Blood on the Tracks: Threading the Labyrinth of the Latest War Push

Monday, 12 February 2007

There's no point in giving much attention to the latest dogs-of-war-and-pony show in the Bush Faction's drive toward war with Iran -- especially with Patrick Cockburn's excellent analysis available (excerpted below). The fact that this "compelling evidence" was laid out in Baghdad, on a Sunday, by anonymous briefers, shows that the Bushists' "evidence" for lethal Iranian hugger-mugger is still as weak and flaccid as, say, a four-heart-attack man whose Viagra prescription has run out. (To its credit, the New York Times story on the press conference, by James Glanz, was more skeptical than Saturday's cringing Pravda piece by that shameless hussy, Michael Gordon; then again, anything beyond a White House press release would have been more skeptical than Gordon's remarkable hussy-fit.)

But there was one passage in the latest piece that did leap out as an especially telling example of the Bush gang's entire horseshit-production enterprise:

The precise machining of E.F.P. components, the officials said, also links the weapons to Iran.
“We have no evidence that this has ever been done in Iraq,” the senior military official said.

So let's get this straight: Before the war, we were supposed to believe that the Iraqis were capable of building the most highly advanced weapons of mass destruction in the world -- but now we're told that they can't even precision-tool a roadside bomb.

But as we noted the other day, the Bushists never bother with logical consistency in the barrage of lies they spew to justify the bloodletting that those prissy cowards, Bush and Cheney, obviously need in order to feel like real he-men. They simply say whatever seems expedient for the next few news cycles, confident that the American corporate media's Memento-like anterograde amnesia will cover their tracks.

Fortunately for us, there are still journalists out there like the Independent's Patrick Cockburn, for whom reality is not "writ on water," but has lasting consequences, and leaves a vivid trace. [Cockburn also notes the reversal of claims in Iraqi weapons capabilities, although I didn't find his article until after I'd started this post. But he supplies more historical and factual context to buttress the point.]

U.S. heats up rhetoric against Iran (Hamilton Spectator, via The Independent)Excerpts: ...The allegations by senior but unnamed U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington are bizarre. The U.S. has been fighting a Sunni insurgency in Iraq since 2003 that is deeply hostile to Iran.

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