Bubble Boy takes it on the road

January 14th, 2008

Here at home, Dubby don’t get no respect — even the Pub candidates have gotten on board with Huckabee, questioning his performance in the last years. He’s now left his throne and done what he didn’t do in the last 7 years — gone a ramblin’ in the very section of the globe he’s devastated; in short, looking for love in all the wrong places. But he doesn’t come empty handed — he’s brought a 20 billion dollar deal in arms for his gulf “allies” … and more threat for Iran.

Dandy, huh? Our village idiot is on the road like an itinerant tinker, hawking his war wares and leaving the potential for death and blood in his wake.

The good news is that five years ago … three … even one, we would have found a number of citizens backing his homegrown delusions of “democratizing” and “Iranian Islamofascists.” This time, even the politico’s are looking on in silence — and the web has found the “Iran incident” in the Strait of Hormuz, a Pentagonzo production, so ham-handed an attempt at politicizing the Iranian “threat” that it quickly threw cold water on the match being struck.

Dubby tried his darnedest to make it “truthi:”

“We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation and they should not have done it, pure and simple,” Bush declared in his first public remarks on Sunday’s incident in the Strait of Hormuz.

Shortly after he spoke, the Pentagon released a video and audio tape that appeared to confirm its charge that Iranian speedboats swarmed three US warships in the Strait and radioed a threat to blow them up.

“My message today to the Iranians is, they shouldn’t have done what they did,” he added. “I don’t know what their thinking was, but I’m telling you what I think it was, I think it was a provocative act.”

Provocative, yes — real, no. It may or may not have been a dicey moment, but it has been sold as another Gulf of Tonkin [faux] incident — and this time, we don’t appear to be falling for it.

A nice collection here, including analysis of Bush’s ME reception, Kristina Borjesson and Amy Goodman deconstruct the Hormuz incident and Glenn Greenwald takes MSM to task for giving it legs.

There’s a link near the bottom to a Must Read about Dubby’s meeting with Olmert, and the last article here is the best — its nothing you haven’t seen posted here again and again over the years, but there’s a difference today; in 2002, 2004, 2006 it would have been a shot fired against the Great Wall of Deluded Power — now, the Wall lies in rubble and the shortcomings of our nekkid emperor are common knowledge, something we can all agree upon.

We’ve come a long way, baby. Not far enough, of course, but perhaps far enough to keep America out of a war with Iran … and that’s nothing to sneeze at!

Jude

snipped from Froomkin’s
Coming Up Empty
[open link for full article on ME visit]

Farnaz Fassihi writes for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

“As President Bush tours the Middle East on his first official visit, he will encounter an Arab public deeply critical of his policies in the region and skeptical that the U.S. means what it says.

“Almost everyone here believes that no other American president has had such a big impact on the region’s political and social landscape, but critics say the change hasn’t produced improvements.

“‘Democracy in the Middle East is now part of history. Nobody believes Bush any more. He has turned the Middle East into a big mess, and you can’t bring democracy and change with instability,’ said Sateh Nour Eddine, managing editor and columnist at Lebanon’s As-Safir newspaper, which is aligned with the U.S.-backed government here.

“Mr. Bush began his presidency with lofty goals for this region: Iraq would serve as a model for democracy, Iran would be tamed, and a Palestinian state would be created to pave the way for peace. But in his last year in office, Iraq remains unstable and chaotic; Iran has emerged as a regional superpower, and peace between Israel and Palestine is elusive. . . .

“‘A popular proverb in Iran says that ‘they wanted to fix a person’s eyebrow but instead they made him blind.’ In our view, this summarizes Bush’s policies in the Middle East,’ said Ali Reza Jalaeepour, a reformist political analyst in Tehran.” …

Bush Stops in Saudi Arabia for Talks
ANNE GEARAN, AP
[open link for article]

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Iran, Mideast peace and democracy in the region topped the agenda for President Bush during talks Monday with ally Saudi Arabia.

Bush’s first visit to the kingdom came as his administration notified Congress of its intent to sell $20 billion in weapons, including precision-guided bombs, to the Saudis. The announcement was timed to coincide with the president’s arrival in the Saudi capital.

It is “a pretty big package, lots of pieces,” national security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters on Air Force One.

The sale is an important part of the U.S. strategy to bolster the defenses of its Arab allies in Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing majority Sunni Muslim Gulf nations against threats from Shiite Iran. The official announcement will start a 30-day review period during which Congress could try to block the sale, which has raised concern among some lawmakers…

“I Have a Mirage!” Bush Declares to the Arab World
Amb. Marc Ginsberg, HuffPo
January 13, 2008

George Bush’s magical mystery tour of the Middle East found him inside the insanely opulent Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi Sunday where he delivered his much-anticipated “I Have a Mirage” speech (you gotta see that hotel to believe it!).

