[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Israel Wants...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This is the best prognosis I've seen, opposed to the one I
posted under this subject line. I hope the redoubtable Chris
Floyd is wrong, but it's by no means a sure thing. --CGE]

  Persian Fire
  By Chris Floyd
  12/16/05 Moscow Times

So now we know: Next time the fire will come in Iran. The blow
will be delivered by proxy, but that will not spare the true
perpetrator from the firestorm of blowback and unintended
consequences that will follow. Even now, the gruesome deaths
of many innocent people in many lands are growing in
futurity's womb.

The Rubicon of the new war was crossed on Oct. 27. Oddly
enough for this renewal of the ancient enmity between the
heirs of Athens and Persia, the decisive event occurred on the
edge of the Arctic Circle, at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, where a
Russian rocket lifted an Iranian spy satellite, the Sinah-1,
into orbit. This launch, scarcely noticed at the time, has
accelerated the inevitable strike on Iran's nuclear
facilities: Israel is now readying an attack for no later than
the end of March, The Sunday Times reports.

The order, from embattled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, puts
Israel's special forces at the "highest stage of readiness"
for the strike. While Iran's plan to begin enriching uranium
-- which will give it the capability of building a nuclear
bomb -- is the precipitating factor, the budding Iranian space
program is a "point of no return" for Sharon, and that is what
is driving the actual timing of the strike. The Sinah-1 is
just the first of several Iranian satellites set for Russian
launches in the coming months.

Thus the Iranians will soon have a satellite network in place
to give them early warning of an Israeli attack, although it
will still be a pale echo of the far more powerful Israeli and
American space spies that can track the slightest movement of
a Tehran mullah's beard. What's more, late last month Russia
signed a $1 billion contract to sell Iran an advanced defense
system that can destroy guided missiles and laser-guided
bombs, the Sunday Times reports. This too will be ready in the
next few months.

There is of course another "precipitating factor": the Israeli
elections on Mar. 28. Sharon, who has left the Likud Party to
form his own cult-of-personality party, faces a fractious
electorate, with his former comrades guaranteeing an attack on
Iran's nuclear sites if Sharon is too "weak" to do it before
the vote. He may well decide to rally the nation -- and stave
off this lunge from the right -- with a blow against Tehran.
Such a move would doubtless be popular at home; everyone
agrees that Iran cannot be allowed to have the kind of nuclear
weapons that Israel itself possesses in such bristling abundance.

The move will be popular in Washington as well. Only a fool
would believe that the fools in the Bush Regime have abandoned
their bloody-minded ambitions for "full-spectrum dominance" in
the Middle East, just because Iraq has turned to goo in their
hands. To these schemers, Iraq has always been merely a
stepping-stone toward the "far enemy," Iran. Indeed, they used
Saddam himself for years as a useful stick to bash the
Iranians, until he stepped out of line with his attack on the
Bush family's longtime business partners, the Kuwaiti royals.
Murder, torture and military aggression are always welcome in
the service of Washington's power elites, but defiance is not
allowed.

Saddam's defiance lasted only a few months before he was
broken in the first Gulf War, but Iran has thumbed its nose at
Washington for 25 years. To the Potomac power-junkies, Iran
has never been properly punished for dumping their puppet, the
Shah, and seizing the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. (The 600,000
Iranians killed by Saddam's U.S.-backed armies don't count in
this brutal calculus; the Tehran regime still stands,
unrepentant.) Yes, these things matter to those who seek to
mask their inadequacies and magnify their importance by
identifying their own psyches with some mass, abstract entity
-- the nation, the volk, the ummah, the tribe, etc. Like
Osama, still smarting from the Crusades, the Bushists are
equally willing to kill innocent people to assuage the psychic
pain of past "humiliations."

But while this endemic lunacy of our human kind plays its
part, the real bottom line for the Bushists is, well, the
bottom line. Iran itself is but a stepping-stone to the
ultimate goal: putting U.S.-controlled hands on the spigots of
Middle Eastern and Central Asian oil, thus providing a brake
to control the political rise of China and India, and ensuring
a "new American century" of unchallenged profit and privilege.
For the elite, of course; as always, the suckers back home
will get stuck with the bills and the body bags from these
geopolitical games.

A nuclear-armed Iran would lie athwart this golden road to
glory like a mighty Persian rampart, so the scaffolding must
be swept aside soon, before the walls are complete. The Bush
regime has already begun a "low-intensity" covert war against
Iran, using the Mujahadeen el-Khalq terrorist group to map
potential targets and carry out bombings, Common Dreams
reports. MEK is a bizarre Iranian militarist cult that once
murdered American officials, then allied with Saddam in the
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. Afterwards, they remained in Saddam's
employ, acting as brutal enforcers in his crackdowns on
Shiites and Kurds; the cruelty of their tortures was
legendary. Yet Bush has eagerly taken these Saddamite
terrorists into his service, Newsweek reports.

With hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- yet
another made-to-order goon ripe for demonizing -- as frontman
for an odious regime, Bush and Sharon will have little trouble
whipping up war fever for the attack. In the next few months,
we'll see the usual charade of "diplomacy" as military plans
are finalized. But the fire is coming; the future is already
groaning with death.

Annotations

Israel readies forces for strike on nuclear Iran
The Sunday Times, Dec. 11, 2005

Iran-s No Longer Moscow-s Satellite
Kommersant, Oct. 28, 2005

The Coming Wars
New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005

The US War with Iran has Already Begun
CommonDreams, June 20, 2005

Consider the Source:MEK
Newsweek, May 19, 2005

Neocons' Pet Iranian Revolutionaries Accused of Torture
Antiwar. com, May 20, 2005

Members of Congress Address MEK Convention
The Agonist, April 14, 2005

Attacking Iran
TomDispatch, March 1, 2005

America Would Back Israel in Attack on Iran, Says Bush
The Daily Telegraph, Feb. 18, 2005

Israel denies plans to attack Iran
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 11, 2005

Russian rocket launches batch of tiny satellites
Spaceflight Now, Oct. 27, 2005

Iran Snaps Up Space Technology
CNN, Nov. 29, 2005

Hawks Plan 'Peaceful' Regime Change in Iran
Antiwar.com, Dec. 22, 2004

Iran War Drums Beat Harder
Antiwar.com, Jan. 11, 2005


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