bustardblog

Bombing Tehran

Bush, unfortunately, is not morphing into Willy Loman. Atrios recently linked to Joshua Mica Marshall, and they made me consider this possibility. But I don't see it.

W is perhaps even more divorced from reality than Willy, but he retains actual, real power.  They both seemingly lost their ability to sell ice in the Arctic, but while Willy realized it on some level, W had never in fact had such a talent.  W, always the cheerleader, exaggerated his contribution to the game's final score; but in fact losing the game didn't really matter very much to him.

Bush is also not becoming Hamlet any time soon. Seymour Hersh's article in this week's New Yorker evokes a tortured Prince, torn between options. I don't see this one either. In my opinion, Hersh uncharacteristically misses the character that is the man.

Marshall's post noted the lack of Bush's strident voice on Iraq in recent days. He feels that the in the last election the public has

now given Bush "the rebuke...And what is more than that he validated it, confirmed the rejection by summarily firing his Defense Secretary...With that admission out of the way, there's really no more cheer leading to be done for the whole effort."

Atrios wrote that he isn't sure Marshall is right, but speculates that Bush "might just check out."

When Bush got into office the only majority on his side were the members of the Supreme Court. Still, he claimed to have received a mandate from the voters. Bush holds democracy in far too much contempt to even recognize, let alone respect, the vote as a rebuke for his policies. Rumsfeld was not fired because Bush lost faith in him. He was merely cast aside as a sop to a country asking for change. But Bush does not intend to change.

Bush failed at selling a mythical vision of his policies. He remains the child furious at being caught with his hand in the cookie jar - but his concern is only about being caught, not about the behavior itself. He's still determined to get the cookie.

Similarly, Hersh's piece speculates that Bush's next move in the Middle East will be tempered by the chastening he received in November for his aggressive, failed foreign policy. In fact, a lot of Bush's team is eagerly preparing and plotting our next attack.

It will piece of cake. This time they'll do it right. There'll be no occupation of Iran. We will simply do that bombing, that shocking and awe-ing thing, which we do so well.

That haven for neo-cons, The American Enterprise Institute, has recently assisted at the birth of the Iran Enterprise Institute. Richard Perle, one of the most influential and strongest supporters of the war in Iraq, will undoubtedly fight so the seat next to Laura Bush (aka the Ahmad Chilabi chair) at the next State of the Union address  be occupied by Iranian refugee Amir Abbas Fakhravar. (Laura Rozen expresses doubts about how well connected he really is in Iran, here.) Others present at the founding of the I.E.I include Reza Pahlavi (son of the former Shah) and the ever effervescent Michael Ledeen. One of it's supporters is Joshua Muravchik, whose piece in Foregin Affairs Hersh referred to, where he wrote that  "one should make no mistake" that Bush will bomb Iran before leaving office. He also wrote  an op-op-ed for the L.A. Times whose first sentence is "WE MUST bomb Iran."

Muravchik works with Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, and Lynn Cheney at The American Enterprise Institute.  Michael Ledeen was the first executive director of a powerful Pro-Israel lobbying group, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, on whose board of advisors Muravchick also sits. (Former board members include Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle.) Although smaller than AIPAC, JINSA is an integral part of The Israel Lobby, as written about by Mearshimer and Walt in the London Review of Books.

The outgoing Ambassador to the U.S. from Israel is confident that Bush will do it, As Amb. Ayalon told the Ma'ariv paper "From his [Bush's] standpoint, ayatollahs with a bomb is unacceptable. ..he will not hesitate to go all the way."

If this seems like a tangled web -  it's because it is - and it is virtually the sidentical web which guided us into Iraq. Four of the most frequently used that Hersh and others employ to make a case that Bush will not bomb Tehran are as follows:

• He's chastened by the elections. There is no evidence that Bush has ever had an iota of respect for the electorate, or for democracy itself.
• He's learned from the debacle in Iraq. Sorry, but to Bush, there is no debacle in Iraq.
• Rice, at the State Department, is more influential with W than was Powell. This may be true, but there is no reason to believe she ever disagrees with Cheney or W in any serious way. (The Vice Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs is Elizabeth Cheney.)
• The new Sect'y of Defense Gates and James Baker will restrain him. This is the silliest of the four. Gates, after all, is the guy who wanted to bomb Nicaragua during the late '80s.  He's the guy who was a millimeter away from being indicted during Iran-Contra. Furthermore, Bush has made it abundantly clear that he does not consult with his father nor his fathers friends.  Remember, he consulted with a higher father when he led us into Iraq.

Tragically, Bush will bomb Iran with the next two years. After all he is merely a pawn in the hands of God, who selected him to bring democracy, and Western values, to the infidel.