Billed as an effort to take his Middle East “Freedom Agenda” off of life support and convince his Middle East audience that democracy is the true path to paradise on earth, Bush could not help but transform what was supposed to be an “uplifting” address into a dire warning that Iran constituted the biggest threat to the Arab world.

Mixing the threat of Iran with a call on Arabs to embrace democracy has a certain oil vs. water quality to it. The problem (like so many ways of the region that remain impenetrably mysterious to this White House) is that most Arabs believe that Bush, rather than Ahmadenijad, or even Bin Laden, is the greatest threat to Middle East peace.

Most Arabs don’t understand how Bush can expect to coax them into some sort of an anti-Iran alliance when our National Intelligence Estimate on Iran — widely disseminated throughout the Arab world — appeared to discredit Iran as a nuclear threat. And, not to forget, most Arabs do not consider themselves victims of Iranian state-sponsored terrorism (and don’t also seem to care one iota that that their fellow Muslims in Iraq, or Lebanon happen to be targeted by Iran’s mullahs). As long as those Revolutionary Guards are instigating terror against Israel, well, that’s none of their business, I guess.

In a region where Israel is the only true democracy, Bush added another touch of incredulity to his tour when he stated: “To the people of the Middle East,. we hear your cries for justice.”

Oh, really?

He and his Secretary of State must surely suffer from oft-convenient lapses of auditory reception.

When Egypt’s autocratic ruler, Hosni Mubarak tossed Ayman Nour into a dungeon — the only certifiably, moderate, secular democrat who dared challenge him in his reelection campaign — Condi Rice just happened to be at a loss for democracy-inspiring words when she met Mubarak in in February, 2006 after a kangaroo court sentenced Nour to 5 years in prison. Best, according to Rice’s conduct, not to mix democracy with other, more urgent agendas she has with Mubarak. So much for “…we hear your cries…”

In Saudi Arabia, when one of the nation’s young, moderate critics of the House of Saud blogs an occasional webslinger and is picked up by the religious police, Rice must have had her IPOD turned up too high.

Need more examples…well, just read the State Department’s 2006 Human Rights reports on Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. etc., etc.

Arabs have long become accustomed to hearing Bush and Rice pontificate about democracy in the Middle East. But to most Arabs, Exhibit #1 of America’s neocon-noble attempt at democracy happened to sadly descend into the carnage that has wracked Iraq since 2003, and like quicksand before an oasis, Arabs are quick to exclaim “laa shukran” (no thanks).

Indeed, the sad commentary is that any Arab that has been seen embracing American democracy assistance has found him or herself victimized, ostracized, and publicly ridiculed due to Bush’s low standing even among moderate Arabs (yes, my friends, there are tens of millions of moderate Arabs who yearn for more open, just societies).

If we could only find a way to galvanize them into a real force for change against extremism.

It’s taken a terribly long time for Rice — no expert on the Middle East either before, during, or after her 7th year in this administration — to understand that “elections” do not constitute “democracy.” So inserted into Bush’s speech was a call for the development of strong civil institutions upon which to build the foundations of democracy.

Some Middle East countries, such as Morocco and Jordan, as well as several Gulf States, have begun doing just that — building independent, non-corrupted judiciaries, and civic institutions. But where it really counts — in Egypt and Saudi Arabia — such civil institutions remain mirages.

It will take a new president with the credibility of not being this president, to restore some faith and confidence in America’s word in the Middle East.

How important is that?

When you come to appreciate, as I have long understood, that the sooner America’s full faith and credit are inspirational once again to galvanize the voices of Arab moderates to have the courage to stand up to their local extremists, well then, you will hear me declare: “I have a dream.”

Does The Hormuz Videotape Literally Produced by the Pentagon Mean Cue Up the War with Iran?
Cue The Threats. Cue The Incident. Cue The High Level Reactions. Cue The Confrontation With Iran?
Kristina Borjesson, BuzzFlash
01/13/2008

Late last December, an unauthenticated audiotape, purportedly of bin Laden threatening Israel, made the rounds of the press and was, by and large, treated as if it were real. Then, right before President Bush’s trip to the Middle East, a videotape was released of a young Jewish man named Adam Pearlman now purporting to be al Qaeda, encouraging sympathizers in the region to greet Bush with bombs. That was reported without much, if any, questioning either. Then came the videotape of the Hormuz incident.

The Defense Department literally produced (as in what TV and filmmakers do) a mini-documentary of the incident between US Navy and Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. The actual incident, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, was 15 to 20 minutes long. The Defense Department’s mini-doc—a bit over four minutes. Asked for a preliminary assessment of the tape, Dartmouth’s forensic video analyst, Hany Farid, said that while it does not appear to be doctored in any way, “it is clear that this video has been spliced together from several clips, probably from different cameras, and that the audio and video are not synchronized.”

