Coming War With Iran - All Iran News Here

[scary]

Hey does anyone think that either the US Israel or Iran would use Biological or Chemical Weapons?

Could Iran hit american with Bioweapons?

I don't think that's possible, however I'm pretty sure they could hit troops with no problem in Iraq, Afghanistan, the issue is that time after time Russia has said that if we attack Iran there will be repercussions, and nearly the same from china.

[bigron]

 
Iran: We'll Dig 320,000 of Graves for Invaders 


30/06/2008 09:53:11 AM GMT
http://aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=135546



A senior Revolutionary Guards commander announced on Sunday that Iran would dig 'some 320,000' graves for the bodies of the slain enemy soldiers killed in a possible military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
 
Brigadier General Mir-Faisal Baqerzadeh, the Head of the Foundation for the Remembrance of the Holy Defense, said that every border province would dig 15,000 to 20,000 graves. While he did not single out any particular 'enemy,' the Brig. Gen. later said Iran does not "wish the families of enemy soldiers to experience what Americans had to go through in the aftermath of the Vietnam War."
 
Baqerzadeh said the decision to prepare the graves in advance was motivated by Iran's concern for preserving the honor of the fallen soldiers. He added that the decision was in compliance with the Geneva Convention.
 
The statement came as a response to a recent report by the New York Times, which said that U.S. military believed a major military exercise by Israel earlier this month was a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran's nuclear sites.
 
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Sunday that Israel is not in a position to take any new adventure against Iran. Addressing the press after attending the 17th joint economic conference of Iran and Pakistan, Mottaki said that in case of any offense against Iran, Israel will receive a deserving response.
 
The Israeli regime is still reeling from its "crushing defeat" in its 2006 war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, he said.
 
Concerning the new package of incentives proposed by the United States, Russia, China, Britain, Germany and France to try to end the row over Iran's nuclear program, the Iranian foreign minister said that Iran is still studying closely the contents of the package. "They treated Iranian package constructively and we will give the required response to them after our study of their package," Mottaki said.
 
On June 14, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana handed the offer of incentives to the Iranian authorities on behalf of the six countries. Iran has also presented its own package of proposals.
 
¬


-- AJP
 

[Biggs]

Hey does anyone think that either the US Israel or Iran would use Biological or Chemical Weapons?

Could Iran hit american with Bioweapons?

iran has no capacity at all to strike at the US mainland, not even European mainland

all 3 parties have bio-chemical weaponns so any could potentially use them, however, the US is the only one with a track record of using them

[scary]

Iran: We'll Dig 320,000 of Graves for Invaders 


30/06/2008 09:53:11 AM GMT
http://aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=135546



A senior Revolutionary Guards commander announced on Sunday that Iran would dig 'some 320,000' graves for the bodies of the slain enemy soldiers killed in a possible military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
 
Brigadier General Mir-Faisal Baqerzadeh, the Head of the Foundation for the Remembrance of the Holy Defense, said that every border province would dig 15,000 to 20,000 graves. While he did not single out any particular 'enemy,' the Brig. Gen. later said Iran does not "wish the families of enemy soldiers to experience what Americans had to go through in the aftermath of the Vietnam War."
 
Baqerzadeh said the decision to prepare the graves in advance was motivated by Iran's concern for preserving the honor of the fallen soldiers. He added that the decision was in compliance with the Geneva Convention.
 
The statement came as a response to a recent report by the New York Times, which said that U.S. military believed a major military exercise by Israel earlier this month was a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran's nuclear sites.
 
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Sunday that Israel is not in a position to take any new adventure against Iran. Addressing the press after attending the 17th joint economic conference of Iran and Pakistan, Mottaki said that in case of any offense against Iran, Israel will receive a deserving response.
 
The Israeli regime is still reeling from its "crushing defeat" in its 2006 war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, he said.
 
Concerning the new package of incentives proposed by the United States, Russia, China, Britain, Germany and France to try to end the row over Iran's nuclear program, the Iranian foreign minister said that Iran is still studying closely the contents of the package. "They treated Iranian package constructively and we will give the required response to them after our study of their package," Mottaki said.
 
On June 14, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana handed the offer of incentives to the Iranian authorities on behalf of the six countries. Iran has also presented its own package of proposals.
 
¬


-- AJP
 

Yep, their preparing for it... When people respond in news articles, you should realize how serious it is.

[bigron]

Preparing the Battlefield

The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.

By Seymour M. Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all


29/06/08 "New Yorker" -- -- Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”

The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”

Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”

Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)

The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.

“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”

“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.

The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.

The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.

Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”

Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”

None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)

A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”

One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”

Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”

Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”

Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.

Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.

Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.—a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”

The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.

In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”—the Defense Intelligence Agency—“are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.

A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions—a beheading, in one case—were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.

It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”

The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags—basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations—judicial, strategic, and political—are different in Iran.”

He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”

A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.

The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”

Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.

The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians—if they have good will.”

The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”

There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”

Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.

It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table.

[bigron]

Catastrophic Déjà Vu

Debunking The Iran War Resolution

By August Wagele

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20199.htm


289/06/08 "ICH" -- - The White House is currently conducting the same tactic on Iran that worked so well on Iraq.  Despite the voluminous evidence that The White House lied and exaggerated to excuse the Iraq invasion, much of the American population (by way of the corporate media) are buying into the same rhetoric they foolishly failed to question only five years ago.

These grave threats against Iran are the culmination of 29 years of resentment.  Started in 1979 when a frustrated faction in Iran overthrew the brutal yet obedient American puppet, The Shaw.

The White House is continually asserting that Iran is: a threat to America, a threat to its neighbors, harming Americans in Iraq, supporting terrorism, and illegally pursuing nuclear weapons.

Just like they did with Iraq, none of these accusations have substantial or concrete evidence to back them up.  They are using the same tactics that worked so well for the Nazis to rally their citizens and excuse their war crimes.  If you tell a big enough lie, often enough, the people will eventually believe you.

Below is the recent resolution by the U.S. Congress and Senate.

Text of Legislation (Italics added for emphasis).

SRES 580 IS

110th CONGRESS

2d Session

Senate RES. 580 (RES. 362 in the house)

Expressing the sense of the Senate on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

June 2, 2008

Mr. BAYH (for himself, Mr. THUNE, and Mr. SMITH) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RESOLUTION

Expressing the sense of the Senate on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.

Whereas Iran is a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, done at Washington, London, and Moscow July 1, 1968, and entered into force March 5, 1970 (commonly referred to as the `Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty') and, by ratifying the Treaty, has foresworn the acquisition of nuclear weapons;

Here is the critical language of the NPT- Article IV section 1, which emphatically states Iran’s rights to pursue nuclear power.

“Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination”…

Whereas Iran is legally bound to declare all its nuclear activity to the International Atomic Energy Agency and to place such activity under the constant monitoring of the Agency;

Whereas for nearly 20 years Iran had a covert nuclear program, until the program was revealed by an opposition group in Iran in 2002;

Whereas the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that the Government of Iran has engaged in such covert nuclear activities as the illicit importation of uranium hexafluoride, the construction of a uranium enrichment facility, experimentation with plutonium, the importation of centrifuge technology and the construction of centrifuges, and the importation of the design to convert highly enriched uranium gas into a metal and to shape it into the core of a nuclear weapon, as well as significant additional covert nuclear activities;

Whereas the Government of Iran continues to expand the number of centrifuges at its enrichment facility and to enrich uranium in defiance of 3 binding United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment activities;

Whereas the Government of Iran has announced its intention to begin the installation of 6,000 advanced centrifuges, which, when operational, will dramatically reduce the time it will take Iran to enrich uranium;

Whereas the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reports that the Government of Iran was secretly working on the design and manufacture of a nuclear warhead until at least 2003 and that Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon as early as late 2009;

Whereas allowing the Government of Iran to obtain a nuclear weapons capability would pose a grave threat to international peace and security;

[All nuclear weapons are a grave threat to international peace and security]

Whereas allowing the Government of Iran to obtain a nuclear weapons capability would fundamentally alter and destabilize the strategic balance of power in the Middle East;

[The strategic balance of America and Israel being able to dominate everyone?]

Whereas, if it were allowed to obtain a nuclear weapons capability, the Government of Iran could share its nuclear technology, raising the frightening prospect that terrorist groups and rogue regimes might possess nuclear weapons capabilities;

[And the splintered Soviet Union couldn’t?  Why don’t we mind when our allies such as Pakistan share their nuclear technology?  Or when our own Congressmen sell our nuclear secrets on the black market?]

Whereas allowing the Government of Iran to obtain a nuclear weapons capability would severely undermine the global nuclear nonproliferation regime that, for more than 4 decades, has contained the spread of nuclear weapons;

[While the NPT has helped restrain states that have signed the NPT, the U.S. has allowed other potentially dangerous states of Pakistan, Israel, and India to obtain nuclear weapons while they refuse to sign the NPT. 

Whereas it is likely that one or more Arab states would respond to Iran obtaining a nuclear weapons capability by following Iran's example, and several Arab states have already announced their intentions to pursue `peaceful nuclear' programs;

[Again, it is their right to do so as long as they sign the NPT]

Whereas the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities throughout the Middle East would make the proliferation of nuclear weapons elsewhere around the globe much more likely;

[What is actually spreading a global nuclear and conventional arms race is America’s belligerent threatening and attacks.  The world is learning that America will not attack a country that actually poses a threat, therefore all countries are pursuing nuclear weapons as a self-defense from America.]

Whereas allowing the Government of Iran to obtain a nuclear weapons capability would directly threaten Europe and ultimately the United States because Iran already has missiles that can reach parts of Europe and is seeking to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles;

Whereas the Government of Iran has repeatedly called for the elimination of our ally, Israel;

[This is false.  Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini who said: …”this occupation regime over Jerusalem" will "vanish from the page of time.”]

Whereas the Government of Iran has advocated that the United States withdraw its presence from the Middle East;

[Would we welcome an aggressive foreign military to stay indefinitely that was surrounding us, wanted our resources, supported local dictatorships, and overthrew our next door neighbor while bribing and arming others to the hilt?]

Whereas the United Nations Security Council has passed 3 binding resolutions under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter that impose sanctions on Iran for its failure to comply with the mandatory demand of the Security Council to suspend all uranium enrichment activity;

Whereas the United States, the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany have offered to negotiate a significant package of economic, diplomatic, and security incentives if Iran complies with the Security Council's demands to suspend uranium enrichment;

[It is their inalienable right and what right do we have to demand?]

Whereas the Government of Iran has consistently refused such offers;

Whereas, as a result of the failure of the Government of Iran to comply with the Security Council resolutions, the international community began taking steps in 2006 that have begun to have an impact on the economy of Iran, but the rapid development of nuclear weapons capabilities by the Government of Iran is outpacing the slowly increasing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Iran;

[There is no evidence of this.]

Whereas the Government of Iran has used its banking system, including the Central Bank of Iran, to support its proliferation efforts and to assist terrorist groups;

Whereas, as a result of that use of Iran's banking system, the Secretary of the Treasury has designated 4 large Iranian banks as proliferators and supporters of terrorism and restricted the ability of those banks to conduct international financial transactions in United States dollars; and

Whereas Iran must import around 40 percent of its daily requirements for refined petroleum products: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Senate--

(1) declares that preventing the Government of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means, is a matter of the highest importance to the national security of the United States and must be dealt with urgently;

(2) urges the President, in the strongest of terms, to immediately use the President's existing authority to impose sanctions on--

(A) the Central Bank of Iran and any other Iranian bank engaged in proliferation activities or support of terrorist groups;

(B) international banks that continue to conduct financial transactions with sanctioned Iranian banks;

(C) energy companies that have invested $20,000,000 or more in the petroleum or national gas sector of the economy of Iran in any given year since the date of the enactment of the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-172; 50 U.S.C. 1701 note); and

(D) companies that continue to do business with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran;

(3) demands that the President lead an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the pressure on the Government of Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, among other measures, banning the importation of refined petroleum products to Iran; and

(4) asserts that nothing in this resolution shall be construed to authorize the use of force against Iran.

[But any affirmation of this resolution shall be cited as a pretext for military aggression against Iran when the White House requires such an excuse.  Exactly as they did before attacking Iraq].

The Congress and the American people must be warned that an attack on Iran will have grave consequences for the region and for the U.S.  Any strikes will be catastrophic for the American economy.  The drastic increase in the price of oil will cause hyperinflation here at home which will hurt us more than our bombs will change Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. 

Rather than the threat posed by Iran, America should be concerned by the threat of the hatred created by our own imperial aggression.

August Wagele is a producer for Scott Horton's interview program on Antiwar radio.
 

[David Rothscum]

Hey does anyone think that either the US Israel or Iran would use Biological or Chemical Weapons?

Could Iran hit american with Bioweapons?

Iran has already been hit with Bioweapons.

[bigron]

Iran: Israel no match for our defenses !!


Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:34:00
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=61953&sectionid=351020101
 
 
Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar says the Israeli regime is no match for the organized and skilled armed forces of Iran.

"Modern weapons are not the only defense criteria… The willpower and support of Iranians is very important," said Brigadier General Mohammad-Najjar on Sunday.

Israel will not be able to match Iran's defensive capabilities and has therefore launched psyops against Tehran, Najjar suggested.

He was referring to recent reports indicating that Israel has launched a military maneuver over the Mediterranean to rehearse for an aerial strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Najjar added that Tel Aviv is a 'mass producer of weapons of mass destruction' and such reports only signal its 'weakness and desperation'.

Israel accuses Iran of pursuing a military nuclear program and demands the country abandon its uranium enrichment. Tehran, however, insists its nuclear activities are aimed at providing fuel for its under-construction power plants.

A former senior Israeli general, Isaac Ben-Israel, claimed on Saturday that Tel Aviv is capable of carrying out a 'successful' aerial strike on Iranian nuclear sites at any time.

Brig. Gen. Najjar, however, warned that Iran is fully prepared to counter any act of aggression.

Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) commander Major General Mohammad-Ali Jafari said on Saturday that Israel is within 'the range of Iran's missiles', warning that Tehran would use all possible means to repel any attack on its soil.

MJ/MD/AA
 
Related News
 Pentagon making case against Iran :
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=61805&sectionid=351020101
 
 'Israel within Iran's missile reach' :
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=61816&sectionid=351020101
 
 Israel: Air strike on Iran will succeed :
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=61815&sectionid=351020101
 
 Paul: Iran war will triple energy prices :
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=61795&sectionid=351020101
 
 Iran tries man for spying for Israel :
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=61817&sectionid=351020101
 
 Iran proposes nuclear-fuel consortium :
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=61793&sectionid=351020104

 
 

[scary]

We are the axis of evil woooo!

[bigron]

David !

Iran was attacked by Iraq with bioweapons,  yes !!

These weapons were manufactured and provided by the US of A  !!

[bigron]

Visit this thread :

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=46920.0

[bigron]

Report: U.S. 'preparing the battlefield' in Iran

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/29/us.iran/index.html


Story Highlights:

New Yorker article says Congress authorized up to $400 million for covert ops in Iran

Journalist Seymour Hersh says program is being staged from Afghanistan

U.S. officials decline comment, deny the U.S. is launching raids from Iraq

Iranian general says troops are building graves for invaders in the event of war



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration has launched a "significant escalation" of covert operations in Iran, sending U.S. commandos to spy on the country's nuclear facilities and undermine the Islamic republic's government, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.

White House, CIA and State Department officials declined comment on Hersh's report, which appears in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Hersh told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that Congress has authorized up to $400 million to fund the secret campaign, which involves U.S. special operations troops and Iranian dissidents.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have rejected findings from U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran has halted a clandestine effort to build a nuclear bomb and "do not want to leave Iran in place with a nuclear program," Hersh said.

"They believe that their mission is to make sure that before they get out of office next year, either Iran is attacked or it stops its weapons program," Hersh said.

The new article, "Preparing the Battlefield," is the latest in a series of articles accusing the Bush administration of preparing for war with Iran.

He based the report on accounts from current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. Watch Hersh discuss what he says are the administration's plans for Iran »

"As usual with his quarterly pieces, we'll decline to comment," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told CNN.

"The CIA, as a rule, does not comment on allegations regarding covert operations," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, denied U.S. raids were being launched from Iraq, where American commanders believe Iran is stoking sectarian warfare and fomenting attacks on U.S. troops.

"I can tell you flatly that U.S. forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else," Crocker said.

Hersh said U.S. efforts were staged from Afghanistan, which also shares a border with Iran.

He said the program resulted in "a dramatic increase in kinetic events and chaos" inside Iran, including attacks by Kurdish separatists in the country's north and a May attack on a mosque in Shiraz that killed 13 people.

The United States has said it is trying to isolate Iran diplomatically in order to get it to come clean about its nuclear ambitions. But Bush has said "all options" are open in dealing with the issue.

Iran insists its nuclear program is aimed at providing civilian electric power, and refuses to comply with U.N. Security Council demands that it halt uranium enrichment work.

U.N. nuclear inspectors say Tehran held back critical information that could determine whether it is trying to make nuclear weapons.

Israel, which is believed to have its own nuclear arsenal, conducted a military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean in early June involving dozens of warplanes and aerial tankers.

The distance involved in the exercise was roughly the same as would be involved in a possible strike on the Iranian nuclear fuel plant at Natanz, Iran, a U.S. military official said.

In 1981, Israeli warplanes destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor.

Iran's parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, warned other countries against moves that would "cost them heavily." In comments that appeared in the semi-official Mehr news agency Sunday, an Iranian general said his troops were digging more than 320,000 graves to bury troops from any invading force with "the respect they deserve."

"Under the law of war and armed conflict, necessary preparations must be made for the burial of soldiers of aggressor nations," said Maj. Gen. Mirfaisal Baqerzadeh, an Iranian officer in charge of identifying soldiers missing in action.

Journalist Shirzad Bozorghmehr in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

Links referenced within this article

President Bush
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/George_W_Bush
Iran
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Iran
Watch Hersh discuss what he says are the administration's plans for Iran »
#cnnSTCVideo
U.N. Security Council
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/United_Nations_Security_Council
Israel
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Israel
Iran
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Iran
George W. Bush
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/George_W_Bush
Israel
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Israel
United Nations Security Council
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/United_Nations_Security_Council

 

 
Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/29/us.iran/index.html 
 

[lilywhite]

(Iran's parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, warned other countries against moves that would "cost them heavily." In comments that appeared in the semi-official Mehr news agency Sunday, an Iranian general said his troops were digging more than 320,000 graves to bury troops from any invading force with "the respect they deserve.")


That means if Americans are fighting them, their bodies will not come home to their families, but will be buried there. Something to think about, anyway.

[David Rothscum]

David !

Iran was attacked by Iraq with bioweapons,  yes !!

These weapons were manufactured and provided by the US of A  !!

True. Any WMD's Iraq had were delivered by the US and Europe. These weapons would have never been used by Iraq ofcourse if the US hadn't installed such a brutal dictator as Saddam. Our leaders seem to hold some kind of grudge against Iran. They overthrew the country's government during the second world war and again during operation Ajax because they didn't let the British oil companies control their national resources.

You see, colonialism never disappeared, it just turned into neo-colonialism through big multinational corporations and institutions like the World Bank and UN. One of the most important parts of neo-colonialism is reducing the population growth of 3rd world countries because otherwise the countries become to powerful to control, Henry Kissinger admitted it himself.

The Iraq-Iran war caused millions of people to be killed, most in Iran. The Iranian government responded by encouraging the people to have more children to compensate for the numerous people killed. This angered the globalists. Charles Galton Darwin wrote that the punishment for a country having to many people born should be war. This man is not nobody, he is the grandson of Charles Darwin and his sister married into the Keynes family that created the World Bank.

