Murderous Mummery:

Marching Into Nightmare With General Petraeus
Written by Chris Floyd
Monday, 08 October 2007

From Reuters: Petraeus steps up accusations against Iran

The U.S. military commander in Iraq stepped up accusations over the weekend that Iran was inciting violence there and said Tehran's ambassador to Baghdad was a member of the Revolutionary Guards Qods force. Washington accuses Iran's Revolutionary Guards' elite Qods force of supporting militias who have attacked U.S. troops.... General David Petraeus, speaking at a U.S. military base about 20 miles from the Iranian border on Saturday, said Iran was giving militia groups advanced weaponry and guidance.

"They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers," Petraeus told a group of reporters when asked if the Iranian government was responsible for killing U.S. troops. Petraeus did not say how he knew Iran's ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, was a Qods force member, but he appeared to suggest the envoy was not under the U.S. military spotlight because he was a diplomat. "The ambassador is a Qods force member," Petraeus said.

If this is true, then why has the United States not already declared war on Iran? In what alternative universe would Washington allow another nation to direct attacks that kill U.S. troops without responding? To revert to the Hitler-era analogy that the Bush Regime is so fond of evoking in regard to Iran, what would the United States have done in 1938 if Nazi Germany had been arming, training, funding and directing deadly assaults on American troops from, say, Mexico? [Of course, in those days, the Bush family would have profited handsomely from such attacks, as the current president's grandfather and great-grandfather, Prescott Bush and George Walker, were heavily invested in the Nazi war machine. But plus ca change, as they say: Bush's family has also feasted on the blood money pouring out of L'il Georgie's rape of Iraq in our brave new century.]

In any case, if what this Fox News propagandist in military drag says is actually true, then by their own lights, both he and his Leader are trembling little cowards, afraid to respond to military aggression from the big bad Persians. What Petraeus did on Saturday was to admit that he and Bush are allowing Iran to kill Americans -- although no doubt the little puppet and his Oval Office string-pullers believe that such talk makes them look tough. But if we were to take them at their word -- and only the most dim-witted, knuckle-dragging fool would do that (take a bow, Washington Post pundits!) -- they have condemned themselves as sniveling pants-wetters, cowering in the face of a murderous bully.

But of course, the drag artist is not telling the truth. He is asserting as unassailable fact accusations which have never been substantiated, not even by the Regime's own intelligence agencies -- whose bar for "confirming" provocative intelligence is, as we all know, preternaturally low. Petraeus doesn't intend for his words to be taken seriously -- that is, not in the real world, where military attacks by one nation on another lead to an immediate response. No, his words are intended for the media echo chamber, where they will bounce around in the midst of all the other mind-obliterating noise, with a few key scraps falling into the mix: "Iran" -- "killing Americans" -- "Qods" -- "Iran" -- "killing Americans" -- "Qods." That's all they want -- and that's all they need -- to get across. They certainly don't want anyone to pay close attention to the details of the patter they're putting out. They just want a few keywords to filter into the battered public consciousness, because these are the elements they will invoke when the time comes to launch their own unprovoked military agression against Iran: "Iran's Qods Force is killing Americans, and we must, reluctantly, retaliate. Therefore, tonight I have ordered a series of air raids on Qods Force bases in Iran...."

And hey: "Qods" sounds a lot like "al Qaeda," doesn't it? That gives you extra traction in the echo chamber -- more bang for the propaganda buck.

But as we noted here a couple of weeks ago, Petraeus' patter is more than a PR exercise laying the groundwork for an upcoming aggressive war; it's also a projection of the military aggression that the Bush Regime is conducting against Iran, "providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed" many Iranians. We quoted Scott Ritter on the subject then, and he's worth re-quoting here:

But fiction often mirrors reality, and in the case of Iran’s Quds Force, the model drawn upon by the U.S. military seems to be none other than America’s own support of anti-Iranian forces, namely the Mujahedin el-Khalk (MEK) operating out of U.S.-controlled bases inside Iraq, and Jundallah, a Baluchi separatist group operating out of Pakistan that the CIA openly acknowledges supporting. Unlike the lack of evidence brought to bear by the U.S. to sustain its claims of Iranian involvement inside Iraq, the Iranian government has captured scores of MEK and Jundallah operatives, along with supporting documents, which substantiate that which the U.S. openly admits: The United States is waging a proxy war against Iran, inside Iran. This mirror imaging of its own terror campaign against Iran to manufacture the perception of a similar effort being waged by Iran inside Iraq against the U.S. has been very effective at negating any Iranian effort to draw attention to the escalation of war-like activities inside its borders.

That the American people are being set up to approve -- or to at least countenance with distracted docility -- another round of mass murder is beyond question. And the fact that many people believe that only an unconstitutional military insurrection against the lawless civilian government will stop this new war shows just how far through the looking glass America has gone. Our living nightmare grows deeper and more lurid with each passing day.