Bricking in Iran

[Kurt will be coming on Gorilla Radio this week, February 14th, '05 at 5:30pm- ape]

Iran Attack: A 50-50 Chance is Closer to a Done Deal
Kurt Nimmo
February 11, 2005


First, read Jim Lobe’s Iran War Drums Beat Harder, and then read The coming showdown in Iran, chock full of information about how Iran will, if attacked, lock the United States into a living hell in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

“Nobody sees military action as the best way to tame Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons ambitions, but as the rhetoric heats up, mutual miscalculation could suck Tehran and Washington into
an unpredictable showdown,” opines Reuters. Nobody, that is, except the Strausscons and the Likudites in Israel.

“There’s a 50-50 chance of an air strike,” said Ali Ansari, an Iran expert at Scotland’s St Andrew’s University. “This not because of deliberate policy in the Pentagon or Iran, but the tensions, the sensitivities, the paranoia are so high that the potential for slip-sliding into something is very high.”

Nonsense. “The latest such urging [to attack Iran] was released here Thursday by the Iran Policy Committee (IPC), a group headed by a former National Security Council staffer Ray Tanter, several retired senior military officers, and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia,” writes Lobe. “The 30-page document, “U.S. Policy Options for Iran” by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Clare Lopez, appears to reflect the views of the administration’s most radical hawks among the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.”

Recall Cheney’s impatience last month—almost directly upon Bush’s re-coronation—basically itching for Israel to attack Iran and indicating Iran is “right at the top of the list” of nations to be invaded this term.

“The study echoes many of the same themes—mainly support for the Iranian exiled and internal opposition against the government—as another policy paper released by the mainly neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in December, but it is also much harsher,” Lobe continues. “Both papers favored military strikes against suspected nuclear and other weapons facilities if that was the only way to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and endorsed ‘regime change’ as U.S. policy.”

“IPC’s main emphasis is on more aggressive actions to bring about the desired goals, including military strikes and active efforts to destabilize the government, in major part through the support and deployment of what it calls ‘indisputably the largest and most organized Iranian opposition group,’ the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK)—an idea that many Iran specialists here believe is likely to prove exceptionally counterproductive.”

Now that wouldn’t be the same MEK added to the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups in 1997, would it? “The group has targeted Iranian government officials and government facilities in Iran and abroad; during the 1970s, it attacked Americans in Iran,” notes GlobalSecurity. “It routinely aims its attacks at government buildings in crowded cities.” Big deal, since when did the Strausscons care about civilians? Ask almost any Iraqi—except, of course, the 100,000 or so dead Iraqis. Even though MEK is officially listed as a terrorist organization, “it has long been supported by the Pentagon civilians and Cheney’s office, and their backers in Congress and the press as a possible asset against Iran despite its official ‘terrorist’ status.”

In a way, I feel sorry for these MEK guys because they will be ultimately betrayed—as nearly anybody who comes into contact with the Strausscons is betrayed. As the personality and career of Ahmad Chalabi demonstrates, the Strausscons favor slime balls that rob banks and sell secrets to their declared enemies.

“[A]s an additional step [in a strategy of destabilization],” the [IPC] paper states, “the United States might encourage the new Iraqi government to extend formal recognition to the MEK, based in Ashraf [Iraq], as a legitimate political organization. Such recognition would send yet another signal from neighboring Iraq that the noose is tightening around Iran’s unelected rulers.”

In fact, as Lobe points out, the Strausscons are actively supporting the MEK terrorist organization. “Indeed, there have been persistent reports, most recently from a former CIA officer, Philip Giraldi, in the current edition of the American Conservative magazine, that U.S. Special Forces have been directing members of the group in carrying out reconnaissance and intelligence collection in Iran from bases in Afghanistan and Balochistan, Pakistan, since last summer as part of an effort to identify possible targets for military strikes.”

Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising, since al-Qaeda, or what Bush and the corporate media call al-Qaeda, at one time did the same thing—serve as a U.S. attack dog—only to become the incarnation of evil, well before September 11, 2001. No doubt, after the Strausscons bomb the heck out of Iran and spread their poisonous chaos, MEK will once again become an officially recognized terrorist group. It is absurd on its face for the reactionaries in Congress to cozy up to this group of civilian killers, since they espouse “a blend of Marxism and Islamism,” according to GlobalSecurity, something you would think is anathema to so-called conservatives. But then amoral Machiavellians like the Strausscons are known to use anybody, regardless of ideology, if it serves their purpose.