Is it just me or has there been a head-spinning amount of political news and developments over the last coupla weeks? Okay, then it is just me. But seriously, you miss the news for a day or two and it's hard to catch up -- kinda like missing a few days of class and then showing up for that big exam at the end of the week: You know you're just gonna have to kind of wing it. Well, there's no winging it here on WardensWorld, just an honest attempt to make some sense out of the winding down of the consensus worst administration in the recorded annals of the republic. So let's begin, shall we? And yes, all this will be on the test.
Sure, Karl Rove is a toxic pig-faced gnome, as hateful as he is despised, and richly deserves all the scorn thrown his way the last week or so after announcing he was leaving the White House next month. But my favorite piece of the week finds Scott Ritter justly demolishing what's left of Dick Cheney's rep with a blistering denunciation of Vice, the real power behind the clown, er throne, in a piece for Truthdig.com titled Why Cheney Really Is That Bad. Not one to beat around the Bush, the combative Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector, argues this is no time for niceties or subtleties, and this may surprise you but we here at WardensWorld happen to agree with him wholeheartedly. Here's an excerpt but it's an absolute must read from start to finish:
"The vice president is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today. Not Osama Bin Laden. Not the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Not Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung Il. Not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Jose Padilla himself. Not even George W. Bush can lay claim to this title. It is Dick Cheney's alone. Operating in a never-never land of constitutional ambiguity which exists between the office of the president and the Congress of the United States, Cheney's office has made its impact felt on the policies of the United States of America as had no vice president's office before him. Granted unprecedented oversight over national security and foreign policy by executive order in early 2001, many months prior to the terror attacks of 9/11, Cheney has single-handedly steered America away from being a nation among nations (albeit superior), operating (roughly) in accordance with the rule of law, and toward its present manifestation as the new Rome, a decadent imperial power bent on global domination whatever the cost.
The absolute worst of the rot that has infected America because of the policies and actions of the Bush administration has originated from the office of the vice president. The nonsensical response to the terror attacks of 9/11, seeking a "global war" versus defending the rule of law at home and abroad, taking the lead in spreading the lies that got us involved in Iraq, legitimizing torture as a tool of American jurisprudence, advocating for warrantless wiretappings of U.S.-based communications (regardless of what the Fourth Amendment says against illegal search and seizure), and pushing for an expansion of America's global conflict into Iran-all can be traced back to the person of Cheney as the point of origin.
America today is very much engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the forces of evil. The enemy resides not abroad, however, but at home, vested in the highest offices of the land. Neither Osama Bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein threatened the life blood of the United States-the Constitution-to the extent that Cheney has. Not Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Not since the American Civil War has there been a constitutional crisis of the magnitude that exists today, threatening to rip the very fabric of American society apart at the seams, courtesy of Dick Cheney."
By the way, you know the little war we're fighting, the one to topple a dictator and spread democracy across the region, the one in which almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in combat, with tens of thousands more suffering severe, life-altering injuries? Turns out democracy is not the true endgame anymore, at least according to the people actually charged with running this fiasco:
"Nightmarish political realities in Baghdad are prompting American officials to curb their vision for democracy in Iraq. Instead, the officials now say they are willing to settle for a government that functions and can bring security.
A workable democratic and sovereign government in Iraq was one of the Bush administration's stated goals of the war.
But for the first time, exasperated front-line U.S. generals talk openly of non-democratic governmental alternatives, and while the two top U.S. officials in Iraq still talk about preserving the country's nascent democratic institutions, they say their ambitions aren't as "lofty" as they once had been.
"Democratic institutions are not necessarily the way ahead in the long-term future," said Brig. Gen. John "Mick" Bednarek, part of Task Force Lightning in Diyala province, one of the war's major battlegrounds."
Of course, with this autocratic bunch in charge, "democratic institutions" may not necessarily apply for this country's long-term future either, as this administration has demonstrated their supreme impatience with the messy ramifications of actually listening to people who don't agree with them or their failed policies. Exhibit A might just might be this shockingly revealing internal White House document obtained by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information lawsuit that instructs staff on how to deal with those pesky demonstrators.
"The manual offers advance staffers and volunteers who help set up presidential events guidelines for assembling crowds. Those invited into a VIP section on or near the stage, for instance, must be " extremely supportive of the Administration," it says. While the Secret Service screens audiences only for possible threats, the manual says, volunteers should examine people before they reach security checkpoints and look out for signs. Make sure to look for "folded cloth signs," it advises.
