Bush will attack Iran to redeem his presidency?! -The iPINIONS Journal

Don’t bet against it….

Even dead-end supporters of America’s misadventure in Iraq expressed grave concerns yesterday after the Bush administration announced that it will soon declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization (as if declaring Iran itself part of the “axis of evil” in 2002 were not foreboding enough…). But their concerns are warranted because they are intimately aware that this demonizing of the enemy is patented foreplay before President George W. Bush unleashes his military arsenal.

Of course, they are also mindful that – as the most unpopular (lame-duck) president in US history – Bush has nothing to lose, but much to gain, by attacking Iran. After all, only the opinion of historians matter to him now. And nothing would do more to redeem his presidential legacy than a preemptive strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.

Although, if truth be told, most world leaders would welcome such a strike – if it were successful. Because they know as well as Bush does that no amount of diplomatic pressure or UN negotiations will ever stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Moreover, no one would deny that nuclear weapons in the hands of the genocidal (“wipe Israel off the map”) president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pose even greater apocalyptic dangers than such weapons in the hands of Osama bin Laden. Yet Bush and Israeli PM Ehud Olmert are the only world leaders with the cajones to prevent this nightmare scenario from becoming a reality. (In fact, I would bet that, if not Bush, then surely Olmert, or his likely successor Bibi Netanyahu, will eventually stop Ahmadinejad…for the sake of mankind!)

Meanwhile, many who have already discarded Bush as a deaf, dumb and done president are probably banking on the fact that the US is so tied down in Iraq – militarily, politically and financially – that it does not have the resources to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, let alone take on the Republican Guard in Iran.

I hasten to remind these Doubting Thomases, however, that even though the US Army and Marines are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force and Navy are rested, cocked and ready to fire smart bombs (from the air and sea) to take out Iran’s nuclear installations. After all, not even VP Dick Cheney is so delusional as to think that oppressed Iranians are just waiting to greet the US soldiers in the streets of Tehran as liberators.

Therefore, listen carefully as Bush bangs the drums of war over the Fall and Winter – by teasing Iran about abetting Iraqi insurgents in the killing of US soldiers and lying about its nuclear program. Because then you won’t be shocked, shocked when he begins raining bombs down on it next Spring to fulfill his vow that:

America will not allow the world’s most dangerous regime to possess . . . the world’s most dangerous weapons.

But, to help you make a more judicious wager, consider further that as early as January 2006, the Washington Post quoted Bush lamenting ominously as follows: