Would You Buy A Used Car From This President?


You know those scenes in scary movies when you think the hero has slain the swamp monster, only to see its bigger, scarier cousin peeking around the corner? This is what it’s like watching the Bush administration deal with the Middle East. Except we are the heroes, or truth is the hero, and Cheney and Co. are the swamp monster. Just when it seemed like we were coming to our senses, reaching a consensus that this war in Iraq is a stupid and tragic “fiasco,” as one of many recent books on the subject calls it, we find that the monster of an Iranian misadventure is looming in the offing, rising in the awful. Don’t you feel like you’ve lived through this scenario before? Well, you have. You have heard the drumbeat slowly, and then faster and faster. We heard it when we heard the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection to Al Qaeda. For several years now the Bush administration and its Rovian Ministry of Propaganda have been spreading the news that Iran is mounting a nuclear threat. Suddenly now, when the chips, er, polls are down and an election is near and the Iraq war is looking more and more like the “quagmire” the Bush administration denied it would ever be (“They’ll greet us like liberators with bouquets of roses!” they said, like a pathetic wallflower out of Tennessee Williams), “Iran,” says the White House, “Iran, Iran.” “Iran, Iran, Iran,” repeats Fox News and CNN and whoever else needs the ratings. Fear has proved a damn good sell, almost as good as sex.
What’s really going on in Iran? Well, the president is a creepy-looking guy who resembles Martin Landau playing a creepy-looking Iranian president. He’s an almost too easy target for demonization—so much so that if I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not (I’ll leave that to Messrs. Rove and Cheney), I’d say he looks like he was picked out of a casting call for a “creepy Iranian president.” He talks a lot of trash about Jews and Israel and the Holocaust. But so does half of the Middle East. It probably doesn’t help that the government of Israel has, with the blessing of the warmongers and weapons-makers in the United States, recently invaded Lebanon. Not to mention the problem of the Palestinians. How long have they been promised some respect?
But looking like Martin Landau and talking crazy about Jews is no basis in itself for a military response or even the imposing of sanctions. If it were, we’d have to take away Mel Gibson's Walmart card. Contrary to this insane—truly insane, as in, against all reason—rhetoric coming out of Washington and the conservative media, Iranian diplomats have been rather measured in their talks with the U.N. It’s generally agreed that the country is years away (some say up to ten years away) from actually developing a nuclear weapon. What Iran has done so far is enrich a very small amount of uranium; but the ability to enrich a very small amount of uranium is a very different thing from the ability to build a nuclear bomb. (The Iranians have achieved 3.5% enrichment, enough to run a power plant. To build a bomb, you need 90% enrichment. And I got this from CNN.) Its leaders, including the fancily titled Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, have said they don’t even want to have a nuclear bomb because nuclear bombs are Islamically incorrect. O.k., whatever. But, even if Iran did have a bomb, it’s hard to see how it could be more dangerous than China, or Russia, which have lots of bombs, or Pakistan, for that matter—which actually is harboring terrorists, and yet (because they have a bomb, perhaps?) we call them our friend.
You wouldn’t know any of this if you exposed yourself to the American or Israeli media for the last few days. “Cheney Warns of Iran As a Nuclear Threat,” said the Washington Post. Oh, no, wait a minute, that was from January of 2005! Here’s today’s: “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, if he ever became the supreme decision maker in his country, would ‘sacrifice half of Iran for the sake of eliminating Israel,’ Giora Eiland, Israel's former national security adviser, told The Jerusalem Post…”
That is just reckless and, again, truly insane. The creepy Ahmadinejad won’t ever become the “supreme decision maker” in his country, if the Iranian people have their say. His polls are even lower than George W.’s—at 15% as of April—and he is using this face-down with the hated American cowboy president as a way of upping his nationalist credentials in his country, a country which has been becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, consumeristic (they love Britney too! well, who doesn’t?), and even feminist. But the Iranian’s civilian nuclear energy research program is perfectly legal, and, while they don’t like Ahmadinejad, they also don’t like being pushed around. Who can blame them?
Pushing around Middle Eastern dictators has worked for the Bush administration in the past. President Bush enjoyed his highest popularity when he was saber-rattling against Afghanistan and Iraq and sending American boys and girls off to fight the infidel there. Rally ‘round the troops.
Once again, we’re being hustled—but this time it’s a much more dangerous game than the hustle we fell for about Iraq. As the papers continually say in their buried asides, yes, Russia and China have "deep economic interestes" in Iran. And Iran is sitting on a whole hell of a lot of oil, 40% of which they haven’t even slurped up out of the ground.
That’s really what all this is about, isn’t it? Come on.
On this blog I have mostly been writing about 9/11, and that’s what I’m working my way up to here. Again, I don’t favor conspiracy theories. But I think that if you take a long hard look at the solid evidence that the Bush administration and their 9/11 Commission lied about at least certain central elements of what happened on 9/11, then what is to say they won’t lie again? In order to, again, provide the basis for a pre-conceived military agenda?
In a now oft-quoted document from the neo-con think tank, the Project for a New American Century, from September of 2000, PNAC members Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Lewis "Scooter" Libby said: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in the Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." But, they cautioned, they probably couldn't get the American people behind such a venture "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor."
Just a year later, on 9/11, they got their new Pearl Harbor.
But with support for the Iraq war now waning, what will be the "justification" for a continued "substantial American force presence in the Gulf"?
Well whatever it is, we don't have to get behind it—in fact, it would be insane.
Let’s just put it like this: Say you had a broker, and your broker told you, like mine once did, that there was this really great stock, Global Crossing, that you should invest a whole bunch of money in, cause it was gonna do really great. And then Global Crossing turned out to be a big lie, a scam, and a worthless stock, and you lost all that money. (But the broker still got his commission, because that’s the way it works.)
Would you be handing over your sheckels to that broker again?
I’m not. I fired his ass.
But say this broker came to you again and said, no, I really mean it this time! There’s this really great stock called Global Domination. I swear it’s going to go through the roof! Just give me a whole bunch more money and….
I don’t think so.
We need a new broker, a new team. As for market research? They don’t even know what’s going on in Iraq, a country they currently occupy, so how can we trust anything they say about Iran? Let’s not get hustled, at the price of innocent lives, again. And let’s pray that we have some say in the matter.