In the days and weeks ahead, the political Demopublican machine will fog up the Iran matter to such a degree that seeing the forest from the trees will become impossible for the average war-starved American (a default position, it would seem).

For the purpose of formulating a principled position, here’s something of what you need to consider: With all its posturing, Iran is preparing a time table for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Iranians will want to pretend they are calling the shots, so to speak. Saving face is a very crucial component of the culture, in case American multiculturalists have not figured that out yet.

The IAEA did a good job in Iraq; when they reported in 2002 that Iraq had been cleansed from WMD, they were 100 percent correct, although “Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush never stopped gabbling about a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, chemical and biological blights, Scuds and squadrons of unmanned aerial vehicles streaking U.S. skies, and traveling laboratories teeming with twisted scientists.”
(And some members of the fantasy-based community still believe “the weapons” are in Bashar al-Assad’s basement.)

So long as its inspectors are fully engaged with Iran, the Iranian crisis will remain a manufactured one, drummed up by interested parties: Iranian exiles and the usual American armchair warriors.

Recall, as the US was ramping-up for war against Iraq, Hans Blix, Chief United Nations weapons inspector, and Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei were crisscrossing Iraq, scouring the place for WMD. The two had turned Iraq into a CSI-like crime scene:

“From November 2002 to January 2003, Blix conducted approximately 300 inspections of more than 230 different sites in Iraq. Of these, more than 20 had hitherto not been inspected. (He set up field offices in Mosul and Basra, places he could never hope to access today.) Despite this empirical exercise, the fantasy-based community asserted that ‘All the Western intelligence services – the UN itself – stated with certainty that this thug had and was hiding WMD?'”

Please read my account at the time of Blix’s efforts in “INK STAINS AND BLOOD STAINS” and “What WMD.”

Dislike for these operatives doesn’t change that what they reported comported with reality, perfectly.

Israel, unlike America, acts in its self-interest. So it is natural that Israelis would, overall, encourage the world to help diminish their own plight vis-a-vis Iran. However, a man I really like, the hard rightist Avigdor Lieberman (foreign minister) is “being criticized for aligning his policies with those of Moscow.” That’s telling. And what is the position of Moscow? Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian news agencies “that although [the] Iranian’s missile exercise was worrying, restraint was needed. An official communiqué urged ‘Western powers to restrain themselves.”

That seems reasonable at this point.