[Pages H2094-H2096]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

WHITE HOUSE NEEDS TO CHANGE RHETORIC

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the American people are concerned and the
world is very uneasy. Congress must begin to restore what the President
and Vice President have shattered: our credibility in the world.
Headlines in the U.S. and international news media remove all doubt
how the U.S. is viewed today in the world. One said: ``Russian official
warns U.S. not to attack Iran.''
``Use of force on Iran unacceptable,'' says France.
``Trigger-happy U.S. worries Putin.''
The BBC reports that the U.S. Central Command officials have already
chosen an extensive list for missile and bomb attacks inside Iran.
Another in the Asia Times: ``Three reasons why we should attack
Iran,'' and all this comes from yesterday's headlines.
The French Foreign Ministry told an Asia news agency that France
believes that the use of force to solve the Iranian nuclear issue is
both unimaginable and unacceptable; but not in this White House.
When the Vice President announced recently that all options are still
on the table, our international credibility took another direct hit. We
cannot afford that kind of warmongering rhetoric any more, not in
dollars, not in soldiers, not in insecurity, and not in international
standing. It sounds like 2002 all over again. Like Yogi Berra said,
``deja vu all over again.''
That is a cause for grave concern on this floor and needs
congressional action. We must include language in every military
appropriation bill that specifically prohibits the administration from
unilaterally waging war in Iran except by a vote of the Congress.
As it stands, the President and the Vice President are using the same
speeches from 2002. They are just replacing the name of the country,
Iraq, with Iran; but this time, the world has noticed.
The French foreign minister tells his boss before a television
audience: ``Predictions that U.S. strikes will be conducted against
Iran have become more common, and this causes concern.''
In the Baltimore Chronicle, Robert Perry writes: ``A number of U.S.
military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
have waged an extraordinary behind-the-scenes resistance to what they
fear is a secret plan by George Bush to wage war against Iran.''
The BBC reports that two ``triggers,'' or pretexts, for a U.S. attack
have already been chosen.
Seymour Hersch writes in The New Yorker that the Pentagon has been
ordered by the White House to plan a bombing campaign against Iran
ready to go on a day's notice.
Michael Klare writing in the Asia Times says that recent remarks by
the President seek to instill the same fear as the run-up to the Iraq
war.

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Listen to the President's rhetoric: ``stabilizing the region in the
face of extremist challenges.''
Then there was the line by the President the other day: ``We are also
taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American
interests in the Middle East.''
And then the President said: ``It is also clear that we face an
escalating danger from Shiite extremists who are just as hostile to
America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East.'' He is
making a bogey-man out of Iran.
People and nations listen to that inflammatory rhetoric from our
President and Vice President and worry about a world careening towards
another war. There is no doubt that America needs a thoughtful and
coherent foreign policy concerning Iran. We ought to talk to them, for
starters.
We don't need to merely change the rhetoric of the White House. We
need to change the administration's perilous world view that America
can and will just shoot its way to peace anywhere there is a problem in
the world.
The first step in restoring America's credibility and global
leadership is to let the world know that Congress is a coequal branch
of government that will exercise its constitutional duty to ensure that
the administration does not run off on its own to go to war.
We have to declare that the days of runaway rhetoric by the
administration are over. But let us go beyond that. Let Congress take
the administration's threat of war off the table and replace it with
America's true belief that we view war as unimaginable and
unacceptable.

Three U.S. Reasons To Attack Iran

(By Michael T. Klare)

