A Hegemonic Hubris
by Paul Craig Roberts
No pullout from Iraq while I'm president, declares George W. Bush.
On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.
Israel is a "peace-seeking state" that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers' money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas Burns.
The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no longer is in the way of it.
Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime's build up for initiating war with Iran.
Three US aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off
Iran. B-2 Stealth bombers are being fitted to carry 30,000 pound
"bunker-buster" bombs to use against hardened sites. Politicized US
generals assert that Iran is providing arms and aid to the Iraqi
resistance to the US occupation.
The media are feeding the US
population the same propaganda about nonexistent Iranian weapons of
mass destruction that they fed us about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction. A former CIA Middle East field officer, Robert Baer,
has written in Time magazine that the Bush regime has decided to attack
the Revolutionary Guards within the next 6 months.
Remember the
"cakewalk war?" Well, this time the neocons think that an attack on the
Revolutionary Guards will free Iran from Islamic influence and cause
Iranians to back the US against their own government.
Lies,
unprovoked aggression, and delusional expectations -- the same
ingredients that produced the Iraq catastrophe -- all over again. The
entire Bush regime and both political parties are complicit, along with
the media and US allies.
According to Baer, the Bush regime has
given no consideration to whether Iran's response to a US attack might
be different than to welcome it as liberation. What if Iran really were
to arm the Iraqi resistance and/or to sink our aircraft carriers? How
can any government, even one as incompetent, delusional and
unaccountable as the Bush regime, initiate war without any thought to
the consequences?
The Bush regime's planned war against Iran
casts light on the large increase in military armaments that the US is
supplying to Israel. With Iraq in chaos and civil war, an attack on
Iran leaves as opposition to Israel only Syria and Hezbollah in
southern Lebanon. Israel cannot finish off the Palestinians until
Hezbollah is destroyed. An Israeli attack on Syria while the US attacks
Iran would leave Hezbollah without supplies in the face of a new
Israeli attack.
The agenda unfolding before our eyes may be the
neoconservative/Israeli/Cheney plan to rid the Middle East of any check
to Israeli territorial expansion.
Nicholas Burns said that the
$30 billion in military aid was not conditional on any Israeli
concessions or progress toward resolving the conflict with the
Palestinians. Israel's ghettoizing and ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinian West Bank proceeds apace.
Meanwhile in America,
while more money is poured into more war, condemned bridges collapse
killing Americans who trusted their government to provide safe
infrastructure. Devastated residents of New Orleans remain unaided.
Financial difficulties deepen for more Americans as falling home prices
and jobs lost to offshoring push more Americans into desperate straits.
The US dollar continues to fall as the government's war debts build up
abroad.
Except for the armaments industry, where is the gain to
America in Bush's wars? Before Bush invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban
had stamped out drug production. The US invasion has brought it back.
On
August 22 Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that US troops are the
"greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known." Tell
that to the 650,000 dead Iraqis and the 4 million displaced Iraqis, and
the tens of thousands of slaughtered Afghans, and the coming civilian
deaths in Iran. Tell that to all the bombed civilians from Serbia to
Africa who are blown to pieces in order that a US president can make a
point. Bush goes far beyond George Orwell's "Newspeak" in his novel,
1984, when Bush equates US hegemony with liberation.
America's
hegemonic hubris is a sickness. A country that tolerates a war criminal
while he openly plans to attack yet another country is definitely not a
light unto the world.
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