Hastings’s
bill has come as a shock to constituents and
people who have followed his career as a 13-term
Democratic Member of Congress from South
Florida. Miami Beach resident Michael Gruener
called Hastings’s bill, “extraordinarily
dangerous,” and asked, “Does Hastings even
consider to whom he is giving this
authorization?”
Fritzie Gaccione,
the editor of the
South Florida Progressive Bulletin
noted that Iran is complying with the 2015 JCPOA (Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action) and expressed
amazement that Hastings has reintroduced this
bill at a moment when the stakes are so high and
Trump’s intentions so unclear.
“How
can Hastings hand this opportunity to Trump?”
she asked. “Trump shouldn’t be trusted with toy
soldiers, let alone the American military.”
Speculation by people in South Florida as to why
Alcee Hastings has sponsored such a dangerous
bill reflect two general themes. One is that he
is paying undue attention to the pro-Israel
groups who raised 10
percent of his coded campaign contributions for
the 2016 election. The other is that, at the age
of 80, he seems to be carrying water for
the pay-to-play Clinton wing of the Democratic
Party as part of some kind of retirement plan.
Alcee Hastings is better known to the public as
a federal judge who was impeached for
bribery and for a series of ethical lapses as a
Congressman than for his legislative record. The
2012
Family Affairs report
by the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics
in Washington found that Hastings paid his
partner, Patricia Williams, $622,000 to serve as
his deputy district director from 2007 to 2010,
the largest amount paid to a family member by
any Member of Congress in the report.
But Hastings sits in one of the
25 safest
Democratic seats in the House and does not seem
to have ever faced a serious challenge from a
Democratic primary opponent or a Republican.
Alcee Hastings’s voting record on war and peace
issues has been about average for a Democrat. He
voted against the
2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force
(AUMF) on Iraq,
and his
79 percent lifetime Peace Action score
is the highest among current House members from
Florida, although Alan Grayson’s was higher.
Hastings voted against the bill to approve the
JCPOA or nuclear agreement with Iran and first
introduced his AUMF bill in 2015. With the
approval of the JCPOA and Obama’s solid
commitment to it, Hastings’s bill seemed like a
symbolic act that posed little danger – until
now.
In the new Republican-led Congress, with the
bombastic and unpredictable Donald Trump in the
White House, Hastings’s bill could actually
serve as a blank check for war on Iran, and it
is
carefully worded
to be exactly that. It authorizes the open-ended
use of force against Iran with no limits on the
scale or duration of the war. The only sense in
which the bill meets the requirements of the War
Powers Act is that it stipulates that it does
so. Otherwise it entirely surrenders Congress’s
constitutional authority for any decision
over war with Iran to the President, requiring
only that he report to Congress on the war once
every 60 days.
Dangerous
Myths
The
wording of Hastings’s bill perpetuates dangerous
myths about the nature of Iran’s nuclear program
that have been thoroughly investigated
and debunked after decades of intense scrutiny
by experts, from the U.S. intelligence community
to the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA).
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As former IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei
explained in his book,
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in
Treacherous Times,
the IAEA has never found any real evidence of
nuclear weapons research or development in Iran,
any more than in Iraq in 2003, the last time
such myths were abused to launch our country
into a devastating and disastrous war.
In
Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of
the Iran Nuclear Scare,
investigative journalist Gareth Porter
meticulously examined the suspected evidence of
nuclear weapons activity in
Iran. He explored the reality behind every
claim and explained how the deep-seated
mistrust in U.S.-Iran relations gave rise to
misinterpretations of Iran’s scientific
research and led Iran to shroud legitimate
civilian research in secrecy. This climate of
hostility and dangerous worst-case assumptions
even led to the
assassination of four innocent Iranian
scientists by
alleged Israeli agents.
The
discredited myth of an Iranian “nuclear weapons
program” was perpetuated throughout the 2016
election campaign by candidates of both parties,
but Hillary Clinton was particularly strident
in claiming credit for neutralizing Iran’s
imaginary nuclear weapons program.