To counter any demonstrators who do get in, advance teams are told to create "rally squads" of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards or banners with "favorable messages." Squads should be placed in strategic locations and "at least one squad should be 'roaming' throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems," the manual says.
"These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators," it says. "The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site."
Advance teams are advised not to worry if protesters are not visible to the president or cameras: "If it is determined that the media will not see or hear them and that they pose no potential disruption to the event, they can be ignored. On the other hand, if the group is carrying signs, trying to shout down the President, or has the potential to cause some greater disruption to the event, action needs to be taken immediately to minimize the demonstrator's effect."
The manual adds in bold type: "Remember -- avoid physical contact with demonstrators! Most often, the demonstrators want a physical confrontation. Do not fall into their trap!" And it suggests that advance staff should "decide if the solution would cause more negative publicity than if the demonstrators were simply left alone." Washington Post.com/2007/08/21/White House Manual Details How To With Protesters
Hey, maybe President Bush, who Karl Rove insists has read 94 books in the past year, really does know what's best for the rest of us and we should all fall in line accordingly, like well drilled soldiers in a time of war. Maybe the distinguished Yale grad really did have it right the other day when he compared his own reckless, unnecessary, preemptive disaster of a war to the unnecessary invasion and ultimately fruitless slaughter and carnage that defined another generation's involvement in another country's brutal civil war: Vietnam.
But unfortunately, like another paranoid, insulated president who couldn't admit a mistake, Richard Nixon, this present occupant of the White House is not content to unleash chaos and misery on just one nation, but instead his administration seeks to imprint their trademark incompetence and misreading of history to other nation-states. And just as our illegal bombing and shortsighted bungling in the internecine affairs of Cambodia set the stage for the extreme political radicalization that led to the ascension of the Khmer Rouge, there's no telling what disasters our misguided meddling into Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon will lead to.
Now, many historians will tell you that Bush couldn't be more wrong in his conflating the present situation in the Middle East with our long military campaign in the Far East:
"Bush and defenders of the current war and Vietnam ignore crucial aspects of history, however. Vietnam by 1975 had been wracked by a brutal fratricidal war for over a quarter-century, and recriminations were unavoidable, and made inevitable by the nature of the U.S. intervention and occupation of the southern half of Vietnam.
Now, as in the Vietnam era, the United States finds itself in a similarly intractable position. By intervening in a country that was not stable to begin with, putting a government into power that is derided as a U.S. client regime, heightening internal struggles, this time between Shiite and Sunni, taking sides in a civil war, causing massive destruction, and continuing to fight amid escalating bloodshed abroad and popular protest at home, the Bush administration is making many of the same errors that the Johnson and Nixon administrations did during the Vietnam War. While there does not appear to be a genocidal Khmer Rouge-type group lurking in the background and ready to cause incalculable terror, there is no question that the various armed groups that have emerged in Iraq since March 2003 are certain to persist and cause greater mayhem and death, perhaps throughout the entire Middle East.
So Bush's analogy is not only incorrect, but exposes the perhaps unavoidable fate facing the United States in Iraq. Continuing this war amid the daily deterioration will only prolong the time it will take to rebuild Iraq and try to heal the hatred and fear that now engulfs it. The sooner the United States begins a timely withdrawal from Iraq, the sooner the Iraqis themselves can begin to sort out their problems, and hopefully prevent a repeat of the killing fields of Cambodia."
And Bush isn't the only modern pol who apparently chooses to ignore the actual history and lessons of the Vietnam War and its bloody, brutal spillover into Cambodia, what with Rudy Giuliani offering an incredible conclusion on how and why we "lost" that conflict. In a long essay for Foreign Affairs magazine, which has already been torn apart by innumerable critics, we get an open window into Rudy's take on the whole wide world -- a take which is startling not only for its consistent misreading of the seminal events of the past century, but more to the point it's stone cold scary for the glimpse it gives us into the foreign policy proposals a Giuliani administration would be inflicting on an unsuspecting world. Despite sacrificing the lives of almost 60,000 American men and women in that war, with again countless thousands more wounded both physically and mentally beyond recognition, Rootin' Tootin' Rudy thinks we senselessly cut and ran from that far corner of the globe while the battle was ready to be taken. Of course, it was a battle Chickenhawk Rudy wanted no part of, but he wants us all to know what if we just had shown some nerve, some fortitude, some guts, and didn't listen to all the damn protesters, we could have shown them commies that we meant business.
