In the wake of the Iraq fiasco, even Bush's chickenhawk war planners know well the unpredictable, chaos-inducing consequences of war.
But that's okay: Creating the conditions of unpredictability and disorder are precisely the aims of this desperate administration.
Reports indicate that Bush is laying the groundwork for a massive strike on Iran:
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Ray McGovern at Consortiumnews analyzes Bush's late August bellicose speech:
It’s not about putative Iranian “weapons of mass destruction” — not even ostensibly. It is about the requirement for a scapegoat for U.S. reverses in Iraq, and the felt need to create a casus belli by provoking Iran in such a way as to “justify” armed retaliation — perhaps extending to an attempt to destroy its nuclear-related facilities.
Bush’s Aug. 28 speech to the American Legion came five years after a very similar presentation by Vice President Dick Cheney.
An invasion of Iran would set off an explosion of rage through the streets of the Islamic world, possibly disrupt several authoritarian Arab states, and provoke military attacks on American soft targets.
But the invasion would just as well supply the necessary political conditions domestically for furtherance of executive power, new intrusions on civil liberties, massive new influxes into the high-tech, military-service-industrial complex, and, Republicans hope, a partial restoration of public confidence (in the midst of their fear and unthinking reaction) in the Republican leadership on national security, a traditional Republican political advantage.
Striking Iran is not a fait accompli; there are limits to the pure insanity that is being contemplated, meaning Bush can be stopped.
Whether these limits come from the American people, the American military brass, and democrats during the 2008 presidential campaign remains to be seen.
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