From Another Day in the Empire
Neocons “Clearing a Path to the Targets” in Iran
Saturday January 20th 2007, 12:45 pm
It takes a “specialist” on “Persian Gulf affairs, with special emphasis on Iran and Iraq” to get at the real reason behind the impending neocon attack on Iran.
Kenneth Katzman, who analyzes U.S. policy and legislation on the Persian Gulf region for members of Congress and their staffs, assigned to the House International Relations Committee, talks the talk across the corporate media spectrum, i.e., he is a neocon propagandist. Katzman tells us “Iran’s ascendancy is not only manageable but reversible,” that is if one “understands the Islamic republic’s many vulnerabilities,” Reuters reports.
As should be obvious by now, the neocon plan to deal with Iran’s “ascendancy” has nothing to do with nukes. It has everything to do with the fact our rulers, in particular the neocon faction, believe Iran is too big for its britches and thus will be cut down to size.
As the Clean Break boys told us a decade ago, an “effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran.” In this context, we can define “strategic initiative” as back-to-back bombing runs, wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, and plenty of mass murder and prolonged misery, and not simply along Israel’s northern border.
According to Wayne White, former top Middle East analyst for the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research, the neocon plan for mass destruction will not be limited to a “surgical strike” against phantom nuke facilities.
“I’ve seen some of the planning,” claims White. “You’re talking about a war against Iran” that likely would destabilize the Middle East for years. “We’re not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We’re talking about clearing a path to the targets” by taking out much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that would undoubtedly target “commerce” (i.e., oil tankers) or U.S. warships now parked in the Gulf, patiently waiting for a new Gulf of Tonkin incident to get the World War Four ball rolling. Mr. White, no longer attached to the State Department, is “much more worried about the consequences of a U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” and rightfully so.
Iran’s illusory nukes, not dissimilar from Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, are simply a pretext, as the idea is to “shock and awe” the target population into submission.
“The logic of targeting civilian infrastructure appears in the book from which the Bush Administration drew its bombing strategy in 2003. Military researchers at the National Defense University wrote Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance in 1996. The text suggested applying U.S. military ‘resources to controlling, affecting, and breaking the will of the adversary to resist,’” writes William Van Wagenen. “Through Shock and Awe, the authors hoped that ‘the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese’ would result. President Bush responded enthusiastically to the concept of ‘Shock and Awe’ when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld introduced it to him in the lead up to the war…. As a war against Iran may be upon us in the coming years, we need to keep in mind the effects of U.S. military tactics on civilian populations. Targeting civilians is still terrorism, whether undertaken for the best of motives or the worst.” For the neocons, nuclear “shock and awe” is perfectly acceptable, even preferable.
Meanwhile, as “speculation over whether the American President was considering a nuclear strike against Tehran grew after his remarks in which he said that the U.S. will take any steps to halt Tehran’s alleged meddling in Iraq, Democratic leaders in Congress stepped up warning against what they said were White House plans to launch an attack against the Islamic Republic without first seeking approval from Congress,” reports Alijazeera.
Note the Democrats are not opposed to attacking Iran, but rather irked by Bush’s insistence on going it alone in solitary unitary decider fashion.
“The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat version of a warmonger, complained. Reid apparently had nothing to say about the morality or sanity of such an attack.
Of course, as events unfold, any pissing contest between the unitary decider and the Democrats, the latter insulted because they are out of the neocon loop, is entirely irrelevant.
Read all of it here.
