http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120005

Its Limbaugh smearing 1/2 the Democratic party.

I had a long complex post justifying my position which I then rather brilliantly managed to wipe before I got a chance to post it. However, luckily the Guardian has now got a piece that sums up what I think on the matter.

‘President Bush has reminded us that he is prepared to take military action to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. On Israeli television this weekend, he declared that “all options are on the table” if Tehran doesn’t comply with international demands….America’s devastating air power is not committed in Iraq. Just 120 B52, B1 and B2 bombers could hit 5,000 targets in a single mission. Thousands of other warplanes and missiles are available. The army and marines are heavily committed in Iraq, but enough forces could be found to secure coastal oilfields and to conduct raids into Iran.

A US attack is unlikely to be confined to the suspected WMD locations or to involve a ground invasion to occupy the country. The strikes would probably be intended to destroy military, political and (oil excepted) economic infrastructure. A disabled Iran could be further paralysed by civil war. Tehran alleges US support for separatists in the large Azeri population of the north-west, and fighting is increasing in Iranian Kurdistan….’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1549198,00.html

And so on.

It may well be that a draft will have to be instituted at some point, but as long as this can be pushed off until just after the end of Bush’s term (perhaps with a President Cheney in power) then this will give the Bush administration the 12 years (in total) it needs to completely reshape the Middle East to American needs.

The reason I think that is because…that’s what happened the last time. Remember under Nixon the Vietnam war spilled out into Cambodia and Laos: effectively a war on three fronts (or three seperate wars depending on your point of view).

This time:

Iraq = Vietnam

Iran = Cambodia

Syria = Laos.

Of course all three of those countries then went Communist and the likelihood that the US will turn a previously mainly secular region into three hardline Islamic states (Iran is already there) is not improbable.

Incidentally, Richard Nixon’s speech in which he announced the invasion of Cambodia (“This is not an invasion of Cambodia”) is worth noting.

“A majority of the American people, a majority of you listening to me are for the withdrawal of our forces from Vietnam. The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program. A majority of the American people want to end this war rather than to have it drag on interminably. The action I have taken tonight will serve that purpose. A majority of the American people want to keep the casualties of our brave men in Vietnam at an absolute minimum. The action I take tonight is essential if we are to accomplish that goal.

We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam, and winning the just peace we all desire.”

Insert “Iraq” for “Vietnam” and you have, due to the miracles of time travel, the speech of A.N. Other American president in five years time.

The whole speech, almost every word of which is a lie, in the typical Nixonian manner, is worth reading.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/richardnixoncambodia.html

The hope that democracy and pro-American attitudes would nicely converge in Iraq was, always, a sad joke—the unsuccessful enforcing of that joke on the Iraqi population was a crime—and the spinout now is an outcome that is hardly unexpected.
This isn’t to say that America will lose—that, too, is a highly improbable event. The U.S. and the West need oil, and will eventually come to terms with the reality of the Middle East that compromises with the fact that the control of oil is never again going to be America’s to command, as it was up to the seventies. A Gulf divided between Saudi and Iranian influence, and an Israel that is, all in all, secure in its real borders is the best the U.S. will get—but it isn’t bad.
The terrorist threat is something else again. This is where the Bush administration is unique—no American government in the past has failed as completely to master a simple security question as the Bushies, and that failure will haunt us all for decades.
To repeat:
1. not supporting the Bush policy in Iraq is not the equivalent of not supporting American interest in the area—it restrains, instead, a peculiarly loathsome combination of megalomania and incompetence.
2. the question for the U.S., now, is one of relevance in the region, not victory or defeat; the pseudo-democracy of the Allawi type, which was the Bush version of Pax Americana in Iraq, is history;
3. the longer the war continues, the higher the chance that a real American interest—a continuous flow of oil—will truly be endangered;
4. anti-war people should spend every effort on supporting the strangling of Bush’s ability to continue to wage a vanity war. The volunteer army is their achilles heel, and it is the place to attack them.

I thought the neo-wingnuts love democracy, or, at least, the constitutional system of shared power known as ‘checks and balances’. I was so naive. It’s all about the Fuhrer.

I’m not much for prognosticating, but two things seem clear to me:

1) There will be some sort of troop reduction in the next 15 months, if only for purely domestic political reasons. It may be only cosmetic, but the message to the American people will be clear: Enough of this, we’re bugging out.

2) Watching Hindrocket and his pals rationalize this turn of events is going to be extremely entertaining.

“There is one obvious catch, however, in Rich’s rosy—for him—scenario. Much as he and his fellow left-wingers can encourage our terrorist enemy, and they do, they don’t have the power to bring about America’s defeat. Notwithstanding endless hectoring from Rich and his fellows on the fringe, there is only one man whose views about Iraq will really matter for the next three and a half years. His name is George W. Bush, and he isn’t going to cut and run. Nor can Rich and his ilk significantly impede the efforts of America’s armed forces.”

In John Man’s trashy but highly entertaining new biography of Genghis Khan (Genghis Khan, Life, Death and Resurrection), Man states a fundamental fact about Empire.

‘Empires expand for as long as they have the power to do so’.

(p206, Bantam version, 2004).

This is self-evidently the case, for two reasons.

a: attacking states leads to neighbouring states feeling forced into military action to prevent you expanding further and attacking them. Alternatively, the forces of the state you have just attacked may retreat to neighbouring states and attack you from there. Either way, you must then attack neighbouring states to keep your conquests, which then necessitates attacking THEIR neighbours and so forth.

b: The costs of your attacking conquering and colonising the states you have invaded necessitate attacking further states to fund the initial attack (and etc. etc. )

This isn’t just to point out the parallels between Genghis Khan’s invasion of the Muslim Empires and Bush’s, although the comparisons are obvious and are made clear in Man’s book (I should add that this comparison is greatly unfair….to Genghis Khan, who showed far greater diplomatic and military prowess than Bush ever did).

However, to repeat, if America really is an imperial power, we would expect further military operations (NOT in North Korea, which, as Bob Woodward’s book was made clear, was simply thrown into the ‘Axis of Evil’ to make it sound like there was no crusade against Islam…i mean perish the thought), but certainly in Iran and Syria. (I should point out that as with Iraq, any military action in Syria would almost certainly (again) be given the tacit support of Iran, who are clearly attempting to resuscitate the Persian Empire (in Shia form) and are using the Americans as useful idiots to achieve this).

If it happens, I for one will be out there cheering for the Republican Guard and Hizbollah.

An invasion of Iran, in any forseeable circumstance, would be everything that some people think Iraq was – illegal, unwinnable, and clear proof Bush was a dangerously stupid maniac.

soru

When you say things like:

‘Of course, just as I would be if the US did anything equivalently stupid like invading iran.’

You are aware that Bush has just stated:

‘Bush said the United States and Israel ‘’are united in our objective to make sure that Iran does not have a weapon.’’

But, he said, if diplomacy fails “all options are on the table.”

“The use of force is the last option for any president. You know, we’ve used force in the recent past to secure our country,” he said.’

Does this mean that in the (increasingly likely) situation that the US will use force against Iran, perhaps even leading to a full scale invasion, the Harry’s Place cheerleaders will fall silent and will NOT support such an action?