29.11.2006

Denna artikel av Jeffrey Steinberg i ett kommande nummer av veckotidskriften Executive Intelligence Review, USA, visar att Cheney/Bush regimen i USA INTE är i färd med att stabilisera Irak, utan att använda Irakkrisen för att få igång en attack mot Iran genomförd av Israel. Valsegern i USA för demokraterna gör dem desperata att ställa den nyvalda kongressen inför ett fullbordat faktum redan innan den samlats. Situationen kan inte vara farligare.

Ett anfall mot Iran skulle öppna helvetets portar, men demokraternas valseger ger också möjlighet att sätta sådan press på Cheney/Bush att det är möjligt att förhindra en utvidgning av den alltmer växande krigszonen och destabiliseringen av Sydvästra och Centrala Asien. Allt fler förstår att det USA, som tillsammans med Iran, är offret för en sådan attack. För att globaliseringen skall kunna härska oinskränkt måste USA, Iran och andra starka nationalstater krossas. Låt oss gripa an arbetet att se till att de svenska politikerna och beslutsfattarna är informerade om faran och inte hakar på krigshetsen mot Iran bara för att de helt ryggradslöst följer "det som är oundvikligt" och understött av dagens supermakter (även kallade "världssamfundet"). Det är inte ett svenskt intresse att tillåta en sådan brittiskstyrd globaliseringspolitik. Hjälp till att sprida artikeln!

Lyndon LaRouche minced no words in discussions with colleagues on Nov. 22, accusing Vice President Dick Cheney and the "Israeli Mafiya" of being behind the latest destabilization of Lebanon--the assassination on Nov. 21 of Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel. LaRouche cited other Israeli provocations since the Lebanon war of July 2006, including a string of confrontations with French peacekeepers, and threats to attack German ships in the Mediterranean that are part of the Lebanon peace-keeping effort, as "state-of-mind" evidence of the war intent.
Things have become so tense between the French and Israeli governments over the Lebanon crisis that French soldiers serving in the Lebanese peacekeeping mission are now authorized to shoot at Israeli Air Force jet fighters overflying Lebanon, after a failed Paris meeting in mid-November between French and Israeli military officials.

LaRouche warned that the climate is being set for an Israeli military raid on Iran's purported nuclear weapons sites, which would lead to a mobilization of support for a larger attack on Iran, involving the United States and other nations--with the quiet but enthusiastic backing of many frightened Sunni Arab regimes, who are being stampeded by the Cheniacs in Washington into this suicidal stance.

LaRouche bluntly characterized the Gemayel assassination as a signal of Israeli plans to launch a military strike against Iran in the near future--at the urging of Cheney and his own masters within the Anglo-American "war party."

Evidence of these Cheney-encouraged Israeli attack plans have been visible in recent weeks, including President Bush's widely-reported comments to French President Jacques Chirac that "I do not discount the possibility that Israel will attack Iran, and if it does this--I will understand it." Those comments were reported in the Israeli daily {Ha'aretz} Nov. 22. And President Bush has reportedly repeated those remarks in several other recent venues.

A Nov. 22 editorial in {Ha'aretz} signed by Gideon Samet further warned of just such an Israeli sneak attack on Iran: "Close your eyes and think about the possibility that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, together with the chief of staff, the minister for strategic threats and his other advisers, will wrack his brain and decide to act against the Iranian nuclear threat--and imagine what this means for you. This is the man," he warned, "who is responsible for managing a failed war against a guerilla army in Lebanon. Does this make you feel calm?" Samet referenced the most recent Seymour Hersh story, published in the {New Yorker} magazine Nov. 20 edition, warning that Cheney is still intent on a military attack on Iran, and U.S. and Israeli special forces commandos are already operating on the ground inside Iran, planting site markers for future bombings, and organizing sabotage operations by Kurds, Baluchis and Azeris.

Bibi Rants

On Nov. 24, speaking in Jerusalem at a conference of the Orthodox Union, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close Cheney ally, openly called for Israeli action against Iran in the most rabid of terms. Describing Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as more dangerous for the Jewish people than Adolph Hitler, because of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, Netanyahu declared, "The future of the Jewish state is as in danger as it has ever been in the last half-century." Making not-so-veiled reference to Israel's own extensive undeclared nuclear weapons program, Netanyahu said, "We must use the powers that we've amassed to make the Jews no longer defenseless and able to shape their destiny and protect their future. This is the most important thing that we can do today. Everything else is secondary." Several weeks earlier, in a speech in Los Angeles, Netanyahu had been even more blunt: "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs."

