Here’s how well Bush’s alleged attempt to drum up war support is working.
Percent of Americans opposed to taking military action against Iran:
May '07: 63%
Oct 07: 68%
Oops, wrong direction Georgie-boy!
Actually, the difference is within the margin of error of the poll. The number in Jan '07 was… 68%.
Well, at any rate DK is not a W-Admin insider – as a Congresscritter he is tapped into the Washington grapevines, so he probably knows a little more than you or I about what the Admin might be planning, but not a lot more. FWIW. (BTW, I’ll vote for Kucinich in the Dem presidential primary, but since I live in Florida my vote won’t count anyway.)
Pffft. Anyone running for president is blowing smoke a good portion of the time, so I wouldn’t take anything he said seriously. He wants to be the peace candidate, and the more war-mongering he can make his opponents (or Bush) look, the better it is for him.
Warmongering kinda runs in the family, doesn’t it?
Something to think about – it’s entirely possible that the Bush III wannabee is a real Bush.
How so? I don’t think that “war mongering” is in any way a fair characterization of what Bush the elder did in 1990. He got together a truly global coalition to expel a brutal dictator from occupying a country allied to the US. There are reasonable arguments to make against Gulf War I, but calling it “war mongering” isn’t one of them.
Or that you’re wrong about what constitutes a “real Bush”.
No real argument, but rather a couple of points I’d like to add.
1-I lived in the States at the time and was in favor – as much as was the rest of the world as proved by the real coalition of nations – of said war. But as short as it was, I became, little by little, disgusted by the whole thing. Meaning that after the first couple of days, when it became clear that it was simply a legal carnage, I wasn’t too high on seeing the American flags all over the place and people high-fivin’ each other. No psychologist I (just a lowly business major) but I remember thinking at the the time that to many an American, said ass-kicking was some sort of redemption for 'nam.
2-The Highway of Death, described by one of your own pilots, as a “turkey shoot,” simply sickened me about the whole thing. Yeah, I realize war is about getting it done in the quickest and safest way possible for your side (the Powell Doctrine), but, if you’ll pardon the pun, I was left with the bitter taste that the whole thing was an overkill – from the start, when they where building-up the Iraqi forces as some sort of formidable enemy. They never were.
Me no like Bush. Much prefer mowed territory. 
Oh, it was warmongering, all right, in the sense that it was not really about Kuwait’s independence nor about honoring alliances (Iraq was also our ally, remember), but about finding/demonstrating a relevant mission for American military power in the post-Cold-War world. In fact, I very strongly suspect that Hussein, in relying on Ambassador April Glaspie’s vague assurances of U.S. indifference to the Iraq-Kuwait dispute, actually played into GHWB’s hands and did exactly what George wanted him to do. No way to prove that, of course, unless we can get Bush I into Guantanamo or onto the extraordinary rendition list . . . sigh . . .
Business major? Business major?! The White Studies Program?!
Well, I suppose, follies of our youth, and all, but…Good God, man! What a long, strange trip its been…
And I, for one, will never forget how the young men of Kuwait dashed to the discos of Cairo in a feverish rush of patriotic fervor!
Someone that is politically brilliant with excellent foreign policy skills. When I was a kid George HW Bush scared me. Now, I long for his presidency.
Bush I got setup by the Kuwaiti royal family when he built Zapata oil. You know Zapata, the company that became the Z in Penn Oil, the company that they named the Bay of Pigs after. Zapata got started by building oil drilling platforms for the Kuwaitis.
Oh, I acknowledge that the Gulf War (Gulf War I? what are we finally going to call it?) was fought in part for the independence of Kuwait, international stability, all the stated reasons; I’m just cynical enough to impute some very different and to them more important motives to Bush I and his advisors. (I’m not posing a conspiracy theory, you understand – just an ordinary political/diplomatic fakeout.) And the war was also fought to protect Saudi Arabia, which was scared shitless of Hussein at that moment, and the Bush family’s ties with the House of Saud are even more interesting.
The Likud can feel its hands slipping off the levers of US middle east policy. The real question is to do with a struggle within the Republican party. One faction reads the polling and is committed to putting the US military at the disposal of Israel again, while it still can. i.e attack Iran.
The other faction knows a loss is coming in 2008 too and is instead looking to future elections and the survival of the Republican party. This faction doesn’t have the big names at the moment, but it would be surprising if it didn’t have sufficient sway to impede the full-blown wars the Neo-Cons/Likudniks are agitating.
If Iran doesn’t want bombs falling from the sky, perhaps they should back off on producing a nuclear weapon.
Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. It began killing Americans by the dozens in 1983. It is supplying training and weapons to insurgents in Iraq. It is funding Hezbollah. Iran has made the fact very clear that it is an enemy of the United States. If they want to continue to stick their finger in our eye, they don’t have the right to bitch if it gets bitten off.
President Bush has declared flat out that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapons program. The sanctions are designed to prevent (or at least slow) that effort and to react to Iran’s provocations in Iraq and elsewhere.
