UK government sources confirm war with Iran is on
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jul 24, 2006, 01:05
In the last few days, I learned from a credible and informed source that a
former senior Labour government minister, who continues to be well-connected
to British military and security officials, confirms that Britain and the
United States " . . . will go to war with Iran before the end of the year."
As we now know from similar reporting prior to the invasion of Iraq, it's
quite possible that the war planning may indeed change repeatedly, and the war
may again be postponed. In any case, it's worth noting that the information
from a former Labour Minister corroborates expert analyses suggesting that
Israel, with US and British support, is deliberately escalating the cycle of
retaliation to legitimize the imminent targeting of Iran before year's end. Let
us remind ourselves, for instance, of US Vice President Cheney's assertions
recorded on MSNBC over a year ago. He described Iran as being "right at the
top of the list" of "rogue states". He continued: "One of the concerns people
have is that Israel might do it without being asked . . . Given the fact that
Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel,
the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world
worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."
But the emphasis on Israel's preeminent role in a prospective assault on
Iran is not accurate. Israel would rather play the role of a regional proxy
force in a US-led campaign. "Despite the deteriorating security situation in
Iraq, the Bush administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy
goal in the Middle East . . ." reports Seymour Hersh. He quotes a former
high-level US intelligence official as follows:
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush
administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have
the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they
are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to
come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
Are these just the fanatical pipedreams of the neoconservative faction
currently occupying (literally) the White House?
Unfortunately, no. The Iraq War was one such fanatical pipedream in the late
1990s, one that Bush administration officials were eagerly ruminating over
when they were actively and directly involved in the Project for a New
American Century. But that particular pipedream is now a terrible, gruelling reality
for the Iraqi people. Despite the glaring failures of US efforts in that
country, there appears to be a serious inability to recognize the futility of
attempting the same in Iran.
The Monterey Institute for International Studies already showed nearly two
years ago in a detailed analysis that the likely consequences of a strike on
Iran by the US, Israel, or both, would be a regional conflagration that could
quickly turn nuclear, and spiral out of control. US and Israeli planners are
no doubt aware of what could happen. Such a catastrophe would have
irreversible ramifications for the global political economy. Energy security would be
in tatters, precipitating the activation of long-standing contingency plans to
invade and occupy all the major resource-rich areas of the Middle East and
elsewhere (see my book, published by Clairview, Behind the War on Terror, for
references and discussion). Such action could itself trigger responses from
other major powers with fundamental interests in maintaining their own access
to regional energy supplies, such as Russia and particularly China, which has
huge interests in Iran. Simultaneously, the dollar-economy would be
seriously undermined, most likely facing imminent collapse in the context of such
crises.
Which raises pertinent questions about why Britain, the US and Israel are
contemplating such a scenario as a viable way of securing their interests.
A glimpse of an answer lies in the fact that the post-9/11 military
geostrategy of the "War on Terror" does not spring from a position of power, but
rather from entirely the opposite. The global system has been crumbling under the
weight of its own unsustainability for many years now, and we are fast
approaching the convergence of multiple crises that are already interacting
fatally as I write.
The peak of world oil production, of which the Bush administration is well
aware, either has already just happened, or is very close to happening. It is
a pivotal event that signals the end of the Oil Age, for all intents and
purposes, with escalating demand placing increasing pressure on dwindling
supplies. Half the world's oil reserves are, more or less, depleted, which means
that it will be technologically, geophysically, increasingly difficult to
extract conventional oil.
I had a chat last week with some scientists from the Omega Institute in
Brighton, directed by my colleague and friend _Graham Ennis_
(http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article355020.ece) (scroll down about to see Graham's
letter published in The Independent), who told me eloquently and powerfully
what I already knew, that while a number of climate "tipping-points" may or may
not have yet been passed, we have about 10-15 years before the
"tipping-point" is breached certainly and irreversibly. Breaching that point means
plunging head-first into full-scale "climate catastrophe". Amidst this looming
Armageddon of Nature, the dollar-denominated economy itself has been teetering on
the edge of spiralling collapse for the last seven years or more. This is not
idle speculation. A financial analyst as senior as Paul Volcker, Alan
Greenspan's immediate predecessor as chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently
confessed "that he thought there was a 75 percent chance of a currency crisis in
the United States within five years."
There appears to have been a cold calculation made at senior levels within
the Anglo-American policymaking establishment: that the system is dying, but
the last remaining viable means of sustaining it remains a fundamentally
military solution designed to reconfigure and rehabilitate the system to continue
to meet the requirements of the interlocking circuits of military-corporate
power and profit.
The highly respected US whistleblower, former RAND strategic analyst Daniel
Ellsberg, who was Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense during
the Vietnam conflict and became famous after leaking the Pentagon Papers, has
already warned of his fears that in the event of "another 9/11 or a major
war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack on Iran, I have no doubt that
there will be, the day after or within days, an equivalent of a Reichstag fire
decree that will involve massive detentions in this country, detention camps
for Middle-Easterners and their quote 'sympathizers', critics of the president
’s policy and essentially the wiping-out of the Bill of Rights."
So is that what all the "emergency preparedness" legislation, here in the UK
as well as in the USA and in Europe, is all about? The US plans are bad
enough, as Ellsberg notes, but the plans UK scene is hardly better, prompting The
Guardian to describe the Civil Contingencies Bill (passed as an Act in 2004)
as "the greatest threat to civil liberty that any parliament is ever likely
to consider."
As global crises converge over the next few years, we the people are faced
with an unprecedented opportunity to use the growing awareness of the inherent
inhumanity and comprehensive destructiveness of the global imperial system
to establish new, viable, sustainable and humane ways of living.Nafeez
Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of _The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry_
(http://www.independentinquiry.co.uk/) (London: Duckworth, 2006). He teaches
courses in International Relations at the School of Social Sciences and Cultural
Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, where he is doing his PhD studying
imperialism and genocide. Since 9/11, he has authored three other books
revealing the realpolitik behind the rhetoric of the "War on Terror", The War on
Freedom, Behind the War on Terror and The War on Truth.
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