The hard sell of the Long War rolls on, this week the President made crystal clear the goal of that hard sell: to prepare the public for the coming attack on Iran.
Where both Glenn Greenwald and here on BMT, Larry Johnson have done a phenomenal job covering the President’s unmistakable signal to hit Iran, it’s worth taking a look a few other things the White House has been up to this week proclaiming that the continued war in Iraq and expansion into Iran is a foregone conclusion.
CNN is reporting that the US has released several Iranians after detaining them for being in Iraq.
The group was released and entered into a hotel in the Rusafa district. Then, “based on further instructions,” U.S. soldiers conducted a search on the hotel rooms occupied by the delegation.
Soldiers confiscated cell phones, a computer and a briefcase filled with Iranian and U.S. money. At that point, the U.S. military said seven Iraqis and the eight Iranian nationals were arrested and “taken to a coalition facility for questioning.”
Video from Associated Press Television on Tuesday showed U.S. soldiers escorting 10 people — their hands bound in front of them and their eyes blindfolded — from the hotel and into military vehicles and driving off.
Indeed, Bush is recruiting some international help to assist him in selling the Long War to not just America, but the world.
In the first broad foreign policy speech of his presidency, Mr Sarkozy struck a notably more pro-US tone than his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, setting out his vision for a world “challenged” by a confrontation between Islam and the west.
He described the standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme as “undoubtedly the most serious crisis before us today”, saying a diplomatic push to rein in Tehran was the only alternative to “the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.” This broke with Mr Chirac, who had earlier suggested that a nuclear-armed Iran might be inevitable.
Meanwhile, the White House is requesting another $50 billion for the war, signaling of course that there was never any intention of a drawdown of forces in Iraq.
President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, a White House official said yesterday, a move that appears to reflect increasing administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces.
The request — which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — is expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the two top U.S. officials in Iraq. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will assess the state of the war and the effect of the new strategy the U.S. military has pursued this year.
Once again, the Petraeus White House report is a foregone conclusion, with the administration planning ahead for more bloodshed and destruction despite the report still being a few weeks away.
But the important info this week remains the same: Bush is strongly hinting that an attack on Iran is imminent. Many of the same key phrases and once again key media pundits are pushing the Long War. Reports have also surfaced this week that the Bush Administration has a plan to hit Iran already in place.
The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.
The paper, “Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East” – written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament – was exclusively provided to RAW STORY late Friday under embargo.
“We wrote the report partly as we were surprised that this sort of quite elementary analysis had not been produced by the many well resourced Institutes in the United States,” wrote Plesch in an email to Raw Story on Tuesday.
Plesch and Butcher examine “what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action” and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a “massive” attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.
And should we need more forces in the “Middle East theater” then there are reports that a massive increase in independent contractors are helping to bolster the planned expansion.
Taking private enterprise way beyond what is reasonable, or desirable, or safe, the CheneyBush Administration has turned over a huge raft of national-security functions to those not adequately trained, not accountable to the public or the law, not showing up on the political radar.
In short, CheneyBush have created what amounts to their own private legions — soldiers, intelligence analysts, security guards, construction experts, supply specialists, et al. — in effect, a “mercenary” force bought and paid for by the American taxpayer.
That’s why there will probably be no draft: There is no guarantee of loyalty from those dragooned into service. Besides, many draftees have politically-connected constituencies. But when one’s mercenary “volunteer” forces are totally beholden to the paymaster for their livelihood and under-the-table payoffs, they will dance with them that brung ’em.
These are no small numbers. It’s estimated that in addition to the 160,000 regular troops in the field in Iraq, CheneyBush control anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 private assets (“independent contractors”). Nobody’s even sure under what “rules of engagement” these guys — many in security and reconstruction fields — operate, or whether they are accountable to anyone other than their corporate bosses’ and the financial “bottom line.”
Indeed, it seems that this week a lot of things have “clicked into place” involving the Long War and Iran. Time is growing short before the Bush Administration makes it move on Tehran. The question is what America can do to stop it, but we surely cannot say that we weren’t warned.
Not by a long shot.