The Iranians immediately claimed that the tape was a fake. New York Times reporter Nazila Fathi, went to the Pentagon to press for more details on their production and wrote that DoD officials couldn’t really say from where came the dire threat—”I am coming to you. … you will explode after a few minutes”–heard at the very end of the tape. “Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore,” added Fathi, “or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.”

In a bizarre twist, a report by the Navy Times suggested that the voice might have come from the politically incorrect nicknamed “Filipino Monkey,” a “mysterious but profane voice. … likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.”

Realizing that public skepticism was reaching critical mass, the Defense Department decided to report that there had been other similar incidents in the past that they just hadn’t mentioned. Then they released what they said was their raw footage of the incident. Loudly absent, of course, was the highly provocative audio of mysterious provenance. This has only served to highlight the fact that their first release was a highly deceptive—and manipulative bit of business.

President Bush rushed to use the tape to promote his Iran agenda. He quickly went before TV cameras and microphones to talk about the Iranian “provocation,” and dredge up that dreaded “all options are on the table” buzz phrase for describing a scope of responses that could include military action. Then US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley—remember him?—piled on with a dark warning: “It could have—and came very close to—resulting in an altercation between our forces and their forces,” he said, “They’ve got to be very careful about this, because if it happens again, they are going to bear the consequences of that incident.”

An altercation seems to be what Mr. Hadley and President Bush might be looking for. Hadley was a member of the White House Iraq Group that worked to manufacture consent for the Iraq War. He was responsible for allowing the bogus claim, about Saddam looking for nuclear material in Niger, to be included in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. So this is deja vu with Mr. Hadley. His long-time ally, the currently low-lying Vice President Cheney, is probably thrilled by the renewed potential for hostilities with Iran.

Meanwhile, President Bush says he’s looking “to bring peace to the Middle East” and to contain Iran’s “hostile aspirations.” Writing for Asia Times Online, M.K. Bhadrakumar reported that the President told the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahnronot, that “Part of the reason I’m going to the Middle East is to make it abundantly clear to nations in that part of the world that we view Iran as a threat, and that the National Intelligence Estimate [NIE] in no way lessens that threat, but in fact clarifies that threat.” Here, Bush invokes the very NIE that contradicted his claims that Iran was a dire nuclear threat into a supporting document for his claims that Iran is a dire threat.

Recent events, the trail of audio and videotapes, Hadley’s comments and Bush’s comments all seem like cues. The “peace part” of the president’s mission seems like a cover story. What he’s really seeking, it seems, is a confrontation with Iran.

Kristina Borjesson is an investigative reporter and the author of FEET TO THE FIRE, The Media After 9/11: Top Journalists Speak Out.

Sensationalist Media Did Pentagon’s Bidding in Fake Naval ‘Provocation’ with Iran
National security expert: This is the “most egregious case of sensationalist journalism” in the service of Pentagon and Bush administration.
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
January 14, 2008

The United States has lodged a formal diplomatic protest against Iran for its “provocation” in the Strait of Hormuz on January 6. But new information reveals that the alleged Iranian threat to American naval vessels may have been blown out of proportion. Democracy Now! spoke with investigative historian Gareth Porter.

Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez: The United States has lodged a formal diplomatic protest against Iran for its “provocation” in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday morning. But new information reveals that the alleged Iranian threat to American naval vessels in the Strait might have been blown out of proportion.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon released video of Iranian patrol boats approaching American warships and an audio recording of a direct threat in English. The accented voice says, “I am coming to you,” and then adds, “You will explode after a few minutes.”

Iranian voice: I am coming to you.

US naval officer: Inbound small craft, you’re approaching a coalition warship operating in international waters. Your identity is not know. Your intentions are unclear. You’re sailing into danger and may be subject to defensive measures. Request you establish communications now or alter your course immediately to remain clear. Request you alter course immediately to remain clear.

Iranian voice: You will explode after a few minutes.

US naval officer: “You will explode after a few minutes.”

Gonzalez: That was an audio recording released by the Pentagon along with the video of the encounter between American warships and Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz.

But a Navy spokesperson told ABC News Thursday that the threat might not have come from the Iranian patrol boats, but from the shore or another ship passing by. The spokesperson added, “I guess we’re not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we’re not saying it absolutely didn’t.”

Iran has denied all allegations of a confrontation and released its own video of the encounter. This is an excerpt of the Iranian video broadcast on Thursday showing what seems to be a routine exchange between an Iranian Navy patrol boat and the American ship.

Iranian naval patrolman: Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian Navy patrol boat. Request side number [inaudible] operating in the area this time. Over.

