| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 4:22 pm Post subject: US military account of Iranian naval incident unravels; yell |
| US military account of Iranian naval incident unravels; yellow journalism continues
Sun, 2008-01-13 19:09. Propaganda and War | Newswire
[from Democracy Now!]
JUAN GONZALEZ: The United States has lodged a formal diplomatic protest against Iran for its “provocation” in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday morning. But new information reveals that the alleged Iranian threat to American naval vessels in the Strait might have been blown out of proportion.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon released video of Iranian patrol boats approaching American warships and an audio recording of a direct threat in English. The accented voice says, “I am coming to you,” and then adds, “You will explode after a few minutes.”
IRANIAN VOICE: I am coming to you.
US NAVAL OFFICER: Inbound small craft, you’re approaching a coalition warship operating in international waters. Your identity is not know. Your intentions are unclear. You’re sailing into danger and may be subject to defensive measures. Request you establish communications now or alter your course immediately to remain clear. Request you alter course immediately to remain clear.
IRANIAN VOICE: You will explode after a few minutes.
US NAVAL OFFICER: “You will explode after a few minutes.”
JUAN GONZALEZ: That was an audio recording released by the Pentagon along with the video of the encounter between American warships and Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz.
But a Navy spokesperson told ABC News Thursday that the threat might not have come from the Iranian patrol boats, but from the shore or another ship passing by. The spokesperson added, “I guess we’re not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we’re not saying it absolutely didn’t.”
Iran has denied all allegations of a confrontation and released its own video of the encounter. This is an excerpt of the Iranian video broadcast on Thursday showing what seems to be a routine exchange between an Iranian Navy patrol boat and the American ship.
IRANIAN NAVAL PATROLMAN: Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian Navy patrol boat. Request side number [inaudible] operating in the area this time. Over.
US NAVAL OFFICER: This is coalition warship 73. I’m operating in international waters.
AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest article for IPS News analyzes how the official US version of the naval incident has begun to unravel. He joins us now from Washington, D.C. Gareth Porter, welcome.
GARETH PORTER: Good morning, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about everything that happened from Sunday, what President Bush said, what the Pentagon was alleging, and now what we understand?
GARETH PORTER: Well, this alleged crisis or confrontation on the high seas is really much less than what met the eyes of the American public as it was reported by news media. And the story really began from leaks from the Pentagon. I mean, there were Pentagon officials apparently calling reporters and telling them that something had happened in the Strait of Hormuz, which represented a threat to American ships and that there was a near battle on the high seas. The way it was described to reporters, it was made to appear to be a major threat to the ships and a major threat of war. And that’s the way it was covered by CNN, by CBS and other networks, as well as by print media.
Then I think the next major thing that happened was a briefing by the commander of the 5th fleet in Bahrain, the Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, which is very interesting. If you look carefully at the transcript, which was not reported accurately by the media, or not reported at all practically, the commander—or rather, Vice Admiral Cosgriff actually makes it clear that the ships were never in danger, that they never believed they were in danger, and that they were never close to firing on the Iranian boats. And this is the heart of what actually happened, which was never reported by the US media.
So I think that the major thing to really keep in mind about this is that it was blown up into a semi-crisis by the Pentagon and that the media followed along very supinely. And I must say this is perhaps the worst—the most egregious case of sensationalist journalism in the service of the interests of the Pentagon, the Bush administration, that I have seen so far.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Gareth Porter, there have been some reports about the apparent splicing of audio onto the actual video that appear to be from two different sources. Could you talk about that?
GARETH PORTER: Well, that’s right. I mean, we don’t yet know exactly what the sequence of events was in this incident. We don’t know exactly when the voices that we hear making what appear to be a threat to the American ships, where—when that occurred in the sequence of events in this incident. And it seems very possible that indeed the Pentagon did splice into the recording, the audio recording of the incident, the two bits of messages from a mysterious voice in a way that made it appear to occur in response to the initial communication from the US ship to the Iranian boats. And it seems very possible that, in fact, those voices came at some other point during this twenty-minute incident.
So this is something that really deserves to be scrutinized and, in fact, investigated by Congress, because of the significance, in the larger sense, of a potential major fabrication of evidence in order to make a political point by the Bush administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter, what about the timing of this, on the eve of President Bush’s visit to the Middle East?
