A picture of a winter city street, which could be anywhere, except for the inscription at the bottom. It is peaceful and most of us have experienced something like it, yet knowing that it is Tehran invokes something else. What is it?
Fear. I feel it seeping into my life, out of the television and computer screens into my imagination. I watch people now act more uncertain in some ways than in the aftermath of 9/11. I read essays and columns, blogs and diatribes and some of them say we have a lot more than fear itself to fear. I watched part of CBS's Jericho Wednesday evening and agree with previous commentators that it is a stalking horse designed to inure the American public to the idea of a survivable nuclear war.A week or two ago when we were fighting ABC/Disney on their so-called docudrama propaganda piece about "The Path to 9/11" we saw several video clips of Bush and Rice telling us how afraid they were ... and are ... that there will be another serious terrorist attack in the United States. This is, perhaps, the nexus of all the terrorist talk, I think. It is a question not so much of the average American being terrorized as it is of Bush and Cheney and Rice and others being terrorized. But, there is so much fraud and falsity in what they say and do, how can we believe they are afraid, perhaps fully terrified of terrorists?
The first thing that is obvious and always has been ... but gets put on the sidelines by the press for reasons that are immediately apparent ... is that Bush and all Republicans could not politically tolerate another terrorist attack, especially after so much effort and rhetoric has gone into thwarting terrorism by pushing it into Iraq and fighting it there. It would break the back of the Republican smugness on self-defense, on being the "hardasses" of American politics. It would destroy Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez even if they were thousands of miles from the attack, buried underground in safe bunkers surrounded by legions of Secret Service and military. An attack now ... and shortly I will posit such an attack ... would disgrace Republicans for all time. Yes, all Republicans have a reason to be afraid of terrorists—a political reason.
The Bush strategy, concocted in coordination with Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld, has always been a multipronged. They are using the potential of another 9/11 to augment the federal Executive. They have taken the fight abroad ... to spare us, they say ... but more importantly to infuse the Military-Industrial Complex with billions and billions of dollars, to make sure that "their base" is enriched by the course of events. They are setting up an "inevitable" conflict with Iran, because they want to control the middle east and its natural resources, as I and others have said many other times. They want to head China off at the pass. There are many others who agree with me, including the author of this article from OpEdNews, whose words echo the growing concern and fear we all have about Bush and Iran.
Someone recently published an essay that suggested that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against the United States with weapons already in place in our major cities. It is a distinct possibility. It raises an avalanche of questions about how next to proceed, given that Bush seems intent on pursuing the PNAC goal of American hegemony in the middle east. I do not know the answers to any of the questions, except one. If there are so many dangers to the U.S. by pursuing regime change in Iran (and Syria) to assert American corporate hegmony over the middle east, then why do it? What manner of person, what kind of politics is it that would deliberately put Americans in their homes and workplaces into mortal danger?
Fear. The Republicans, who now are clearly going to lose one and perhaps both houses of Congress in some 40 days, perhaps for another generation, have little chance of holding their coalition of radical fundamentalists, radical cleptocrats, radical social darwinist racists together. They need another overwhelming event to catalyze their own internal fractiousness, and to quell the dissent from the present minority. When would they "deploy" such an event? It will come next month, of course, in time to create a crushing sense of apprehension and fear before the election. If the Iranians so much as lift a finger in their own defense, BushCheney will respond with draconian measures at home. You could easily expect martial law, cancellation of the elections, and descent into a real wartime fortress state where civil liberties and civil rights are effectively gone.
We know how they will rule. They rule with mendacity. They rule with corruption. They rule with libel and insinuendo. They have God on their side, they say. How are you going to resist it, now that your representatives in Congress have given away their Constitutional claims to checks and balances? You will fall under their heel and become part of the corporate state, a cog, a spinning wheel somewhere in the apparatus, spinning endless profits for a few truly demented and horrid people who care nothing about you.
When you have finished reading this essay, click here for some remarkable photographs of Iran. Iran may never look the same again. And neither may we!
brettnet