Wag the dog in desperation

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There will be war with Iran? Why? Because Bush needs it. Badly. And because the warmongering neocons need it. Badly. For Bush, it is a matter of popularity, legacy. For the neocons, it is a matter of credibility. The Iraq War has been bad for business, pretty much destroying everyone affiliated with it. And the destroyed now need to destroy. Something, anything -- and Iran is the obvious target.

And, what's worse, Bush and the warmongering neocons don't seem to have learned a thing from the Iraq War. They still think they're right about everything, Iran included.

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Here's the latest evidence of what is almost surely to come:

1) As the BBC is reporting, the U.S. has arrested seven Iranians in Baghdad, all with the Iranian Electricity Ministry. Iran claims they were there on business, an official visit, something about a power station. The U.S. military has refused to comment on the matter. (See also The New York Times.) The U.S. has for some time been trying to connect Iran to the violence in Iraq. Is this latest incident part of that campaign?

2) As Think Progress is reporting, Bush said in a speech to the American Legion today that "technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust". Just as Iraq was supposedly an imminent nuclear threat before the Iraq War, so is Iran now supposedly an imminent nuclear threat. Bush and his fellow warmongers got it wrong then, badly wrong. They are wrong now, and similarly irresponsible in ratcheting up the blood-curdling rhetoric. It was Bush today, but it's been Cheney in the recent past.

3) As The Raw Story is reporting, a new study (pdf) by two British security and arms experts "concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran's WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order... Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion."

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One war has been lost (Iraq), one war has been forgotten (Afghanistan), and now there may soon be a third. The record speaks for itself, but the man who launched those two wars still has the power to launch another one. War with Iran would be a terrible idea under any circumstances -- a last resort, if that. It is especially terrible given the motivating forces: desperation, personal and political alike, and righteous ideological delusion.

As the Fred Thompson character, Admiral Josh Painter, puts it so bluntly in The Hunt for Red October: "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."

The war, the Iran War, will be waged over there, massively, but the ramifications will be felt around the world.

If you didn't think the Bush presidency could get any worse, think again.