They're already setting the stage to destroy Iran, with diseases being spread that will destroy the Iranian food crops. Don't believe that they could not do that, we know they wanted to do this in Afghanistan. This will be even worse than what they've done in Iraq.

[bigron]

David !

The Brits and the US have taken turns in what action has been taken in
the middle east

It all started when together with the French they finished the Ottoman Empire !!!

[bigron]

Top US commander briefed on IDF’s four-front strategy in potential Iran war context

June 29, 2008, 9:08 AM (GMT+02:00)
http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=5386

 
Top US commander Adm. Michael Mullen sees for himself:


The visiting Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, carried out a guided tour of Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip over the weekend. It was led by the IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and OCs Northern and Southern Commands, Maj. Gens. Eisenkott and Galant.

He was briefed on IDF tactics in a war on all these potential flashpoints in the context of a comprehensive conflict with Iran and then held long conversations with defense minister Ehud Barak and Ashkenazi.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that it is very unusual for the top American commander to carry out a close, on-the-spot study of Israel’s potential war fronts. It was prompted on the one hand by skepticism in parts of the US high command of Israel’s ability to simultaneously strike Iran’s nuclear installations and fight off attacks from three borders while, at the same time, Adm. Mullen showed he was open to persuasion that the IDF’s prospective tactics and war plans were workable.

Military circles in Washington, commenting on the large-scale air maneuver Israel carried out with Greece earlier in June, have opined that 100 warplanes are not enough for the Israel Air Force to destroy all of Iran’s secret nuclear sites; more than 1,000 would be needed. Israel military tacticians in contact with US commanders have countered that, while Iran’s secret nuclear locations are scattered and buried deep, still, every chain has weak links and is therefore vulnerable.

The tough threats issued by Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Mohamed Ali Jafari on Saturday, June 28, were prompted by the Adm. Mullen’s Israeli border tour, word of which was flashed to Tehran by Syrian-Iranian observation posts inside Syrian and Lebanese borders.

(The Sunday Times added that Iran moved its ballistic Shihab-3 missiles into launch positions, with Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant among its possible targets.)

Saturday, DEBKAfile reported:

The IRGC chief, Mohammad Ali Jafari issued Tehran’s toughest and most explicit threats yet in response to recent reports of Israeli preparations to strike Iran’s nuclear installations.

Hinting at an American attack, he said: “If there is a confrontation between us and the enemy from outside the region , definitely the scope will reach the oil issue.”

After this action (of imposing controls on the Gulf waterway), the oil price will rise very considerably,” he said.

Speaking to the Iranian newspaper Jam-e Jam, Jafari differentiated between Iran’s responses to possible American and Israeli attacks.

The oil weapon would be applied in reprisal for the former – “and this is among the factors deterring enemies”, he said, while “Israelis know if they take military action against Iran… the abilities of the Islamic and Shiite world, especially in the region, will deliver fatal blows.”

Jafari noted that Israel was in range of Iranian missiles.

He said Iran’s “allies in the region” could also retaliate, referring to those living in “Lebanon’s heartland of South Lebanon,” without naming Hizballah.

US forces were “more vulnerable than the Israelis” because of their troops in the region. “Iran can in different ways harm American interests, even far away,”

Jafar warned Iran’s neighbors not to let their territory be used.

“If the attack takes place from the soil of another country ... the country attacked has the right to respond to the enemy's military action from where the operation started," he said.

[bigron]

   
UPDATED ON:
Monday, June 30, 2008
22:01 Mecca time, 19:01 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/06/2008630173538122871.html


 
US 'escalates covert Iran missions' 
 
 
Iranian revolutionary guards have been captured by US forces, the article said .
 
US congressional leaders have agreed to a presidential request for up to $400 million in funding for covert operations against Iran, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.

Previous cross-border operations have included the capture of Iranian security officers and the backing of anti-Tehran armed groups, said the report by Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter.

The operations have been taking place since last year, the article said.

Bush's request, made through a Presidential Finding document, was approved by US congressional leaders, including Democrats, late last year, the report said.

Cross-border US operations against Iran include seizing members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and taking them across the border to Iraq for interrogation, the report said.

But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which include the CIA, have now been significantly expanded, the New Yorker said, citing current and former officials.

Armed Sunni groups

 
Hersh says he believes the US is planning for a  possibe strike on Iran .

The operations also include providing support to armed Sunni Muslim groups opposed to the Iranian government, which is Shia.

Among groups inside Iran benefiting from US support is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People's Resistance Movement, according to Robert Baer, a former CIA officer cited by the article.

Vali Nasr, an Iran analyst, told Hersh that the group was a vicious organisation suspected of links to al-Qaeda.

The article said US support for the dissident groups could prompt a violent crackdown by Iran, which could give the Bush administration a reason to intervene.

US denial

Ryan Crocker, the US amabassador to Iraq, told the CNN news channel that he had not read the article, but denied the allegations of cross-border operations.

"I'll tell you flatly that US forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else," he said in an interview from Baghdad on Sunday.

Hersh has written previously about possible administration plans to go to war to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

An April 2006 article in the New Yorker that suggested "regime change" in Iran, whether by diplomatic or military means, was Bush's ultimate goal.

Iran maintains that its nuclear activities are for peaceful energy purposes only.

Election battle

Hersh told Al Jazeera that he believed the US was planning for a possible strike against Iran, something that was being pushed by Bush and Dick Cheney.

"The president and the vice-president truly believe that the Iranians have [nuclear]bombs or will have them soon, no matter what their own intelligence says."

In December, a joint report by US intelligence agencies found that Iran was less determined to develop nuclear weapons than was previously thought.

Hersh said he also believed a strike was more likely if Barack Obama, the US Democratic presidential candidate, became favourite to win November's presidential poll.

Howeever Hersh said he thought that Bush and Cheney believed their policies would be safe in the hands of John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

[Biggs]

some wonderful images of Iran and what it is really like

http://www.irandefence.net/showthread.php?t=32

[Sub-X]

some wonderful images of Iran and what it is really like

http://www.irandefence.net/showthread.php?t=32

Wow great find Biggs,some brilliant images,shows what a beautiful country Iran is 

[David Rothscum]

some wonderful images of Iran and what it is really like

http://www.irandefence.net/showthread.php?t=32

http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html

[Biggs]

Wow great find Biggs,some brilliant images,shows what a beautiful country Iran is 

yep, damned far removed from the image usually painted in the MSM

[Biggs]

http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html

that one is good too, and I love Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), what a wonderful songwriter/singer he is

[baldguy]

some wonderful images of Iran and what it is really like

http://www.irandefence.net/showthread.php?t=32

Thanks Biggs for the pictures, I had no idea they had such modern infrastructure. Unfortunately that will make them more vulnerable to modern warfare. Makes me feel sick when I think of the war pictures that will be coming from Iran. When will people start saying no, no more needless human misery.

[William Rausch]

I mostly agree with Judith Young’s article False Flags for Denver DNC? in Pacific Free Press (see: http://pacificfreepress.com/content/view/2774/81/ ), except that I have a different idea of the significance of impending events in the Denver area.

The attack on Iran will be justified by a false flag terrorist attack or act of military aggression, as the statements of Zbigniew Brzezinski before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1, 2007 and the letter from Gary Hart to the Iranian leadership of September 26, 2007 (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/unsolicited-advice-to-the_b_65984.html ) make all too clear.  (Also see Seymour Hersh’s upcoming New Yorker article dated July 7, 2008 concerning US-sponsored terrorism against Iran at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh .)  However, I still feel the most likely scenario is an attack on US Forces already in theater, as this would enable the White House to claim any subsequent attack on Iran to be defense of those forces requiring no further authorization of force by Congress.  (Indeed, such an attempt has already been made, with the incident a few months back of a group of Boston Whalers approaching US ships while a radio message (subsequently proven to have been a hoax) claimed the ships would be destroyed.  War was only averted because the US theater commander at the time (who has, alarmingly, since been replaced) resisted.)  If a domestic terror attack is used instead, the most likely targets in the past have been thought to be the Galveston-Texas City-Houston Ship Channel-Port of Houston area (per the late Roland Carnaby), or downtown Portland, Oregon (per observation of frequent exercises based on that scenario).  But I think the preparations for the Democratic National Convention in Denver are indicative of a potential attack, not on Denver itself, but upon the area of Washington, DC.  

According to old Cold War plans, Denver is designated the alternate seat of government for the United States should Washington become unavailable for that purpose.  Further, with the Congress controlled by the Democrats, enough Congress critters could be expected to show up in Denver to allow the seating of a rump Congress that would give a veneer of legitimacy to subsequent action.  The protests outside the convention (in which the only protest organization that openly called for violence somehow wound up being the only one that got a permit, thus showing that the government appears to want violence at the convention protests, as do Rush Limbaugh and other Neo-Con commentators) will apparently be provocateured to violence, thus justifying a large presence of police and military personnel in the streets (to defend the rump Congress?), while a sudden local shortage of gasoline and/or diesel fuel (whether a planned event in itself or merely the predicted consequence of a sudden concentration of police and military vehicles in the area) will clear the streets of civilian traffic.

What does anybody else think?

[Biggs]

Thanks Biggs for the pictures, I had no idea they had such modern infrastructure. Unfortunately that will make them more vulnerable to modern warfare. Makes me feel sick when I think of the war pictures that will be coming from Iran. When will people start saying no, no more needless human misery.

yes the image painted of them in the US/UK MSM is quite inaccurate

and it will indeed mean that the civilians suffer more as a result, or at least comparitively, but be assured that iran's military have made many preparations for asymetrical war, plus they have plenty of modern weapons too, so they wil be able to retaliate/resist quite well.

having said all that I am not sure  that anybody is going to bomb them, I feel that the loonies are just using it as a threat to scare us all, but then of course they only need to carry out the threat once.