US naval officer: This is coalition warship 73. I’m operating in international waters.

Amy Goodman: Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest article for IPS News analyzes how the official US version of the naval incident has begun to unravel. He joins us now from Washington, D.C. Can you talk about everything that happened from Sunday, what President Bush said, what the Pentagon was alleging, and now what we understand?

Gareth Porter:: Well, this alleged crisis or confrontation on the high seas is really much less than what met the eyes of the American public as it was reported by news media. And the story really began from leaks from the Pentagon. I mean, there were Pentagon officials apparently calling reporters and telling them that something had happened in the Strait of Hormuz, which represented a threat to American ships and that there was a near battle on the high seas. The way it was described to reporters, it was made to appear to be a major threat to the ships and a major threat of war. And that’s the way it was covered by CNN, by CBS and other networks, as well as by print media.

Then I think the next major thing that happened was a briefing by the commander of the 5th fleet in Bahrain, the Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, which is very interesting. If you look carefully at the transcript, which was not reported accurately by the media, or not reported at all practically, the commander — or rather, Vice Admiral Cosgriff actually makes it clear that the ships were never in danger, that they never believed they were in danger, and that they were never close to firing on the Iranian boats. And this is the heart of what actually happened, which was never reported by the US media.

So I think that the major thing to really keep in mind about this is that it was blown up into a semi-crisis by the Pentagon and that the media followed along very supinely. And I must say this is perhaps the worst — the most egregious case of sensationalist journalism in the service of the interests of the Pentagon, the Bush administration, that I have seen so far.

Gonzalez: And there have been some reports about the apparent splicing of audio onto the actual video that appear to be from two different sources. Could you talk about that?

Porter:: Well, that’s right. I mean, we don’t yet know exactly what the sequence of events was in this incident. We don’t know exactly when the voices that we hear making what appear to be a threat to the American ships, where–when that occurred in the sequence of events in this incident. And it seems very possible that indeed the Pentagon did splice into the recording, the audio recording of the incident, the two bits of messages from a mysterious voice in a way that made it appear to occur in response to the initial communication from the US ship to the Iranian boats. And it seems very possible that, in fact, those voices came at some other point during this twenty-minute incident.

So this is something that really deserves to be scrutinized and, in fact, investigated by Congress, because of the significance, in the larger sense, of a potential major fabrication of evidence in order to make a political point by the Bush administration.

Goodman: What about the timing of this, on the eve of President Bush’s visit to the Middle East?

Porter:: Well, of course, there’s no doubt that the motivation for the Pentagon to blow this incident up was precisely the timing of President Bush leaving on a trip to the Middle East, in which one of his major purposes was to try to keep together a coalition of Arab states, which — a very, very loose and shaky coalition to oppose Iran and to support, hopefully, according to the administration’s policy, the US pressure on Iran through diplomatic and financial means, through the Security Council and through its allies in Europe. So this is definitely part of the reason, very clearly, that what was a very minor incident which did not threaten US ships, as far as we can tell from all the evidence so far, was turned into what was presented as a confrontation and a threat of war.

Gonzalez: I’d like to ask you, I was watching the Republican debate last night on Fox News and was astonished to see one of the moderators spend quite a bit of time on this topic, questioning every one of the candidates as to whether they believe the Navy commander on the scene did the right thing by not blowing the Iranian boats out of the water. Surprisingly, only Ron Paul, the maverick, even questioned some of the facts of the incident as reported. Your response to this suddenly becoming a topic for the presidential debates?

Porter:: Well, I think it’s astonishing that you have this incident being regarded as a test of whether the United States is being belligerent enough, when the commanders of the ships themselves clearly did not regard this as a threat to the safety of their ships. This is the point, again, that the commander of the 5th fleet made very clearly. He was asked by reporters whether the commanders were close to firing on the Iranian ships, and he said, “No, that was not the case,” that at no point were they about to fire on the ships and that they did not feel threatened by the Iranian boats. Bear in mind, what has not been reported by the media, that these are essentially small speedboats that are at most armed with machine guns, not with any weapons that were capable of harming those ships.

Goodman: This also comes right at the time that new documents have — newly declassified documents have revealed that the Johnson administration faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate the war in Vietnam, to provide a pretext for increased bombing and increased troops there.

Porter:: Well, you know, this is an incident — the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the policy shenanigans surrounding it are something that I wrote about in my book, Perils of Dominance, about the US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. And what actually happened regarding the Gulf of Tonkin was that the ships, because of anxiety on the part of the crew of these ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, they thought they were under fire originally. They sent back messages saying that.

But within a matter of a couple of hours, the commander of the flotilla had decided that they had been mistaken, and he passed that message on to the Pentagon, and the Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was informed by early afternoon on the same day. And it is my interpretation, based on the evidence, that he failed — he refused to inform President Johnson of that fact, and that’s why Johnson went ahead with a decision to bomb North Vietnam, which had already been made at noontime.

