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President Bush's Only Achievement in the Middle East is to Increase the Power of Iran
The most soaring rhetoric about democracy is swiftly choked to death by petrol fumes
Just as we were all sighing with relief at the end of the Bush years, the lame duck President has waddled into the Middle East to remind us his beak is still nuclear-tipped. With one year to go, he is standing on the sands of Arabia to announce Iran is "the world leading state sponsor of terror" and must be confronted "before it's too late". He then quacks a few words about peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the "success" of the surge in Iraq.
So what can we really expect from Act III of Bush in Arabia? Most of us assumed the recent US National Intelligence Estimate - showing Iran stopped its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 - killed the prospect of a Bush bombing raid on Iran. But Bush knows that as it currently stands, he will be remembered as the President who emboldened and empowered the Islamic Republic of Iran. He took out the Ayatollahs' two biggest strategic enemies - Saddam and the Taliban - and helped them become gold-lined by sending oil prices soaring to more than $100 a barrel.
Today, after Bush's "re-engineering" of the region, a Shia crescent sympathetic to Iran is now rising on top of the world's oil supplies, from Saudi Arabia through Iraq. Bush may believe, in his flat and faded mind, that bombing the country is his only way to put this right: his former press secretary Ari Fleischer has been focus-grouping to find the best language to sell an attack on Iran.
If Bush can't publicly justify the attack on the basis of counter-proliferation, he may try to do it on the basis of counter-terrorism. If it's not bombs he's after, it's baddies. The President has already had the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officially declared "a terrorist organisation" - and last week, it appears the White House deliberately concocted a story that Iranian ships were attacking the US navy in international waters.
You remember the tale, featured on front pages everywhere. We were told that the day before Bush headed for the Middle East, Iranian speedboats armed with machine-guns in the Strait of Hormuz suddenly decided to charge at the US navy. They announced, "You will explode after a few minutes." The US ships thought they were being attacked; only the restraint of US navy commanders in the face of such wild provocation prevented a full-blown war with Iran. Bush used it to remind the world of the evil of Iran.
But here's a funny thing: it didn't happen. A few US ships were briefly approached by tiny Iranian vessels - but their regional commander, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, says his men were never perturbed. The Iranian ships had "neither anti-ship missiles nor torpedoes", he stated, "and I wouldn't characterise the posture of the US 5th Fleet as afraid of these small boats".
Nor did the Iranians say "you will explode". The US ships were in open seas, and the Navy now admits anybody within a vast radius could have broadcast this message, explaining: "We cannot make a direct connection to the [Iranian] boats there. It could have come from the shore, from another ship passing by." In the recordings, the "threat" isn't even made with an Iranian accent.
So why did Bush hype it up hysterically? There are a few possible explanations. Optimistically, he may be trying simply to hold together his shaky coalition of Arab rulers in the region, who are united by almost nothing save their fear of Iran and of their own people. Pessimistically, it may be part of a sustained PR operation ahead of his own Gulf of Tonkin.
As the gunboat-incident-that-never-was travelled across the world, the US National Archives in a sweet coincidence released new classified information about the fictitious event Lyndon B Johnson used to justify ramping up the Vietnam War. In August 1964, the US claimed the North Vietnamese navy attacked two of their destroyers. The new releases show the US knew "no attack happened that night"; they just wanted a casus beli. Incredibly, Hillary Clinton chose that very day to brag she wants to be LBJ to Barack Obama's Martin Luther King.
But at least some of us who got Iraq wrong have learnt from it. The evidence is clear today that far from damaging the despicable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a bombing campaign may be the only thing that can save him now. Ahmadinejad is wildly unpopular with Iran's young electorate, who find his priorities - denying the Holocaust, beating couples who hold hands in public, and hanging gay teenagers - ridiculous. He looks set to lose the looming election - unless Bush bombs, causing a surge of nationalist sentiment.
Bush's curtain call looks unlikely to be any more successful in the rest of the region. I am desperate to report some good news from Iraq - but I can't pretend the surge is it. My Iraqi friends have been telling me for months why it has coincided with a fall in violence - and it's nothing to brag about.
