Cross posted at the front page of My Left Wing.

Venezuala’s President Hugo Chavez is wrong about one thing.  George W. Bush is not the devil.  Dick Cheney is.  

But Chavez has been right about darn near everything else, including whose side to take in the next world order.

The “new” world order began about the time the Berlin Wall fell and America became a benevolent global hegemon.  The “next” world order started at the approximate moment U.S. psychological operations troops staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad and America turned into a Barbecue Republic.

The singular phenomenon that kick-started the next world order was the failure of the best-trained, best-equipped armed force in history to restore order to a country it had invaded.  The neoconservatives who had taken over the U.S. government had based its aggressive foreign policy on the efficacy of military might, and the quagmire in Iraq proved that military might was no longer an effective tool of national power.

That was a green light for the counter-U.S. coalition of global, balance and emerging powers to gel.  At the recent UN summit, we saw an unmasking of the energy alliance between China, Russia, Venezuela and Iran.  China is the big bopper in this strategic dope deal, but the lynchpin is Iran as personified by its rising star Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  

While President Chavez’s speech before the UN General Assembly was largely boorish, President Ahmadinejad’s remarks to that body were nothing short of brilliant.  In eloquent, measured fashion he admonished the rest of the world to join him in telling the United States of America to pound sand up its canyon, and the rest of the world subtly but perceptibly smiled and nodded “yes.”

What’s It All About, Dickie?

The neoconservative policy on Iraq, as formulated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), was never about weapons of mass destruction or terrorism or Saddam Hussein.  It was about controlling the world energy market by establishing a permanent military base of operations in the heart of the oil rich Middle East.  

The Iran situation is similar.  We don’t know for sure if Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons at some point in the future, but that really isn’t the concern.  Charter PNAC member and de facto U.S. Emperor Dick Cheney couldn’t give a quail’s last chirp about a couple more a-bombs in the world.  All the attention the administration and its echo chamberlains are focusing on weapons is for the purpose of keeping the proles scared and voting Republican.  It also distracts the proles from seeing what Cheney’s actual motives are.  

Cheney’s real problem is that he broke his promise to his big oil buddies by letting his pal Don Rumsfeld spray the Iraq situation into the fan.  That gave China and its partners the opening they needed to crack the western world’s control of the energy market.  If Iran, with help from Russia and China, can develop a mature, independent nuclear energy industry, and if those three countries, along with Venezuela, can take over the energy sources for Asia, eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America, British Petroleum and Mobil Exxon will start going the way of Ford and General Motors.  

Cheney doesn’t want to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities to keep it from having nuclear weapons.  Cheney wants to keep Iran from having a nuclear energy industry.  

Fail Safe Diplomacy

I can’t tell if Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a Dubya-class simpleton, if she’s being used as a fall girl by Cheney, or a combination of the two.  But I do know that her attempts at “diplomacy” are designed to guarantee war, and suspect that much of the rest of the world knows that too.

Her cease-fire flip-flops in the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict were transparent stratagems.  She stiff-armed a cease-fire agreement to give the Israeli Defense Force time to accomplish its military objectives; then she pushed for a cease-fire when it became apparent that the Israelis were tactically and strategically getting their cans kicked.  

And by setting unreasonable conditions for direct negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, she all but ensured that negotiations can’t take place.  Telling a nation it can have a nuclear energy program as long as it doesn’t enrich its own uranium is a bit like saying “you can have an automobile industry but you have to make your cars in our country and you have to let us make them for you.”  Moreover, she’s demanding that Iran give up its “inalienable right” to develop peaceful nuclear technology guaranteed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  

The Rovewellians have taken to calling Ahmadinejad “crazy,” but if he’s crazy, he’s crazy like a fox.  The only thing that could convince me he’s crazy like a crazy would be if he caved on the Bush administration’s demands that he give up his uranium enrichment capability.

Cheney and John Bolton and Doug Feith and the rest of the crazy neocon braintrust know Ahmadinejad won’t back down.  In fact, they’re counting on it.  That will give them the justification to say, “We tried diplomacy and it didn’t work,” and proceed with plan A.

Which will be crazy like a warren of March Hares.  

In Part II: global replacing “Q” with “N.”

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

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