[Peace-discuss] Obama "more dangerous than his predecessor"

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Chris Floyd marshals the evidence, such as it is.  --CGE]

	Fri 29 May 2009
	Convergence and Continuity: The American-Backed Terror Campaign in Iran 	 
Written by Chris Floyd

On Thursday, a suicide bomber walked into a mosque, detonated his explosives and 
killed and wounded almost 140 people. In the wreckage and confusion afterward, a 
final death count has not yet been established, but the latest available 
information puts it at 23.

It is unlikely that you heard about this terrorist attack -- because it took 
place in Iran. For years, Iran has endured a series of terrorist actions -- 
suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, open assaults by fanatical gunmen, 
sabotage, and "targeted assassinations" of government officials, scientists and 
others. Multitudes have been slaughtered in these operations, whose ferocity and 
frequency are surpassed only by the atrocities that have been unleashed in the 
four countries that have been on the forefront of America's Terror War: Iraq, 
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. One shudders to think what Washington's 
response would be to such a sustained campaign on American soil.

Of course, it is no mystery why the attack on the mosque in Zahedan -- a city 
situated at the strategic point where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and 
Afghanistan converge -- attracted so little attention in the Western press. 
Every day, we are schooled relentlessly by our political and media classes to 
regard the Iranians -- heirs to one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated 
civilizations -- as demons and subhumans, whose lives are of little account. 
This can be seen in the long-running debate over an attack on Iran, which 
focuses almost entirely on the advantages or disadvantages such an assault would 
pose for American and Israeli interests -- and not at all on the thousands of 
human beings living in Iran who would be killed in the operation.

But There is another reason why the terrorist attack in Zahedan has not been 
greeted with commiserations from the White House or excited coverage from our 
government-spoonfed media: because it is highly likely that the United States 
played a role in fomenting the attack, either by direct or by collateral hand.

As AFP notes, Zahedan is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, with "a 
large ethnic Sunni Baluch minority," which is often at odds with the 
Shiite-dominated central government. The region -- which is also a prime conduit 
for arms and drug trafficking across the volatile borders -- has been roiled for 
years by the militant Sunni extremist group, Jundullah (Soldiers of God). This 
group, aligned philosophically if not operationally with al Qaeda, has openly 
boasted of killing hundreds of people in its campaigns, and, as Chris Hedges 
notes, "has a habit of beheading Iranians it captures, including a recent group 
of 16 Iranian police officials, and filming and distributing the executions."

You would think that such violent, frenzied zealots -- fellow travellers of 
Osama bin Laden! -- would be taken up by our Terror Warriors as poster boys for 
the evils of "Islamofascism." But as we noted here a few months ago, "bombings 
and beheadings and deathporn videos are not inherently evil; they can also be a 
force for good -- as long as they put to the service of America's ever-noble, 
ever-lofty foreign policy ideals."

For Jundullah is one of the several armed insurgent groups inside Iran being 
supported by the United States. As Andrew Cockburn reported last year:

     Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert 
offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its 
contents, "unprecedented in its scope."

     Bush's secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from 
Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions 
permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of 
targeted officials.  This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full 
support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian 
opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department's list 
of terrorist groups.

     Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or 
"army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the 
Afghan border -- whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports 
cutting his brother-in-law's throat.

     Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include 
Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi Arabs of south west Iran. 
Further afield, operations against Iran's Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be 
stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.


Thus the attack this week in Zahedan is an integral part of a wide-ranging 
campaign of American-supported terrorism inside Iran -- even if the "darksiders" 
in the U.S. security organs had no direct involvement or knowledge of this 
particular attack. When you are in the business of fomenting terror (see here 
and here), there's no need for micro-management. You co-opt the armed extremists 
who best serve your political agenda of the moment; you slip them guns, money, 
intelligence, guidance -- and then you turn them loose on the local populace.

We have seen this over and over; in Iraq, for example, where American death 
squads -- such as the ones led by Stanley McChrystal, recently appointed by 
Barack Obama to work his "dirty war" magic in Afghanistan -- joined with mostly 
Shiite militias to carry out massive "ethnic cleansing" campaigns and individual 
assassinations. We saw it years ago, in the American-led construction of an 
international army of mostly Sunni extremists raised to hot-foot the Soviets in 
Afghanistan -- then turned loose upon the world. And of course this lineage of 
terror-breeding as an instrument of American foreign policy goes back for many 
decades. with one of the earliest, most spectacular successes being the use of 
religious extremists to help bring down the secular republic in Iran in 1953.

