Foreign Correspondent: U.S. Beats War Drums in Middle East-- Leaders In Washington And Tehran Say They Don’t Want A Full-Scale War, But They Are Playing A Dangerous Game

U.S. soldiers are increasingly disliked in Iraq. Photo: Reese Erlich

-by Reese Erlich,
Author, The Iran Agenda Today

While the world focuses on the coronavirus pandemic, tensions between the U.S. and Iran are heating up.

The two countries are engaging in tit-for-tat military attacks that threaten a wider war. In mid-March, Washington officials accused an Iran-allied militia of launching rockets at a US military base in Iraq, killing two American soldiers and one British soldier. The Pentagon retaliated with a missile strike against the group Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, killing militiamen, five Iraqi servicemen, and a civilian who were also at the base. On March 26 rockets once again hit near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

The Pentagon sent two aircraft carriers to the region, claiming in a March 19 Navy statement that the U.S. is protecting “freedom of navigation and [the] free flow of commerce.” Threatening a possible military attack on Iran, the Navy said the carriers “provide the combatant commander significant striking power for contingency operations.”

Leaders in Washington and Tehran say they don’t want a full-scale war, but they are playing a dangerous game. And the people of Iraq will suffer the consequences.

“Iraq has become a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran,” says Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-born human rights activist and writer based in Washington, D.C., in a phone interview. “Iraq is paying in blood and treasure.”

How it all began

In 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the nuclear accord with Iran and imposed harsh sanctions on Tehran. Iran waited a year to see if the European signatories to the accord-- Britain, France, and Germany--  would live up to the agreement by engaging in normal trade and investment. The Europeans knuckled under to Trump, so Iran decided to slam down its fist.

By mid-2019, oil tankers from US-allied countries came under attack. Iran seized a U.K. tanker and shot down a US drone. Iran also pulled back from some provisions of the nuclear accord.

At the end of 2019, Iran-allied militias launched rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq. Washington portrays these militias as tools of Iran. Groups such as Kataib Hezbollah do receive arms and training from Iran, but they are also now part of the Iraqi army.

The U.S. picks its favorites within the Iraqi military as well, arming and training Kurdish militias and Iraqi army special forces.

Kataib Hezbollah and similar Iran-allied militias initially bore the brunt of fighting ISIS, according to Patrick Theros, a former US ambassador to Qatar and now a strategic advisor to the Gulf International think tank in Washington, D.C.

“The militias are not Iranian controlled,” Theros tells me in a phone interview. “The Iranians can’t just send an order and be confident it will be obeyed.”

But the Trump Administration acts as if the militias are extensions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, as seen in the January 3 assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleinmani and Iraqi militia head Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Assassinations backfire

Those assassinations were a huge mistake, according to Nader Talebzadeh, an analyst and influential TV host in Iran. “What the American President did was unify the Iranian people and took things to a different level,” he tells me in an interview.

Ordinary Iraqis were even more outraged at the murder of al-Muhandis, who was an extremely popular leader in the fight against ISIS, according to Theros.

“We’re killing Iraqis, not Iranians,” Theros says. “That affects the attitudes toward us.”

The Iraqi parliament passed a resolution calling for the withdrawal of all foreign troops. Iraqi military leaders demanded that Washington get permission from top Iraqi leadership prior to launching another retaliatory raid.

Trump responded to these assertions of Iraqi sovereignty by threatening to impose harsh sanctions and seize Iraq’s central bank reserves held by the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

“That makes us look like an occupying force,” Theros notes wryly.

Resentment of Iran

Iraqis have plenty of legitimate complaints against their leaders in Tehran. Iranian troops entered Iraq to assist the fight against ISIS, but stayed to spread Iranian influence. Many resent Iran’s role in supporting brutal and corrupt Iraqi politicians.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets in late 2019, protesting both the US and Iranian presence. Demonstrators burned down two Iranian consulates. Ordinary Iraqis were furious at the lack of electricity, water, and widespread government corruption. Iranian-allied militias and government forces brutally suppressed the peaceful demonstrations, killing more than 600 people and injuring tens of thousands.

The demonstrations forced the resignation of Prime Minister Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi on March 1. Adnan al-Zurufi was appointed the new prime minister, but parliament must confirm him by mid-April. Al-Zurufi had lived in the US for years and holds dual U.S./Iraqi citizenship. He returned to Iraq after the 2003 US invasion, and Washington installed him as governor of Najaf province.

Iraqi politicians are wheeling and dealing over al-Zurufi’s nomination. He has US backing and is hoping for Iranian support as well.

The opposition street protestors see al-Zurufi as part of the old establishment they oppose, but their numbers have dwindled. While thousands had occupied Baghdad’s Tahrir Square at the height of protests last year, only a few hundred remain today.

But Theros says the world shouldn’t write off Iraq’s protest movement. “Unless the government addresses the issues they were protesting, they will be back,” he says. “It’s gone dormant, but it’s not dead.”

U.S. policy failure

Iran currently faces a series of crises: low international oil prices, major flooding in the south, and a spreading coronavirus pandemic.

Harsh, unilateral U.S. sanctions have severely damaged the Iranian economy but have not changed Iran’s policies in the region. Nor has U.S. military action.

Nevertheless, the Trump Administration is pressuring the new Iraqi prime minister to cut off imports of Iranian gas and electricity, in keeping with US sanctions. For the moment, Washington has given Iraq waivers to allow trade to continue. Many Iraqis don’t like Iran but the economies of the two countries are deeply intertwined.

“They can’t do it,” Theros says. “They have no choice but to choose Iran over the U.S.”

So the ball is in the U.S.’ court. Trump can continue his “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran and face continued Iraqi attacks on US troops. Or he can back off to focus on domestic concerns and avoid a wider war.

Iranians can wait. They may yet see regime change in Washington this November, long before it comes to Tehran.

Foreign Correspondent: A New Arab Spring In Lebanon And Iraq-- Once Again, People In The Middle East Want Democratic Reforms And An End To Corruption And Foreign Domination

-by Reese Erlich

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Lebanese have been demonstrating in the streets against corruption and for democratic rights. The protestors come from all economic classes and religious/ethnic groups.

Like the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010, these protests are spontaneous and without traditional leaders. And they are sending corrupt political parties and foreign powers scrambling to manipulate the protests for their own nefarious ends.

