[News] Do the bomb Iran shuffle

[Anti-Imperialist News]

THE ROVING EYE
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MK11Ak01.html

Do the bomb Iran shuffle

By Pepe Escobar

Get ready for a flurry of fuzzy satellite "intelligence" of generic 
warehouses all across Iran frantically described as segments of a 
nuclear bomb assembly line (Remember a famous "secret nuclear 
facility" in Syria not long ago? It was a textile factory.)

Get ready for a flurry of crude diagrams depicting suspect devices, 
or the containers that hide them, all capable of reaching Europe in 
45 minutes.

Get ready for a flurry of "experts" on Fox, CNN and the BBC endlessly 
dissecting all this extended black ops dressed up as "evidence". For 
instance, former UN weapons inspector David Albright, now at the 
Institute for Science and International


Security (ISIS), has already pulled his return of the living dead 
stunt, displaying his "bomb Iran" credentials complete with diagrams 
and satellite intel.

Forget Iraq - it's sooo 2003. Hit the new groove; hyping overdrive 
for the war on Iran.

Turning Japanese

First of all, ditch common sense.

If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, it would be diverting 
uranium for it. The report released by the International Atomic 
Energy Agency (IAEA) this week - as politicized as it may be - flatly 
denies it.

If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, UN inspectors working for 
the IAEA would have been thrown out of the country.

Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 2002. And yet it was 
shocked and awed. The same rationale applies to Iran.

What Tehran may have conducted - if the compromised intel used in the 
IAEA report is to be believed - is a bunch of experiments and 
computer simulations. Everybody does it - for instance countries 
which have renounced the bomb, such as Brazil and South Africa.

What the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - in charge of the 
civilian nuclear program - certainly wants is a deterrent.

That is, the possibility of building up a nuclear bomb in case they 
face an unequivocally established threat of regime change, provoked, 
most likely, by a US attack and invasion.

Doubts swirl about the competence - or the impartiality - of the new 
IAEA head, the meek Japanese Yukya Amano. The best answer is in this 
WikiLeaks 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/230076?CMP=twt_gu>cable. 


As for the origin of most of the IAEA's self-described "credible" 
intel, even the New York Times was forced to report that "some of 
that information came from the United States, Israel and Europe." 
Gareth Porter offers the 
<http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105776>definitive debunking of the report.

Moreover, expect major pressure on the CIA to renege the crucial 2007 
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which established - irrefutably 
- that Tehran had ditched a nuclear weapons program way back in 2003.

All this dovetails with the dogs of war already barking.

European minions may be incompetent enough to win a war in Libya 
(they did it only when the Pentagon took over satellite intelligence).

They may be incompetent enough to manage Europe's financial disaster. 
But France, Germany and the UK have already started barking - calling 
for further stringent sanctions on Iran.

In the US, Democrats and Republicans alike are calling not only for 
sanctions; in the case of wacko Republicans, which of course, is an 
oxymoron, they're calling for a new version of Shock and Awe.

It's never enough to repeat how things work in Washington. The 
Banjamin Netanyahu government in Israel tells the powerful American 
Israel Public Affairs Committee what to do, and the AIPAC orders the 
US Congress what to do.

That's how the House Foreign Affairs Committee is considering a 
bipartisan bill that is essentially a declaration of war.

According to the bill, neither President Barack Obama, nor Secretary 
of State Hillary Clinton, nor in fact any US diplomat can engage in 
any kind of diplomacy with Iran - unless Obama convinces the 
"appropriate congressional committees" that not talking would mean an 
"extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the 
United States".

"Appropriate congressional committees" happens to define exactly the 
House Foreign Affairs Committee, which gets its martial marching 
orders from Bibi in Israel via AIPAC in Washington.

Try telling any of these Israeli-firsters at the United States 
Congress what are the real immediate consequences of an attack on 
Iran; the Strait of Hormuz closed within minutes, at least 6 million 
barrels of oil out of the world economy (already in recession in the 
industrialized North), a barrel of oil hitting $300 or $400.

It doesn't matter; they're incapable of doing the math.

Prep well, and stick to the agenda

Rumors swirl about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) 
recently claiming, according to the Fars news agency, that only four 
Iranian missiles can deter Israel.

These missiles might - or might not - be Soviet Kh-55 nuclear cruise 
missiles from the Ukraine and Belarus, with a maximum range of 2,500 
kilometers, that Iran may have bought years ago in the black market.

The IRGC, of course, is mum. That only feeds the fog of (pre)war - as 
nobody exactly knows how well defended Iran is.

It's an open secret in Washington that regime change in Iran is being 
war-gamed by the Pentagon since at least 2004.

The favorite neo-con 2002 road map still applies, the targets being 
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan - all key nodes 
in the Pentagon-coined "arc of instability".

Imagine PhDs in warmongering examining the chessboard. Iraq was duly 
shocked and awed (even though the US is now being booted out). Syria 
is too hard to crack for incompetent North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization. Lebanon (Hezbollah) can only be captured if Syria falls 
first. Libya was a victory (forget about a protracted civil war). 
Somalia is containable with Uganda and drones. And South Sudan is in the bag.

That leaves - for hardcore practitioners of Full Spectrum Dominance 
doctrine - the enticing possibility of a successful attack on Iran as 
the ultimate creative destruction move, reshuffling all the cards 
from the Middle East to Central Asia. The "arc of instability" 
terminally destabilized.

How to accomplish it? So simple - as the warmongers see it. Convince 
Obama that instead of being whacked around, conservatives will kiss 
his brogues and he'll be canonized as the re-energizer of the US 
economy if he just went to fight another war.

Anyone for Occupy Iran - literally?

Pepe Escobar is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0978813820/simpleproduction/ref=nosim>Globalistan: 
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 
2007) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/Red-Zone-Blues-snapshot-Baghdad/dp/0978813898>Red 
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, 
just out, is 
<http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Does-Globalistan-Pepe-Escobar/dp/1934840831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233698286&sr=8-1>Obama 
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.




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