Some time this spring or summer, barring an unexpected
turnaround by Tehran, US President George W Bush is likely to
go on national television and announce that he has ordered US
ships and aircraft to strike at military targets inside Iran.
We must still sit through several months of soap opera at
the United Nations in New York and assorted foreign capitals
before this comes to pass, and it is always possible that a
diplomatic breakthrough will occur--let it be so!--but I am
convinced that Bush has already decided an attack is his only
option and the rest is a charade he must go through to
satisfy his European allies.
The proof of this, I believe, lies half-hidden in recent
public statements of his, which, if pieced together, provide
a casus belli, or formal list of justifications, for going to
war.
Three of his statements, in particular, contained the
essence of this justification: his January 10 televised
speech on his plan for a troop ``surge'' in Iraq, his State
of the Union address of January 23, and his first televised
press conference of the year on February 14. None of these
was primarily focused on Iran, but Bush used each of them to
warn of the extraordinary dangers that country poses to the
United States and to hint at severe US reprisals if the
Iranians did not desist from ``harming US troops''.
In each, moreover, he laid out various parts of the overall
argument he will certainly use to justify an attack on Iran.
String these together in one place and you can almost
anticipate what Bush's speechwriters will concoct before he
addresses the American people from the Oval Office some time
this year. Think of them as talking points for the next war.
The first of these revealing statements was Bush's January
10 televised address on Iraq. This speech was supposedly
intended to rally public and congressional support behind his
plan to send 21,500 additional US troops into the Iraqi
capital and al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni
Insurgency.
But his presentation that night was so uninspired, so
lacking in conviction, that--according to media commentary
and polling data--few, if any, Americans were persuaded by
his arguments. Only once that evening did Bush visibly come
alive: when he spoke about the threat to Iraq supposedly
posed by Iran.
``Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its
territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face
of extremist challenges,'' he declared, which meant, he
assured his audience, addressing the problem of Iran. That
country, he asserted, ``is providing material support for
attacks on American troops''. (This support was later
identified as advanced improvised explosive devices--IEDs or
roadside bombs--given to anti-American Shi'ite militias.)
Then followed an unambiguous warning: ``We will disrupt the
attacks on our forces . . . And we will seek out and destroy
the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our
enemies in Iraq.''
Consider this Item 1 in his casus belli: because Iran is
aiding and abetting the United States' enemies in Iraq, the
US is justified in attacking Iran as a matter of self-
defense.
Bush put it this way in an interview with Juan Williams of
National Public Radio on January 29: ``If Iran escalates its
military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or
innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly . . . It makes
common sense for the commander-in-chief to say to our troops
and the Iraqi people--and the Iraqi government that we will
help you defend yourself from people that want to sow discord
and harm.''
In his January 10 address, Bush went on to fill in a second
item in any future casus belli: Iran is seeking nuclear
weapons to dominate the Middle East to the detriment of the
United States' friends in the region--a goal that it simply
cannot be allowed to achieve.
In response to such a possibility, Bush declared, ``We're
also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and
protect American interests in the Middle East.'' These
include deploying a second US aircraft-carrier battle group
to the Persian Gulf region, consisting of the USS John C
Stennis and a flotilla of cruisers, destroyers and submarines
(presumably to provide additional air and missile assets
for strikes on Iran), along with additional Patriot anti-
missile batteries (presumably to shoot down any Iranian
missiles that might be fired in retaliation for an air
attack on the country and its nuclear facilities).
``And,'' Bush added, ``we will work with others to prevent
Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the
region.''
Bush added a third item to the casus belli in his State of
the Union address on January 23. After years of describing
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda as the greatest threats to U.S.
interests in the Middle East, he now introduced a new menace:
the resurgent Shi'ite branch of Islam led by Iran.
Aside from al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists, he
explained, ``It has also become clear that we face an
escalating danger from Shi'ite extremists who are just as
hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the
Middle East.'' Many of these extremists, he noted, ``are
known to take direction from the regime in Iran'', including
the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon.
As if to nail down this point, he offered some hair-raising
imagery right out of the Left Behind best-selling book series
so beloved of Christian evangelicals and their
neoconservative allies: ``If American forces step back [from
Iraq] before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be
overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic
battle between Shi'ite extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni
extremists backed by al-Qaeda and supporters of the old
regime. A contagion of violence could spill across the
country, and in time the entire region could be drawn into
the conflict. For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For
the enemy, this is the objective.''
As refined by Bush speechwriters, this, then, is the third
item in his casus belli for attacking Iran: to prevent a
``nightmare scenario'' in which the Shi'ite leaders of Iran
might emerge as the grandmasters of regional instability,
using such proxies as Hezbollah to imperil Israel and pro-
American regimes in Jordan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia--with
potentially catastrophic consequences for the safety of
Middle Eastern oil supplies. You can be sure of what Bush
will say to this in his future address: no U.S. president
would ever allow such a scenario to come to pass.
Many of these themes were reiterated in Bush's White House
Valentine's Day (February 14) press conference. Once again,
Iraq was meant to be the main story, but Iran captured all
the headlines.
Bush's most widely cited comments on Iran focused on claims
of Iranian involvement in the delivery of sophisticated
versions of the roadside IEDs that have been responsible
for many of the U.S. casualties in recent months. Just a
few days earlier, unidentified U.S. military officials in
Baghdad had declared that elements of the Iranian
military--specifically, the Quds Force of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards--were supplying the deadly devices to
Shi'ite militias in Iraq, and that high-ranking Iranian
government officials were aware of the deliveries.
These claims were contested by other U.S. officials and
members of Congress who expressed doubt about the reliability
of the evidence and the intelligence work behind it, but Bush
evinced no such uncertainty: ``What we do know is that the
Quds Force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to
networks inside of Iraq. We know that. And we also know that
the Quds Force is a part of the Iranian government. That's a
known.''
What is not known, he continued, is just how high up in the
Iranian government went the decision-making that led such
IEDs to be delivered to the Shi'ite militias in Iraq. But
that doesn't matter, he explained. ``What matters is, is that
they're there . . . We know they're there, and we're going to
protect our troops.'' As commander-in-chief, he insisted, he
would ``do what is necessary to protect our soldiers in
harm's way''.
He then went on to indicate that ``the biggest problem I
see is the Iranians' desire to have a nuclear weapon''. He
expressed his wish that this problem can be ``dealt with'' in
a peaceful way--by the Iranians voluntarily agreeing to cease
their program to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels. But
he also made it clear that the onus was purely on Tehran to
take the necessary action to avoid unspecified harm: ``I
would like to be at the . . . have been given a chance for us
to explain that we have no desire to harm the Iranian
people.''
No reporters at the press conference asked him to explain
this odd twist of phrase, delivered in the past tense, about
his regret

