- The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans
are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran.
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- US Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off
Iran.
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- US Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in
bases in countries bordering or near to Iran.
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- US B-2 stealth bombers have been refitted to carry 30,000
pound "bunker buster" bombs.
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- The US government is financing terrorist and separatist
groups within Iran.
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- US Special Forces teams are conducting terrorist operations
inside Iran.
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- US war doctrine has been altered to permit first strike
nuclear attack on Iran and other non-nuclear countries.
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- Bush's war threats against Iran have intensified during
the course of this year. The American people are being fed a repeat of
the lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq.
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- Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his
denunciations of Iran for threatening "the security of nations everywhere"
and of the Iraqi resistance for "a vision that rejects tolerance,
crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and
children in the pursuit of political power." Those are precisely the
words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration.
The Pew Foundation's world polls show that despite all the American and
Israeli propaganda against Iran, the US and Israel are regarded as no less
threats to world stability than demonized Iran.
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- Bush has discarded habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions,
justified torture and secret trials, damned critics as anti-American, and
is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million
deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers
of all time. The vast majority of "kills" by the US military
in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians.
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- Now Bush wants to murder more. We have to kill Iranians
"over there," Bush says, "before they come over here."
There is no possibility that Iranians or any Muslims who have no air force,
no navy, no modern military technology are going to "come over here,"
and no indication that they plan to do so. The Muslims are disunited and
have been for centuries. That is what makes them vulnerable to colonial
rule. If Muslims were united, the US would already have lost its army in
Iraq. Indeed, it would not have been able to put an army in Iraq.
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- Meanwhile the US media focuses on whether Republican
Senator Larry Craig is a homosexual or has offended gays by denying to
be one of them. The run-up for the public's attention is why a South Carolina
beauty queen cannot answer a simple question about why her generation is
unable to find the United States on a map.
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- The war criminal is in the living room, and no official
notice is taken of the fact.
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- Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush
administration has decided to bomb Iran "back into the stone age."
Punishing air and missile attacks have been designed not merely to destroy
Iran's nuclear energy projects, but also to destroy the public infrastructure,
the economy, and the ability of the government to function.
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- Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media
and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians,
the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air
attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. Last summer
the Bush administration demonstrated to the entire world its total disdain
for Muslim life when Bush supported Israel's month-long air attack on Lebanese
civilian infrastructure and civilian residences. President Bush blocked
the attempt by the rest of the world to halt the gratuitous murder of Lebanese
civilians and infrastructure destruction. Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle
East into a wasteland is the Bush policy. For Bush, civilian casualties
are a non-issue. Hegemony uber alles.
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- The Bush administration has made its war plans for attacking
Iran and positioned its forces without any prior approval from Congress.
The "unitary executive" obviously doesn't believe that an attack
on Iran requires the approval of Congress. By its absence and quietude,
Congress seems to agree that it has no role in the decision.
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- In the improbable event that Congress were to make any
fuss about Bush's decision to attack yet another country, the State Department
has devised legalistic cover: simply declare Iran's military to be a "terrorist
organization" and go to war under the cover of the existing resolution.
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- The "Iran issue" has been created by the Bush
administration, not by Iran. Iran, like many other countries, has a nuclear
energy program to which it is entitled as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have found
no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
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- The Bush administration has brushed away this fact, which
should be determining, just as the Bush administration brushed away the
fact that weapons inspectors reported, prior to Bush's invasion of Iraq,
that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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- The Bush administration managed to disrupt the work of
the pesky IAEA weapons inspectors in Iran. Iran has been working successfully
with the IAEA and has achieved what a senior IAEA official recently described
as a milestone agreement. The Bush administration instantly went to work
to discredit the agreement and unleashed its new lapdog, French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, to threaten "the bombing of Iran."
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- The Bush administration's position is legally untenable
and is really nothing but a contrived excuse to start another war. Bush
claims that Iran, alone among all the signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, must be denied its right under the pact to develop nuclear energy,
because Iran, alone among all the other signatories, will be the only country
able to deceive the IAEA inspectors and develop nuclear weapons. Therefore,
Iran must be denied its rights under the agreement.
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- Bush's position on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
is as legally untenable as his position on every other issue the
Geneva Conventions, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, habeas corpus,
the constitutional separation of powers, and presidential signing statements
that he cavalierly attaches to new laws in order to override the legislative
power of Congress. Bush's position is that the meaning of laws and treaties
varies with his needs of the moment.
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- Bush has declared himself to be the "decider."
The "decider" decides whether Americans have any rights under
the Constitution and whether Iran has any rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. As the "decider" has decided that Iran has no such rights,
the "decider" decides whether to attack Iran. No one else has
any say about it. The people's representatives are just so much chaff in
the wind.
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- Whatever form of government Bush is operating under,
it is far outside an accountable constitutional democratic government.
Bush has transitioned America to caesarism, and even if Bush leaves office
in January 2009, the powers he has accumulated in the executive will remain.
Unless Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, there is no prospect
of the US Congress and federal judiciary ever again being co-equal branches
of government.
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