A.J.
5th February 2007, 16:24
As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is
preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.
The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush
cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what
he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real
target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and
Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced
weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on
24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working
with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government."
Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein
was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a
natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-
Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan.
Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times
and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not
engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.
As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows,
"neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Cheney believe their opportunity to
control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption,
there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist
Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat.
In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build
one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a
nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has
abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original
signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations - until
gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report
by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian
nuclear programme to military use.
The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go
anywhere and see anything". They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and
Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA,
Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and
only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went
to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the
US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland.
Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at
Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of
the world's longest illegal occupation - Iran has a history of obeying international law and
occupies no territory other than its own.
The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant
media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions", just as the vocabulary of
Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a
demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a
close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has
been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and
south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts,
Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He said: "The regime
occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply
military action or killing anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli
regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its
power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds.
An attack would surely unite them.
Nuclear option
The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American
naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of
what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022-02, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004,
National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled "Nuclear Weapons Deployment
Authorisation" , was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been
that NSPD 35 authorised the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in
the Middle East.
This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most
dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear
weapons is being discussed openly in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect
of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and central Asia.
Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been
flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions . . . since last summer".
The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran before the end of
April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US
will use nuclear munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean.
"The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the
process of regional destabilisation.
It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the
attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as
victims, the Israelis . . . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will
destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion
is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks,
disinformation et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US Congress is going
to authorise the war."
Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the "surge" of US troops to Iraq, Vice-
President Cheney said: "It won't stop us." Last November, a majority of the American
electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq.
Apart from insipid speeches of "disapproval" , this has not happened and is unlikely to
happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives,
Nancy Pelosi, and the would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards,
have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a
"liberal". He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in
Herzliya, where he spoke about "an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At
the top of these threats is Iran . . . All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will
never get a nuclear weapon." Hillary Clinton has said: "US policy must be unequivocal . . .
We have to keep all options on the table." Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have
distinguished themselves by attacking the former president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw
the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a
truthful book accusing Israel of becoming an "apartheid state". Pelosi said: "Carter does
not speak for the Democratic Party." She is right, alas.
In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled Answering the
Charges by Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College London, on behalf of others
seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual
honourable exceptions, parliament remains shamefully silent, too.
Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq, which
has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for
Iran now, read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked?
North Korea has nuclear weapons.
In numerous surveys, such as the one released on 23 January by the BBC World Service,
"we", the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As
for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out,
apart from Professor Edalat and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists,
writers and thespians, who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech", are as silent as a
dark West End theatre. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand-
year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?
[John Pilger is a renowned author, journalist and documentary film-maker. A war
correspondent, his writings have appear in numerous magazines, and newspapers.]
February 5, 2007 New Statesman (UK)
preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.
The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush
cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what
he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real
target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and
Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced
weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on
24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working
with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government."
Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein
was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a
natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-
Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan.
Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times
and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not
engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.
As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows,
"neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Cheney believe their opportunity to
control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption,
there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist
Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat.
In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build
one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a
nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has
abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original
signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations - until
gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report
by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian
nuclear programme to military use.
The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go
anywhere and see anything". They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and
Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA,
Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and
only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went
to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the
US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland.
Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at
Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of
the world's longest illegal occupation - Iran has a history of obeying international law and
occupies no territory other than its own.
The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant
media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions", just as the vocabulary of
Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a
demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a
close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has
been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and
south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts,
Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He said: "The regime
occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply
military action or killing anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli
regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its
power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds.
An attack would surely unite them.
Nuclear option
The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American
naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of
what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022-02, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004,
National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled "Nuclear Weapons Deployment
Authorisation" , was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been
that NSPD 35 authorised the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in
the Middle East.
This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most
dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear
weapons is being discussed openly in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect
of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and central Asia.
Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been
flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions . . . since last summer".
The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran before the end of
April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US
will use nuclear munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean.
"The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the
process of regional destabilisation.
It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the
attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as
victims, the Israelis . . . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will
destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion
is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks,
disinformation et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US Congress is going
to authorise the war."
Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the "surge" of US troops to Iraq, Vice-
President Cheney said: "It won't stop us." Last November, a majority of the American
electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq.
Apart from insipid speeches of "disapproval" , this has not happened and is unlikely to
happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives,
Nancy Pelosi, and the would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards,
have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a
"liberal". He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in
Herzliya, where he spoke about "an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At
the top of these threats is Iran . . . All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will
never get a nuclear weapon." Hillary Clinton has said: "US policy must be unequivocal . . .
We have to keep all options on the table." Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have
distinguished themselves by attacking the former president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw
the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a
truthful book accusing Israel of becoming an "apartheid state". Pelosi said: "Carter does
not speak for the Democratic Party." She is right, alas.
In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled Answering the
Charges by Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College London, on behalf of others
seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual
honourable exceptions, parliament remains shamefully silent, too.
Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq, which
has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for
Iran now, read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked?
North Korea has nuclear weapons.
In numerous surveys, such as the one released on 23 January by the BBC World Service,
"we", the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As
for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out,
apart from Professor Edalat and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists,
writers and thespians, who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech", are as silent as a
dark West End theatre. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand-
year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?
[John Pilger is a renowned author, journalist and documentary film-maker. A war
correspondent, his writings have appear in numerous magazines, and newspapers.]
February 5, 2007 New Statesman (UK)