Gonzalez: I’d like to ask you, going back to the incident also, one of the key contradictions now that have surfaced between the initial reports and certainly after the Iranian release of their own video is that initially the public was told that these were Revolutionary Guard boats, and now the Iranian government has said no, that they were actually boats of the Iranian Navy, and they clearly identified themselves as such.

Porter:: I do not know what the provenance of these Iranian boats was, whether it was IRGC or Iranian Navy. We do have pictures, photographs of the IRGC small speedboats that clearly resemble the boats that are depicted — at least one of them — depicted in the video. But from the evidence that we have right now, it’s really impossible to say what — whether these boats belonged to be on IRGC or not. It is the case, however, that the IRGC does have, apparently, the primary responsibility to patrol in this area of the gulf. I heard yesterday a former commander of the IRGC state very clearly that they do in fact have the primary responsibility to patrol in that area. So it’s certainly the — it’s a possibility, a good possibility, that these were IRGC boats.

Goodman: Gareth, I want to thank you for being with us, investigative historian, writes for Inter Press Service. His latest book is called Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

The U.S. military inflicts more damage on its own credibility
(updated below - Update II)
Glenn Greenwald, Salon
Thursday January 10, 2008 14:49 EST

It seems increasingly clear that the U.S. military’s initial claims about its interaction with those five Iranian speed boats in the Strait of Hormuz was exaggerated in significant ways, approaching Jessica Lynch/Pat Tillman/Iraq-is-going-great territory. It’s impossible to resolve all of the conflicting details of each side’s self-serving version, but the most inflammatory facts which the Navy originally asserted, and which the American news media uncritically regurgitated, are quite dubious, if not demonstrably false.

Here, for instance, was the first paragraph of Tuesday’s Washington Post story by Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson, highlighting the most dramatic and scariest part of the U.S. military’s narrative:

We’re coming at you, the Iranian radio transmission warned. Your ships will explode in a couple of minutes.

The next paragraph summarized the Navy’s version that “five Iranian patrol boats sped toward the USS Port Royal and two accompanying ships as they crossed the Strait of Hormuz” and then “‘maneuvered aggressively’ on both sides of the U.S. ships.” The next paragraph recounted:

After the radio transmission, two of the Iranian boats dropped “white box-like objects” into the water, [Vice Adm. Kevin J.] Cosgriff said.

Those are the two “facts” that infused the story with such a sinister tone — explicit threats from the Iranian boats to destroy the American ships, followed by their dropping of unidentifiable boxes, which, one was supposed to infer, could easily have been explosive devices.

But the first “fact” seems almost certainly false, and the second one is highly questionable. Iranian Hooman Majd at The Huffington Post noted that the voices on the tapes issuing the melodramatic threats were unquestionably not Persian. As he put it: “the person speaking doesn’t have an Iranian accent and moreover, sounds more like Boris Karloff in a horror movie than a sailor in the elite branch of Iran’s military.” A regular Iranian commenter at Cernig’s blog made the same point. Listen for yourself to the audio and see how credible the threats sound.

Since then, additional facts have emerged strongly negating the claim that that message came from those Iranian boats. The audio of the threats is crystal clear in sound quality, with no ambient noise — something highly unlikely to be the case if delivered from a small, speeding boat. Moreover, as the New York Times’ Mike Nizza reports today, quoting a reader claiming to be a former Naval officer, the channel that was used to convey the transmission is easily accessible to all sorts of private parties and is often the venue for hoaxes, pranks, and false messages.

Even the Pentagon itself is now acknowledging the lack of proof for the initial version, “saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship.” As Nizza put it: “The list of those who are less than fully confident in the Pentagon’s video/audio mashup of aggressive maneuvers by Iranian boats near American warships in the Strait of Hormuz now includes the Pentagon itself.”

The video released by the U.S. military contained video and audio that were patched together, and as Cernig notes, the audio containing the threatening messages was suspicious from the start:

The section of the released tape which contains the actual threat to “blow up” anyone, as I noted yesterday, comes at the very end and is very much unconnected in any causal sense to the rest of it. The sound is clearer and less cluttered by background noise, while there is no video accompanying it — the only such section of the tape — just an ominously black screen. The accent of the alleged Iranian threatener is way wrong. I’ve known several Iranians well in the UK and their accents when speaking English were all very different from that on the tape — less gutteral.

Moreover, the audio and video released by the Iranians, from the vantage point of one of the Iranian speed boats, shows verbal interaction between them and one of the American ships, in which each is identifying themselves to the other.

