Bush 'plans Iran air strike by August'

[Steve Gardner]

This article offers a mix of hope and fear.

Fear because, whilst it's been clear for a long time that these insane, megalomaniacal, war-mongering arseholes will stop at nothing to attack Iran, their threats have always been just threats. Now we have alleged 'inside' information that suggests these threats are time-bound.

Hope, because it hints at the possibility that there might actually be some resistance from those bodies established to provide the requisite checks and balances hitherto so obviously missing from American politics.

Source: Asia Times

NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.

The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC's elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds' stated mission is to spread Iran's revolution of 1979 throughout the region.

[SNIP]

The source said the White House views the proposed air strike as a limited action to punish Iran for its involvement in Iraq. The source, an ambassador during the administration of president H W Bush, did not provide details on the types of weapons to be used in the attack, nor on the precise stage of planning at this time. It is not known whether the White House has already consulted with allies about the air strike, or if it plans to do so.

[teddy]

I'm convinced there will be a strike, just in time to boost support for Mccain's election bid. Will it be one step too far? I think it will be very easy to demonstrate to people just how wrong this would be. We have all the evidence that the Iraq invasion was illegal and based on contrived intelligence. Now with Iran we have all the evidence we need to demonstrate that they do not pose any threat. People might just wake up.

[Steve Gardner]

May 28, 2008 5:43:56 GMT teddy said:

People might just wake up.

This is what I'm hoping for but - I don't how you're finding things elsewhere - so many people I come across are starting to fall for the propaganda again hook, line and sinker.

It's a prime example of doublethink, where the lies that took us into Iraq are recognised when talking about Iraq but somehow forgotten when talking about Iran.

And, more broadly, I find myself horribly outnumbered when I talk about things like the way our freedoms are being torn down.

I started a thread recently in another forum about a new helicopter in the skies above New York, which is equipped with cameras enabling it to 'see-but-not-be-seen" - a characteristic that was promoted as a good thing in the fight against terrorism. This thing is kitted out with some $10M of kit, enabling it to see faces and numberplates on the streets in realtime and provide video feed to the NYPD.

Now, on its own, maybe no big deal. But I used it as the catalyst for a debate about the creeping nature of government surveillance. I used the boiling frog analogy and referred to all the other measures that have been implemented - whether legally or not - or are being considered, including a chip implant to track our minute-by-minute whereabouts.

You can guess the tone of the replies, can't you?

"It makes me feel safe." "If you've done nothing wrong, you needn't worry."

Their views generally stem from an unshakable trust of authority - in other words, "doublethink". Orwell was so on the money, it's scary.

[Steve Gardner]

Here's a neat short video showing some of the parallels between the lead-up to the war with Iraq and the ratcheting-up of tensions with Iran.

Description from Google Video

Open Letter: foxattacks.com/iran Sign the open letter to the major television networks urging them to NOT follow FOX's lead to another war. The video shows the evidence of how they are repeating the same distortions and fear mongering they did before the Iraq war.

[teddy]

People I've been in contact with are now more aware - at first maybe they did'n't believe me that 9/11 was an inside job, and maybe still don't, but the other inconsistencies such as the Iraq war are just too much to ignore. Nevertheless, there's only so many people one person can effect, and so you're probably right that most will believe it hook, line and sinker. The tendancy seems to be to trust authority. I have learned that in fact, authority is the last entity to trust.

[Steve Gardner]

I tell you something I have used from time to time - the testimony you posted of William Schaap before the Martin Luther King trial.

He offers an insight not only into the fact that governments use the media to spread disinformation but, as you know, also expains a little about how and why it works.

It hasn't pursuaded anyone necessarily, but it has forced some to concede that government's are not above this type of manipulation.

That said, it doesn't tend to change their minds about the current campaign against Iran. Which is interesting, because that's pretty much what Schaap says - that even when faced with the truth, they will still find some way to reject it.

[teddy]

So what made us make that leap? Without wishing to blow our own trumpets, I guess at some point the number of inconsistencies were so great that we had to re-evaluate our position. Myself, I can actually remember rejecting information that did not back up my then-belief that we had the moral high-ground. Why can't other people make that leap? I think in many cases it's because people are just too busy with their daily lives and making that leap requires a certain amount of inquisitiveness and dedication.

[Steve Gardner]

May 30, 2008 21:01:53 GMT teddy said:

So what made us make that leap?

This is a good question. Having made that 'leap', I can no longer perceive the world I once believed in. My entire philosophy has changed.

I remember the first time someone told me they thought 9/11 was an inside job. I was in an AOL chat room in November 2001. Naturally, bin Laden and al Qaeda were on everyone's virtual 'lips'. And this one lone 'voice' popped up suggesting the US government was involved.

They were torn a new arsehole.

But, they linked to a site I remember well. It was called Hunt the Boeing. It's no longer available at its original home but you can see the material here, though not particularly well presented.

It doesn't matter now whether that site can be debunked or not - it was enough to get me curious. And, as you say, there is just an overwhelming number of inconsitencies surrounding the 'official' version of events, it simply cannot be true.

Then, take a little tour of history and, for me, the whole thing was like a revelation. When you look at past actions, past crimes, and the geopolitcal forces that have been and are at work, it's easy to see 9/11 in context, not as a standalone event, but as one major event in an ongoing programme.

Anyway, thought you'd like these. Four clips showing an interview given by Scott McClellan - Bush's former Press Secretary - to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. McClellan has just published a book, so his words needs to be seen in that context, but they are nonetheless pretty damning overall.

There are times when I think he's trying to portray Bush in a favourable light - which made me question what was really going on with this book - but then he makes some comments that leave you aghast, like at the very end of the first segment.

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[teddy]

I think McClellan is giving an apologetic version of events - i.e. we meant good, but it didn't go to plan, and some mistakes were made. I wouldn't give this story too much importance - it tells us what we already know, but waters it down for mainstream media consumption.

About the leap in belief, I think you're right. Looking at history really made a difference for me.

[Steve Gardner]

Here's another really interesting piece from Asia Times.

If its sources are reliable, it includes clear evidence that Brzezinski was right when he argued last February that the US would lure Iran into a military engagement through provocation and/or a false flag attack.

Take the following extract, for example.

Pentagon civilian and military opposition to such a strategic attack on Iran had become well-known during 2007. But this is the first evidence from an insider that Cheney's proposal was perceived as a ploy to provoke Iranian retaliation that could used to justify a strategic attack on Iran.

Anyone familiar with the Northwoods Document will recognise the concept of a plan designed to 'justify a strategic attack'.

Source: Asia Times

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official.

J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.

McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposal several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran", citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think-tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation for such an attack. Carpenter said the DoD officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about how far the administration would go - what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks".

The question of escalation posed by DoD officials involved not only the potential of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but possible responses by Hezbollah and by Iran itself across the Middle East.

Carpenter suggested that DoD officials were shifting the debate on a limited strike from the Iraq-based rationale, which they were not contesting, to the much bigger issue of the threat of escalation to full-scale war with Iran, knowing that it would be politically easier to thwart the proposal on that basis.

The former State Department official said DoD "knew that it would be difficult to get interagency consensus on that question".

The Joint Chiefs were fully supportive of the position taken by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the Cheney proposal, according to Carpenter. "It's clear that the military leadership was being very conservative on this issue," he said.

At least some DoD and military officials suggested that Iran had more and better options for hitting back at the United States than the United States had for hitting Iran, according to one former Bush administration insider.

Former Bush speechwriter and senior policy adviser Michael Gerson, who had left the administration in 2006, wrote a column in the Washington Post on July 20, 2007, in which he gave no hint of Cheney's proposal, but referred to "options" for striking Iranian targets based on the Cheney line that Iran "smuggles in the advanced explosive devices that kill and maim American soldiers".

Gerson cited two possibilities: "Engaging in hot pursuit against weapon supply lines over the Iranian border or striking explosives factories and staging areas within Iran." But the Pentagon and the military leadership were opposing such options, he reported, because of the fear that Iran has "escalation dominance" in its conflict with the United States.

That meant, according to Gerson that, "in a broadened conflict, the Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than we complicate theirs".

Carpenter's account of the Pentagon's position on the Cheney proposal suggests, however, that civilian and military opponents were saying that Iran's ability to escalate posed the question of whether the United States was going to go to a full-scale air war against Iran.

Pentagon civilian and military opposition to such a strategic attack on Iran had become well-known during 2007. But this is the first evidence from an insider that Cheney's proposal was perceived as a ploy to provoke Iranian retaliation that could used to justify a strategic attack on Iran.

The option of attacking nuclear sites had been raised by Bush with the Joint Chiefs at a meeting in "the tank" at the Pentagon on December 13, 2006, and had been opposed by the Joint Chiefs, according to a report by Time magazine's Joe Klein last June.

After he become head of the Central Command (Centcom) in March 2007, Admiral William Fallon also made his opposition to such a massive attack on Iran known to the White House, according Middle East specialist Hillary Mann, who had developed close working relationships with Pentagon officials when she worked on the National Security Council staff.

It appeared in early 2007, therefore, that a strike at Iran's nuclear program and military power had been blocked by opposition from the Pentagon. Cheney's proposal for an attack on IRGC bases in June 2007, tied to the alleged Iranian role in providing both weapons - especially the highly lethal explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) - and training to Shi'ite militias appears to have been a strategy for getting around the firm resistance of military leaders to such an unprovoked attack.

Although the Pentagon bottled up the Cheney proposal in inter-agency discussions, Cheney had a strategic asset which could he could use to try to overcome that obstacle: his alliance with General David Petraeus.

As Inter Press Service reported earlier last week, Cheney had already used Petraeus' takeover as the top commander of US forces in Iraq in early February 2007 to do an end run about the Washington national security bureaucracy to establish the propaganda line that Iran was manufacturing EFPs and shipping them to the Mahdi Army militiamen.

Petraeus was also a supporter of Cheney's proposal for striking IRGC targets in Iran, going so far as to hint in an interview with Fox News last September that he had passed on to the White House his desire to do something about alleged Iranian assistance to Shi'ites that would require US forces beyond his control.

At that point, Fallon was in a position to deter any effort to go around DoD and military opposition to such a strike because he controlled all military access to the region as a whole. But Fallon's forced resignation in March and the subsequent promotion of Petraeus to become Centcom chief later this year gives Cheney a possible option to ignore the position of his opponents in Washington once more in the final months of the administration.