Willy Loman's powerlessness meant his only option was his own suicide. Bush still is the most powerful man on earth. It's not his own suicide that worries me.

UPDATE:
It seems that Andrew Sullivan and I are on the same page when it comes to Bush's tenuous grasp of reality.

The Israel Lobby - Part II

This is the second part of a two part series regarding Op-Ed's in yesterday's N.Y Times. Please click on this link to start with mypost of yesterday.

Who cares? So what if the discourse on the U.S./Israel relationship is stifled and intimidation prevails? 

Therein one sees the brilliance of the sub-editor at the Times. On the right of Mr. Judt’s gentle article is Tom Friedman’s Op-Ed. In it he mourns the non-existence of options we have in Iran. He states that are only two choices: letting Irango nuclear, or another blundering catastrophe by our incompetently run military. But if we were to have an open discussion of the realities of the Middle East, we would have to examine why Iran feels it must have a nuclear weapon. We would talk about Israel’s refusal to sign the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The acquisition by Iran’s near-neighbors,India and Pakistan, of nuclear weapons with U.S.approval would have to be part of the debate. So too, would be the fact that Iran is the only country to be attacked with Weapons of Mass Destruction in the last 50 years.

Despite its frequent promises to never introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, the world knows that Israel has done so, just as the world knows that it has continuously upgraded its ability to deploy them. During the 1990’s, Israel acquired diesel submarines which it armed with cruise missiles that have the capacity to carry nuclear warheads, “giving Israel a triad of land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear weapons for the first time.” The Washington Post went on to mention the opinion of analysts that this development “would complicate U.S. efforts to keep other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere from seeking to acquire nuclear arms. It could also spur a nuclear arms race in the Middle East”. (emphasis added) Friedman got it right (this time) – the U.S. has virtually no options in Iran, as longs as it supports Israel’s illegal nuclear program.

 But it was Maureen Dowd’s piece being placed to the left of Judt’s that guarantees the lay-out designer his promotion. Speaking of Rumsfeld she wrote: “He suggested invading
Iraq the day after 9/11. He didn’t want to invade Iraq because it was connected to 9/11.” The justification for invading Iraq had to be ‘concocted’ by the neo-cons. She quotes retired Marine general Trainor as saying “He just wanted to show them the front end of an M-1 tank. He could have been in Antarctica fighting penguins. He didn’t care, as long as he could send the message that you don’t mess with Hopalong Cassidy.”

 The neo-cons who targeted Iraq thereby saved the lives of a whole lot of Penguins, but killed or wounded tens of thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Inn fact, “regime change” in Iraq had been a goal of the neo-cons Rumsfeld brought into the Pentagon for many years. In fact two of them, in 1996, when they were working for newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called for Saddam’s overthrow and voiced “energetic” support for Ahmad Chalabi. Another of the neo-cons argued with President Bush that we should attack Iraq before we went after the Taliban in Afghanistan.The government of Israel itself lobbied for the war in Iraq. On the 16^th of August, 2002, the Washington Post reported that “Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.” Ariel Sharon is quoted as saying that strategic cooperation between the US and Israel had reached “unprecedented dimensions.”   

Israel also was a “full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional” weapons. To the extent that Iraq
presented a threat to anyone, it was to Israel, not to the U.S.

It must be noted that while the outcome in Iraq appears to be a disaster for U.S. interests; Israel is not disappointed. They are losing neither blood nor treasure in
Baghdad. A weak, divided Iraq, pre-occupied by its own civil war is fine with Tel Aviv. To suggest that the war planners in the Pentagon were surprised by the violence that swept Iraq after Saddam’s fall is naïve in the extreme. They deliberately chose not to participate with the CIA on war Games designed to examine how an occupation would turn out. They chose to ignore that State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project” which did in fact project a lot of the problems that subsequently occurred.

So when a Richard Perle, formerly of the Pentagon, tells us that we could bomb Iran and be out of there before anyone even knew we did it, we have to be wary. Not only ecause he was so wrong on Iraq but also because the continued intimidation of critics of Israel prevents an honest, forthright analysis of what is in the self-interest of the U.S., and even of Israel itself. In fact, Israel suffers when real peace is postponed.

Having Judt’s piece on “The Israeli Lobby” surrounded by the words of Friedman and Dowd, underlines how very central is the need to openly discuss the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. What are our options in Iran? What went so wrong in Iraq? This is why the next Pulitzer must go to the layout sub-editor!.

 

Scary News

I thought the link in the previous post hilarious.

This, (H/T Ataturk- link at right) is terrifying. I can only hope that Seymour Hersh has started to use drugs. I have no reason to believe that he has - but his article for Monday's New Yorker is scary.