White House to insanely market another war.

The idea that our government would market a war that only a few top leaders considered necessary would have seemed incredible back before Bush stole toe Presidency in 2000. Then, beginning in about September 2002 they did exactly that, marketing and conducting the disaster in Iraq. That peremptory war in Iraq solved the problem of the essentially toothless intransigence of Saddam at the cost of totally destroying Iraq as a nation and - so far - destroying the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and at present conducting an occupation of Iraq that is burning through $3 billion per week.

No one would be stupid enough to try double-or-nothing and begin marketing another war even before there appears to be any resolution of the mess in Iraq would they? Not if they were sane they wouldn't. But if an organization can be described as "insane" the Bush administration would be the prime example.

Just because an idea is crazy and unworkable doesn't seem to stop the Bush administration. That said, the current rumors that the Bush administration is starting to roll out the marketing for another peremptory war, this time with Iraq, needs to be considered seriously. So this article in the New Yorker should be considered a warning of the intended actions of the insane Bush administration.

Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can’t confirm his friend’s story; neither can I. But it’s worth a heads-up:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely. It follows the pattern of the P.R. campaign that started around this time in 2002 and led to the Iraq war. The President’s rhetoric on Iran has been nothing short of bellicose lately, warning of “the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.” And the Iranian government’s behavior—detaining British servicemen and arresting American passport holders, pushing ahead with uranium enrichment, and, by many reliable accounts, increasing its funding and training for anti-American militias in Iraq—seems intentionally provocative. Perhaps President Ahmedinejad and the mullahs feel that they win either way: they humiliate the superpower if it doesn’t take the bait, and they shore up their deeply unpopular regime at home if it does. Preëmptive war requires calculations (and, often, miscalculations) on two sides, not just one, as Saddam learned in 2003. When tensions are this high between two countries and powerful factions in both act as if hostilities are in their interest, war is likely to follow.

Just because a proposed action is insane does not mean that some supporters might not consider it useful to them. Both the Bush administration in the U.S. and the administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are both losing support inside their respective nations.

Bush and Cheney are both willing to take on ideas others consider not only wrong and unworkable, but even insane. Both consider disagreement to be disloyalty. They ignore both expert opinion and the experts themselves. Mahmoud Ahmadinehad has a reputation for similar behavior. Both are in political trouble at home, and both appear likely to run the risk of another war just to maintain power.

The rumors of the roll-out of another effort to market a war need to be considered seriously.