"America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. … Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America."
And just as the neoconmen responsible for selling us the Iraq war in the first place tell us about our own present war of occupation: even thinking of cutting our losses will lead to even more dire consequences and embolden the enemy. Never mind that we expect our leaders to be wise enough to refrain from expending precious resources on a battle is already lost, that it is folly to keep digging a hole you already can't climb out of, but as Fred Kaplan writes in Slate (Rudy the Anti-Statesman: Giuliani's Loopy Foreign-Policy Essay) about Rudy's simplistic reading of the Vietnam conflict:
Does he really believe this? What books have his advisers been giving him? The "South Vietnamese partners" were as corrupt and illegitimate as they come. The Khmer Rouge came to power amid a political vacuum that was spawned as much by Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia as by anything else. As for the "expansionist" Soviet Union, things didn't end very well for the Moscow Politburo. America, it is now widely agreed, was weakened by the Vietnam War, not by its termination. And, by the way, how about that "domino theory"? You'd think from his description that Southeast Asia has subsequently all gone Communist.
As another writer nailed it in a recent column fittingly entitled Rudy Giuliani: Confused, Ignorant or Deceitful (although personally I would substitute the word and for or!),
"That the former mayor is unsuited to be president is evident from his recent essay in Foreign Affairs. He is breathtakingly naive, shockingly irresponsible, and cynically dishonest in turn. Indeed, since this document was undoubtedly carefully drafted and vetted by his campaign staff and outside policy advisers, his personal instincts likely are even more extreme."
And the hits to Rudy's steadily worsening reputation keep on coming! Even within the pages of Time magazine, that bastion of mainstream media that once hailed Giuliani as America's Mayor and proclaimed him Person of the Year for 2001, grave doubts and extreme reservations are being voiced. Amanda Ripley examines the Rudy record behind the boasting and finds it alarmingly wanting. In Behind Giuliani's Tough Talk, she writes:"Giuliani says he understands terrorism "better than anyone else running for President," and he certainly talks about it more than anyone else. But being a victim of terrorism, or the steely leader of a recovery, is not necessarily the same as understanding terrorism.
The evidence ... shows great, gaping weaknesses. Giuliani's penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now. Giuliani's limitations are in fact remarkably similar to those of another man who has led the nation into a war without end.
Giuliani's record on managing New York City's emergency responders is more telling — and shows a more complicated leadership style than Americans saw on 9/11. "When we reflected on his tenure, we saw qualities that were not helpful," says Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 commission and former Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration. "[For President], I think you want someone who is not polarizing. Someone who brings people together by the power of persuasion rather than the power of dictate. Someone who is considering of other points of view and ultimately decisive. And on all three scores, I have serious doubts about the Mayor."
More than anything else, counterterrorism experts interviewed by TIME cited Giuliani's campaign rhetoric as a cause for concern. He frequently conflates different threats, from Iraqi insurgents to al-Qaeda to Iran, into one monolithic dark force. He routinely compares the terrorism threat to the Holocaust and the cold war. In one 15-min. phone interview in August, Giuliani compared the terrorism threat with Nazism or communism six times. When I asked him if he risked exaggerating the threat, since most terrorist plots against the West are not the kind of attacks that will bring down a nation, he replied, "I'm not saying it would take down a country. What terrorism can do and has done is kill thousands and thousands of people. It's real, it's existential, it's independent of us."
Retired Lieut. General William Odom was director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1988. He calls Giuliani's terrorism rhetoric "the most delightful thing that al-Qaeda could want." And he laments that Giuliani isn't showing the stoicism he displayed on 9/11. "We need a President who cools it," says Odom, a senior fellow with the conservative Hudson Institute. As for Giuliani's analogy to the cold war, a period Odom knows rather well, he is unimpressed. "Jihadism is a mosquito bite compared to communism," he says. "Anybody who talks about terrorism this way is like a witch doctor."
Spot on, as our friends the Brits like to say!
Giuliani's Foreign Affairs piece is titled Toward a Realistic Peace, but don't be fooled by the misleading word peace: as you'd expect from a gung-ho warhawk who never met a conflict he wasn't comfortable sending someone else's sons to fight, Rudy is much more at home hiding behind a barrage of tough-guy prose proclaiming there's not a problem that can't be surmounted by the application of America's military might no matter where it takes place.
