I hope the local subscribers of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette realize what a treasure they have with Gene Lyons as a columnist for their paper. Growing up in Mississippi, my local papers were the Clarke County Tribune and the Meridian Star. You can take my word for it, they didn't have any Gene Lyons writing for them.
This week, he's writing about how the Cheney-Bush Administration’s temporary insanity continues 08/16/06. He discusses the Cheney-Bush foreign policy in the Middle East, the neoconservative dogmas used to justify it and what "a catastrophic mess they’ve made of it". He also talks about the irony of the US and Israel hoping for France and the UN - remember the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" talk? - to bail out what the Cheney-Bush administration made into our joint disaster in Lebanon. And he concludes:
Achieving high rank in President Simple’s administration, the neo-cons - no war veterans among them - convinced him that removing Saddam Hussein, a secular military dictator, was crucial to defeating al-Qa’ida religious fanatics hiding in Pakistani caves several time zones away. With a grateful citizenry strewing rose petals in their path, American liberators would turn Iraq into an Arab Switzerland.
Now they’re eager to double down on that calamitous bet. The Jerusalem Post recently reported that Israeli defense officials received “indications from the U. S. that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.” Thankfully, sources told veteran American reporter Robert Parry, even hawkish cabinet members think that’s “nuts.” After the smoke clears, Israel, a functioning democracy, will doubtless investigate.
Since the fall of Baghdad, moreover, some neo-cons have joked that “real men go to Tehran.” U. S. intelligence sources can find no evidence that Iran controls Hezbollah’s actions, although they arm Lebanon’s Shiite militia as surely as the U. S. sponsors Israel. Neo-cons see one last chance to achieve their megalomaniacal daydreams before the November congressional elections, provoking a war whose scale - from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas - most Americans don’t comprehend, and which couldn’t be “won” without resorting to nuclear weapons. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh contendsthat thePentagon is resisting White House pressures to plan exactly that. Daniel Levy thinks that “disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon ‘creative destruction’ in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers.” Had George W. Bush heeded France in 2003, allowing United Nations inspectors to document that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction, today’s situation wouldn’t be so scary. This time, Americans need to listen. (my emphasis)
Juan Cole prints an essay by Ray Close on what a bad idea it would be for the US to attack Iran, and adds his own commentary. The major points include:
Lebanese Hizbullah does retain a significant capability to fire missiles into northern Israel. Even calling it an "undiminished" capability might not be too far from accurate. Assuming Hizbullah would be willing to use them to retaliate for a US attack on Iran, this give Iran a strategic depth that Israel's month-long Lebanon war failed to remove. That increases the risks involved in an Iran War. But, conversely, it creates more urgent political pressure for the Cheney-Bush administration to attack Iran.
Iran's C-802/SACCADE cruise missiles give them a significant ability to strike at US warships and at oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
Close and Cole understood Bush's Monday 08/14/06 speech at the State Department as I did, largely a war threat against Iran. Close concludes by arguing that Cheney and Bush are pursuing an Iran policy that can produce one of two results: "1. War with Iran (with negative consequences beyond anyone's ability to imagine); or 2. Another humiliating demonstration of impotence."
Larisa Alexandrovna in Is Lebanon the 'Trigger' for U.S. War With Iran? AlterNet.org 08/10/06, written before Monday's ceasefire took effect, talks about her concerns that the Cheney-Bush administration saw the Israel-Lebanon War as a trigger event to widen the Iraq War to Iran. She describes a conversation she had in May with Sam Gardiner. Gardiner was suggesting then that the positioning of US aircraft carriers could be preparation for strikes on Iran. And Alexandrovna writes:
But at that time, he and I did not speak of our theories on triggers. I had, however, long claimed that any trigger would have to involve Israel, either as a defensive measure or a measure of provocation. An attack on Israel would be the easiest way to shore up domestic support.
When I was told that Israel had begun a military strike on Lebanon, for me there was no question: This was the trigger. Just prior to Israel's bombing of Lebanon, I got a call from a friend in the military who told me about two Israeli troops being kidnapped across the border into Lebanon. My first question was, "Do they say it is Hezbollah?" and of course we know now that it was. But when my friend answered that it was indeed Hezbollah, I knew that Israel - for whatever reason - had become a proxy U.S. war machine for Dick Cheney's madness of regime change in Iran.
Now, her last retrospective claim of that foresight can't be taken at face value, because she couldn't have known that such a "trigger" had been pulled until Israel actually started waging war on Lebanon. (We could be generous and assume something got lost in editing.)
My friend said not to worry, that the soldiers would be exchanged for Hezbollah prisoners in Israel. I knew this not to be the case, and I said that this will be full military action, full war, with many casualties. My friend thought I was overreacting.
Yet there is a full war and full military action, and it is not by accident. It is also exactly on time to be the trigger. But this will not be the worst of it, because Syria will be drawn in; it has to be, and then Iran. This is the strategy that was feared and that is now being played out across the Middle East.
This is a strategy long wanted by the far right and people like Dick Cheney, and this is a strategy that was long in the planning.
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