Serving Up "Fresh" and Not So Fresh Demons for U.S. Consumption

Queen George, the New & Improved Butcher of Baghdad

I think Patrick Cockburn pretty much gets it re: the latest helping of Team Bush Kool-Aid, dutifully being lapped up and pronounced "delicious" by yer regular press corpse, despite it being over four years old...and rancid. Iran is mostly being proffered as quite the convenient scapegoat for Shrub's peckerwood Captain Ahab thing in Mesopotamia.

This latest tilt of the Middle Eastern pinball machine/meat grinder over to Team Sunni, which will, as sure as the sun rises, eventually seesaw back to Team Shiite (and then vice versa, ad nasueum), is--good god we all hope--mostly smokescreen, although Queen Shrub and King Dick make Nixon seem sane in comparison.

Still, it's not like the administration has a lot to work with:

One expert on Iraq asked me in perplexity: "Even if Bush does launch a war against Iran, where does he think it will get him? He will still be stuck in Iraq and the Iranians are not going to surrender. He will just have widened the war."

The answer to this question is probably that the anti-Iranian tilt of the Bush administration has more to do with American than Iraqi politics. A fresh demon is being presented to the US voter. Iran is portrayed as the hidden hand behind US failure in both Iraq and in Lebanon. The US media, gullible over WMD, is showing itself equally gullible over this exaggerated Iranian threat.

The Bush administration has always shown itself more interested in holding power in Washington than in Baghdad. Whatever its failures on the battlefield, the Republicans were able to retain the presidency and both Houses of Congress in 2004. Confrontation with Iran, diverting attention from the fiasco in Iraq, may be their best chance of holding the White House in 2008.

And it's not like Americans don't know enough about Iran, which has been on the radar hate-ar screen since 1979 (that whole Mossedeq thing, in contrast, is sooooo pre 9/11 and therefore irrelevent...wait, so's 1979...um, nevermind). Add in the fact that Ahmandinejad really IS a nutjob, and Central Casting couldn't do any better.

Besides, any day the administration can distract attention away from its failures, not to mention its criminal behavior, is, at this point, a "good" day. They're trying to stall and run out the clock until 2009...and then, if necessary, the pardon pen will be unleashed with a fury that old Marc Rich could only dream of. Of course, yer same regular press corpse will barely bleat.