The bit about the “white boxes” being dropped into the water seems almost equally dubious. Neither the video of the incident released by the U.S. military, nor the video version released by the Iranian government, includes any such event, nor are there any references to it at all on the audio.

The Bush administration issued the most threatening possible rhetoric as part of its original, now-discredited rendition of events. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley warned ominously: “This is a provocative act — not a smart thing to do, and they are going to have to take responsibility for the consequences, if they do it again,” a threat issued as he flew with the President to Israel. Bush himself issued his standard threat about all options being on the table when dealing with Iran, about which, The Washington Post’s Wright reported today: “some diplomatic and military officials in Washington said inflated the significance of the brief incident.”

Needless to say, as Cernig documents, Bush followers, who believe it’s the duty of every American to click one’s heels and blindly accept every statement made by our Government and military, are in full attack mode, with The Weekly Standard predictably labelling any deviations from blind acceptance as A New Disgrace. Nobody takes pleasure in suggesting that the statements from the U.S. military are unreliable or false, but given their history, what else would a sentient, rational person do?

As Chris Floyd notes today, intelligence documents just released by the National Security Agency demonstrate more conclusively than ever before that the Vietnam War “was launched under precisely the same kind of knowingly false, manufactured pretext as” the invasion of Iraq.

Floyd links to this article, which quotes the Federation of American Scientists’ Steven Aftergood, whose organization obtained the documents, describing one of the newly disclosed U.S. intelligence reports on the Gulf of Tonkin “attack” as follows:

The author of the report “demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was ‘unimpeachable,’ but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that ‘no attack happened that night,’” FAS said in a statement.

“What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It’s a dramatic reversal of the historical record,” Aftergood said.

“There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen the complete study,” he said.

None of this is to compare the incident in the Strait of Hormuz with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The video released by the Iranians appears truncated and edited, and there is good reason to believe that the Iranian speed boats were acting unusually, if not recklessly and provocatively. But when the U.S. military issues factually dubious claims, and the U.S. media (as it almost always does) uncritically regurgitates them — at least at first — all that does is further erode their own credibility as well as the ability for a rational person to believe anything they say.

UPDATE: In comments, Mr. Jones offers this quasi-defense of the U.S. military’s conduct here:

The first thing I recalled wasn’t the Gulf of Tonkin but when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988. Iranian gunboats had been behaving similarly, putting the ship’s inexperienced crew on edge. They mistook the radar blip for an incoming fighter and launched missiles. What a disaster.

Anyway, I’m reluctant to place the blame on the military in this case. When you have large US forces maneuvering around in semi-hostile waters, with 20-year olds manning the stations, how can you not get into these situations. A midshipman mistaking a foreign voice on the radio as Iranian and coming from the boats seems far less serious than mistaking a passenger jet from an incoming fighter and shooting it down, yet that is exactly what happened. I could believe that this was the crew’s initial determination. I’ll save my criticism for the people who put them in this situation.

That’s fair enough, as far as it goes. It’s not hard to see how initial reports from such a tense situation could be unreliable. But that’s why the Pentagon — and the U.S. media — shouldn’t uncritically broadcast reports of this kind to the world as though they are corroborated fact. Additionally, it’s precisely because of the ease with which miscalculations of this sort can arise when warmongering rhetoric and belligerent behavior are the norm that such conduct is so ill-advised and dangerous.

UPDATE II: There are (at least) two issues raised by this incident:

(1) Did the American ships reasonably perceive that the boats posed a threat?

(2) Did the U.S. military make factually dubious claims about what occurred?

Questions (1) and (2) are separate and distinct. The topic of this post is question (2), not question (1). Therefore, making arguments about question (1) as though it addresses question (2) is incoherent. You can think that the answer to question (1) is clearly “yes,” but that doesn’t change in any way the answer to question (2). Even if the perception of a threat was reasonable, that doesn’t justify — obviously — issuing false or dubious claims about what happened.

Nonetheless, for those who can’t or won’t recognize that distinction, here is an article from Inter Press Service that should be read (h/t Mad Dogs):

Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a “battle at sea”, new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats….

The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.

“I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats,” said Cosgriff.

The edited Navy video shows a crewman issuing an initial warning to approaching boats, but the footage of the boats maneuvering provides no visual evidence of Iranian boats “making a run on U.S. ships” as claimed by CBS news Wednesday in its report based on the new video….

Cosgriff’s answers to reporters’ questions indicated that the story promoted earlier by Pentagon officials that one of the U.S. ships came very close to firing at the Iranian boats seriously distorted what actually happened.

Again, whether there was a reasonable threat perception is completely independent of whether the U.S. government’s original version had any basis in fact, but — at least according to Adm. Cosgriff’s latest statements — there appears to be ample evidence to call both propositions into question.

