There are some for whom the dream of going to war with Iran has not died. As succinctly detailed in the article <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2010/04/01/what-war-with-iran-means" source="Antiwar.com" author="Patrick Buchanan">What War with Iran Means</a>, these criminally insane members of the Senate have expressed themselves in no uncertain terms: <bq author="Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.">Diplomacy has failed. Iran is on the verge of becoming nuclear and we cannot afford that.</bq> <bq author="Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.">We have to contemplate the final option. The use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.</bq> <bq author="Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.">[War is a ] terrible thing, [but] sometimes it is better to go to war than to allow the Holocaust to develop a second time.</bq> These people are a danger to all of us. They should be severely censured for war-mongering. It seems that bi-partisanship is not dead, after all. <i>Not a single American</i> should support America going to war with Iran. Iran barely has any peaceful nuclear capabilities and has no military nuclear capability. They do not pose a danger to the U.S. America has spilled enough innocent blood in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the number of civilian victims vastly exceeds those that posed even an infinitesimal danger to the U.S. Since 1990, the Iraqi people have been subject to sanctions and bombing campaigns. U.N. sanctions block nearly everything needed to survice, including food and medicine, much as the Israelis do to the Palestinians. The bombing started in 1990 during Gulf War I and never really stopped, though it increased dramatically in 1998 (coincidentally during the Lewinsky and subsequent Clinton impeachment proceedings) and again, of course, with the official start of Gulf War II. Iran is already suffering under a sanctions regime. Many in the U.S. would like to turn the screws even further.<fn> This is unconscionable, inhuman. It puts the U.S. in the company of the worst of the worst of history. As even <i>Patrick Buchanan</i> says: <bq>As with Iraq in 2003, the war will be launched by the United States against a nation that did not attack us — to strip it of weapons it does not have.</bq> We can only hope that this is some sort of sick April Fool's joke on the part of Mr. Buchanan, but the publication date is from the 2nd. <hr> <ft>Instead of sanctions, the U.S. should support actual free and fair elections, as pointed out in <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/the_islamists_are_not_coming?page=full" source="Foreign Policy" author="Charles Kurzman & Ijlal Naqvi">The Islamists Are Not Coming</a>: <bq>[...] the more free and fair an election is, the worse the Islamic parties do. By our calculations, the average percentage of seats won by Islamic parties in relatively free elections is 10 points lower than in less free ones. [...] Even if they don't win, Islamic parties often find themselves liberalized by the electoral process. We found that Islamic party platforms are less likely to focus on sharia law or armed jihad in freer elections and more likely to uphold democracy and women's rights.</bq> So, in order to quash Islamist terrorism (such as it is in the Western world---nearly nonexistent), all the U.S. has to do is stop upholding non-participatory, undemocratic and unfair dictatorships in Muslim countries. Like in Saudi Arabia, etc.</ft>