Linda Heard,

THE Americans and the Israelis are acting in concert vis-à-vis Iran. The unmistakable message they are putting out loud and clear is that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is on the cards in the event Tehran doesn’t cave into their demands. Are they bluffing as part of an arm-twisting strategy or are they seriously planning to transform this region into an inferno?

Pundits have been analyzing the probability of a US or Israeli attack on Iran for several years now. Some have even come up with likely dates but most of those have come and gone eroding the analysts’ credibility and dulling fears. There’s been so much chatter on the subject that we may reach the point when a “will they or won’t they?” discussion will turn into nothing more than an academic exercise on the basis it hasn’t happened so, therefore, it probably never will. The danger is Iran and the region could easily be lured into letting down its guard. Certainly, members of the Iranian leadership have indicated they don’t take the threat very seriously even though they are planning for every contingency and threatening to set the Middle East aflame if attacked.

In recent weeks, since the Israelis launched a supposed dry run in the eastern Mediterranean using 100 fighter planes and aerial tankers, the chatter has reached a crescendo. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has vowed, “Iran will not be nuclear”. Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz has termed a strike on Iran “unavoidable”.

Retired Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit warned that if Israel doesn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities within a year, Israel would be vulnerable to nuclear incineration. He says that even if Israel doesn’t receive a green light from the US, it should be prepared to go it alone. Shavit believes there is a window of opportunity before the upcoming US election when the deed should be done in case of a win by Barack Obama, who has advocated jaw-jaw before war-war.

ARCH neoconservative and former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton says he believes Israel is poised to strike in November once the ballot has taken place.

Knesset member and retired Maj. Gen. Dani Yotom, who isn’t known for his hawkish views, says sanctions against Iran aren’t working and so “a military operation is needed”. Even the normally moderate Israeli historian Benny Morris recently said, “If the issue is whether Israel or Iran should perish, then Iran should perish”.

Suspicions that an attack might be in the pipeline were heightened after leaks supposedly forced the Israeli prime minister to admit he had secretly met with Aviam Sela, a brilliant military tactician said to be the architect of Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. It is believed that Sela was asked to give his opinion on the feasibility of similarly putting Iran’s nuclear facilities out of action.

There is no doubt that Israelis genuinely fear a nuclear-armed Iran, which they believe would constitute an existential threat, but why are Israelis being so upfront about their intentions when history tells us they normally strike first and answer questions later?

Given that Iran is not Iraq circa the 1980s as far as airpower, weaponry, technology and sophisticated communications go and in light of the fact Iran’s main nuclear facilities are buried under layers of steel and concrete as much as 100 feet underground, eradicating Tehran’s nuclear capability would be challenging for any military unless it was prepared to unleash nuclear bunker-busters. Moreover, unlike the Osirak surprise strike, an attack on Iran would trigger serious military repercussions that could involve Syria, Hezbollah and pro-Iranian Shiite Iraqi groups. Such a pre-emptive move would probably result in a massive loss of life on all sides and would have a devastating effect on the global economy with oil prices reaching hitherto unimaginable heights.

Further, since neither Israel nor the US are in any position to launch a ground invasion without the complicity of anti-government Iranian surrogates, strikes on Iranian nuclear plants would probably result in Tehran not only reconstructing but setting their sights on developing nuclear weapons even if they’ve no plans to do so now. It’s worth mentioning that the Osirak reactor was for peaceful purposes and it was only after it was hit that Saddam Hussein actively sought a bomb.

According to the New Yorker’s veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in an article titled “Preparing the Battlefield”, President George W. Bush has sanctioned covert operations and requested $400 million designed to destabilize Iran outside the sphere of the US military. These will largely be carried out by Iranian dissidents rather than Americans in the field, he says. But, once again, Iran is not Iraq. It’s a far more cohesive country and although not all of its citizens support the government, most identify themselves as proud Iranians who harbor a historical aversion to neoimperialist plots. There is no doubt that Israel and the US would like the Iranian government to be wiped off the face of the earth along with its nuclear ambitions but both countries are divided on what to do. So far their joint and separate belligerency isn’t working. If their bellicose words and provocative actions are, indeed, a giant bluff they are ineffective. They are simply causing the Iranian leadership to dig its heels in further and assert its right under the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Even if this is a coordinated bluff, it could so easily reach the point of no return when to maintain strategic credibility, the players will have to make good on their threats. Certainly, one Iranian commander Brig. Gen. Mir-Faisal Baqerzadeh is taking these to heart already. According to Press TV, he has already got his troops digging more than 320,000 graves within Iran’s bordering provinces to provide any invading force with “the respect they deserve”.

Now here is a interesting letter that a reader wrote to this article today.

