Iran is in the crosshairs

It's pretty clear from Richard Bruce-Epaminondas-Sherman-Patton Cheney's interview on Fox News Sunday and Hadley's interviews on Meet the Press and This Week that Iran is back in the Bush administration's crosshairs in a big way. The charge made by The Dick and Bush is that Iran has created "networks" that supply Iraqi insurgents with arms and materials to kill US soldiers in Iraq and we're going to go after these "networks" (if that's not code for we're heading into Iran, then it is just foolish blowhard bluster). Of course the vast majority of US casualties in Iraq are caused by IEDs, and the vast majority of IEDs are employed by Sunni insurgents. Are we really to believe that Shiite Iran is cooperating with Iraqi Sunni insurgents? I'm very skeptical and it will be interesting to watch this time around how the US press handles the Bush administration's hard sell to expand the war into Iran and Syria. Will there be US journalists who actually go into to Iraq to verify these assertions of Iranian involvement in IED production? Will there be US journalists who dig around in the US to see whether this is part of a misinformation campaign?

The plain, strategic fact is that Iran, like Iraq, sits on a pile of oil and natural gas that can fund their aspirations in the region, or it can be used as leverage against the aspirations of others' interests in the region, including US and Israeli interests. The US brain trust invaded Iraq with a view to strengthening our hand in the region (i.e., energy supplies and Israel), but by so doing the US ended up strengthening the interests of Iran by strengthening the Shiite majority in Iraq. Now Iran is in the cat-bird seat and can more or less sit back and let the Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq push the US out -- they don't need to supply the Shiites with arms. The question for the American people is what should our response to this strategic blunder and the politics of oil be? The Bush administration's view is that we must continue our reliance upon oil, so it's time to knock Iran down a peg or two and anyone who challenges US interests in the Middle East. I see no way to do this without permanently taking away their oil – most of the indigenous people of the Middle East are simply never going to use oil money to further US interests. But our grabbing the oil or inserting puppet governments to control it would be extremely bloody, costly, and destabilizing. As it is, if we throw in the current cost of maintaining our military operations in the Middle East, which are there almost exclusively to safeguard our interests in the oil and gas reserves there, the price of gas is over 7 bucks a gallon. If we add in environmental and social costs, the price goes up to at least 15 bucks a gallon. My question for this dependence upon oil is, cui bono? Do average American citizens really benefit from this huge cost of keeping us addicted to oil (the real costs of which are cleverly kept hidden from us)? Do average American people really care whether we use oil to fuel our cars or another fuel? I think there's a better way . We have the technologies and ability over the next 5-10 years to get away from oil to the point that it drives the price down so low that it weakens our adversaries and makes Middle East oil irrelevant (as well as Russian, Venezuela...) while helping the environment, but it would take a change in government policy to do it. The problem is that this new strategy of getting off oil addiction would make a lot of military spending unnecessary and it would hurt the bottom lines of the oil titans. Guess whose bottom lines and interests the Bush administration will try to protect while hiding behind the flag and patriotism? The irony is that the probable expanding of the war into Iran and Syria will undoubtedly blow up in our faces again, and average American citizens will pay a heavy price with their blood, taxes, and jobs and the view of America as an imperial resource-grabber around the globe will gain more traction and fuel more terrorism.