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gilipolla · Guest

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MAX20060101&articleId=1699
Last Chance to Spare Iran: You Can Do It
by Dr. Mary Maxwell

January 1, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

According to Scott Ritter, we Americans have been sending aerial vehicles (unmanned drones) into the Iranian hinterland for some months now. And, according to Kurt Nimmo, the CIA has put Turkey on notice for “the possible US air operation against Iran and Syria.” The fact that our newspapers and

Network television refuse to tell us about this does not absolve us of responsibility. You must, and I repeat, must, do all you can to stop this.

Reasons to Spare Iran

Why should we act decisively to stop the Pentagon from bombing Iran? Of the following five reasons,

I cannot say which is the most important – they seem equally to merit priority. Still, for practical reasons, one can be singled out as the absolute top priority. Namely, the US should not engage in nuclear war – whether in Iran or anywhere else in the world. True, the US has already used bunker buster weapons and munitions with depleted uranium in Iraq, but nuclear weapons should NEVER be used. We must draw the line even against so-called ‘mini nukes’.

Four specific reasons why we should protect Iran are:

*
Quite simply, a consensus has been reached since 1945 that crimes against humanity are off-limits (not a bad consensus when you think of it – we may be on the receiving end someday)

*
Iran should be respected for its cultural achievements that date back to the Persian empire, and which were appropriated liberally by European civilizations (ah, Persian carpets…ah, glazed tiles)

*
‘Regime change’ sparks recollection of the fact that the CIA already changed Iran’s regime once – in 1953. It helped overthrow the popular leader Mossadegh, and then trained the horrific secret service, SAVAK, for the Shah

*
We Americans would be wrecking our own future, and our self-esteem, by engaging in such a war

Then there is the matter of neocon authorship of the proposal to strike Iran. Most neocons think destruction is wonderful! I ask: is there any reason for us to click our heels in response to the orders of the neocon dimwits? I’m reaching for my Slang Thesaurus (edited by Jonathon Green) to find a better word, as I don’t think ‘dimwit’ does justice to the neocon situation. Let’s see, Section 431 offers these synonyms:

airhead, boob, cementhead, clod, diphead, dork, drongo, dumbellina, dumbski, horse’s arse, lunchbox, mental job, mule, musclehead, room to rent, thickie, thicko.

Let me mention that I am a Johns Hopkins alumna and every time I read that Paul Wolfowitz, a former professor at that university, has an impressive intellect I cringe. By the way, despite my alluding to my education, I am well aware of my own innocence and stupidity. Part of me feels that it is entirely wrong for me to issue recommendations such as “Hold back those bombs” or “Let Iran be free.” Almost certainly I am in the dark about many things that could alter my views. This explains why I relied above on five arguments that appear unassailable: don’t nuke, eschew crimes against humanity, respect Persia’s history, remember our role in SAVAK, and preserve America’s self-esteem. Moreover, caution is especially due here because I am not just offering my viewpoint, I am explicitly urging you, dear Reader, to do what you can to restrain America.

Hence, let me air a few more issues. We hear that a reason to suppress Iran has to do with its audacious plan to shift oil sales from US currency to euros. Fair enough, but does that really justify all the risks of a war? We hear also that regime change in Teheran would be beneficial. Go to the website called regimechangeiran.blogspot.com and you will find a large banner in which the red, white, and green flag of Iran merges imperceptibly into the stars and stripes. Under that banner is the statement “The blogosphere supports real democracy in Iran” (By the way, let’s not forget the rumor that Paul Wolfowitz’s Iranian girlfriend favors regime change in Teheran). Again the question arises: is war a logical way to provide a nation with less dictatorial rule? Look at Iraq. Saddam may yet re-attain power.

There is also a purely selfish reason for us to help Iran that should not be overlooked. Namely, if citizens use enough muscle on this isolated issue “Stay the hell out of Iran”, and thereby chalk up a victory, it would bode well for when we take a stand against domestic incursions such as the all-too-imminent threat of martial law on our shores.

A Crucial Preliminary Obstacle: Lulling

So why is every decent American citizen not jumping to denounce the likely invasion of Iran? (And, down the road, the threatened invasion of Syria and North Korea?) Insularity and laziness are not the explanation, in my opinion. Rather, we get fooled by frequent statements that all options are still open. Sec. of State Rice has said as much. Also, the new head of Israel’s Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu – Bibi – indicates that if he wins the March elections he will ‘take out’ Iran’s nuclear reactor the same way Israel took out Iraq’s nuclear reactor, Osiraq, in 1981 (which was a clean, non-war move.)

It is essential not to let ‘options’ or the promise of a delayed timing fool us. Bibi’s mention of a March date could be a calculated method of putting us at ease during January and February – to our detriment. We are forever being fooled, not only by those who plant future dates in our mind, but also by our human-nature tendency to bank on the most favorable scenario. For example, lately I have been unconsciously treating myself to the optimistic pretense that Iran will be spared from the coming hell of bombs, maimed bodies, and destroyed homes.

For us to call attention to any situation where there is a danger that we might be lulled into inaction, it would be useful to have a new word or concept. Just call it the ‘anti- lull signal’, or for those who thirst for acronyms, ALS. In the lead-up to America’s attack on Iraq, I can remember a series of televised interviews, in 2003, in which the late Professor Edward Said and other experts were asked to predict the likely outcome of a military attack. All interviewees came up with hopeful statements except Said. He painted a picture that later materialized. Roughly, his words were “It would be an absolute disaster to attack Iraq. Necessarily it would bring about a civil war, and a destabilization of the region.” Maybe it would have helped if someone screamed ALS! ALS! to the other interviewees.

As a rule, as long as our personal survival is not at stake, we unconsciously opt to be lulled. Just like a casino patron sitting in front of the slots, our hopes are higher than they should be. Today many people understandably entertain the hope that we will stay out of Iran. Wayne Madsen, in his ever-juicy gossip column, mentioned a few months ago that Iran’s leaders are in possession of an incriminating photo of George W. Bush, taken in his younger days that could be used to blackmail him. Who knows, maybe it is true.

Another notion that is circulating is that Russia, possibly possessing far greater war power than it admits, will be Iran’s protecting ally. Or that the European Union, in its desire to show defiance of US aggression, would endorse peaceful negotiations with Iran. Of those two bases for hope, I don’t take the latter seriously, as I think the EU’s independence is largely feigned. The former, however, is plausible: classic balance-of-power theory supports the notion of a Russia-Iran alliance.

The ‘Surprise” Element

An excellent reason to be circumspect about starting a war is the matter of unforeseen outcomes. Are you old enough to recall the bumper sticker “Nuke Iran” that was popular in 1980? What brought on that display of jingoism? It was the Yankee shock at the fact that Islamic revolutionaries had taken 52 Americans hostage in Iran. These unfortunate men were captured at the American embassy on November 4th, 1979, and held for over a year. Pride being what it is, we were dying to punish Iran. Of course at that time, the American public had no inkling that the final three months of the hostages’ ordeal was a product of the Reagan-Bush election strategy. They wanted to prevent the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, from having the glory of getting the hostages freed just before the November elections.

To deprive Carter of just such an ‘October Surprise,’ George Bush, Sr. reportedly did a deal with the Ayatollah on October 19th, 1980 to make our 52 Americans suffer ‘bonus time’. They would not be liberated before the election – indeed the day of their release was the exact day of Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. This proves, does it not, that our patriotic lust for war against the mean old Ayatollah was misplaced. Nuking Iran at that time (25 years ago) would have punished the wrong wrongdoer!

Reading about Iran

Two bestsellers are worth reading simply for pleasure. One is Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni. The other is Reading Lolita in Teheran by Azar Nafisi, about a discussion group run by a teacher of English literature for her students, in her home in Teheran. Another old chestnut, but still riveting, is the autobiography of Sattareh Farman Farmaian Daughter of Persia. What you will come away with from these books, besides a sense of the inevitable role of the female in the future development of that country, is the sense that the people of Iran are refreshingly open to new social arrangements, and that the world could be their oyster.

Mary Maxwell, Ph.D., P.O. Box 4307, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106, USA is a political scientist. She can be emailed as ‘mary’ at her website: marymaxwell.us She hereby permits anyone to copy or distribute this article as long as it remains unaltered and carries this notice.

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.campaigniran.org/press_releases2.asp
PRESS RELEASE January 17, 2006

Referral of Iran to the Security Council:

Prelude to a New War

Last week’s decision by the UK, France and Germany to abandon their negotiations with Iran, followed by their joint call with the US for Iran’s referral to the UN Security Council by an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board, is a step toward a new war in the Middle East. Iran has responded by reiterating its readiness for further talks but has warned that referral will result in a ban by Iran on further voluntary snap checks by IAEA inspectors. Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. Senate have already announced that military intervention against Iran must be an option.

The three European powers, known as the ‘E3’, took their decision after Iran ended its voluntary moratorium on nuclear research last Tuesday. But there are in fact no grounds for this decision under international law. The Tehran agreement of 21 October 2003 signed by the E3 states: “While Iran has a right within the nuclear non-proliferation regime to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, it has decided voluntarily to suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as defined by the IAEA.” In November 2004, as part of the Paris Agreement, the E3 formally reconfirmed that Iran’s moratorium was “a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation.” Clearly if the moratorium was not a legal obligation in November 2004, resuming scientific research under the watchful eye of the IAEA now cannot reasonably be used as a justification for abandoning negotiations.

Amidst escalating and uncorroborated accusations about a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme, little attention has been paid to Iran’s rationale for its latest action. As a signatory to the IAEA, Iran has the right to develop the capacity to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Iran claims that its programme is aimed solely at using nuclear power to generate electricity for future generations. No one disputes predictions that Iran’s oil exporting capacity will end well within this century, making the nuclear option a logical one for Iran to explore. Notwithstanding the contention in the West that Iran’s secrecy has, in effect, abrogated its rights in this regard, one cannot assume “facts not in evidence” as we know happened, with the benefit of hindsight, in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.

On 23 March 2005, Iran offered a new set of practical measures intended to reassure the international community of its peaceful intentions, including:

· Limiting the enrichment programme to a level sufficient “to solely meet the contingency fuel requirements of Iran’s power reactors;”

· Offering “immediate conversion of all enriched uranium to fuel rods to preclude even the technical possibility of further enrichment;” and

· Allowing “continuous on-site presence of IAEA inspectors at the conversion and enrichment facilities to provide unprecedented added guarantees.”

In September 2005, Iran offered to invite western companies – including American firms – to collaborate in the development of Iran’s nuclear technology, an arrangement which could provide further safety measures and guarantees that the program is indeed purely for the generation of electricity. These initiatives have been ignored both by the E3 and by the Western media, which have continued an almost exclusive focus on Israeli and Western accusations.

Iran feels that its efforts, particularly its 2 ½ year research moratorium and voluntary agreement to additional intrusive spot checks, have accomplished nothing. Negotiations have stalled over the E3’s insistence, under US pressure, that Iran permanently forfeit its right under international law to uranium enrichment – a step clearly not proscribed by the NPT. After its experience in struggling with shortages of parts for its aging aircraft, Iran rejects the prospect of being dependent on external sources for reactor fuel. Significantly, Israel, India and Pakistan enjoy warm relations with and support from Western governments despite having covertly developed nuclear weapons and despite their continuing refusal to sign the NPT or to allow IAEA inspections. The employment of obvious double standards leads to a loss of credibility for the West, and loss of good-will elsewhere.

Iran’s resumption of nuclear research, which Iran says will be purely for generating electricity, has been deliberately conflated by the US administration with production of a nuclear bomb. Dr Mohamed El-Baradei, Director-General of the IAEA, has publicly confirmed that despite their rigorous inspection programme in Iran, IAEA inspectors have found no shred of evidence of a nuclear weapons programme in Iran. Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, is unequivocal about the situation: “It is the US, and not Iran that is operating outside international law when it comes to the issue of Iran's nuclear programme.” Under Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has an “inalienable right … to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.”

Israeli and US administration figures, on the other hand, have made clear their intentions on Iran. Seymour Hersh, the renowned investigative journalist who exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, revealed in the New Yorker Magazine in January 2005 on the basis of numerous interviews with high ranking Bush administration officials that the US is planning for a new war, this time against Iran. On 11 December 2005, the Sunday Times reported that Ariel Sharon the prime minister of Israel has instructed Israel Air Force to launch an air assault against Iranian nuclear plants before the end of March 2006. The neo-conservatives in the Bush administration and the pro-Israel lobby seem resolved to implement plans for fomenting regime change, as in the US-supported coup d’etat in Iran in 1953, or directly imposing such change, as happened in Iraq more recently. The destruction and loss of life for taking military action on a false premise – upwards of 30,000 Iraqi civilians to date in the current conflict – could be eclipsed by the aftermath of an assault on Iran.

Referral to the UN Security Council will escalate tensions to a new level. Iran’s parliament has passed by an overwhelming majority a law requiring the government to withdraw from its voluntary adoption of the IAEA snap inspections protocol if referral takes place. Thus referral to the Security Council may start a runaway reaction that might bring us to a point-of-no-return. By advancing the referral process, the E3 may well have paved the way for another UN Security Council stand-off, similar to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and conceivably to another US-led military confrontation in the Middle East even more catastrophic than the Iraq war.

We appeal to every member of the British, French and German parliaments to oppose their governments’ decisions to abandon negotiations with Iran. We appeal to the US Congress and Senate and to European parliaments to oppose Iran’s referral to the UN Security Council. The only realistic way forward in dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme is through international dialogue under the auspices of the IAEA.

Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran

campaign@campaigniran.org

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mike_whi_060131_battle_plans_for_ira.htm
January 31, 2006

Battle Plans for Iran
by Mike Whitney

http://www.opednews.com

In less than 24 hours the Bush administration has won impressive victories on both domestic and foreign policy fronts. At home, the far-right Federalist Society alum, Sam Alito, has overcome the feeble resistance from Democratic senators; ensuring his confirmation to the Supreme Court sometime late on Tuesday. Equally astonishing, the administration has coerced both Russia and China into bringing Iran before the United Nations Security Council although (as Mohamed ElBaradei says) “There’s no evidence of a nuclear weapons program.” The surprising capitulation of Russia and China has forced Iran to abandon its efforts for further negotiations; cutting off dialogue that might diffuse the volatile situation.

“We consider any referral or report of Iran to the Security Council as the end of diplomacy,” Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told state television.

The administration’s success with Iran ends the diplomatic charade and paves the way for war. Now, UN Ambassador John Bolton can make his appearance before the Security Council with allegations of “noncompliance” that will rattle through the corporate media and prepare the world for unilateral military action.

The administration has no expectation of securing the votes needed for sanctions or punitive action. Its all for show. The trip to the Security Council is simply a ploy to provide the cover of international legitimacy to another act of unprovoked aggression. The case has gone as far as it will go excluding the requisite “touched up” satellite photos and spurious allegations of unreliable dissidents.

We should now be focused on how Washington intends to carry out its war plans, since war is inevitable.

Those who doubt that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team will attack Iran, while so conspicuously overextended in Iraq, are ignoring the subtleties of the administration’s Middle East strategy.

Bush has no intention of occupying Iran. Rather, the goal is to destroy major weapons-sites, destabilize the regime, and occupy a sliver of land on the Iraqi border that contains 90% of Iran’s oil wealth. Ultimately, Washington will aim to replace the Mullahs with American-friendly clients who can police their own people and fabricate the appearance of representative government. But, that will have to wait. For now, the administration must prevent the incipient Iran bourse (oil-exchange) from opening in March and precipitating a global sell-off of the debt-ridden dollar. There have many fine articles written about the proposed “euro-based” bourse and the devastating effects it will have on the greenback. The best of these are “Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar” by William R. Clark, and “The Proposed Oil Bourse” by Krassimir Petrov, Ph.D.

The bottom line on the bourse is this; the dollar is underwritten by a national debt that now exceeds $8 trillion dollars and trade deficits that surpass $600 billion per year. That means that the greenback is the greatest swindle in the history of mankind. It’s utterly worthless. The only thing that keeps the dollar afloat is that oil is traded exclusively in greenbacks rather than some other currency. If Iran is able to smash that monopoly by trading in petro-euros then the world’s central banks will dump the greenback overnight, sending markets crashing and the US economy into a downward spiral.

The Bush administration has no intention of allowing that to take place. In fact, as the tax-cuts and the budget deficits indicate, the Bush cabal fully intends to perpetuate the system that trades worthless dollars for valuable commodities, labor, and resources. As long as the oil market is married to the dollar, this system of global indentured servitude will continue.

Battle Plans

The Bush administration’s attention has shifted to a small province in southwestern Iran that is unknown to most Americans. Never the less, Khuzestan will become the next front in the war on terror and the lynchpin for prevailing in the global resource war. If the Bush administration can sweep into the region (under the pretext disarming Iran’s nuclear programs) and put Iran’s prodigious oil wealth under US control, the dream of monopolizing Middle East oil will have been achieved.

Not surprisingly, this was Saddam Hussein’s strategy in 1980 when he initiated hostilities against Iran in a war that would last for eight years. Saddam was an American client at the time, so it is likely that he got the green light for the invasion from the Reagan White House. Many of Reagan’s high-ranking officials currently serve in the Bush administration; notably Rumsfeld and Cheney.

Khuzestan represents 90% of Iran’s oil production. The control over these massive fields will force the oil-dependent nations of China, Japan and India to continue to stockpile greenbacks despite the currency’s dubious value. The annexing of Khuzestan will prevent Iran’s bourse from opening, thereby guaranteeing that the dollar will maintain its dominant position as the world’s reserve currency. As long as the dollar reigns supreme and western elites have their hands on the Middle East oil-spigot, the current system of exploitation through debt will continue into perpetuity. The administration can confidently prolong its colossal deficits without fear of a plummeting dollar. In fact, the American war-machine and all its various appendages, from Guantanamo to Abrams Tanks, are paid for by the myriad nations who willingly hold reserves of American currency.

This extortion-scheme is typically referred to as the global economic system. In reality, it has nothing to do with either free markets or capitalism. That is just philosophical mumbo-jumbo. It is the dollar-system; predicated entirely on the ongoing monopoly of the oil trade in dollars.

Invading Khuzestan

In a recent article by Zolton Grossman, “Khuzestan; the First Front in the War on Iran?”, Grossman cites the Beirut Daily Star which predicts that the “"first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply, forcing it to depend on its limited stocks."

This strategy has been called the “Khuzestan Gambit”, and we can expect that some variant of this plan will be executed following the aerial bombardment of Iranian military installations and weapons sites. If Iran retaliates, then there is every reason to believe that either the United States or Israel will respond with low-yield, bunker-busting nuclear weapons. In fact, the Pentagon may want to demonstrate its eagerness to use nuclear weapons do deter future adversaries and to maintain current levels of troop deployments without a draft.

Tonkin Bay Redux

On January 28, 2006, Iranian officials announced that they would “hand over evidence that proved British involvement in bombings in the southern city of Ahvaz earlier in the week” that killed eight civilians and wounded 46 others. This was just one of the many bombings, incitements, and demonstrations that have taken place in Khuzestan in the last year that suggest foreign intervention. The action is strikingly similar to the 2 British commandoes who were apprehended in Basra a few months ago dressed as Arabs with a truckload of explosives during the week of religious festival.

Coincidence?

Probably not.

Step by step, Iran is being set up for war. What difference does the provocation make? The determination to consolidate the oil reserves in the Caspian Basin was made more than a decade ago and is clearly articulated in the policy papers produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) The Bush administration is one small province away from realizing the its dream of controlling the world’s most valued resource. They won’t let that opportunity pass them by.

We're in for another war.

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20051221&articleId=1576
The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview
by Michel Chossudovsky

December 21, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca

Paper presented at the Perdana Global Peace Forum 2005
Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,

14-17 December 2005

The debate regarding war and Militarization raises the broad issue of national sovereignty.

I am particularly gratified as an economist to participate in this important event in the Nation’s capital, in Malaysia, a country which at a critical moment in its history, namely at the height of the 1997 Asian crisis, took the courageous stance of confronting the Washington Consensus and the international financial establishment.

Under the helm of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, carefully designed financial measures were taken to avoid the collapse of the ringgit, thereby foreclosing a scenario of economic dislocation, bankruptcy and impoverishment, as occurred in Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea.

These 1997 measures forcefully confronted the mainstream neoliberal agenda. In retrospect, this was a momentous decision, which will go down in the Nation’s history. It constitutes the basis for an understanding of what is best described as "economic and financial warfare".

Today we have come to understand that war and macro-economic manipulation are intertwined. Militarization supports economic warfare. Conversely, what is referred to euphemistically as "economic reform" supports a military and geopolitical agenda

Introduction

The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. In the largest display of military might since the Second World War, the United States and its indefectible British ally have embarked upon a military adventure, which threatens the future of humanity.

An understanding of the underlying historical background is crucial. This war agenda is not the product of a distinct neo-conservative project. From the outset of the Cold War Era, there is a consistent thread, a continuum in US military doctrine, from the "Truman doctrine" to Bush's "war on terrorism".

Foreign Policy adviser George F. Kennan had outlined in a 1948 State Department brief what was later described as the "'Truman doctrine."

What this 1948 document conveys is continuity in US foreign policy, from "Containment" to "Pre-emptive" War. In this regard, the Neo-conservative agenda under the Bush administration should be viewed as the culmination of a post World War II foreign policy framework. The latter has been marked by a succession of US sponsored wars and military interventions in all major regions of the World. From Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, to the CIA sponsored military coups in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the objective has been to ensure US military hegemony and global economic domination, as initially formulated under the "Truman Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.

Despite significant policy differences, successive Democratic and Republican administrations, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have carried out this global military agenda.

Moreover, Kennan's writings pointed to the formation of an Anglo-American alliance, which currently characterizes the close relationship between Washington and London. This alliance responds to powerful economic interests in the oil industry, defense and international banking. It is, in many regards, an Anglo-American extension of the British Empire, which was officially disbanded in the wake of the Second World War.

The Truman doctrine also points to the inclusion of Canada in the Anglo-American military axis. Moreover, Kennan had also underscored the importance of preventing the development of a continental European power that could compete with the US.

With regard to Asia, including China and India, Kennan hinted to the importance of articulating a military solution:

"The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better"

Weakening the United Nations

From the outset of the Cold War, the objective was to undermine and ultimately destroy the Soviet Union. Washington was also intent upon weakening the United Nations as a genuine international body, an objective that has largely been achieved under the Bush administration:

The initial build-up of the UN in U.S. public opinion was so tremendous that it is possibly true, as is frequently alleged, that we have no choice but to make it the cornerstone of our policy in this post-hostilities period. Occasionally, it has served a useful purpose. But by and large it has created more problems than it has solved, and has led to a considerable dispersal of our diplomatic effort. And in our efforts to use the UN majority for major political purposes we are playing with a dangerous weapon which may some day turn against us. This is a situation, which warrants most careful study and foresight on our part. (Kennan 1948)

The Post Cold War

The wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the same "military road-map". Confirmed by military documents, the US war agenda not only targets Iran, Syria and North Korea, but also its former Cold War enemies: Russia and China.

We are dealing with a global military agenda characterized by various forms of intervention. The latter include covert military and intelligence operations in support of domestic paramilitary groups and so-called liberation armies. These operations are largely devised with a view to creating social, ethnic and political divisions within national societies, ultimately contributing to the destruction of entire countries, as occurred in Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, the US sponsored "democratization" agenda consists in intervening in countries’ internal affairs, often with a view to destabilizing national governments and imposing sweeping "free market" reforms. In this regard, the illegal invasion of Haiti following a US sponsored military coup, which was also supported by Canada and France, is an integral part of Washington’s global military agenda.

War and Globalization

War and globalization are intimately related processes. Military and intelligence operations support the opening up of new economic frontiers and the remolding of national economies. The powers of Wall Street, the Anglo-American oil giants and the U.S.-U.K. defense contractors are indelibly behind this process.

Ultimately, the purpose of America’s "War on Terrorism" is to transform sovereign nations into open territories (or "free trade areas"), both through "military means", as well as through the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms. The latter, implemented under IMF-World Bank-WTO auspices often serve to undermine and destroy national economies, precipitating millions of people into abject poverty. In turn, so-called "reconstruction programs" imposed by donors and creditors in the wake of the war contribute to a spiraling external debt.

In a twisted logic, "war reparations" financed by external debt are being paid to the US invader. Billions of dollars are channeled to Western construction conglomerates such as Bechtel and Halliburton, both of which have close links to the US Department of Defense.

Iran and Syria: Next Phase of the War

Confirmed in national security documents, a central objective of this war is the conquest and confiscation of Middle East oil wealth. In this regard, the broader Middle East – Central Asian region encompasses some 70 percent of the World’s oil and gas resources, more than thirty times those of the US.

The Anglo-American oil giants in alliance with Wall Street and the military-industrial complex are indelibly behind America’s war agenda.

The next phase of this war is Iran and Syria, which have already been identified as targets.

Iran is the country with the third largest oil and gas reserves (10%) after Saudi Arabia (25%) and Iraq (11%). The US is seeking with the complicity of the UN Security Council to establish a pretext for the bombing of Iran, which is presented as a threat to world peace.

Israel is slated to play a key role in launching the military operation against Iran.

This operation is in a state of readiness. Were it to occur, the war would extend to the entire Middle Eastern region and beyond. At the same token, Israel would become an official member of the Anglo-American military axis.

In early 2005, several high profile military exercises were conducted in the Eastern Mediterranean, involving military deployments and the testing of weapons systems. Military planning meetings were held between the US, Israel and Turkey. There has been a shuttle of military and government officials between Washington, Tel Aviv and Ankara.

Intense diplomatic exchanges have been carried out at the international level with a view to securing areas of military cooperation and/or support for a US-Israeli led military operation directed against Iran. The UN Security Council resolution regarding Iran’s nuclear program provides a pretext, which the US plans to use to justify military intervention.

Of significance is a November 2004 military cooperation agreement between NATO and Israel. A few months later, Israel was involved for the first time in military exercises with NATO, which also included several Arab countries.

A massive buildup in military hardware has occurred in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. Israel has taken delivery from the US of some 5,000 "smart air launched weapons" including some 500 BLU 109 'bunker-buster bombs.

Nuclear Weapons in Conventional War Theaters: "Safe for Civilians"

An attack on Iran using tactical nuclear weapons (mini-nukes) has also been contemplated. Tactical nuclear weapons with an explosive capacity between one third to 6 times a Hiroshima bomb have been cleared for use in conventional war theaters. .

The mini-nukes have been redefined as a defensive weapon, which is "safe for civilians" "because the explosion is underground". The Senate in a December 2003 decision, has authorized their use in conventional war theaters

Air strikes against Iran could contribute to extending the war to the broader Middle East Central Asian region. Tehran has confirmed that it would retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes directed against Israel (CNN, 8 Feb 2005). These attacks could also target US military facilities in the Persian Gulf, which would immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out war.

In recent developments, Israel’s armed forces have been ordered by Prime minister Ariel Sharon, "to be ready by the end of March [2006] for possible strikes" on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities (The Sunday Times, 11 December 2005).

Meanwhile, Iran is building its air defense capabilities. Russia has recently announced that it plans to sell to Iran some 29 Tor M-1 anti-missile systems.

The planned attack on Iran should also be understood in relation to the timely withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, which has opened up a new space, for the deployment of Israeli forces. The participation of Turkey in the US-UK-Israeli military operation is also a factor, following an agreement reached between Ankara and Tel Aviv.

Global Military Agenda

The war in the Middle East is part of a carefully defined military agenda. Formulated in September 2000, a few months before the accession of George W. Bush to the White House, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) published its blueprint for global domination under the title: "Rebuilding America's Defenses."

The PNAC is a neo-conservative think tank linked to the Defense-Intelligence establishment, the Republican Party and the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which plays a behind-the-scenes role in the formulation of US foreign policy.

The PNAC's declared objectives are:

o
defend the American homeland;

o
fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;

o
perform the "constabulary" duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;

o
transform U.S. forces to exploit the "revolution in military affairs;"

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who now heads the World Bank, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, had commissioned the PNAC blueprint prior to the 2000 presidential elections.

The PNAC outlines a roadmap of conquest. It calls for "the direct imposition of U.S. "forward bases" throughout Central Asia and the Middle East "with a view to ensuring economic domination of the world, while strangling any potential "rival" or any viable alternative to America's vision of a 'free market' economy" (See Chris Floyd, Bush's Crusade for Empire, Global Outlook, No. 6, 2003)

Distinct from theater wars, the so-called "constabulary functions" imply a form of global military policing using various instruments of military intervention including punitive bombings, covert intelligence operations and the sending in of US Special Forces, etc.

New Weapons Systems

The PNAC’s "revolution in military affairs" (meaning the development of new weapons systems) consists of the "Strategic Defense Initiative", the concurrent weaponization of space and the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons:

"While it has long been a U.S. policy to use nuclear weapons in order to respond to a nuclear attack… the new policy allows the U.S. to use nuclear weapons against states that do not have nuclear weapons and for a host of new reasons, including rapid termination of a conflict on U.S. terms or to ensure success of the U.S. forces."

(statement of Jorge Hirsh, see Global Research,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MCD20051101&articleId=1173

The National Defense Strategy

Since 2000, the basic premises of the PNAC have been reasserted in a number of national security documents. In March 2005, The Pentagon released its National Defense Strategy document. While the latter follows in the footsteps of the administration's "preemptive" war doctrine as detailed by the Project of the New American Century (PNAC), it goes much further in setting the contours of Washington's global military agenda.

It calls for a more "proactive" approach to warfare, beyond the weaker notion of "preemptive" and defensive actions, where military operations are launched against a "declared enemy" with a view to "preserving the peace" and "defending America".

The document explicitly acknowledges America's global military mandate, beyond regional war theaters. This mandate also includes military operations directed against countries, which are not hostile to America, but which are considered strategic from the point of view of US interests. Whereas the preemptive war doctrine envisages military action as a means of "self defense" against countries categorized as "hostile" to the US, the new Pentagon doctrine envisages the possibility of military intervention against countries, which do not visibly constitute a threat to the security of the American homeland.

The document outlines "four major threats to the United States":

- "Traditional challenges" are posed by well known and recognized military powers using "well-understood' forms of war."

- "Irregular threats" come from forces using so-called "unconventional' methods to counter stronger power."

- "The catastrophic challenge" pertains to the "use of weapons of mass destruction by an enemy."

o
"Disruptive challenges" pertains to "potential adversaries utilizing new technologies to counter U.S. advantages."

