Over the cliff with George and Dick? Tom Engelhardt provides some disturbing analysis of the storm being brewed up by our neo-con artists in regards to ‘regime change’ in Iran.

After all, to anyone not delusional - which leaves out you-know-who and his vice president - a massive air assault on Iran, surely involving bunker-busting missiles with staggering explosive power, would seem to be an act of madness. The decision to attack Iran would be the equivalent of setting off an advanced IED directly under the main highway of what’s left of global order.

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The possibility of an attack on Iran has been a long time on the horizon. You’d have to start back at that moment before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when, as Newsweek reminded us, one quip of the bolder neocons was: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” You’d have to go back to January 2005, when reporter Seymour Hersh, in a New Yorker piece, “The Coming Wars,” wrote, “In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran,” and added that, in close cooperation with the Israelis, “the Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer.”

You’d have to go back to March 2005, when ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern pointed out at Tomdispatch.com that “Bush administration policy toward the Middle East is being run by men… who were routinely referred to in high circles in Washington during the 1980s as ‘the crazies’” and who, he warned, might well head for Iran next.

You’d have to go back to August 2005 when, in the American Conservative magazine , former CIA official Philip Giraldi warned: “In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran” — possibly involving an “unprovoked nuclear attack” on that country. A contingency plan was, he claimed, being drawn up in the Pentagon, “acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.”

The litany goes on and on. Read more Here

There was an article recently by Nick Cohen in The Observer recently (no longer online) which was fairly interesting to me. Personally, I still know wrong from right in my daily personal life, but in world affairs I’m a bit lost. I know that the bungled Iraq War is a disaster for American energy security, but that particular issue is something for neocons to be mad about, not “moral” people. The disastrous situation in Iraq now actually gives me an easy out, a way to still be against Bush’s war and say I was rightly against it all along. But I was originally against it because I thought Bush was planning to acquire Iraq as the “51st state”, which it turns out he wasn’t. The Coalition Provisional Authority DID cede power to an elected Iraqi government. So was removing Saddam a morally wrong idea, or merely a strategic blunder? What was the moral thing to do?

The author, a born and bred leftist, says that the European Left was against the war just because they hate America and that they have lost their moral compass. It’s a tad long-winded, but here’s the meat of it:

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

A part of the answer is that it isn’t at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists’ atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.

It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America. I hate to repeat the overused quote that ‘when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything’, but there is no escaping it. Because it is very hard to imagine a radical left wing alternative, or even mildly radical alternative, intellectuals in particular are ready to excuse the movements of the far right as long as they are anti-Western.

On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini’s old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs.

A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet’s Chile, published a letter to an ‘unknown Iraqi’ and asked, ‘What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?’

His reply summed up the fears of tens of millions of people. War would destabilise the Middle East and recruit more fanatics to terrorist groups. It would lead to more despots ‘pre-emptively arming themselves with all manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to ‘Armageddon’. Dorfman also worried about the casualties - which, I guess, were far higher than he imagined - and convinced himself that the right course was to demand that Bush and Blair pull back. Nevertheless, he retained the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit to sign off with ‘heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children’.

- Posted by JK

Something which came our way from Steve Hammons of the Populist Party of America…

What can we learn about the desires for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq on the part of some government officials, Washington think tank intellectuals, journalists, war profiteers and average Americans?

Most of what has been discussed and written about on these topics has centered on the thinking, theories and intelligence information put forth by these individuals and groups.

But what about the deeper psychological and moral aspects of people who have enthusiastically sent thousands of American troops to violent deaths and severe, permanent injuries?

What about the inner nature of people who so desired this war which has also resulted in the deaths of and injuries to tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children?

We probably don’t need to be rocket scientists or licensed psychiatrists and psychologists to try to look at some of the reasons why these officials, journalists and everyday people wanted war and were so eager to sacrifice our fellow Americans and loved ones as well as innocent Iraqis.

