| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 10:47 am Post subject: |
| Iran: A Bridge too Far?
The weapon that could defeat the US in the Gulf
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7147.htm
A word to the reader: The following paper is so shocking that, after preparing the initial draft, I didn’t want to believe it myself, and resolved to disprove it with more research. However, I only succeeded in turning up more evidence in support of my thesis. And I repeated this cycle of discovery and denial several more times before finally deciding to go with the article. I believe that a serious writer must follow the trail of evidence, no matter where it leads, and report back. So here is my story. Don’t be surprised if it causes you to squirm. Its purpose is not to make predictions –– history makes fools of those who claim to know the future –– but simply to describe the peril that awaits us in the Persian Gulf. By awakening to the extent of that danger, perhaps we can still find a way to save our nation and the world from disaster. If we are very lucky, we might even create an alternative future that holds some promise of resolving the monumental conflicts of our time. MG
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Iran: A Bridge too Far?
by Mark Gaffney
10/26/04 "ICH" -- Last July, they dubbed it operation Summer Pulse: a simultaneous mustering of US Naval forces, world wide, that was unprecedented. According to the Navy, it was the first exercise of its new Fleet Response Plan (FRP), the purpose of which was to enable the Navy to respond quickly to an international crisis. The Navy wanted to show its increased force readiness, that is, its capacity to rapidly move combat power to any global hot spot. Never in the history of the US Navy had so many carrier battle groups been involved in a single operation. Even the US fleet massed in the Gulf and eastern Mediterranean during operation Desert Storm in 1991, and in the recent invasion of Iraq, never exceeded six battle groups. But last July and August there were seven of them on the move, each battle group consisting of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier with its full complement of 7-8 supporting ships, and 70 or more assorted aircraft. Most of the activity, according to various reports, was in the Pacific, where the fleet participated in joint exercises with the Taiwanese navy.
But why so much naval power underway at the same time? What potential world crisis could possibly require more battle groups than were deployed during the recent invasion of Iraq? In past years, when the US has seen fit to “show the flag” or flex its naval muscle, one or two carrier groups have sufficed. Why this global show of power?
The news headlines about the joint-maneuvers in the South China Sea read: “Saber Rattling Unnerves China”, and: “Huge Show of Force Worries Chinese.” But the reality was quite different, and, as we shall see, has grave ramifications for the continuing US military presence in the Persian Gulf; because operation Summer Pulse reflected a high-level Pentagon decision that an unprecedented show of strength was needed to counter what is viewed as a growing threat –– in the particular case of China, because of Peking’s newest Sovremenny-class destroyers recently acquired from Russia.
“Nonsense!” you are probably thinking. That’s impossible. How could a few picayune destroyers threaten the US Pacific fleet?”
Here is where the story thickens: Summer Pulse amounted to a tacit acknowledgement, obvious to anyone paying attention, that the United States has been eclipsed in an important area of military technology, and that this qualitative edge is now being wielded by others, including the Chinese; because those otherwise very ordinary destroyers were, in fact, launching platforms for Russian-made 3M-82 Moskit anti-ship cruise missiles (NATO designation: SS-N-22 Sunburn), a weapon for which the US Navy currently has no defense. Here I am not suggesting that the US status of lone world Superpower has been surpassed. I am simply saying that a new global balance of power is emerging, in which other individual states may, on occasion, achieve “an asymmetric advantage” over the US. And this, in my view, explains the immense scale of Summer Pulse. The US show last summer of overwhelming strength was calculated to send a message.
The Sunburn Missile
I was shocked when I learned the facts about these Russian-made cruise missiles. The problem is that so many of us suffer from two common misperceptions. The first follows from our assumption that Russia is militarily weak, as a result of the breakup of the old Soviet system. Actually, this is accurate, but it does not reflect the complexities. Although the Russian navy continues to rust in port, and the Russian army is in disarray, in certain key areas Russian technology is actually superior to our own. And nowhere is this truer than in the vital area of anti-ship cruise missile technology, where the Russians hold at least a ten-year lead over the US. The second misperception has to do with our complacency in general about missiles-as-weapons –– probably attributable to the pathetic performance of Saddam Hussein’s Scuds during the first Gulf war: a dangerous illusion that I will now attempt to rectify.
Many years ago, Soviet planners gave up trying to match the US Navy ship for ship, gun for gun, and dollar for dollar. The Soviets simply could not compete with the high levels of US spending required to build up and maintain a huge naval armada. They shrewdly adopted an alternative approach based on strategic defense. They searched for weaknesses, and sought relatively inexpensive ways to exploit those weaknesses. The Soviets succeeded: by developing several supersonic anti-ship missiles, one of which, the SS-N-22 Sunburn, has been called “the most lethal missile in the world today.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union the old military establishment fell upon hard times. But in the late1990s Moscow awakened to the under-utilized potential of its missile technology to generate desperately needed foreign exchange. A decision was made to resuscitate selected programs, and, very soon, Russian missile technology became a hot export commodity. Today, Russian missiles are a growth industry generating much-needed cash for Russia, with many billions in combined sales to India, China, Viet Nam, Cuba, and also Iran. In the near future this dissemination of advanced technology is likely to present serious challenges to the US. Some have even warned that the US Navy’s largest ships, the massive carriers, have now become floating death traps, and should for this reason be mothballed.
The Sunburn missile has never seen use in combat, to my knowledge, which probably explains why its fearsome capabilities are not more widely recognized. Other cruise missiles have been used, of course, on several occasions, and with devastating results. During the Falklands War, French-made Exocet missiles, fired from Argentine fighters, sunk the HMS Sheffield and another ship. And, in 1987, during the Iran-Iraq war, the USS Stark was nearly cut in half by a pair of Exocets while on patrol in the Persian Gulf. On that occasion US Aegis radar picked up the incoming Iraqi fighter (a French-made Mirage), and tracked its approach to within 50 miles. The radar also “saw” the Iraqi plane turn about and return to its base. But radar never detected the pilot launch his weapons. The sea-skimming Exocets came smoking in under radar and were only sighted by human eyes moments before they ripped into the Stark, crippling the ship and killing 37 US sailors.
The 1987 surprise attack on the Stark exemplifies the dangers posed by anti-ship cruise missiles. And the dangers are much more serious in the case of the Sunburn, whose specs leave the sub-sonic Exocet in the dust. Not only is the Sunburn much larger and faster, it has far greater range and a superior guidance system. Those who have witnessed its performance trials invariably come away stunned. According to one report, when the Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani visited Moscow in October 2001 he requested a test firing of the Sunburn, which the Russians were only too happy to arrange. So impressed was Ali Shamkhani that he placed an order for an undisclosed number of the missiles.
The Sunburn can deliver a 200-kiloton nuclear payload, or: a 750-pound conventional warhead, within a range of 100 miles, more than twice the range of the Exocet. The Sunburn combines a Mach 2.1 speed (two times the speed of sound) with a flight pattern that hugs the deck and includes “violent end maneuvers” to elude enemy defenses. The missile was specifically designed to defeat the US Aegis radar defense system. Should a US Navy Phalanx point defense somehow manage to detect an incoming Sunburn missile, the system has only seconds to calculate a fire solution –– not enough time to take out the intruding missile. The US Phalanx defense employs a six-barreled gun that fires 3,000 depleted-uranium rounds a minute, but the gun must have precise coordinates to destroy an intruder “just in time.”
The Sunburn’s combined supersonic speed and payload size produce tremendous kinetic energy on impact, with devastating consequences for ship and crew. A single one of these missiles can sink a large warship, yet costs considerably less than a fighter jet. Although the Navy has been phasing out the older Phalanx defense system, its replacement, known as the Rolling Action Missile (RAM) has never been tested against the weapon it seems destined to one day face in combat.
Implications For US Forces in the Gulf
The US Navy’s only plausible defense against a robust weapon like the Sunburn missile is to detect the enemy’s approach well ahead of time, whether destroyers, subs, or fighter-bombers, and defeat them before they can get in range and launch their deadly cargo. For this purpose US AWACs radar planes assigned to each naval battle group are kept aloft on a rotating schedule. The planes “see” everything within two hundred miles of the fleet, and are complemented with intelligence from orbiting satellites.
But US naval commanders operating in the Persian Gulf face serious challenges that are unique to the littoral, i.e., coastal, environment. A glance at a map shows why: The Gulf is nothing but a large lake, with one narrow outlet, and most of its northern shore, i.e., Iran, consists of mountainous terrain that affords a commanding tactical advantage over ships operating in Gulf waters. The rugged northern shore makes for easy concealment of coastal defenses, such as mobile missile launchers, and also makes their detection problematic. Although it was not widely reported, the US actually lost the battle of the Scuds in the first Gulf War –– termed “the great Scud hunt” –– and for similar reasons. Saddam Hussein’s mobile Scud launchers proved so difficult to detect and destroy –– over and over again the Iraqis fooled allied reconnaissance with decoys –– that during the course of Desert Storm the US was unable to confirm even a single kill. This proved such an embarrassment to the Pentagon, afterwards, that the unpleasant stats were buried in official reports. But the blunt fact is that the US failed to stop the Scud attacks. The launches continued until the last few days of the conflict. Luckily, the Scud’s inaccuracy made it an almost useless weapon. At one point General Norman Schwarzkopf quipped dismissively to the press that his soldiers had a greater chance of being struck by lightning in Georgia than by a Scud in Kuwait.
But that was then, and it would be a grave error to allow the Scud’s ineffectiveness to blur the facts concerning this other missile. The Sunburn’s amazing accuracy was demonstrated not long ago in a live test staged at sea by the Chinese –– and observed by US spy planes. Not only did the Sunburn missile destroy the dummy target ship, it scored a perfect bull’s eye, hitting the crosshairs of a large “X” mounted on the ship’s bridge. The only word that does it justice, awesome, has become a cliché, hackneyed from hyperbolic excess.
The US Navy has never faced anything in combat as formidable as the Sunburn missile. But this will surely change if the US and Israel decide to wage a so-called preventive war against Iran to destroy its nuclear infrastructure. Storm clouds have been darkening over the Gulf for many months. In recent years Israel upgraded its air force with a new fleet of long-range F-15 fighter-bombers, and even more recently took delivery of 5,000 bunker-buster bombs from the US –– weapons that many observers think are intended for use against Iran.
The arming for war has been matched by threats. Israeli officials have declared repeatedly that they will not allow the Mullahs to develop nuclear power, not even reactors to generate electricity for peaceful use. Their threats are particularly worrisome, because Israel has a long history of pre-emptive war. (See my 1989 book Dimona: the Third Temple? and also my 2003 article Will Iran Be Next? posted at < http://www.InformationClearingHouse.info/article3288.htm >)
Never mind that such a determination is not Israel’s to make, and belongs instead to the international community, as codified in the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). With regard to Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) recent report (September 2004) is well worth a look, as it repudiates facile claims by the US and Israel that Iran is building bombs. While the report is highly critical of Tehran for its ambiguities and its grudging release of documents, it affirms that IAEA inspectors have been admitted to every nuclear site in the country to which they have sought access, without exception. Last year Iran signed the strengthened IAEA inspection protocol, which until then had been voluntary. And the IAEA has found no hard evidence, to date, either that bombs exist or that Iran has made a decision to build them. (The latest IAEA report can be downloaded at: www.GlobalSecurity.org)
In a talk on October 3, 2004, IAEA Director General Mohamed El Baradei made the clearest statement yet: "Iran has no nuclear weapons program", he said, and then repeated himself for emphasis: “Iran has no nuclear weapons program, but I personally don’t rush to conclusions before all the realities are clarified. So far I see nothing that could be called an imminent danger. I have seen no nuclear weapons program in Iran. What I have seen is that Iran is trying to gain access to nuclear enrichment technology, and so far there is no danger from Iran. Therefore, we should make use of political and diplomatic means before thinking of resorting to other alternatives.”
( http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=5051 )
No one disputes that Tehran is pursuing a dangerous path, but with 200 or more Israeli nukes targeted upon them the Iranians’ insistence on keeping their options open is understandable. Clearly, the nuclear nonproliferation regime today hangs by the slenderest of threads. The world has arrived at a fateful crossroads.
A Fearful Symmetry?
If a showdown over Iran develops in the coming months, the man who could hold the outcome in his hands will be thrust upon the world stage. That man, like him or hate him, is Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has been castigated severely in recent months for gathering too much political power to himself. But according to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was interviewed on US television recently by David Brokaw, Putin has not imposed a tyranny upon Russia –– yet. Gorbachev thinks the jury is still out on Putin.
Perhaps, with this in mind, we should be asking whether Vladimir Putin is a serious student of history. If he is, then he surely recognizes that the deepening crisis in the Persian Gulf presents not only manifold dangers, but also opportunities. Be assured that the Russian leader has not forgotten the humiliating defeat Ronald Reagan inflicted upon the old Soviet state. (Have we Americans forgotten?) By the mid-1980s the Soviets were in Kabul, and had all but defeated the Mujahedeen. The Soviet Union appeared secure in its military occupation of Afghanistan. But then, in 1986, the first US Stinger missiles reached the hands of the Afghani resistance; and, quite suddenly, Soviet helicopter gunships and MiGs began dropping out of the skies like flaming stones. The tide swiftly turned, and by 1989 it was all over but the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth in the Kremlin. Defeated, the Soviets slunk back across the frontier. The whole world cheered the American Stingers, which had carried the day.
This very night, as he sips his cognac, what is Vladimir Putin thinking? Is he perhaps thinking about the perverse symmetries of history? If so, he may also be wondering (and discussing with his closest aides) how a truly great nation like the United States could be so blind and so stupid as to allow another state, i.e., Israel, to control its foreign policy, especially in a region as vital (and volatile) as the Mid-East. One can almost hear the Russians’ animated conversation:
“The Americans! What is the matter with them?”
“They simply cannot help themselves.”