War drums

To add to the excellent overview by Linda Heard (July 1), I wish to state the following:

1. Is not Jerusalem sacred to all of Islam? What are the Israelis thinking? I cannot imagine any nation of Islam launching any kind of nuclear strike on Israel for the simple reason that in doing so, Jerusalem would become either destroyed or simply irradiated to the point of making any pilgrimages to it untenable.

2. Iran has become too important to many nations in the region. With its current pipeline projects to supply gas and other cooperative ventures in its neighboring states, Iran has shown itself to be a valuable resource to those neighboring countries. An attack on it would endanger its important role in helping stabilize the nations of the region, a role for which Washington is no doubt jealous.

3. The truth has become transparent. Democracy is spread by subversion! The right of a people to choose its own government and its own form of government is a myth as proven by the election of Hamas in Gaza and the resultant oppression by America and Israel against it. The right of a nation not engaged in aggression to be secure within its borders is a myth. It is shameful for a nation that cries democracy for the world to use terrorists and dissidents to undermine those governments that it is in contention with. In the case with Iran, it is now clear that the only aggressors in the region are the US and Israel.

4. Who are Israel’s real enemies? It is not the Arabs. History has shown that Arabs have historically protected and sheltered their Semitic brethren, the Jews, when they were being persecuted and murdered by the Europeans. While the Arab states are opposed to the illegal creation of Israel and the dispossession of Arab peoples from Palestine, it has been Europe that has shown the greatest hatred toward Jews and even to this date, despite harsh laws criminalizing anti-Semitism such hatred remains. Even in the US many groups exist that hold Jewry in disdain. As the current economic crises deepen within America, this hatred is bound to increase as it becomes obvious who the rich are. Perhaps Israel should be looking westward to see if the dragon is rising out of the sea, as foreseen by John in Revelation, and recognizing just who that dragon is.

5. The only solutions to the dilemmas facing the Middle East must come from the nations of the region, not from outsiders.

The obligation of each nation in the region including Israel is to protect the integrity of the region. This means protecting it against any hegemonic interests that would attempt to dominate the region for whatever excuse. While hatred exists among nations it is time to put aside such feelings. While accepting that major differences do exist and that there are valid reasons for those feelings, what is more important is to find a way so that each can exist without allowing outsiders to impose their might or will upon the region. Be warned the dogs are at the doors; whether you let them into your home is your choice. (Even though the beasts have already entered by the back door!) With all due consideration.

Jerry Copeland, United States published 5 July 2008

Ken Gude | The Guardian

As George Bush flaps helplessly across Europe like a lame duck with a broken wing, the eagerness on display for his departure from the international scene has not been met with an appreciation of the size and scope of the problems that have festered during his tenure. The Bush presidency has been an unmitigated disaster and it is understandable to hope that it ends as quickly as possible. Yet we must be prepared for the consequences of the last eight years and simply ushering Bush out of the door will not wipe away all the damage no matter who is elected to succeed him.

I count no fewer than six multifaceted top-tier issues that require urgent and sustained attention as Bush arrives in London today: Iraq and the broader Middle East; climate change and energy geopolitics; trade, debt, and systemic poverty; Afghanistan, Pakistan, and international terrorism; the rise of Asian powers China, Russia, and India; and, Iran and nuclear proliferation — and that list does not even include other pressing crises such as Darfur or Guantanamo. Yet before we can even begin to address these problems, the threshold challenge for the new administration will be to rejuvenate the trans-Atlantic alliance.

The United States is weaker now than at any point since the end of the Cold War and perhaps far longer than that. Suspicions about American power have grown both because it has been deployed recklessly and because its limits have been clearly exposed. America’s traditional European allies have been in turn rebuked from abroad for a perceived lack of support or undermined at home because of it.

A good deal of the responsibility for the current state of trans-Atlantic relations can be traced to Washington, but that has also made it easier for the Europeans to say no to things they would rather not do. The United States is still the world’s dominant military and economic power, but reasonable questions persist about whether any post-Bush American president can hope to lead the international community in the manner of his predecessors or whether that leadership is in fact desired.

The total failure of the Bush foreign policy has made one lesson abundantly clear; even a nation as powerful as the United States cannot accomplish its objectives in today’s international environment without meaningful contributions from a broad set of allies. Another consequence of the Bush debacle is the task of securing that support is now vastly more difficult. The next president must rebuild the moral foundation of American international leadership and convince Europeans to join the United States in a true partnership as we work to address the challenges of the modern world. Some will be understandably reticent, others outright opposed. Yet the problems we face are so great that we no longer have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines in the hope that someone else will take care of our problems.

