G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Gearing Up For New War In Iran
By Bill Gallagher
Created Feb 13 2007 - 8:59am
- from the Niagara Falls Reporter (posted with permission) [1]
DETROIT -- It's frightening to realize that one of every three Americans is
bonkers. They think George W. Bush is a good president, doing a good job.
They cling to the belief that the war in Iraq was essential for national
security and, although there have been some setbacks, the United States will
prevail and "victory is our only option."
Polls show a sorry one-third of the American people are still attached to
the lies, myths, hoaxes and deceptions that formed the basis of our policies
toward Iraq and the ongoing disaster the war has brought. This one-third is
so resistant to the truth and so consumed with delusion that their views are
beyond political conversion and only medical intervention makes any sense.
They're nuts. And we all know far too many of them.
A handful of people consumed with political power and/or greed escape the
nut brand. Blind partisans and political hacks stick with Bush and his
puppeteer, Vice President Dick Cheney. So, too, do corporate moguls, oil
barons, military contractors and the super-rich who are the beneficiaries of
raids on the U.S. Treasury and the taxpayer-funded largess they receive from
this vile administration. But the normal, the sensible and the sane have
long abandoned them.
It's revealing that so many shills in the corporate media are card-carrying
members of the sorry one-third, still echoing the administration's lies and
failing to challenge "Bubble Boy" Bush's aversion to reality.
But Bush and his dwindled supporters remain dangerous as they gear up to
sell the war with Iran just as they did with Iraq. They are again using fear
and deceit to propagate the aggression and imperialism the neocons employ to
foster U.S. domination of the world's resources.
The Project for the New American Century types have long had Iran in their
crosshairs, just as they did Iraq. It has nothing to do with fighting
terrorism and everything to do with controlling oil and Israel's "security."
In spite of their failures in Iraq, these crazies still dominate the
Bushevik foreign policy and world view. Make no mistake about it -- they're
aiming their guns at Iran.
They figure this is the time, since Bush's days are numbered and another war
will divert attention from the mess in Iraq. Just bomb the bejesus out of
Iran's nuclear facilities and watch the 24-hour media coverage bolster
public support for the president.
Never mind that such aggression will set off a regional or even world war;
these arrogant bastards don't care. Dominance is their game, and the deaths
of thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Iranians
don't matter in their brutal calculations. They will simply create fear to
justify an attack. We know their game.
The poster boy for this mentality is Douglas J. Feith, the former
under-secretary of Defense for Policy and a PNAC alumnus. He led a rump
intelligence group, a little workshop for war in the Pentagon that
fabricated links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Former defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Cheney and Bush used the lies
repeatedly, and their allies in the media joyfully trumpeted the morphing of
bin Laden into Saddam.
The lie campaign worked so well that, at one time, nearly 60 percent of the
American people believed Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Feith pruned
and cherry-picked the information -- or disinformation -- and dodged the
normal reviews from the broader government intelligence services.
When the lies were exposed -- no weapons of mass destruction and no
Saddam-al-Qaeda connection -- the Busheviks simply wrote off the systematic
deceptions as "intelligence failures."
Failures, my ass. The plot was a great success. They wanted to invade Iraq
and they did. They'll do the same things to justify bombing Iran.
The Pentagon's acting inspector general Thomas F. Gimble finally blew the
whistle on Feith's dirty work. His report -- the first major review and
criticism of the Defense Department's selective intelligence-sifting
operation -- shows how information was distorted.
The campaign began shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and Feith and his little
band of liars sought out anything and everything they could find to show
that Iraq and al-Qaeda worked in collaboration.
One memo they generated in July 2002 was titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Making
the Case." Rumsfeld and Cheney drooled when they got that kind of material.
They just "knew" Saddam and bin Laden were brothers bound in terror. Why
couldn't the CIA and the French, German and Russian intelligence services
just open their eyes?
Four years too late, the Pentagon watchdog revealed that Feith and his lie
brigade "developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence
assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship, which included some
conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence
community."
In a moment of sublime understatement, Gimble said Feith "did not provide
the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers." Armed
Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said of the report
exposing the intelligence manipulation, "I can't think of a more devastating
commentary."
Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said,
"Armed service members in particular are paying a terrible price" for the
deceptions.
But Feith and the other neocons who hijacked American foreign policy and
brought us the Iraq fiasco are getting another chance to spread more havoc
in the Middle East as they plan and orchestrate a military assault on Iran.
Nothing gets more respect in the Bush administration than failure.
Britain's Guardian reports that "U.S. preparations for an air strike against
Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the
Bush administration." The paper's sources point to a offensive next year as
Bush prepares to leave office.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last Friday, "I don't know how many
times the president, Secretary Rice and I have had to repeat -- we have no
intention of attacking Iran."
But former CIA officer and National Security Council staff member Vincent
Cannistraro told the Guardian that "planning is going on, in spite of public
disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign
against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry
this out are being put in place."
