Bush in Brussels: US steps up threats of wider Mideast war

By Patrick Martin
24 February 2005

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George Bush began his European tour in Brussels with a series of bellicose pronouncements, putting his hosts on notice that the United States intends to push ahead with new military threats and provocations that could expand the current war in Iraq into a wider conflagration embracing much of the Middle East.

The principal target of Bush’s threats was Iran, but Syria also came in for a heavy-handed warning. The US president denounced Tehran for allegedly planning to build nuclear weapons and made clear his opposition to the strategy, pursued by Britain, France and Germany, of offering economic concessions to Iran in return for promises to limit its nuclear programs to energy production. He claimed that Iran had “breached a contract with the international community. They’re the party that needs to be held to account—not any of us.”

While this language clearly resembles Bush’s rhetoric before the attack on Iraq, when he cited Saddam Hussein’s alleged multiple violations of UN resolutions, Bush went out of his way to deny press reports suggesting an imminent US military strike against Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons labs.

Pentagon planning for such strikes—including the dispatch into Iran of special forces teams to choose targets—was reported by the New Yorker last month. Pentagon officials have since confirmed they are systematically updating longstanding contingency plans for military action against Iran, to take into account the presence of 160,000 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, which border Iran on the west and east.

Last week, former top US weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in remarks at a college campus in Olympia, Washington, said that Bush has already signed off on a June 2005 air strike against selected Iranian targets. Ritter also claimed that the Bush administration had manipulated the result of the January 30 Iraq election, reducing the vote of the victorious Shiite coalition from 56 percent to 48 percent in order to block the emergence of a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. He suggested that New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh, author of the report on war planning against Iran, was about to publish an exposé of Iraq vote fraud.

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