President Bush, a lame-duck loose cannon, is traipsing around the Middle East calling Iran a state sponsor of terror and condemning what he calls Iran’s “provocative” acts in the Strait of Hormuz at the choke point between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.
Everyone knows the president and his viceroy, Vice President Dick Cheney, are just itching to launch American bombers and cruise missiles against Iran before the end of this second nightmarish term of office, and now we hear that the so-called “provocative” incident, which we were told was replete with threats to blow up a destroyer in “15 seconds” was actually the work of a “prankster” who was making threats on the air using English with a faked (badly) Iranian accent.
So has this brush with disaster, which would have surely ensued had the US Navy fired on Iranian speedboats in their vicinity, led the president to pull back from his bellicosity?
No. On the contrary, he’s upping the ante, calling Iran a terrorist state, thus implicitly giving himself permission to “take them out.”
' Luckily for us and for the longsuffering people of Iran, the US Navy is run by officers who are not crazy, who don’t want another war, and who especially don’t want a war that includes having a fleet of American ships stuck like sitting ducks in the confined space of the Persian Gulf in the sights of hundreds of Iranian shore-to-ship missiles. (They were all sunk in minutes with a loss of a whole aircraft carrier battle group and 20,000 crewmembers in a Pentagon war game played in 2002 and then hushed up.)
As long as the admirals in Washington, and the captains on those ships in harm’s way, keep their cool, and don’t let themselves be provoked by the hotheads in the White House and in Tehran who see political benefits in provoking hostilities, Bush’s wet dream of a third war in the Middle East against Iran won’t come true.
The same can’t be said for the US media, which for the most part have been trumpeting all the president’s scariest and most threatening lines, while burying the news that the provocation in the Gulf was faked.
A real news organization worthy of the name would be trying to find out who’s behind the fakery. It shouldn’t be hard—a military that can use satellite technology to send a cruise missile or a Predator drone-fired missile crashing down onto the holder of a cell phone, should have no trouble locating the source of a fake ship-to-ship communication. (Unless of course it turns out that the message was the work not of a prankster, but of someone working for the Bush gang.)
Let’s be clear here. The naval armada that Bush has assembled in the Gulf has no function other than to threaten Iran. The US military has adequate air bases on land in and around Iraq to handle all the needs of US troops in that country, and the ships in the gulf are of no use whatsoever in the conflict in landlocked Afghanistan, because they can’t send planes there without overflying Iran.
Their role is simply to provoke. To provoke what? Why a war, of course.
Congress needs to pull the plug on this madness before one of the many scams and schemes of the Bush/Cheney gang succeeds in the president’s goal of getting a hot war going between the US and Iran.
A really amateurish effort—prank or black-op—to make a routine cat-and-mouse game by Iranian speedboats and a US battle group into a live-fire incident with dead bodies in the water—could have succeeded.
There must be no next time. It’s time to move forward, with dispatch, on Dennis Kucinich’s bill of impeachment against Cheney, which features the administration’s aggressive efforts to foment a war against Iran in violation of the UN Charter. __________________ DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
We need to ask ourselves, what did we expect them to say? "Oh sorry, it was just another Mossad false-flag job"? Of course they have a story, they always do, and it matters not how ridiculous it is.
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Harold Smith (0 articles, 2 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 350 comments)
on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 6:15:34 PM
In a sense, I guess you can say it was a "prankster".
Similar to the pranksters who tried to pass off crudely forged documents relating to the attempted purchase of uranium from Niger, or similar to the prankster who tried to make it look like "Arabs" were targeting people with anthrax bearing mail, or similar to the prankster who tried to make it look like scattered, smothered, short burning fires brought down three buildings, or simmilar to the pranksters who attacked the USS Liberty and tried to say it was an accident.
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Harold Smith (0 articles, 2 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 350 comments)
on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 8:18:37 AM
Sang the same sabre rattling song during the South Carolina debates. But there was one lonely, ridiculed voice that called for caution. Among the chuckles and finger pointing from the neo-con wanna be's, Ron Paul stood strong of the opinion that such shenanigans were dangerous, that we should be cautious and not act quickly or irrationally, and that we should get out of the business of provoking and antagonizing our neighbor states. Only no one listened.............
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William Casino (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 9:56:57 AM
I hope that our lawbreakers in congress know enough history to remember The Gleiwitz incident which was a staged attack on August 31st 1939 against the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz.
This provocation was one of several actions by the German SS to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany, which would be used to justify the subsequent invasion of Poland.
In reality, Iran is as much a threat to the United States as Poland was to Germany in 1939.I remember the brave Polish army attacking tanks with cavalry.Horse against tanks that was a no brainer.
I can’t figure what these nut jobs want to start another war for except to line their pockets with money from the American treasury at the cost of more American lives.
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Michael Chavers (38 articles, 0 quicklinks, 11 diaries, 160 comments)
on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 11:28:26 AM
The scare tactic failed. Our media was given videos of "terrorist small boats threatening U.S. war ships. Don't believe everything you see or hear on T.V. I don't even believe it was a prank.
I used to send out fake information for the military when I was in the Persian Gulf during the mid 80's. Your government is providing deceptive information to you and the rest of the world.
The one thing the Bush administration forgot to take into account was that Iranians have video cameras too and can place their videos on the Internet. Listen to both sides before you make judgment.
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Gallaher (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 470 comments)
on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 3:06:08 PM
