| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 10:51 am Post subject: How To Prevent Another 9/11 |
| How To Prevent Another 9/11
by Paul Findley
On a recent Sunday morning, NBC's Meet-the-Press host Tim Russert, CBS veteran newsman Dan Rather and retired ABC Nightline host Ted Koppel mused about the stormy debate over President Bush's spy policies.
Koppel declared that the debate will end the instant America suffers another 9/11, and he added, ominously “as we certainly will.” He implied, of course, that Congress would then swiftly give the president all the latitude in spying that he wants. Neither Russert nor Rather dissented.
Our present policies make another 9/11 inevitable. Our acts of war strengthen the insurgency in Iraq and elsewhere. U.S. forces, using white phosphorus gas, destroyed most of Fallujah, an ancient Iraqi city of 300,000. A bombing by the CIA—not widely known for war making—caused bitter protest in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda operatives now enjoy rising public approval in both Iraq and Pakistan, but still no change in U.S. policies.
Our government should explore every avenue of diplomatic settlement, but when Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden proposed a truce, the White House contemptuously said no. Bush calls bin Laden's insurgents terrorists. They call themselves fighters for justice. At the least, our officials should ask privately for truce details but, more importantly, for details about Arab grievances against America.
These grievances are soaring, but the U.S. administration has done nothing to try to identify them, much less redress them. In Iraq, our forces try to kill insurgents who mainly want our forces to leave. In Israel and Palestine, we, in effect, help Israel destroy the lives and livelihood of Arabs who resist occupation, as well as those who don't. There, the main Arab grievance is U.S. unconditional support despite Israel's take-over of Arab land and its daily violation of Arab human rights.
Arab fury led to 9/11. Months ago, bin Laden stated publicly that the deadly assault was payback for America's involvement in Israel's lawlessness, principally in 1982 when our government donated the guns, planes and bombs with which Israel slaughtered more than 18,000 Arabs in Beirut. Our long, major in the denial of Arab rights doomed the U.S. invasion of Iraq before it started.
Still, a just peace beckons. Our government can prevent another 9/11 without firing a shot or spending more billions in a futile attempt to encase America in a protective cocoon. All we need to do is stand resolutely for justice. This requires a halt to U.S. acts of war in Iraq and the suspension of all aid until Israel treats Palestinians justly, either by ending its occupation of their land seized in 1967 or by according them full citizenship in Israel. The U.S. government cannot force Israel to do its bidding, but it can and should put firm conditions on further aid.
No matter how Israel responds, these U.S. decisions would elicit pro-American rejoicing worldwide and reduce, perhaps stop the insurgency in Iraq. They would restore luster to the name America, a country now reviled for starting wars, incarcerating insurgents without due process and routinely sending detainees to secret prisons for torture.
Why doesn't Washington act? From long personal experience, I provide the answer: almost all U.S. politicians fear that any criticism of Israel will cause them big trouble the next time they seek reelection.
Fear reaches far beyond Washington. Citizens capable of expressing moral outrage in newspapers, on television, from pulpits, and in the halls of academia are as silent as the politicians. Is everyone afraid that calling Israel to account will lead to false but painful charges of anti-Semitism? Is that why no one—not Russert, Koppel or Rather, not a single journalist of prominence in the nation-- is willing to speak or write about the folly of our lop-sided, lethal pro-Israel policies?
Are we fated to suffer more wars, more dead soldiers and marines, more blighted families here and abroad, more billions in public debt, and searing hostility worldwide, simply because America's national leadership, almost to the last person, quakes before Israel's political power in this land?
President Bush could swiftly transform the grim clouds of war into the bright promise of peace. All he needs to do is sheath his sword and take a firm stand for justice. But will he? -0-
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Paul Findley, a Republican, served in Congress 1961-83, 12 of those years on the House Middle East subcommittee. He is the author of five books, one a 7-week Washington Post bestseller. He resides in Jacksonville, Illinois. | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 11:15 am Post subject: Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed For Iran |
| Juggernaut Gathering
Momentum, Headed For Iran
By Ray McGovern
2-6-6
What President George W. Bush, FOX news, and the Washington Times were saying about Iraq three years ago they are now saying about Iran. After Saturday's vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report Iran's suspicious nuclear activities to the UN Security Council, the president wasted no time in warning, "The world will not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons."
