Article: Bush Looking To Provoke Iran To Validate His Iraq Occupation

Bush Is Standing Our Soldiers In the Middle Of The Mideast And Directing Them To Challenge All Who Would Resist Their Advance

In order to convince Americans to stand aside while he diverted our nation's defenses from the hunt for the suspects in the 9-11 attacks in Afghanistan to Iraq, Bush justified his invasion as a defense of our national security. After no WMDs were found and no ties between the 9-11 suspects and Saddam could be proved, Bush shifted his reasoning for keeping our soldiers bogged down there to a defense of the dubious Iraqi government which he created behind the intimidation of our occupying forces. Now Bush is faced with the prospect of the Maliki regime, that our soldiers have fought and died to prop-up, collapsing away from Bush's destructive agenda to escalate our nation's involvement in the sovereign country.

Bush's justification for keeping our military forces hunkered down in the middle of Iraq's civil war has inevitably shifted again - this time, to the last possible refuge of his tyrant's reign in the sovereign nation. Bush has now authorized our soldiers to capture and kill Iranians in Iraq who they claim pose a threat to our occupying, muckraking forces. The Bush charge against these faceless Iranians within Iraq is that they're providing bombs and other weapons to the warring factions that he's chosen to wedge our soldiers in-between. Shia militias have been identified by Bush as benefiting from Iranian assistance or whatever influence he's alleging. But, aside from the lack of any significant proof offered from the administration of a proliferation of weapons from Iraq's next-door neighbor, there is the amazing hypocrisy to his charges which ignores our country's own role in training and arming these very Shiite forces as part of the new Iraqi police force and army.

From the beginning of the occupation and the disbanding of the Batthist-dominated Iraqi army, Bush and Rumsfeld stood aside and allowed the Shias to dominate the ranks of the new Iraqi forces as they were used as a hammer to intimidate the resisting Sunni communities before, during, and after the elections held under Bush's increased occupation. Right away, the residents in the Sunni regions of Iraq complained of massacres in their communities by government-backed Shiite death squads. Now, almost three years later, Bush is supposed to be concerned about these militias; not because of the massacres of Iraqis that he stood by and allowed, but because of an alleged threat to the American soldiers he's ordered to re-invade their homes, detain suspects indefinitely in the new Iraqi gulags, and impede their free movement with repressive checkpoints and roadblocks.

In his cynical occupation of Iraq, Bush has managed to turn almost every faction and sect in Iraq into an adversary, creating the incredible dynamic of our forces fighting and dying against the very populations in Iraq that Bush has claimed to be liberating. His latest escalation promises to direct our forces in a scatter-shot way into these populated areas of Iraq to attack whoever they label a threat to their strident advance. Their attitude is much like that of our own country's Pilgrims, who expanded their dominion over the land they occupied by announcing their arrival to the inhabitants they encountered with blasts of their muskets. The Iraqis and Iranians in Iraq our troops encounter as they bully their way through their neighborhoods will either be with us, or against us; to resist, or be conquered by the foreign invaders.

In Bush's Mideast crusade, he's posturing to dominate the region by projecting his military-backed aggression behind our relatively inadequate forces from Israel's border, through Iran, to Afghanistan. After unilaterally insinuating our American soldiers in the middle of Iraq - into the middle of the region without a mandate from the people who live there - Bush has cast everyone who would resist his swaggering imperialism into his adversary and "enemy" to posture against as a convenient defense of his manufactured American mission. Without regard for the century-old relationships that exist between Syria, Iraq, and Iran, Bush has chosen to define them as a threat because they threaten his swaggering military advance into their territory.

In his SOTU address, Bush sought to portray Syria and Iran as enemies of the regime in Iraq that he installed behind his bloody coup.

"These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq," Bush told Congress and the American people. "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq," he said.

It's not just an incredible charge that Saddam's enemies in Syria would have objected to his fall, it's the inconvenient fact of the closeness of Bush's new Iraqi puppet regime to his Syrian foils. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani just got back from a visit to Damascus to talk over the security agreement he'd signed in December with his Syrian neighbor, Bashar al-Assad. Likewise, in Iran, Iraqi President Talibani and Prime Minister Maliki are fully wrapped in an embrace of the government of Bush's nemesis, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The only thing our soldiers are defending in Iraq are their own precarious lives, made unnecessarily vulnerable by their imperious commander-in-chief's insistence on keeping them there and escalating their aggression against the Iraqis and the very people in the region Bush is claiming to protect. He's now intent on re-invading their neighborhoods with our nation's defenders in a cynical attempt to provoke a response from Iran, and to draw Iran into his rhetorical web of blame for the violent consequences of his own military aggression in Iraq and in the region.

Bush has decided to ignore American's "skepticism and pessimism" about his plan to proceed with his escalation, even as Congress is moving to stop him, telling reporters at the White House today that, "I'm the decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster," he said. "In other words, I had to think about what's likely to work."

Bush told reporters that he wanted to "work diplomatically" with Iran and "solve our problems peacefully," even as he threatens their country and citizens with our military forces in neighboring Iraq, and directs our battleships to patrol the Iranian coast. Bush is the "disaster" in the Mideast. He's put us all at risk as he puts his own ambitions ahead of the citizens in the region, and ahead of the interests and demands of our own nation's citizens and legislators; again. He's made himself into an unnecessary danger as he pokes our military into one clash or the other in Iraq, looking to pick a fight with Iran to distract from his failed distraction from his failure against the original a-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

In Bush's new doctrine that he's crafting in Iraq, American soldiers are to be used as bait as he trolls for anyone who dares attack and resist his military expansion into their homeland -- responding to that resistance with more of his own aggression, and then validating his military muckraking as "protecting the American people from future harm." In that effort to 'protect Americans', Bush could make a great deal of progress by just dismantling his military occupation of Iraq and removing the American pride he's insisting on piling up in the middle of the disaster he's created.