Endgaming Iran
Mike Whitney
Counterpunch
June 1, 2008

[T]he Pentagon is anticipating a "Serbia-type" attack which will target major industry, oil production and civilian infrastructure. This strategy has been described in great detail by author John Pilger in his article, “Calling Kosovo Humanitarians to Account” [in Antiwar.com.

Pilger states: "NATO's civilian targets included public transport, hospitals, schools, museums, churches. ..bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons and market places."

Citing the goal of opening the region to a "free-market economy", Pilger notes how NATO intentionally targeted state owned businesses to bring Kosovo into the global economic paradigm and remove any stain of its socialist past.

Pilger says: "In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state-owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. NATO's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centers of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed."

We expect that the same basic strategy will be applied to Iran although it will be predictably papered-over in the media.  Read More.

House Resolution 362 Calls for a Full Blockade of Iran
June 20, 2008

Over the last four weeks, close to half of the House have agreed to cosponsor a bill that demands that President Bush “initiate an international effort” to impose a land, sea, and air blockade by “prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products,” and by “imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran...”

Such a blockade—similar to that passed against Japan just before Pearl Harbor—would undoubtedly be considered an act of war by Iran.

Contact Just Foreign Policy to send a letter to your Representative, registering your opposition to such an ominous resolution.

Myth Of US Invincibility
Floats In The Persian Gulf
Mark H. Gaffney
rense.com
April 16, 2005

[During the summer of 2002, the US military staged the most elaborate and expensive war games ever conceived, called Operation Millennium Challenge. The enemy forces were designated "Force Red," under the command of Lt. General Paul Van Riper.]

Astutely and very covertly, Van Riper armed his civilian marine craft and deployed them near the US fleet, which never expected an attack from small pleasure boats. Faced with a blunt US ultimatum to surrender, Force Red suddenly went on the offensive: and achieved complete tactical surprise. Force Red's prop-driven aircraft suddenly were swarming around the US warships, making Kamikaze dives. Some of the pleasure boats made suicide attacks. Others fired Silkworm cruise missiles from close range, and sunk a carrier, the largest ship in the US fleet, along with two helicopter-carriers loaded with marines. The sudden strike was reminiscent of the Al Qaeda sneak attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Yet, the Navy was unprepared. When it was over, most of the US fleet had been destroyed. Sixteen US warships lay on the bottom, and the rest were in disarray. Thousands of American sailors were dead, dying, or wounded.

If the games had been real, it would have been the worst US naval defeat since Pearl Harbor. Read more.

Bush's 9/11 Reichstag Fire
Harvey Wasserman
Common Dreams
September 13, 2002

[In a prescient article, written 7 months before the start of the Iraq War, Wasserman observed:]

When Hitler was rising to power in 1930s Germany, somebody did him the favor of burning the Reichstag, the German Parliament. It's widely believed the Nazis torched it themselves.

Hitler's cynical minions turned that fire into a horrific wave of terror. They blamed "the communists" and the Jews, the trade unionists and the homosexuals. With the support of a terrified populace, they suspended civil rights and civil liberties, fattened their war machine and rode the fascist tide into a full-blown dictatorship. The rest, as they say, is history.

The neverending White House-sponsored orgy of 9/11 rhetoric, recrimination and retaliation has become a treacherous parallel. Few Americans believe the Bush Administration itself brought down the World Trade Center last year. But the conviction is widespread throughout Europe and the Muslim world, and for good reason.

This unelected regime---Hitler also came to power with a minority of votes---has used the terrible tragedies of September 11 in much the way the Nazis jumped on the Reichstag fire. Bush has failed to capture or try 9/11's alleged perpetrators. But he's used the tragedy to push an extreme rightist agenda aimed at crushing civil liberties, silencing all opposition, fattening a war machine, and arrogating the right to unilaterally attack other countries without tangible provocation…

Indeed, while professing staunch hatred of Big Government, so-called Patriotic conservatives have trashed virtually every guarantee of individual freedom on which American greatness has been built…

Because these absolute powers are now being used primarily against people of color, most Americans think these new power won't affect them. But as in Germany, it's only a matter of time before everyone and anyone is intimidated, and everyone and anyone is subject to official attack… Read More

The Brownshirting of America
Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch
October 15, 2004

Bush's conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.

I remember when conservatives favored restraint in foreign policy and wished to limit government power in order to protect civil liberties. Today's young conservatives are Jacobins determined to use government power to impose their will at home and abroad…

Talk radio's "news stories" do not need to be true. Their importance lies in inflaming resentments and confirming that America's implacable enemies are working resolutely to destroy us...

Truth and falsity are out of the picture; the criteria are: who's good, who's evil, who's patriotic, who's unpatriotic.

These are the traits of brownshirts. Brownshirts know they are right. They know their opponents are wrong and regard them as enemies who must be silenced…

The media… has been concentrated in few hands, and they are not the hands of newsmen. Corporate values rule. If lies sell, sell them. If listeners, viewers, and readers want confirmation of their resentments and beliefs, give it to them. Objectivity turns listeners off and is a money loser... Read more. 

The age of anxiety
Richard Sennett
The Guardian
October 23, 2004

Hard fascism rams home to the citizen that he or she is held in that iron grip, as in Mussolini's theatre of force or George Orwell's nightmare Nineteen Eighty-four. Soft fascism is not so much a velvet glove as an invisible hand, the operations of control hidden from scrutiny as Patriot Act II, and more, internal repression presented to the public as merely preventive action against threats that have yet to materialize. The Bush administration acted in this preventive way, for instance, by shutting three of the larger Muslim charities in America, not for anything they had done, but for what might happen, some time, somewhere. In hard fascism the state exploits concrete fear, in soft fascism the state exploits diffuse anxiety…

Reality TV and its like have made invasion of privacy into popular entertainment. The pleasure of stripping away privacy fits into an economy where high-tech firms such as Oracle make large profits from developing personal data bases, listening devices, and auditing software for business. Government destruction of private rights thus become "naturalized": the public already enjoys the act of stripping people naked, and this intrusion is just an extension of how business gets done in the computer age… Read more.

The Reality of Red-State Fascism
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
LewRockwell.com
December 31, 2004

The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream punditry, and hence there have been few attempts to explain it – much less have libertarians thought much about what it implies. My own take is this: the Republican takeover of the presidency combined with an unrelenting state of war, has supplied all the levers necessary to convert a burgeoning libertarian movement into a statist one.

The remaining ideological justification was left to, and accomplished by, Washington's kept think tanks, who have approved the turn at every crucial step. What this implies for libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear separation between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It also requires that we face the reality of the current threat forthrightly by extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward and less rightward. Read More.

Will the US launch "Mini-nukes" against Iran in Retaliation for Tehran's "Non-compliance"?
Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
February 22, 2006

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of radioactive fallout, over a large part of the Middle East.

All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as "a weapon of last resort" have been scrapped. "Offensive" military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of "self-defense".

The distinction between tactical nuclear weapons and the conventional battlefield arsenal has been blurred. America's new nuclear doctrine is based on "a mix of strike capabilities". The latter, which specifically applies to the Pentagon's planned aerial bombing of Iran, envisages the use of nukes in combination with conventional weapons…

Military planning focuses on "the most efficient use of force" , -i.e. an optimal arrangement of different weapons systems to achieve stated military goals. In this context, nuclear and conventional weapons are considered to be "part of the tool box", from which military commanders can pick and choose the instruments that they require in accordance with "evolving circumstances" in the war theater. (None of these weapons in the Pentagon's "tool box", including conventional bunker buster bombs, cluster bombs, mini-nukes, chemical and biological weapons are described as "weapons of mass destruction" when used by the United States of America and its coalition partners)… Read more.

Bush's Armageddon Wish
Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch
June 12, 2006

Just as the Bush Regime planned to attack Iraq and then orchestrated a case based on lies, the Bush Regime has already planned to attack Iran. Only this time nuclear weapons will be used.

Nuking Iran is an essential part of the attack plan. The US lacks the necessary conventional military force to invade and occupy Iran, but the use of nuclear weapons against Iran has a wider purpose. The neocons are determined not to have any more embarrassments, such as the Iraqi insurgency. By nuking Iran they intend to send a wider message that the US will use every means at its disposal to ensure its hegemony. The neocons believe that the use of nukes will convince Arabs and the wider world that there is no recourse to accepting America's will.

The neoconservatives could not care less about public opinion. Neocons are contemptuous of the American people. Leo Strauss taught neocons that it was their duty to deceive the clueless American people in order to implement their agenda of global domination. The neocons believe that they have a perfect right, even the obligation, to manipulate the public through propaganda and black ops in order to create acceptance and support for their wars of aggression.

The neocons are the epitome of evil, and they have succumbed to hubris. Like Hitler when he attacked the Soviet Union, neocons believe that their manipulative skills and use of military power will carry the day for their agenda. Hitler's hubris doomed Germany to destruction. What price will America pay for neocon hubris?

When the neocon Nazis nuke Iran it will revive memories in Japan and break the US-Japanese alliance. Japan owns enough US Treasury bonds to be able to destroy both the US dollar and the market for Washington's endless red ink. Russia, China, India, and even our European lackeys will have it forcefully brought home to them that the US is an out-of-control rogue nation. They will unify against us. Most likely our bought and paid for puppets in the Middle East will fall, and Islamic leaders will gain Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Al Qaeda will gain tens of millions of recruits.

Francis Fukuyama's phrase, "the end of history" takes on new meaning. Read more.

Behind Bush's "New Way Forward"
Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com
Dec. 20, 2006

[For Bush] The contest in Iraq is a struggle between will and doubt. Every day his defiance proves his superiority over lesser mortals. Even the Joint Chiefs have betrayed the martial virtues that he presumes to embody. He views those lacking his will with rising disdain. The more he stands up against those who tell him to change, the more virtuous he becomes. His ability to realize those qualities surpasses anyone else's and passes the character test.

The mere suggestion of doubt is fatally compromising. Any admission of doubt means complete loss, impotence and disgrace. Bush cannot entertain doubt and still function. He cannot keep two ideas in his head at the same time. Powell misunderstood when he said that the current war strategy lacks a clear mission. The war is Bush's mission…

Winning means not ending the war while he is president. Losing would mean coming to the end of the rope while he was still in office. In his mind, so long as the war goes on and he maintains his will he can win. Then only his successor can be a loser.

Bush's idea of himself as personifying martial virtues, however, is based on a vision that would be unrecognizable to all modern theorists of warfare. According to Karl von Clausewitz, war is the most uncertain of human enterprises, difficult to understand, hardest to control and demanding the highest degree of adaptability. It was Clausewitz who first applied the metaphor of "fog" to war. In his classic work, "On War," he warned, "We only wish to represent things as they are, and to expose the error of believing that a mere bravo without intellect can make himself distinguished in war." Read more