April 10, 2006
Another Neocon Step to
War...this Time Against Iran
by Rodrigue Tremblay
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them
to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war."
Dwight D.
Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th president of the United States
When a country's leaders are bent for war,
and they believe to have the means to do it, there is little that can stop
them. This was amply demonstrated before World War I, when the German High
Command under Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke had been preparing for war for a
long time. The archduke's assassination, in the summer of 1914, provided the
pretext for war. Germany then launched a ''preemptive'' war against France and
Russia, and the rest is history. Adolf Hitler did the same thing to start World
War II. He launched
"preventive" attacks and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, and
Poland in 1939, ostensibly to provoke "regime change" in these
countries.
It was also imperial Japan's pretext when it made the
"preventive" offensive and unprovoked attack against the United
States at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. In many other cases—such as
the invasion of Bulgaria by Greece in 1925, Manchuria by Japan in 1931,
Ethiopia by Mussolini's fascist Italy in 1935, Greece by Mussolini again in
1940, or Hungary by the Soviet Union under Khrushchev in 1956, Czechoslovakia
by the Soviet Union under Bresznev in 1968, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979—all the invading countries, without exception, claimed to act in
the name of their self-defined national interests.
The war that George W. Bush
launched against Iraq, in March 2003, followed the same pattern. It was
preceded, in September 2002, by the re-issuing of the old but illegal
"preventive war" theory, and dubbed this time the "Bush Doctrine". This was a war that
had been planned and prepared for more than a decade. The perfect pretext came
with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. After some sideline manoeuvres at the United
Nations, Bush went ahead with his war even though the U.N. Security Council
refused to authorize the aggression. The real purpose of these manoeuvres was
to gain public support in the U.S. through an intense propaganda campaign
carried out with the help of the American corporate media (ACM). The purpose of
this intense media campaign was to demonize Saddam Hussein and present him as a
monster, armed with nuclear weapons and ready to use them against the United
States.
The Bush administration had polls done months
before the 2003 war of aggression against Iraq that indicated the American
public would only support a conflict with Iraq if there was a danger that
Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. That's the reason they had to
invent the Iraqi nuclear threat, even though their own intelligence reports and
those of the United Nations indicated otherwise.
You can be certain that if there is a war against Iran, it
will follow the same pattern. The campaign of demagoguery and propaganda to
picture Iran as a direct (nuclear) threat to the United States is going full
speed. —Vice President Dick Cheney, the same one who was saying, every
other day in 2002, that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" aimed
at the United States, is all over the place again saying there would be
“meaningful consequences” if Iran refuses to comply with demands to
stop its nuclear program, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) has confirmed that there is “no evidence of a nuclear weapons
program or any diversion of nuclear material,” in Iran. That this is also a program
which is perfectly legal under the terms of the 1968 Treaty on Non-Proliferation of
Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or that the United States has just violated this
treaty by signing a nuclear cooperation agreement with India, and has for years
assisted Israel in building its stockpile of nuclear bombs, does not really
matter. But we know that the Bush-Cheney administration is not preoccupied with
legal matters. For his part, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix
says Iran is at least five years from a nuclear bomb.
What matters is the propaganda results. And it works. Just
as if it were freshly drawn from George Orwell's novel '1984' a recent Fox poll found that Iran has
now replaced North Korea as the nation Americans believe to be America's
greatest immediate threat. And a Washington Post poll found 56 percent of Americans back
military action to ensure Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon. An important
propaganda step was achieved on March 28 (2006), when the U. N. Security
Conncil approved unanimously a statement, not legally binding, urging Iran to
suspend uranium enrichment and limit its nuclear program to exclusively
peaceful purposes, as requested by the International Atomic Energy
Agency .
But, just as the U.S.-led war
against Iraq had little to do with the 2001 terrorist attacks against the
United States and a lot to do with Neocons' plans to subjugate the entire
Middle East, the coming U.S.-led war against Iran has little to do with any
Iranian nuclear threat against the United States.
The Neocons, who
always put Israel first, have long lobbied for the U.S. to strike at Iran and
Syria. The Bush-Cheney administration would merely be following the Neocons'
line by overthrowing the mullahs in charge in Tehran. This would be done
essentially for the same reasons the CIA overthrew the elected government of
Muhammad Mossadeq, in 1953, after it had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company.
The Neocon Bush-Cheney administration wants to establish a
friendly government in Iran in order to control the oil development of the
Caspian Sea and in order to remove another potential adversary to Israel.
—There is also another geopolitical objective this time, and that is to
prevent Iran from going ahead full speed with its electronic Iranian Oil Bourse. Initially
scheduled to go into business last March, and to use the euro for international
oil transactions rather than the US dollar, the Iranian Bourse's starting date
has been postponed by at least several months and, possibly by more than a
year. In any case, it would certainly not be fully operational before July 1st
(2006).
In the longer term, however, the Iranian Oil Bourse could
pose a challenge to the current system built around the U.S. dollar. Presently,
the two international oil exchanges, the London-based International Petroleum
Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), are both
controlled by American interests (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.) and both
invoice sales solely in US dollars. You have to keep in mind that Iraq was the
first country, in November 2000, to actually demand to be paid in euros for its
oil. Now, the same scenario could unfold in the coming months with Iran. With
one exception: this time, Great Britain
has told George W. Bush that it will not take part in any armed action against
Iran’s nuclear sites. The same applies to Russia:
it has signified that it will not support any attempts to use force to resolve
the stand-off over Iran's controversial nuclear program.
Nevertheless, a
military conflict with Iran could come earlier than most people expect,
although some observers expect a fall U.S.-Iran showdown, just in time for the
November American mid-term elections. Desperate people do desperate things, and
Bush's illegal war in Iraq is not going well. It cannot be exploited, as in the
beginning, for domestic partisan political reasons. Bush may thus be tempted to
raise the ante and go after Iran to reclaim his "Commander-in-Chief"
mantle. Keep in mind also that October is traditionally the month of big stock
market corrections.—Stay tuned.
_______________________________________________
Posted by Rodrigue Tremblay,
April 10, 2006, at 11:30am
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