SAUDI ARMS DEAL, PART THE SECOND...

The more I read of this New York Times story about this Saudi arms deal, the more peeved I get. This whole deal is supposedly to help counter Iran:

"Worried about the impression that the United States was starting an arms race in the region, State and Defense Department officials stressed that the arms deal was being proposed largely in response to improvements in Iran’s military capabilities and to counter the threat posed by its nuclear program, which the Bush administration contends is aimed at building nuclear weapons."

How many different ways can these fuckers twist the bogeyman of Iran? Iran is why we have to stay in Iraq, Iran is why we have to sell weapons to dictatorships, Iran is why our troops in Iraq are getting killed, Iran is why we have to subvert Hamas even though they were the democratically-elected choice of the Palestinians, etc. Iran should start charging royalties whenever Bush or his administration invokes their name. They'd be a superpower tomorrow...

The story also has this to say:

"Along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are likely to receive equipment and weaponry from the arms sales under consideration, officials said. In general, the United States is interested in upgrading the countries’ air and missile defense systems, improving their navies and making modest improvements in their air forces, administration officials said, though not all the packages would be the same."

Since when did the navies of Middle Eastern countries become, well, ours? Why are we interested in improving the navies of other countries? I would guess it's so they can attack other countries more efficiently, tearing up their infrastructure a little more so that we can have Halliburton come in after we help provoke some more wars over there?

Oh hell...I just gotta go to sleep...

IRAN AS AN EXCUSE...

...to find new ways to make enemies out of the whole world...

I'm kind of relieved in a way, now that I realize the Bushies know they're full of shit when they accuse Iran of "meddling" in Iraq, which of course is the ultimate example of the pot calling the kettle black. How do we know this? Because of this story from the AP (so this link will be dead soon):

President Bush is defending plans to set up a missile defense system in Russia's back yard, despite the strain it has put on already-tense U.S.-Russian relations.

The president told a group of foreign reporters that the weapons system is in response to Tehran's nuclear ambitions, and that the missiles will be aimed at Iran, not Russia.

Bush wants to base part of the system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Bush is telling Putin, who correctly refers to this move as imperialism (note that I didn't use quotation marks), to "get over it." Get over it? Really?

Too bad we don't lead by example in "getting over" things. Or I should say, we only "get over" things that we can make money on. Like for example, we've never "gotten over" the fact that Cuba is a communist country, but we've really put China's communism behind us. If Russia put a missile "defense" system in South America somewhere, the right-wing freakos would never "get over it," no matter how many times Russia assured us the missiles weren't aimed at us.

And all this is happening at at time when we need to be reducing our military presence around the world, not increasing it. But I guess the military-industrial complex won't rest until there's a missile aimed at every person on earth, depleted uranium in every river, and unexploded ordnance on every playground. It's an ugly, yet highly profitable, vision of the world.