[Peace-discuss] Bush's aim: war with Iran?

[C. G. Estabrook]

The US government has done remarkable things this last week, announcing 
in deed if not in word that it will make war without reference either to 
international law or to the views of its own populace.

American planes apparently continue to attack and kill people in 
Somalia, and American troops today took the unprecedented step of 
storming an Iranian consulate in the northern Iraqi town of Irbil and 
seizing six members of its staff.  (Those old enough will remember how 
in 1979, during the Iranian revolution against a US-supported dictator, 
the USG declaimed constantly against its Tehran embassy's being seized.)

Many people noted and were disturbed by Bush's zombie-like appearance 
during his speech last night.  Some said he looked frightened, certainly 
ill at ease.  Could he be abashed at the enormity of a lie he was 
telling -- or rather at what he was leaving out?  Could the troops to 
Iraq be only part of bigger plan to provoke a war with Iran?

We now know of course that the administration lied repeatedly in the 
run-up to the invasion of Iraq.  The Downing Street memo is only one of 
a range of documents that show that the USG was planning the attack on 
Iraq all the while it was asserting that no decision had been made. 
(Our Congressional representative still says that his vote for war in 
October 2002 was only a vote to give the president an option, because no 
decision had been made: I assume that he was either lied to or rather 
obtuse.)

Bush lied explicitly again, just before the recent election, in regard 
to Rumsfeld's tenure, and then said he did so because "I didn’t want to 
inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign" 
-- i.e, didn't want to let the voters know the truth about a major 
decision about the war.  Is he doing it again now?

There is, it seems to me, a possibility that the decision has been taken 
to go to war with Iran, even with nuclear weapons, and that the present 
time is taken up with preparing for that war (note the naval maneuvers 
and the promotion of admirals into jobs directing such a war) and 
manufacturing a Tonkin Gulf-like excuse for launching it.  That would 
make some horrible sense of a strange remark by Joe Lieberman -- the 
only politician mentioned explicitly in Bush's speech -- at an American 
Enterprise Institute event last Friday: Lieberman compared the war in 
Iraq to the Spanish Civil War, as a prelude to "the larger war on 
Islamist terrorism" ... (Spanish Civil War, 1936-39; World War II, 
1939-45).

Glenn Greenwald, who has written well about this administration's 
massive invasion of civil rights, from the Padilla case to the Military 
Commissions Act, considers the government's intentions towards Iran in 
the following piece.  --CGE

===

Iraq continues to receive the overwhelming bulk of attention in the 
media and among political analysts. But the fate of Iraq, tragically, is 
all but sealed -- the President will send more troops and order them to 
be increasingly brutal and indiscriminate, and they will stay through at 
least the end of his presidency. That is just a fact. The far more 
attention-demanding issue now is what the President's intentions are 
with regard to Iran.

As Think Progress notes, the White House took multiple steps yesterday 
to elevate dramatically the threat rhetoric against Iran. Bush included 
what The New York Times described as “some of his sharpest words of 
warning to Iran” yet. But those words could really be described more 
accurately not as “threats” but as a declaration of war.

He accused the Iranian government of “providing material support for 
attacks on American troops” and vowed to “seek out and destroy the 
networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies.” But 
those networks are located in Iran, which means that search and destroy 
missions on such networks would necessarily include some incursion into 
Iranian territory, whether by air or ground.

Hours before the speech, the White House released a Powerpoint 
presentation with details about the president’s new policy. “Increase 
operations against Iranian actors” was listed in the “Key Tactical 
Shifts” section. As The New York Times reported: “One senior 
administration official said this evening that the omission of the usual 
wording about seeking a diplomatic solution [to the Iranian nuclear 
stand-off] ‘was not accidental.’”

But these were merely the latest in a series of plainly significant 
events over the last several weeks that, taken alone, are each 
noteworthy themselves, but when viewed as a whole unmistakably signal a 
deliberate escalation of tensions with Iran by both the U.S. and Israel:

     * Israel's Prime Minister "accidentally" ending decades of nuclear 
ambiguity by unambiguously acknowledging Israel's nuclear arsenal;


     * New Defense Secretary Robert Gates's extraordinary departure -- 
the very same week -- from long-standing protocol by explicitly 
describing Israel as a nuclear power;


     * The arrest by the U.S. military of senior Iranian military 
officials in Iraq;


     * The announced build-up of forces in the Persian Gulf back in 
December, the purpose of which -- according to Bush officials -- "is to 
make clear that the focus on ground troops in Iraq has not made it 
impossible for the United States and its allies to maintain a military 
watch on Iran" (As well as an incident [the collision of a US submarine 
with a Japanese merchant ship] revealing the placement of a 
nuclear-powered submarine in the Straits of Hormuz);


     * The leaking by the Israeli military that Israel was developing 
plans for an attack on Iran using small-grade, limited tactical nuclear 
weapons. Though the leak was done in such a way as to create plausible 
deniability as to its significance -- the leak was to a discredited 
newspaper and leaks that a country has "planned" for a certain type of 
attack are commonplace and do not mean they are actually going to attack 
-- the leak was nonetheless deliberate and caused the phrases "Israeli 
nuclear attack" and "Iran" to be placed into the public dialogue, at 
exactly the time that tensions have been deliberately heightened between 
the U.S./Israel and Iran -- the purpose of which is almost certainly not 
a planned nuclear attack by Israel on Iran, but a ratchering up of the 
war rhetoric;