The current protests raise many of the same issues as the Arab Spring, says David Dunford, a former U.S. ambassador to several Middle East countries and author of From Sadat to Saddam: The Decline of American Diplomacy in the Middle East.




“People in both countries are sick and tired of sectarian jockeying and foreign influence,” he tells me in a phone interview.

In my opinion, the uprisings expose false logic of the vacuum theory, which posits that U.S. military withdrawal automatically benefits the villain du jour, whether Russia, Iran, or China. Instead, the protests show that the people of the Middle East don’t want domination by Washington, D.C., or any outside power.

Lebanon crisis

On a trip to Lebanon earlier this year, I spoke with businessmen who warned of a coming economic crisis. The Lebanese currency was dropping against the dollar, and the businessmen saw an economic meltdown coming.

It wasn’t hard to see why. Walking along Beirut’s cornice, or seaside road, I passed by dozens of vacant, multi-million dollar condos owned as vacation homes or investments by Saudi sheiks and Emirati businessmen.

Meanwhile, working class Lebanese can’t get basic services: electricity, garbage collection and protection from raging forest fires. The poverty rate is around 30 percent, according to the World Bank.

On October 17, spontaneous demonstrations began when the government imposed a new tax on the What’s App program, widely used on cell phones to make free calls. But demonstrators quickly added corruption and lack of democracy to their list of demands. They called for the entire government to resign and an end to Lebanon’s system by which certain government positions are guaranteed to each ethnic/religious group and hence to the corrupt political parties.

People sat down on major thoroughfares and set up roadblocks. Universities shut, and when they reopened, students refused to attend. Banks closed because depositors feared they couldn’t access their money.

For the first time, Lebanese from different economic classes and religions joined together demanding an end to the country’s sectarian political system. They opposed the old, corrupt parties, whether backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, or Iran.

People were particularly angry with Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who gave $16 million to his bikini model mistress. Hariri and his cabinet resigned October 29. All the parties in the ruling coalition, which was led by Hezbollah, scrambled to respond.

Amal and Hezbollah, the two parties with largely Shia Muslim support, initially supported the demonstrations. But so did Samir Geagea, the ultra right wing Maronite Christian leader and sworn enemy of Hezbollah. Hezbollah and Amal later withdrew support, having been accused of beating peaceful demonstrators.

Groundhog Day all over again

The Trump Administration, in what has become a Groundhog Day experience, didn’t know how to respond to yet another world crisis, according to a former U.S. diplomat who recently met with White House and State Department officials. Washington views Lebanon through the prism of Iran and Syria, he says. “They have no understanding of what's going on in Lebanon,” the diplomat tells me, on condition of anonymity.

So far, the Trump Administration does not plan a military intervention but seeks to weaken Hezbollah, which it alleges is an Iranian proxy. But factions within the administration differ on tactics.

The White House’s National Security staff believes Hezbollah controls the Lebanese government and has significant influence in the Lebanese Army. They want to pressure the Army and opposition parties to break with Hezbollah.

So on October 31, in a surprise move, the U.S. stopped all aid to the Lebanese Army, including $105 million which had been already approved in September.

The State Department and Pentagon opposed the aid cut, arguing that the Army constitutes a stabilizing and pro-western force. Cutting U.S. military aid, they argue, just provides more openings for Iran and Russia to exert influence.

All sides believe that the mass protests have weakened Hezbollah. But Hezbollah not only has a well-armed, battle-hardened militia, it can mobilize tens of thousands of civilian supporters in a matter of hours. It consistently wins seats in the Lebanese parliament and has proven adept at forming electoral alliances, even with former enemies.

Iraqis oppose U.S. and Iran

Given Lebanon’s unsuccessful system guaranteeing government positions to ethnic groups, you’d think the U.S. would have tried something different in Iraq. Instead, Washington has created an equally flawed system and imposed it on a poorer, war-ravaged country.

In Iraq, the political parties break down by religious/ethnic group, resulting in a Shia Muslim prime minister and Kurdish president. Each party places its supporters in government jobs and issues government contracts to corrupt partners. As a result, the government functions as an ATM for the parties and the wealthy elite.

Meanwhile, ordinary Iraqis don’t have safe drinking water and government-supplied electricity. Many complain that government services are worse today than under Saddam Hussein.

Protests against corruption and the party system broke out October 1. Demonstrators condemned corruption in the pro-U.S. and pro-Iran parties in Iraq, and within the parties of the Kurdish region.

The government launched a brutal crackdown. To date, more than 300 protesters have been killed, mostly by uniformed security forces and government-affiliated snipers.

Protesters threw gasoline bombs at the Iranian consulate in Karbala and chanted anti-Iran slogans. Persons unknown launched seventeen rockets into a U.S. air base.

Iraqis have long opposed U.S. occupation of their country. But over the past few years, they’ve also grown angry at Iran’s influence over certain political parties and Iranian-controlled militias affiliated with the Iraqi Army.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Muslim cleric, has supported the demonstrations and opposed Iranian meddling. Moktada al-Sadr, whose political party won a plurality in the last parliamentary elections, has called for an end to all foreign interference, whether from Washington or Tehran.

The uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq show once again that people in the Middle East want democratic reforms, and an end to corruption and foreign domination. Nowhere is it written that countries must either support the U.S. or Iran. It may be difficult, but people can determine their own future.

Another Criminal Dies

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1985

by Gaius Publius

George H.W. Bush's life is a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.
     —Former president Barack Obama

Rosalynn and I are deeply saddened by the death of former President George H.W. Bush. His administration was marked by grace, civility, and social conscience.
     —Former president Jimmy Carter

Scouring the Web for comments on the death of George H.W. Bush turns up quite a bit of praise from luminaries as widely disparate as the Dalai Lama, Ellen DeGeneres and CIA director Gina Haspel. Mohammed bin Salman paid a visit to Bush senior and was welcomed warmly, spawning this tweet from the former president:

Delighted to join the 43rd President and Jim Baker in welcoming the Saudi Crown Prince His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman and His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Salman to Texas. A wonderful chance to celebrate the long-standing friendship between our two nations. pic.twitter.com/282LAJqWpO

— George Bush (@GeorgeHWBush) April 7, 2018

From lesser lights to greater, from murderers to comedians, the praise continues. 

