Paul Craig Roberts: More War on the Horizon

2007-08-26

Richard Moore

Original source URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18249.htm

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

More War on the Horizon
By Paul Craig Roberts

08/23/07 "ICH" --- -- No pullout from Iraq while I¹m president, declares George 
W. Bush.

On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.

Israel is a ³peace-seeking state² that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers¹ 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 regime¹s build up for initiating 
war with Iran.

The Bush regime says it is going to designate part of Iran¹s military--the 
Revolutionary Guards--a terrorist organization, whose bases and facilities Bush 
intends to bomb along with Iran¹s 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 ³bunker-buster² 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 is 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 ³cakewalk war²? 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 Iran¹s 
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 regime¹s 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. Israel¹s 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 government¹s war debts build up abroad.

Except for the armaments industry, where is the gain to America in Bush¹s 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 
³greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.² 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 
Orwell¹s ³Newspeak² in his novel, 1984, when Bush equates US hegemony with 
liberation.

America¹s 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.
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