THE STATE OF WAR

By Erhard Crome

[This article (In tempore belli)) published in: Das Blattchen, 3/15/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,  http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=2289.]


The prediction fulfills itself or what they want to be self-fulfilling is repeated again and again. The “clash of cultures” now becomes a fact after it seemed the delusion of a bizarre senior a decade ago. What influence peddlers had their fingers in the game when the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed were circulated? Was this absurd game really devised by the provincial gazettes of Danish pig feeders?

The defamation fits very well in the war plans of the emperor overseas. The other extremist who is passed off as president in Teheran explains how his plans are derived from the emperor’s plans. The madness takes its course. You desecrate my sacred cow; I defile yours. Nothing should be sacred any more, neither the prophet nor the victims of the holocaust. Your “freedom of the press” is “answered” by mine – eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. In Turkey, there is rioting. In Lebanon, embassy offices are burning. In Nigeria, there are dead bodies. The commander-in-chief can declare: You see the necessity of our military power!

The age of imperialist wars produces its war pretexts. People are dumbfounded and think back almost wistfully to the times of the “balance of terror” when “preventive” nuclear war would not occur because the use of nuclear weapons on one side would inevitably lead to their use on the other side on the world chessboard of the logic of the Cold War. Now the self-proclaimed superpower threatens with the next war and the others are silent. China will evade the great conflict with the US because it expects the US one day will not be able to pay for its own military machine and does not want to be drawn into war either on account of Iran or Cuba. The US accepted China’s geo-political needs in the case of North Korea. Russia still licks its wounds from the historical defeat of communism. The Soviet mega-rockets may have become as rusty as the East German U-boats.

In the meantime, the sides have changed. Napoleon’s successor in Paris who pretended to be against the Iraq war declares France would also use its nuclear weapons in a first strike… Iran was clearly meant… In contrast, the Brits signal that the Middle East has become too turbulent. The violent actions of the West ultimately gave birth to more suicide assassins, not peace.

The US wants to keep possibilities open. In 1953, the US overthrew the Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in a military coup because he insisted on nationalizing Iranian oil. Decades of the Shah dictatorship followed. The popular movement to overthrow the Shah was Islamic, not secular-democratic. The Ayatollah regime was the consequence. The US plotted revenge. The military base Diego Garcia was built in the Indian Ocean and Saddam Hussein stylized as an aggressor against Iran. Today Iran is encircled on all sides after the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US agreements with Pakistan and the naval forces in the Indian Ocean. Thus Iran “is ready.”

Germany, France and Great Britain that first pretended to negotiate now as a “troika” help the US manufacture “grounds for war.” Presumably Iran is producing nuclear weapons. That is the reason for instrumentalizing the International Atomic Energy Commission and rushing to the UN Security Council. According to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to maintain facilities for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Everything else is insinuation providing pretexts for war.

Nuclear weapons will be used. In the terror scenarios in Germany, attacking a nuclear power plant is a super-atrocity. The US – or Israel with US support – wants to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Nuclear warheads equipped with bunker-busters are needed for this. Bunker-busters release radioactivity. The middle class media controlled by the empire try to fool us that these are “clean” bombs since “mini-nukes” only release mini-radioactivity. These are “our” bombs and as such the good bombs. There is no explanation whether the targets to be bombed have nuclear materials. This will greatly enlarge the radioactive clouds.

No one speaks of how many thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of casualties will devastate the Iranian civilian population. Casualties are inevitable. Iran was not exhausted or weakened by Iraq from past wars before the US attack. Thus the danger of a long-lasting intensifying war is real. The past wars are not enough for the man in Washington. Another one should be added. Once again the great game around oil is uppermost.

We are thrown into the times of war. Counter-forces are created in tempore belli. The attempt at resistance is worthwhile. Whoever witnessed Chernobyl may still remember the breathing pains and the pressure on the thyroid gland during the first nights, even in Berlin. The next clouds will draw across Iran.