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Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Isn't It Iranic

Fred Kaplan's trust is sweet, if entirely misplaced, regarding the supposedly beneficial effects of the NIE. I'm not sure how many times you have to explain it to these people -- the Cheneyites are never going to let inconvenient "facts" and "details" and "repudiations" get in the way of their idée fixe. If they have to swim in Podhoretzian lunacy regarding the CIA's traitorousness -- forgetting of course that the CIA has already knocked over Iran once before, scarcely fifty years ago -- so be it. They count on and encourage their fan base to be ignorant and reflexive over these things.

Biden deserves credit so far for being willing to speak a bit more proactively about the venality, if not the outright stupidity, of these people. I'm not sure who's the bigger idiot, Bush for seriously saying that his DNI walked in and said there was new and important information about Iran without telling him what that information was, or anyone who believes a word he says about anything anymore.

These people are liars, buffoons, imbeciles. Why do presumably intelligent people think that a rational, logical event will simply stop them from what they've wanted for years?

Two things that I have not yet seen entering the conversation regarding Iran and nukes, and given the state of the media, I have no hope for seeing them raised:
  1. The presidency of Iran is very much a figurehead position. "Taking out" Ahmadinejad is a different matter than, say, rolling Hugo Chàvez down the road. The country is actually run by a council of mullahs, who appear to alternately ignored, despised, and/or revered by the citizens, depending on where they are in the food chain. It is a more complicated matter than simply "replacing" Ahmadinejad.


  2. Much talk about "potential" and "weaponization" and "knowledge", but no talk whatsoever about whence the knowledge and infrastructure came. Pakistani national hero A.Q. Khan is generally credited with giving them what weaponization knowledge they do have, and Russia's own Bill Pooty-Poot, he of the transparent soul-eyes, has undertaken several cooperative agreements to help the Iranians build facilities and infrastructure.

Should these small facts be brought up somewhere along the line in due consideration of whether we should attack yet another country we know nothing about for no goddamned reason, or should we continue to thumb our dicks and pretend that Cheney and Bush and the rest of them will be cowed by something as inconsequential as evidence?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, I don't know - as I've made clear many times before, I'm no optimist on my best day, but I have trouble believing that even this crew will have the plums to try anything now. In 2003, he had a fair amount of trust and a lot of wait-and-see ambivalence backing him up. Plus, what were we going to do once it came out that there were no WMD - call for a do-over? Retroactively take back the invasion? This time, they got pantsed before they could start anything. It's hard to see how they could look like anything other than literal, true Hitlers should they do anything now. Sure, there's the true believers who will always be in the bunker with George and Dick to the bitter end, but I have a strange feeling this is all just embarrassed bluster, that they know they've lost their chance to act. I hope I'm right.

Of course, there is the bottomless bovine apathy of the Murican people to consider...

Heywood J. said...

I hope you're right too, but I don't think these people have the capacity for embarrassment, and I don't think a Gulf of Tonkin-type of contrived incident is beneath them.

Oddly, I think what it all really depends on is whether they have the generals supporting them. Most of the Hersh reports over the past year indicates that support as being extremely iffy, and nobody's going to stake their reputation on these chumps this time around.

It's just a matter of muscle and gall, so we'll see. But again, I put absolutely nothing beneath these people.