GARETH PORTER: Well, of course, there’s no doubt that the motivation for the Pentagon to blow this incident up was precisely the timing of President Bush leaving on a trip to the Middle East, in which one of his major purposes was to try to keep together a coalition of Arab states, which—a very, very loose and shaky coalition to oppose Iran and to support, hopefully, according to the administration’s policy, the US pressure on Iran through diplomatic and financial means, through the Security Council and through its allies in Europe. So this is definitely part of the reason, very clearly, that what was a very minor incident which did not threaten US ships, as far as we can tell from all the evidence so far, was turned into what was presented as a confrontation and a threat of war.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Gareth Porter, I’d like to ask you, I was watching the Republican debate last night on Fox News and was astonished to see one of the moderators spend quite a bit of time on this topic, questioning every one of the candidates as to whether they believe the Navy commander on the scene did the right thing by not blowing the Iranian boats out of the water. Surprisingly, only Ron Paul, the maverick, even questioned some of the facts of the incident as reported. Your response to this suddenly becoming a topic for the presidential debates?
GARETH PORTER: Well, I think it’s astonishing that you have this incident being regarded as a test of whether the United States is being belligerent enough, when the commanders of the ships themselves clearly did not regard this as a threat to the safety of their ships. This is the point, again, that the commander of the 5th fleet made very clearly. He was asked by reporters whether the commanders were close to firing on the Iranian ships, and he said, “No, that was not the case,” that at no point were they about to fire on the ships and that they did not feel threatened by the Iranian boats. Bear in mind, what has not been reported by the media, that these are essentially small speedboats that are at most armed with machine guns, not with any weapons that were capable of harming those ships.
AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter, this also comes right at the time that new documents have—newly declassified documents have revealed that the Johnson administration faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate the war in Vietnam, to provide a pretext for increased bombing and increased troops there.
GARETH PORTER: Well, you know, this is an incident—the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the policy shenanigans surrounding it are something that I wrote about in my book, Perils of Dominance, about the US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. And what actually happened regarding the Gulf of Tonkin was that the ships, because of anxiety on the part of the crew of these ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, they thought they were under fire originally. They sent back messages saying that.
But within a matter of a couple of hours, the commander of the flotilla had decided that they had been mistaken, and he passed that message on to the Pentagon, and the Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was informed by early afternoon on the same day. And it is my interpretation, based on the evidence, that he failed—he refused to inform President Johnson of that fact, and that’s why Johnson went ahead with a decision to bomb North Vietnam, which had already been made at noontime.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, going back to the incident also, one of the key contradictions now that have surfaced between the initial reports and certainly after the Iranian release of their own video is that initially the public was told that these were Revolutionary Guard boats, and now the Iranian government has said no, that they were actually boats of the Iranian Navy, and they clearly identified themselves as such.
GARETH PORTER: I do not know what the provenance of these Iranian boats was, whether it was IRGC or Iranian Navy. We do have pictures, photographs of the IRGC small speedboats that clearly resemble the boats that are depicted—at least one of them—depicted in the video. But from the evidence that we have right now, it’s really impossible to say what—whether these boats belonged to be on IRGC or not. It is the case, however, that the IRGC does have, apparently, the primary responsibility to patrol in this area of the gulf. I heard yesterday a former commander of the IRGC state very clearly that they do in fact have the primary responsibility to patrol in that area. So it’s certainly the—it’s a possibility, a good possibility, that these were IRGC boats.
AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter, I want to thank you for being with us, investigative historian, writes for Inter Press Service. His latest book is called Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
Source URL: www.democracynow.org/2008/1/11/us_backs_off_claim_of_naval | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 4:23 pm Post subject: Israel won't accept nuke weapons in Iran |
| Israel won't accept nuke weapons in Iran
By LAURIE COPANS, Associated Press WriterMon Jan 14, 8:12 AM ET
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a powerful parliamentary panel on Monday that Israel rejects "no options" to block Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, a meeting participant said.
The statement was the Israeli leader's clearest indication yet that he is willing to use military force against Iran.
"Israel clearly will not reconcile itself to a nuclear Iran," the meeting participant quoted Olmert as telling the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. "All options that prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capabilities are legitimate within the context of how to grapple with this matter."
The meeting participant spoke on condition of anonymity because the session was closed.
