Pre-empting: Who's Next?

Journalist Seymour Hersh who uncovered, amongst other things, the My Lai massacre, the Abu Ghraib prison torture, and now the preventive strike against Lebanon.

Seymour Hersh has done it again. This time, his article, which as always begins by carefully meandering through the terminology of blame so as to neither confirm nor deny Western media angles on Middle East issues (i.e. "In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel....triggering...a full-scale war"), is about what most thinking people in the world already knew: the 33-day war in Lebanon was an unwarranted prelude to further accusations against Iran and Syria. The Saccharinist is still of the opinion that Iran will not actually be attacked, though the media war against Iran certainly intensifies. But not without competition from Iran's side.

More specifically, the article clearly indicates that both Israel and the United States had planned this attack for some time and the alleged "trigger" of the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers was merely a bogus media sensation to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars of damage and the over 1,000 civilian lives lost in this illegal war. "...Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah -- and shared it with Bush administration officials -- well before the July 12th kidnappings," Hersh writes. Sounds like a pre-emptive attack to me.

As the US heads toward major mid-term elections in November, the most important task -- for both Democrats and Republicans -- is to convince the American people that they are in danger. Sadly, this is very easy to do. This politics of fear rings of religion -- you know, that institution of fear that has subordinated the masses for millennia -- and today the fear is swelling in the heartlands and badlands of America. Just ask this 59 year old lady from Vermont.

With over two months to go before the elections, there is no doubt that the Bush administration and its cohorts have other scary scenarios planned ahead to secure their agenda in the sympathies of these unsuspecting Americans.