Pissing contest or Prelude?
Iran is up on our plate with a vengeance, and I’m sure some of you are concerned. CNN has shown pictures of the hostages, including that of a female soldier that will be released tomorrow; a letter written home and a statement included the stock ‘n trade “apology” for entering Iranian waters — meanwhile, UK is showing film documenting their exact position which seems to disprove the Iranian assertion. It was good to see that the sailors were not bound and blindfolded, as we’ve seen in the past.
We have a LOT of big guns in the gulf — and the Iranians are showing off their own, with an ambitious war-game maneuver. The new Navy Admiral that is part of Dub’s current military team is in Baghdad and has stated that he has absolutely no interest in Iran at the moment — indeed, they have their hands full there. ABC’s Martha Raddatz reported from Baghdad on Charlie Rose Monday night that the military “expectations” had been lowered enormously there, and that there was a genuine scramble to accomplish something positive — they are aware that they’re losing the public support, and perhaps the funds.
If this flap with Iran had occurred two months ago, I would have been more concerned — and I am, of course, especially with a spun-up Dubby at the helm. But things are very fluid right now … and even though April is a month in which rash decisions seem the norm, I’m not sure we should jump to conclusions. If this is going to shake out into war, there needs to be a bigger PR push from the Hill. The Little Prince has his plate full with dust-up’s at the moment … and that’s how we should keep him. An idle mind is the Debil’s playground.
Be mindful, but don’t add any fear to the Universe. Keep Light and prayers. And keep telling the truth to anyone who’ll listen.
Here’s the tit and tat.
Jude
Easter Surprise: Attack on Iran, New 9/11… or Worse
Heather Wokusch
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
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“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
– George W. Bush, September 2002
“This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous… Having said that, all options are on the table.”
– George W. Bush, February 2005
The Bush administration continues moving closer to a nuclear attack on Iran, and we ignore the obvious buildup at our peril.
Russian media is sounding alarms. In February, ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir Shirinovsky warned that the US would launch a strike against Tehran at the end of this month. Then last week, the Russian News and Information Agency Novosti (RIA-Novosti) quoted military experts predicting the US will attack Iran on April 6th, Good Friday. According to RIA-Novosti, the imminent assault will target Iranian air and naval defense capabilities, armed forces headquarters as well as key economic assets and administration headquarters. Massive air strikes will be deployed, possibly tactical nuclear weapons as well, and the Bush administration will attempt to exploit the resulting chaos and political unrest by installing a pro-US government.
Sound familiar? It’s Iraq déjà vu all over again, and we know how well that war has gone.
Seymour Hersh has published numerous articles in The New Yorker detailing the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iran. His latest, “The Redirection,” discusses US participation in Iran-based clandestine operations, the kidnapping of hundreds of Iranians (including many “humanitarian and aid workers”) by US forces and the shocking revelation that an Iran-Contra-type scandal has been run out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office with some of the illicit funds going to groups “sympathetic to al-Qaeda.”
“The Redirection” also reports that the Pentagon has been planning to bomb Iran for a year and that a recently-established group connected to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is formulating a assault strategy to be implemented “upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.” Hersh notes that current capabilities “allow for an attack order this spring,” possibly when four US aircraft-carrier battle groups are scheduled to be in the Persian Gulf simultaneously.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Congress busies itself with non-binding, timid resolutions on Iraq and recently altered a military-funding bill to make it easier for Bush to invade Iran. As Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) explained, language demanding that Bush seek congressional approval before attacking Iran “would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran.”
Such sheer ignorance and blind denial would be laughable if it weren’t marching us into Armageddon.
But with this Administration (and this Congress, apparently) diplomacy be damned.
It’s now widely known that Iran had broached peace talks with the US in 2003 - Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice admitted as much in 2006 when she said, “what the Iranians wanted earlier was to be one-on-one with the United States.” Yet the White House rejected Tehran’s overture outright and Rice has since developed selective amnesia, later saying of the Iranian proposal, “I don’t remember seeing any such thing. ”
For its part, the UN Security Council recently tightened sanctions aimed at pressuring Iran to cease uranium enrichment, and in response, Iran announced it would cooperate less with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
It’s worth noting that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and says that its program falls under the legally permitted right to “peacefully use nuclear technology.” In contrast, Israel has neither signed nor ratified the NPT and the US would breach the Treaty by conducting a nuclear attack against Iran.
Besides, the Bush administration’s message to its enemies has been very clear: if you possess WMD you’re safe, and if you don’t, you’re fair game. Iraq had no nuclear weapons and was invaded, Iran doesn’t as well and risks attack, yet that other “Axis of Evil” country, North Korea, reportedly does have nuclear weapons and is left alone. When considering that India and Pakistan (and presumably Israel) developed secret nuclear weapons programs yet remain on good terms with Washington, the case for war becomes even more tenuous.
What consequences would arise from a US attack on Iran? Retaliation, for one. Tehran promised a “crushing response” to any US or Israeli assault, and while the country - ironically - doesn’t possess nuclear weapons to scare off attackers, it does have other options. Iran boasts a standing army estimated at 450,000 personnel, as well as long-range missiles that could hit Israel and possibly even Europe. In addition, much of the world’s oil supply is transported through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch of water which Iran borders to the north. In 1997, Iran’s deputy foreign minister warned that the country might close off that shipping route if ever threatened, and it wouldn’t be difficult. Just a few missiles or gunboats could bring down vessels and block the Strait, thereby threatening the global oil supply and shooting the price of crude oil to over $100 a barrel, with untold negative consequences for the world economy.
An attack on Iran would also inflame tensions in the Middle East, and could tip the scales towards a new geopolitical balance, one in which the US finds itself shut out by Russia, China, Iran, Muslim countries and the many others Bush has managed to alienate during his period in office.
The most horrific impact of a US assault on Iran, of course, would be the potentially catastrophic number of casualties. The Oxford Research Group predicted that up to 10,000 people would die if the US bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, and that an attack on the Bushehr nuclear reactor could send a radioactive cloud over the Gulf. If the US uses nuclear weapons, such as earth-penetrating “bunker buster” bombs, radioactive fallout would become even more disastrous.
The devastating implications of a US strike on Iran are clear. And that begs the question: how could the US public be convinced to enter another potentially ugly and protracted war?
Former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi chillingly noted that the Pentagon’s plans to attack Iran were drawn up “to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States.” Writing in The American Conservative in August 2005, Giraldi added, “The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites … As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States.”
Chew on that one a minute. The Pentagon’s plan would be in response to a terrorist attack on the US, but not contingent upon Iran actually having been responsible. How outlandish is this scenario: another 9/11 hits the US, the administration says it has secret information implicating Iran, the US population demands retribution and bombs start dropping on Tehran.
While even contemplating another 9/11 brings shudders, it’s worth noting that last year, Congress quietly approved provisions making it easier for the President to declare federal martial law after a domestic terrorist incident. And recall that in late 2003, General Tommy Franks openly speculated on how a new 9/11 could lead to a military form of government: “a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution.”
Meanwhile, Iran conducted wargames in the Persian Gulf last week and just yesterday, the US Navy began its largest maneuvers in the region since the 2003 Iraq invasion, complete with over 100 US warplanes and 10,000 personnel.
The clock is ticking, and there’s far too much at stake.
If you’re from the US, contact your Senators today and ask them to support the Webb amendment prohibiting the Administration from attacking Iran without congressional approval. Tell them to support the Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) bill making it harder for Bush to declare martial law and take over the National Guard, and while you’re at it, tell your Senators to only fund troop withdrawal and to bring the troops home. Thank those Congress members who voted against more war funding.
We could be looking at WWIII. The time for positive action is now. ++
US hawks see strikes on Iran as less likely now
Influential thinkers who backed a US-led invasion of Iraq now say containment, not confrontation, is best for Iran.
Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor
March 28, 2007
WASHINGTON - Earlier this month when House leader Nancy Pelosi struck a provision from a $100-billion spending bill that would have specifically required President Bush to seek congressional approval before any military strike on Iran, it was seen as a victory for the hawks in Washington.