Maybe we just need to do some good, old-fashioned soul-searching. The parents, spouses, children and friends of our troops who have been killed and injured have certainly done this already. And more are required to do it with each passing day.

Read The Full Report

When will the American Media and Government hold equally accountable the other people feeding insurgents in the Iraq war? The Saudi Arabian Government is providing financial, military and personnel aid to the Sunni insurgents also. We never hear President Bush or the media demanding they Saudi back off its support to the Sunni insurgents as he does his rhetoric against the Iranians. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers that hit us on September 11, 2001 were from Saudi and so was Bin Laden! These people are friends of the Bush family. But they are still killing American Soldiers.

- Posted by Michael Boetjer, Captain U.S. Army (Ret.), Double Blue Star Father, Fort Wayne, Indiana

An interesting article from the U.K. Telegraph about the economic situation in Iran. I don’t get the impression that the Iranians are all hot to trot about pushing the nation into a war with “The Great Satan?” It certainly doesn’t sound like the Iranian president is standing up against the US from a position of real political power.

First, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alienated the rest of the world with his religious extremism, nuclear ambitions and global grandstanding. Now, due to domestic failures and economic incompetence, he is doing the same to ordinary Iranians

Sound like somebody else we know? Looks like we have the populace of two nations being led to the brink of war by their clueless, unpopular, theological zealot leaders.

Read The Full Article

Steve Hammons elaborates on this and expanded points in his essay “Will Bush, Cheney Attack Iran? When and Why?.” This is a good historical and political analysis concerning the Iranian regime and the growing potential for catastrophic showdown between it and the U.S.

In recent US elections, the American people sent a strong message to the Bush administration and their supporters in Congress: the Iraq War and the direction the Bush administration has led the country is of great concern.

Americans saw that the killing and destruction in Iraq are beginning to seem pointless. The damage to our military and the financial costs to our nation do not seem worthwhile. The reasons for and intelligence prior to the Iraq invasion may have been fraudulent - consciously and purposely fraudulent.

Americans voted for moderate and progressive candidates to try to put a stop to this and lead the US in a better direction.

In recent elections in Iran, candidates for office who were allied with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were soundly defeated.

The Iranian people seemed to be saying that they did not approve of the bellicose and threatening statements and style of Ahmadinejad. The direction he is taking their country apparently has created great concern among Iranians.

The Iranian people voted for relatively progressive and moderate candidates to try to put a stop to this and lead Iran in a better direction.

Still, the political leaders of both the US and Iran seem to continue this escalating confrontation, placing the safety and welfare of their people and their nations, as well as the international community, at grave risk.

In a related vein, here is Robert Dreyfuss’ essay “Bush’s Trash Talk About Iran”

Since President Bush’s State of the Union address last Tuesday, the White House has manufactured a crisis that pits the United States against Iran. In what looks like the military and diplomatic equivalent of a full court press, Washington has unleashed a barrage of threats, maneuvers and limited military actions that seem calculated to set the United States on a collision course with Iran in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

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Were this not so deadly serious, it would be farcical. One goal, apparently, of U.S. threats and bluster against Iran in Iraq is an attempt to break ties between Iran and, say, SCIRI - even though SCIRI is organically tied to Tehran and even though it was created in 1982 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Though SCIRI is happy to receive U.S. support as well (its turbaned leader recently visited the Oval Office), there is no question that the Shiite leaders in Iraq know that one day the United States will leave, while Iran, Iraq’s giant neighbor to the east, will always be there. Those realities seem not to have registered with Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, who told The Washington Post that even though SCIRI and Iran had close ties in the 1980s, “Now it’s a different situation, so there is a need for adaptation of what’s appropriate in terms of a relationship.” Perhaps, by invading the compound of SCIRI’s leader and seizing several officers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard there last month, Khalilzad thought he was sending the “appropriate” message that SCIRI needs to break its ties to Iran. Not likely.

Read the complete article Here

Surprise, surprise!

The Iraq Study Group may not have a solution for how to end the war, but it does have a way for its corporate friends to make money.