(See Michel Chossudovsky, From "Rogue States" to "Unstable Nations": America's New National Security Doctrine,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO504A.html)

Mammoth Defense Budget

This military blueprint outlines the contours of a project of global military hegemony. It is predicated on a massive increase in defense spending. The underlying objective consists in overshadowing, in terms of defense outlays, any other nation on earth including America's European allies.

The United States military this year [2005] will be larger than the next 25 countries put together.... So, you know, essentially if spending patterns hold, which is to say European defense spending is declining, American is rising, in about five years, the United States will be spending more money than the rest of the world put together on defense." (Council on Foreign Relations, Annual Corporate conference, 10 March 2005).

The defense budget estimated at 401.7 billion dollars (FY 2005) does not include the "emergency supplemental defense budget" earmarked for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither is the DoD participation's in the "war on terrorism" included in the defense budget. (See http://64.177.207.201/static/budget/annual/fy05/) Nor does it include another 40 billion dollars allocated to America's intelligence apparatus, headed by John Negroponte. Approximately 80 percent of the intelligence budget, including America's system of spy satellite's, directly supports US military initiatives.

Extensive War Crimes

The economic and strategic objectives behind this war are rarely mentioned. This military project is presented to public opinion as part of the "global war on terrorism" in which Al Qaeda is unequivocally upheld, as the aggressor. The crimes of war including the torture of civilians are casually presented as "collateral damage".

In this regard, the military occupation of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians (according to the Lancet, John Hopkins School of Public health study).

The routine application of torture, the setting up of numerous concentration camps is now fully documented, not to mention the kidnapping of civilians including children, who are dispatched to the Guantanamo concentration camp in Cuba.

Killing the messenger: US forces have also targeted and killing of independent journalists in Iraq, who do not report the lies and fabrications of the Anglo-American military axis.

While the international community focuses on Iran and North Korea’s nuclear program, the evidence suggests that the US led military coalition is routinely using prohibited weapons. It also plans to use nuclear weapons in the next phase of this war.

Napalm and white phosphorous bombs have been used in Iraq against civilians in densely populated urban areas. The Western media (specifically the BBC) has attempted to camouflage the use of these weapons systems.

Torture

Torture is an official US government policy. The orders to torture POWs in Iraq and Guantanamo emanated from the highest levels of the Bush Administration. Prison guards, interrogators in the US military and the CIA were responding to precise guidelines.

The US President had directly authorized the use of torture including "sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc."

(See ACLU at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ACL412A.html ).

The secret CIA torture chambers and detention centers set up in a number of countries including the European Union are consistent with the Pentagon’s guidelines on the use of torture.

While torture is now accepted by the Bush administration, the controversy in the US pertains not to torture per se but to whether the information obtained from suspected terrorists through the application of torture can be used in a court of law to indict an alleged "terrorist".

The Criminalization of Justice

Despite the public outrage, the tendency is towards acquiescence and acceptance of the US torture agenda. The legitimacy of the war criminals in high office, who formally ordered these crimes is not questioned. "Legal opinions" drafted on the behest of war criminals are being used to "legalize" torture and redefine Justice.

War criminals legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable them to redefine the contours of the judicial system and the process of law enforcement.

It provides them with a mandate to decide "who are the criminals", when in fact they are the criminals.

In other words, what we are dealing with is the criminalization of the State and its various institutions including the criminalization of Justice.

The truth is twisted and turned upside down. State propaganda builds a consensus within the Executive, the US Congress and the Military. This consensus is then ratified by the Judicial, through a process of outright legal manipulation.

Media disinformation instills within the consciousness of Americans that somehow the use of torture, the existence of concentration camps, extra judicial assassinations of "rogue enemies", all of which are happening, are "under certain circumstances" "acceptable" and perfectly "legal" because the Justice department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), says "it's legit".

The existence of an illusive outside enemy who is threatening the Homeland is the cornerstone of the propaganda campaign. The latter consists in galvanizing US citizens not only in favor of "the war on terrorism", but in support of a social order which upholds the legitimate use of torture, directed against "terrorists", as a justifiable means to preserving human rights, democracy, freedom, etc.

Racism and the Anti-Terrorist Legislation

Meanwhile, a wave of racism and xenophobia directed against Muslims has been unleashed throughout the western world. The arbitrary arrests and detention of Muslims on trumped up charges has become common practice.

"Anti-terrorist" legislation has been adopted in a number of western countries which allows for the arrest and detention without charge of alleged terrorists, including leaders of so-called ‘domestic radical groups" (meaning antiwar activists), who are now categorized as a threat to Homeland Security.

While "expressing concern" regarding human rights violations, the so-called international community has nonetheless accepted the legitimacy of "the war on terrorism". Moreover, in the wake of 9/11, a significant section of the antiwar movement, while condemning the US-led war, continues to uphold the legitimacy of the "war on terrorism".

In turn, the UN has endorsed the "war on terrorism". Under the disguise of peacekeeping, the United Nations, in violation of its own charter and the Nuremberg jurisprudence on war crimes, is collaborating with the US led military coalition.

War Propaganda

The underlying objective of the media disinformation campaign is provide a humanitarian mandate to the US led war, while galvanizing public opinion in support of America's "war on terrorism" agenda. Racism and Xenophobia, including the arbitrary arrest of alleged terrorists, are an integral part war propaganda.

One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to "fabricate an enemy". As anti-war sentiment grows and the political legitimacy the Bush Administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this illusive "outside enemy" must be dispelled.

Propaganda purports not only to drown the truth but also to "kill the evidence" on how this "outside enemy", namely Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was fabricated and transformed into "Enemy Number One". The entire National Security doctrine centers on the existence of an "outside enemy" which is threatening the Homeland.

Possessing a "just cause" for waging war is central to the Bush administration's justification for invading and occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The "war on terrorism" and the notion of "preemption" are predicated on the right to "self defense." They define "when it is permissible to wage war": jus ad bellum.

Jus ad bellum also serves to build a consensus within the Armed Forces command structures. It also serves to convince the troops that they are fighting for a "just cause". More generally, the Just War theory in its modern day version is an integral part of war propaganda and media disinformation, applied to gain public support for a war agenda.

In October 2001, when Afghanistan was bombed and later invaded, several "Progressives" largely upheld the Administration's "just cause" military doctrine. The "self-defense" argument was accepted at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11, without examining the fact that the US administration had not only supported the "Islamic terror network", it was also instrumental in the installation of the Taliban government in 1995-96. Moreover, the invasion of Afghanistan had been planned well in advance of September 11, 2001.

In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement against the illegal invasion of Afghanistan was isolated. The trade unions, civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Media disinformation prevailed. People were misled as to the nature and objectives underlying the invasion of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were identified as the prime suspects of the 9/11 attacks, without a shred of evidence and without addressing the historical relationship between Al Qaeda and the US intelligence apparatus. In this regard, understanding 9/11 is crucial in formulating a consistent antiwar position.

The "war on terrorism" is the cornerstone of the America’s propaganda and media disinformation campaign. In an utterly absurd logic Al Qaeda is presented as an upcoming super-power, capable of waging a nuclear attack against the US.

The "War on Terrorism"

Amply documented, the war on terrorism is a fabrication. Al Qaeda is a US sponsored "intelligence asset". Saudi-born Osama bin Laden is a creation of U.S. foreign policy. He was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders." During the Cold War, but also in its aftermath, the CIA — using Pakistan’s Military Intelligence apparatus as a go-between —played a key role in training the Mujahideen.

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan Jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad. (Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999)

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have supported the so-called "Militant Islamic Base", including Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, as part of their military-intelligence agenda. The links between Osama bin Laden and the Clinton administration in Bosnia and Kosovo are well documented by congressional records.

Ironically, the U.S. Administration’s undercover military-intelligence operations in Bosnia were fully documented by the Republican Party. A lengthy Congressional report by the Republican Party Committee (RPC) published in 1997 accused the Clinton administration of having "helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base" leading to the recruitment, through the so-called "Militant Islamic Network", of thousands of Mujahideen from the Muslim world:

The Clinton administration’s ‘hands-on’ involvement with the Islamic network’s arms pipeline included inspections of missiles from Iran by U.S. government officials … the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization … has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. … TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing) and Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll numerous militant groups. (Congressional Press Release, Republican, Party Committee (RPC), U.S. Congress, Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base, Washington DC, 16 January 1997. The original document is on the website of the U.S. Senate Republican Party Committee (Senator Larry Craig), at

http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1997/iran.htm; emphasis added.

Counter-Terrorism

The CIA has created it own terrorist organizations including "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" which is led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.

And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations, which it has itself created. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program "to go after" these terrorist organizations.

Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings must appear to be "genuine". The objective is to present the terror groups as "enemies of America."

The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America's war on terrorism" agenda.

The "war on terrorism" requires a humanitarian mandate. The war on terrorism is presented as a "Just War", which is to be fought on moral grounds "to redress a wrong suffered."

To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat.

The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an "advertising" campaign, "it gives a face to terror."

Fabricating Intelligence

The propaganda campaign has been supported by an extensive fabrication of intelligence.

Revelations regarding the controversial Downing Street Memorandum and the forged Niger uranium dossier are but the tip of the iceberg.

Known and documented prior to the invasion of Iraq, the substance of Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council was not only fabricated, it was actually based, in what constitutes a clear case of plagiarism, on a student’s text which had been "lifted" (copy and paste) from the internet:

A close textual analysis of the British Intelligence report quoted by Colin Powell in his [February 5, 2003] UN Address suggests that its UK authors had little access to first-hand intelligence sources and instead based their work on academic papers, which they selectively distorted.

The authors of the dossier are members of Tony Blair's Press Relations Office at Whitehall. Britain's Secret Service (MI6), either was not consulted, or more likely, provided an assessment that did not fit in with the politicians' argument. In essence, spin was being sold off as intelligence.

The bulk of the 19-page document (pp.6-16) had been directly copied without acknowledgement from an article in last [2002] September's Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis". The author of the piece is Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He has confirmed to me that his permission was not sought by MI6; in fact, he didn't even know about the British document until I mentioned it to him.

Concluding remarks

The so-called "War on Terrorism" is a lie.

Amply documented, the pretext to wage this war is totally fabricated.

Realities have been turned upside down. Acts of war are heralded as "humanitarian interventions" geared towards restoring ‘democracy’.

Military occupation and the killing of civilians are presented as "peace-keeping operations."

The derogation of civil liberties under the so-called "anti-terrorist legislation" is portrayed as a means to providing "domestic security" and upholding civil liberties.

Meanwhile, the civilian economy is precipitated into crisis; expenditures on health and education are curtailed to finance the military-industrial complex and the police state.

Under the American Empire, millions of people around the world are being driven into abysmal poverty, and countries are transformed into open territories.

U.S. protectorates are installed with the blessing of the so-called "international community." "Interim governments" are formed. Political puppets designated by America’s oil giants are casually endorsed by the United Nations, which increasingly performs the role of a rubber-stamp for the U.S. Administration.

Reversing the tide of war can not be limited to a critique of the US war agenda. Ultimately what is at stake is the legitimacy of the political and military actors and the economic power structures, which ultimately control the formulation, and direction of US foreign policy.

While the Bush administration implements a "war on terrorism", the evidence (including mountains of official documents) amply confirms that successive U.S. administrations have supported, abetted and harbored international terrorism.

This fact, in itself, must be suppressed because if it ever trickles down to the broader public, the legitimacy of the so-called "war on terrorism" collapses "like a deck of cards." And in the process, the legitimacy of the main actors behind this system would be threatened.

How does one effectively break the war and police state agendas? Essentially by refuting the "war on terrorism" which constitutes the very foundations of the US national security doctrine.

A war agenda is not disarmed through antiwar sentiment. One does not reverse the tide by asking President Bush: "please abide by the Geneva Convention" and the Nuremberg Charter. Ultimately a consistent antiwar agenda requires unseating the war criminals in high office as first step towards disarming the institutions and corporate structure of the New World Order.

To break the Inquisition, we must also break its propaganda, its fear and intimidation campaign, which galvanizes public opinion into accepting the "war on terrorism".

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The Globalization of Poverty " published in eleven languages. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization which hosts the critically acclaimed website: www.globalresearch.ca . He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

His most recent book is entitled: America’s "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005., http://www.globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/truth911.html

Appendix A

There is vast body of documentary evidence on the role of al Qaeda, There is growing evidence from a number of recent disclosures that the US sponsored intelligence apparatus is behind the terrorists.

1. Operation Able Danger

Official Pentagon documents reveal that the 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and 3 other hijackers were under close surveillance as part of a secret Pentagon operation more than a year prior to 9/11.

These documents largely refute the official US government narrative as presented by the 9/11 Commission.

For the past four years, we have been told by the administration of George Bush and by the official 9/11 Commission report of Chairman Thomas Kean and Executive Director Philip Zelikow that Egyptian extremist Mohammed Atta was the key player in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Atta, according to the Kean report, was the "tactical leader of the 9/11 plot". He was the pilot who on that dreadful morning flew the first plane, American Airlines 11, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. It was Atta’s face, on television and in newspapers across the world, that became the symbol of Islamic terrorism. And it was Atta’s name - not the names of any of the 18 other hijackers allegedly lead by Atta on that day - that was cited by international security researchers. Atta was, as the Kean report stresses, "the tactical commander of the operation in the United States". According to both the Bush administration and the official 9/11 Commission report, he was working on the orders of Osama Bin Laden who, from remote Afghanistan, controlled the entire operation.

Now, almost exactly four years after 9/11, the facts appear to have been turned upside down. We now learn that Atta was also connected to a top secret operation of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the US. According to Army reserve Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a top secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger had identified Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.

Able Danger was an 18-month highly classified operation tasked, according to Shaffer, with "developing targeting information for al-Qaida on a global scale", and used data-mining techniques to look for "patterns, associations, and linkages". He said he himself had first encountered the names of the four hijackers in mid-2000.

(see Daniele Ganser, Able Danger adds twist to 9/11, 9/11 Ringleader connected to secret Pentagon operation,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20050827&articleId=867

2. The Bali 2002 Bombing: Recent Disclosure

In a recent interview, former president of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid admitted that the Indonesian military and police played a complicit role in the 2002 Bali bombing.

(See http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20051014&articleId=1085)

Other reports point to links between Indonesian intelligence (BIN) and the alleged terrorist organization Jemiah Islami (JI).

Asked who he thought planted the second bomb, Mr Wahid said: "Maybe the police ... or the armed forces."

"The orders to do this or that came from within our armed forces, not from the fundamentalist people," he says.

The [Australian SBS's Dateline] program also claims a key figure behind the formation of terror group Jemaah Islamiah was an Indonesian spy.

Former terrorist Umar Abduh, who is now a researcher and writer, told Dateline Indonesian authorities had a hand in many terror groups.

"There is not a single Islamic group either in the movement or the political groups that is not controlled by (Indonesian) intelligence," he said. (see the Australian, 12 October 2005)

3. The Basra September 2005 British Covert Operation

Two British undercover "soldiers" wearing wigs and dressed in Arab clothing, were driving a car loaded with weapons and ammunition, towards the center of Basra.

The two SAS Special Forces agents were arrested by the Iraqi police authorities They were subsequently "rescued" by British forces, in a major military assault on the building where they were being detained:

"British forces used up to 10 tanks " supported by helicopters " to smash through the walls of the jail and free the two British servicemen."

The incident, which resulted in numerous civilian and police casualties, has caused "political embarrassment".

Several media reports and eyewitness accounts suggested that the SAS operatives were disguised as Al Qaeda "terrorists" and were planning to set off the bombs in Basra's central square during a major religious event.

The citizens of Basra witnessed the arrest. Civilians were killed and injured when British forces under the command of Brig Lorimer led the military assault on the prison. Al Jazeera reported the circumstances of the arrest in an interview with Fattah al-Shaykh, member of the Iraqi National Assembly:

If you really want to look for truth, then we should resort to the Iraqi justice away from the British provocations against the sons of Basra, particularly what happened today when the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the center of the city of Basra in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime. (Al Jazeera TV 20 Sept 2005).

Nobody in Basra believes that the two arrested SAS men were "working undercover against militants linked to Iran":

"The Iraqi police stopped a car with two foreigners dressed as Arabs, and full of weapons and explosives," he said. "There have been terrorist attacks and explosions in Basra - of course the police wanted to investigate.".... Mr Hakim dismissed as "propaganda" reports that the soldiers were working undercover against militants linked to Iran. Officials in Basra have called for an espionage trial for the two in an Iraqi court. British soldiers' legal immunity "does not apply when they are out of uniform", Mr Hakim said. (Mr. Hakim is a leading official in Iraq's largest Shia Muslim party, quoted in the Financial Times, 29 Sept 2005)

Thwarting the Investigation

In his capacity of Commanding Officer of the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police in Basra, Captain Ken Masters was responsible for investigating the circumstances of the arrest of two undercover elite SAS men, wearing Arab clothing, by Iraqi police in Basra. The investigation was not completed. Ken Masters died in unusual circumstances three weeks later.

Captain Ken Masters had a mandate to cooperate in his investigations, with the civilian Iraqi authorities. As part of his mandate he was to investigate "into allegations that British soldiers killed or mistreated Iraqi civilians". Specifically in this case, the inquiry pertained to the circumstances of the British assault on the prison on 19 September. The press reports and official statements suggest that the assault on the prison was authorized by the Ministry of Defense.

Was the British military blocking Captain Masters police investigation?

There were apparent disagreements between British military commanding officers and the military police officials dispatched to the war theater in charge of investigating the actions and behavior of military personnel. (The Independent 17 Oct 2005).

Was pressure put to bear on Captain Masters by the Ministry of Defense? According to Michael Keefer, the British Army led by Brig Lorimer was determined

"to remove these men from any danger of interrogation by their own supposed allies in the government the British are propping up—even when their rescue entailed the destruction of an Iraqi prison and the release of a large number of prisoners, gun-battles with Iraqi police and with Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, a large popular mobilization against the British occupying force, and a subsequent withdrawal of any cooperation on the part of the regional government—tends, if anything, to support the view that this episode involved something much darker and more serious than a mere flare-up of bad tempers at a check-point."

(See Michael Keefer, Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra? 25 September 2005,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=KEE20050925&articleId=994 )

Selected References

This text is intended to provide an overview of the key issues underlying the US war agenda. Selected references and supporting documentation are indicated below.

A comprehensive archive of articles on different dimensions of the US War is available at the website of the Centre for Research on Globalization at www.globalresearch.ca

Niloufer Bhagwat, The Security Council Resolution on Syria is a pretext for the bombing and occupation of Syria, by, November 2, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BHA20051102&articleId=1175

Michel Chossudovsky, America’s "War on Terrorism", Second edition, Global Research, 2005, 387 p.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/truth911.html

Michel Chossudovsky, Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran, May 1, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20CH20050501&articleId=66

Michel Chossudovsky, Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Resistance Movement, September 18, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20050918&articleId=967

CIA Uses German Bases to Transport Terrorists, Deutsche Welle, 27 november 2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20051127&articleId=1332

Thomas Eley, Did Big Oil participate in planning invasion of Iraq? December 11, 2005, wsws.org,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ELE20051211&articleId=1444

Chris Floyd, Sacred Terror: The Global Death Squad of George W. Bush, December 10, 2005,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FLO20051210&articleId=1434

Max Fuller, Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq, November 10, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FUL20051110&articleId=1230

Daniele Ganser, Able Danger adds twist to 9/11, 9/11 Ringleader connected to secret Pentagon operation, GlobalResearch.ca, 27 August 2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20050827&articleId=867

Seymour Hersh, Where is the Iraq war headed next? December 10, 2005, The New Yorker,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HER20051210&articleId=1436

Michael Keefer, Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra? Suspicions Strengthened by Earlier Reports, Globalresearch.ca, 25 September 2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=KEE20050925&articleId=994 )

Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter, Israel Readies Force to Strike on Nuclear Iran, December 11, 2005 , Sunday Times

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MAH20051211&articleId=1446

Serendepity, Torture and the CIA, December 10, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SER20051210&articleId=1441

Eric Waddell, The Battle for Oil, December 14, 2004, GlobalResearch.ca,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WAD20041214&articleId=311

Mike Whitney, Why Iran will lead to World War 3, GlobalResearch.ca, 9 August 2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WHI20050809&articleId=825

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6734
Cheney's Plan: Nuke Iran
Stand athwart the apocalypse, and shout: "No!"
by Justin Raimondo

A recent poll shows six in ten Americans think a new world war is coming: the same poll says about 50 percent approve of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Somewhat inexplicably, about two-thirds say nuking those two cities was "unavoidable." One can only wonder, then, what their reaction will be to this ominous news, revealed in a recent issue of The American Conservative by intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi:

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing – that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections."

Two points leap out at the reader – or, at least, this reader – quite apart from the moral implications of dropping nukes on Iran. The first is the completely skewed logic: if Iran has nothing to do with 9/11-II, then why target Tehran? As in Iraq, it's all a pretext: only this time, the plan is to use nuclear weapons. We'll wipe out the entire population of Iran's capital city because, as Paul Wolfowitz said in another context, "it's doable."

The other weird aspect of this "nuke Iran" story is the triggering mechanism: a terrorist attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11. While it is certain that our government has developed a number of scenarios for post-attack action, one has to wonder: why develop this plan at this particular moment? What aren't they telling us?

I shudder to think about it.

The more I look at it, and the more I think of it, the more I sense a monumental evil casting its shadow over the world, and I have to tell you, it makes me wonder how much more time I want to spend on this earth. In my more pessimistic moments, I doubt whether we can avoid the horrific fate that seems to await us just around the next corner, the next moment, looming over the globe like a gigantic devil stretching its wings and blotting out the sun.

It seems to me that the question of whether life is really worth living anymore is inextricably bound up with the question of whether or not these madmen can be stopped. If not, then the only alternative is to live it up while we can and laugh defiantly in the face of the apocalypse. Why write columns, why comment at all, if we can't have any effect on the outcome? On the other hand, some ask

"Surely the New York Times and the Washington Post can find a lede here: 'US has plan to nuke Tehran if another 9/11.' Can we get at least a bloody story out of this?"

Might I suggest another lede?: "Armageddon approaches." Or perhaps, for the literary-mind secularists among us: "After many a summer dies mankind."

Where oh where is the "mainstream" media on this? That's a laughable question, because the answer is heartbreakingly obvious: they are nowhere to be found, and for a very good reason. As the Valerie Plame case is making all too clear, the MSM has been a weapon in the hands of the War Party at every step on the road to World War IV. It's an American tradition. As William Randolph Hearst famously put it to an employee in the run-up to the Spanish-American conflict of 1898:

"You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

Any objective examination of the Anglo-American media's role as a megaphone for this administration's "talking points" would have to conclude that the Hearst school of journalism has been dominant since well before the invasion of Iraq. Aside from the post-9/11 hysteria that effectively swept away all pretenses of a critical stance, the MSM was well acclimated to simply reiterating the U.S. government line on matters of war and peace all through the Clinton era, when friendly media coverage of the Balkans and numerous other Clintonian interventions habituated the press corps to a certain mindset. By the time the Bush administration set out on a campaign of deception designed to lie us into invading and occupying Iraq, the MSM was largely reconciled to playing the role of the government's amen corner.

With the U.S. and British media in the pocket of the Powers That Be, what hope is there that the American people – who don't believe anything if they don't see it on television – will awaken to the danger in time? Again, in my more pessimistic moments, there doesn't seem to be any such hope: television news seems firmly in the camp of the War Party, and the "mainstream" print media also doesn't seem a likely venue for this kind of reporting.

On my more optimistic days, however, I almost believe it's possible to outflank the War Party on the media front – because the Internet is a mighty weapon that will defeat them in the end. A recent Pew study shows that this is not just a technophilic fantasy:

"The Internet continues to grow as a source of news for Americans. One-in-four (24%) list the internet as a main source of news. Roughly the same number (23%) say they go online for news every day, up from 15% in 2000; the percentage checking the Web for news at least once a week has grown from 33% to 44% over the same time period.

"While online news consumption is highest among young people (those under age 30), it is not an activity that is limited to the very young. Three-in-ten Americans ages 30-49 cite the Internet as a main source of news.

"The importance of the Web for people in their working years is even more apparent when the frequency of use is taken into account. One-third of people in their 30s say they get news online every day, as do 27% of people in their 40s. Nearly a quarter of people in their 50s get news online daily, about the same rate as among people ages 18-29."

What this means is that we can put the news the MSM won't cover – e.g., the story about Cheney's Dr. Strangelove plan to strike Iran – on the front page of Antiwar.com and potentially reach one-in-four Americans. Last month we had over 2 million readers; this month is headed toward the same range – and that's in summertime, a traditionally slow time for us. Yet we're setting new records.

This, it seems to me, is the only reason for hope: a strategy of doing an end run around the mass media. We must mount a last desperate attempt to stand athwart the apocalypse shouting "No!" The alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

Never for a minute did any of us who founded Antiwar.com imagine we would one day be front and center in a twilight struggle to protect the country and the world from such a monumental evil, and yet here we are, a band of hobbits up against all the dark powers of Mordor. Without getting any more melodramatic than is absolutely unavoidable, I can only note that we've come a long way on our quest to rid the world of this particular Ring of Power, and the battle seems to be reaching some sort of dramatic climax. As to whether or not the Cheney-neocon-War Party axis of evil will be defeated in the end, no one can confidently predict at the moment. Yet one thing does seem clear: as long as Antiwar.com is around, we have at least a fighting chance.

I want to thank each and every one of our readers who have supported us down through the years, even as I remind them that their future support is even more vitally important than ever before. Together we can beat the War Party – but not without constant vigilance. We stand on the watchtower just as long as you, our readers and supporters, keep us there. I hope and trust we will continue until the end – whatever that end may turn out to be.

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mike_whi_060204_why_russia_caved_in_.htm
February 4, 2006

Why Russia caved-in on Iran
by Mike Whitney

http://www.opednews.com

Many war-weary newshounds are probably wondering why Russia caved in at the IAEA board meeting and agreed to have Iran sent before the UN Security Council. Russia, of course, is very familiar with Iran’s nuclear program (having worked with Iran on its nuclear power projects) and fully realizes that the Mullahs are not developing nuclear weapons.

So, why would they go along with the coercive maneuvering of the United States that is so clearly designed to pave the way for war?

Obviously, Russia’s foreign minister’s comment that the referral to the UNSC is “only a warning” doesn’t adequately explain why Russia would have placed its ally in such grave danger of a preemptive attack.

So why did Russia capitulate?

It may be, in the words of the Godfather, that the Bush administration made Putin “a deal he couldn’t refuse”. For one thing, MosNews reports just yesterday that “Lukoil will replace the disgraced Halliburton” in providing fuel in Iraq. MosNews states, “Over three months beginning from April 1, LITASCO will have to deliver 180,000 tons of gasoline and 130,000 tons of diesel fuel to Iraq. After this the contract may be renewed.

Halliburton’s replacement was chosen by a tender, the results of which the Pentagon announced on March 8. The winners were six Turkish companies and the U.S. Refinery Associates which won the right to the largest contract worth $108.5 million.”

That’s a pretty hefty reward for Putin’s vote on Iran, but apparently it only scratches the surface. (We should also note the generous prizes handed out to the 6 Turkish companies. Is this Turkey’s payoff for using its bases in future military operations against Iran?)

Russia’s real goal, however, is “the securing of rights for exploration and extraction at the huge West Qurna-2 oil field.” Putin has always insisted that the Bush administration honor Saddam’s previous commitments with Lukoil. It appears now that Putin is winning that battle.

According to the Boston, Globe Lukoil president Vagit Alekperov met with Iraq’s oil minister Ibrahim al-Ulloum to firm up “an understanding” about Russia’s $6 billion contract to develop the West Qurna-2 oil field. Al-Ulloum, of course, is just following Washington’s directives in reviving the moribund Russian contract. But it is striking that Bush would surrender such an enormous trophy as one of Iraq’s main oil fields just to secure Russia’s vote.

Why?

Does the administration really need a war with Iran so desperately?

Yes.

The truth is, that even the control of oil is not nearly as critical to the US as maintaining it’s continued dominance in the exchange of oil in greenbacks. If Iran is allowed to open its oil bourse (exchange) in March and openly compete with the US’s monopoly on trading oil in petrodollars, the central banks across the globe will dump hundreds of billions of dollars overnight, and the American economy will disappear beneath the waves.

This is not fiction.

The reason the United States is the unchallenged leader of the global economic system is because it has a stranglehold on the oil trade. Even the oil itself, or the price at which it is sold, is of less importance than the means by which it is traded. The nation that controls the currency, determines the rules of the game. It forces other nations to stockpile mountains of its debt-ridden script, while Congress breezily produces oceans of red ink. America’s fat-cat bankers and corporatists are now living off the generosity of the developing world that must hold on to worthless dollars so they can purchase oil. Iran’s plan to sell its oil in petro-euros threatens to break up this massive extortion-ring and put the greenback nose-to-nose with its global competitor; the euro.

The Lukoil transaction should prove to skeptics that Washington is prepared to give up anything to prevent the opening of Iran’s oil exchange. The UN Security Council is just the last step before military operations begin.

The Bush administration is dead-set on attacking Iran and removing this existential threat to the American economy and the ongoing supremacy of the reserve currency.

Now that the case is in the Security Council, things should move ahead fairly quickly.

SteveUK2 · Joined: 19 Oct 2005 Posts: 280 Location: UK

gilipolla · Guest

Or maybe both Russia and China are too deeply married to the dollar in various ways to not want to see its sudden collapse?

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.rense.com/general67/heading.htm
Bush-Cheney Heading
For Nuclear Rendevous
At Desert One
By Webster Griffin Tarpley

Author - 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA
8-27-5

WASHINGTON DC/LOS ANGELES -- With the direct threat of military attack against Iran issued Aug. 13 by Bush, the world has entered a phase of new and acute danger of general war. Bush made the threat in an interview with Israeli television. "All options are on the table," said Bush, speaking from his estate in Crawford, Texas. Asked if that included the use of force, Bush replied: "As I say, all options are on the table. The use of force is the last option for any president and you know, we've used force in the recent past to secure our country." (Reuters, dateline Jerusalem, August 13, 2005) Bush's comments were ostensibly made in the context of the US campaign to shut down the Iranian nuclear program, but in reality came in the midst of feverish US-UK preparations for a new 9/11 of state-sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism which is intended in the intentions of the terrorist controllers in London and Washington to set the stage for the attack on Iran, as well as for martial law austerity dictatorships throughout the English-speaking world, and beyond.

A possible scenario for what is in store over the next few weeks could well include a nuclear detonation under US military auspices on the coast of the Carolinas under the cover of the anti-terrorism exercise Sudden Response 05, but blamed on Hezbollah or some other alleged Iranian asset, followed by US atomic bombing of Iranian military bases, nuclear sites, and other strategic targets, using nuclear devices of various yields. US confrontation with Russia, China, and the other powers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization would not be far behind. With that, the nuclear genie would be out of the bottle, and we would not see him confined again in our lifetimes.

With these new threats from Bush, so reminiscent of his 2002-2003 demagogy in advance of the invasion of Iraq, there could be no rational doubt that the US regime was in headlong flight forward towards war with Iran. Bush and Cheney, and their masters in the US secret government, appeared determined to repeat, on a grand scale, the fiasco of the April 1980 Operation Eagle Claw the attempt to extract the US hostages from Iran which left 8 US dead among a field of burning aircraft at the Iranian site labeled Desert One. This time, the toll would be many orders of magnitude greater.

GERMANY: "EXTREMELY DANGEROUS" "UNCONTROLLED ESCALATION"

That Bush's threats were no mere throw-away lines was shown by the blunt response just a few hours later by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who in August 2002 had been the first NATO head of government to repudiate the then-imminent Iraq war. "Take the military options off the table, since we,ve seen that they are worthless," said Schroeder in a campaign speech in Hanover. He told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag: "I consider the military option extremely dangerousI can definitely exclude that under my leadership this government would be a part of it." Instead, Schroeder spoke in favor of "patient diplomacy," and also of German-Russian reconciliation. Schroeder pointed to the evident limits of the much-touted US "superpower," noting that "in the United States, one should realize that the US might, unilaterally, win wars, but cannot win peace, as we have seen in Afghanistan, and even more so in Iraq." (BamS, August 14, 2005) German Foreign Minister Fischer warned that military operations against Iran would always bring the risk of uncontrollable escalation. (DPA, August 13)

In an irony of history, Schroeder's prompt stand against a wider war has increased the penalty for the aggression now being planned by the Bush-Cheney regime and its backers. If the US attacks Iran before the September 18 German elections, Schroeder might be swept back into office, given the clear inability of his feckless opposition to resist US dictation. When Wolfgang Schaeubele, one of Schroeder's key opponents, visited Bush, Bush told him that "his greatest concern is Iran." However, Bush reassured his guest that there would be no US attack on Iran before the German vote on September 18. (Frankfurter Rundschau, August 18 )

The British Foreign Office was compelled to align itself with Schroeder's critique. The Foreign Office spokesman stated: "Our position is clear and has been made very, very clear by the Foreign Secretary. We do not think there are any circumstances where military action would be justified against Iran. It does not form part of British foreign policy." (Sunday Times, August 14, 2005) Thus, according to all present indications, the US would go into Iran utterly alone, without even the window dressing of a sham coalition of the bribed and the blackmailed.

PUTIN: DON'T LOWER THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD

Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his own response to Bush from the deck of the Russian battle cruiser Peter the Great in the Barents Sea. Putin's warning addressed the Cheney-Rumsfeld reliance on low-yield nuclear weapons as a key component of US strategy. "I think that lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear arms is a dangerous trend, because somebody may feel tempted to use nuclear weapons," Putin told journalists. "If that happens, the next step can be taken -- more powerful nuclear arms can be used, which may lead to a nuclear conflict. This extremely dangerous trend is in the back of the mind of some politicians and military officials," the president said. (Interfax, August 17) This can be read as a nuclear counterthreat in response to Bush's "all options are on the table." The threatening overtone took on consistency over the following hours. Putin flew in a Tupolev-160 strategic bomber with Major General Anatoly Zhikharev, deputy commander of the Russian strategic air force. With Putin on board, this plane was one of two which successfully flight-tested what Russia described as "a new, high-precision, long-range cruise missile." Putin had his picture taken in a flight helmet and, in contrast to Bush's ludicrous "Mission Accomplished" bluster, announced that the cruise missiles had hit their target. A new Russian RSM-54 ICBM, called SS-N-23 Skiff by NATO, was fired from the submerged nuclear sub Yekaterinburg in the Barents Sea and also hit its target on the Kura testing range on the Kamchatka peninsula. All this was in the context of maneuvers by the surface warships and subs of the Russian Northern Fleet.

Russia was also joining with China in Peace Mission 05, an unprecedented joint exercise in the Far East between August 18 and August 26, evidently directed against US-UK meddling in the region. The political basis of this cooperation against hegemonism had been outlined in the July 15 Russo-Chinese joint statement on the world strategic situation. At the same time, intelligence agencies of Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus held a drill involving the prevention of terror attacks on energy assets. Between August 22 and August 30 the combined air defense forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States will drill warding off air attacks around Astrakhan at the northern end of the Caspian Sea. The hypothetical aggressor was, once again, clearly the United States. Russian military sources indicated that the US and NATO had so far not mounted military exercises on this scale in multiple regions. The message of all this is that Russia's military comeback has succeeded to a remarkable degree, with more to come: Putin also announced a 22% increase in the Russian military budget, which is still dwarfed overall by the US. Russia, however, has been able to maintain substantial superiority in a limited number of strategically decisive categories. As the US has grown weaker under catastrophic neocon misleadership, Putin has grown more assertive: On August 17, Putin met with King Abdullah of Jordan in Sochi and called for a fixed timetable for the gradual departure of foreign forces from Iraq the theme Bush sees as taboo. Putin also called for the convocation before the end of the year of an international conference to stabilize Iraq another Bush bugaboo. US intentions in the Far East had been made clear by attack dog Zbigniew Brzezinski in a July 29 article in the Moscow Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which boasted that the Russian presence in that region was about to collapse. During August, Pakistan was holding Tri-Service maneuvers along its border with Iran, thus possibly creating a diversion to complicate Iran's situation.

WAR PSYCHOSIS IN WASHINGTON

For weeks, top US officials foolishly ignoring rumblings from many quarters around the world -- have given free rein to their obsession with Iran. When a few days after the London 7/7 attacks, a bomb in Israel claimed the lives of two victims, Rumsfeld placed the blame on Hezbollah and Iran. On August 9, Rumsfeld and outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers complained that Iran was responsible for the availability in Iraq of new types of shaped charge explosive devices, which had played a key roll in the heavy US losses of early August. Press accounts alleged that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards had created a special terror unit for anti-US operations inside Iraq, featuring the use of sophisticated and deadly shaped charges which were capable of easily knocking out the US Abrams tanks. According to one version, the Iranian commander of this irregular warfare group is a certain Abu Mustafa al Sheibani, who leads a score of teams of Iraqi Shiites and Hezbollah fighters who are expert in using the shaped charges. The overall commander of the effort is identified as Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani. (Michael Wane, "Inside Iran's Secret War for Iraq," Time, August 21, 2005) The propaganda value of such stories for whipping up an anti-Iran war psychosis is obvious.

In an article appearing August 1, Rumsfeld went far towards declaring Moslems in general as inferior beings against which crusades could and should be waged. According to Rumsfeld, the terrorists "seek to destroy things they could never build in 1,000 years and kill people they could never persuade." (London Financial Times, August 1, 2005) These statements were accompanied by a campaign of warmongering hysteria in the reactionary and neofascist media. Arnaud de Borchgrave, the Belgian count who runs United Press International, wrote on August 16 that Iran is responsible for having made Iraq "hell for the US," and that the current Jaafari regime represents a step towards a "greater Iranian Shiite empire." In de Borchgrave's view, the "military option for air strikes is on the table." (UPI, August 16, 2005)

THE GIRALDI SIGNAL PIECE

The acute danger of a US nuclear sneak attack on Iran had been indicated by a signal piece contributed by CIA veteran Philip Giraldi to the magazine The American Conservative. Giraldi is the partner of retired CIA operations man Vince Cannistraro, and can be presumed to be drawing on high-level leaks by those opposed to the Bush-Cheney war scenario. Giraldi wrote:

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." (The American Conservative, August 1, 2005; reprinted by Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, July 25, 2005)

The notion of a massive nuclear and conventional attack on Iran which is so graphically evoked here should not obscure the other, more immediately important, element of this warning: Cheney is counting on "another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." It is evident that such a determined warmonger as Cheney is hardly likely to leave the coming of that indispensable terrorist provocation to chance: the terror event that provides the pretext for war must be an integral part of the plan being pushed through the US bureaucracy by the secret government, their spokesmen Bush and Cheney, and the neocon faction in general. We are dealing in short with state sponsored terrorism.

As for the military side, US nuclear sneak attack plans have been in the works for some years under the supervision of the utopian Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In the summer of 2004, Rumsfeld promulgated an "Interim Global Strike Alert Order." "Global strike" is Pentagon jargon for pre-emptive attack or, in plain English, a sneak attack. Under this order, the US STRATCOM (Strategic Command, corresponding to the Cold War Strategic Air Command) in Nebraska revamped its posture to be ready to deliver nuclear and conventional attacks on states alleged to be developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The plans to deal with an alleged threat from North Korea and/or Iran go under the designation CONPLAN (or contingency plan) 8022-22. This planning was ordered by Bush in a January 2003 secret directive in order to provide a "full-spectrum" global strike, including notably "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives." A centerpiece of CONPLAN 8022-22 is the so-called bunker-busting nuclear projectile, a specially configured earth-penetrating bomb designed to destroy deeply buried facilities, command bunkers, and the like. The entire package was foreshadowed in the pre-emptive war clauses of Bush's National Security Strategy published in September 2002, supposedly in response to the 9/11 events. In December 2002, the Pentagon's quadrennial Nuclear Posture Review ordered STRATCOM to prepare for greater flexibility in nuclear attack options against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and China quite an enemies, list.

According to Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had been reorganized to be able to carry out such short-notice pre-emptive attacks. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson boasted that his headquarters was the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and were ready to execute an attack "in half a day or less." In July 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the progress made on CONPLAN 8022-22, gloating that "the president charged you to 'be ready to strike at any moment's notice in any dark corner of the world' [and] that's exactly what you've done." The May 15, 2005 Washington Post article by William Arkin detailing CONPLAN 8022-22 was an important signal piece and would take an important place in a chronology of the current escalation.

CONPLAN 8022-22 appears to ignore the messy experience of defeat in Iraq and rather chooses to harken back to a mythologized version of the Afghan campaign of 2001-2002. It calls for nuclear and conventional air strikes, with limited use of Special Forces teams: the result is practically no "boots on the ground" or "follow-on ground operations," according to published reports. Afghanistan was subdued in 2001-2002 by means of air power to enforce deals made on the ground by CIA negotiators with local warlords and druglords. Something similar involving bribery of Iraqi generals was tried on the way to the bloody morass of present-day Iraq. The CONPLAN 8022-22 strategy is utopian enough to enrage any military traditionalist concerned about logistics, depth, and political factors. It is Blitzkrieg, with the utopian elements accentuated.

Wayne Madsen reports information he describes as coming from the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German foreign intelligence service, according to which the nuclear and conventional bombing campaigns already detailed will be supplemented by infrastructure sabotage and other acts of terrorism by the People's Mujaheddin (Mujaheddin e Khalq, MEK), US Special Operations units, and other marauders. (Despite recent talk of a US "war on terror," the Pentagon is not reticent about using the MEK, who are still on the State Department list of terrorist organizations, as auxiliaries. In fact, some of the MEK personnel have been personally rehabilitated by none other than General Geoffrey Miller, one of the principal felons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.) The goals of the US operations include inciting a rebellion in the Khuzestan province of southwestern Iran, the site of many of Iran's oil fields and refineries, most probably including the critical Kharg Island tanker terminal. The majority of this area's population are Shiite Arabs. According to one scenario, the US would intervene in response to an appeal from the phantomatic Al Ahwaz Popular Democratic Front, whose program would include secession from Iran and the declaration of an independent Arab state calling itself Ahwaz. This simulacrum of Ahwaz corresponds to the new state called simply "Arabistan" in the standard Bernard Lewis Plan for the Balkanization of the Middle East. (see map). Also in correspondence with the Bernard Lewis Plan, the CIA is agitating among Kurds and Turkmen along the border with Iraq and Turkey and among Baluchis along the border with Pakistan by promising them their own balkanized homelands. The Persians, according to this report, would be relegated to an oil-poor "Irani triangle" (or "Iranistan," in classic Bernard Lewis Plan terminology) around Teheran, Isfahan, and Qom. According to the BND, the US Navy is tapping Iranian undersea cables, while US Task Force 121 covert action teams are swarming over sensitive points inside Iran. The presence of US special forces teams on Iranian territory has been an open secret since the beginning of 2005, along with numerous violations of US airspace by US military aircraft. (See <http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/>http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/, August 10, 2005)

US WAR AIMS: THE BERNARD LEWIS PLAN

To clarify these points, a map reflecting the Bernard Lewis Plan for the Balkanization of the Middle East is included with this article. This map is based on one published in Linda de Hoyos, Derivative Assassination: Who Killed Indira Ghandi? (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985), with some changes. Bernard Lewis served during World War II as an agent of the British Arab Bureau, the imperialist agency charged with keeping the Arab world weak so as to preserve London's domination. Bernard Lewis is associated with two principal ideas about the Moslem and Arab world. The first is that the real basis of Islam is not at all to be found in the luminous Baghdad Renaissance of the Caliph Haroun al Rashid around 800 AD, in its time the most advanced civilization in the world, but is to be sought rather in the benighted irrationalism of al Ghazali and his Destruction of Philosophy the world of dervishes, sheikhs, and necromancers. Over more than a century, the British have sought to control the Arab and Islamic sense of identity by finding, publicizing, and glorifying the most backward and self-destructive tendencies in one and a half millennia of Moslem history, attempting to accredit these as the true essence of Islam. Bernard Lewis, glorification of Moslem irrationalism thus prepares the way for the ideology attributed to al Qaeda. Lewis, second idea is that the existing Arab countries are illegitimate, and need to be carved up into a crazy quilt of ridiculous petty states who will be unable to threaten any important interest of Anglo-American imperialism. In a 1992 Foreign Affairs article in which he surveyed the region in the aftermath of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, Lewis offered the following prophecy of the coming Lebanization of the entire Middle East on the lines of the post-1975 Lebanese civil war:

"The eclipse of pan-Arabism has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something better, truer and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates"as happened in Lebanon"into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."

Of course, Bernard Lewis only repeats with his usual arid banality the geopolitical nostrums which his British imperialist predecessors had expressed with far greater panache. T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), for example, who was a far more colorful operative than Lewis, developed similar ideas in an October 29, 1918 meeting with Lord Cecil, Lord Curzon, Lord Balfour, General Smuts, and Mark Sykes of the Foreign Office, who helped draw up the map of the modern Middle East in the infamous Sykes-Picot deal. At that time the British effort was to break up and balkanize a Caliphate that actually existed, with its center in Constantinople. Lawrence stated:

"If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear, then the Caliphate by the common consent of Islam would fall to the family of the prophet, the present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca. Hussein's activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states he would set up to succeed the Turks would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If properly handled the Arab states would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to combine against an outside force."

In other words, the eternal British mantra of divide and conquer, now embraced with giddy enthusiasm by fanatical parvenu neocons, greedy barbarian Bushmen, and cost-plus arrivistes along the Potomac.

The Bernard Lewis Plan represents the real US-UK war aims in the Middle East. This map is what Appalachian poor whites, no-future rural youth, and black and Hispanic ghetto victims are dying for in Iraq. The hogwash spouted by neocons about democracy, or Bush's pledge to bring reform and modernization to Arab societies, are cynical subterfuges to achieve this goal. In the light of this analysis, the basic purpose of Bush's Iraq invasion was quite simply the destruction of that society, and the deliberate provoking of a three-way civil war. This is, after all, what we are observing empirically. Maybe it is now clear why, despite an alleged $20 billion in reconstruction funds available, there is so little electricity in Baghdad.

THE WAR PLANS FOR IRAN

According to one high-ranking retired US military officer, a warning has been issued inside the Pentagon about a large-scale terrorist attack in the US around the fourth anniversary of 9/11 on September 11, 2005. (EIR, August 16, 2005) According to this source, US CENTCOM (Central Command), SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and STRATCOM (Strategic Command) were asked what their capabilities against Iran would be. CENTCOM reported that it was bogged down in Iraq and had nothing to spare. SOCOM replied that it could mount raids inside Iran, but these would not be sufficient to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program, and might include losses so heavy as to be politically unacceptable. STRATCOM offered a target list for nuclear attack. According to this source, the reluctance of the US military to cross the nuclear threshold with a sneak attack was great, with key generals "highly resistant" to such a move. This source implied that the center of support for US nuclear aggression against Iran was in INSCOM, the Intelligence and Security Command, the home of utopian psychological warfare strategists and assorted Strangeloves. (EIR, August 16, 2005) Generally speaking, INSCOM and SOCOM, with their old boy networks and interfaces with CIA, DIA, NSA, etc., are the prime suspects in the terror provocations now looming.

The US campaign which thus shapes up has many of the characteristics of a punitive expedition, The US would bomb the bases of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, along with the nuclear facilities at Bushehr, Isfahan, and related locations. But published reports also indicate that the Pentagon utopians feel that they will also need to seize control of the areas where the laboratories, research facilities, factories, universities, and reactors are located, in order to ensure their complete destruction. The utter devastation of these areas might require as much as one month. After this, the US forces would leave most of Iran immediately, except perhaps for some advisers attached to the Ahwaz forces and other rebels. It will thus will be a campaign of pure vandalism and destruction, designed to push Iran back into the Stone Age. It will aim at the destruction of modern civilization. This will be the main thrust, and not any neocon slogans about democracy, modernization, women's rights or other Orwellian lies.

The war party in Washington was shocked by the July 8 demand of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that the US establish a firm timetable for vacating the Uzbek and Kyrgyz bases in central Asia which were extorted by Bush from Putin on September 11, 2001. On July 29, President Karimov of Uzbekistan had given the US an ultimatum to get out of his country within 180 days, meaning by January 29, 2006. As Sovietologist Stephen Cohen noted on WTOP radio in Washington DC soon afterwards, this represented the first rollback of US-UK expansionism into the former Soviet sphere since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. On August 2, the Russian government newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta suggested that, once the US left, Russia would take over this key airbase. It was also clear that the US was shopping all over the region for bases from which to attack Iran and other states. In this connection, a Russian newspaper suggested that Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, who shares a border with Iran, was ready to grant the US a base or perhaps even two. But Aliyev's top international affairs adviser denied it, and indicated that his country was not interested in joining US moves against Iran. Central Asia is beginning to resemble the Balkans of the pre-1914 or 1939-41 phases, with the great powers jostling each other for advantage as hostilities loom closer.

Despite the limited ground forces which the Pentagon utopians imagine they will need to vandalize Iran, the US forces in neighboring Iraq will nevertheless require reinforcement during the time of operations in Iran. There may be insurrections among the Iraqis, counterattacks across the border by the Iranians, and the like. The most probably means to accomplish a buildup of 20,000 to 30,000 US troops in Iraq will be available in the time between October 15 and December 15. Anecdotal reports of individual servicemen having their leaves cancelled for this approximate time frame have been received. US military spokesmen have already referred to their plans for a "plus-up" of their numerical strength during this period, allegedly because of the need to protect the October 15 constitutional referendum and the December 15 national elections. But that will be a pretext, a deception. Indeed, all such US troop strength projections are based on nothing but deception, as in the case of Rumsfeld's July 27 visit to Iraq to promise some form of troop reduction during 2006. These statements are calculated to deceive US voters in advance of the (scheduled) November 2006 US Congressional election, but above all to deceive the Iranian leadership. They are also designed to fool US soldiers, giving them the mirage of light at the end of the tunnel in their personal predicament. Their truth content is equivalent to that of certain protestations of mutual friendship made during May and early June of 1941 by Hitler and Stalin. The US government and mass media are currently operating in a total wartime propaganda mode. At the New York Times, for example, the despicable tradition of Judith Miller, Iraq war stenographer for the neocon regime, showed itself alive and well, as Richard Bernstein attempted to write off the German warnings as a mere election ploy by Schroeder. "No country, including the United States, is making serious military threats against Iran," wrote the mendacious Bernstein in the face of all reality. (NYT, August 16, 2005)

MEDIA BLACKOUT

An example of the US covert buildup with active press complicity and lying came in the August 18 edition of The Washington Post. Here we are informed by staff writer Bradley Graham that 700 members of the 1st battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division will be going to Iraq soon. The deployment will be "to bolster prison operations," wrote Graham, who also cited Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable as saying that "The basic fact driving this deployment is the steady rise of the prison population. There need to be some additional resources devoted to this." Elsewhere in the article we read that the troops will "not necessarily provide prison guards but rather engage in a number of detention-related operations, such as securing the area around a prison compound or transporting detainees from one prison to another." To see the absurdity of this cover story, we need only recall that paratroopers are by definition among the most highly trained elite shock troops, whose main purpose is to carry out offensive operations behind the lines of an enemy. To use them for defensive operations is a waste. Unless the Pentagon generals have gone mad as hatters on the tactical plane as well as the strategic one, they would know that the many hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to train a paratrooper will be quickly lost if that trooper is required to act for any length of time as a prison guard, detainee convoy escort, or garrison soldier around a prison. Paratroopers must train as paratroopers or they soon cease to be paratroopers and become useless. These paratroopers and others being shipped to Iraq are earmarked for use in the upcoming attack on Iran, the only possible offensive use for such troops at the present time. The US press is now full of falsifications of this puerile character.

Pentagon planners are aware that Iran would respond to a foreign invasion with an array of asymmetrical warfare techniques. But they may not realize how aggressive Iran might be when facing attack. The US has no monopoly on preventive attacks. The Taliban had few opportunities for preventive attacks. Saddam Hussein, possibly because of his long-standing ties to the US, never undertook preventive action during Operation Desert Shield in late 1990, when US forces in northern Saudi Arabia were very weak, and his passivity probably continues to disorient US planners to this very day. Iranian officials have proclaimed repeatedly that they are not Iraq, and will not resign themselves to an exclusively defensive posture if hostilities are imminent. And since the US has already committed multiple acts of war against Iran with teams on the ground and overflights, international law will be on the Iranian side.

IRANIAN COUNTERMEASURES

How might Iran respond to a US attack? An obvious measure would be to step up the flow of bombs, guns, and fighters into Iraq. But the main Iranian card is that country's long Persian Gulf coast. This narrow seaway is of course the oil aorta of the world, and Iran would have many operations to sever it. Iran is thought to possess an array of missiles ranging from obsolete Chinese Silkworms to ultra-modern Russian 3M-82 Moskit (called SS-N-Sunburn by NATO) and even the SS-NX-26 Yakhonts sea-skimming cruise missiles. The Sunburn, for example, has been designed for the express purpose of sinking US aircraft carriers, and could also destroy supertankers. Even artillery pieces and tank cannon could become interdicting factors when deployed in the rough territory along the northern coast of the Gulf. A few hulks scuttled in the Straits of Hormuz could block all traffic as totally as did the freighters sunk by Nasser in the Suez canal in 1956. And then there are mines. A few Iranian mines set adrift in the Gulf in 1987 caused the maritime insurance premiums for tankers to rise so sharply that the Emir of Kuwait was forced to re-flag his ships under US registry so as to procure US escorts and minesweepers. Deliveries destined mainly for Europe, Japan and China would be cut off, and the economies of these countries would be severely curtailed. The oil price would rise into the ionosphere, with the mythical Hubbert's peak nowhere in sight. The US would view the results with some Schadenfreude, since powerful economic and strategic rivals would be dealt stunning blows, even as a wholly artificial demand for dollars would emerge as nations scrambled to pay their imported oil bills. But the constriction of Gulf oil traffic would be a prelude to the thermodynamic collapse of the world economy.

Finally, there is no guarantee that Iran would imitate the restraint shown by Saddam Hussein, who never so far as is known contemplated attacks on targets located on US territory.

As for the US forces engaged in Iran, they might quickly find themselves in an extraordinarily critical situation, somewhat along the lines of Mogadishu in 1993, or like the British at Saratoga. If the Iranian human wave assaults of the Iran-Iraq war are any indication, significant parts of the Iranian population may prove willing to wage a form of people's war against the invaders. At worst, the US forces might face a fate similar to that of the German army in Romania in the closing months of 1944 annihilation. Responsible US military leaders must act now to prevent such a needless catastrophe.

The Pentagon has a trick of flying dying soldiers out of theatre and not counting them in the Iraq casualty statistics even if they expire a few moments after their airplane has left the ground. Some reckonings of actual US deaths as a result of Iraq operations range between 7,000 and 9,000, with part of the discrepancy due to this practice. (Brian Harring, The Harring Report, TBRNews.org) US deserters must be approaching 6,000, with many of them taking the last available chance to make a run for it when their planes land at Shannon Airport in Ireland for refueling. Cases of documented fragging have now surfaced. These factors, plus the difficulty of attracting recruits to be sent into the Iraqi shooting gallery, add up to the collapse of US land forces Army and Marines by early 2006 at the latest.

ZARQAWI: A CLASSIC FALSE FLAG COUNTERGANG

Inside Iraq, the US-UK coalition has been cynically employing terrorism as a counterinsurgency tactic. These operations have been developed in accordance with the British colonial doctrine of General Frank Kitson, the author of such classics as Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace Keeping and Gangs and Counter-Gangs. These speak to the heart of false flag operational doctrine. When Kitson found anti-British nationalism developing in Kenya during the time of the Mau-Mau, he deliberately created false flag units which, presenting themselves as Mau-Mau, committed the most unspeakable atrocities. The effect was to discredit the nationalists and slow down the country's progress towards independence. As I noted in 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism, the Zarqawi operation in Iraq is a US-UK asset. Zarqawi is manifestly a false flag countergang, tasked to carry kidnappings and grisly murders as necessary for the purpose of discrediting and demonizing the opposition to continued occupation.

The average person around the world might well be astounded that the neocon administration in Washington, who never learned the lesson of Vietnam, have also been unable to learn the lesson of Iraq. The neocons would assert that they are acting on the lessons of Iraq, which for them add to the thesis that the US is losing in Iraq because of infiltration of weapons, supplies, and foreign fighters through the famously porous borders of Syria and Iran. This amounts to a psychotic flight forward, in which the neocons hope to escape from the problem of military defeat and the breakdown of the US land forces by courting a larger military defeat and the accelerated disintegration of US land forces.

The attitude of Russia and to some extent of China towards a US invasion of Iran represents a giant question mark. There is every reason to think that, since the fall of the Shah, the USSR and then Russia have been determined to prevent the US occupation of Iran, especially northern Iran and the Caspian Sea coast, the possession of which would give London and Washington the opportunity to project their meddling deep into new areas of central Asia. In his Carter-era study entitled Hostage to Khomeini (New York: Benjamin Franklin House, c. 1980), Mother Jones columnist Robert Dreyfuss wrote that the decisive factor in blocking the US special forces action at Desert One in April 1980 was a massive show of force over that site by the Soviet Air Force. According to one version cited by Dreyfuss, it was Soviet bombs, and not an accidental collision, which caused the conflagration that ended that mission. Today there are teams of Russian technicians at Bushehr, and Russia has reportedly installed a mobile system of ground to air missiles to defend the reaction from possible US or Israeli strikes. The implementation of CONPLAN 8022-22 would almost certainly cause fatalities among the Russian personnel involved in these activities. Will Russia prove more willing to tolerate a US presence in Iran, or the deaths of her citizens, than the USSR had been? We may soon find out, and they results may be anything but edifying.

IN SEARCH OF A PRETEXT FOR WAR

In order to wage war, the Anglo-Americans must have a pretext that will allow the controlled corporate media to portray them as the aggrieved parties, the victims of aggression. The model is the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, or Hitler's Gleiwitz radio station massacre, which provided the cover story for his September 1, 1939 attack. After six months of sending special forces teams and aircraft into Iran, this is of course a hard case to argue, but the American people generally do not know about the illegal incursions, and no lie is too big for the media.

A duo of military madmen have come forward with one approach to destroying Iran as a modern state. They are Lt. General Thomas McInerney, assistant vice chief of staff of the Air Force and director for the Defense Performance Review, and Army Maj. General Paul Vallely, former deputy commanding general, Pacific. Vallely also bills himself as the senior military commentator of Fox News. In their book <http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0895260662>Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror, these two develop the following lunatic scenario for dealing with Iran:

"The United States must prepare to approach the UN Security Council with a draft resolution for a total economic embargo on Iran, the seizing of Iranian assets (to be held in trust for future Iranian government), and a strict naval quarantine in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The United Nations would lift the embargo only when the Iran government dismantles its nuclear weapons program under the supervision of international inspections. Libya (and before Libya, South Africa) has given Iran an example to follow on how to dismantle a nuclear weapons program in a way that meets international standards of verification. Iran would be required to surrender or destroy all equipment needed to produce fissionable materials (highly enriched uranium and plutonium), all long-range ballistic missiles, and all cruise missiles; release all documents related to its nuclear weapons program; and expel all foreign scientists, technicians, and engineers involved in nuclear weapons design, development, and production. Because the French or Russians are likely to veto " or, at least, threaten to veto " such a Security Council resolution, the United States should be ready to impose these conditions on Iran with a coalition of our own." (As excerpted in National Review.)

The method is the same as Iraq use the UN as a fig leaf for acts of war if possible, otherwise repudiate any notion of international law and act unilaterally, using a group of petty states as a cloak. The proposed closing of the Straits of Hormuz would of course represent a major act of war, and would be seen clearly as such by Europe, Japan, and China, who depend on Persian Gulf oil. Clearly some other approach will be required.

TERRORISM UNDER THE COVER OF EXERCISES AND DRILLS

That approach is to create a pretext for war using state sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism on a scale larger the previous exercise of this type on September 11, 2001. Giraldi states above that Cheney's planning includes "another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." Since the ruling clique manifestly wants war, they are not going to leave such an attack to chance; they are going to furnish themselves, with their own guaranteed apparatus. One variant, already the object of numerous rumors and chatter around Washington, is a "new 9/11" attack against several major US cities, including New York and Washington. A possible occasion might be the anniversary day of September 11, 2005. To be fully effective, the attacks would have to be attributable to an Iranian-backed grouping, most likely Hezbollah, which is considered by the US an Iranian asset. Hezbollah, a mass political party in Lebanon, is big enough to allow a considerable number of patsies and double agents to be housed or at least sheep-dipped there.

The synthetic terror event required by the Bush-Cheney clique and its masters is likely to be conducted through the US military and intelligence apparatus under the cover of a terror drill or a war exercise. Since even those parts of the 9/11 truth movement who have talked the most about military drills have not sufficiently clarified this matter, a word of explanation is required.

If we catalogue each coup d,etat, high-level political assassination, destabilization, war provocation, and spectacular terrorist event on a world scale over the past 50 years, we will find that almost all of them have been conducted or conduited in whole or in part through the military/intelligence apparatus of the state involved. In many cases, the cover story which has allowed this to be done has taken the form of a military or terrorism maneuver or exercise which closely resembled the actual event which followed, but which masqueraded as a mere drill up to the very last moment. For example, the US Operation Mongoose, which on the surface had to do with the assassination of Fidel Castro, appears to have functioned as a cover story for operations leading to the assassination of President Kennedy. On the day after John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to assassinate President Reagan, there was scheduled a presidential succession exercise, presumably one of the Nine Lives series. This is discussed in my book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington DC: EIR, 1992; reprinted Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2004).

9/11 itself offers the greatest density of war drills and terror drills seen so far. These included Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Vigilance, Northern Guardian, Tripod II, and a National Reconnaissance office drill. The publication of William M. Arkin's Code Names (Hanover NH: Steerforth Press, 2005) has added Global Guardian to this list. Global Guardian is important since it establishes beyond doubt what I argued in 9/11 Synthetic Terror: namely that one of the main ingredients of the 9/11 plot was an option for a thermonuclear confrontation with Russia and possibly other states. A recent posting on cooperativeresearch.org notes that Global Guardian also had included some simulation of a rogue network interfering in the command and control of strategic assets a kind of nuclear coup:

A 1998 Defense Department newsletter reported that for several years Stratcom had been incorporating a computer network attack (CNA) into Global Guardian. The attack involved Stratcom "red team" members and other organizations acting as enemy agents, and included attempts to penetrate the Command using the Internet and a "bad" insider who had access to a key command and control system. The attackers "war dialed" the phones to tie them up and sent faxes to numerous fax machines throughout the Command. They also claimed they were able to shut down Stratcom's systems. Reportedly, Stratcom planned to increase the level of computer network attack in future Global Guardian exercises., [<http://www.iwar.org.uk/infocon/dtic-ia/Vol2_No1.pdf>IAnewsletter, 6/98]

The bad" insider points towards the invisible government's 9/11 threat to launch the war of civilizations in the nuclear dimension should Bush refuse to unleash it on the conventional plane. Details about these exercises are found in my 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005) As I try to show, some of these maneuvers involved sending US Air Force fighter interceptors to Alaska and Northern Canada so as to reduce the probability that these planes would be able to prevent the aircraft or other flying objects from hitting the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. These maneuvers also sowed confusion, with fake blips inserted on radar screens manned by loyal officers, and military and commercial aircraft masquerading as hijacked planes. This use of maneuvers on 9/11 is consistent with the LIHOP (Let It Happen on Purpose) or perhaps HIHOP (Helped It Happen on Purpose) interpretation of 9/11 which has been ably defended by Michael Ruppert. These maneuvers can be compared to the Fletcher Prouty character being sent to the South Pole just at the time of the Kennedy assassination in Oliver Stone's JFK.

But, when we come to Global Guardian, Amalgam Virgo, the plane hijacking exercise under whose overall aegis 9/11 was manifestly prepared over a period of months and years, and to such specific exercises as the 9/11 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) drill involving a hijacked aircraft hitting that agency's own headquarters, the terror drill mimics the actual attacks so closely that the drill must be seen as the deliberate camouflage of the attack. Modern military and security bureaucracies involve officers sitting in front of consoles in war rooms and situation rooms for hours on end. If there is to be state sponsored terrorism, some of the terror operations have to be prepared using those very consoles. Some of the officers present may support the coup, assassination, provocation, or terror plot. Some may be indifferent or simply unwitting. Some might actively oppose the plot and sabotage it if they knew what was coming. Outside agencies of unknown orientation may also be watching. Thus, a drill designed so as to be practically congruent with the terror attack tremendously facilitates the work of the plotters, faction. If a loyal officer asks the coup plotter sitting next to him what he is doing, the coup plotter can cite the code name of the drill, and also note that the loyal officer does not possess the proper security clearance needed to know any more. In other words, war drills and terror drills are the keys to making the terror attacks happen on purpose through the state apparatus of the relevant country. They are one key reason why any explanation of 9/11 short of invisible government MIHOP (i.e., that the US invisible government made 9/11 happen on purpose) is inadequate.

These basic facts were illustrated once again in London on July 7, 2005. Scotland Yard knew in advance that these attacks were coming, as shown through the warnings to Netanyahu and, presumably, other visiting bigwigs. The long-range preparation of the London explosions was carried out under the aegis of a trio of exercises: Atlantic Blue for the UK, Topoff 3 for the US, and Triple Play for Canada. These dealt with bomb attacks on the London Underground system at the same time that an important international conference was taking place in the UK in this case, the meeting of the G-8 in Gleneagles, Scotland. The drill apparently included a biowar attack on the conference, a detail that seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor. The immediate cover for the London 7/7 events was by all accounts the simulation being conducted by Peter Power and Visor Consultants, which involved bombs going off at pretty much the same stations at the same times that the explosions actually occurred. The Visor Consultants drill may well have involved personnel on the ground who thought they were participating in a legally sanctioned simulation, but who were really performing actions which led to the explosions. In this way, drills can help to produce the destructive effects associated with the terror attack. They can also transform unwitting employees into patsies, some of whom can pay for their naivete with their lives. These may or may not be the same persons as the patsies who are ultimately accused of being responsible.

CASE STUDY: SUDDEN RESPONSE 05

With these facts in mind, let us turn to the following two items. The first is an article from the Winston-Salem Journal of March 18, 2005. The second is a press release from the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) issued June 29, 2005. Both have to do with operation Sudden Response 05, a nuclear terrorism drill which began August 17, 2005.

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=
WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MG
Article&cid=1031781660453

Winston-Salem Journal

Friday, March 18, 2005

N.C. sites to be part of summer terrorism drill

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SHALLOTTE - The largest terrorism drill in North Carolina history is being planned for August and will include a mock attack on the Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal in Brunswick County.

Officials said Wednesday the drill will stretch from Fort Bragg to Morehead City in the state's central coast area to Brunswick County on the southeastern coast.

Emergency and law-enforcement units from Virginia to South Carolina have been invited to participate, as have those from the seven counties that surround Fort Bragg. Participation by military personnel and equipment will hinge on their availability.

The exercise is thought to be the first to test the new National Response Plan that takes effect next month and requires coordination among local, state and federal officials in terrorism and emergency response.

The idea came from Fort Bragg and the FBI, said Andy Albright, an exercise facilitator and civilian employee of the Coast Guard in Wilmington. Other military bases and state and local agencies were invited to join.

Planning for the drill has been going on for a year, Albright said.

The exercise is to begin with a weapons of mass destruction drill at Fort Bragg with some of the perpetrators escaping. Other events will occur over the next three days at or near other military bases in eastern North Carolina, at the State Port in Morehead City and in the Pamlico Sound.

There will be a May 17 workshop in Morehead City to help prepare those who will participate and a July exercise to test communications before the August events, Albright said.

Randy Thompson, Brunswick County's emergency services director, said it has been 31/2 years since local emergency management has tested its response to a situation at Sunny Point.

The last time was when a boat loaded with munitions caught fire and burned at the terminal, the largest military munitions shipping point in the United States.

http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.
showstory&storyid=C9BFBBAC-F3CA-BD2E-008C7B34AFE33114

NorthCom Press Release

Exercise to focus on nuclear terror scenario

Posted Jun 29, 2005 at 1:00:PM MDT

FORT MONROE, Va. -- Here's the scenarioA seafaring vessel transporting a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the warhead off the ship to detonate it. Is this really a possibility?

Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) here is planning its next exercise on the premise that this crisis is indeed plausible.

Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is intended to train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence Management operations in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV's response to a nuclear detonation.

Some of this year's objectives for SR05 are to refine nuclear incident Concept of Operations, produce a CM Operation Order, refine command post set-up procedures and maintain situational awareness of multiple CM incidents.

The Sudden Response exercise has been held at Quantico, Va., in the past, but has been moved to Fort Monroe to maximize command post training time. The senior leadership felt that it was more important to accomplish training instead of losing up to a day and a half in travel time, said Paul Deflueri, J7 Lead Exercise Planner. "This will allow us to still meet our training objectives," he said.

Some external participants may work with JTF-CS during the exercise.

"We,re trying to get representatives from FEMA Region IV as well as representatives from South Carolina Emergency Management Division and active duty soldiers from the (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive) Consequence Management Response Force to play the role of task force units," Defluri said. "Each time we do one of these internal exercises, we try to make it more robust and try to add in fidelity," Defluri said. "That's what we,re trying to do for SR05: create a good scenario and be able to replicate the effects as best we can. That way we can give the command a really good CM exercise."

In the related exercise Operation Orbit Comet, held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, under the command of Maj. Gen. Virgil Packett, the drill involved military response to the taking of several US Congressmen as hostages by terrorists. Congressmen Bob Etheridge and Mike McIntyre volunteered to play the victims in this exercise, which had some of the features of a dry run for a coup. This exercise was also slated to include a raid on a safe house, the detonation of a large explosive device on a ferry, and a simulated commercial oil spill at Morehead City.

Without attempting a line-by-line exegesis, it ought to be clear that an exercise of this type would lend itself to transformation into an actual nuclear terrorist incident, including the detonation of some kind of nuclear device. This is especially true given the presence of Fort Bragg, home of the US special forces, founded by General Edward Lansdale, who was an integral part of the Allen Dulles-Lyman Lemnizter clique which has been key to secret government operations since the Kennedy-LBJ era. We cannot be reassured by the intent of the organizers to make these proceedings "more robust and try to add in fidelity," since the maximum of fidelity would be to include a nuclear device or nuclear detonation.

We should also bear in mind that, before they settled on the nuclear test site of Alamogordo, New Mexico, US World War II nuclear planners had considered setting up their nuclear proving ground on the coastal islands of North Carolina. The advantage was seen in the fact that the nuclear fallout from a detonation along the North Carolina coast would tend to drift directly out over the Atlantic Ocean, instead of falling on populated areas, as the New Mexico fallout always threatened to do. This means that the rogue network could organize a quite spectacular nuclear 9/11 along the Carolina coast without also doing commensurate damage to their already rickety war machine.

CITIZENS MOBILIZE TO STOP TERROR DRILLS

It is possible to fight back. The mobilization that started at a Sunday, July 24 morning workshop at the Washington DC Truth Convergence has perhaps disrupted the hidden agenda of Sudden Response 05. A mobilization by a number of websites especially www.total411.info -- and email blasters starting on July 28 identified the obvious subversive potential of Sudden Response 05, and urged vigilance by world public opinion and local citizens. On August 15, the website of the Charleston Post and Courier published a strange article which apparently represented the attempt of this paper to respond to widespread fears in the region that the planned drill was going to culminate in an actual nuclear detonation. Here we read:

Still, this chatter has stirred up folks all over the Lowcountry, worried that nuclear fallout could seriously ruin their weekend. Officials with Charleston County, the state's emergency management personnel and even the Department of Defense have gotten worried calls from folks scanning the skies for mushroom clouds over Fort Sumter. Trouble is, as with most conspiracy theories, the facts often get in the way. Locals officials say no drills are planned this week, and the state Ports Authority says no plans have been made to detonate any nuclear weapons in the harbor.Other details, such as why Iran would blow up Charleston, are not explained in these theories.
https://www.charleston.net/stories/?newsID=36369&section=localnews ]

Of course, the web sites calling attention to this suspicious drill never implied that Iran would have anything to do with the possible explosion, which was always clearly attributed to the rogue network inside the US command structure. Otherwise, the denials respecting activity in the Charleston area was pure lying. Here was a case where the cockroaches of the invisible government may have wilted in the bright glare of publicity. Perhaps as a result of this negative publicity, the start of the drill was postponed from the scheduled August 17 to August 18 at 3:30 in the afternoon. In the afternoon of August 18 it became apparent that the drill was going to be postponed a second time, probably to Monday, August 22, or perhaps definitively. Soon NORTHCOM announced that this dangerous drill was over. If local citizens can work to prevent terror drills from erupting into provocations, the task of the terrorist controllers and coup plotters will become complicated beyond measure. At the same time, the American people may finally break through to awareness about the crimes plotted within their own government, and shut those criminals down for good.

Another highly dangerous drill series is the so-called Urban Dispersion Program, being held in New York City between August 6 and 26. (<http://urbandispersion.pnl.gov/>http://urbandispersion.pnl.gov/) As Salon reported, "Government scientists released colorless, harmless gas at four Manhattan locations Monday as part of an effort to find out how fast and far a toxic substance could spread if released in the city. According to this article, this program "aims to produce a computerized model of air flow patterns that could help authorities decide how to evacuate people after a chemical or biological attack." Another round of gas dispersion is scheduled to take place in the spring of 2006. This type of drill poses the obvious threat that a single rogue network official might be able to replace the harmless gas with some far more toxic substance.
(http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8BRQSO80.html)
The basic interest of New Yorkers is to have this pernicious drill series shut down as soon as possible.

We should stress that there are numerous war drills and terror maneuvers going on, and all of them require vigilant scrutiny followed by timely denunciation and exposure as necessary. On August 18, a "multi-agency command and control tabletop exercise" was scheduled to be held on the University of California Maritime Campus with the participation of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most sinister of the private military firms, involving the hypothesis of port-related terrorism in and around San Francisco Bay. 200 people were involved as "participants, evaluators, controllers, or observers." On Friday, August 19, a mysterious explosion, later ascribed to a defective transformer, took place in San Francisco. Were these events connected? Or again: from August 15 to August 19, NORTHCOM held Alaska Shield/Northern Edge, with an array of "simulated natural disasters and terrorist events in 21 communities." Incessant terror drills offer the rogue network multiple opportunities to go live with the provocation they are seeking, and also function as a kind of mass brainwashing. With these drills, the secret government is waging war on the people. One basic demand for activists is therefore that these sinister and suspicious drills be called off, since they represent a threat to the American people and to world peace.

ANTI-NEOCON GENERAL OUSTED

As noted above, the command center for operation Sudden Response 05 is Fortress Monroe, located near where the James River meets Chesapeake Bay, not far from the scene of the 1862 Monitor-Merrimac battle. The fort features a cell where Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was held prisoner after the Civil War on charges of high treason, and it is evident that some top military officers ought to be occupying that cell block today.

One of these is General Peter J. Schoomaker, presently the US Army Chief of Staff, who is part of a utopian/irrationalist clique in the Pentagon which has been fostered by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Schoomaker was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command in 1994-1996, commander of the US Army Special Operations Command in 1994-1996, and commander in chief of the United States Special Operations Command in 1997-2000. Schoomaker was brought back from undistinguished retirement to head the Army after the firing of Gen. Shinseki, who had questioned the utopian recipes for the conquest of Iraq. He also took part in the aggressions against Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Haiti. Schoomaker was an integral part of the failed hostage rescue mission at Desert One in April, 1980, which once again prods us to ponder the high incidence of fascist outlooks among defeated military officers. Schoomaker may be usefully compared to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's military yes-man.

On August 9, 2005 Schoomaker fired General Kevin P. Byrnes, one of the army's dozen or so four-star generals, from his post as leader of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). The ouster of such a high-ranking officer was a rarity, and the reason given was the transparent cover story of an extra-marital affair with a civilian woman. What makes this relevant to our purposes is that the Army's TRADOC plays a key role in maneuvers. In fact, the headquarters for Sudden Response 05 was located at Fort Monroe, placing the entire operation under Byrnes, command. Byrnes was replaced by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace. (Washington Post, August 10, 2005) What was the goal of cashiering Byrnes, just as the Cheney drive for nuclear terrorism and nuclear attack on Iran went into overdrive?

The utopian-terrorist faction of the US military loves to wage war on the cheap. More traditionalist views stress logistics and force structure. Byrne had reportedly clashed in

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Byrne had reportedly clashed in 2002 with the Pentagon's utopian intelligence boss, Stephen Cambone (the keystone of the Cambone-Boykin-Miller clique responsible for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib) over troop strength cuts. According to one version, Byrnes, command had been ordered to prepare for the influx of 50,000 raw recruits into Fort Rucker, Alabama possibly in the context of a reinstituted military draft. TRADOC had also been told to prepare to accept recruits with no education, with criminals records, with no ability to speak English practically penal divisions. Army retirees were also slated to be dragooned back into service. Byrnes would thus emerge as the leading figure of a military opposition of sorts against the crackpot aggressive planning of the Bush-Cheney-neocon regime. Byrnes was also said to be associated with a group of generals linked to the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. (www.waynemadsenreport.com, August 10, 2005) Carlisle Barracks is the home of Jeffrey Record, who is the author of a decidedly down-beat evaluation of the first Gulf War of 1990-91. Analysts associated with the War College have also been exceptionally blunt in their criticism of the current Iraq war. Record wrote in January 2004 that the Iraq war had been a "strategic error," and was being waged with a strategy that "promises more than it can deliver." The intriguing question remains as to whether Byrnes was also disinclined to have drills and exercises in which TRADOC was involved used as covers for state-sponsored terrorism.

The events of 9/11 were prepared by a scenario film, The Lone Gunmen, which depicted an airplane coming under the control of a terrorist faction of the US government who used a sophisticated remote control system to attempt to crash a passenger airliner into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Sudden Response 05 also corresponds to a terror scenario. This one was called Special Bulletin, and it revolved around terrorists seizing a nuclear weapon aboard a ship in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina and preparing to detonate it. US security forces attempt to disarm the bomb, but it blows up despite their efforts, causing a hecatomb. This film was shown on television in 1983, and was directed by Edward Zwick and written by Marshall Hersokovitz. It starred David Rasche, Michael Madsen, and Lane Smith. Its showing caused considerable uneasiness in the Charleston area.

If these variations should not prove viable, there is always the possibility of staging a more traditional Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Persian Gulf or somewhere nearby, blaming it on Iran. The sinking of a US warship could easily be carried out by a third country UK, Israel, Australia, or any of the Echelon powers to reduce the possibility of exposure.

MILITARY TAKEOVER

Given the collapse of US middle class support for Bush and his neocon war adventures signaled by the resounding success of the Cindy Sheehan anti-war vigils on August 17, it might be expected that the new 9/11 followed by the Iran or North Korean attacks might cause protests and chaos inside the US. For such an eventuality, the neocons as disciples of Hitler's main legal adviser Carl Schmitt have the remedy: police-state, military dictatorship. At the end of the first week of August it became known that the US Army Northern Command (in other words, the madman Schoomaker and his cabal. Planners in Colorado Springs, including Admiral Timothy J. Keating, Northcom commander, and Major General Richard J. Rowe, chief operations officer, were said to be contemplating a total of 15 crisis scenarios presupposing multiple simultaneous terror attacks in the US. These mobilization plans were drawn up in CONPLAN 2002, a 1,000 page overall guide to a military takeover, and in CONPLAN 0500, which addresses the specifics of the 15 scenarios. Both CONPLANS were said to be well on their way to becoming OPLANS, or operational plans. These activities are manifestly a continuation of the Pentagon's 1968 Operation Garden Plot, the original plan for a military seizure of this country. (9/11 Synthetic Terror, p. 377)

The outcry against this thinly veiled plan for a military dictatorship in the traditional civil liberties community was decidedly muted. In fact, the most vociferous protest came from Homeland Security boss Chertoff, who complained in effect that the coming police state had to be organized under his own Department of Homeland Security, and not under the military.

TERROR POTBOILERS

An entire new scurrilous literary genre has grown up around the neocon campaign to attack Iran. This new vogue resembles the pre-1914 German attack scenario novels published in Great Britain, but at least those were clearly labeled as fiction. A recent tome in the new genre is Kenneth R. Timmerman's Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. Timmerman tries to pin the 9/11 attacks on Iran, in the same way Laurie Mylroie and Judith Miller tried to pin them on Iran. His black propaganda technique is too much even for the Washington Post, whose reviewer commented: "The reader gets the impression that Timmerman would rather not bother with facts precisely because they undermine his conspiracy theory. A persistent problem with this book is its absence of credible evidence." Another author who writes out of the attack Iran bag is Jerome Corsi, who was part of the Swift boat slanders against Kerry and has also founded the Iran Freedom Foundation the US domestic arm of the Mujaheddin e Khalq. Corsi responded to the leak of the NIE on Iran by warning that: "The atomic 9-11 plot is in full swing as you are reading these words. The attack could happen any day." Corsi's book is entitled Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians; it is dismissed as "irresponsible" by the Washington Post, which notes that both Timmerman and Corsi "present their ideology as self-evident verity and their assumptions as incontrovertible facts. Still in the bookstalls is Paul L. Williams with his lurid Osama's Revenge: The Next 9/11, full of last year's stories about the suitcase bombs that are allegedly already inside the US. All of these figures are at home on Fox News, and also on the 9 PM to 1 AM John Bachelor Show on the ABC Radio Network, a kind of radio shock theater for practitioners of extreme neocon gothic. Among other key black propaganda conduits are Joseph Farah's World Net Daily and G2 Bulletin. Here we can read such elucubrations as these: "WND and G2 Bulletin previously reported, based on captured al-Qaida leaders and documents, that the terrorist group has a plan called American Hiroshima, involving the multiple detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled into the U.S. over the Mexican border with the help of the MS-13 street gang and other organized crime groups. (WorldNetDaily.com, August 8, 2005)

INTELLIGENCE WARFARE IN WASHINGTON DC

In the first half of August, Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, whose intelligence contacts make him something of an unpredictable gadfly, came forward with allegations that a special military intelligence unit code-named Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta, the chief 9/11 patsy, as part of an al Qaeda cell in the United States. According to Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who said he had worked with Able Danger, the military intelligence people wanted to alert the FBI, but were prevented from doing so by lawyers. Shaffer also alleged that, after 9/11, he had informed Philip Zelikow, the highly suspect staff director of the Kean-Hamilton commission and a partner of Condoleezza Rice, about Able Danger's awareness of Atta's presence in the US prior to the World Trade Center attacks. The final 9/11 commission report had no mention of this matter. The 9/11 commission responded to this allegation with a chaotic series of denials, finally coming to rest with the assertion that Shaffer's story was not "historically significant." Since the report about Atta to the FBI had been blocked during the Clinton administration, Weldon and the right-wing radio demagogues appeared eager to exploit this story for partisan advantage, be it only to eclipse Cindy Sheehan. Weldon also appeared interested in attacking the Kean-Hamilton investigation. The reality was clearly that those who prevented the FBI from being alerted to Atta if this ever really happened -- were by all odds moles cooperating in the invisible government's 9/11 project. As far as Zelikow's role in suppressing vital evidence, this incident would take its place in a long catalogue of such sabotage developed over the past year by the 9/11 truth movement. At the same time, it cannot be excluded that the entire affair was a dog and pony show staged in the context of the intelligence warfare of August 2005, not of summer 2000. The information about Atta was allegedly generated by the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, and this is not a reliable source. Reacting to the Able Danger story Kristen Breitweiser of the Jersey Girls called the Kean-Hamilton 9/11 commission results "an utterly hollow report," and called for the creation of a new and independent investigation. Indeed: the only adequate answer to this new round of allegations is a real examination of 9/11 by an independent, international truth commission not controlled by Washington insiders.

Opposition to the Cheney war plan was also in evidence in the broader civilian Washington bureaucracy, where full-scale intelligence warfare was raging among the various factions. On August 1, the CIA issued its long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. The main thrust of this document was to undercut the neocon hysteria according to which Iran was quickly approaching the point of no return at which it would join North Korea in possessing at least one nuclear device. According to the NIE, Iran, although determined to acquire nuclear weapons, was about ten years away from being able to do so about double the 5 years cited in February 2005 by Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby in testimony to the Congress. CIA veteran Ray McGovern pointed out that the leaking of the NIE had been designed to undercut Cheney, Bolton, and their circle. However, noted McGovern, "Cheney does not feel at all bound by US intelligence." (TomPaine.com, August 3, 2005)

A few days later, on August 4, additional indictments were forthcoming in the case of former Pentagon Larry Franklin, part of the Feith-Luti neocon shop, accused of traducing Pentagon secrets to Israel. Two FBI raids of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over the previous months had led to widespread anticipation of further indictments . Indicted on this occasion were Steven Rosen, former AIPAC Director of Foreign Policy issues and a former CIA and RAND Corporation employee who held top security clearances, along with Keith Weissman, AIPAC's former Senior Middle East Analyst. Nor was this all. It was later reported that Rosen was meeting with David M. Satterfield, former US Ambassador to Lebanon and currently the deputy to neocon Zalmay Khalilzad at the US Embassy in Baghdad. According to the article, Rosen obtained classified information from Satterfield and sent it out in a memo to AIPAC employees, and then disclosed it to "a foreign national." (New York Times, August 18, 2005) Satterfield had been a loud protagonist of the Bush administration campaign to eject Syria from Lebanon; in February 2005 Satterfield had gone to Lebanon with neocon Paul Wolfowitz in an attempt to organize a US "people power" coup in that country. At that time, signs observed in Beirut street demonstrations read: "Satterfield Get out of Lebanon!" AIPAC was a significant target because it was a headquarters for so much of the neocon agitation for war with Iran: on May 24, Richard Perle had addressed the AIPAC annual convention with a call for war with Iran, ranting: "If Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon, I think we will have no choice but to take decisive action."

Another useful indictment was that of Jack Abramoff on August 11; Abramoff, in addition to being a gangster who served as money bags for Tom Delay and other Congressional Republicans, was also a pro-war ideologue in his own right. But at the same time it was clear that if the intent really was to stop the threatening conflagration, more and better indictments would be needed. Leading neocons were now at the confluence of a series of investigations: the Pentagon leaks to Israel, the Valery Plame matter, the forged Niger yellowcake documents, and the Achmed Chalabi leaks to Iran. Caught in the crossfire were such figures as Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Michael Ledeen, Douglas Feith, etc. Unconfirmed reports from the Chicago grand juries working with independent counsel Fitzgerald asserted that sealed indictments had already been returned against the top figures of the Bush administration, but there was no way to verify this in the short term.

Underlying the entire Iran nuclear question is the hypocrisy of the double standards applied by the US. Just a few weeks earlier, the US had granted India various forms of nuclear assistance, despite India's active nuclear bomb program. Brazil was getting ready to export nuclear fuel, and yet was not targeted in the same way as Iran. The lesson is clear: countries the US is seeking to cultivate are not harassed, but critics of US policy are put through the wringer. Britain, France, and Germany, to some degree caught up in the distorted US view, offered to guarantee Iran that they would not start a nuclear attack on Teheran, but they could not offer any real assurances about what the US, Israel, India, Pakistan, or others might do. It must finally be recalled that the Bush regime's threats of preventive nuclear attack against non-nuclear states as embodied in the September 2002 national security statement, along with its efforts to develop new forms of mini-nukes to use in such sneak attacks, effectively destroy the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in its very foundations. No sovereign state could accept such infringements on its sovereignty as are now being demanded from Iran.

THE ISRAELI ANGLE

Another factor tending to heighten the adventurism of the US-UK-Israel grouping is the fact that Israeli society has been brought to the edge of civil war by the efforts of Sharon to dismantle Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip and to abandon that area as a Palestinian Bantustan or "living tomb" in the framework of a longer-term strategy to tighten the Israeli grip on Jerusalem and the West Bank. According to former Prime Minister Barak, Sharon's Likud Party is on the verge of collapse over this matter. Without going into the details, it is clear that the activism of these vociferous and violent Israeli right-wing fanatics makes an assassination of Sharon a distinct possibility. In the wake of such an assassination, even if it were carried out by Jewish terrorists, an Israeli attack on Iran would surely be more likely. This might be done in ostensible disregard of US wishes, according to the decades-old Breakaway Ally Scenario, which was embraced by Cheney on the morning of January 20, 2005. According to this, Israel strikes first, and then leaves the US to deal with the consequences. According to a pro-Israeli website, the war plan for Iran was presented to Sharon in 2004 under the title of "Project Daniel: Israel's Strategic Future," which was largely a recipe for Israeli pre-emptive action. Co-author Yoash Tsiddon-Chatto, a former Knesset member and the former chief of planning for the Israeli Air Force, told WND military action should include "striking all known Iran nuclear facilities, including hidden facilities, underground tunnels, covert operations, such as the killing of scientists ... whatever is necessary." (Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily.com, May 4, 2005)

THE SHAME OF THE LEFT GATEKEEPERS

The present crisis would not be possible if the overall lesson of September 11, 2001 had been learned by a significant minority of the US population, and if that minority had an institution through which to act. Here the responsibility of the Democratic Party is very grave, since the Democrats have continued to portray themselves as the True Believers of the 9/11 Myth, the most faithful devotees of blaming 9/11 on al Qaeda, Bin Laden, the laptop, the cave, Atta, and the rest. Especially along the left extremity of the Democratic Party, we find a line of foundation-funded opinion leaders and commentators whom we can only define as left gatekeepers. These gatekeepers have stubbornly denied, mocked, vilified, censored, blacked out and embargoed any suggestion that 9/11 was a provocation by a US military-intelligence network, which it so manifestly was. So much so that if we ask why the US population would still believe the Bush administration on 9/11 and the imminent terror attacks of 2005 when they would not believe Bush about any other issue the answer must be that the left gatekeepers are responsible. If the American people do not finally move out of their present credulous gullibility and realize that the large-scale international terrorism of our time is overwhelmingly state sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism, they will continue to be an easy mark for the unscrupulous factions who do not hesitate to employ terror as a means to power.

HILEX 75: ROGUE DRILLS CAN BE STOPPED

Finally, no one should give up in despair before the imminent danger of a new round of state sponsored terrorism designed to lead to war with Iran and/or North Korea. These plans can be defeated, and the key to defeating them is to produce a shock wave of publicity, of denunciation, of indignation, and of outrage. Such plans have been defeated before. Back in the late fall of 1975, the Anglo-American finance oligarchs and their secret team military operatives were reeling from the recent rout the previous spring in Vietnam. Some of them, including James Rodney Schlesinger, had held a meeting on Easter Monday, just after the fall of Saigon, to discuss desperate military expedients to prevent the possible collapse of the entire US-UK world strategic position. The method chosen was a possible nuclear confrontation with the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Typically, this secret and illegal plan was built into a military staff exercise, in this case HILEX 75. HILEX (high level exercise) 75 was designed as a staff exercise, a headquarters drill, involving top government officials and simulating a strategic confrontation with Moscow. But in this case the staff exercise contained and concealed a real confrontation, to be set off over some appropriate pretext. What pretext? We do not know, since the world thankfully never got that far. A group of activists in the main NATO countries embarked on a campaign of denunciation and exposure weeks in advance, flooding newspaper, radio, and television offices, elected officials at all levels, key academics, and others with word of what was looming. On Christmas Eve 1975, I passed out leaflets with a half-dozen friends on the steps of the Milan cathedral in Piazza Duomo spelling out exactly what was planned. This was a part of a mobilization across western Europe, the US, and Canada. Somehow, the confrontation variant hidden within the HILEX 75 drill was allowed to lapse. We must now do the same thing with Sudden Response 05 and similar terror drills and war exercises. As the astounding success of the Cindy Sheehan operation suggests, support for the Bush regime is now evaporating with breathtaking speed. In a climate marked by the radical rejection of Bush and everything he stands for, the 9/11 myth for which Bush was the leading salesman may also disintegrate, making a new 9/11 and a widening of the war that much more difficult.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

The organizing committee for the Independent International Truth Commission on the September 11, 2001 Events on July 24 set up a Monitoring Group to attempt to apply prospectively, into the future, the lessons about terrorism that had been learned from the intensive study of 9/11 and earlier cases. The IITC Monitoring Group is accordingly checking the public affairs departments of the official websites of NORAD, the Department of Defense and its subdivisions, FEMA, Homeland Security, the British Ministry of Defense and Home Office, NATO Headquarters, and similar sites in Russia, China and the OECD countries generally. The goal is to identify in advance those drills, maneuvers and exercises which lend themselves to cloaking acts of state sponsored synthetic terrorism, and to expose and denounce in advance the dangers that are thus identified. The cooperation of all persons of good will in this vital work is actively requested; send emails to tarpley@tarpley.net. This essay would not have been possible without the first fruits of this monitoring activity.

The methodology used here was presented to the IITC workshop at the Truth Convergence held at American University, Washington DC on July 24, 2005. The basic analysis presented in this article was posted in interview form on CloakandDagger.de on July 28, 2005, and in subsequent programs on August 7, August 11, and August 18. It was presented to the McClendon study group at the National Press Club in Washington DC on August 3, 2005, on the Meria
Heller internet radio program on August 17, 2005, and with Sally O,Brien on WBAI New York on August 21 and August 25, 2005..

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BUSH’S WAR PLAN INCLUDES USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2006-02-09 02:46.

By Jack A. Smith
Hudson Valley (N.Y.) Activist Newsletter, Feb. 7, 2006

The United States government is preparing for an eventual nuclear war with a determination approximating Cold War standards, but this time with an expressed preemptive first-strike option against even non-nuclear countries.

During the 15 years following the implosion of the Soviet Union, Washington has been upgrading the efficiency and kill power of its 10,000 warhead nuclear arsenal, and has been modernizing its delivery fleet of ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, warships and bombers. Many aging weapons have been eliminated since the Cold War, but new and more deadly instruments of mass destruction have already been deployed, with many more on the way.

The anticipated “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War never materialized except in the paradoxical configuration of a profitable war dividend for the military-industrial complex, a large portion of which is derived from nuclear weapons and various support systems.

“The United States continues to spend billions of dollars annually to maintain and upgrade its nuclear forces,” according to an article titled “U.S. Nuclear Forces 2006” in the January-February issue of the prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It is deploying a larger and more accurate preemptive nuclear strike capability in the Asia-Pacific region, and shifting its doctrine toward targeting U.S. strategic nuclear forces against ‘weapons of mass destruction’ complexes and command centers.

“The Defense Department is upgrading its nuclear strike plans to reflect new presidential guidance and a transition in war planning from the top-heavy Single Integrated Operational Plan of the Cold War to a family of smaller and more flexible strike plans designed to defeat today's adversaries. The new central strategic war plan is known as OPLAN (Operations Plan) 8044.”

In a chilling and ambiguous statement before the release of the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained the plan as the product of “thinking about the 21st century in a way that’s different from the 20th century. . . . We’re trying to figure out how you conduct a war against something other than a nation-state and how . . . you conduct a war in countries that you are not at war with.”

The Pentagon expects the so-called War on Terrorism, which it has just officially renamed the “Long War,” to last at least 20 years, according to a statement to the American Forces Press Service Jan. 25 by Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, assistant to the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In his statement he equated the Long War against a relative handful of opponents to the Cold War between the two superpowers.

Odierno was speaking about the use of unconventional “special operations” during the new-type conflict, referring to a “holistic concept” but evidently not mentioning nuclear weapons in his interview. Obviously, the new war plan at least in part is intended to avoid another defeat such as U.S. forces have experienced in the Iraq War. Full-scale ground invasions do not appear to loom large in 20-Year-War planning.

The Pentagon remains prepared as usual to fight two major wars and a couple of insurgencies simultaneously. But its new type of “full scale dominance” over terrorism focuses on special operations, special military forces, an electronic battlefield, ground and air robots, communications and surveillance mastery, control of the skies and space, political and economic subversion, sanctions, assassinations, a worldwide propaganda apparatus, and, now, the pièce de résistance — precision nuclear attacks when desired.

The militarist mind perceives two anticipated advantages to this new plan: (1) It will require far fewer “boots on the ground,” and (2) the specific mini-wars within the Long War will be brief. The fewer the “boots,” the fewer the grumblings by the American people about GI deaths; the briefer the engagement, the less likely it will be remembered a week later by a nation absorbed in trivia, commerce, consumerism, and a strong attachment to being Number One in the world.

Gen. Richard B. Meyers testified about the new plan in Senate hearings last April. He said that the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which directs global and space strike operations, “has revised our strategic deterrence and response plan that became effective in the fall of 2004. This revised, detailed plan provides more flexible options to assure allies, and dissuade, deter, and if necessary, defeat adversaries in a wider range of contingencies."

One aspect of the OPLAN’s global strike scenario is CONPLAN 8022, which the Bulletin article describes as “a concept plan for the quick use of nuclear, conventional, or information warfare capabilities to destroy — preemptively, if necessary — ‘time-urgent targets’ anywhere in the world. . . . As a result, the Bush administration's preemption policy is now operational on long-range bombers, strategic submarines on deterrent patrol, and presumably intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).”

Preemption in concert with a nuclear first strike became implicit U.S. policy in the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in late 2001 and has become more explicit since then. During the Cold War, the USSR pledged never to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a first strike against nuclear or non-nuclear states, but the U.S. stubbornly refused to follow suit.

Hans M. Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert and project director at the Federation of American Scientists, wrote the following of CONPLAN in last September’s Arms Control Today: “Foremost among the doctrine’s new features are the incorporation of preemption into U.S. nuclear doctrine and the integration of conventional weapons and missile defenses into strategic planning. . . . The new nuclear doctrine makes it clear that the United States will not necessarily wait for the attack but preempt with nuclear weapons if necessary.”

One of the several reasons the Pentagon may use nuclear weapons in a preemptive attack, Kristensen said, is as a “demonstration of U.S. intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter adversary WMD use.” Theoretically, had the plan been in full operation at the time, President George W. Bush could have let loose nuclear weapons against Iraq under the false assumption that it possessed WMD and was preparing to attack America. (Bush in October 2002: "Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction .... [and who] is exploring ways of using [aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States.”)

According to military affairs expert William Arkin writing in the Washington Post May 15 last year, CONPLAN authorizes “for the first time a preemptive and offensive strike capability against Iran and North Korea. . . . The global strike plan holds the nuclear option in reserve if intelligence suggests an ‘imminent’ launch of an enemy nuclear strike on the U.S. or if there is a need to destroy hard-to-reach targets.” Iran does not possess nuclear weapons and insists that it will never build them (D.P.R. Korea may have one or two small weapons without an effective delivery system to reach the U.S. or an intention to use them.). CONPLAN thus entertains the use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state, an explicit violation of the 1970 nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) — preemptively, and thus illegally, at that.

Commenting on Tomdispatch.com 10 days after Arkin’s revelations, long-time anti-nuclear analyst Jonathan Schell declared: “In a shocking innovation in American nuclear policy . . . the administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the president can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours’ notice. . . . These actions make operational a revolution in U.S. nuclear policy.”

Washington does not publicly disclose the names of the “adversaries” against whom such nuclear weapons are aimed. Bush Administration and Pentagon documents usually refer to “rogue states,” and “terrorists,” but this seems to be a deception. It is absurd to suggest that the world’s strongest conventional and nuclear military power will be threatened by any of the so-called “rogue states,” all of which are spectacularly weaker than the U.S.

As far as the co-called War on Terrorism and terrorists are concerned, even if a small atomic device could be acquired and hand-delivered by al-Qaeda to a target in the U.S. — a most unlikely event — what use is America’s huge nuclear arsenal against a suicidal fanatic with a weapon of any kind and no state to retaliate against?

The only rational explanation for Washington’s continual modernization of its nuclear arsenal and delivery systems is (1) to remain the planet’s sole superpower against all competitors including China and the European Union, and (2) to extend U.S. military, economic and political hegemony throughout the entire world to the point of creating a 21st century American Empire. (For those who blanch at the suggestion of empire, note that even Jimmy Carter, as you will see below, now deplores the quest for “American imperial dominance,” a formulation that could have been lifted from the pages of Monthly Review.)

Even though there are irrefutable indications that Russia and D.P.R. Korea remain among the states foremost in the Pentagon’s nuclear bombsights, as undoubtedly do Iran, Syria and others, China has become the principal target — not because it is a military threat but as a potential economic and geopolitical rival of the first magnitude.

China, which is itself threatened by the nuclear potential of American air bases in close proximity (thanks to the spoils of the Afghan war), the hellfire of ground-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles from the U.S., and the brimstone of submarine-launched missiles from the Pacific, is expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s leading economic power in 35 to 40 years. Nuclear weapons intimidate as well as kill, and there may come a time when China will have to be “put in its place” one way or the other.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article, written by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, states the following: “During the past few years, the navy has significantly changed the homeporting of SSBNs [nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines] to meet new planning requirements. . . . The primary goal of the shift is to increase coverage of targets in China, according to navy officials. (Pacific-based SSBNs also target Russia and North Korea.).”

Until 2002, the U.S. maintained 10 SSBNs in the Atlantic and four in the Pacific. Today there are nine missile submarines in the Pacific and five in the Atlantic. By 2008, the fleet of 14 SSBNs will share 336 Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles armed with 2,000 nuclear warheads. These ballistic missiles deliver their deadly payload faster than land- or air-launched missiles.

Launching the program to cover the Pacific Rim with the improved Tridents, Rear Adm. Charles B. Young declared in August 2002 that the move "enhances system accuracy, payload, and hard-target capability, thus improving [U.S.] available responses to existing and emerging Pacific theater threats." Once again, those “threats” were unspecified.

Advance reports about the Pentagon’s QDR indicate that the Navy’s “greater presence in the Pacific Ocean” includes a permanent increase to at least six aircraft carriers — half the fleet. The report also requests the “return to a steady-state production rate of two attack submarines per year not later than 2012.” Each submarine costs a minimum of $2 billion. In all probability, most of the new subs will prowl Pacific waters.

In addition to nuclear warheads, the Pentagon seeks to install 96 conventional warheads on 26 of its multiple-warhead Trident submarine launched ballistic missiles. The reason, Bloomburg News reported Jan. 17, “is to allow quicker preemptive attacks on deeply buried enemy command centers or stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).” William Arkin has written that “This weapon would give the U.S. global conventional preemption — a first-strike capability — in 30 minutes to attack North Korean or Iranian WMD or leadership facilities.” He posits that ballistic missile submarines are now “the front line of U.S. offensive capabilities.”

The Pentagon has scrapped its obsolete ground-based MX Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles, but is strengthening its Minuteman III force of 500 missiles with perhaps 800 warheads. Modernization of the Minuteman, according to the Bulletin article, “continues under an ambitious $7 billion-$8 billion, six-part program intended to improve the missile's accuracy and reliability and extend its service life beyond 2020.” The Air Force is developing an entirely new ICBM which it hopes to have ready in 2018.

The U.S. has recently modernized its fleet of long-range nuclear bombers, the B-2A Spirit and the B-52H Stratofortress. “Neither bomber is maintained on day-to-day alert as during the Cold War,” report Norris and Kristensen, “yet the alert level has increased with the recent tasking of bomber wings in Global Strike missions.“ By 2018, according to the QDR draft, the Pentagon desires to “develop a new land-based penetrating long-range strike capability.

These bombers carry a mix of nuclear weapons ranging in size from 10 kilotons to 1.2 megatons. One nuclear kiloton emits the energy equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT. A 1.2 megaton bomb is the energy equivalent of 1.2 million tons (2.4 billion pounds) of TNT.

To convey what this means in practice we will quote from an article by Conn Hallinan that appeared on Portside Feb. 1. He was discussing the primitive atom bomb named “Little Boy” with the power of 13 kilotons that the U.S dropped from a B-29 named “Enola Gay” on the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, a day that, like the Holocaust, must happen “never again”: “The fireball that consumed Hiroshima reached 18 million degrees in one millionth of a second. It evaporated 68% of the city, demolishing structures built to withstand an 8.5 earthquake. It charred trees five miles from ground zero, blew out windows 17 miles from the city’s center, and killed 100,000 people [almost all civilians] in a single blow. Another 100,000 plus would follow in the months ahead.”

By comparison, the most powerful weapon used against the U.S. occupation army by the resistance in Iraq is the IED (improvised explosive device) — a homemade “roadside” bomb with only a few pounds of explosive material. The biggest ever of these weapons contained about 200 pounds of TNT.

Even so, they have been effective enough for the new Pentagon budget to allocate spending over $3.3 billion, following a previous $2 billon, to devise a deterrent to IEDs, which so far has proved elusive. As the Pentagon invests astronomical billions on a technologically awesome array of modern mechanisms of death and destruction, it may be useful to recall that the operative weapon used to commandeer airplanes for the suicide missions of Sept. 11, 2001, was a dozen or so box cutters that cost a couple of dollars each — but we digress.

Considering Washington’s calculated hysteria about Iran’s desire to build nuclear power plants, which do not contravene the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is interesting to note that the U.S. routinely violates the treaty in two major ways.

First, as mentioned earlier, it is contrary to the NPT to threaten non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons, as the U.S. now does. Last Dec. 5, 16 Congressional Democrats sent a message of concern to President Bush about the new nuclear doctrine, which contained these words about the treaty: “This drastic shift in U.S. nuclear policy threatens the very foundation of nuclear arms control as shaped by the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which has helped prevent nuclear proliferation for over 35 years. In the context of efforts to strengthen and extend the treaty, the United States issued a negative nuclear security assurance in 1978, reiterated in 1995, that the United States would not use nuclear force against NPT member countries without nuclear weapons unless attacked by a non nuclear-weapon state that is allied with a nuclear-weapon state.”

Second, while pledging the nearly 180 non-nuclear nations which have signed the NPT to eschew developing nuclear weapons, the treaty further obliges the U.S., USSR, Britain, France and China to take steps toward nuclear disarmament. But according to David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: “The United States has failed to fulfill its obligations under Article VI of the NPT, requiring good faith efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament — for more than 30 years. The United States [also] has failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.”

By scoffing at the notion of nuclear disarmament in practice, by modernizing its nuclear capability, and by embracing an aggressive first-strike policy, Washington is not only violating the NPT but is contributing toward the proliferation of nuclear weapons. “Nothing could be more calculated to goad other nations into nuclear proliferation,” is how Jonathan Schell put it.

As long as the U.S. maintains its huge arsenal, none of the eight other nuclear-enabled states are willing to significantly disarm. Meanwhile other countries begin to consider obtaining nuclear weapons as a defense against a possible American attack, a hardly illogical consequence of Washington’s nuclear equivalent of saber rattling. D.P.R. Korea’s tiny nuclear capability, for example, was developed to defend itself against U.S. threats, and as a bargaining chip in hopes of a negotiated peace with Washington, which never signed a peace treaty with Pyongyang after the Korean war almost 53 years ago. The USSR developed nuclear weapons because it feared Washington would vaporize Moscow the way it did Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lest it be forgotten that one of the principal reasons the U.S. destroyed these two Japanese cities was as a warning to the non-nuclear Soviet Union. China obtained nuclear weapons for the same reason.

Britain and France built nuclear bombs so as not to be completely dominated by and dependent upon the reigning hegemon of the post-war capitalist world. India and Pakistan developed their weapons against each other, but the U.S. has been winking and nodding toward them, just as it does toward Israel’s nearly 200 nuclear weapons. These last three countries are in outright violation of the entire non-proliferation treaty, which they refuse to sign — and they remain American allies, while non-nuclear Iran is a potential nuclear target for the U.S. and Israel for insisting on building a nuclear power station. Washington’s hypocrisy about Iran’s actions has reached the point on Feb. 4 where a spokesperson charged that Teheran was “threatening the world.” (See article below, “Iran and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.)

Arguing that the Bush Administration’s Global Strike policy is a “negative trend for nuclear proliferation,” Theresa Hitchens, a vice president at the Center for Defense Information, noted in a 2003 report that the seeds for this policy were planted during the Clinton Administration. She was referring to then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s “counter-proliferation” strategy, which was based on taking defensive and offensive measures against the acquisition of WMD by small countries. The use of U.S. nuclear weapons in this endeavor was left open in what has been termed by the Arms Control Association as “strategic ambiguity.”

Opposition to the Bush Administration’s reckless nuclear strategy is generating domestic opposition but it is relatively small so far. There has been sufficient criticism, however, for the Pentagon on Feb. 2 to decide against publishing its long-delayed revised draft of the “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,” which was to provide a precise public statement on the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. Newspaper leaks over the last months, combined with some congressional opposition, convinced the Bush Administration to eliminate the report.

But as Hans Kristensen wrote for the Nuclear Information Project the day the report was withdrawn: “The decision to cancel the documents simply removes controversial documents from the public domain and from the Pentagon's internal reading list. The White House and Pentagon guidance that directs the use of nuclear weapons remains unchanged by the cancellation.

Former President Jimmy Carter has sharply condemned Bush’s nuclear program, which he implied was a product of U.S. imperialism. On Nov. 20 he declared:

“There are determined efforts by U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world. These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements, including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

“Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them and, therefore, abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms-control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of 'first use' of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.”

Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has featured a “Doomsday Clock” as part of its front cover. When and if the clock hands reach midnight, it will indicate that nuclear war is about to destroy the world. The worst years for the clock were when it reached three minutes to midnight in 1949, when the USSR joined the U.S. as a nuclear power, and 1984 after President Ronald Reagan greatly accelerated the arms race.

The best year was 1991, when the Doomsday Clock was moved back to 17 minutes to midnight as the Cold War ended and the U.S. and USSR signed the long-stalled Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) coupled with further unilateral cuts in tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. Soon afterward the Soviet Union dissolved, leading many Americans to believe that the U.S. would finally get rid of its nuclear sword and shield “down by the riverside,” but that was based on an unrealistic understanding of imperialism.

By 2002, the clock hands moved forward to 7 minutes before midnight — the same position it was in during the intense Cold War year of 1980 — mainly because the Bush Administration rejected a series of arms control treaties and said it would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The Doomsday clock has remained the same until now: too close to the utilization of nuclear weapons for comfort, assuming one is even aware of the danger.

The great physicist, pacifist, and socialist Albert Einstein deeply regretted his intellectual contribution to the construction of nuclear weapons. (He had feared Nazi Germany would acquire them first.) In the post-Hiroshima years, Einstein was a strong advocate for complete nuclear disarmament until the day he died in 1955. In May 1946 he wrote, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

The drift to catastrophe continues, less flagrantly than during the Cold War but no less potentially apocalyptic for being relatively covert. Washington has become considerably more aggressive now that the counter-balance of Moscow’s powerful presence no longer exists. The size and content of America’s nuclear arsenal, combined with its quest for world hegemony, and its unjust, illegal and immoral policy of preemptive war, have made the U.S. the most dangerous state in world history.

The large activist U.S. antiwar movement has essentially relegated the matter of nuclear weapons to a low priority 15 years after the end of the Cold War in order to concentrate on stopping the war in Iraq. But if we do not wish the hands of the Doomsday Clock to tick closer to midnight, it will be incumbent upon the peace forces to pay far more attention to Washington’s disastrous nuclear policy.

A domestic constituency exists for complete nuclear disarmament. According to an Associated Press poll conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs 10 months ago, 66% of Americans believe no nation, including the U.S., should possess nuclear weapons. Polls in many nations are in agreement. Most people in the world fear nuclear weapons and want them destroyed.

The longer we wait, the longer “we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." While continuing the struggle against the unjust Iraq adventure and the Pentagon’s 20-year Long War, let’s raise that fighting banner too long in disuse — Ban the Bomb! In the unforgettable words at the melancholy conclusion of “On the Beach,” the popular 1959 anti-nuclear film, “There is still time.” But it is ticking away, more quickly than we think.

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.rense.com/general69/moh.htm
The Mohammed Cartoons -
Recruiting Europe For
Bush's War On Iran

By Webster Griffin Tarpley
2-9-6

WASHINGTON, DC -- The NATO intelligence provocation appearing in the guise of the scurrilous Mohammed cartoons published by the reactionary newspaper Jyllands Posten of Denmark, and then by a series of other European publications, has already done much to mobilize the armies, bases, and treasuries of Europe in support of the lunatic plan to the Bush-neocon clique for a nuclear sneak attack and punitive expedition against Iran over the coming weeks or months. As I warned in a red alert for synthetic terrorism issued on total411.info and other sites in the late afternoon of Feb. 3, this entire affair has been cynically orchestrated by NATO intelligence agencies to set the stage for a new world war.

In recent years, Moslem and Arab resentment for the various crimes of imperialism has been directed primarily against the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. What is new about the present crisis is that Denmark, Norway, France, and Germany are the main targets this time, while the usual suspects in London and Washington can remain in the background and hypocritically condemn the inflammatory cartoons. The result has been a massive degeneration of the ideological climate of Europe in favor of militant racism in the form of the Samuel Huntington War of Civilizations. The Europeans are now far more likely than previously to go to war against Iran as the tail on the Anglo-American kite. The genocidal demand that the European Union cut off all aid to the Hamas-led government of Palestine has become far more likely to succeed.

BILDERGERGERS AND NEOCONS

The evidence strongly suggests that the cartoon provocation was presented to Atlanticist oligarchs at the meeting of the Bilderberger group held from May 5 to May 8, 2005 at the Dorint Sofitel Seehotel Überfahrt in Rottach-Egern, on the shores of the Tegernsee lake in the south German federal state of Bavaria. (See http://www.bilderberg.org/2006.htm#
Fountainhead for a partial attendance list) The first publication of the cartoons in Denmark followed in September 2005. This meeting was attended by the certified neocon fascist madmen Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and William Luti all desperadoes haunted by the prospect of criminal indictment for their roles in the Iraq aggression, the Plame case, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, and the Lord Conrad Black embezzlement case. All three are fanatic proponents of the wider war against Iran, also in the hope of staying out of jail. Others in attendance included Dutch, Belgian, and Spanish royalty, top Eurocrats and NATO bigwigs (including NATO Secretary General Jaap Hoop de Scheffer himself) from Brussels, Rockefeller and Rothschild international bankers, and such all-purpose villains as Henry Kissinger. Another prominent participant in the Bavarian Bilderberger group was Anders Eldrep of Denmark, a Bilderberger regular over the last five years. This Anders Eldrep (or Eldrup),the chairman of DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas), is the husband of Merete Eldrep, the managing director of JP/Politikens Hus (JP for Jyllands-Posten), the Danish publishing firm which owns the newspaper which first published the Mohammed cartoons.

The Bilderberger group, founded after World War II by Britain's genocidal Prince Philip and the Nazi SS Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, represents one of the key nodal points where the international finance oligarchs meet under US-UK leadership to ratify consensus on larger strategic initiatives. It was for example the Bilderberger meeting held near Stockholm in Saltsjøbaden, Sweden in the spring of 1973 which secured the final consensus for the Royal Dutch Shell plans for the October 1973 Middle East War and the attendant "Arab" oil boycott, which looted Japan and Europe and imposed global austerity to stabilize the US dollar and the Atlanticist banking system. That financiers' staged oil boycott was the 1973 version of today's "peak oil" hoax.

SOMETHING ROTTEN: POLITIETS EFTERRETNINGSTJENESTE

As for the repeated canard about freedom of the press, all the countries of the Nordic Council have long maintained press control through psychological warfare boards with the power to suppress and plant news stories for propaganda purposes. Sweden is the best-known example, but Denmark, a NATO member state, is no slouch either. Having directed political organizing in Denmark for a number of years, the present writer can also personally attest to the pervasive surveillance of publishing, political meetings, and public speech (as of the mid-1980s) maintained by the PET (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste), the Danish Security Intelligence Service. The PET is a sinister and stealthy organization staffed by devotees of the Danish monarchy, and its mandate is unchecked. (See http://www.pet.dk/English.aspx for a chilling self-presentation, including the ominous news that "the new Danish legislation on terrorism expands the scope of the Intelligence Service so that PET's investigations, to a higher degree than previously, may provide the basis of actual criminal cases or other more offensive initiatives." Author's emphasis, WGT.) Denmark, in short, is a monarchist police state.

Denmark has been largely a British puppet state over the last two centuries since Lord Nelson burned the Danish fleet in a sneak attack on Copenhagen which put an end to Denmark as an independent power. For the broadest political purposes, provocations coming from Denmark can be thought of as being signed by the warmonger Tony Blair personally. The current Danish neocon regime is in any case a member of Bush's coalition of the willing engaged in the illegal occupation of Iraq.

The editor of Jyllands Posten who ordered the publication of the cartoons is Flemming Rose, who has extensive connections to Daniel Pipes, another neocon fascist madman who runs Campus Watch, a neo-McCarthyite witch-hunting organization which vilifies American professors who criticize Israel or show sympathy for the Palestinians. President Bush wanted to name Daniel Pipes to the board of the US Institute of Peace, a government-funded arm of the State Department which organizes conferences and publishes books. When the raving extremist Pipes turned out to be too widely discredited to obtain Senate confirmation for this post, Bush forced his nomination through with a summer 2003 recess appointment to a temporary term at USIP without Senate approval. Daniel Pipes is the nepotist son of Richard Pipes, a Sovietologist who was a leading figure in George H.W. Bush's 1976 Team B, the incubator of today's neocon clique. At the time of his recess appointment, Daniel Pipes was accused by the very moderate Arab-American Institute of "hatred and bigotry" in the context of his "bizarre obsession with all things Arab and Muslim." (http://www.aaiusa.org/pr/release08-14-03.htm) This is the sick, racist point of view embraced by Jyllands Posten.

Flemming Rose provided details of his conversation with Daniel Pipes in a later article. They talked about the need to mobilize Europe for the war of civilizations against the Moslem world. Rose wrote: "Pipes is surprised that there isn't greater alarm in Europe over the challenge that Islam represents thanks to falling rates of fertility and a weakened sense for its own history and culture." (Flemming Rose, "The Threat from Islamism, Jyllands-Posten, October 29, 2004) The relation of such racist arguments to the Mohammed cartoons provocation should be clear enough.

GENERAL WAR IN SIGHT

With these facts, a strong prima facie case for preconcert in the cartoon affair emerges. The convergence of the US-UK nuclear lynch mob's dragging Iran before the United Nations Security Council in a parody of the spring 2003 US-UK proceedings against Iraq, plus the cartoons affair, means that a new general war, perhaps more like the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) than futuristic scenarios of World War III, is now in sight.

EURO-TRAITORS ON THE MARCH

The impact of the cartoon affair has been to re-invigorate the already considerable racist and xenophobic forces of European society, making these tendencies more respectable in parts of the mainstream. For the moment, xenophobic reactionaries Euro-traitors in every sense are in power in France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, and other countries of the old continent. None of these governments would dare resist Rice and Straw in a war vote at the UN. Of course, if these regimes decide to play Mussolini to Bush's Hitler and actually send their troops to join the Anglo-Americans in war with Iran, most of them would fall, but that would come too late to avoid the looming general conflagration.

The alleged free speech defended by ranting Atlanticist hypocrites (including Cheney) thus amounts to the opposite: the defense of a society incessantly manipulated by out-of-control secret intelligence agencies with the help of the controlled corporate media a martial law society on the road to the endless war desired by the invisible government and the neocons.

PRECONCERT ON BOTH SIDES

Danish embassies have been burned in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. There are indications that some of these violent riots were not spontaneous, but were the work of mercenary rent-a-mobs stoked and steered by CIA, MI-6 and Mossad. In Beirut, UN officials told CNN they knew about the riot before it happened. But the embassy attacks, plus world-wide threats, protests, and economic boycotts, have gone far to convince European public opinion that the war of civilizations between the west and the Moslem world is indeed inevitable.

In 2003, Germany, France, Belgium, and other European nations rejected the Bush-Blair plan for an illegal aggressive war against Iran. Since, then, Atlanticist (US-UK) intelligence networks have been working to overthrow or subvert the leading European governments. In Germany, Chancellor Schroeder has been replaced by Mrs. Merkel, a puppet of Wall St. and the City of London. In France, the Chirac presidency, weakened by its own foolish support of last year's European constitution, has been wholly subverted by last fall's "Moslem" riots, which were led by old Nazi networks sheep-dipped in Islam under the guidance of Atlanticist intelligence agencies. The beneficiary has been the Anglo-Saxon Trojan horse, Sarkozy. Chirac has even issued his own nuclear threats against Iran. The days are long gone when Chirac could reject the war of civilizations and be cheered for it by Algerian students, as he was in the spring of 2003. The one valuable lesson most Europeans had learned from the twentieth century the utter and suicidal futility of war has been called into question by the cartoons affair.

IF A TERRORIST ATTACK OCCURS, BLAME CHENEY

Since last July, the world has known of the order from Dick Cheney to the Pentagon to prepare for the atomic bombing of Iran in the wake of a new 9/11 terrorist atrocity. Given Cheney's manifest aggressive intent, it should also be plain that he is not occupying his time doing rain dances in the hopes of conjuring up a new terrorist attack. Cheney and his invisible government backers in the US-UK rogue network are actively preparing a new 9/11 or Gulf of Tonkin provocation with weapons of mass destruction in order to secure the pretext for their attack. Our advice to the world is accordingly: if mysterious WMD incidents occur anywhere in the world, don't start looking for the swarthy perpetrators sporting turbans in the caves of Pushtunistan. Look instead in Dick Cheney's office.

THE REAL CASUS BELLI: THE IRAN OIL BOURSE

Much of the real urgency of the Anglo-American attack on Iran comes not from nonexistent nuclear devices, but from the planned March 20 opening of the Iran oil bourse, the first international exchange since 1945 where buyers and sellers of oil can conduct their oil transactions using a currency other than the US dollar in this case, the euro. The Iran oil bourse threatens the number one pillar of US-UK world domination the global hegemony of the dollar, as anchored in the dollar's central role in oil and other raw materials transactions. With the Iranian oil bourse, as much as $1 trillion of central bank reserves may flee the US greenback into the euro, the yen, and other currencies. The concomitant exodus of hot money from Wall Street would then puncture the US stock bubble, the US housing bubble, and the US bubble economy generally, leading to a collapse of the dollar in international exchange and the dumping of hundreds of billions of dollars in US treasury bonds now in the hands of the Chinese and Japanese. The transition from today's outmoded and obsolete dollar-based system to a dollar-euro-yen system of fixed parities, gold settlement, and high-technology exports to the developing sector could be easily handled by peaceful negotiations, but this is exactly what the neocons are determined to prevent. Ironically, the neocon obsession for general war to preserve dollar dominance, by almost guaranteeing the closure of the straits of Hormuz, will lead to an even more catastrophic dollar collapse and world depression than the peaceful Iranian oil bourse ever could. The neocons, in other words, are playing a losing hand. Only fools would join them.

BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH

When might the new hostilities begin? General Sharon, before he was incapacitated, had told the Israeli Defense Force to be ready to strike Iran in March. The former US Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter says that the attack order has already been given. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the maverick Russian politician, thinks that the most likely date is March 28, coincident with the Israeli elections. Zhirinovsky has longed served as an auxiliary to Russian President Putin, and his estimate may benefit from the insights of the Russian special services. Whenever the attack comes, it is clear that the NATO logistics and manpower infrastructure the German railways, the French air force and navy, the Italian ports and air bases will play a vital role. Without these, the US could hardly operate in the Middle East at all. Today, the US neocons may be offering occupation rights in various secondary target countries, like Syria, to tempt countries like France or Italy into joining the war. When Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, he was joined by troops from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and other European states. These auxiliaries had received promises of their own, but they fared poorly. The parallel is suggestive for the path some Europeans wish to tread today.

RATTLING THE CAGES OF OFFICIAL WASHINGTON

Last Wednesday, a Home Depot in the Washington DC suburb of Gaithersburg, Maryland was evacuated because of suspicious package emitting a strange smell, which turned out to be a harmless videotape recorder. Last Friday, the Rachel Carson Elementary School in the same community, which is part of the region where many federal officials and bureaucrats live and have their families, was evacuated because of another suspicious package which a local official claimed looked like an Improvised Explosive Device or Iraq-style roadside bomb. It was "something like you might see in a war zone," said the spokesman of the Gaithersburg fire department said to the radio and television that afternoon. The school is typically attended by the children of federal employees. But the "IED" also turned out to be a big nothing. Early this evening, the Russell Senate Office Building was evacuated because of a nerve gas alert that also proved to be groundless, a complete false alarm. But a dozen senators had to flee. This escalating pattern of incidents likely to provoke hysteria among US government officials betrays the intent of the invisible government to overload the circuits and facilitate the stampeding of this government into a wider war full of incalculable danger.

MOSLEMS: DO NOT ACCEPT PROVOCATIONS

Our advice to the Moslem world: DO NOT FALL FOR PROVOCATIONS. From Count Thurn's 1618 defenestration of Prague to Bismarck's Ems telegram in 1870, big wars have often grown out of staged provocations. For years former Prime Minister Dr. Mahatir Mohammed of Malaysia, an astute Moslem observer who knows how the Atlanticists operate, has been telling his co-religionists that the greatest vulnerability of the oppressors is located in the weakness of the US dollar. Mahatir's argument has long been that it is time to stop complaining and dump the dollar. The fall of the dollar will entail the fall of the International Monetary Fund and of Wolfowitz's World Bank, the greatest engines of global oppression. Those who burn the embassies of European countries or attack their citizens risk becoming dupes serving as recruiting sergeants for the NATO armies and air forces that are about to strike Iran, currently the leading Moslem state, plus Syria and others. It is time to break ideological profile, and respond unpredictably on the international monetary front, where the chances for success are the greatest.

REFUTE THE BLOOD LIBEL OF 9/11

In terms of the battle of ideas, the other great task for the Moslem world and for persons of good will everywhere is to contribute to the utmost to the dismantling and discrediting of the ultimate blood libel against Islam, the fantastic Atlanticist myth surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. The international 9/11 truth movement has shown how rogue networks inside the Pentagon and CIA organized those events. Since the basis of every attack on Islam is 9/11, it is incumbent on Moslems to join in refuting the myth. This will have the additional effect of eroding Bush's fanatical political base, and preparing his fall.

WORLD PEACE

In my address to the Inter-Religious Conference in Khartoum, Sudan in October 1994, I pleaded for a platform of ecumenical and irenic cooperation among the world's great faiths based in the comprehensive scientific, technological, and economic development of all nations. This is the call of Christianity, with its imperative of charity (agape) and faith expressed through good works, as in the second great commandment: love your neighbor. This is the call of the doctrine of social solidarity in Islam. This is the call of Confucian benevolence and the related need for rulers to promote prosperity and education. These are the ideas reflected in similar impulses prominent in Buddhism, Judaism, and other faiths. These are ideas readily accessible to persons of good will whose outlook is purely secular, whatever their political persuasion. Humanity must act now to neutralize war provocations, and thus to prevent the horrors of war itself.

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=KEE20060210&articleId=1936
Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Understanding the Planned Assault on Iran

by Michael Keefer

February 10, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

Iran has been in the gun-sights of George W. Bush and his entourage from the moment that he was parachuted into the presidency in November 2000 by his father’s Supreme Court.

A year ago there were signs, duly reported by Seymour Hersh and others, that the United States and Israel were working out the targeting details of an aerial attack on Iran that it was anticipated would occur in June 2005 (see Hersh, Gush Shalom, Jensen). But as Michel Chossudovsky wrote in May 2005, widespread reports that George W. Bush had “signed off on” an attack on Iran did not signify that the attack would necessarily occur during the summer of 2005: what the ‘signing off’ suggested was rather “that the US and Israel [were] ‘in a state of readiness’ and [were] prepared to launch an attack by June or at a later date. In other words, the decision to launch the attack [had] not been made” (Chossudovsky: May 2005).

Since December 2005, however, there have been much firmer indications both that the planned attack will go ahead in late March 2006, and also that the Cheney-Bush administration intends it to involve the use of nuclear weapons.

It is important to understand the nature and scale of the war crimes that are being planned—and no less important to recognize that, as in the case of the Bush regime’s assault on Iraq, the pretexts being advanced to legitimize this intended aggression are entirely fraudulent. Unless the lurid fantasies of people like former Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security and now Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton count as evidence—and Bolton’s pronouncements on the weaponry supposedly possessed by Iraq, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela show him to be less acquainted with truth than Jean Harlow was with chastity—there is no evidence that Iran has or has ever had any nuclear weapons development program. Claims to the contrary, however loudly they may have been trumpeted by Fox News, CNN, or The New York Times, are demonstrably false.

Nor does there appear to be the remotest possibility, whatever desperate measures the Iranian government might be frightened into by American and Israeli threats of pre-emptive attacks, that Iran would be able to produce nuclear weapons in the near future. On August 2, 2005, The Washington Post reported that according to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which represents a consensus arrived at among U.S. intelligence agencies, “Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years” (Linzer, quoted by Clark, 28 Jan. 2006).

The coming attack on Iran has nothing whatsoever to do with concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Its primary motive, as oil analyst William Clark has argued, is rather a determination to ensure that the U.S. dollar remains the sole world currency for oil trading. Iran plans in March 2006 to open a Teheran Oil Bourse in which all trading will be carried out in Euros. This poses a direct threat to the status of the U.S. dollar as the principal world reserve currency—and hence also to a trading system in which massive U.S. trade deficits are paid for with paper money whose accepted value resides, as Krassimir Petrov notes, in its being the currency in which international oil trades are denominated. (U.S. dollars are effectively exchangeable for oil in somewhat the same way that, prior to 1971, they were at least in theory exchangeable for gold.)

But not only is this planned aggression unconnected to any actual concern over Iranian nuclear weapons. There is in fact some reason to think that the preparations for it have involved deliberate violations by the Bush neo-conservatives of anti-proliferation protocols (and also, necessarily, of U.S. law), and that their long-term planning, in which Turkey’s consent to the aggression is a necessary part, has involved a deliberate transfer of nuclear weapons technology to Turkey as a part of the pay-off.

Prior to her public exposure by Karl Rove, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, and other senior administration officials in July 2003, CIA agent Valerie Plame was reportedly involved in undercover anti-proliferation work focused on transfers of nuclear technology to Turkey that were being carried out by a network of crooked businessmen, arms dealers, and ‘rogue’ officials within the U.S. government. The leaking of Plame’s identity as a CIA agent was undoubtedly an act of revenge for her husband Joseph Wilson’s public revelation that one of the key claims used to legitimize the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s supposed acquisition of uranium ore from Niger, was known by the Bush regime to be groundless. But Plame’s exposure also conveniently put an end to her investigative work. Some of the senior administration officials responsible for that crime of state have long-term diplomatic and military connections to Turkey, and all of them have been employed in what might be called (with a nod to ex-White House speechwriter David Frum) the Cheney-Bolton Axis of Aggression. Thanks to the courage and integrity of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, there is evidence dating from 2002 of high-level involvement in the subversion of FBI investigations into arms trafficking with Turkey. The leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent may therefore have been not merely an act of revenge for her husband’s contribution to the delegitimizing of one war of aggression, but also a tactical maneuver in preparation for the next one.

George W. Bush made clear his aggressive intentions in relation to Iran in his 2002 State of the Union address; and his regime’s record on issues of nuclear proliferation has been, to put it mildly, equivocal. If, as seems plausible, Bush’s diplomats had been secretly arranging that Turkey’s reward for connivance in an attack on Iran should include its future admission into the charmed circle of nuclear powers, then the meddling interference of servants of the state who, like Plame and Edmonds, were putting themselves or at least their careers at risk in the cause of preventing nuclear weapons proliferation, was not to be tolerated.

The ironies are glaring. The U.S. government is contemplating an unprovoked attack upon Iran that will involve “pre-emptive” use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-weapons-holding state. Although the pretext is that this is necessary to forestall nuclear weapons proliferation, there is evidence to suggest that planning for the attack has involved, very precisely, nuclear weapons proliferation by the United States.

It would appear that this sinister complex of criminality involves one further twist. There have been indications that the planned attack may be immediately preceded (and of course ‘legitimized’) by another 9/11-type event within the U.S.

Let us review these issues in sequence.

Plans for a conventional and ‘tactical’ nuclear attack on Iran

On August 1, 2005 Philip Giraldi, an ex-CIA agent and associate of Vincent Cannistraro (the former head of the CIA’s counter-intelligence operations and former intelligence director at the National Security Council), published an article entitled “Deep Background” in The American Conservative. The first section of this article carried the following headline: “In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran.” I quote the first section of Giraldi’s article in its entirety:

“The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.”

The implications of this report are breathtaking. First, it indicates on the part of the ruling Cheney faction within the American state a frank in-house acknowledgment that their often-repeated public claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 attacks are the rubbish that informed people have long known them to be.

At a deeper level, it implies that “9/11-type terrorist attacks” are recognized in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon as appropriate means of legitimizing wars of aggression against any country selected for that treatment by the regime and its corporate propaganda-amplification system. (Though the implicit acknowledgment is shocking, the fact itself should come as no surprise, since recent research has shown that the Bush administration was deeply implicated not merely in permitting the attacks of September 11, 2001 to happen, but in actually organizing them: see Chossudovsky 2002: 51-63, 144-56; Chossudovsky 2005: 51-62, 135-46, 237-61; Griffin 2004: 127-46, 169-201; Griffin 2005: 115-35, 277-91; Marrs 134-37; and Ruppert 309-436.)

And finally, Giraldi’s report suggests that the recent U.S. development of comparatively low-yield nuclear weapons specifically designed to destroy hardened underground facilities, and the recent re-orientation of U.S. nuclear policy to include first-strike or pre-emptive nuclear attacks on non-nuclear powers, were both part of long-range planning for a war on Iran.

Articles published by William Arkin in the Washington Post in May and October 2005 reported on what the U.S. military’s STRATCOM calls CONPLAN 8022, a global plan for bombing and missile attacks involving “a nuclear option” anywhere in the world that was tested in an exercise that began on November 1, 2005; the scenario for this exercise scripted a dirty-bomb attack on Mobile, Alabama to which STRATCOM responded with nuclear and conventional strikes on an unnamed east-Asian country that was transparently meant for North Korea.

Jorge Hirsch has outlined the deployment of key administrative personnel and of ideological legitimations in preparation for a nuclear attack on Iran (Hirsch, 16 Dec. 2005). And Michel Chossudovsky has described the command structure that has been set up to implement STRATCOM’s current plans for preemptive ‘theatre’ nuclear warfare (see Chossudovsky 2006). But it must be emphasized that these plans, as tested in November 2005 in the exercise referred to by Arkin, involve the creation of an impression of what theorists of nuclear war call “proportionality.” An attack on Iran, which would presumably involve the use of significant numbers of extremely ‘dirty’ earth-penetrating nuclear bombs, might well be made to follow a dirty-bomb attack on the United States, which would be represented in the media as having been carried out by Iranian agents.

Yet as Giraldi indicates, although the bombing of Iran would follow and be represented as a response to “another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States,” the planned pattern involves a cynical separation of appearance from reality: “the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in [this] act of terrorism….”

Earth-Penetrator ‘dirty bombs

Talk about “low-yield” nuclear weapons, by the way, means simply that the most recent U.S. nuclear weapons can be set to detonate with much less than their maximum explosive force. The maximum power of the B61-11 earth-penetrating “bunker-buster” bomb ranges, by different accounts, from 300 to 340 or 400 kilotons (see Nelson; Hirsch, 9 Jan. 2006). (By way of comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945, killing some 80,000 people outright, and a further 60,000 over the next several months due to radiation poisoning and other injuries, had a yield of 15 kilotons.) The lowest-yield setting of the BL61-11 is reportedly 0.3 kilotons—equivalent, that is to say, to the detonation of 300 tons of TNT.

But since these new weapons are designed as earth-penetrating “bunker-buster” rather than air-burst bombs, each one can be expected to produce large volumes of very ‘dirty’ radioactive fallout. Robert Nelson of the Federation of American Scientists writes that even at the low end of the B61-11 bomb’s yield range, “the nuclear blast will simply blow out a huge crater of radioactive material, creating a lethal gamma-radiation field over a large area.” The very intense local fallout will include both “radioactivity from the fission products” and also “large amounts of dirt and debris [that] has been exposed to the intense neutron flux from the nuclear detonation”; the blast cloud produced by such a bomb “typically consists of a narrow column and a broad base surge of air filled with radioactive dust which expands to a radius of over a mile for a 5 kiloton explosion.”

Yet wouldn’t the “tactical” and “low-yield” nature of these weapons mean that civilian casualties could be kept to a minimum? A study published in 2005 by the National Research Council on the Effects of Nuclear Earth-Penetrator and Other Weapons offers estimates of the casualties that could be caused by these weapons. According to Conclusion 6 of this report, an attack in or near a densely populated urban area could be expected, depending on the B61-11’s yield setting, to kill from several thousand to over a million people. An attack in a remote, lightly populated area might kill as few as several hundred people—or, with a high-yield setting and unfavourable winds, hundreds of thousands.

But what kinds of yield settings might the U.S. military want to use? Conclusion 5 of the NRC report might seem to suggest that genuinely low-yield settings might be possible: the yield required “to destroy a hard and deeply buried target is reduced by a factor of 15 to 25 by enhanced ground-shock coupling if the weapon is detonated a few meters below the surface.” Conclusion 2, however, is more sobering. To have a high probability of destroying a facility 200 metres underground, an earth-penetrating weapon with a yield of 300 kilotons would be required—that is to say, a weapon with twenty times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. Extrapolating from the information the report provides, one might guess that a weapon in the 7-8 kiloton range—with half the power of the Hiroshima bomb—could be deployed against a facility like Natanz, the sensitive parts of which are buried 18 metres underground and protected by reinforced concrete (Beeston). A similar or smaller weapon might be used against the uranium fuel enrichment facility at Esfahan—a city of two million people which is also, by the way, a UNESCO World Heritage City.

The NRC report, it should be noted, was written by a committee, and one that on the issue of civilian casualties seems to have had some difficulty in making up its collective mind. Conclusion 4 of the report informs us that “For the same yield and weather conditions, the number of casualties from an earth-penetrator weapon detonated at a few meters depth is, for all practical purposes, equal to that from a surface burst of the same weapon yield.” But Conclusion 7 tells a different story: “For urban targets, civilian casualties from nuclear earth-penetrator weapons are reduced by a factor of 2 to 10 compared with those from a surface burst having 25 times the yield.”

The most charitable interpretation I can give to Conclusion 7 is that it was composed for a readership of arithmetical illiterates—who the authors assume will be unable to deduce that what is actually being said (assuming a linear relation between yield and casualties) is that an earth-penetrating weapon will cause from 2.5 to 12.5 times more casualties than a surface-burst weapon of the same explosive power.

In light of the fact that the NRC report was commissioned by the United States Congress, we can ourselves conclude that the U.S. government is contemplating, open-eyed, a war of aggression that American planners are fully aware will kill—at the very least—many tens of thousands, and perhaps many hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The pretexts

The principal reason being advanced for an attack upon Iran is the claim that Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear threat with the capacity and presumably the intention of launching nuclear ballistic-missile attacks upon Israel and even western Europe and the United States.

Iran does possess ballistic missiles, including the Shahab-3, which with a range of 1300 kilometers is capable of striking Israel, as well as U.S. forces throughout the Middle East. (Why Iran would dream of initiating military aggression against the U.S. or against Israel, which possesses an arsenal of some 200 nuclear warheads, together with multiple means of delivering them, including ballistic missiles, is not explained.)

A fear-mongering article published by The Guardian on January 4, 2006, included the information that the next generation of the Shahab missile “should be capable of reaching Austria and Italy.” The leading sentence of this same article declares that “The Iranian government has been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according to the latest western assessment of the country’s weapons programmes” (Cobain and Traynor). But neither this article nor a companion piece (Traynor and Cobain) published the same day provides any evidence that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program, even though both articles were based upon a “report from a leading EU intelligence service,” a “55-page intelligence assessment, dated July 1 2005, [that] draws upon material gathered by British, French, German and Belgian agencies.”

There is in fact very good evidence, in the form of exhaustive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2003, that Iran does not have and has never had any such program. As the physicist Gordon Prather wrote in September 2005, “after two years of go-anywhere, see-anything inspections, [the IAEA] has found no indication that any special nuclear materials or activities involving them are being—or have been—used in furtherance of a military purpose” (Prather, 27 Sept. 2005).

But what about intentions? The Guardian journalists inform us that “western leaders … have long refused to believe Tehran’s insistence that it is not interested in developing nuclear weapons and is only trying to develop nuclear power for electricity” (Cobain and Traynor). Perhaps it is time these “western leaders”—George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and whatever rag-tag and bob-tail of lesser luminaries they are dragging after them—began to attend to the facts.

A good place to start might be with William Beeman’s and Thomas Stauffer’s assessment of the physical evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program. (Stauffer, by the way, is a former nuclear engineer and specialist in Middle Eastern energy economics; Beeman directs Brown University’s Middle East Studies program; both have conducted research on Iran for three decades.) Beeman and Stauffer note that Iran has three principal nuclear facilities.

Of the first two, a uranium enrichment plant in Natanz and a deuterium research facility in Arak, they remark that “Neither is in operation. The only question of interest is whether these facilities offer a plausible route to the manufacture of plutonium-based nuclear bombs, and the short answer is: They do not.”

Beeman and Stauffer compare the third facility, the PWR pressurized “light-water” reactor under construction at Bushehr, with Israel’s heavy-water graphite-moderated plant at Dimona. The Bushehr reactor is designed to maximize power output through long fuel cycles of 30 to 40 months; it will produce plutonium isotopes (PU240, 241 and 242) that are “almost impossible to use in making bombs”; and “the entire reactor will have to shut down—a step that cannot be concealed from satellites, airplanes and other sources—in order to permit the extraction of even a single fuel pin.” Israel’s Dimona plant, in contrast, produces the bomb-making isotope PU239; moreover, it “can be re-fueled ‘on line,’ without shutting down. Thus, high-grade plutonium can be obtained covertly and continuously.”

Claims emanating from the U.S. State Department to the effect that Iran possesses uranium-enrichment centrifuges or covert plutonium-extraction facilities are dismissed by Beeman and Stauffer as implausible, since “the sources are either unidentified or are the same channels which disseminated the stories about Iraq’s non-conventional weapons or the so-called chemical and biological weapons plant in Khartoum.”

As Michael T. Klare remarks, the U.S. government’s “claim that an attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear potential should invite widespread skepticism.” But skeptical intelligence appears to be the last thing one can expect from the corporate media, whose organs report without blinking Condoleezza Rice’s threat that “The world will not stand by if Iran continues on the path to a nuclear weapons capability” (see [Rice]), and George W. Bush’s equally inane declaration, following the IAEA’s vote to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, that “This important step sends a clear message to the regime in Iran that the world will not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons” (see [Bush]).

There is much to be said about the sorry process of propagandizing, diplomatic bullying, and behind-the-scenes blackmail and arm-twisting within the IAEA and in other forums—all of it strongly reminiscent of the maneuverings of late 2002 and early 2003—that has led to the present situation, where in early March the Security Council will be called upon, as in the case of Iraq three years ago, to accept and legitimize the falsehoods on which the new war of aggression is to be based. The early stages of this process were lucidly analyzed by Siddharth Varadarajan in three fine articles in September 2005. Its more recent phases have been assessed by Gordon Prather in a series of articles published since mid-September 2005, and also, with equal scrupulousness and ethical urgency, by another well-informed physicist, Jorge Hirsch, who has been publishing essays on the subject since mid-October. I will not repeat here the analyses developed in their articles (the titles of which are included in the list of sources which follows this text). But Varadarajan’s recent summary judgment of the diplomatic process is worth quoting: “Each time it appeases Washington’s relentless pressure on Iran, the international community is being made to climb higher and higher up a ladder whose final rungs can only be sanctions and war. This is precisely the route the U.S. followed against Iraq in its quest to effect regime change there” (Varadarajan, 1 Feb. 2006).

It is also worth saying something, however briefly, about the media campaign that has accompanied the diplomatic preparations for war. This has included, since mid-2005, accusations that that Iran was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, some of whose perpetrators are alleged (by members of the wholly discredited Kean Commission of inquiry into the events of 9/11) to have passed through Iran on their way to the U.S. (see Coman; Hirsch, 28 Dec. 2005; and also, if you believe The 9/11 Commission Report to have any credibility, Griffin 2005).

A more relevant accusation surfaced in November 2005, when the New York Times reported that senior U.S. intelligence officials had briefed IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei and his senior staff on information gleaned from a “stolen Iranian laptop computer” which they said demonstrated that Iran had developed nuclear weapons compact enough to fit onto its Shahab missiles. But as Gordon Prather wrote, “‘sources close to the IAEA’ said what they had been briefed on appeared to be aerodynamic design work for a ballistic missile reentry vehicle, which certainly couldn’t contain a nuke if the Iranians didn’t have any. Furthermore, according to David Albright, a sometime consultant to the IAEA, who has actually had access to the ‘stolen Iranian laptop,’ the information on it is all about reentry vehicles and ‘does not contain words such [as] ‘nuclear’ and ‘nuclear warhead’” (Prather, 23 Nov. 2005).

Sorry, boys: no biscuit.

And yet the object of the exercise was evidently not to persuade the IAEA people, who are not idiots, but rather to get the story into the amplification system of that Mighty Wurlitzer, the corporate media.

This strategy has evidently worked. The New York Times, for example, may have parted company with Judith Miller, the ‘star’ reporter whose sordid job was to serve as a conduit for Bush regime misinformation during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, but in Elaine Sciolino they have a reporter who is no less skilled in passing off neocon propaganda as fact (see Prather, 7 Jan. 2006). The New York Times also gave front-page space in mid-January to an article by Richard Bernstein and Stephen Weisman proposing “that Iran has restarted ‘research that could give it technology to create nuclear weapons’” (quoted by Whitney, 17 Jan. 2006). “Perhaps,” Mike Whitney suggests, “the NY Times knows something that the IAEA inspectors don’t? If so, they should step forward and reveal the facts.”

The key facts, as Whitney wrote on January 17, are that there is no evidence that Iran has either a nuclear weapons program or centrifuges with which to enrich uranium to weapons-grade concentration. “These are the two issues which should be given greatest consideration in determining whether or not Iran poses a real danger to its neighbors, and yet these are precisely the facts that are absent from the nearly 2,500 articles written on the topic in the last few days.” Add to these the further fact, noted above, that the August 2005 National Intelligence Estimate doubled the time American agencies thought Iran would need to manufacture “the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon” from the previous estimate of five years to a full decade.

Why then is the American public being incited to ever greater anxiety in the face of a weapons program which—on the paranoid and unproven assumption that it actually exists—is if anything a receding rather than a gathering threat?

Fox News has led the way among the non-print media in drum-beating and misinformation—to the extent, as Paul Craig Roberts observes, that a Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll can plausibly report “that 60% of Republicans, 41% of Independents, and 36% of Democrats support using air strikes and ground troops against Iran in order to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.” Worse yet, an LA Times/Bloomberg poll apparently finds that 57% of the respondents “favor military intervention if Iran’s government pursues a program that would enable it to build nuclear arms.” Any civilian nuclear power program opens up this possibility (Canada, had it so desired, could have become a nuclear-weapons power forty years ago)—but the function of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is precisely to open the way to peaceful nuclear power generation while preventing the further dissemination of nuclear weapons. What the LA Times/Bloomberg poll therefore means, Roberts says, is that “if Iran exercises its rights under the non-proliferation treaty, 57% of Americans support a US military attack on Iran!”

Numbers like these suggest that George W. Bush will indeed get the new war he so desires. And it appears that he will get it soon. As Newt Gingrich declared on Fox News in late January, the matter is so urgent that the attack must happen within the next few months. “According to Gingrich, Iran not only cannot be trusted with nuclear technology, but also Iranians ‘cannot be trusted with their oil’” (Roberts).

The Euro-denominated Tehran Oil Bourse

Gingrich’s wording may sound faintly ludicrous. However, it would appear to be a slanting allusion to the fact that the Iranian government has announced plans to open an Iranian Oil Bourse in March 2006. This Bourse will be in direct competition with the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE)—and unlike them will do business not in U.S. dollars, but in euros. What Gingrich evidently means is that the Iranians cannot be trusted to market their oil and natural gas in a manner that continues to benefit the United States.

Peter Phillips and his colleagues in Project Censored explained very clearly in 2003 how the current U.S. dollar-denominated system of oil and gas marketing provides the U.S. with a highly advantageous system of exchange. In 1971, “President Nixon removed U.S. currency from the gold standard”:

“Since then, the world’s supply of oil has been traded in U.S. fiat dollars, making the dollar the dominant world reserve currency. Countries must provide the United States with goods and services for dollars—which the United States can freely print. To purchase energy and pay off any IMF debts, countries must hold vast dollar reserves. The world is attached to a currency that one country can produce at will. This means that in addition to controlling world trade, the United States is importing substantial quantities of goods and services for very low relative costs.” (Phillips)

As Krassimir Petrov has observed, this amounts to an indirect form of imperial taxation. Unlike previous empires, which extracted direct taxes from their subject-nations, the American empire has “distributed instead its own fiat currency, the U.S. Dollar, to other nations in exchange for goods with the intended consequence of inflating and devaluing those dollars and paying back later each dollar with less economic goods—the difference capturing the U.S. imperial tax.”

Oil, backed by military power, has provided the rest of the world with a reason for accepting depreciating U.S. dollars and holding ever-increasing amounts of them in reserve. Petrov remarks that in 1972-73 the U.S. made “an iron-clad arrangement with Saudi Arabia to support the power of the House of Saud in exchange for accepting only U.S. dollars for its oil. The rest of OPEC was to follow suit and accept only dollars. Because the world had to buy oil from the Arab oil countries, it had the reason to hold dollars as payment for oil. [….] Even though dollars could no longer be exchanged for gold, they were now exchangeable for oil” (Petrov).

But as Phillips notes, the economic reasons alone for switching to the euro as a reserve currency have been becoming steadily more persuasive: “Because of huge trade deficits, it is estimated that the dollar is currently [in late 2003] overvalued by at least 40 percent. Conversely, the euro-zone does not run huge deficits, uses higher interest rates, and has an increasingly larger share of world trade. As the euro establishes its durability and comes into wider use, the dollar will no longer be the world’s only option.” The result will be to make it “easier for other nations to exercise financial leverage against the United States without damaging themselves or the global financial system as a whole.”

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, several analysts suggested that one very obvious motive for that war was the fact that, beginning in November 2000, Iraq had insisted on payment in euros, not dollars, for its oil. In mid-2003, by which time the U.S. had made clear the intended terms of its occupation of Iraq, one such analyst, Coilin Nunan, remarked that it remained “just a theory” that American threats against Iraq had been made on behalf of the petro-dollar system—“but a theory that subsequent U.S. actions have done little to dispel: the U.S. has invaded Iraq and installed its own authority to rule the country, and as soon as Iraqi oil became available to sell on the world market, it was announced that payment would be in dollars only” (Phillips). William Clark writes, more directly, that the invasion was principally about “gaining strategic control over Iraq’s hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintain[ing] the US$ as the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market” (Clark, 28 Jan. 2006).

There is currently some debate over the extent to which U.S. war preparations against Iran are motivated by concern for the continued hegemony of the petrodollar (see Nunan). I find the analyses of William Clark and Krassimir Petrov persuasive.

Clark notes that an important obstacle to any major shift in the oil marketing system has been “the lack of a euro-denominated oil pricing standard, or oil ‘marker’ as it is referred to in the industry.” (The current “oil markers,” in relation to which other internationally traded oil is priced, are Norway Brent crude, West Texas Intermediate crude [WTI], and United Arab Emirates [UAE] Dubai crude—all of them U.S. dollar denominated.) In his opinion, “it is logical to assume the proposed Iranian bourse will usher in a fourth crude oil marker—denominated in the euro currency,” and will thus “remove the main technical obstacle for a broad-based petro-euro system for international oil trades.” This will have the effect of introducing “petrodollar versus petroeuro currency hedging, and fundamentally new dynamics to the biggest market in the world—global oil and gas trades. In essence, the US will no longer be able to effortlessly expand credit via US Treasury bills, and the US$’s demand/liquidity value will fall” (Clark, 28 Jan. 2006).

An even partial loss of the U.S. dollar’s position as the dominant reserve currency for global energy trading would, as Petrov suggests, lead to a sharp decline in its value and an ensuing acceleration of inflation and upward pressure on interest rates, with unpleasant consequences. “At this point, the Fed will find itself between Scylla and Charybdis—between deflation and hyperinflation—it will be forced fast either to take its ‘classical medicine’ by deflating, whereby it raises interest rates, thus inducing a major economic depression, a collapse in real estate, and an implosion in bond, stock, and derivative markets […], or alternatively, to take the Weimar way out by inflating, […] drown[ing] the financial system in liquidity […] and hyperinflating the economy.”

Any attempt, on the other hand, to preserve what Mike Whitney calls the “perfect pyramid-scheme” of America’s currency monopoly (Whitney, 23 Jan. 2006) by means of military aggression against Iran is likely to result in equal or greater disruptions to the world economy. American military aggression, which might conceivably include attempts to occupy Iran’s oil-producing Khuzestan province and the coastline along the Straits of Hormuz (see Pilger), will not just have appalling consequences for civilians throughout the region; it may also place American forces into situations still more closely analogous than the present stage of Iraqi resistance to the situation produced in Lebanon by Israel’s invasion of that country—which ended in 2000 with Israel’s first military defeat (see Salama and Ruster).

The involvement of Turkey

One significant difference between the warnings of a coming war circulating in early 2005 and those which have appeared in recent months is the current evidence of feverish diplomatic activity between Washington and Ankara. The NATO powers have evidently been co-opted into Washington’s war plans: the so-called EU-3 (France, Germany, and Britain) presented Iran with a negotiating position on the nuclear fuel cycle for Iran’s power plants that seemed designed to produce an indignant refusal. (As Aijaz Ahmad writes, the European group “was not negotiating; it was relaying to Iran, and to all and sundry, what the U.S. was demanding and threatening to report Iran to the Security Council if the latter did not comply. Everyone knows that Iran had closed its Isphahan facility voluntarily, as a confidence-building measure, expecting some reciprocity, and then re-opened it, in retaliation, after having waited for reciprocity for many months and not getting it—indeed, receiving only escalated demands.”)

But according to the well-connected Jürgen Gottslich, writing in Der Spiegel in late December, Iran was not discussed during the new German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung’s recent visit to Washington. Gottslich wrote that “the speculation surrounding an American strike against Iran centers more on developments in Turkey. There has been a definite surge in visits to Ankara by high-ranking National Security personnel from the U.S. and by NATO officials. Within the space of just a few days, FBI Director Robert Mueller, [CIA] Director [Porter] Goss and then NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer visited Turkey.” Condoleezza Rice also flew to Turkey immediately after her December trip to Berlin.

The aim of these visits has quite obviously been to bring Turkey into line with a planned attack on Iran. As Gottslich writes, “On his Istanbul visit, Goss is alleged to have given Turkish security services three dossiers that prove Iranian cooperation with al-Qaeda. In addition, there was a fourth dossier focusing on the current state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

But why, beyond the obvious fact of Turkey’s shared border with Iran, should Turkey be such an important factor in American war plans? The answer is suggested by an article published by an American academic, Robert Olson, in the June 2002 issue of Middle East Policy. According to Noam Chomsky, Olson “reports that 12 percent of Israel’s offensive aircraft are to be ‘permanently stationed in Turkey’ and have been ‘flying reconnaissance flights along Iran’s border,’ signaling to Iran ‘that it would soon be challenged elsewhere by Turkey and its Israeli and American allies’” (Chomsky 159). These Israeli aircraft would evidently take part in any American and Israeli aerial attack on Iran, and Turkish consent would no doubt be necessary for their use in such an act.

What advantages might Turkey hope to gain from its consent? The collaboration of Britain, France and Germany in the cranking up of diplomatic pressure on Iran might suggest that Turkey’s much-desired admission to the European Union could have been held out as one carrot—possibly with the argument that participation in an attack on a fundamentalist Islamic state could be one way of calming European fears over the entry of a Muslim nation into the Union. An equally persuasive advantage may have been a secret promise of future admission to the select group of nuclear powers.

Christopher Deliso has assembled evidence both of Turkey’s persistent involvement in the smuggling and production of nuclear weapons technology, including centrifuge components and triggering devices (Deliso, 21 Nov. 2005)—and also of the very interesting fact that the key administration officials involved in the outing of Valerie Plame, who was investigating these murky operations, included people, among them Marc Grossman, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, who give every appearance of having been centrally involved in the very network of nuclear arms proliferation that the CIA was working to uncover (Deliso, 24 Nov. 2005). Even when supplemented by Sibel Edmonds’ indications of high-level collaboration in the frustration by Turkish agents of the FBI’s parallel investigations of what appears to be the same network, the evidence remains at best suppositious. And yet despite the inaccessibility of details—which will no doubt remain inaccessible for as long as Dick Cheney, John Bolton and the rest retain the power to frustrate investigations into the activities of their close associates and subordinates—the larger pattern is, to say the least, intriguing. The same highly-placed neoconservatives who have been crying wolf over Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons appear to have been deeply—and lucratively—involved in the trafficking of restricted and forbidden weapons technology into Turkey.

Should this pattern turn out indeed to involve corruption, hypocrisy, and treachery on the grand scale that Deliso’s investigative reporting would suggest, is there any reason one should be surprised?

What else, to be frank, would you expect from people such as these?

Global Research Contributing Editor Michael Keefer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Guelph. He is a former President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. His recent writings include a series of articles on electoral fraud in the 2004 US presidential election published by the Centre for Research on Globalization.

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060222&articleId=2032
Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust?
Will the US launch "Mini-nukes" against Iran in Retaliation for Tehran's "Non-compliance"?

by Michel Chossudovsky

February 22, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

Part I of this text was published as a separate article entitled:

The Dangers of a Middle East Nuclear War
New Pentagon Doctrine: Mini-Nukes are "Safe for the Surrounding Civilian Population"
by Michel Chossudovsky

"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.... This weapon is to be used against Japan ... [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. ... The target will be a purely military one... It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."

(President Harry S. Truman, Diary, July 25, 1945)

"The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.." (President Harry S. Truman in a radio speech to the Nation, August 9, 1945).

[Note: the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; the Second on Nagasaki, on August 9, on the same day as Truman's radio speech to the Nation]

(Listen to Excerpt of his speech, Hiroshima audio video)

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of radioactive fallout, over a large part of the Middle East.

All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as "a weapon of last resort" have been scrapped. "Offensive" military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of "self-defense".

The distinction between tactical nuclear weapons and the conventional battlefield arsenal has been blurred. America's new nuclear doctrine is based on "a mix of strike capabilities". The latter, which specifically applies to the Pentagon's planned aerial bombing of Iran, envisages the use of nukes in combination with conventional weapons.

As in the case of the first atomic bomb, which in the words of President Harry Truman "was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base", today's "mini-nukes" are heralded as "safe for the surrounding civilian population".

Known in official Washington, as "Joint Publication 3-12", the new nuclear doctrine (Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations , (DJNO) (March 2005)) calls for "integrating conventional and nuclear attacks" under a unified and "integrated" Command and Control (C2).

It largely describes war planning as a management decision-making process, where military and strategic objectives are to be achieved, through a mix of instruments, with little concern for the resulting loss of human life.

Military planning focuses on "the most efficient use of force" , -i.e. an optimal arrangement of different weapons systems to achieve stated military goals. In this context, nuclear and conventional weapons are considered to be "part of the tool box", from which military commanders can pick and choose the instruments that they require in accordance with "evolving circumstances" in the war theater. (None of these weapons in the Pentagon's "tool box", including conventional bunker buster bombs, cluster bombs, mini-nukes, chemical and biological weapons are described as "weapons of mass destruction" when used by the United States of America and its coalition partners).

The stated objective is to:

"ensure the most efficient use of force and provide US leaders with a broader range of [nuclear and conventional] strike options to address immediate contingencies. Integration of conventional and nuclear forces is therefore crucial to the success of any comprehensive strategy. This integration will ensure optimal targeting, minimal collateral damage, and reduce the probability of escalation." (Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations p. JP 3-12-13)

The new nuclear doctrine turns concepts and realities upside down. It not only denies the devastating impacts of nuclear weapons, it states, in no uncertain terms, that nuclear weapons are "safe" and their use in the battlefield will ensure "minimal collateral damage and reduce the probability of escalation". The issue of radioactive fallout is barely acknowledged with regard to tactical nuclear weapons. These various guiding principles which describe nukes as "safe for civilians" constitute a consensus within the military, which is then fed into the military manuals, providing relevant "green light" criteria to geographical commanders in the war theater.

"Defensive" and "Offensive" Actions

While the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review sets the stage for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, specifically against Iran, The Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations goes one step further in blurring the distinction between "defensive" and "offensive" military actions:

"The new triad offers a mix of strategic offensive and defensive capabilities that includes nuclear and non-nuclear strike capabilities, active and passive defenses, and a robust research, development, and industrial infrastructure to develop, build, and maintain offensive forces and defensive systems ..." (Ibid) (key concepts indicated in added italics)

The new nuclear doctrine, however, goes beyond preemptive acts of "self-defense", it calls for "anticipatory action" using nuclear weapons against a "rogue enemy" which allegedly plans to develop WMD at some undefined future date:

Responsible security planning requires preparation for threats that are possible, though perhaps unlikely today. The lessons of military history remain clear: unpredictable, irrational conflicts occur. Military forces must prepare to counter weapons and capabilities that exist or will exist in the near term even if no immediate likely scenarios for war are at hand. To maximize deterrence of WMD use, it is essential US forces prepare to use nuclear weapons effectively and that US forces are determined to employ nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use. (Ibid, p. III-1, italics added)

Nukes would serve to prevent a non-existent WMD program (e.g. Iran) prior to its development. This twisted formulation goes far beyond the premises of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review and NPSD 17. which state that the US can retaliate with nuclear weapons if attacked with WMD:

"The United States will make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force – including potentially nuclear weapons – to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies." ... (NSPD 17)

"Integration" of Nuclear and Conventional Weapons Plans

The Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations outlines the procedures governing the use of nuclear weapons and the nature of the relationship between nuclear and conventional war operations.

The DJNO states that the:

"use of nuclear weapons within a [war] theater requires that nuclear and conventional plans be integrated to the greatest extent possible"

(DJNO, p 47 italics added, italics added, For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 )

The implications of this "integration" are far-reaching because once the decision is taken by the Commander in Chief, namely the President of the United States, to launch a joint conventional-nuclear military operation, there is a risk that tactical nuclear weapons could be used without requesting subsequent presidential approval. In this regard, execution procedures under the jurisdiction of the theater commanders pertaining to nuclear weapons are described as "flexible and allow for changes in the situation":

"Geographic combatant commanders are responsible for defining theater objectives and developing nuclear plans required to support those objectives, including selecting targets. When tasked, CDRUSSTRATCOM, as a supporting combatant commander, provides detailed planning support to meet theater planning requirements. All theater nuclear option planning follows prescribed Joint Operation Planning and Execution System procedures to formulate and implement an effective response within the timeframe permitted by the crisis..

Since options do not exist for every scenario, combatant commanders must have a capability to perform crisis action planning and execute those plans. Crisis action planning provides the capability to develop new options, or modify existing options, when current limited or major response options are inappropriate.

...Command, control, and coordination must be flexible enough to allow the geographic combatant commander to strike time-sensitive targets such as mobile missile launch platforms." Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations Doctrine (italics added)

Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO)

While presidential approval is formally required to launch a nuclear war, geographic combat commanders would be in charge of Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO), with a mandate not only to implement but also to formulate command decisions pertaining to nuclear weapons. ( Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations Doctrine )

We are no longer dealing with "the risk" associated with "an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch" as outlined by former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara , but with a military decision-making process which provides military commanders, from the Commander in Chief down to the geographical commanders with discretionary powers to use tactical nuclear weapons.

Moreover, because these "smaller" tactical nuclear weapons have been "reclassified" by the Pentagon as "safe for the surrounding civilian population", thereby "minimizing the risk of collateral damage", there are no overriding built-in restrictions which prevent their use. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Dangers of a Middle East Nuclear War , Global Research, February 2006) .

Once a decision to launch a military operation is taken (e.g. aerial strikes on Iran), theater commanders have a degree of latitude. What this signifies in practice is once the presidential decision is taken, USSTRATCOM in liaison with theater commanders can decide on the targeting and type of weaponry to be used. Stockpiled tactical nuclear weapons are now considered to be an integral part of the battlefield arsenal. In other words, nukes have become "part of the tool box", used in conventional war theaters.

Planned Aerial Attacks on Iran

An operational plan to wage aerial attacks on Iran has been in "a state of readiness" since June 2005. Essential military hardware to wage this operation has been deployed. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 ).

Vice President Dick Cheney has ordered USSTRATCOM to draft a "contingency plan", which "includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons." (Philip Giraldi, Attack on Iran: Pre-emptive Nuclear War , The American Conservative, 2 August 2005).

USSTRATCOM would have the responsibility for overseeing and coordinating this military deployment as well as launching the military operation. (For details, Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 ).

In January 2005 a significant shift in USSTRATCOM's mandate was implemented. USSTRATCOM was identified as "the lead Combatant Command for integration and synchronization of DoD-wide efforts in combating weapons of mass destruction." To implement this mandate, a brand new command unit entitled Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike , or JFCCSGS was created.

Overseen by USSTRATCOM, JFCCSGS would be responsible for the launching of military operations "using nuclear or conventional weapons" in compliance with the Bush administration's new nuclear doctrine. Both categories of weapons would be integrated into a "joint strike operation" under unified Command and Control.

According to Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,

"The Defense Department is upgrading its nuclear strike plans to reflect new presidential guidance and a transition in war planning from the top-heavy Single Integrated Operational Plan of the Cold War to a family of smaller and more flexible strike plans designed to defeat today's adversaries. The new central strategic war plan is known as OPLAN (Operations Plan) 8044.... This revised, detailed plan provides more flexible options to assure allies, and dissuade, deter, and if necessary, defeat adversaries in a wider range of contingencies....

One member of the new family is CONPLAN 8022, a concept plan for the quick use of nuclear, conventional, or information warfare capabilities to destroy--preemptively, if necessary--"time-urgent targets" anywhere in the world. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an Alert Order in early 2004 that directed the military to put CONPLAN 8022 into effect. As a result, the Bush administration's preemption policy is now operational on long-range bombers, strategic submarines on deterrent patrol, and presumably intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)."

The operational implementation of the Global Strike would be under CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022, which now consists of "an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers,' (Japanese Economic Newswire, 30 December 2005, For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, op. cit.).

CONPLAN 8022 is 'the overall umbrella plan for sort of the pre-planned strategic scenarios involving nuclear weapons.'

'It's specifically focused on these new types of threats -- Iran, North Korea -- proliferators and potentially terrorists too,' he said. 'There's nothing that says that they can't use CONPLAN 8022 in limited scenarios against Russian and Chinese targets.' (According to Hans Kristensen, of the Nuclear Information Project, quoted in Japanese Economic News Wire, op. cit.)

Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization

The planning of the aerial bombings of Iran started in mid-2004, pursuant to the formulation of CONPLAN 8022 in early 2004. In May 2004, National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 35 entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization was issued.

The contents of this highly sensitive document remains a carefully guarded State secret. There has been no mention of NSPD 35 by the media nor even in Congressional debates. While its contents remains classified, the presumption is that NSPD 35 pertains to the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East war theater in compliance with CONPLAN 8022.

In this regard, a recent press report published in Yeni Safak (Turkey) suggests that the United States is currently:

"deploying B61-type tactical nuclear weapons in southern Iraq as part of a plan to hit Iran from this area if and when Iran responds to an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities". (Ibrahim Karagul, "The US is Deploying Nuclear Weapons in Iraq Against Iran", (Yeni Safak,. 20 December 2005, quoted in BBC Monitoring Europe).

This deployment in Iraq appears to be pursuant to NSPD 35 ,

What the Yenbi Safak report suggests is that conventional weapons would be used in the first instance, and if Iran were to retaliate in response to US-Israeli aerial attacks, tactical thermonuclear B61 weapons could then be launched This retaliation using tactical nuclear weapons would be consistent with the guidelines contained in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review and NSPD 17 (see above).

Israel's Stockpiling of Conventional and Nuclear Weapons

Israel is part of the military alliance and is slated to play a major role in the planned attacks on Iran. (For details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 ).

Confirmed by several press reports, Israel has taken delivery, starting in September 2004 of some 500 US produced BLU 109 bunker buster bombs (WP, January 6, 2006). The first procurement order for BLU 109 [Bomb Live Unit] dates to September 2004. In April 2005, Washington confirmed that Israel was to take delivery of 100 of the more sophisticated bunker buster bomb GBU-28 produced by Lockheed Martin ( Reuters, April 26, 2005). The GBU-28 is described as "a 5,000-pound laser-guided conventional munitions that uses a 4,400-pound penetrating warhead." It was used in the Iraqi war theater:

The Pentagon [stated] that ... the sale to Israel of 500 BLU-109 warheads, [was] meant to "contribute significantly to U.S. strategic and tactical objectives." .

Mounted on satellite-guided bombs, BLU-109s can be fired from F-15 or F-16 jets, U.S.-made aircraft in Israel's arsenal. This year Israel received the first of a fleet of 102 long-range F-16Is from Washington, its main ally. "Israel very likely manufactures its own bunker busters, but they are not as robust as the 2,000-pound (910 kg) BLUs," Robert Hewson, editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons, told Reuters. (Reuters, 21 September 2004)

The report does not confirm whether Israel has stockpiled and deployed the thermonuclear version of the bunker buster bomb. Nor does it indicate whether the Israeli made bunker buster bombs are equipped with nuclear warheads. It is worth noting that this stock piling of bunker buster bombs occurred within a few months after the Release of the NPSD 35¸ Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization (May 2004).

Israel possesses 100-200 strategic nuclear warheads . In 2003, Washington and Tel Aviv confirmed that they were collaborating in "the deployment of US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Israel's fleet of Dolphin-class submarines." (The Observer, 12 October 2003) . In more recent developments, which coincide with the preparations of strikes against Iran, Israel has taken delivery of two new German produced submarines "that could launch nuclear-armed cruise missiles for a "second-strike" deterrent." (Newsweek, 13 February 2006. See also CDI Data Base)

Israel's tactical nuclear weapons capabilities are not known

Israel's participation in the aerial attacks will also act as a political bombshell throughout the Middle East. It would contribute to escalation, with a war zone which could extend initially into Lebanon and Syria. The entire region from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia and Afghanistan's Western frontier would be affected..

Year Deployed: 1973
Dimensions: 10.0 meters length
Weight: 4,500 kilograms
Propulsion: Single-stage
Throw-weight: 500 kilograms
Range: 500 kilometers
Guidance: Inertial
Circular Error Probable: Unknown
Warhead: Single
Yield: Conventional, chemical, or nuclear possible
Locations: Unknown
Number Deployed: 50-100 missiles
Primary Contractor: IAI

Israel's Jericho-1 (Luz YA-1) SRBM

The Role of Western Europe

Several Western European countries, officially considered as "non-nuclear states", possess tactical nuclear weapons, supplied to them by Washington.

The US has supplied some 480 B61 thermonuclear bombs to five non-nuclear NATO countries including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, and one nuclear country, the United Kingdom. Casually disregarded by the Vienna based UN Nuclear Watch, the US has actively contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Western Europe.

As part of this European stockpiling, Turkey, which is a partner of the US-led coalition against Iran along with Israel, possesses some 90 thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs at the Incirlik nuclear air base. (National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005)

Consistent with US nuclear policy, the stockpiling and deployment of B61 in Western Europe are intended for targets in the Middle East. Moreover, in accordance with "NATO strike plans", these thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs (stockpiled by the "non-nuclear States") could be launched "against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran" ( quoted in National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005)

Moreover, confirmed by (partially) declassified documents (released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act):

"arrangements were made in the mid-1990s to allow the use of U.S. nuclear forces in Europe outside the area of responsibility of U.S. European Command (EUCOM). As a result of these arrangements, EUCOM now supports CENTCOM nuclear missions in the Middle East, including, potentially, against Iran and Syria"

(quoted in http://www.nukestrat.com/us/afn/nato.htm italics added)

With the exception of the US, no other nuclear power "has nuclear weapons earmarked for delivery by non-nuclear countries." (National Resources Defense Council, op cit)

While these "non-nuclear states" casually accuse Tehran of developing nuclear weapons, without documentary evidence, they themselves have capabilities of delivering nuclear warheads, which are targeted at Iran. To say that this is a clear case of "double standards" by the IAEA and the "international community" is a understatement.

Germany: De Facto Nuclear Power

Among the five "non-nuclear states" "Germany remains the most heavily nuclearized country with three nuclear bases (two of which are fully operational) and may store as many as 150 [B61 bunker buster ] bombs" (Ibid). In accordance with "NATO strike plans" (mentioned above) these tactical nuclear weapons are also targeted at the Middle East.

While Germany is not officially a nuclear power, it produces nuclear warheads for the French Navy. It stockpiles nuclear warheads and it has the capabilities of delivering nuclear weapons. The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company - EADS , a Franco-German-Spanish joint venture, controlled by Deutsche Aerospace and the powerful Daimler Group is Europe's second largest military producer, supplying .France's M51 nuclear missile.

France Endorses the Preemptive Nuclear Doctrine

In January 2006, French President Jacques Chirac announced a major shift in France's nuclear policy.

Without mentioning Iran, Chirac intimated that France's nukes should be used in the form of "more focused attacks" against countries, which were "considering" the deployment of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

He also hinted to the possibility that tactical nuclear weapons could be used in conventional war theaters, very much in line with both US and NATO nuclear doctrine (See Chirac shifts French doctrine for use of nuclear weapons , Nucleonics Week January 26, 2006).

The French president seems to have embraced the US sponsored "War on Terrorism". He presented nuclear weapons as a means to build a safer World and combat terrorism:

Nuclear weapons are not meant to be used against "fanatical terrorists," nevertheless "the leaders of states which used terrorist means against us, as well as those who considered using, in one way or another, weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they are exposing themselves to a firm, appropriate response on our side...".(Ibid)

Although Chirac made no reference to the preemptive use of nuclear weapons, his statement broadly replicates the premises of the Bush administration's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review , which calls for the use of tactical nuclear weapons against ''rogue states" and "terrorist non-state organizations".

lick on base locations to view satellite image (Akinci not available...yet).

The stockpiled weapons are B61 thermonuclear bombs. All the weapons are gravity bombs of the B61-3, -4, and -10 types.2 .

Those estimates were based on private and public statements by a number of government sources and assumptions about the weapon storage capacity at each base.

(National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005)

Building a Pretext for a Preemptive Nuclear Attack

The pretext for waging war on Iran essentially rests on two fundamental premises, which are part of the Bush administration's National Security doctrine.

1. Iran's alleged possession of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (WMD), more specifically its nuclear enrichment program.

2. Iran's alleged support to "Islamic terrorists".

These are two interrelated statements which are an integral part of the propaganda and media disinformation campaign.

The "Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)" statement is used to justify the "pre-emptive war" against the "State sponsors of terror", --i.e. countries such as Iran and North Korea which allegedly possess WMD. Iran is identified as a State sponsor of so-called "non-State terrorist organizations". The latter also possess WMDs and potentially constitute a nuclear threat. Terrorist non-state organizations are presented as a "nuclear power".

"The enemies in this [long] war are not traditional conventional military forces but rather dispersed, global terrorist networks that exploit Islam to advance radical political aims. These enemies have the avowed aim of acquiring and using nuclear and biological weapons to murder hundreds of thousands of Americans and others around the world." (2006 Quadrennial Defense Review ),

In contrast, Germany and Israel which produce and possess nuclear warheads are not considered "nuclear powers".

In recent months, the pretext for war, building on this WMD-Islamic terrorist nexus, has been highlighted ad nauseam, on a daily basis by the Western media.

In a testimony to the US Senate Budget Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran and Syria of destabilizing the Middle East and providing support to militant Islamic groups. She described Iran as the "a central banker for terrorism", not withstanding the fact amply documented that Al Qaeda has been supported and financed from its inception in the early 1980s by none other than the CIA. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Who is Osama bin Laden, Global Research 2001).

"It's not just Iran's nuclear program but also their support for terrorism around the world. They are, in effect, the central banker for terrorism," (Statement to the Senate Budget Committee, 16 February 2006)

"Second 9/11": Cheney's "Contingency Plan"

While the "threat" of Iran's alleged WMD is slated for debate at the UN Security Council, Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a contingency plan "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States". This "contingency plan" to attack Iran uses the pretext of a "Second 9/11" which has not yet happened, to prepare for a major military operation against Iran.

The contingency plan, which is characterized by a military build up in anticipation of possible aerial strikes against Iran, is in a "state of readiness".

What is diabolical is that the justification to wage war on Iran rests on Iran's involvement in a terrorist attack on America, which has not yet occurred:

The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections. (Philip Giraldi, Attack on Iran: Pre-emptive Nuclear War , The American Conservative, 2 August 2005)

Are we to understand that US military planners are waiting in limbo for a Second 9/11, to launch a military operation directed against Iran, which is currently in a "state of readiness"?

Cheney's proposed "contingency plan" does not focus on preventing a Second 9/11. The Cheney plan is predicated on the presumption that Iran would be behind a Second 9/11 and that punitive bombings would immediately be activated, prior to the conduct of an investigation, much in the same way as the attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001, allegedly in retribution for the role of the Taliban government in support of the 9/11 terrorists. It is worth noting that the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan had been planned well in advance of 9/11. As Michael Keefer points out in an incisive review article:

"At a deeper level, it implies that “9/11-type terrorist attacks” are recognized in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon as appropriate means of legitimizing wars of aggression against any country selected for that treatment by the regime and its corporate propaganda-amplification system.... (Keefer, February 2006 )

Keefer concludes that "an attack on Iran, which would presumably involve the use of significant numbers of extremely ‘dirty’ earth-penetrating nuclear bombs, might well be made to follow a dirty-bomb attack on the United States, which would be represented in the media as having been carried out by Iranian agents" (Keefer, February 2006 )

The Battle for Oil

The Anglo-American oil companies are indelibly behind Cheney's "contingency plan" to wage war on Iran. The latter is geared towards territorial and corporate control over oil and gas reserves as well as pipeline routes.

There is continuity in US Middle East war plans, from the Democrats to the Republicans. The essential features of Neoconservative discourse were already in place under the Clinton administration. US Central Command's (USCENTCOM) theater strategy in the mid-1990s was geared towards securing, from an economic and military standpoint, control over Middle East oil.

"The broad national security interests and objectives expressed in the President's National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Chairman's National Military Strategy (NMS) form the foundation of the United States Central Command's theater strategy. The NSS directs implementation of a strategy of dual containment of the rogue states of Iraq and Iran as long as those states pose a threat to U.S. interests, to other states in the region, and to their own citizens. Dual containment is designed to maintain the balance of power in the region without depending on either Iraq or Iran. USCENTCOM's theater strategy is interest-based and threat-focused. The purpose of U.S. engagement, as espoused in the NSS, is to protect the United States' vital interest in the region - uninterrupted, secure U.S./Allied access to Gulf oil.

(USCENTCOM, http://www.milnet.com/milnet/pentagon/centcom/chap1/stratgic.htm#USPolicy , italics added)

Iran possesses 10 percent of global oil and gas reserves, The US is the first and foremost military and nuclear power in the World, but it possesses less than 3 percent of global oil and gas reserves.

On the other hand, the countries inhabited by Muslims, including the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, West and Central Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, possess approximately 80 percent of the World's oil and gas reserves.

The "war on terrorism" and the hate campaign directed against Muslims, which has gained impetus in recent months, bears a direct relationship to the "Battle for Middle East Oil". How best to conquer these vast oil reserves located in countries inhabited by Muslims? Build a political consensus against Muslim countries, describe them as "uncivilized", denigrate their culture and religion, implement ethnic profiling against Muslims in Western countries, foster hatred and racism against the inhabitants of the oil producing countries.

The values of Islam are said to be tied into "Islamic terrorism". Western governments are now accusing Iran of "exporting terrorism to the West" In the words of Prime Minister Tony Blair:

"There is a virus of extremism which comes out of the cocktail of religious fanaticism and political repression in the Middle East which is now being exported to the rest of the world. "We will only secure our future if we are dealing with every single aspect of that problem. Our future security depends on sorting out the stability of that region.""You can never say never in any of these situations." (quoted in the Mirror, 7 February 2006)

Muslims are demonized, casually identified with "Islamic terrorists", who are also described as constituting a nuclear threat. In turn, the terrorists are supported by Iran, an Islamic Republic which threatens the "civilized World" with deadly nuclear weapons (which it does not possess). In contrast, America's humanitarian "nuclear weapons will be accurate, safe and reliable."

The World is at a Critical Cross-roads

It is not Iran which is a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel.

In recent developments, Western European governments --including the so-called "non-nuclear states" which possess nuclear weapons-- have joined the bandwagon. In chorus, Western Europe and the member states of the Atlantic alliance (NATO) have endorsed the US-led military initiative against Iran.

The Pentagon's planned aerial attacks on Iran involve "scenarios" using both nuclear and conventional weapons. While this does not imply the use of nuclear weapons, the potential danger of a Middle East nuclear holocaust must, nonetheless, be taken seriously. It must become a focal point of the antiwar movement, particularly in the United States, Western Europe, Israel and Turkey.

It should also be understood that China and Russia are (unofficially) allies of Iran, supplying them with advanced military equipment and a sophisticated missile defense system. It is unlikely that China and Russia will take on a passive position if and when the aerial bombardments are carried out.

The new preemptive nuclear doctrine calls for the "integration" of "defensive" and "offensive" operations. Moreover, the important distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons has been blurred..

From a military standpoint, the US and its coalition partners including Israel and Turkey are in "a state of readiness."

Through media disinformation, the objective is to galvanize Western public opinion in support of a US-led war on Iran in retaliation for Iran's defiance of the international community.

War propaganda consists in "fabricating an enemy" while conveying the illusion that the Western World is under attack by Islamic terrorists, who are directly supported by the Tehran government.

"Make the World safer", "prevent the proliferation of dirty nuclear devices by terrorists", "implement punitive actions against Iran to ensure the peace". "Combat nuclear proliferation by rogue states"...

Supported by the Western media, a generalized atmosphere of racism and xenophobia directed against Muslims has unfolded, particularly in Western Europe, which provides a fake legitimacy to the US war agenda. The latter is upheld as a "Just War". The "Just war" theory serves to camouflage the nature of US war plans, while providing a human face to the invaders.

What can be done?

The antiwar movement is in many regards divided and misinformed on the nature of the US military agenda. Several non-governmental organizations have placed the blame on Iran, for not complying with the "reasonable demands" of the "international community". These same organizations, which are committed to World Peace tend to downplay the implications of the proposed US bombing of Iran.

To reverse the tide requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, schools, universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war, which contemplates the use of nuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: Iran is not the threat. Even without the use of nukes, the proposed aerial bombardments could result in escalation, ultimately leading us into a broader war in the Middle East.

Debate and discussion must also take place within the Military and Intelligence community, particularly with regard to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, within the corridors of the US Congress, in municipalities and at all levels of government. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the political and military actors in high office must be challenged.

The corporate media also bears a heavy responsibility for the cover-up of US sponsored war crimes. It must also be forcefully challenged for its biased coverage of the Middle East war.

For the past year, Washington has been waging a "diplomatic arm twisting" exercise with a view to enlisting countries into supporting of its military agenda. It is essential that at the diplomatic level, countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America take a firm stance against the US military agenda.

Condoleezza Rice has trekked across the Middle East, "expressing concern over Iran's nuclear program", seeking the unequivocal endorsement of the governments of the region against Tehran. Meanwhile the Bush administration has allocated funds in support of Iranian dissident groups within Iran.

What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called "Homeland Security agenda" which has already defined the contours of a police State.

The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity.

It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The Globalization of Poverty " published in eleven languages. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, at www.globalresearch.ca . He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His most recent book is entitled: America’s "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005.

To order Chossudovsky's book America's "War on Terrorism", click here.

Note: Readers are welcome to cross-post this article with a view to spreading the word and warning people of the dangers of nuclear war.

Part I of this text was published as a separate article entitled:

The Dangers of a Middle East Nuclear War
New Pentagon Doctrine: Mini-Nukes are "Safe for the Surrounding Civilian Population"
by Michel Chossudovsky

Related Texts by the author:

Nuclear War against Iran, by Michel Chossudovsky, January 2006

Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran, by Michel Chossudovsky, May 2005

Annex A

Five basic types of US Military Plans:

• Campaign Plan (CAMPLAN): A plan for a series of related military operations aimed at accomplishing a strategic or operational objective within a given time and space (e.g., campaign plan for Iraq incorporating a number of subordinate specific plans).

• Operations Plan (OPLAN): A completed plan required when there is compelling national interest, when a specific threat exists, and/or when the nature of the contingency requires detailed planning (e.g., North Korea). OPLANs contains all formatted annexes (see below), and Time Phased Force and Deployment Data (TPFDD), a database containing units to be deployed, routing of deploying units, movement data of forces, personnel, logistics and transportation requirements. An OPLAN can be used as a basis for development of an Operations Order (OPORD).

• Operations Plan in Concept Form Only (CONPLAN): An operations plan in an abbreviated format prepared for less compelling national interest contingencies than for OPLANs and for unspecific threats. A CONPLAN requires expansion or alteration to convert into an OPLAN or OPORD. It normally includes a statement of Strategic Concept and annexes A-D and K (see below). CONPLANs that do have TPFDDs are usually developed because of international agreement or treaties.

• Functional plans (FUNCPLAN): An operations plan involving the conduct of military operations in a peacetime or non-hostile environment (e.g., disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, counter-drug, or peacekeeping operations).

• Theater Security Cooperation and Theater Engagement Plans (TSCPs and TEPs): Day-to-day plans to set the initial conditions for future military action in terms of multinational capabilities, U.S. military access, coalition interoperability, and intelligence

SOURCE: Supplement to Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World , by William Arkin (Copyright William Arkin, 2005)

ANNEX B

Timeline in the Development of US Nuclear doctrine (2002-2006) [excerpts]

Source The Nuclear Information Project (copyright Nuclear Information Project, click to see complete and detailed Timeline )

2002

January 8: The Nuclear Posture Review is officially published.

June: White House issues National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 14, "Nuclear Weapons Planning Guidance."

September 14: White House issues National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 17, "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction."

September 17: White House issues the National Security Strategy of the United States. The document publicly formulates a more proactive preemption doctrine

December 10: White House issues "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction," the unclassified version of National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 17. The wording in NSPD 17 of using "potentially nuclear weapons" is replaced with "all of our options."

December 16: White House issues National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 23, "National Policy on Ballistic Missile Defense."

2003

January 10: President Bush signs Change 2 to the Unified Command Plan (UCP), which assigns four emerging missions to STRATCOM: missile defense, global strike, information operations, and global C4ISR. (Command and Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Sensors and Reconnaissance). The directive identifies global strike as "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives."

March: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld issues "Nuclear Posture Review: Implementation Plan, DOD Implementation of the December 2001 Nuclear Posture Review Report to Congress."

April: STRATCOM issues CONPLAN (Concept Plan) 8022-01, Strategic Concept.

June 4: STRATCOM issues CONPLAN 8022-02, Strategic Concept draft.

June: White House issues National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 28, "United States Nuclear Weapons Command and Control, Safety, and Security." The guidance "provides direction on various nuclear issues, to include security."

October 1: OPLAN (Operation Plan) 8044, the first strategic plan not using the name SIOP, is put into effect by STRATCOM.

November: The first CONPLAN 8022 (Global Strike) is completed by STRATCOM.

2004

April 19: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld issues NUWEP (Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy). The document states in part: "U.S. nuclear forces must be capable of, and be seen to be capable of, destroying those critical war-making and war-supporting assets and capabilities that a potential enemy leadership values most and that it would rely on to achieve its own objectives in a post-war world."

May 24: Air Combat Command publishes Global Strike CONOPS.

May: White House issues National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 35, "Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization," which authorizes deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

July 8: STRATCOM commander General E. Cartwright informs Congress that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "just signed the Interim Global Strike Alert Order, which provides the President a prompt, global strike capability." The Alert Order directs the Air Force and Navy to put CONPLAN 8022 into effect on selected strike platforms including long-range bombers and strategic submarines.

August 17: STRATCOM publishes Global Strike Interim Capability Operations Order (OPORD).

October 1: OPLAN 8044 Revision 01 becomes effective. According to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers, "STRATCOM has revised our strategic deterrence and response plan that became effective in the fall of 2004. This revised, detailed plan provides more flexible options to assure allies, and dissuade, deter, and if necessary, defeat adversaries in a wider range of contingencies.” (emphasis added)

November: CJCS publishes "Strategic Deterrence Joint Operating Concept."

2005

January 10: CJCS issues Global Strike Joint Integrating Concept, Version 1.

March 1: President Bush signs Unified Command Plan 2004.

October 1: OPLAN 8044 Revision 02 is put into effect by STRATCOM. According to the Pentagon, this was a "major revamping" of the U.S. strategic war plan which, among other issues, included the "integration of conventional strike options into [the] OPLAN."

2006

Early 2006: CJCS is scheduled to publish updated Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Pub 3-12). However, this and three other Joint Pub nuclear documents were cancelled.

February 6: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld released the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Source: The Nuclear Information Project Copyright The Nuclear Information Project 2005

gilipolla · Guest

http://gowans.blogspot.com/2006/01/why-iran.html
Why Iran?

The increasingly frequent demonization of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Western media has become an integral part of the stepped-up efforts of Washington, London, the EU-3 and Tel Aviv to bring Iran under US control, efforts that may, if scattered newspapers reports are to believed, culminate in the aerial bombing by US or Israeli forces or both of Iranian nuclear facilities early this spring.

A London Sunday Times article of December 11, 2005 revealed that Israeli armed forces had been ordered “to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran.” Scotland’s The Herald (January 10, 2006) echoed the Times’ report.

Meir Dagan, the chief of Israel’s spy service, Mossad, General Aharon Zeev-Farkasj, who retired earlier this month as head of Israeli military intelligence “and Israeli policy makers all agree that a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities cannot be ruled out.” (New York Times, January 13, 2006.) But they say “Israel has no intention, for now, of trying to deal with Iran alone or through military means.” (New York Times, January 13, 2006)

But do they have an intention of dealing with Iran through military means in partnership with the US?

UPI (December 30, 2005), citing the German weekly, Der Spiegel, revealed that “Washington appears to be dispatching high-level officials to prepare its allies for a possible attack (on Iran) rather than merely implying the possibility as it has repeatedly done during the past year.” CIA Director Porter Goss is said to have traveled to Ankara to clear the way for Turkey to be used as a staging ground for US warplanes to fly missions against Iranian targets.

Whether planning for an attack is in an advanced stage, or whether reports of an imminent assault are a ruse to pressure Iran, is unclear. Whatever the case, there’s no mistaking the reality that the Iranian president is being elevated to the position of international enemy #1, in much the same way Saddam Hussein was in the run-up to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Emblematic is the Times of London’s Bronwen Maddox (January 12, 2006) asking whether Ahmadinejad is “the most dangerous leader in the world?” and answering her own question in the affirmative by noting it’s “thin reassurance for the West that Iranian clerics are the bulwark against Ahmadinejad’s excesses.” Not too many months ago, Kim Jong Il was called the most dangerous leader in the world, though the demands of the Western propaganda machine have since thrust him aside, for now, to better align with the shifting priorities of US foreign policy.

Not to be outdone, Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at the University of Oxford, speaks of Ahmadinejad as the “seemingly half-crazed Iranian President.” (Globe and Mail, January 12, 2006) In doing so, he places the Iranian president in the company of north Korea’s Kim Jong Il, also regularly presented as half-mad, along with a legion of other Third World leaders who have, as the standard operating procedure of imperialism, been described variously as bloodthirsty, dictatorial, despotic, antidemocratic and monstrous -- whatever it takes to make the messy and murderous business of regime change appear to be worth the price.

Ash, by the way, worries that US or Israeli bombing raids “would take the lives of innocent civilians – or at least of people who Iranian television could credibly claim were innocent civilians,” implying that while the job of taking over a country might seem messy, the carnage is probably an illusion conjured up by the propaganda ministry of the country whose innocent civilians’ lives are not really being snuffed out.

“Innocent civilians” has become a cliché, a prepackaged phrase to be thrown about, and absorbed, without much thought. What about innocent soldiers? Is a solider, or for that matter, a guerilla, or insurgent, who resists an invader any less innocent than a civilian? And can people like Ash, who prepare public opinion for war, be considered innocent? One wishes Ash could be plunked down in the middle of Tehran, to take the place of the innocent civilians he says probably won’t be killed or mangled or permanently disabled by the terror bombing of the US and Israeli air force. If he’s right, he has nothing to worry about.

It happens so regularly as to have become a law, that we can soon expect prominent critics of US foreign policy to join in the demonization, at the same time donning t-shirts emblazoned with the smiling mug of George W. Bush above the words: “international terrorist,” just to show they’re above the fray and with the angels. Analysis of foreign affairs, in the hands of pro-imperialist scribblers, like Ash, and of professed anti-imperialists, who invariably deplore the “monsters” imperialist armies and bomber crews are set in motion against, is nothing more than demonology.

The problem with the Bush international terrorist t-shirts is that, while Bush is indeed a terrorist, and deserves the opprobrium, so were all his predecessors, and so too would be anyone who replaced him. Get rid of one international terrorist, and another will immediately pop up in the White House to take his place. Like whack-a-mole, no matter how many moles you hit, the rodents keep coming back, because that’s the way the game is programmed.

The t-shirts would convey a deeper truth if they featured the outline of faceless person, accompanied by the following note: place picture here of head of US (or British or French or German) government. When all heads of US governments, to single out one imperialist country, have at least one entry in their portfolios of terrorist acts, from the ethnic cleansing of aboriginal populations and wars of conquest that attended the expansion of the US westward, through the wars of conquest to dominate the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and Cuba, through regular bloody interventions throughout Latin America, to fire-, carpet-, and atomic-bombings of civilian populations, it’s clear there’s something deeper than the personal characteristics of high state officials that account for this sanguinary, horrific, record. Like whack-a-mole, there seems to be something deep in the programming that thrusts individuals forward as the culprits, when in fact they’re simply agents through which the program works. It’s not individuals, but the program, that ultimately matters.

A clue to what the logic is that governs the program can be glimpsed in the Heritage Foundation’s 2006 Index of Economic Freedom. The think tank’s index is a kind of measure of how pleased you’d be with a country if you had a whole pile of cash to invest, or goods and services to sell, and were looking around for a good place to expand your stock of capital. Hong Kong, for example, which tops the list, has everything a capitalist could want. No tariffs and no barriers to trade, no pesky minimum wage laws, free entry of capital, unrestricted repatriation of earnings, and a low corporate and personal income tax rate. Other countries high on the list include Singapore (no tariffs, low corporate income tax), Ireland (hungry for foreign investment and willing to do whatever it takes to get it), Luxemburg (virtually free entry of goods) and the UK (good foreign investment climate, minimal tariffs).

The countries at the bottom, on the other hand, are a veritable Who’s Who of international pariahs, as defined by US State Department: Cuba (rank: 150, restricts and imposes performance criteria on foreign investment); Belarus (rank: 151, “concerted resistance to the private sector, and resistance to privatization” serving “to hinder foreign investment; follows “active policies of import suppression and export promotion”); Venezuela (rank: 152, “government controls key sectors of the economy” limiting US investment opportunities); Zimbabwe (rank: 154, “generally unwelcoming to foreign investment,” preferring “majority Zimbabwean participation” in new ventures and eventual local ownership); Iran (rank: 156, see below) and north Korea (rank: 157, ”firmly rooted in communism” with a “central command economy” which “controls all imports and exports” and prohibits most foreign investment). We’re supposed to believe these countries -- the perennial bugbears of US-UK foreign policy – are countries of concern, not because they set local development and economic sovereignty ahead of what Western investors and trans-nationals believe is their inalienable right to accumulate capital wherever they like, but because they’re supposed to be anti-democratic and contemptuous of human rights.

Yet all these countries share one thing in common: they prohibit or impose conditions on foreign investment and imports. That includes US investment and US exports. It would hardly be surprising that the US state, dominated by business interests, where the majority of cabinet members are, and have, for at least the past century, been corporate directors or members of corporate law firms, would be hostile to countries that interfere with, or prohibit, activities related to the accumulation of capital by US-based trans-nationals.

Iran prohibits private ownership of power generation, postal services, telecommunications and large-scale industry – hardly an inviting place for a foreign investor looking to expand his capital. Add to that the fact that Iran’s constitution severely restricts foreign ownership in the petroleum sector and mandates that the banking sector be state-owned. There’s also the reality that the government uses its ownership stake in over 1,500 companies to influence pricing to meet social policy (not trans-national profit-making) goals. Top these multiple crimes against the potential for fat profits with a trade policy that fosters the development of domestic industry by discouraging imports, and the conclusion is clear: Iran isn’t the kind of place a capitalist scouring the globe for markets and investment opportunities is going to warm up to.

So, is alarm over Iran acquiring the means to develop nuclear weapons, and Ahmadinejad’s reputed “violent anti-Semitism,” a cover for an effort to pry open the Iranian economy to move it up the Index of Economic Freedom?

Ask yourself this: Is the US trying to make over Iraq, its latest conquest, into another Hong Kong, the index’s champion? Before the US installed itself as the effective ruler of the country, Iraq had a largely state-owned economy, imposed restrictions on foreign ownership of key economic sectors, and subsidized necessities, such as fuel, cooking oil and staples, to meet social policy objectives. Like Iran today, Iraq had all the features of a largely closed, dirigiste economy, so richly at odds with the expansionary requirements of US capital. But Iraq, under US guidance, is in the midst of an economic makeover. State-owned enterprises are to be sold off. Subsidies for fuel and oil are being eliminated. The country is under the control of the IMF. Foreign investors are to be allowed to enter the state-run oil-export business, and promises are being made to open up downstream infrastructure, like refining, to private investors. (New York Times, August 11, 2005) So, yes, Iraq is being transformed from an economy much like Iran’s into one much like Hong Kong’s.

That’s one reason to believe that alarm over Iran is contrived, a cover for pursuing a new economic makeover project to benefit the economic elite of the US imperialist alliance. But there are others. Lay aside the monumental hypocrisy of rich, industrialized countries, some teeming with nuclear weapons, all with the capability of producing them, most with their own civilian nuclear power industries, demanding that Iran relinquish its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to independently develop nuclear power for civilian use. Ignore, too, that the same demands are not made of other less developed countries, higher on the index of economic freedom, and more accommodating to the profit-making interests of Western investors and trans-national corporations.

It’s not as if Iran hasn’t a legitimate need for nuclear energy, notwithstanding the insinuations of the Bush administration that a country rich in oil hasn’t a need for nuclear energy. On top of oil, Iran has abundant supplies of uranium. And while it sits on a sea of oil, it lacks sufficient refinery capacity. So it imports refined fuel.

Add to that the fact that the US hasn’t always been opposed to nuclear power in Iran, and the alarm over Iran’s nuclear energy program is seen for what it is -- contrived. Under the Shah, a consortium of US corporations, led by Westinghouse, put together a proposal to build a massive nuclear power industry in the country – with the approval of the US government. (Washington Post, March 27, 2005) The proposal was shelved after the Shah was overthrown.

Were Westinghouse hired to build nuclear power plants in Iran today, US foreign policy wouldn’t be so hostile, but Iran’s nuclear facilities are being built by Russia, a US economic competitor. Nor would Washington look askance if US investors were allowed to own Iran’s proposed nuclear industry, but Iran’s constitution forbids foreign ownership of power generation.

What about the claim Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons? It’s true that on top of strengthening Iran’s economic sovereignty, a civilian nuclear power industry, and domestic control over the fuel cycle, would give the country the means to develop nuclear weapons. But who are the US, France, the UK and Israel, all possessed of nuclear weapons themselves and having no intention of relinquishing them, to tell Iran it can’t have them, too? Moreover, just because someone has the means to do something, doesn’t mean they’ll do it. Your neighbor has the means to creep into your bedroom late at night and slip a stiletto under your sternum, but do you stay awake worrying about it?

Western media coverage implicitly accepts as an axiom that if Iran is permitted to exercise its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to refine uranium, it will, ipso facto, produce nuclear weapons, and use them. The only evidence it will do so, is that the US, some Western European countries which have a habit of joining the US in pulverizing countries you’ll find at the bottom of the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, and Israel, keep rattling their sabers in Tehran’s direction; faced with unceasing threats, Iran may decide to acquire a nuclear capability to make imperialist countries think twice about doing to Iran what they have, in recent years, done to Iraq and Yugoslavia, and to countless other less developed countries in other times. Indeed, it would seem almost to be a necessity of maintaining any kind of real sovereignty, to equip oneself with an effective means of deterring the inevitable threats of destabilization, economic strangulation and open warfare that the ruling interests of Washington and other advanced, industrialized countries routinely employ to keep the world open to their products, services and capital.

But that’s not the Western media line. Instead, we’re to understand that Iran may acquire nuclear weapons, not as a self-defensive measure, but because its president is “half-crazed,” the clerics who hold him in check are not much better, and that they all want to “wipe Israel off the map,” which is to say, fire a few nuclear tipped missiles Israel’s way to reduce the Jewish settler state to cinders. Surely, this is not beyond the capability of anyone who denies the Holocaust.

The line that a “half-crazed” and “violently anti-Semitic” president of Iran has denied the Holocaust and threatened to wipe Israel off the map, is a useful as a tool to justify strenuous action against Iran, including war, but it creates an impression that doesn’t quite line up with the facts.

Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust remarks were a challenge to those who use the Nazi’s attempt to systematically exterminate European Jews as justification for displacing Palestinian Arabs to found a Jewish state. What he said about the Holocaust amounted to this:

“Either it took place or it didn’t. If it didn’t take place, then it is a fabrication. If it did, it wasn’t the Arabs who did it; it was the Europeans. Why then should the Palestinians pay the price of what the Europeans did against the Jews?” (Musayeb Naimi, editor of Al Wefaq, New York Times, December 20, 2005)

That, by the way, is a question those who express high moral dudgeon over the Iranian president’s comments, have steered clear of. Instead, they’ve latched onto his questioning of the Holocaust, even as a hypothetical, as the mark of a half-crazed Jew-hater.

Ahmadinejad’s remarks:

“If you committed this big crime, then why should the oppressed Palestinian nation pay? This is our proposal: If you committed the crime, then give part of your land in Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to them so that the Jews can establish their own country.” (New York Times, December 15, 2005)

“Why do you want to force Israel on the holy land of Palestine by killing Muslims? Give a piece of your land in Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska so the Jews can create their own state.” (Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2005)

“Is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler, the reason for their (the Europeans’) support to the occupiers of Jerusalem? … If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe – like in Germany, Austria or other countries – to the Zionists, and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe, and we will support it.” (Washington Post, December 9, 2005)

To this, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s spokesman, Raanan Gissin, replied: “Just to remind Mr. Ahmadinejad, we’ve been here long before his ancestors were here. Therefore, we have a birthright to be here in the land of our forefathers and to live here.” (Washington Post, December 9, 2005) Who’s the religious fanatic?

Ahmadinejad’s assertion that Israel must be wiped from the face of the map (by which he meant the idea of Israel as a Jewish homeland, founded on expulsion of Palestinians) has, predictably, been deliberately misinterpreted as a call for a second Holocaust, this serving the necessary pro-war propaganda function of painting Ahmadinejad as beyond the pale – a new Hitler whose country must be contained, crushed and subordinated, like the countries of all the other propaganda program-fabricated monsters the US and its janissaries have argued they needed to take out.

When Egypt’s ambassador to the UN, Maged Abdelaziz, criticized a UN General Assembly Resolution adopted November 1, 2005 to set aside a day each year to commemorate the Nazi perpetrated anti-Jewish holocaust as being too narrow (“We believe no one should have a monopoly on suffering,”) US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton replied, “When a president of a member state can brazenly and hatefully call for a second Holocaust by suggesting that Israel, the Jewish homeland, should be wiped off the face of the map, it is clear that not all have learned the lesson of the Holocaust and that much works needs to be done.” (New York Times, November 2, 2005)

Ahmadinejad’s explanation of what he meant by “wiping Israel of the face of the map” is a far cry from what Bolton, and others, angling for intervention in Iran, would have you believe. “The only logical solution to solve the Palestinian issues, explained Ahmadinejad, “is to hold free elections with the participation of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories and in recognition of a nation’s legitimacy.” (RNA, cited in Workers World, November 6, 2005). Ahmadinejad later noted that “they (Bolton and others) created a lot of hue and cry over that,” adding, “It is clear what we say: Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.” (New York Times, January 15, 2006) This isn’t the half-crazed ranting of a violently anti-Semitic leader; it’s a call for justice.

It is a standard practice, going back to at least WWI, if not earlier, to select an individual on whom all the fear and hatred whipped up by a deliberate program of pro-war propaganda can be focused. Where plans to pry open the Iranian economy are concerned, Ahmadinejad is that person, as Hugo Chavez (now described by the US as anti-democratic, though popularly elected (New York Times, January 14, 2006)) is in Venezuela, Fidel Castro is in Cuba, Alexander Lukashenko is in Belarus, Robert Mugabe is in Zimbabwe and Kim Jong Il is in the DPRK. Since the Second World War, it has been common practice to try to equate such individuals to Hitler, a fairly easy task in Ahmadinejad’s case, not because he’s anti-Semitic, but because his hostility to the expulsion of Palestinians as the basis of Israeli can be readily twisted into an apparent anti-Semitism, while his opposition to the idea of a Jewish state in historic Palestine, featuring a single dominant ethnic group by design and intention, can be distorted demagogically to create the appearance he’s committed to a second Holocaust.

The hostility of Western powers to Iran, then, has little to do with the ideas of Iran’s leadership, especially as they pertain to Israel, for those ideas, as presented by pro-interventionists, are distortions deliberately twisted to build a case for economic strangulation, at the very least, and war, quite probably. Instead, the hostility is rooted in Iran’s economy, and the country’s assertion of economic sovereignty. It would, however, be wrong to say that Iran’s hostility to the idea of Israel as an ethnically-defined state, founded on a gross injustice perpetrated against Palestinians, is entirely insignificant to US foreign policy, for insofar as it signals an opposition to Israel, it strikes at part of the apparatus the US relies on to enforce its domination of the Middle East. But domination, to what end?

It’s often said that the US seeks to bring renegade states under its control, either for entirely spurious reasons (to introduce democracy and respect for human rights, for example) or, where these reasons have been discredited and shown to be false, for reasons that are often left unstated. Power, control, domination – these represent the end point of the analysis, as if imperialist powers seek power for power’s sake.

But what is it about renegade states that impel Western powers to bring them under their control? Rebellion, yes, but against what? Against the economic interests of Western powers; not out of hostility to the West as a policy, but out of commitment to their own independent development and sovereignty. State-ownership of key, and in some cases, all economic sectors; intervention in internal markets in pursuit of social policy objectives; control of, or influence over, pricing, including the price of labor; and the use of barriers to trade to foster internal industrial development; these are policies that may significantly improve the living conditions of domestic populations, but they, of necessity, impede the pursuit by Western investors and trans-nationals of activities related to capital accumulation. Since the same investors and trans-nationals hold almost exclusive sway over the policies of Western states, they are able to press the apparatus of the state into service to unblock pathways to foreign investment and export. Subversion, destabilization, economic strangulation and war are used to establish political and military control over economically renegade states, to define a space wherein investors and trans-nationals of whichever alliance of advanced, industrialized countries has undertaken the intervention are free to move about economically, to sell products and services without restriction, to own industry and infrastructure, to accumulate capital, and to do so without constraint, free from performance conditions, with profit senior to all other considerations.

Why Iran? (1) To stifle the country’s economic development by depriving it of nuclear power; (2) To prevent it from acquiring a nuclear deterrent to Western aggression; (3) To keep it from becoming powerful enough to challenge the US attack dog in the region, Israel; and the reason to which the preceding three are subordinate: (4) To put an end to Iran’s assertion of economic sovereignty, which conflicts with the profit-making interests of US investors and trans-nationals.

Achieving these goals is a multi-phase project. The project has now moved into the phase of preparing public opinion for some manner of stepped up intervention, possibly culminating in terror bombing of Iranian targets. This will not make people in the West or Israel safer, but will greatly heighten the chance there will be retaliatory strikes against Western and Israeli targets. This, however, is of little moment to the economic elite of the advanced, industrialized countries, who are compelled by the logic of capitalism to vigorously pursue the project of capital accumulation. Iran, as other countries deemed to be of concern by US foreign policy, is a multiform obstacle to unimpeded foreign investment and export. A state dominated by business interests, scouring the globe for investment and export opportunities, will quite naturally move in the direction of undermining and outraging the sovereignty of closed or economically sovereign countries, to open markets and improve investment climates. The demonization of Ahmadinejad is merely the mostly publicly visible part of that project.

gilipolla · Guest

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iran/2006/0314intention.htm
Iran: Where Do We Go From Here?
By Mike Whitney
Uruknet
March 14, 2006

The Bush administration has run into a rock wall at the Security Council. Neither Russia nor China will agree to any resolution that condemns Iran for "noncompliance" with its treaty obligations. In fact, there is general agreement that Iran has not violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) so the point is moot. This eliminates any chance that punitive action will be taken against Iran or that sanctions will be applied.

So why did the Bush administration take the case this far if they knew that there was no possibility for consensus on the main issue? The administration knew from the beginning that the world body would not support sanctions or military action. The intention was simply to increase suspicion about Iran’s nuclear programs and mobilize public support for a war. In fact, the United States is not at all concerned with Iran’s nuclear programs. It is merely a hoax that is being used to conceal Washington’s war plans.

Presently, the administration is trying to coerce the Security Council to issue a strongly-worded "presidential statement" laying out what Iran needs to do to ease concerns that it is using its civilian programs to hide a nuclear weapons program. Since there is "no evidence" of such programs (according to the UN watchdog agency IAEA) the Security Council should not become involved in a process that can only strengthen the administrations plans to attack Iran.

The "presidential statement" does not have the power of a Security Council "resolution". It cannot be used to apply sanctions or to take military action. It is purely a formal reprimand that makes constructive suggestions for changing behavior. It is designed to allay fears that Iran may be secretly building nukes. Unfortunately, the statement is utterly meaningless since Iran has already allowed the most extensive inspection regime to rummage through every aspect of its nuclear program for 2 years without producing any proof of wrongdoing.

The Bush administration would never waste its time on diplomatic maneuvering unless it had a goal in mind. The strategy for using the presidential statement as a pretext for war is evident in the way the wording is being negotiated. Rather than simply saying that the Security Council hopes that Iran will guarantee that its program is "exclusively peaceful purposes"; the US wants to add that, "continued enrichment-related activity would add to the importance and urgency of further action by the Council".

This phrasing provides the US with a pretext for intervention if Iran continues to enrich uranium.The statement also contains a demand that Iran accept an "additional protocol" that gives IAEA inspectors "exceptional access to plants". It asks for "additional 'transparency measures,’ including access to individuals, documents, and research laboratories".

In essence, the statement insists that Iran forgo its "inalienable right" to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and accept an intrusive inspection-regime that can ferret through every armory, barracks, conventional-weapons site, communications facility, ammunition-dump, palace, and research laboratory in the country. This is the same rule that was applied to Saddam before the war in Iraq.

But, why should Iran agree to this public humiliation if it has done nothing wrong? Should they sacrifice their sovereign rights just to placate Washington? Iran will never accept these conditions nor would the United States if the situation was reversed. Iran must continue to defend its right to enrich uranium and, thus, vindicate the principle that underscores international treaties. The Bush administration has no authority to repeal treaties nor does it have the right to create the conditions whereby the terms of those treaties are rescinded.

The "presidential statement" will be used in the media to demonize Iran for its alleged "defiance" and to convince the public that there is universal agreement on Iran’s imaginary nuclear weapons programs. Although the statement does not authorize the US to take unilateral action, it will be used to do just that. John Bolton has already admitted that if the Security Council does not meet the administrations expectations, the US may act on its own and look for partners in applying sanctions or taking military action.

So, where do we go from here? There’s a good chance that the logistical groundwork for war with Iran has already been laid. This would explain the earnestness of American diplomats at the State Dept. and the UN. The Security Council needs to realize the gravity of the situation and take positive steps to diffuse the crisis. The Council should forgo the issuing of the "presidential statement" and buttress Iran’s rights under the NPT to enrich uranium under the strict supervision of the IAEA. They should also condemn any unilateral action by member states as a violation to the UN Charter which confers sole authority to the UN Security Council for sanctions or military action. Most of all, the United Nations must defend its own credibility as a viable institution for world peace by ensuring that it is not used to mask the war-mongering objectives of other nations.