And as we noted here last year:

     Bush's directive represents an intensification of the drive for open war 
with Iran, but it is not a new development; rather, it is a major "surge" in a 
state terror campaign the Administration has been waging against Iran (among 
others) for years. As I wrote as along ago as August 2004, the Bushists have 
openly sought, and received, big budgets and bipartisan support for terrorist 
groups and extremist militias all over the world. Here's an excerpt from that 
2004 report:

         If you would know the hell that awaits us – and not far off – there's 
no need to consult ancient prophecies, or the intricate coils of hidden 
conspiracies, or the tortured arcana of high-credentialed experts. You need only 
read the public words, sworn before God, of top public officials, the great 
lords of state, the defenders of civilization, as they explain – clearly, 
openly, with confidence and pride – their plans to foment terror, rape, war and 
repression across the face of the earth.

         Last month, in little-noticed testimony before Congress, the Bush 
Regime unveiled its plans to raise a host of warlord armies in the most volatile 
areas in the world, Agence France-Presse reports. Bush wants $500 million in 
seed money to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" – i.e., bands of 
lawless freebooters – to serve as Washington's proxy killers in the so-called 
"arc of crisis" that just happens to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and 
strategic pipeline routes of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South 
America.

         Flanked by a gaggle of military brass, Pentagon deputy honcho Paul 
Wolfowitz told a rapt panel of Congressional rubber-stamps that Bush wants big 
bucks to run "counter-insurgency" and "counter-terrorist" operations in 
"ungoverned areas" of the world – and in the hinterlands of nations providing 
"sanctuary" for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush's 2002 "National 
Security Strategy" of unprovoked aggressive war against "potential" enemies, 
Howlin' Wolf proposed expanding the definition of "terrorist sanctuary" to any 
nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers to offer even verbal 
encouragement to America's designated enemies du jour....

         There's nothing really new in Bush's murder-by-proxy scheme, of course; 
America has a long, bipartisan tradition of paying local thugs to do 
Washington's bloodwork. For example, late last month, Guatemala was forced to 
pay $420 million in extortion to veterans of the U.S.-backed "paramilitaries" 
who helped Ronald Reagan's favorite dictator, right-wing Christian coupster 
Efrain Rios Montt, kill 100,000 innocent people during his reign, the BBC 
reports. The paramilitaries, whose well-documented war crimes include rape, 
murder and torture, had threatened to shut down the country if they weren't 
given some belated booty for their yeoman service in the Reagan-Bush cause.

         But Wolfowitz did reveal one original twist in Bush's plan: targeting 
the Homeland itself as a "terrorist sanctuary." In addition to loosing his own 
personal Janjaweed on global hotspots, Bush is also seeking new powers to 
prevent anyone he designates a "terrorist" from "abusing the freedom of 
democratic societies" or "exploiting the technologies of communication" – i.e., 
defending themselves in court or logging on to the Internet. As AFP notes, 
Wolfowitz tactfully refrained from detailing just how the Regime intends to curb 
the dangerous use of American freedom, but he did allow that "difficult 
decisions" would be required.


[Perhaps some of those measures to prevent people from "exploiting the 
technologies of communication" to spread discontent with the Imperium are being 
formalized right now in the new Administration's plans for a "cyberspace 
command," where "the armed forces [will]  conduct both offensive and defensive 
computer warfare," as the NY Times reports. And since "cyberwar" -- like the 
Terror War -- "knows no borders" (as the usual anonymous "senior intelligence 
official" told the Times), the Obama White House is now busying trying to figure 
out just how you can aim its cyberwar offensives at the Homeland itself. After 
all, said the official, "how do you fight them if you can’t act both inside and 
outside the United States?” How indeed? Better start training your carrier 
pigeons for any private messages you might want to send.]

II.
In any case, whatever its provenance, the attack on the Zahedan mosque serves a 
confluence of interests. For it comes not only at a strategic location but also 
at a strategic time: just two weeks before the Iranian presidential election, 
with the hardline incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing a strong challenge from 
two reformist candidates.

