Sunday, February 25, 2007

Here we go again

Seymour Hersh has yet another invaluable look inside the byzantine politics of the Kremlin White House called The Redirection.

Of course in a democracy the goverments policies should be open and transparent, at least in the broad strokes. For example, we should know who our allies are and who the bad guys are. So I guess what follows gives you a good barometer of how committed to our democratic heritage our current regime is.

Judging from what Hersh has to report, not very.

Having failed to secure Afghanistan, in large part due to our rush to get our hands dirty in Iraq, our fearless leader is eager to start a shooting war with Iran. Naturally that means his minions are actively seeking to create a pretext for said war. But in addition we have decided to greenlight a Saudi plan - hatched by prince 'Bandar Bush' (you may remember him from Fahrenheit 911) to fund extremist terrorist Sunnis.

Does that plan ring a bell? It was the same plan used in Afghanistan against the Soviets: Saudi money and mullahs with US military training and technology, which resulted in.... Al Qaeda!

That's right, apparently Bush has decided that the Shiites of Iran are more dangerous than Osama bin Laden's peeps! So we'll arm and unleash all the Al Qaeda wannabees we can find and point them towards Iran and Hezbollah... and hope they focus all their hate on them. So the US, Israel, Saudi and the 'Salafists' (the new and improved rebranded name for Al Qaeda type terrorists) against team Shiite - that's the plan for peace in the Middle East.

Quite the plan, eh? Of course, in order to do this both the Congress and the CIA have to be cut out of the operation... so it is being run out of the Veeps office, natch. Luckily our regime has plenty of folks with resumes that say IRAN-CONTRA on them, which provided invaluable experience (Hersh reviews the 'lessons') in what and what not to do when using an illegal 'national security' slush fund to essentially conduct a personal foreign policy with no oversight or even knowledge on the part of either the Congress or the security agencies.

Kinda like how kings of days gone by used to use their personal purse to finance wars of whim and fancy.

Puts a whole new spin on the meaning of the term 'conservative,' don't it?