Olmert addressed the panel days after discussing Iran's nuclear ambitions in talks with President Bush in Jerusalem.
During that visit, Israeli officials disputed the recently released conclusions of a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
In Jerusalem, Bush declared that Iran remained "a threat to world peace," but reasserted his commitment to trying to resolve the standoff over Iran's nuclear program diplomatically.
Israel, which sent warplanes in 1981 to demolish an unfinished nuclear reactor in Iraq, advocates a diplomatic solution to the Iranian standoff as well. But in his comments to the parliamentary committee, Olmert said: "It's clear that Israel won't reconcile itself to a nuclear Iran. We reject no options a priori."
Israel considers Iran to be its most dangerous enemy and rejects Tehran's insistence that has only a peaceful nuclear program designed to produce energy for civilian uses. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the dissolution of the Jewish state. Iran possesses long-range missiles that are capable of striking Israel and can be fitted with nuclear warheads.
Meir Javedanfar, an Israel-based Iran analyst, said Olmert refused to rule out a military option "in order to increase the urgency to find a diplomatic solution."
"I think this is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's way of making sure that the international community stays alert on the Iranian nuclear issues," Javedanfar said. "The concern in Israel is that after the NIE report, the world is just going to sit and watch Iran continue with its nuclear weapons program."
Two sets of U.N. sanctions have failed to push Iran to abandon its enrichment of uranium, a process that could also be used to develop fissile material for a warhead.
Although Israel successfully knocked out Iraq's nuclear program with a single airstrike 26 years ago, any attack on Iran's nuclear program would be more complicated because its facilities are scattered, with some hidden underground.
Such an attack would also almost certainly unleash an Iranian reprisal against Israel, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf or both. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 11:12 pm Post subject: Bush courts Saudi allies after warning Iran |
| Bush courts Saudi allies after warning Iran (AFP.com)
by Laurent Lozano 49 minutes ago
US President George W. Bush began a visit to close ally Saudi Arabia on Monday to rally support from the regional economic and political powerhouse for his campaign to isolate archfoe Iran.
The president's first visit to the kingdom coincided with notification to Congress in Washington of the administration's intention to sell high-tech weaponry to Riyadh, the first part of a planned 20-billion-dollar arms deal with Gulf Arab states.
Bush, on a tour of the region also aimed at fostering Middle East peace, warned in a keynote speech on Sunday in Abu Dhabi of what he called the threat to the world posed by Iran.
"The United States is strengthening our longstanding security commitments with our friends in the Gulf -- and rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late," he said.
Bush, who flew into Riyadh from Dubai and was embraced by King Abdullah at the airport, also charged that the Islamic republic was "today the world's leading state sponsor of terror".
The US leader landed just hours after French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- who has offered to share civilian nuclear technology with Muslim countries -- wrapped up a visit to Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil producer.
On Monday, Bush and Abdullah dined at the Riyadh palace which also serves as the king's residence.
They will meet again on Tuesday at the monarch's ranch near the capital, before Bush visits Egypt on Wednesday to round off his week-long Middle East tour.
But diplomats said the US and Saudi leaders face "difficult talks" both on Iran and the Middle East conflict.
While Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia has voiced concern over the rise of Shiite Iran, it is opposed to another war after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that has strengthened the Islamic regime in Tehran.
Tensions between Washington and Tehran -- already high over Iran's controversial nuclear programme -- escalated shortly before Bush headed to the region over a confrontation in the strategic Strait of Hormuz between Iranian speedboats and US warships.
Iran lashed out at Bush's speech, saying regional ties would hold strong.
"The declarations of Bush show the desperation and sense of failure in the last months of his presidency," said foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini.
Saudi Arabia itself has called for restraint, with Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal saying: "We are keen that harmony and peace should prevail among states of the region."
Iran and the international community have been at loggerheads for several years over its nuclear drive, which Washington suspects is a cover for ambitions to build atomic weapons -- a charge Tehran denies.
As Bush held talks with the king, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack revealed that Congress had been notified of the administration's intention to sell 900 satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions to Saudi Arabia for 120 million dollars.
The weapons are the first part of a planned 20-billion-dollar deal with the Gulf which the administration announced last July.
The notification kicks off a 30-day period during which Congress can raise objections.
A US official did not deny that the notification had been deliberately timed to coincide with Bush's visit.
