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On the escalator
to war with Iran
By Patrick J. Buchanan
06/15/07 "WND"
-- -- - These are the "birth pangs" of a "new Middle East,"
said Condi Rice last summer, as Israel pounded Lebanon.
Unfortunately, the new Middle East may make us all pray for the
return of the old.
Hamas is today engaged in savage street fighting with Fatah for
control of Gaza. If Hamas prevails, it could convert this
Palestinian enclave into a terrorist base camp between Israel
and Egypt.
In northern Lebanon, Islamic jihadists are battling the army for
control of a Palestinian refugee camp. Scores are dead.
On Wednesday, a seventh parliamentarian was assassinated with
his son in a Beirut car bomb attack.
In Samarra, the Golden Mosque was attacked again on Wednesday,
collapsing the two minarets that survived last year's bombing.
Gen. David Petraeus is grim about the consequences of what he
says was an al-Qaida attack to escalate the Sunni-Shia war
With Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan convulsed by
ever-widening civil wars, a new danger is that the United
States, tied down in two of those wars, may be about to lash out
and launch a third – on Iran.
"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military
action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans
in Iraq," Joe Lieberman blurted on "Face the Nation," adding,
"To me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran,
where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they
are training those people coming back into Iraq to kill our
soldiers."
"If there's any hope of ... stopping their nuclear weapons
development," Lieberman said, "we can't just talk to them."
Joe's call for air strikes follows the GOP debate where several
presidential hopefuls did not even rule out the use of tactical
atomic weapons to deal with Iran's uranium enrichment program.
These are politicians, however, and bashing Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's Iran has no political downside. More ominous are
the grim words of serious U.S. diplomats and soldiers not
usually given to bellicose rhetoric.
On Wednesday, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told CNN
that Iran is not only arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, but
Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and insurgents in Iraq.
"There's irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this
and it's a pattern of activity," said Burns. He added there was
no chance the shipments were coming from rebel groups in Iran.
"It's certainly coming from the government of Iran. It's coming
from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps command, which is a
basic unit of the Iranian government," said Burns.
NATO officials in Afghanistan say Iranian-made AK-47s, plastic
explosives, mortars and one "explosively formed penetrator" bomb
that can pierce coalition armor have been intercepted.
On Wednesday, Gen. Petraeus told USA Today's Cesar Soriano Iran
is "funding, arming, training and, even in some cases, directing
the activities of extremists and militia elements in Iraq."
The flow of arms from Iran into Iraq, said Petraeus, has not
diminished since the May 28 meeting between U.S. Ambassador Ryan
Crocker and his Iranian counterpart.
"The people they (the Iranians) are arming are very, very
serious thugs," said Petraeus. The general claims militants
armed by Iran kidnapped the British contractors on May 29 and
were behind the recent mortar and rocket attacks on the Green
Zone.
What Iran is being publicly charged with here, by responsible
U.S. officials, are acts of war – arming insurgents and
terrorists to kill U.S. soldiers and civilians.
"As many as 200 American soldiers" may have been killed by
Iranians or Iranian-trained insurgents, Lieberman claimed.
Petraeus and Nick Burns would not be making these charges
publicly if the White House did not want them made publicly.
What is going on? The most logical explanation is that the White
House is providing advance justification for air strikes on
camps of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that are allegedly
providing training for and transferring weapons to Afghan and
Iraqi insurgents. And if the United States conducts those
strikes, Iranians will unite around Ahmadinejad, and Tehran will
order retaliatory strikes against U.S. targets in Iraq and
perhaps across the Middle East.
President Bush will then have his casus belli to take out Natanz
and all the other Iranian nuclear facilities, as the Israelis
and the neocons have been demanding that he do. This would mean
a third Middle Eastern war for America, with a nation three
times as large and populous as Iraq. Perhaps it is time to begin
constructing a new wing on Walter Reed.
Which raises the question: Where is the Congress? Why is it not
holding public hearings and sifting the evidence to determine if
Tehran is behind these attacks on Americans and if the United
States has not itself been aiding insurgents inside Iran?
Or is it all up to George W. as to whether we launch a third and
wider war in the Middle East, which could result in an economic
and strategic disaster for the United States?
All Rights Reserved. WorldNetDaily.com Inc.
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