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Saturday, August 12, 2006

Does America have "no quarrel with the Iranian people"?

We've heard steadily since July 12 that Lebanese Hizbullah is a "proxy" of Iran. Sometimes of Syria, too.

Wednesday, British authorities announced they had foiled a plot by Muslim terrorists that "was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale". I suppose that Scotland Yard never got around to imagining what a nuclear war would be like. Oh, I forget. If We do it, it's "legitimate self-defense". If the Islamunists do it, it's "mass murder on an unimaginable scale". Because they hate our values. Sometimes its hard to fit all the Party lines together.

Today Bush gave his weekly radio address:

America is fighting a tough war against an enemy whose ruthlessness is clear for all to see. The terrorists attempt to bring down airplanes full of innocent men, women, and children. They kill civilians and American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they deliberately hide behind civilians in Lebanon. They are seeking to spread their totalitarian ideology. They're seeking to take over countries like Afghanistan and Iraq so they can establish safe havens from which to attack free nations. These killers need to know that America, Great Britain, and our allies are determined to defend ourselves and advance the cause of liberty. With patience, courage, and untiring resolve, we will defend our freedom, and we will win the war on terror. (my emphasis)

Is there one shred of evidence that Lebanese Hizbullah was even remotely connected to the alleged London plot? Or that the various sectarian militias in Iraq participated in it? Apparently there is some indication of an Al Qaida link, which could link back to Afghanistan where Cheney and Bush and Rummy couldn't be bothered to send reinforcements into the mountains of Tora Bora to nail Osama Bin Laden and many of his most experienced operatives when they had the chance.

For that matter, I'm still waiting to hear details of the actual case the British have against the alleged London plotters. The initial reports make it sound like they were "self-starters" who sought out terrorist expertise in Pakistan. That could be serious enough. Al Qaida itself largely operates as a "franchise" organization. And the fact that the alleged plotters did some things that seem obviously amateurish doesn't mean they weren't Al Qaida-connected. Mohammad Atta (an Egyptian) and the 9/11 plotters (mostly Saudis, if anyone remembers) were hardly super-spies. They did some dumb things as well, like key plotters hanging around together publicly, or Atta getting stopped speeding while he had an outstanding warrant on him for a traffic violation.

But 2006 is looking more and more to me like a replay of 2002, when the war that Cheney and Bush and their poodle Tony Blair had decided on by July 2002 at the latest was marketed to the American and British publics and to Congress.

Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Nor did they have any operational connections to Al Qaida. Nor did they have the "weapons of mass destruction" that were the main justification for the war, so they they couldn't have given them to terrorists even if they had been of a mind to do so.

Meanwhile, while pouring troops and money and mercenaries into Iraq and extracting contracts for Halliburton and other crony favorites of the Bush dynasty, the federal government has diddled around on things that would actually defend Americans against terrorist attacks - and the main defense is preventing them. The risk of liquid explosive on aircraft was known in 1995. What fraction of one day's war expenditures in Iraq has gone into research on detection devices for them to be used in airport screenings?

And we shouldn't follow the path of our infallible generals and assume that Technology is our salvation. The alleged London plot wasn't discovered by airport security. According to the most recent report I saw, the first alert British authorities received about it came from a Muslim neighbor of one of the plotters who phoned in about the guy being involved in some kind of suspicious activity.

It also involved cooperation between at least Britain and Pakistan. US officials apparently played little role in it, based on what I've seen in the public record so far. Juan Cole points to an intriguing question. The British have been following this plot supposedly for a year now. But Bush was first briefed about it in detail on Friday 08/04/06. Cole writes at his Informed Comment blog on 08/11/06:

US authorities were only told about some details two weeks ago, apparently. It may be that the British counter-terrorism community learned its lesson from the loose lips of the Bushies in summer of 2004. I argued then that from what we could tell from open sources, it seemed likely that the Bush administration played politics with information about a double agent in Pakistan who was helping monitor a London al-Qaeda cell. It seems likely that the election-year leak allowed budding terrorists like Mohammad Sadique Khan to escape closer scrutiny, and so permitted the 7/7/05 London subway bombings to go forward.

In other words, the international cooperation that is so vital to thwarting these sorts of plots has been repeatedly put at risk by the foolish, reckless, obsessively partisan policies and practices of the Cheney-Bush administration.

The 9/11 plot was primarily hatched in Hamburg. This year and last, a new German Chancellor who wants to be more cooperative with the United States has had to deal with the scandals of the CIA's illegal "renditions" of prisoners to be tortured. Anyone who was even aware of the practice is considered tainted in German politics. And now this year, they have to deal with the USA's one-sided position to the Israel-Lebanon War. And threats of war against Iran.

