Iran Can Play "Rush To War" Too

By Cernig

Doubtless egged on by their own equally-crazed versions of Kyl and Lieberman, Iran's parliament has passed a non-binding resolution of its own:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's parliament on Saturday approved a nonbinding resolution labeling the CIA and the U.S. Army ``terrorist organizations,'' in apparent response to a Senate resolution seeking to give a similar designation to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The hard-line dominated parliament cited U.S. involvement in dropping nuclear bombs in Japan in World War II, using depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, supporting the killings of Palestinians by Israel, bombing and killing Iraqi civilians, and torturing terror suspects in prisons.

``The aggressor U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency are terrorists and also nurture terror,'' said a statement by the 215 lawmakers who signed the resolution at an open session of the Iranian parliament. The session was broadcast live on state-run radio.

The resolution, which is seen as a diplomatic offensive against the U.S., urges Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government to treat the two as terrorist organizations. It also paves the way for the resolution to become legislation that - if ratified by the country's hardline constitutional watchdog - would become law. The government is expected to wait for U.S. reaction before making its decision.

They could have added in the Iran/Contra debacle, death squads in South America, repeated fomenting of coups in foreign nations, warrantless surveillance on their own countrymen, detention and rendition in contravention of the Geneva Conventions and even arming terror groups such as the MeK and PKK. On the evidence alone, there's as much justification for the Iranian resolution as the American one.

However, the arguments against passing such resolutions - that designating a branch of a foreign government or armed service in such a way is unsupported by international law and is simply flagrant posturing at best but dangerous warmongering at worst - still hold. I'm as opposed to this move as I was to the U.S. one. Yet it is indicative that Iran's hardliners are as certain that they will come out top from any conflict as America's hardliners are sure of their own victory. Indeed, independent experts have assessed that the Iranians are quite possibly correct. Which should give the rest of us pause to think before enabling any more of the same kind of tit-for-tat rhetoric.