“What idiots!”
“A nation as foolish as this deserves to be taught a lesson…”
“Yes! For their own good.”
“It must be a painful lesson, one they will never forget…”
“Are we agreed, then, comrades?”
“Let us teach our American friends a lesson about the limits of military power!”
Does anyone really believe that Vladimir Putin will hesitate to seize a most rare opportunity to change the course of history and, in the bargain, take his sweet revenge? Surely Putin understands the terrible dimensions of the trap into which the US has blundered, thanks to the Israelis and their neo-con supporters in Washington who lobbied so vociferously for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, against all friendly and expert advice, and who even now beat the drums of war against Iran. Would Putin be wrong to conclude that the US will never leave the region unless it is first defeated militarily? Should we blame him for deciding that Iran is “one bridge too far”?
If the US and Israel overreach, and the Iranians close the net with Russian anti-ship missiles, it will be a fearful symmetry, indeed…
Springing the Trap
At the battle of Cannae in 216 BC the great Carthaginian general, Hannibal, tempted a much larger Roman army into a fateful advance, and then enveloped and annihilated it with a smaller force. Out of a Roman army of 70,000 men, no more than a few thousand escaped. It was said that after many hours of dispatching the Romans Hannibal’s soldiers grew so tired that the fight went out of them. In their weariness they granted the last broken and bedraggled Romans their lives…
Let us pray that the US sailors who are unlucky enough to be on duty in the Persian Gulf when the shooting starts can escape the fate of the Roman army at Cannae. The odds will be heavily against them, however, because they will face the same type of danger, tantamount to envelopment. The US ships in the Gulf will already have come within range of the Sunburn missiles and the even more-advanced SS-NX-26 Yakhonts missiles, also Russian-made (speed: Mach 2.9; range: 180 miles) deployed by the Iranians along the Gulf’s northern shore. Every US ship will be exposed and vulnerable. When the Iranians spring the trap, the entire lake will become a killing field.
Anti-ship cruise missiles are not new, as I’ve mentioned. Nor have they yet determined the outcome in a conflict. But this is probably only because these horrible weapons have never been deployed in sufficient numbers. At the time of the Falklands war the Argentine air force possessed only five Exocets, yet managed to sink two ships. With enough of them, the Argentineans might have sunk the entire British fleet, and won the war. Although we’ve never seen a massed attack of cruise missiles, this is exactly what the US Navy could face in the next war in the Gulf. Try and imagine it if you can: barrage after barrage of Exocet-class missiles, which the Iranians are known to possess in the hundreds, as well as the unstoppable Sunburn and Yakhonts missiles. The questions that our purblind government leaders should be asking themselves, today, if they value what historians will one day write about them, are two: how many of the Russian anti-ship missiles has Putin already supplied to Iran? And: How many more are currently in the pipeline? In 2001 Jane’s Defense Weekly reported that Iran was attempting to acquire anti-ship missiles from Russia. Ominously, the same report also mentioned that the more advanced Yakhonts missile was “optimized for attacks against carrier task forces.” Apparently its guidance system is “able to distinguish an aircraft carrier from its escorts.” The numbers were not disclosed…
The US Navy will come under fire even if the US does not participate in the first so-called surgical raids on Iran’s nuclear sites, that is, even if Israel goes it alone. Israel’s brand-new fleet of 25 F-15s (paid for by American taxpayers) has sufficient range to target Iran, but the Israelis cannot mount an attack without crossing US-occupied Iraqi air space. It will hardly matter if Washington gives the green light, or is dragged into the conflict by a recalcitrant Israel. Either way, the result will be the same. The Iranians will interpret US acquiescence as complicity, and, in any event, they will understand that the real fight is with the Americans. The Iranians will be entirely within their rights to counter-attack in self-defense. Most of the world will see it this way, and will support them, not America. The US and Israel will be viewed as the aggressors, even as the unfortunate US sailors in harm’s way become cannon fodder. In the Gulf’s shallow and confined waters evasive maneuvers will be difficult, at best, and escape impossible. Even if US planes control of the skies over the battlefield, the sailors caught in the net below will be hard-pressed to survive. The Gulf will run red with American blood…
From here, it only gets worse. Armed with their Russian-supplied cruise missiles, the Iranians will close the lake’s only outlet, the strategic Strait of Hormuz, cutting off the trapped and dying Americans from help and rescue. The US fleet massing in the Indian Ocean will stand by helplessly, unable to enter the Gulf to assist the survivors or bring logistical support to the other US forces on duty in Iraq. Couple this with a major new ground offensive by the Iraqi insurgents, and, quite suddenly, the tables could turn against the Americans in Baghdad. As supplies and ammunition begin to run out, the status of US forces in the region will become precarious. The occupiers will become the besieged…
With enough anti-ship missiles, the Iranians can halt tanker traffic through Hormuz for weeks, even months. With the flow of oil from the Gulf curtailed, the price of a barrel of crude will skyrocket on the world market. Within days the global economy will begin to grind to a halt. Tempers at an emergency round-the-clock session of the UN Security Council will flare and likely explode into shouting and recriminations as French, German, Chinese and even British ambassadors angrily accuse the US of allowing Israel to threaten world order. But, as always, because of the US veto the world body will be powerless to act...
America will stand alone, completely isolated. Yet, despite the increasingly hostile international mood, elements of the US media will spin the crisis very differently here at home, in a way that is sympathetic to Israel. Members of Congress will rise to speak in the House and Senate, and rally to Israel’s defense, while blaming the victim of the attack, Iran. Fundamentalist Christian talk show hosts will proclaim the historic fulfillment of biblical prophecy in our time, and will call upon the Jews of Israel to accept Jesus into their hearts; meanwhile, urging the president to nuke the evil empire of Islam. From across America will be heard histrionic cries for fresh reinforcements, even a military draft. Patriots will demand victory at any cost. Pundits will scream for an escalation of the conflict.
A war that ostensibly began as an attempt to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons will teeter on the brink of their use…
Conclusion
Friends, we must work together to prevent such a catastrophe. We must stop the next Middle East war before it starts. The US government must turn over to the United Nations the primary responsibility for resolving the deepening crisis in Iraq, and, immediately thereafter, withdraw US forces from the country. We must also prevail upon the Israelis to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and open all of their nuclear sites to IAEA inspectors. Only then can serious talks begin with Iran and other states to establish a nuclear weapon free zone (NWFZ) in the Mid East –– so essential to the region’s long-term peace and security.
* * *
Mark Gaffney’s first book, Dimona the Third Temple? (1989), was a pioneering study of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Mark’s articles about the Mid-East and proliferation issues have appeared in the Middle East Policy Journal, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, the Earth Island Journal, The Oregonian, the Daily Californian, and have been posted on numerous web sites, especially Counterpunch.org. Mark’s 2003 paper Will Iran Be Next? can be viewed at < www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran.htm> Mark’s newest book, Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes, was released by Inner Traditions Press in May 2003. Email <Mhgaffney@aol.com> For more information go to www.GnosticSecrets.com | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 6:30 am Post subject: |
| U.N. disagrees on sanctions against Iran
By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer
Wed Oct 11, 8:01 PM ET
The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council agreed Wednesday to start working on U.N. sanctions against Iran next week, but failed to bridge differences on how harsh the penalties should be, diplomats and officials said.
They told The Associated Press that while the U.S. called for broad sanctions to punish Iran's defiance in pursuing its nuclear program, Russian and Chinese representatives at a top-level Vienna meeting favored less severe measures.
The diplomats and government officials demanded anonymity in exchange for discussing the confidential meeting of the five Security Council countries and Germany — the six powers whose repeated attempts to entice Iran to enter negotiations finally broke down last week over Tehran's refusal to give up uranium enrichment.
In New York, U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told the Council on Foreign Relations that package of incentives meant to persuade Iran to halt uranium enrichment remained on the table.
But he said Iran's stance left little choice but to "head back to the Security Council in a couple of days, at the end of this week or early next ... to begin the process of writing and then passing, we hope, a sanctions resolution that will raise the cost to the Iranians of what they are doing in the nuclear round."
Reflecting the importance of the meeting of the six powers, Russia, Britain, France and Germany sent top negotiators directly answerable to their foreign ministers, while the U.S. and China were represented by their chief representatives to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. Burns participated via video hookup.
One of the diplomats, who had been briefed on the substance of the meeting, said that while Burns had urged broad sanctions — such as a total ban on missile and nuclear technology sales — the Russians and Chinese backed prohibitions of selected items as a first step.
He also said the Chinese and Russian envoys called for renewed negotiations with the Iranians in parallel to working on sanctions to punish Tehran for defying a Security Council demand that it freeze enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear arms.
Burns told the Council on Foreign Relations that the countries trying to stop Iran's programs "had come to a fork in the road." Despite a substantial package of incentives and an offer of direct negotiations with the United States, Iran "turned us down," he said.
"If at any time the Iranians wish to come forward and negotiate with the United States and these other countries, then we'll be very happy to do so," Burns said.
The differences among the Security Council powers reflected continued divisions over how harshly to penalize the Islamic republic for ignoring a Security Council deadline to stop all enrichment activities by the end of August. Russia and China, which have strategic and economic interests in Iran, have recently swung behind the Americans and Europeans in agreeing to the need for sanctions but have publicly opposed attempts to make them too severe.
"All agree for the need for sanctions but there are problems with how harsh they should be," said one of the diplomats, whose country is accredited to the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.
He said the meeting did not discuss North Korea and its claim to have tested a nuclear bomb, but all participants agreed juggling two nuclear crises complicated international nonproliferation efforts.
Iran, OPEC's No. 2 producer of crude, is apparently ready to face the threat of sanctions because it is confident they will be more symbolic than damaging because of international concerns any tough penalties could prompt Tehran to retaliate by cutting off oil exports.
Restating his country's defiance, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted by state television Wednesday as saying "the day sanctions are imposed on Iran by its enemies would be a day of national celebration for the Iranian nation."
In separate comments earlier, Ahmadinejad called the prospect of sanctions "a hollow threat."
"These three or four countries are bullying, they have no right to intervene," he said, in reference to the United States, France, Britain and Germany. "The Security Council has no right to intervene."
The Security Council demanded a halt to enrichment after the Iran ignored calls from the IAEA to suspend such activities until doubts about the country's nuclear program have been cleared. Uranium must be enriched before it can be used in either nuclear reactors or atomic weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Senior EU negotiator Javier Solana had met with top Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani over the past few weeks in a new attempt to persuade Tehran to suspend enrichment and start nuclear talks with the six-nation alliance.
But those talks failed last week over Iran's refusal to freeze enrichment even for a limited time.
While the representatives of five of the six nations at the Vienna talks subsequently met with IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, the Americans did not attend, said a U.N. diplomat.
There was no reason given for their absence, but one of the diplomats speculated it could have been a show of U.S. displeasure with ElBaradei, whom Washington in the past has accused of being too soft on Iran. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 4:55 pm Post subject: Why Do We Still Fight a Lost War? |
| Cynicism and Moral Cowardice
Why Do We Still Fight a Lost War?
http://www.counterpunch.org
By WILLIAM S. LIND
At least 32 American troops have been killed in Iraq this month. Approximately 300 have been wounded. The "battle for Baghdad" is going nowhere. A Marine friend just back from Ramadi said to me, "It didn't get any better while I was there, and it's not going to get better." Virtually everyone in Washington, except the people in the White House, knows that is true for all of Iraq.
Actually, I think the White House knows it too. Why then does it insist on "staying the course" at a casualty rate of more than one thousand Americans per month? The answer is breathtaking in its cynicism: so the retreat from Iraq happens on the next President's watch. That is why we still fight.
Yep, it's now all about George. Anyone who thinks that is too low, too mean, too despicable even for this bunch does not understand the meaning of the adjective "Rovian." Would they let thousands more young Americans get killed or wounded just so George W. does not have to face the consequences of his own folly? In a heartbeat.
Not that it's going to help. When history finally lifts it leg on the Bush administration, it will wash all such tricks away, leaving only the hubris and the incompetence. Jeffrey Hart, who with Russell Kirk gone is probably the top intellectual in the conservative movement, has already written that George W. Bush is the worst President America ever had. I think the honor still belongs to the sainted Woodrow, but if Bush attacks Iran, he may yet earn the prize. That third and final act in the Bush tragicomedy is waiting in the wings.
A post-election Democratic House, Senate or both might in theory say no to another war. But if the Bush administration's cynicism is boundless, the Democrats' intellectual vacuity and moral cowardice are equally so. You can't beat something with nothing, but Democrats have put forward nothing in the way of an alternative to Bush's defense and foreign policies. On Iran, the question is whether they will be more scared of the Republicans or of the Israeli lobby. Either way, they will hide under the bed, just as they have hidden under the bed on the war in Iraq. It appears at the moment that a Congressional demand for withdrawal from Iraq is more likely if the Republicans keep the Senate and Senator John Warner of Virginia remains Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee than if the Democrats take over.
There is a great deal of material available to the Democrats to offer an alternative, much of it the product of the Military Reform Movement of the 1970s and 80s. Gary Hart can tell them all about it. There is even a somewhat graceful way out of Iraq, if the Dems will ask themselves my favorite foreign policy question, WWBD - - What Would Bismarck Do? He would transfer sufficient Swiss francs to interested parties so that the current government of Iraq asks us to leave. They, not we, would then hold the world's ugliest baby, even though it was America's indiscretion that gave the bastard birth.
But donkeys will think when pigs fly. A Democratic Congress will be as stupid, cowardly and corrupt as its Republican predecessor; in reality, both parties are one party, the party of successful career politicians. The White House will continue a lost war in Iraq, solely to dump the mess in the next President's lap. America or Israel will attack Iran, pulling what's left of the temple down on our heads. Congress will do nothing to stop either war.
