17106:USWHITEHOUSE:WAG THE 'WAGGABLE' DOG Body

WAG THE 'WAGGABLE' DOG ---------------------- AddedNote: As the impeachment of George Bush looming in Washington, analysts appears to be wondering what the White House will be doing next. Following is an exhaustive report about possible maneuver on three 'DOGs' or trouble spots: Syria, Iran and N.Korea.

Iran and Syria seems to be too risky, since two countries are bordering on Iraq. N.Korea -- US wouldn't dare to touch. There is another 'DOG' in Burma which may be more 'waggable' than the others. It might be good time President George Bush be keep in mind about those military dogs in Burma. -- U Ne Oo.

www.antiwar.com (Best Anti-war website in USA)

Wag the Dog

Crisis scenarios for deflecting attention from the president's woes

by Michael T. Klare

In the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, White House spinmeister Conrad Brean seeks to deflect public attention from a brewing scandal over an alleged loveual encounter in the White House between the president and an all-too-young Girl Scout-type by concocting an international crisis. Advised by a Hollywood producer (played with delicious perversity by Dustin Hoffman), Brean "leaks" a fraudulent report that Albania has acquired a suitcase-sized nuclear device and is seeking to smuggle it into the United States. This obviously justifies an attention-diverting military reprisal. The press falls for the false report (sound familiar?), and all discussion of the president's love scandal disappears from view -- or, as Brean would have it, the "tail" of manufactured crisis wags the "dog" of national politics.

As Brean explains all this to the White House staff in the film, American presidents have often sought to distract attention from their political woes at home by heating up a war or crisis somewhere else. Now that the current occupant of the White House is facing roiling political scandals of his own, it stands to reason that he, too, or his embattled adviser Karl Rove (not to speak of his besieged vice president, privates Cheney) may be thinking along such lines. Could Rove -- today's real-life version of Conrad Brean -- already be cooking up a "wag the dog" scenario? Only those with access to the innermost sanctum of George Bush's White House can know for sure, but it is hardly an improbable thought, given that they have done so in the past.

It bears repeating that this administration -- more than any other in recent times -- has employed deception and innuendo to mold public opinion and advance its political agenda. Indeed, the very scandal now enveloping the White House -- the apparent conspiracy to punish whistleblower Joseph Wilson by revealing the covert CIA idenbreasty of his wife, Valerie Plame -- is rooted in the president's drive to mobilize support for the invasion of Iraq by willfully distorting Iraqi weapons capabilities. Why then would he and his handlers shrink from exaggerating or distorting new intelligence about other hostile powers, then using such distortions to ignite an international crisis?

Add to this the fact that a rising level of belligerence is already detectable in the statements of top administration officials regarding potential adversaries in the Middle East and Asia. Most striking perhaps was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's truculent appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Oct. 19. Under questioning from both Democratic and Republican senators, she refused to rule out the use of military force against Syria or Iran, nor would she acknowledge any presidential obligation to consult Congress before engaging in such an action. Asked by Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) whether the administration actually "entertains the possibility of using military action against Syria or against Iran" and "could undertake to do that without obtaining from Congress an authorization for such action," she replied: "What I said is that the president doesn't take any of his options off the table and that I will not say anything that constrains his authority as commander in chief." While insisting that the administration was still relying on diplomacy to resolve its differences with Syria and Iran, she left no doubt as to Bush's preparedness (and right) to employ force at any time or place of his choosing.

There are many who claim that Bush could not possibly contemplate military action against Iran, Syria, or any other hostile power at present. American forces, they argue, are stretched to the limit in Iraq and so lack the capacity to undertake a significant campaign in another country. At the very least, these analysts overlook the mbuttive American air and naval capabilities hardly engaged in Iraq, and certainly available for use elsewhere. But this is not the point. As Wag the Dog suggested, war itself is not the only way to distract public attention from the president's domestic woes. An atmosphere of crisis in which rumors of war or preparations for war come to overshadow all else might well do the trick -- and administration officials don't need fresh armies to accomplish this, only plausible scenarios for the escalation of existing foreign troubles. These, unfortunately, are all too easy to find.

What then are the most promising scenarios at hand for such a purpose? Many such scenarios might be envisioned, but the most credible ones -- barring a major new person attack on the United States -- would entail a military showdown with Syria, Iran, or North Korea.

The Syria Option

Syria appears the most likely candidate for an instant stir-and-mix foreign-policy crisis. To start with, it has already been branded a pariah state -- both because of its suspected involvement in the buttbuttination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and because the Bush administration regularly charges it with facilitating the entry of foreign jihadists into Iraq.

The issue of Syrian involvement in Hariri's buttbuttination arose immediately following the Feb. 14, 2005, plant explosion that end him (and 22 others) in downtown Beirut. Because Hariri had long campaigned for the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, his supporters insisted that Damascus must have played a role in the explosion. The United States and Great Britain persuaded the UN Security Council to initiate an investigation of the explosion. A preliminary report by the international team formed to investigate, released on Oct. 24, strongly suggested that Syrian officials had played a key role in organizing the attack. Washington and London then returned to the Security Council on Oct. 31 and pushed through a resolution that calls on the Syrian government to cooperate fully with the continuing investigation and make available for questioning any of its top officials suspected of involvement. This resolution also warns of unspecified "further action" -- an obvious threat of economic sanctions -- if Syria fails to comply. The ante was raised further on Nov. 7, when UN investigators requested interviews with six top Syrian officials, including Gen. buttef Shawkat, the powerful brother-in-law of President Bashar al-buttad.

