Bush lied about when he knew Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program.

From Think Progress:

President Bush has said he first learned that there was new intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program “in August” when DNI Mike McConnell told him “we have some new information.” The White House later revealed that Bush was told at that time that Iran’s nuclear weapons program “may be suspended.” Gareth Porter of IPS News writes that “it now appears” that “Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007,” months before the White House has conceded. December 17, 2007 7:28 pm |

Was there any doubt?

This goes beyond misunderstanding or spin. Bush simply lied because he has been pushing for war with Iran well after he learned that the nuclear weapons program that was allegedly the reason for the war he wanted had been stopped.

So why does Bush really want to start a war with Iran? Does he actually have an objective rational reason, or is he simply an psychotic war-lover?

After the election in November, America needs a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" that has subpoena power and the power to offer immunity from prosecution to those who admit their criminal behavior as part of the Bush administration and tell their stories fully in public.

It's going to take something like that to begin to rebuild the truest Americans have lost in government officials. The refusal to take such a step after Nixon resigned or after Reagan's administration got caught in the Iran-Contra mess has simply allowed the criminals to do it again in the Bush administration.

So? B-52 flies from one B-52 base to another? So what?

The story about a B-52 bomber taking off from a B-52 base in Minot, ND and flying to the B-52 base at Barksdale, LA should have been a non-event. How could anyone even guess what the payload was? Obviously someone leaked it. Why?

Larry Johnson offers some additional data. Like, for example, "the only times you put weapons on a plane is when they are on alert or if you are tasked to move the weapons to a specific site." Also relevant is the fact that Barksdale, LA is where the B-52's are staged to the Middle East.

As Larry says, why would the Air Force need to move nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to the base from which flights going to the Middle East normally begin?

Click on the label "Iranian War" below for my previous posts on the buildup to the attack on Iran.

Another Bush delusion

From Think Progress we find out more about Bush's beliefs from the book "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush" by Robert Draper.

The U.S. Intelligence Agencies admitted in 2004 that Saddam had not had any WMD's. However

Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs. [p. 388]

This is the man who says that he is America's 'decider.' As I pointed out earlier he said

"And in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, he [Bush}continued, “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president."

Bush is a man who suffers from delusions, and he is also the man who will ultimately decide if the U.S. has to attack Iran.

Bush and Cheney are rumored to have directed the start of a propaganda effort to justify an attack on Iran. See White House to insanely market another war.

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.

Can Bush come out of his delusional fog long enough to realize that a war with Iran will be a disaster? I seriously doubt it.

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.

More desk-pounding to attack Iran

Think Progress reports that ex-UN Ambassador John Bolton hopes we go to war against Iran within the next six months.

If Bolton supports an idea, everyone should know that it is a really, really bad idea.

An American attack on Iran is almost certain

Glenn Greenwald has today posted one of the most discouraging articles on the American actions in the Middle East that I have read since the Bush administration was idiot enough to preemptively attack Iraq.

Glenn makes a strong case that an attack on on Iran is close to inevitable. In the last two paragraphs of this post I make my case for a window of between April and June 2008 as being the most likely time for that attack.

Glenn starts by explaining that the Democrats in Congress are caving in to the Republicans on every front (led by Hillary Clinton) because they fear that to oppose the actions of Bush and Cheney in Iraq will raise antagonism towards Democrats in the 2008 election and permit a return to Republican control of Congress. This argument of Glenn's is a continuation of his post yesterday. Glenn's argument is roughly as follows:

Sen. Karl Levin came back from a two day guided tour of U.S. military bases and officer's messes in Iraq with the message from those high-ranking officers that the surge is working, but that the Maliki government has failed to take advantage of the political space that the success of the surge provided. (In this he is supported by Hillary Clinton who will sell out anyone to become President in 2008.) But of course, Levin's message is a load of crap. (See my previous post From GI's; we aren't winning, aren't wanted and can't win in Iraq from the New York Times OpEd by the 82d Airborne sergeants.) Glenn says:

As a matter of substance, Levin's call for the Prime Minister to be replaced is, of course, completely nonsensical. As Hilzoy pointed out, the political failures in Iraq are not due to Maliki's failures and replacing him will therefore achieve nothing. Beyond that, as Rosen explained in the Democracy Now interview:

The Iraqi government doesn't matter. It has no power. And it doesn't matter who you put in there. He's not going to have any power. Baghdad doesn't really matter, except for Baghdad. Baghdad used to be the most important city in Iraq, and whoever controlled Baghdad controlled Iraq. These days, you have a collection of city states: Mosul, Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Irbil, Sulaymaniyah. Each one is virtually independent, and they have their own warlords and their own militias. And what happens in Baghdad makes no difference. So that's the first point.

