Crunch Time

Published September 17, 2007

By Nathan Bradbury

You’ve heard the phrase “crunch time.” You’ve probably heard athletes use it to refer to the waning moments of a game, your parents around tax time, or maybe you’ve used it while making the final moves to get your term paper in on time. These moments before any deadline are fleeting at best.

But what if the realities of life’s due dates ceased to function normally? What if you could convince your professor that your “Sex Life of Bonobos” term paper “could last six days, six weeks… I doubt six months” past the due date?

Sadly, we do not have the verbal skill set to negotiate such a beautiful arrangement. However, for our esteemed political leaders, such a reality must not exist. Since the beginning of the Iraq War in the Spring of 2003, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld (the author of the quote above), and a slew of others have consistently claimed that we are “approaching a crucial moment” in winning the war.

There have been many variations on that theme: changing crucial to critical, moment to a few months, a few months to a year, and so on. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve needed extensions on deadlines before. Sometimes we get distracted. Good-looking ladies, suave gentlemen, beer, etc. are all capable of derailing even the most diligent student— or politician, as the situation may have it.

This gratuitous display of procrastination tactics would impress me if it didn’t mean the continued loss of American and Iraqi lives everyday. I bring this up now not to harp further on Bush’s fabrication of fables but to bring into focus a harrowing turn on our “roadmap to victory”.

Three weekends ago The Sunday Times in London reported, “The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days.”

Shocked by the government’s goal of throwing us headlong into more international turmoil? You should be. It seemed that the American people had made their stance on this war clear in 2007. Obviously, we have not. Here’s what media analyst Jerry Policoff had to say about this report:

This article, which ran in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London, was clearly planted by Bush’s Neocon enablers, and seems to be preparing the world for a massive U.S. air operation against Iran involving 1,200 targets. Also, note the inclusion of references to a report released by the Institute for the Study of War written by Kimberly Kagan. Kagan is the wife of Fred Kagan, one of the most un-repentant of the PNAC Neocon gang that got us into Iraq. He is also one of the architects of the current “surge.”

Regardless of whether you agree with Mr. Policoff’s commentary or not, what he says makes sense given the public relations campaign that spearheaded the buildup to the war in Iraq in 2002. Parallels between our invasion of Iraq and the current potential for an invasion of Iran are uncanny. With Iraq, we said we were searching for links between Osama bin Laden and former President Hussein’s WMD’s (a formula for international terror). Now we say Iran’s program of nuclear proliferation and uranium enrichment presents us with a similiar catastrophic threat. We had pressure from the U.N. to wait for more conclusive evidence and form an international coalition to resolve any issues in Iraq. Now, we have the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)— a group of 118 nations that consider themselves without formal alliances— and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pushing us to halt our efforts to isolate and control Iran.

On September 10th, the IAEA and Iran reached an agreement over the maintenance of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program. That afternoon, the U.S. announced its plans to build a new military base in Badrah (central Iraq) just four miles from the Iranian border. Apparently, the U.S. military will also be taking control of the main border crossing between Iran and Iraq (in Zurbatiya) and its security detail.

This is starting to seem like a re-run of a bad sitcom. We’ve got the stalwart father, loving mother, and the awkwardly incompetent son acting for us on the global stage everyday. Only in the real world, we don’t get to laugh when our government gets its coat caught in the car door. Sadly, there is no reason for us to expect that door to open any time soon— mind the road rash.

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