Iran-Ready to Attack (Brit's point of view)

[snappyturtle]

http://www.newstatesman.com/200702190014 The New Statesman is a British current affairs magazine. This article by Dan Plesch is interesting because it tells more about the preparatory efforts of the U.S. to attack Iran. These efforts are already in place....or about to be! This article claims that Bush had his sights on Iran as soon as Saddam was toppled. Check it out. I am interested in what others think about it.

[Peace Patriot]

1. Aside from its complete immorality and illegality, if Bush/Cheney strike Iran,

the consequence may well be that China crashes the US dollar (they hold much of our debt paper), or a consortium of China, Russia and India do so (they met recently with this as the agenda--how to stop the bully US), or an an even bigger consortium including most of Europe (everyone potentially impacted by US nukes or mass refugee problems--Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, along with FORMER allies France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Ireland....), or, basically, the entire world, will join together to crash the US dollar and punish us in other ways. South America--now gone almost entirely "blue" as to political maps--has been discussing a South American "Common Market" and common currency--to get off the US dollar. The punishment could be very severe--and we, the American people, unfortunately, would be the ones to suffer it most. The Bush Junta no doubt has all their stolen booty in foreign currency.

There is no question that Cheney (18% approval rating) "wants" Iran. That's the main reason he's in office. They had a deal. The Corporate Reich would cover his ass. He would get them control of the Mideast oil fields. And there is no question that he's moved the US fleet into position, and that the "surge" money and troops are a buildup to bombing/invasion of Iran, in Cheney's mind.

But there are other possibilities: 1. That the fleet is there to warn off Iran, as to its legitimate and natural interest in the disaster we have created next door. And Cheney intends to hang onto Iraq with tooth and claw (our soldiers lives). (There is no way Cheney can invade Iran--doesn't have the troops; can't hold it; "Big Crusade" has bombed at home--74% of the people opposed--nobody wants this dirty "Crusade.") So the idea is to hold Iraq. 2. That the fleet is there as cover for a US withdrawal, again to warn Iran off intervening in Iraq in the subsequent vacuum. Cheney and Bush are not good at anything except killing people. They cannot put together the international meeting needed for the US to withdraw from Iraq. They have to do it with guns and threats and saber-ratting. 3. There is a split between Bush and Cheney--evident in the Libby trial, and in other ways--with Bush tugged by, for instance, the Iraq Study Group (Bush I), by Republicans concerned about elections, by the economic realities (China holding our paper--China gets a lot of its oil from Iran), and by the complete repudiation of his war policy by the American people (in so far as they could outvote the machines) in 2006.

So, with Possibility #3, what we are looking at is a CONFUSED policy: Cheney pushing for war, war, war, to save his ass from the Corporate Reich (who don't like their tools getting indicted--Cheney has been unable to get a handle on Fitzgerald), and/or to create such mayhem that impeachment is impossible, on the one hand (and Cheney having to do so with his chief co-dirty trickster, Rumsfeld, ousted*); and, on the other hand, Bush, Cheney's puppet, trying to distance himself from the Plame wars, and build his "My Pet Goat" library.

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*(Rumsfeld's ouster is pretty interesting. On the surface, there has been no change of policy in Iraq. So why was he ousted? If it was some sort of sop to the Democrats, it was short-lived. Bush came right back with "the surge." And if it wasn't related to the elections, what WAS it related to? My guess: To a Pentagon plot, uncovered by insiders, to plant nukes in Iraq, after the invasion, as followup to the Niger/Iraq nuke forgeries--planted evidence to justify the war, and to discredit the CIA (--enticed into a no-nukes-in-Iraq position, by the "crude" forgeries). The plot was foiled--possibly by someone in Plame's WMD counter-proliferation network. Thus, the outings of Plame and that network by two enraged plotters--Rumsfeld and Cheney. Cheney has more of an excuse--political coverup--and is harder to oust (with his Diebold/ES&S "mandate"). Rumsfeld--on the operational end, actively engaged in this nefarious plot--had to go. And what went with him was the foul "dirty trickster" operational capability re war on Iran. Cheney is still in forward motion on that scheme (so is Libby, in my opinion), but now lacks the dirty ops they had arranged for tricking Iran into war, or that capability is severely reduced.)

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Upshot of all this: The world is not nearly as paralyzed, in dealing with Bush Junta aggression, as it was back in 2003. The Junta has lost all sorts of support. Even the Brits are pulling out. Support at home has evaporated. They're barely hanging onto their base (maybe 30%--diehard 'christian' jihadists, the super-rich). There is disaster everywhere you look in their administration--starting with a $10 trillion deficit (and that's just the part we know about). Rampant corruption. Discontent on every side, within and without government, within and without the Republican Party, among corporatists, and even among war profiteers, who may fear their big tit drying up, when the dust settles with the American people. The Junta has transformed us into a "paper tiger." Our emergency services are in shambles. Our schools are failing. Millions of jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing capability has been outsourced. Even services are being outsourced. The middle class is disappearing--even their homes are becoming worthless now. Upward mobility (hope for the poor) is gone. Costs for ordinary people (energy, medical, education) are skyrocketing. The credit card companies are completely out-of-control. Not to mention the enormous damage to our military. All with a government that doesn't give a crap. And the whole world can see it. We could not have been better set up for some sort of attack--financial, natural disaster, plague, opportunistic terrorist or insider terrorist (if those plans are still in place). So how Cheney intends to bomb and occupy Iran, in these circumstances, is beyond me. It is a practical impossibility. The man may be mad. And Bush may be stupid. But I don't think the US military leaders are stupid (or crazy). I think there are very powerful forces, at home and abroad, pushing back.

Even limited damage to Iran I think would cause such a reaction, we would never recover. And what has Iran done to deserve such an attack? They want nukes. Lord, if I were them, I would want nukes, too. They do not have imperial ambitions. There is no evidence of it whatsoever. They may have elements who sympathize with Palestinians and other displaced Middle Easterners, and hate Israel, but they wouldn't bomb Israel (with total annihilation as the probable consequence). Bush/Cheney may have created a far more dangerous world than we had before, but we will just have to live with it, and hope for a standoff, until we can do better. Bombing Iran, to stop them from getting nukes, will not solve the problem, and could well fail. Then what? You have the entire Muslim world up in arms--and the entire rest of the world in sympathy with them. Even just thinking coldly and strategically, it is stupid beyond belief. The scheme of an old sick man trying to hang onto power.

[snappyturtle]

2. After all you said, this haunts me:

"Even just thinking coldly and strategically, it is stupid beyond belief. The scheme of an old sick man trying to hang onto power."

It haunts me because I think our "leaders" are just stupid and uncaring enough to do it.

edit:typo

[Peace Patriot]

3. I know what you mean. The fact that we can have NO confidence in them

whatever, and that "checks and balances" on insane leadership seem to have evaporated, is scary as hell.

We have been derelict in many ways as a people. We let the Corporate Reich take over our vote counting system--like sheep to the slaughter--and now they "count" all our votes with "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, for godssakes! I mean, Insanity R Us, in many ways. We've let the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us of grow into a monster--a standing invitation to fascists who want to conduct wars of choice. We benefited from it. We got jobs from it. We didn't question. We let the Corporate Rulers rape and pillage third world countries with "free trade." Now they're raping and pillaging us, and we wonder what happened.

So if the consequence of all these blind spots is that our out-of-control tyrants in the White House lead us to Armageddon, or to lesser forms of ruination, you could say we have only ourselves to blame. It's not exactly true, though. Somewhat true. But mostly we have been oppressed, and, until now, subtly brainwashed and manipulated, by forces who know that we have something very valuable, and I don't mean our wealth. I mean our sovereignty as a people--which is expressed through the mechanism of voting. And with that sovereignty, we hold the potential power to pull the corporate charters of all these bad actors, dismantle their gargantuan monopolies, and seize their assets for the common good--and the good of the world.

We have that power. They know it. And that power had to be smashed.

We live at the vortex of evil in the world. The Corporate Powers are literally destroying the planet. They are amassing huge, unimaginable profit from our poor soldiers in Iraq, our taxes, our pocketbooks, our illnesses, our dependence on automobiles and electricity and gas, and from the outsourcing of all our jobs and our manufacturing capability. They are looting FEMA. They are looting Social Security (borrowing against it). They are looting government pension funds. They long ago looted and destroyed many private pension funds. They are absolutely fleecing credit card customers, in an orgy of usury. They are looting the last of our natural resources. They have run up a $10 trillion deficit with multiple tax breaks for the super-rich. And they are doing these things and worse to people all over the world. In Iraq, they slaughtered one hundred thousand people, in the initial bombing alone, to create a puppet government to sign the contracts to give away Iraqi oil to Bush/Cheney's buds in the oil industry. Bush and Cheney are their tools, and are perfect reflections of the Corporations that run them. Greedy beyond belief, ugly, murderous, lawless.

And we, and we alone, among the peoples of the earth, have the theoretical power to curtail them, and dismantle them. They operate from our shores by our agreement, through state charters. Thus, a special effort has been mounted to propagandize us, and to deprive us of our rights as citizens and as a free people, in many ways that we have barely noticed. The most obvious and outrageous is the corporate-run secret voting machines. But they have also taken over our public airwaves. We get nothing but rightwing propaganda 24/7 now. They've taken over Washington DC with lavish lobbying. They've eroded every control we have over them. It's taken them two decades, since Reagan. Bush is the coup de grace.

What do we do about it? First of all, acknowledge the magnitude of the problem. It is not small. It will not be easy to fix. Second, look to the power mechanism--our vote. That is the key to turning things around. Until we have transparent vote counting again, we are nearly powerless. Third, know that we are not the first people on earth to be oppressed, and many countries have survived oppression and restored democracy. All the new leftist (majorityist) democracies in South America are good examples. Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay--all with majority governments now, setting out on a new path toward justice and self-determination (and with big democracy movements also in Peru and Paraguay, a new leftist government in Nicaragua of all places, a huge democracy movement in Mexico, and a new one in Guatemala as well). If the South Americans can do it, so can we. If the South Africans can do it, so can we. If Europe after WW II can do it, so can we.

The particular lessons of South America that I have gleaned are these:

1. TRANSPARENT elections!
2. Grass roots organization.
3. Think big.

It is useless and paralyzing to be consumed with worry. We have a long hard job of democracy repair to do. Most tyrants sit on a house of cards. So do these. Their support among the American people is nil. They are universally despised, at home and abroad. And those responsible for propping them up--collusive Democrats, badass Corporate CEOs and a few nutjob 'christian' preachers--are equally vulnerable. I would say stay focused, like a laser-beam, on the mechanism of power. Transparent elections!