[Sosfbay-discuss] 939 again: the Iraq War morphs into the Iran War (Paul Craig Roberts, Info Clearing House)

[Drew Johnson]

The Iraq War Morphs Into The Iranian War

By Paul Craig Roberts
Information Clearing House, April 29, 2008
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19839.htm


29/04/08 "ICH" - It is 1939 all over again. The
world waits helplessly for the next act of naked
aggression by rogue states. Only this time the
rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist
Italy. They are the United States and Israel.

The targeted victims are not Poland and France,
but Iran, Syria, the remains of the Palestinian
West Bank and southern Lebanon.

The American mass media is overjoyed. War
coverage attracts viewers and sells advertising.

The neoconservatives are ecstatic. Hegemony uber
alles is back on track.

The US Air Force can’t wait “to show what it can
do.”

Defense contractors see no end of the profits.

Under cover of the mayhem and propaganda, Israel
can grab the remains of the West Bank and have
another go at grabbing the water resources of
southern Lebanon.

Unlike the US and Israel, Iran is neither
occupying any other country’s territory nor
threatening to invade another country.
Nevertheless, propaganda against Iran is spouting
from US and Israeli mouths at an increasing rate.
Lie after lie rolls off the tongues of leaders of
the “two great democracies.”

On April 27 Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff, blamed Iran for
“increasingly lethal and malign influence” in
Iraq. Has Admiral Mullen forgot that it is the
US, not Iran, that is responsible for as many as
one million dead Iraqis and four million
displaced Iraqis, the “collateral damage” of a
“cakewalk war” now into its sixth year?

On April 26 the Washington Post reported that
“the Pentagon is planning for potential military
courses of action” against Iran.

The Bush Regime’s national security advisor says
Iran is a threat in Iraq, an accusation echoed
endlessly by secretary of defense Robert Gates,
secretary of state Rice, vice president Cheney,
and president Bush. The US, which has 150,000
troops in Iraq, is not a threat. The US troops
are protecting Iraq from Iran, al Qaeda, and the
Taliban. Just ask Fox “News.”

Doing its part to egg on war with Iran, the US TV
news program, “60 MInutes,” gave air time to the
commander of the Israeli Air Force, General
Eliezer Shkedi, who declared in a special
interview that Iranian president Ahmadinejad was
the new Hitler and that we must not again make
the mistake of disbelieving a Hitler.

There are better candidates for the role than
Ahmadinejad.

Gen. Shkedi himself sounds like Hitler blaming
Poland for the outbreak of the second world war.
Ahmadinejad has attacked no country, whereas
Israel repeatedly invades its neighbors and
continues 40-year occupations of Syrian and
Palestinian territory.

As Noam Chomsky has written, the US government
thinks that it owns the world (Chomsky could have
added that Israel thinks it owns the Middle East
and America). Americans can wallow in indignation
over China’s occupation of Tibet, but be
perfectly content with America’s occupation of
Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel can wax eloquently
about “Palestinian terrorism” while its military
and Zionist settlers terrorize Palestinians.

Americans see no hypocrisy in “their”
government’s damning of Russia for opposing the
incorporation of former Russian satellites and
constituent parts in a US military alliance.

Americans see manifest destiny, not US
aggression, when “their” government drops bombs
on Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and
Pakistan. Americans do not think it is aggression
for them to develop war plans to attack Iran or
China or N. Korea or whomever, or to maintain
hundreds of military bases all over the globe.
The same Americans work themselves into
hysterical frenzies over “Iranian influence in
Iraq” and “al Qaeda plans to bring the war to
America.”

As Chomsky says, we own the world. No one else
counts.

Except Israel.

Israel counts so much that every presidential
candidate has declared his and her willingness to
expend whatever American blood and treasure are
necessary “to protect Israel.” There are no
limits on the promise “to defend Israel,” no
matter what Israel does, no matter if Israel
initiates (yet again) war with its neighbors, no
matter if it continues to force Palestinians out
of their homes and villages in order to “create
living room” for Israelis.

With this sort of promise, why should Israel ever
settle for anything less than “greater Israel”?

Just as the US government launched its illegal
invasion of Iraq on the back of lies about
weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds,
the US government claims it must attack Iran or
Iran will build a nuclear weapon. The Bush Regime
has learned never to discard a lie as long as it
works.

The lie works for the US Congress, the US media
and much of the US public, but it is breaking
down abroad. On April 27 the British newspaper,
the Independent, responded to the recent US
government claim that the Syrian facility
attacked last September by Israel in an act of
naked aggression was a nuclear reactor built by
N. Korea:

“There is no independent way to verify any of
this, especially since the installation has now
been destroyed. We must rely on the integrity of
the Israeli and US intelligence. That is where we
hit a problem. The former US Secretary of State
Colin Powell presented similar evidence to the
United Nations Security Council in February 2003
showing what we were told was strong evidence of
Iraqi storage of weapons of mass destruction. As
we all know, that intelligence turned out to be
bogus.”

A needless war, a country destroyed, all for
bogus intelligence. Why must we repeat our crime
in Iran?

Why do we persist in our crime in Iraq? On April
27 McClatchy Newspapers reported that 50 Iraqi
political leaders representing numerous political
groups including Sunnis went to Sadr City to
protest the siege by the US military. Why is al
Sadr under seige? He called for a halt to
bloodshed between Iraqis, for a “liberation of
ourselves and our lands from the occupier,” for
“a real government and real sovereignty.”
However, for the Bush Regime, rhetoric about
“freedom and democracy” is but a mask behind
which to impose a US puppet government. Real
Iraqi leaders like al Sadr are “terrorists” who
must be eliminated.

Why do the American people and “their”
representatives in Congress continue to tolerate
a criminal Bush Regime that uses lies and
propaganda to mask its acts of naked aggression,
war crimes under the Nuremberg standard?

Why does the rest of the world continue to
receive political representatives from a war
criminal government?

What if the rest of the world told the US to
close its bases, its embassies, its CIA
operations and to go home?

Self-righteous Americans would regard such
demands as effrontery! We own the world.


Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was
Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of
Good Intentions.He can be reached at:
PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com






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