Lebanon bombing

The big Middle East story today is all the talk, with France joining in, about bombing Iran. Except that bombing won't happen for the next couple of years, I don't have much to say.

The conflict though is usually misleadingly (deliberately misleadingly) characterized as the US attempting to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. What is at issue here is Iran having the technological capability, in theory, to build a weapon. I've read it described as a "weapons option".

Many NPT non-weapons states have a "weapons option", including some that have been caught with advanced weapons programs. Weapons-option states include Taiwan, South Korea, Romania, Brazil, the Netherlands and Japan. Having a weapons option is in no way inconsistent with the non-proliferation treaty Iran ratified, or with the additional protocols to that treaty that Iran has offered to ratify after having its right to enrich uranium is reaffirmed.

The US position that Iran does not have a right to have the technology that would make it a weapons-option state is so unreasonable that I've never seen it defended by any of its supporters. It violently contradicts the technology with discrimination clause of the NPT.

Anyway, Iran is likely to pass 3000 centrifuges over the next year and the US is not likely to bomb Iran in response. Just because bombing Iran would bring Iran closer to a weapon, would strengthen Iran's leadership's standing with its population and accelerate the forced withdrawal of the US from Iraq at least and maybe Afganistan also.

But Lebanon is at least equally interesting right now.

Lebanon's population lurched in the anti-Western direction after last year's war and I expected Lebanon's government to reflect that by now.

Slightly unfortunately for my record as a predictor, but very unfortunately for the people of Lebanon, the US, with Saudi help, has managed to keep political power in Lebanon in the hands of pro-Western forces that are dramatically unrepresentative of the population of the country.

People, democracy is a good thing. And not just when the side you want is winning. This goes for Lebanon and also for US efforts to isolate Sadr and Iraqi nationalists in Iraq and for Hamas.

Keeping the side that wins or that would win out of power is always a bad idea because the same resources that side could use to win the elections, it can use to win a non-electoral struggle that is much more destructive.

Is this a matter of naivety or is it that in all cases, Israel and the US would rather see destructive conflicts than a peaceful process that puts anti-Israel/US/West forces in power? I'm not sure there's a practical difference, meaning I'm not sure the answer matters in real life, but I tend to take cynicism over stupidity as an explanation for US actions in the Middle East maybe too often.

Stupidity and naivety are random. They would cause the US to randomly allow elections in Palestine, not realizing their side would lose. Or giving in to Sistani on elections in 2003, before the Shiites began systematically consolidating their power, and watching their leverage decrease steadily ever since.

But not only does it make sense that Israel would rather its rivals be divided and debilitated by internal conflict than stable, Israeli strategists have explicitly stated this preference. So in this situation it is very difficult to imagine a string of coincidences that have lead in Israel's preferred direction consistently whenever there has been US involvement in the Middle East.

But another pro-Western politician was killed recently in Lebanon. How much better it would have been for one-person one-vote elections to have sent him or other people in his side to retirement.

At this point I'm curious, is the plan really to kill three or four more politicians and call a vote? The pro-Western Lebanese really wouldn't rather just call a vote now? Or does the West have some leverage over them that their own preferences don't matter?