For those looking for clues to what the world would be like without a strong and respected United States leading an alliance of capable partners, go no further than the faltering NATO effort in Afghanistan. With US forces bogged down in Iraq, it is not possible for America to contribute enough ground forces so NATO has had to go hat in hand to other member-states seeking to fill the void. Some countries have admirably stepped up, but others have not, and as a result the success of the Afghan mission hangs in the balance. Make no mistake, Afghanistan is not Iraq. It was a United Nations approved military mission in direct response to an unprovoked attack on the United States. Its early success had the potential to finally return Afghanistan to the community of nations after decades of conflict.

NATO took over the mission, its first beyond the borders of Europe, in 2003 and now the most successful and enduring multilateral security institution of the 20th century is struggling to demonstrate its relevance in the radically different global security environment of the 21st.

Amid the rubble of the Bush presidency and even in the face of these enormous challenges, there is still hope. His reign has been such an obvious catastrophe that it may be easier to turn the page on the last eight years, creating the opening for a new era of trans-Atlantic relations.

The next administration will have to earn its way back to international leadership, a process that comes with an implicit challenge to America’s allies. The burdens of global leadership are going to be shared more broadly.

Is Europe ready?

Ramzy Baroud, Aljazeera.net English.

When US forces descended on Baghdad five years ago, they seemed unstoppable. It seemed only a matter of time before the same frenzied scenario took place in Tehran, Damascus, and elsewhere.

As it turned out, the day Saddam’s status was toppled was the day that the US Army faced its real battle in Iraq.

Five years of continuous and unrelenting bloodbaths may have toned down Bush’s expectations. The lonely crusader who once vowed to fight tyranny at any cost is now trying to secure a treaty that would indefinitely secure US interests in Iraq. His administration may essentially be hoping to achieve what it regards as the best possible outcome of a worst possible situation.

Coopting the UN has helped secure temporary legitimacy to the occupation. The international body, once rendered irrelevant, became a major hub for American diplomacy seeking to legitimize its occupation in a country that refuses to concede. Even willing Iraqi leaders, perfectly rehearsed elections and mass suppressions have failed to bring stability and validation. Of course, White House, State Department and US military spokespeople ventured into endless talk about democracy, freedom, liberty and security in order to woo an increasingly agitated American public. But US action on the ground spoke of another reality: An imperial quest.

Now the Bush administration is ready to crown its Iraq travesty with a long-term strategy that would turn Iraq’s occupation into a lasting one. The US is “negotiating” a treaty with the Iraqi government, one that would replace the UN mandate and legalize the US occupation of Iraq permanently.

Basically, time is running out for Bush. If no treaty is reached by the end of the year, his administration could find itself pleading to the Security Council for another extension of the mandate. This would be an embarrassing and dangerous scenario for US diplomacy because it would allow Russia and China to re-emerge as important players wielding veto powers. By signing a long-term treaty, the Bush administration would pre-empt any action by a future Democratic president of Iraq.

When the UN Security Council voted unanimously to extend the US-led multinational forces in Iraq in November 2005, the US celebrated the decision as a sign of international commitment to Iraq’s political transition. John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN, had repeatedly lambasted the UN and now saw “the unanimous adoption of this resolution (as) a vivid demonstration of broad international support for a federal, democratic, pluralistic and unified Iraq.”

After this the Pentagon said the “US planned to cut the numbers of troops next year.” Since then, the opposite has actualized. Iraqi troops failed their first serious test — in failing to crack down on Mehdi Army — and US forces grew in numbers. In order for the US to sign a long-term strategic treaty with the Iraqi government, it needs a level of stability. The US’ dilemma is that this coveted stability is nowhere in sight.

Since late 2007, officials in the US, the UN and Iraq have asserted that they have no intention of seeking another UN mandate.

The US-Iraq treaty is thus the only option that will legalize the American occupation. The idea of the treaty is to give the impression that the relationship between the two is not that of the occupied and the occupier, but two sovereigns with mutual interests and equitable rights.

Iraqis are, unsurprisingly, furious about US expectations from the treaty. According to Cockburn, “Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilize Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.”

Iraqi Cabinet spokesman Ali Al Dabbagh was quoted by Iraqi TV as saying that government will not compromise on Iraq’s sovereignty. Although it is difficult to believe in Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s commitment to “full sovereignty,” one cannot underestimate the pressure he faces in the Parliament — fractious alliances, nationalists from various backgrounds, unstable Shiite front, skeptical Sunni leadership. Al Jazeera reported on how two of these legislators testified to the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that, “US troops should leave Iraq before talks on a long-term security pact could be completed.” Khalaf Al-Ulayyan, the founder of the National Dialogue Council wants talks delayed “until there is a new administration in the United States,” but the US wants an agreement by July.

To avoid embarrassment, “it’s entirely possible that the Bush administration, sometime this summer, will force the hapless regime of Prime Minister Maliki to submit to a US diktat on a US-Iraq accord.” (Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation). “If Maliki signs the accord, and ignores the opposition from Parliament, he would instantly lose whatever remaining credibility he has left as an Iraqi leader,” which would lead to more violence in Iraq on the eve of US elections.

