This Week You Need To Know

Bush's Tragic Southwest Asian 'Peloponnesian War'

by Jeffrey Steinberg

As of this writing on Jan. 6, President George W. Bush, goaded on by Vice President Dick Cheney, is plunging headlong into an even deeper strategic fiasco in Southwest Asia. By all accounts, Bush will soon announce his latest folly: a "surge" of anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 additional U.S. combat troops into Iraq. At the same time, the President is preparing the way for yet another Cheney-induced strategic blunder: a military strike against purported "secret nuclear weapons sites" inside Iran. While the latter scheme has not been publicly advertised by Administration officials, U.S. military and intelligence specialists tracking events in the Persian Gulf remain convinced that a "Global Strike" plan for bomber and missile strikes against select targets inside the Islamic Republic is on the table at the White House and would be launched without prior consultation with Congress or the United Nations Security Council.

The latest twist on the "bomb Iran" scheme, as reported by well-placed Washington sources, is that the rationale for preventive war against Iran is that the United States and/or Israel must strike Iran before the first bomb-grade nuclear material has been enriched and stockpiled in some unknowable locations. Given that even Israeli Mossad analysts have concluded that Iran is incapable of obtaining a nuclear bomb before 2009—under the most wildly optimistic of circumstances—and American analysts believe that the earliest date is well past 2010, the Bush White House has been forced to resort to the most outlandish form of sophistry, to make a case for preventive war sometime between Spring of this year and when they leave office in January 2009.

As Lyndon LaRouche noted in discussions with colleagues on Jan. 5, it was this same kind of sophistry practiced by the Greek ruler Pericles that drew Athens into the self-destruction known as the Peloponnesian Wars. Bush, LaRouche warned, is falling into the identical trap that destroyed the once-great republic of Athens, and the consequences for the United States—if Bush and Cheney are allowed to get away with this latest insanity—may spell the doom of the United States.

These are the times we are living through....

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