After all, the Democrats took control of Congress last year in large part because of voter anger over the Iraq war. If they were saying that Bush doesn’t need their permission to take action against Iran, then his “all options are on the table” rhetoric looks stronger, and raises the possibility of expanded conflict in the Middle East.
But war with Iran, or even targeted air strikes at presumed nuclear facilities, is looking less and less likely. Despite tough rhetoric from both sides and increased tension over Iran’s move to detain 15 British sailors last week, a variety of influential thinkers who championed the US-led invasion of Iraq are now saying that containment, not confrontation, is the best approach to Iran.
“I think the discussion has really shifted,” says M. J. Rosenberg, the director of analysis for the Israel Policy Forum, a pressure group in Washington that favors diplomatic efforts to resolve the Middle East’s problems and worries that the Iraq war has made Israel and America less safe. “The conventional wisdom in Washington has changed,” says Mr. Rosenberg. There were influential people who thought that thought military action could be possible this year, he says. “Now, hardly anyone does.”
Mr. Rosenberg says continued tough talk – and the Democrat climbdown over the spending bill – largely serve two functions: to hopefully soften up Iran in ongoing diplomatic negotiations over inspections of its nuclear facilities; and as a sop to hard-line groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which advocates continued political and economic sanctions on Iran until it gives up its nuclear program, and whose lobbying was largely seen as leading Ms. Pelosi to take her action. [ Editor’s Note: The original version mischaracterized AIPAC ’s position.]
Polls show attacking Iran is unpopular
But it’s not just doves like Rosenberg. The more hawkish forces in Washington – from neoconservatives who believe the Middle East should be remade by force to pro-Israel lobby groups that say military strikes would prevent Iran from advancing its nuclear ambitions – have taken a step back.
The logistics of a strike, with an expanded US military role in Iraq and the fact that the two US carrier groups in the Gulf can’t stay there indefinitely, are growing ever more difficult. And polls show a large majority of Americans prefer diplomacy, at least for now.
“If Bush attacked Iran tomorrow, the great majority of Americans would think he was nuts,'’ Patrick Clawson, deputy director for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said last week at a conference in Washington on America’s options with Iran.
Mr. Clawson, a vigorous proponent of invading Iraq, sees the Islamic Republic of Iran as an intractable enemy of the US, and has repeatedly urged that the US focus on regime change there by supporting exiled dissidents and democratic opponents inside the country.
But he has recently written that military action against Iran “is clearly undesirable” and thinks war is out of the question, unless it is triggered by a “much more aggressive” stance from Iran, for instance a withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or the testing of a nuclear weapon.
At the same conference, which was sponsored by the RAND Corporation, a think tank with close ties to the American military establishment, Ken Pollack, another supporter of the Iraq invasion, said he favors keeping the pressure on Iran with sanctions, which he thinks could work in containing their nuclear program if Iran sees that the social and economic costs are high enough.
He sees military action as an absolute last resort, and worries that Iran could easily tie up US forces in Iraq – where the US alleges many of the Shiite militias closely cooperate with Tehran. “We need to think about Iraq before we go off on some half-cocked military action against Iran,'’ Mr. Pollack says.
To be sure, there are still real risks of an eventual escalation. The UN Security Council on Saturday backed a package of sanctions against Iran that includes a ban on Iranian arms exports and a freezing of the assets abroad of 28 individuals and organizations involved in the country’s nuclear program.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned about the planned sanctions last week, saying that if big powers via the Security Council took “illegal actions” and ignored the Islamic Republic’s rights, “we can also carry out illegal actions and we will do that.” He insisted Iran would continue with efforts to enrich uranium – a fuel needed for both nuclear reactors, but that could also be used to make a weapon.
David Ochmanek, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for strategy and now a defense analyst at RAND, argues that the logic of seeking nuclear weapons from the Iranian perspective is compelling – and America’s desire to stop that just as urgent.
He says Iran’s conventional military, particularly its Air Force and anti-aircraft batteries “are really a museum” and that its recent history – a ruinous war with Iraq in the 1980s in which Sunni Arab regimes, and at times the US, supported Iraq – has convinced it to rely on itself rather than international forums when it comes to its defense.
