What the Bush Adm. may actually be aiming at - as a politically serendipitious blowback from strikes on Iran - would be another major terrorist attack on US interests or US soil.
Al Qaeda now exists more as an ideological franchise than an organization. But Hezzbollah on the other hand....
Hezzbollah is an actual organization, more like a ministate, which has both military and terrorist capabilities and which has close ties to, and receives funds from, Iran : The organization has missiles and drones, and demonstrated considerable military capability in driving Israeli forces from Lebannon. One cannot assume, for that matter, that the organization does not possess one or two portable nuclear devices.
In going to war against Iran, the Bush Administration will be inviting Hezzbollah retaliation. That might not come immediately, but it would be an underestimation, I feel, to discount the possibility that some of the most outrageous of the many Bush Administration generated US PR debacles surrounding the Iraqi invasion and occupation were wholly unintentional :
The gratuitiously offensive nature of the sexual humiliation tactics used at Abu Ghraib, while disastrous at one level, also serve the interests of some in the Bush Administration who need a more significant Causus Bellum now that the sting of 9-11 has ebbed somewhat.
The overall effect of US behavior since the invasion of Iraq has been to polarize Islamic attitudes - this is surely happening within such subcultures as Hezzbollah, and so I have to wonder : when will the Bush Administration's Trotskyite rolling "permanent war" in the Mideast cause the voices of hotheads to prevail, against the voices of caution, in the call for strikes against US interests ? And, would the Bush NeoCons be blindsided, or would they have been expecting such an attack ? It would be a mistake to assume that the growing World hatred of the US was unanticipated or undesired by the Bush Neocons and their Dominionist and Rapturist Christian allies - such World hatred, and subsequent terrorist attacks on the US, would, indeed, enable serve to advance both the domestic and geopolitical aims of the NeoCons.
Of course, such attacks would provide a pretext for US actions against Syria and Iran. Domestically, however, they would be at least as useful for the Bush NeoCons and the new US Right ( AKA the religious right ).
Another strike of magnitude comparable to or larger than the September 11, 2001 attack - "9-11 redux" - or even several much smaller attacks, would provide George W. Bush, the NeoCons, and the Christian right - especially with the likely escalation conflict and mayhem in the Mideast theatre - with sufficient pretext for substantial crackdown - under the rubric of "national unity - on domestic political dissent. We could expect frenzied demonization of Islamic-American groups with a subsequent widespread outbreak of hate crimes and perhaps the internent of Muslims and certain ethnicities of Mideastern origin : also, a crackdown on political and cultural dissident groups - outspoken voices on the left, gays, and so on. Some on the US right have long planned and yearned for something like this, at least since the REX-84 days when a Reagan NSC order unleashed Ollie North to plan a concentration camp system. So, "the fire next time" - a 9-11 redux - would finalize, for the forseeable future, the transformation of US government into an authoritarian security state.
Beyond harshly repressive domestic political measures, further terrorist attacks within the US would enable the "toughening up America", and full mobilization of America's war-fighting capability - by way of a reinstituted draft, privatized military services, or both. In fact, this has been underway in a low grade way since September 11, 2001, and it should be noted that one of the side effects of the Iraq conflict has been a dramatic expansion in the number of battle hardened US Army and National Guard units. This may have been unintentional, but it lays groundwork for future war and is congruent with an overall Spartanization of an American that has come to be viewed by some as grown dangerously soft.
The upshot of this train of events will be a "Spartanization" of America, under a new, embattled and combatitive mentality, and - meanwhile a rolling, graduated blitz through the Mideast which, conveniently, could have the effect of destabilizing Saudi Arabia - and that, in turn, would demand US led "stabilization" measures. Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia - one down, two to go, and the US will achieve direct control of something on the order of 1/2 of the World's oil. That control can be, in turn, used to exert pressure on nations opposed to the new US hegemonic order.
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