"We're getting into kind of a relaxed period here." -- President George W. Bush, Aug. 9, 2007.
DETROIT -- Wake up, world! Cling to your children and loved ones. Prepare for the worst. Be vigilant. Don't relax. Bush at rest is terrifying -- often worse than Bush at war. The most rested and relaxed president in U.S. history is also our most dangerous and reckless, incapable of reflection or remorse.
Bush gives little thought to grave matters, won't tolerate dissension and surrounds himself with his "nanny corps" of enablers and protectors. His decisions flow almost exclusively from visceral vision -- his "gut" -- and, of course, his regular conversations with God.
After a brief visit with his family in Kennebunkport, Maine, where it's cool, Bush will trek off to the oppressive heat of west Texas, to the Potemkin village the media dutifully calls his "Crawford ranch."
Bush has spent 418 days of his presidency at the faux ranch, where the public view of him is this man of great action, chopping and clearing mesquite wood and riding his bike. The image of this sweating, manly man buttresses his claim to be the "decider" and the "commander guy."
The other 23 hours of the day, Bush lies back in air-conditioned splendor, and we're told he reads serious literature and charges his batteries for the next great crisis our nation will face. In fact, Bush and his shady master and manipulator, Vice President Dick Cheney, have already chosen the crisis.
The ramped-up rhetoric against Iran is a sure sign a decision has already been made to launch a military assault on the Shiite nation. Striking Iran would be a multi-faceted win for the neoconservative nuts whose warped thinking and worship of violence dominate Bush's disastrous foreign policy.
Hitting Iran will be justified with evidence that Iranian weapons -- especially sophisticated, explosively formed penetrators -- are used to kill American troops in Iraq and create more instability there. Besides, we might as well try to knock out Iran's nuclear ambitions while we're at it.
An attack on Iran will delight the most extreme and belligerent elements in Israeli politics and be another step in the quest for U.S. military dominance in the Middle East -- basic dogma found in neocon scripture.
Bringing Iran directly into the war would also serve as a convenient diversion from the basic failures of the military strategy in Iraq and the folly of the invasion in the first place.
The Bushevik chorus is pointing to Iran as the foreign-inspired reason for the continued hostility toward the U.S. occupation. Those murderous, intolerant Iranians are responsible for the violence in Iraq.
Last Wednesday, a front-page headline in The New York Times read "U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb is Killing More Troops in Iraq." My alarm went off immediately when I saw the byline of Times reporter Michael R. Gordon.
He often shared bylines with Judy Miller, the disgraced former Times reporter who helped the Bush propaganda machine sell the war in Iraq with a string of articles about secret weapons laboratories, aluminum tubes for nuclear production and anything Cheney's office fed her. Miller and Gordon's major claims about Iraq's weapons programs were simply false.
Gordon has become Miller's replacement as the White House's resident stenographer at the Times. In February, another Gordon piece carried the headline "Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made in Iran, U.S. Says." Gordon's work is usually spiced with unattributed remarks from high-ranking administrative sources or military types going on the record with information virtually impossible to verify.
Another alarm went off for me when I saw Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, now the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, was the principal source for Gordon's report. Odierno commanded the Fourth Infantry Division, and the "aggressive tactics" he employed north of Baghdad and Tikrit were criticized as both ineffective and actually helping foster the insurgency.
Thomas Ricks in his excellent book "Fiasco," assessing the military leadership involved in Iraq, found several critics of Odierno who argued he allowed his troops to be overly rough in treating civilians.
Odierno became known for going into areas and having his troops round up all military-aged men and detain them, sometimes for months. Their crimes were typically simply being alive in that part of Iraq when Odierno's boys swept through town.
After a little stateside rest, Odierno now is in charge of day-to-day military operations in Iraq and is the administration's point man in pumping up Iran as the most threatening enemy.
McClatchy Newspapers reports, "The Bush administration has launched what appears to be a coordinated campaign to pin more of Iraq's security troubles on Iran." The evidence of that orchestration is widespread.
Reporters Warren P. Stroble, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef see Cheney as the man behind the curtain, bellowing for yet another war. McClatchy reports Bush's top aides "have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear programs."
In the cycle of madness Cheney and Bush have wrought, the United States is selling $20 billion in high-tech military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the source of much of the money to finance the 9/11 attacks and 15 of the 19 hijackers.
Since Saddam's fall, Saudi money has flowed to Sunni insurgents, and they are killing U.S. troops and attacking Shiites wherever they can. Rewarding the Saudis with more weapons only encourages more violence in Iraq and across the Middle East.
Auditors found the U.S. military command in Iraq cannot account for 190,000 AK-47s and other weapons purchased for the Iraqi security forces. The U.S.-bought weapons invariably end up in the hands of insurgents. Bush and Cheney want to pin the blame for Iraqi violence and the failure of the U.S. occupation on Iran, the pretext for the planned military strike.
Bush turned to his apocalyptic absolutes in selling more war in Iraq and another down the road in Iran.
"It's an ideological struggle," he warned at his pre-vacation news conference, "and I believe it's a struggle between the forces of moderation and reasonableness and good and the forces of murder and intolerance."
Maybe Bush is right. I suppose we can relax for a few weeks. As former White House chief of staff Andrew Card infamously noted in 2002 when the administration was gearing up to sell the lies that led to war in Iraq, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
But the "relaxed period" will end quickly with the guns of September pointed at Iran.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Aug. 14 2007 |