President Obama and Secretary of State John
Kerry also reinforced a false narrative that the
“dual-track” approach of Obama’s first term,
escalating sanctions and threats of war at the
same time as holding diplomatic negotiations,
“brought Iran to the table.” This was utterly
false. Threats and sanctions served only to
undermine diplomacy, strengthen hard-liners on
both sides and push Iran into building 20,000
centrifuges to supply its civilian nuclear
program with enriched uranium, as documented in
Trita Parsi’s book,
A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy
With Iran.
A
former hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran who
rose to be a senior officer on the Iran desk at
the State Department told Parsi that the main
obstacle to diplomacy with Iran during Obama’s
first term was the U.S. refusal to “take ‘Yes’
for an answer.”
When
Brazil and Turkey persuaded Iran
to accept the terms of an agreement proposed by
the U.S. a few months earlier, the U.S.
responded by rejecting its own proposal. By
then the main U.S. goal was to ratchet up
sanctions at the U.N., which this diplomatic
success would have undermined.
Trita
Parsi explained that this was only one of many
ways in which the two tracks of Obama’s
“dual-track” approach were hopelessly at odds
with each other. Only once Clinton was replaced
by John Kerry at the State Department did
serious diplomacy displace brinksmanship and
ever-rising tensions.
Next
Target for U.S. Aggression?
Statements by President Trump have raised hopes
for a new detente with Russia. But there is no
firm evidence of a genuine rethink of U.S. war
policy, an end to serial U.S. aggression or a
new U.S. commitment to peace or the rule of
international law.
Trump
and his advisers may hope that some kind of
“deal” with Russia could give them the strategic
space to continue America’s war policy on other
fronts without Russian interference. But this
would only grant Russia a temporary reprieve
from U.S. aggression as long as U.S. leaders
still view “regime change” or mass destruction
as the only acceptable outcomes for countries
that challenge U.S. dominance.
Students of history, not least 150 million
Russians, will remember that another serial
aggressor offered Russia a “deal” like that in
1939, and that Russia’s complicity with Germany
over Poland only set the stage for the total
devastation of Poland, Russia and Germany.
One former U.S. official who has consistently
warned of the danger of U.S. aggression against
Iran is retired General Wesley Clark. In his
2007 memoir,
A Time To Lead,
General Clark explained that his fears
were rooted in ideas embraced by hawks in
Washington since the end of the Cold War. Clark
recalls Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Paul Wolfowitz’s response
in May 1991 when he congratulated him on his
role in the Gulf War.
“We
screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The
president believes he’ll be overthrown by his
own people, but I rather doubt it,” Wolfowitz
complained. “But we did learn one thing that’s
very important. With the end of the Cold War, we
can now use our military with impunity. The
Soviets won’t come in to block us. And we’ve got
five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old
Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria
before the next superpower emerges to challenge
us … We could have a little more time, but no
one really knows.”
The view that the end of the Cold War opened the
door for a series of U.S.-led wars in the Middle
East was widely held among hawkish officials and
advisers in the Bush I administration and
military-industrial think tanks. During the
propaganda push for war on Iraq in 1990, Michael
Mandelbaum, the director of East-West studies at
the Council on Foreign Relations,
crowed to the New York Times,
“for the first time in 40 years, we can conduct
military operations in the Middle East without
worrying about triggering World War III.”
Self-Inflicted Nightmare
As we
begin the fifth U.S. administration since 1990,
U.S. foreign policy remains trapped in the
self-inflicted nightmare that those dangerous
assumptions produced. Today, war-wise Americans
can quite easily fill in the unasked questions
that Wolfowitz’s backward-looking and simplistic
analysis failed to ask, let alone answer, in
1991.
What
did he mean by “clean up”? What if we couldn’t
“clean them all up” in the short historical
window he described? What if failed efforts to
“clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes”
left only chaos, instability and greater dangers
in their place? Which leads to the
still largely unasked and unanswered question:
how can we actually clean up the violence and
chaos that we ourselves have now unleashed on
the world?