The arms deal, which includes weaponry and high-tech munitions, has alarmed Israel and some US Congressmen, especially as Saudi Arabia refuses to recognise the Jewish state.
The administration, which has also announced a 30-billion-dollar military aid pact with Israel, argues the deal with the Saudis is needed to counter the perceived threat from Iran.
The continuing high oil price was also likely to be on the agenda of Bush's talks with the king having already featured in his talks with other Gulf oil producers.
"There has been discussions of oil and energy along with other issues that have come up in these talks," Bush counsellor Ed Gillespie told reporters.
"They talked about the nature of the market and the vast demand that's on the world market today for oil."
Bush and Abdullah are also expected to discuss efforts to combat terrorism, with the US administration believing its ally -- the homeland of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden -- still has "more to do". | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:20 pm Post subject: Petraeus says Iran still training Iraq militants |
| Petraeus says Iran still training Iraq militants (afp.com) - additional rhetoric to get US to go to war with Iran sooner rather than later
by Byran Pearson2 hours, 22 minutes ago
The commander of US forces in Iraq said on Wednesday that Iran was continuing to train militants despite Tehran's pledge to cut all support for the insurgency.
General David Petraeus said he was uncertain if supplies of weapons flowing into Iraq from Iran was decreasing, but said that Iranian training of militants posed a serious threat to Iraq's stability.
Asked whether Iran had stopped the flow of money and weapons into Iraq, Petraeus told reporters: "We honestly don't know, it is unclear. We do know that training (of Iraqi militants in Iran) has continued.
"It is at an important scale, because these are individuals with considerable skill who can train other individuals in Iraq.
"It is a very unhelpful addition to the mix. We call it a lethal accelerant to a situation in Iraq that already has enough challenges."
US President George W. Bush said on Saturday after meeting Petraeus in Kuwait that Iran had to stop supporting the militia special groups that attack Iraqi and coalition forces.
"Iranian agents are in our custody, and we are learning more about how Iran has supported extremist groups with training and lethal aid."
Petraeus, on a visit to the Zurbitiyah border post which lies east of Baghdad on the frontier with Iran, said he was uncertain whether the level of weapons coming into the country from Iran was rising or falling.
"The signature attacks that employ Iranian-provided weapons have decreased substantially," he told a small group of reporters.
"The EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) had been running at a low level until about the first 10 to 12 days of this month, when we saw a noticeable increase but in the last several days they have gone down again.
"We are uncertain if that was a trend or not, so we will just have to watch the scene for a while."
"We are obviously hoping to confirm that the Iranians are living up to their pledges... to stop the funding, training, arming and directing of extremist groups in Iraq. Only time will tell."
Petraeus was inspecting the border post at Zurbitiyah where coalition forces established a presence two years ago in a bid to stop weapons and insurgents from slipping into Iraq.
New technology has been installed at the post to screen trucks, luggage and people. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:29 pm Post subject: Is Bush Losing Control of the Military? Navy report undermin |
| Is Bush Losing Control of the Military? Navy report undermines Bush's efforts to isolate Iran
January 11. 2008
by Chris Gelken
OhmyNews
TEHRAN — The U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet has released a statement saying it cannot say with any certainty that threats to blow up its vessels actually came from Iranian Navy speedboats in Sunday's Straits of Hormuz incident.
The revelation tacitly supports the Iranian version of events, in that it was a normal challenge by Iranian naval officials for the American vessels to identify themselves, and at no time was there any serious danger of an escalation or any hostile action.
According to the commander of the Iranian naval forces, the patrol boats were on a regular patrol when they challenged the three American vessels to identify themselves and declare any helicopter activity in the area.
The U.S. quickly released a video showing Iranian speedboats in close proximity to the warships, with audio that the Iranians claimed was fake.
On Thursday the Iranian Navy released its own footage, taken on board one of the speedboats, showing a radio operator making clear requests in English for identification and activity reports. One of the American vessels can be heard to reply; "This is coalition warship 73, I am operating in international waters."
Shortly after the challenge and the response, the Iranian speedboats left the area.
The incident came as President George W. Bush began his first ever visit to Israel , where he frequently cited the Hormuz incident as further evidence of Iran 's belligerence.
The latest U.S. Navy report, however, appears to suggest quite the opposite, and undermines current efforts by Bush to isolate Iran and build an anti-Tehran alliance among its Arab neighbors.