By 2008, I may not be the only monarchist in America.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 5:15 pm Post subject: Israel's Plan for a Military Strike on Iran |
| October 11, 2006
The BBC and Israeli Propaganda
Israel's Plan for a Military Strike on Iran
http://www.counterpunch.org
By JONATHAN COOK
The Middle East, and possibly the world, stands on the brink of a terrible conflagration as Israel and the United States prepare to deal with Iran's alleged ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel, it becomes clearer by the day, wants to use its air force to deliver a knock-out blow against Tehran. It is not known whether it will use conventional weapons or a nuclear warhead in such a strike.
At this potentially cataclysmic moment in global politics, it is good to see that one of the world's leading broadcasters, the BBC, decided this week that it should air a documentary entitled "Will Israel bomb Iran?". It is the question on everyone's lips and doubtless, with the imprimatur of the BBC, the programme will sell around the world.
The good news ends there, however. Because the programme addresses none of the important issues raised by Israel's increasingly belligerent posture towards Tehran.
It does not explain that, without a United Nations resolution, a military strike on Iran to destroy its nuclear research programme would be a gross violation of international law.
It does not clarify that Israel's own large nuclear arsenal was secretly developed and is entirely unmonitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or that it is perceived as a threat by its neighbours and may be fuelling a Middle East arms race.
Nor does the programme detail the consequences of an Israeli strike on instability and violence across the Middle East, including in Iraq, where British and American troops are stationed as an occupying force.
And there is no consideration of how in the longer term unilateral action by Israel, with implicit sanction by the international community, is certain to provoke a steep rise in global jihad against the West.
Instead the programme dedicates 40 minutes to footage of Top Gun heroics by the Israeli air force, and the recollections of pilots who carried out a similar, "daring" attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor in the early 1980s; menacing long shots of Iran's nuclear research facilities; and interviews with three former Israeli prime ministers, a former Israeli military chief of staff, various officials in Israeli military intelligence and a professor who designs Israel's military arsenal.
All of them speak with one voice: Israel, they claim, is about to be "wiped out" by Iranian nuclear weapons and must defend itself "whatever the consequences".
They are given plenty of airtime to repeat unchallenged well-worn propaganda Israel has been peddling through its own media, and which has been credulously amplified by the international media: that Iran is led by a fanatical anti-Semite who, like Adolf Hitler, believes he can commit genocide against the Jewish people, this time through a nuclear holocaust.
Other Israeli misinformation, none of it believed by serious analysts, is also uncritically spread by the film-makers: that Hizbullah in Lebanon is a puppet of Iran, waiting to aid its master in Israel's destruction; that Iran is only months away from creating nuclear weapons, a "point of no return", as the programme warns; and that a "fragile" Israel is under constant threat of annihilation from all its Arab neighbours.
But the programme's unequivocal main theme -- echoing precisely Israel's own agenda -- is that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is hellbent on destroying Israel. The film-makers treat seriously, bordering on reverentially, preposterous comments from Israel's leaders about this threat.
Shimon Peres, the Israeli government's veteran roving ambassador, claims, for example, that Iran has made "a call for genocide" against Israel, compares an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp", and warns that "no one would like to see a comeback to the times of the Nazis".
Cabinet minister Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet domestic security service, believes Israel faces "an existential threat" from Iran. And Zvi Stauber, a former senior figure in military intelligence, compares Israel's situation to a man whose neighbour "has a gun and he declares every day he is going to kill you".
But pride of place goes to Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and the current leader of the opposition. He claims repeatedly that the only possible reason Iran and its president could want a nuclear arsenal is for Israel's "extermination". "If he can get away with it, he'll do it." "Ayatollahs with atombic bombs are a powerful threat to all of us." A nuclear Iran "is a threat unlike anything we have seen before. It's beyond politics" -- apparently worse than the nuclear states of North Korea and Pakistan, the latter a military dictatorship and friend of the US barely containing within its borders some of the most fanatical jihadist movements in the world.
Apart from a brief appearance by an Iranian diplomat, no countervailing opinions are entertained in the BBC programme; only Israel's military and political leadership is allowed to speak.
The documentary gives added credence to the views of Israel's security establishment by making great play of a speech by Ahmadinejad -- one with which the Israeli authorities and their allies in Washington have made endless mischief -- in which the Iranian president repeats a statement by Iran's late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, that went unnoticed when first uttered.
In the BBC programme, Ahmadenijad is quoted as saying: "The regime occupying Jerusalem should be eliminated from the page of history". This is at least an improvement on the original translation, much repeated in the programme by Netanyahu and others, that "Israel must be wiped off the map".
But for some strange reason, the programme makers infer from their more accurate translation the same diabolical intent on Ahmadinejad's part as suggested by Netanyahu's fabricated version. Iran's nuclear weapons, we are told by the programme as if they are already in existence, have "presented Israel's leaders with a new order of threat". In making his speech, the BBC film argues, Ahmadinejad "issued a death sentence against Israel".
But, as has now been pointed out on numerous occasions (though clearly not often enough for the BBC to have noticed), Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the need for regime change, the ending of the regime occupying the Palestinians in violation of international law. They were not talking, as Netanyahu and co claim, about the destruction of the state of Israel or the Jewish people. The implication of the speech is that the current Israeli regime will end because occupying powers are illegitimate and unsustainable, not because Iran plans to fire nuclear missiles at the Jewish state or commit genocide.
Overlooked by the programme makers is the fact that "fragile" Israel is currently the only country in the Middle East armed with nuclear warheads, several hundred of them, as well as one of the most powerful armies in the world, which presumably make most of its neighbours feel "fragile" too, with far more reason.
And, as we are being persuaded how "fragile" Israel really is, another former prime minister, Ehud Barak, is interviewed. "Ultimately we are standing alone," he says, in apparent justification for an illegal, unilateral strike. Iran's nuclear reasearch facilities, Barak warns, are hidden deep underground, so deep that "no conventional weapon can penetrate", leaving us to infer that in such circumstances Israel will have no choice but use a tactical nuclear strike in its "self-defence". And, getting into his stride, Barak adds that some facilities are in crowded urban areas "where any attack could end up in civilian collateral damage".
But despite the terrifying scenario laid out by Israel's leaders, the BBC website cheerleads for Israel in the same manner as the programme-makers, suggesting that Israel has the right to engineer a clash of civilisations: "With America unlikely to take military action, the pressure is growing on Israel's leaders to launch a raid."
As should be clear by now, the Israeli government's fingerprints are all over this BBC "documentary". And that is hardly surprising because the man behind this "independent" production is Israel's leading film-maker: Noam Shalev.
Shalev, a graduate of a New York film school, has been making a spate of documentaries through his production company Highlight Films, based in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, that have been lapped up by the BBC and other foreign broadcasters. With the BBC's stamp of approval, it is easy for Shalev to sell his films around the world.
Shalev, who claims that he doesn't "espouse a political view", started his career by making documentaries on less controversial subjects. He has produced films on Ethiopian immigrants arriving in Israel, and on the Zaka organisation, Jewish religious fundamentalists who arrive at the scene of suicide attacks quite literally to pick up the pieces, of human remains.
In the past his films managed to bypass the reticence of broadcasters like the BBC to broach the combustible subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside their news programmes by touching on the topic obliquely. Importantly, however, Shalev's films always humanise his Israeli subjects, showing them as complex, emotional and caring beings, while largely ignoring the millions of Palestinians the Israeli government and army are oppressing.
According to a profile of Shalev published in the Israeli media in 2004, his success derives from the fact that he has developed a "soft-sell approach", showing Israel in a good light without "the straightforward 'hasbara' [propaganda] efforts which explain Israel's case that Israel's Foreign Ministry is required to disseminate to European and American news outlets."
In the words of an Israeli public relations executive, Shalev has a skill in telling Israel's story in ways that international broadcasters appreciate: "[Shalev] also shows the Israeli side, he is not one of those traitors who sell their ideology for money. He has the skill to market it in such a way that overseas they want to see it, and this is very important."
But recently Shalev has grown more confident to try the hard sell for Israel, apparently sure that the BBC and other foreign broadcasters will still buy his films. And that is because Shalev offers them something that other film-makers cannot: intimate access to Israel's security forces, an area off-limits to his rivals.
Before the disengagement from Gaza last year, for example, Shalev made a sympathetic documentary, shown by the BBC, about a day in the life of one Israeli soldier serving there. The film largely concealed the context that might have alerted viewers to the fact that the soldier was enforcing a four-decade illegal occupation of Gaza, or that the Strip is an open-air prison in which thousands of Palestinian have been killed by the Israeli army and in which a majority of Gazans live in abject poverty.
Interviewed about the documentary, Shalev observed: "The army really is very, very careful. There is no indiscriminate firing. I saw, and this was not a show put on just for us, that before any shot is fired there is confirmation that there is nobody behind or in front of the objective. The army is very sensitive to non-deliberate fire."
In other words, Shalev's film for the BBC shed no light on why Israel's "deliberate" fire has killed hundreds of Palestinian children during the second intifada or why a large number of civilians have died from Israeli gunfire and missile strikes inside the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this year Shalev made another film for the BBC, "The Hunt for Black October", to coincide with the release of Stephen Spielberg's movie Munich. "The BBC gains exclusive access to the undercover Mossad agents assigned to track down the Palestinian group responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics," the BBC was able to glow in its promotional material.
Shalev's latest film, "Will Israel bomb Iran?", follows this well-trodden path. Arabs and Muslims are again deprived of a voice, as are non-Israeli experts.
So why did the BBC buy this blatant piece of propaganda?
Here are a few clues. Shalev's film includes:
* footage taken from inside Hizbullah bunkers under the supervision of the Israeli army as it occupied south Lebanon.
* a "rare view" of the inside of the Israeli army's satellite control room, which spies on Israel's Arab neighbours and Iran and which, according to programme, is "incredibly guarded about its security arrangements".
* an exclusive appearance by Israel's former military chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, who we are told is "rarely interviewed".
* a glimpse inside a Rafael weapons factory, which the programme tells us is "rarely filmed".
In other words, the BBC, and the other broadcasters who will air this "documentary" in the coming weeks and months, has been dazzled by Shalev's ability to show us the secret world of the Israeli army. So dazzled, it seems, that it has forgotten to check -- or worse, simply doesn't care -- what message Shalev is inserting between his exclusive footage.
It might have occurred to someone at the BBC to wonder why Shalev gets these chances to show things no one else is allowed to. Could it be that the "hasbara" division of the Israeli Foreign Ministry has got far more sophisticated than it once was?
Is the Israeli government using Shalev, wittingly or not, and is he in turn using the BBC, to spread Israeli propaganda? Propaganda that may soon propel us towards the "clash of civilisations" so longed for by Israel's leadership.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:40 pm Post subject: US General: Strikes on Iran possible by 2007 |
| Forwarded:
JD wrote:
Tell me again you lying neocon/pro-Israel bastards about how the war in the Middle East is for democracy and not about fighting Israel's enemies.
US General: Strikes on Iran possible by 2007
US Air Force General reveals details of possible US aerial offensive against Iran should diplomacy fail to solve dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambition; says 'doing it alone' is not an option for Israel
Yitzhak Benhorin
WASHINGTON - Is it possible to halt Iran's nuclear program by military means? For years, this question has been asked by Israeli and US military officials.
Israel prefers Washington to act on its behalf but academics, left-wing politicians and experts say a military option is not on the cards for the Bush administration because of the situation in Iraq.
But retired US Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney thinks otherwise. There is a good military solution to Iran's nukes but it requires courage and determination to act Mcinerney told Ynet in an interview.
McInerney served as a pilot and a strategic commander in the US Air Force for 35 years. Following his retirement in 1994 he served as a commentator for Fox News.
McInerney said Iran should be attacked by fall 2007 if diplomacy fails.
He added that an aerial attack should be backed by a secret land operation aimed at deposing the Ayatollahs.
McInerney said a military operation against Iran should aim at destroying 1,500 targets within 24 to 36 hours, which would delay Iran's nuclear ambitions by at least five years.
He added that paralyzing the Iranian air force and the Shihab 3 missiles aimed at Israel would be among the goals of a US military offensive against Iran.
He said the Iranian Navy should also be destroyed to prevent Tehran from blocking the Persian Gulf.
Overthrowing the Ayatollahs
The retired general estimates that such offensive would significantly destabilize the Ayatollah's regime.
Asked whether the exiled Iranian opposition is capable of governing Iran once the Ayatollahs are ousted, McInerney said the Iranian nation is divided and many citizens opposed to the Ayatollahs would attempt to take power.
Over 4,300 protests took place in Iran last year, he said.
He also noted that only 51 percent of Iranians are Persians while 49 percent belong to different ethnic groups.
He added that the Ayatollahs can be ousted if the US clandestinely supports opposition groups within Iran.
A US aerial attack against Iran would involve the following stages, says Mcinerney:
- 60 stealth aircraft, B-2, and F-117, would take part in the initial attack
- The second aerial wave would involve 400 aircraft (B-52, B-1, F-15, F-16 and F-18)
- 150 aircraft special aircraft would be dispatched for refueling and intelligence collection missions
- 500 cruise missiles would be fired at targets in Iran from US warships
The B-2 is capable of firing 80 250-kilogram bombs at 80 different targets simultaneously.
Diverting his attention to the importance of possessing key intelligence for a successful assault, McInerney expressed confidence in his country's intelligence-gathering capability.
He added however that hitting 20 to 50 percent of Iran's military targets is enough to loosen the Ayatollahs' grab on Iran.
He noted that although Israel's military campaign had some flaws, Hizbullah lost 25 percent of its fighters and refused to release injured figures, signs that group is in a difficult position after the war.
Asked if 'going it alone' is an option for Israel, McInerney praised Israel's aerial capabilities but warned that the lack of aircraft carriers and the geographical distance make it extremely difficult for Israel to carry out a successful offensive against Iran.
