From Britain - Iran: the next war

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Iran: the next war

Cover story
by John Pilger
Monday 13th February 2006
http://www.newstatesman.com/200602130008

Bush and Blair are gearing up for it, and they are preparing us, too - just as they did before attacking Iraq. But where is the threat?

Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?

Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."

That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response", you sense he means it.

Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations". Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbour, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.

full article: http://www.newstatesman.com/200602130008

[sasha031]

1. the next war leaves me breathless, full of anxiety

that is why I don't understand why Dem's on TV allow themselves to get framed into this debate.

i am so horrified at the thought, my 1st thought if it happens it will be the end of us all...(oh how I hope I'm wrong)

[JohnyCanuck]

2. What a coinkydink

that the Europeans who, by and large, took a pass on the Iraq war and scorned the US and Britain as warmongers are at this particular point in time now finding in the fooferah over the cartoons a motivation for also climbing on board the empire's latest "let's all go bomb Iran" campaign, the next step in launching the neocons' war of civilizations.

Cartoons of Mass Destruction
Contributed by: harrisp

by Paul Richard Harris

What on earth could possibly be wrong with those Muslims? Are they unable to appreciate humour? Sure, the cartoons published in Europe that show the Prophet Muhammad unfavourably are cheeky, rude, and maybe even insulting. But jokes are often made at the expense of religious figures without provoking the reaction we have seen from Muslims across the world. It’s hard to imagine that devout Christians, for instance, would not have been offended (numerous times) by Monty Python routines; but I don’t recall priests and acolytes hitting the streets to call for the death of Great Britain.

But while the present reaction to the cartoons is astonishing to some, and expected by others, these were just jokes, right?

No, they weren’t just jokes.

Leaving aside whether Muslims are stiff-necked and unable to appreciate a joke, at least one at their own expense, these cartoons were not published to be funny. Nor were they published, as claimed by the chief editor of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, to “examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues.” They were published to inflame, to denigrate, to anger, to humiliate.

It has been argued that Muslims need to lighten up a bit and stop taking themselves so seriously. That may or may not be valid; but the fact remains the newspapers who published these cartoons knew exactly what they were doing and the reaction they could expect. Regardless of whether the Muslims are stiff-necked, publishing these cartoons was no different than yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. They might have underestimated the fury with which Muslims would respond, but they knew they would provoke anger. They did so with careful, and malicious, intent

http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20060208093913379

Flemming Rose and the Straussian Art of Provocation

As suspected, and claimed on this blog over the weekend, the inflammatory anti-Muslim cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were a deliberate provocation designed to outrage and incite Muslims and thus engender support in Europe and America for the manufactured “clash of civilizations” engineered by the Straussian neocons. As Christopher Bollyn writes for the American Free Press, the neocon operative behind the cartoon scheme is Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, who has “has clear ties to the Zionist Neo-Cons.” Rose “traveled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes, the Neo-Con ideologue who says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes, who compares ‘militant Islam’ with fascism and communism,” Bollyn reveals.

Daniel Pipes is one of the more virulent and hateful of the Straussian neocons, famous for his racist and xenophobic statement that Muslim immigrants are “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene,” an attitude straight out of the Nazi school of racial hyperbole (a philosophy embraced by no small number of Jabotinsky Likudites and their fellow travelers among the traitorous Straussian neocons).

SNIP

Rose told the international paper owned by The New York Times that “he would not publish a cartoon of Israel’s Ariel Sharon strangling a Palestinian baby, since that could be construed as ‘racist.’”

As Daniel Pipes and his ilk have repeatedly demonstrated, it is not racist to characterize Arabs and Muslims as “brown-skinned peoples” suffering from bad hygiene, although it is a crime to take the apartheid state of Israel to task for murdering Palestinian children. But then, as Lenni Brenner has documented, the followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky—and his political creation, the reactionary Likud Party in Israel—are not only well versed in fascism, but murderous racism as well.

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=211

[KoKo]

4. Excellent read....it was obvious to us "watchers" that this was all

planned. And just like Iraq the train is heading down the same "crash cart" path.

[KoKo]

3. It's all about the Dollar Exchanged for the Bourse/that's why Dems won't

do anything. They know the dollar will collapse if Iran is allowed to stop trading oil in dollars. Bush in collusion with Blair will use "all necessary force" to keep the dollar from falling.


Dems in Power know that with our economy already on the brink this is the only alternative they have. Rather than urge diplomacy they will go along with Bush because he's the only game in town. :-(

[raccoon]

5. Great post. nt

[phusion]

6. Iran plans to move over to the Euro, right?

Wouldn't that benefit the Europeans more than trying to prop up a dying US economy by ensuring that Iran continues to trade in US dollars?

[KoKo]

7. Here's another snip from the article which explains it very well...

(It would destabilize the world financial markets...not good for the EU and inflaming the Europeans worried about Muslim uprisings will get them onboard, too. The Euro still needs to be balanced against the Dollar..and a shock would destabilize everything...but here's the explanation from the article)

-------------------------
Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.

That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.

While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labour MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all".

[phusion]

8. thx! n/t

[KoKo]

9. K&R this article by Pilger is incredible...and well written, plus scary

Let's keep this up there.

[mogster]

10. Horrifying prospects

Read this. It's important.

[KoKo]

11. Pilger really puts it all into perspective in a way we can understand...

I hope all DU'ers will read this. I fear it will go down to archives before the days is over.

[mogster]

12. Not yet.

Kick! ;-)

[schrodingers_cat]

13. Yikes! K & R (n/t)

[KoKo]

14. Kick...download this tonight and read it when you have time..It's GOOD!

and spells it out so well why Bush will eventually go to war in Iran...maybe not this year but definitely in 2007 after the Mid-terms and why the Dems will go along.

Oil, Eurodollars, Petrodollars... It all makes sense when you read this article from John Pilger one of our BEST REPORTERS...from abroad.