Faith-based Intelligence

How’s that for an oxymoron?

On his photo-op junket to the Middle East, President Bush has told the Israelis (and, apparently, anyone else who won’t laugh at him) to disregard the conclusions of the recent National Intelligence Estimate that declared, based on the work of SIXTEEN different American intelliegence entities, that Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program. His intelliegence community has said Iran is no longer working toward a nuclear weapon, yet the President publicly rejects the conclusions of his own intelligence community because their pronouncements, based on actual facts, don’t agree with his preconceptions and opinions.

This is not the first time this has happened. We’ve been down this road before. Before the Iraq invasion, UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix found no evidence of WMD’s in Iraq. A typical insult by right-wing mouth-breathers in 2002 and 2003 was that Blix couldn’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground. Using the right-wing’s logic, apparently neither could the American military. There is a myth today that we went into Iraq based on faulty intelligence. It wasn’t the intelligence. It was the leadership. There were many in the intelligence community who were telling the President, through his gatekeeper Dick Cheney, that there were no WMD. In fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted by Newsweek as telling his aides the night before his notorious address to the Security Council that the evidence he was to present was, in his words, “Bullshit.” Bush’s minions finessed the intelligence, rejected that which did not back-up the conclusions that had already been made, and flat out fabricated intelligence. The only thing faulty before the Iraq War was the integrity of the President.

Now, as the President tries to slide the United States into a third war since becoming President, we are going through the very same process. The intelligence community is giving the President information that does not conform with what he has been saying. We know that the NIE was submitted to Vice-President Cheney more than a year ago, but publication was withheld at his order as he tried unsuccessfully to finesse changes in the report to reflect the official party line. All the while, he and Mr. Bush were making speeches declaring Iran’s continued development of nuclear weapons, knowing the NIE showed this was false. Of course, the White House says the President was unaware of the NIE conclusions. If this is true, which is almost impossible, then either the President is incompetent and should be removed from office and the aides who failed to tell him removed from office and prosecuted, or he is a liar and should be removed from office.

Then again, it is possible God has spoken to George W. Bush. He was fond of telling evangelicals in 2000 that God had told him to run for President. Perhaps, God has told him that the NIE is wrong.

Mirrian-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines faith as: “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” Apparently, this is how the United States is now running its foreign policy.

George W. Bush, Iran, and the Gulf of Tonkin

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, thwarted by the release of the National Intelligence Estimate in their mad, headlong rush into war with Iran, are desperate to find any excuse to attack Iran, which has been the ultimate goal of the neo-cons since the first Gulf War in 1991. It is the conclusion of the SIXTEEN intelligence agencies that prepare the National Intelligence Estimate that, despite the rhetoric to the contrary of the President and Vice-President that Iran was right on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, assertions made long after the NIE was initially submitted to the White House a YEAR AGO, Iran stopped their nuclear weapons research in 2003! Yet, the rhetoric continues and the President’s cheerleader, Dana Perino, continues to insist that Americans will see a mushroom cloud over New York if something isn’t done soon to stop the Iranians, (from doing what?). It would seem now that, with their Administration facing it’s last twelve months in office, Bush and Cheney are desperately seeking their own Gulf of Tonkin incident.

In the decades since Lyndon Johnson took over the escalation of the war in Vietnam from John F. Kennedy, it has been revealed from tapes, transcripts, and documents that the entire Gulf of Tonkin incident was a fabrication. President Johnson and the military had been ratcheting up the rhetoric against North Vietnam, yet Johnson was facing increasing pressure from the Republican nominee for President in the 1964 election, to reveal his intentions for Vietnam. Johnson,n desiring re-election that November,  insisted he didn’t want a war with Vietnam, while all the time urging the military to find a provocation that the American people would accept to justify a full-scale American intervention in the civil war between the Communist butchers in Hanoi and the corrupt right-wing dictatorship in Saigon, a not very palatable choice for Americans. NSA documents released in 2005 show that two American ships, the Maddox and the Turner Joy had deliberately entered North Vietnamese waters as US Navy seals, operating in fast boats out of Da Nang, clandestinely attacked various targets on the North Vietnamese coast with the intention of drawing a North Vietnamese attack. Later, it was claimed that the ships were in international waters and that Hanoi’s attack was completely unjustified and premeditated. Johnson had his excuse and Congress immediately passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution granting the President authority to do whatever was necessary to stop Communist aggression anywhere in Indochina.

It is the Bush Administration’s claims, despite statements to the contrary by both Democratic AND Republican leaders on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees, that previous Congressonal resolutions grant then President authority to carry out any attacks deemed necessary against Iran. However, without the justification now that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the President needs his own Gulf of Tonkin incident to provide the excuse he needs to fulfill the desires of Norman Podhoretz and the other neo-cons who have for years been desperate for an American attack on Iran and which the President has all but promised before he leaves office. It appears that he is about to get it and the Iranians may stupidly hand it to him.

Iranians in patrol boats repeatedly buzz American war ships which have been sent to the Persian Gulf. Of course, the lunatic fringe that runs Iran would like to provoke the United States and, of course, their childish and insane followers in the Iranian military would love nothing more than to be dispatched to their seventy-seven virgins in Paradise (has anyone figured out what happens after the followers of Allah have deflowered their seventy-seven virgins?).

When a person is attacked in a dangerous neighborhood, it can argued that if that person wasn’t in the neighborhood in the first place, he or she wouldn’t have been attacked. This does not remove the guilt of the attacker, but is a common sense realization of the situation. The American navel forces in the Persian Gulf, while ostensibly protecting the transport of oil through the Straits of Hormuz, serve as a target for the Iranian nutcases who dream of Paradise and the coming of the Twelfth Imam of Something or Other. If the Americans are patient enough, and their ships, which can easily blow away any Iranian swift boats that may, mosquito-like, taunt them, approach just close enough to provoke the Followers of Allah, one of these swift boats will, one of these days, get blown out of the water.

The President’s cheerleader, Dana Perino, continues to use the USS  Cole as an example of why such an incident would deserve a full-scale massive response by the entire United States military. The difference, however, is that the Cole was in port and the terrorists snuck in. In the Gulf, the ships can easily spot any approaching vessels and destroy them, as they should. It is not necessary, unless the Iranians truly provoke us with a true attack on Americans, to start a full-scale war against them. The consequences will be the disruption of oil production and exports in the Persian Gulf, a massive spike in oil prices, a world-wide economic recession, if not depression, a vast increase in the wealth and influence of China (which holds trillions of dollars in US debt) and Russia (which is enriching itself with oil production from Siberia and the Caspian Sea region), and many other consequences that are completely unforeseen.

Before Americans continue their testosterone-fed fantasies of “blowing away the Iranians,” we might want to look at the consequences of doing so (which Donald Rumsfeld apparently didn’t do before invading Iraq) and, given what even the most hard-core Republicans see as the Bush Administration’s rather ambivalent relationship with the truth, we might want to examine carefully anything they may decide to declare a provocation.

We’ve been down this road before, in 1964. George Bush wasn’t willing to fight in that conflict. Let’s tell him that we aren’t willing to fight in this one unless there is a genuine reason to.