Tue 14 Mar 2006
Why They Hate Iran, Part One of However Many They Need
Posted by Michael under politics[12] Comments
So, today Bush was out pushing that Iran is behind a lot of the violence in Iraq. You might not have heard this, what with the media being so occupied with examining what went wrong with Iraq, whether the President had preordained to invade and sought pat excuses, or the build-up to impeachment for having lied to the nation and broken the law multiple times – I know, I know, it’s hard to hear through the din of a working democracy – but there are apparently people in the Administration who think Iran might also be making nukes.
And so, here’s exactly why they will invade Iran:
- Iran – they will say – is the whole reason why Iraq is so fucked up in the first place. Insurgents? Iranian agents seeding the land with chaos! They’ve already been testing this one with crowds, and they’re even willing to get out there and say it in front of reporters.
- Iran is central to terror and its planning and funding, and so we have to do this because of 9/11, etc.
- Iran may have nukes, and if imaginary WMDs produced by starving Iraqis using refined fairy dust and wishes made manifest are good enough to invade a place, nukes are like double-plus good-good. All they have to do is point at Iran and say, “Arabs With Nukes!” and everyone in Goat Herder, USA, will show up with a musket and their great-grandpappy’s gas mask from dubya-dubya-eye. They know good and damn well that if rigged voting machines didn’t hand them the ’04 election then fear sure as hell did, and they will play that song as loud as they can.
- If we invade Iran, we get another few months of media “embeds” and exciting theme music on Fox News and all kinds of great flash and dazzle to take everyone’s minds off Iraq. This will be convenient because they second we’re off the streets of Baghdad the country is going to fucking melt. Oh wait, that’s already happening. That insurgency that Cheney said was in its last throes, like, a year ago? Two years ago? Yeah, I don’t think our departure from the country is exactly going to encourage those dudes to embrace the political process, so BushCo will be mighty glad to have something to distract us while that shit goes down – er, further down.
- Some of these yahoos in the Bush Administration probably think that this invasion shit has worked out pretty well, all things considered, because they are being spoon-fed by vassals who dare not contradict them. They will assume that an invasion of Iran, using Iraq as a staging ground, is, like, totally even better than two-for-one Tuesdays down at the Dairy Queen.
- The ones that know how fucked we are in Iraq can use an invasion of Iran as an excuse to withdraw the bulk of our troops from the failed state we’ve created next door.
- War is a great way to drum up support for the home team during some awfully nervous mid-terms.
- Some of the planners and “architects” (do you really keep calling someone that when the only thing they’ve built in their whole fucking lives is a single shack that spontaneously combusted?) will honestly believe that this time – no, really – the population will be so grateful that they’ll rise up and do the heavy lifting for us. Take a guess how many red X’s come up when Richard Dawson looks to the big board for that one?
- They just don’t give a shit what happens to people who aren’t lily-white and weak-chinned from the inbreeding.
- Toppling Iran would further isolate Russia, either leading them to get as chummy as possible out of desperation or igniting another, smaller Cold War. Win-win, in their book.
Seriously. All those things are true. They are going to invade Iran. They will do so before the year is out. They will do so right before mid-terms, or possibly right after, so that the Republicans who need to distance themselves can do so without yet actually having to vote yet or no on authorizing force. This assumes, however, that they don’t use the “inciting violence in Iraq, thus it’s a part of the already-approved Iraq invasion” justification. They will do so thinking that it will distract us from Iraq – perhaps genuinely believing, quite wrongly, that it will improve things in Iraq. They will think that we will win because we’re America and we can win against anybody, right? Then they will figure out that they were wrong, and they will blame insurgents and terrorists and talk about trying to expand the swamp (remember that “draining the swamp” shit they were shoveling at first, about Iraq?) and all that crap. We will fuck up yet another huge-ass country and we will leave it even worse than it was before and we will shit on what’s left of our own reputation and then, when anyone questions the people who had the bright idea in the first place, they will in turn question that person’s patriotism and when that doesn’t stick they will look somewhere – anywhere – else to lay the blame: they’ll claim it’s the UN’s fault, the IAEA’s fault, anyone they’d like to take a swing at on their way down. They will console themselves that at least in their failure they managed to damage an institution they despise with a white-hot passion.
