Updates on the Iran-Israel War, Part 2

Conversations with leading analysts

By Daniel Falcone

Part 1 is here.

First published in Counterpunch. Please support this great newsletter—no one lands them like Counterpunch.

Part 2: Civil Society Watches Another War

Daniel Falcone: What do you foresee the role of civil society and intergovernmental organizations in the coming days and weeks regarding Iran?

Lawrence Davidson: There will be some protests and much analysis. However, it may be that the die is cast. It will be a hard sell to make international law and human rights effective guides for state behavior. If the historical record is predictive, they will not again serve as guides until we experience some sort of sobering catastrophe.

As to Iran specifically, its war of attrition with Israel will continue. Despite the spin of U.S. reporting, Israel will be the first to face a real crisis. This will force the U.S. back into the war to halt Iranian attacks. The Zionist lobby will insist on this. The Zionists will not draw any of the obvious lessons from the Iranian attacks.

I must say it was [eye-opening] for me to see Israel get some of the same punishment they have inflicted upon Gaza. One would hope they would learn an important lesson from this experience and perhaps there are many Israelis who have drawn the correct lesson. But Netanyahu and his cohort are probably oblivious.

Stephen Zunes: Unlike the Bush administration and its allies in the media, who put great effort into convincing Americans to support the war on Iraq, Trump has put little energy into convincing Americans to support war on Iran. His speech Saturday evening seemed largely improvised and lasted only four minutes. It’s as if the U.S. has become so deindustrialized they can’t even manufacture consent anymore.

On the positive side, polls prior to the U.S. bombing showed overwhelming majorities opposing the United States entering the war, with barely 15%supporting it. Unlike the first couple years of the Vietnam War and the first several months of the Iraq War, we don’t have to work to get most Americans on our side. They already are. Even some pro-Israel groups (i.e., J Street, New Jewish Narrative) have come out against war with Iran, demonstrating there are divisions even among Zionists.

Unfortunately, American civil society is badly distracted simply in defending itself from an increasingly authoritarian state and the havoc it has unleashed against minorities, immigrants, education, the environment, and government itself. Mobilizing against a war, particularly one that does not involve American ground troops, in the face of all the other political crises would be challenging. Furthermore, unlike the 1980s when activists were inspired to defend a promising if imperfect socialist experiment in Nicaragua against a U.S. assault, Iran is a decidedly reactionary regime which most of its own people would like to see toppled (albeit not by a foreign power).

Little can be expected from intergovernmental organizations either. There is obviously the threat of a U.S. veto of anything the UN Security Council would try to offer. More generally, Iran is seen in the region and beyond as a something of a pariah state, so few nations, particularly in the West, can be expected to stick their necks out in defense of international law, even if Iran’s grievances are valid.

Richard Falk: If interpreting this question as pertaining to Europe and North America, as well as Israel and Palestine, it is anticipated that anti-war civil society organizations will be very active in opposing the attacks on Iran’s nuclear program and its facilities devoted to enrichment of uranium. If the war goals are extended to regime change by Israel and supported by the U.S., such opposition might be expected to grow. Trump’s foreign policy identity was established by opposition to any future U.S. involvement in ‘forever wars’ and state-building undertakings (that failed at great expense most spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan) by invoking a neo-isolationist foreign policy sloganized as ‘America First,’ while being sustained by militarist domestic rule and neo-fascist ideology incorporating unconditional support for whatever Israel undertakes, however, unlawful, cruel, and risky.

In the context of the evolving unprovoked aggressive war against Iran, civil society and the UN are confronted by an almost total inversion of the posture taken in the Suez Crisis. With respect to Iran, the violation of UN Charter red lines designed to uphold war prevention commitments, the U.S. and the West dismissive attitude toward the relevance of international law in the event of recourse to non-defensive warmaking. Here the rationalization for Israel’s aggression, addressed sympathetically in Western media, is based on alleged threat perception relating to an apprehended Iranian possession of nuclear warheads. A more reasonable view of the nuclear dimension of national security would situate the threat on Israel’s side of the bright red line.

After all Israel has a covertly acquired nuclear weapons arsenal of 300-400 warheads as facilitated by Western secret assistance and as purged from the periodic nonproliferation review program agendas. While Iran is a generally complying party to the NPT Israel has never joined and has rejected efforts to establish a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, a proposal ardently supported in the past by both Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East was repeated rejected by Israel and its Western backers. It would at least readjust the international debate if NGOs and the UN brought these realities into the light of day. As it is, the nuclear path chosen by North Korea would serve as a national security tutorial on the benefits of proliferation in the Nuclear Age. Despite hostility to North Korea and its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, its nuclear program and nuclear weapons arsenal were never attacked. In contrast, Libya, Ukraine, and now Iran have been presumably attacked because they lacked a nuclear retaliatory capability. The lessons to be drawn are ominous.

Beyond the nuclear dimension, it would be important to understand that U.S. support for Israel in relation to Iran is partly based on a racist containment rationale that carried into practice Samuel Huntington’s 1990s anticipation of a ‘clash of civilizations’ along the fault lines of the Middle East separating Islam from the white West. From this perspective Israel is integral to Western post-colonial imperialism, manning the frontline of Islamic containment, and doing the dirty work of the West backed up by the U.S. to the extent necessary. Iran to an extent conspired by vowing to destroy Zionist governance in Israel and encouraging street chants along the lines of ‘death to Israel, death to America.’

Next time: Part 3: The War Machine and the Lobby

Daniel Falcone is a historian specializing in the revolutions of 1848 and the political refugees who sought asylum in New York City. His academic work focuses on Giuseppe Garibaldi’s influence on New York’s local history and the politics of memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aside from his research, he is a teacher and journalist whose work has appeared in additional publications such as The Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, The Nation, Jacobin, and Truthout. His journalistic pieces, Q&As with public intellectuals, intersect history with modern-day geopolitical issues.