The US media is unrepentant and so is the US Congress. It’s not enough that both of these institutions played controversial roles in misleading the country into the Iraq war, now they may also be working together to get the US into war in Iran. Since neither the media nor Congress has really felt any backlash from the US taxpayer over the Iraq war they perhaps feel that if it was that easy the first time, why not do it again. The American public has actually demanded very little in the way of explanation or reform from either the media or Congress, who created and pushed the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and then voted to give the President the power to declare, and to prosecute a preemptive war, with little or no Congressional oversight. The media and Congress probably don’t understand why they should stop with a war in Iraq, when it’s so easy to use the same smoke and mirrors to continue their possibly paid service to Israel, by also getting the US to attack Iran, the country that’s next on Israel’s list of Muslim countries that must be eliminated as a competing military power.
This same media and US Congress, having just carried out another policy takeover, this time forcing an end to the Dubai ports deal with just enough screaming fire in the theatre to get the Patriot Act passed with very little serious reform, just might be at it again. I guess when you can no longer use 9/11 terror to get the people of the United States to do your bidding, trumped up fears about Arabs overseeing our ports will do. One has to wonder why the talk show patriots who stoked and fanned the fear, are ok with communist China controlling west coast ports, and in the case of China, we are literally talking about the Chinese military, but it just terrifies the media and Congress to imagine Arabs at the ports, and especially Arabs that recognized the Taliban government when it took control of Afghanistan, even though the United States also recognized, and cooperated with that same Taliban government. As bad as that bit of hypocrisy and fear mongering is, it pales in comparison to the likelihood that the next big event to be staged by our media and Congress, might be another preemptive attack, but this time against Iran. How many more of our children must die in preemptive wars to satiate Israel’s Arab and Muslim blood lust, before the people of this country will wake up?
For months now, nearly everyone who is attempting to keep up with media and Congressional gamesmanship or rather warmongering, has examined every possible angle that might be used to create public support, fake evidence and a cause for another war. Most have looked seriously at ways that the media and Congress might trump up the nuclear energy threat in the same way that they ramped up the Iraq nuclear weapons threat. Maybe analysts have been giving the media and Congress too much credit. They have imagined that the media and Congress have maintained enough respect for the American people, and our elected President, that they must come up with some clever way to create the impression of an imminent threat of some type. That was last time. This time it seems that they will simply resort to fixing polls, and public beating. Not real physical beating, but rather beating by media criticism, innuendo, humiliation and questionable poll results.
As the pressure for war mounts, Bush’s numbers in the polls are reaching historic lows, and comparisons with the impeached Richard Nixon are becoming more frequent. Every time Condoleeza Rice, or John Bolton issue another warning about the threat of Iran’s nuclear energy program to the US, the media gives the war drum another thump, and the Congress gives the high hat a ping. It’s a vaudeville routine, old and played out, yet we still buy tickets to this show where we are the clowns. How will Ms. Rice explain her role in leading us into war in Iran, when she has yet to explain how she supposedly misplaced, prior to 9/11, an intelligence brief warning that Bin Laden was poised to attack the US? How will she explain a war in Iran, that might be launched based upon the same threatened mushroom cloud that she said we would awaken too if we didn’t attack Iraq unilaterally, and without UN or Congressional cover? Did she forget that no one has found the WMD that she claimed was being hidden in Iraq, or the nuclear missile that was supposedly aimed at the US that didn’t even exist? No matter. Neither logic nor an explanation is needed. All they need this time around is a desperate man who wants to be President for three more years. Problem is, that Bush doesn’t look, or act like he’s a desperate man, and that might be our only hope.
President Bush, even if he’s unpopular right now because of the escalation of violence in Iraq and the threat of civil war, he needn’t feel that an attack on Iran will get him anything different than the attack on Iraq did. By now we should have learned that Israel’s use for its US proxy army is limited. Once we have invaded Iran, and created chaos there, Israel will no longer have any need for us until its time to attack Syria. As it waits for Syria to ripen, it will humiliate the US to even greater degrees, just as it has done during the war in Iraq through the Abu Ghraib scandal, Guantanamo, and other embarrassing incidents that served to diminish US credibility and international prestige, and increase our national debt, while enriching, and also emboldening Israel.
Many people credited Bush for buying time during the lead up to the Iraq invasion by going to Congress and the UN, and also allowing time for the charade of a UN attempt at further weapons inspections. That extra time could have made a difference if the Arab League had not failed to do its part to help arrange Saddam Hussein’s requested exile. Few, if anyone even knew that Hussein had chosen exile over invasion, or that it wasn’t the US that dropped the ball that led ultimately to the invasion, rather than exile, and the subsequent fall of Iraq, since neither the US or the Arab media reported that very significant bit of information until recently.
Our country needs our President to be strong for us again. The only thing that makes a media beating less painful, and the treachery of old friends more bearable, is when you get beat up for good reasons, and along with new, and better friends. An entire world of people who are tired of war, and fear and hate and warmongering will stand with Bush if he resists the temptation to go to war for media manufactured popularity, and the cooperation of a Congress that might look completely different come November. His test is to choose between fear and hope. I’m betting that he will choose hope, and that he will use his next three years as President to steer the world carefully through these troubled times, and ultimately to peace. Our test is to decide whether we will help the media, and a fickle Congress to destroy him by forcing him into another war, or whether we can be his new friends who will stand with him, and win.