Emerging Threats
Bush tries to ’sell’ democracy
CLAUDE SALHANI, UPI
Jan. 14, 2008

WASHINGTON — After spending the last few days trying to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, President Bush continued his tour of the Middle East, this time flaunting democracy to the oil-rich Gulf countries the way traders in this business-minded society flaunt their wares along the Dubai waterfront or in the old market place in Abu Dhabi.

Sunday’s speech, delivered by Bush in Abu Dhabi, was the highlight of his six-nation, eight-day Middle East tour. It was intended to be a keynote speech where the president outlined his vision for the Middle East.

Although he was addressing an audience of businessmen, government officials, academics and students – all of whom were carefully selected – Bush was, in fact, talking to all the people of the Middle East, reminding them of what he had previously said numerous times – that “democracy is the only system of government that yields peace and stability.”

Those words might go down well with many people in the region but it’s certainly not something his hosts – princes and kings, some of whom are absolute rulers – would have enjoyed hearing.

Being careful not to upset any of the leaders he is trying to recruit for an eventual showdown with Iran – be it political or even military — Bush avoided naming individual countries or rulers – except of course for Iran. Bush chided the leaders of the region for holding back on democratization.

“You cannot build trust when you hold an election were opposition candidates find themselves harassed and in prison,” he said. “You cannot expect people to believe in the promise of a better future when they are jailed for peacefully petitioning their government.

“And you cannot stand up a modern confident nation when you do not allow people to voice their legitimate criticisms.”

He could in fact have been addressing any of the Middle East’s leaders, including his next two hosts: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia or President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Egypt for its heavy-handed approach in dealing with opposition groups demanding political change, fair elections and a greater say in their government. Mubarak tends to reply to these demands by sending out riot police armed with batons.

But if Bush was discreet in his address to the Arab leaders, the gloves came off when it came to talking about Iran, situated just some 150 miles from where Bush was standing, across the clear blue waters of the Gulf, of which even the name is disputed. The Arabs tend to call it the Arabian Gulf and Iran refers to it as the Persian Gulf.

Bush called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror” and accused Tehran of sending hundreds of millions of dollars to extremists around the world.

“Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere,” he said. “So the United States is strengthening our longstanding security commitments with our friends in the Gulf and rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late.”

Gulf states have mixed feelings about Iran. On the one hand the oil-rich Gulf states – Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman – have always looked at their Persian neighbor with trepidation. That fear may have somewhat grown in recent years since Iran has been trying repeatedly to export its Islamic revolution. Additionally, the notion of a nuclear-armed Iran does nothing to alleviate this fear.

But on the other hand, Iran has always been one of the Gulf countries’ primary trading partners. During his visit to Dubai on Monday, where he will be only 100 miles away from Iran, if Bush were able to stroll along the Dubai waterfront, he would see the scores of dhows loaded with merchandise going to and coming from Iran. Just as they have for the last several centuries.

Of his host for today, the United Arab Emirates, Bush described it as “a model Muslim state that is tolerant toward people of other faiths.”

Addressing the leaders of Abu Dhabi, he said: “You have succeeded in building a prosperous society out of the desert. You have opened your doors to the world economy. You have encouraged women to contribute to the development of your nation — and they have occupied some of your highest ministerial posts.”

“And just as our commitment to Asia helped people there secure their freedom and prosperity, our commitment to the Middle East will help you achieve yours.” he said.

But just as the leaders in the region heard from Bush talk about democratization which they did not necessarily appreciate, Bush will in return hear from them talk about Iran that he in turn might not appreciate. What Bush might hear from Iran’s neighbors is to tone down the rhetoric and avoid a confrontation that would drag the entire region into mayhem.

Bush Meets Olmert
The Hands of Esau
URI AVNERY, CounterPunch
January 14, 2008

The End of the Road for George W. Bush
Chris Hedges
Jan 13, 2008

The Gilbert and Sullivan charade of statesmanship played out by George W. Bush and his enabler, Condoleezza Rice, as they wander the Middle East is a fitting end to seven years of misrule. Despots stripped of power are transformed from monsters into buffoons. And this is the metamorphosis that is eating away at the Bush presidency.

Bush stood in Jerusalem, uncomfortable and palpably bored. He mouthed platitudes about a peace settlement that mocked the humanitarian crisis he aided and abetted in Gaza, the rapacious land grab by Israel in the West Bank and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The diminished George Bush, increasingly irrelevant at home and abroad, is fading into insignificance. A year from now one half expects to see him stand up at the next president’s inauguration and screech “I’m melting! I’m melting!” as he sinks into a puddle of slime. He will return, I expect, to his ranch, where he will be able to spend the rest of his life doing the only task for which he has shown any aptitude—cutting down brush with a chain saw.