[Biggs]

I'm Off To Iran Before Israel Bombs It

By George Galloway

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20209.htm

30/06/08 "Daily Record" -- - BY the time you read this, I will be in Iran. I've never been there before, never met an Iranian leader - I don't even like the present Iranian leadership - so remember all that, because it might become important.

I'm determined to do my bit for the anti-war effort. We need another war like Gordon Brown needs another by-election.

But the Sunday papers were again full of Israeli war games and threats as speculation mounts of a massive bombardment of yet another Muslim country.

I'm going for the first anniversary of Press TV, on which I present two programmes - Comment at 10.30pm on Thursdays and The Real Deal at 10.30pm on Sundays.

This week I hope to meet Ali Larijani, formerly Iran's nuclear negotiator, now speaker of the Iranian parliament and, I hope, the next president.

Larijani proved beyond even the CIA's attempt at contradiction that Iran is acting entirely within her legal rights to develop nuclear power.

As a signatory to the treaty governing the development of nuclear weapons, Iran has done nothing wrong under it either, at least according to the watchdog maintained by the international community, the IAEA.

Israel, on the other hand, refuses to sign the nuclear weapons treaty and thus, with a chutzpah which takes the breath away, claims it's not in breach of it.

Yet last week, it acknowledged the truth first revealed by the Israeli hero Mordechai Vannunu, who spent nearly 20 years in solitary for telling us that they possess nuclear weapons in abundance.

Their brazenness about this reached its apogee when they publicly thanked France, in the diminutive form of Nicolas Sarkozy, for the decisive help they had given them (we ourselves gave them the heavy water technology) to enable to build their nuclear arsenal.

So let me run that past you. Israel, which has hundreds of nuclear weapons, seems to be planning to attack a country with none with the support of France, Britain and the US and all in the name of, er, checking the spread of nuclear weapons in that region.

You couldn't make it up, but alas you don't have to.

The Dr Strangeloves who've taken over the bunker have already done so.

Next week's column, should I survive, will no doubt tell you about the great civilisation that is Persia, which hasn't attacked another country for more than 300 years, not a boast we can make ourselves.

Iran is no broken-backed land enfeebled by decades of war and sanctions.

If attacked, she most certainly will defend herself and by all means necessary.

Fasten your seatbelts.

[lilly]

I saw the pictures, lovely indeed.   Music by Cat Stevens, my all time favorite singer.  
Peaceful human beings going about their lives, children's happy faces.    And the US Government, Israel Government and their cohorts are planning to attack Iran, destroy lives , animals and nature, for power, oil and wealth.
Our troops must carry out their evil agenda.

What can we do, that we are not already doing to stop this?   I feel so frustrated that we can't do something to stop it  NOW.

Next, US....Sweden...UK...heck, the world.

Best of luck Biggs, ooo George and thanks.

[David Rothscum]

that one is good too, and I love Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), what a wonderful songwriter/singer he is

Yeah, it's a great song. People need to see that Iran is just a normal country that is about to be completely destroyed for no reason.

[David Rothscum]

Alright, something fishy's going on in Iran, our government probably killed 15 Iranians again.
Let's start here:
http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustralia/iran_gas_blast_may_have_killed_15_550619
Iran gas blast may have killed 15
Monday, 30 June, 2008
An explosion at a gas distribution company in a town near the Iranian capital is thought to have killed 15 people, Iran's Fars news agency said.

The cause of the blast late Sunday was not immediately clear, but Fars said a large number of gas canisters used in homes for cooking had exploded.

"It is not yet clear if (the blast) was intentional or not," Fars reported, adding that the explosion occurred at a gas company in a suburb of Karaj, west of Tehran.

"The number of probable deaths in the explosion has been put at 15," Fars reported without giving more details.

Source: AAP
Now here's DEBKAfile's take on this story:
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5394
Mysterious explosion at Iranian military facility

DEBKAfile Special Report

June 30, 2008, 6:45 PM (GMT+02:00)

DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report that an explosion Monday, June 30, at Bidganeh near the town of Shahriar 40 kilometers east of Tehran occurred at a military installation, not a civilian building as Tehran claimed.

At first, the Iranian authorities reported 15 people were killed, correcting this later to no casualties. The precise function of the targeted facility is not known. While Iran claimed the blast was caused by a gas leak, Western military sources are skeptical and believe the authorities are trying to cover up some sort of sabotage.
Don't take it too serious though, because DEBKA is about as reliable as a Clinton.
But we have all the reason to believe this is not a gas leak. Why? This happened before. Here's an article on it:
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2008/me_iran0139_05_15.asp
Iran now says mosque explosion was a bomb,
not a gas leak
NICOSIA — Iran has changed its story, acknowledging that an explosion that killed 12 people in a mosque was an insurgency bombing.

The Iranian Justice Ministry said Britain, Israel and the United States facilitated the bombing of a Shiraz cultural center on April 12. The ministry said Teheran would appeal to the International Court of Justice to prosecute these countries.

For more than a month, Iran denied that the explosion in Shiraz comprised an attack. Instead, Teheran said the explosion in the mosque complex stemmed from a gas leak.

Justice Ministry spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi said 12 people have been arrested and deemed as key suspects in the bombing. Later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the detainees confessed that they were directed by Britain and the United States.

"Due to sincere and timely efforts of Iranian security personnel, those involved in Shiraz bombing were immediately arrested and confessed to their link with the Zionist regime, United States and Britain," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the official Iranian news agency, Irna.

[DCUBED]

Well, we all know that the the US has got black-ops running around Iran so it wouldn't be surprising if this was an op.  They are probably following the same blueprint as they did in 1953 with Operation AJAX.

[bigron]

MoJo Convo: Iran Panic? Talk About It With the Experts

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/06/8836_mojo-convo-iran.html



MoJo writer Laura Rozen asked an Israeli intel correspondent, an Iranian American activist, an arms expert, a former peace negotiator, and an anti-war intellectual:

How likely is a scenario in which the US or Israel strikes Iran before Bush leaves office? (Or is the Left falling for the hawks' propaganda?)

They'll be checking in on this MoJo Blog entry starting Monday to discuss their answers with readers—and each other. Want to talk to Daniel Levy, Yossi Melman, Trita Parsi, Danny Postel, and Jacqueline Shire about their take on Iran? Now's your chance. Leave a comment below for one of the five guest MoJo Blog moderators and they'll respond.









Daniel Levy, a former Middle East peace negotiator, is Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation, and of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation:

I'm going to look at the Israeli side of the equation as I think this is the direction that any action is most likely to come from, although the blowback would of course most likely impact the US (and perhaps embroil it in a war with Iran). Also I will not address how disastrous the consequences of a military strike would be in my opinion, notably for Israel and its supporters in the US.

Bottom line: I still think a strike is still less rather than more likely, although I am increasingly concerned, more so than in the past. The Israeli political timetable may add a new element encouraging action, given that Prime Minister Olmert will remain in office only a limited number of months and Defense Minister Barak needs to justify why he has stayed in the Olmert government. This of course dovetails the US political calendar. These considerations are not sufficient to precipitate action, but if the Israeli Defense establishment is of the opinion that eventually a strike is inevitable (and I am not convinced it is) then the chances of a short timetable are enhanced.

The bombing of the Osirak Iraqi reactor in 1981, and of a suspected Syrian nuclear site in September '07, are problematic precedents in that they encourage a false Israeli presumption regarding the efficacy and minimal cost of a military strike. Iran is a different story. Israel's recent regional moves—negotiations with Syria, cease-fire with Hamas, and even the likely prisoner exchange with Hezbollah—all suggest a concerted effort to blunt some of the instruments that Iran could deploy in the region. Actually all of these moves make sense, but would be smarter as a backdrop to American engagement with Iran (I could explain more on this later). So why all the Israeli bluff and bluster? Well, it might be to push the P 5+1 and others into squeezing Iran harder, or part of Olmert's domestic spin that this is the wrong time to change Prime Minister. But few believe that the sanctions will lead to a unilateral Iranian climb down, and the political explanation is unsatisfying. Hence the worry. Still, the Israel-America no-surprises rule would certainly apply to a mission against Iran, so if Israel is planning something (and again I'm not convinced) then opposition from the Pentagon can prevent it.






Yossi Melman is national security correspondent for Israeli daily Haaretz and co-author of Every Spy a Prince, and The Nuclear Sphinx of Iran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran:

Very, very unlikely. The military and intelligence contingency plans to attack Iran are still in the making. From the operational point of view, Israel and the US are not ready yet. The supportive political-diplomatic environment has not been created yet. Attacking Iran is considered by Israeli military and political decision makers as a last resort. I assume that they and the international community, including the US, are waiting to see the results of next year's presidential elections in Iran, to be held in May 2009.






Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US and president of the National Iranian American Council:

The recent war rhetoric coming out of Israel seems more geared towards ensuring that America keeps its military option on the table, than towards signalling that Israel itself is prepared to take military action. Even if Israel does have the capability to strike Iran—which is debatable—Israel certainly does not have the capability to successfully eliminate all Iranian nuclear facilities. Would Israel initiate an attack—knowing it would fail—only to force the US to step in and utilize its military option? Possibly, but it would come at a great expense to Israel: the Jewish state's deterrence is to a large extent based on the outside world not knowing what Israel can and cannot do. By attacking Iran and failing to destroy the Iranian facilities, Israel would reveal the limitations of its capabilities and strike a major blow against its own deterrence.