In that context, nuclear weapons have a “unique deterrent value” and he argues that strikes on Iranian facilities today would probably lead Iran to “redouble its efforts” to acquire a bomb.
Of course, Iran insists that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful energy purposes. Speaking by video link because the US won’t allow him to leave New York, Iranian Ambassador to the UN Javad Zarif disputed the belief of strategists like Mr. Ochmanek that a nuclear weapon would be attractive for Iran.
“Nuclear weapons won’t help Iran,” he said. They would “increase our vulnerabilities and decrease our influence … nuclear deterrence for Iran is just a myth.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Zarif maintained the insistent Iranian line that it needs to be able to produce nuclear fuel on its soil. He said that “everyone knows… sanctions will not reach the intended result” and turned a favorite saying of former President Ronald Reagan’s by describing the attitude of the two countries towards one another as “mistrust and verify.”
Diplomacy now seen as best path
Zarif said suggestions by some UN diplomats that a compromise could be reached – in which an international consortium would promise to supply Iran with nuclear fuel produced abroad – are unacceptable, though he implied that an agreement to produce fuel in Iran with international oversight might be acceptable, though this is an outcome the US says it won’t accept.
For now, diplomacy is taking its course. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Tuesday he aimed to continue talks with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator early next week.
“There’s no guarantee that diplomatic options will succeed,” says Mr. Pollack. “But [they’re] likeliest to succeed. ++
US democracy ideals lose steam to Bush ‘realism’: experts
Raw Story
Wednesday March 28, 2007
Fallout from the Iraq war has prompted a new “realism” in US foreign policy, which is edging out early Bush administration ideals of promoting democracy around the world, analysts say.
US President George W. Bush pushed hard for reform in the Middle East during his first term in office, and still says that ideological change is an integral part of what he calls the “war on terror.”
And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was “really concerned” last week on the eve of an Egyptian constitutional referendum that opponents said was certain to curb freedoms.
Experts say the crippling war in Iraq has forced Washington to pursue “realist” policies over Bush’s earlier “idealist” ways.
“The failure of US policy in Iraq has provided autocratic regimes in the Middle East a reprieve from the pressure to democratize, as long as they position themselves clearly on the side of Washington in its looming confrontation with Iran, Syria, and Shiite Islamists,” said analyst Marina Ottoway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The lofty ideals of democracy promotion may still find their way into the administration’s speeches, but when it comes to policy, America’s enemies’ enemies are its friends.”
Ottoway said Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been “the biggest beneficiaries of the US loss of interest in draining the swamp of autocracy once it was confronted by large alligators such as Iran and its allies.”
For Thomas Carothers, another expert at the Carnegie Endowment, dictators of the world have beat back democratic principles by presenting them as a new manifestation of US imperialism.
“The way that President George W. Bush is making democracy promotion a central theme of his foreign policy has clearly contributed to the unease such efforts — and the idea of ‘democracy promotion’ itself — are creating around the world,” he wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.
“Some autocratic governments have won substantial public sympathy by arguing that opposition to Western democracy-promotion is resistance not to democracy itself, but to American interventionism.
“Moreover, the damage that the Bush administration has done to the global image of the United States as a symbol of democracy and human rights by repeatedly violating the rule of law at home and abroad has further weakened the legitimacy of the democracy-promotion cause.”
Egypt and Saudi Arabia are not the only countries to benefit from US support while turning a deaf ear to calls for democratic reform.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who just ousted the chief high court justice in what opponents call a power grab, recently received a surprise visit from US Vice President Dick Cheney who simply urged him to do more to fight Al-Qaeda extremists along the border with Afghanistan.
Azerbaijan, under iron-fisted rule by President Ilham Aliev who succeeded his father in 2003, last week signed an energy deal with the United States.
And in US-ally Colombia Bush has been content with President Alvaro Uribe’s efforts to control his territory and fight narco-terrorism despite a scandal linking government officials and extremist paramilitaries. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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