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PD Editorial: First, define sanctuary citys scope

Sundays Letters to the Editor

Gullixson: Waging war against Muslims, the media and Agnes Grill

Close to Home: Deportation plan has destructive local impact

Calexit would be a disaster for progressive values

Close to Home: Threaten Iran? Here we go again

DONNA BRASSET- SHEARER

DONNA BRASSET-SHEARER IS A CULTURAL-ANTHROPOLOGIST WITH A BACKGROUND IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. | February 5, 2017, 12:05AM

| Updated 3 hours ago.

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has the idea that Irans recent missile test warrants a strong notice to Iran to be very careful about provoking the ire of the Trump administration. The critics of Flynns warning to Iran arent against the idea that the United States has a right to defend itself against an enemy provocation. On the contrary, they are concerned that Flynns hard-line rhetoric against Iran can inadvertently invite a counterproductive escalation of the already frayed tensions between the two countries.

It took years of a hard-won struggle with European allies to negotiate the 2015 Iran deal, which secured an arrangement by which Iran agreed to cease all efforts to advance any nuclear weapons work for 10 years in exchange for much- needed sanctions relief. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran was compelled largely against the wishes of its own hard-line factions to comply with the terms of the agreement, even when it meant unrelenting, intensely intrusive inspections of its military arsenals over an entire decade. Countries that have not signed the non-proliferation treaty Israel, North Korea and Pakistan are not under the same obligation or scrutiny to reassure the world that they will not build or use nuclear weapons in a hypothetical war with a rival state.

If there is any doubt that Flynns warning to Iran is not ideologically based, consider his comments in his recent book Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies, co-authored by his colleague Michael Ledeen. The U.S. is confronted with an international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy us, they wrote.

In her New York Review of Books appraisal of Field of Flight, national security expert Jessica Matthews notes that Flynn and Ladeen have singled out Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua as emblematic of the evil countries the U.S. should take to task, lest they eventually succeed in defeating, dominating and destroying the U.S. Both Flynn and Ledeen have been advocating for some time that the nuclear issue aside the goal of U.S. policy toward Iran should be regime change, an idea that has had Iranian hardliners on defensive alert ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In a now infamous quote, Ledeen caught the attention of Irans defense ministry a few years back for its rarely articulated arrogance: Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.

These are the kinds of sentiments evoked by the new administrations Make American great again trope, even as it reveals a remarkably ahistorical perspective on world affairs. One wonders where the learning curve is regarding the utility of throwing a weaker country Vietnam? Iraq? against the wall, or where the rationality lies in listing China or Russia among the evil countries that Flynn believes require every dimension of American national power in a cohesive synchronized manner similar to the effort during World War II to fight an impending war that would be international in scale.

If, in his new role as national security adviser, Flynn continues to hold or worse, to act upon the near apocalyptic worldview expressed in his book, the world is in for some dark times.

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As Mathews concludes in her review, Clearly this is a time for rethinking many long-established claims and convictions, and for new foreign policies As threatening as the external environment is, it could easily become much worse.

If there is a silver lining in this daunting narrative, it surely rests with the worlds citizenries. There may be no better time than the present to forge the international alliances necessary to check the political power of the worlds hard-line military ideologues.

Donna Brasset-Shearer of Petaluma is a cultural-anthropologist with a background in international relations.

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Close to Home: Threaten Iran? Here we go again - Santa Rosa Press Democrat