William Blum’s Anti-Empire Report on the paucity of real debate in the US:
Like clinical paranoia, “the threat from Iran” is impervious to correction by rational argument.
Two new novels have just appeared, from major American publishers, thrillers based on Iran having a nuclear weapon and the dangers one can imagine that that portends — “Banquo’s Ghosts” by Rich Lowry & Keith Korman, and “The Increment” by David Ignatius. “Bomb, bomb, bomb. Let’s bomb Iran,” declares a CIA official in the latter book. The other book derides the very idea of “dialogue” with Iran while implicitly viewing torture as acceptable.
On May 12, in New York City, a debate was held on the proposition that “Diplomacy With Iran Is Going Nowhere” (English translation: “Should we bomb Iran?”). Arguing in the affirmative, were Liz Cheney, former State Department official (and daughter of a certain unindicted war criminal) and Dan Senor, formerly the top spokesman for Washington’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Their “opponents” were R. Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state, and Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official and CIA analyst and author of “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq”, a book that, unsurprisingly, did not have too long a shelf life.
This is what “debate” on US foreign policy looks like in America in the first decade of the 21st century AD — four quintessential establishment figures. If such a “debate” had been held in the Soviet Union during the Cold War (“Detente With The United States Is Going Nowhere”), the American mainstream media would unanimously have had a jolly time making fun of it.