     * Increasingly explicit advocacy by neoconservatives in the U.S. 
for a war with Iran, as reflected by the recent Washington Post Op-Ed by 
Joe Lieberman in which he really did declare that the U.S. is already at 
war with Iran ("While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is 
emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by 
Iran");


     * in the later stages of 2006, the President's most prominent 
neoconservative supporters becoming increasingly explicit about their 
advocacy of war with Iran;


     * The transparent and deliberate use by the President throughout 
the last several months of 2006 of highly threatening and accusatory 
language towards Iran that is identical in content and tone to the 
language he used towards Iraq in the months immediately preceding the 
U.S. invasion -- often verbatim identical.



I think there is a tendency to dismiss the possibility of some type of 
war with Iran because it is so transparently destructive and detached 
from reality that it seems unfathomable. But if there is one lesson that 
everyone should have learned over the last six years, it is that there 
is no action too extreme or detached from reality to be placed off 
limits to this administration. The President is a True Believer and the 
moral imperative of his crusade trumps the constraints of reality.

The AEI/Weekly Standard/National Review/Fox News neonconservative 
warmongers are mocked because of how extremist and deranged their 
endless war desires are, but the President is, more or less, one of 
them. He thinks the way they think. The war in Iraq has collapsed and 
the last election made unmistakably clear that Americans have turned 
against the war, and the President's response, like their response, was 
to escalate. How much more proof do we need of how extremist and 
unconstrained by public opinion and basic reality he is?

For anyone with ongoing doubts, here is how the President thinks, as 
expressed in an October, 2006 interview with his with his ideological 
soulmate, Fox's Sean Hannity:


     Hannity: Is this a struggle literally between good and evil?

     Bush: I think it is.

     Hannity: This is what it is? Do you think most people understand 
that? I mean, when you see the vacillating poll numbers, does it 
discourage you in that sense?

     Bush: Well, first of all, you can't make decisions on polls, Sean. 
You've got to do what you think is right. The reason I say it's good 
versus evil is that evil people kill innocent life to achieve political 
objectives. And that's what Al Qaeda and people like Al Qaeda do.


Bush means all of that. That's really what he believes. And he isn't 
constrained by the things that constrain rational people because his 
mission, in his mind, transcends all of those mundane limitations. Is 
there anyone who still doubts that?

More importantly, a war with Iran can happen in many ways other than by 
some grand announcement by the President that he wants to start a war, 
followed by a debate in Congress as to whether such a war should be 
authorized. That is the least likely way for such a confrontation to occur.

We have 140,000 troops (soon to be 20,000 more) sitting in a country 
that borders Iran and where Iran is operating, with an announced 
military build-up in the Persian Gulf imminent, increased war rhetoric 
from all sides, the beginning of actual skirmishes already, a reduction 
(if not elimination) on the existing constraints with which our military 
operates in Iraq, and a declaration by the President that Iran is our 
enemy in the current war.

That makes unplanned -- or seemingly unplanned -- confrontations highly 
likely, whether through miscalculation, miscommunication, misperception, 
or affirmative deceit. Whatever else is true, given the stakes involved 
-- the unimaginable, impossible-to-overstate stakes -- and the fact that 
we are unquestionably moving forward on this confrontational path quite 
deliberately, this issue is receiving nowhere near the attention in our 
political discussions and media reports that it so urgently demands.

For all the pious talk about the need to be "seriously concerned" and 
give "thoughtful consideration" to what will happen if we leave Iraq, 
there is a very compelling -- and neglected -- need to ponder what will 
happen if we stay and if we escalate. And the need for "serious concern" 
and "thoughtful consideration" extends to consequences not just in Iraq 
but beyond.


UPDATE: For those who think that the threat of military confrontation 
with Iran isn't a serious one, here is a BBC report from this morning:

     US forces have stormed an Iranian consulate in the northern Iraqi 
town of Irbil and seized six members of staff.

     The troops raided the building at about 0300 (0001GMT), taking away 
computers and papers, according to Kurdish media and senior local officials.

     The US military would only confirm the detention of six people 
around Irbil.

     The raid comes amid high Iran-US tension. The US accuses Iran of 
helping to fuel violence in Iraq and seeking nuclear arms. Iran denies 
both charges.

     Tehran counters that US military involvement in the Middle East 
endangers the whole region. . . .

     One Iranian news agency with a correspondent in Irbil says five US 
helicopters were used to land troops on the roof of the Iranian consulate.

     It reports that a number of vehicles cordoned off the streets 
around the building, while US soldiers warned the occupants in three 
different languages that they should surrender or be killed.

This is the most serious action yet. Isn't it a definitive act of war 
for one country to storm the consulate of another, threaten to kill them 
if they do not surrender, and then detain six consulate officers?


http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/