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Wednesday, April 12, 2006

How can we trust this Administration on Iran?
Posted by Jill | 6:22 AM
We now know that the Bush Administration didn't just act on "bad intelligence", but outright lied in order to start the war in Iraq that Bush had wanted as far back as 1999, when he was a candidate for president.

The latest evidence of this lying comes from the infamous "trailers" which the Administration told us were bioweapons labs -- while they knew perfectly well that they weren't.

MoDo weighs in:

Talk about a fearful symmetry.

Iran was whipping up real uranium while America was whipped up by fake uranium.

Obsessed with going to war against a Middle East country that had no nuclear weapon, the Bush administration lost focus on and leverage over a Middle East country hurtling toward a nuclear weapon.

That's after the Bush crew lost focus on and leverage over an Asian country that says it has now produced a whole bunch of nuclear weapons.

To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, these guys wouldn't have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.

[snip]

The nuclear doves announcement was embarrassing for Mr. Bush, who had said on Monday that he was determined to prevent Iran from getting the know-how to enrich uranium. But the Persian logic cannot be faulted. If you pretend to have W.M.D., the U.S. may come and get you. Ask Saddam. If you really have W.M.D., you're bulletproof. Ask Kim Jong Il.

I'm sure the mad-as-cheese Mr. Ahmadinejad cannot believe his luck. The down-the-rabbit-hole Bush administration is tied up in Iraq, helping to create a theocracy friendly to Iran while leaving Iran to do whatever it wants on W.M.D.

In this week's New Yorker, Seymour Hersh writes about the Pentagon planning for a possible strike against the nutty "apocalyptic Shiites," as the former C.I.A. agent Robert Baer calls the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad and his chorus line of clerics.

Mr. Hersh quotes a source close to the Pentagon saying that Mr. Bush believes "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy." Which makes sense, in a wag-the-camel way, since saving Iraq is not going to be his legacy.

The Bush hawks, who have already proven themselves cultural cretins in Iraq, seem to still be a long way from that humble foreign policy they promised. A former defense official told Mr. Hersh that the plan was based on an administration belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." The official's reaction: "What are they smoking?"

Just as Rummy dismissed questions back in August 2002 about a possible invasion of Iraq as a media "frenzy" — even as plans were well under way — the defense chief shrugged off The New Yorker story as "Henny Penny, the sky is falling."

Noting that the president is "on a diplomatic track," He Who Should Be Fired said that while W. was obviously concerned about Iran as a country that supports terrorists and wants W.M.D., "it is just simply not useful to get into fantasy land."

Yes, the reality-based community of journalists should stay out of fantasy land, which is already overcrowded with hallucinatory Bushies.


It takes only one lie to destroy a president's credibility. Republicans wrung their hands in the 1990's because a president lied about sex. Now, Bush's apologists would tell us to trust the president on Iran because he's the president -- even when he has a track record of lying that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people and has destroyed our moral authority in the world.

If Iran now has enriched uranium (as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now claims), that country now counts as a Serious and Legitimate Problem. In the short term, the immediate problem is a potential nuclear strike on Israel to "wipe it off the map." Whether most Americans want George W. Bush, with his known messianic delusions, to be the one to make the decision as to whether Israel is worth a worldwide conflagration remains to be seen. The Christofascists will have no problem with it, as they have already decided that Bush is God's Own Anointed Architect of Armageddon, but I don't believe that those who are NOT religious crazies are going to go for it.

I don't have any answers as to what to do. But watching the President, the Vice President, and their senile Secretary of Defense rubbing their figurative hands together in anticipation of using nuclear bunker-busters in Iran, like the Mythbusters about to blow something up real good, doesn't exactly make me confident that these guys have any motivation to, or any idea how to, resolve this conflict without destroying the entire world in the process.
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