Top 100 Reasons Not to Bomb Iran
Top 100 Reasons Not to Bomb Iran
1. There are over 80
million men, women, and children in Iran. Bombing them would
be mass-murder.
2. If the U.S. government and its allies
bomb Libya and Iran when their governments choose not to
have nuclear weapons, you can forget about North Korea and
the rest of the world choosing not to have nuclear
weapons.
3. The longer the world has nuclear weapons, and
the more countries that have them, the greater the
likelihood of nuclear war.
4. We now know that even a
small nuclear war can block out the sun, kill crops, and
starve eve-ryone on earth who survives.
5. Bombing people
makes those who survive and many who care about them very
angry, which is why the “war on terrorism” has
predictably increased terrorism.
6. Bombing people kills
many, injures more, traumatizes even more, enrages even
more, cre-ates huge numbers of refugees, and destabilizes
the region bombed.
7. Bombing Iran will produce anti-U.S.
and anti-Western and anti-Israeli terrorism.
8. Bombing
Iran risks direct war between the United States and nuclear
governments including Russia.
9. If you think people want
to be bombed because of shortcomings and evil deeds of their
governments, you’re not actually thinking at all; you
don’t want to be bombed because of the shortcomings and
evil deeds of your government.
10. If bombing nations
made people better off and created human rights, earth would
be a para-dise by now.
11. Bombing countries is illegal
under the Kellogg-Briand Pact without exceptions, and
regard-less of whether Congress “authorizes” it. Another
country bombing you would be a crime regardless of which
parts of its government “authorized” it.
12. Bombing
countries is illegal under the United Nations Charter with
two narrow exceptions, and regardless of whether or not the
U.S. Congress does or does not do anything.
13. One of
those exceptions is when the U.N. Security Council
“authorizes” a war. It has not done so in this case and
certainly will not. And doing so wouldn’t get you around
the Kel-logg-Briand Pact.
14. The other exception is
“defense,” but if anything is not defense it is
the bombing of a far smaller country half-way around the
world that has not attacked or even threatened to at-tack
your country.
15. Attempts to provoke Iran into attacking
U.S. military forces near Iran (or to disguise some U.S.
forces as Iranian and have U.S. forces shoot at each other,
as Vice President Dick Cheney once proposed) does not result
in an Iranian attack on the actual United States or any
legal ability to claim “defense.”
16. Israel is not a
U.S. state.
17. The Israeli government has been
threatening, provoking, and lying about Iran for decades,
which are not defensive behaviors.
18. Saudi Arabia is
not a U.S. state.
19. The Saudi government has been
threatening, provoking, and lying about Iran for decades,
which are not defensive behaviors.
20. Iraq is not a U.S.
state. It is the smoldering ruin of a previous war launched
on almost identi-cal and wholly dishonest
pretexts.
21. Not only waging war is a crime, but
threatening war is a crime under the United Nations Charter.
The United States has been threatening war on Iran for
decades, and any attack would follow that string of criminal
actions.
22. The idea that the government of Iraq or
Israel or some other nation could invite the U.S. government
to wage war against Iran in and from its territory does not
exist in written law and would not legitimize yet another
war in the eyes of the world.
23. Gallup polling finds
that in most countries out of 65 surveyed, people’s top
choice as the greatest threat to peace in the world is the
United States government. This needs to be countered, not
exacerbated.
24. It is hard to find anyone in the United
States, and even in the U.S. government, who can even name
every current U.S. war, much less every minor military
action the U.S. military is engaged in. This is a sign that
something has spiraled out of control.
25. Including
recent U.S. wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen,
Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq, the United States military has,
just since World War II, killed or helped kill some 20
million people, overthrown at least 36 governments,
interfered in at least 84 foreign elections, at-tempted to
assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, and dropped bombs on
people in over 30 countries. In many cases, these actions
have undone democracy. In none have they created or
“spread” it.
26. A nation possessing prohibited
weapons is no legal, moral, or practical justification for
war. If every lie about Iraq in 2002-2003 had been true, it
would have been no justification for bombing Iraq. The
United States did and still does possess nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons, and that doesn’t justify
anyone bombing the United States.
