Lost in the Roar: War Alarms Drowned by Beltway Bloodlust

by Chris Floyd - Sept 28, 2007

"I got my hammer ringin', baby, but the nails ain't goin' down." -- Bob Dylan Hammerblows of truth keep falling on the Bush Regime's propaganda campaign for war against Iran, which has been built up out of allegations so specious and shoddy that they make the manifold deceits of the Attack Iraq carnival look like gospel truth. But far from doing any damage to the engine of death now rolling toward Persia, the hammers are not even being heard above the roar.

Of course, it is actually inaccurate to refer to the "Bush Regime's propaganda campaign." As we have noted here before, the Democratic-led Congress has already overwhelmingly swallowed the Bush case for war – the Senate even accepted the Regime's mendacious casus belli unanimously. And this week, the Democrats went even further in adopting aggression against Iran as their own cause, when a majority of them joined with the obedient goose-steppers of the GOP in support of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which effectively if not officially authorized military action against Iran by declaring the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a "foreign terrorist organization" and tying it to attacks on American soldiers in Iraq. The measure accepted at face value the proven mendacities and manipulations of Bush war propaganda, offering a selection of carefully-filtered testimony from the sainted General Petraeus (whom the Senate has declared literally sacrosanct, with its recent passage of an amendment "strongly" condemning any one who exercises their right of free speech to question "the honor, integrity and patriotism" of "any member of the armed forces" and Petraeus in particular). The Democrats have made it clear where they stand on aggression against Iran: alongside – or even in advance of – the war criminals of the Bush Administration.

(For a devastating take on the latest confirmation of Bush's criminal intent to launch a war of aggression against Iraq – the newly released transcript of the talks between Bush and then-Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar just before the war – see Juan Cole's blistering piece: The War Crime of the Century. One central point of the transcript is Bush's admission that he had turned down Saddam's offer to go into exile – one of several offers Iraq put on the table to avoid war before the invasion, including an offer to hold free, internationally-supervised elections and allow heavily-armed foreign troops to conduct WMD inspections. But Bush wanted war; and the war came. Cole's conclusion is damningly true: "[Bush] had a real offer in the hand, of Saddam's flight. He rejected it. By rejecting it, he will have killed at least a million persons and became one of the more monstrous figures in recent world history.")

Now this is the man whom the Democrats are so slavishly eager to support on Iran. This is the man whose minions they so willingly believe about Iran, having already been lied to in precisely the same fashion about Iraq, by precisely the same kind of honorable, patriotic men of unquestionable integrity. (Colin Powell, anyone?) This is beyond cravenness, beyond cowardice, beyond incompetence, beyond even the most bitterly tragic farce. No, something else is at work here. As we have noted before – echoing the powerful arguments of Arthur Silber – the Democrats are doing this because they want to.

It's the same reason they supported the invasion of Iraq; the same reason they supported Bush's obscene tax cuts for the rich; the same reason they supported the outrageous whitewash of the 9/11 investigation; the same reason they championed the "Bankruptcy Bill" put the screws to working people and the poor; the same reason they supported "Defense of Marriage" bills that legitimize hate and penalize love; the same reason why they rolled over and played dead when not one but two presidential elections were stolen from them. It's because they too, like the Bush and his ilk, worship at the altar of money and power. They too believe that the wealthy and well-connected should order the earth for their pleasure, through war, loot, terror, fraud, rapine – by any means necessary. Their "honor" depends solely on how well they serve this cause, not on how well they uphold their Constitutional responsibilities or live up to the ideas they espouse. (See Silber again for more on this.)

If you oppose aggressive war, if you oppose the unbridled ravages of Money Power, if you stand for the Constitution and the rule of law, then there is no hope to be found in these national Democrats – because they are on the other side. They demonstrate this every day – witness the spectacle at the recent Democratic debate, when the three Establishment-anointed "leading" candidates – Clinton, Obama and Edwards – each said they could not guarantee to stop America's perpetration of the murderous war crime in Iraq by the end of their first term. Think of that. Think of someone watching a vicious thug savagely beating a child, over and over, pounding the child into bloody goo – then declaring that if they chase the thug away and take his place, they will go on beating the child, year after year after year after year.

Similarly, these "serious" candidates refuse to "take any options off the table" in regard to Iran. (Clinton, by the way, voted for Kyl-Lieberman's virtual authorization for aggression; Obama courageously skipped the vote.) Yet as both Gareth Porter and Scott Ritter demonstrate in detail, none of the charges leveled in the amendment – which is of course just a parroting of the Bush Regime's case for war – have been proven; many of them have been disproven. The International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, essentially agrees with Iran's position that the "nuclear case is closed;" after the most exhaustive investigation in the agency's history, the IAEA has "finally assembled enough data to enable them to close the books on the Iranian nuclear program, noting that all substantive questions have been answered and that contrary to the speculative assessments put forward by the Bush administration, it appears that Iran’s nuclear program is, in fact, dedicated to permitted energy-related activities," as Ritter notes.

Once again, something else is at work beneath the public rhetoric. Ritter again, on the charges that Iran's covert Quds Force is directing violence in Iraq:

But fiction often mirrors reality, and in the case of Iran’s Quds Force, the model drawn upon by the U.S. military seems to be none other than America’s own support of anti-Iranian forces, namely the Mujahedin el-Khalk (MEK) operating out of U.S.-controlled bases inside Iraq, and Jundallah, a Baluchi separatist group operating out of Pakistan that the CIA openly acknowledges supporting. Unlike the lack of evidence brought to bear by the U.S. to sustain its claims of Iranian involvement inside Iraq, the Iranian government has captured scores of MEK and Jundallah operatives, along with supporting documents, which substantiate that which the U.S. openly admits: The United States is waging a proxy war against Iran, inside Iran. This mirror imaging of its own terror campaign against Iran to manufacture the perception of a similar effort being waged by Iran inside Iraq against the U.S. has been very effective at negating any Iranian effort to draw attention to the escalation of war-like activities inside its borders.

Ritter also notes the most sinister development growing out of the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to New York: the concentrated, deliberate effort across the Establishment to tie Iran to 9/11. Once again, Hillary Clinton was in the forefront, declaring her horror that the Iranian leader would want to pay his respects at Ground Zero; the "liberal media" giant CBS News weighed in also. Everywhere was heard the refrain "terrorist state, 9/11, terrorist state, 9/11" – the kind of crude hatemongering that even Josef Stalin might have found too blatant. We know that the myth that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11 was the clinching argument for many if not most Americans who supported the invasion of Iraq; certainly, it was the chief motivator for the many U.S. soldiers in the invasion force who told admiring reporters that they were there "as payback for 9/11." The same conflation is being used again, against Iran, and is being insinuated and disseminated by the same players: the serious, respectable American Establishment: the federal government, Congress, the Democratic "opposition," the "liberal media," and right on down the gilded line.

And despite intimations that some military brass are resisting a new act of aggression – not out of moral principle, evidently, but on the practical grounds that it might break the already overstrained armed forces – it must be remembered that the chief mouthpieces relaying the Bush propaganda about Iran's direct involvement in Iraq have been…military brass. As we noted here the other day, "the Bush Regime ruthlessly purges officers who question the Leader's maniacal agenda or stand up too strongly for the honor and well-being of their troops." When Bush and Cheney want to pull the trigger, suitable generals and admirals will be found.

The hammers keep ringing from truth-tellers like Ritter, Silber, Porter, Jon Schwarz and others -- but the nails ain't goin' down. And a house held together by nothing but lies cannot stand.