[NYTr] More War on the Horizon

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Aug 24, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08242007.html

A Hegemonic Hubris

More War on the Horizon

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

No pullout from Iraq while I'm president, declares George W. Bush.

On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.

Israel is a "peace-seeking state" that needs $30 billion of US
taxpayers' money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas
Burns.

The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no
longer is in the way of it.

Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime's build up for
initiating war with Iran.

The Bush regime says it is going to designate part of Iran's military
-- the Revolutionary Guards -- a terrorist organization, whose bases
and facilities Bush intends to bomb along with Iran's nuclear energy
sites. Three US aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran.
B-2 Stealth bombers are being fitted to carry 30,000 pound
"bunker-buster" bombs to use against hardened sites. Politicized US
generals assert that Iran is providing arms and aid to the Iraqi
resistance to the US occupation. The media are feeding the US
population the same propaganda about nonexistent Iranian weapons of
mass destruction that they fed us about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction. A former CIA Middle East field officer, Robert Baer,
has written in Time magazine that the Bush regime has decided to attack
the Revolutionary Guards within the next 6 months. Remember the
"cakewalk war"? Well, this time the neocons think that an attack on the
Revolutionary Guards will free Iran from Islamic influence and cause
Iranians to back the US against their own government.

Lies, unprovoked aggression, and delusional expectations -- the same
ingredients that produced the Iraq catastrophe -- all over again. The
entire Bush regime and both political parties are complicit, along with
the media and US allies.

According to Baer, the Bush regime has given no consideration to
whether Iran's response to a US attack might be different than to
welcome it as liberation. What if Iran really were to arm the Iraqi
resistance and/or to sink our aircraft carriers? How can any
government, even one as incompetent, delusional and unaccountable as
the Bush regime, initiate war without any thought to the consequences?

The Bush regime's planned war against Iran casts light on the large
increase in military armaments that the US is supplying to Israel. With
Iraq in chaos and civil war, an attack on Iran leaves as opposition to
Israel only Syria and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel cannot
finish off the Palestinians until Hezbollah is destroyed. An Israeli
attack on Syria while the US attacks Iran would leave Hezbollah without
supplies in the face of a new Israeli attack.

The agenda unfolding before our eyes may be the
neoconservative/Israeli/Cheney plan to rid the Middle East of any check
to Israeli territorial expansion.

Nicholas Burns said that the $30 billion in military aid was not
conditional on any Israeli concessions or progress toward resolving the
conflict with the Palestinians. Israel's ghettoizing and ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinian West Bank proceeds apace.

Meanwhile in America, while more money is poured into more war,
condemned bridges collapse killing Americans who trusted their
government to provide safe infrastructure. Devastated residents of New
Orleans remain unaided. Financial difficulties deepen for more
Americans as falling home prices and jobs lost to offshoring push more
Americans into desperate straits. The US dollar continues to fall as
the government's war debts build up abroad.

Except for the armaments industry, where is the gain to America in
Bush's wars? Before Bush invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had stamped
out drug production. The US invasion has brought it back.

On August 22 Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that US troops are
the "greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known."
Tell that to the 650,000 dead Iraqis and the 4 million displaced
Iraqis, and the tens of thousands of slaughtered Afghans, and the
coming civilian deaths in Iran. Tell that to all the bombed civilians
from Serbia to Africa who are blown to pieces in order that a US
president can make a point. Bush goes far beyond George Orwell's
"Newspeak" in his novel, 1984, when Bush equates US hegemony with
liberation.

America's hegemonic hubris is a sickness. A country that tolerates a
war criminal while he openly plans to attack yet another country is
definitely not a light unto the world.

[Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He
is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at:
PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com ]