As usual, the network of those who run the world we merely inhabit have nothing but respect for each other. And why not? They may pick each other off from time to time (both Saddam Hussein and Moamar Khaddafi, were once in high favor), but over the long haul, keeping each member of the ruling circle in a reverential spotlight keeps them all — keeps the circle itself — in reverence as well. Since they operate as a system, the system is honored each time its members, no matter how deadly, are honored as well. And the system sees that the system is always honored.

That's why Bernie Sanders and his new progressive colleagues in the House are so hated. They want to take that system apart. It's why Nancy Pelosi surrendered to the No Labels-financed "Problem Solvers" caucus rather than to those same new progressives and their agenda. The tiny system of people that run the world supports the tiny system of people that run the world, and always will.

For a truer perspective on who those people are and what they do, let's look not to the system's predictable, fawning self-praise, but at less propagandistic comments on the passing of one of its members, former CIA director, former vice president, and former president George H.W. Bush, a man who stood at the center of American power for most of his long adult life.

Again, this is just a sample of those comments on a sample of that life. A true deep dive into his sordid history would take a book.

George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State-Sponsored Terrorism

To pick just a single incident, this is from the late Robert Parry, writing in 2000 at Consortium News:

In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.

The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.

In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.

The CIA report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.

A foreign diplomat and a U.S. citizen are murdered in DC on Embassy Row. The deed is planned by Manuel Contreras, a CIA asset who was also simultaneously intelligence chief for the Pinochet government of Chile. And George H.W. Bush, as head of the CIA, performs the cover-up, going so far as to plant false stories among media assets (sorry, CIA-friendly journalists) in places like Newsweek, and going so far as to mislead the FBI in its own investigation.

This is the man Jimmy Carter praised for "grace, civility, and social conscience." Saying a man complicit in murder is gracious is like saying a mafia don is good to his family and kind to old people and animals. Bill Clinton's praise of Bush, "From the moment I met him ... I was struck by the kindness he showed to Chelsea, by his innate and genuine decency, and by his devotion to Barbara, his children, and their growing brood," strikes just this note.

In the same article the word "assessment" appears, a word so enamored of the anti-Trump forces these days. Parry writes:

[T]he CIA – then under CIA Director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras.

Bush "leaked for public consumption" an "assessment" knowingly filled with lies. The CIA has leaked many lying, secret "assessments" for public consumption; it's what they do. If we weren't so desperate to get rid of Donald Trump — and believe me, security-state people like George H.W. Bush are eagerly on board with that effort — we'd be nervous about what a leaked CIA assessment that immediately cast a shadow on an elected president, within a month of his election no less, might augur.

Does the concept of an American Praetorian Guard concern you? It does me.

George H.W. Bush and the Theft of the 1980 Election

The big enchilada in the George H.W. Bush story is the theft of the 1980 election and its aftermath, the Iran-Contra payoff and cover-up. The bones of the story, the original "October Surprise," go like this.

In 1980, when the Iranian hostage crisis was raging and Reagan and Bush were running against incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Oval Office, former CIA director Bush, future CIA director William Casey and others met at least three times with Iranian officials, including a meeting in Paris on October 19, and struck a deal with the Iranian government to extend the holding of 52 American hostages until after the election, thus denying Carter a diplomatic victory (and by the way, extending the suffering of those hostages).

In exchange, Bush and Casey promised that the Reagan administration would secretly sell arms to Iran through a cutout, Israel. Iran had just become involved in a major war with Iraq at the time and was desperate for arms.

Of course, because the arms sales were secret, the Reagan administration had money on its hands it had not gotten from Congress, and it decided to spend that money propping up the Contras, a brutal right-wing resistance army fighting the socialist (of course) Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

It's the secret support of the Contras (a name taken from the Spanish for counter-revolution), which was expressly forbidden by Congress in 1985 under the third Boland Amendment, that caused the story to unravel. The contra money was found, the Iranian arms sales were found, and the 1980 Reagan-Iran hostage deal was both widely suspected and widely feared.

Why feared? If a U.S. president had committed what many would call treason to gain office, what would the effect on the American people be? Would they ever trust elections — or worse, their leaders — again? Proof of Reagan and Bush's act was potentially destabilizing as, say, proof that elements of the CIA had murdered John Kennedy would have been.

Nixon and Treason

The U.S. had in fact faced this problem before — proof that a candidate had committed treason with a foreign government — when outgoing president Lyndon Johnson uncovered similar deeds ("treason" to use Johnson's word) by Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign, and declined to act on it, save to tell Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen to tell Richard Nixon to "cut it out," or words to that effect.

Proof of Nixon's treason didn't emerge until 2008, when the tape of the phone call itself was released and the accusation was later confirmed by conservative writer George Will. By then, of course, the whole affair was old news, something from the last generation's history, and could be reliably assumed to be ignored.

So here. Proof of every part of the October Surprise–Iran-Contra story emerged, though proof of the meeting between Bush, Casey and the Iranians in Paris was predictably contravened by a "secret alibi," yet that story is now widely and predictably ignored by all who praise him. 

Robert Parry and the October Surprise

Robert Parry was the primary reporter investigating the October Surprise connection to the breaking Iran-Contra story (emphasis added):

Though there were early rumors about a secret Republican deal with Iran, the October Surprise mystery didn’t gain much traction until the exposure of secret Iran-Contra arms shipments approved by Reagan to Iran in 1985-86. Suddenly, the notion that Reagan and his Vice President George H.W. Bush would lie about covert dealings with Iran didn’t seem so preposterous.

Essentially, the October Surprise question was whether Reagan’s secret contacts with Iran dated back to Campaign 1980, as a growing number of witnesses — from inside the governments of Iran, Israel, France and the United States — were alleging.

However, when Congress finally agreed to look into the October Surprise case in 1991-92, Republicans were determined to circle the wagons around the then-sitting President George H.W. Bush, who was facing a tough reelection fight against Democrat Bill Clinton.

Rather than welcome any truth-seeking, the Republicans and their media allies went on the attack claiming that the October Surprise case was a baseless “conspiracy theory.”

Elites "circling the wagons" to protect elites, even treasonous ones, is the theme of this piece. Eventually, Democrats and the media shied away from the story, leaving Parry essentially alone with his investigation (links in original):

Parry ... received the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for his work with the Associated Press on Iran-Contra, where he broke the story that the Central Intelligence Agency had provided an assassination manual to the Nicaraguan Contras (Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare). In mid-1985 he wrote the first article on Oliver North's involvement in the affair, and, together with Brian Barger, in late 1985 he broke the CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US scandal, helping to spark Senator John Kerry's interest in investigating Iran-Contra. The Associated Press had refused to publish the drug trafficking story, and only relented when its Spanish-language newswire service accidentally published a translation. Barger and Parry continued to press their investigation of North even as most of the media declined to follow it up, eventually publishing a story in mid-1986, based on 24 sources, which led to a Congressional committee asking questions of North. After North denied the allegations, Barger was pushed out of the Associated Press, and Parry was unable to publish any further follow-ups to the story until after Eugene Hasenfus' plane (Corporate Air Services HPF821) was shot down in Nicaragua in October 1986. After finding out that his boss had been "conferring with [Oliver] North on a regular basis", Parry left AP in 1987 to join Newsweek, which he left in 1990.

In August 1990, PBS' Frontline asked Parry to work on the October Surprise conspiracy theory, leading to Parry making several documentaries for the program, broadcast in 1991 and 1992. He continued to pursue it after a Congressional investigation had concluded the story was untrue, turning his Frontline research into a book published in 1993, and in 1994 he unearthed "a treasure-trove of government documents" supporting the theory, "showing that the [Congressional] task force suppressed incriminating CIA testimony and excluded evidence of big-money links between wealthy Republicans and Carter's Iranian intermediary, Cyrus Hashemi". In 1996, Salon wrote about his work on the theory, saying that "his continuing quest to unearth the facts of the alleged October Surprise has made him persona non grata among those who worship at the altar of conventional wisdom."

But this is not a piece about Robert Parry. It's a piece about George H.W. Bush.

Was George Bush in Paris in October 1980?

Evidence points to the presence of the future vice-president in Paris for the October meeting. Among others, the pilot of the plane that conveyed the participants places him there:

Russbacher [the pilot] states that Bush, while in Paris, met with Hashemi Rafsanjani, the second in command to the Ayatollah and now the president of Iran, and Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian businessman who was extremely powerful. Arrangements were apparently made to pay Iran $40 million to delay the release of hostages in order to thwart President Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. The $40 million was the beginning of terms that created the Iran-Contra scandal that is now being reopened by Congress.

Russbacher is concerned for his life, but feels that the other pilots will now come forward in a new Congressional investigation.

From the article, Russbacher was also "a member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and worked with the Central Intelligence Agency." Now note this:

[Russbacher] indicates that there is a growing division within the Central Intelligence Agency. "There is no one higher than the CIA, but there are groups within the company (term used by insiders for the CIA) that are very, very strong. And the group or clique that I belonged to, in my opinion, was probably the strongest but there are other factions that are at war with themselves," Russbacher states."You have these groups that are answerable to no one. Well, they are answerable to one man, on top, and he doesn't seem to care how the problems are resolved, just as long as they are taken care of." The man Russbacher is referring to is President Bush.

The only contrary evidence that Bush was not in Paris on October 19, the date in question, was a "secret alibi witness" whose name wasn't released until 2011, after the witness was safely dead. Secret witnesses, of course, can't be interviewed and their evidence tested by the press. 

In 1992, when the story was raging, Bush publicly and angrily demanded that he be cleared. "Bowing to those pressures ... Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, chairman of the House investigative task force, agreed to a curious bargain in which he and a few senior investigators were shown the destination of Bush’s supposed afternoon trip on Oct. 19, 1980, but with the proviso that they never interview anyone who was there or disclose any names. So, without verifying Bush’s alibi, the House task force cleared Bush of going to Paris."

Note the role of a Democrat in covering for Bush.

The "secret alibi witness" was, of course, a Bush family friend who had worked many times with Bush and had in fact been saved by Bush when the Watergate scandal threatened to take him down. More on this part of the story can be found here: "Taking a Bush Secret to the Grave".

So whom do you trust? Ex-CIA chief George H.W. Bush and the witness whose name he worked for decades to keep secret, or the rest of the evidence to the contrary? Elites assert the former in public statements, whatever they privately believe. The rest of us move on with our lives. Thus does the system that rules us retain its power.

Bush's Sins Are Many

Bush's sins are many and great. As head of the CIA in the late 1970s, he "actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America." This means he was an accomplice to a great many murders. In the 1980 election campaign, he committed treason against the U.S. constitution by treating with an enemy and interfering with the negotiations of the elected president.

As president, he betrayed the trust of Mikhail Gorbachev, promising that after the unification of Germany, NATO would not move "one inch forward." NATO has since moved several inches forward...

...so much so that Trump's questioning of NATO during the 2016 campaign counts as one of his own great sins. War with Russia is the course we're on today, and this is one of the causes, that U.S. leaders have wanted this conflict to continue since the Soviet Union fell. Elites protecting elites.

In 1990, the Bush administration led Saddam Hussein, a U.S. ally, to believe that it wouldn't interfere if Iraq punished Kuwait for "slant-drilling" and other offenses by invading Kuwait. Before the Iraqi invasion, April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Saddam invaded Kuwait. Then the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The strongest impetus for signing the NAFTA treaty prior to 1992 was George H.W. Bush, after which Bill Clinton campaigned for, and ultimately passed the treaty as well. 

In 1992, outgoing President Bush pardoned those in his inner circle who were convicted of crimes in the Iran-Contra scandal. All this with no mention of the vile Willie Horton campaign ads, or the vile elevation of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For all this he is much honored. And every honor he is accorded as a public figure honors the criminals and murderers who hold power over a globalized establishment. Keep this in mind the next time your own favorite elected says of a similar person, "Too bad he died. He was a good man."

GP
 

What 15 Years Of US Occupation Has Produced: Angry Iraqis

Iraqi refugees flee ISIS attack in 2014. Photo: (c) Reese Erlich

-by Reese Erlich

Militant protests continue in the oil rich city of Basra despite a harsh government crackdown. Thousands of Iraqis are demanding jobs, restoration of basic utility services and an end to government corruption. The protests quickly spread to other southern Iraqi cities and Baghdad.

Iraq has faced major electricity shortages since the 2003 US invasion. In Basra salt water flows from faucets because of filtration system breakdowns. Transparency International lists Iraq as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

In the first two weeks since the protests began July 14, over a dozen protestors were killed, hundreds were wounded and 750 arrested, according to the Gulf Centre for Human Rights.

Angry protestors closed the port of Um Qasr and even shut the Iraq-Kuwait border for a time, according to Yerevan Saeed, a former journalist and now a research fellow at the Middle East Research Institute.

Saeed, a colleague with whom I worked during reporting trips to Iraq, said the protests reflect widespread anger throughout the country.

"Everyone, from Basra to Kurdistan, is frustrated with the current politicians," he told me. "The political elite are corrupt. That brings everyone together at the moment."

Iraq has been in turmoil since the 2003 US invasion. Far from bringing democracy and prosperity as promised by US officials, the occupation resulted in rule by a corrupt, wealthy elite. As many as 7000 US troops continue to occupy Iraq, 15 years after the initial invasion. And Iraqis are pissed-- as seen in the results of parliamentary elections in May and a recount finalized in August.

A coalition headed by anti-US, nationalist cleric Muqtada al Sadr won a plurality of 54 out of 329 seats in parliament. A pro-Iranian coalition headed by Hadi al Ameri took 48. The US-backed coalition led by Prime Minister Haider al Abadi came in third with 42 seats, a big blow to the Trump administration.

Sadr, a Shia cleric with conservative views on social issues, formed an alliance with the secular Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). Both agreed to focus on jobs, fighting corruption and combating outside domination of Iraq-- whether from the US or Iran.

To some extent, they share a common social base among workers and the poor. For example, voters elected a woman ICP candidate Suhad al-Khateeb, a teacher who organized in the poor neighborhoods of Najaf, an otherwise religious and conservative city. It will be interesting to see if the left can expand its base in the months ahead.

Iraqi politicians now face the difficult task of forming a new government. Although a solid majority voted for parties opposed to US domination, a pro-US candidate could emerge from back room chicanery, according to Saeed.

"I think we're months away from a new government," he said.

Shock and Awe-- the movie



Two recent films about Iraq are worth catching. Shock and Awe dramatizes the struggle of Knight Ridder reporters and an editor to expose the George Bush administration's lies leading to the 2003 Iraq War. It has an outstanding cast that includes Rob Reiner, Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson.

The Knight Ridder wire, which provided news to 31 dailies, was one of the few mainstream outlets to challenge the assertion that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The film uses video from speeches and press conferences to skewer Bush, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney. It's great to hear the editor character played by Rob Reiner declaim that "We will not be stenographers for the Bush Administration."

Of course the left media and the massive anti-war movement had a far better analysis than anything in the Knight Ridder articles. But Knight Ridder was certainly the best of the US mainstream media.

Unfortunately, I don't think Shock and Awe is good cinema. The good guys remain good throughout and the bad guys stay evil. So there's little dramatic tension. It got rotten reviews and stopped playing in theaters soon after release. Nevertheless I would recommend streaming it as a refresher on the close collaboration of the US ruling elite and the mainstream media.

Nowhere to Hide



The documentary film Nowhere to Hide, which will air on PBS, has the opposite problem. It's compelling cinema but without a clear political focus.

Norwegian-Kurdish filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed gave a small camera to Nori Sharif, a hospital medic, and told him to film his life for the next three years. Nori lived in Jawala, a mostly Sunni area of central Iraq known as the Triangle of Death because of its fierce resistance to U.S. occupation.

The documentary opens with Nori expressing his joy that the American troops are finally pulling out of Iraq at the end of 2011. He's happy the US is leaving and optimistic about an independent Iraq, not a view often seen in US media.

First we meet his family, a lively bunch of dancing kids, a wife and in laws. We get a hint of things to come when Nori interviews a crane operator who was kidnapped twice by Al Qaeda and has been disabled as a result.

We later experience the ISIS onslaught through Nori's eyes. "Who creates this violence and why?" he asked plaintively. "No one understands, not even me." Another time he told the camera, "I don't understand this war. It tears you to pieces."

And that's the film's biggest weakness. The documentary maker could have included other sources to explain the big picture: the US desire to control oil, establish military bases and dominate the region. Instead, we're left with the impression that Sunnis, Shia, Yazidis and others are just doomed to fight one another.

The film does powerfully portray, however, what the war looks like from the perspective of an ordinary Iraqi. We see the brutality of the US-sponsored police, the sudden arrival of ISIS and how Nori's family flees Jawala with only a few hours notice.

One of the children asks how long will they be away? Her mom answers, "Only a few days." We know this isn't true, and we feel as helpless as the family. Despite the hardships, however, the family manages to express some optimism.

"Right now we cannot tell when or how the war will end," Nori said. "In the end the will to build will win over the forces of destruction. Because life must go on."

PBS airs Nowhere to Hide as part of its POV series on August 27.

Is Anti-War Fever Building in the U.S.?

Jimmy Dore highlights and discusses Bernie Sanders' recent foreign policy statement. Portions of Sanders' speech are discussed below, but the entire video is worth watching.

by Gaius Publius

Is anti-war fever building in the U.S.? One would not think so given all the signs — apparent public apathy toward multiple military involvements, happy compliance with "security" at the increasingly painful airport, lack of protests and so on.

Yet there are two signs I'd like to put forward as indicating a growing willingness to forgo foreign "entanglements" (undeclared wars), springing either from a weariness with them, a nascent abhorrence of them, or a desire to focus U.S. dollars on U.S. domestic solutions, like the hugely popular Medicare for All. (Click to see just how popular Medicare for All, called "Medicare Buy-In" at the link, is across party lines. UPDATE: The two are not identical, but the "buy-in" option is likely a good proxy for full Medicare for All.)

• The first sign is Bernie Sanders, the most popular politician in America and by far its most popular senator, making statements like these in the speech linked and discussed in the video at the top of this piece. For example, at 9:00 in the clip, Sanders says (emphasis his):

SANDERS: In other words, what we have seen in time and time again, disasters occur when administrations, Democrat and Republican, mislead Congress and the American people. And when Congress fails to do its constitutional job in terms of asking the questions of whether or not we should be in a war. And I think we need to ask that very hard question today.

And here is the point that I hope the American people are asking themselves. Is the war on terror, a perpetual, never-ending war, necessary to keep us safe?

I personally believe we have become far too comfortable with the United States engaging in military interventions all over the world. ... We have now been in Afghanistan for 17 years. We have been in Iraq for 15 years. We are occupying a portion of Syria, and this administration has indicated that it may broaden that mission even more.

We are waging a secretive drone war in at least five countries. Our forces, right now, as we speak, are supporting a Saudi-led war in Yemen which has killed thousands of civilians and has created the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet today.

