The White House's plot to bomb Iran

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jul 13, 2008 | by Andrew McGall

THE LONG BREWING White House plan to attack Iran resurfaced last week with the New Yorker's publication of Seymour Hersh's latest investigative report. Here we see Dick Cheney and George Bush coldly weaving another web of lies to engineer an attack as illegitimate as the one against Iraq.

Haven't these two spilled enough blood in that senseless occupation, not a war but a colonial occupation? Bush and Cheney have made the covert standards of the Cold War -- terror, assassination, torture, "regime change" -- overt U.S. policy. These two war mongers' hands drip with blood and the disgusted and fearful American public knows it.

The administration is trying to scare us and the Iranian government into a conflict. Hersh says we have special forces inside Iran kidnapping its military personnel. We are paying fundamentalists linked to al-Qaida and other opposition groups to foment terror there.

The White House duo evidently believes that it can do with Iran what it accomplished with Iraq: Persuade Americans that a threat requires military action. In January, a prankster's radio threat during a routine confrontation between Iranian patrol boats and a Navy ship blew up into a one-day international scare. Hersh says the White House cabal learned a lesson: The public briefly supported retaliation. An unnamed source tells Hersh that at a meeting in Cheney's office a few weeks later: "The subject was how to create a casus belli between Teheran and Washington."

Should Cheney get his war, we may or may not succeed in changing the Iranian government, but we surely will kill a lot of innocent people, further destabilize the Middle East, roil the oil markets and send another tidal wave through the world's weakened economies. Ready to pour another half trillion dollars into a military misadventure? An attack on Iran undoubtedly would create new legions of hate-driven terrorists to fuel the endless war that our "bring 'em on" Cowboy-in-Chief invites.

The two lame ducks in the White House are quacking about another threat in precisely the same cynical fashion they fomented the Iraq takeover. Iran's getting the Bomb! Iran's getting the Bomb! Bomb Iran. Bomb Iran. They have rejected the best U.S. intelligence estimate that Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon.

As this tragic looney-tune develops we find, surprise!, the Iraqis dislike us. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars and more than 4,100 American lives to create a government that does not want us around. It is resisting our demand for permanent bases and immunity from its laws. What? Iraq does not want to be our colony? Our oil slaves? Even more weird: Our disastrously expensive (and corrupt) colony likes the Iranians and wants closer ties with them.

The ugliest fact of all: Hersh says we're paying Sunni fundamentalists -- the al-Qaida base dedicated to destroying Western values -- to undermine Iran from within. Think of it: Cheney using the 9/11 monsters for his own dark purposes. Remember, after the Twin Towers, Iran cooperated with the United States in pursuit of al- Qaida operatives.

Hersh shows Cheney feverishly plotting with his supporters in the military and intelligence communities and driving out dissenters. Ultimately, he is waging his own terror campaign. We inveigh against the defiant rogue government of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while we engage in the same conduct -- state sponsored terrorism.

The United States has a well-documented history of provoking conflict or finding excuses for it. The post-9/11 world is one in which the intelligence and defense communities have fragmented into partisan groups with, Hersh reports, Cheney intervening in the military chain of command to direct operations.

Congressional Democrats are cooperating in their usual supine manner. John McCain's on Cheney's side; Saint Obama has said not a word on the war talk.

At need, one element or another of our rogue government may yet find or create an excuse for a blunder that will haunt this nation far longer than the Iraq lie. That we allowed our leaders to stampede us into Iraq and to keep us there suggests we lack the will, the humanity and the freedom to prevent a real war.

Andrew McGall is a deputy metro editor at the Bay Area News Group. Reach him at amcgall@bayareanewsgroup.comOnline

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh story, "Preparing the Battlefield," and others in his Annals of National Security are online at www.newyorker.com.