Did you catch the President’s speech last week?

Allegedly about Iraq, Bush’s speech instead laid the groundwork for our next war, against Iran.

Six times in the speech Bush mentioned Iran, the 18th-largest nation on the planet.

He implicitly rejected the Iraq Study Group’s advice to work diplomatically with Iran and Syria. On the contrary, the President announced the deployment of Patriot missiles and an aircraft carrier as a means of “addressing Iran and Syria.”

As if to provoke Iran, just hours prior to the speech, U.S.-led forces raided an Iranian consulate-to-be in northern Iraq and took prisoners.

The President linked these military moves against Iran to the goal of stabilizing Iraq. However, as I reported in this newspaper last year in its April 18, Sept. 13 and Dec. 4 editions, the Bush Administration has been plotting war against Iran for many years.

In September, I warned on these pages, “Starting shortly after the November election, you are going to hear a blitzkrieg of reasons for why we should go to war in Iran.”

Sure enough, the Dec. 11 issue of U.S. News & World Report contained two separate columns advocating war with Iran because of their possible nuclear capabilities.

One of the columnists pushed the idea of destabilizing the Iranian government by bombing its ports and refineries in addition to (probably several hundred) military targets – “regime change,” just like in Iraq.

Now, the President contends we have to go after Iran because of their meddling in Iraq, too.

Stung by bipartisan criticism, however, the White House scrambled to temporarily disguise its moves and motives.

Bush spokesman Nick Saban – excuse me, Tony Snow – was forced to issue a prepared denial Friday: “This notion that somehow what the president was announcing was a precursor to. a planned war against Iran, that’s just not the case.”

Expect a few more zigs and zags before the President, without international support or Congressional authorization, likely declares unilateral war on Iran later this year.

Wait, doesn’t the American public want us out of Iraq as soon as possible instead of in a new war with Iran? Doesn’t Congress have the Constitutional responsibility to declare war? What the heck is going on?

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, may have the answer.

In an astonishingly candid assessment of U.S. foreign policy in October 2005, Wilkerson stated: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues…”

What’s a cabal? According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, it is “the artifices and intrigues of a group of persons secretly united in a plot (as to overturn a government).”

So, take it from Colin Powell’s right-hand man – our foreign policy, if not our government as a whole, has been overthrown from the inside.

It has been hijacked by a small group of zealots who fervently believe they can bomb the world into democracy.

As their efforts falter in Afghanistan and Iraq and their supporters vanish, the cult of “shock and awe” has increasingly isolated itself from the outside world.

This siege mentality explains why nothing – not the November elections, not the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations – has impeded the Bush Administration’s escalation of war in Iraq and the creation of war with Iran.

The brakes the Founding Fathers built into the Constitution have failed. We are hurtling over the edge, unchecked and unbalanced.

How will all this end? I’ll let Colonel Wilkerson have the last word, from his October 2005 speech:

“I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious. you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again.”

- John Knox is an associate research scientist in the Faculty of Engineering and an instructor/advisor in the Department of Geography