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by Ray McGovern
It is an exceedingly dangerous time. Vice President Dick Cheney and his hard-core "neo-conservative" protégés in the administration and Congress are pushing harder and harder for President George W. Bush, isolated from reality, to honor the promise he made to Israel to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.On Sept. 23, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned pointedly:
"If we escalate tensions, if we succumb to hysteria, if we start making threats, we are likely to stampede ourselves into a war [with Iran], which most reasonable people agree would be a disaster for us…I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq."
So why the pressure for a wider war in which any victory will be Pyrrhic-for Israel and for the U.S.? The short answer is arrogant stupidity; the longer answer-what the Chinese used to call "great power chauvinism"-and oil.
The truth can slip out when erstwhile functionaries write their memoirs (the dense pages of George Tenet's tome being the exception). Kudos to the still functioning reportorial side of the Washington Post, which on Sept. 15, was the first to ferret out the gem in former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan's book that the Iraq war was "largely about oil."
But that's okay, said the Post's editorial side (which has done yeoman service as the White House's Pravda) the very next day. Dominating the op-ed page was a turgid piece by Henry Kissinger, serving chiefly as a reminder that there is an excellent case to be made for retiring when one reaches the age of statutory senility.
Dr. Kissinger described as a "truism" the notion that "the industrial nations cannot accept radical forces dominating a region on which their economies depend." (Curious. That same truism was considered a bad thing, when an integral part of the "Brezhnev Doctrine" applied to Eastern Europe.)
What is important here is that Kissinger was speaking of Iran, which-in a classic example of pot calling kettle black-he accuses of "seeking regional hegemony."
What's going on here seems to be a concerted effort to get us accustomed to the prospect of a long, and possibly expanded war.
Don't you remember? Those terrorists, or Iraqis, or Iranians, or jihadists…whoever…are trying to destroy our way of life.
The White House spin machine is determined to justify the war in ways they think will draw popular support from folks like the well-heeled man who asked me querulously before a large audience, "Don't you agree that several GIs killed each week is a small price to pay for the oil we need?"
Consistency in U.S. Policy?
The Bush policy toward the Middle East is at the same time consistent with, and a marked departure from, the U.S. approach since the end of World War II.
Given ever-growing U.S. dependence on imported oil, priority has always been given to ensuring the uninterrupted supply of oil, as well as securing the state of Israel. The U.S. was, by and large, successful in achieving these goals through traditional diplomacy and commerce.
Granted, it would overthrow duly elected governments, when it felt it necessary-as in Iran in 1953, after its president nationalized the oil. But the George W. Bush administration is the first to start a major war to implement U.S. policy in the region.
Just before the March 2003 attack, Chas Freeman, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia for President George H.W. Bush, explained that the new policy was to maintain a lock on the world's energy lifeline and be able to deny access to global competitors.
Freeman said the new Bush administration "believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them" and that, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. is uniquely able to shape global events-and would be remiss if it did not do so.
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