The next IAEA milestone will be reached on March 6, when its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, makes a formal report to the Security Council regarding what steps Iran needs to take to allay growing suspicions. The Bush administration, however, has already mounted a full-court press to indict and convict the Iranian leaders, and the key question is why.
Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and insists (correctly) that the treaty assures signatories the right to pursue nuclear programs for peaceful use. And when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claims, as she did last month, "There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment," she is being, well, disingenuous again.
If Dr. Rice has done her homework, she is aware that in 1975 President Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a nuclear program to meet future energy requirements. This is what Iranian officials are saying today, and they are supported by energy experts who point out that oil extraction in Iran is already at or near peak and that the country will need alternatives to oil in coming decades.
Ironically, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric. The project fell through when the Shah was ousted three years later.
It is altogether reasonable to expect that Iran's leaders want to have a nuclear weapons capability as well, and that they plan to use their nuclear program to acquire one. From their perspective, they would be fools not to. Iran is one of three countries earning the "axis-of-evil" sobriquet from President Bush and it has watched what happened to Iraq, which had no nuclear weapons, as well as what did not happen to North Korea, which does have them. And Iran's rival Israel, which has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty but somehow escapes widespread opprobrium, has a formidable nuclear arsenal cum delivery systems.
Israeli threats to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities simply provide additional incentive to Tehran to bury and harden them against the kind of Israeli air attack that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981. Although the US (together with every other UN Security Council member) condemned that attack, Dick Cheney and other senior officials do not disguise their view that it was just what the doctor ordered at the time ... and that the same prescription might take care of Iran.
Who Is Threatened by Iranian Nukes?
The same country that felt threatened by putative nuclear weapons in the hands of Iraq. With at least 200 nuclear weapons and various modes of delivery at their disposal, the Israelis have a powerful deterrent. They appear determined to put that deterrent into play early to pre-empt any nuclear weapons capability in Iran, rather than have to deal with one after it has been put in place. Israeli leaders seem allergic to the thought that other countries in the region might be able to break its nuclear monopoly and they react neuralgically to proposals for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
Bending over backwards to such sensitivities, the US delegation to the IAEA delayed the proceedings for a day in a futile attempt to delete from Sunday's report language calling for such a zone. The final report called for a "Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction." This is the first time a link has been made, however implicitly, between the Iranian and Israeli nuclear programs.
The argument that the US is also threatened directly by nuclear weapons in Iranian hands is as far-fetched as was the case before the war in Iraq, when co-opted intelligence analysts were strongly encouraged to stretch their imaginations - to include, for example the specter that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be delivered by unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) launched from ships off the US coast. No, I'm not kidding. They even included this in the infamous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 1, 2002.
That canard was held up to ridicule by the US Air Force, which was permitted to take a footnote in the NIE. The scare story nonetheless provided grist for the president's key speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002 - three days before Congress voted to authorize war. That was also the speech in which he also warned, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
While Congress was voting for war on October 10, more candid observations came in highly unusual remarks from a source with excellent access to high-level thinking at the White House. Philip Zelikow, at the time a member of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and confidant of then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (and later Executive Director of the 9/11 commission), said this to a crowd at the University of Virginia: Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990 - it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name ... the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.
More recently, in the case of Iran, President Bush has been unabashed in naming Israel as the most probable target of any Iranian nuclear weapons. He has also created a rhetorical lash-up of the US and Israel, referring three times in the past two weeks to Israel as an "ally" of the US, as if to condition Americans to the notion that the US is required to join Israel in any confrontation with Iran. For example, on February 1 the president told the press, "Israel is a solid ally of the United States; we will rise to Israel's defense if need be." Asked if he meant the US would rise to Israel's defense militarily, Bush replied with a startlingly open-ended commitment, "You bet, we'll defend Israel."