LaRouche concluded his warning on an imminent Cheney-encouraged Israeli attack on Iran with a caution against what he called "kinematic thinking." Do not look for narrow cause and effect, LaRouche warned. There has been a longterm master plan to blow up the entire extended Southwest Asia and Persian Gulf region, to bring about an end to the Westphalian era of the nation-state system, and to particularly destroy the United States. This, he concluded, is what is driving Cheney and company to now seek to play the Israeli "breakaway ally" game to detonate that longstanding plan.

Such a U.S.-backed Israeli strike against Iran, though militarily inconsequential--unless Israel used nuclear weapons, would trigger a wave of global asymmetric warfare--the kind of permanent "clash of civilization" that Britain's Arab Bureau operative Dr. Bernard Lewis has been promoting for decades. Lewis, like longtime British agent-of-influence Dr. Henry Kissinger, has been a top advisor to Vice President Cheney, frequently leading informal seminars at the Vice President's Residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

Kissinger Speaks--And Cheney Acts

On Nov. 24, Kissinger himself weighed in for an Israeli strike against Iran in a ponderous op-ed piece, published in the {Washington Post} and several European newspapers. While ostensibly promoting diplomatic dialogue between the United States, Europe, the Sunni Arab states and Tehran, Kissinger pointedly wrote: "The nuclear negotiations with Iran are moving toward an inconclusive outcome. The Six eventually will have to choose either effective sanctions or the consequences of an Iranian military nuclear capability and the world of proliferation that implies. Military action by the United States is extremely improbable in the final two years of a presidency facing a hostile Congress--though it may be taken more seriously in Tehran. Tehran surely cannot ignore the possibility of a unilateral Israeli strike if all negotiation options close."

Later in the same op-ed, Kissinger also promoted the idea, already being peddled by neoconservatives in the Vice President's Office and the American Enterprise Institute, of an American-European-Sunni Arab alliance with Israel {against Iran}--what Kissinger euphemistically called a "policy of equilibrium" between Iran and the Sunni regimes.

The same time that Kissinger's rant appeared in the {Post}, the {Wall Street Journal} published a Nov. 24 wildly provocative lead frontpage story, titled "Religious Divide: To Contain Iran, U.S. Seeks Help From Arab Allies." Mischaracterizing the flurry of U.S. diplomacy as "a bid to stabilize the region and build a coalition to contain Iran's Shi'ite regime," author Jay Solomon accurately catalogued a full-court press by top Bush Administration officials, to align Sunni Arab regimes against Tehran, in what amounts to a bizarre war alliance of Washington, Tel Aviv, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Solomon did quote Middle East scholar Vali Nasr of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, Cal., warning against such a campaign: "The whole rhetoric of containing Iran could spark competing extremism," he warned. "Washington doesn't want to be seen as actively encouraging this."

Or do they? The fact that Vice President Cheney, the leading war-hawk in the Bush Administration, kicked off the Sunni Arab dialogues, with a Nov. 24 trip to Riyad, Saudi Arabia, underscores that some in the Bush Administration are in no way backing off from plans for hard military confrontation before leaving office--perhaps, even before the 110th Congress is sworn in at the beginning of January 2007.

Joshua Muravchik, an AEI resident scholar and leading neocon propagandist, put it bluntly in an article published in the November/December 2006 issue of {Foreign Policy} magazine. "Make no mistake," he wrote, "President Bush will need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon its drive for the bomb. Its rulers are religio-ideological fanatics who will not trade what they believe is their birthright to great power status for a mess of pottage. Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there."

Muravchik warned, "The global thunder against Bush when he pulls the trigger will be deafening, and it will have many echoes at home... We need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes... The defense should be global in scope. there is a crying need in today's ideological wars for something akin to the Congress for Cultural Freedom of the Cold War, a global circle of intellectuals and public figures who share a devotion to democracy. The leaders of thsi movement might include Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, and Anwar Ibrahim."

