Secondly, by further discrediting the Bushites for hyping Hussein’s non-existent WMD’s, it helps prevent them from launching a unilateral attack on Iran before they leave office (although that still might be possible). The U.S. rulers’ liberal faction knows that tackling Iran will require far greater military force than the missiles and bombs the Bush gang once seemed tempted to use. Recalling the 750,000-strong multi-national force they were able to muster for their 1991 Iraq invasion, the liberals are forcing Bush & Co. to work through the United Nations.

The NY Times editorialized (6/1), "Having long taken a back seat to the Bush administration in publicly challenging Iran’s nuclear program, [UN] inspectors last week moved into the driver’s seat, demanding that Tehran come clean on any progress it has made toward building a bomb....The Americans have handed over the wheel on the confrontation with Iran. After challenging Iran’s atomic efforts with everything from diplomatic crusades to shows of military force, the Americans backed off late last year, based on a new intelligence finding that Tehran had suspended work in late 2003 on the design of nuclear arms. Now, in the waning days of President Bush’s second term, it would be difficult — politically, diplomatically and militarily — for them to try to press for a new confrontation."

Aiding Liberal Imperialists Seeking Larger Forces for Wider Wars

Turncoat McClellan helped sell Bush’s on-the-cheap warmaking, Rumsfeld’s hi-tech "shock and awe" invasion which failed to win a war but managed to kill one million Iraqis. But McClellan now serves the more powerful multilateral camp of U.S. bosses. His bestseller resulted from a year of close collaboration with Peter Osnos, publisher of PublicAffairs press and a senior fellow at the Century Fund, a liberal, ruling-class think-tank. A recent Century Fund study, "America’s Slide From Leadership to Isolation," blames the current Iraq fiasco on "too few U.S. boots on the ground" and "U.S. abandonment of collective security for a unilaterally driven agenda." It concludes, "In coming years, U.S. political leaders will almost certainly have to adapt their styles and aspirations to global leadership to the international rules of the game that the United Nations embodies" — although, again, that depends on what U.S. rulers think they can get away with on their own.

U.S. global leadership — that is, imperialist domination, with junior partner allies — is also the goal of another of McClellan’s newfound backers, billionaire currency swindler, election fixer, Rockefeller ally and liberal "philanthropist" George Soros. Osnos got his big start as an officer in Soros’s Human Rights Watch and has published six Soros books through PublicAffairs. After buying votes in various pro-U.S., anti-Russian electoral "revolutions" in Eastern Europe, Soros now calls for U.S.-led multi-national military action against Chinese influence in Darfur.

Another liberal McClellan enabler is life-long war criminal Richard Holbrooke, vice-chairman of Perseus investors, the firm that owns PublicAffairs. Holbrooke was an aide to ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in the U.S. genocide in Vietnam in the 1960s and advised Bill Clinton’s bombing of Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. A nominal supporter of Hillary Clinton, Holbrooke recently jumped on the Obama bandwagon by conceding his nomination at a May 26 debate in Toronto.

McClellan didn’t jump ship alone. His older brother Mark, also a former GOP stalwart, joined the liberals last year. As Bush’s head of Medicare/Medicaid until 2006, he made those agencies blank-check factories for giant drug companies. Today, Mark McClellan heads a program at the liberal Brookings Institution that studies ways of federalizing health care and subordinating Big Pharma’s profits to the rulers’ larger war agenda. McClellans’ opportunistic fence-jumping reflects a major, ongoing effort by the imperialists to win as broad a base as possible to their cause. The coming elections are, of course, their main focus.

Book Benefitting Obama

Scott McClellan’s Iraq "exposé" chiefly aids Barack Obama. Hypocritically feeding on widespread anti-war sentiment, Obama proposes an Iraq exit strategy. But his platform demands 92,000 new soldiers towards "making the finest military in the world...best-prepared to meet 21st-century threats." (Obama 2008 website) Voting for Obama as an anti-war candidate would thus be a grave political error. Voting for anyone, in fact, can’t help at all.

The solution to the capitalists’ endless wars and their ceaseless attempts to trick us into supporting them lies outside their fruitless electoral process. It lies in building a communist party dedicated to the long-term struggle of overthrowing the deadly profit system.