[Peace-discuss] US war plan?

[C. G. Estabrook]

There's now a serious possibility that the Republicans could
lose control of the House of Representatives this fall, and at
least a statistical possibility that they could lose the
Senate.  Meanwhile, approval of the administration's foreign
policy, principally in regard to Iraq, has fallen well below
50% and continues to decline, while the Medicare drug fiasco
has driven approval of their domestic policy, never high, to
new lows.  Moreover, the legal difficulties of the
administration's Gauleiters, notably Libby and Rove, are
serious, and the bottom could fall out of the ramshackle
structure that supports the administration's felonious
wiretapping (with some people thinking that there are further
revelations to come about that curious episode: why did they
bypass FISA, after all?).    

Cornered rats proverbially fight back, however, and if things
really get bad as 2006 goes on, with mid-term elections
looming, the administration always has their ace in the hole:
an emergency, preferably violent.  (Imagine where the Bush
administration would be, had there been no 9/11/01 attack.) 
Bush today produced a suspect account of an almost-emergency,
a putative foiled attack on Los Angeles in '02.  (Again, the
question: why mention it now? Why didn't they prosecute the
conspirators at the time?)

I've posted reasons to suppose that a full-scale attack on
Iran (four times the size of Iraq and not defenseless, as
Iraq was) is out of the question.  But, acting on the advice
of the Truman-era senator who observed that "you can do
anything you want with the American people if you scare them
enough," the administration has been making headway among
Americans with its scare campaign about Iran -- despite the
uncomfortable resemblance to the campaign for the Iraq
invasion (madmen armed with nuclear weapons, etc.) As our boy
emperor himself once memorably put it, "Fool me once, shame on
you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."  Perhaps not, but
the administration is surely trying...

But the administration may not have to choose between a
full-scale attack on Iraq and de-escalating the crisis.  If
things get desperate enough that they need a military
emergency to rally support for a beleaguered Bush and Co,
there are things that they could do, short of all-out war. 
(Seymour Hersh and others have said military intrusions --
"special operations" -- by the US and Israel have been
underway in Iran for some time; the administration's new
budget, just submitted to Congress, calls for a substantial
increase in money for "special ops and psy-ops.")

The Australo-British journalist John Pilger notes that, while
the Pentagon cannot seriously plan to occupy Iran, it may be
that "it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the
border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of
Iran's oil. 'The first step taken by an invading force,'
reported Beirut's Daily Star, 'would be to occupy Iran's
oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of
Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply.' On
28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of
British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings,
over the past year."  Last year, the Iranian government
announced that it would build the country's second nuclear
reactor in Khuzestan...

A US attack by land, sea, and/or air would of course be an act
of desperation, driven as much or more by failing domestic
politics as by American's long-term policy to control Middle
East energy resources.  But given that the US has malgre lui
constructed a vast self-conscious Shi'ite region (Iran, Iraq,
and the oil-producing part of Saudi Arabia) that is at once in
possession of most of the world's oil and hostile to the US, a
further attempt at control in this fashion may recommend itself.  

Remember that the US doesn't need Mideast oil for its own
consumption (one reason that Bush's comments on it in the SOTU
speech were so odd), but has for decades insisted on control
of it as a way to control its major economic rivals, Europe
and northeast Asia: the US will not easily give up control of
the spigot.  And Khuzestan may be the handle of the spigot. 

--CGE