27. The very same
people who told lies about Iraq are telling almost identical
lies about Iran. They’re counting on you to have no
memory, no sense of judgment, no ability to resist fear
mongering and fluttering flags. They’re counting on you to
fall in line and obey like a drool-ing idiot.
28. In
2003, Iran proposed negotiations with the United States with
everything on the table, in-cluding its nuclear technology,
and the United States refused. Shortly thereafter, the U.S.
government started angling for a war.
29. War supporters
said the United States urgently needed to attack Iran in
2004, 2007, 2015. It did not attack. The claims turned out
to be lies. Even a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate in
2007 pushed back and admitted that Iran had no nuclear
weapons program.
30. The United States gave Iran nuclear
energy technology and encouraged its use.
31. Iran was
attacked with chemical weapons by Iraq, in part provided by
the United States, and refused to use similar weapons in
response.
32. Iran’s Muslim leader has forbidden the
use or possession of weapons of mass destruction.
33. The
CIA gave Iran slightly and obviously flawed plans to build a
nuclear bomb, as part of an effort to frame Iran, and the
man who blew the whistle on that to Congress, Jeffrey
Sterling, was sent to prison as a reward.
34. The United
States has imposed sanctions on Iran that have denied it
green energy technol-ogies and caused significant human
suffering.
35. It is one of the worst possible ways to
blame victims when a government imposes sanctions that
create deprivation, blames the suffering country for
suffering, and justifies war as a re-sult.
36. Sanctions
were used as a step toward war in the case of Iraq, and many
in the U.S. govern-ment have been pushing for war on Iran
since 1979.
37. These include lots of nasty old war
mongers who do things like sing the Beach Boys’
“Barba-ra Ann” changing the lyrics to “Bomb bomb bomb
bomb bomb Iran.” If we let them bomb Iran they will
never shut up.
38. The United States has been
lying about Iran having a nuclear weapons program for
decades, as well documented by Gareth Porter and other
journalists.
39. The 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was not
necessitated by anything Iran did. Iran agreed to tougher
inspections than any other country on earth has ever agreed
to, and those inspec-tions have established that the
agreement was not necessitated by anything Iran
did.
40. The agreement was an alternative to war, which
many in the U.S. Congress and media were clamoring for and
demanding urgently. The failure to launch the war then or on
any of the previous occasions when it was supposedly
urgently needed has resulted in nothing but fur-ther
evidence that there is no need for a war.
41. The White
House has made clear that it wants to manufacture any
possible excuse to aban-don the
agreement.
42. Eventually, after numerous broken
agreements, the nations native to North America stopped
making or believing in agreements with the U.S. government.
The nations of the world will do the same, if the United
States refuses to abide by its commitments.
43. Iran’s
government is deeply flawed, but not in comparison with
governments the United States arms and funds and
supports.
44. The U.S. government facilitates weapons
sales from the United States to 73% of the world’s
dictatorships, and gives military training to most of
them.
45. There is no correlation between where wars
happen and where human rights are abused or democracy
lacking or threats to world peace emanating.
46. There is
no correlation between where wars happen and population
density or resource scarcity or religion or
ideology.
47. There is a strong correlation between where
wars happen and where fossil fuels are
pro-duced.
48. There is a strong correlation between
which nations launch wars and which nations import fossil
fuels.
49. There is a strong correlation between which
nations launch wars and which nations’ people accept war
as a legitimate tool of public policy.
50. There is a
strong correlation between where the United States launches
wars and where that small number of nations remains that
have no U.S. military bases and accept no economic dictates
from the United States.
51. It’s good for the world,
including the people of the United States, for such places
to continue to exist, for the U.S. government not to become
a world government by force of arms. Such an effort is
doomed to failure and misery.
52. Look at a map. Iran is
surrounded by U.S. wars and bases. Its government has shown
more restraint than recklessness in that context, perhaps,
than the U.S. government might show were the Canadian and
Mexican borders (in violation of laws of physics as well as
of hu-mans) lined with Iranian military bases.