In a chilling report titled "From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq"
in the March issue of "Vanity Fair" magazine, Craig Unger details the
designs to attack Iran. "The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war have
been using the same tactics -- alliances with shady exiles, dubious
intelligence on WMD -- to push for the bombing of Iran," he writes.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist, told Unger, "It's
absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps -- demonize the bad
guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is
Iraq redux." Unger traces the neocon designs on Iran to the views of Richard
Perle and other neocons including Feith who wrote a report in 1996 for the
Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, an Israeli-American
think tank.
The report titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm"
contained "the kernel of a breathtakingly radical vision for a New Middle
East. By waging wars against Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, the paper asserted,
Israel and the U.S. could stabilize the region. Later, the neoconservatives
argued that this policy could democratize the Middle East."
Before the craziness contained in "A Clean Break" was tried out in Iraq, a
significant addition was made to the list of targeted nations -- Iran. It
came from Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel's newly elected prime minister.
He met with Perle and made his pitch to include Iran on the list of nations
in need of "democratization." Two days later, addressing Congress, Netanyahu
argued, "The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran." Perle and Feith have
served as advisers to Netanyahu and Israel's Likud Party.
Unger writes, "Ten years later, 'A Clean Break' looks like nothing less than
a playbook for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era. Many
of the initiatives outlined in the paper have been implemented -- removing
Saddam from power, setting aside the 'land for peace' formula to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon -- all with
disastrous results."
With that record in mind, Bush is now allowing the most radical elements of
the Likud Party in Israel and their neocon allies in the United States to
dictate the next move in the Middle East. As Unger argues, we are on the
path Netanyahu staked out in his speech and taking the fight to Iran."
While Iraq bleeds and disintegrates as a nation, Bush plans even more
violence in the Middle East. The already over-stretched U.S. military is
being pressed to do the jobs civilians are refusing to do there.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is asking that military personnel
temporarily fill "more than one-third of 350 new State Department jobs in
Iraq that are to be created under the new strategy," The New York Times
reports.
The State Department is supposed to be expanding provincial reconstruction
teams in Baghdad and western Anbar Province. But too few experienced career
Foreign Service officers have volunteered for the jobs outside the Green
Zone, so Rice wants the Pentagon to pick up the slack.
Why don't the neocons volunteer to implement their ideas? Let's ask Feith,
Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, his brother Frederick, Dick Cheney's daughter
Elizabeth, the entire staff at the neocon bunker and the American Enterprise
Institute to sign up to help in Iraq.
What better way to demonstrate the sincerity of their convictions? The truth
is, most of the neocons are physical as well as moral cowards. They let
others do their dirty work and die. They have other priorities.
_______
BILL GALLAGEHR
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Bill Gallagher
Created Feb 13 2007 - 8:59am
- from the Niagara Falls Reporter (posted with permission) [1]
DETROIT -- It's frightening to realize that one of every three Americans is
bonkers. They think George W. Bush is a good president, doing a good job.
They cling to the belief that the war in Iraq was essential for national
security and, although there have been some setbacks, the United States will
prevail and "victory is our only option."
Polls show a sorry one-third of the American people are still attached to
the lies, myths, hoaxes and deceptions that formed the basis of our policies
toward Iraq and the ongoing disaster the war has brought. This one-third is
so resistant to the truth and so consumed with delusion that their views are
beyond political conversion and only medical intervention makes any sense.
They're nuts. And we all know far too many of them.
A handful of people consumed with political power and/or greed escape the
nut brand. Blind partisans and political hacks stick with Bush and his
puppeteer, Vice President Dick Cheney. So, too, do corporate moguls, oil
barons, military contractors and the super-rich who are the beneficiaries of
raids on the U.S. Treasury and the taxpayer-funded largess they receive from
this vile administration. But the normal, the sensible and the sane have
long abandoned them.
It's revealing that so many shills in the corporate media are card-carrying
members of the sorry one-third, still echoing the administration's lies and
failing to challenge "Bubble Boy" Bush's aversion to reality.
But Bush and his dwindled supporters remain dangerous as they gear up to
sell the war with Iran just as they did with Iraq. They are again using fear
and deceit to propagate the aggression and imperialism the neocons employ to
foster U.S. domination of the world's resources.
The Project for the New American Century types have long had Iran in their
crosshairs, just as they did Iraq. It has nothing to do with fighting
terrorism and everything to do with controlling oil and Israel's "security."
In spite of their failures in Iraq, these crazies still dominate the
Bushevik foreign policy and world view. Make no mistake about it -- they're
aiming their guns at Iran.
They figure this is the time, since Bush's days are numbered and another war
will divert attention from the mess in Iraq. Just bomb the bejesus out of
Iran's nuclear facilities and watch the 24-hour media coverage bolster
public support for the president.
Never mind that such aggression will set off a regional or even world war;
these arrogant bastards don't care. Dominance is their game, and the deaths
of thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Iranians
don't matter in their brutal calculations. They will simply create fear to
justify an attack. We know their game.
The poster boy for this mentality is Douglas J. Feith, the former
under-secretary of Defense for Policy and a PNAC alumnus. He led a rump
intelligence group, a little workshop for war in the Pentagon that
fabricated links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Former defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Cheney and Bush used the lies
repeatedly, and their allies in the media joyfully trumpeted the morphing of
bin Laden into Saddam.