(Code: we can't have Israeli soldiers killed or wounded when expendable US soldiers are available. Our sole mission is to serve the Chosen. What are you some kind of anti-semite?)
McInerney said that the Ayatollahs would seek the opportunity to leave the country to Switzerland where they hold large accounts should military commanders seek to overthrow them.
The general said should diplomacy fail, the US would consider military options against Tehran within a year at the latest, charging the west should not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Iranian threats to launch attacks against western countries, Iraq and Israel through sleeping terror cells proves Tehran's link to terror groups like Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
He concluded that a diplomatic solution is preferable but without a serious military option in the cards, diplomacy would fail and the US should be ready to act.
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http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 7:09 pm Post subject: Scott Ritter on "Target Iran: The Truth About the White |
| Monday, October 16th, 2006
Scott Ritter on "Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change”
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/144204
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Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter: “The path that the United States is currently embarked on regarding Iran is a path that will inevitably lead to war. Such a course of action will make even the historical mistake we made in Iraq pale by comparison.” [includes rush transcript]
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Twenty-five ministers from the European Union are expected to meet tomorrow to ask the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran. They say sanctions are necessary because of Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment. Though Iran contends its nuclear program is for generating electricity, the U.S. and some of its allies allege it is trying to develop atomic weapons.
On Saturday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, said that Western threats to impose sanctions were part of a "psychological war" and that the Islamic Republic was more determined than ever to pursue peaceful nuclear technology.
A new book by former weapons inspector - Scott Ritter - claims that the Bush Administration is determined to wage war against Iran. In "Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change," Ritter examines the administration’s regime-change policy and the potential of Iran to threaten US national security interests.
Scott Ritter, Ritter served from 1991 to 1998 as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq in the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). His new book is, "Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change." His previous book is "Iraq Confidential."
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: A new book by former weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, claims the Bush administration is determined to wage war against Iran. In Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change, Scott Ritter examines the administration’s regime change policy and the potential of Iran to threaten U.S. national security interests. He writes, “The path the United States has currently embarked on regarding Iran is a path that will inevitably lead to war. Such a course of action will make even the historical mistake we made in Iraq pale by comparison,” he writes. Scott Ritter joins us in the studio now. Welcome to Democracy Now!
SCOTT RITTER: Well, thanks.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is the key to understand about Iran right now, about the U.S., well, about your title targeting -- Target Iran?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, the most important thing is to understand the reality that Iran is squarely in the crosshairs as a target of the Bush administration, in particular, as a target of the Bush administration as it deals -- as it relates to the National Security Strategy of the United States. You see, this isn’t a hypothetical debate among political analysts, foreign policy specialists. Read the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy, where Iran is named sixteen times as the number one threat to the national security of the United States of America, because in the same document, it embraces the notion of pre-emptive wars of aggression as a legitimate means of dealing with such threats. It also recertifies the Bush administration doctrine of regional transformation globally, but in this case particularly in the Middle East. So, we’re not talking about hypotheticals here, regardless of all the discussion the Bush administration would like you to believe there is about diplomacy. There is no diplomacy, as was the case with Iraq. Diplomacy is but a smokescreen to disguise the ultimate objective of regime change.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the difference in approach the U.S. takes to North Korea, which has, according to their own reports, set off a nuclear bomb, and Iran?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, the only thing that the Bush administration’s approach towards North Korea and the Bush administration’s approach towards Iran have in common is that the endgame is regime change. Other than that, what you see -- I guess the other thing they have in common is the total incoherence of their approach. Look, North Korea and Iran, you can’t compare; it’s apples and oranges.
North Korea is a declared nuclear power. They even declared their intent to have nuclear weapons. They haven’t hidden this from anybody. They withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in total conformity with the rule of law. They put the world on notice. They said, we will not participate. They gave them the appropriate timeline. They invited the inspectors out. And then, surprise, surprise, despite the fact that the Bush administration said, “Well, they’re just bluffing,” well, they’re not bluffing. They just popped one off. And guess what. If we continue to push North Korea irresponsibly -- because again, what are we talking about here?
What do we want to achieve in North Korea? Do we really care about the North Korean people, want human rights to -- no, regime change. This is all about regime change. This is about the United States being able to dictate the terms of coexistence with everybody else in the world. Do people understand that our policy towards China is regime change? Do they understand what the ramifications of that is? That’s what’s going on with North Korea. And we shouldn’t be surprised that they did exactly what they said they were going to do.
Now, we take Iran. Iran is a nation that says, “We don’t have a nuclear weapons program. We have no intention.” In fact, when North Korea exploded their device, the Iranians condemned it. They said nuclear weapons cannot be part of a global equation. And yet, we continue to try and lump them together as if North Korea and Iran are part and parcel of the same policy. Well, maybe they are part and parcel of the same incoherent approach that the Bush administration has taken to dealing with nuclear proliferation.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, you just returned from Iran?
SCOTT RITTER: I came -- I was in Iran in early September, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did you do there?
SCOTT RITTER: I went there as a journalist for Nation magazine. I was there to research an article that hopefully will come out some time in November. You know, it was funny, the Iranian government, like many governments, says one thing, does another. I had a whole agenda that had been agreed upon in advance, that I was going to go and interview X, interview Y, visit sites, see etc. And I got there to find out that the Iranian government, regardless of what we had coordinated here in the United States, had no clue (a) that I was coming and (b) that I had an agenda. So, I show up in Iran, and I’m on my own.
What an eye-opening experience to be on your own in a nation that has been called an Islamic fascist state. I have been to dictatorships in the Middle East. I have been to nations that have a high security profile. Iran is not one of these nations. I’m a former intelligence officer who has stated some pretty strong positions on Iran, and yet I had full freedom of movement in Iran with no interference whatsoever. And as a result, although I didn’t have the approved agenda, I had my own agenda, which allowed me to interview senior government officials, senior military officials, senior intelligence officials, and to visit sites that were deemed sensitive. The conclusion is that the American media has gotten it wrong on Iran. It’s a very modern, westernized, pro-Western, and surprisingly pro-American country that does not constitute a threat to the United States whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re a former weapons inspector in Iraq.
SCOTT RITTER: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about similarities or differences you see between the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and what’s happening now with Iran?
SCOTT RITTER: The biggest similarity that we need to point out is that in both cases no evidence was put forward to sustain the allegations that are being made. Iraq was accused of having weapons of mass destruction programs, reconstituting chemical, biological, nuclear, long-range ballistic missile programs. There was an inspection process in place that had access, full access to the facilities in question, and no data was derived from these inspections that backed up the Bush administration's allegations. And yet, Iraq was told, it’s not up to the inspectors to find the weapons. It’s up to Iraq to prove they don't exist. Iraq had to prove a negative. And they couldn't. We now know that in 1991, Saddam Hussein had destroyed the totality of his weapons programs. There weren’t any left to find, discover. There was no threat.
We now have Iran. It’s alleged to have a nuclear weapons program. And yet the International Atomic Energy Agency, the inspectors who have had full access to the sites in Iran, have come out and said, “Well, we can’t say that there isn’t a secret program that we don’t know about. What we can say, as a direct result of our investigations, there is no data whatsoever to sustain the Bush administration's claims that there is a nuclear weapons program.” And yet, the Bush administration once again is putting the onus on Iran, saying, “It’s not up to the inspectors to find the nuclear weapons program. It’s up to the Iranians to prove that one doesn’t exist.” Why do we go down this path? Because you can’t prove a negative. There’s nothing Iran can do that will satisfy the Bush administration, because the policy at the end of the day is not about nonproliferation, it’s not about disarmament. It’s about regime change. And all the Bush administration wants to do is to create the conditions that support their ultimate objective of military intervention.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, one of the things you talk about in your book is that no attention has been paid to the Supreme Leader's pronouncement in the form of a fatwa, that Iran rejects outright the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
SCOTT RITTER: Well, when we say “Supreme Leader,” first of all, most Americans are going to scratch their head and say, “Who?” because, you see, we have a poster boy for demonization out there. His name is Ahmadinejad. He’s the idiot that comes out and says really stupid vile things, such as, “It is the goal of Iran to wipe Israel off the face of the world,” and he makes ridiculous statements about the United States and etc. And, of course, man, he -- it’s a field day for the American media, for the Western media, because you get all the little sound bites out there, Ahmadinejad, Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. But what people don't understand is, while he can vocalize, his finger is not on any button of power. If you read the Iranian constitution, you’ll see that the president of Iran is almost a figurehead.
The true power in Iran rests with the Supreme Leader. The Supreme Leader is the Ayatollah Khamenei. He is supported by an organization called the Guardian Council. Then there’s another group called the Expediency Council. These are the people that control the military, the police, the nuclear program, all the instruments of power. And not only has the Supreme Leader issued a fatwa that says that nuclear weapons are not compatible with Islamic law, with the Shia belief system that he is responsible, in 2003 he actually reached out to the Bush administration via the Swiss embassy and said, “Look, we would like to normalize relations with the United States. We’d like to initiate a process that leads to a peace treaty between Israel and Iran.” Get this, Israel and Iran. He’s not saying, “We want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” He is saying, “We want peace with Israel.” And they were willing to put their nuclear program on the table.
Why didn’t the Bush administration embrace this? Because that leads to a process of normalization, where the United States recognizes the legitimacy of the theocracy and is willing to peacefully coexist with the theocracy. That’s not the Bush administration's position. They want the theocracy gone. They will do nothing that legitimizes that, nothing that sustains peace. They rejected peace. So, it’s not Ahmadinejad that represents the threat to international peace and security when it comes to American-Iranian relations. It’s the Bush administration, because the Bush administration refuses to put peace on the table. Bush talks about diplomacy. There will not be diplomacy, true diplomacy, until he puts Condoleezza Rice on an airplane, sends her to Tehran to talk to the Supreme Leader.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Scott Ritter. He has written a new book. It’s called: Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change. And the picture on the cover has an image of a U.S. gun, of a gun with an American flag. Talk about the image you have here and the backdrop of it.
SCOTT RITTER: You know, I wish I could take credit for that image. But unfortunately, that is the work of -- not unfortunately, fortunately that’s the work of a really good graphic designer with Nation Books who came up with, I think, a cover that is not only attractive but symbolic. But I think the point is here that Iran is the target. You know, we talk about America and the symbols of America. And yet, we have an American flag transformed into a symbol that the world recognizes when you say the United States: a weapon. And it’s very sad to think of the United States, the nation that’s supposed to espouse human rights, individual civil liberties, that when you talk about the United States around the world today, they think about us only in terms of violence, violence brought on by guns, because that’s what we’ve become, a nation of violence.
AMY GOODMAN: The scenario you envision around the U.S. and Iran?
SCOTT RITTER: War. The bottom line is that the Bush administration has two more years left to govern here in the United States. They have a policy of regional transformation in the Middle East: regime change. We see that policy in play today in Iraq with all of its horrible manifestations. You’d think that they would have learned something, but they haven’t. They continue to articulate that Iran needs to be transformed into a viable democracy, although, according to your news broadcast today and then other news coming out, it looks like we’re going to give up on democracy in Iraq.
Look, Bush has already said that he doesn’t want to leave Iran to the next president, that this is a problem he needs to solve now. And the other factor that we haven’t woven in here that we need to is the role played by Israel in pressuring the United States for a very aggressive stance against Iran. Israel has drawn a red line that says, not only will they not tolerate a nuclear weapons program in Iran, they will not tolerate anything dealing with nuclear energy, especially enrichment, that could be used in a nuclear program. So, even if Iran is telling the truth -- Iran says, “We have no nuclear weapons program. We just want peaceful nuclear energy” -- Israel says, “So long as Iran has any enrichment capability, this constitutes a threat to Israel,” and they are pressuring the United States to take forceful action.
AMY GOODMAN: In what way?
SCOTT RITTER: Oh, it’s diplomatic pressure. We see -- starting in 2002, you saw the Israeli prime minister and the defense minister come running to the United States in the lead-up to the war with Iraq, saying, “Hey, let's not worry too much about Iraq. That’s not really a big problem. I know we’ve got a lot of rhetoric going on about weapons of mass destruction, but the big problem’s Iran.” And the Bush administration said, “We don't want to talk about Iran right now. We’re dealing with Iraq.” In the immediate aftermath of the war, Israel came and said, “Alright, thank you for getting rid of Saddam. We now want you to focus on Iran.” And the United States continued to put Iran on the back burner. And it wasn’t until the Israeli government leaked some intelligence to an Iranian opposition group, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who came out and said, “Hey, look, there’s this site in Natanz. They’re doing enrichment there.” And suddenly the United States was forced to say, “Oh, we’ve got to put Iran back on the front burner.” And it’s been Israel that’s been dictating the pace of media operations, let’s say, on Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Something the media says is that Iran doesn’t need nuclear power -- it has plenty of oil -- that nuclear power is just its way of getting nuclear weapons.
SCOTT RITTER: Well, there can be no doubt that Iran has plenty of oil, but that oil is the only thing Iran has going for it, in terms of a viable world-class economy. In 1976, the Shah of Iran came to the United States, sent his representatives to intercede and say, “Look, we’ve done an analysis, and we’ve got a finite amount of oil. And right now we need to export it. And if we don't export it, we don't make money, etc. We don't have enough oil to sustain this. We need to come up with an indigenous energy policy that frees up our oil for exportation. We want to use nuclear energy.” And the U.S. government went, “Good idea, Shah. We're all for it.” That was Gerald Ford.
The chief of staff of the White House at the time was Dick Cheney. The Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld. So, this argument that both Cheney and Rumsfeld put out today that Iran is a nation awash in a sea of oil, there is no need for a nuclear energy program, they both supported Iran's goals of achieving nuclear energy in 1976. Not only nuclear energy, but they also supported the Shah when he said, “We cannot allow a nuclear energy program’s fuel to be held hostage by the vagaries of sanctions and war. We need an indigenous fuel-manufacturing capability inclusive of the full uranium enrichment process.” And guess what the U.S. government said in 1976. “No problem, Shah. Good deal.” Of course, in 1979, the Islamists come in and suddenly we change our opinion. The bottom line is, Iran has every right legally to a nuclear energy program, and economically, we’ve already deemed it a responsible way to go.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, both the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner have said covert actions have already begun in Iran, U.S. military. Do you think that is true?