One can argue that no pleasant scenarios are possible in Iraq at any time under a US military presence.

Gwynne Dyer

In the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” the world’s most famous private detective refers to “the curious incident of the dog in the night.”

“But the dog did nothing in the night,” replies his interlocutor.

“That was the curious incident,” says Holmes.

The dogs aren’t barking over the US-Iraq treaty, either, and that is equally curious.

To begin with, the Iraqi dogs aren’t barking. Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki clearly doesn’t like the deal that the Bush administration is forcing on him, but will accept it because his government wouldn’t survive a week without US military support. The Shiite religious authorities will not issue a fatwa against it, because their first priority is to preserve the Shiites’ newfound domination of Iraq. But in fact most Iraqis who know about it, hate it.

That includes most of the Iraqi Parliament’s 270 members, who sent a letter to the US Congress last week asking it to reject any US-Iraq security agreement unless the White House agrees to a specific timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. But Congress will not get to vote on the deal, because the White House has defined it not as a treaty (which has to be ratified by the Senate), but as an alliance (which doesn’t).

Equally curious is the lack of outcry in the US media. Last week the Middle Eastern correspondent of “The Independent,” Patrick Cockburn, published two leaked reports about the terms of the “alliance” and the tactics that the Bush administration is using to get the Iraqi government’s approval by the end of July. Nobody denied them, but hardly any mainstream outlet in the US media reported them as a major story, either.

Cockburn revealed that the United States will retain more than 50 military bases in Iraq as part of the “strategic alliance” it is pressuring Baghdad to sign. They will not be defined as US bases, however, since US negotiators insist that a perimeter fence with a few Iraqi soldiers on it is a sufficient fig-leaf to make it an “Iraqi base.”

However, those American soldiers on “Iraqi bases” will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens without prior consultation with the Iraqi authorities, if US negotiators get their way. US soldiers, and American civilian contractors as well, will enjoy full legal immunity for their actions. So it will remain the case, as it has been since the invasion, that any American employed by the US government in Iraq can kill any Iraqi without having to explain and justify his or her actions to Iraqis. Indeed, the Unites States will be entitled to conduct entire military campaigns on Iraqi soil without consulting the Iraqi government. The US government is not even willing to tell the Iraqi government what American forces are entering or leaving Iraq under the terms of the “alliance,” apparently because it fears that the government would inform the Iranians.

Terms of this sort are familiar from the era of the European empires, when similar treaties were signed between, for example, the British government and its Iraqi colony in the Middle East. Ali Allawi, minister of finance in the Iraqi transitional government 2005-06, warns that this is “a reprise of that treaty,” and predicts that it will lead to the same “riots, civil disturbances, uprisings and coup” that filled the quarter-century between the British-Iraqi treaty in 1930 and the Iraqi revolt that finally overthrew the local puppet regime in 1958.

Some sort of treaty is needed to provide a legal basis for a continuing US military presence in Iraq, since the existing UN mandate lapses at the end of 2008. The particular treaty that the White House is forcing on Baghdad is designed to justify a permanent military occupation of Iraq, and as far as possible to tie the next administration’s hands when it comes to pulling US troops out of the country.

The Iraqi government will probably accept the US demands after some protests, because its survival depends on American troops. Washington is also threatening to allow $20 billion of outstanding US court judgments against Saddam Hussein’s regime to be executed, wiping out 40 percent of Iraq’s foreign exchange reserves.

The trickier question is what happens if President Bush’s successor is not the like-minded John McCain. To the extent that they can successfully pretend that the US has won the war in Iraq, they can attach a very high political cost to Barack Obama’s pledge to pull US troops out of the country, and this treaty also serves as part of that charade. But it does not oblige US troops to stay in Iraq forever. It just says they can if they want to. This game is not over, and neither is the war.

Unmasking the real plans of American occupiers/invaders/terrorists sitting in the Pentagon

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent

LONDON, 7 June 2008 — A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilize Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

The accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq — a victory that he says Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

“The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans.”-Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 — 10,000 more than when the military “surge” began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government. The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. “It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty,” said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimize the government in Baghdad that will be seen as an American pawn.

The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: “This is just a tactical subterfuge.” Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 ft and the right to pursue its “war on terror” in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called “strategic alliance” without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said that such a deal would create “a permanent occupation”. He added: “The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans.”

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.

The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.

Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now.

The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.

Just who are the real terrorists ?

By Linda Heard

Someone once told me if you’re going to tell a lie make it a whopper based on the premise the more outrageous the lie the more likely it is to be believed. At the time, I wrote off his advice as hogwash but as we see from the Iraq debacle, he was right. Five years later, the deceit continues undiminished and nobody has been held to account.