But the question is: Did the naval commanders deliberately rob their Commander-in-Chief of a timely stick to beat the Iranians with?
"There may have been tendency among the command levels to assume that those radio messages came from the Iranian boats, and their initial reports were based on their assumptions rather on what their equipment actually told them," said Carl Osgood, a Washington-based writer and political analyst.
"I think one possible reason why the admission was made is because there is concern in the American military command about going to war by accident," he said.
There is resistance among the highest levels of the United States military against a war against Iran , Osgood said, "and that could be a source, or a source, of that admission."
He pointed out that Admiral William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, had expressed his opposition to escalating tension with Iran .
Fallon told al-Jazeera television in September, "This constant drum beat of conflict is what strikes me, which is not helpful and not useful. I expect there will be no war and that is what we ought to be working for."
In February 2007, Fallon had expressed strong opposition to the deployment of a third carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf . According to an article written by respected analyst Gareth Porter and published in May 2007, Fallon had once confided that "there would be no war with Iran while I am head of Central Command."
The electronic warfare and signals intelligence teams on the American warships should, at the very least, have been able to instantly identify the direction and relative distance from source of each and every signal coming in. Therefore, it is fair to assume that they knew the Iranians were not responsible for the threats even as the first U.S. Navy reports of the incident were being released.
The U.S. Navy's subsequent admission would suggest that rather than being a correction to a report that was made in haste, in the heat of the moment; an order had come down the line to release the real facts of the incident, whether or not they damaged or contradicted statements being made by the President of the United States.
So is Bush, the Commander-in-Chief, losing control of the U.S. military? Perhaps, given the growing opposition in the armed forces to expanding the war, and the fact that Bush's rhetoric against Iran is frequently at odds with reality.
"What we have to keep in mind is the intention of the Bush administration, particularly from Vice President Dick Cheney that for at least the past two years their intention has been to trigger another war in the region, this time targeting Iran ," said Osgood, "and that's the background for this latest incident."
Osgood noted the historical precedents, such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that broadened America 's involvement in South East Asia and the Vietnam War.
"In the United States there is definitely a political faction that is very concerned that this administration is looking for any pretext for war, and it is one of the elements of an impeachment resolution that was introduced into the House a couple of months ago in November, calling for the impeachment and removal from office of Vice President Dick Cheney," Osgood said, "so there are political splits over the question of war with Iran." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:36 pm Post subject: Bush and U.S. Reviled and Detested in the Middle East |
| Bush and U.S. Reviled and Detested in the Middle East
The End of the Road for George W. Bush
AP photo / David Furst, pool
President Bush, center, listens to Franciscan priests as they overlook the Sea of Galilee in the ancient village of Capernaum, Israel.
By Chris Hedges
January 13, 2008
The Gilbert and Sullivan charade of statesmanship played out by George W. Bush and his enabler, Condoleezza Rice, as they wander the Middle East is a fitting end to seven years of misrule. Despots stripped of power are transformed from monsters into buffoons. And this is the metamorphosis that is eating away at the Bush presidency.
Bush stood in Jerusalem, uncomfortable and palpably bored. He mouthed platitudes about a peace settlement that mocked the humanitarian crisis he aided and abetted in Gaza, the rapacious land grab by Israel in the West Bank and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The diminished George Bush, increasingly irrelevant at home and abroad, is fading into insignificance. A year from now one half expects to see him stand up at the next president’s inauguration and screech “I’m melting! I’m melting!” as he sinks into a puddle of slime. He will return, I expect, to his ranch, where he will be able to spend the rest of his life doing the only task for which he has shown any aptitude—cutting down brush with a chain saw.
He may yet rise again to torment us with an attack on Iran, condemning more innocents to slaughter. He and his cigar-smoking soul mate Ehud Olmert would like to go out with one more flash of mayhem and violence. But even this will not ultimately save him. Bush will soon be reduced to the cipher he once was, left to spend the rest of his life trying to salvage a legacy of shame and deceit. In a just world he would be put on trial, if not by the International Criminal Court of Justice then by the U.S. Congress. He would be forced to face up to his lies and wars of aggression. But the moral rot that infects the nation has seeped into the bowels of the legislative as well as the executive branch.