53. S.
figures, including Senator John McCain, have spoken often
over the years of wanting to overthrow the government of
Syria and subsequently the government of Iran. The first
step has been disastrous in human and in its own terms. The
larger criminal goal of overthrowing Iran will lead to more
disasters if it is not abandoned.
54. Following the
failure to overthrow Assad despite so much effort, a war on
Iran would require extremely massive murder and
destruction.
55. Think of all the crazy people who have
ever held power in Washington, D.C. Attacking Iran was too
crazy for them.
56. On February 27, 2017, Donald Trump
said, “Almost 17 years of fighting in the Middle East . .
. $6 trillion we’ve spent in the Middle East . . . and
we’re nowhere, actually if you think about it we’re less
than nowhere, the Middle East is far worse than it was 16,
17 years ago, there’s not even a contest . . . we have a
hornet’s nest . . . .”
57. Trump campaigned for
office, like most candidates before him, claiming to oppose
over-throwing governments, and admitting what disasters are
produced by doing so.
58. Military families in swing
states made the difference (as did thousands of other
factors in that close election) by turning against Hillary
Clinton, believing she would be more likely to en-gage in
more wars.
59. In fact, polling has long found the U.S.
public to favor a significant reduction in military
spending, greater use of diplomacy, and fewer
wars.
60. Waging wars for democracy is not terribly
democratic when the people don’t want them and are not
allowed any say in the matter.
61. When Korea announced
plans for peace in April 2018, major U.S. weapons
companies’ stocks plummeted, and propaganda for a war on
Iran surged.
62. Congress and President Trump in 2017
pushed military spending up to well over 60% of the federal
discretionary budget, stripping funding away from human and
environmental needs at home and abroad. That trend of many
years cannot be reversed unless the wars are
stopped.
63. Converting to peaceful industries would
involve so much savings that anyone in need could be
re-trained and assisted in the transition.
64. Bombing
Iran would be an environmental catastrophe for the earth far
outstripping any green energy efforts you’re engaged
in.
65. Maintaining the U.S. military in preparation for
the possibility of bombing Iran — a possibility that grows
with every threat of peace breaking out in Korea or between
the United States and Russia — is an environmental
catastrophe for the earth far outstripping any green ener-gy
efforts you’re engaged in.
66. A war on Iran would
easily cost more than, and a small fraction of annual U.S.
military spend-ing is more than, what it would cost to end
starvation on earth, or end the lack of clean drink-ing
water on earth, or make U.S. colleges free, or convert the
United States to clean energy, or quintuple actual
non-weapons U.S. foreign aid, or build fast trains
connecting all major U.S. cities.
67. The way to
alleviate refugee crises is to halt existing wars and put a
fraction of their cost into aiding refugees, not launch new
wars that leave many more people homeless.
68. A United
States government responsible for providing clean drinking
water, schools, medi-cine, and solar panels to others would
be more secure and face far less hostility around the world,
and it could become such a benefactor for far less than it
spends making itself hated.
69. With every war for
freedom we can count on losing more of our actual freedoms,
and that would be all the more so with a war as crazy as an
attack on Iran.
70. An attack on Iran would also require
intense propaganda fueling the racist and Islamophobic
bigotry already on the rise in the United
States.
71. Results in the United States can be safely
predicted to include: more racist violence, even more
militarized policing, restrictions of speech and assembly,
and a rise in fundamentalist religious hatred and gun
sales.
72. Results in the United States can also be
counted on to include: cuts to all human and envi-ronmental
needs, and a major pushback against all progressive
political initiatives in the name of war.
73. If the U.S.
government bombs Iran, then that insane NRA video with
Charlie Daniels de-manding a war on Iran — which you may
have thought was merely a ploy to sell guns to fan-tasy
backyard warriors — will have gotten what it said it
wanted. That lunacy will be U.S. poli-cy.