Britain’s Gordon Brown yesterday promised to hold an enquiry into the “mistakes” made in Iraq. Sounds good, but don’t hold your breath. All previous inquiries have been labeled “whitewashes”. They can’t afford the truth to come out else they might get a one-way ticket to The Hague.

Ambassador David Satterfield, and adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is doing the rounds of talk shows lauding America’s victories over Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

On one occasion the host interjected to mention the unpalatable fact that Al-Qaeda members only flocked to Iraq once the Americans were in place leaving Satterfield momentarily nonplussed.

It’s obvious that Satterfield is so saturated in the party line he forgot the Pentagon’s recently published study that found with certainty that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no links to Al-Qaeda. And lest we forget Saddam didn’t have WMD either, which means not only was the war immoral the prewar sanctions on that country that contributed to the deaths of over half-a-million Iraqi children were too.

Think about it for a moment. The warmongers invaded, crushed and occupied a country that was no threat to anyone. They stood by as it was looted, exacerbated sectarianism, flattened entire towns, tortured untold numbers of innocents, brought in gum-chewing, tattooed foreign mercenaries and paid crony companies billions of dollars for mythical reconstruction projects.

They then pretended to hand over sovereignty to that country while at the same time constructing permanent bases and the biggest US Embassy in history resembling a small town. They said they had no interest in Iraq’s oil, yet they are putting immense pressure on the Iraqi government (sic) to sign into law a bill that permits foreign (read American) oil companies to lock up decades-long deals. Let’s be frank. Iraq wasn’t a blunder, it was a crime. So how did they manage to get away with implanting their long-conceived plot to do away with Israel’s No. 1 foe, ensure their competitors couldn’t get their hands on Iraq’s resources and entrench their military might in the region? Future historians will no doubt be scratching their heads over this one. You had to live through it to believe it.

First, they cleverly used the politics of fear to sway public opinion. As noted in the Project for the New American Century’s document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, the warmonger signatories - who later became senior members of the Bush administration - needed “a new Pearl Harbor”. On Sept. 11, 2001 they got it. Americans and their allies were in shock. Almost every country in the world was sympathetic and willing to do anything to help. And, boy, did they capitalize on that empathy even managing to persuade Russia to stay silent as they made deals with Caspian states to allow US bases.

Step one was a country where a giant bogeyman was supposed to be hiding out in a cave presumably equipped with a dialysis machine and a production studio and whose black-turbaned government forced women to wear a burqa and disallowed nail polish. But then Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld was disappointed because there weren’t enough targets for his bombs. It was no fun bombing a country into the Stone Age when it was already there.

Step two was the insidious demonizing of Muslims, thousands of whom were arrested and held for months without charge or access to lawyers. In that climate of fear, it was relatively simple to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein was conniving with the people who brought down the World Trade Center. US officials warned of mushroom clouds; Prime Minister Tony Blair said British interests could be attacked within 45 minutes of Saddam giving the order. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell allowed himself to be used as their fall guy. He spouted the most unbelievable scripted codswallop the UN had ever heard…yet, bullied and bribed nation after nation pretended to believe him as IAEA chief Mohammed El-Baradei and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix did little to discredit the hoax.

Step three entailed replacing Osama in people’s minds with Saddam, who overnight morphed into a hydra-headed monster whose idea of a pleasant weekend was gassing and torturing his own people.

Step four was ‘Shock and Awe’ which illuminated the Baghdad skyline on March 19, 2003. As their bombs and missiles rained down on crowded market places scattering limbs, they told us those bombs and missiles were Saddam’s even though the Independent’s Middle East correspondent inconveniently dug up their Made in the USA shards.

As the months went on, we began to wonder what happened to the WMD. They told us it was only a matter of time before it would be unearthed from under the sands or discovered in a tunnel under one of Saddam’s palaces. They even suggested it may have been shipped off to a neighboring country for safekeeping!!

Step five was an orchestrated administration campaign to inject us with mass amnesia. Never mind about the weapons, they said. We are here to liberate the poor Iraqi people from their evil dictator and deliver freedom and democracy. Look, look, they said. The Iraqis have purple fingers! With up to one million dead, Iraqis are lucky they have any fingers at all.

To be fair, they couldn’t have done it without the aid of a compliant, supine media, which embedded its reporters with US battalions and agreed not to show captured US soldiers, flag-draped coffins, military funerals or scenes of blood-soaked Iraqi civilians. Independent reporters who neglected to abide by the script were discredited, refused access to information and even shelled.

I still recall a live report from David Chater of Sky News, who saw the barrel of a US tank slowly turn toward the Palestine hotel - known to be a journalist’s hang-out - before firing its shell killing three reporters. The Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were also hit.