Danny Postel is the author of Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism and a member of Chicago's No War on Iran Coalition:

None of us can be certain at this point whether the US or Israel will attack Iran, but I read recent signs as being just ominous enough that I'd rather err on the side of being too worried than of not being worried enough. Even that paragon of cool sobriety The Economist now concludes that Israel's recent maneuvers suggest that it might not be bluffing. One thing we do know is that the intellectual runway is being slicked for an attack. John Bolton has floated the suggestion that Israel will attack after the November elections but before the next president takes office, while Daniel Pipes has evoked the same scenario, only with the US doing the job. Pipes thinks Bush will attack only if Obama wins (the assumption being that McCain would take care of business himself), whereas Bolton sees Israel attacking no matter who wins. Norman Podhoretz not only "prays" that Bush will bomb Iran but has personally urged the president to do so in a private meeting between the two. (Bush, according to Podhoretz, "gave not the slightest indication of whether he agreed," but "listened very intently" and "looked very solemn.") The writing on the wall looks deadly serious to me. I'd rather fall for the hawks' propaganda than awake one morning to find out that I'd underestimated the threat. But even if it is just posturing, it's a very dangerous game with potentially cataclysmic consequences.







Jacqueline Shire is a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, and served previously as a foreign affairs officer in the Department of State's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs:

For a host of reasons, ably articulated by others, I think the likelihood that the US attacks Iran before Bush leaves office to be quite low (due to reluctance to undermine Iraq's fragile stability or take on another military conflict with uncertain consequences, the economic impact of higher oil prices, opposition from international partners, and a pragmatic understanding that a strike may only drive Iran's nuclear program underground or fail to set back irretrievably the enrichment effort).

For similar reasons I believe that Israel too will ultimately decide to hold off, and suggest that if Israel were going to strike Iran, it might have already done so.

That aside, there is an uncertainty to the Israel-Iran-strike calculus that bears examining. Over the summer and into the fall, we can expect that Iran will continue doggedly, if imperfectly, installing and operating centrifuges at Natanz, expanding and improving upon their uranium enrichment efforts where possible. Barring a last minute breakthrough, we can also expect the formal rejection of the latest diplomatic offer made by the EU's Javier Solana in June, and the start of more sanctions discussions at the UN Security Council.

Add to this dispiriting mix some incendiary rhetoric from an over-confident Tehran toward Israel, and Israel's reported conclusion that Iran’s timetable to a bomb is closer to late-2009 than the US intelligence community's assessment of mid-next decade, and we may wake up to a smoldering Natanz some morning before 2009.

While not likely in a greater-than-50-percent sense, this avoidable scenario depends largely on how Tel Aviv reads the news from Tehran—continued progress on enrichment, a rejection of diplomatic overtures, over-confidence in the political leadership—and marries it with other factors, in particular its own domestic political considerations, its assessment of how Sens. McCain or Obama would address Iran, and whether there has been any progress internationally on how to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions.

In short, who knows? Israel has very deliberately maintained opacity on this question, veering between shows of force and official denials. We are left to continue watching closely all the variables and pressing for a diplomatic resolution.

[bigron]

I'm Off To Iran Before Israel Bombs It

By George Galloway

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/comment/columnists/lifestyle-columnists/george-galloway/2008/06/30/i-m-off-to-iran-before-israel-bombs-it-86908-20626143/

30/06/08 "Daily Record" -- - BY the time you read this, I will be in Iran. I've never been there before, never met an Iranian leader - I don't even like the present Iranian leadership - so remember all that, because it might become important.

I'm determined to do my bit for the anti-war effort. We need another war like Gordon Brown needs another by-election.

But the Sunday papers were again full of Israeli war games and threats as speculation mounts of a massive bombardment of yet another Muslim country.

I'm going for the first anniversary of Press TV, on which I present two programmes - Comment at 10.30pm on Thursdays and The Real Deal at 10.30pm on Sundays.

This week I hope to meet Ali Larijani, formerly Iran's nuclear negotiator, now speaker of the Iranian parliament and, I hope, the next president.

Larijani proved beyond even the CIA's attempt at contradiction that Iran is acting entirely within her legal rights to develop nuclear power.

As a signatory to the treaty governing the development of nuclear weapons, Iran has done nothing wrong under it either, at least according to the watchdog maintained by the international community, the IAEA.

Israel, on the other hand, refuses to sign the nuclear weapons treaty and thus, with a chutzpah which takes the breath away, claims it's not in breach of it.

Yet last week, it acknowledged the truth first revealed by the Israeli hero Mordechai Vannunu, who spent nearly 20 years in solitary for telling us that they possess nuclear weapons in abundance.

Their brazenness about this reached its apogee when they publicly thanked France, in the diminutive form of Nicolas Sarkozy, for the decisive help they had given them (we ourselves gave them the heavy water technology) to enable to build their nuclear arsenal.

So let me run that past you. Israel, which has hundreds of nuclear weapons, seems to be planning to attack a country with none with the support of France, Britain and the US and all in the name of, er, checking the spread of nuclear weapons in that region.

You couldn't make it up, but alas you don't have to.

The Dr Strangeloves who've taken over the bunker have already done so.

Next week's column, should I survive, will no doubt tell you about the great civilisation that is Persia, which hasn't attacked another country for more than 300 years, not a boast we can make ourselves.

Iran is no broken-backed land enfeebled by decades of war and sanctions.

If attacked, she most certainly will defend herself and by all means necessary.

Fasten your seatbelts.

[bigron]

In Case You Missed it:

A World Of Hurt

Video

Why USA and Israel Will Attack Iran?


REAL REASON WHY USA & ISRAEL WILL ATTACK IRAN


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEpp9E6aJGw&eurl=http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20210.htm

[bigron]

 
Shadow of war looms as Israel flexes its muscle

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/29/israelandthepalestinians.middleeast/print


Israeli fighter jets flew 1,500 kms across the Mediterranean this month, in a dry run for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Tehran has threatened to treat such a raid as a declaration of war. As the Middle East braces itself for a stand-off of epic proportions, how close is the region to that nightmare scenario?
Peter Beaumont, Rory McCarthy, Tracy McVeigh and Paul Harris The Observer, Sunday June 29, 2008 Article historyThe meeting at the home of Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was not supposed to be public. The man invited into Olmert's official residence in Jerusalem was Aviam Sela, architect of Operation Opera in 1981, when Israel launched a long-range strike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. Regarded as a brilliant aviation tactician, in particular in the field of in-flight refuelling, Olmert's office tried to play down the meeting. But the rumours in Israel's defence establishment were already flying.

Sela, according to sources close to the meeting, had been called in so that Olmert could ask his opinion on the likely effectiveness of a similar raid to Opera on the nuclear installations of Iran.

Peace in the Middle East depends on Sela's and Israel's answer. Yesterday, responding to the Israel's increasingly bellicose language, Iran's top Revolutionary Guards Commander, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned that it would respond to any attack by hitting Israel with missiles and threatened to control the oil shipping passage through the Straits of Hormuz.

If Israel were to attack it would have to overcome considerable practical problems. There is no one who believes that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would be anything like Opera, when eight F-16s and a similar number of F-15s crept into Iraq. For one thing, in pursuing its nuclear ambitions, Iran took note of the Osirak lessons. Its facilities, including a light water reactor at Bushehr and the controversial uranium enrichment process at Natanz, are dispersed and, in the case of Natanz, protected by up to 23 metres of hardened concrete.

To destroy the uranium centrifuge halls at Natanz alone, analysts have argued, might require up to 80 5,000lb penetrating bombs dropped in almost simultaneous pairs to allow the second bomb to burrow through the crater of the first. Opera required just a handful of bombs.

To strike even the bare minimum of so-called target sets associated with Natanz and Bushehr without the assistance of US cruise missiles fired from their ships in the Persian Gulf would require a massive military effort and, according to the Israeli air force's own assessments, might risk the loss of large numbers of its aircraft for a temporary impact.

But the rumours keep circulating and the hushed briefings are multiplying. In the Israeli Prime Minister's traditional round of interviews on the eve of Passover earlier this year, Olmert vowed that Iran 'will not be nuclear'.

Since then, a series of senior Israeli officials have added their own warnings of the threat of an Israeli strike. Most strident has been Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz who said earlier this month that Israel would have no choice but to attack Iran.

Other officials, too, such as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Israeli ambassador to the US Sallai Meridor, have made less inflammatory remarks but in a similar vein.

If the rhetoric, coming in the midst of an effort by the so-called G5+1 to persuade Iran to accept incentives to suspend uranium enrichment, is alarming, then so too are Israel's ostentatious preparations for war.

Earlier this month, the Israeli Air Force conducted one of the largest aerial exercises in its history, flying 100 F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, supported by midair fuel tankers and rescue helicopters, 1,500kms west over the Mediterranean. That precisely matches the distance from Israel to Iran's nuclear facilities.

And while some of the messages amount to signalling, to warn Iran as well as the EU and the US that Israel does not intend its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East to be challenged, it is clear that Israel has launched an aggressive information campaign apparently designed to soften up public opinion for the case for war, reminiscent of the run-up to the war against Iraq. Indeed, some of the same cast are back on stage, not least the former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, who has loudly been making the case for an Israeli strike.

Academics and journalists who have recently visited Israel have come back from meetings convinced the country is getting ready for war. The campaign has been assisted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in the US and the Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre in the UK, two influential Jewish lobby groups who have brought over experts to brief the media.

Last week, Bicom invited journalists to meet Shmuel Bar, a former military intelligence officer and civil servant in the Prime Minister's Office. Now an academic, Bar writes on Iranian defence doctrine. On Monday the same organisation will be hosting a member of Israel's security cabinet, Isaac 'Bouji' Herzog, who once again will answer questions, among other issues, on the threat posed by Iran.

And at the centre of the present flurry of activity is the question of exactly what threat is posed. The National Intelligence Estimate, the official view of the US intelligence community is that Iran ceased work on its secret weapons programme in 2003 (a view disowned by George Bush). Israel's assessment is that Tehran is two years from a bomb.

The mutual suspicion between Israel and Iran is at historic levels. Israel cites the existential danger posed by an Iranian regime that has suggested that the Jewish state would 'vanish from the page of time'.

