Increasingly, people in the know are revealing what some of us have realized for months, even years: the United States, under the pernicious control of Muslim-hating neocons, will attack Iran, and sooner before later.

As Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane write, citing a report authored by a “well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament,” the United States is ready, willing, and eminently able to reduce Iran to a smoldering ruin, much the same way Iraq was reduced.


“The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles,” write Alexandrovna and Kane, citing the report. “The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicizing the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely.” In fact, for those of us who have followed the neocons, an attack against Iran is not “likely,” but indeed imminent. It is part and parcel of the neocon master plan to decimate the Muslim world and may be considered the crown jewel, as the neocons believe Iran is far too cheeky. As well, the kissing cousins of the neocons, the neolibs, want to bring the Muslim world down a few pegs, as the tenets of Islam preach against ruinous usury of the sort neolibs love to impose on the world at large. Neocons, on the other hand, simply hate Muslims, as all reactionary and racist Zionists viscerally hate Muslims.

“Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact,” Alexandrovna and Kane summarize.

Of course, as we know, Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, unlike “Samson Option” neighbor Israel, and all the hysterical neocon bellyaching—and histrionic predictions of Tel Aviv withering under the pall of a mushroom cloud—is nothing more than propaganda, albeit flimsy and transparent propaganda. In fact, Iran’s “nuclear facilities”—completely legal under the terms of the NPT—are secondary, even third or fourth tier targets. More important to the murderous neocons is Iran’s “economic infrastructure,” as the point is to make the average Iranian suffer terribly, as the Iraqis have suffered and continue to suffer, with apparently no end in sight.

“Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a ‘full-spectrum approach,’ designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of ‘a weak or failed state.’ Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration’s National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power.”

Or, as eluded, eliminate it as a viable state altogether, thus ushering in untold misery, disease, and mortality, again a mirror of the situation in Iraq.

Plesch and Butcher continue:

This wider form of air attack would be the most likely to delay the Iranian nuclear program for a sufficiently long period of time to meet the administration’s current counterproliferation goals. It would also be consistent with the possible goal of employing military action is to overthrow the current Iranian government, since it would severely degrade the capability of the Iranian military (in particular revolutionary guards units and other ultra-loyalists) to keep armed opposition and separatist movements under control. It would also achieve the US objective of neutralizing Iran as a power in the region for many years to come.

However, it is the option that contains the greatest risk of increased global tension and hatred of the United States. The US would have few, if any allies for such a mission beyond Israel (and possibly the UK). Once undertaken, the imperatives for success would be enormous.

Sort of like the “success” of Iraq? But then the “imperative” is not taking out Iran’s military and government per se, but rather, as stated above, reducing it to “a weak or failed state” of the sort amenable to yet another brutal dictator—the Shah’s son, in waiting, will do—imposed by the neocons, and wide open for neolib fire sales and loan sharking schemes.

Iran has a weak air force and anti aircraft capability, almost all of it is 20-30 years old and it lacks modern integrated communications. Not only will these forces be rapidly destroyed by US air power, but Iranian ground and air forces will have to fight without protection from air attack.

British military sources stated on condition of anonymity, that “the US military switched its whole focus to Iran” from March 2003. It continued this focus even though it had infantry bogged down in fighting the insurgency in Iraq.

But then the “insurgency” in Iraq is not really a problem for the neocons, as the point is to continue the process of eroding any prospect of civility and peace, even a modicum of humanity. In fact, the U.S. will stay in Iraq until the process is complete and the country is split into three disparate pieces based along ethnic, religious, and tribal lines, and thus more easily managed as weak and malleable vassal states. Iran faces a likewise future, including a ferocious “insurgency,” actually a general form of resistance against occupation, an entirely normal reaction. Again, this hardly matters, as the point is order out of chaos—that is, chaos for the average Iranian, order for the neocons and neolibs. For our reigning war criminals, on par with the Nazis, order is achieved through mass murder, disease by way of depleted uranium and a greatly degraded civilian infrastructure, infant mortality, and the mass exodus of people of somewhat higher means, as most Iraqis able to flee their homeland have done so.

Plesch and Butcher write about the domestic political aspects of the impending Iran attack:

This debate is bleeding over into the 2008 Presidential election, with evidence mounting that despite the public unpopularity of the war in Iraq, Iran is emerging as an issue over which Presidential candidates in both major American parties can show their strong national security bona fides. …

The debate on how to deal with Iran is thus occurring in a political context in the US that is hard for those in Europe or the Middle East to understand. A context that may seem to some to be divorced from reality, but with the US ability to project military power across the globe, the reality of Washington DC is one that matters perhaps above all else. …

We should not underestimate the Bush administration’s ability to convince itself that an “Iran of the regions” will emerge from a post-rubble Iran. So, do not be in the least surprised if the United States attacks Iran. Timing is an open question, but it is hard to find convincing arguments that war will be avoided, or at least ones that are convincing in Washington.