Should Iran develop a nuclear bomb or the capability to do so, the United States can easily destroy that capability in 24 hours or less. Should Iran raise the stakes and attack American assets in the gulf, their “air force” will be swept from the skies within hours and the United States will be able to do pretty much whatever they want.
Can we mount a ground invasion and take and hold the entire country? No. But we can remove the leadership and thier military capability with relative ease.
What happens then? What happens after the “American cowboys” satisfy their “imperialist bloodlust”? We provide the 70 percent of the population that isn’t stuck in the 12th century the chance to run their own country. That would mean, of course, that a few million more people would owe their freedom to the United States of America. How annoying.
Not gonna happen, and Iran has as much right to a nuclear program as any other country, subject only to its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, as you know. And the Iranians, if they have any sense, have learned from the respective lessons of North Korea and Iraq: Have nuclear weapons and you can bargain with the U.S.; lack them and you’re fucked.
:dubious: No, no it hasn’t. That is a lie, and a damned lie, too, as you know. If anything, it is the U.S. that has been at (a mostly one-sided) war with Iran ever since 1953.
The “relative ease” applies only to the regime-removal stage. What comes after that is imponderable but most probably horrible for them and for us. Which we should have learned by now.
:dubious: You are not serious. There are 26 million Iraqis (that’s minus the nearly, or more than, one million who have died as a direct or indirect result of the U.S. invasion, and the even larger numbers who have become refugees in Iraq or abroad) who owe their “freedom” to the U.S., but they do not appear to be appreciative, because in their case “freedom” amounts to the right to live in a failed state, and we (and the Iraqis, and the Iranians) have no reason whatsoever to expect a regime change in Iran would produce any preferable (to the Iranians) result, and many reasons to suppose it would produce an even worse result.
Even if we knew for sure that was true (do you happen to have a solid cite that actually definitively links the Iranian government to this?), it appears that we in our turn are supplying training and weapons to insurgents in Iran.
That is, it’s claimed that we are giving support to the Kurdish-separatist PKK, a group which we ourselves have condemned as a terrorist organization, to encourage them in trying to destabilize Iran. I don’t see how we can logically argue that it’s okay for us to support insurgents in Iran but not for Iran to support insurgents in Iraq.
I completely agree with all of this (except that I don’t understand the contemptuous scare quotes around the term “air force”. AIUI, the IRIAF certainly would be no match for the full might of the USAF, but it is definitely an air force worthy of the name. Their fleet is rumored to include quite a few recently manufactured Russian aircraft, as well as a bunch of older American-made ones from Boeing, Northrop and Lockheed).
What I don’t understand is why, given those incontrovertible facts, the prospect of Iran getting a nuclear weapon should be such a frightening one. You make it abundantly clear that if they ever dared to use such a weapon, Tehran would be a puddle of molten glass. You know that, I know that, the Iranians know that. So why is an Iranian nuke seen as such a threat?
I’m reminded of the drumbeat for war back in early 2003, when the Administration kept hammering away on the theme that Saddam Hussein was just too close to successful nuke ownership for safety, that his WMD were a pressing danger, that we couldn’t afford to wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud, yadda yadda yadda. It turned out basically to be just warmongering bullshit from an Administration that had already decided on invasion and regime change in Iraq.
Why should I believe now that the Iranian nuclear ambitions are such a catastrophic threat, just because the same warmongering bullshitters are saying so?
Because some people insist that the Iranians are not rationally self-interested actors, and that we should take Iranian rhetoric at face value.
OTOH, sooner or later a regime (and a complacent/supportive society) will come along that really is suicidal in that way. Is Iran that regime? Very unlikely, but you never can tell, right?
I mean, if we were to go to war with Iran, I’d be the first person to advocate, say, presidential assassination as a remedy. But I can still understand why conservative students of history would be made uneasy by modern-day Iran.
Iraq tried cooperation, and look what happened to it. America doesn’t respond to reason, negotiation or even outright giving in; only brute force. Sooner or later, if they don’t get nukes we will send those missles. It’s the clear duty of the Iranian government, not to mention much of the rest of the world’s governments, to get nukes so they can point them at us.
Not without using nukes ourselves, not that I put such a thing beyond Bush.
America is the enemy of freedom. What would happen is what always happens. We would devastate Iran, kill enormous numbers of them for their own good, gloating all the while. The vast majority of the population would dedicate themselves as our enemies, and we’d be baffled that they weren’t grateful for us laying waste to Iran and killing their friends and relatives. And what freedom they have would be gone.
That’s what would happen, because that’s what America does.
We’re not going to a full-scale ground war with Iran because we can’t, okay?
We do have bunker-buster bombs and the aircraft to carry them, though. The likelihood of Death Throes Dick taking out their suspected WMD sites (Hey, he was only 1 letter off the last time; anybody could make that mistake), probably not until after the primaries, and leaving the next administration to deal with the consequences, is too damn high, though.
I disagree. The current administration is going to be the bogeyman raised by the Democrats in every election from now until kingdom come.
There’s enough rational self interest in the GOP to ensure they’ll pull the rug from an attempt by Dick Cheney to make them the gold standard of ‘not suited for public office’. No 11th hour shenanigans.