Welcome to the true meaning of the occupation of Iraq. Ever wonder why Dick Cheney and friends have worked so hard to keep those secret White House energy policy meetings from early 2001 a secret?

President Bush hired an employee from the U.S. consultancy firm Bearing Point Inc. over a year ago to advise the Iraq Oil Ministry on the drafting and passage of a new national oil law. As previously drafted, the law opens Iraq’s nationalized oil sector to private foreign corporate investment, but stops short of full privatization. The ISG report, however, goes further, stating that “the United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.” In addition, the current Constitution of Iraq is ambiguous as to whether control over Iraq’s oil should be shared among its regional provinces or held under the central government. The report specifically recommends the latter: “Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population.” If these proposals are followed, Iraq’s national oil industry will be privatized and opened to foreign firms, and in control of all of Iraq’s oil wealth.

The proposals should come as little surprise given that two authors of the report, James A. Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger, have each spent much of their political and corporate careers in pursuit of greater access to Iraq’s oil and wealth.

Read The Full Article

Here’s a good follow up piece by Tom Engelhardt on Bush family consigliere Baker and cohorts who worked to ensure that while the ISG would be filled with notable movers and shakers from numerous previous administrations, no one on it, nor any expert ‘team’ advising it, would represent the one point of view that a majority of Americans have by now come to support - actual withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq on a set timeline.” We can’t do that, you silly prole. There’s still gold in them their hills! Black gold. Texas Tea.

Read his report “Fixing The War”

Oh yeah, and in case anyone hasn’t gotten the memo yet, “War Is A Racket”

I had heard of this, but was confused as to the story attribution since this exact same thing happened in a congressional hearing this year with the seven-term Alabama Congressman Terry Everett executing basically the same display of ignorance as Mr. Reyes here. I was wondering if this story was getting transposed, but then, I don’t doubt at all the probability that NOTHING will have been learned by the Corporacrats running all branches of our political system. This is truly absurd, and portends some increasingly deadly absurdity in the next few months and years. It will most likely also serve as dangerously distasteful fodder for the old argument that both parties have to be abandoned entirely (but for different reasons, much akin to the the differences inherent between a wife who leaves a husband out of neglect, and one because of direct abuse).

Law enforcement and intelligence experts are scratching their heads in disbelief upon discovering that the next House Intelligence Committee Chairman doesn’t possess even a basic understanding of terrorism or terrorist groups. In fact, he’s never heard of Hezbollah.

Representative Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), who was Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi’s second choice to head the sensitive and vital committee, did not know what Hezbollah was and incorrectly described Al-Qaeda as being Shiite rather than Sunni.

Rep. Reyes appeared disoriented when a reporter asked him basic questions about the Islamic groups that are the principal targets of America’s intelligence agencies, including Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and others.

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He also asked Reyes about the terrorist group Hezbollah. “Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah…” he said, laughing. “Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak
Spanish?”

“This is no laughing matter. Where was this man when Israel and Hezbollah battled for almost two weeks?” asked a former intelligence officer and now New York City detective.

“We went from an impeached judge to a man ignorant of the basic facts regarding terrorist groups. What kind of oversight will that be?” he added.

Read The Complete Report

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

Read the full article on the Future of Iraq: The Spoils of War

Want to know what exactly ‘victory’ means to George Bush and his Texan cronies? Look here. Looks like its shaping up to be a pretty big win in his eyes. Oh yeah, sorry about your dead kid, and that two trillion dollars it cost you to pull this off.

Read The Report

Finally. Its been awhile waiting for someone to point out the obvious about the Bush/Blair regimes and the fact that the United States can’t give up on Iraq because it absolutely positively must have their oil on the market. This is a refreshingly well-written post, too.

Powell adds that more troops, more country boys from the National Guard, effectively, will not reverse a “grave and deteriorating” situation. Having been elbowed from the corridors of power for knowing more about soldiering than Rumsfeld, vice-president Dick Cheney, or the draft-dodger in the Oval Office, the former general is entitled to a certain satisfaction. Such is not his demeanour. To paraphrase: things are bad, getting worse, and won’t be fixed with still more casualties.

