The Mideast: Bush Plays With Dynamite

FOR DUBYA, IT'S IRAN OR BUST

We have come to understand that George W. Bush neither listens to reason nor learns from experience. Still, it is difficult to understand what purpose the president's bullying of Iran serves other than to appeal to the withered prune formerly known as his political base.

Let’s be clear: Iranian President Ahmadinejad and his Awful Ayatollahs are meddling in Iraq and their actions are a threat to regional stability. There is no question that their intentions are malevolent. But the actions of the Bush administration are a greater threat and there is a palpable feeling aboard in the land that the president is willing to risk starting another war to score political points.

What other reason can there be? Even the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, presented to the president yesterday, doesn't focus on Iran or the insurgency that it backs, instead noting that things are likely to get much worse because of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. (Click here for more on that.)

Remember that ghastly story a couple of weeks ago about five American soldiers being killed defending a government compound in Karbala against insurgents dressed like U.S. soldiers? And that Iran was to blame?

It turned out that the story was a fabrication. Four of the five troopers had been abducted and shot execution style. Meanwhile, Fox News now reports that our good friends the Iraqis were behind the attack and two senior Iraqi commanders, one of them an intelligence officer, were involved in planning it.

Not to worry, the White House will reach into its frayed neocon kit bag and find some other pretext to ratchet up the blame game against Iran. The administration just doesn't want us to know what it claims to know. This explains why it has again postponed offering details of its charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq. Don't hold your breath waiting for this one.

The New York Times notes in an editorial:

"In what passes for grand strategy in this administration, the president’s aides say he is betting that bloodying Iranian forces in Iraq, and raising the threat of a wider confrontation, will weaken Tehran’s regional standing and force its leaders to rethink their nuclear ambitions. Never mind that Mr. Bush’s last big idea — that imposing democracy on Iraq would weaken Iran’s authoritarians — has had the opposite effect."

What is all the more dismaying about this dismal state of affairs (in which Condoleezza Rice, that dismal secretary of state, is playing a starring role) is that the White House refuses to consider any kind of diplomatic approach.

I once believed that a way to defeat the Islamic jihad against the West would be to kill the Muslim word with kindness. I'm not talking about sending Karen Hughes to Mideast capitals to lecture kindergarten classes, but rather an effort to reach out to Muslims and show them that the U.S. is no longer the saber-rattling colonial power that their forebears loathed for good reason.

Boy was I naive! As Zbigniew Brzezinski states in the following post, the White House is playing the colonialist part to the hilt through its "Manichean impulses and imperial hubris" and we know how well that is playing on the Arab Street.

When George Bush ran for president, he asserted that he was a uniter. As the last six years have shown, he is a divider. And a misunderestimater in thinking that driving the wedge between Iran and America ever deeper will somehow make Iraq, the Middle East and world safer.