Iran Attack After Labor Day,"Congress has already given its overwhelming approval"

leftchick

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Thu Aug-30-07 08:39 AM
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Iran Attack After Labor Day,"Congress has already given its overwhelming approval"

Edited on Thu Aug-30-07 08:41 AM by leftchick

so don't get your hopes up for them to put up much of a fuss. :(

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock: Countdown to Midnight in Persia

http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1270/135/

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The assault will most likely be made with conventional weapons, the authors say, as the political and environmental effects of a nuclear strike on Iran would not be worth the limited military value of such an attack. After all, the Bushists want to control Iran and milk it dry after they destroy the regime and slaughter a vast number of innocent people. Halliburton and Exxon wouldn't be able to move right in and start gobbling up loot in a radiated land.

This is what is coming. This is what the Bushists will be selling to us soon. (Glenn Greenwald has a useful roundup of the growing madness here.) One sees comments here and there to the effect that "the American people will never accept this," that "Bush can't get away with this kind of thing after Iraq," or that "this isn't 2002, with everyone still raw and dazed after 9/11," etc., etc. But such declarations are pipe-dreams, foolish hopes. As we have pointed out here many times, Bush and Cheney are not interested in obtaining the "consent of the governed" for their militarist agenda -- nor do they need it.

Congress has already given its overwhelming approval to the specious reasons for war that Bush and his minions have advanced. The corporate media is doing its part again too; for example, the media's flagship, the New York Times, has been "stovepiping" warmongering spin straight from the White House and Pentagon onto its front pages -- exactly as it did in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and even using the same reporter, Michael Gordon, who with his co-writer Judith Miller was reponsible for the dissemination of so many useful lies. The same system that fed the engines of aggressive war in 2002-03 -- reporter gets spin from Bushists, paper prints spin, Bushists then cite the report as "confirmation" of the lies they themselves concocted -- is in operation now.

Unless the Bushists institute a draft, it is inconceivable that any kind of mass protest movement strong enough to derail the coming war will arise from among the somnolent American people. The majority of Americans will grudgingly accept the war -- if they do not openly support it -- as long as it does not directly and immediately affect them. Only a ground invasion, with conscript troops, would spread the direct pain throughout American society. That's why the aggression will be based on air and naval power (along with the secret armies and death squads and mercenaries of America's covert forces.) The destruction of countless thousands of innocent people -- and the vital infrastructure to support the lives of millions more -- will simply be a dazzling light show on the nation's TV screens, complete with glitzy graphics and dramatic music.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1225&Itemid=135%20

Down in the Flood: The Senate's Blank Check for War on Iran

As you may know -- unless you rely on the corporate media for your news, of course -- yesterday the U.S. Senate unanimously declared that Iran was committing acts of war against the United States: a 97-0 vote to give George W. Bush a clear and unmistakable casus belli for attacking Iran whenever Dick Cheney tells him to.

The bipartisan Senate resolution – the brainchild (or rather the bilechild) of Fightin' Joe Lieberman – affirmed as official fact all of the specious, unproven, ever-changing allegations of direct Iranian involvement in attacks on the American forces now occupying Iraq. The Senators appear to have relied heavily on the recent New York Times story by Michael Gordon that stovepiped unchallenged Pentagon spin directly onto the paper's front page. As Firedoglake points out, John McCain cited the heavily criticized story on the Senate floor as he cast his vote.

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This vote is the clearest signal yet that there will be no real opposition to a Bush Administration attack on Iran. This is yet another blank check from these slavish, ignorant goons; Bush can cash it anytime. This is, in fact, the post-surge "Plan B" that's been mooted lately in the Beltway. As you recall, there was much throwing about of brains on the subject of reviving the "Iraq Study Group" plan when the "surge" (or to call it by its right name, the "punitive escalation") inevitably fails. Bush put the kibosh on that this week ("Him not gonna do nothin' that Daddy's friends tell him to do! Him a big boy, him the decider!"), but that doesn't mean there isn't a fall-back position – or rather, a spring-forward position: an attack on Iran, to rally the nation behind the "war leader" and reshuffle the deck in Iraq.