In repeatedly labeling Israel our "ally," Bush is following his own corollary to the dictum of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that if you repeat something often enough, most people will believe it. In an unusual moment of candor in a discussion of domestic affairs last May, Bush noted: That's the third time I've said that. I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
Why No Treaty?
The trouble is that, strictly speaking, allies are not picked by presidential whim - or by smart staffers like the top Bush aide who bragged that he and his colleagues are "history's actors ... creating new realities." Bush's speech writers are acting as though the "new realities" they create can include defense treaties. But unless they've changed the Constitution, in our system nations become allies via treaty; and treaties have to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
There is no treaty of alliance with Israel.
But why? Earlier, I had had the impression that it must be because of US reluctance - despite widespread sympathy for Israel - to get entangled in the complexities of the Middle East and gratuitously antagonize Arab countries. Comparing notes with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues with more experience in the Middle East, however, I learned that the Israelis themselves have shown strong resistance to a US-Israel defense treaty - for reasons quite sound from their perspective, and quite instructive from ours.
The possibility of a bilateral treaty was broached after the 1973 Yom Kippur war as a way to reduce chances of armed conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. But before the US could commit to defending Israel, its boundaries would have had to be defined, and the Israelis wanted no part of that. Moreover, the Israelis feared that a defense pact would curb their freedom of action - as would signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They were aware that in a crisis situation, the US would almost certainly discourage them from resorting to their familiar policy of massive - often disproportionate - retaliation against the Arabs. It became quite clear that the Israelis did not want the US to have any say over when they would use force, against whom, and what (US or non-US) equipment might be employed.
Aside from all that, the Israelis were, and are, confident that their influence in Washington is such as to ensure US support, no matter what. And, as President Bush's rhetoric demonstrates, they are correct in thinking they can, in effect, have their cake and eat it too - a commitment equivalent to a defense treaty, with no binding undertakings on Israel's part.
That is a very volatile admixture. Congress would do well to wake up to its Constitutional prerogatives and responsibilities in this key area - particularly now that the juggernaut to war has begun to roll.
Preparing the Public
One major task is to convince the public and, as far as possible, our allies that the Iran-nuclear problem is critical. This would be an uphill task, were it not for the success of our domesticated media in suppressing the considered judgment of the US intelligence community that Iran is nowhere near a nuclear weapon.
Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer, to her credit, drew on several inside sources to report on August 2, 2005, that the latest NIE concludes Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," with general consensus among intelligence analysts that 2015 would actually be the earliest. That important information was ignored in other media and quickly dropped off the radar screen.
In the Washington of today there is no need to bother with unwelcome intelligence that does not support the case you wish to make. Polls show that hyped-up public statements on the threat from Iran are having some effect, and indiscriminately hawkish pronouncements by usual suspects like senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain are icing on the cake. Ahmed Chalabi-type Iranian "dissidents" have surfaced to tell us of secret tunnels for nuclear weapons research, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps reminding the world that Iran is the "world's leading state sponsor of terrorism." Administration spokespeople keep warning of Iranian interference on the Iraqi side of their long mutual border - themes readily replayed in FOX channel news and the Washington Times. This morning's Chicago Tribune editorial put it this way: There will likely be an economic confrontation with Iran, or a military confrontation, or both. Though diplomatic efforts have succeeded in convincing most of the world that this matter is grave, diplomatic efforts are highly unlikely to sway Iran.
On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that Congress has the political will to use military force against Iran, if necessary, repeating the mantra " We cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear nation." Even Richard Perle has come out of the woodwork to add a convoluted new wrinkle regarding the lessons of the attack on Iraq. Since one cannot depend on good intelligence, says Perle, it is a matter of "take action now or lose the option of taking action."
