Robert Dreyfuss: Bush's Trash Talk About Iran [View All]

from TomPaine.com:


Bush's Trash Talk About Iran
Robert Dreyfuss
February 01, 2007


Robert Dreyfuss is an Alexandria, Va.-based writer specializing in politics and national security issues. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005), a contributing editor at The Nation and a writer for Mother Jones, The American Prospect and Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website, www.robertdreyfuss.com.

Since President Bush’s State of the Union address last Tuesday, the White House has manufactured a crisis that pits the United States against Iran. In what looks like the military and diplomatic equivalent of a full court press, Washington has unleashed a barrage of threats, maneuvers and limited military actions that seem calculated to set the United States on a collision course with Iran in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. All in all, it is an exceedingly risky and dangerous gambit.

Even if the intent is not to create a shooting war between the two countries, one false move by radicals on either side could ignite exactly that, whether by hardliners in Iran seeking to cement their influence as the rising, hegemonic power in the Gulf or by frustrated U.S. neoconservatives desperate to prevent the final collapse of their misadventure in Iraq by expanding that war to include Iran, and perhaps Syria.

By now, the elements of Washington’s brinkmanship in the Gulf are well known: Bush’s pledge to use U.S. military and intelligence capabilities against alleged Iranian activity in Iraq; the dispatch of a second U.S. aircraft carrier task force to the Gulf; the shipment of Patriot missile batteries to defend American-allied Arab Gulf sheikhdoms; the seizure of several teams of Iranian diplomats and personnel in Baghdad and Irbil; and the report that the White House had issued “kill or capture” orders to U.S. forces in Iraq who encounter Iranian operatives.

Meanwhile, the United States has stepped up pressure on U.S. allies and Western banks to stop doing business as usual with Iran’s economic institutions and pushed for sanctions against Iran over its alleged plan to acquire nuclear weapons. It has also dropped hints about orchestrating an oil war against Iran by colluding with Saudi Arabia to drive oil prices downward. At the same time, the administration has issued a series of wildly inflated charges that Iran is involved in masterminding the Iraqi insurgency, is providing weapons and IED explosive devices that are killing U.S. troops and, most recently, was behind a well-coordinated raid in Karbala, in which a fleet of SUVs disguised as carrying American forces kidnapped and executed four U.S. soldiers. ....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/02/01/bushs_trash_talk_about_iran.php