The White House decision to authorize the aggressive steps against Iranians in Iraq appears to formalize the American effort to contain Iran’s ambitions as a new front in the Iraq war. Administration officials now describe Iran as the single greatest threat the United States faces in the Middle East, though some administration critics regard the talk about Iran as a diversion, one intended to shift attention away from the spiraling chaos in Iraq.Experience has shown, especially with this administration, that if they tell you "Oh, we have no plans whatsoever" to do something, you've caught them red-handed and they're well on the way to doing it.
In adopting a more confrontational approach toward Iran, Mr. Bush has decisively rejected recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that he explore negotiations with Tehran as part of a new strategy to help quell the sectarian violence in Iraq.
In the interview on Friday, Ms. Rice described the military effort against Iranians in Iraq as a defensive “force protection mission,” but said it was also motivated by concerns that Iran was trying to further destabilize the country.
Mr. Bush’s public warning to Iran was accompanied by the deployment of an additional aircraft carrier off Iran’s coast and advanced Patriot antimissile defense systems in Persian Gulf countries near Iran’s borders. Both the White House and the secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, insisted Friday that the United States was not seeking to goad Iran into conflict, and that it had no intention of taking the battle into Iranian territory. The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, warned reporters away from “an urban legend that’s going around” that Mr. Bush was “trying to prepare the way for war” with Iran or Syria.
Mr. Gates said that the United States did not intend to engage in hot pursuit of the operatives into Iran.
“We believe that we can interrupt these networks that are providing support, through actions inside the territory of Iraq, that there is no need to attack targets in Iran itself,” Mr. Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I continue to believe what I told you at the confirmation hearing,” he added, referring to last month’s hearings on his nomination, “that any kind of military action inside Iran itself would be a very last resort.”
As Maureen Dowd notes, President Bush has always been known for his aggressive gamesmanship to the point where he will change the rules of the game so that he can win.
W. always acts like he’s upping the ante in a board game where you roll the dice and bet your plastic army divisions on the outcome. This doesn’t surprise some of his old classmates at Yale, who remember Junior as the riskiest Risk player of them all, known for dropping by the rooms of friends, especially when they were trying to study for exams, for extended bouts of “The Game of Global Domination.”Iran has already proven to be an unstable country when it comes to dealing with outside provocation -- just ask Jimmy Carter. The president of Iran has demonstrated time and again that he's not wrapped too tight as far as diplomacy is concerned (the Holocaust deniers' festival that attracted David Duke being one example), and overt assaults on Iran's honor and sovereignty such has arresting their citizens in Iraq seem designed to do little more than just piss them off so we'll have a rationale for attacking them: "It all started when he hit me back."
Junior was known as an extremely aggressive player in the venerable Parker Brothers board game, a brutal contest that requires bluster and bluffing as you invade countries, all the while betraying alliances. Notably, it’s almost impossible to win Risk and conquer the world if you start the game in the Middle East, because you’re surrounded by enemies.
His gamesmanship extended to sports — he loved going into overtime and demanding that points be played over because he wasn’t quite ready.
As Graydon Carter recollects in the new Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy wrote an article for the magazine about W. that made this point: “Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn’t lose. He’ll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him.”
So, you have to ask: how many more people -- American soldiers and civilians of Iraq, Iran, and Syria -- will have to die in order to fulfill the neocons' wet dream of world conquest in the name of cheap American gasoline and so that George W. Bush can say, "I won!"
