Intellpuke: The following article is written by journalist Craig Unger
and appears in the March 2007 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Mr.
Unger's article follows:
The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq
war have been using the same tactics-alliances with shady exiles, dubious
intelligence on WMD-to push for the bombing of Iran. As President Bush
ups the pressure on Tehran, is he planning to double his Middle East bet?
In the weeks leading up to George W. Bush's January 10 speech on the war in
Iraq, there was a brief but heady moment when it seemed that the president might
finally accept the failure of his Middle East policy and try something new.
Rising anti-war sentiment had swept congressional Republicans out of power.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been tossed overboard. And the Iraq
Study Group (I.S.G.), chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former
congressman Lee Hamilton, had put together a bipartisan report that offered
a face-saving strategy to exit Iraq. Who better than Baker, the Bush family's
longtime friend and consigliere, to talk some sense into the president?
By the time the president finished his speech from the White House library,
however, all those hopes had vanished. It wasn't just that Bush was doubling
down on an extravagantly costly bet by sending 21,500 more American troops to
Iraq; there were also indications that he was upping the ante by an order of
magnitude. The most conspicuous clue was a four-letter word that Bush uttered
six times in the course of his speech: Iran.
In a clear reference to the Islamic Republic and its sometime ally Syria, Bush
vowed to "seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry
and training to our enemies." At about the same time his speech was taking
place, U.S. troops stormed an Iranian liaison office in Erbil, a Kurdish-controlled
city in northern Iraq, and arrested and detained five Iranians working there.
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