January 31, 2007
The denials out of the Bush Administration are hardly encouraging.
I’m talking about Iran now, the next frontier of Bush madness.
John Negroponte, testifying before Congress on Tuesday, responded to a question from the ever more attractive Chuck Hagel, who asked: “Do you think we are drifting toward a military confrontation with Iran?”
Negroponte responded: “I don’t think that has to be, Senator,” and adding some blather about preferring to resolve things peacefully.
But that’s just recycled blather from the Bush hot air machine that cranked so much propaganda out before the Iraq War. Bush and his cronies constantly mentioned that they wanted a peaceful resolution, while all along war was in the works.
On ABC News Tuesday, Bush did the same shuck and jive, saying “Nobody’s talking about” invading Iran.
Here Bush may have been slicing the baloney pretty thin. His plans, according to Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, are for bombing Iran, not invading. But that Bush wants regime change in Tehran there should be no doubt. John Bolton, who barely has cleared out his desk at the UN, just told reporters in France that the only solution in Iran is “regime change,” though he denied it was Administration policy.
Meanwhile, there’s more hype every day about Iran’s role in Iraq, the most recent being the allegation that Iran was behind the killing of five Americans in Karbala on Jan. 20. The evidence for the allegation was flimsy—simply that the assault was “sophisticated.”
As Professor Juan Cole points out for Salon, we should take Bush’s claims about Iran’s role in Iraqi assaults on Americans “with a large grain of salt.” He explains: “To begin with, some 99 percent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups. Most of the outside help these groups get comes from the Sunni Arab public in countries allied with the United States, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops. Meanwhile, the most virulent terror network in Iraq, which styles itself ‘al-Qaida in Mesopotamia,’ has openly announced that its policy is to kill as many Shiites as possible. That the ayatollahs of Shiite Iran are passing sophisticated weapons to these, their sworn enemies, is not plausible.”
But it is these kinds of allegations that Bush will use to widen the Iraq War to Iran.
Unless we and Congress stop him.
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