Like some others, I started blogging about Bush nuking Iran months ago. I knew he would, because I knew he was up to his eyeballs in outing Valerie Plame, and the key player who was gonna save them all ran away instead.
John Ashcroft.
Oh yeah. Rove got him the gig, and he was expected to cover up, obfuscate, obliterate, and otherwise suppress any concept of responsibility in outing Plame. Oops. So we got Fitzgerald instead. Are you really suprised that Bush ordered this smear? Please.
Then Iraq started to go exactly as planned. I say this because I’m certain Bush invaded and occupied Iraq to win the 2002 midterms, establish permanent bases there to protect the oil, and continue to empty the treasury into his corporate supporters’ pockets. He couldn’t do this with an organized, united government there, so he counted on the civil war to keep everyone occupied while he sited and built said permanent bases. He didn’t give a shit about the Iraqi people, and he had an ace in the hole.
Nuking Iran. This had to be in the planning all along, and it’s been dependent on the 2006 mid-term election timing. It’s possible that he never would have had to nuke Iran if Iraq had been slower to collapse into civil war. But as always, he misunderestimated the situation, and the Iraqi people are killing each other now while killing US soldiers faster than he planned. Bush’s polls are sliding down faster than he planned. So his ace in the hole is looking like the only card in the deck. I knew that he would have to divert attention. I knew he was capable of killing more hundreds of thousands of brown people to maintain political control over the Congress and avoid a Democratic Senate Select Committee.
I have blogged about Bush nuking Iran here and here and here and here.
Sy Hersh writes about it here and here.
But I think Bush has misunderestimated the situation again.
I think Bush has gone to the terror well too often. I think playing the only card in the deck for short term political gain, to bump the polls in advance of the mid-term elections, will backfire on him, for precisely the same reason Iraq backfired on him.
He is getting only the information he wants to hear. Many of us out here in Left Blogistan have known about the dangers of this idiotic move all along, but Bush is hearing that if we nuke a country, the people of that country will rise up and overthrow the government. Really? Did we rise up and overthrow Bush after September 11?
Bush is expecting us to unite in total supprt of him for dropping the biggest nukes in history on Iran, and also expecting the Iranian people to rise up and support him for nuking their country.
Can he possibly believe this?
He doesn’t give a shit. Playing the only card in the deck, slaughtering brown people, creating more chaos, birthing more terrorists; he doesn’t give a shit. All he’s trying to do is avoid the perp walk. And I think the deck is stacked against him.
