Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Initially, the Bush Regime denied that Bush’s escalation
speech on January 10 signaled that the Regime intends to attack
Iran. Now a number of Regime officials have made it clear that
Iran, not Iraq, is the focus of the Regime’s war planning.
Robert Gates, the new Defense Secretary and member of the Iraq
Study Group, was supposedly brought into the Pentagon to de-escalate
the war. Gates now says that Iran is the target of US military
moves in the Persian Gulf.
Suddenly the media is full of Bush Regime propagandistic assertions
designed to make the American public believe that Iran is the
enemy that is fighting against our troops in Iraq. To facilitate
this deception, the Bush Regime staged a propaganda event by invading
an Iranian government liaison office in Northern Iraq, kidnapping
the Iranian officials and declaring them to be involved in plans
to kill US troops.
The Bush Regime’s latest big lie is that the US is not
winning in Iraq because of Iran. “The Iranians are acting
in a very negative way,” alleges the “moderate”
Gates. Iraq, the target for the escalation in US troop levels,
has dimmed in importance. In the few days since Bush’s “surge”
speech, Bush, Cheney, Gates, Rice, and national security advisor
Hadley have said far more about Iran than about Iraq. In 2003,
the same technique was used by the Bush Regime to shift the public’s
attention from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. The technique
succeeded to the extent that even today a significant percentage
of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the
9/11 attacks.
Clearly, the Bush Regime expects that it can again deceive the
American public. There is no doubt that Iran will be attacked.
The Israeli government and the neoconservatives have been demanding
it.
The question is: why is Bush, who is confronted with failure
in Iraq, willing to compound his problems by attacking a more
powerful Muslim state that the US has no prospect of being able
to occupy?
A former member of the National Security Council gave me a possible
answer. Bush can bury his defeat in Iraq with a “victory”
in Iran.
Here is the victory scenario: Bush and Cheney will claim that
their air attack on Iran succeeded in destroying Iran’s
(non-existent) nuclear weapons program. The victory claimed by
the Bush Regime and the propagandistic US media will “make
America safe from nuclear attack.” This will restore Bush’s
popularity and move the US back to a 50-50 political split in
time for Karl Rove to steal the 2008 election with the fraudulent
electronic voting machines built and programmed by Republican
operatives.
The former national security official believes that Bush will
be able to claim victory over Iran, because Iran will avoid responding
militarily. Iran will not use its Russian missiles to sink our
aircraft carriers, to shut down oil facilities throughout the
Middle East, or to destroy US headquarters in the “green
zone” in Baghdad. Instead, Iran will adopt the posture of
another Muslim victim of US/Israeli aggression and let the anger
seep throughout the Muslim world until no pro-US government is
safe in the Middle East.
Bush needs a short-run victory, and Iran will let him have it
in order to gain the long-run victory.
The consequences for the US, Israel, and the US puppet regimes
in the Middle East will be catastrophic, but they will not occur
in the short-run.
This explanation solves the dilemma of why Bush would get deeper
into the quagmire for the sake of the Israel Lobby. A US attack
on Iran allows Bush both to satisfy the powerful Israel Lobby
and to claim to have destroyed Iran’s (non-existent) weapons
of mass destruction.
Some patriotic Americans, who believe it is still possible to
save America from war and a police state, see cause for hope in
the upcoming trial of “Scooter” Libby, the former
chief operative of VP Cheney. Libby is accused of lying about
his role in leaking a covert CIA agent’s name to the press
in an effort to discredit damaging evidence that Bush had lied
about Iraq possessing WMD. The patriots believe that Libby’s
trial will damage the Bush Regime and, thereby, reduce the Regime’s
danger to freedom and democracy in America.
At this delicate point in time, the Bush Regime would not allow
the Libby trial to go forward unless the Regime had arranged with
the media shills it uses to control the explanation of the news
(with insider leaks) to testify in a manner that lets Libby off
the hook. If Libby is exonerated, expect Cheney and the neocon
nazis to attack Joe Wilson as a terrorist sympathizer who tried
to discredit Bush’s invasion of Iraq and war on terror.
The attack on Wilson will lead into an all-out-assault on the
antiwar movement.
If the Regime overcomes its defeat in Iraq with a “victory”
in Iran, “you are with us or against us” will take
on new life, and we will find out who are those intended for the
Halliburton-built detention camps constructed in the US at great
cost with our tax dollars.
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