With so much information on tap I’m flabbergasted that so many people still believe the Iraq fairytale. I wish they’d get in touch with me. I’ve got a few pyramids and a sphinx going cheap. Sad, isn’t it!

Iraq accounted for 60 per cent of worldwide terrorism fatalities.

By Ramzy Baroud

The data provided in the US State Department’s annual terrorism report for 2007 points to some interesting if puzzling conclusions. The much publicised document, made available 30 April via the State Department’s website, makes no secret of the fact that Al-Qaeda is back, strong as ever. It also suggests that violence worldwide is nowhere near subsiding, despite President Bush’s repeated assurances regarding the success of his “war on terror”.

Will the report inspire serious reflection on the US’s detrimental foreign policy and its role in the current situation?

Let’s look at some of the data. To start with, take Pakistan. Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda-inspired attacks in the country more than doubled (from 375 to 877) between 2006 and 2007. These attacks have claimed the lives of 1,335 people, compared to 335 in a previous report. That is a jump of almost 300 per cent.

Then there’s Afghanistan, which was supposedly “liberated” shortly after 11 September 2001. The number of attacks reported there increased a sharp 16 per cent in 2007. Some 1,127 violent incidents killing 1,966 people represent a significant surge in violence compared to 2006’s 1,257 deaths.

There have also been many other violent incidents around the world, including but not limited to North Africa, the terrorist bombings in Algeria in particular.

But this is barely half the story — or 40 per cent of it, if we want to be as specific as the terrorism report. Iraq accounted for 60 per cent of worldwide terrorism fatalities.

Considering the fact that the horrifying violence currently witnessed in Iraq was unheard of prior to the US invasion of 2003, will the Bush administration take a moment to connect the dots? Even a third grader could figure this one out: the US occupation was a major, if not sole factor, in Iraq’s relentless bloodbath. In order to right the wrong in Iraq, the US military should clearly just withdraw, and Bush — or whoever next claims the White House — should stop fabricating pretexts to justify a prolonged mission.

On 1 May 2003, President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. As he stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln a huge banner behind him bore the words “Mission Accomplished”. The New York Times then wrote, “the Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall.”

Instead, more than five years after Bush’s speech, the administration seems determined to maintain a military surge, having added 20,000 soldiers. Making no apologies for the war’s contribution to an increase in terrorist activities, Bush’s officials continue to rationalise the surge as a commonsense response to ongoing violence, conveniently omitting the US’s own part in this violence. The State Department report doesn’t classify any of the thousands of innocent victims killed by US or coalition forces as victims of terrorism.

Russ Travers, deputy director of the Counterterrorism Centre, stated on the day the report was published, “It’s a fair statement that around the globe people are getting increasingly efficient at killing other people.” While Travers’ assertion is undoubtedly true, there seems to be no intention of providing any context, no connection drawn to the US’s direct invasions, or indirect but equally devastating role in campaigns of violence, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan.

But what the State Department’s terrorism report didn’t fail to do was once again identify Iran as the world’s “most active” state sponsor of terrorism. As reported in the Associated Press on 1 May, Iran was responsible for “supporting Palestinian extremists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, whereÉ elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps continued to give militants weapons, training and funding.”

The irony is that the report further contributes to the US’s long-touted case for war against Iran; ironic because the report’s findings, if viewed responsibly, substantiate the claim that the Bush administration’s policies have only made the world more unsafe. Wouldn’t a war against Iran hike up the number of violent or terrorist incidents?

It also remains unclear how powerful Al-Qaeda really is, and how much of its capabilities were hyped in order to enable the Bush administration to continue its mission. Consider the two occasions Al-Qaeda was back in the news recently.

News media cited official Afghani reports attributing the recent assassination attempt on US-ally Afghani President Hamid Karzai to Al-Qaeda. In other reports, the US rationalised its own assassination of a leading Somali militia leader Aden Hashi Eyrow on 1 May as targeting a key Al-Qaeda member. It’s not the logic of the assassination that is key here, but rather the fact that while Al- Qaeda has reached a position of strength that can penetrate several layers of defences in Afghanistan, the US is getting itself involved in a regional feud in Somalia. Why would the Bush administration be chasing Al-Qaeda in Somalia, as in Iraq, if the group is reportedly in the most powerful position in Afghanistan?

Moreover, if Al-Qaeda indeed exists on such a large and influential scale in so many countries, isn’t it time to question the logic used by the Bush administration’s “war on terror” that was meant to weaken and destroy Al- Qaeda in the first place?

It may be, of course, that Al-Qaeda’s power and outreach is inflated for political reasons, where every conflict the US is involved in becomes immediately reduced to those who support, shield or host Al-Qaeda or Al- Qaeda inspired groups, thus justifying US military intervention anywhere.

Instead of dealing with the obvious truths that the terrorism report highlights, the authors of the report have resorted to another logic that places blame squarely on external circumstance, never holding the US government accountable for its actions.