Talk like this is anathema in our militarized state, comments usually relegated to the fringes of public discourse. For Sanders to say this (and similarly anathemic remarks elsewhere in the speech) certainly denotes a shift, especially since Sanders during the campaign was not considered strong on foreign policy, especially progressive (non-orthodox) foreign policy.

As Jimmy Dore said in reply to the last sentence quoted above, "It's not Syria? Can you [say] "stop the butcher" is the worst? No. Turns out what we're doing is the 'worst humanitarian crisis in the world today,' committing siege warfare in Yemen, which ... is a war crime. And we're doing it, with Saudi Arabia."

Sanders also says we're "fighting terror" in 76 countries. Let that sink in, as Sanders wishes it to — we're engaged in military conflict in 76 countries, almost a third of the nations in the world. I'm not sure many in the lay public appreciate the importance, or the likely consequences, of that surprising fact. (For one example of those consequences, consider that foreign wars often come home.)

Elsewhere in the video Dore asks, "Do you see Chuck Shumer saying our wars have had 'dire consequences'?" Sanders, it seems to me, is launching a toe-to-toe battle with what right-wingers have lately been calling the American "deep state" and I've been calling the security establishment.

• The second sign comes from Donald Trump during the campaign. This isn't just Sanders going out on a limb — taking a flier, as it were — on a deeply unpopular position. Consider how often Donald Trump, the campaign version, made similar statements: 

He also famously said this about NATO and its mission:

What I'm saying is NATO is obsolete. NATO is -- is obsolete and it's extremely expensive for the United States, disproportionately so. And we should readjust NATO.

If the U.S. security establishment is working to get rid of Trump, to take him out by whatever means necessary, campaign statements like that would be one of many reasons.

If Americans Could Vote Against the Forever War, Would They Do It?

I recently noted how different the outcomes are when the public indicates policy preferences with their votes versus polling data. DC politicians of both parties ignore polling with impunity. Votes, on the other hand, especially in party primaries, can force change — witness the Trump nomination and the Sanders (stolen) near-nomination.

In some ways, small but not insignificant, the 2016 election was a test of the anti-war waters, with Trump asking questions about the need and mission of NATO, for example, that haven't been asked in over a generation, and Clinton, the proud choice of the neocon left and right, in strong disagreement.

It's too much or too early to say that Trump's public pullback from U.S. hegemony helped his election, though that's entirely possible. But it's certainly true that his anti-Forever War sentiments did not hurt him in any noticeable way.

I'll go further: If Sanders runs in 2020 and adds anti-war messaging to his program, we'll certainly see the title question tested.

GP
 

It will take more than right-wing nincompoopery to challenge a powerhouse religious terror-mongering state like ISIS

Washingtonpost.com caption: National security correspondent Greg Miller discusses the impact of three terrorist attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait after an Islamic State leader called to make the month of Ramadan a time of "calamity for the infidels." Watch the clip here.

"The jihadists of ISIS may be terrorists -- to use an imprecise, catch-all term -- but as [author Abdel Bari] Atwan explains, they are both well paid and disciplined, and the atrocities they commit and upload on the Internet are part of a coherent strategy."

-- Malise Ruthven, in "Inside the Islamic State,"
in the July 9 New York Review of Books

by Ken

Same-day terror attacks on three continents?

ISIS claims to be behind deadly Tunisia attack

By Liz Sly

BEIRUT — Assailants beheaded, bombed and gunned down victims on three continents Friday, killing more than 60 people and raising fears that a global surge of terror strikes could be imminent.

There was initially no reason to believe the disparate attacks — at a factory in France, a beach resort in Tunisia and a mosque in Kuwait — were connected.

But then the Islamic State asserted responsibility for two of them, first the bombing in Kuwait in which 25 died and later, in a separate statement, the assault on the beach in Tunisia, which killed 39.

The second statement contained a warning that more attacks soon will follow: “Let them wait for the glad tidings of what will harm them in the coming days, Allah permitting,” it said, referring to the “apostates” who had been the target of the assault.

The three incidents followed an appeal Tuesday from the Islamic State’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, for Muslims to mark the holy month of Ramadan by carrying out acts of “jihad,” or holy war. . . .

And so, apparently, another coup for ISIS. Which sent me back to "Inside the Islamic State," an essay by Malis Ruthven in the July 9 New York Review of Books taking off from the book Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate by Abdel Bari Atwan (to be published by University of California Press in September), "based on visits to the Turkish-Syrian border, online interviews with jihadists, and the access to leaders he enjoys as one of the Arab world’s most respected journalists." Ruthven describes the "convincing picture" drawn by Atwan of ISIS, with its network of interconnections spread far, wide, and deep, as "a well-run organization that combines bureaucratic efficiency and military expertise with a sophisticated use of information technology."

Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s official successor as leader of “al-Qa‘ida central,” looks increasingly irrelevant. Bin Laden’s true successor is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy caliph of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State. As “Commander of the Faithful” in that nascent state he poses a far more formidable threat to the West and to Middle Eastern regimes—including the Saudi kingdom—that are sustained by Western arms than bin Laden did from his Afghan cave or hideout in Pakistan.

One of the primary forces driving this transformation, according to Atwan, is the digital expertise demonstrated by the ISIS operatives, who have a commanding presence in social media. A second is that ISIS controls a swath of territory almost as large as Britain, lying between eastern Syria and western Iraq. As Jürgen Todenhöfer, who spent ten days in ISIS-controlled areas in both Iraq and Syria, stated categorically in January: “We have to understand that ISIS is a country now.”

Not that this "country" is any less ruthless than we have come to know -- if anything it's more so, as we come to understand that all the ruthlessness and terror is deliberate, conceived and acted out with a careful view to the impact it will have on friends, enemies, and perhaps most important those in between. "Far from being an undisciplined orgy of sadism," Ruthven writes, "ISIS terror is a systematically applied policy that follows the ideas put forward in jihadist literature," and he duly takes us through that.

I wish I could neatly summarize what took Atwan a book to set out and Ruthven a lengthy NYRB essay to encapsule. "Atwan explains," for example,

how the Islamic State’s media department employs an army of journalists, photographers, and editors to produce slick videos with high production values that are disseminated on the Internet without their source being detected. Activists use “virtual private networks” that conceal a user’s IP address, in conjunction with browsers—including one originally developed for US Navy intelligence—that enable the viewer to access the “dark Internet,” the anonymous zone frequented by child pornographers and other criminals.