But if it’s so blindingly obvious, why doesn’t anyone stop it? Because we have demonstrated as a nation, three times now, that we are totally OK with these chumps being in charge of the whole shebang: legislative, executive and judicial. As a country, assuming election results are accurate and thus that the majority really has spoken, we have officially approved all this bullshit, every last steaming dollop.
Bon appetit.
So heinous, and yet so true. Sigh.
Sometimes I’m really amazed at how busy this administration is, managing to fuck shit up both here and abroad. And then I realize about half of it is just not doing anything to *prevent* the fucked-up-ness, while the other half of it is the more active fucking-up, and I’m not so impressed.
Yeah, in my opinion they have achieved an equal mix of being damned when they do and damned when they don’t.
Good post. And I wouldn’t doubt if it’s 100% accurate. I *loved* (strange word for it) the thought of going into Iran and then Bush&Co. using that as a way of saying we’re leaving Iraq.
It’s all so crazy — it’s really hard to compute.
“They are going to invade Iran. They will do so before the year is out.”
Ha! Them and what army?
OK, seriously, when they do, and then subsequently fail, it won’t be the insurgents’ and dead-enders’ fault. It’ll be ours for not having clapped hard enough.
Them and what army?
Exactly – that’s their excuse to pull out of Iraq. They are desperate to see the Iraqis form a token government so they can get the hell out of Dodge and move on to other oil fields.
It’ll be ours for not having clapped hard enough.
Is that like when Tinkerbell nearly bites it in Peter Pan? “If you believe in WMDs, boys and girls, clap your hands!”
We’re not going to invade Iran. The military would mutiny. This is just distraction.
OK, so if that’s the case, I’ve totally fallen for it. Is it really as simple as them wanting to distract us from Iraq? Did I let my paranoia about them get to me? I’m not questioning your assessment, because you’re the one with the Poli-Sci degree (I flunked the Poli-Sci classes I liked, so let’s not even discuss the ones I didn’t). I’m genuinely curious. For all my talk of how stupid everyone in the Bush Administration is, I am not so ready to underestimate them that I’ll pass up an opportunity to interpret the signs.
you’re the one with the Poli-Sci degree
Pff. Don’t be fooled into thinking that means anything. There’s millions of halfwits with polisci degrees. Here’s my thinking:
Iran is a MUCH, MUCH more powerful military than Iraq, what with having not been bombed to bits and economically isolated for a decade and a half, as Iraq was in 2003. It’s also three times as large, much richer, and with a much larger population. No country in the world would sign on to help us and, in fact, I suspect we would find most of the first world actually imposing economic sanctions on us. China would probably withdraw its investments and many countries would start liquidating their dollar assets in favor of Euros. That would make the Great Depression look like a picnic, since our entire economy is supported on other countries propping up our currency for us.
Also, we’d need to use southern Iraq as the staging ground for an invasion, and the Shi’ites there would flat-out explode, meaning we’d have to fight our way just to get to the border where the Iranian tanks are, while having constant rear-guard attacks. This means air support becomes nearly useless. Even if Bush and Cheney were full-blown looney tunes, the Joint Chiefs aren’t.
If there’s anything good about this stupid misadventure in Iraq, it’s that it has totally tied our hands in regards to doing something even stupider with Iran. I also suspect that with a majority of the country already soured on the current war, any build-up to a second one will result in massive GOP losses. I bet Karl Rove knows it, too.
So we’ll hear lots of saber-rattling because it’s the only arrow left in their quiver, but I can’t see how any general (or campaign advisor) is going to let them unsheath it. You still have the psychos, like John Bolton, who honestly believe we can invade whomever we like. But those guys ain’t calling any shots. They stuck his wack ass in the UN for a reason – to piss off the UN, to be sure, but mostly it was a stick-crazy-aunt-Ethel-in-the-attic maneuver.
OK, so they’re really just doing this to make some big noise? Are they so stupid that they don’t realize that talking a big talk with neither intention nor ability to back it up only hurts us even more?
Did I just underestimate their stupidity again?
Well, my guess is they’re just trying to divert attention from the disaster in Iraq long enough to get through the midterm elections. They don’t really do the long-term thinking thing; it’s all the here and now. See: Medicare drug benefit, biggest deficits in history, etc.
Test.
Another test.