A rational White House might pause at that. A president marking time until the constitution evicts him from Pennsylvania Avenue might even decide to quit while he’s behind, and perhaps ameliorate a little of the vast damage he has caused. Be serious: this is the boy George. Despite the damning judgement of American voters, despite the slaughter, despite the failure to quell terrorism, and despite the conclusions of Pop’s old pal, Jim Baker, and the elders of the Iraq Study Group, he cleaves to an astounding conclusion. He still thinks he’s right. George, one suspects, would give a goofy grin at the prospect of Armageddon itself.

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If any of this is true, and it seems more likely by the day, a couple of conclusions are obvious. First, Bush means for America to remain in Iraq for many years to come. At this rate, he will unite all the warring factions against the stars and stripes. Secondly, if the US stays, Britain stays: Tony Blair has welded every British interest to American policy.

The anti-war movement did not quite think this one through, after all. There was a want, if you like, of historical memory, and a failure to take Bush and Blair at their words. They said that their war could last for unspecified generations. We marched up and down for a while and then went home. We did not quite grasp the scale of the thing. Yet if Bush now puts more troops into Iraq, Britain will somehow match the commitment and the “long haul” will begin to seem endless. That should be cause for another protest or two.

We forget about actions and consequences. Blair has changed Britain in ways most of us have yet to notice, far less understand.

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America could afford Vietnam. It cannot afford Iraq when Russia is turning carbon fuels into weapons, China is at the table and the Saudis are heading the way of all corrupt, mendacious regimes. In the end, the truth is slightly disorienting: for once, this pair were not lying. They meant what they said about endless wars. They intend to fight in Iraq, and across the globe, for a very long time to come. Short of uprisings in Britain and the US, that counts as the future, yours and mine.

Read The Complete Report

Time Magazine actually delivers some pretty good historical context to the goings ons in Iraq. This is all, of course, beyond the comprehension of those running American foreign policy today, and explains why we are in a real shit show when it comes to what the future holds for us, to say nothing about what the tortured land of Iraq is in store for.

Just as consequential, for Sunnis and anyone else who knows Iraqi history, Saddam’s executioners shouted the name of Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Muqtada’s father-in-law. Ayatollah Sadr, whom Saddam executed in 1980, is perhaps as responsible as Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for modern, resurgent Shi’a Islam. Sadr founded the Da’wa Party, a violent, secretive organization committed to the creation of an Iraqi Shi ‘a Islamic republic, and today a political party that counts none other than Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as a member

In 1979, Sadr and the Da’wa took the side of the Iranian revolution, sparking demonstrations and unrest across Iraq. After Sadr’s Da’wa attempted to assassinate Hussein’s longtime foreign minister Tariq Aziz on April 1, 1980, Saddam, in fairly quick succession, executed Sadr and invaded Iran. Saddam was convinced that unless he pre-empted Sadr - in other words, Iran - he would end up on the gallows. Two years later, in Dujail, the Da’wa did try to assassinate Saddam. Saddam’s brutal retribution against Dujail is what got him hanged last Saturday.

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Only time will tell us what Sadr intends do with Iraq if he ever does take over. But the Sunnis today will tell you they don’t need to wait. On Saturday, they saw all the evidence they needed: the symbolism of executing Saddam on the Muslim High Holiday of Id al-Adha as a gift to the Shi’a, and and the decision of Maliki to get special approval from Iraq’s senior Shi’a clerics, the ‘marja’iya,’ to carry out the execution on that day.

No one is ever going to take a poll, but it’s safe to say that most Sunni fear Ayatollah Sadr’s dream of an Iraqi Shi’a Islamic republic has already come true.

Read The Complete Article

There is more on the whole sorry affair of how the hanging of Saddam Hussein went down and the sure blowback to result from it this piece Lynching The Dictator in Slate, by Christopher Hitchens of all people. The references to George Orwell’s tract Revenge Is Sour was particularly apt.