Over on
Talking Points Memo -- which I still think is finest blog going -- David Kurtz has posted a couple of items that sound notes once relegated to...well, to lower-profile blogs such as this one.
As Josh has sketched out, there are any number of ways for military confrontation with Iran to evolve, and none of them plausibly involves the President announcing his intentions in advance in an address from the Oval Office. Rather, there will be an incident (some would say, "incident") which becomes the justification or the tripwire, call it what you will, for U.S. military action.
And:
Even the watered-down version of events in the Commission's report made it absolutely clear that Cheney, ensconced in the White House bunker on the morning of the attacks, had issued shootdown orders outside of the chain of command and then conspired with the President to conceal this fact from the Commission.
Since then, I've gone from being open to the idea of an Imperial Vice Presidency to being convinced that historians will debate whether something approaching a Cheney-led coup d'etat has occurred, in which some of the powers of the Executive were extra-constitutionally usurped by the Office of the Vice President.
Cheney's in charge, and a staged incident will trigger war with Iran. Next thing you know, Josh Marshall will admit that the MONGOOSE team killed JFK...
5 comments:
Newsweek's article "A Shot Heard Round the World" of 2/27/06 fires a mainstream shot across the bows of the SS Official Story in that it challenges the timeline of the 9/11 Commission with respect to Cheney's shootdown order on the "letsroll" flight 93.
None of the 9/11 Commission staffers believed Cheney's story, the article says, but after a battle with Gonzales, the draft reports's skepticism was "toned down."
TinyURL.com/yrekpp
You have to be familiar with the facts and with arcana of the 9/11 Commission Report to recognize the serious implications of Newsweek's innuendo, which is disguised as psychological background on Cheney.
The Democratic leadership -- not the occasional blog or columnist -- needs to stand up and say the obvious, so it gets on the nightly news.
The question is, does even one of these presidential candidates have the cojones to do it -- despite the fact that they all know that the "incident" is coming any day now?
These are same whores who now pretend that their authorization vote wasn't really a vote for an invasion of Iraq, when everyone else in the country knew exactly what it meant.....
One of the leaked Brit government memos (the ones all but ignored in the American press until bloggers set up a howl) noted that Bush had actually inquired if there wasn't some way to stage an "incident", to justify an invasion of Iraq, in the absence of UN approval.
How much more evidence does our craven third estate and political class require? Or is a staged incident a "conspiracy theory", so therefore it can't be true?
Or is presidential criminality not something we mention in polite company, because then you don't get invited to D.C. cocktail parties, and are no longer considered one of the "responsible" people?
sofla said...
Aside from some potential military coup d'etat, there is really no way to prevent any president from doing anything he wants in military terms in the short term, for whatever reason he wants to do it. Especially if there is a pretext for his action that people find reasonable, even if it is manufactured.
About the only thing possible is to punish these guys doing such things after the fact, and hope that the prospect of future punishment will deter current actions. However, if Bush escapes his Iraq deceptions and ensuing war crimes without any impeachment action, how far would somebody need to go beyond such manifest treachery and treason to this country's interests before there might be some deterrent effect shown?
This may be an obvious point, but would an imminent invasion explain the Senate fillibuster to stamp out any debate on Iraq? Is Iran not taking our bait fast enough?
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