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Is Bush Leading US to Nuclear War?

Comment by Larry Ross, May 5, 2007

Hartung and Berrigan document that Bush is increasing nuclear weapon expenditures, and developing nuclear war-fighting doctrines and new nuclear weapons while he portrays his chosen target (Iran) as being a nuclear threat. But Iran is within the NPT agreements by enriching uranium to power Iran's nuclear reactors.

Again Bush is lying to lay the groundwork and justification for war with Iran, as he did in preparation for his war with Iraq. The authors have assembled an impressive array of facts in the following article which supports this.

A companion article: "If You Think Bush Is Evil Now, Wait Until He Nukes Iran" by Paul Craig Roberts presents a more detailed strategy of how Bush is creating the justification for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran.

"A host of US commanding generals have said that the Iraq war is destroying the U.S. military and that Bush's insane war has depleted and exhausted the US Army and Marine Corps". But Bush hopes that his bombing of Iran will provoke Iran into entering the Iraq war and Bush can then blame Iran for destroying US troops. This will enflame US opinion thus providing Bush with the excuse "to save US troops by nuking Iran."

This sounds like a simple transparent plan based on deceit that would be rejected by Americans.

But as Roberts says: "With the captive American media providing propaganda cover, the neo-conservatives believe that their plan will work. The neocons, led by Cheney, "have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to the will of the US government" and "Insurgency and terrorism cannot prevail against nuclear weapons."

IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei recently called the neocons 'crazies who want war with Iran '.

It's glaringly obvious from these articles and many others on our website, that a criminal deluded group willing to risk all humanity has the power to carry out their worst fantasies.

They must be stopped from implementing their destructive plans. Americans, helped by concerned people everywhere, must impeach Bush and his cohorts before they unleash catastrophic nuclear forces that can destroy the world.

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Is Bush Leading Us to Nuclear War?

by William D. Hartung and Frida Berrigan, Truthout.org, May 23, 2007

Only days before the fifth anniversary of September 11, President George W. Bush addressed military officers in Washington to warn that nuclear-armed terrorists could "blackmail the free world and spread their ideologies of hate and raise a moral threat to America."

    This alarmist vision was accompanied by the White House's release of "A National Strategy for Combating Terrorism," which painted a picture of a "troubling potential WMD terrorism nexus emanating from Tehran." The administration is building the case for war against Iran - a job made easier by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent announcement that Iran can now enrich uranium on an industrial scale - despite the fact that many Iran-watchers and nuclear experts consider their claims of enrichment capacity to be an overblown boast.

    This is not the first time the "no-nuclear-weapons-for-you" ploy has been used to lay the groundwork for a war. On Oct. 7, 2002, while making the case for regime change in Iraq, President Bush said: "America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

    Yellow cake, aluminum tubes and histrionics about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities followed ... all of which were challenged at the time, and have turned out to be completely fabricated. And, when not grinding the axe of pre-emptive war as counter-proliferation strategy, the administration periodically raises the specter of nuclear terrorism, in the form of dirty bombs and suitcase-sized warheads.

    But while the United States demands that other countries end their nuclear programs, the Bush administration is busy planning a new generation of nuclear weapons. Nearly 20 years after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the United States is allocating more funding, on average, to nuclear weapons than during the Cold War.

    The Bush administration is pumping this money -- more than $6 billion this year - into renovating the nuclear weapons complex and designing new nuclear weapons. Such hypocrisy is one of the main obstacles to nuclear arms reductions because it runs the risk of shattering the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in which the nuclear-armed states pledged to begin the process of disarmament if the non-nuclear states opted not to pursue the deadly technology.

    The centerpiece of the administration's move toward developing a new generation of nuclear weapons is "Complex 2030," a multiyear plan introduced last April by the National Nuclear Security Administration (the semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear weapons program).

Continue.....

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If You Think Bush Is Evil Now, Wait Until He Nukes Iran

by Paul Craig Roberts, June 6, 2007

The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Sanchez says, is "to stave off defeat," and that requires more intelligence and leadership than Sanchez sees in the entirety of our national political leadership: "I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time."

More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with headlines reporting that "U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third of Baghdad, the military said on Monday." After five years of war the U.S. controls one-third of one city and nothing else.

A host of U.S. commanding generals have said that the Iraq war is destroying the U.S. military. A year ago Colin Powell said that the U.S. Army is "about broken." Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn says Bush has "piecemealed our force to death." Gen. Barry McCaffrey testified to the U.S. Senate that "the Army will unravel."

Col. Andy Bacevich, America's foremost writer on military affairs, documents in the current issue of The American Conservative that Bush's insane war has depleted and exhausted the U.S. Army and Marine Corps:

"Only a third of the regular Army's brigades qualify as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president's strategy of escalation, the U.S. will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve.

"The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping the Army's lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000 commissioned officers. By next year, the number is projected to grow to 3,500. The Guard and reserves are in even worse shape. There the shortage amounts to 7,500 officers. Young West Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not seen in three decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service has begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who agree to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as more and more officers want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC scholarships go unfilled for a lack of qualified applicants."

Bush has taken every desperate measure. Enlistment ages have been pushed up from 35 to 42. The percentage of high school dropouts and the number of recruits scoring at the bottom end of tests have spiked. The U.S. military is forced to recruit among drug users and convicted criminals. Bacevich reports that wavers "issued to convicted felons jumped by 30 percent." Combat tours have been extended from 12 to 15 months, and the same troops are being deployed again and again.