CT Blue

Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times reporter, and now columnist for the Guardian, makes the case that, mired as he is in Iraq, the Boy-King and his handlers are making ready to attack Iran:

When President Bush took his place in front of television cameras last Thursday to deliver his latest assessment of conditions in Iraq, one thing was certain. He would utter the word “Iran” more than once.

Sure enough, Bush blamed “Iranian-backed militants” for much of the violence in Iraq. He said the United States had to keep fighting in Iraq in order to “counter the destructive ambitions of Iran.” Then he warned that Iran’s efforts to influence events in Iraq “must stop.”

…

We have now entered a season in which every speech by an official of the Bush administration that has anything to do with Iraq or the Middle East includes threats against Iran. This intensifying drumbeat suggests that, incredible as it may seem, the United States is seriously considering launching a military attack on Iran.

…

This latest round of saber-rattling comes in the wake of more concrete evidence that the US is marshaling its forces for an attack on Iran.

Two prominent British specialists recently issued a report asserting that US military planners have identified an astonishing 10,000 bombing targets in Iran. Private contractors report that the Pentagon has asked them to prepare cost estimates for ground support and reconstruction in an unnamed West Asian country.

A former CIA analyst, Bob Baer, published an article predicting that the US will use Iran’s activities in Iraq to justify a massive bombing campaign, and concluded: “There will be an attack on Iran.”

One of the truly amazing things about the Bush war marketing machine is its ability to make self contradicting assertions that go unnoticed in the American Press. Thus, we are told that our primary enemy in Iraq is Iran, while we are simultaneously led to believe that we are battling Al Qaeda. That would make some kind of sense if those two entities could be considered to be working together, but that’s a neo-con fantasy. The Shia Iranians are simply not in an alliance with the Sunni Al Qaeda, any more than the secular Saddam was likely to be allied with the fundamentalist Al Qaeda.

Bush can successfully have it both ways because no attempt is made at fact checking, and anyone who mentions these inconvenient facts runs the risk of being branded as soft on terror, merely for pointing out that reality and Bush have no points of connection. Thus, it appears, we may be sold an Iranian war with the same marketing strategy that gave us Iraq. This time, apparently, the strategy will be to simply blow them to bits. It is always possible, of course, that such a strategy will succeed, but given Team Bush’s batting average, there’s no reason to think that it will. As Kinzer points out, there’s lots of reasons to believe that it won’t. This time, by the way, there’ll be no consultation with Congress. If it happens, it will happen without notice. Both Iran and American democracy will be reduced to rubble.

I should, I suppose, acknowledge that Bush could be saying we are fighting both of these entities at the same time. That amounts to an admission that we are smack in the middle of a civil/ideological war in which we don’t dare choose sides, since either alternative is unpalatable.