Iran points to statements such as the one made last week by the Israeli Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defence chief. In an interview published in the Russian press, Ben-Eliezer said that Iran would be annihilated if it tried to attack Israel. In truth, Israel's concerns are as much concerned with regional strategic issues as they are with the threat posed by Tehran, and in particular maintaining the status of sole nuclear power in the region. A repeat of the 2006 attack on Tehran's ally Hizbollah in Lebanon would be more difficult to contemplate with a nuclear Iran. By the same argument, a nuclear Iran might embolden not only Hizbollah but Hamas in Gaza, too.

What is clear is that the push inside the Israeli establishment for a strike is not being driven by the timetable of Iran's mastery of the technical aspects alone, but by geopolitical considerations. That point was reinforced by Bar last week when he identified a window of opportunity for a strike on Iran - ahead of the November presidential election in the United States which could see Barack Obama take power, and possibly engage with Syria and Iran. An Obama presidency would close that window for Israel, says Bar.

'The support is almost unanimous for this in Israel. One hundred percent. I don't think there is anybody within Israel who sees Iran's threats as rhetoric. So the question is, when do we reach that bridge?' he said, adding that the West is naive to believe that any kind of negotiation will work. 'The only thing that can stop Israel's intent [to bomb] would be extremely robust steps on the part of the West - a blockade of Iranian refined oil, something that would indicate that steps were meant to force regime change. Since that is not on the cards, only bombing Iran will work.

'If it's an Israeli attack they will put pressure on Iran's Arab neighbours to respond to the problem also. It will be counter-productive for Iran to launch a major attack on Israel.

'So they will launch a few rockets at us; that is not devastating for Israel,' he said with a shrug. Israel's case, as put by Bar, is that 'most of the Arab Middle East will side with the hope that Israel does the job and not the US. And make no mistake that they all want the job done. They will condemn it in public of course and then get on with their lives,' he said.

Har added that there would probably be another war with Lebanon - 'a month or two months, that is as long as the Middle East has wars for. We can easily cope with that. That's the nature of life in this region. We will set the Iranian programme back and yes, then we will need to come and take it out of existence again after that timeline. There will be no total conclusion, I hesitate to call it the "final solution", but there are no such solutions.'

But despite Israel's insistence that it has the will to go it alone, it is aware that it must secure at the very least the agreement of the US to turn a blind eye. And there are signs that the Bush White House is deeply split on the issue of any possible Israeli military strike against Iran.

Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and the remnants of the neoconservative lobby in Washington are believed to be sympathetic to the idea. However, there are also those in strong positions, such as Defence Secretary Robert Gates and some senior military chiefs, who are thought to be privately opposed to such a move. 'If it were up to Bush and Cheney they would want to see this thing done,' said Larry Johnson, a former top CIA analyst. 'But they are now up against a lot of fundamental military realities that make it hard. The military has been pushing back against this.'

Right-wing think-tanks, however, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, have been vocal in their advocation of confronting Iran. Indeed, the institute recently produced a report on a theoretical military attack on Iran authored by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, entitled 'The Last Resort: Consquences of Preventive Military Action Against Iran'.

The study fell short of recommending such an attack but it did provide an exhaustive argument on why and how such an attack would work. That led critics to dub it a blueprint for war with Iran. It suggested that the possible best line of attack would in fact not be against Tehran's nuclear programme but against its oil industry, thus cutting off the source of Iran's current wealth. 'The political shock of losing the oil income would cause Iran to rethink its stance,' the report suggested.

It comes at a time when a resolution has been put forward in Congress calling for a naval blockade of Iran led by US warships. The proposal calls for the United States to lead an international effort to cut off the country by sea, something that would almost certainly by seen as an act of war by Iran. The resolution has got huge support from Israeli politicians and the country's highly effective lobbying industry in Washington, led perhaps inevitably by Aipac, which has made the issue its legislative priority. 'The war drums are beating. There is no doubt about that,' said Johnson.

A recent flurry of bilateral meetings between senior US and Israeli military officials in recent weeks has contributed to a sense that planning for a strike may be far advanced. Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, travelled to Israel last week for the second time in seven months, cutting short a tour of Europe to meet with Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel's military chief.

Also last week, a senior Israeli foreign ministry official reportedly travelled to Vienna for a rare meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency to encourage them to work more quickly on strategies to block Iran's nuclear programme. Although an American government spokesman in Washington said the meeting had been scheduled several months in advance, he added: 'Obviously, when Chairman Mullen goes to Israel and speaks with the Israelis, they will no doubt discuss the threat posed by Iran.'

Paradoxically, Israel has adopted a much less confrontational approach elsewhere in the region: there is the admittedly tenuous Gaza ceasefire and a prisoner swap with the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah is close. There are indirect talks under way with the Syrians and Israel has called for a direct dialogue with Lebanon. Talks with the Palestinians, however frail, none the less continue.

And amid the talk of windows of opportunity and the dry runs for missile strikes, more moderate voices are managing to make themselves heard. Ephraim Halevy, a former head of the intelligence agency Mossad, told a meeting of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem on Tuesday that Iran's nuclear ambitions did not represent an existential threat to Israel.

'I am convinced that Israel cannot be destroyed,' Halevy said. 'We should not sink into the doldrums of "Israel is on the verge of extinction".' Ultimately, he said, the United States would talk to Iran, and Israel needed to be part of that dialogue.

Martin Van Creveld, Israel's leading military historian, said there were some in the Israeli government who were indeed serious about a military option. But he said the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would probably not be affected by Israel flexing its military muscles. 'I would be very surprised if the Iranians cave in. I think they are going to follow the same road as every nuclear country has followed since the 1960s [including Israel]; namely they are going to build nuclear weapons without admitting it,' he said. 'And I don't see this made the world into a worse place. I am convinced the outcome is going to be a balance of power and I personally think that a nuclear Iran may not be such a bad thing for the world... Iran is a third-world country. I don't see why people are so afraid of it.'

Prime Minister Olmert, and the hawks around him, may take some convincing of that.

About this articleClose This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday June 29 2008 on p36 of the World news section. It was last updated at 01:13 on June 29 2008.

[bigron]

Congress to Bush and Cheney: Do What You Want in Iran

David Bromwich
Sun Jun 29, 11:38 PM ET
 
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20080630/cm_huffpost/109868

Seymour Hersh's "Preparing the Battlefield," in the July 7 New Yorker, will be
discussed in the coming weeks by everyone interested in our foreign policy and
the future of the American constitution. The complete failure of congressional
oversight, to which the article points, is a larger subject that will be with
us until the election and beyond. For if the vice president and his
neoconservative advisers have their way -- and they remain, in spite of setbacks,
the most active, energetic, and ambitious faction within the Bush
administration -- the U.S. will be at war with Iran or on the way to war by
January 2009. And if that is so, it will matter less than we think who is
elected in November. The momentum will be there; the country will be committed.

In late 2007, after winning an election whose central issue was a more prudent and rational policy in the Middle East, congressional Democrats, obedient to the wishes of a Presidential Finding, signed away $400 million for secret operations against Iran. A more craven act of submission would be hard to imagine; and they did this in the glow of victory, in direct contradiction of their mandate. What were they signing for? Sabotage, assassination, covert support for political clients and "destabilization" generally are predictable parts of such a design; but the Democrats, in the months between their capitulation and Hersh's article, made no mention of dissatisfactions at having been cut off from oversight. The truth seems to be that in this area, as in so many others, only the Office of the Vice President oversees the Office of the President. "The process is broken," one of Seymour Hersh's informants told him, "and this
is dangerous stuff we're authorizing." Yet the Democrats in the "Gang of Eight"
whom the president consults on classified programs -- Reid, Pelosi, Rockefeller,
Reyes -- may prefer to have things broken. What they don't know, can't hurt them
at the polls, or so they seem to believe. It is the same passive obedience that
led the Democrats to close the debate early for the authorization of the Iraq
war in 2002, so they could clear the decks for the election; to banish all use
of the words Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, in late 2004, so they could clear the
decks for the election; and to confine themselves to flawless platitudes about
Iraq in 2008, so they can clear the decks for the election. The desertion of
principle is exceeded only by the evasion of responsibility.

Still, what were they risking when they let the administration go ahead in Iran
without accountability? The answer was given by Secretary of Defense Gates when
he met with a group of Democrats late last year. Gates told the Democrats that
if the U.S. made a preemptive strike against Iran, "We'll create generations of
jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America."
Now, what Democrat, in 2007 or 2008, has spoken as if he heard that warning
from the Secretary of Defense?

To the extent that we have sidestepped a war with Iran, the notable resistance
has been mounted so far by persons within the armed forces like Admiral Mullen
and Admiral Fallon -- the latter of whom (according Hersh's informant) got along
fine with President Bush but crossed Vice President Cheney by wanting to know
about the secret operations officially under his command. Had Fallon consulted
the Democrats, they might have shown him how to hold onto his job by following
their pattern of uninformed consent.

The stifling of free discussion within Congress about the American provocations
in Iran, is both a cause and a symptom of the one-sidedness of the treatment of
the issue in the mainstream media. It is handled as if Iran's nuclear research
were the sole danger in the case; and as if it were a foregone conclusion that
in this matter, the fears of some Israelis are bound to be closer to the truth
than the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007.

Why has House Concurrent Resolution 362 -- a device promoted by AIPAC that commits
its supporters to press for a naval blockade of Iran, which would be an act of
war -- received so little public attention and debate? AIPAC has denied that a
blockade is intended, but the language of its resolution leaves no doubt; it
goes for "imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles,
ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting
the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating
the suspension of Iran's nuclear program." Nothing except a blockade could
possibly accomplish the enumerated tasks of interdiction and inspection.