Finally, is there really a need for lengthy reports that cost large sums of money and thousands of work hours if the lessons gleaned are always the wrong ones, leading to more blunders that prompt more violence, and more terrorism reports?

-Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

Linda Heard, sierra12th@yahoo.co.uk

It doesn’t look as though Americans in Iraq are going anywhere anytime soon. Officially Iraq’s sovereignty was handed back to its rightful owners years ago, which means the occupiers remain in the country at the invitation of the Iraqi government. OK, try not to laugh!

Fact is the occupying power is digging in for the long haul and there is little the Iraqi leadership can do about it even if it wanted to. When challenged about their supersized, superfortified embassy sprouting on prime land — which one must assume was sequestered rather than gifted by Iraq — and their mushrooming permanent military bases, the Americans cite the postwar German/Japan models.

In other words, they are saying the victor has a perfect right to hang around the necks of the vanquished in perpetuity.

In this case, I don’t blame Arab governments for refusing to send their diplomatic personnel into the jaws of danger merely to hobnob with Iraqi officials for the purposes of affording them legitimacy when, as we know, the real decision-making takes place in Washington.

It could be that the Pentagon’s new plan to transform the so-called Green Zone into a walled-off oases of 21st century Western luxury is, in part, an attempt to lure reluctant ambassadors into lending credibility to the game with their mere presence and encourage their own diplomats to put their lives on the line.

According to the Associated Press, the US has a $5 billion, “five-year development ‘dream list’ to create a zone of influence around the new $700 million embassy to serve as a kind of high-end buffer for the compound”. In fact, it is now likely to cost more than $1.3 billion as we know from an emergency supplemental funding request delivered by President Bush to Congress in 2006.

The article quotes US Navy Capt. Thomas Karnowski, whose team conceived the plan, as explaining, “When you have $1 billion hanging out there and 1,000 employees lying around, you kind of want to know who your neighbors are. You want to influence what happens in your neighborhood over time.”

Unfortunately, we still don’t know the purpose of such a gigantic embassy, dubbed “Fortress America” that will house 1,000 permanent staff, a 3,000-strong security contingent and a substantial Marine detachment over 104 acres. To give this context, it is six times bigger than the UN headquarters in New York.

But we do know that it will contain its own power station, water and sewage treatment facilities, school, office buildings, apartment blocks, clubhouse, swimming pools and a cinema.

So how did the US take possession of 104 acres back of prime real estate smack in the center of the capital? Surely, the Iraqi government lodged its objections. Certainly the British would be up in arms if, say, the French decided Hyde Park would be a suitable site for its diplomatic mission and it’s doubtful the Egyptians would acquiesce to any extension of the US Embassy that would demolish their historical upmarket Garden City district.

Yet, according to reports, an interim Iraqi government actually transferred these 104 acres to the US in 2004 lock, stock and barrel. This is scandalous. No government would willingly sign away their people’s assets, let alone to an enemy responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its innocent citizens. This is just another indication that the Iraqi leadership is not in charge.

Returning to the Green Zone, Capt. Karnowski envisages shopping malls, luxury condos, state-of-the-art hospitals, an amusement park and five-star hotels featuring in the blueprint.

The Marriott is already signed up, he says, although Marriott International is reluctant to confirm or deny this claim.

Are we, therefore, to construe that the Green Zone is slated to become a sort of embassy extension where Americans, elite Iraqis and visiting dignitaries can pretend they’re in Manhattan, at least when they are not actively ducking rockets and mortars?

It’s surely bad enough that the Americans effectively destroyed Iraqi culture during the 2003 invasion when they stood back as museums were looted and libraries ransacked. Are they now going to be allowed to superimpose their own “culture” onto Iraq’s very heart?

Moreover, there is something horribly elitist about this plan. What about the rest of Baghdad that is still suffering from power outrages and still resembles a war zone in parts?

Rather than construct multistoried malls for the benefit of diplomats and generals, the US should be working to restore the power/water treatment plants and reequip the hospitals it destroyed.

Take a good look at the ugly face of 21st century imperialism folks, for this is surely it. Whether they’ve got 5,000 troops in country or 150,000 the Americans have moved into Iraq and they’ll stay there as long as they can.

Iraq: The Israeli Agenda
Neil Berry

Last week’s fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war occasioned much debate in the British media. But the contributors to the debate conspicuously did not include the war’s principal British proponent, Tony Blair. As little inclined as ever to admit to culpability over the Iraq debacle, Britain’s former prime minister has “moved on” and is now preoccupied with a dizzying assortment of fresh projects.

