David Swanson: Iran and WWIII

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/


Tuesday, 04 September 2007
by David Swanson

The administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney is set on a course that leads directly to a third world war. And a third world war leads almost inevitably to most of us dying horrible deaths. And we're not talking about it.

The White House has made clear it is seriously considering attacking Iran with massive bombing aimed at destroying the nation's military and changing its government. Iran will certainly retaliate. If attacked, and possibly even if not attacked, Israel will join in the fighting. The resistance in Iraq will intensify dramatically. Controlling the oil of Iran and Iraq will be out of the question short of thorough genocide. Anti-American furor will sweep the Muslim world. The nuclear nation of Pakistan will be a prime target for an Islamic revolution.

If we don't have a world war on our hands immediately, one will be very hard to avoid. We will have taught every nation, again, that the only path to safety is acquisition of nuclear weapons. We will have isolated the United States from most of the world, including many of our traditional allies. Terrorist attacks against American targets will come, and the United States will retaliate, again, not with law enforcement but with additional aggressive warfare.

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The founders of the United States feared these moments for us. To protect us, they gave Congress the sole power to declare war. The current Congress, building on the misdeeds of others in recent decades, has given up its power. In fact, we've reached the point where Congress cannot easily take it back. Were Congress to declare with a veto-proof majority that Bush must not bomb Iran, is anyone sure Bush would listen?

join a lot of others in here by cutting down the Democratic Congress, if they do go along with this and do not challenge Bush.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/


How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.

It is well-nigh impossible to imagine a force in American public life today rising up to thwart the Administration's will on any element of its militarist and corporatist agenda, including the arbitrary launch of an attack on Iran. What's more, even if some institution had the will -- and made the effort -- to balk Bush, it wouldn't matter. As the New York Times noted a couple of weeks ago:

…Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.

At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”

Thus the Administration's own spokesmen are now saying openly, in plain English, what they once only insinuated beneath layers of legal jargon: that the president of the United States does not have to obey the law of the land. He does not have to obey acts passed by Congress. He is free to act arbitrarily, to do anything whatsoever that he claims is necessary to "defend national security," in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There is literally nothing anyone can do – not Congress, not the courts – to stop him.