Unfortunately the subject as laid out even by Ruthven, is too long and complex for reasonable representation in a few sentences. Which also means that the case is beyond both the attention span and interest level of right-wing foreign-policy ideologues who are looking for arguments that, in a couple of sentences, press their ideological hot buttons. The process reminds me of nothing as much as the way we're always told that TV and movie projects to studio execs whose principal qualification is total ignorance of and lack of curiosity about the world around them.

"The obvious question that arises," Ruthven writes, "is, where will all of this end?" And the answer appears to be even scarier than one might have thought, because Baghdadi seems to be positioning ISIS as a rival in the Sunni world to what Atwan describes as the Saudi kingdom's "quasi-caliphal claim to lead the Muslim world as 'Guardian of the Two Holy Shrines' (Mecca and Medina)." ISIS, he points out, makes much of "the royal family’s love of luxury and acceptance of corruption which, it claims, renders its members ideologically and morally unfit for the task."

"By appropriating Wahhabism’s iconoclastic rhetoric," Ruthven begins his wind-up, "along with its anti-Shia theology, ISIS challenges the legitimacy of the Saudi rulers as guardians of Islam's holy places far more effectively than any republican movement." He began this piece with a vision conjured in The Guardian in November 2001 (i.e., two months after 9/11) by novelist James Buchan, a former Middle East correspondent: "the triumphant entry into Mecca of Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist." Now, Ruthven writes, "with Iraq and Syria falling apart and the US caught between conflicting impulses (fighting alongside Iran in Iraq while opposing it in Syria), it may only be a matter of time before the nightmare imagined by James Buchan becomes a reality."

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Conservatives In The House Vote Down A Resolution To Get U.S. Soldiers Out Of Iraq And Syria

South Jersey voters have a choice: Norcross backs pointless wars; Law doesn't

Wednesday afternoon, the House voted on a resolution introduced by Jim McGovern (D-MA), H Con Res 55, that directs the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove United States Armed Forces deployed to Iraq or Syria on or after August 7, 2014, other than Armed Forces required to protect United States diplomatic facilities and personnel. It was defeated 139-288, 222 Republicans sticking up for their new BFF, Barack Obama. (Led by Hoyer and Israel, 66 Democrats-- mostly Blue Dogs and New Dems-- voted with the Republicans.) 19 Republicans crossed the aisle in the other direction and voted with Pelosi and the Democrats. Justin Amash (R-MI) voted "present."


Ted Lieu (D-CA) was one of the Democrats eager to vote for the resolution. "What we need is a political solution in Syria and Iraq," he told us after the roll call. "Military force never has, and never will, prop up a government: the people have to do it themselves. Iraqi soldiers will continue to run and lose unless they have an Iraqi government that they can believe in. Until Iraqi Sunni soldiers are willing to die for Iraqi Shiite soldiers, or vice versa, we should not have American soldiers there to die for both. And if we have Iraqi miliitary forces willing to die for their government and their country, we also wouldn't need American troops.

One of the ConservaDems voting with the GOP was, not unexpectedly, Donald Norcross of South Jersey. The progressive Democrat who is challenging him in the NJ-01 primary is Alex Law, and Alex told us he would have voted differently Wednesday:

The situation we now face in the Middle East is incredibly complex. Congress attempted to answer how the United States should respond this week by voting to keep US military forces engaged in the conflict in Iraq and Syria. My Democratic primary opponent, conservative Donald Norcross, voted with the GOP to pass the resolution. I think both he and the GOP are wrong. As a nation, we must begin to examine the problems in that region of the world not just as they are today, but rather what brought us this new threat in ISIS. If we do that, we will unfortunately find that our bellicose military industrial sector is responsible.

We were pressured into a war we never should have fought during the Bush years, spending unfathomable amounts of money creating tools of war. In "winning" that war, we have created another enemy in ISIS, born from our conflict often armed with the surplus of weaponry we produced to feed the demands of lobbyists from defense contractors. I am a believer in freedom and defending the liberty that is so precious to America, but this never ending war has created enemies and wasted our national treasure. It has temporarily bankrupted our moral high ground in the world when the torture we committed was revealed. Rather than bully the world with our awesome might, we should lead with our commitment to our founding principles. Sometimes it is alright to walk away from a fight or to resist without having troops on the ground, and when I am in Congress, I will vote with the progressives to help make that American policy a reality.

Lou Vince, the progressive Democrat running for Congress in the Santa Clarita/Simi Valley/Antelope Valley area and an ex-marine, faces a different kind of conservative than Alex. Instead of a duplicitous DINO, Lou is up against a deranged teabagger, Steve Knight. Knight worships war and voted against the resolution. "I was disappointed to learn that the House voted against a resolution to withdraw our troops from Iraq and Syria," Lou told us after the vote. "Congress needs to exercise its duty to debate and vote on this military engagement. The fact that this de-facto war has been going on for nearly a year and Congress keeps authorizing and appropriating money for it without ever taking up the actual war authorization issue is just plain wrong to me. We cannot send our military into harm’s way to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria unless it is properly considered and authorized by Congress. I don’t think that this piece meal and haphazard approach will serve us well in correcting a failed and inadequate overall strategy. This quagmire of one step at a time-- especially with the steps out of order-- is going to leave us trapped in a political and military dilemma."

If you'd like to help Alex replace Norcross and Lou replace Knight in Congress, please give them a hand here.

Four former Blackwater guards in Iraq are sentenced to terms ranging from 30 years to life in shooting of 31 civilians

The four former Blackwater guards sentenced today are (l-to-r): Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten, and Paul Slough. Slatten, the only defendant convicted of murder, was sentenced to life; the others, convicted of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, were sentenced to 30 years plus a day.

"You can't just shoot first and seek justification later."

-- federal prosecutor T. Patrick Martin

by Ken

Oh, you can't? You know, just shoot first and seek justification later? Any chance this new rule may be applied elsewhere in our criminal-justice system?

I suppose it's wrong to be cynical and snarky on a day that witnesses one small blow for accountability. This afternoon, a mere seven-plus years after the fact, a Reagan-appointed federal judge has given a life sentence to a Blackwater Worldwide contract guard in Iraq who was found guilty of murder, and sentenced three other Blackwater employees convicted of assorted counts of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter to terms of 30 years plus a day.

