from CounterPunch, by Paul Craig Roberts
<<Initially, the Bush Regime denied that Bush’s escalation speech on January 10 signaled that the Regime intends to attack Iran. Now a number of Regime officials have made it clear that Iran, not Iraq, is the focus of the Regime’s war planning. Robert Gates, the new Defense Secretary and member of the Iraq Study Group, was supposedly brought into the Pentagon to de-escalate the war. Gates now says that Iran is the target of US military moves in the Persian Gulf.
<<Suddenly the media is full of Bush Regime propagandistic assertions designed to make the American public believe that Iran is the enemy that is fighting against our troops in Iraq. To facilitate this deception, the Bush Regime staged a propaganda event by invading an Iranian government liaison office in Northern Iraq, kidnapping the Iranian officials and declaring them to be involved in plans to kill US troops.
<<The Bush Regime’s latest big lie is that the US is not winning in Iraq because of Iran. “The Iranians are acting in a very negative way,†alleges the “moderate†Gates. Iraq, the target for the escalation in US troop levels, has dimmed in importance. In the few days since Bush’s “surge†speech, Bush, Cheney, Gates, Rice, and national security advisor Hadley have said far more about Iran than about Iraq. In 2003, the same technique was used by the Bush Regime to shift the public’s attention from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. The technique succeeded to the extent that even today a significant percentage of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
<<Clearly, the Bush Regime expects that it can again deceive the American public. There is no doubt that Iran will be attacked. The Israeli government and the neoconservatives have been demanding it.>>
The rest of the article (
www.counterpunch.com) explains what's in it for Bush. He can bury the defeat and the God-awful blunder of Iraq with a "victory" over Iran. The "nuclear sites" are bombed, Iran wisely does not retaliate, and Bush claims a huge victory and the non-verifiable destruction of Iranian nuclear capabilities. All in time for Rove and his crooked voting machine manufacturers to fix the 2008 elections again.