In 2012, Norwegian General Robert Mood was
forced to withdraw a U.N. peacekeeping team from
Syria after Hillary Clinton, Nicolas Sarkozy,
David Cameron and their Turkish and Arab
monarchist allies
undermined U.N. envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan.
In 2013, as they unveiled their
“Plan B,” for
Western military intervention in Syria,
General Mood told the BBC,
“It is fairly easy to use the military tool,
because, when you launch the military tool in
classical interventions, something will happen
and there will be results. The problem is that
the results are almost all the time different
than the political results you were aiming for
when you decided to launch it. So the other
position, arguing that it is not the role of the
international community, neither coalitions of
the willing nor the U.N. Security Council for
that matter, to change governments inside a
country, is also a position that should be
respected.”
General Wesley Clark played his own deadly role
as the supreme commander of NATO’s
illegal assault
on what was left of the “old Soviet surrogate
regime” of Yugoslavia in 1999. Then, ten days
after the horrific crimes of September 11, 2001,
newly retired General Clark dropped in at the
Pentagon to find that the scheme Wolfowitz
described to him in 1991 had become the Bush
administration’s grand strategy to exploit the
war psychosis
into which it was plunging the country and the
world.
Undersecretary Stephen
Cambone’s notes
from a meeting amid the ruins of the Pentagon on
September 11th include orders from Secretary
Rumsfeld to, “Go massive. Sweep it all up.
Things related and not.”
A
former colleague at the Pentagon showed Clark a
list of seven countries besides Afghanistan
where the U.S. planned to unleash “regime
change” wars in the next five years: Iraq;
Syria; Lebanon; Libya; Somalia; Sudan; and
Iran. The five- to ten-year window of
opportunity Wolfowitz described to Clark in 1991
had already passed. But instead of reevaluating
a strategy that was illegal, untested and
predictably dangerous to begin with, and now
well past its sell-by date, the neocons were
hell-bent on launching an ill-conceived
blitzkrieg across the Middle East and
neighboring regions, with no objective analysis
of the geopolitical consequences and no concern
for the human cost.
Misery and
Chaos
Fifteen years later, despite the catastrophic
failure of illegal wars that have
killed 2 million people
and left only misery and chaos in their wake,
the leaders of both major U.S. political parties
seem determined to pursue this military
madness to the bitter end – whatever that end
may be and however long the wars may last.
By framing their wars in terms of vague
“threats” to America and by demonizing foreign
leaders, our own morally and legally
bankrupt leaders and the subservient U.S.
corporate media are still trying to obscure the
obvious fact that
we are the aggressor
that has been threatening and attacking country
after country in violation of the U.N. Charter
and international law since 1999.
So U.S. strategy has inexorably escalated from
an unrealistic but limited goal of overthrowing
eight relatively defenseless governments in and
around the Middle East to risking nuclear war
with Russia and/or China. U.S.
post-Cold War triumphalism
and hopelessly unrealistic military ambitions
have revived the danger of World War III that
even Paul Wolfowitz celebrated the passing of in
1991.
The
U.S. has followed the well-worn path that has
stymied aggressors throughout history, as the
exceptionalist logic used to justify aggression
in the first place demands that we keep doubling
down on wars that we have less and
less hope of winning, squandering our national
resources to spread violence and chaos far and
wide across the world.
Russia
has demonstrated that it once again has both the
military means and the political will to “block”
U.S. ambitions, as Wolfowitz put it in
1991. Hence Trump’s vain hopes of a “deal” to
buy Russia off. U.S. operations around islands
in the South China Sea suggest a gradual
escalation of threats and displays of
force against China rather than an assault on
the Chinese mainland in the near future,
although this could quickly spin out of control.
So,
more or less by default, Iran has moved back to
the top of the U.S.’s “regime change” target
list, even though this requires basing a
political case for an illegal war on the
imaginary danger of non-existent weapons for the
second time in 15 years. War against Iran would
involve, from the outset, a massive bombing
campaign against its military defenses, civilian
infrastructure and nuclear facilities, killing
tens of thousands of people and likely
escalating into an even more catastrophic war
than those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.