The ethnic cleansing of Iraq is now almost complete. Sunnis have been driven from Shia areas. Shia have been driven from Sunni areas. They aren't killing each other, because they aren't near each other. The surge has simply consisted of building vast "peace walls" between the communities so they are even less likely to touch. We have turned Baghdad into Belfast-on-steroids, and called it peace.
Nor is the picture any better with Israel/Palestine. It was widely reported that Bush called for Israel to end its vicious occupation of the West Bank - but again, it's not true. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragged last week that Bush is "not doing a single thing that I don't agree to", adding, "He doesn't apply pressure. No, he doesn't apply pressure."
Far from advocating a return to the 1967 borders, Olmert brags that Bush did no such thing: "He thinks of the '67 borders, but he has already said '67 plus," meaning Israel could retain its favourite settlement blocks after all. He added, "He's the only President who's ever said that. And that's an amazing achievement for Israel." With these terms, no peace is possible.
So why did Bush's honeyed words end here, like this? A clue can be found in the place where Bush will end his visit in wild luxury this week - as the guest of the Saudi royal family in Riyadh. This is the most vicious tyranny in the region, a gang of torturing thugs, and Bush will literally hold their hands and whisper sweet words of love and friendship. (Oh, and sell them $20bn of arms while he's at it.) Why? One reason: they sit on the biggest pot of oil on earth. The most soaring rhetoric about democracy is swiftly choked to death by petrol fumes.
Until the United States has kicked its addiction to Middle Eastern oil, it will only ever see the region as a giant petrol station - with a friendly Israel-shaped tent looking out anxiously over the pumps.
© 2008 Independent News and Media Limited
15 Comments so far
Show AllGareth Porter of Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net) reports that the scary-voiced warning we hear on the U.S. tape WAS SPLICED INTO THE TAPE BY THE NAVY, who heard it over the air at the same time the small Irani ships were asking them to identify themselves. They may have believed at first hearing that it came from an Irani boat, but it could actually have come from anywhere. (Cheney? CIA?)
Since the nuclear weapons "justification" for an attack went bye-bye, the administration has been using the "danger down the road" warning. This incident and the Bush rhetoric about Iran sending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to support terror all around the world are nothing more than attempts to repeat Iraq. Demonize the target; frighten the populace; cower the UN into stronger and stronger sanctions; attack.
And listen to folks like Giuliani who can't support the incredibly reckless Bush and Cheney enough. Every time they open their mouths they tell us more reasons NOT to vote for them: "pre-emptive war will keep us safe" being just one. (And making the tax cuts for the wealthy permanent being another.)
This statement is incorrect: "Until the United States has kicked its addiction to Middle Eastern oil, it will only ever see the region as a giant petrol station - with a friendly Israel-shaped tent looking out anxiously over the pumps."
Israel makes it harder for the US to obtain the oil because AIPAC forces us to sanction countries like Iran, Syira, Libya etc.
Would yu believe that a high-ranbking Naval officer even suggested that we look into the feasability of SMALL BOATS
It's hard to believe that a high ranking officer in the Navy would suggest that small boats represent a problem. During WW2, we had torpodeo boats, President Kennedy commanded one, and they wrecked havoc on the Japanese. They saved Gen MacArthur's ass from the Phillipines, etc.
No wonder we aren't getting anywhere to-day. The complexity of to-day overcomes the small minds that control our government.
More than a year after his criminal invasion of Iraq, Bush actually admitted that he had been unaware that Iraq was composed of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. He was unaware that Saddam was a Sunni and that his overthrow benefitted the Shiites in Iraq and Iran. We have a self-confessed incompetent in charge of U.S. foreign policy, but the media never comments upon that. Instead, we hear reports like "The President is touring the Middle East to promote peaceful resolution of that area's conflicts." I feel like Alice in Wonderland, where everything just keeps getting stranger and stranger. I can only conclude that the MSM employs aliens from a different planet who can't see the reality of the earth. Earth to the MSM: The President is an incompetent, just like you. That's why you get along so well. Three cheers, in Chinese, for Bush and the MSM: Phooey, phooey, phooey!