74. If the U.S.
government bombs Iran, Netanyahu will openly tell the world
that the United States and its people are a bunch of easily
manipulated chumps.
75. If the U.S. government bombs
Iran, John Bolton will never be off your television
channel, and any station without him will have his moustache
on.
76. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations claims
that Iranian weapons have been used in a war that the U.S.,
Saudi Arabia, and allies are illegally and disastrously
waging in Yemen, cre-ating the single greatest human
catastrophe on earth, the worst famine seen in ages, and the
worst outbreak of cholera ever in the world. That’s not a
justification to impose similar suffer-ing, or any
suffering, on the people of Iran.
77. While Iranian
militarism should be ended, Iran spends less than 1 percent
what the United States does on militarism, and the
comparison in terms of foreign weapons sales is even more
extreme.
78. It is hard to find a war anywhere on the
planet without U.S. weapons in it. In fact, a report that
made news the same day as the ambassador’s claims about
Iranian weapons pointed to the long-known fact that many of
the weapons used by ISIS had once belonged to the Unit-ed
States, many of them having been given by the U.S. to
non-state fighters (aka terrorists) in
Syria.
79. Alternatives to war include the rule of law.
Iranians suspected of crimes, like Americans and Saudis and
anyone else suspected of crimes, should be prosecuted or
otherwise held ac-countable through processes of truth and
reconciliation. Committing more crimes does not reduce
crime.
80. Prime Minister Netanyahu should be questioned
about sharpshooters murdering nonviolent demonstrators in
Gaza, not listened to as he proclaims the same baseless lies
about Iran that he did 16 years earlier about
Iraq.
81. The United States overthrew Iran’s democracy
in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator / weap-ons customer
who lasted until 1979. Iran has never done anything like
that to the United States.
82. The United States shot
down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people. Iran
has never done anything like that to the United
States.
83. The United States has labeled Iran an evil
nation, attacked and destroyed the other non-nuclear nation
on the list of evil nations, desig-nated part of Iran’s
military a terrorist organization, falsely accused
Iran of crimes including the attacks of 9-11, murdered Iranian scientists, funded opposition groups in Iran (including
some the U.S. also designates as ter-rorist), flown drones over Iran, openly and illegally
threatened to attack Iran, and built up
mili-tary forces all around Iran’s borders, while
imposing cruel sanctions on the country. Iran has never
done anything like any of these things to the United
States.
84. The United States now has a president who
seeks the approval of people who want to bring about the end
of the world in the Middle East for religious reasons, and
who have praised President Trump’s announcement of moving
the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem for just those
reasons.
85. The roots of a Washington push for a new war
on Iran can be found in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, the 1996
paper called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing
the Realm, the 2000 Rebuilding America’s Defenses, and in
a 2001 Pentagon memo described by Wesley Clark as listing these nations
for attack: Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and
Iran.
86. In 2010, Tony Blair included Iran on a similar list of
countries that he said Dick Cheney had aimed to overthrow.
The line among the pow-erful in Washington in 2003 was that
Iraq would be a cakewalk but that real men go to Tehran. The arguments in
these old forgotten memos were not what the war makers tell
the public, but much closer to what they tell each other.
The concerns here are those of dominating re-gions rich in
resources, intimidating others, and establishing bases from
which to maintain control of puppet governments.
87. The
reason why “real men go to Tehran” is that Iran is not
the impoverished disarmed nation that one might find in
Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. Iran is much bigger and much
better armed. Whether the United States launches a major
assault on Iran or Israel does, Iran will retaliate against U.S. troops and
probably Israel and possibly the United States itself as well. And the
United States will without any doubt re-retaliate for that.
Iran cannot be unaware that the U.S. government’s pressure
on the Is-raeli government not to attack Iran consists of reassuring the Israelis that the United
States will attack when needed, and does not include even
threatening to stop funding Israel’s military or to stop
vetoing measures of accountability for Israeli crimes at the
United Nations. President Obama’s am-bassador refrained
from one veto on illegal settlements, while President-Elect
Trump lobbied foreign governments to block the
resolution.