Gareth Porter believes that
Trump will avoid war on Iran
for the same reasons as Bush and Obama, because
it would be unwinnable and because Iran has
robust defenses that could inflict significant
losses on U.S. warships and bases in the Persian
Gulf.
On the other hand, Patrick Cockburn, one of the
most experienced Western reporters in the Middle
East, believes that we will
attack Iran in one to two years
because, after Trump fails to resolve any of the
crises elsewhere in the region, the pressure of
his failures will combine with the logic of
escalating demonization and threats already
under way in Washington to make war on Iran
inevitable.
In this
light, Rep. Hastings’s bill is a critical brick
in a wall that bipartisan hawks in Washington
are building to close off any exit from the path
to war with Iran. They believe that Obama let
Iran slip out of their trap, and they are
determined not to let that happen again.
Another brick in this wall is the recycled myth
of Iran as the greatest state sponsor of
terrorism. This is a glaring contradiction with
the U.S. focus on ISIS as the world’s main
terrorist threat. The states that have sponsored
and fueled the rise of ISIS have been, not Iran,
but Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the other Arab
monarchies and Turkey, with
critical training, weapons and logistical and
diplomatic support
for what has become ISIS from the U.S., U.K. and
France.
Iran
can only be a greater state sponsor of terrorism
than the U.S. and its allies if Hezbollah, Hamas
and the Houthis, the Middle Eastern resistance
movements to whom it provides various levels of
support, pose more of a terrorist danger to the
rest of the world than ISIS. No U.S. official
has even tried to make that case, and it is hard
to imagine the tortured reasoning it would
involve.
Brinksmanship and Military Madness
The U.N. Charter
wisely prohibits the threat as well as the use
of force in international relations, because the
threat of force so predictably leads to its use.
And yet, post-Cold War U.S. doctrine quickly
embraced the dangerous idea that U.S.
“diplomacy” must be backed up by the threat of
force.
Hillary Clinton has been a
strong proponent of this idea since
the 1990s and has been undeterred by either its
illegality or its catastrophic results. As I
wrote in
an article on Clinton
during the election campaign, this is
illegal brinksmanship, not legitimate diplomacy.
It takes a lot of sophisticated propaganda
to convince even Americans that a war machine
that keeps threatening and attacking
other countries represents a “commitment to
global security,” as President Obama claimed in
his Nobel speech. Convincing
the rest of the world is another matter again,
and people in other countries are not so easily
brainwashed.
Obama’s hugely symbolic election victory and
global charm offensive provided cover for
continued U.S. aggression
for eight more years, but Trump risks giving the
game away by discarding the velvet glove and
exposing the naked iron fist of U.S. militarism.
A U.S. war on Iran could be the final straw.
Cassia Laham is the co-founder of
POWIR (People’s
Opposition to War, Imperialism and Racism) and
part of
a coalition organizing demonstrations
in South Florida against many of President
Trump’s policies. Cassia calls Alcee Hastings’s
AUMF bill, “a dangerous and desperate attempt to
challenge the shift in power in the Middle East
and the world.” She noted that, “Iran has risen
up as a pivotal power player countering U.S. and
Saudi influence in the region,” and concluded,
“if the past is any indicator of the future, the
end result of a war with Iran will be a
large-scale war, high death tolls and the
further weakening of U.S. power.”
Whatever misconceptions, interests or ambitions
have prompted Alcee Hastings to threaten
80 million people in Iran with a blank check for
unlimited war, they cannot possibly outweigh the
massive loss of life and unimaginable misery for
which he will be responsible if Congress should
pass H J Res 10 and President Trump should act
on it. The bill still has no co-sponsors, so let
us hope that it can be quarantined as
an isolated case of extreme military
madness, before it becomes an epidemic and
unleashes yet another catastrophic war.
Nicolas J S Davies is the author
of Blood On Our
Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of
Iraq. He also wrote the chapters on
“Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a
Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a
Progressive Leader.