The whole purpose of such a resolution is to herd the Democratic Congress into
the Office of the Vice President until the two spaces are indistinguishable. A
vote for the resolution amounts to a vow of silence regarding anything the U.S.
chooses to do against Iran. The vice president believed that he had war within
his grasp when an incident almost erupted in January 2007 between Iranian
patrol boats and American ships in the Strait of Hormuz. There were no cheers
of relief in the OVP when the navy stayed calm and the fever went down. A few
weeks later, Hersh reports, the vice president held a meeting. "The subject,"
said a former official of the administration, "was how to create a casus belli
between Tehran and Washington."

Vice President Cheney learned long ago that he can outplay the Democrats in the
game of power, because he is willing to use power. The Democrats, by contrast,
don't even want to be responsible for the power that they have. In early 2007,
when most voters believed the result of the 2006 election signified a policy of
withdrawal from Iraq, nobody was surer than Dick Cheney that a plan to withdraw
would never be brought forward. If the Democrats were serious, Cheney said,
they would vote against appropriations. He was right. They didn't have the
nerve, and they did not mean to withdraw. Instead, they rewarded the
administration, whose venality and recklessness were a matter of international
embarrassment, with an exorbitant donation of public money to subsidize new
acts of violence.

Thanks to Seymour Hersh's reporting, today they are under the glare of public
exposure; and, unlike the vice president, they can hardly invoke a new-model
interpretation of "inherent powers" or a "theory of the unitary executive" to
screen them from public questioning. Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, Harry Reid,
Sylvestre Reyes, John Murtha, David Obey and all the bewildered and negligent
Democrats (to say nothing of the Republicans, who claim nothing for themselves
but a perfect dependency on the president) -- all may fairly be asked if they are
happy with the Cheney-Bush secret operations in Iran. Are they even interested
in knowing what the operations are? They did not care much about oversight, but
now we are watching them.

[bigron]

July 1, 2008

Anti-Iran Arguments Belie Fearmongering
 
by Gareth Porter

New arguments by analysts close to Israeli thinking in favor of U.S. strikes against Iran cite evidence of Iranian military weakness in relation to the U.S. and Israel and even raise doubts that Iran is rushing to obtain such weapons at all.

The new arguments contradict Israel's official argument that it faces an "existential threat" from an Islamic extremist Iranian regime determined to get nuclear weapons. They suggest that Israel, which already has as many as 200 nuclear weapons, views Iran from the position of the dominant power in the region rather than as the weaker state in the relationship.

The existence of a sharp imbalance of power in favor of Israel and the United States is the main premise of a recent analysis by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) suggesting that a U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is feasible. Chuck Freilich, a senior fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center on Science and International Affairs, has also urged war against Iran on such a power imbalance.

All three have close ties to the Israeli government. WINEP has long promoted policies favored by Israel, and its founding director, Martin Indyk, was previously research director of the leading pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Freilich is a former Israeli deputy national security adviser.

These analysts, all of whom are pushing for a U.S., rather than an Israeli attack, argue that Iran's power to retaliate for a U.S. attack on its nuclear facilities is quite limited. Equally significant, they also emphasize that Iran is a rational actor that would have to count the high costs of retaliation. That conclusion stands in sharp contrast to the official Israeli line that Iran cannot be deterred because of its allegedly apocalyptic Islamic viewpoint on war with Israel.

Clawson summed up the argument for a U.S. attack from Iranian weakness in an interview with Ha'aretz. "My assessment," he said, "is that contrary to the impression that has been formed, Iran's options for responding are limited and weak."

Freilich made a similar point in an article in the Jerusalem Post last week. "Instead of unwarranted, self-deterring risk aversion," he wrote, "let us not forget who wields the incalculably greater 'stick': Iran certainly will not."

A paper by Clawson and Eisenstadt published by WINEP earlier this month not only acknowledges but bases its argument for aggressive war on the fact that Israel holds a decisive edge over Iran militarily. "A nuclear-armed Iran could dangerously alter the strategic balance in the region," write the WINEP authors, "handcuffing Israel's room to maneuver on the Palestinian and Lebanese fronts…."

The WINEP co-authors thus highlight the degree to which Israel now has virtually complete freedom to use military force in the region as long as it does not attack Iran directly. Israel's bombing and ground campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and its destruction of an unidentified target in Syria – an ally of Iran – last September, evidently to make the point that Israeli warplanes could also hit targets in Iran, demonstrate how Israel has been able to use air power at will without fear of an Iranian military response.

Israel has been accustomed to such an extreme disparity in military power for decades. Ray Close, who was CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia at the time, recalls that after the Yom Kippur war of 1973, the Israeli air force frequently made very low-level runs over Saudi airbases in northern Saudi Arabia. The Israeli warplanes would drop empty fuel tanks on the runways near Saudi fighter plains to remind the Saudis that they could have been just as easily dropping 500-pound bombs on the Saudi planes, according to Close.

Clawson and Eisenstadt conclude that a military strike against Iran by the United States could be successful, but they acknowledge that such a strike "might cause Iran's leadership to conclude that the country needed nuclear weapons to deter and defend against the United States."

The authors contradict the official Israeli position that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon, observing that the Iranian nuclear program has not actually been pursued with the urgency that has been publicly attributed to it by Israel and the United States. They write that Iran "has been engaged in less of a nuclear race than a nuclear saunter."

Contrary to the explicit anti-Israel objective attributed to the Iranian nuclear program by the Israeli government, moreover, they assess the motive of the Iranians as being "the desire for prestige and influence" – aspirations that could be fulfilled without having nuclear weapons, as other analysts have observed.

Clawson and Eisenstadt argue that Iranian threats of retaliation against a naval blockade should not be taken at face value, because Iran has demonstrated great caution in response to past attacks on its own population by foreign states.

They cite the U.S. shoot-down of an Iranian passenger airliner in 1988, when Iran threatened retaliation but agreed to a cease-fire with then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein out of fear of a U.S. entry into the Iran-Iraq war.

The pro-Israel analysts further minimize the threat that Hezbollah would unleash its thousands of rockets against cities in northern Israel, which has long been regarded by Israel as Iran's single most important deterrent to a U.S. attack on its nuclear program. In September 2006, after the Israeli war in Lebanon, Freilich wrote that Hezbollah's rocket arsenal had already "lost much of its deterrent value." The Israeli population, Freilich observed, had already borne the brunt of a Hezbollah rocket attack and had been "willing to pay the price."

Clawson and Eisenstadt suggest that the United States could reduce the likelihood of Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel in retaliation for an attack on its nuclear sites by "quietly indicating that, as in 2006, it would support a tough Israeli response to Hezbollah rocket attacks."

Clawson even contradicted the official Israeli and U.S. line that Hezbollah is simply a proxy of Iran, asserting in his interview with Ha'aretz that there is "no guarantee" Hezbollah's leaders would "react automatically" to a U.S. strike against Iran. Instead, he suggested, they would act on their own interests "as they understand them."

Hezbollah is "very aware of Israel's strength, and of the harsh reaction that may result if Hezbollah attacks," Clawson said.

As for the Iranian threat to attack U.S. naval targets or otherwise use its navy to stop shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Clawson and Eisenstadt express confidence that "the U.S. response would almost certainly cripple or destroy Iran's navy." They clearly imply that Iran would have to weigh its options for such retaliation against that loss.

Their argument that Iran is too militarily weak to mount a significant retaliation reflects expert opinion within Israel. In a paper for the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University last February, Ephraim Kam, widely regarded as the leading Israeli academic specialist on Iran, wrote, "Iran's retaliatory capability against Israel is yet limited."

In basing the case for aggressive war against Iran on the weakness of the target state rather than the threat of its military power and aggressiveness, the pro-Israeli analysts are following a familiar pattern in dominant power policymaking toward war on weaker states. The main argument made by advocates of U.S. air attacks against North Vietnam within the U.S. government in 1964 was that both North Vietnam and its ally China were too weak to credibly threaten an aggressive military response.


(Inter Press Service)
 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=13072 
 

[bigron]

July 1, 2008

Does Iran Have Bush Over a Barrel?
 
by Jim Lobe

If President George W. Bush wants to boost Republican chances of holding on to the White House and keeping Democratic gains in Congress to a minimum in the November elections, he might consider taking an attack on Iran before the end of his administration "off the table."

Of course, that's probably the last thing Bush – and his particularly belligerent vice president, Dick Cheney – will do.

But there's a little doubt that forswearing military action against Tehran should ease the upward pressure on world oil prices – which hit a historic high Monday of more than $143 per barrel before falling back to $140 – and thus offer at least some reprieve to the U.S. consumer at a time when record gasoline prices appear to be driving widespread popular dismay with the state of the U.S. economy.

"f this administration truly wanted to spare Americans further pain at the pump, there is one thing it could do that would have an immediate effect," wrote Michael Klare, author of a new book, Rising Power, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, in this week's Nation magazine. "[D]eclare that military force is not an acceptable option in the struggle with Iran."

While oil analysts say that prospects of a continuing decline in the dollar no doubt played an important role in Monday's price jump, they also pointed to this weekend's pointed reaction by the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Gen. Mohammed Ali Jafari, to recent U.S. and Israeli threats to attack Tehran's nuclear facilities, as well as his assessment that those threats should be taken seriously, as a major factor.

In addition to retaliating against any regional powers, presumably including Israel, which take part in such an attack, Jafari warned that Tehran would "definitely act to impose control on the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz," after which, he added, "the oil price will rise very considerably, and this is among the factors deterring the enemies."

Indeed, even without an attack, continuing tension involving Iran's nuclear program will almost certainly contribute to a continued rise in oil prices to as high as $170 a barrel in the coming weeks and months, OPEC's president, Chakib Khelil, said during a conference in Madrid.

World oil prices have risen by nearly 50 percent since the beginning of 2008 and nearly doubled over the past year. Analysts have argued over how much of that increase is due to structural factors in the world economy – such as growing demand in middle-income countries and the depreciating dollar that would tend to make the price increase permanent – and how much is related to worries about possible supply disruptions arising from the kind of conflict that has plagued the Niger Delta region in Nigeria, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda in the Gulf, economic or other sanctions against key oil producers, or war.

