Bush Urges His Private Death Squad To Speed Up The Slow Rush To War With Iran

Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reports:
Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.
...
In Iraq, U.S. troops now have the authority to target any member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, as well as officers of its intelligence services believed to be working with Iraqi militias. [...] Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority.

The wide-ranging plan has several influential skeptics in the intelligence community, at the State Department and at the Defense Department who said that they worry it could push the growing conflict between Tehran and Washington into the center of a chaotic Iraq war.

Or -- on the contrary -- they might be intended to provoke a reaction which could then be used as a pretext for war with Iran.

Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque noticed that the Iranians who are being attacked in Iraq are in the country at the request of the government -- the government supported by the USA -- and as he says in Death and Dishonor: Bush's New Assassination Order, this leaves no doubt:

The purpose of the order is to provoke Iran into some action that can be trumpeted as a casus belli for the Bush Faction's long-planned war against Iran.

What Bush has done with this order is to turn the American military into his own private death squad. It is an act of breathtaking dishonor, of unspeakable moral filth. That this pathetic little man and the jumped-up thugs around him – especially the hulking, smirking, lying coward Dick Cheney – are allowed to show their faces among civilized people, much less exercise power over a mighty nation, remains an unfathomable mystery...and a source of deep shame for all Americans.

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane of Raw Story have been collecting the history of our long slow rush to war. In Escalation of US Iran military planning part of six-year Administration push, they write:

The escalation of US military planning on Iran is only the latest chess move in a six-year push within the Bush Administration to attack Iran
...
While Iran was named a part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002, efforts to ignite a confrontation with Iran date back long before the post-9/11 war on terror. Presently, the Administration is trumpeting claims that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA’s own analysis shows and positing Iranian influence in Iraq’s insurgency, but efforts to destabilize Iran have been conducted covertly for years, often using members of Congress or non-government actors in a way reminiscent of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.

There's much more good new reporting at Raw from Larisa and Muriel, including a timeline, The Build Up To Iran, which details -- step by deliberate bloodthirsty step -- exactly how our rogue administration has brought us to the very brink of war with a country which has done nothing to us or any of our people. Every step of the timeline is documented by references to mainstream news sources, so it will be invaluable for batting away wingnuts, but whether it will cut much ice against the professional mass-murderers who now run our country remains to be seen.

What is Bush thinking?

Stephen P. Pizzo at Atlantic Free Press calls it another game of Texas Hold-em and says:

He's not putting his own children's lives at risk, but OPK – Other People's Kids. [...] As long as he can keep feeding fresh troops into Iraq his project cannot be proven a failure. If Bush can just keep borrowing other people's kids to place at risk, and rolling over – renewing — his Iraq policy for just two more years, he's home free. It's another Texas “win/win” in which the perp gets away and the American people pay the price.

Pizzo is writing about banking scams and Iraq, but I believe the same demented keep-it-rolling philosophy is also driving the administration's policies in Iran, the Middle East, and the whole so-called War on so-called Terror.

In a nutshell: It's not their money being poured into Iraq, and it's not their blood either, but they and their moneyed base reap the profits.

It's not all about money, of course; to a certain extent it's also about power. But it's also about responsibility, and the avoidance thereof.

They simply can't stop now; they're in too-dangerous waters. If they stopped making war and allowed the truth to be revealed -- the truth about the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the truth about upcoming wars with Iran and likely Syria, the truth about 9/11, the truth about the so-called the War on Terror -- their final shred of legitimacy would vanish in an instant, and the so-called president and all his war-profiteering cronies -- the "have-mores" he likes to call his "base" -- would be one small step from the guillotines.



Am I dreaming? Of course I am. But at least it's a pleasant dream.

One small step for a few vicious men, and one giant leap for mankind.