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that he was unable to explain to the Iranian people why he
had meant them no harm--presumably after the fact. However,
if you view this as the Bush version of a Freudian slip, one
obvious conclusion can be drawn: that Bush has already made
the decision to begin the countdown for an attack on Iran,
and only total capitulation by the Iranians could possibly
bring the process to a halt.
Further evidence for this conclusion is provided by Bush's
repeated reference to Chapter 7 of the United
Nations Charter. On three separate occasions during the
press conference he praised Russia, China and the
``EU3''--the United Kingdom, France and Germany--for
framing the December 23 UN Security Council resolution
condemning Iran's nuclear activities and imposing economic
sanctions on Iran in the context of Chapter 7--that is, of
``Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of
the Peace and Acts of Aggression''.
This sets the stage for the international community, under
UN leadership, to take such steps as may be deemed necessary
``to maintain or restore international peace and stability'',
ranging from mild economic sanctions to fullscale war (steps
that are described in Articles 39-51). But the December 23
resolution was specifically framed under Article 41, which
entails ``measures not involving the use of armed force'', a
stipulation demanded by China and Russia, which have
categorically ruled out the use of military force to resolve
the nuclear dispute with Iran.
One suspects that Bush has Chapter 7 on the brain, because
he now intends to ask for a new resolution under Article 42,
which allows the use of military force to restore
international peace and stability. But it is nearly
inconceivable that Russia and China will approve such a
resolution. Such approval would also be tantamount to
acknowledging U.S. hegemony worldwide, and this is something
they are simply unwilling to do.
So we can expect several months of fruitless diplomacy at
the United Nations in which the United States may achieve
slightly more severe economic sanctions under Chapter 41 but
not approval for military action under Chapter 42. Bush knows
that this is the inevitable outcome, and so I am convinced
that, in his various speeches and meetings with reporters, he
is already preparing the way for a future address to the
nation.
In it, he will speak somberly of a tireless U.S. effort to
secure a meaningful resolution from the United Nations on
Iran with real teeth in it and his deep disappointment that
no such resolution has been not forthcoming. He will also
point out that, despite the heroic efforts of American
diplomats as well as military commanders in Iraq, Iran
continues to pose a vital and unchecked threat to U.S.
security in Iraq, in the region, and even--via its nuclear
program--in the wider world.
Further diplomacy, he will insist, appears futile and yet
Iran must be stopped. Hence, he will say, ``I have made the
unavoidable decision to eliminate this vital threat through
direct military action,'' and will announce--in language
eerily reminiscent of his address to the nation on March 19,
2003, that a massive air offensive against Iran has already
been under way for several hours.

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