DUBYA'S DANGEROUS GAMBIT
Thanks to my Canadian Connection RAD has previewed the October 8, 2007 New Yorker article by Seymour M. Hersh entitled Shifting Targets: The Administration's plan for Iran. If the article is correct, President Bush is seriously thinking about a strategic bombing campaign against Iran to send that regime the message that while we are bogged down in Iraq with conventional forces, the US still has the military capacity and will to strike at Iran via an air war.
If Hersh's sources are correct - the possibility that the administration might do this provides the most convincing reason why both the President and the Vice President must be impeached. My Canadian friend rhetorically argues that there is not enough time to do this. But that's the beauty of the impreachment process, to stop the administration in its track, like the GOP did to Slick Willie, the circle of impeachment and then a trial need not be closed merely begun!
What would be political cowardly is for the Democrats in the House and Senate to not seize the moment here to make the case for impeachment NOW - based on a laundry list of "high crimes and misdemeanors by this administration including the following high points:
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Cooking intelligence about WMDs as the lead in to the Iraq invasion and occupation;
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Redeploying US troops again and again risking the readiness of the military;
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Using rendition and torture in violation of international law and US law;
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Refusing to cooperate with congressional committees in exercising oversight over administration policy;
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Using the doctrine of the unitary presidency to make the executive branch immune to checks and balances;
If the Democrats make the political decision, as they did with Reagan in '86, to leave the lameduck alone to twist on his rope they are underestimating the damage that the Bush/Cheney team has already done to our democracy and the greater damage they will do to our nation and people of the Middle East. RAD has NO sympathy for the leaders of the region but burning the village to save the people makes no moral nor geo-political sense!
One should not allow the pursuit of the perfect to become an obstacle for doing the good - in this case challenging an administration which has clearly become the most dangerous one in American history! If you thought Nixon and Watergate was awful or Reagan and Iran Contra were a stain on our history, they are nothing compared to the damage that has been done to this nation under the Bush imperial presidency.
When Congressman Earl Blumenaer and Senator Ron Wyden were taken to the woodshed in their town hall meetings in the August recess for not pushing impeachment, their constituents moral outrage was warranted. If you read just this abbreviated version of Sy Hersh's artilce, you will know why impeachment, not the election of '08, is the only realistic option to take at this time. We are simply running out of time to hold the administration accountable.
Of course the chaos created by thinking and then doing the unthinkable will make the current war in Iraq seem like a picnic by comparison. Richard Nixon's "incursion" into Cambodia in the spring of '75 to get at the NLF sanctuaries along the Ho Chi Minh trail did not bring peace, but enlarged the Vietnam War and eventual led to the rise of the Pol Pot regime and its killing fields which wiped out 2,000,000 people. So do your homework, please! Read the article online:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh
SH (first page only) : In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August.
“The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”
The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants.
The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.
The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.
During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.
At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.”
The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has made it clear that the United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran. The State Department is working diligently along with the international community to address our broad range of concerns.” (The White House declined to comment.)
I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization.
And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)
“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”
That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”
RAD: If Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and/or John Edwards inherit this mess - they will discover what the saying means "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." JFK inherited Harry Truman's Vietnam policy (which IKE smartly avoided) then JFK upped the ante. LBJ then took over for a fallen president and didn't want to be the first president to lose a war! Richard Nixon had a "secret peace plan" for Vietnam!
What is the statute of limitations on the gullibility of the American voter? And why does anyone think that a "limited" strike on Iran will remain such? WW I began with an assassin's bullet killing an obscure Archduke Ferdinand. We had plenty of surgical strikes and smart bombs dropped on Vietnam, more than in all of WW II... And we still lost the war and along with it 50,000 American soldiers died. Don't allow the administration to create another geo-political wasteland.
Impeach Bush/Cheny now!
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