Surely, the “debate” is “bleeding over” (excuse the impending pun) into the presidential selection process, or more accurately the field of potential selectees, for as we know, almost to a man and one woman, the gaggle of pre-approved selectees are on record as stating no options are off the table, in other words they have expressed a willingness to attack Iran with the devastating and criminal results that entails. “U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons,” Clinton told AIPAC earlier this year. “In dealing with this threat … no option can be taken off the table,” that is to say slaughtering toddlers and grandmothers is on the table.

In 2004, Barack Obama said “that the United States one day might have to launch surgical missile strikes into Iran and Pakistan to keep extremists from getting control of nuclear bombs,” the Chicago Tribune reported at the time.

So eager is Rudy Giuliani to kill Iranians, he has hired the top drawer neocon, Norman Podhoretz, as his Senior Foreign Policy Adviser. “As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department’s latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism’s weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV,” writes Rudy’s Strangelovian adviser (see Podhoretz’s The Case for Bombing Iran).

McCain? “For us to say that the Iranians can do whatever they want to do and we won’t under any circumstances exercise a military option would be for them to have a license to do whatever they want to do,” the Manchurian candidate told Fox News in circuitous fashion.

Mitt Romney, addressing a large percentage of his supporters in Herzliya, Israel, said in January “that the United States must keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.” In the neocon-infested Jerusalem Post, Romney declared: “The military option must remain on the table. The regime should know that if nuclear material from their nation falls into the hands of terrorists and is used, it would provoke a devastating response from the civilized world.”

John Edwards, darling of the CFR set: “As to the American people, this is a difficult question. The vast majority of people are concerned about what is going on in Iraq. This will make the American people reticent toward going for Iran. But I think the American people are smart if they are told the truth, and if they trust their president. So Americans can be educated to come along with what needs to be done with Iran.” Translation: if—no, strike that, rather when—the U.S. attacks Iran, the American people will be easily bamboozled, as they invariably are, once again with tales of aluminum tubes or babies pitched on cold hospital floors. Americans, unfortunately, are bedazzled by cheap lies, sort of the way a beaten wife is sidetracked by an abusive husband’s empty promises.

Naturally, the only candidate—and sincerely a candidate, not a Bilderberger or CFR selectee—against all of this bloody grandstanding is Ron Paul. “If I were a betting man I would bet that they will attack Iran before the end of this administration, which means in the next year or so,” Paul told the Alex Jones show. “The plans have been laid just like the plans were laid to go into Iraq a long time before they did but they had to wait for the right opportunity.”

As the Plesch and Butcher report indicates, the “right opportunity” is almost upon us and the neocons are ready—more than ready, in fact chomping at the bit. However, I don’t believe the neocons will bother with formalistic excuses, speeches before the United Nations, or dog and pony shows like the ludicrous charade of chemistry test tubes and helium balloons Colin Powell orchestrated at the behest of the neocons—or as Powell fondly called them, the “fucking crazies”—prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush, as the commander and decider guy, will simply launch a shock and awe attack against Iran.

Hillary Clinton will be left with the mess.

Addendum

Incidentally, as if to simply and inordinately demonstrate that the crop of “presidential hopefuls,” especially on the Republican side, are flaming neocons who will, if “elected,” continue the same old neocon murder-all-the-time policies, note that Daniel Pipes, described by Harpers as “another neoconservative adviser on the Middle East,” in the same way a fox might be appointed to caretake a chicken coop, has “signed on with Rudy’s campaign.” According to Ken Silverstein, “Pipes is even further out ideologically than Norman Podhoretz, another Giuliani adviser,” and that is putting it mildly. “Pipes frequently issues … warnings, declaring that militant American Muslims intend to mount a second American Revolution, and impose Islamic law. In this context, he has criticized Bush for suggesting in public that Islam is a peaceful religion,” notes Michael Scherer.

Pipes’ personal views on the conflict can be traced back to the early days of the struggle. In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an ideological father to the Israeli right wing, wrote that there would be no peace until the Arabs in Israel were psychologically crushed. “As long as the Arabs preserve a gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us, nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish that hope,” he declared. More than a decade later, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, echoed those sentiments. “For only after total despair on the part of the Arabs, a despair that will come not only from the failure of the disturbances and the attempt at rebellion, but also as a consequence of our growth as a country, may the Arabs possibly acquiesce in a Jewish state of Israel,” he wrote in 1936.

Today, such views are most strongly held in Israel by right-wing political parties, and in America by Jewish supporters of the Israeli settlement movement and evangelical Christians, who have found common cause with the hard-line aspects of the pro-Israel lobby. Those groups were well represented at the Interfaith Zionist Leadership Summit, which began May 17 at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington D.C. Pipes was greeted there as a celebrity, receiving standing ovations before and after his speech.

In short, Giuliani has surrounded himself with rabid, murderous, and treasonous Israel Firsters, criminals determined to drag the United States into yet another bloodbath.

Not that it matters because the AIPAC Queen, Hillary, will be the next presidential selectee.