The Straits of Hormuz seem to be warming - due to Geoplolitical Games and Brinkmanship

[Ed Jewett]

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[TD="class: contentheading"]Super Savage Sunday: Obama Tightens the Screws on Iran[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"]WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD [/TD]
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[TD="class: createdate, colspan: 2"]TUESDAY, 07 FEBRUARY 2012 00:51[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"]Arthur Silber follows up the post we linked to yesterday with some more specifics on how an effective campaign against the war with Iran might look: "The First Ad: Who Are the Nazis Now?" Ads like these would be a devastating Zen slap in the head to the stunted American consciousness. Get on over there and read it now.

Meanwhile, the Peace Laureate is tightening the screws on Iran even further. Barack Obama took a few minutes away from the big game on Super Bowl Sunday and imposed still more sanctions on Tehran -- to punish them for legally pursuing a peaceful nuclear energy program under close international supervision. (The pure, unmitigated evil of these Persians, eh?)

Again, it must be stressed that not a single government in the world -- including Israel -- believes that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. Not one. No one is making that claim. In fact, leading figures in both the United States and Israel have made it very plain in recent weeks that they do not believe Iran is building a nuclear weapon. There is no Iranian nuclear weapons program. It does not exist. And yet these same leaders, at the same time, tell us that we must put more and more pressure on Iran -- we must assassinate its scientists, we must carry out covert ops inside its territory, we must surround it with bristling military bases, we must belly up to its shores with vast fleets, we must fill its skies with spy drones, and we must drive its ordinary citizens into ruin and suffering with an ever-increasing array of sanctions -- in order to .... what, exactly?

Again, let's make it clear, in great block letters ten feet high and five feet wide: the elites pushing us rapidly toward war do not believe Iran is building a nuclear bomb. What's more, they would not feel threatened if Iran did have a bomb. There is only one thing they want: regime change in Tehran. And there is only reason they want it: domination of strategic oil lands of the Middle East. They certainly aren't concerned about the actual nature of the Tehran regime -- which is far less repressive than the West's beloved extremists in Saudi Arabia -- nor are they concerned in the slightest about the Iranian people. The sanctions themselves prove that.

Wise man William Blum is also on the case in his latest Anti-Empire Report:
[Last month] we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that "three leading Israeli security experts the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel."

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:
Question: Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now ... in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.
Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. ... There are "certain things [the Iranians] have not done" that would be necessary to build a warhead.
But as Blum notes, these statements are "never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all." Instead, the fierce watchdogs of the American media are more than happy to shape their stories in the service of the greater cause of warmongering -- even though, again, our elites know full well that the "Iranian bomb" is an empty threat:
On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: "But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that's what concerns us." Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No ..." 5

One of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:
Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?

Van Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I've researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn't deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they're the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. ... We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons ... thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany."
And so the beat goes on. Ordinary Iranians are going hungry, getting poorer, having their futures destroyed for the sole purpose of augmenting the wealth and power and privilege of our American elites and their colonial outriders. And if this domination is not handed to them on a platter by the current Iranian regime, our elites are quite happy to kill countless thousands of innocent people to get it.

That's the reality. That's the world you're living in. Do you like it? No? Then change it.
29 Comments and 12 Reactions
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[TD="class: contentheading"]Runaway Train: Stop the War Against Iran -- Now[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"]WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD [/TD]
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[TD="class: createdate, colspan: 2"]MONDAY, 06 FEBRUARY 2012 00:20[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"]Almost every day brings some new barrage of fear-mongering lies and vaporous accusations from leading members of the Obama Administration and other nabobs at the top of the political-media elite, all of them aimed relentlessly at one goal: justifying military action against Iran.

It is an almost exact replay of what we saw in 2002-2003 during the build-up to the war of aggression against Iraq with one significant exception. The "progressive" opposition to the baseless warmongering is virtually non-existent this time around because the warmonger-in-chief is their own champion, their partisan standard-bearer. Many voices that hurled thunderous denunciations at the Bush Regime for its brazen manipulations toward a baseless and unjustified war are now silent that is, if they are not actively supporting the increasingly rabid saber-rattling by the Peace Laureate. To them, Obama's re-election is more important than anything on earth: certainly more important than the thousands (or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of innocent people who will die in the long-running, far-reverberating hellstorm that an attack on Iran will create.

So now there is even less resistance to the fever-stoking against Iran. Yet what is playing out before our eyes is even more brazen than the build-up to the war crime against Iraq. Right now, in real time, in real life, the Obama administration and its allies in warmongering are telling the American people, over and over, that Iran is preparing terrorist strikes in the United States, that Iran is joining hands with Al Qaeda, that Iran is killing American soldiers in Afghanistan (just as they did in Iraq), that Iran is building long-range missiles that launch their nearly-completed nuclear weapons straight into the Heartland. The Obama administration is carefully and deliberately and knowingly building up the Iranian "threat" to such monstrous heights that it will be impossible to back down: Tehran terrorists striking in the Homeland with Al Qaeda while they ready their nukes to destroy America we're supposed to negotiate with such monsters? There is only one way to save our sweet little children from nuclear obliteration strike the Persian aggressors before they kill us! It's a plain case of self-defense.

There is of course absolutely no substance to any of this. There is no substance to the claim that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. And there would be no "threat" to the United States if they did build one. (And no threat to Israel either, which is sitting there with its vast nuclear arsenal, fully able right now, in real time, in real life to "wipe Iran from the map" at the push of a button.) The only "threat" Iran poses with or without nuclear weapons is to the domination of the Middle East and its oil wealth by the American elite and its international partners.

Yet here we are, genuinely on the brink of another war a war which will make the mass-murdering, $3 trillion FUBAR in Iraq and Afghanistan look like the Summer of Love. Yet the "professional Left" is bending all its might to re-elect the perpetrator behind this Bush-like push for aggressive war. (And of course the professional Right is fully on board.) Can anything stop this runaway train?

In his latest post, Arthur Silber lays out a number of practical, effective steps that can be taken today to bring the danger of this lunatic course to public consciousness. They are there if anyone wants to take them up especially those in the "dissident" world who already have a broad media platform, and could leverage that position to force this issue to the forefront.

Will anyone do it? Like Silber, I have my doubts. But the alternative is a numb acquiescence to an enormous evil being prepared right in front of us. If it happens, no one can say that they didn't see it coming. When the thousands lie dying and the world grows darker, the only question will be this: Did you try to stop it, or not?
10 Comments and 17 Reactions
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