I thought Al Qaeda and Osama were Sunni and now there is a Shi'a threat? No wonder there are Muslims who think this is a war against Islam.
The unidentified voice is now reported by usually reliable sources (which I've now lost the link to - guardian.uk?) to have been a known "mischievous" ham radio operator in the region who uses the name "Filipino Monkey."
Bush probably was not involved in the fabrication or splicing of the Pentagon video and probably not told about it. More likely the Cheney crowd was trying to create a situation where Bush had no alternative but to order an attack. The Bush people traveling with him would have no reason to update him on the reports even from US MSM questioning the accuracy of the initial story, and once he gets a story set in his head, further facts can't dislodge it anyway.
This is another slap in the face of America, and the world. Bush on TV selling arms to the guys we buy our gas from, at prices that help his friends get richer. Who in the hell is he representing over there? It's no wonder the world hates us and thinks we are criminal in allowing Bush to continue to try and expand the empire and using religion as an excuse to commit genocide. And, using the United Nations and the World bank and the IMF and other 'international' organizations to facilitate the suicidal economic-demands of the empire.
Hoa binh
Mammon is his great uniter.
"Today, after Bush's "re-engineering" of the region, a Shia crescent sympathetic to Iran is now rising on top of the world's oil supplies, from Saudi Arabia through Iraq."
Someone should re-engineer his brain!
Remember the Cole.
msnbc reports that while the Navy is still sure it was the Iranians, Navy Times (published by Gannett, not DOD) reports that Navy vets think it was "Filipino Monkey". This isn't what he calls himself, it's an ethnically insulting name others made up to describe him. He's apparently been cursing and threatening people in the Gulf for the last quarter century.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/bush-j14.shtml
"Iran has denied the charges and called the incident an unexceptional encounter, one of many that occur in the narrow waters off the Iranian coast that are patrolled by US war ships. On Sunday, the Navy Times reported that the voice heard at the end of a recording released by the US, warning that the American ships would soon explode, may have had no connection to the Iranian boats. Instead, it "may have come from a locally famous heckler" known to intervene in radio transmissions between ships in the area."
Hence the "Filipino Monkey".
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/bush-j14.shtml
"Bush is able to count on the complicity of the Democratic Congress in conducting his warmongering policy against Iran. Democrats in the Senate helped pass a resolution last September, urging the Bush administration to declare the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran a terrorist organization. The two leading presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have repeatedly made bellicose anti-Iranian statements, declaring their willingness to use the military against Iran."
Oh Earl, remember the USS Libery. We got payback for the USS Cole, but not for the USS Liberty. The real enemy is still at large and running the white house, congress and the house.
Honestly, I found this article very childish and foolish. US has achieved a lot of goals, it removed Saddam, and replaced it with a puppet regime who does what they are asked for.
Removed the Taliban, and in the past 6 years, the world has received for 40 metric tons of Opium which is destroying life in the middle east and europe while the money from the sale is going back to big companies who sell luxury products and other crap to the war lords.
Bush solved the Palestinian issue partially by helping Israel demonize the Palestinian to a degree no one in the western world care for the starving children of Gaza and the total destruction of the life in the west bank.
Bush has solved the problem with US economy, by shifting the money from the tax payers, into the hand of the big companies in the name of the war on terror, that my friend would have not been possible without a strong Iran in the region, because as always the whole US military existence depends on an enemy dangerous and strong enough to justify billions of dollars spent on military while your schools don't have fund for books or health care for your children.
Bush has archived a lot in the ME, without him you would not receive a $20 billion dollar contract with Saudi Arabia, or France could not sign a multi billion dollar contract with UAE to sell them a nuclear plant.
Do not simplify the issue by just looking at Iran in this equation, the issue is much more complex than the simple "Iran is the only winner" comment.