Teeters & Brinks

We need to be very careful now.

The First Bush held a news conference yesterday and said he knew that Iran was supplying various armaments to insurgent groups in Iraq. He also said he’d have to do something about it because, as Commander-in-Chief, it’s his job not so much to wage war with Iran but to protect U.S. troops.

From Bush to Cheney to SECDEF Gates, the litany has been the same these past few days: no one, absolutely no one, is making plans for a war with Iran.

What we also know about this lack of planning, however, is that a ground war with Iran has already been ruled out. They have a strong and well-trained army with a surfeit of materièl and supplies, while we are now stretched quite thin with our involvement in Iraq along with the staffing and maintenance of our many bases throughout the world.

What is also included in this lack of planning would be air strikes concentrating on fifty or sixty targets – supposedly sites for the production not of the screw-filled improvised explosive devices (IED’s) harming our troops, but sites for the production of the nuclear material Iran is developing for its nuclear power (Bush: read nuclear weapons) industry. That is, we "protect" the troops by going after yet another political agenda.

So it is all, once again, a smoke screen. Yet, while the eyes and throat might be burning a bit, there’s yet to be a coughing fit anywhere in the land.

(from Cherub: An Iraqi War Diary, G. K. Wuori © 2007)