America is engaged in a great ideological struggle -- fighting Islamic extremists across the globe." --Bush in
speech before American Legion 8/28/07
No other nation in the region has been more pernicious and destructive in their interference in Iraq than the U.S. and Britain. Yet, Bush today, adopted dictatorial rhetoric in arguing to continue to defend the regime he installed behind the sacrifices of our soldiers and propped-up against Iraqi resistance, labeling all who would resist his strident military advance as "extremists."
“I want our fellow citizens to consider what would happen if these forces of radicalism and extremism were allowed to drive us out of the Middle East,” Bush told the audience at the American Legion in Nevada. “The region would be dramatically transformed in a way that could imperil the civilized world,” he claimed.
Once again evoking the images of 'mushroom clouds' and nuclear war, Bush today warned a gathering of veterans about the prospect of Iran initiating a "nuclear holocaust" which he says would occur because of their "pursuit of technology which
could lead to nuclear weapons."
"Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," Bush said in the first in a series of speeches planned to defend his announced decision to brush past any anticipated September recommendation to end his Iraq occupation by a date certain.
"We will confront this danger before it is too late." he said.
Bush warns of some hostile takeover of Iraq by outside forces in the future as if his own American invasion and occupying forces were some unremarkable kin to the faltering regime. There is a similarity to their tyranny in that Maliki himself lived in exile in Syria for twenty-one years, providing at least that one kinship between the U.S. over-throwers and the Shiite usurper to Saddam's U.S. assisted rule. But the most important relationship between Bush and Maliki is our lame-duck loser's ability to provide the muscle for the increasingly autocratic prime minister's presumptuous reign in return for his precarious positiong of our forces against Iran.
"I want our fellow citizens to consider what would happen if these forces of radicalism and extremism are allowed to drive us out of the Middle East," Bush told the crowd. "The region would be dramatically transformed in a way that could imperil the civilized world. Extremists of all strains would be emboldened by the knowledge that they forced America to retreat. Terrorists could have more safe havens to conduct attacks on Americans and our friends and allies. Iran could conclude that we were weak -- and could not stop them from gaining nuclear weapons. And once Iran had nuclear weapons, it would set off a nuclear arms race in the region," Bush warned.
"Extremists would control a key part of the world's energy supply, could blackmail and sabotage the global economy. They could use billions of dollars of oil revenues to buy weapons and pursue their deadly ambitions. Our allies in the region would be under greater siege by the enemies of freedom. Early movements toward democracy in the region would be violently reversed."
Imagine, as Bush wonders aloud, if the U.S. did manage to leave Iraq, how the news of that exit would be received by the terrorists who've enjoyed safe haven in the mountains of Afghanistan. Predictably, they would label the withdrawal a defeat for our cause in Iraq. It would, in fact, be a defeat for Bush's ambition to use Iraq as a permanent base of operations against Iran, Syria, and other countries in the region Bush that imagines dominating militarily.
The exit from Iraq would also represent a defeat for the Bush cabal's ambition to control the flow and resource from the country's lucrative oil fields. Nothing could be more critical to this administration's imperialistic ambitions than to lose whatever leverage over the regional oil supply and market they imagine they've gained from their invasion and occupation of Iraq.
It is, in fact, that ambition to control the flow and sales of the region's oil that has led to the obsession with Iran that the administration masks behind their inflated, unproved accusations of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Their oil ambitions are clear and unambiguously presented along with their National Intelligence Estimates which regularly list Russia's investments in Iran's oil infrastructure and China's billion dollar oil deals with the most celebrated member of Bush's 'evil axis.'
It's not enough for the U.S. to illegally invade and occupy a sovereign nation in the face of Russian and Chinese objections, now the Bush regime is intent on pressing their aggression and military posturing against Russia and China's economic ally, Iran, to the point of destabilizing the balance of weaponry in Europe which had allowed the decades-old deescalation of tensions and relative peace to prevail. And, they want us to believe that the target of their own destabilizing aggression is the most pernicious threat.
The Bush regime sees the prospect of Russia's shifting alliances as threats to the U.S. 'national security'. The administration would like nothing more than for Russia and China to be regarded as pariahs in the world community, especially now that their UN influence will likely be a determining factor in Bush's scheme to force even more action against Iran out of the U.N. Security Council. Bush would be more than satisfied to isolate Russia, and China with a manufactured pall of suspicion and fear, making oil-producing nations reluctant to do business with them out of fear of U.S. retaliation and making existing deals with Iran appear sinister and threatening.
The question of Iranian interference in Iraq was actually downplayed in the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate released in February which suggest Iran's meddling is far less than Bush is now claiming.
from the report: (
http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20070202_release.pdf)
"Iraq's neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq's internal sectarian dynamics." In other words, it's the civil war, stupid, not some expected involvement in the power struggle raging out of control in the country from Iraq's next-door neighbor.
It's Bush's 'interest' in suppressing Iran's oil influence which is the ONLY reason that the administration is using the weight of our nation's defenses to pressure the Iranian government and destabilize yet another oil power in the region. The U.S. position on the oil was made transparently clear by then National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, who testified in a Feb.2 hearing last year that, "a combination of rising demand for energy and instability in oil-producing regions is increasing the geopolitical leverage of key producing states."
"Record oil revenues and diversification of its trading partners are further strengthening the Tehran government." Negroponte warned the senate committee. Negroponte and others in the Bush regime are worried that Iran will just 'diversify' or change who they sell their oil to; like to Russia or China, who both have major oil deals pending with Iran.