He may yet rise again to torment us with an attack on Iran, condemning more innocents to slaughter. He and his cigar-smoking soul mate Ehud Olmert would like to go out with one more flash of mayhem and violence. But even this will not ultimately save him. Bush will soon be reduced to the cipher he once was, left to spend the rest of his life trying to salvage a legacy of shame and deceit. In a just world he would be put on trial, if not by the International Criminal Court of Justice then by the U.S. Congress. He would be forced to face up to his lies and wars of aggression. But the moral rot that infects the nation has seeped into the bowels of the legislative as well as the executive branch.

World leaders, including those whom Bush desperately wants to intimidate, now dismiss him. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said a few days ago that relations with the United States are of “no benefit to the Iranian nation. The day such relations are of benefit, I will be the first one to approve of that.”

Bush will have flown from Israel to Palestine to Kuwait to Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia to Egypt in search of a legacy, one that he hopes will lift up his name in history. But, isolated and deluded, he has yet to grasp that he and the United States are reviled and detested for our violence, arrogance and greed. The bands played on the tarmac. He was toasted at state dinners. But even our allies, including Kuwait and Egypt, know Bush is a danger to himself and others.

He publicly displayed his inability to connect rhetoric with reality. He promised peace and cooperation, a new era, a Palestinian homeland. He promised solutions that will arise from negotiations that do not exist. Negotiations, in his eyes, are always about to begin. They were about to begin a year ago. They were about to begin with Annapolis. They are about to begin now. The messy issues between the Israelis and Palestinians that he and his administration have never attempted to address—the borders, the expanding Jewish settlements and outposts, the plight of Palestinian refugees and Jerusalem—will all be seamlessly solved … one day. But the brutal reality of the Israeli occupation barrels forward. The Jewish settlements and outposts continue to be expanded.
The crisis in Gaza, with the cuts in fuel and electricity, the deadly army incursions and airstrikes, has turned the world’s largest walled prison into a swamp of human misery. And huge new settlements, like Har Homa, continue to rise up on Palestinian soil.

When Bush met with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah he blithely defended the patchwork of Israeli roadblocks that have turned the West Bank into a series of ringed Palestinian ghettos. The roadblocks, he told Abbas, are necessary for Israeli security. He announced that the 1949 Green Line, the borders established by the United Nations, would never be restored. There would be no discussion, he said, of the status of Jerusalem. And the plight of Palestinian refugees would be solved by setting up an international fund, meaning, of course, that none would ever return. In short, he offered an unequivocal endorsement of right-wing Israeli policy with not a murmur of dissent. And the Palestinians can either have it rammed down their throat or rot. Bush will be back, he has promised, in May to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state. Olmert, no doubt, will again be fulsome in his praise, which is probably what Bush’s trip to the Middle East is, at its core, really about. Bush desperately wants someone to pretend with him that he is an agent for peace and statesmanship. Olmert, who knows the callow American leader will give him everything he desires, is happy to oblige.

But as Bush basks in the glow of his own fantasy, the suffering in Gaza, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, along with the savage occupation of Iraq, continues to fuel widespread anger and rage. Bush has spent his time in office bolstering the Middle East’s most despotic regimes, including that of Gen. Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. He approved a $20-billion arms package for these states. He has backed efforts to crush mainstream Islamic groups that have electoral legitimacy and popular support. He has stood by as these regimes have stifled democratic dissent, and he has, with Israeli encouragement, isolated governments, even friendly governments, in the Middle East that raised feeble protests. But his day is past. There is open revolt. Opinion polls show that two-thirds of Palestinians, and three-fourths of Israelis, do not believe Bush can affect events in the Palestinian territories.

The agenda of the Bush White House is exposed as irrelevant, myopic and counterproductive. Most Arab countries are in open defiance of Washington and are actively reaching out to Iran.

“As long as they [Iran] have no nuclear program … why should we isolate Iran? Why punish Iran now?” Arab League Secretary-General Abu Moussa told The Washington Post.

The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, is in Iran for talks. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended December’s Gulf Cooperation Council summit. The Iranian president attended the just-completed hajj in Mecca at the invitation of the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah. Tehran is exploring the resumption of diplomatic ties with Egypt, cut since the 1979 revolution, and has offered to cooperate with Cairo in the production of nuclear energy. And the Syrian and Lebanese governments have ignored Washington’s warnings to sever ties with Hezbollah and Hamas.

It is the end of the road for George Bush. The world takes less and less notice of him. He strutted and swaggered across the stage. He bellowed and raged. He plundered and murdered. And now he wants to be anointed as a peacemaker. His presidency, like his life, has been a tragic waste. But he at least he has a life. There are tens of thousands of mute graves in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan that stand as stark testaments to his true legacy. If he wants to redeem his time in office he should kneel before one and ask for forgiveness.

Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author most recently of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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