IRAN THE LONG GAME

One of Daniel Larison's readers flags down how we've taken yet another step towards open war with Iran.

One of my commenters alerted me to House Res. 1553, which states:

Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time to protect against such an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel.

Naturally, Rep. Jason Chaffetz is among the resolution’s 46 co-sponsors. The National Iranian American Council has called on Minority Leader Boehner to reject the measure, but why would he bother? Two of his leadership colleagues, Mike Pence and Thaddeus McCotter, co-sponsored the resolution, and it has the support of other high-profile Republican members, including Paul Ryan and Dan Burton. That tells me that this is not just a product of hard-liners such as Michelle Bachmann and Peter King, but that it expresses the views of a fairly broad-cross section of the Republican members in the House. I guess I can’t stop “nitpicking,” but this seems like an awfully strange resolution for an “antiwar” Republican to co-sponsor. It is also thoroughly depressing that Paul Ryan, one of the few credible figures in the conference when it comes to fiscal responsibility, is among the supporters of such a ludicrous measure. 

I respect Larison's logic, but I'm shaking my head that he's actually slightly surprised that an attack on Iran is something that a "fairly broad cross section" of Republicans want.  No offense Dan, but have you been paying attention to the GOP over the last 50 years?  They're not Eisenhower conservatives anymore.  Not to say that the Democrats have been much better on the subject of blowing things up, but the Republicans have certainly perfected the practice here in the last decade or so.

Yes, a large percentage of the United States Congress is willing to go to war for Israel.  There's something disturbingly, if not deadly wrong with that.

It's not just Congress, either.  But hey, the worse the economy gets, the more and more smacking around Iran looks like a better reflationary option, eh?