Discredited Neo-Con Talking Points From the Iraq War Are Back, Lazily Re-Purposed for Iran
Remember all the infamous one-liners from the Global War on Terror? In the years after 9/11, when the neocon establishment in Washington was pushing ahead with its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were everywhere.
It’s a slam dunk case! We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’ll be greeted as liberators. Islam is a religion of peace. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.
Those last two are direct quotes from President George W. Bush, the man most responsible — whether through extreme naiveté or extreme duplicity — for propagating these ridiculous slogans and using them to justify decades-long wars that ended in ignominy for the United States. You’d think that after Iraq and Afghanistan this kind of rhetoric would be totally discredited. But you’d be wrong.
Over the past few days, almost since the moment Israel began bombing Iran, we’ve seen the reappearance of almost all the old GWOT rhetoric. Then as now, the purpose is to justify a U.S. military adventure abroad and gaslight the American people into supporting regime change in Iran.
For those of us who were in high school and college during and immediately after 9/11, who saw the propaganda play out in real time, it’s an amazing thing to witness what’s happening now.
In particular, the point about needing to stop Iran before it gets a nuclear weapon is almost word-for-word how Iraq hawks argued for a preventative war against Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iraq’s WMDs had to be destroyed, we were told, before they could be used in a terror attack against the U.S. that would dwarf 9/11.
For those keeping track, we have been hearing about Iran’s impending nuclear weapon for at least 20 years. Tehran, we’re told, is always just months or weeks away from having deployable nukes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran was getting “extremely close” to a nuclear weapon — in 1996.
Similarly, the point about how we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here — a ubiquitous line in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — is exactly what Netanyahu argued recently on ABC News. “You want these people to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to your cities? Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York. Look, I understand ‘America First.’ I don’t understand ‘America Dead.’” (It’s worth noting, too, that Netanyahu was a loud voice in the build-up to the Iraq War warning against Saddam’s non-existent nuclear program.)
Remember how we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq? That was Vice President Dick Cheney’s line. Turns out the Iranians are also waiting to be liberated and will greet western militaries with open arms! After all, God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom, right? According to Mark Levin, who is old enough to know better, isolationists “stand in the way of Trump and Netanyahu transforming the Middle East” — as if transforming the Middle East is both a feasible and desirable thing for the United States to do.
It’s the same with all these neocon arguments. Remember Ahmed Chalabi? He was the western-friendly Iraqi dissident politician and founder of the Iraqi National Congress, which became a major source of evidence of Iraq’s WMD program and ties to Al Qaeda for the Bush administration. Chalabi himself was at one point floated as a possible post-Saddam leader of Iraq.
Yet nearly all the information Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress provided to U.S. intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the war turned out to be false, including information from an Iraqi defector codenamed named “Curveball,” whose first-hand descriptions of mobile biological weapons factories wound up in intelligence dossiers that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. In the end, Chalabi’s fabrications were exposed (no WMDs were ever found in Iraq), and he was revealed as almost certainly an Iranian agent.
Now we have a new Chalabi: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Shah of Iran, who this week released a pro-regime change video. “The Islamic Republic has come to an end and is falling,” he said. “What has begun is irreversible. The future is bright and together we will navigate this sharp turn in history. Now is the time to stand; it is time to take back Iran. May I be with you soon.”
Reza is the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the grandson of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the military officer who was installed by the British in the 1920s after the previous monarch (of the Qajar dynasty) was deposed in a western-backed coup. Mohammad Reza was deposed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and his son Reza, now 64, hasn’t lived in Iran in more than 40 years. The idea that he’s somehow the “legitimate” ruler of Iran, enjoys popular support among Iranians, or that he’s a reliable voice on the question of regime change in Tehran, is about as far-fetched as thinking in 2003 that Chalabi would be a reliable source of information about Saddam’s WMD program, let alone a good choice to lead Iraq.
And yet these are the kinds of arguments and rhetoric flying around right now as neocons rally around another foreign war and agitate for U.S. involvement. It took about five minutes for Sen. Lindsey Graham, perhaps the epitome of an unreconstructed neocon war hawk, to go from arguing that we need to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities to openly calling for regime change in Iran, urging President Trump to “be all-in” and declaring that he himself is “willing to risk what happens next.”
Of course Graham and other armchair war hawks are willing to risk regime change with no plan for what comes next — they won’t have to impose order on the aftermath in Iran. Neither will Netanyahu or his soldiers. After Israel “internationalizes” the problem of a decapitated Iran, American troops will be the ones expected to impose order and rebuild the country, and everyone knows it.
The lesson here is that neocons never come up with new arguments, they just switch up the geography. And like clockwork, they insist that if you don’t support the Current War you’re at best unpatriotic, at worst in the pay of a foreign government.
Lucky for those of us who remember the quixotic hunt for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, and were assured the Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators and that Iraq would become a western-style democracy, we’ve heard all this before and we recognize it for the cheap propaganda that it is.