[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5082-5083]
[From the U.S. 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.
  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

[[Page 5083]]

     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 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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