The lie campaign worked so well that, at one time, nearly 60 percent of the
American people believed Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Feith pruned
and cherry-picked the information -- or disinformation -- and dodged the
normal reviews from the broader government intelligence services.
When the lies were exposed -- no weapons of mass destruction and no
Saddam-al-Qaeda connection -- the Busheviks simply wrote off the systematic
deceptions as "intelligence failures."
Failures, my ass. The plot was a great success. They wanted to invade Iraq
and they did. They'll do the same things to justify bombing Iran.
The Pentagon's acting inspector general Thomas F. Gimble finally blew the
whistle on Feith's dirty work. His report -- the first major review and
criticism of the Defense Department's selective intelligence-sifting
operation -- shows how information was distorted.
The campaign began shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and Feith and his little
band of liars sought out anything and everything they could find to show
that Iraq and al-Qaeda worked in collaboration.
One memo they generated in July 2002 was titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Making
the Case." Rumsfeld and Cheney drooled when they got that kind of material.
They just "knew" Saddam and bin Laden were brothers bound in terror. Why
couldn't the CIA and the French, German and Russian intelligence services
just open their eyes?
Four years too late, the Pentagon watchdog revealed that Feith and his lie
brigade "developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence
assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship, which included some
conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence
community."
In a moment of sublime understatement, Gimble said Feith "did not provide
the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers." Armed
Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said of the report
exposing the intelligence manipulation, "I can't think of a more devastating
commentary."
Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said,
"Armed service members in particular are paying a terrible price" for the
deceptions.
But Feith and the other neocons who hijacked American foreign policy and
brought us the Iraq fiasco are getting another chance to spread more havoc
in the Middle East as they plan and orchestrate a military assault on Iran.
Nothing gets more respect in the Bush administration than failure.
Britain's Guardian reports that "U.S. preparations for an air strike against
Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the
Bush administration." The paper's sources point to a offensive next year as
Bush prepares to leave office.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last Friday, "I don't know how many
times the president, Secretary Rice and I have had to repeat -- we have no
intention of attacking Iran."
But former CIA officer and National Security Council staff member Vincent
Cannistraro told the Guardian that "planning is going on, in spite of public
disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign
against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry
this out are being put in place."
In a chilling report titled "From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq"
in the March issue of "Vanity Fair" magazine, Craig Unger details the
designs to attack Iran. "The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war have
been using the same tactics -- alliances with shady exiles, dubious
intelligence on WMD -- to push for the bombing of Iran," he writes.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist, told Unger, "It's
absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps -- demonize the bad
guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is
Iraq redux." Unger traces the neocon designs on Iran to the views of Richard
Perle and other neocons including Feith who wrote a report in 1996 for the
Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, an Israeli-American
think tank.
The report titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm"
contained "the kernel of a breathtakingly radical vision for a New Middle
East. By waging wars against Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, the paper asserted,
Israel and the U.S. could stabilize the region. Later, the neoconservatives
argued that this policy could democratize the Middle East."
Before the craziness contained in "A Clean Break" was tried out in Iraq, a
significant addition was made to the list of targeted nations -- Iran. It
came from Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel's newly elected prime minister.
He met with Perle and made his pitch to include Iran on the list of nations
in need of "democratization." Two days later, addressing Congress, Netanyahu
argued, "The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran." Perle and Feith have
served as advisers to Netanyahu and Israel's Likud Party.
Unger writes, "Ten years later, 'A Clean Break' looks like nothing less than
a playbook for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era. Many
of the initiatives outlined in the paper have been implemented -- removing
Saddam from power, setting aside the 'land for peace' formula to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon -- all with
disastrous results."
With that record in mind, Bush is now allowing the most radical elements of
the Likud Party in Israel and their neocon allies in the United States to
dictate the next move in the Middle East. As Unger argues, we are on the
path Netanyahu staked out in his speech and taking the fight to Iran."
While Iraq bleeds and disintegrates as a nation, Bush plans even more
violence in the Middle East. The already over-stretched U.S. military is
being pressed to do the jobs civilians are refusing to do there.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is asking that military personnel
temporarily fill "more than one-third of 350 new State Department jobs in
Iraq that are to be created under the new strategy," The New York Times
reports.
The State Department is supposed to be expanding provincial reconstruction
teams in Baghdad and western Anbar Province. But too few experienced career
Foreign Service officers have volunteered for the jobs outside the Green
Zone, so Rice wants the Pentagon to pick up the slack.
Why don't the neocons volunteer to implement their ideas? Let's ask Feith,
Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, his brother Frederick, Dick Cheney's daughter
Elizabeth, the entire staff at the neocon bunker and the American Enterprise
Institute to sign up to help in Iraq.
What better way to demonstrate the sincerity of their convictions? The truth
is, most of the neocons are physical as well as moral cowards. They let
others do their dirty work and die. They have other priorities.
_______
BILL GALLAGEHR
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson