The Coming U.S. Attack On Iran: Is April 20th The 'Strike Date'? -
'British Fear U.S. Commander Is Beating The Drum For Iran Strikes' -
'The Building Blocks of War' - 'One Foot in the Grave: Iran Attack
Nearer, More Likely Than Most Suspect' - 'Iran: Danger and
Op****tunity' - 'Ritter Says White House Preparing For War In Iran' -
'Possibility of US Attack to Iran Real: Head of Urosevic Foundation' -
'Russia "Alarmed" As U.S. Readies April Nuclear Attack On Iran' -
'U.S. Attack on Iran: Worried Yet? Saudis Prepare for "Sudden Nuclear
Hazards" After Cheney Visit ' - 'Russians, Saudis Expect U.S. Attack
On Iran' - 'Russian Iintelligence Sees U.S. Military Buildup On Iran
Border' - 'Operation Cassandra' - 'Bush's Middle East Peace Plan
Includes Israeli attack On Iran' (read the full stories below)
As you read the re****ts below, bear in mind that the next full moon
(often a key indication of a night attack by air) is on the 20th
April. That might well be the scheduled date for a U.S. air strike on
Iran, if these warnings are accurate...
- o O o -
(For constantly-updated news headline and blogger article links on the
recent sensational 'U.S. Nuclear Treason And Betrayal' revelations of
Sibel Edmonds, the ex-FBI whistleblower who has been called 'The most-
gagged woman in America', go to
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/EDMONDS.HT=
M
- for updated economic and current events news, go to
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/freehist.htm
)
See Also: 'The Plan For Three World Wars'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/3WARS.HTM
'Astounding Quotes From The Political And Financial Elite On The
Planned New World Order'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/TRAGEDY.HTM
Archived 'New World Order Intelligence Update' Articles on the 'New
World Order'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/sect22.htm
The Elite's Secretive Plan For A 'North American Union'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/NAU1.HTM
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/NAU2.HTM
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/NAU3.HTM
'The 1935 U.S. War Plan For The Invasion Of Canada'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/USINVASN.HTM
'Canadian Troops To Police U.S. Cities During Martial Law;
U.S. Troops To Seize Strategic James Bay Hydro Plant If Quebec
Separates?'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/CANTROOP.HTM
'The Grand Canal - The Elite's Continent-Reshaping, Climate-Altering
Water-Diversion Plan Will Turn Canadian Water Into 'Liquid Gold' From
James Bay To Mexico!'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/grand.htm
The Elite's "Newstates' Constitution For The Coming 'United States Of
North America'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/NEWSTATE.HTM
For related re****ts, see:
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/quebec.htm
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/drum.htm
If this lengthy news posting fails to fully load, you can read all of
these stories (and more) at http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/IRANPLAN.HTM
- o O o -
British Fear U.S. Commander Is Beating The Drum For Iran Strikes
By Damien McElroy,
Foreign Affairs Correspondent,
Daily Telegraph, UK,
5 April, 2008.
British officials gave warning yesterday that America's commander in
Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed
Baghdad government.
A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran's
intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian
military facilities, according to a Whitehall *****sment. In closely
watched testimony in Wa****ngton next week, Gen Petraeus will state
that the Iranian threat has risen as Tehran has supplied and directed
attacks by militia fighters against the Iraqi state and its US allies.
General Petraeus: recent attacks on the green zone used Iranian-
provided, Iranian-made rockets
The outbreak of Iraq's worst violence in 18 months last week with
fighting in Basra and the daily bombardment of the Green Zone
diplomatic enclave, demonstrated that although the Sunni Muslim
insurgency is dramatically diminished, ****a forces remain in a strong
position to destabilise the country.
"Petraeus is going to go very hard on Iran as the source of attacks on
the American effort in Iraq," a British official said. "Iran is waging
a war in Iraq. The idea that America can't fight a war on two fronts
is wrong, there can be airstrikes and other moves," he said.
"Petraeus has put emphasis on America having to fight the battle on
behalf of Iraq. In his re****t he can frame it in terms of our soldiers
killed and diplomats dead in attacks on the Green Zone."
Tension between Wa****ngton and Tehran is already high over Iran's
covert nuclear programme. The Bush administration has not ruled out
military strikes.
In remarks interpreted as signalling a change in his approach to Iran,
Gen Petraeus last week hit out at the Iranian leader****p. "The rockets
that were launched at the Green Zone were Iranian-provided, Iranian-
made rockets," he said. "All of this in complete violation of promises
made by President Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian
leaders to their Iraqi counterparts."
The humiliation of the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki by the
Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in fighting in Basra last week
triggered top-level warnings over Iran's strength in Iraq.
Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, will
answer questions from American political leaders at the US Congress on
Tuesday and Wednesday before travelling to London to brief Gordon
Brown.
The Wall Street Journal said last week that the US war effort in Iraq
must have a double goal.
"The US must recognise that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war
against it in Iraq," wrote the military analyst Kimberly Kagan.
There are signs that targeting Iran would unite American politicians
across the bitter divide on Iraq. "Iran is the bull in the china
shop," said Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the Armed Services
Committee. "In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the
****'ite groups, whether they be political or military."
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=3D/news/2008/04/05/wi=
ran105.xml
- o O o -
The Building Blocks of War
By Chris Gelken,
American Chronicle,
April 5, 2008.
The Petraeus re****t could be the tipping point, but can we really
trust it?
Just how much is Iran involved in, or indeed responsible for, the
instability in Iraq? The answers to this question are often vague,
ambiguous and frequently tainted by self interest.
Last week General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq,
declared that the mortars and missiles fired on Baghdad=B4s fortified
Green Zone were of Iranian manufacture. He further asserted that they
were supplied by Iran, and fired by Iranian trained insurgents.
As for the provenance of the weapons, that is for a forensic
ballistics expert to decide. Regarding the rest, well, it depends on
who you trust, doesn=B4t it?
And next week, Petraeus is going to tell Congress that everything that
has gone wrong in Iraq is Iran=B4s fault.
By contrast, many Iraq watchers are of the opinion that the recent
Baghdad government assault on Basra and the subsequent nation-wide
surge in violence was inspired by Vice President Dick Cheney during
his recent visit to the region. Another of the building blocks,
apparently, in plans for military action against Tehran. The aim, they
say, was to destroy any sup****t base the Iranians may have among the
****a militias to prevent effective retaliation in the event of a wider
conflict.
Many of those same experts also point to Iran as being largely
responsible for brokering a ceasefire.
Obviously Iran has some influence in Iraq, but is it a positive or a
negative influence?
It would be ridiculous for anyone to suggest that there are no Iranian
manufactured weapons in Iraq. One cannot imagine the number of Iranian
weapons that were captured in the course of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War.
Weapons that were then stored in ammunition dumps that were
inexplicably left unguarded after the US-led invasion of 2003, and
subsequently looted.
But proving a link between the weapons used against the Green Zone and
the official sanctioning of their positioning in the hands of
insurgents by the Tehran government is rather tricky.
Having said that, one cannot say with absolute conviction that certain
Iranian government agencies are not turning a blind eye and allowing
modern weapons across what is a very long, ****ous and virtually
impossible to police border. But the question remains whether this is
official policy, are the responsible agencies acting under direct
orders from government leaders in Tehran?
On the other hand, was there nothing more than a discreet nod, a
surreptitious wink? Perhaps.
Or are the accusations entirely without basis in fact, a deliberate
attempt to justify an attack on Iran?
The fact is, no conclusive evidence has been presented to prove the
case either way. One can read reams of authoritative text on the
subject - both boldly asserting Iran=B4s interference, and equally
painting Tehran as a maligned victim. The fact is, everything is
possible, but exploring those alternatives is often inconvenient,
especially when the ultimate aim is to find an excuse to launch
military action against Tehran.
Accusing Iran of being responsible for the death of American troops in
Iran is not without a similar and chilling precedent in recent US
history.
There are still plenty of Irish-Americans reading this article who
remember stuffing their dollars into the Noraid collection tin knowing
full well they would be used to buy explosives and Armalites for the
boys back home in Ireland. Explosives and Armalites they used against
British civilians and British soldiers. Let us not be na=EFve.
Of course there are going to be Iranians who hold the same "noble"
convictions of their Irish-American counterparts. There are doubtless
Iranian officials who would turn a blind eye, as did their Boston
opposite numbers. And with no doubt whatsoever there will be criminal
elements who would be delighted to organize the purchase and
trans****tation of weapons across a border as leaky as the one between
the US and Mexico. Whether motivated by political conviction or a
handsome fee, it really makes little difference in the end.
While Wa****ngton could have acted a little more proactively to clamp
down on Noraid activities, none of this suggests that the White House
actively and officially sanctioned the murder of British civilians and
soldiers, does it? And if one can accept that premise, one also has to
accept the possibility that the Iranian weapons that have found their
way into Iraq did not necessarily get there with the blessing of the
Tehran government.
Perhaps, like Wa****ngton, Tehran is being deliberately ambivalent. And
really, you do not go to war with a country for being ambivalent.
There is another interesting aspect to the "Iranian" involvement in
Iraq that has not been adequately explored by the mainstream media. It
is worth taking note of the fact that many Sunni Iraqis commonly refer
to ****a Iraqis as Iranians. It is a religious, racial thing. They do
not consider the ****a Iraqis to be real Arabs, so they refer to them
as Iranians, who are Persian.
Given the general lack of understanding that Western countries have of
the Middle East, despite their decades of interference here, isn=B4t it
conceivable that the frequent re****ts if "Iranian" activity cited by
Sunni Awakening Councils who are now allied with the US military,
might in fact be mis-identifications? It could be widespread, or it
could have happened only occasionally. It could be deliberate, or it
could be an innocent mistake, but one with far reaching consequences.
There is a precedent. During the Balkan Wars, Muslim jihadists, or
just plain mercenaries, fought on the side of the Bosnian army. They
were commonly referred to as Afghans, when in fact most of them were
not. Actually, many of them were Saudi.
Some of these "Afghans" might now be in Iraq. There is ample
op****tunity for confusion, and ample op****tunity for deliberate
trouble making.
Iraq is a mess. Any semblance of law and order is but a distant memory
of the really old folks who can remember when the British ran the
place. Persecuted by Saddam Hussein, then bombed, starved and then
bombed again, occupied and abused, it is a land of op****tunity for the
unscrupulous and those wi****ng to settle a score.
Courtesy of the mayhem and mismanagement following the 2003 invasion,
Iraq is the perfect venue for those with a grudge to play out their
fantasies of revenge, or advance their geo-political ambitions.
But the point this article is trying to make, probably very badly, is
creating new scores to settle will not resolve anything.
The Petraeus re****t next week will possibly be one of the last
building blocks in Wa****ngton=B4s attempt to build a case for military
action against Tehran.
In one way or another, he will cite many of the things referred to in
this article, though obviously not in quite the same way. It will be
up to Congress and the American public to prevent what has already
been a disaster for the United States and this region, from becoming
something far, far worse.
Source: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/57631
- o O o -
One Foot in the Grave: Iran Attack Nearer, More Likely Than Most
Suspect
by Chris Floyd,
The Baltimore Chronicle,
Saturday, 22 March, 2008.
A very im****tant, very disturbing -- and almost entirely overlooked --
piece appeared on Juan Cole's Informed Comment site this week. It was
a guest column by William R. Polk, laying out, in copious and
convincing detail, the evidence indicating that the United States will
indeed launch a military strike against Iran, most probably before
George W. Bush leaves office.
However, even if Bush does hold off for some reason, the processes
that Polk describes will almost certainly lead the next president into
war with Iran, especially as the three remaining major candidates have
forcefully pledged to keep "all options, and I mean, all options on
the table" (Polk quotes Barack Obama's bellicose formulation). And
none of them are likely to have the political courage that Polk
rightly says would be necessary to climb down from the highly
aggressive posture that both parties have adopted toward Iran.
Polk is no radical firebrand; indeed, he comes toting heavy
Establishment lumber: White House service (under John Kennedy), top
academic and institutional posts, weighty books on history and
international affairs, etc. Yet he paints as stark a picture of the
situation as the most implacable dissident.
One development that has arisen after the article was posted gives
added credence to Polk's case. In recent days, both Bush and Dick
Cheney have revived the scaremongering threat of an Iranian nuclear
bomb that had seemed diffused by the NIE re****t earlier this year. Of
course, that re****t -- in which America's myriad intelligence
agencies declared their consensus view that Iran's nuclear weapons
program is moribund -- was itself a more subtle piece of
scaremongering. Because the re****t asserted -- without any credible
evidence -- that Iran HAD been building a nuke until 2003. While the
headlines focused on the overall conclusion, the Bush Administration
made hay with that latter assertion: "See, we told you Iran has been
building a nuclear weapon! We were right."
They weren't, of course, but this assertion was a propaganda weapon
just waiting to be picked up: and now it has. Bush and Cheney refer to
the NIE re****t as "proof" that Iran has been surreptitiously building
nuclear weapons in the recent past -- and therefore could be secretly
building them again right now. Cheney was very explicit about this
during his recent tour of Iraq and other stops in the Middle East -- a
trip that many have noted carries sinister echoes of a similar jaunt
he made around the region just before the invasion of Iraq. As AP
notes:
"Vice President Dick Cheney retained his tough stance against Iran on
Wednesday and said the U.S. is uncertain if Tehran has restarted the
nuclear weaponization program that a U.S. intelligence re****t says it
halted in 2003...Critics of the Bush administration said the re****t
should dampen any campaign for a U.S. confrontation with Iran.
But Cheney that that while the NIE said Iran had a program to develop
a nuclear warhead, it remains unclear if it has resumed that activity.
"What it (the NIE) says is that they have definitely had in the past a
program to develop a nuclear warhead; that it would appear that they
stopped that weaponization process in 2003. We don't know whether or
not they've restarted," he said."
Bush too has been pu****ng this line, most recently in an interview
with a government-funded Farsi-language radio station piping White
House propaganda into Iran itself. As Dan Froomkin notes, Bush
repeated the lie he has often told, asserting that Iran has "declared
they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people." Iran has always
declared the opposite, of course. Bush also echoed Cheney's
provocative "mystficiation" about the current state of the alleged
Iranian weapons program. As Bush put it: "They've hidden programs in
the past and they may be hiding one now, who knows?"
As Polk points out, Bush has made pre-emptive war a cardinal tenet of
the official U.S. national security policy, declaring that America
"will not wait" for potential security threats to develop, but will
"confront challenges earlier and more comprehensively, before they are
allowed to mature...In all cases, we will seek to seize the initiative
and dictate the tempo, timing, and direction of military operations."
Under such a policy, uncertainty about a potential threat actually
becomes a spur to military action. Cheney has long been an evangelist
for the "one-percent solution;" i.e., if there is even a one percent
chance that some threat might prove true, you must act as if the
danger is 100 percent certain to occur. This paranoid lunacy -- or
shrewd marketing device to guarantee non-stop boodle from war
profiteering -- is now the official governing philosophy of America's
foreign policy.
You must read Polk's entire piece to get the full weight and impact of
the facts he marshals. But below are a few pertinent excerpts:
"The article [a piece in US News and World Re****t outlining "six signs
that the U.S. may be headed for war in Iran"] curiously p***** over in
silence the much more impressive build-up of naval power in the
Persian Gulf. As of the last re****t I have seen, a major part of the
U.S. Navy is deployed in and around the Persian Gulf. The numbers are
stunning and include not only a vast array of weapons, including
nuclear weapons, cruise and other missiles and hundreds of aircraft
but also "insertion" (invasion) forces and equipment. Even then, these
already deployed forces amount to only a fraction of the total that
could be brought to bear on Iran because aircraft, both bombers and
troop and equipment trans****ts, stationed far away in Central Asia,
the Indian Ocean, Europe and even in America can be quickly employed .
Of course, deploying forces along Iran's frontier does not necessarily
mean using them. At least that is what the Administration says.
However, as a historian and former participant in government, I
believe that having troops and weapons on the spot makes their use
more likely than not. Why is that?
It is because a massive build-up of forces inevitably creates the
"climate" of war. Troops and the public, on both sides, come to accept
its inevitability. Standing down is difficult and can entail loss of
"face." Consequently, political leaders usually are carried forward by
the flow of events. Having taken steps 1, 2 and 3, they find taking
step number 4 logical, even necessary. In short, momentum rather than
policy begins to control action. As Barbara Tuchman showed in her
study of the origins of the First World War, The Guns of August, even
though none of the parties really wanted to go to war, none could stop
the process. It was the fact that President Kennedy had been reading
Tuchman's book just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, I believe, that
made him so intent on not being "hijacked by events." His restraint
was unusual. More common is a surrender to "sequence" as was shown by
the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It would have taken a
major reversal of policy - and considerable political bravery -- to
halt either invasion once the massive build-up was in place. No such
effort was made then. Will it be now? I think the odds are against
it."
Later, viewing the attack in a larger context, Polk writes:
"Thus, even short of a nuclear Armageddon, the "Long War" advocated by
the Neoconservatives would spread misery, violence, starvation,
disease and death. The "fabric" that holds societies together would be
shredded so that a chaos even Hobbes could not have imagined would
become common over much of the world. The worst affected would be the
poor nations but even rich societies would be corrupted and crippled.
Reacting over a generation or more to fear of terrorism and the
emotional "blow-back" of war, they would lose faith in law, civil
liberties, indeed civil society in general. Strong men would come to
the fore proclaiming that survival justifies giving up the civic,
cultural and material good life. Step by step along the path of the
long war, we could fall into the nightmare George Orwell laid out in
his novel 1984.
If this is even a remote and unlikely danger, and I believe it is far
more than that, we would be foolish indeed not to try to find means to
avoid taking any steps - of which war with Iran would be not a step
but a leap -- toward it."
Again, the complex and detailed case Polk puts together should be read
in full. But its overall message about a catastrophic and murderous
war with Iran is unmistakable: the hour is much, much later than we
think.
(Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years,
working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various
newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University.
Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor
of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
)
Source: http://baltimorechronicle.com/2008/032208Floyd.shtml
- o O o -
Iran: Danger and Op****tunity
By William R. Polk,
Guest Op-Ed,
www.juancole.com,.
Thursday, March 20, 2008.
Cassandra and Yogi Berra are an unlikely pair, but I hear both of
their voices today. Cassandra, like some of us, was cursed to be
always disbelieved as she correctly predicted the future while
baseballer Yogi Berra will be remembered for his penetrating insight
into the flow of history, "This is like deja vu all over again."
It is through the unlikely medium of U.S. News and World Re****t that
Cassandra speaks. The March 12 issue gives us "6 signs the U.S. may be
headed for war in Iran." The first tip the magazine highlights is the
firing of Admiral William Fallon. While Fallon is hardly a "dove," he
apparently - to judge by hints he gave in an interview with Thomas
Barnett published in the March issue of Esquire - had argued that an
attack on Iran made no military sense. If this really was his
judgment, he obviously was not the man to be "CINC [Commander-in-
chief] Centcom." That is, if the Bush administration really is intent
on an attack.
Among other straws U.S. News and World Re****t found in the wind
blowing out of Wa****ngton was the projected trip by Vice President
Dick Cheney to what the magazine correctly described as a "logistics
hub for military operations in the Persian Gulf," Oman, where the
Strait of Hormuz constitutes "the vulnerable oil transit chokepoint
into and out of the Persian Gulf that Iran threatens to blockade in
the event of war."
Here is where Yogi Berra begins to come into the picture. As the U.S.
News and World Re****t notes, "Back in March 2002, Cheney made a high-
profile Mideast trip to Saudi Arabia and other nations that officials
said at the time was about diplomacy toward Iraq and not war..." It was,
as we now know, one of the concerted moves in the build-up to the
already-decided-upon plan to attack Iraq. Is Cheney's 2008 trip "like
deja vu all over again?" That certainly is the inference drawn by U.S.
News and World Re****t.
Then, U.S. News and World Re****t introduces the Israeli card. It
re****ts the widely held belief that the Israeli air attack on Syria,
analyzed by Sy Hersh in one of his insightful pieces of investigative
re****ting on February 11, 2008 in The New Yorker, was not what it was
proclaimed to be, an attack on a presumed nuclear site, but a means to
force the Syrians to activate their anti-aircraft electronics - as
America used to do with the Russians - to detect gaps along what might
be a flight path from Israel toward Iran.
Why a flight path across Syria? Both because Turkey might not allow
the use of its airspace and because using Jordan's airspace, as Israel
did in its June 7, 1981 strike on the Iraqi nuclear facility at
Osiriq, might seriously weaken the Jordanian regime which Israel would
like to keep in place, at least for the time being.
Is a flight across Syria and Iraq to attack Iranian targets feasible?
The short answer is yes: the aircraft the United States has supplied
to Israel have the range and presumably could be refueled on their
return at a remote base among the 14 or so bases the U.S. has built
and maintains in Iraq.
U.S. News and World Re****t also drew attention to the stationing of a
guided missile destroyer off the Lebanese coast as another indication
of preparations for war. The article does not explain why but points
out that the destroyer has an anti-aircraft capability; so, the
inference is that it would shoot down any Syrian aircraft attempting
to hit Israel.
The article curiously p***** over in silence the much more impressive
build-up of naval power in the Persian Gulf. As of the last re****t I
have seen, a major part of the U.S. Navy is deployed in and around the
Persian Gulf. The numbers are stunning and include not only a vast
array of weapons, including nuclear weapons, cruise and other missiles
and hundreds of aircraft but also "insertion" (invasion) forces and
equipment. Even then, these already deployed forces amount to only a
fraction of the total that could be brought to bear on Iran because
aircraft, both bombers and troop and equipment trans****ts, stationed
far away in Central Asia, the Indian Ocean, Europe and even in America
can be quickly employed .
Of course, deploying forces along Iran's frontier does not necessarily
mean using them. At least that is what the Administration says.
However, as a historian and former participant in government, I
believe that having troops and weapons on the spot makes their use
more likely than not. Why is that?
It is because a massive build-up of forces inevitably creates the
"climate" of war. Troops and the public, on both sides, come to accept
its inevitability. Standing down is difficult and can entail loss of
"face." Consequently, political leaders usually are carried forward by
the flow of events. Having taken steps 1, 2 and 3, they find taking
step number 4 logical, even necessary. In short, momentum rather than
policy begins to control action. As Barbara Tuchman showed in her
study of the origins of the First World War, The Guns of August, even
though none of the parties really wanted to go to war, none could stop
the process. It was the fact that President Kennedy had been reading
Tuchman's book just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, I believe, that
made him so intent on not being "hijacked by events." His restraint
was unusual. More common is a surrender to "sequence" as was shown by
the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It would have taken a
major reversal of policy - and considerable political bravery -- to
halt either invasion once the massive build-up was in place. No such
effort was made then. Will it be now? I think the odds are against it.
In fact, moves are being made, decisions are being taken and rationale
has been set out that point in the opposite direction. Consider just a
few of these in addition to what U.S. News and World Re****t
highlighted:
* The strategic rational for pre=EBmptive military action was set forth
in the 2005 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America.
It proclaimed that "America is a nation at war...[and] will defeat
adversaries at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing...
[rather than employing] A reactive or defensive approach...Therefore, we
must confront challenges earlier and more comprehensively, before they
are allowed to mature...In all cases, we will seek to seize the
initiative and dictate the tempo, timing, and direction of military
operations." In short, as Henry Kissinger pointed out in The
International Herald Tribune, April 14, 2006, it is an assertion of
the intention to engage in pre=EBmptive or "first strike" warfare. So,
the process that began in Afghanistan and was then carried to Iraq and
(on a smaller scale) to Somalia points toward action against Iran.
* Why Iran? Iran is not the only target. American "Special Ops" forces
are engaged in a number of countries, at last count about twenty. A
"training" force (an echo of Vietnam) is being deployed in Pakistan to
help fight the Pathan hosts of the Taliban and Usama bin Ladin along
the frontier with Afghanistan and another is in India to help the
action against the Naxalite insurgents, but Iran is the major target.
* Among the reasons that the Bush administration has proclaimed are
that Iran is sup****ting terrorism by supplying arms, training and
encouragement both to anti-American insurgents in Iraq and to anti-
Israeli Hizbullah militants in Lebanon and that it is moving toward
the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Doubts have been expressed on both
of these contentions. Iran played a positive role in against the
Taliban (and against the drug trade) in Afghanistan and evidence on
Iraq is, at best, sketchy. On the nuclear issue, a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) re****ted in November 2007 the consensus of
all the American intelligence agencies "with high confidence" that
Iran is not actively seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
* Additionally, there is a psychological or political motivation.
President Bush proclaimed on January 29, 2002 that Iran was part of
the "Axis of Evil." He and others have conjured the memory of the
seizure of the American embassy and taking of our officers hostage and
have condemned the lamentable Iranian government record on civil
liberties and particularly on the treatment of women. With Iraq under
occupation and presumably incapable of mounting a credible threat
outside its own territory and with North Korea immune to attack (as it
already has nuclear weapons), Iran is the major perceived adversary
capable of doing what National Defense Strategy of the United States
of America termed "adopting threatening capabilities, methods, and
ambitions...[to] 1) limit our global freedom to act, 2) dominate key
regions, or 3) attempt to make prohibitive the costs of meeting
various U.S. international commitments."
Decoded and applied to Iran, the Strategy paper defines Iranian
actions as disrupting American objectives in the Middle East and has
the potential to dominate what is believed to be the largest still-
only-partially-developed pool of oil and gas in the world.
Thus, as defined by the National Defense Strategy of the United States
of America, Iran is an obvious target.
Apparently, President Bush's firing of Admiral Fallon was meant to
signal to the Iranians that "all options remain on the table." This is
the publically proclaimed policy of the Bush administration and has
also been adopted by the Democratic Party aspirants to the White
House, notably even by Barack Obama who recently said, "all options,
and I mean all options, are on the table."
Leaving aside the issue of international law - which defines the
conditions under which military action is defense (and so is legal)
rather than aggression (and so is illegal) and which, having been
adopted by the United States government, is American law also -- is a
pre=EBmptive military strike against Iran feasible? Allegedly, Admiral
Fallon did not think so. I certainly do not either. The reasons are
both evident and unambiguous. They include the following:
* However they may feel about their government, Iranians are a proud
and nationalistic people who have suffered for generations from
meddling, espionage and invasions by the Russians, the British and the
Americans. They are even less likely than the Cubans (as the organizer
of the CIA Bay of Pigs task force, Richard Bissell, predicted) or the
Iraqis (as the Neoconservatives fantasized in 2003) to welcome foreign
intrusion. If attacked, they undoubtedly would fight.
* While the United States could almost certainly quickly destroy the
Iranian regular army, as it did the Iraqi regular army, the Iranians
are better prepared for a guerrilla war than were the Iraqis. They
have in being a force of at least 150 thousand dedicated and
appropriately armed members of the Pasdaran-i Inqilab (Revolutionary
National Guard) on land and at sea a numerous assortment of small,
maneuverable and lethal speedboats stationed all along the Persian
Gulf coast. Use of the boats would probably be suicidal but it would
be a miracle if they failed to inflict heavy casualties among the
American fleet. They almost certainly could interdict oil tankers.
* War is always unpredictable - except that it is always worse than
expected. No one thought that the First World War would last more than
a few months. The cost is also always unestimated. Before the American
invasion of Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought it
would cost only about $50 billion; his deputy (and later president of
the world bank) Paul Wolfowitz thought it would cost nothing because
the Iraqis would pay for it; and when Larry Lindsay, the White House
economic adviser, predicted it might cost $200 billion, President Bush
fired him. Estimates now run between $2 and $6 trillion. To ****eld
this reality from the public, the Bush administration resorted to
massive borrowing abroad - U.S. Treasury obligations amounted to $2.7
trillion as of early this year and are now higher - and to a massive
increase -- up 70% during this Administration -- in national debt.
Almost no casualties were expected in Iraq; now American dead number
about 4,000 and a realistic figure for various categories of "wounded"
- officially put at about 20,000 - actually runs in the hundreds of
thousands. Just coping with the American wounded is expected to cost
half a trillion dollars.
But, Iraq is a small country while Iran is large, diverse and
populated by about three times as many people as Iraq. The costs,
human, material and monetary would certainly be a multiple of those
suffered in Iraq. It is not unlikely that war with Iran would
effectively "break" the American volunteer army and bankrupt America.
* Given this unattractive scenario, military planners have re****tedly
emphasized their intent to use mainly or even solely "surgical" air
strikes. But the fact that CENTCOM has positioned ****ps to "insert"
troops may be taken as a tacit admission by military planners that air
strikes alone would be unable to destroy either Iran's nuclear
facilities (which are believed to be widely scattered, often located
in heavily populated urban areas and/or in protected underground
locations) or to crush the nation's will to resist. Almost certainly,
military commanders would demand permission to follow up air strikes
with some form of "boots on the ground." Presumably and at least
initially these would likely be Special Forces, but, inevitably (I
would assert from my observation and study of past military
adventures) some of these forces, even if intended only for limited
action and quick withdrawal, will get caught and have to be rescued.
Thus, what is planned and begun as restricted action is extremely
unlikely to be containable.
=B7 Military action is also likely to result in various military,
paramilitary and economic and other responses by Iranians and others
outside of the immediate theater of combat. Consider the following:
1. The Iraqi government, although installed by the United States, is
predominantly culturally and religiously allied to Iran; in the shock
of an American invasion of Iran, it would almost certainly collapse or
intensify the struggle against American personnel in Iraq. Guerrilla
forces of Muqtada as-Sadr's "Mahdi Army," now observing a ceasefire,
would turn on the Americans;
2. What the Hizbullah forces in Lebanon could do other than firing
rockets is, to me at least, unclear, but a renewed round of savage
fighting with Israel would appear likely;
3. Those Middle Eastern governments allied with or thought to be
subservient to the United States (Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt)
might either be overthrown by their own military, have to fight civil
wars or, at least would become even more unpopular;
4. Elsewhere, Muslims of all sects would probably almost universally
turn against the United States so that much of Asia and Africa would
be convulsed and Americans and American interests would suffer; but
5. It is the economic consequences of an invasion that are, perhaps,
the most predictable and the most damaging to America. Iran produces
about 8% of the world's flow of energy and roughly 40% of the world's
energy is conveyed by tanker down the Persian Gulf. Iran's own
production - and possibly much of the Saudi production which is worked
by Saudis of ****a persuasion - would be drastically curtailed or even
halted, and as a result of naval action tankers are likely to be laid
up or sunk in the Gulf. With oil already at over $105/bbl, the price
is likely to soar with the predictable result of a major world
economic catastrophe. Just for the United States, every $1 rise in the
price of oil diminishes the national income by some $3 billion.
Such might be the results of a decision to attack Iran. But, what if
the current actions and pronouncements are just threats, intended only
to frighten the Iranians into doing what the United States wants?
* First, to be effective, threats must be credible. I imagine that the
Iranians must view our threats in something like the scale I have just
set out. If they have, I imagine that they will have concluded that
the United States government would have to be mad to attack Iran when
the costs of doing so are so evident and so large. In short, they
probably would have reached the same conclusion Admiral Fallon is said
to have reached.
* Second, it does not seem clear to me what the Iranians could do,
even if they wished to do so, to satisfy the United States' demands
unless Iran were occupied. Absent a large and intrusive American
presence, how could an Iranian government prove that it does not have
or at least seek nuclear weapons? Proving a negative has always been
logically impossible and any attempt to do so would certainly be
politically unsatisfactory to America and probably politically
impossible for Iran. This, we should remember, is roughly the
situation we (and the IAEA) reached in Iraq.
* Third, having received a credible threat to destroy their country,
the Iranians almost certainly would seek as rapidly as secretly
possible to acquire the only sure means to deter such an attack,
possession of a nuclear weapon. This also was the conclusion that
Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA reached. (Interview in the Argentinian
newspaper Clarin on November 29, 2007) Thus, a policy of threat that
falls short of actual attack must result in a long-term defeat even if
seemly producing a short-term victory for the United States.
Since we must assume that both the Iranian and American governments
will realize the logic of these points, I think we must conclude that
a policy of threat would slide almost inevitbly into conflict.
Moreover, war does not occur only by design. During the long years of
the Cold War, many of us worried over the danger of accidental war.
Dozens of incidents illustrated the danger - and at least some were
avoided more by luck than by cleverness. One in which I was involved
was averted during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As careful as we on the
Crisis Management Committee then were, we could see that an
unpredictable and even a rather trivial event could happen and could
have disastrous consequences. One I luckily caught was this: one of
our destroyers was positioned above a Soviet submarine, intent on
embarrassing it when the submarine surfaced. When I received notice of
the situation, my mind went back to the June 28, 1914 assassination of
Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo. I could imagine a
sailor throwing a bottle and his counterpart firing a pistol.
Accidents happen despite all attempts at control: most are immediately
contained as was the submarine incident in the Missile Crisis, but
luck cannot be guaranteed. War is a weapon with many triggers.
Of course, we must factor into our estimates the fact that some
Americans, notably the Neoconservatives who have set much of the
policy of the Bush administration, have actively espoused a war
policy. (See, for example, Norman Podhoretz's article "Stopping Iran:
Why the Case for Mililtary Action Still Stands," February Commentary.)
Their position has been encouraged and echoed by the current Israeli
government. Less known is the fact that the American and Israeli
"hawks" have their counterparts in the Iranian government, as the
former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations admitted to me
privately. Consider their positions:
* The Neoconservatives began almost twenty years ago to advocate what
has come to be called "the long war," in the vortex of which the world
would be recast. One of them, the former CIA Director James Woolsey,
tried to be optimistic, saying he hoped this world-wide and
cataclysmic conflict would not last more than 40 years.
* Religious fundamentalists - Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus -
share an eschatological vision. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that
each faith includes groups who actually yearn for apocalypse during
which time the world is destroyed to be reborn as a messiah or mahdi
appears. To the "true believers," hurrying toward the end of the world
is a race not toward horror but a fulfilling spiritual experience in
which it is only the enemies of the true faith who will suffer (as St.
John so graphically ****trays in The Revelation). In their version of
messianism, the ****is believe that the righteous will be delivered
from the tyranny of the corrupt, the ****is believe, and the earth will
be filled with justice and happiness.
Thus, one need not fear but actually should embrace actions that lead
toward "the end." We know this eschatology is the mind-set of
Christian fundamentalists; less well known is that it is also the mind-
set of ****a fundamentalists. What we think of as fatalism, is not just
acceptance of destiny but often is proactive. This may shape at least
some Iranian attitudes toward the terrible destruction that would come
from an American attack. My impression is that the Iranian ****a
fundamentalists, presumably including their mujtahid leader****p,
believe that the ensuing war would hasten the way toward the Last Day
when the Twelth Imam, The Mahdi, would reappear to cleanse the world
of evil.
* If the mujtahid leader****p, which is obviously deeply religious and
obviously incor****ates the central dogma of ****ism, holds these views
then a policy of threat or even of brutal military action will produce
effects different from those we thought shaped the attitude of the
Russian leader****p during the Cold War. Then, we shared with the
Russians a salutary vision of horror -- as set out, for example, in
Cormac McCarthy's recent novel, The Road. The absolute need to avoid
war was the ultimate brake on us because we knew that if we really
went to war millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people would be
made refugees, wounded or incinerated. But, if one really believes in
the Last Day, then this brake is loosened. Thus, I think we should
factor into our calculations on American policy toward Iran, a
reaction very different from that we expected from the Russians.
* Moreover, even among secular Iranians (and others), I detect a
belief that while America would win battles it would lose the war,
that over time, Western society, seen as corrupt, materialistic and
selfish, would give way, exhaust itself or retreat to its home ground
while those who have no place to which to retreat are kept "pure" by
their very poverty and are inspired by their faith or nationalism
cannot and will not surrender.
* Thus, even short of a nuclear Armageddon, the "Long War" advocated
by the Neoconservatives would spread misery, violence, starvation,
disease and death. The "fabric" that holds societies together would be
shredded so that a chaos even Hobbes could not have imagined would
become common over much of the world. The worst affected would be the
poor nations but even rich societies would be corrupted and crippled.
Reacting over a generation or more to fear of terrorism and the
emotional "blow-back" of war, they would lose faith in law, civil
liberties, indeed civil society in general. Strong men would come to
the fore proclaiming that survival justifies giving up the civic,
cultural and material good life. Step by step along the path of the
long war, we could fall into the nightmare George Orwell laid out in
his novel 1984.
If this is even a remote and unlikely danger, and I believe it is far
more than that, we would be foolish indeed not to try to find means to
avoid taking any steps - of which war with Iran would be not a step
but a leap -- toward it. So what might those means be? I begin with
the nuclear issue:
Since obviously means should be tailored to the issue to be solved, we
must begin by asking why Iran would want nuclear weapons.
* If I were an Iranian, I would point to President Bush's formulation
of the "Axis of Evil." I would note that Iraq did not have nuclear
weapons and was virtually destroyed while North Korea which had them
and was left in peace. Having a nuclear weapon is the surest form of
defense in our dangerous world. There are, of course, other reasons
for becoming a nuclear power - access to advanced technology, national
prestige, cheap power, etc. - but the bottom line is national defense.
* It follows that threats must encourage the Iranian leader****p to
acquire a nuclear capacity. If I were an Iranian, that is what I would
certainly advocate. And, if America attacks Iran, even if it manages
to completely destroy all the production facilities and kill all the
technicians, as an Iranian I would do all in my power to beg, borrow
or steal a bomb. We can be sure that that would be the aim of any
future Iranian government. It was, after all, also the aim of the
government of the Shah, and had he lived a few more years the current
Iranian government would have inherited nuclear weapons. So, threats
and certainly any military action can only be ultimately self-
defeating even if tem****arily successful.
The second question we should address is what is the consequence of
Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon and what we should do about it. There
are, I suggest, four interlocking answers:
* first, from personal experience during the Cuban Missile Crisis and
from my study, I firmly believe that the existence of nuclear weapons
anywhere constitutes a danger to people everywhere. Thus, we should do
all we can to get all nations to phase them out with all deliberate
speed. For the first half century of the nuclear age, as McGeorge
Bundy describes it in Danger and Survival, we have been both prudent
and lucky, but we have little reason to think we can count on either
as former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara argues in
"Apocalypse Soon" (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005).
* Second, if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it will not be able to
use it or threaten to use it aggressively for fear of an almost
certain attack. This has been true of all the nuclear powers -- the
US, the Soviet Union, China, India, Pakistan, Britain, France, North
Korea and Israel. While dangerous and costly, Mutually Assured
Destruction (MAD) has worked. Ironically, this ultimate weapon is
employable only as a deterrent. Therefore, I think that the near
hysteria evoked by the nuclear issue as applied to Iran is overblown
or as put forward by some even meretricious. But,
* Third, if Iran does acquire a weapon, it is likely that other
countries in the area would follow its (and Israel's) lead and move
toward acquisition. These might include Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the
richer of the Gulf states and conceivably even Syria. Today,
acquisition is largely a matter of allocation of resources and in
changed cir***stances might be achieved without having to actually
make them.
* Fourth, it seems to me that this, I judge predictable, course of
events offers us a rare op****tunity to move toward nuclear sanity. We
must not forget that crises are also times of op****tunity. This could
be so crucial to our life on this planet that I will dilate on it:
1. The reason why states acquire nuclear weapons (as distinct from why
they seek to acquire nuclear technology) is fear of attack. The Soviet
Union did because of fear of us, China did largely out of fear of the
USSR, India and Pakistan did out of fear of one another, Israel did in
fear of the Arabs. However, as more and more states acquire weapons,
parity or balance is replaced by growing unpredictability. Arguably,
Israel, for example, gained security when it alone in the Middle East
had the bomb. But if, as I believe is inevitable, other states acquire
them, its security will be diminished and its danger increased.
Therefore, arguably, since it already has the strongest army and air
force in the area, it would be to Israel's interest to create a
nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. It is probably not possible to
force the Israelis into such a policy, if it is directly solely at
them, but overall considerations I have mentioned argue that the
United States should revert to the policy we espoused in the 1960s
which foresaw the elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide. The
Iranian crisis could thus be a catalyst in a move toward a safer
world.
2. Since threat or attack would lead to disaster, and since it is to
the fundamental interest of the United States to move toward peace, a
part of the solution to the Iranian "crisis" should involve the
revocation of the 2005 National Defense Strategy of the United States
of America which causes other nations to fear us and which is more
likely to embroil us in wars than to enhance our national security.
Highlighting this issue, the Iranian crisis thus gives us an
op****tunity to readjust our goals and our means of action.
3. Included in our means of action is an awesome military force, which
we have painfully learned does not always and necessarily enhance our
security and well-being but can, itself, be a cause of danger and
impoverishment. This is the lesson of history: great powers seldom
fail on the battlefield but often lose sway by exhaustion or hubris.
Our military machine is grossly out of pro****tion both to our needs
and to what the world will peacefully tolerate. And some pieces of it,
particularly the legacy of Secretary Rumsfeld, the "Special Operations
Command," are a clear and present danger to us. As we recognize the
dangers inherent in the Iranian crisis, we can use the op****tunity for
a clear-headed re=EBvaluation of our real security needs and best means
to achieve them.
4. Involved also in the Iranian crisis is our conception of the world
order. As a piece of the settlement of the Iranian crisis, both we and
the Iranians have a chance to come to grips with reality: we cannot
remake other cultures and should not try to do so. The harder we
press, the more ugly the process becomes both for us and for them.
Specifically in Iran, our threats bring out the worst in the ruling
group. Once the pressure is removed, Iranians will have the breathing
room to reffirm their obvious desires for "the good life." Then a more
humane order will have a chance. That is the course of events we have
seen, for example, in Vietnam.
5. Also coming out of this crisis we have seen that the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has made a major contribution to our
security and well-being. It has served our purposes not by being our
rubber stamp but by being professional and independent. We should
learn from this experience. But, American administration after
administration has purposefully made the United Nations weak and has
deliberately picked weak men to lead it. We would be well advised to
use the process of solving the Iran crisis to reconsider how it and
other international institutions, such as the world court, could
enhance our national interest.
In conclusion, I believe that we are at one of those rare points in
history when great nations find themselves, as Shakespeare put it so
memorably at the changing of the tide:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries,
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
I hope and trust we will use the tide of the Iranian "crisis" to lead
on to fortune rather than getting bound in shallows and miseries.
William R. Polk
March 18, 2008
William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council
responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from
1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of
Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was
also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International
Affairs. His most recent book is Violent Politics: A History of
Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla Warfare from the American Revolution
to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
Source:
http://www.juancole.com/2008/03/iran-danger-and-op****tunity-polk-gue=
st.html
- o O o -
Ritter Says White House Preparing For War In Iran
By Ed Barna,
Herald Correspondent,
Rutland Herald, VT,
April 4, 2008.
MIDDLEBURY -- Scott Ritter, former head of weapons inspection in Iraq
who protested there were no weapons of mass destruction to justify an
invasion, believes the same is true for Iran.
But there is an 80 percent chance of war with Iran, he told about 200
people Wednesday at Middlebury College as part of a series of talks
facilitated by the Vermont Peace and Justice Center.
The pattern of preparations for such a conflict has been steadily
developing and involves Congress as well as the Bush-Cheney
administration, he said.
People ask him if he feels vindicated by the absence of WMDs in Iraq,
he said, but "there isn't any vindication in being right about this
one." A war with Iran would hasten the ongoing decline of American
standing in the world, and afterward Russia and China would be ready
to take advantage of the resulting power vacuum, he said.
Among the war clouds Ritter cited were:
Preemptive strikes against the two groups most likely to erupt if the
United States invaded Iran, Hezbollah (unsuccessfully attacked by
Israel) and Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (unsuccessfully attacked in
Basra by Iraq's central government).
Ritter predicted a similarly disappointing showing if the American
forces attacked Iran, a country 2-1/2 times as large and populous as
Iraq that is much more unified culturally and did not have its army
destroyed in a previous war with the United States.
Recent visits to Middle Eastern allies by high officials, ostensibly
for other purposes, but really to prepare them for the effects of such
a war.
The appearance of the "miracle laptop," as Ritter called it, a
thousand pages of technical do***ents supposedly from a stolen Iranian
computer, which dubiously had just the sort of information the
administration needed to sup****t a hard-line stand on Iran.
Congressional supplementary funding for more "bunker-busting" bombs,
with a contract completion deadline of April.
Congressional supplementary funding for the extra bombers to carry
those bombs, with a contract completion date of April.
Cheney's order to send a third aircraft carrier battle group close to
the Persian Gulf, a necessary bolstering of forces for a war with
Iran.
Admiral William Fallon, the first admiral to be head of Central
Command, said that level of naval forces was unnecessary and blocked
the move. Ritter said that was "a heroic thing."
The main target of Ritter's criticisms was an American public that
couldn't pass a test on the Constitution and understands little of
international history and politics, and refuses to believe the life of
an Iraqi is worth as much as the life of an American.
He began his talk, not by trumpeting the danger of war, but by talking
about spring, and the birds that will soon have babies in their nests.
Mother birds will forage, come to the nests, see open mouths begging
for food, and puke into each one, he said.
Just so, Ritter said, people sit in front of their televisions every
night and wait to be stuffed with mushy phrases like "The surge has
been successful" and "Baghdad is 70 percent secure" and "We have
apparently won the war."
"The reality of Iraq is that it is a broken nation," Ritter said.
Groups like the Kurds and ****a are not unified groups, there is
already a civil war, and most of the opposition to our presence comes
from our being the invaders, he said.
"It is far too easy to look for people to blame," he said. For
instance, "we blame the media, but the media simply give us what we're
asking for."
Everyone needs to start understanding and caring about their
Constitutional rights, and everyone needs to start finding the facts
for themselves and taking strong individual stands, Ritter said. If
you do nothing but take in what the TV and newspapers tell you, "all
you're going to get in return is puke."
Source:
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=3D/20080404/N=
EWS04/804040381/1002/NEWS01
- o O o -
Possibility of US Attack to Iran Real: Head of Urosevic Foundation
TREND News Agency,
2 April, 2008.
Azerbaijan, Baku, 2 April / corr . TrendNews D.Khatinoglu / Bringing
the U.S. military forces to battle preparedness in the Persian Gulf
once again testifies the supposition of outbreak of a new war in the
region. "The USA's beginning a new war is real," said the Chairman of
the Urosevic Research Foundation of London, Piruz Mujtahidzade .
The Russian special services informed that the USA brings its army to
battle preparedness on the border of Iran, Iranian newspaper ' Intihab
' re****ted referring to the ****tal of Information Clearing House. The
material says that Wa****ngton is preparing to attack Iran in the near
future, placing new military aircrafts and ****ps in the Persian Gulf.
"The USA continues its plans of occupying the countries in the
region," the Professor of Political Sciences of Tehran University,
Mujtahidzade , re****ted to TrendNews by Telephone from London on 2
April. According to him, the USA has tied up to crisis around Iraq,
and therefore, yet is not capable to begin a new war.
"The tension in Iraq in the recent period resulted from Wa****ngton's
plans to attack Iran. The Mehdi Army was not involved in the disorders
in Iraq. The new confrontation was caused by the statement made by
Prime Minister of Iraq, Nuri al- Maliki , who due to the sup****t by
the USA called on the British peacekeepers to recede from their
positions in the controlled zone (Basra), provoking Mehdi Army to come
to show its advantage in the region, as well as organized disorders
and killed activists of Mehdi Army and tried to demonstrate it as
order of Iran to create disorder with hands of ****ite organization.
Such scenario is necessary to prove that as tough Iran interferes in
the situation in Iraq," Mujtahidzade said.
According to the expert, the USA's attacking Iran or Syria will bring
to serious crisis both in the region and in the USA itself. "Attacking
Iraq, the USA harmed its international image, as well as its military
forces weakened and serious problems appeared in its economy.
Beginning a new war, which is necessary to hide the mistakes being
made, will bring to deeper crisis," the expert said.
Source:
http://news.trend.az/index.shtml?show=3Dnews&newsid=3D1167558&lang=
=3DEN
- o O o -
Russia "Alarmed" As U.S. Readies April Nuclear Attack On Iran
By Sorcha Faal,
Collective Bellaciao, France,
3 April 2008
Russian Foreign Ministry Officials are re****ted to be `alarmed` today
over a `presentation` made by the United States War Leaders to
President Putin at this weeks NATO summit in Romania and which details
the Americans plan to begin a nuclear attack against Irans atomic
facilities in the next two weeks.
Most disturbing of these re****ts, according to Foreign Ministry
Analysts, are the United States `offers and threats` towards Russia to
`remain neutral` in this conflict or face the combined weight of the
American and EU central banks deliberate collapsing of the Western
banking system, and US dollar, and which is estimated will cause the
loss of nearly $800 billion of Russian foreign reserves.
To the `offers` presented to President Putin for keeping Russia out of
this war, these re****ts continue, will be NATO`s rejection of Ukraine
and Georgia member****p into the Western Military Alliance and the
ending of the planned US Missile ****eld being planned for Poland and
the Czech Republic.
In what, sadly, p***** for diplomacy these days with the United
States, this `presentation` to President Putin is eerily reminiscent
of the offer made to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan prior to the US
invasion of their country after their rejection of the American offer,
and which French news sources re****ted was stated, "Either you accept
our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of
bombs."
To the likelihood of the US carrying out their brutal expansion of
their war against the Muslim peoples of the World with a nuclear
attack upon Iran there remains today little doubt as Saudi Arabia has
ordered their people to prepare for nuclear war, and as we can read as
re****ted by Iran`s Press TV News Service, and which says:
"Saudi Arabia is re****tedly preparing to counter any `radioactive
hazards` which may result from a US strike on Iran`s nuclear plants.
Popular government-guided Saudi newspaper Okaz recently re****ted that
the Saudi Shura Council approved of nuclear fallout preparation plans
only a day after US Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Kingdom`s
high ranking officials, including King Abdullah.
As a result of the Shura ruling, the Saudi government will start the
implementation of `national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and
radioactive hazards that may affect the Kingdom following expert
warnings of possible attacks on Iran`s Bushehr nuclear reactors`."
Israel is, likewise, said to be preparing for this new war, and as we
can read as re****ted by Israeli News Sources, and which state:
"Defense Minister Ehud Barak authorized on Sunday evening the plans
for a national emergency drill, which is scheduled to take place in
two weeks time."
Russian Military Analysts, in these re****ts, further state that with a
US nuclear strike against Iran, Israel will, also, launch a
simultaneous against Syria, and as we can read, as re****ted by
Israel`s Ynet News Service, the Syrian Nation is preparing for:
"Syria is preparing for a comprehensive Israeli strike which will be
combined with an attack on Hizbullah, sources in Damascus have told
the London-based Arabic-language al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. The
sources, which refused to reveal their identity, re****ted that Syria
was closely monitoring the movement of Israeli forces along the
northern border.
The newspaper re****ted Wednesday that Damascus viewed the Israeli
media re****ts and statements made by senior Israel Defense Forces
officials as incitement and attempts to prepare the Israeli and global
public opinion for a war against Syria.
In addition to the military preparations, the sources said, Damascus
has raised its security alert level for fear that Israeli forces would
infiltrate its territories through one of its bordering countries,
mainly referring to Lebanon.
Over the past few weeks, the Syrians have stationed three armored
divisions, special forces and nine mechanized infantry divisions
opposite Lebanon`s western valley, as the Syrians estimate that a
ground Israeli invasion may take place in that area."
As the American people remain under the greatest threat in their
history to their freedom, and as Britain`s top economic experts are
stating that the US is now falling into a Great Depression, with the
most of their citizens receiving food aid in their entire history,
while at the same time their Military re****ts the spending of over
$1.6 trillion on new weapons for their wars, one cannot but shudder to
think of the grave consequences should their grab for total World
domination fails.
But, with all of the failed attempts by many Global powers in the past
to establish their rule over the entire World, and should the United
States fail in their nuclear attack against Iran, and with the added
backdrop of the growing crisis of our Earth being able to feed its own
people, even the most simplest of minds can see the folly of the
Americans desires.
This cannot, however, be said of the American people, and who continue
leading their `American Dream` lives while being led to their own
destruction along a road paved with celebrity trivialities and banal
stories of nothingness that p***** for news in their country.
Never has it been more true the age old saying, "For those who do not
learn history they are doomed to repeat it."
Source: http://nuclearno.com/text.asp?12725
- o O o -
U.S. Attack on Iran: Worried Yet? Saudis Prepare for "Sudden Nuclear
Hazards" After Cheney Visit
by Chris Floyd,
Global Research,
March 31, 2008
Empire Burlesque
I. One Tick Closer to Midnight
Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings
with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed
that the Saudi Shura Council -- the elite group that implements the
decisions of the autocratic inner circle -- is preparing "national
plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may
affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on
Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," one of the kingdom's leading
newspapers, Okaz, re****ts. The German-based dpa news service relayed
the paper's story.
Simple prudence -- or ominous timing? We noted here last week that an
American attack on Iran was far more likely -- and more imminent --
than most people suspect. We pointed to the mountain of evidence for
this case gathered by scholar William R. Polk, one of the top aides to
John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to other indicators
of impending war. The story by Okaz -- which would not have appeared
in the tightly controlled dictator****p without approval from the top
-- is yet another, very weighty piece of evidence laid in the scales
toward a new, horrendous conflict.
We don't know what the Saudis told Cheney in private -- or even more
to the point, what he told them. But the release of this story now,
just after his departure, would seem to be a clear indication that the
Saudis have good reason to fear a looming attack on Iran's nuclear
sites and are actively preparing for it.
II. A Nuclear Epiphany in Iran?
And they certainly should be bracing themselves. A U.S. attack on Iran
will come suddenly, and if it is indeed aimed at destroying Iran's
nuclear capabilities -- a "threat" being talked up again with new
urgency by both Cheney and Bush lately -- it has the potential for
unimaginable consequences. As we noted here in a previous piece:
Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one
course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural
measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden
interval between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the
infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world.
Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to
gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack - a Pearl Harbor in
reverse - against Iran, the Wa****ngton Post re****ts....And when this
attack comes - either as a stand-alone "knock-out blow" or else as the
precursor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier
aggression in Iraq - there will be no warning, no declaration of war,
no hearings, no public debate. The already issued orders governing the
operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president: he
picks up the phone, he says, "Go" - and in twelve hours' time, up to a
million Iranians could be dead.
This potential death toll is not pacifist hyperbole; it comes from a
National Academy of Sciences study sponsored by the Pentagon itself,
as The Progressive re****ts. (Although Bush's military brass like to
peddle the public lie that "we don't do body counts" of the enemy, in
reality, like all good businessmen they keep precise accounts of their
production outputs: i.e., corpses.) The Pentagon's NAS study
calibrated the kill-rate from "bunker-busting" tactical nukes used to
take out underground facilities - such as those which house much of
Iran's nuclear power program.
Another simulation by scientists, using Pentagon-devised software, was
even more specific, measuring the aftermath of a "limited" nuclear
attack on the main Iranian underground site in Esfahan, the magazine
re****ts. This small expansion of the Pentagon franchise would result
in stellar production figures: three million people killed by
radiation in just two weeks, and 35 million people exposed to
dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation in Afghanistan, Pakistan
and India. Bush has about 50 nuclear "earth-penetrating weapons" at
his disposal, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Nor is the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran mere "liberal paranoia."
Bush himself pointedly refused to take the nuclear option "off the
table" this week. But what's more, Bush has made the use of nuclear
weapons a centerpiece of his "National Security Strategy of the United
States," issued last month, The Progressive notes. While reaffirming
the criminal principle of "pre-emptive" attacks on perceived enemies
which may or may not be threatening America with weapons they may or
may not possess, Bush declared that "safe, credible and reliable
nuclear forces continue to play a critical role" in the "offensive
strike systems" that are now a key part of America's "deterrence."
In the depraved jargon of atomic warmongering, a "credible" nuclear
force is one that can and will be used in the course of ordinary
military operations. It is no longer to be regarded as a sacred taboo.
This has long been the dream of the Pentagon's "nuclear priesthood"
and its acolytes, going back to the days of Hiro****ma and Nagasaki.
For decades, a strong faction within the American power structure has
been afflicted with a perverted craving to unleash these weapons once
more. An almost ***ual frustration can be discerned in their laments
as time and again, in crisis after crisis, their counsels for "going
nuclear" were rejected - often at the very last moment. To justify
their aberrant desire, they have relentlessly demonized an ever-
changing array of "enemies," painting each one as an imminent,
overwhelming threat, led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil,
impervious to reason, fit only for destruction. Evidence for the
"threat" is invariably exaggerated, manipulated, even manufactured;
this ritual cycle has been enacted over and over, leading to many wars
- but never to that ultimate, orgasmic release.
Now this paranoid sect has at last seized the commanding heights of
American power....
And they have found a most eager disciple in the peevish dullard
strutting in the Oval Office. Under their sinister tutelage, Bush has
eviscerated 40 years' worth of arms control treaties; officially
"normalized" the use of nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear
states; rewarded outlaw proliferators like India, Israel and Pakistan;
and is now destroying the last and most effective restraint on the
spread of nuclear weapons: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The treaty guarantees its signatories - such as Iran - the right to
establish nuclear power programs in exchange for rigorous
international inspections. But Bush has arbitrarily decided that Iran
- whose nuclear program undergone perhaps the most extensive
inspection process in history - must end its lawful activities. Why?
Because the country is led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil,
impervious to reason, who one day may or may not threaten America with
weapons they may or may not have.
So the NPT is dead. As with the Geneva Conventions and the U.S.
Constitution, it now means only what Bush says it means. Force of
arms, not rule of law, is the new world order. The attack on Iran is
coming....
The nuclear sectarians have waited decades for this moment. Such a
chance may never come again. Will they let it pass, when with just a
word, in just twelve hours, they can see their god rising in a pillar
of fire over Persia?
(Chris Floyd is a frequent contributor to Global Research.)
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=3Dva&aid=3D8494
- o O o -
Russians, Saudis Expect U.S. Attack On Iran
By Paul Craig Roberts,
VDARE.com,
March 30, 2008.
The US Congress, the US media, the American people, and the United
Nations, are looking the other way as Cheney prepares his attack on
Iran.
If only America had an independent media and an opposition party. If
there were a shred of integrity left in American political life,
perhaps a third act of ****d aggression--a third war crime under the
Nuremberg standard--by the Bush Regime could be prevented.
On March 30, the Russian News & Information Agency, Novosti, cited a
high-ranking security source: "The latest military intelligence data
point to heightened US military preparations for both an air and
ground operation against Iran."
According to Novosti, Russian Colonel General Leonid Ivashov said
"that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on
Iran's military infrastructure in the near future."
The chief of Russia's general staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, said last
November that Russia was beefing up its military in response to US
aggression, but that the Russian military is not "obliged to defend
the world from the evil Americans."
On March 29, OpEdNews cited a re****t by the Saudi Arabian newspaper
Okaz, which was picked up by the German news service, DPA. The Saudi
newspaper re****ted on March 22, the day following Cheney's visit with
the kingdom's rulers, that the Saudi Shura Council is preparing
"national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive
hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of
possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors."
And Admiral William "there will be no attack on Iran on my watch"
Fallon has been removed as US chief of Central Command, thus clearing
the way for Cheney's planned attack on Iran.
The Iranians don't seem to believe it, despite the dispatch of US
nuclear submarines and another aircraft carrier attack group to the
Persian Gulf. To counter any Iranian missiles launched in response to
an attack, the US is deploying anti-missile defenses to protect US
bases and Saudi oil fields.
Two massive failures by the American media, the Democratic Party, and
the American people have paved the way for Cheney's long-planned
attack on Iran. One failure is the lack of skepticism about the US
government's explanation of 9/11. The other failure is the Democrats'
refusal to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush for
lying to the Congress, the American people, and the world and
launching an invasion of Iraq based on deception and fabricated
evidence.
If an American president can start a war exactly as Adolf Hitler did
with pure lies and not be held accountable, he can get away with
anything. And Bush and his evil regime have.
Hitler launched World War II with his invasion of Poland after staging
a "Polish attack" on a German radio station. On the night of August
31, 1939, a group of Nazis disguised in Polish uniforms seized a radio
station in Germany. Hitler announced that "last night Polish troops
crossed the frontier and attacked Germany," a claim no more true than
the Bush Regime's claim that "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass
destruction." Hitler's lie failed, because his invasion of Poland,
which began the next day allegedly in reprisal for the Polish attack,
had obviously been planned for many months.
Iran is a beautiful and developed country. It is an ancient
civilization. It has attacked no one. Iran is a signatory to the
Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Iran is permitted by the treaty to
have a nuclear energy program. The Bush Regime's case against Iran is
based on the Bush Regime's desire to deny Iran its rights under the
treaty.
The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have repeatedly
re****ted that they have found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear
weapons program. Despite all the disinformation from US Gen. Petraeus
and other Bush Regime military lackeys, Iran is not arming the Iraqis
who are resisting the American occupation.
If Iran were arming insurgents, the insurgents would have two weapons
that would neutralize the US advantage in the Iraqi conflict: missiles
to knock down US helicopter gun****ps and rocket-propelled grenades
that knock out American tanks. The insurgents do not have these
weapons and must construct clumsy anti-tank weapons out of artillery
shells. The insurgents are helpless against US air power and cannot
mass forces to take on the American troops.
Indiscriminate American violence has reduced Iraq to rubble. The
civilian infrastructure is essentially destroyed--electricity, water
and sewer systems, medical care and schools. Depleted uranium is
everywhere poisoning everyone, including US troops. There is no
economy, and half or more of Iraqis are unemployed. Literally no Iraqi
family has escaped an injury or a death as a consequence of the US
invasion. Millions of Iraqis have become displaced persons. A
developed country with a professional middle class has been destroyed
because of lies told by the President and Vice President of the US.
The Bush Regime's lies are echoed by a neoconservative media, and have
gone unchallenged by the opposition party and an indifferent American
public.
In Afghanistan, death and destruction rains on even the smallest
village from the air. America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are wars
against the civilian populations.
Just as the world could not believe Hitler's next horror and thus was
always unprepared, the Iranians despite all the evidence cannot
believe that even the Great Satan would gratuitously attack Iran based
on nothing but lies about non-existent nuclear weapons.
Iran's only chance would be to strike before the US delivers the first
blow. Instead of using its missiles to take out the Saudi oil fields
and to sink the US aircraft carriers, instead of closing the Strait of
Hormuz, instead of arming the Iraqi ****'ites and moving them to
insurgency, Iran is perched like a sitting duck in denial even as the
US and its Iraqi puppet Maliki move to eliminate Al Sadr's Iraqi
****'ite militia in order to avoid supply disruptions and a ****'ite
rebellion in Iraq when the US attack on Iran comes.
It is im****tant to emphasize that Iran is making no moves toward war.
Having tamed, blackmailed, and purchased Congress, the US media, and
US allies and puppets, Cheney might delight in the arrogance with
which he can now attack Iran free of any restraint or fabricated
provocation.
On the other hand, he might cover himself by orchestrating an "Iranian
provocation" to justify his attack as a response. But like Hitler's
planned attack against Poland, Cheney's attack on Iran has long been
in the works.
On March 29 the Associated Press re****ted that Libyan leader Moammar
Gadhafi "poured contempt on fellow Arab leaders" at the Arab summit
that day. Gadhafi told the Arab "leaders," many of whom are on the
American payroll, that their American masters would turn on them all,
just as America turned on Saddam Hussein after using him to fight a
proxy war against Iran.
Saddam had once been an ally of Wa****ngton, Gadhafi reminded the
Arabs, "but they sold him out." Gadhafi told the American puppets,
"Your turn is next."
Gadhafi asked, "Where is the Arabs' dignity, their future, their very
existence?" If Arabs remain disunited, he predicted, "they will turn
themselves into protectorates. They will be marginalized and turn into
garbage dumps."
Indeed, it is this disunity that permits the US to bomb and murder at
will in the Middle East.
(Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during
President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall
Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including
the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International
Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor
by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-
Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Wa****ngton;
Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet
Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny
of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the
Constitution in the Name of Justice. Read Peter Brimelow's Forbes
Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of
prosecutorial misconduct)
=2E
Source: http://vdare.com/roberts/080330_iran.htm
- o O o -
Russian Iintelligence Sees U.S. Military Buildup On Iran Border
RIA-Novosti, Moscow,
27 March, 2008.
MOSCOW, March 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russian military intelligence
services are re****ting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near
Iran's borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.
"The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S.
military preparations for both an air and ground operation against
Iran," the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not
yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.
He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against
Iran "that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its
knees at minimal cost."
He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the
first time in the past four years reached the level that existed
shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of
Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to
deliver a massive air strike on Iran's military infrastructure in the
near future.
A new U.S. carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Gulf.
The USS John C. Stennis, with a crew of 3,200 and around 80 fixed-wing
aircraft, including F/A-18 Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers,
eight sup****t ****ps and four nuclear submarines are heading for the
Gulf, where a similar group led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has
been deployed since December 2006.
The U.S. is also sending Patriot anti-missile systems to the region.
Source: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070327/62697703.html
- o O o
-
Operation Cassandra
By William S. Lind,
Lew Rockwell.Com,
via Information Clearing House,
26 March, 2008.
Admiral Fallon's (forced?) resignation was the last warning we are
likely to get of an attack on Iran. It does not mean an attack is
certain, but the U.S. could not attack Iran so long as he was the
CENTCOM commander. That obstacle is now gone.
Vice President Cheney's Middle East tour is another indicator.
According to a re****t in The American Conservative, on his previous
trip Cheney told our allies, including the Saudis, that Bush would
attack Iran before the end of his term. If that re****t was correct,
then his current tour might have the purpose of telling them when it
is coming.
Why not just do that through the State Department? State may not be in
the loop, nor all of DOD for that matter. The State Department, OSD,
the intelligence agencies, the Army and the Marine Corps are all
opposed to war with Iran. Of the armed services, only the Air Force
re****tedly is in favor, seeking an op****tunity to show what air power
can do. As always, it neglects to inform the decision-makers what it
cannot do.
The purpose of this column is not to warn of an imminent assault on
Iran, though personally I think it is coming, and soon. Rather, it is
to warn of a possible consequence of such an attack. Let me state it
here, again, as plainly as I can: an American attack on Iran could
cost us the whole army we now have in Iraq.
Lots of people in Wa****ngton are pondering possible consequences of an
air and missile assault on Iran, but few if any have thought about
this one. The American military's endless "we're the greatest"
propaganda has convinced most people that the U.S. armed forces cannot
be beaten in the field. They are the last in a long line of armies
that could not be beaten, until they were.
Here's roughly how it might play out. In response to American air and
missile strikes on military targets inside Iran, Iran moves to cut the
supply lines coming up from the south through the Persian Gulf (can
anyone in the Pentagon guess why it's called that?) and Kuwait on
which most U.S. Army units in Iraq depend (the Marines get most of
their stuff through Jordan). It does so by hitting ****pping in the
Gulf, mining key choke points, and destroying the ****t facilities we
depend on, mostly through sabotage. It also hits oil production and
ex****t facilities in the Gulf region, as a decoy: we focus most of our
response on protecting the oil, not guarding our army's supply lines.
Simultaneously, Iran activates the ****ite militias to cut the roads
that lead from Kuwait to Baghdad. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr
Brigades - the latter now supposedly our allies - enter the war
against us with their full strength. Ayatollah Sistani, an Iranian,
calls on all Iraqi ****ites to fight the Americans wherever they find
them. Instead of fighting the 20% of Iraq's population that is Sunni,
we find ourselves battling the 60% that is ****ite. Worse, the ****ites
logistics lie directly across those logistics lines coming up from
Kuwait.
U.S. Army forces in Iraq begin to run out of supplies, especially POL,
of which they consume a vast amount. Once they are largely immobilized
by lack of fuel, and the region gets some bad weather that keeps our
aircraft grounded or at least blind, Iran sends two to four regular
army armor and mech divisions across the border. Their objective is to
pocket American forces in and around Baghdad.
The U.S. military in Iraq is all spread out in penny packets fighting
insurgents. We have no field army there anymore. We cannot
reconcentrate because we're out of gas and ****ite guerrillas control
the roads. What units don't get overrun by Iranian armor or ****ite
militia end up in the Baghdad Kessel. General Petraeus calls President
Bush and repeals the famous words of Marshal I MacMahon at Sedan:
"Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerd=E9s." Bush
thinks he's overheard Petraeus ordering dinner - as, for Bush, he has.
U.S. Marines in Iraq, who are mostly in Anbar province, are the only
force we have left. Their lines of supply and retreat through Jordan
are intact. The local Sunnis want to join them in fighting the hated
Persians. What do they do at that point? Good question.
How probable is all this? I can't answer that. Unfortunately, the
people in Wa****ngton who should be able to answer it are not asking
it. They need to start doing so, now.
It is imperative that we have an up-to-date plan for dealing with this
contingency. That plan must not depend on air power to rescue our
army. Air power always promises more than it can deliver.
As I have warned before, every American ground unit in Iraq needs its
own plan to get itself out of the country using only its own resources
and whatever it can scrounge locally. Retreat to the north, through
Kurdistan into Turkey, will be the only alternative open to most U.S.
Army units, other than ending up in an Iranian POW camp.
Even if the probability of the above scenario is low, we still need to
take it with the utmost seriousness because the consequences would be
so vast. If the United States lost the army it has in Iraq, we would
never recover from the defeat. It would be another Adrianople, another
Manzikert, another Rocroi. Given the many other ways we now resemble
Imperial Spain, the last analogy may be the most telling.
I have said all this before, in previous columns and elsewhere. If I
sound like Cassandra on this point, remember that events ended up
proving her right.
March 26, 2008
(William Lind is an analyst based in Wa****ngton, DC.)
Copyright (c) 2008 William S. Lind
Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19613.htm
- o O o -
Bush's Middle East Peace Plan Includes Israeli attack On Iran
By Bert Hielema,
Belleville Intelligencer,
19 March, 2008.
U.S. President George W. Bush frightened me when he announced that
Vice President Dick Cheney was going to the Middle East to seek peace,
because in the Bush dictionary 'peace' means 'war.'
Cheney is going to dot the 'I's' and cross the 'T's' on the final
agreement with Israel to attack Iran. That suspicion became certainty
when Admiral William J. Fallon, the overall U.S. commander for the
Middle East, resigned in an obvious dispute with the real boss in
Wa****ngton: Cheney. We now face an "all-out-war," a truly "fin de
siecle" event.
'Siecle' sounds like 'cycle' which is a time period where events
repeat themselves. A Russian agricultural expert has a 'cycle' named
after him, the so-called 'Kondratieff Cycle'. Going back hundreds of
years he detected a 50-60 year interval between economic depressions,
which prompted two economists to predict that the 1990s - 60 years
after the Dirty Thirties - would be disastrous. James Dale Davidson
wrote "The Great Reckoning," sub-titled "How the World will Change in
the Depression of the 1990s", while Dr. Ravi Batra wrote, "The Great
Depression of 1990" and "Surviving the Great Depression of 1990."
We sailed through that decade without major financial upsets, thanks
to Alan Greenspan who, by flooding the market with money, prevented a
severe downturn. Call him "the monetary Viagra man" as he managed to
keep the economy erect even though, by all normal standards, it should
have gone limp.
Now all financial testosterone has disappeared: it's pay-up time
because "The Great Reckoning" has not been revoked, merely postponed.
Today, we see the converging of three cycles: first, the belated
Kondratieff one; second, the final phase of "The Fourth Turning" a
book by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and third, the end of a 1,000
year super cycle.
"The Fourth Turning" divides history into four seasons, each lasting
about two decades, consisting of growth, maturing, stabilizing, and
destruction.
In recent America history, the first phase includes the Trueman-
Eisenhower-Kennedy years - the American Dream period - followed by the
Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan maturing stage. The first Bush-
Clinton-second Bush period has just been concluded, typified by
national drift and institutional decay, indicating the unraveling of
the American Dream.
We are now in the Fourth Turning: a crisis mood, where the very
survival of the nation is at stake. Says this book: "If there is a
war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort - in other
words, a total war.... America could become a society that is good...
(or) the next Fourth Turning might end in apocalypse."
To me, an Iran attack signals apocalypse. Human history started in the
Middle East: will it end there as well? There is no doubt that we are
facing a major crisis.
Then there is the super cycle of a thousand years. Going back 4,000
years, we see how, after 1,000 years of relative stagnation, around
the year 1,000 BC King David emerges, and slowly the world awakens,
with, around 500 BC the birth of Rome and the rise of the Greek
civilization. This period reached its peak in the time of Christ,
making the spread of the Gospel possible.
Then we see 1,000 years of decline: 500 years of gradual
disintegration leading to the collapse of the Roman empire in the late
fifth century. That descent continued for another 500 years, the time
period we now call the Dark Ages, when commerce and public order
collapsed, a full millennium of downhill development.
Then sometime around the end of the 10th century Western Europe began
something new and vital: five centuries of slow revival, known as the
Middle Ages. They brought a rebirth of money, art and social mobility,
a true renaissance, which increased its pace for the next 500 years,
arriving where we are today. Thus again 1,000 years of deterioration
was followed by 1,000 years of progress.
All signs now point to immense future negatives.
It is striking that today we see a host of books that have the word
"End" in it. I have a number of those: "The End of Nature" by Bill
McKibben; "The End of Science, Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the
Twilight of the Scientific Age", by John Horgan; "The End of Oil, on
the Edge of a Perilous New World," by Paul Roberts.
Perhaps there is some merit in these long and short cycles. If Bush-
Cheney-Israel do attack Iran - and I'm sure they plan this - then,
indeed, we face an ever more dangerous world.
No wonder the price of gold and oil is steadily increasing.
This and earlier columns can be seen at hielema.ca. He can be reached
at hielema@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.intelligencer.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3D948769
These news items are posted here under 'Fair Use' provisions.
(This posting may be freely re-posted)
________________________
And the likely response to an economic or financial crisis by 'El
Presidente' Bush?
George W. Bush: Constitution of the United States is just a "goddamned
piece of paper."
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8534.shtml
'General Tommy Franks Says U.S. Constitution May Not Survive, Sees
Possible Military Form Of Government In The United States'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/FRANKS.HTM
'Concentration Camps in America? Martial Law Civilian Detention
Centers?'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/CONCAMP.HTM
'Astoni****ng 1987 'Miami Herald' News Re****t Reveals Existence Of A
'Secret Government', Plus Plans To Suspend Constitution, Impose
Martial Law, And Activate Civilian Detention Centers'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/CONCAMP2.HTM
U.S. Congressman: American Concentration Camps "On The Books"
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/CONCAMP3.HTM
'More Preparations For U.S. Martial Law'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/MOREMART.HTM
'FEMA: America's Secret Government-In-Waiting'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/fema.htm
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/MELTDWN1.HTM
'Sorting Through The Rubble In Post-Bubble America'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/MELTDOWN.HTM
'The Coming U.S. Economic and Financial Meltdown'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/MELTDWN2.HTM
'The U.S. Economic and Financial Meltdown Accelerates'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/MELTDWN3.HTM
'No End In Sight As U.S. Financial Crisis Deepens'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/GEO443.HTM
'War Is A Racket' by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/BLACK-OP.HTM
'Chemtrails: Are They For Climate Control, Weather Modification,
'Black Ops',<br> Or For Biological Warfare And Mass Vaccine Testing?'
_______________________
And, in case you missed them....
The London 'Sunday Times': 'For Sale: West's Deadly Nuclear Secrets'
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece
The London 'Sunday Times': 'FBI Denies File Exposing Nuclear Secrets
Theft'
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3216737.e=
ce
The London 'Sunday Times': 'Mole's Tip-Off Thwarted Nuclear Spy Ring
Probe'
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3257725.e=
ce
'Treason at the State Department: A Whistleblower's Story'
http://pajamasmedia.com/2008/01/fbi_whistleblower_bombshell_tr.php
'Congress Seeks to Limit 'State Secrets' Privilege'
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=3D12299
Watch this superb 50 minute streaming video on Sibel Edmonds:
'Kill The Messenger' http://tinyurl.com/2ukg78
___________________________
For constantly-updated news headline and blogger article links on the
recent sensational 'U.S. Nuclear Treason And Betrayal' revelations of
Sibel Edmonds, the ex-FBI whistleblower who has been called 'The most-
gagged woman in America', go to
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/EDMONDS.HT=
M
These serious allegations, involving the alleged 'sale' of nuclear
secrets, reach right to the top of the U.S. government. The
prestigious London 'Sunday Times' first broke this blockbuster story
on 6th January, 2008 - it has been completely 'blacked out' by the
U.S. media and wire services!
"If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this
case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal
trials" - Sibel Edmonds
For updated economic and current events news, and under-re****ted 'News
You Need To Know', go to http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/mystery.htm
_________________________
NATO's very own new European 'drug smuggling republic' is roiling
Balkan politics as the CIA-BND-Bilderberg-created 'Kosovo Republic'
seeks to obtain international recognition for its illegal 'declaration
of independence' from Serbia, to become Europe's first state financed
by heroin trafficking..
You can follow the origins of the Bilderberg-inspired Kosovo 'heroin
and oil' war, and the current unfolding of events leading unavoidably
to the next Balkan war, by clicking on the link below (that page is
regularly updated with news re****ts - scroll down it for the latest
news items)
'How The Elite Bilderberg Group Secretly Planned And Executed The
Kosovo War'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/BILD98.HTM
______________________
'How Canada Lost Its Rights And Liberties - And Few Cared!'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/CANLIB.HTM
'How Britain Legislated Away 2,000 Years Of Rights And Freedom'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/UKLIB.HTM
________________________
Lookng for the best in Daily Bible Devotionals?
C.H..Spurgeon: 'Morning And Evening'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/DEVOTION.HTM
'Daily Light On The Daily Path'
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/DLDEVOTS.HTM
Download the classic 'Precious Bible Promises' here...
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/PROMISES.HTM
'Remember Lot!' - J.C. Ryle
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/LOT.HTM
Download (Or Read Online) Free Christian Classics:
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/SERMONS.HTM
Download (Or Read Online) Free Classic Travel And History Books:
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/freetrav.htm
http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/freethist.htm
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