For months, the Bush Faction has been
conducting a low-key PR campaign to put Iran in the crosshairs for a
military strike. Last week, Bush himself upped the wattage with a
public declaration that “all options are on the table” for slapping
down Tehran, Agence France Presse reports. He even alluded to the
invasion of Iraq as an example of the kind of action he has in mind.
Bush scarcely bothered to hide his disdain for peaceful solutions to
the row with Iran. After mouthing the usual pious lies about “working
feverishly on the diplomatic route,” he immediately dismissed such
efforts with a sneer: “As you know, I’m skeptical.”
The chief
angle of Bush’s warmongering campaign has been Iran’s nuclear energy
program. Although Iran is allowed by international treaty to develop
nuclear energy resources and has been proceeding under international
supervision, there are concerns that Tehran might follow the example of
U.S. allies such as Israel, India and Pakistan and use the technology
to develop a secret nuclear weapons program. This has been the cue for
a reprise of those “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” tropes that the
Bushists used to such great fear-rousing effect in fomenting their
aggression against Iraq.
But the latest investigation by the
International Atomic Energy Agency found that Iran is not developing a
nuclear weapons program, The Independent reports. And Bush’s own
intelligence services say that even if Iran did start a weapons
program, it would take at least 10 years to produce a bomb — plenty of
time for “feverish diplomacy” to work, you would think. So while
“Iranian Nuke Threat” is still a good scare phrase for a cable news
crawl, it might not be enough to sway an increasingly war-weary public
to leap into another military adventure.
That’s why the Bushists
are throwing new tropes into the mix. In his chest-thumping bluster
last week, Bush said pointedly that he would be willing to use military
force to “provide the opportunity for people to live in free
societies.” That’s a blank check for hitting Iran (and many other
countries) any time he feels like it.
But such noble gasbaggery
might still prove too vague to close the deal. So now they’ve waving
the bloody shirt: “Iran is killing American soldiers in Iraq.” That’s
the charge currently percolating through the corporate media — NBC,
Time magazine, etc. — from the usual anonymous “senior officials” and
the never-anonymous but always mendacious Pentagon warlord Don
Rumsfeld. “It’s true that weapons clearly, unambiguously, from Iran
have been found in Iraq,” he announced last week, with same
clinched-sphincter certainty he once displayed in declaring that he
knew where Iraq’s WMD were hidden: “They’re in the area around Tikrit
and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
Left
unexplained is why Shiite Iran would want to help Sunni insurgents
overthrow a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government led by Tehran proteges
(and employees) who are busy aligning the country with, er, Tehran.
That’s the kind of self-defeating stupidity one might expect from the
Bush poltroons, who have spent $300 billion and almost 1,900 American
lives to establish an unstable, terrorist-ridden, fundamentalist
Islamic state in the center of the Middle East. But it’s unlikely that
the subtle Persians, with 3,000 years of statecraft behind them, would
be foolish enough to kill the golden goose that Bush has handed them by
destroying Saddam and installing their allies in power.
Still, a
lack of sense and credibility in a casus belli has never hindered the
Bush Faction before. And it won’t now. The plain fact is that Bush
doesn’t want “diplomacy to work” against Iran. He wants the situation
to reach a crisis point that will “justify” military action. It’s the
only form of politics he knows: You foment (or invent) a crisis, then
use deceit, fear and brute force to impose your radical agenda. And the
takedown of Iran is a long-held ambition of the corporate militarists
behind the Bush Faction’s relentless quest for “full spectrum
dominance” over world affairs.
The “high” Bush got from his Iraq
assault is now wearing off, politically and personally. He needs
another hit of blood and destruction. And don’t think he’s worried
about the prospect of a much wider conflagration arising from a bombing
strike against Iran. After all, chaos and instability only mean more
money for his war-profiteering family and cronies — and greater
authority for “war leaders” seeking to “secure the Homeland.”
More
war is the only way for the Bush Faction to maintain its power and keep
advancing its rapacious agenda. So there will be more war.
Chris Floyd