"The U.S. Army needs a minimum of ten new combat brigades. … We must also take a hard look at other requirements, especially in terms of submarines, modern long-range bombers, and in-flight refueling tankers."
But for all his trademark bluster, nowhere in the numbingly long-winded piece is it explained how all these lofty goals are to be accomplished given an American military that is already overstretched, worn down, and in poor morale. In case Rudy missed it, we're having trouble meeting the minimum monthly recruitment goals, even after foolishly lowering the qualifying standards for American soldierhood. Nor is it likewise explained how a nation deeply in debt, and already expending an obscene amount on defense, homeland security and intelligence can continue to fund what amount to expansionist, imperialistic, and in some cases nakedly aggressive colonial goals of empire.
"For 15 years, the de facto policy of both Republicans and Democrats has been to ask the U.S. military to do increasingly more with increasingly less. The idea of a post-Cold War 'peace dividend' was a serious mistake – the product of wishful thinking and the opposite of true realism. As a result of taking this dividend, our military is too small to meet its current commitments or shoulder the burden of any additional challenges that might arise. We must rebuild a military force that can deter aggression and meet the wide variety of present and future challenges. When America appears bogged down and unready to face aggressors, it invites conflict ... The next U.S. president must also press ahead with building a national missile defense system … Bush deserves credit for changing America's course on this issue. But progress needs to be accelerated."
So building a costly Star Wars-type "shield" to protect us would be a Giuliani priority, despite widespread belief that the system may never be workable. And not only would it cost some $10 billion a year to build, but even a perfectly operational system may do nothing to protect the next terrorist attack. Let's hope Rudy's next missive contains an infusion of actual logic into his grand design for world domination, because this one is frightening in its lack of diplomacy and insistence on a belligerent, unilateral approach to foreign policy.
"Constellations of satellites that can watch arms factories everywhere around the globe, day and night, above- and belowground ... must be part of America's arsenal."
"We must also develop the capability to prevent an attack—including a clandestine attack—by those who cannot be deterred."
"Those with whom we negotiate—whether ally or adversary—must know that America has other options. The theocrats ruling Iran need to understand that we can wield the stick as well as the carrot, by undermining popular support for their regime, damaging the Iranian economy, weakening Iran's military, and, should all else fail, destroying its nuclear infrastructure.
Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. Has there ever been a politician in need of intensive psychotherapy more than this bullying creep? Taking a line from the Good Book that Republicans regularly use as a campaign prop but whose most basic tenets of decency, humility, compassion and generosity they almost uniformly ignore:
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?
Or to paraphrase slightly, why should anyone vote a man into the highest post in the land when it appears the closest members of his own family can't stand to be in the same census tract as the guy? The answer, of course, is we shouldn't, and hopefully won't.
9 comments:
Good lord. You'd swear that Al-Queida had suitcase bombs on every corner the way Rudy goes on. And Cheney is without a doubt the most evil human being on the planet. You won't get any of the "M.C. Rove" moments out of this guy. We all know he shot that guy in the face on purpose. Speaking of Rove, Fox News actually made an attempt to go after him, instead of kissing his ass like you figure they would. They kept asking him about testifying, and he wouldn't budge on his "privileged information" crap.
Hell in a handbasket, man.
Great post!
Rudolf is a douchebag. He is a tumbling dickweed drifting about the town. He couldn't make it any clearer that he's a tool of the corporate militarists. The satellite defense thing has been effectively debunked again and again and yet he still endorses it. Why I wonder? Could it be because whether it works or not, it'll be a massive boondoggle for some lucky defense contractor? Hey, let's think of more ways to siphon tax dollars from out of the natinal coffers and into some CEO's offshore bank account!
PS--I'm reading a Michael Ruppert book called "Crossing the Rubison"...his main contention is that 9-11 and the G.W.O.T. were engineered by some elite corporate militarists (including Dick)in order to justify seizure of the few remaining rich oil fields (as a response to the threat of Peak Oil.) At least, that's what I gather it's about so far; I'm not that far into yet. It seems like it's gonna be a juicy read and I'll keep you fellows posted on my progress. Perhaps I'll experience some sort of Grand Revelation.
that is, "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the end of the Age of Oil" A mouthful, eh?