It's very possible that the British government, as Cole specutlates, withheld information from US authorities simply because they didn't trust them to put the fight against real terrorism ahead of Karl Rove's political priorities.

Even those governments that are trying to cooperate with the US, in other words, find themselves trying to do so in spite of the Cheney-Bush administration's unpopular and often illegal activities.

You don't have to be a diplomat to figure out where that puts governments like Egypt or Jordan or even Iraq (!) where the United States in general and the Cheney-Bush government in particular are dearly despised by majorities of their populations.

Yet here is Bush today, equating the alleged Heathrow plotters to the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and to Lebanese Hizbullah. You know, Hizbullah the Iranian proxy. We've been down this road before. It's left our troops huddled on their bases in Iraq and in the Green Zone in Baghdad, venturing out to shoot at faith-based militias in Baghdad residential neighborhoods and dropping 500-lb. bombs on "terrorist safe houses" in villages, making new enemies with virtually every foray.

Anyone who thinks that banning toothpaste from carry-on bags, or preventing fliers from taking bottled water they purchased in the secure areas of airports onto the plane, is going to protect us from suicide bombers determined to kill Americans, well, you might as well start popping OxyContin pills, because it can't make your perception of the terrorism threat any worse.

Part of the consequence of going to war in Iraq and backing Israel's war in Lebanon - which is looking more and more like a coordinated effort with the Cheney-Bush administration as the preparatory phase to war with Iran - is that Americans are at greater risk for terrorist attacks. Going to war with Iran will dramatically increase that risk.

If you think those policies are necessary, then you should be demanding that the Cheney-Bush crime family should also be doing everything they can to improve airport and seaport security, rehabilitate the federal government's heckuva-job disaster-response capabilities, and bolster the public-health network nationally. Moralizing about the iniquity of The Terrorists is emotionally satisfying. But to pretend there aren't terrorism repercussions of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy is to descend to the level of psychotics and neoconservative foreign-policy mavens.

Jim Lobe wrote this week on the 'New Middle East' Out Of Control Inter Press Service/TomPaine.com 08/11/06. He quotes Colin Powell's longtime aide and former State Department chief of staff for Powell, Col Lawrence Wilkerson:

"This whole business is nuts -- unless, of course, you believe what the rumor-mongers are beginning to pass around," wrote Wilkerson in reference to the Lebanon war in an email exchange with IPS [Inter Press Service]. "(T)hat this entire affair was ginned up by Bush/Cheney and certain political leaders in Tel Aviv to give cover for the eventual attack by the U.S. on Iran. At first, I refused to believe what seemed to be such insanity. But I am not so certain any longer."

How do we know when the decision to attack Iran has definitely been made? Robert Fisk in his book The Great War for Civilisation (2005) gives us a hint. He describes watching War President Bush addressing the United Nations General Assembly in September 2002:

How small he looked in the high-backed chair. You had to sit in the auditorium of the UN General Assembly to realise that George Bush Junior—threatening war in what was built as a house of peace—could appear such a little man. But then again Julius Caesar was a little man, and so was Napoleon Bonaparte. So were other more modern, less mentionable world leaders. Come to think of it so was General Douglas MacArthur, who had his own axis of evil, which took him all the way to the Yalu River. But on 12 September 2002, two-thirds of the way through George W. Bush's virtual declaration of war against Iraq, there came a dangerous, tell-tale code which suggested that he really did intend to send his tanks across the Tigris River. "The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people," he told us in the UN General Assembly. In the press gallery, nobody stirred. Below us, not a diplomat shifted in his seat. The speech had already rambled on for twenty minutes but the speechwriters must have known what this meant when they cobbled it together.

Before President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, he announced that America "has no quarrel with the Libyan people." Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the Father told the world that the United States "has no quarrel with the Iraqi people." In 2001, Bush the Son, about to strike at the Taliban and al-Qaeda, told us he "has no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan." And now that frightening mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr. Bush said—absolutely none—with the Iraqi people. So, I thought to myself as I scribbled my notes in the UN press gallery, it's flak jackets on.

I don't recall hearing that particular phrase in relation to Iran yet. Keep an eye out for it. My guess is that we'll be hearing it soon.

After that, the Transportation Safety Administration will surely do something more to boost airline security. Like requiring all passengers to wear nothing but hospital gowns on flights. I hope they require them to be clear plastic hospital gowns. It would at least make the no-water, no-reading-material flights more interesting. It might also freak out the Christian Right types enough to make a few of them wonder what the [Cheney] is going on.

Tags: bush, hizbullah, israel, iraq war, jim lobe, juan cole, lebanon, robert fisk

posted at 2:54:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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