One of those projects has been to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict, though the signs are that it is already giving way to other concerns, such as combating climate change and making a start on his lucrative memoirs. Perhaps only a professional fantasist could ever have supposed that tackling a problem that has defeated so many others would require anything less than sustained personal commitment over an indefinite period of time. That Blair undertook the role of Middle East peace envoy on a part-time basis speaks for itself.

It is true that in the run-up to the war Blair insisted Britain would only support a US-led pre-emptive war on condition that it entailed an all-out effort to resolve the conflict. But, echoing the manifesto of the neoconservatives in Washington, he also intimated that simply deposing Saddam Hussein would yield a substantial peace dividend. The settling of the Palestine-Israel conflict was billed as the prize, the great byproduct of “regime change” in Baghdad and the emergence of Iraq as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

What is extraordinary is how Blair, along with all the other protagonists of the Iraq war, continues to be portrayed as having acted in good faith if nothing else. The mainstream Western media are little receptive to the notion that he functioned as one of the chief salesmen for an ideology-driven war whose true objective, far from being to make the Middle East a better place, was to create havoc. In the US, claims that the war was undertaken for essentially cynical reasons find no place in public discussion; they do not find much more of one in British public discussion either, for all that the media in Britain permit more open discussion of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

The British journalist, Jonathan Cook, makes a persuasive case that the chaos into which Iraq has descended was anything but an unintended consequence of the Anglo-American invasion. Yet Cook’s is a voice unfamiliar not just to the general public but even to the more educated sections of British society. A sometime staff writer for the Guardian who now lives in Nazareth, he operates, perforce, as an underground writer, publishing much of his work on the US online left-wing magazine Counterpunch: His trenchant analysis of the motives underlying the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq is deemed far too radical for mainstream consumption.

In his last book, Blood and Religion (2006), Cook argued that Israel is a pseudo-democracy whose systematic oppression of the Palestinian people was inherent in the Zionist program to establish a Greater Israel, an expanded military state where only Jewish blood and religion count. In his new book, Israel and the Clash of Civilizations, he argues that the Iraq war was as much a Zionist as an American undertaking and that it was inspired in no small degree by the US/Zionist ambition to sow discord in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is a view of course that Cook is by no means unique in holding but few have propounded it with such cogency. Cook maintains that civil war in Iraq followed by partition was the projected upshot of the invasion, just what the pro-Israeli neoconservatives who came to shape US foreign policy under President George W. Bush wanted. He points out that while the United States has long gone in for regime change, especially in its “backyard” of Central America and the Caribbean, it has usually had in mind whom it was planning to install as its dependable “strong man”. In the case of Iraq, however, the striking thing is that it has not been impossible to identify the strong man Washington hoped would replace the old one. Indeed, the actions of the Bush administration guaranteed that no such strong man would emerge. In short, Iraq seems to be a case of “regime overthrow” rather than “regime change”, with brutal military occupation the actual goal of the invasion rather than a brief transitional phase while a new leader was installed.

Cook’s central contention is that this distinctive strategy for regime overthrow originated not in Washington but in Israel. In the early 1980s, he writes, the Jewish state’s security establishment developed ideas about dissolving other states of the Middle East with a specific view to nurturing ethnic and religious conflict. This was in effect a re-imagining of the regional power structure that existed under the Ottoman Empire — before the arrival of European colonialists and their reordering of the Middle East into nation states — but with Israel replacing Turkey as the local imperial power. The aim was to partition potentially powerful states such as Iraq and Iran between their rival ethnic and sectarian communities, thus neutralizing the threat they posed to Israel.

Not the least benefit of the ensuing chaos, it was calculated, would be that Israel became free to pursue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the occupied territories, and possibly from inside Israel too. That such a policy was bound to promote Islamic radicalism was seen by Zionist strategists as positively desirable, and the fact is that with the rise of Hamas in the occupied territories, Israel has succeeded in greatly increasing Western alarm about Islam as a global threat, in the process identifying the question of what to do with the Palestinians with the issue of what the West should do about Islamic extremism.

Of a piece with all this has been Israel’s assiduous cultivation of a view of itself as standing in the frontline of an epoch-making “clash of civilizations” between East and West. The message of Israel and the Clash of Civilizations is that Israel was all too well prepared to exploit the US “war on terror” to reshape the Middle East in its own interests and that the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians and that of the US occupation of Iraq have become inextricably bound up with each other.

What is certain is that the Zionist plan to remake the Middle East is no figment of Jonathan Cook’s imagination. Nor can it be doubted that, fortuitously or not, events have unfolded much as the plan envisaged. Whether Cook is right in every particular may be a matter for debate, but that he has written a challenging book is not. Nevertheless, the Western media can be expected to carry on peddling the line that the instigators of the Iraq debacle meant well, ignoring the indications that they were party to a project designed not to bring peace to the Middle East but to ensure Israel’s safety, albeit at the cost of plunging the Middle East into chaos.