Bush and Cheney: All Dressed up and no Place to Go
Center for Research on Globalization, Canada
by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay Global Research
“The leader whose thinking process most resembles [Adolf] Hitler’s is our own president. —Like Hitler, (George W.) Bush’s ideological beliefs have blinded him to reality, and like Hitler, he seems impervious to advice that conflicts with his beliefs.” — Charley Reese
“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. ” — Plato, (428/427-348/347 B.C.), ancient Greek philosopher
“If the war is enlarged in the next 20 months to include Iran— if that happens—for the next 20 years the United States is going to be bogged down in a war which spans Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then you can forget about American global leadership.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter
For many months, the Bush-Cheney administration and its Neocon allies in Congress and in the media have been inching toward a fresh new war against Iran, possibly using nuclear weapons, under the same flimsy pretext that it had used, in 2003, to launch an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. The military gear had been positioned, with three full armadas in or around the Gulf of Hormuz, and the propaganda machine was running full time to persuade the American people that a state of perpetual war was in their interests.
But something happened on the road to war. On December 3, Michael McConnell, Director of the National Intelligence Council, dropped a political bomb. His office—in close collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the fifteen other U.S. Intelligence agencies, regrouped under the umbrella of the United States Intelligence Community (IC)—issued a devastating report about the veracity of the claims made for months by the Administration that Iran was actively engaged in developing a nuclear arms program. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report said, “We judge that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program….We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007.” The Director of the US National Council issued also a most unusual statement, saying that “the decision to release an unclassified version of the key judgments of this NIE [report] was made when it was determined that doing so was in the interest of our nation’s security. The Intelligence Community is on the record publicly with numerous statements based on our 2005 assessment on Iran. Since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.” In other words, even if the Intelligence Community felt that the disclosure would undermine a key Bush-Cheney policy, they were ready to go public with the damaging report for the sake of national interest. [more]