Hopefully, the Generals will prevent disaster in Iran

From Jeff Huber at the Pen and Sword

I've been saying for some time that the only way the Pentagon might block a strike on Iran would be through key four-star officers resigning in protest. Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter of the Sunday Times reported this week that something like that might be afoot.

Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources…

…“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

[...]

From the sound of things, a majority of the top Pentagon brass thinks a strike on Iran would be a disastrous failure, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates seems to agree with that view. Mr. Bush's chief ally overseas, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is on record as saying it would not "be right to take military action against Iran."

Also see the piece by John Amato at Crooks and Liars, quoting Sy Hersh

Hersh..inside the military, they are planning very seriously at the President's request to attack Iran

They aren't very happy about this getting out:

We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…

Grover Nyquist thinks that going to war with Iran is stupid. But Bush is pushing for it.

Geez! Grover Nyquist! And he thinks the NeoCons have screwed up.
Ryan Powers in Think Progress
In this month’s issue of Vanity Fair, Craig Unger writes... that not all of Bush’s key conservative allies are pleased with the administration’s course on Iran:

“Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn’t happened,” says the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, an influential conservative who backed the Iraq invasion. “And all the things the critics said would happen have happened. [The president’s neoconservative advisers] are effectively saying, ‘Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.’ But after you’ve lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?”

...Richard Perle, a former Bush administration official, has said, “I have very little doubt” that Bush would order “necessary military action” against Iran. “Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office,” wrote American Enterprise Institute analyst Joshua Muravchik.

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Keep telling yourself, "It's not about the oil".

It really has been about the oil.
Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque

The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come... Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.

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What are the Neocons selling?

Walrus Speaks at Sic Semper Tyrannis

...I would like to paraphrase what we have seen and can expect to see in future.

To do so, you need to understand what the NeoCons objectives have been from the outset. They are a little Like Kaiser Wilhelms' reasons for encouraging German militarism from about 1900.

1. Protect the existence and power of the "military Industrial Complex". This has been under threat since the demise of the Soviet Union because people started to demand a "peace Dividend". The result was the PNAC and the idea that America, now being the sole pre-eminent superpower, should maintain this position - in other words keep spending on defence.

2. Demonise Arabs, the existence of an enemy is a pretext by a ruling class for postponing any social change aimed at reversing the massive social inequities between rich and poor in America for example reforming taxation, social security, health care, education, etc. etc. "because we are at war". These issues threaten the rich.

In other words, the entire NeoCon thing is all about maintaining the status quo and keeping the lid on the pressures for reform.

Read the rest.

2007, Year of the NeoCon?

Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

I don't like to fall into full-bore paranoia, but after watching the Bush administration for six years, I'm more inclined to credit conspiracy theories than I am to believe in coincidence. One the eve of Mr. Bush's New Year's announcement about his new Iraq strategy, I more than suspect that America is about to be pushed into a full bore neoconservative policy of militarization from which it will take decades or longer to extract ourselves.

Over at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Larisa Alexandrovna paints a grim and all too likely scenario:

The administration is stalling as it supposedly weighs its Iraq options, when in fact they have already made their decision… One need only look at the slow leaks coming out, not the least of which was Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Washington Post, to understand that we are going to be sending more troops to Iraq…

In the meantime, naval carriers are deployed to send Iran “a warning,” as though the threats thus far and the passing of sanctions are not warning enough. Add to that the detainment of Iranian diplomats invited to Iraq by the Iraqi leadership. Why is the US arresting diplomats invited to a country that the US claims is a sovereign nation governing itself?

…given this entire context, ask yourself again why Saddam Hussein is being executed now, during Hajj even? What is the urgency?

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