Is Dick Cheney an Iranian Mole? Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The Times today has an op-ed piece entitled "Iran's Operative in the White House" I desperately wanted to read it, but it's only available to the their "Times Select" elite. So I did what any other self-respecting Interweb-hax0r would do: I found it posted elsewhere. The premise is, of course, absurd, but if you take the "what-if" scenario and run with it, things start to make sense in this Bizarro-world created by the Bush-Cheney cabal:

Consider that the Bush administration's first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban regime, Iran's bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran's even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

You really think that's just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?

Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down. The U.S. dismantled Iraq's army, broke the Baath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran’s ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn’t have done better — so maybe they did write the script....

We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that's just another coincidence?

Or think about broader Bush administration policies in the Middle East. For six years, the White House vigorously backed Israeli hard-liners and refused to engage seriously in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus nurturing anti-Americanism and religious fundamentalism. Then last summer, the White House backed Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which turned Iran's proxies in Hezbollah into street heroes in much of the Arab world.

Consider also the way the administration has systematically antagonized our former allies in Europe and Asia, undermining chances of a united front to block Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Mr. Cheney may nominally push for sanctions against Iran, but by alienating our allies he makes strong sanctions harder to achieve.

And by condoning torture and extralegal detentions in Guantánamo, the White House antagonized Muslims around the world and made us look like hypocrites when we criticize Arab or Iranian human rights abuses. Take Mr. Cheney's endorsement of the torture known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning: "It's a no-brainer for me," he said. The torturers in Iran's Evin prison must have cheered. They got a pass as well.

Even at home, Iran's leaders have been bolstered by President Bush and Mr. Cheney. Iran's hard-liners are hugely unpopular and the regime is wobbly, but Bush administration policies have inflamed Iranian nationalism and given cover to the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Scary because it's true. You think punks like Ahmadinejad and Chavez would have had the chutzpah to challenge the U.S. like they have been before the neoconfused lied and manipulated their way into power?

The article's author concludes with a powerful call to action for everyone in this country:

...Whenever we’ve suspected a mole in our midst, we've gone to extreme lengths to find the traitor. This time, betrayed not by a mole but by failed policies, let's be just as resolute. It's time to uproot policies that in the last half-dozen years have damaged American interests incomparably more than any mole or foreign spy ever has in the last 200 years.

Cheney may not be getting checks from the Ayatollah, but he should be. He's missing out on another golden opportunity to cash in on destroying our nation.