They Had No Choice

Things have been starting to get out of the control of the Obama administration. They had to come up with something drastic. No matter how unbelievable.

Here's Glenn Greenwald's assessment:

The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it.

Iranian Muslims in the Quds forces sending maurading bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it. But since the U.S. Government rolled out its Most Serious Officials with Very Serious Faces to make these accusations, many people (therefore) do believe it.

Glenn Greenwald

It is kind of hard to believe that people still believe them. But we were primed and conditioned by years of cold war threats and by the biggie – 9/11.

To begin with, this episode continues the FBI’s record-setting undefeated streak of heroically saving us from the plots they enable.

Really, that’s a winning approach. You can’t say it isn’t.

The Terrorist Mastermind at the center of the plot is a failed used car salesman in Texas with a history of pedestrian money problems. Dive under your bed.

I think this is as cynically humorous as I’ve ever seen Glenn Greenwald. I’m enjoying it, actually.

[S]ome Very Serious Experts are very, very afraid and want you to know how Serious this all is. Within moments of Holder’s news conference, National Security Expert Robert Chesney – without a molecule of critical thought in his brain — announced that this “remarkable development” was “very scary.”

[...]

The ironies here are so self-evident it’s hard to work up the energy to point them out. Outside of Pentagon reporters, Washington Post Editorial Page Editors,and Brookings “scholars,” is there a person on the planet anywhere who can listen with a straight face as drone-addicted U.S. Government officials righteously condemn the evil, illegal act of entering another country to commit an assassination?

I seriously doubt it. Unless it’s in England and Israel.

Then there’s the War on Terror irony: our Hated Enemy here (Iran) is a country which had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. Meanwhile, our close ally, the victim on whose behalf we are so outraged (Saudi Arabia), is not only one of the most tyrannical and aggressive regimes on the planet, but produced 15 of the 19 hijackers and had extensive and still-unknown involvement in that attack.

Yes, and I noticed (in my previous post) that Iran-Saudi relations are experiencing tension in part because the latter “sent troops to help Bahrain's Sunni rulers quell pro-democracy protesters led by the island's Shia majority.” (source)

If the U.S. is so deeply offended by the involvement of a foreign government in an attack on U.S. soil, it would be looking first to its close friend Saudi Arabia, where “elements of the government” were likely involved in an actual plot rather than a joke of a plot.

[...]

To make sure you understand just how dastardly and evil the Iranian plotters here are, the DOJ in its complaint highlighted that the used-car-salesman-Terrorist-Mastermind said that he preferred that nobody else be killed when the Saudi Ambassador was assassinated, but if it were absolutely necessary, he could accept some unintended deaths! [...] Is that not the mentality that drives U.S. behavior in multiple countries around the world every day? The U.S. flattened an entire civilian apartment building in Baghdad with a 2,000-pound bomb when it thought Saddam Hussein was there (he wasn’t — oops — but lots of innocent people were). NATO repeatedly bombed structures in Tripoli where it thought (mistakenly) Moammar Gadaffi was located, in the process almost certainly killing large numbers of unintended targets.

Okay, we could fill volumes with examples of that behavior, but the bottom line is:

The U.S. is the living, breathing symbol of this “collateral damage” rationale.

[...]

Really, for brazen irony, how can this be beat?

Tom Kean, former chairman of the 9/11 Commission said the alleged plot “surprises me.” Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett, Kean said the plot is “pretty close to an act of war. You don’t go in somebody’s capital to blow somebody up.”

That’s pretty good, okay, but I’d be hard pressed to choose a top brazen irony from this crowd of masters of brazen irony.

So ludicrous are the claims here — why would Iran possibly wake up one day and decide that it wanted to engage in a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil when it could much more easily kill Saudi officials elsewhere? and if Iran and its Quds forces are really behind this inept, hapless, laughable plot, then nothing negates the claim that Iran is some Grave Threat like this does.

[...]

Even the NYT noted — with great understatement — that the allegations “provoked puzzlement from specialists on Iran, who said it seemed unlikely that the government would back a brazen murder and bombing plan on American soil.” The Post noted that “the very rashness of the alleged assassination plot raised doubts about whether Iran’s normally cautious ruling clerics supported or even know about it.”

Is Glenn thinking that this plot was even too over the top for the normally supportive corporate press to sanction?

But we all know that only Bad Muslim countries exploit foreign policy fabrications for political gain, and not the United States of America (especially not with Barack Obama, rather than a Republican, in the White House).

Oh, yeah. I forgot that for a second.

If the Obama administration decided tomorrow that military action against Iran was warranted in response, is there any doubt that large majorities of Americans — and large majorities of Democrats — would support that? As I said when discussing the Awlaki killing, the truly “scary” aspect of all of this is that the U.S. Government need only point and utter the word “Terrorist” and hordes of citizens will rise up and demand not evidence, but blood.

USA! USA! USA!

And, as a huge bonus to Washington, hordes of citizens would attack rather than join the protesters who are threatening to actually change this country with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Seriously, the Obama administration had no choice. It had to take the gamble. With the OWS movement and Holder’s involvement in Fast and Furious, they had to do something - and do it now.