Syria: War on Iran Through the Back Door?

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How appropriate it is that President Barack Obama should have invoked Franklin D. Roosevelt in his extremely bellicose speech on the evening of September 10. Like FDR, the people who put Obama in power have given every indication that they are itching to get us into another war. In this case, it is with Iran; in Roosevelt’s case, it was with Germany again. In both instances, the American people in their wisdom are and were overwhelming opposed to it.

In the 1930s the opposition to U.S. involvement in war in Europe grew largely out of the fact that the country had learned that those awful atrocity stories that we had been told about the Germans that had played such a role in whipping up fervor for our entry into World War I were all just so much propaganda. As President George W. Bush once tried to say, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” The same motivation is certainly at work today with what has now been admitted about the supposed “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and what a large and growing minority of people have learned about the events of 9/11. One can add to that the great weariness of a people who have now been at war for more than a decade. Whether it is the lies or the wars we are wearier of might well be a close call.

But the drumbeat for war against Iran that began during the last years of the Bush administration has continued just offstage throughout the Obama administration. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been openly pleading for it, as have his many unregistered agents in the United States. It has been as hard to sell as another war on Germany was to sell to the American public in the 1930s and most of the first two years of the 1940s. If that much-wanted war with Iran is to be had it will require some great new “provocation,” Roosevelt’s example points the way.

With the 9/11 subterfuge we have already had the “new Pearl Harbor” that served to light the fuse for our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another such direct provocation would be too obvious. But if we can just commit ourselves militarily to the Syrian war, new opportunities would present themselves, and who can doubt that the plans are already in full swing? Syria is allied with Iran, just as Japan was allied with Germany. Roosevelt had tried his best to provoke the Germans into attacking us, but Hitler refused to go for the bait. FDR’s solution was to provoke Japan into attacking us by presenting them with a secret ultimatum in the guise of negotiations. He, in effect, made them an offer that they had to refuse, that left them no choice but to go to war with us. He thereby achieved his war with Germany by the back door through war with Japan.

Aware of this country’s war weariness, and wariness, Obama, like Roosevelt, promises that we will have to make no further real sacrifice. Obama says that there will be no American “boots on the ground,” while FDR, as late as October of 1940 during the election campaign in a speech in Boston declared, "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." All the while Roosevelt was taking every action he could to make sure that that is exactly what would happen. Of course, that is not the FDR quotation that Obama chose for his speech. Rather, it is this one from 1935:

Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.

Uttered at this particular point in our history, the statement Obama’s speechwriters chose could hardly be more inapt. Not since Britain at the height of its imperial power has any nation been more entangled in foreign martial enterprises. Manifestly, if there be any “national determination,” it has been entirely in the opposite direction since Roosevelt took office, and at a quickened pace in this century. In a certain sense, though, there is a harmony between the quote and Obama’s actions. FDR spoke of our “ideals and principles” and proceeded to ally this country with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and then to pursue a war policy, on both the European and Pacific fronts, that could hardly have been better designed to advance the interests of that pernicious foreign power. His war policies, in fact, which resulted in the Communist takeover of a large part of both Europe and Asia, were not in the furtherance of but were at the expense of this nation’s interests and our professed “ideals and principles.”

Once again, it is abundantly clear that the interests that we have been pursuing are not those of this country, but those of a foreign power. Israel is not the Soviet Union, but as a blatantly ethnic-supremacist, apartheid state, its fundamental makeup and goals, indeed, its cherished ideals and principles, could hardly be less consistent with those of this country.

David Martin

September 13, 2013

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