Posted
8:40 pm
by Ken
IranWhat with Ahmedinejad's
letter to Bush and the more specific
Hassan Rohani open letter,
Jim Henley first thought a
deal between the US and Iran might be in the offing, then last Sunday had
second thoughts on reading the news that
the carriers are heading for the Gulf. (The significance or otherwise of the carriers is discussed in comments to Henley's
second post.) I don't know either. But here are a few links.
We start, of course, with the
Hersh article that dragged discussion of the war plans into the mainstream. Professor Paul Rogers of the
Oxford Research group has produced a detailed study of the likely causes, course, and
consequences of a war, available in print and PDF formats and
online here.
On the Left, Immanuel Wallerstein
doesn't think an attack is likely. The editors of
Monthly Review think it's a definite possibility, as does MRzine writer
Pham Binh. Michele Brand
looks at how the the European powers have stoked the crisis. From the other side of the antiwar spectrum, a British conservative
weighs in, as do
Brian Cloughley and military historian
Martin Van Creveld. Arthur Silber has been on his
usual eloquent form, Billmon
likewise, also the
World Socialist Web Site. See also Juan Cole
here and
here.
Has Ahmedinejad threatened to destroy Israel? No, but the endlessly repeated assertion that he has is likely to be even more dangerous than 'Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors'. When it was claimed that Ahmedinejad had called for Israel to be
'wiped off the map' my first reaction was that several states have recently been wiped off the map - the USSR, the GDR, Yugoslavia - in a way that did not involve the massacre of their populations. Every proponent of the one-state solution wants to see Israel 'wiped off the map' in this sense. Several sources now argue that Ahmedinejad
didn't say that in the first place, and the argument between
Christopher Hitchens and
Juan Cole over the import of what he did say hasn't disputed that. Gary Leupp
sums it up nicely.