On the Eve of Destruction by Scott Ritter

Don’t worry, the White House is telling us. The world’s most powerful leader was simply making a rhetorical point. At a White House press conference last week, just in case you haven’t heard, President Bush informed the American people that he had told world leaders “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” World War III. That is certainly some rhetorical point, especially coming from the man singularly most capable of making such an event reality.

Pundits have raised their eyebrows and comics are busy writing jokes, but the president’s reference to Armageddon, no matter how cavalierly uttered and subsequently brushed away, suggests an alarming context. Some might note that the comment was simply an offhand response to a reporter’s question, the kind of free-thinking scenario that baffles Bush so. In a way, this makes what the president said even more disturbing, since we now have an insight into the vision, and related terminology, which hovers just below the horizon in the brain of George W. Bush.

When I was a weapons inspector with the United Nations, there was a jostling that took place at the end of each day, when decisions needed to be made and authorization documents needed to be signed. In an environment of competing agendas, each of us who championed a position sought to be the “last man in,” namely the person who got to imprint the executive chairman (our decision maker) with the final point of view for the day. Failure to do so could find an inspection or point of investigation sidetracked for days or weeks after the executive chairman became distracted by a competing vision. I understand the concept of “imprinting,” and have seen it in action. What is clear from the president’s remarks is that, far from an innocent rhetorical fumble, his words, and the context in which he employed them, are a clear indication of the imprinting which is taking place behind the scenes at the White House. If the president mentions World War III in the context of Iran’s nuclear program, one can be certain that this is the very sort of discussion that is taking place in the Oval Office.

A critical question, therefore, is who was the last person to “imprint” the president prior to his public allusion to World War III? During his press conference, Bush noted that he awaited the opportunity to confer with his defense secretary, Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following their recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. So clearly the president hadn’t been imprinted recently by either of the principle players in the formulation of defense and foreign policy. The suspects, then, are quickly whittled down to three: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney, and God.

Hadley is a long-established neoconservative thinker who has for the most part operated “in the shadows” when it comes to the formulation of Iran policy in the Bush administration. In 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Hadley (then the deputy national security adviser) instituted what has been referred to as the “Hadley Rules,” a corollary of which is that no move will be made which alters the ideological positioning of Iran as a mortal enemy of the United States. These “rules” shut down every effort undertaken by Iran to seek a moderation of relations between it and the United States, and prohibited American policymakers from responding favorably to Iranian offers to assist with the fight against al-Qaida; they also blocked the grand offer of May 2003 in which Iran outlined a dramatic diplomatic initiative, including a normalization of relations with Israel. The Hadley Rules are at play today, in an even more nefarious manner, with the National Security Council becoming involved in the muzzling of former Bush administration officials who are speaking out on the issue of Iran. Hadley is blocking Flynt Leverett, formerly of the National Security Council, from publishing an Op-Ed piece critical of the Bush administration on the grounds that any insight into the machinations of policymaking (or lack thereof) somehow strengthens Iran’s hand. Leverett’s article would simply underscore the fact that the Bush administration has spurned every opportunity to improve relations with Iran while deliberately exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Iranian theocracy.

The silencing of informed critics is in keeping with Hadley’s deliberate policy obfuscation. There is still no official policy in place within the administration concerning Iran. While a more sober-minded national security bureaucracy works to marginalize the hawkish posturing of the neocons, the administration has decided that the best policy is in fact no policy, which is a policy decision in its own right. Hadley has forgone the normal procedures of governance, in which decisions impacting the nation are written down, using official channels, and made subject to review and oversight by those legally and constitutionally mandated and obligated to do so. A policy of no policy results in secret policy, which means, according to Hadley himself, the Bush administration simply does whatever it wants to, regardless. In the case of Iran, this means pushing for regime change in Tehran at any cost, even if it means World War III.

But Hadley is simply a facilitator, bureaucratic “grease” to ease policy formulated elsewhere down the gullet of a national security infrastructure increasingly kept in the dark about the true intent of the Bush administration when it comes to Iran. With the Department of State and the Pentagon now considered unfriendly ground by the remaining hard-core neoconservative thinkers still in power, policy formulation is more and more concentrated in the person of Vice President Cheney and the constitutionally nebulous “Office of the Vice President.”

Cheney and his cohorts have constructed a never-never land of oversight deniability, claiming immunity from both executive and legislative checks and balances. With an unchallenged ability to classify anything and everything as secret, and then claim that there is no authority inherent in government to oversee that which has been thus classified, the Office of the Vice President has transformed itself into a free republic’s worst nightmare, assuming Caesar-like dictatorial authority over almost every aspect of American national security policy at home and abroad. From torture to illegal wiretapping, to arms control (or lack of it) to Iran, Dick Cheney is the undisputed center of policy power in America today. While there are some who will claim that in this time of post-9/11 crisis such a process of bureaucratic streamlining is essential for the common good, the reality is far different.

It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this has never been truer than in the case of Cheney. What Cheney is doing behind his shield of secrecy can be simply defined: planning and implementing a preemptive war of aggression. During the Nuremberg tribunal in the aftermath of World War II, the chief American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, stated, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Today, we have a vice president who articulates publicly about global conflict, and who speaks in not-so-veiled language about a looming Armageddon. If there is such a future for America and the world, let one thing be certain; World War III, as postulated by Dick Cheney, would be an elective war, and not a conflict of tragic necessity. This makes the crime even greater.

Sadly, Judge Jackson’s words are but an empty shell. The global community lacks a legally binding definition of what constitutes a war of aggression, or even an act of aggression. But that isn’t the point. America should never find itself in a position where it is being judged by the global community regarding the legality of its actions. Judge Jackson established a precedent of jurisprudence concerning aggression based upon American principles and values, something the international community endorsed. The fact that current American indifference to the rule of law prevents the international community from certifying a definition of criminality when it comes to aggression, whether it be parsed as “war” or simply an “act,” does not change the fact that the Bush administration, in the person of Dick Cheney, is actively engaged in the committing of the “supreme [war] crime,” which makes Cheney the supreme war criminal. If the world is not empowered to judge him as such, then let the mantle of judgment fall to the American people. Through their elected representatives in Congress, they should not only bring this reign of unrestrained abuse of power to an end, but ensure that such abuse never again is attempted by an American official by holding to account, to the full extent of the law, those who have trampled on the Constitution of the United States and the ideals and principles it enshrines.

But what use is the rule of law, even if fairly and properly implemented, if in the end he who is entrusted with executive power takes his instructions from an even higher authority? President Bush’s relationship with “God” (or that which he refers to as God) is a matter of public record. The president himself has stated that “God speaks through me” (he acknowledged this before a group of Amish in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2004). Exactly how God speaks through him, and what precisely God says, is not a matter of speculation. According to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, President Bush told him and others that “God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” As such, at least in the president’s mind, God has ordered Bush to transform himself into a modern incarnation of St. Michael, smiting all that is evil before him. “We are in a conflict between good and evil. And America will call evil by its name,” the president told West Point cadets in a speech in 2002.

The matter of how and when an individual chooses to practice his faith, or lack thereof, is a deeply personal matter, one which should be kept from public discourse. For a president to so openly impose his personal religious beliefs, as Bush has done, on American policy formulation and implementation represents a fundamental departure from not only constitutional intent concerning the separation of church and state but also constitutional mandate concerning the imposition of checks and balances required by the American system of governance. The increasing embrace by this president of the notion of a unitary executive takes on an even more sinister aspect when one realizes that not only does the Bush administration seek to nullify the will of the people through the shackling of the people’s representatives in Congress, but that the president has forgone even the appearance of constitutional constraint by evoking the word of his personal deity, as expressed through his person, as the highest form of consultation on a matter as serious as war. As such, the president has made his faith, and how he practices it, a subject not only of public curiosity but of national survival.

That George W. Bush is a born-again Christian is not a national secret. Neither is the fact that his brand of Christianity, evangelicalism, embraces the notion of the “end of days,” the coming of the Apocalypse as foretold (so they say) in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible. President Bush’s frequent reference to “the evil one” suggests that he not only believes in the Antichrist but actively proselytizes on the Antichrist’s physical presence on Earth at this time. If one takes in the writing and speeches of those in the evangelical community today concerning the “rapture,” the numerous references to the current situation in the Middle East, especially on the events unfolding around Iran and its nuclear program, make it very clear that, at least in the minds of these evangelicals, there is a clear link between the “end of days” prophesy and U.S.-Iran policy. That James Dobson, one of the most powerful and influential evangelical voices in America today, would be invited to the White House with like-minded clergy to discuss President Bush’s Iran policy is absurd unless one makes the link between Bush’s personal faith, the extreme religious beliefs of Dobson and the potential of Armageddon-like conflict (World War III). At this point, the absurd becomes unthinkable, except it is all too real.

Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation’s greatest founders, made the separation of church and state an underlying principle upon which the United States was built. This separation was all-inclusive, meaning that not only should government stay out of religion, but likewise religion should be excluded from government. “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Francis Hopkinson in 1789. “Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” If only President Bush would abide by such wisdom, avoiding the addictive narcotic of religious fervor when carrying out the people’s business. Instead, he chooses as his drug one which threatens to destroy us all in a conflagration derived not from celestial intervention but individual ignorance and arrogance. Again Jefferson, in a letter written in 1825: “It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”

Nightmares, more aptly, unless something can be done to change the direction Bush and Dobson are taking us. The problem is that far too many Americans openly espouse not only the faith of George W. Bush but also the underlying philosophy which permits this faith to be intertwined with the governance of the land. “God bless America” has become a rallying cry for this crowd, and those too ignorant and/or afraid to speak out in opposition. If this statement has merit, what does it say for the 6.8 billion others in the world today who are not Americans? That God condemns them? The American embrace of divine destiny is not unique in history (one only has to recall that the belt buckles of the German army during World War II read “God is with us”). But for a nation born of the age of reason to collectively fall victim to the most base of fear-induced theology is a clear indication that America currently fails to live up to its founding principles. Rather than turning to Dobson and his ilk for guidance in these troubled times, Americans would be well served to reflect on President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered in the middle of a horrific civil war which makes all of the conflict America finds itself in today pale in comparison:

“Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. … The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. … [T]hat He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

God is not on our side, or the side of any single nation or people. To believe such is the ultimate expression of national hubris. To invoke such, if one is a true believer, is to embrace sacrilege and heresy. This, of course, is an individual right, granted as an extension of religious freedom. But it is not a collective right, nor is it a right born of governance, especially in a land protected by the separation of church and state.

The issue of Iran is a national problem which requires a collective debate, discussion and dialogue inclusive of all the facts, and stripped of all ideology and theocracy which would seek to deny reasoned thought conducted within a framework of accepted laws and ideals. It is grossly irresponsible of an American president to invoke the imagery of World War III without first sharing with the American people the framework of thought that produced such a comparison. Such openness will not be forthcoming from this administration or president. Not in the form of Stephen Hadley’s policy of no policy, designed with intent to avoid and subvert both bureaucratic and legislative process and oversight, or Dick Cheney’s secret government within a government, operating above and beyond the law and in a manner which violates both legal and moral norms and values, and certainly not in the president’s own private conversations with “God,” either directly or through the medium of lunatic evangelicals who embrace the termination of all we stand for, and especially the future of our next generation, in a fiery holocaust born from the fraudulent writings of centuries past. The processes which compelled George W. Bush to speak of a World War III are intentionally not transparent to the American people. The president has much to explain, and it would be incumbent upon every venue of civic and public pressure to demand that such an explanation be forthcoming in the near future. The stakes regarding Iran have always been high, but never more so than when a nation’s leader invokes the end of days as a solution.

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation Books, 2005) , “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement” (Nation Books, April 2007).

French-kissing the war on Iran By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE

President George W Bush goes to New York next week for the annual United Nations General Assembly to ratchet up the demonization of Iran, confident that his new French ally is doing "a heck of a job". President Nicolas Sarkozy - widely referred to in Paris as King Sarko the First - has let loose the dogs of war with more panache than a madame from the chic seventh arrondissement parading her miniature Pinscher.

The Sarkozy-sponsored, Europe-wide demonization-of-Iran campaign has now begun. Hot on the heels of Sarkozy coining the ultimate catch phrase - "the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran" - it was the turn of his glamorous, dashing, humanitarian top diplomat.

"We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," said Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister and founder of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) on French 24-hour news channel LCI.

In the reasoning of the "French doctor", as he is known around the world, there was always the unspoken aside during the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program that it might proceed "right to the end". But then came the assumption, set in stone, that an Iranian nuclear bomb is inevitable and will pose "a real danger for the whole world".

The Bush White House, opportunistic Republicans and assorted neo-conservatives obviously loved it. From Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), abandoned his cautious demeanor in an effort to dismiss all the hysteria set off by the French comments, saying, "We need to be cool and not hype the Iranian issue."

ElBaradei has not endeared himself to Western powers led by the United States and France over the IAEA's agreement with Iran requiring it to answer questions about past secret nuclear research but without addressing its uranium-enrichment program.

ElBaradei's remarks are a reminder to all the players that only the UN Security Council is entitled to authorize the use of force against Iran, and recall events leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the elusive search for weapons of mass destruction.

"There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons," ElBaradei said.

A measure of the perplexity in European diplomatic circles was contributed by Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik: "I don't understand why he [Kouchner] resorted to martial rhetoric at this juncture," she said at the sidelines of an IAEA meeting in Vienna.

As much as Europe may be divided over the issue, the problem is there's a looming fatalistic atmosphere in most European chancelleries, not to mention the European Union in Brussels, that an attack on Iran is all but inevitable.

The white man's oil burden
Meanwhile, it seems clear that Sarkozy's game is playing messenger to big (energy) business. He is well known in Paris as the man of the CAC 40 - the French equivalent of the Dow Jones index.

The French rapprochement with the Bush administration - in both Iraq and Iran - could not but revolve around oil, what has been called "the entry of France into Mesopotamia and Persia". The former US Federal Reserve oracle and the world's most powerful central planner, Alan Greenspan, finally admitted what even the mineral kingdom already knew: Iraq was invaded because of oil. An attack on Iran, if it happens, will also be because of oil (and gas).

The huge Majnoun oilfield in southeast Iraq, near the Iranian border, the fourth-largest in the country with reserves of more than 12 billion barrels, had been awarded by Saddam Hussein to Elf of France. The US occupation obviously nullified all of Saddam's contracts.

Then last month US giant Chevron and Total of France signed an agreement to prospect and develop Majnoun together. They already have a partnership regarding the Nahr ben Omar field in southern Iraq (6 billion barrels).

The recent Kouchner trip to Baghdad had a non-humanitarian central theme: oil. But there's a huge catch: the new oil law - the key Bush "benchmark", meaning a de facto denationalization of the Iraqi oil industry - has to be approved by the Iraqi Parliament (the debate has already been postponed for months).

In June, Chevron and Total executives met with Iraqi government representatives to discuss their agreement - but there was still no new oil law. And even if there were a law, there would have to be some sort of security on the ground, what with the Sunni Arab resistance attacking oil installations on a daily basis.

Meet the charming hot warrior
Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali described Kouchner as "an unguided missile". The missile is moved by a lethal weapon: vanity. There's a lot of murkiness behind the glowing, vapid, ingratiating profiles of this charming "humanitarian patriot".

It's a long time since the barricades of May 1968 at the Latin Quarter in Paris, when he wanted to change the world by defying the "square" bourgeois order; a long time since the 1970s when he was sent by the visionary Jean-Francois Bizot, the founder of the swingin' countercultural Actuel magazine, all over the world as a reporter to document the planet's ills; a long way from a medical non-governmental organization founded - with the discreet Richard Rossin - to alleviate people's misery and suffering and defend their human rights in war theaters.

Kouchner was in favor of the war on Iraq - on the basis of human rights serially violated by Saddam (as if the US occupation would turn Iraq into Sweden). Recently, he became the first French foreign minister to go to Iraq since 1988 - vainly offering French mediation as an "honest broker" among Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, none of whom, perhaps wisely, bothered to take it.

Another myth perpetrated by the majority of the French, and large sectors of the US, press is that Kouchner and Sarkozy harbor "humanitarian motives" for an intervention in Darfur in Sudan. There are rumors in Paris of a dodgy French-supported coup about to be engineered against the government in Khartoum. The motive in this case is precious Sudanese oil - which simply cannot be allowed to be solely in the hands of the Chinese.

Media hero? Certainly. Shameless egomaniac? Most of the time. There are reasons to believe Kouchner may also be quite a distorted humanist. The French doctor is arguably the most popular European proponent of imperialism with a human face. The phenomenon has been dissected with implacable brilliance by Jean Bricmont in his book Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2006).

Bricmont is a first-class, rigorous European intellectual, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, one of the executive directors of the highly respected Brussels Tribunal (an association of "intellectuals, artists and activists who denounce the logic of permanent war promoted by the American government and its allies"), and recently a co-organizer of an extensive Noam Chomsky compilation at the prestigious French collection L'Herne.

In his book, Bricmont describes how humanitarian imperialism became the ordre du jour:

Moralizing rhetoric combined with perfectly cynical practice (notably in Afghanistan) was amazingly successful. In Europe, especially in France, where revolutionary illusions were fading, the intelligentsia took charge of a major reversal, from the systematic criticism of power, associated with [Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Michel] Foucault, to its systematic defense - especially the power of the United States - symbolized by the emergence of the "new philosophers" as media stars. Defense of human rights became the theme and principal argument of the new political offensive against both the socialist bloc and Third World countries emerging from colonialism.

Gone are the days when France, as Bricmont writes in his book regarding the war on Iraq, could "act independently of European Union structures" and oppose US hegemony "without firing a single shot". In a recent piece on Counterpunch.org, Bricmont explained how there won't be any opposition at the core of Europe to an attack on Iran:

France has been changed from the most independent European country to the most poodlish (this was in fact the main issue in the recent presidential election, but it was never even mentioned during the campaign). In France, moreover, the secular "left" is, in the main, gung-ho against Iran for the usual reasons (women, religion). There will be no large-scale demonstrations in France either before or after the bombing. And, without French support, Germany - where the war is probably very unpopular - can always be silenced with memories of the Holocaust, so that no significant opposition to the war will come from Europe (except possibly from its Muslim population, which will be one more argument to prove that they are "backward", "extremist" and enemies of our "democratic civilization").

Kouchner is of course aware he's playing in the "winning" camp. Nevertheless, quite a few top European intellectuals are baffled that a doctor who created an association helping populations destroyed by war is now all but advocating war (humanitarian imperialism as a way to "save" the women and the youth of Iran). By following the dictates of Sarkozy - whose knowledge of foreign policy rivals Miss France's - Kouchner seems to ignore how Iraq turned into an ethical, political, strategic - and humanitarian - disaster of biblical proportions.

French public opinion, though, simply will not swallow Sarkozy basking in the glow of a self-appointed role as preferred Bush courtesan. The excellent French blog Rue89.com has pointed out how foreign policy in France is woven "without a national debate, even a parliamentary discussion".

"Unguided missile" Kouchner has been to many a theater of war to know better: he should beware his missiles don't reduce himself - and his master - to collateral damage.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Beating Louder on Iran - Bush's War Drums

By RAY McGOVERN
Former CIA Analyst

It is as though I'm back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.

It is precisely the kind of work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now-ever since 9/11, when "everything changed."

Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists put their jobs at grave risk if they expose things like fraudulent wars.

The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible-and held accountable-for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms, to spies, to-not least-open media.

Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained-as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained-by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.


Reporting From Informants

The above is in no way intended to minimize the value of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting and running clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make a crucial contribution. Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully "turned" into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a welcome relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was "regime change." (Don't feel embarrassed if you did not know this; although it is publicly available, our corporate- owned, war profiteering media has largely suppressed this key story.)

One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence Robert Baer, now reports (in this week's Time) that, according to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran;" that the administration's plan to put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike; and that the delusional "neo-conservative" thinking that still guides White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.

Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer's sources tell him that administration officials are thinking "as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities."


Rove and Snow: Going Wobbly?

Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing in The American Conservative, earlier noted that in the past Karl Rove has served as a counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put the brakes on Cheney's death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to Iran. And former Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most devoted neo-cons just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com) speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove's departure.

In short, it seems possible that Rove, who is no one's dummy and would not want to be required to "spin" an unnecessary war on Iran, may have lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided-or was urged-to spend more time with his family. As for administration spokesperson Tony Snow, it seems equally possible that, before deciding he had to leave the White House to make more money, he concluded that his stomach could not withstand the challenge of conjuring up yet another Snow job to explain why Bush/Cheney needed to attack Iran. There is recent precedent for this kind of thing.

We now know that it was because former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld went wobbly on the Iraq war-as can be seen in his Nov. 6, 2006 memo to the president-that Rumsfeld was canned. (That was the day BEFORE the election.) In that memo, Rumsfeld called for a "major adjustment" in war policy. And so, Robert Gates, who had been waiting in the wings, was called to Crawford, given the test for malleability, hired, and dispatched by the president immediately to Iraq to weigh in heavily with the most senior U.S. generals (Abizaid and Casey). They had been saying, quite openly, Please, please; no more troops; a surge would simply give the Iraqis still more time and opportunity to diddle us while American troops continue to die. So much for the president always listening to his senior military commanders. And the bug of reality was infecting even Rumsfeld.

In his memo to the president, Rumsfeld suggested that U.S. generals "withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions-cities, patrolling, etc.," and move troops to Kuwait to serve as a Quick Reaction Force. Bush, of course, chose to do just the opposite.

Our domesticated press has not yet been able to put two and two together on this story, so it has been left to investigative reporters like Robert Parry to do so. In his Aug. 17 essay, "Rumsfeld's Mysterious Resignation", Parry closes with this:

"The touchy secret about Rumsfeld's departure seems to have been that Bush didn't want the American people to know that one of the chief Iraq War architects had turned against the idea of an open-ended military commitment and that Bush had found himself with no choice but to oust Rumsfeld for his loss of faith in the neoconservative cause."

Granted, it is speculative that similar factors, this time with respect to war planning for Iran, were at work in the decisions on the departure of Rove and Snow. Someone ought to ask them.

Surgical Strikes First?

With the propaganda buildup we have seen so far on Iran, what seems most likely, at least initially, is an attack on Revolutionary Guard training facilities inside Iran. That can be done with cruise missiles. With some twenty targets already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there are enough assets already in place to do that job. But the "while-we're-at-it" neo-con logic referred to above may well be applied after, or even in conjunction with, that kind of limited cruise missile attack.

Cheerleading in the Domesticated Media

Yes, it is happening again.

The lead editorial in yesterday's Washington Post regurgitates the allegations that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is "supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq;" that it is "waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible." Designating Iran a "specially designated global terrorist" organization, says the Post, "seems to be the least the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq."

It's as though Dick Cheney and friends are again writing the Post's editorials. And not only that: arch neo-con James Woolsey told Lou Dobbs on Aug. 14 that the US may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program. As Woolsey puts it, "I'm afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they could have the bomb."

Woolsey, self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs," has long been out in front plumbing for wars, like Iraq, that he and other neo-cons myopically see as being in Israel's, as well as America's, interest. On the evening of 9/11, Woolsey was already raising with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings the notion that Iraq was a leading candidate for state sponsorship of the attacks. A day later, Woolsey told journalist James Fallows that, no matter who proved responsible for 9/11, the solution had to include removing Saddam Hussein because he was so likely to be involved the next time (sic).

The latest media hype is also rubbish. And Woolsey knows it. And so do reporters for the Washington Post, who are aware of, but have been forbidden to tell, a highly interesting story about waiting for a key National Intelligence Estimate-as if for Godot.

The NIE That Didn't Bark

The latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding if and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been ready since February. It has been sent back four times-no doubt because its conclusions do not support what Cheney and Woolsey are telling the president and, through the domesticated press, telling the rest of us as well.

The conclusion of the most recent published NIE (early 2005) was that Iran probably could not acquire a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," a formula memorized and restated by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at his confirmation hearing in February. One can safely assume that McConnell had been fully briefed on the first "final draft" of the new estimate, which has now been in limbo for half a year. And I would wager that the conclusions of the new estimate resemble those of the NIE of 2005 far too closely to suit Cheney.

It is a scandal that the congressional oversight committees have not been briefed on the conclusions of the new estimate, even though it cannot pass Cheney's smell test. For it is a safe bet it would give the lie to the claims of Cheney, Woolsey, and other cheerleaders for war with Iran and provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible approach to Iran.

But Attacking Iran Would Be Crazy

Despite the administration's war-like record, many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won't happen because it would be crazy; that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn't dare undertake yet another reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.

But rationality and common sense have not exactly been the strong suit of this administration. Bush has placed himself in a neoconservative bubble that operates with its own false sense of reality. Worse still: as psychiatrist Justin Frank pointed out in the July 27 VIPS memo "Dangers of a Cornered Bush," updating his book, Bush on the Couch:"

"We are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.

"This makes it a monumental challenge-as urgent as it is difficult-not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure-like going to war with Iran, in order to embellish the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of 'the first war of the 21st century.'"

Scary.

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com

An earlier, shorter version of this piece appeared on Consortiumnews.com


"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

If You Think Bush Is Evil Now, Wait Until He Nukes Iran By Paul Craig Roberts

The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Gen. Sanchez says, is “to stave off defeat,” and that requires more intelligence and leadership than Gen. Sanchez sees in the entirety of our national political leadership: “I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time.”

More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with headlines reporting: “U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third of Baghdad, the military said on Monday.” After five years of war the US controls one-third of one city and nothing else.

A host of US commanding generals have said that the Iraq war is destroying the US military. A year ago Colin Powell said that the US Army is “about broken.” Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn says Bush has “piecemealed our force to death.” Gen. Barry McCafrey testified to the US Senate that “the Army will unravel.”

Col. Andy Bacevich, America’s foremost writer on military affairs, documents in the current issue of The American Conservative that Bush’s insane war has depleted and exhausted the US Army and Marine Corps:

“Only a third of the regular Army’s brigades qualify as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president’s strategy of escalation, the US will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve.”

“The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping the Army’s lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000 commissioned officers. By next year, the number is projected to grow to 3,500. The Guard and reserves are in even worse shape. There the shortage amounts to 7,500 officers. Young West Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not seen in three decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service has begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who agree to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as more and more officers want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC scholarships go unfilled for a lack of qualified applicants.”

Bush has taken every desperate measure. Enlistment ages have been pushed up from 35 to 42. The percentage of high school dropouts and the number of recruits scoring at the bottom end of tests have spiked. The US military is forced to recruit among drug users and convicted criminals. Bacevich reports that wavers “issued to convicted felons jumped by 30 percent.” Combat tours have been extended from 12 to 15 months, and the same troops are being deployed again and again.

There is no equipment for training. Bacevich reports that “some $212 billion worth has been destroyed, damaged, or just plain worn out.” What remains is in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under these circumstances, “staying the course” means total defeat.

Even the neoconservative warmongers, who deceived Americans with the promise of a “cakewalk war” that would be over in six weeks, believe that the war is lost. But they have not given up. They have a last desperate plan: Bomb Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney is spear- heading the neocon plan, and Norman Podhoretz is the plan’s leading propagandist with his numerous pleas published in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary to bomb Iran. Podhoretz, like every neoconservative, is a total Islamophobe. Podhoretz has written that Islam must be deracinated and the religion destroyed, a genocide for the Muslim people.

The neocons think that by bombing Iran the US will provoke Iran to arm the Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing rocket propelled grenades and with surface to air missiles and unleash the militias against US troops. These weapons would neutralize US tanks and helicopter gunships and destroy the US military edge, leaving divided and isolated US forces subject to being cut off from supplies and retreat routes. With America on the verge of losing most of its troops in Iraq, the cry would go up to “save the troops” by nuking Iran.

Five years of unsuccessful war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel’s recent military defeat in Lebanon have convinced the neocons that America and Israel cannot establish hegemony over the Middle East with conventional forces alone. The neocons have changed US war doctrine, which now permits the US to preemptively strike with nuclear weapons a non-nuclear power. Neocons are forever heard saying, “what’s the use of having nuclear weapons if you can’t use them.”

Neocons have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to the will of the US government. Insurgency and terrorism cannot prevail against nuclear weapons.

Many US military officers are horrified at what they think would be the worst ever orchestrated war crime. There are reports of threatened resignations. But Dick Cheney is resolute. He tells Bush that the plan will save him from the ignominy of losing the war and restore his popularity as the president who saved Americans from Iranian nuclear weapons. With the captive American media providing propaganda cover, the neoconservatives believe that their plan can pull their chestnuts out of the fire and rescue them from the failure that their delusion has wrought.

The American electorate decided last November that they must do something about the failed war and gave the Democrats control of both houses of Congress. However, the Democrats have decided that it is easier to be complicit in war crimes than to represent the wishes of the electorate and hold a rogue president accountable. If Cheney again prevails, America will supplant the Third Reich as the most reviled country in recorded history.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell

George Bush's Samson Option - by Stephen Lendman

The Samson Option is terminology used to explain Israel's intention to use its nuclear arsenal as an ultimate defense strategy if its leaders feel threatened enough to think they have no alternative. It comes from the biblical Samson said to have used his great strength to bring down the pillars of a Philistine temple, downing its roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistine tormentors. It's a strategy saying if you try killing me, we'll all die together, or put another way, we'll all go together when we go. Richard Wagner had his apocalyptic version in the last of his four operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen - Gotterdammerung, or Twilight of the Gods based on Norse mythology referring to a prophesied war of the Gods resulting in the end of the world.

The Bush Doctrine isn't that extreme, and it's not the intent of this essay to suggest its unintended consequences may turn out that way even though the threat it may is real if they start firing off enough nukes like they're king-sized hand grenades. The Doctrine refers to the administration's foreign policy first aired by George Bush in his commencement speech to the West Point graduating class in June, 2002. It was later formalized in The National Security Strategy of September, 2002 and updated in more extreme form in early 2006 that makes for scary reading not recommended at bedtime. It mentions Iran in it 16 times stating: "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran" while failing to acknowledge what Pogo said about us on an Earth Day poster in 1970 and in a 1972 book titled - "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us."

The updated NSS details an "imperial grand strategy" with new language more belligerent than the original version that was intended to be a declaration of preemptive or preventive war against any country or force the administration claims threatens our national security. It followed from our Nuclear Policy Review of December, 2001 claiming a unilateral right to declare and wage future wars using first strike nuclear weapons that in enough numbers potentially can destroy all planetary life, save maybe some resilient roaches and bacteria. In still other national security documents, the administration intends being ready by maintaining total control over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to defeat any potential challengers using all weapons in the arsenal, including those nukes masquerading as king-sized grenades.

The doctrine got its baptism in Afghganistan right after the 9/11 attacks and before the 2002 NSS was released. It then played out in real time "shock and awe" force (without nukes) in Iraq that seemed to work like a charm until it didn't. That brings us to today and an administration feeling cornered by failure and needing to change the subject and get a victory in the face of major defeat or at least buy enough time to run out the clock on its tenure so a new administration can take over and deal with the mess left over. It'll be king-sized if the audible war drums now beating are for real.

Enter Iran to play dual roles for the Bush administration plus the same one always center stage when strategic resources are at stake. It's the designated target to pull George Bush's Middle East fat out of the fire and fulfill our 28 year commitment to regime change in the country since its 1979 revolution ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi whom we installed to replace democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 in the CIA's first-ever go at regime change. Those events began and ended the same way - violently, but if George Bush proceeds as he's now threatening, they'll seem like tempest-in-teapot prologues to the main event ahead looking like full scale war large enough to engulf the whole region and entire Muslim world with it.

CIA's assessment is blunt. If the US attacks Iran, Southern Shia Iraq will light up like a candle and explode uncontrollably throughout the country. CIA ought to know and likely concluded big trouble won't just be in Iraq, Shia Islam and the Middle East. It may show up anywhere including a neighborhood near you but not to express reconciliation and friendship.

Washington's other motive is no mystery to anyone knowing why we attacked and now occupy Iraq. It had nothing to do with nonexistent weapons and everything to do with removing a leader unwilling to accept our imperial management rules whose country happens to have the fourth largest and easily accessible proven oil reserves in the world we want to control. The joke goes - how did our oil end up under his sand. The same is true for Iran and has since 1979. The country's leaders reject our rules, and it too has easily accessible oil reserves that are the world's third largest behind Saudi Arabia and Canada (including the country's heavy reserves). Further, both countries have vast untapped more of them adding to their allure and Washington's determination to control them alone to have veto power over who gets access.

If the US attacks Iran, all bets are off on what's to come. The echoes of Waterloo could turn George Bush's Middle East adventurism into his inadvertent Samson option by expanding the Iraq conflict to a regional one with impossible to predict consequences that won't be good for Western interests and especially US ones. It will inflame the region and produce a tsunami of Shia rage and solidarity enough to inflame and unite the whole Muslim world in fierce opposition to America, its culture and people. It may irrevocably transform the region making it unwelcome for decades or longer to anything Western that only arrives for what it can take and doesn't take no for an answer.

It's backlash may also affect the administration and its party as unintended fallout from an ill-conceived adventure gone sour and beyond repair. And it may have further unintended consequences as well - the painful blowback kind from angry people striking back in catastrophic payback ways far harsher than ever before. It could be a dirty bomb or two detonated in one more US cities or a nuclear reactor core meltdown from sabotage or attack releasing lethal radiation in amounts great enough to make downwind areas from it forever uninhabitable. Imagine a nightmarish vision of New York or Chicago (surrounded by 11 aging nuclear power plants) as ghost towns, their structures intact but unfit to be occupied.

There is a macabre bright side, however, once past the onslaught if it comes and its aftermath. In six years, the Bush administration achieved the near-impossible. It made the US a pariah state alienating the whole Muslim world and vast numbers more everywhere including growing numbers at home with George Bush's approval rating at numbers approaching the lowest ever for a US president. Its policies of permanent war on the world, repression at home, entrenched corruption, worship of wealth and privilege, and indifference to human needs and the people he was elected to serve already destroyed any notion the country is a model democratic state or that Bush and his neocon fanatics should be governing it. Their imperial arrogance accelerated the country's fading global hegemony well advanced since the 1970s and likely irreversible. They buried the nation's influence and dominance in Iraq's smoldering sands and Afghanistan's rubble that are now both graveyards for US ambitions in those regions and beyond.

Attacking Iran will just make things far worse. It would be a fanatical "hail Mary" act of insanity that by one definition is repeating the same mistakes, expecting different results. It has no more chance of success than our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if nuclear weapons are used, including so-called low-yield ones, it will be an appalling crime against humanity and catastrophic event potentially affecting millions in the region by radiation poisoning alone. If it happens, it will irreversibly weaken US influence and credibility everywhere accelerating our decline even faster toward second-class status and loss of world leadership already hanging by a thread. It could also be a potentially lethal blow to the benefits of "Western civilization" always arriving through the barrel of a gun and thuggish heel of a colonizer's boot with the US having the biggest barrels and largest shoe sizes.

Key US players know the risks and want our losses cut before it's too late to act. They want an end to war, not more of it in a strategically vital world region too important to lose while fearing it's likely too late. The National Intelligence Estimate supports them believing the war in Iraq is unwinnable, transforming the country into a pro-American state impossible, and the president's notion of victory illusory. George Bush ignores its assessment and presses on.

Reports by Seymour Hersh and others now say the administration wants to weaken the Bashir Assad-led Syrian government's alliance with Iran and further undermine Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon and the region by funding Sunni extremist groups with known ties to al-Queda in what's called a "redirection program." It's the brainchild of Dick Cheney/Elliott Abrams (of Iran-Contra notoriety)/Zalmay Khalilzad/Condi Rice/Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan/Israeli elements & Co. with CIA's hands are all over it covertly beyond Congress' reach. It includes a larger effort, with Saudi help, to fund and unleash Sunni extremist elements against Tehran at the same time Washington is preparing to include Iran and Syria in regional discussions on the situation in Iraq. It proves again duplicity and shameless hypocrisy are never in short supply in Washington. They're only topped by the neocon leadership's crazed strategy to make a hopeless Middle East debacle catastrophic.

The Concocted Myth of Iran's Threat

The ancient Persian empire became Iran on March 21, 1935. From that time till now, Iran obeyed international law, never occupied a foreign territory, and never threatened or attacked another state beyond occasional border skirmishes over unsettled disputes of the kinds other nations engage in that are far short of all out wars. It only had full-scale conflict defensively after Saddam Hussein launched a full-scale invasion in September, 1980 backed, equipped and financially aided by Washington that included supplying chemical and biological weapon precursors and crucial intelligence on Iranian field positions and force strength.

The conflict became known as the Iran-Iraq war. It lasted till August, 1988 over which time a million or more people died, countless numbers more were wounded and displaced, with America all the while inciting both sides to keep up the killing. It hoped to destroy both countries and then move in to pick up the pieces like it's been trying to do since in the Middle East and elsewhere with growing difficulty as not everyone likes our rules and some are even bold enough to renounce them.

Iran became a major US adversary after its 1979 revolution established the Islamic Republic in February, 1980. Since then, the two countries have had no diplomatic ties and relations between them have been frosty and uncertain at best with Washington only interested in normalization on its usual one-way dictated terms. They're the same kinds offered other developing states - we're "boss," surrender your sovereignty to ours, and accede to neoliberal market-based rules made in Washington that aren't negotiable. Iran refuses so it's public enemy number one topping the US target queue for regime change. Rule by extremist mullahs and reactors aren't the problems. They're just pretexts like all the phony intelligence about Iran destabilizing Iraq discussed below.

Despite a hopeless quagmire in Iraq, the Bush administration seems focused on further escalation notwithstanding the danger, near-impossible chance of success, and mounting opposition and anger to its agenda in the homeland. It's coming from the public on Iraq and even the Congress with some there getting twitchy enough to voice concern, though still far short of acting as they can and should with too many there twitching to fight, not quit. It's also heard in the highest ranks of power from both parties first circulated in the Jim Baker-led Iraq Study Group that reported its rumor-leaked findings December 6. It represented a clear rejection of Bush administration Iraq policies gone sour, a proposed rescue plan and effort to save his family name, and a scheme to restore US Middle East dominance, fast slipping away, and near past the point of no return by now from which there's likely none.

Despite its clout, its recommendations went unheeded, especially regarding engaging Iran and Syria to help bail Bush's Middle East fat out of its self-made fire. And nothing's changed in the wake of Washington's agreeing to include those countries' officials in initial and follow-up discussions on Iraq's security along with members of the Arab League, Organization of Islamic Unity, G 8 countries, and five permanent members of the Security Council.

The decision represents no softening of the US's position, and the administration likely will use the talks to repeat unproved claims Iranian elements support anti-American forces in Iraq, continue refusing broader diplomatic discussions unless Tehran stops enriching uranium which it won't nor should it be forced to or be punished for, and keep negotiating the way it always does - making ultimatums and accepting no compromise, meaning nothing will be resolved and tensions will only be further heightened. And if anyone doubts that's how things will unfold, the New York Times was front and center spelling it out. It reported any US discussions involving Iran and Syria won't be "from a position of weakness (so the administration intends) ratcheting up the confrontational talk (to show) the United States was in more of a driver's seat" and not planning to negotiate in good faith. No surprise.

The Bush administration's rejectionism has even deeper roots going back at least to a 2003 "grand bargain" offer from Iran - unreported, of course, in the corporate media. It was approved by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former President Mohammad Khatami and former Foreign Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi. Former Bush National Security Council official Flynt Leverett revealed it calling it a "serious proposal (he knew from multiple sources) went all the way up to former Secretary of State Colin Powell (who) 'couldn't sell it at the White House.' " It was part of a six year Bush administration pattern of rejecting all Iranian overtures with responses of ultimatums, threats and Washington-style bullying all framed to send the same message. Washington wants nothing less than regime change and may go to war for it.

Fast forward to today and the largely unreported testimony of former Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee February 1. He highlighted it in an op ed piece in the Los Angeles Times February 11 calling "The war in Iraq....a historic strategic and moral calamity undertaken under false assumptions.... undermining America's global legitimacy (and) tarnishing America's moral credentials. (It's) driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability." It's too bad he ignored the most damning fact of all - the Iraq and Afghan wars are both acts of illegal aggression the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime" and Nazis convicted of it were hanged. Don't expect a hint of that from a spear-carrying member of the empire in good standing.

Brzezinski did say the conflict is ominous for the national interest, and if the country stays bogged down in Iraq it's on track for a "likely head-on conflict with Iran and much of the Islamic world." He believes if it happens it will mean a "spreading and deepening (protracted) quagmire lasting 20 years or more and eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan (causing) pervasive popular antagonism" and plunging the US into growing political isolation. He stated a "plausible scenario (for war with Iran) might be "some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act (real or otherwise) blamed on Iran."

Brzezinski represents powerful interests using him as their influential spokesman. They want an end to policies gone sour they see harming "the national interest" meaning their own. He and they want "a significant change in direction" with a strategy to "end the occupation of Iraq" with a serious US commitment to "shape a regional security dialogue that includes all Iraq's neighbors including Iran and Syria and other major Muslim countries like Egypt and Pakistan." He's calling for an unambiguous "determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time," and believes the US should "activate a credible and energetic effort (to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without which) nationalist and fundamentalist passions (will eventually doom) any Arab regime (perceived supporting) US regional hegemony." Brzezinski sounded alarmist about the Bush administration's hostile intentions toward Iran, and his implications are clear. Washington's agenda is ominous and threatening the national interest. He denounced the scheme and pressed Congress to engage Iran, not attack it. His message so far is unheeded.

Brzezinski's influential voice was joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin's addressing the international security conference in Munich February 10. He stunned listeners with his harsh frankness accusing the US of endangering the world pursuing policies aimed at making it "one single master (in a) unipolar world." He went on saying "It has nothing in common with democracy (and the people) teaching us democracy (but) don't want to learn it themselves." He continued that US policy "overstepped its national borders in every way....in the economic, political and cultural policies it imposes on other nations."

He claimed the US is responsible for "a greater and greater disdain for the principles of international law (and) no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them." He also accused the US of stimulating "an arms race (in an environment where) peace is not so reliable." He added "Unilateral actions have not resolved conflicts but have made them worse," and force should only be used when authorized as international law requires by the UN Security Council. He sounded an alarm gone unheard in the West that "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force - military force.... that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts (and) Finding a political settlement....becomes impossible." He further warned about the use of "space (or) high tech weapons" with implications of a new cold war, nuclear arms race and frightening possibility of devastating nuclear war that was unthinkable before the age of George Bush.

The Dominant Media React

As President of a major world power, Putin's comments went out to the world getting broad coverage, if only for a day or so, while Brzezinski's were largely and shamelessly ignored by the corrupted corporate media still carrying the administration's water and trumpeting its phony claims like verifiable gospel. It happened on February 11 in the New York Times as reported by correspondent James Glanz. His column breathed the scantiest hints of skepticism that smacked of the same kind of Judith Miller-type journalism about WMDs helping take the country to war with Iraq in 2003. He said the US military showed "their first public evidence of the contentious assertion that Iran supplies Shiite extremist groups in Iraq with some of the most lethal weapons in the war....used to kill more than 170 Americans in the past three years" with only hints about its reliability or the source presenting it having none.

He cited senior defense officials in Baghdad February 11 displaying "an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers (claimed to be directly linked) to Iranian arms factories." Without credible proof, they said "Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against Americans (basing their judgment) on general intelligence assessments (of the same kind used to justify attacking Iraq, meaning phony ones.) The specious Times report reeked of innuendos for what it lacked in hard proof about lethal weapons. They could have come from any source, manufactured anywhere, including by Pentagon contractors easily able to duplicate anything scattered around the country and on Iraqi streets for years after the Iranian conflict and now used by resistance fighters or anyone else who has them.

Typical Times saber rattling was at it again after Bush's inept February 14 news conference trumpeting his claim Iran was sending weapons to Iraq to undermine security and kill Americans while never looking more pathetic and awkward doing it. In "Times talk," reporters Stolberg and Santora stated "Mr. Bush's remarks amounted to his most specific accusation to date that Iran was undermining security in Iraq....(and he) dismissed as 'preposterous' the contention by some skeptics that the United States was drawing unwarranted conclusions about Iran's role." They barely questioned the president's nonsensical claim he's certain "the (paramilitary) Quds Force, a part of the government, has provided these sophisticated I.E.D's that have harmed our troops" that has as much credibility as those WMDs we had to fear along with that "mushroom shaped cloud" we couldn't afford to wait to see before acting.

Facts On the Ground Trump the Propaganda

Revealed facts on the ground in Iraq belie all Pentagon and administration phony assertions along with their shameless daily echoing on the Times front pages. The military couldn't even get its evidence straight in presenting an 81mm mortar shell Iran doesn't make, and the ones shown the media had fake markings in English for a Farsi-speaking country. It's also inconceivable Shia Iran would be fighting Iraq's Shia government it's allied with and aids. The US has been fighting an anti-Iranian Sunni resistance largely in al-Anbar province and the most violent parts of Baghdad. It stretches credibility to imagine Iran is arming its enemy that denounces Iraq's dominant Shia puppet government as a US pawn.

That hardly deters Washington claiming further solid evidence Iranian agents are involved in what the State Department calls "networks" (meaning Iranians) working with individuals and groups in Iraq sent there by the Iranian government without a shred of evidence to prove it. Even General Peter Pace, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, dismisses the claim as unproved and further said during a February trip to the Pacific region there is "zero" chance of a US war with Iran.

He may be echoing the kind of sentiment the London Times reported February 25 that "highly placed defence and intelligence sources (say) Some of America's most senior commanders are prepared to resign (in protest) if the White House orders a military strike against Iran." The paper calls this type of high-level internal dissent unprecedented signifying great distaste and misgivings in the Pentagon for an attack on Iran. That's a sentiment even its Joint Chiefs Chairman may share as well as the six retired generals (and likely others) who publicly denounced the Pentagon's handling of the Iraq war last spring and the administration's incompetence overall.

Nonetheless, preparations for war go on that veteran journalist Seymour Hersh again wrote about in late February in the New Yorker magazine. According to Hersh's informed sources: "The Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran....at the direction of the President. (It includes) a contingency plan...that can be implemented (in) 24 hours....The Iran planning group (is assigned) to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq (on top of its previous focus to destroy) Iran's nuclear facilities and possible regime change." Hersh's report supplements others, like one from BBC, saying the US military is planning an all out "shock and awe" blitzkrieg on the country's nuclear facilities, military and infrastructure that may come in the spring that's now just days away.

A clear sign of that possibility is the huge naval buildup in the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean with two heavily equipped and armed carrier groups in theater and a reported third en route either to replace one there or add to it. The combined task force in place is a formidable assemblage of 50 or more warships with nuclear weapons, hundreds of planes and contingents of Marines and Navy personnel.

The buildup is part of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plan for preemptive nuclear war specifically targeting Iran and North Korea. Earlier, Dick Cheney originated the idea when he served as GHW Bush's Defense Secretary in the early 1990s. Rumsfeld picked up the scheme in 2004 as authorized by the 2002 National Security Strategy proclaiming an official doctrine of preemptive or preventive war for the first time. From it he approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" for military readiness against hostile countries that included the nuclear option. He drew on CONPLAN (contingency/concept plan) 8022 completed in November 2003 detailing a plan to preemptively strike targets anywhere in the world judged a national security threat including hardened structures using tactical so-called low-yield nuclear bunker busters with Iran the apparent first target of choice. The Omaha-based US Strategic Command (StratCom) would run any operation if undertaken as it's the command center for the country's nuclear deterrent and overseas the military's nuclear arsenal.

All military branches have ready battle plans to implement against Iran under the name TIRANNT for Theater Iran Near Term. If an attack order comes, it can be launched from the assembled Naval task force in the region and/or by long-range US-based bombers and other warplanes and missiles strategically based in locations like Diego Garcia and elsewhere within striking distance of Iranian targets. It will be able to assault Iran round the clock for weeks against a claimed number of 1500 nuclear-related sites located at 18 main locations in the country. Also designated are thousands of strategic military and civilian targets including vital infrastructure, industrial sites, air, naval and ground force bases, missile facilities and always command-and-control centers with possible help from Israeli warplanes that might, in fact, initiate an attack with US forces then joining in to support their regional partner.

That kind of devious scheme could persuade Congress to go along never wanting to offend the Israeli Lobby that's been spoiling for a fight with Iran for years and now may get it horrifically with unimaginable consequences. They'll affect Israel and the US alike as well as spillover to unstable countries in the region like the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese and may be unsettling enough to unseat sitting rulers and governments replacing them with the kinds of fundamentalist regimes not likely to welcome US presence or influence in the region and intending to do something about it.

The Bush Roadmap to War with Iran

Reports circulated as early as last year and in 2005 that the Bush administration signed off on a "shock and awe" attack against Iran to destroy its perfectly legal commercial nuclear program that may involve using so-called "mini-nuke robust earth penetrator bunker-buster" weapons that won't be "mini" in their catastrophic effects if indeed used. These are powerful dangerous weapons. They can be made to any desired potency, would likely be from one-third to two-thirds as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb that destroyed an entire city, but could have far greater explosive capability that potentially will be catastrophic to the area struck and well beyond by radiation contamination alone.

Pentagon false and misleading reports about them claim they're "safe for civilians" because they penetrate the earth and explode underground. Test results prove otherwise showing when released from 40,000 feet a B61-11 nuclear earth-penetrator burrowed about 20 feet in the soil for a pre-explosion depth able to produce intense fallout over the area struck that's unremediable and would result in enough permanent surface contamination to be unsafe for human habitation. Nonetheless, weapons able to cause a nuclear holocaust are cleared for use real time along with conventional ones if a "shock and awe" attack is ordered against Iran or any other nation on the false and misleading pretext of protecting the national security only threatened by a rogue leadership at home willing to risk catastrophic mass destruction in pursuit of its insane and unachieveable imperial aims.

Not surprisingly, we have an eager partner in Israel straining at the leash to fulfill its long-term agenda to attack Iran alone (possible but doubtful) or along with its US ally that keeps getting reinforced by bellicose statements by its high officials like the one reported February 13 by ultra-right wing Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman. He commented in a radio interview that if necessary "We will have to face the Iranians alone, because Israel cannot remain with its arms folded, waiting for Iran to develop non-conventional (nuclear) weapons." Officials like Lieberman, current Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are dangerous men on the far right allied with others in government and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) all dripping war talk that must be taken seriously from a nation dedicated to conflict and never shy about striking the first all out aggressive blow.

The same theme comes from a report published February 11 that vice-president Cheney's national security advisor, John Hannah (who replaced Lewis Libby just convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI), speaking for the Bush administration, considers 2007 "the year of Iran" saying a US attack is a real possibility. Hannah played a key role in the run-up to the Iraq war having written the first draft of Colin Powell's infamous pre-war speech to the Security Council citing bogus evidence. He also played a lead role putting out phony pre-war intelligence from Iraqi exiles. Now he's at the seat of power and must be taken seriously, especially since his boss barely disguises his aggressive posturing for war against the Iranian state he's wanted for 15 years or more.

They're both part of the high-level propaganda messaging similar to the lead-up to the Iraq war. It's aim is instill fear to make the administration's case that Iran poses serious threat enough to justify military action against it. It follows UN Resolutions 1696 in July demanding Iran suspend uranium enrichment by August 31, which it didn't, and 1737 in December imposing limited sanctions on Iran for not abiding by what the Security Council demanded in July. A second deadline passed putting the Iranian matter back in the Security Council to consider new sanctions be imposed and ratcheting things closer to a US attack as further events unfold.

And so the beat goes on with US oil reserves being stockpiled, Iranian diplomats apprehended in Iraq, the Pentagon and Israeli forces scheming together, the US military buildup in the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean continuing, US ground forces moved to the Iran-Iraq border, Patriot missiles strategically installed in Israel and neighboring Arab states, a "surge" of up to 50,000 additional troops planned, and a change of commanders on the ground in Iraq made replacing less hawkish ones with others supporting the Bush war strategy.

They're part of the new Pentagon team under Defense Secretary Robert Gates who told the Senate Armed Services Committee the military needs to prepare for large-scale operations against countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran that reaffirms the administration's commitment to its "long war" Dick Cheney said won't end in our lifetime, but may end up shortening it. Clearly Iran is the next planned target, the dominant media echoes the threat, and Congress is just a talking-shop like always posturing as the gathering storm in the Gulf intensifies.

Published reports, citing credible sources, point to an attack on Iran by April by an administration on total expanded war footing with the president spoiling for a fight by goading Iran to react in response to his order to "seek out and destroy" (supposed) Iranian "networks" in Iraq. Bush minced no words in a radio interview saying "If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq (even though there's none)....we will respond firmly." Other officials joined the jingoistic chorus accusing Iran of involvement in sectarian violence practically signaling an upcoming attack that easily could follow a manufactured pretext if Iran fails to provide one on its own which it won't. It's never hard to do, and the infamous trumped up Gulf of Tonkin one in August, 1964 shows how easy it is to fool the public and get Congress to go along.

Iran could save us the trouble by responding to US provocations going on now for months by illegally flying unmanned aerial surveillance drones across its airspace and secretly placing special forces reconnaissance teams on the ground "to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic minority groups" according to an earlier report by Seymour Hersh. So far, Iran hasn't taken the bait even though it knows what's happening and reportedly downed one or more intruding aircraft it has every legal right to do but is treading dangerously against an adversary looking for any pretext to pounce. It's leaders also knew what Washington was up to after being made a charter member of Bush's "Axis of Evil." In that status, it's blamed for the administration's failure in Iraq with false claims of arming the resistance and inciting violence.

War on Iran may, in fact, have already started, and two bombings in Southeastern Iranian Zahedan bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan the week of February 12 may have been one of its volleys. Arrests were made and a video seized according to provincial police chief Brigadier General Mohammad Ghafari. From it he claims the "rebels (have an) attachment to opposition groups and some countries' intelligence services such as America and Britain." An unnamed Iranian official also told the Islamic Republic News Agency one of those arrested confessed he was trained by English speakers, and the attack was part of US plans to provoke internal unrest.

While none of this conclusively proves US involvement, there's no secret Washington wants regime change, is actively stirring up internal ethnic and political opposition toward it, and reportedly is working with exiled Iranian leaders including the Mujahideen el-Khalq (MEK) Iranian opposition guerrilla cult the US State Department lists as a terrorist organization, but not apparently when it's on our side.

Full-scale war on Iran may just be a concocted terrorist attack away from starting the "shock and awe." There's no secret what's planned and none whatever that doing it will be another unprovoked, unwarranted act of preemptive illegal aggression only the US and Israel support. It's also no secret Iran is no pushover. It's no match for US and/or Israeli power, but it's got powerful weapons one writer says are "unstoppable" like Russian-built SS-N-22 Sunburn Missiles and more advanced SS-NX-26 Yakhont anti-ship ones designed to sink a US carrier that's a formidable weapon of war but not invulnerable. Iran also has Russian 29 Tor M-1 anti-missile systems and NATO-made Exocet and Chinese Silkworm anti-ship missiles that pack a punch and can sink our ships when launced from land, surface ships or submarines along with 300 or more warplanes, and a large ground force estimated at around 350,000.

US engaging Iran may now hinge on resolving the Washington power struggle between Bush administration neocons and more practical trilateralist types in the camp of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jim Baker, and other powerful Washington figures including the president's father. It's also up to Congress to decide which side it's on and whether it will act or watch from the sidelines and risk nuclear war and its fallout. It may not be long finding out how events will unfold. Just the kind and level of rhetorical noise will tell who's winning with congressional inaction and media complicity so far giving the hawks a big advantage. Haven't we seen this script before, and isn't the likely ending clear, except this time the stakes are far greater and so is the risk to everyone on both sides.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and tune in online to hear The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com each Saturday at noon US central time.


"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

Countdown - Iran Must Get Ready to Repel a Nuclear Attack by Léonid Ivashov *

For the general Leonid Ivashov, the former Chief of the Russian armed forces’ Staff, it is doubtless that the Bush administration plans nuclear attacks against Iran and that the Pentagon will be capable to carry them out within the few coming weeks. He is too sure that the United States will not be talked out of it by the other nuclear powers and will have to endure but a conventional counter. The only unknown thing yet is if this project will be approved or refused by the United States’ Congress.


16 FEBRUARY 2007

From
Moscow (Russia)


In the overall flow of information coming from the Middle East, there are increasingly frequent reports indicating that within several months from now the US will deliver nuclear strikes on Iran. For example, citing well-informed but undisclosed sources, the Kuwaiti Arab Times wrote that the US plans to launch a missile and bomb attack on the territory of Iran before the end of April, 2007. The campaign will start from the sea and will be supported by the Patriot missile defense systems in order to let the US forces avoid a ground operation and to reduce the efficiency of the return strike by “any Persian Gulf country”.

“Any country” mostly refers to Iran. The source which supplied the information to the Kuwaiti paper believes that the US forces in Iraq and other countries of the region will be defended from any Iranian missile strikes by the frontier Patriots.

So, the preparations for a new US aggression entered the completion phase. The executions of S. Hussein and his closest associates were a part of these preparations. Their purpose was to serve as a “disguise operation” for the efforts of the US strategists to deliberately escalate the situation both around Iran and in the entire Middle East.

Analyzing the consequences of the move, the US did order to hang the former Iraqi leader and his associates. This shows that the US has adopted irreversibly the plan of partitioning Iraq into three warring pseudo-states – the Shiite, the Sunnite, and the Kurdish ones. Washington reckons that the situation of a controlled chaos will help it to dominate the Persian Gulf oil supplies and other strategically important oil transportation routes.

The most important aspect of the matter is that a zone of an endless bloody conflict will be created at the core of the Middle East, and that the countries neighboring Iraq – Iran, Syria, Turkey (Kurdistan) – will inevitably be getting drawn into it. This will solve the problem of completely destabilizing the region, a task of major importance for the US and especially for Israel. The war in Iraq was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilization. It was only a phase in the process of getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries, which the US declared or will declare rouge.

However it is not easy for the US to get involved in yet another military campaign while Iraq and Afghanistan are not “pacified” (the US lacks the resources necessary for the operation). Besides, protests against the politics of the Washington neocons intensify all over the world. Due to all of the above, the US will use nuclear weapon against Iran. This will be the second case of the use of nuclear weapons in combat after the 1945 US attack on Japan.

The Israeli military and political circles had been making statements on the possibility of nuclear and missile strikes on Iran openly since October, 2006, when the idea was immediately supported by G. Bush. Currently it is touted in the form of a “necessity” of nuclear strikes. The public is taught to believe that there is nothing monstrous about such a possibility and that, on the contrary, a nuclear strike is quite feasible. Allegedly, there is no other way to “stop” Iran.

How will other nuclear powers react? As for Russia, at best it will limit itself to condemning the strikes, and at worst – as in the case of the aggression against Yugoslavia – its response will be something like “though by this the US makes a mistake, the victim itself provoked the attack”.

Europe will react in essentially the same way. Possibly, the negative reaction of China and several other countries to the nuclear aggression will be stronger. In any case, there will be no retaliation nuclear strike on the US forces (the US is absolutely sure of this).

The UN means nothing in this context. Having failed to condemn the aggression against Yugoslavia, the UN Security Council effectively shared the responsibility for it. This institution is only capable to adopt resolutions which the Russian and also the French diplomacy understands as banning the use of force, but the US and British ones interpret in exactly the opposite sense – as authorizing their aggression.

Speaking of Israel, it is sure to come under the Iranian missile strikes. Possibly, the Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance will become more active. Posing as victims, the Israelis will resort to provocations to justify their aggression, suffer some tolerable damage, and then the outraged US will destabilize Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution.

Some people tend to believe that concerns over the world’s protests can stop the US. I do not think so. The importance of this factor should not be overstated. In the past, I have spent hours talking to Milosevic, trying to convince him that NATO was preparing to attack Yugoslavia. For a long time, he could not believe this and kept telling me: “Just read the UN Charter. What grounds will they have to do it?”

But they did it. They ignored the international law outrageously and did it. What do we have now? Yes, there was a shock, there was indignation. But the result is exactly what the aggressors wanted – Milosevic is dead, Yugoslavia is partitioned, and Serbia is colonized – NATO officers have set up their headquarters in the country’s ministry of defense.

The same things happened to Iraq. There were a shock and indignation. But what matters to the Americans is not how big the shock is, but how high are the revenues of their military-industrial complex.

The information that a second US aircraft-carrier is due to arrive at the Persian Gulf till the end of January makes it possible to analyze the possible evolution of the war situation. Attacking Iran, the US will mostly use air delivery of the nuclear munitions. Cruise missiles (carried by the US aircrafts as well as ships and submarines) and, possibly, ballistic missiles will be used. Probably, nuclear strikes will be followed by air raids from aircraft carriers and by other means of attack.

The US command is trying to exclude a ground operation: Iran has a strong army and the US forces are likely to suffer massive casualties. This is unacceptable for G. Bush who already finds himself in a difficult situation. It does not take a ground operation to destroy infrastructures in Iran, to reverse the development of the country, to cause panic, and to create a political, economic and military chaos. This can be accomplished by using first the nuclear, and subsequently the conventional means of warfare. Such is the purpose of bringing the aircraft carrier group closer to the Iranian coast.

What resources for self-defense does Iran have? They are considerable, but incomparably inferior to the US forces. Iran has 29 Russian Tor systems. Definitely, they are an important reinforcement of the Iranian air defense. However, at present Iran has no guaranteed protection from air raids.

The US tactics will be the same as usual: first, to neutralize the air defense and radars, and then to attack aircrafts in the air and on land, the control installations, and the infrastructure, while taking no risks.

Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc.

At the same time all of the above sends a signal to the pro-Western opposition and to a fraction of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s elite to get ready for the coming developments. The US hopes that an attack on Iran will inevitably result in a chaos in the country, and that it will be possible to bribe some of the Iranian generals and thus to create a fifth column in the country.

Of course, Iran is very different from Iraq. However, if the aggressor succeeds in instigating a conflict between the two branches of the Iranian armed forces – the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and the army – the country will find itself in a critical situation, especially in case at the very beginning of the campaign the US manages to hit the Iranian leadership and delivers a nuclear strike or a massive one by conventional warfare on the country’s central command.

Today, the probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high. It does remain unclear, though, whether the US Congress is going to authorize the war. It may take a provocation to eliminate this obstacle (an attack on Israel or the US targets including military bases). The scale of the provocation may be comparable to the 9-11 attack in NY. Then the Congress will certainly say “Yes” to the US President.


Léonid Ivashov
Le général Léonid Ivashov est ancien chef d’état-major interarmes de la Fédération de Russie. Il est aujourd’hui vice-président de l’Académie russe de géopolitique et membre de la conférence Axis for Peace.



"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell