’t look for McCain or Bolton or even Dean Baquet in the Hague, though. The “exceptional” nation still operates with impunity. But overseas anger against the US warmongers puts all Americans at risk. No empire lasts forever…
