and this one:At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. “They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something we would be forced to retaliate for,” says Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. …
A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident’s spiraling into a crisis are higher than they’ve been in years.
Well, you figure it out yet?? Maybe this will help: it is the same thang that puts the neo-cons, AIPAC, the furthest-right Straussian/Randian objectivist libertarians, expansively large US energy corporations, and the military/security state industrial economy all in bed together. Still don't see it?Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) announced his candidacy for president in Springfield, IL, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” address. In his speech, Obama reiterated his call to redeploy U.S. forces out of Iraq by March 2008.
This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol attacked Obama’s Iraq policy, saying he wants to appease terrorists like pro-slavery politician Stephen Douglas tried to appease slave-owners. Kristol said, “Obama’s speech is a ‘can’t we get along’ speech — sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858.
Given the near-exponentially expanding problems created by global climate change, the profusion of treatment resistant bacteria and viral agents, the dessimation and desertization of huge tracts of necessary arable and fertile land, and the collapse of the oceans, the reality that the planet can no longer sustain billions of human beings, requires those completely void of ethical responsibility (the Randian call of the selfish) and swathed in amorality to demand that the US military take any action necessary (including nuclear war) to secure control of the earth's energy and water resources. These people realize that only through direct confrontation will they themselves be able to hold onto power, to survive with most of their assets, property, and lifestyles intact, while millions upon millions suffer and die.
This 5% of the population is controlling every aspect of US governance at this moment. They know that a US economic collapse is potentially imminent if other than US dollars are demonstrated to be the currency of preference for the rest of the planet. To keep USD in the flow, and to artificially maintain the economy for themselves and their own selfish greed, these folks are willing to unleash the full dogs of war, not only against Iran and the rest of the middle-East, but also threaten and demand obediance from Russia and China. The oil of the middle east is the most efficient to refine, a light crude easy to pump, easy to transport, and easy to convert to products. The rest of the world's reserves are heavy and super heavy; they require nearly as much energy to refine as they produce at enormous expense. The other than US powers of the planet want middle-eastern crude now and are willing to pay for it not using USD, but Euros and Yuan. This is a huge problem.
Congress will do nothing, knowing as they do, that their own lives are part and parcel of the group that will enjoy the outcome of US control of planetary resources. This is, and will never be, about the citizens. This war, these ongoing efforts to expand and increase the war, is for control of the future in their views. When all is said and done, the US will be a nation of two groups. A few million extraordinarily wealthy people living in superb luxury, free to do anything as they please, and hundreds of millions living in environmental collapse, abject poverty, deep depressive pandemics of diseases and hazardous/toxic ravages. The rich and powerful are asking the rest of us to keep them that way at our own expense, as long as we don't know why.
