Slouching toward D-day

This editorial by Pablo Escobar is highly recommended. Reading this will do many things, not the least of which is that, if you only get your news from the US media, you will suddenly be aware that you have no idea what is really going on in the Middle East.

...the mood in Tehran is increasingly grim. Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, positively scared state-TV viewers - a rarity in media-controlled Iran - when he said the US will try to strike Iran and he's willing to "become a martyr". It's as if Tehran has finally drawn the implications of a two-pronged hardcore militarization of the eastern Mediterranean region. On the one hand there is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allied with Israel against Syria, on the other the Persian Gulf, where the US is lining up against Iran.
...

Since 2004, inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been able to "go anywhere and see anything" in Iran - according to the agency's own assessment. This includes the latest visit this past Saturday to the uranium-conversion plant in Isfahan. Visitors this time included members of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Group of 77 developing nations, the Arab League and, for the first time, journalists. In sum, that was a real sample of what otherwise passes for the "international community". The visitors were in synch: an attack on Iranian nuclear installations would be catastrophic.

But even coyotes in the Mojave Desert now know that Admiral William J Fallon, the new head of CentCom, a specialist in planning air/sea warfare, may be itching to set fire to the Strait of Hormuz. They also know that US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney hold constitutional power to order a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran.
...

Every major player also knows that the chain of pretexts is already established: the shaky Maliki government fails to meet the United States' security "benchmarks" (as it certainly will); Iran is set up for the fall; Washington engineers a provocation in the Persian Gulf; the path is cleared for a Congress-approved "defensive" US strike. Democrats in Congress are doing little to prevent the escalation, when they could at least organize themselves to torpedo the "use of force" authorization for Iraq and pass a law preventing the Bush administration from attacking Iran. Russia, China and the European (dis)Union also remain paralyzed.

He is certainly correct about this. While Russia and China have both expressed the strongest positions against military strikes on Iran, with Russia even shipping 4,000 TOR-M1 surface-to-air missiles to Tehran, none of this is will do much good if the White House is as intent on attack as everyone believes they are. The latest nonsense about Iranian government-supplied munitions is just the most recent smoke the White House is fanning to justify a strike (how many more times are we going to see "the military" present "evidence" of Iranian government involvement only to watch the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Pace, come out the next day and say that this is not evidence of that at all?) It doesn't much matter whether such evidence is necessary or sufficient to justify an attack like the one being planned. But no one seems to know how to curtail the maniacal march of the Bush administration toward "benevolent global hegemony." Actually, I think there is one mechanism and that is for Congress -- every one of those useless turds -- to deny any legality to Bush for such a strike and pass a law to that end. The hope for this, however, is slim, with Congress still grappling over the equally useless non-binding resolution.

Bind Bush now!