One More Time

This is a busy week and there is a lot I have to get accomplished this week before I have a couple of weeks in Indianapolis but there is something very important going on and I want to make sure the few readers who do stop by here don't miss out on it. Maybe if enough of us get the ugly truth out in the open?

Cheney, with Bush following meekly behind, is about to take the next step outlined in the PNAC. Expect the U.S. to attack Iran, probably before spring is over. All of the symptoms are appearing just as they did with the run up to the attack on Iraq. There are some excellent sources you should be following on a daily basis. Jeff Huber over at Pen and Sword is on top of the bullshit being spread from his excellent military perspective. McJoan at Dkos is, as always, paying attention. You might also consider getting another view of the news from the foreign press.

Most of all it is important to watch for the fnords. In an excellent post at Dkos Stagarite reminds us of the concept coined by the late Robert Anton Wilson and examines propaganda in its light in I have seen the fnords.

It is very hard to accept that our government has been hijacked by insane people. It is very hard to accept that virtually everything we hear from the government with respect to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and soon Iran are webs of half truth, outright lies and propaganda meant to blind us to the tragedy of war and make us support more and more of it. Accept it you must or you will just follow the homicidal maniacs running our country blindly into the next useless and reckless war.

You need to get this into your head and not ever lose sight of it. This simple thought should filter every thing you see and hear from the media or government.

Our leaders are insane and drunk with power. They have led our great country far astray and if we follow them will lead us to further and final destruction. Everything they say is a lie until proven otherwise. Don't ever underestimate their capacity for evil and hate.

Even though I am horribly ashamed to say it, take the above paragraph to heart, it will serve you well. I'll leave you with a dose of Krugman.

First, you’d set up a special intelligence unit to cook up rationales for war. A good model would be the Pentagon’s now-infamous Office of Special Plans, led by Abram Shulsky, that helped sell the Iraq war with false claims about links to Al Qaeda.

Sure enough, last year Donald Rumsfeld set up a new “Iranian directorate” inside the Pentagon’s policy shop. And last September Warren Strobel and John Walcott of McClatchy Newspapers — who were among the few journalists to warn that the administration was hyping evidence on Iraqi W.M.D. — reported that “current and former officials said the Pentagon’s Iranian directorate has been headed by Abram Shulsky.”

Next, you’d go for a repeat of the highly successful strategy by which scare stories about the Iraqi threat were disseminated to the public.

This time, however, the assertions wouldn’t be about W.M.D.; they’d be that Iranian actions are endangering U.S. forces in Iraq. Why? Because there’s no way Congress will approve another war resolution. But if you can claim that Iran is doing evil in Iraq, you can assert that you don’t need authorization to attack — that Congress has already empowered the administration to do whatever is necessary to stabilize Iraq. And by the time the lawyers are finished arguing — well, the war would be in full swing.

Finally, you’d build up forces in the area, both to prepare for the strike and, if necessary, to provoke a casus belli. There’s precedent for the idea of provocation: in a January 2003 meeting with Prime Minster Tony Blair, The New York Times reported last year, President Bush “talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire.”

In the end, Mr. Bush decided that he didn’t need a confrontation to start that particular war. But war with Iran is a harder sell, so sending several aircraft carrier groups into the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf, where a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident could all too easily happen, might be just the thing.

O.K., I hope I’m worrying too much. Those carrier groups could be going to the Persian Gulf just as a warning.

But you have to wonder about the other stuff. Why would the Pentagon put someone who got everything wrong on Iraq in charge of intelligence on Iran? Why wasn’t any official willing to take personal responsibility for the reliability of alleged evidence of Iranian mischief, as opposed to being an anonymous source? If the evidence is solid enough to bear close scrutiny, why were all cameras and recording devices, including cellphones, banned from yesterday’s Baghdad briefing?

It’s still hard to believe that they’re really planning to attack Iran, when it’s so obvious that another war would be a recipe for even bigger disaster. But remember who’s calling the shots: Dick Cheney thinks we’ve had “enormous successes” in Iraq.

Updated 2/14 to correct a spelling error