Of course, the very last thing that the militarists in Washington and Israel 
want to see is the election of a moderate in Iran. They want -- and need -- 
Ahmadinejad, or someone just like him, so they can keep stoking the fires for 
war. A moderate president, more open to genuine negotiations, and much cooler in 
rhetoric than the loose-lipped Ahmadinejad, would be yet another blow to their 
long-term plans. Because the ultimate aim -- the only aim, really -- of the 
militarists' policy toward Iran is regime change. They don't care about 
"national security" or the "threat" from Iran's non-existent nuclear arsenal; 
they know that there is no threat whatsoever that Iran will attack Israel -- or 
even more ludicrously, the United States -- even if Tehran did have nukes. They 
don't care about the suffering of the Iranian people under a draconian, 
repressive and corrupt regime. They are not worried about Iran's "sponsorship of 
terrorism," for, as we've seen, the militarists thrive on -- when they are not 
actively fomenting -- the fear and anguish caused by terrorism. This fear is the 
grease that drives the ever-expanding war machine and 'justifies' its own 
ever-increasing draconian powers and corruption.

No, in the end, the sole aim of the militarist policy is to overthrow Iran's 
current political system and replace it with a regime that will bow to the 
hegemony of the United States and its regional deputy, Israel. There is no 
essential difference in aim or method between today's policy and that of 1953. 
(Except that the regional deputy in those days was Britain, not Israel.) What 
they want is compliance, access to resources and another strategic stronghold in 
the heart of the oil lands -- precisely what they wanted, and got, with the 
installation of the Shah and his corruption-ridden police state more than a 
half-century ago.

They play the long game, our militarists. For example, they agitated openly -- 
and  plotted covertly -- for the invasion of Iraq for almost 10 years before 
they finally got their way. They have worked for 30 years now to restore a 
client regime in Iran, and today, with the relentless bipartisan demonizing of 
the Iranians -- and the "mushroom cloud" fearmongering over a non-existent 
nuclear weapons program -- they are as close as they have ever been to their 
goal. To lose a fear-raising (and fundraising!) asset like Ahmadinejad now would 
be a bitter disappointment.

And what better way for an incumbent president to stand tall before the voters 
than to rally the nation around him in the face of a horrible terrorist attack? 
A mosque full of Shiite worshippers, blown to pieces, with photos showing the 
blood of the innocent martyrs splattered on the ruined walls? This serves the 
interests of all the major players in the great geopolitical game: the Iranian 
hardliners, the American and Israeli militarists, the Jundullah extremists. Of 
course, it doesn't serve the interests of the murdered dead, or the Iranian 
people -- or the American people, for that matter. But this too is nothing new. 
As we noted here in 2007, in a piece about an earlier escalation of state terror 
by the American government:

     There are really no words to describe how morally depraved and monumentally 
stupid this policy is. It is of course not all that surprising that it springs 
from a family whose political fortunes are founded, at least in part, from the 
financial fortunes it reaped from helping build the Nazi military-industrial 
complex; a family that continued trading with the Nazis even after Americans 
were in battle against Hitler's forces. The Bushes and their outriders have 
always been attuned to the kind of brutal realpolitik that is willing -- at 
times eager -- to see American blood shed in order to advance their elitist 
agenda. (Which they have of course internalized as being identical with the 
"national interest.")

     But as we've also noted many times, this political "philosophy" is by no 
means unique to the Bush Family faction. It is resolutely bipartisan, and deeply 
embedded in the mindset of the American Establishment. The Bushes are nothing 
but second-rate camp followers, empty shells and non-entities, originating 
nothing, ignorant and cynical in equal measure, their only unusual trait being 
how open they are in their scorn for the worthless rabble and the bullshit 
Constitution that the crypto-Commies like Madison and Jefferson foisted on the 
proper rulers of the country. Otherwise, they simply regurgitate the unprocessed 
prejudices, unexamined assumptions and vulgar ambitions of the clique that 
spawned them.

