Martin Amis's Embarrassment of Casus Belli posted by Richard Seymour

"We have", said Amis on the most recent This Week programme, "an embarrassment of casus belli against Iran". The word "embarrassment" was well-placed in that sentence, since he had previously offered the thought that "we're all supposed to feel terrible" about the US having supported Iraq's deadly invasion of Iran in the 1980s, "but in fact", a revolutionary Iran would have been a greater threat to stability in the long run.

You could easily make yourself contemptible, talking like that. Let's see how far we can take this argument: Amisian "stability" involves a massive conflagration, a war of aggression which killed about a million people on all sides, one that nurtured within itself the seeds of future wars, one that contained genocide, one that so bankrupted the Iraqi state and so indebted it that it actually tried (with what it thought was official approval from Washington) to steal the Kuwaiti treasury. The subsequent war landed US troops on Saudi soil, and launched a massive campaign of 'containment', which included within it the genocidal sanctions regime. Some might think that this was a pivotal moment in the alteration of trends in world "stability". Iran was not alone in possessing a revolutionary postcolonial state, of course. Quite a few contiguous territories were governed by revolutionary nationalist regimes: none of them had to undergo the civilising process of having hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers fried to death for the sake of "stability" - but then, perhaps this is what ails them? Perhaps a little imperial democide is called for as therapy for unstable polities? Surprisingly, Amis doesn't recommend any such thing. So, why did Iran require this treatment? Islam. Islam, Islam, Islam. The new horrorism. Because of its talk of Islam, Amis will never be entirely reasonable about Iran, and the alleged casus belli we have against it. This is why "Iran is our natural enemy".

There is one other local threat to stability about which Amis will never be entirely reasonable. He thinks about it with the blood, and with the soil, and with the genes, and the jeans.