While America continues failing spectacularly in Iraq---despite pumping ungodly amounts of money into the venture---its eye wanders to Iraq's neighbor, Iran. The lads in charge of the States have been grinding their war machine forward for months, nearly years, pumping themselves up, convincing themselves---which isn't very hard---that this war will be much easier, that this war will go as planned, that this war will have a plan and that this war will be the beginning of the end of the Arabic stronghold on the Middle East. Flowers and dividend payouts for everyone! <h>Sparking Iran</h> <img attachment="cwjmo070222.gif" align="left" class="frame" caption="Moving On...">To that end, the Bush administration and all that goes with it has offered up the image of itself as a snarling dog, bristling with fear and anger, slobbering its hate in a growing pool, held back only by the thinnest of frayed ropes, waiting for Iran to step over the line and make a complete flattening and takeover of the country the most moral possible outcome. Ahmadinejad, with a glint of madness in his own eye, as well as a complete and utter disregard for the wishes of the people he ostensibly represents, has thus far utterly ignored the danger and, in fact, baited it further. As Jon Stewart recently said: <iq>Hey, Ahmadinejad ... we're trying like crazy to keep Sir Bombs-a-lot from flattening your country, but you're not really helping at all.</iq> Now, it seems that the country that has emerged as the American lapdog of the 21st century, England, may take the first steps (as detailed in <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=10748" source="Antiwar" author="Ray McGovern">Brinkmanship Unwise in Uncharted Waters</a>). Iran recently captured 15 British soldiers from a patrol vessel---supposedly in Iranian waters. Whether they were or not makes no real difference; it's sheer hypocrisy to imagine that the Brits would handle an Iranian military vessel found floating just outside their territory and differently, to say nothing of the mushroom cloud the Americans would raise were it to happen near their shores. With America---and, hence, Britain---just looking for any excuse to bomb Iran back to the stone age<fn>, this does not bode well. In what can only be the kind of coincidence that needs a lot of help to happen, a threat Congress made recently to get itself a backbone and actually execute the duties accorded to it by the Constitution has been rescinded. <bq>...the Democrats last week refused to include in the current House bill on Iraq war funding proposed language forbidding the White House from launching war on Iran without explicit congressional approval.</bq> As the Bush Administration has made abundently clear, a failure to explicitly forbid something is as good as an implicit sanction. With Congress leaving the can of lighter fluid on the table and Britain dashing into the room with a pack of matches, it's not hard to connect the dots to reveal Bush grinning by the light of yet another conflagration. Blair, for his part, seems happy to finish out his term with a bang, pretending to care about the captured soldiers, but not doing anything at all in his power to actually get them home safe (like acknowledging that the boundary he claims the boat never crossed <iq>is a fake with no legal force</iq>). To carry the Vietnam analogy over to fresh territory, we may, in the near future, be looking back on this incident as the Iran war's "Gulf of Tonkin"<fn>. <h>Missiles for Russia</h> As if two unsuccessful wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, with a third in the offing, Iran, weren't enough, the Bush administration is antagonizing Russia as well. After the dance to the fiscal death that was the Cold War, the complete collapse of Russian society and ensuing wholesale piracy of its economy by the West and a few enterprising, amoral Russians, things seemed somewhat patched up between the countries. Bush had found Putin, <iq>looked into his soul</iq>, and seen a kindred spirit who likewise had no regard for the poor and underprivileged. One by one, Eastern European nations, the former bulkhead against further European insanity<fn>, democratized or joined the EU. Former parts of Russia, now called "satellites", organized themselves into independent nations. Much of the military hardware forming the bristling western front of Russia was dismantled or became a good deal less organized. Regardless of the reason behind it, this decrease in military tension was a good thing. So, now that Russia is acting like one of the staunchest allies of the US and even holds many of the same goals---ignoble though they may be---the US is leaping into the breach to show just who the biggest jerk on the planet really is. Not happy with an ungodly number of missiles deployed in the continental 48<fn> and who knows how many nuclear warheads riding around the world in submarines, the Bush administration is pushing forward with installing a new missile defense network in Europe itself. The missiles are to be aimed in the general direction of North Korea and Iran. The US would have the world---and Russia in particular---believe that this is to counter possible attacks against America from these arch-fiends. The fact that all of Russia also happens to lie in that direction is the purest coincidence. It's unknown who---besides easily terrified Americans---actually believes that either North Korea or Iran could lob a missile 1,000 miles, much less the 10,000 required to reach America. This is not Hollywood and it's not that bloody simple; odds are that neither country will ever have the capability, even if they were not hampered in any way in pursuing that goal. This story should still be fresh in people's minds from 5 years ago, when it was last peddled to justify the Iraqi invasion<fn>. Putin, needless to say, was not amused. He is far from being a stupid man and is, in actuality, not similar to Bush at all. He is feeling quite in control of a Russia whose class and economic structure are looking increasingly like those of America: a lot of money at the top, with a whole bunch of people at the bottom forming a lower-class engine. That the two countries arrived at this situation from opposite ends of the spectrum changes nothing; in fact, it is perhaps Russia that is less over-extended in its finances. Were there to be a new nuclear buildup, a 21st-century pissing contest, it is likely that the vastly overextended United States may be the first to cave in. This is not really a big secret, so look for more and more countries eager to put an end to US empirical posturing---countries like China and Iran---to put more effort into normalizing and extending relations with Russia. As usual, the US doesn't lack for brazenness or lack of subtelty---they expect the world to believe that the US is doing this for everyone's own good, a selfless act of military aid to less fortunate countries, covering countries like <iq>France, Germany, Italy - all countries that need to be protected. Even western Russia as well.</iq> Only the strictest diplomatic training kept everyone in the room from bursting into laughter. This issue is only in its infancy, with the Pentagon having announced plans to the general public only in the last few days. At least in this case the US is in diplomatic contact with Russia, in contrast to the situation with Iran, where the US is seriously hoping to carpet-bomb a country flat without having spoken to it officially for decades. It's madness, but it's happening. This is the world that empire built. One would question the US ability to even pay for an attack on Iran or to deploy missiles in Europe were it not for the nearly $1 trillion budget allocation for all things military in 2007. It seems there's always enough cash on hand for the really important things. <hr> <ft>An act which, curiously, is not considered savage by civilized society, at least not in the way that the beheading of a single individual is. Bombing from 20,000 feet is surgical and precise; slaughtering thousands with tons of bombs is too abstract to comprehend as a crime---especially when we're the ones doing it.</ft> <ft>The famously faked attack on a US vessel that we used as an excuse to enter armed conflict with Vietnam.</ft> <ft>Many forget all too quickly how many Russians died in both world wars. The Russian desire to shield itself against Europe with other countries, though not reasonable, is wholly understandable.</ft> <ft>The contiguous 48 states forming the many body of the United States, for foreign readers.</ft> <ft>At the time, Condaleeze Rice famously spoke of <iq>mushroom clouds</iq> over America and Bush spoke of WMD-carrying Iraqi drone planes arriving within 30 minutes. These are capabilities possessed by only one nation on the planet and even <i>our</i> stuff doesn't work half the time.</ft>