World leaders, including those whom Bush desperately wants to intimidate, now dismiss him. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said a few days ago that relations with the United States are of “no benefit to the Iranian nation. The day such relations are of benefit, I will be the first one to approve of that.”
Bush will have flown from Israel to Palestine to Kuwait to Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia to Egypt in search of a legacy, one that he hopes will lift up his name in history. But, isolated and deluded, he has yet to grasp that he and the United States are reviled and detested for our violence, arrogance and greed. The bands played on the tarmac. He was toasted at state dinners. But even our allies, including Kuwait and Egypt, know Bush is a danger to himself and others.
He publicly displayed his inability to connect rhetoric with reality. He promised peace and cooperation, a new era, a Palestinian homeland. He promised solutions that will arise from negotiations that do not exist. Negotiations, in his eyes, are always about to begin. They were about to begin a year ago. They were about to begin with Annapolis. They are about to begin now. The messy issues between the Israelis and Palestinians that he and his administration have never attempted to address—the borders, the expanding Jewish settlements and outposts, the plight of Palestinian refugees and Jerusalem—will all be seamlessly solved ... one day. But the brutal reality of the Israeli occupation barrels forward. The Jewish settlements and outposts continue to be expanded. The crisis in Gaza, with the cuts in fuel and electricity, the deadly army incursions and airstrikes, has turned the world’s largest walled prison into a swamp of human misery. And huge new settlements, like Har Homa, continue to rise up on Palestinian soil.
When Bush met with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah he blithely defended the patchwork of Israeli roadblocks that have turned the West Bank into a series of ringed Palestinian ghettos. The roadblocks, he told Abbas, are necessary for Israeli security. He announced that the 1949 Green Line, the borders established by the United Nations, would never be restored. There would be no discussion, he said, of the status of Jerusalem. And the plight of Palestinian refugees would be solved by setting up an international fund, meaning, of course, that none would ever return. In short, he offered an unequivocal endorsement of right-wing Israeli policy with not a murmur of dissent. And the Palestinians can either have it rammed down their throat or rot. Bush will be back, he has promised, in May to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state. Olmert, no doubt, will again be fulsome in his praise, which is probably what Bush’s trip to the Middle East is, at its core, really about. Bush desperately wants someone to pretend with him that he is an agent for peace and statesmanship. Olmert, who knows the callow American leader will give him everything he desires, is happy to oblige.
But as Bush basks in the glow of his own fantasy, the suffering in Gaza, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, along with the savage occupation of Iraq, continues to fuel widespread anger and rage. Bush has spent his time in office bolstering the Middle East’s most despotic regimes, including that of Gen. Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. He approved a $20-billion arms package for these states. He has backed efforts to crush mainstream Islamic groups that have electoral legitimacy and popular support. He has stood by as these regimes have stifled democratic dissent, and he has, with Israeli encouragement, isolated governments, even friendly governments, in the Middle East that raised feeble protests. But his day is past. There is open revolt. Opinion polls show that two-thirds of Palestinians, and three-fourths of Israelis, do not believe Bush can affect events in the Palestinian territories.
The agenda of the Bush White House is exposed as irrelevant, myopic and counterproductive. Most Arab countries are in open defiance of Washington and are actively reaching out to Iran.
“As long as they [Iran] have no nuclear program ... why should we isolate Iran? Why punish Iran now?” Arab League Secretary-General Abu Moussa told The Washington Post.
The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, is in Iran for talks. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended December’s Gulf Cooperation Council summit. The Iranian president attended the just-completed hajj in Mecca at the invitation of the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah. Tehran is exploring the resumption of diplomatic ties with Egypt, cut since the 1979 revolution, and has offered to cooperate with Cairo in the production of nuclear energy. And the Syrian and Lebanese governments have ignored Washington’s warnings to sever ties with Hezbollah and Hamas.
It is the end of the road for George Bush. The world takes less and less notice of him. He strutted and swaggered across the stage. He bellowed and raged. He plundered and murdered. And now he wants to be anointed as a peacemaker. His presidency, like his life, has been a tragic waste. But he at least he has a life. There are tens of thousands of mute graves in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan that stand as stark testaments to his true legacy. If he wants to redeem his time in office he should kneel before one and ask for forgiveness.
Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author most recently of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” can be found every other Monday on Truthdig. He is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.
This story can be viewed online at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080113_the_end_of_the_road_for_george_w_bush/ | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