SCOTT RITTER: I respect the reporting of Seymour Hersh. I respect the analysis of Sam Gardiner. And I respect the integrity of people who have talked to me who are in a position to know. Look, we’re already overflying Iran with unmanned aerial vehicles, pilotless drones. On the ground, the CIA is recruiting Mojahedin-e-Khalq, recruiting Kurds, recruiting Azeris, who are operating inside Iran on behalf of the United States of America. And there is reason to believe that we’ve actually put uniformed members of the United States Armed Forces and American citizens operating as CIA paramilitaries inside Iranian territory to gather intelligence.
Now, when you violate the borders and the airspace of a sovereign nation with paramilitary and military forces, that’s an act of war. That’s an act of war. So, when Americans say, “Ah, there’s not going to be a war in Iran,” there's already a war in Iran. We’re at war with Iran. We’re just not in the declared conventional stage of the war. The Bush administration has a policy of regime change. They’re going to use the military, and the military is being used.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute, but the role of the media in all this. In the lead-up to the invasion, they slammed you, they smeared you, as you were a UN weapons inspector who was opposed to the invasion.
SCOTT RITTER: Well, you know, they can come at me again all they want. I could care less. It’s like water off a duck's back. The problem’s not me. The issue is not me. The issue is truth and facts. I think it’s clear today that we weren’t given the truth and the facts about the reality of Iraq in the lead-up to the war, and it's clear the media is not doing the same with Iran. We are being preprogrammed to accept, at face value, true anything negative about Iran. That’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book, to put it into a proper perspective.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter. His book is Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change. He is a former UN weapons inspector. And tonight, you will be at the Ethical Culture Society in New York City, along with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.
From: "Donald Jones"
Subject: RE: Bush Orders Nuclear Aircraft Carrier Eisenhower and Additional Navy Ships To Iran's Western Coast
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:14:09 -0400
The striking arm of the carriers is the F/A-18. Bush would have to suddenly strike Tehran and decapitate the entire Iranian government at one blow before doing anything else. F/A-18s and Tomahawks can’t do that. Otherwise, 50,000 Iranian soldiers would plunge into Iraq and attack our troops there. It would be like Custer’s last stand for us. Iran has about 750,000 regular and reserve soldiers plus 5,000,000 militia. The nuclear sites are well hidden and protected and we would have to use several dozen nukes to be certain of their destruction. That might result in half the world’s oil supplies being stopped at the wellheads. We don’t have the troops to attack anyone now. In 10 divisions there are 37,000 pure riflemen. Not very many. The CIA needs talk to the mullahs and senior Iranian military professionals about the consequences of any attack on us by Iran . This should be the CIA’s war, not the army’s. Until Bush ceases to appear to be an Israeli toady to the Arabs, we are doomed to endless conflict. I think we should tell the Israelis to take care of their problems while we take care of ours. But since Bush is a Mexican Israeli we are doomed to open borders and fighting Israel ’s wars for it.
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Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 6:22 PM
Subject: Bush Orders Nuclear Aircraft Carrier Eisenhower and Additional Navy Ships To Iran 's Western Coast
Bush Orders Nuclear Aircraft Carrier Eisenhower and Additional Navy Ships To Iran 's Western Coast
"This is very serious," said Ray McGovern, a former CIA threat-assessment analyst who got early word of the Navy officers' complaints about the sudden deployment orders. (McGovern, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the CIA, resigned in 2002 in protest over what he said were Bush Administration pressures to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq . He and other intelligence agency critics have formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.)
Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College , says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about like the date" of any possible military action against Iran . (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article.
So what is the White House planning?
As reports circulate of a sharp debate within the White House over possible US military action against Iran and its nuclear enrichment facilities, The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061009/lindorff
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War Signals?
by DAVE LINDORFF
[posted online on September 21, 2006]
As reports circulate of a sharp debate within the White House over possible US military action against Iran and its nuclear enrichment facilities, The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.
As Time writes in its cover story, "What Would War Look Like?," evidence of the forward deployment of minesweepers and word that the chief of naval operations had asked for a reworking of old plans for mining Iranian harbors "suggest that a much discussed--but until now largely theoretical--prospect has become real: that the U.S. may be preparing for war with Iran."
According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk , Virginia , the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.
The Eisenhower had been in port at the Naval Station Norfolk for several years for refurbishing and refueling of its nuclear reactor; it had not been scheduled to depart for a new duty station until at least a month later, and possibly not till next spring. Family members, before the orders, had moved into the area and had until then expected to be with their sailor-spouses and parents in Virginia for some time yet. First word of the early dispatch of the "Ike Strike" group to the Persian Gulf region came from several angry officers on the ships involved, who contacted antiwar critics like retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner and complained that they were being sent to attack Iran without any order from the Congress.
"This is very serious," said Ray McGovern, a former CIA threat-assessment analyst who got early word of the Navy officers' complaints about the sudden deployment orders. (McGovern, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the CIA, resigned in 2002 in protest over what he said were Bush Administration pressures to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq . He and other intelligence agency critics have formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.)
Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College , says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about like the date" of any possible military action against Iran . (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article.
So what is the White House planning?
On Monday President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly at its opening session, and while studiously avoiding even physically meeting Iran 's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was also addressing the body, he offered a two-pronged message. Bush told the "people of Iran " that "we're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis" and that he looked forward "to the day when you can live in freedom." But he also warned that Iran 's leaders were using the nation's resources "to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons." Given the President's assertion that the nation is fighting a "global war on terror" and that he is Commander in Chief of that "war," his prominent linking of the Iran regime with terror has to be seen as a deliberate effort to claim his right to carry the fight there. Bush has repeatedly insisted that the 2001 Congressional Authorization for the Use of Force that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan was also an authorization for an unending "war on terror."
Even as Bush was making not-so-veiled threats at the UN, his former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, a sharp critic of any unilateral US attack on Iran, was in Norfolk, not far from the Eisenhower, advocating further diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran's nuclear program--itself tantalizing evidence of the policy struggle over whether to go to war, and that those favoring an attack may be winning that struggle.
"I think the plan's been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran ," says Gardiner. "It's a terrible idea, it's against US law and it's against international law, but I think they've decided to do it." Gardiner says that while the United States has the capability to hit those sites with its cruise missiles, "the Iranians have many more options than we do: They can activate Hezbollah; they can organize riots all over the Islamic world, including Pakistan, which could bring down the Musharraf government, putting nuclear weapons into terrorist hands; they can encourage the Shia militias in Iraq to attack US troops; they can blow up oil pipelines and shut the Persian Gulf." Most of the major oil-producing states in the Middle East have substantial Shiite populations, which has long been a concern of their own Sunni leaders and of Washington policy-makers, given the sometimes close connection of Shiite populations to Iran 's religious rulers.
Of course, Gardiner agrees, recent ship movements and other signs of military preparedness could be simply a bluff designed to show toughness in the bargaining with Iran over its nuclear program. But with the Iranian coast reportedly armed to the teeth with Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles, and possibly even more sophisticated Russian antiship weapons, against which the Navy has little reliable defenses, it seems unlikely the Navy would risk high-value assets like aircraft carriers or cruisers with such a tactic. Nor has bluffing been a Bush MO to date.
Commentators and analysts across the political spectrum are focusing on Bush's talk about dialogue, with many claiming that he is climbing down from confrontation. On the right, David Frum, writing on September 20 in his National Review blog, argues that the lack of any attempt to win a UN resolution supporting military action, and rumors of "hushed back doors" being opened in Washington, lead him to expect a diplomatic deal, not a unilateral attack. Writing in the center, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler saw in Bush's UN speech evidence that "war is no longer a viable option" in Iran . Even on the left, where confidence in the Bush Administration's judgment is abysmally low, commentators like Noam Chomsky and Nation contributor Robert Dreyfuss are skeptical that an attack is being planned. Chomsky has long argued that Washington's leaders aren't crazy, and would not take such a step--though more recently, he has seemed less sanguine about Administration sanity and has suggested that leaks about war plans may be an effort by military leaders--who are almost universally opposed to widening the Mideast war--to arouse opposition to such a move by Bush and war advocates like Cheney. Dreyfuss, meanwhile, in an article for the online journal TomPaine.com, focuses on the talk of diplomacy in Bush's Monday UN speech, not on his threats, and concludes that it means "the realists have won" and that there will be no Iran attack.
But all these war skeptics may be whistling past the graveyard. After all, it must be recalled that Bush also talked about seeking diplomatic solutions the whole time he was dead-set on invading Iraq , and the current situation is increasingly looking like a cheap Hollywood sequel. The United States , according to Gardiner and others, already reportedly has special forces operating in Iran , and now major ship movements are looking ominous.
Representative Maurice Hinchey, a leading Democratic critic of the Iraq War, informed about the Navy PTDOs and about the orders for the full Eisenhower Strike Group to head out to sea, said, "For some time there has been speculation that there could be an attack on Iran prior to November 7, in order to exacerbate the culture of fear that the Administration has cultivated now for over five or six years. But if they attack Iran it will be a very bad mistake, for the Middle East and for the US . It would only make worse the antagonism and fear people feel towards our country. I hope this Administration is not so foolish and irresponsible." He adds, "Military people are deeply concerned about the overtaxing of the military already."
Calls for comment from the White House on Iran war plans and on the order for the Eisenhower Strike Group to deploy were referred to the National Security Council press office, which declined to return this reporter's phone calls.
McGovern, who had first told a group of anti-Iraq War activists Sunday on the National Mall in Washington , DC , during an ongoing action called " Camp Democracy ," about his being alerted to the strike group deployment, warned, "We have about seven weeks to try and stop this next war from happening."
One solid indication that the dispatch of the Eisenhower is part of a force buildup would be if the carrier Enterprise --currently in the Arabian Sea, where it has been launching bombing runs against the Taliban in Afghanistan , and which is at the end of its normal six-month sea tour--is kept on station instead of sent back to the United States . Arguing against simple rotation of tours is the fact that the Eisenhower's refurbishing and its dispatch were rushed forward by at least a month. A report from the Enterprise on the Navy's official website referred to its ongoing role in the Afghanistan fighting, and gave no indication of plans to head back to port. The Navy itself has no comment on the ship's future orders.
Jim Webb, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and currently a Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia , expressed some caution about reports of the carrier deployment, saying, "Remember, carrier groups regularly rotate in and out of that region." But he added, "I do not believe that there should be any elective military action taken against Iran without a separate authorization vote by the Congress. In my view, the 2002 authorization which was used for the invasion of Iraq should not extend to Iran ."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061009/lindorff
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Chris Hedges: Bush’s Nuclear Apocalypse
By Chris Hedges
10/09/06 "TruthDig" -- -- The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.
War with Iran —a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East —is probable by the end of the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East , defined three states at the start of its reign as “the Axis of Evil.” They were Iraq , now occupied; North Korea , which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran . Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua , and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America . He knows nothing about the Middle East . He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.
These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States , slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.
But this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president himself may hold such a vision.
The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in the Middle East . Iran actually signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has violated a codicil of that treaty written by European foreign ministers, but this codicil was never ratified by the Iranian parliament. I do not dispute Iran ’s intentions to acquire nuclear weapons nor do I minimize the danger should it acquire them in the estimated five to 10 years. But contrast Iran with Pakistan , India and Israel . These three countries refused to sign the treaty and developed nuclear weapons programs in secret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. The word “Dimona,” the name of the city where the nuclear facilities are located in Israel , is shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli threat to Muslims’ existence. What lessons did the Iranians learn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies?
Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime by recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclear capacity, and given that, with the touch of a button Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entails making “preemptive” and unprovoked strikes.
Those in Washington who advocate this war, knowing as little about the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can hit about 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster in southern Lebanon , where the Israeli air campaign not only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese behind the militant group, is dismissed. These ideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based universe. The massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As retired General Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed out, once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon . And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missiles and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must be faced—either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation.
“As a people we are enormously forgetful,” Dr. Polk, one of the country’s leading scholars on the Middle East, told an Oct. 13 gathering of the Foreign Policy Association in New York . “We should have learned from history that foreign powers can’t win guerrilla wars. The British learned this from our ancestors in the American Revolution and re-learned it in Ireland . Napoleon learned it in Spain . The Germans learned it in Yugoslavia . We should have learned it in Vietnam and the Russians learned it in Afghanistan and are learning it all over again in Chechnya and we are learning it, of course, in Iraq . Guerrilla wars are almost unwinnable. As a people we are also very vain. Our way of life is the only way. We should have learned that the rich and powerful can’t always succeed against the poor and less powerful.”
An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East . The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf , could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia , the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain , Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq , as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.
The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel . And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies of the Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a regional war, one that would over time spell the final chapter in the Zionist experiment in the Middle East . The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program “the Samson option.” The Biblical Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple and killed everyone around him, along with himself.
If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left behind with the nonbelievers, then this news should cheer you up. If you are rational, however, these may be some of the last few weeks or months in which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying republic and way of life.
Chris Hedges is former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author of the bestseller “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” reports on Bush’s plan for Iran , and how a callous war, conceived by zealots, will lead to a disaster of biblical proportions.
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World War W
by Michael Carmichael
October 10, 2006
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CAR20061010&articleId=3443
BREAKING NEWS: Eisenhower Carrier Group Sails for Iran Theater:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/trackback/1530
Whose War?:
http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html
Iran: The Next War (for Israel ):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php
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"How did eight or nine neoconservatives redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?"
