William Fallon – Milestone to War on Iran?

Yesterday’s resignation of US Admiral William Fallon has set Washington pundits scurrying to cast bones and read the entrails.

Fallon had most recently served as the top US commander in the Middle East. The Admiral defied Bush/Cheney by publicly opposing any US attack on Iran. From the Washington Post:

“And so Fallon, the good cop, may soon be unemployed because he’s doing what a generation of young officers in the U. S. military are now openly complaining that their leaders didn’t do on their behalf in the run-up to the war in Iraq: He’s standing up to the commander in chief, whom he thinks is contemplating a strategically unsound war.”

NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, under pressure from the White House, had lately been refusing to take Fallon’s calls.

Fallon’s resignation/firing comes at an interesting time. Just a week from now General David Petraeus who Fallon has branded as an ass-kisser, will appear before Congress to testify about the wonderful progress he’s achieved in Iraq. And this Sunday, the Prince of Darkness himself, Dickster Cheney, is off to the Middle East for “talks.”

Will the US attack Iran? Cheney and Bush want to, that much is obvious. Their military leaders don’t want to but they’ve just been given a message by the impaling of Fallon what lies in store for the career of anyone who dares oppose the Evil Twins. Israel wants to go, badly. More US Navy warships are headed to take up station within striking range of Iran. Who knows what predeployments are being made for the US Air Force’s strategic bomber force? Bush/Cheney are running out of time to do this – getting awfully close to a “now or never” moment. One thing is plain – there’s nothing in these developments that suggests the US wants to focus on dialogue with Tehran.

And what if they go ahead? Well, hang onto your hats. There’ll be no conquest of Iran to rival what happened in Iraq. The US Army is simply tapped out. They’ll have to be content with airpower – bombing and cruise missile attacks. They’ll have to show a degree of competence beyond anything seen so far if the bombing campaign is to work and, by “work,” that means total reduction of Iran’s anti-shipping weaponry, submarine and land-based.

If Iran survives with a fraction of its anti-ship weaponry intact, the Persian Gulf is closed for business. Nobody will be able to ship oil out of the Gulf and, sorry to say this kiddies, but that means a meltdown in the world economy. The US economy collapses into a depression and every other developed nation gets shoved into that same hole.

But surely Bush/Cheney wouldn’t do anything that stupid, would they? How do you think they got their nation stuck in Iraq? They ignored reality, all the warnings, and went in believing they would be out within six weeks to six months. These are profoundly stupid people. Then again, that adds a certain spice to this looming peril, doesn’t it?

 

Pull The Other One

The George Bush White House hasn’t been known for saving US taxpayers’ money but that’s not always the case.

Take the tape backup system meant to preserve records, including White House e-mails, in case of a disaster. Well the White House spared the taxpayers a few thousand dollars by recycling those tapes right up until 2003. Now it was just coincidence, a pure fluke, that in reusing those tapes White House e-mails pertaining to the Valerie Plame scandal disappeared – gone forever. Oopsie! Won’t happen again. Promise.

From the Washington Post:

The back-ups are meant to preserve records in case of a disaster. They also serve a role in ensuring that federal record-keeping laws are met, according to administration officials and records management experts. Two separate statutes require the White House to preserve federal or presidential records.
The prospects for recovering data that has been overwritten is uncertain, especially if the tapes were re-recorded numerous times, according to technology experts.

In a court affidavit filed shortly before midnight Tuesday, the official in charge of overseeing White House computer systems said that recycling, or overwriting, the backup tapes was “consistent with industry best practices related to tape media management.”

But Theresa Payton, chief information officer in the Office of Administration, also said the White House stopped the practice in October 2003 and that back-ups made since then have been preserved.

Payton did not explain in her sworn statement why the White House stopped recycling its back-up tapes. She also said that White House officials have not determined whether e-mail also is missing from 2003 to 2005.

“At this stage, this office does not know if any emails were not properly preserved in the archiving process” during that time, Payton said. “We are continuing our efforts.”

Hey, c’mon, we’re talking about George Bush and Dick Cheney here – the most powerful man in America and his trained chimp. You don’t think they’d pull an underhanded stunt like erasing 18-minutes of White House tapes, do you? Oh, I forgot, that was the other crook.

 

Showdown In The Gulf – Clumsy Propaganda?

The Bush/Cheney regime’s contentions about a provocative charge against three US Navy, “armed to the teeth” warships by plainly gunless Iranian “gunboats” is beginning to spring a lot of leaks.

The US Navy’s own video shows a small flotilla of speedboats, not gunboats, as is apparent from this Navy close-up of one of the boats released to the media. But the navy also released a video on which someone with a heavy accent is supposed to have threatened the US warships, saying “I am coming to you… you will explode …after minutes.”

From the New York Times:

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

A commentator who claimed to be a former US Navy officer with experience in the Gulf wrote to the paper warning against putting much reliance on anything heard in that region on Channel 16 UHF:

“But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)

“On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility.”

This episode is beginning to sound an awful lot like the Bush/Cheney agitprop that has been the signature of this administration. We know Cheney is squirming in his pants to get at Iran and we know these charlatans are entirely willing to lie right into the faces of the American people to get their way.