Iran's Moxie War

Look, I have my misgivings, too,
but what choice do we have except to stay the course?

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done

--The Gambler, Kenny Rogers


And tell me something I don't know instead of everything I do
And look at me as if I mean something to you

--The Hard Way, Mary Chapin Carpenter
_________

I included Mary Chapin Carpenter because her plaintive lyrics of a love gone cold remind me of how this administration addresses us, namely, through rote lies and evasion.

Sen Joe Lieberman [Ind-Pluto] argued in yesterday's Wall Street Journal for the rush to war with Iran (Iran's Proxy War.) He quotes Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, who said Iran is using the terrorist group Hezbollah to train and organize Iraqi extremists, "who are responsible in turn for the murder of American service members."

Brig. Gen. Bergner is featured in a photo captioned, "describ[ing] Iranian meddling in Iraq." Brilliant use of military terms--meddling. I thought that's what Lucy Ricardo did when she spied on neighbors Ethel and Fred. Surely someone who meddles is just a bit pesky, and their meddlesome behavior can be curtailed with a stern warning to get your nose out of other people's business, right?

Lieberman warns, "These latest revelations should be a painful wakeup call to the American people, and to the U.S. Congress."

But there is no surprise here. As we are now the de facto rulers of a much reduced Iraq--Iran's natural enemy--we shall now draw their ire. And it is a double scoop of success for Ahmadinejad to attack (via his proxies), for everyone in the Mid East terror racket gets a piece of the show time this way. After all, $3 Million a month is small potatoes compared to the U.S. Big Red One.

We can buy whole cities--witness Playas, N.M.--and turn them into Hollywood sets for terrorism, er, counterterrorism training. These guys cut their teeth on the real thing. Probably a better training anyway, when all is said and done.

After rattling off a litany of abuses against the Lebanese, the Palestinians and Afghans, Lieberman says, "the fanatical government of Iran is the common denominator that links them together." So. . . ya mean we attacked the wrong country? This is not golf; you don't get a mulligan.

It is a transparent set-up to war:

"Most of this work must be done by our diplomats, military and intelligence operatives in the field. But Iran's increasingly brazen behavior also presents a test of our political leadership here at home."

"It is of course everyone's hope that diplomacy alone can achieve this goal. . . However, as Gen. Bergner said on Monday, "There does not seem to be any follow-through on the commitments that Iran has made to work with Iraq in addressing the destabilizing security issues here." The fact is, any diplomacy with Iran is more likely to be effective if it is backed by a credible threat of force--credible in the dual sense that we mean it, and the Iranians believe it."

Uh--what else would a military man advocate for but use of force, and why would Iran want a stable Iraq, when such a tasty little oyster sits shucked before them? Thank you, America, but you should go now.

As reporter Joe Galloway said last year (among many others), we should honor the Iraqis by pulling back to the international borders and letting them duke it out in their own civil war. This is their war, not ours. Some of our leaders just think we have interests in their oil, but it is not ours.

The fanatical regime in Tehran has concluded that it can use proxies to strike at us and our friends in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine.

These the same friends you strolled amongst on the boulevard wearing your handy-dandy bullet-proof vest? With friends like those, Joe, you don't need enemies. Maybe this is some kind of self-delusion resulting from your collective memory of your persecuted peoples. But look what happened to the good Jewish people who thought the same in Wiemar Germany. They are not your friends, and calling them such doesn't make it so.

The only correct action is withdrawal given this scenario. Pushing on with an attritted force is self-destructive, especially as we lack rights and reason for perduring there, anyway. Otherwise, we are guilty of creating our own twilight. The twilight of the gods.

If I were a betting woman, and believed in apocryphal books like Revelations, I'd say GWB comes as close to the Antichrist as anyone else whose led us in a while.

We need to bring our troops home, build our Army back, stateside, fortify our infrastructure, and beef up police and intelligence agencies, working on creating strong international intelligence reciprocity to ferret out terror cells globally. Running al Qaida out of Baghdad is hardly the decimation of al Qaida International.

There is something Wagnerian about the whole thing. Truly GWB should be wearing a helmet with horns on his head--Texas Longhorns, if he wishes. The horns would serve double purpose, as he should be wearing cuckold's horns for being Cheney's boy. Instead of the Ring cycle, we'll call ours the Spin Cycle.

Meanwhile, it's your average citizen whose hung out to dry.

--Lisa