October 14, 2006
Why Bush Should (but Won't) Be Impeached
by Paul Craig Roberts
The case for impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney is far stronger than the case against President Bill Clinton or the impending case that drove President Nixon to resign. With Republican control of Congress, especially of the House where impeachment must originate, it is hardly surprising that impeachment of the Republican Bush administration is a dead letter.
What is surprising is that conservatives with a long tradition of adulation for the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights have not been up in arms against the Bush regime's all-out assault on the foundation of America 's political system. Instead, the case for impeachment has come from the left wing. This weakens the case, because it can be portrayed as a partisan political move instead of a last-ditch attempt to save the Constitution.
In Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney, edited by Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips, left-wing professors, journalists, and activists present a 300-page, 12-count indictment.
It is for the most part a sound indictment. A conservative American constitutionalist who loves his country can find little in the case for impeachment to take exception to.
Despite the strength of the case for impeachment, I do not think it will happen, because Bush has convinced Americans that his crimes against truth, the U.S. Constitution, and the Geneva Conventions are necessary measures in the "war against terrorists." As long as Americans understand 9/11 as an attack on America by "Islamo-fascism," the executive branch will have wide latitude in usurping liberty.
Seymour Hersh in his book Chain of Command asks,
"How did eight or nine neoconservatives redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?"
"How indeed?" ask the editors of Impeach the President. Their answer seems to be that the Democrats have been intimidated and "truth and facts have been barricaded off from reaching most of the American people." The editors have faith in the American people to do the right thing if only they can find out the truth.
It is refreshing to see that the Left, unlike the neoconservatives, believes in the American system. However, as Claes Ryn indicates in his book America the Virtuous, it would appear that the American system has been eroded over the decades by the rise of the new Jacobin ideology known as neoconservatism.
In columns available on Antiwar.com on Oct. 12, Leon Hadar and William S. Lind point out that the Democrats are as neoconized as the neoconized Republicans. There is no difference.
At a recent conference hosted by the journal The National Interest, it was the Democrat Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, who sounded like Richard Perle and William Kristol, not the Republican Stefan Halper, who served in the Reagan administration. Halper presented a devastating critique of Bush's neocon foreign policy.
The problem is not that the Democrats are intimidated. The problem is that the Democrats are part of the problem. The editors of Impeach the President indirectly acknowledge this fact when they report that Congress "looked the other way" when Bush acknowledged that he lied to cover up his felony of illegally spying on U.S. citizens and declared the real criminal to be the NSA official who blew the whistle. Democrats, no less than Republicans, have permitted the Bush regime to violate the separation of powers and the rule of law. A branch of government that no longer defends its power is a branch of government that no longer believes in its power. Just as the Reichstag faded away for Hitler, the U.S. Congress has faded away for the Bush administration.
Claes Ryn is correct when he says a change of mind has occurred. The Constitution and the political system based on it are on the ropes because the players no longer believe in them. They believe in executive power to act forcefully in behalf of "American exceptionalism."
Civil libertarians rely on the judiciary to defend constitutional rights, but the Supreme Court has been compromised by Bush's appointments of Roberts and Alito, men who believe in "energy in the executive." Without support from Congress, the judiciary cannot protect civil liberty. With the passage of the recent detainee and spy bills, Congress has allied itself with the Bush regime against civil liberty.
Beliefs are more important than institutions. Michael Polanyi wrote that if people believed in the principles of Stalinism, democracy would uphold Stalinism. If people believe in American hegemony, they will not complain when barriers to hegemonic actions are removed. If people believe fighting terrorism is more important than civil liberty, they will lose civil liberty.
What America needs to refurbish is its beliefs. Without renewing our beliefs, we cannot renew our civil liberties and hold government accountable.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=9855
Cynicism and Moral Cowardice
Why Do We Still Fight a Lost War?
http://www.counterpunch.org
By WILLIAM S. LIND
At least 32 American troops have been killed in Iraq this month. Approximately 300 have been wounded. The "battle for Baghdad " is going nowhere. A Marine friend just back from Ramadi said to me, "It didn't get any better while I was there, and it's not going to get better." Virtually everyone in Washington , except the people in the White House, knows that is true for all of Iraq .
Actually, I think the White House knows it too. Why then does it insist on "staying the course" at a casualty rate of more than one thousand Americans per month? The answer is breathtaking in its cynicism: so the retreat from Iraq happens on the next President's watch. That is why we still fight.
Yep, it's now all about George. Anyone who thinks that is too low, too mean, too despicable even for this bunch does not understand the meaning of the adjective "Rovian." Would they let thousands more young Americans get killed or wounded just so George W. does not have to face the consequences of his own folly? In a heartbeat.
Not that it's going to help. When history finally lifts it leg on the Bush administration, it will wash all such tricks away, leaving only the hubris and the incompetence. Jeffrey Hart, who with Russell Kirk gone is probably the top intellectual in the conservative movement, has already written that George W. Bush is the worst President America ever had. I think the honor still belongs to the sainted Woodrow, but if Bush attacks Iran , he may yet earn the prize. That third and final act in the Bush tragicomedy is waiting in the wings.
A post-election Democratic House, Senate or both might in theory say no to another war. But if the Bush administration's cynicism is boundless, the Democrats' intellectual vacuity and moral cowardice are equally so. You can't beat something with nothing, but Democrats have put forward nothing in the way of an alternative to Bush's defense and foreign policies. On Iran , the question is whether they will be more scared of the Republicans or of the Israeli lobby. Either way, they will hide under the bed, just as they have hidden under the bed on the war in Iraq . It appears at the moment that a Congressional demand for withdrawal from Iraq is more likely if the Republicans keep the Senate and Senator John Warner of Virginia remains Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee than if the Democrats take over.
There is a great deal of material available to the Democrats to offer an alternative, much of it the product of the Military Reform Movement of the 1970s and 80s. Gary Hart can tell them all about it. There is even a somewhat graceful way out of Iraq, if the Dems will ask themselves my favorite foreign policy question, WWBD - - What Would Bismarck Do? He would transfer sufficient Swiss francs to interested parties so that the current government of Iraq asks us to leave. They, not we, would then hold the world's ugliest baby, even though it was America 's indiscretion that gave the bastard birth.
But donkeys will think when pigs fly. A Democratic Congress will be as stupid, cowardly and corrupt as its Republican predecessor; in reality, both parties are one party, the party of successful career politicians. The White House will continue a lost war in Iraq , solely to dump the mess in the next President's lap. America or Israel will attack Iran , pulling what's left of the temple down on our heads. Congress will do nothing to stop either war.
By 2008, I may not be the only monarchist in America .
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
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October 12, 2006
Bush Has Achieved
America's Demise
The Founding Fathers' country
no longer exists
by Paul Craig Roberts
When does "collateral damage" so dwarf combatant deaths that war becomes genocide?
Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq has cost 655,000 Iraqis their lives. That is the conclusion of a study financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies and conducted by physicians under the direction of Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists. These are deaths over and above the pre-invasion mortality rate. Bush's illegal invasion raised Iraq 's mortality rate from 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The study is published by the distinguished British medical journal, The Lancet, and is available on the journal's Web site [.pdf].
The study uses a scientific method known as "cluster sampling." In 87 percent of the deaths, the researchers requested death certificates, and more than 90 percent of the surveyed households produced the death certificates. Violence accounted for 601,000 deaths, and disease and destruction of civilian infrastructure accounted for 54,000 deaths. The violent deaths are attributed to gunshot wounds, coalition air strikes, and car bombs.
Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Gilbert Burnham says, "We're very confident with the results." Columbia University epidemiologist Ronald Waldman says the survey method used is "tried and true" and that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."
When asked about the report, President Bush stated, "I don't consider it a credible report." Bush, of course, is not reality-based, and he knows that any unfavorable news is "enemy propaganda." That's what the neocons who pull his strings tell him, and that is what he believes.
What percentage of these 655,000 deaths were insurgents or "terrorists"? Probably 1 percent and no more than 2 percent. Bush's "war on terror" is, in fact, a war on Iraqi civilians.
Bush's invasion has also spawned sectarian conflict or civil war, although the Bush regime denies it. Even Bush is smart enough to know that "bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq " is not compatible with setting off a civil war in Iraq . Since Bush the faith-based believes that he is bringing "freedom and democracy to Iraq ," he cannot accept the fact that he has started a civil war.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are not the only innocent victims of Bush's illegal aggression. The New York Times (Oct. 11) reports that Department of Veterans Affairs documents show that about one in five U.S. soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan have suffered at least partial disability.
To date, more than 100,000 U.S. troops who are veterans of these wars have been granted disability compensation. Although the U.S. cannot put on the ground in Iraq more than 150,000 troops at one time, 1.5 million troops have served so far and 567,000 have been discharged, of which 100,000 are receiving disability payments.
Paul Sullivan, director of programs for Veterans for America , says that the current rate of injuries will produce 400,000 American veterans suffering 30 percent to 100 percent disability. Apparently, one of the severe forms of disability is post-traumatic stress, which does not count as a physical wound.
What is America 's reward for Bush's illegal wars that have killed 655,000 Iraqis, an uncounted number of Afghans, and disabled as many as 400,000 U.S. troops?
According to the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate and to practically every Middle East expert, Bush's invasions have radicalized the Muslim Middle East, created legions of recruits for extremists, undermined America's puppet rulers, imperiled Israel, and destroyed America's reputation.
We are talking about over 1 million casualties that have no other cause than blatant lies by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the bloodthirsty neoconservative cabal that occupies Bush's subcabinet, and their corporate media propagandists, especially The Weekly Standard, Fox News, National Review, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Bush regime deceived America and the world with its lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that would be turned against the West by terrorists. By giving speeches that continually mentioned Iraq in the same context as 9/11, the Bush regime created the widespread impression, still prevalent among Americans, that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
What kind of government would destroy the lives through death or disability of over 1 million people for no valid reason?
The same kind of government that fires its own lawyers for doing their constitutional duty. Navy lawyer Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was assigned the task of bringing Salim Hamdan to a guilty plea before the unconstitutional military tribunal that President Bush created for Guantanamo detainees. Instead, Cmdr. Swift did his duty and defended his client, winning in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Bush administration retaliated by blocking Cmdr. Swift's promotion, which killed his military career and sent the chilling message to all U.S. military and government attorneys that constitutional scruples are career-enders in the Bush regime. Anyone who stands for the U.S. Constitution is against Bush and his neocon regime.
The Bush regime is proceeding exactly as the Nazi regime proceeded. First, eliminate every person of conscience and integrity from the government. Second, redefine duty as service to the leader: "You are with us or against us" – a formulation that leaves no place for duty to the U.S. Constitution. Patriotism is redefined from loyalty to country and Constitution to loyalty to the government's leader.
Americans are too inattentive and distracted to be aware of the grave danger that the neoconservative Bush regime presents to American liberty and to world stability. The neoconservative drive to achieve hegemony over the American people and the entire world is similar to Hitler's drive for hegemony. Hitler used racial superiority to justify Germany 's right to ride roughshod over other peoples and the right of the Nazi elite to rule over the German people. Neoconservatives use "American exceptionalism" and "the war on terror." There is no practical difference. Hitler cared no more about the peoples he mowed down in his drive for supremacy than the neoconservatives care about 655,000 dead Iraqis, 100,000 disabled American troops, and 2,747 dead ones.
When Bush the Decider claims unconstitutional powers and uses "signing statements" to negate U.S. law whenever he feels the rule of law is in the way of his leadership, he is remarkably similar to Hitler, the F? who told the Reichstag on Feb. 20, 1938: "A man who feels it his duty at such an hour to assume the leadership of his people is not responsible to the laws of parliamentary usage or to a particular democratic conception, but solely to the mission placed upon him. And anyone who interferes with this mission is an enemy of the people."
You are with us or against us.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=9844
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.counterpunch.org
On Borrowed Time (and Money)
Lost Wars and a Lost Economy
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
President Bush and his neocon flaks have simultaneously lost two wars and America 's economic future.
Last Friday's payroll jobs report was a continuation of Bush's dismal record. Only 59,000 net new private sector jobs were created during September. That is about 90,000 less than would be needed to stay even with population growth. Like all jobs that the US economy has created in the 21st century, the September jobs are in domestic services.
Waitresses and bar tenders accounted for a quarter of the new jobs.
The remainder were in health care and social assistance, wholesale trade and transportation, financial activities, and accounting and bookkeeping services.
US manufacturing lost another 19,000 jobs. Since Bush took office, the US has lost 3 million manufacturing jobs.
Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services in Washington DC notes that the growth of total hours worked over the current "recovery" is less than half the average rate of all previous recoveries and is the worst performance on record. Due to offshoring, manufacturing hours worked have declined 6.6% since the recovery began in November 2001.
It has been years since the US economy has created high-productivity, high-paying jobs in export and import-competitive sectors. The US manufacturing trade deficit is now twice the size of the oil import bill. The years of deficits have destroyed America 's creditor status in the balance of payments. At the beginning of this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time in 90 years, the US is now paying noticeably more to foreign creditors than it receives from its investments abroad."
Jobs offshoring and work visas for foreigners are dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society for American citizens. In the 21st century, real income growth has been limited to a few at the top, while median family income stagnates or declines. As a result of the moronic American system of tying CEO pay to quarterly results, fat cats get richer by arbitraging labor and replacing American workers with foreigners | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 9:10 pm Post subject: Iran: The Unthinkable War, Part I |
| Iran: The Unthinkable War, Part I
Pretending You Didn't Know
by Juan Santos
www.dissidentvoice.org
October 2, 2006
"Every nuclear weapon is a portable Auschwitz."
-- Daniel Ellsberg
The Democrats are silent as the Bush regime prepares for war against
Iran -- silent in the face of a potential nuclear mass murder --
even a global war. Silent in the face of an attack that could cause
an utter meltdown of the global economy, a 1930s style Depression
that would send millions, perhaps billions of people into starvation-
level poverty, as the prices of oil and gasoline triple.
