The US government doesn't have troops for a major ground invasion of Iran today.
We cannot rule out missile attacks in the style of the Clinton administration's bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan, and the Israeli government attack of Osirak in Iraq. But such attacks, which, if they come, will come unannounced and end as soon as they begin, cannot be prevented by activists' threat to demonstrate in the streets (the threat that won't be taken seriously in any case, given the sad records of recent ANSWER and TONC September demonstrations and the likely low level of the October 27 UFPJ regional demonstrations). There were little responses from the Left to the Israeli bombing of Osirak in 1981 and the US bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 as a matter of fact, and no political impact of left-wing responses to them has been felt afterward.
I conclude that what we should be concentrating on is educational work to oppose economic sanctions and covert actions, stop "democracy assistance," and counter media propaganda in service of them.
This is the type of problem we should be fighting against:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/weekinreview/14cooper.html> October 14, 2007 The Nation Clinton's Iran Vote: The Fallout By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
SENATORS Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted against it. Senator Barack Obama said he would have voted against it if he had voted. Former Senator John Edwards implied he would have voted against it if he could vote.
And Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton? She voted in favor of the measure in question, which asked the Bush administration to declare Iran's 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. Such a move — more hawkish than even most of the Bush administration has been willing to venture so far — would intensify America's continuing confrontation with Iran, many foreign policy experts say.
On 10/14/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 13, 2007, at 11:18 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
>
> > But Americans (workers or not) don't have to love everything the
> > Iranians do. A new U.S. foreign policy doesn't mean lovy-dovy
> > relationships with everybody regardless of their conduct. It only
> > means that Americans (and their agency, their state) are committed (in
> > fact, constrained) to using the most civilized methods to address
> > their differences with the Iranians. If, on top of that, the new
> > foreign policy is in a position to induce the cooperation among
> > workers of all nations, then that'd be further progress.
>
> Of course. And I think an "it's none of our business" approach would
> have a lot of popular appeal, though of course the ruling class would
> fight it hard. I don't think you'd have to preface the argument with
> a long analysis of the suckiness of the Iranian regime (or, for that
> matter, the deeper suckiness of the Saudi Arabian regime). But it's
> inevitable that it's going to come up in conversation or debate, and
> I don't see any purpose in being evasive or dishonest in answering.
The "it's none of our business" approach can't be advanced within the ideology of liberalism and human rights which makes it our business. It's this ideology that needs to be rejected. Leftists have to present a way of thinking about the relation between Americans and other peoples that doesn't assume that Iranians (and other people in the global South) need help from Americans but not vice versa, which is the racist, imperialist premise of this ideology. -- Yoshie