Four Blackwater guards sentenced in Iraq shootings of 31 unarmed civilians

By Spencer S. Hsu and Victoria St. Martin
Washington Post
April 13 at 4:05 PM

A federal judge in Washington handed down prison terms of 30 years to life behind bars to four Blackwater Worldwide guards convicted in a deadly 2007 shooting that killed 14 unarmed Iraqis and injured others in a Baghdad traffic circle.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth sentenced Nicholas A. Slatten of Sparta, Tenn., to life in prison. Slatten is the only of the four guards convicted of murder in the incident, in which American security contractors fired assault rifles and grenades into halted noonday traffic, a low point of the U.S. war in Iraq that sent relations between the two countries into a crisis.

Three other guards, Paul A. Slough of Keller, Tex.; Evan S. Liberty of Rochester, N.H.; and Dustin L. Heard of Knoxville, Tenn., were convicted of multiple counts of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter in the Sept. 16, 2007, incident at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. All three were sentenced Monday to 30 years plus one day in prison.

“It’s clear that these fine young men panicked,” said Lamberth, an Army veteran and Reagan appointee who served as chief district judge from 2008 to 2013.

While defendants have filed appeals, Monday’s sentencing brought an emphatic end to the U.S. government’s years-long effort to demonstrate accountability for American security contractors’ conduct on the battlefield.

In sentencing documents, federal prosecutors called on a judge in Washington to impose lengthy prison terms. The four defendants sought leniency, saying they have been unfairly singled out for harsh treatment for a wartime tragedy.

Jurors found that the defendants, at the time among 19 Blackwater guards providing security for State Department officials in Iraq, shot recklessly and out of control after one of them falsely claimed that their convoy, called Raven 23, was threatened by a car bomber.

The guards claimed that they acted in self-defense after coming under AK-47 gunfire as they cleared a path back to the nearby Green Zone for another Blackwater team that was evacuating a U.S. official from a nearby car bombing.

Prosecutors said in court Monday that the men were guilty of an atrocity against innocent Iraqis, and cited the appalled testimony of fellow Blackwater guards who told jurors that the defendants fired destructive weapons without provocation.

The other contractors “chose to abide by their training, and not to shoot first and make excuses later,” Assistant U.S. Attorney T. Patrick Martin said. “This was one instance they could not back the actions of their teammates.”

Patrick said a lengthy sentence would deter future unwarranted bloodshed by American contractors, passing along the lesson: “You are entrusted to do a job with deadly weapons, but you must use them only when necessary, and their use must be justified. You can’t just shoot first and seek justification later.”&nbsp.; . .

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The Man with the Brain of Cotton strikes again, proving again that there's no stupid like brain-dead right-wing stupid

"On the Ground"? Why, maybe it's because he's so darned tall, but it often seems as if the Man with the Brain of Cotton's feet don't reach to the ground.

by Ken

We already have a burgeoning tradition of right-wing "intellectuals" like Louisiana Gov. Booby Jindall and Wisconson Rep. Pauly-Pauly-Pauly Ryan, whose only imaginable intellectual credentials consist of blithering endlessly about policy matters that normal right-wingers never talk about, because they don't care about them except when they come gift-wrapped in brain-dead right-wing platitudes.

Now the hero of the Right-Wing Zero Functional Intelligence movement is Arkansas's freshman U.S. senator, Tom Cotton. One might think that his patina of Harvard education, not to mention his service as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, would mean that he knows something about the Middle East and possibly foreign policy, but he continues to demonstrate that he knows nothing about, well, apparently about anything.

It's going to be hard to top the blithering ignorance and imbecility with which the Man with the Brain of Cotton introduced himself to the world at large, in his famous letter to Iranian leaders purporting to teach them a thing or two about American democracy, when the only thing he knows about American democracy is that it's possible for a pathetic creature like him to be elected as one of 100 U.S. senators.

I'm not going to say that our boy Cottonbrain has topped the Letter to Iran, but it's not for want of trying.

As DailyKos's Laura Clawson writes of Senator Cottonbrain (in "Tom Cotton: Put Iraq out of your mind. Bombing Iran would take just 'several days'"): "Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton: losing his grip on reality, or lying shamelessly?"

It's not clear which conclusion would be more unflattering to Cotton in light of his claim that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would be just like when then-President Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in the late 1990s. It's just silly to think about the Iraq War of the 2000s, according to Cotton—silly, or a lie pushed by President Obama—"the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case." Simply not the case!

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”

Well, no, Senator Cottonbrain. This is a disadvantage of mouthing off about Iran when you don't actually know anything about Iran, starting with the considerable imperviousness to bombing with which its nuclear facilities have generally been constructed, and proceeding to a geopolitical situation that has very little to do with Sadaam Hussein's Iraq.

Such construction, of course, is often taken as proof of Iranian nefariousness. I think rather of a point that Ian Welsh made in a post yesterday, "Iranian Concerns About the Nuclear Deal Are Reasonable," about the fate of countries trying to resist First World control which give up weapons programs:

The West has been picking off, or attempting to pick off, states in order to isolate them, from Libya and Iraq to the Ukraine, with massive pressure on Venezuela. . . .

Libya gave up its weapon program. Iraq had no weapons program. Giving up your weapons program (ie, giving up your sprint capacity) is really dangerous. As commenter MFI noted, Qaddafi wound up getting sodomized by a knife because he made a deal with the West to give up his program.

The sanctions are absolutely crippling and I understand why many Iranians are absolutely desperate to make a deal. But some deterrent must be maintained. If it isn’t, well, the record of what happens to such countries is simply not good.  This is one reason why Khamenei is leery -- he knows his neck is on the line, and his death could be very unpleasant.

Laura Clawson in her post harks back to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's 2003 prediction about a war with Iraq ("It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months") and writes:

If the war in Iraq had ended after the six months that Rumsfeld thought was so unlikely, maybe Cotton could fool Americans into thinking that bombing Iran now wouldn't have broader implications. But we know how Iraq went, and it'll probably be at least a few more years before voters are ready to once again be sold the idea that war in the Middle East will be a breeze.

Which is all utterly true, but only begins to suggest the dimension of Senator Cottonbrain's cluelessness about Iran. I'm not aware of anyone actually familiar with the Iranian nuclear program who believes it could be even be seriously damanged by less-than-nuclear bombardment. I shudder to think what Senator Cottonbrain has to say about the prospect of nuclear war.

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