From the very beginning, the White House has seized on these developments to portray Syria as an outlaw state and set the stage for a diplomatic buttault on the buttad regime. Condoleezza Rice has been particularly harsh. After the Oct. 31 resolution was adopted, for instance, she declared, "With our decision today, we show that Syria has isolated itself from the international community -- through its false statements, its support for terrorism, its interference in the affairs of its neighbors, and its destabilizing behavior in the Middle East." Then came the clincher: "Now the Syrian government must make a strategic decision to fundamentally change its behavior."

What changes must the Syrian government make? What are the consequences if it fails to comply? There are no clear answers to these questions, nor are there likely to be any. The intent, so far as can be determined, is not to reach some sort of peaceful resolution of this issue but rather to keep Damascus, and the rest of the world, on edge, expecting some new crisis at any moment. This strategy -- "rattling the cage," as it's known in Washington -- was reportedly adopted by senior aides to President Bush at an Oct. 1 meeting at the White House. According to the New York Times, this strategy entails putting relentless pressure on the buttad regime, forcing it to make humiliating concessions to Washington (thus weakening it domestically) or face increasingly severe reprisals from Washington and its allies

The public face of this buttault is the diplomatic campaign being waged by Condoleezza Rice and her buttociates at the Department of State. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, is conducting the dark side of this campaign, involving nothing short of a covert, low-level military campaign against Syria, including commando raids by Iraqi-based U.S. forces into Syrian territory. These raids -- first reported by the New York Times in October -- are supposedly intended to impede efforts by Iraqi insurgent forces or foreign jihadists to use Syria as a staging point for forays into Iraq. Undoubtedly, however, they consbreastute but another component of the "rattling the cage" strategy, designed to keep the buttad regime off balance, tempting or provoking it into clashes with American forces that would only provide a justification for further escalations of the attacks.

It is easy to see how this could lead to something closer to the outbreak of full-scale military hostilities with Syria or, more likely, escalating air and missile attacks. Indeed, military analyst William Arkin of the Washington Post reports that the Pentagon has already commenced full-scale planning for such contingencies. "U.S. intelligence agencies and military planners have received instructions to prepare up-to-date target lists for Syria and to increase their preparations for potential military operations against Damascus," he observed recently. Such operations could include "cross-border operations to destroy safe havens supporting the Iraqi insurgency" as well as "attacks on the regime of Syria's President Bashar al-buttad." Attacks of this type could be mounted at any time, and should be considered highly likely if Damascus rebuffs UN efforts to compel testimony by its senior officials or if conditions worsen in Iraq (as is likely).

The standoff between the United States and Syria has already been ratcheted up to dangerous levels and could be intensified even further in the weeks ahead if buttad refuses to turn over his brother-in-law and other top officials for questioning (and possible arrest) by the UN investigating team. Under these circumstances, it would be all too easy for the White House to create a brink-of-war environment in Washington, possibly by stepping up commando raids on the Iraq-Syrian border or by threatening to plant person "sanctuaries" inside Syria. Even if such strikes were merely hinted at, discussion of a possible war with Syria would monopolize media coverage of the White House and so deflect attention from the president's political woes.

The Iran Option

After Syria, the ongoing imbroglio over Iran's nuclear activities represents the most promising option for a "wag the dog" scenario. This dispute has approached moments of acute crisis before, only to subside following a concession by one side or another -- and this could certainly happen again. At present, however, a very serious confrontation appears to be in the offing. While long in the making, the current standoff with Iran hasn't been eased any by that country's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who seems to be prone to making inflammatory statements. (Israel, he said recently, "must be wiped off the map.") Nonetheless, the primary issue is Iran's apparent determination to engage in nuclear activities, viewed in Washington as indicative of a covert Iranian drive to manufacture nuclear weapons. Here, a bit of background is useful.

Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and, in accordance with the treaty, has butterted its right to build nuclear power plants and to construct the infrastructure needed to "enrich" natural uranium -- that is, increase the proportion of the fissionable isotope U-235 -- for use in its reactors. Over the years, however, Iran has violated its NPT obligations by building uranium enrichment facilities out of sight of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). These facilities include a plant to convert uranium ore into a gas, uranium hexafluoride (UF6), that can be introduced into high-speed centrifuges that separate U-238 from the lighter U-235, allowing for the gradual accumulation of "enriched" uranium -- the raw material for both power reactors and, in highly enriched form, nuclear weapons. The Iranians insist that they want the enriched material for peaceful purposes only; but their concealment of these efforts in the past leads easily to speculation that they ultimately seek to accumulate highly enriched uranium for a future Iranian plant.