Other War Councils

In addition to the Cheney meetings with King Abdullah and other top Saudi officials, President Bush was personally going to be in Amman, Jordan at the end of November, to meet with King Abdallah II and with Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite who has fallen out of favor with Washington, amidst talk of a U.S. "Sunni turn" which has also been dubbed "re-Baathification."
Both Tom Hayden and Paul William Roberts wrote on Nov. 24 that secret talks have already taken place between leading Iraqi Sunni insurgents and Bush Administration officials in Amman, Jordan. One meeting, according to Jordan's Prince Hassan, included former Iraqi Vice President and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, who is being looked to as a key interlocutor between Washington and leading Sunni insurgents. Prince Hassan told journalist Roberts that Condi Rice has "made a personal appeal to the Gulf Cooperation Council last month to act as intermediaries between the US and the armed Sunni resistance, not including Iraq's Al Qaeda leaders."

A further indication of this policy turn was also cited in the {Wall Street Journal}: On Nov. 30, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will hold meetings with the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan and the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the six Persian Gulf Sunni oil sheikdoms. According to the {Journal}, "They are expected to discuss how to deter Iran from meddling in the politics of neighbor countries and from developing a nuclear arsenal... The visits come amid U.S. efforts to build a Sunni-based regional alliance. U.S. naval fleets have engaged in training exercises with several Persian Gulf countries. Last month, the U.S. conducted war games with Bahrain, Qatar, the U.A.E. and about two dozen other countries about 20 miles outside of Iran's territorial waters. The exercises were part of the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, which seeks to stanch weapons trafficking."

New Stovepipes for Old

Much hoopla has been made of the pending release of the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, a Congressionally-sponsored and White House-endorsed Iraq Study Group. But there are growing signs that the Cheney gang inside the Bush Administration has already moved preemptively to undercut the impact of the effort, by launching an in-house Iraq policy review, to be completed simultaneous to the Baker-Hamilton effort. The primary input of the Baker-Hamilton group has been long anticipated: Start direct talks, with no preconditions, with Tehran and Damascus. But a Nov. 23 {Newsday} story by Washington bureau chief Tim Phelps warned "Internal strife within the Baker commission, outright opposition from President George W. Bush and Tuesday's assassination of a cabinet member in Lebanon are complicating the prospect of U.S. overtures to Syria and Iran over Iraq, informed sources say. A source who spoke recently to a leader of the Iraq Study Group said he complained bitterly about internal dissention and partisanship among members of the supposedly bipartisan group, and was worried about reaching consensus on the key issues."

Further threatening the efforts of the Iraq Study Group is a revival of the pre-Iraq war "stovepipe" of dubious intelligence directly to the Vice President's office from the Pentagon, bypassing the CIA and other major intelligence community components. The existence of this stovepipe was featured in the latest Seymour Hersh {New Yorker} magazine piece, "Iran: The Next Act," but earlier reports that the chief Iraq pre-war intelligence spinmeister, Abraham Shulsky, of the Office of Special Plans, had been reassigned to work on "the Iran problem" at the Pentagon's Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy, already raised eyebrows.

Hersh revealed that a new highly-classified CIA study, based on U.S. technical intelligence efforts, raised serious doubts about Iran conducting an ambitious secret nuclear weapons program. But that CIA assessment has been challenged by "intelligence from Israeli spies operating inside Iran" who "claimed that Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear bomb." According to Hersh, the details of the Israeli spies' findings have been withheld from the CIA, but the "raw" intelligence has been passed from the Pentagon to Cheney's staff, and is being used as powerful ammunition in the faction fight inside the Bush White House.

The stakes in this fight are enormous. An Israeli or American bombing attack against Iran would unleash chaos on a regional or global scale; a new oil price shock, an almost certain consequence of a hard confrontation with Iran, would blow out the global financial system, adding to the chaos.
Which brings us back full circle to Lyndon LaRouche's warning that the events now unraveling in Southwest Asia are not the result of tragic reactions and counter-reactions. They are the playing out of a master-plan for global disaster, that would destroy the United States, en route to plunging the planet into a New Dark Age. This is why LaRouche insists that the path to peace in the wartorn Middle East begins with the impeachment of Dick Cheney and George Bush.