Cheney is just the face of unbridled aggression and blatant greed run amok. He has hijacked the machinery of government in a thousand different ways, reorganizing the chain of command so that almost everything -- intelligence, covert ops -- runs through his office, while Bush is just a hayseed hustler. Yeah, I was also surprised that Chris Wallace was the only one to ask some hardball questions of Rove. The others were just puff pieces. Pathetic.
Yeah Max, I heard of the peak oil thesis, and it rings true. Mayhaps that was a big topic at the Cheney Energy Task Force meetings. I forget where i read it or heard it, but supposedly there was a map of the Middle East basically laid out on the table, and it was where can we do business here. Enron of course was sending millions to the Taliban right up until the end hoping to get their cooperation on the pipeline deal.
Right now I'm reading The Cell, which purports to follow the FBI/CIA breakdowns in stopping the 9/11 plot. It totally accepts the official narrative of events so far, mainly that there was no cooperation bw the two agencies and the terrorists fell thru the cracks. Nothing about the training exercises going on, building 7, etc.It also suffers from John Miller's enormous ego, the network news guy who once interviewed OBL and has not stopped retelling the story to anyone who will listen. He injects himself into what would other wise be a good kind of detective, police story of tracking down the original WTC bombers, etc. I'm eager to finish it so I can move on to a more conspiratorial book, for lack of a better word. I may check out the Ruppert book. I think we're pretty damn close to blowing the lid off this investigation any day now!
Haha, yes yesss!
I'm only a few chapters in so far, but yes what you said is correct: out of the extremely limited number of documents released about the "energy task force" meetings, there were maps of the middle east oil fields. Ruppert points out that 60% of the world's oil is located within a very small triangle encompassing the gulf, eastern Saudi Arabia, western Iran, and the eastern half of Iraq. He's big on the connections between Wall Street, the CIA, and the illegal drug trade. When I really think about it, it seems pretty obvious: estimates of worldwide drug revenue are on the order of like 600-800 billion a year, and all that cash is going somewhere, for chrissake. Obviously the "War on Drugs" is a huge joke...clearly our government, with its vast resources and manpower, could crack down on the drug business if it really wanted to. Ruppert documents numerous connections between Wall Street brokerage frims, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the CIA...there's this massive overlap where so-and-so works here for a few years, then jumps pver here for a while...the same crap we see between the government and the oil, defense, and private equity/financial speculation sectors. I knew there was stuff like this happening, but Ruppert really lays it all out in alarming fashion...I'm only as I said a few chapters in and I've already seen stuff that raises my eyebrows.
I'm starting to gain a rudimentary understanding of peak oil. I mean, even my feeble grasp of economics allows me to see that:
1) Discovery of new oil fields is decreasing
2) Oil consumption is rising, and will increase exponentially due to industrializing nations like China and India.
All this equals higher prices, and think of how many things are made of plastic...everything! I'm only 31 but even I remember seeing gas for .99 a gallon when I got my first car. That's tripled prices in just fifteen years!
So with all this, of course these militarist oilmen cheat their way into the whitehouse, seize control of the U.S. military and start invading oil-rich nations..for democracy! And it can't be coincidence that Dick has his secret meetings with oil execs and has unprecedented national defense powers shifted over to him mere months before the 9-11 attacks. Hell, the DOT guy Norman Mineta testified in front of the whitewash commission that he was standing right next to Cheney while he was being briefed on the plane approaching the Pentagon...Dick Cheney was in charge of the national air defense and gave no orders to shoot the plane down! What did Mineta say...they said, "Mr. Vice President, the plane is fifteen miles out.....ten miles...five miles....two miles....do the orders still stand?" After which he testified that Cheney angrily retorted, "Have you seen anything that would indicate otherwise?" or words to that effect. This is all in the goddam official report and yet no one in the mainstream media seems too interested.
Insanity! This country is in deep doo-doo, Mr. Warden! As if you didn't know that already!
Let me know more about that book you're reading when you finish it. I think after I'm done with the Ruppert text I'll check out the one you recommended by Nafeez Ahmed.
Let me know if you crack the case!
The Ahmed book is incredible and i recommend it to you and Serge and anyone interested in the truth behind the coverup. The only disappointing thing is I was expecting more conclusions to be drawn about who was behind the actual events, at least who let it happen.
I always thought that Cheney moment that Mineta talks about is close to a smoking gun, but just seems to get no mention outside of the Internet.