In the scenarios presented, and widely accepted as valid representations of the administration's intentions toward Iran, a swift bombing campaign would be followed by the same type of regime change they've bungled in Iraq. After bombing Iran with our own nuclear bunker-busters in every spot the Bush regime claims the 'underground nuclear bunkers' they imagine are located, self-described 'democracy czar' Elizabeth Cheney would be ready to fly in a compliant sampling of Iranian exiles to assume power after they chase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into his own hidey-hole.
The Bush regime wants this next preemptive assault to be seen as a response to assistance they claim is flowing from Iran to the Iraqi resistance. But it's clear that it is the U.S. forces who are responsible for the majority of proliferation of weaponry and training which the 'insurgents' have used to their advantage, not Iran or any other outside influence.
The examples of Bush's 'democracy' that he offered with his invasion for those who fell outside of the protected 'interim authority' were of the efficacy of violent overthrow, of military dominance, and bloody suppression to achieve power. Those are the same lessons our government taught Saddam when our government was using the former dictator's military as a wedge against Iran.
Between 1977 and 1987, some 4,500-5,000 Kurdish villages were systematically destroyed, and the survivors were forced into concentration camps. Many of the atrocities took place at a time when the U.S. was actively supporting Hussein in a manufactured revolution against the Iranian government, whose leaders had humiliated Americans in the '70's hostage crisis. Iraq used chemical weapons in 1983-1984, during that conflict with Iran. It has been reported that some 20,000 Iranians were killed by Iraq's mustard gas, and the nerve agents tabun and sarin.
The New York Times reported in Aug. 2002 that during the Reagan administration, the U.S. military provided Saddam with critical intelligence that was used in Iraq's aggression against Iran, at a time when they were clearly using chemical and biological agents in their prosecution of that war.
The United States was an accomplice in the use of these materials at a time when President Reagan's top aides, including then- Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci and Gen. Colin L. Powell, then national security adviser, were publicly condemning Iraq for its use of poison gas, especially after Iraq attacked Kurds in Halabja. The classified support reportedly involved more than 60 military advisers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who provided detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb-damage assessments for Saddam.
A 1994 Senate Banking Committee report, and a letter from the Centers for Disease Control in 1995, revealed that the U.S. had shipped biological agents to Iraq at a time when Washington knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons to kill thousands of Iranian troops. The reports showed that Iraq was allowed to purchase batches of anthrax, botulism, E. coli, West Nile fever, gas gangrene, dengue fever. The CDC was shipping germ cultures directly to the Iraqi weapons facility in al-Muthanna.
I suppose the Bush regime will want to step outside of all of that and claim to have clean hands, but we are more than just the merchants of Iraqi's misdeeds, we are the authors, the teachers, the mentors, the architects, the ultimate masters of the violence there. Bush is continuing a long line of oppressors throughout history who have raped Iraq for their own greed and lust for power. If violence continues to spread it will be the result of the defining act of Bush's imperious reign - his bloody disruption of Iraq - as his regime marches on with seeming invincibility, without any obstacle of democracy yet impeding his tyrant's reign.
The dirty secret that they are loath to say out loud is that it has become clear they were ignorant of the way the balance of power would shift away from the advantage they had of Saddam's hostility to the Iranians, to a ruling power in Iraq whose majority openly favors Iran.
The Shiite majority they helped to install will make it harder for Bush to use Iraq as a springboard for future military meddling against Iran or Syria. It must have occurred to someone in the White House that the ascendancy of a Shiite majority in Iraq undermines the decades of coddling we gave to Saddam to keep the Iranians from gaining influence in the region. Bush's invasion and occupation helped the very elements in Iran our government tried for decades to eliminate realize positions of power in Iraq that they couldn't have dreamed of winning on the battlefield.
Still, Bush postures to defeat an Iranian regime which was literally hand-in-hand with his supposed-puppet Maliki during a state visit this month. It's predictable that Bush is now determined to undermine that relationship which threatens to undo all of the ulterior motives his cabal envisioned as a reward for their invasion and occupation. The prospect of Bush's fledgling plutocracy in bed with a member of his 'axis of evil' has his regime scrambling to do a bit of marginalizing of their own of Iraq's new leadership.
The sectarian violence in Iraq gives them the wedge they need to continue their grip on power there. Chaos is the breeding ground for Bush's imperialism. The heightened concern by the Bush regime about Iranian influence in Iraq can only signal their intention to exploit the violence to justify more of their own planned militarism.
In order to sell this latest Iran distraction, the accusations have to bypass the Shiite-dominated government which relied on the Shias, led by al-Sadr, who allowed the Maliki regime to assume power and perpetuated them with their votes and their participation in the Iraqi parliament.
It will take another suspension of disbelief to buy into the Bush administration's escalating proposition that Iran is, somehow, now a larger threat to Iraqis than Bush's own destabilizing, escalating occupation. It'll take another fearful surrender of our responsibility and right to determine who our enemies are for Bush to pull off this latest distraction from his destructive failure in Iraq - like the benefit of doubt Bush was afforded by the American people as they cowered behind his swaggering militarism in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.
Bush and his military minions have isolated American deaths in Iraq they say Iran is responsible for and are presumably set to avenge them. Those American soldiers' lives are certainly important enough to highlight and to examine causes and blame for their demise. But this latest focus by the Bush administration on these deaths, and the Iranian influence they say is responsible for the killings, is disproportionate in comparison to the thousands of other U.S. soldiers' deaths in Iraq which are a direct result of Bush's manufactured aggression which he has staged behind the sacrifices of our soldiers.
Hopefully our nation is past all of our reflexive acceptance of Bush's fearmongering. Hopefully we understand that it is the Bush administration which is the largest threat to peace and security in the region and in the rest of the world that they've destabilized with their mindless aggression.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bigtree
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