Iraq is so disintegrated, so ethnically cleansed, so broken that, as Rosen points out, it does not really exist as an entity any longer:

Iraq has been changed irrevocably, I think. I don't think Iraq even -- you can say it exists anymore. There has been a very effective, systematic ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad, of Shias --from areas that are now mostly Shia. . . . And Baghdad is now firmly in the hands of sectarian Shiite militias, and they're never going to let it go.

Rosen reports that the number of externally displaced Iraqis is now close to 3 million -- most of them Sunnis, representing a sizable portion of the Iraqi Sunni population which, in turn, further ensures Shiite sectarian militia control of most of the country. Always obscured by the exciting debate over whether we are "winning" is what happens if we "win" -- the installation of an Iran-and-Syria-friendly Shiite "government" surrounded by an ethnically divided country armed and ruled by sectarian militias loyal to a whole variety of Middle East actors. In light of all of that, Sen. Levin's claim of "military progress" is just incoherent.

The load of Levin crap is intended to allow the Democrats to win big in November of 2008. The beltway Democrats fear that if they attack the actions of the administration they can be painted as unpatriotic and as not supporting the troops while they are in combat. It is this avoidance of discussing the Administrations' idiocy that is causing the surreal "...recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day." which the 82d Airborne sergeants wrote about in their Sunday NY times OpEd.

If it were just the current status of the war in Iraq, that would be bad, but it is actually a lot worse than that. The problem is that Cheney and the Bush administration have determined to attack Iran before then. Glenn Greenwald quotes from an article by former CIA Officer Robert Baer in Time Magazine entitled Prelude to an Attack on Iran. He

...casts such an attack as virtually inevitable prior to the end of the Bush presidency, and likely much sooner than that:

Reports that the Bush Administration will put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: it's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. . . .

Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to democratic and a friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking.

And what do we do if just the opposite happens -- a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. "IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this administration. There will be an attack on Iran."

The purpose of attacking Iran is to destabilize the Iranian government and cause it to fall and be replaced. But Glenn has the following opinion (as do i)

Given our militarily weakened state, the latter goal seems virtually impossible. And, ironically as always, a bombing campaign against Iran would do more to strengthen that government than anything else we could do. But Iran is the Evil Enemy. And Enemies must be attacked and bombed and harmed. The people who think that way are very much still in control, beginning with the Oval Office, and it is very difficult to see how that outcome will be averted. Certainly the likes of Carl Levin aren't going to stop it.

Anyone who thinks that a military attack on Iran will cause the overthrow of the Iranian government should look at the history of the Soviet Union.

The purges of high military leaders by Joe Stalin were not conducted because Joe was an evil man. They were conducted because the USSR was highly unstable and Stalin's collectivization efforts had made a revolt quite likely. Stalin was negotiating peace with Germany because he feared losing control of the USSR in the case of war.

But then the Germans attacked the USSR, and instead of overthrowing Stalin they rallied behind him in the Great Patriotic War. Americans often don't realize it but other than in the Pacific, which was a battle of primarily Navy and Marines, the deadliest, most significant, and most massive battles of WW II were fought in the USSR. Soviet citizens may have hated Stalin generally, but they hated the German invaders more.

Iran is one of the oldest nations on Earth. The people there may not like their current government but they will join together to repel any attacker and to prevent that attacker from achieving their goals. Americans reacted exactly the same way September 12, 2001, and Bush/Cheney/Rove/Rumsfeld stupidly threw away their opportunity to lead a unified America against the real terrorists who attacked us.

Only stupid or ignorant people would ignore the reality that an American attack on Iran will unify the Iranian people behind whatever government they have, no matter how much it is disliked. Bush is both stupid and ignorant, and Cheney is certainly ignorant. Yet based on their stupidity and ignorance, along with the acquiescence of the Democratic politicians in Washington, the U.S. is going to soon initiate another unnecessary and unwinnable war in the Middle East.

The Democratic politicians are sitting on their hands for fear of losing the election in November 2008. If they sit on their hands past the excessively early primaries, they need not fear primary challenges. I'd guess that the main reason Cheney/Bush haven't attacked Iran yet is exactly that. Such an attack would cause the defeat in the primaries of too many Democrats who are supporting the war in Iraq and soon, Iran.

The primaries are why I think we have not yet attacked Iran. As soon as the primaries in the larger Blue states are over, Iran will be attacked. The Democratic politicians, by their silence when it counted, will be comitted to support the attack.

If the attack is done no later than about June 2008 things cannot have gone to crap badly enough yet to be a major threat to Republican reelections in November 2008. That makes a window of between about April and June as the most likely time-of-attack. Look for sharply increased media propaganda just before that.

Sure hope I'm wrong.

Cheney's push to war with Iran is succeeding

Will bunch at Daily News Attytood explains how the war hawks in Cheney's office are winning the internal power struggle in the White House.