Sen. Tom Cotton is hoping people will forget all the pre-Iraq War II talk promising that it will be a “cakewalk” and that “we will in fact be greeted as liberators.” He is hoping no one will remember when the Bush Administration sold the Iraq war based on the Rumsfeldian lie that total victory would take “five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that…”
No, he wants us to forget the Iraq war altogether and simply concentrate on the sublime beauty of steadily bombing Iraq from the air as was the strategy in the Clinton Administration — a strategy that left untold thousands of innocent civilians dead in both sudden and slow, painful ways.
But this time he wants us to visualize the sublime beauty of attacking Iran in such a manner.
Bombing Iran would be a piece of cake, he asserted in an interview with the neoconservative “Christian” activist group Family Research Council. It would only take “several days” and it would:
…be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.
Cotton was also disgusted that the Administration’s negotiators did not keep “the credible threat of military force on the table throughout” the negotiations with Iran. This threat of deadly force, he bizarrely claimed “always improves diplomacy.” Well perhaps, if by diplomacy one means “either your brains or your signature will be on the agreement.”
Senator Cotton mischaracterized the framework agreement, falsely claiming that Iran did not give up a single thing and in return the US made all the concessions. Iran’s agreement to give up 97 percent of its uranium reserves is not a concession? Nor is giving up the vast majority of its centrifuges?
The interviewer from the Family Research Council, an organization which claims to promote traditional family values, made no objection to the proposal from Senator Cotton that would, if carried out, end the lives of countless innocent families in Iran. Persian families apparently don’t count.
Senator Tom Cotton makes the previous generation of neocons, whose lies led the US into dozens of disastrous military conflicts over the past 20 years, look like a bunch of peaceniks. No wonder Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel gave Cotton a million dollars. He must have the neocon old guard giddy with excitement and anticipation.
1:01 am on April 9, 2015
