Reply #2: The road was paved by elements in Corporate America

[Dover]

Corporate war machine gathers speed
By Ismael Hossein-zadeh

There is strong evidence that as the Bush administration is mulling over plans to bomb Iran, the simmering conflict between high-ranking military professionals and militaristic civilian leaders is bursting into the open.

The conflict, festering ever since the invasion of Iraq, has now been heightened over the US administration's policy of an aerial military strike against Iran. While civilian militarists, headed by

Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, are said to have drawn plans to bomb Iran, senior commanders are openly questioning the wisdom of such plans. <1>

The administration's recent statements that it is now willing to negotiate with Iran might appear as a change or modification of its plans to launch a military strike against that country. But a closer reading of those statements indicates otherwise: such pronouncements are premised on the condition that, as President George W Bush recently put it, "The Iranian regime fully and verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment."

In light of the fact that suspension of uranium enrichment, which is nothing beyond Iran's legitimate rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is supposed to be the main point of negotiation, Iran is asked, in effect, "to concede the main point of the negotiations before they started". <2>

Military professionals question the administration's plans of a bombing campaign against Iran on a number of grounds. For one thing, they doubt that, beyond a lot of death and destruction, the projected bombing raids can accomplish much, ie, destroy Iran's nuclear program.


..snip..

Calling such business and/or ideologically driven warmongers "civilian militarists", military historian Alfred Vagts points to a number of historical instances of how civilian militarists' eagerness to use military force for their nefarious interests often led "to an intensification of the horrors of warfare". For example, he points out how in World War II, "civilians not only anticipated war more eagerly than the professionals, but played a principal part in making combat ... more terrible than was the current military wont or habit". <4>

..cont'd

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH16Ak01.html