Hadi Ghaemi, Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian opposition within Iran, the Iranian opposition activists worldwide, and even the questionable spokespersons for NIAC agree that a military strike should not be considered as an option to solve the human rights crisis in Iran. Iranians all say it will rally Iranians (including members of the opposition) in support of the IRI, just when that decrepit regime most needs it. And the regime knows it.
But if not a military strike, then what? If we want to solve the continuing human rights crisis in Iran, isn't it obvious we need regime change? Who, on any side, would argue that there is any other way to insure human rights there than to have different people in charge. Right now the IRI is a hierarchy of powermongers and cronies at the top, paying out millions of economically dependent or religiously fanatic thugs at the bottom. No honest man, averse to rape and torture as a way of enforcing God's will, can enter the system.
But if Iranians don't want an Iraq situation (culture looted; infrastructure destroyed; brain drain, because all the white-collar citizenry eventually flee; depleted uranium shells everywhere; life slowly borrowed back from multinational war-profiteering corporations) and Iranians don't want the mojahedin given carte blanche to make strategic terror strikes, and the layering on of sanctions has only scathed the country's entrenched economic powerhouses, and as the IRI very clearly and very logically does not respond to hypocritical UN finger-wagging, just as they do not respond to the international community's hypocritical nuclear standards, and they go on executing more people than any government but China's; and voices from all sides including the Iranian opposition's seem to agree that an attack will not work for the same reason diplomacy doesn't, because of U.S. and Britain's criminal history and well-earned distrust of the West (distrust from both the regime and from the democratic-minded Iranian people); and if the U.S. will simply not act decisively to cut off Iranian oil exports to the common market, which would end the IRI's life faster than you could say "economically motivated revolution," because yet again this ancient, entrenched, insoluble factor in our foreign policy, which is our consumption of oil for domestic power requirements that could easily be fulfilled by wind and solar (a restructuring toward which we should have begun in 1973, during the first oil crisis, when Americans were shooting each other over spots at gas pumps), indeed because of the same U.S. resource thievery (and Americans' cultural acceptance of our corporations' deciding influence in our foreign policy) of which the entire Middle East rightly accuses us... Ah... That's it.
[NOTE: the U.S. uses twice as much oil as it produces. Our transportation, home electricity, and half our heating needs could be powered by harnessing just two windy states' wind, by an incentive plan for equipping buildings with geothermal auxiliary systems, and a federal stimulus "Manhattan Project"-type program to rapidly deploy solar panels on roofs in major cities. For more, unbiased information on just how capable we already are of making replacing the power generated by the imported half of our oil consumption, research for yourself.]
Well then, let's solve the humanitarian problem, avoid a militarized response to invasion, a galvanizing of the Iranian population against yet another foreign incursion, avoid loss of cultural artifacts, rid Iran of its non-inclusive and incompetent government, and give ourselves a swift kick in the ass toward building the new energy infrastructure we have needed for almost four decades, by cutting off the oil.
That's right. Take naval control of the Persian Gulf. Enforce an embargo. Choke the bastards where it matters while reclaiming our lost moral high ground. It worked to overthrow the Shah (made damned near the entire country go on strike in 1979) and it will work again, if we just dare to address what got us in this mess in the first place.
Go to Congress and get approval for it, this embargo, this act of war (so that we don't violate our own Constitution again, as we are with Libya), based on the genuine addressing of a severe and otherwise unstoppable humanitarian crisis and of course the so-called threat to our national security; take up our despicable allies in Saudi Arabia on their offer to make up the slack with their multiple millions barrels-per-day of currently withheld production; tell those career aggravators in the Israeli right wing to forget an air strike and just help us patrol the waters; sell it to our Obama-phobic idiot class and their asinine representatives in Congress as a crusade, call it a "crusade for human decency," and a manly assertion of our right to defend ourselves against looming threat to our way of life yada yada (instead of as a badly, badly needed reorientation toward energy sustainability and environmental sanity and adherence to our own constitution). They'll love it. Finally, harness all the urgency the giant PR campaign against Iran's nuclear program has generated to impel immediate action, to catch the IRI off guard.
Once even the Basiji and the rural poor in Iran revolt, for sheer economic necessity, Iran will turn toward democracy. That is what we want, right? Surely our national ethic has not been replaced by the contradicting mission of its most amoral "citizens," corporate legal structures literally designed only to exploit, without regard for their effect on our national character, our standing in the world, or our long-term interests. Surely the country cannot afford to let them continue to profit from needless conflicts, that undermine our future, and trap us in such a sticky web of contradicting interests that we cannot, for all our might and wealth, act when we most need to act. Such unaccountable, un-imprisonable "citizens" could never be allowed to determine our foreign policy. Nay. In fact, our ethic, our mission, and our only desire for other nations is that they may enjoy the fairness and freedom that we do, the freedom we are willing to fight for. After all, we've always only wanted peace and democracy for these inexplicably troubled Middle Eastern nations, right?
Well, Iranians will find their way to it, once we stop feeding the wolves that watch over them. They have learned (and even once, 2,500 years ago, proved) that the only system that has any hope of including all its citizens, of respecting all its traditions, and of securing them against violations of their human rights, is one that respects people's human rights and freedom to practice their own religion and culture. Let's be honest: The U.S. will never really launch a major military action on the basis of human rights alone, and would never be able to sell it to its public. But it could impose an embargo, and argue strongly for dramatic belt-tightening measures and programs to source new energy domestically, on the basis of humanitarian concern, in the context of a looming conflict with no winners, one that would have us fighting at the pumps anyway, and suddenly.
And then we don't even have to occupy another Middle Eastern country, not that we can afford to. Without the Islamic Republic regime, a government that itself only exists as a reaction to Western hypocrisy, Iranians will manage their own democracy just fine. Maybe they'll even show us how to keep corporate corruption out of it.