The latter risk factors, according to some analysts, could account for as much as $50 of the total current price, although most believe that the figure is about half that.

How much is due to the uncertainty about Iran is also a matter of considerable debate. Many point to the unprecedented $11 one-day spike in oil prices – from $128 to $139 a barrel – that took place June 6 after Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz warned that an Israeli attack on Tehran's nuclear facilities was "unavoidable" if international pressure did not succeed in persuading it to freeze its uranium enrichment program.

While that incident offered the most spectacular suggestion of a relationship between threats against Iran and the price of oil, most analysts believe the effect is somewhat more modest, albeit still quite real.

"I don't think it would be unreasonable to say it could be a few dollars [out of the current $140 a barrel]," Paul Saunders, an energy expert who directs the Nixon Center, told IPS.

And in congressional testimony just last week, Daniel Yergin, a longtime analyst and historian of the oil industry, observed, "You see the Iranians make a … bellicose statement, and you see the price of oil go up five or seven dollars."

That is not a new pattern, according to Klare, who said the possibility of a $100-a-barrel price first loomed nearly two years ago amid speculation during the July-August war between Israel and Hezbollah that the conflict could spread to Iran. At that time, the price hovered around $75 a barrel before falling back to just over $50 a barrel in early 2007, its lowest point in the last 18 months.

Even though the price retreated after Mofaz's remarks, events of the past 10 days have helped drive up the price to historic levels. These include the publication of a front-page New York Times article about a massive Israeli air exercise that purportedly simulated an attack on Iran, and a New Yorker article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh about a $400 million covert action program directed against Tehran; and public warnings by U.S. hawks close to Cheney's office that either the Israelis or the U.S. would attack Iran between the November elections and the inaugural of a new president in January 2009; as well as Jafari's weekend remarks.

Klare believes that the oil markets believe "there's at least a 50-percent chance that the U.S. and/or Israel will attack Iran before Bush leaves office and that Iran will retaliate [in ways] … that would push oil prices to $200 a barrel and above" which is why speculators are buying oil futures now at $140 and even $150 a barrel.

"The run-up in the price today will only encourage more speculators to get into the act, unless the administration makes clear it has no intention of attacking Iran and will force Israel to make a similar declaration, neither of which is likely to occur," he told IPS.

Meanwhile, the voting public is clearly worried about where oil prices are going. Seven out of 10 people told a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last week that their families had suffered "financial hardship" as a result of the price increases, and more than eight in 10 blamed the administration for "not [having] done enough" to ease the impact.

According to a Pew Research Center poll taken earlier in June, three of four voters believe gas prices will be "very important" in deciding who to vote for – a larger percentage than those who cite terrorism or the Iraq war. By margins of nearly 20 percent, those same voters said they had more confidence in Democrats and Sen. Barack Obama than they did in Republicans and Sen. John McCain to deal with the issue.

That's one reason why most analysts rate the chances of an attack by either country before the election as quite low. Others accept Jafari's logic that the likely impact on oil prices before or after the elections make an attack improbable.

"I think one of the things that makes [an attack] a lot less likely is what it will actually do to the oil price," said the Nixon Center's Saunders.


(Inter Press Service)
 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=13074 
 

[bigron]

Pentagon Official Warns of Israeli Attack on Iran

U.S. Offical Sees Two 'Red Lines' That Could Prompt Strike


BY JONATHAN KARL
WASHINGTON, June 30, 2008—
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/US/story?id=5281043&page=1


Senior Pentagon officials are concerned that Israel could carry out an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities before the end of the year, an action that would have enormous security and economic repercussions for the United States and the rest of the world.

A senior defense official told ABC News there is an "increasing likelihood" that Israel will carry out such an attack, a move that likely would prompt Iranian retaliation against, not just Israel, but against the United States as well.

The official identified two "red lines" that could trigger an Israeli offensive. The first is tied to when Iran's Natanz nuclear facility produces enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon. According to the latest U.S. and Israeli intelligence assessments, that is likely to happen sometime in 2009, and could happen by the end of this year.

"The red line is not when they get to that point, but before they get to that point," the official said. "We are in the window of vulnerability."

The second red line is connected to when Iran acquires the SA-20 air defense system it is buying from Russia. The Israelis may want to strike before that system -- which would make an attack much more difficult -- is put in place.

Some Pentagon officials also worry that Israel may be determined to attack before a new U.S. president, who may be less supportive, is sworn in next January.

Pentagon officials believe the massive Israeli air force exercise in early June, first reported by the New York Times, was done to prepare for a possible attack. A senior official called it "not a rehearsal, but basic, fundamental training" required to launch an operation against Iran.

"The Israeli air force has already conducted the basic exercise necessary to tell their senior leadership, 'We have the fundamentals down.' Might they need some more training and rehearsals? Yes. But have they done the fundamentals? I think that is what we saw," the official told ABC News, adding that if Israel moves closer to military action, he expects to see more exercises like the one conducted in early June.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was in Israel over the weekend for a series of meetings with senior Israeli military officials, including, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to a military spokesman, Iran's nuclear program was "a major topic" of discussion.

The widely held view among Pentagon officials is that an Israeli attack would do only temporary damage to Iran's nuclear program, and that it would cause major problems in the region and beyond, prompting a wave of attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.

As another senior defense official put it, "We'd be guilty by association."


Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

[bigron]

US ‘won't allow' Iran to shut key Gulf oil route

30 June 2008   

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/darticlen.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2008/June/middleeast_June701.xml&section=middleeast&col=


MANAMA - The commander of the US navy's Fifth Fleet warned on Monday that the United States will not allow Iran to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf sea lane through which much of the world's oil is supplied.

"They will not close it... They will not be allowed to close it," Vice-Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff told a press conference in Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet is based.

His remarks followed comments by the chief of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, who issued a new warning last week against any attack against his country over its controversial nuclear drive.

"It is natural that when a country is attacked it uses all of its capabilities against the enemy, and definitely our control of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would be one of our actions," Jafari said.

The strait between Iran and Oman is a vital conduit for energy supplies, with as much as 40 percent of the world's crude passing through the waterway from Gulf suppliers.

"Certainly if there is fighting... the scope will be extended to oil, meaning its price will increase drastically. This will deter our enemies from taking action against Iran," Jafari said.

Cosgriff said: "The latest Iranian statements are not helpful."

He insisted that that the international community will work to protect navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, adding that any action by Iran "will not be an action against the United States but against the international community".

According to news reports, more than 100 Israeli warplanes staged a training exercise with Greece earlier this month to prepare for a possible long-distance strike and as a warning to Tehran.

But Cosgriff said he did not see "any reason for Israel to strike Iran" in the short term.

Iran has been slapped with three sets of UN sanctions over its defiance of Security Council ultimatums to suspend uranium enrichment, the process which produces nuclear fuel for civilian reactors but in highly extended form can also make the fissile core for an atomic bomb.

Iran insists its nuclear ambitions extend only to generating electricity for a growing population but both Israel and the United States suspect it of trying to develop a bomb.

There have been several confrontations between Iranian and US vessels in the Gulf this year.

Iran, the OPEC oil cartel's number two producer, has said that using oil as weapon is not on its agenda -- but has also not ruled it out.

A former head of Israel's Mossad foreign intelligence agency, Shabtai Shavit, said in comments published on Sunday that the Jewish state had one year to destroy Iran's nuclear programme or face the risk of coming under nuclear attack.

Israel has the Middle East's sole if undeclared nuclear arsenal.

 

 
 

[bigron]

The identity of Israel’s post-Olmert prime minister will determine its war options on Iran

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=5397

July 1, 2008, 1:30 PM (GMT+02:00)

According to DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources, the overriding considerations that will determine if and when Israel attacks Iran are these: whether to strike before George W. Bush’s exit, whether Iran’s strategic ties with Syria and the Palestinian Hamas can be severed in advance and what prime minister is chosen to manage the war.

These are the determinants, rather than “the red lines” cited by senior Pentagon officials to ABC News Monday as triggers for an Israeli offensive, namely when Natanz nuclear facility produces enough weapons-grade uranium – some time in 2009 or this year - and when Iran acquires SA-20 air defense systems from Russia

DEBKAfile quotes intelligence sources as negating those triggers:

1. Contrary to most reports, including those put out by Teheran, Iran is lagging behind its target date for producing a sufficiency of weapons-grade uranium. It is held up by the technical hitches dogging the smooth, continuous activation of its high-grade centrifuges.

2. Moscow has suspended all sales of sophisticated air defense systems to Iran and Syria alike – so that Israel has no cause for haste on that score.

3. That Iran is heading for a nuclear weapon is no longer in doubt. What Israel must decide very soon is whether to strike Iran’s production facilities before Bush leaves the White or wait for his successor to move in, in 2009.

There is a preference in Jerusalem for a date straight after the America’s November 4 presidential election - except that military experts warn that weather and lunar conditions at that time of the year are unfavorable.

If Israel does opt for an attack, August and September would be better, they say - or else hold off until March-April 2009.

Israel’s political volatility is another major factor in the uncertainty surrounding an attack. Towards the end of September, the ruling Kadima party is committed to a leadership primary. The party’s choice of prime minister and the factors that determine how he (or she) reaches a decision on attacking Iran can only be guessed at.

4. A final consideration must be Israel’s ability to prevent Syria and Hamas opening war fronts at the time of Israel’s attack on Iran. In other words, the IDF needs to know it must contend with two fronts, Iran and the Lebanese Hizballah, not four.

Notwithstanding these major deterrents, the weight of opinion in Israel’s decision-making community at this time is in favor of an early military strike. There is an international consensus that Iran cannot be allowed to attain a nuclear bomb, but no sanctions or incentives are proving effective as preventatives. Therefore, it is felt, the sooner Israel pre-empts a nuclear-armed Iran, the better, because the longer it delays, the more dangerous the Islamic Republic’s retaliatory capabilities will become.


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