One of the most influential intellectual authors of the war on Iraq, Perle and his "neo-conservative" colleagues see themselves as men of biblical stature. Just before the attack on Iraq, Perle prophesized: If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
Those songs have turned out to be funeral dirges for over 2,250 US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
--------
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and
is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS). | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 11:49 pm Post subject: Ex-U.N. Inspector: Decision Already Made To Attack Iran |
| Ex-U.N. Inspector: Decision Already Made To Attack Iran
http://www.bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=10282
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11812.htm
Ex-U.N. Inspector: Decision Already Made To Attack Iran
Ex-U.N. inspector: Iran's next: Ritter warns that another U.S. invasion in Mideast is imminent
By Brandon Garcia
02/06/06 (Santa Fe New Mexican, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) The former U.N. weapons inspector who said Iraq disarmed long before the U.S. invasion in 2003 is warning Americans to prepare for a war with Iran.
"We just don't know when, but it's going to happen," Scott Ritter said to a crowd of about 150 at the James A. Little Theater on Sunday night.
Ritter described how the U.S. government might justify war with Iran in a scenario similar to the buildup to the Iraq invasion. He also argued that Iran wants a nuclear energy program, and not nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration, he said, refuses to believe Iran is telling the truth.
He predicted the matter will wind up before the U.N. Security Council, which will determine there is no evidence of a weapons program. Then, he said, John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, "will deliver a speech that has already been written. It says America cannot allow Iran to threaten the United States and we must unilaterally defend ourselves."
"How do I know this? I've talked to Bolton's speechwriter," Ritter said.
Ritter also predicted the military strategy for war with Iran. First, American forces will bomb Iran. If Iranians don't overthrow the current government, as Bush hopes they will, Iran will probably attack Israel. Then, Ritter said, the United States will drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.
The only way to prevent a war with Iran is to elect a Democratically controlled Congress in November, said Ritter, a lifelong Republican. He later said he wasn't worried his advice would be seen as partisan because, "It's a partisan issue." He said the problem is one party government and if Democrats controlled the presidency and Congress, he would advise people to elect Republicans.
Most of Ritter's hour-long speech focused on Iraqi weapons programs from shortly before the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. He also discussed the weapons-inspections process during that time.
Ritter was in charge of U.N. weapons inspections until he resigned in 1998. Before the Iraq invasion, Ritter said, he told Congress that inspections needed to continue.
He also said he was a Marine in the Persian Gulf War and was part of an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s.
Throughout the 1990s, Ritter said, America's real policy for Iraq was regime change -- not forcing Iraq to disarm and destroy chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons programs. The U.S. insisted on regime change, he said, because it believes transforming the Middle East countries into democracies will help ensure American access to oil.
The policy, he said, was borne from a political problem, not a threat to national security.
Ritter said the CIA knew Iraq had no ballistic, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons by 1995. "We knew there were no WMDs in Iraq," he said.
Ritter blamed Americans' apathy for allowing Bush to claim there was an intelligence failure. Presidents can lie to the public too easily about national security issues because Americans aren't paying attention, he said.
"It's a damn shame there's so many more people interested in the Seattle Seahawks and the Pittsburgh Steelers," he said in reference to the two teams that played in Sunday's Super Bowl.
After his speech, Ritter took questions from the audience. The first questioner wondered whether the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were faked. Ritter, a fiery speaker, seemed irritated by the question and said the attacks were real.
Someone else asked if he was interested in running for Congress. While the question drew applause, Ritter responded, "I hate politics."
Ritter, 44, was promoting his book Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein. The speech was sponsored by Peace Action New Mexico.
Contact Brandon Garcia at 995-3826 or at bgarcia@sfnewmexican.com. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 10:02 pm Post subject: John Pilger: The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon |
| http://www.truthout.org
The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon
By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 10 February 2006
Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."
That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response." you sense he means it. Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations." Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbor, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.
However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament ..." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.
Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991. Iran offers no "nuclear threat." There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognize the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.
Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show that it was "above suspicion." Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under the NPT.
Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.
For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.
At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy."
It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real and probably imminent.
Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.
That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.
While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labor MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all."
But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars," as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.
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With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in June.
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