The Navy's War vs. Bolton's War
( Excerpt from Tom Dispatch )
I can’t help but remember the line from George Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan: “How long, O Lord, how long?” Which is why today’s piece by TomDispatch regular Michael Klare should be considered genuine news. It took almost two decades of plodding, destructive, victory-less effort, but parts of the U.S. military (the Navy and Air Force) have evidently finally begun thinking about how to ditch the war on terror -- even if only to focus on the possibility of getting into a potentially more devastating kind of conflict. Tom
The Navy’s War vs. Bolton’s War
The Pentagon’s Spoiling for a Fight -- But With China, Not Iran
By Michael T. Klare
The recent White House decision to speed the deployment of an aircraft carrier battle group and other military assets to the Persian Gulf has led many in Washington and elsewhere to assume that the U.S. is gearing up for war with Iran. As in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials have cited suspect intelligence data to justify elaborate war preparations. On May 13th, acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan even presented top White House officials with plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East for possible future combat with Iran and its proxies. Later reports indicated that the Pentagon might be making plans to send even more soldiers than that.
Hawks in the White House, led by National Security Advisor John Bolton, see a war aimed at eliminating Iran’s clerical leadership as a potentially big win for Washington. Many top officials in the U.S. military, however, see the matter quite differently -- as potentially a giant step backward into exactly the kind of low-tech ground war they’ve been unsuccessfully enmeshed in across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa for years and would prefer to leave behind.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176570/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_fighting_the_next_war%2C_not_the_last/#more