     Of course, at times the idiot George W. Bush and the criminally ignorant 
crew that surrounds him have brought the inherent lawlessness, greed, brutality 
and incompetence of the American elite to what seem like new heights -- although 
even the sick-making murder of the Iraq campaign has still not approached the 
genocidal fury of, say, the bipartisan bombing of Indochina, and the millions of 
dead that the "best and the brightest" left behind there. Nor have Bush's 
domestic repression and flagrant abuse of authority -- as bad as they are -- yet 
approached the toxic and all-pervasive level of the "Red Scares" launched by 
Democratic icons Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman. (Joe McCarthy merely took the 
ball that Truman put into play and ran with it.)  But sufficient unto the day is 
the trouble thereof; the crimes of the Bush Administration are not any less 
heinous -- and the people they have murdered are not any less dead -- just 
because these crimes are not some aberration of the idiot and his crew but are 
instead continuations and at times accelerations of long-standing Establishment 
thinking and policy.

     But with each passing decade, the technological tools of repression and 
militarism grow more overpowering and far-reaching. With each passing decade, 
the pernicious after-effects and blowback from past depredations build up and 
compound, breeding new evils. With each passing decade, the societal rot 
engendered by the rapacity of the elite spreads deeper, eating away at the 
foundation of the Republic and the fabric of our communities, and weakening or 
destroying the social and institutional counterbalances to unchecked greed and 
ambition.

     Thus in one sense it doesn't matter if the Bush Faction is any more or less 
criminal and destructive than other administrations. The world in which they are 
blundering around killing people is far more unstable and dangerous than before, 
because it is filled with the compounded evil and folly of previous times.


Of course, that was written a long time ago, back in those dark days when Bush 
Family factotum Robert Gates was still running the Pentagon and operators of 
death squads and torture shops like Stanley McChrystal were given high commands; 
back when the government was going to court to protect warantless spying on 
Americans and seeking to strip all rights from Terror War captives held 
indefinitely at the arbitrary will of the president, and devising "legal" 
justifications for these exercises of authoritarian power; back when the 
Pentagon and CIA were expanding their operations in Pakistan and intensifying 
the civilian-shredding air war in Afghanistan; back when we had militarist 
leaders who considered the mass-murdering war crime in Iraq to be "an 
extraordinary achievement;" back when cynical and hypocritical presidents would 
travel to harsh dictatorships in the Middle East to deliver "major speeches" on 
America's great commitment to freedom and democracy in Muslim lands; and back 
when the president and his secretary of state routinely ignored all contrary 
evidence to insist that the Iranians were developing a nuclear arsenal that 
would soon threaten the whole world with destruction, while U.S. covert agencies 
were funding and fueling the death and suffering of Iranian civilians in 
terrorist operations.

Thank god everything is different now, in our glorious new era of Progressive 
Continuity. Too bad those people in Zahedan can't tell the difference.

http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1772-convergence-and-continuity-the-american-backed-terror-campaign-in-iran.html


Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> Is there any evidence - I mean evidence - that "we" are involved in the 
> protests in Iran?  Sorry, I'd like to believe it's just an upwelling of the
> people yearning to be free, but unfortunately you have to wonder ...
> 
> Ricky
> 
> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn
> 
> --- On *Thu, 6/18/09, C. G. Estabrook /<galliher at illinois.edu>/* wrote:
> 
> 
> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Obama
> "more dangerous than his predecessor" To: "peace-discuss"
> <peace-discuss at anti-war.net> Date: Thursday, June 18, 2009, 9:30 PM
> 
> "...the new Commander in Chief is still not about to radically change, let
> alone reform, the US’s long-standing role in the Middle East ... Obama is
> simply candy-coating the delivery of US imperialism in the region. Given the
> lack of opposition to Obama’s policies back home, it is becoming clear that
> he may well be more dangerous than his predecessor when it comes to the US’s
> motivations internationally.  Had Bush pushed for more military funds at this
>  stage, the antiwar movement ... would have been organizing opposition weeks
> in advance, calling out the neocons for wasting our scarce tax dollars during
> a recession on a never-ending, directionless war. But since Obama’s a
> Democrat, a beloved one at that, mum's the word ... we are in for many more
> years of war and bloodshed, funded by US taxpayers and approved by a 
> Democrat-controlled White House and Congress."
> 
> June 18, 2009 These Are Obama's Wars Now: Democrat Approved By JOSHUA FRANK
> 
> It’s time to toss those Obama t-shirts in the trash.
> 
> On Monday the Democrat controlled House voted 226-202 to approve a rushed
> $106 billion dollar war spending bill, guaranteeing more carnage in Iraq and
> Afghanistan (and lately Pakistan) until September 30, 2009, which marks the
> end of the budget year...