The stage is being set in Iran. I read yesterday that we are already doing covert ops there courtesy of the Defense Dept., which unlike the CIA does NOT have to report to Congress about its doings because, get this, we are in a time of war and any military action is considered another front in the same war. So these maniacs are sponsoring terrorism inside of Iran hoping to get Tehran to take the bait. We've already called their Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, blamed all the IED stuff on them. It's a matter of time before it all escalates and Cheney gets his trigger for broadening the war. As you implied, if Iran had no oil, we wouldn't care if Hitler's son was in charge.
I keep going back to that Executive Order 51, which gives the Vice President total control over the running of the government in the event of an emergency, setting the stage for martial law. As usual, no mention in the MSM that I can tell.
Also stumbled on some interesting JFK stuff, the fact that apparently Prescott Bush put together the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket in '52, and that Nixon has always been a front for the Bush interests, going all the way back to the start of his political career. Bush/Nixon/LBJ, CIA elements, Big Oil, it's all there. Bush was running the Bay of Pig things for years, recruiting Cubans for the operation. Watergate was all related to this, as you know.
Also found a document written by Wolfowitz, Libby etc commissioned by Cheney in '92 that reads like a blueprint for World domination by the US military. It was rejected by then pres-Bush, but almost all of the important parts surfaced in later documents Rebuilding America's Defenses and of course Project for a New American Century. Where it stops, no one knows. If the Dems can't wrest power back from these maniacs, we are in deep doo-doo, and will be for years and years...
Sir Warden:
The Eisenhower-Nixon--Bush connection is one I was unaware of. I'll have to google it on the Internets.
Regarding Iran...I too am increasingly thinking we'll see an air campaign sometime within the next year. If a prediction must be made, here goes: sometime around March-July of 2008 we'll start to hear Propaganda stating that Iran "is-too-big-a-threat-and-must-stopped-before-they-destroy-civilization." Of course, maybe I'm wrong. The POTUS race will be kicking into high gear then and such rhetoric could hurt the Rethuglicans' hopes. BUT: maybe that's good for them? I'm just throwing out ideas here. Think about it: the POTUS campaign in full swing, the Greedy Old Party has naught to run on due to the fact that Bush has wrecked the country...perhaps making people scared of crazy Arabs with Nukes is their only hope as they see it?
On the other hand, with Bush's approval ratings in the gutter and anti-war sentiment so high, it may be political suicide for them to start beating the War Drums. Maybe Americans won't fall for it this time.
But wait! Americans....have no say in the matter. Do they? Aren't we a pliant bunch of drooling commoners too concerned with surviving in this lasseiz faire corporate clusterfuck to bother questioning da gub'ment's foreign policy? (present company excluded, of course.) Well I think that's what they think of us. And by and large, they're probably right. They can and will get away with murder. Literal murder. I believe there's a very real possibility that if BushCo engages the full force P.R. campaign they're capable of, that is, if they start using their media contacts to plant "news" stories painting gloomy pictures of Our Imminent Doom, a political victory just might be achieved. I can readily imagine a bunch of spineless Democrats hemming and hawing in a pathetic attempt to stake out a "middle ground" in some phony Iran-With-Nukes Debate.
"You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."
So maybe they see a military strike against Iran as a political
boon. Or maybe not...maybe they really have painted themselves into a corner with the Iraq Debacle. In that case it may be advantageous for an air strike against Iran to happen sooner, before the POTUS race heats up. If that is how it pans out, then I would expect to hear the Propaganda Siren Songs start sometime during the next month, while 9-11-01 is still fresh in the National Psyche as a result of the sixth anniversary.
Or maybe I'm just plain wrong. Maybe there'll be no airstrikes. If this is the case, we'll still be seeing covert ops by way of support for factions opposed to the current Iranian government. Iran has tons of oil, a government that is not a U.S. client, and ambitions to insure its survival via nuclear weapons; all these things make them evil.
No, Max, I don't think you're wrong on the last count. Sooner rather than later, air strikes are gonna happen, and why -- because the Israel lobby is gonna wanna squeeze as much as they can out of the final months of the Bush regime. It's the tail wagging the dog. Go to Rawstory.com, a great site I just found, and they have a story about the impending air campaign, to be followed by executive orders being implemented all but declaring martial law. Call me paranoid, but an evil sumbitch like Cheney is not going away without a fight. One way or the other, we will either be "attacked" by "terrorists" or we will attack Iran. Count on it, my friend. The rest of your observations are as usual on the mark.
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