The potentials for horror for tens of millions of people in the
region are almost unspeakable. Such a war would quickly spread to
Iraq -- where Halliburton's "Green Zone" in Baghdad would be turned
to instant rubble by such missiles as were left for an Iranian
counterstrike, giving US soldiers in the Zone their own taste of
Lebanon, even as Shia Muslims turn a face of cold steel -- or wild,
inconsolable grief and rage -- toward the death of every US and
British soldier, mercenary, spy, journalist, and profiteer in Iraq.
According to Agency France-Presse, the head of Iran's Revolutionary
Guards said, "The Americans know better than anyone that their
troops in the region and in Iraq are vulnerable. I would advise them
not to commit such a strategic error. I would advise them to first
get out of their quagmire in Iraq before getting into an even bigger
one."
Iraqi Shi'ite leader Moqtada al Sadr has announced that his Mahdi
army would retaliate for a US attack on Iran.
A major defeat in Iraq could lead immediately to a military draft,
radicalizing, at last, the anti-war movement in the US.
That war would spread throughout the region is all but certain.
Whether it could be contained to the region is entirely uncertain.
Militant forces in next door in Pakistan could rise up, forcing
loose that government's shaky hold on power, and putting the
capacity for a nuclear counterstrike on US targets directly in the
hands of the "terrorists" Washington claims to fear and oppose.
40% of the oil on the world market would dry up overnight as Iran
shut down the Straights of Hormuz in retaliation. Were a
counterstrike aimed at Saudi and other regional oil fields, a
tripling of world oil prices might well seem a modest projection.
Seymour Hersh has noted, "Should war break out in the Middle East
again… or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as
the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a
last resort, would now be a strong probability." Ariel Sharon put
the matter more directly. "Arabs may have the oil, but we have the
matches," he said.
In the West, Daniel Ellsberg has suggested a connection between an
attack on Iran and rapid developments toward martial law in the US.
Gerard Baker put it this way in a pro-war London Times essay
called "Prepare yourself for the unthinkable: war against Iran may
be a necessity."
[T]he kind of society we live in and cherish in the West, a long way
from Tehran or Damascus, will change beyond recognition. We balk now
at intrusive government measures to tap our phones... Imagine how
much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our governments fear we
are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or
truckload away from another Hiroshima.
By "another Hiroshima," he means a Hiroshima in the West, of
course, -- that's what's "unthinkable" -- not the Hiroshimas and
mini-Hiroshimas the US, and in all likelihood, Israel, will rain on
the people of Iran.
An attack on Iran would be the farthest thing from "clean"
or "surgical." The reality is that it would bring horrible death to
tens, even hundreds of thousands of people who live near US targets.
While the official line is to minimize the death dealing potentials
of nuclear "bunker busters" or Earth Penetrating Weapons (EPWs)of
the kind sure to come into play against Iran's deeply buried nuclear
energy facilities, the International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War (IPPNW), winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, begs
to differ.
An IPPNW study concludes that:
[E]ven a very low-yield nuclear EPW exploded in or near an urban
environment… will inevitably disperse radioactive dirt and debris
over several square kilometers and could result in fatal doses of
radiation to tens of thousands of victims.
These tens of thousands "would die excruciating deaths over several
days to a week or more."
Daniel Ellsberg told a gathering of World Can't Wait activists:
Every nuclear weapon is a portable Auschwitz. The first one that is
used may kill only hundreds, depending on where they are used, which
would be extremely ominous. People would say, "Ah, they can be used
easily." The use of nuclear weapons even in a deserted field against
an underground site by this country would bring us into a new era of
history -- the consequences of which would so dwarf the Holocaust
there would be simply no comparison. The nuclear wars in our future -
- that would be started by an act now being planned by this country -
- are Hitler-like to the hundredth degree.
Even if the messianic Bush regime gets cold feet -- an unlikely
proposition -- the Jerusalem Post assures us that Israel, with its
200 nuclear weapons, may well "go it alone" against Iran.
In his 1997 book Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies,
Israel Shahak wrote, "Israel is preparing for a war, nuclear if need
be, for the sake of averting domestic change not to its liking, if
it occurs in some or any Middle Eastern states.... Israel clearly
prepares itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle
East . . . without hesitating to use for the purpose all means
available, including nuclear ones."
They would no doubt have the backing of Ariel Sharon sycophant
Hillary Clinton and the House Democrats who all but unanimously
voted for a resolution supporting Israel's most recent war crimes in
the devastation of Lebanon. Only eight Democrats could be found to
oppose it.
With respect to Iran, one House member told Seymour Hersh, "There's
no pressure from Congress" to avoid military action. "The only
political pressure is from the guys who want to do it." The coming
war is an imperative of Empire, not just Republican extremism or the
compulsion of Christian fascists courting Armageddon.
In fact, an attack on Iran is straight out of the Democrat's
playbook.
Stephen Zunes, Middle East Editor for Foreign Policy in Focus,
remarked on the Democratic Party's 2004 platform:
One possible target for American forces under a Kerry administration
is Iran. The platform implies an American right to such military
intervention by stating that "a nuclear-armed Iran is an
unacceptable risk to us and our allies." No concern is expressed,
however, about the already-existing nuclear arsenals of Iran's
neighbor Pakistan or of nearby Israel. Iran has called for a nuclear-
free zone in the region, which the Democrats appear to reject,
apparently because it would require America's regional allies to get
rid of their nuclear arsenals as well. The Democrats, like the
Republicans, believe that instead of pushing for multilateral and
verifiable arms control treaties, the United States can effectively
impose a kind of nuclear apartheid, unilaterally determining which
countries can have nuclear weapons and which countries cannot.
Get that: Iran has called for a nuclear free Middle East and the
Democrats and Republicans alike have rejected that call.
>From Lieberman to Obama to Clinton to Kerry to Harman to Bayh to
Dean, the story is the same. Robert Dreyfuss writes that "just as
the Democrats meekly got in line to support the invasion of Iraq,
many (perhaps most) elected Democrats are demanding a confrontation
with Iran, too. Some, such as Hillary Clinton, are even trying to
out-Bush the president in demanding a showdown with Iran."
The Democrat's position paper on "defense," "Real Security:
Protecting America and Restoring Our Leadership in the World", says
Democrats will "roll back the nuclear threats of Iran and North
Korea." The document, gangster style, literally states that
Democrats in power would make "an offer Iran cannot refuse"
adding, "Iran should understand the existential threat of military
response…"
"Real Security" calls for massively beefing up spending both on the
military and on so-called "Homeland Security," while offering an
ever-so-slightly altered version of Bush's policy of "staying the
course" in the occupation of Iraq.
The Democrats are the furthest thing from a "peace" party.
Even liberal Democrat stalwarts like Barbara Boxer have the mad
gleam of war in their eyes. Boxer, faced with a claim by Iran that
it has no interest in developing nuclear weapons, recently raged on
The Ed Schultz Show that Iran should prove the point by signing the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran of course, is a signatory to
that treaty, and Boxer's comments were the kind of rabid lie --
let's not be polite and call it "misinformation" -- that would have
left liberals in a rage if it came from the mouth of a Bush or
Cheney.
The Democrats refuse even to set a timetable for withdrawal from
Iraq – although a recent poll by Zogby International showed that 72%
of U.S. troops serving in Iraq believe that the United States should
end its occupation of Iraq by the end of this year, and even though
61% of Iraqis support Iraqi resistance attacks on US troops. Oddly,
the Christian Science Monitor says that the same percentage -- 61%
of people in the US -- oppose the war in Iraq. 87% of Iraqis want
the US out of their country.
A new poll from Reuters shows that only 9% of people in the US favor
air strikes on selected military targets in Iran.
But no one in the Democratic Party cares what we say, as long as we
don't make real trouble for them -- trouble in the streets -- any
more than they cared about the millions who marched in peaceful
demonstrations across the globe in a bid to stop the invasion of
Iraq before it started. They voted for it anyway, whatever excuses
they offer now.
In a word, a vote for the Democrats is a vote for war -- in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Lebanon or, now, Iran. It is an endorsement of US war
crimes, of the policy of "pre-emptive war." It is a vote in favor of
a nuclear Middle East and of US and Israeli nuclear first strikes.
It's also a matter of pretending you didn't know.
The truth is that there is no such thing as the lesser of two evils.
There is only capitulation to, cooperation with and endorsement of
evil, or resistance to it. A slow poison is no better than a fast
one, once you're dead. And the more you swallow, of course, the more
you will swallow. Only those who resist merit support.
With respect to war, a vote for the Democrats has one impact only;
it changes nothing at all but the voter -- turning her into the
moral equivalent of a "Good German," in her relationship to the
oppressed peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds, even if she means
only to oppose the Christian Fascists and Armageddon mongers on the
hard Republican Right.
US strategists are not simple madmen -- they are imperialists. There
is a method and a strategy to the madness, however insane an attack
on Iran might appear, and however immense the potential "blowback"
to the Empire.
As Larry Everest notes, the Bush regime "is not unaware of these
various concerns. But its view is that delay and equivocation will
only make matters worse and give openings to the U.S.'s regional and
global rivals, and that it could lose the whole game if it doesn't
maintain the momentum in the so-called `war on terror,' and
aggressively move forward."
"This spring, UN Ambassador John Bolton declared (in clear reference
to military attacks possibly including nuclear weapons), `The longer
we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more
intractable it will become to solve… We must be prepared to rely on
comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to
stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses.'"
Coming up in Part II: Iraq, Iran, and "Weapons of Mass Destruction"
Juan Santos is a writer and editor in Los Angeles California. His
essays from 2006 are collected at: http://the-fourth-
world.blogspot.com/. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 8:25 am Post subject: |
| Putin cool to Olmert's Iran plea
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/66C8CC87-D0AB-4B26-BC8A-E9B71A20D3C7.htm
Thursday 19 October 2006, 8:36 Makka Time, 5:36 GMT
Olmert (L) and his hosts differed on the Iran nuclear question
An Israeli appeal to Russia that it should help block Iran's acquisition of a nuclear bomb appears to have failed, with Russia not offering any public pledge.
Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, did not give any reassurance that Russia would check any Iranian intent to acquire nuclear weaponry following a plea from Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, on Wednesday in Moscow.
Although ties between Russia and Israel have warmed dramatically since the Soviet Union collapsed, the two countries are in deep disagreement over how to confront the Iranian nuclear threat.
Israel considers Iran to be its greatest threat.
Israel, like the West, disbelieves Tehran's claims that it is developing energy, and wants its nuclear capabilities to be put in check.
However, Russia continues to build Iran's first nuclear reactor, and has impeded the imposition of UN sanctions on Tehran for refusing to scale back its nuclear ambitions.
"We don't have the privilege to ignore the true intentions of Iran, whose leadership publicly calls for the destruction of the state of Israel," Olmert said at a joint press conference with Putin.
"The entire international community must join ranks to block Iran's intention of arming itself with nuclear weapons.
"I leave this meeting with the sense that President Putin understands better than before the danger that lurks from Iran's direction, should it succeed in realising its objectives of arming itself with nuclear weapons."
Putin remained silent, saying nothing about Iran at the news conference.
Interests
Asked afterwards in a briefing with Israeli reporters whether he was disappointed by Putin's silence or had received private assurances, Olmert replied that he was convinced Putin is "very concerned" Iran might acquire nuclear capabilities.
Alexei Malashenko, a Middle East expert at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, said Russia would continue to hold out against imposing sanctions on Tehran, to safeguard its strong commercial interests and independent role in the Middle East.
"Russia will resist until the end. If it backs down and decides to make concessions, it will lose its image in the Muslim world," he said.
Western concerns about Russia's role in the Iranian standoff grew last month after Moscow caved in to Iranian pressure and agreed, by March, to ship nuclear fuel to the atomic power plant it is building in Iran.
Supplies to Hezbollah
Russia's supply of military technology to other countries was another subject Olmert addressed after the meeting. Israel claims that Lebanon-based Hezbollah fighters used Russian missiles against it in summer.
Israel does not accuse Russia of directly supplying Hezbollah, but maintains the arms were sold to Syria and Iran, which sent them on to their Hezbollah proxies.
Russia has denied its missiles reached Hezbollah.
Olmert, in his briefing with the Israeli press, would not say whether the Russians confirmed Israel's claims. But he said he was "satisfied" from his talks with them that they would "do all in their power to take steps so we don't have to worry in the future".
Agencies
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Israel to US: Now for Iran
By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/03398F16-8119-4A21-83E4-D93E5F161B55.htm
Sunday 29 August 2004, 14:00 Makka Time, 11:00 GMT
Tehran maintains its nuclear programme is for civil purposes
Having succeeded in getting the United States to invade and occupy Iraq, Israel is now making efforts to instigate the Bush administration to deal with the "Iranian threat".
This week, a high-ranking Israeli official urged the US "and the rest of the free world" to deal with the "Iranian threat before it is too late".
The remarks - reminiscent of the vitriolic propaganda campaign against Iraq prior to the Anglo-American invasion of the Arab country last year - coincided with the publication of an article by a leading Israeli military historian Martin Van-Creveld, suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon might very well order an attack on Iranian nuclear plants.
Writing in the Paris-based International Herald Tribune on 21 August, Creveld opined an Israeli or American (or a joint Israeli-American) attack on Iranian nuclear plants might be carried out before the US November elections.
Israel reportedly possess a big arsenal of nuclear weapons - estimates range from 100 to 400 weapons and bombs - along with efficient delivery systems, including a fleet of long-range American-supplied F-15 fighter bombers as well as the medium range ballistic missile Yeriho.
Justification
Seeking to justify Tel Aviv's fixation on Iran, Israeli leaders are citing three reasons why Iran ought to dispose of its alleged would-be nuclear capability.