88. As in any country, no matter what its
government, the people of Iran are fundamentally good,
decent, peaceful, just, and fundamentally like you and me.
I’ve met people from Iran. You may have met people from
Iran. They’re not a different species. They’re not evil.
A “surgical strike” against a “facility” in their
country would cause a great many of them to die
very painful and horrible deaths.
89. The proponents of
attacking Iran themselves admit that if Iran had nukes
it would not use them. This is from the American Enterprise
Institute: “The biggest problem for the United States is
not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s
Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the
second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad,
all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, ‘See,
we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran
wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them
immediately.’ … And they will eventually define Iran
with nuclear weapons as not a problem.” Is that clear?
Iran using a nuclear weapon would be bad. But what would be
really bad would be Iran ac-quiring a nuclear weapon and
doing what every other nation with them has done since
Naga-saki: nothing. That would be really bad because it
would damage an argument for war and make war more
difficult, thus allowing Iran to run its country as it,
rather than the United States, sees fit. Of course it might
run it very badly (although we’re hardly establishing a
model for the world over here either), but it would run it
without U.S. approval, and cease to be an argument for
military spending increases, and that would be worse than
nuclear de-struction.
90. Ahmadinejad did not say
“Israel should be wiped off the map.” A more accurate
translation was “the regime occupying Jerusalem must
vanish from the page of time.” The government of Israel,
not the nation of Israel. Not even the government of Israel,
but the current regime. Hell, Americans say that about their
own regimes all the time, alternating every four to eight
years depending on political party. Iran has made clear it
would approve of a two-state solu-tion if Palestinians
approved of it.
91. Violent solutions are less likely to
succeed than nonviolent ones, especially violent solutions
in search of a problem to justify them. The tools of
nonviolence are developing quickly and racking up successes.
They are more likely to achieve good ends, and those
successes are almost always far longer lasting. The United
States government needs to catch up with the
times.
92. The choices are not (a) bomb another country,
or (b) do nothing. Other choices include aid, diplomacy, the
rule of law, disarmament. Every time people try to urgently
rush us into a bad choice, we can point out all the years in
which we could have been transforming the world with a whole
variety of good choices.
93. We could start making those
choices now. But those who want peace have to be as
orga-nized and determined as those who want war. We have to
actively demand diplomacy and sanctions relief and aid and
cooperation and arms embargoes and conversion.
94. There
is no such thing as arriving at a war as a last resort. War
is a choice. A “hawk” is noth-ing other than someone who
prefers to choose war.
95. There is everything to be
gained by making peace with Iran, governmentally,
culturally, eco-nomically.
96. Persian history is at the
roots of Western history and could be studied as
such.
97. Cultural and academic exchanges with a country
that produces wonderful art, films, books, food, and a
soccer team that actually qualifies for the world cup would
be far preferable to yet more war.
98. A U.S. war on
Iran, with or without a handful of partners or sidekicks,
would unite the people of Iran and much of the world against
the United States. It would justify in the eyes of much of
the world an underground Iranian program to develop nuclear
weapons, a program that does not now exist.
99. The
environmental damage would be tremendous, the precedent set
incredibly dangerous, all talk of cutting the U.S. military
budget would be buried in a wave of war frenzy, civil
liber-ties and representative government would be flushed
down the Potomac, a nuclear arms race would spread to
additional countries, and any momentary sadistic glee would
be out-weighed by accelerating home foreclosures, mounting
student debt, and accumulating layers of cultural
stupidity
100. The “news” broadcasters who called
Trump “presidential” when he started bombing people on a
small scale would declare him something just short of king
for life if he bombed Iran.
Original Article link: http://davidswanson.org/top-100-reasons-not-to-bomb-iran/
David
Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and
radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign
coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include
War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio.He is a 2015, 2016,
2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
Help support
DavidSwanson.org, WarIsACrime.org, and TalkNationRadio.org
by clicking here: http://davidswanson.org/donate.
Sign
up for these emails at https://actionnetwork.org/forms/articles-from-david-swanson.