Then, of course, as perfect counterpoint to a perfectly ridiculous situation, President Ahmani-Nejad (his spelling) of Iran is hosting yet another attempt to declare that the Nazi Holocaust did not actually happen. Ahmadi-Nejad is leaving no stone unturned in his program of defining all the world's troubles and particularly the hornets' nest of the middle east in terms of Israeli existence. Fortunately, nothing will come of this conference and no one not already insane on this issue will be converted one way or the other. Senator Tim Johnson underwent surgery on Wednesday for hypertrophy of the venous and arterial system supplying his brain. The prognosis is guarded, and thus the balance of power in the United States Senate remains in limbo for a while. Fortunately, Senator Johnson has not died of his condition and that leaves the balance weakly in favor of the Democrats. There is no telling when a resolution to this issue might be forthcoming.
By now everyone knows that President Bush is not impressed with the ISG / Baker Commission Report. Is anyone surprised that he would not take the rebuke stated in this report personally? The Pentagon has signalled that it wants more troops rather than fewer, so Congress will now be on the spot to discern from the maze of rhetoric and posturing what mission it is that Bush wishes to accomplish (finally) with these troops. If the mission is to give birth to a modern democracy in the middle east, a show place of civilized debate and restrained emotion, one wonders how any Congress, much less one controlled by the opposition party could buy into that nonsense. If the mission is to sit on the petroleum assets of Iraq and wave a sword at anyone who dares to question the American theft of natural resources, then clearly it is going to take way more than double the number of troops now committed and the time will be more like fifty years than fifty weeks!
If the mission in Iraq cannot be stated directly, if it is itself secret, a singularly important tactic supporting the strategy of eradicating terrorism from the world, one has to ask how. All the evidence is that the presence of Americans (and Israel) in the middle east simply and effectively enflames the 14th century mentality of the people and their ayatollahs into a jihadist state of mind, while providing the modern-day politicians of the area with the thing that demagogues love most—a bogeyman to focus the attention of the populace onto and away from their real issues.
I frankly do not see Bush and his people as so stupid that they believe they can take on the entire Muslim world. I think they intend only to take on the most dangerous elements of that world, namely Iraq and Iran (and Syria for good measure). I believe that the worse it gets in Iraq, the more likely Iran will be to overplay its already dirty hand. And, to reiterate for perhaps the third time on this website, that is the mission: to provoke Iran into a stupid blunder and to then retaliate with the brute force of American strategic arms ... nukes!
The long term consequences of this would be difficult to pin down. The short and mid-term, however, would be quite easy. Iran would cease to exist as a viable theocracy or militant state. Syria would evaporate. Iraq will become a platform for the expression of U.S. geopolitical and economic interests, a vassal state, a colony of the American Imperium.
The reasons I think this is the secret plan of Bush and his Administration is that everything they have done has led to a situation in which the earlier stated missions are impossible to achieve. This plan not only fits with the economic motive, but with the shorter-term plan to suck the terrorists out of the woodwork of the surrounding nations into the new holocaust of Iraq there to insure their bloody demise.
Bush and Rove rarely do anything without the potential for multiple benefits in multiple theaters of operation, and even benefits when things go awry. They told us they would be making history their way when they took office, and finally we should begin to take them at their word. That word is, by the way, murder. They have presided over the deliberate murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent (and not so innocent) Iraqis, for the purpose of extending American economic and political interests permanently into the middle east. It does not matter now what their design was, they have forfeited their ends to their means. As Bush continues on his bullheaded path, the only thing that will really stop him is impeachment.