"Israel simply wants to keep five hundred million Muslims in this region under the mercy of its nuclear arsenal"
Abd Al-Sattar Qasim,
Political Science Professor,
Najah University, Nablus,
These include the Islamist nature of the Iranian regime, Iran's refusal to recognise Israel and the Islamic republic's alleged support of resistance groups fighting Israeli occupation and colonisation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab East Jerusalem as well as part of Southern Lebanon.
However, according to Abd Al-Sattar Qasim, Professor of Political Science at the Najah University in Nablus, these are only "pretexts".
"I believe that Israel is the most dangerous state in the world today. Imagine what state the stability and security of the world would be in if the messianic Jewish extremists of Gush Euminim reached power in Israel and suddenly found themselves in control of Israel's massive nuclear arsenal."
Maintaining supremacy
Qasim believes the sole motive behind Israel's currently evolving showdown with Iran is the Israeli determination to "maintain its nuclear monopoly and strategic supremacy in this region".
"Israel simply wants to keep five hundred million Muslims in this region under the mercy of its nuclear arsenal. The appearance of any possible strategic deterrence would upset Israel's strategic calculations and might rectify the strategic balance of power in the Middle East."
Creveld tacitly agrees, saying: "Iran would be crazy" not to try developing a nuclear capability, given Israel's aggrandising nuclear armaments, including the reported deployment of nuclear-equipped submarines in the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and perhaps the Persian Gulf.
Israel reportedly makes nuclear
weapons at its Dimona reactor
"It all depends on Ariel Sharon - an old war-horse who back in 1982 led Israel into a disastrous invasion of Lebanon. One can only hope that this time he will think twice," the military historian said.
In the public relations battle, Israel argues that Iran is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, a claim that is much less than true since Iran has said repeatedly that it will accept any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will be acceptable to the Palestinians.
Furthermore, Iran could also make a similar argument, quoting statements by Israeli ministers and officials calling for the extermination of millions of Muslims.
No easy target
Israeli strategists recognise that attacking and destroying Iranian nuclear installations would not be an easy job.
These facilities, they admit, are widely dispersed, well-guarded and housed in underground bunkers.
"It wouldn't be as easy as the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor," said Ephraim Ascolai, a nuclear weapons expert at the Jafee Centre for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, alluding to the Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor in 1981.
But in an interview with Aljazeera.net, Ascolai pointed out an Israeli attack on Iranian facilities was not unthinkable.
He argued, however, that the "Iranian nuclear crisis" was not an exclusively Israeli problem, but a world problem.
"You see, this is not only between Israel and Iran. The US, Australia and Europe have a vital interest in stopping Iran from going nuclear," he said.
Facing retaliation
Israel faces a host of problems carrying out a successful attack on Iranian nuclear plants, not the least of which being the would-be expected Iranian retaliation.
Iran Defence Minister Shamkhani
has warned Israel of retaliation
Iranian Defence Minister Ali Shamkhani has said on more than one occasion that Tehran will carry out a massive retaliation if Israel attacked Iran.
In a recent interview with Aljazeera, Shamkhani warned that his country would not sit down idly awaiting an Israeli strike and would resort to a pre-emptive option against Israel and the US.
"The concept of a pre-emptive strike is not an American exclusivity," he said.
True, Shamkhani's statements do have a large rhetorical content since a non-nuclear Iran possesses no strategic deterrent against a supposedly nuclear Israel, backed by its guardian-ally, the US.
But it would be utterly naive to assume the Iranians would do nothing in the face of a flagrant and unprovoked Israeli or American attack on their country.
Leaving to US
In addition, Israel would have serious logistical problems carrying out an attack on the Iranian installations.
Turkey, with its at least nominally Islamic government, is unlikely to allow Israel to use its airspace to launch attacks on a neighbouring Islamic country with which Ankara has been seeking to improve and upgrade political and economic relations.
Moreover, using the "Jordanian-Iraqi conduit" would further enforce convictions, already salient among most Arabs and Muslims, that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq was carried out first and foremost to serve Israel's regional strategic interests.
"I think the safest thing for Israel is to let the Americans do it"
Ira Sharkansky,
Political Science Professor,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
This, coupled with US brazen support of Israel's settlement expansion in the West Bank, would likely bring American credibility in this part of the world to an all-time low.
In that light, Israel's most workable approach would be to leave it to the Americans, according to Ira Sharkansky, Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"I think the safest thing for Israel is to let the Americans do it," he told Aljazeera.net.
And Israel, directly and through its powerful lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has been making strenuous efforts to get Washington to "do something" about Iran.
Repercussions
It is not clear yet what the repercussions of the reported FBI apprehension of an Israeli spy operating in the Pentagon will be for Israel's efforts to get the US to attack Iran.
The alleged spy - reportedly Larry Franklin, who worked in the office of Undersecretary of Defence Douglas Feith - is said to have passed sensitive documents pertaining to Iran to Israel via two AIPAC representatives.
He reportedly had a close association with two Pentagon Jewish officials, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, both of whom are strong advocates of a tough American policy on Iran.
"We will not see an immediate effect, but many American officials ... would think twice before deciding to have too-close relations with Israel"
Israeli analyst Allan Pappie,
Haifa University
And Iran's alleged nuclear programme was said to be the main focus of Franklin's activities.
Israeli analyst Allan Pappie of Haifa University believes the Franklin affair will deal "a very serious blow" to American-Israeli relations at the intelligence level.
In an interview with Aljazeera.net, Pappie has said the affair will have a long-term negative effect on US-Israeli relations and on the way Israel and its supporters in the US are perceived.
"We will not see an immediate effect, but many American officials, especially at the intelligence and defence levels, would think twice before deciding to have too-close relations with Israel."
Tel Aviv's most immediate and serious concern, however, may be whether the scandal will scuttle its efforts to persuade Washington to attack Iran's nuclear sites.
Aljazeera
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Oct 31, 2006 4:07 pm; edited 2 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 3:51 pm Post subject: Iran sounds an awful lot like Iraq |
| Iran sounds an awful lot like Iraq
There is a disturbing sense of déjà vu in Washington's actions and rhetoric.
By Jon Sawyer
Jon Sawyer is director of the Washington-based Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He has reported from Iran and throughout the Middle East.
October 29, 2006
AN EMBATTLED president, a Congress distracted by a sex scandal, looming midterm elections — and yet overwhelming agreement, with scant debate or publicity, on fateful legislation that set the nation on a path to war.
It happened eight autumns ago, when three-quarters of the House of Representatives and every single senator voted for regime change in Iraq.
Has it happened again, on Iran?
Four weeks ago, Congress enacted and President Bush signed the Iran Freedom Support Act, a resolution very much in the spirit of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. It mandates sanctions against any country aiding Iran's nuclear programs, even those to which that country is legally entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The new law got virtually no coverage in the congressional rush to adjourn and amid the controversy surrounding e-mails between Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) and teenage boys serving in the House page program. It has been overshadowed since by North Korea's explosion of a nuclear device and the world's debate about how to respond.
But if the confrontation over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program ends in war — initiated by this administration or the next — you can bet this law will be cited as proof that Congress was onboard all along.
The congressional action isn't the only sign of déjà vu. Recent months have seen the creation of an "Iran directorate" at the Pentagon, using some of the same personnel as the Office of Special Plans, the shadowy Pentagon outfit led by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith that was accused of massaging raw intelligence on Iraq to make the case for war look far more solid than in fact it was.
Iran has now supplanted Iraq as the greatest single threat to the United States, according to the National Security Strategy released earlier this year. Articles in the New Yorker and Time describe an accelerated rate of contingency military planning in an environment in which many senior officials — on the military and civilian sides — consider war with Iran more a question of when rather than if.
As in the run-up to the Iraq war, there are assertions of a broad consensus of experts' views that Iran is intent on developing a nuclear weapons capability; and, just as in 2003, there are muted voices questioning how definitive the evidence is. (The most recent National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran's progress toward weapons capability was actually slower than previously thought, and Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte says that, in his view, Iran is still four to nine years away from having the bomb.)
Once again, U.S. officials are discounting the work of U.N. weapons inspectors on site, and, once again, those inspectors — and the agencies for which they work — are saying that the best way to contain the nuclear threat is to keep them in place.
"People confuse knowledge, industrial capacity and intention," Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Newsweek magazine in an interview last week. "A lot of what you see about Iran right now is assessment of intentions."
He and other IAEA officials warn that the Bush administration's hard-line suspicions of Iran could make reading those intentions even harder. Tehran has already suspended IAEA access to some nuclear facilities and could expel the international inspectors entirely. It happened in Iraq in 1998 — and the vacuum that followed made possible ever-more speculative estimates as to Iraq's imagined progress toward fielding weapons of mass destruction.
The run-up to possible war is also marked, yet again, by the absence of firsthand knowledge of the enemy.
The war to topple Saddam Hussein came 12 years after the rupture of diplomatic relations, with U.S. policymakers dependent on questionable exile groups long removed from direct knowledge of conditions inside the country. In the case of Iran, the gap is longer still — nearly 27 years since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power.
Assistant Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns announced earlier this year that State Department diplomats would be based in Dubai and elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe to monitor Iran, in a move he likened to Riga Station, the Latvian capital where, during the 1920s and 1930s, diplomats such as George Kennan kept tabs on the Soviet Union. The effort comes late. As Burns himself acknowledged, as recently as early last year, "there were exactly two people focusing full time on Iran" at the State Department.
To be sure, war with Iran is nowhere near as inevitable as the neoconservative proponents of aggressive action would make it appear. The U.S. military is mired in Iraq. The combination of vast oil reserves and 70 million people make Iran a formidable adversary, one that has shown itself more than willing to rely on groups such as Hezbollah or Hamas to wage terrorism on the United States, Israel and allied nations. Here at home, meanwhile, public opinion surveys show little appetite for another go at preventive war.
In the face of those hurdles, and the acknowledged gaps in proven facts, it is remarkable that the neoconservative handmaidens of the Iraq war are so assertive on Iran, as to the inevitability of war and the rightness of waging it.
Last April, the Weekly Standard ran an article nearly 8,000 words long laying out the case for war, why diplomacy and sanctions are doomed to fail and why letting Tehran actualize its nuclear weapons potential would be more threatening to the U.S. and to the world than the consequences of whatever it takes — even land invasion on the scale of Iraq — to prevent that from happening. The article's author was Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA Middle East specialist and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has a record of being articulate, confident and — in the case of Iraq — wrong.
An issue brief that Gerecht wrote for the American Enterprise Institute in August 2002 predicted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would likely prompt "simultaneous uprisings" by freedom-seeking Iranians. A November 2002 column dismissed concerns that war with Iraq would destabilize the Middle East. "The one truly unsettling thing a second Persian Gulf war might unleash," Gerecht wrote, "is Iraqi democracy." In February 2003, he brushed aside concerns that the Iraq war might inspire acts of terrorism by Muslims in Europe. "The coming war in Iraq," he wrote, "will probably diminish, not enhance, the odds that young Muslim males will become holy warriors…."
But at a time when a majority of Americans have turned against the Iraq war, when Bush's long advantage on national security issues is under fire and when Democrats dream of wresting control of not just the House of Representatives but the Senate too, the most extraordinary parallel to the pre-Iraq-war environment is that so many Democrats have given the administration a vote on Iran that amounts to yet another blank-check endorsement of U.S. unilateralism — even as diplomats struggle in New York to craft a multilateral approach to Iran.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) voted for the Iran Freedom Support Act. So did House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). So did all but 21 members of the House and every member of the Senate, which approved the measure by unanimous voice vote.
The law they backed codifies existing U.S. sanctions against Iran — and extends those sanctions to any countries or companies deemed to have aided Iran in the development or acquisition of nuclear weapons or of "destabilizing numbers and types" of advanced conventional weapons. It states the sense of Congress that the United States shall not enter into any form of cooperation with the government of any country that so aids Iran, unless and until Iran has suspended all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing-related nuclear activity and has "committed to verifiably refrain from such activity in the future" — even though such activities are permitted under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Democrats who voted for the measure were at pains to distinguish it from the Iraq Liberation Act, noting, for example, that the legislation specifically rejected military aid to opponents of Iran's current government, and that it calls for Iran's "democratic transformation," not regime change. Among those who favor both, however, this is seen as little more than a wink and a nod.
Michael Ledeen, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, has beaten the Iran war drums for years. He told the House International Relations Committee in testimony last March that he was untroubled that the new law stops short of explicitly calling for regime change. "People are just afraid of coming out and using the language," he said. "You cannot have freedom in Iran without bringing down the mullahs, so what are we talking about?"
In 1998, the Clinton administration went along with the Iraq Liberation Act reluctantly, fearing that the law's stark anti-Saddam Hussein line would tie its hands. Republican leaders were demanding a tough line, and Democrats, facing midterm elections in the shadow of President Clinton's pending impeachment, were eager to go along.
For all its bellicose rhetoric on Iran, the Bush administration appeared to have similar reservations about the Iran Freedom Support Act. It staved off congressional action for more than a year, contending that mandatory sanctions would short-circuit the delicate diplomacy of taking Iran to the U.N. Security Council. To critics within the administration, the law raised the specter of U.S. unilateralism at a moment when Washington needed allies more than ever.
The administration eventually gave in to congressional insistence on tough talk — not just from Republicans but from Democrats, the latter seizing the chance to draw a foreign policy red line while at the same time assailing Bush for wasting lives and dollars in Iraq.
Smart politics? Most Republicans and most Democrats appear to believe that it is — that it's a good idea to take Iran off the table, to make sure it doesn't figure as an issue in the Nov. 7 elections. It's reminiscent of the decision many of them made before the midterms in 1998 and again in 2002, when the bipartisan vote authorizing use of force against Iraq made the looming war almost a nonissue in that year's midterm elections.
Maybe this time, on Iran, someone will yet decide that it's worth taking the debate to the people. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
