Independent UK: Bush's Only Achievement In Mid-East Is To Increase Power Of Iran

[Hissyspit]

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/johann_hari/article3336121.ece#2008-01-14T00:00:01-00:00

Johann Hari: President Bush's only achievement in the Middle East is to increase the power of Iran
The most soaring rhetoric about democracy is swiftly choked to death by petrol fumes

Published: 14 January 2008
Just as we were all sighing with relief at the end of the Bush years, the lame duck President has waddled into the Middle East to remind us his beak is still nuclear-tipped. With one year to go, he is standing on the sands of Arabia to announce Iran is "the world leading state sponsor of terror" and must be confronted "before it's too late". He then quacks a few words about peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the "success" of the surge in Iraq.

So what can we really expect from Act III of Bush in Arabia? Most of us assumed the recent US National Intelligence Estimate – showing Iran stopped its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 – killed the prospect of a Bush bombing raid on Iran. But Bush knows that as it currently stands, he will be remembered as the President who emboldened and empowered the Islamic Republic of Iran. He took out the Ayatollahs' two biggest strategic enemies – Saddam and the Taliban – and helped them become gold-lined by sending oil prices soaring to more than $100 a barrel.

Today, after Bush's "re-engineering" of the region, a Shia crescent sympathetic to Iran is now rising on top of the world's oil supplies, from Saudi Arabia through Iraq. Bush may believe, in his flat and faded mind, that bombing the country is his only way to put this right: his former press secretary Ari Fleischer has been focus-grouping to find the best language to sell an attack on Iran.

If Bush can't publicly justify the attack on the basis of counter-proliferation, he may try to do it on the basis of counter-terrorism. If it's not bombs he's after, it's baddies. The President has already had the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officially declared "a terrorist organisation" – and last week, it appears the White House deliberately concocted a story that Iranian ships were attacking the US navy in international waters.

You remember the tale, featured on front pages everywhere. We were told that the day before Bush headed for the Middle East, Iranian speedboats armed with machine-guns in the Strait of Hormuz suddenly decided to charge at the US navy. They announced, "You will explode after a few minutes." The US ships thought they were being attacked; only the restraint of US navy commanders in the face of such wild provocation prevented a full-blown war with Iran. Bush used it to remind the world of the evil of Iran.

MORE

[thunder rising]

1. Well put, 'nuf said

[laconicsax]

2. Oh, Snap!

[Wizard777]

3. Link is not working. n/t