Setting the stage for Iran war

February 12th, 2007 at 11:42 Björn Hallberg

And so people are buying into the same sort of deception that got the US into Iraq. Or in fact every major conflict since the Spanish-American war. Will they ever learn? Larry Chin is the latest to argue, correctly in my mind, that the planning for war has already started and that this year will see an increase in make-believe evidence presented against Iran. The fabrication of the case against Iran has begun. And it will not stop there. The chaos that will follow from engaging another made-up enemy in yet another theater, while leaving past objectives woefully unfulfilled even according to their own definition, may well be intentional and the onset of a much broader and vicious campaign. The question is how much of this is sheer stupidity and stubbornness and how much is an actual desire to fire the first volley in the next world war. Put another way, is it even possible that anyone could be so delusional about the state of the world and could have bought into the definition of a clash of civilizations or is it just a calculated “risk” that a more “robust” war will do what wars always have the potential to do, namely silence dissent at home, stave off economic collapse in the short run, open new markets for corporations and add to the power play of geopolitics? Or to put it yet another way, whether or not this chain of events is being advanced by idiots or rational, but immoral, intellects.

Some skeptics have maintained for years that the Bush administration will not attack Iran, based on the rational concept that not even the Bush administration and its neocons would be insane enough risk a full-blown superpower nuclear war.

But in a testimony before Congress, Robert Gates declared that the Pentagon, indeed, has plans for full-scale war against Iran, Russia and China. This statement, a virtual promise of world war, suggests that the Anglo-American establishment is prepared to wage the endless war. So much for sanity.

As Chin also points out, the testimony by Zbigniew Brzezinski last week really puts the US position in perspective. Clearly, Brzezinski is not so much concerned about the “calamity” for its own sake. Rather because it undermines US hegemony, which at the end of the day is much more than carrier groups or cruise missiles. You know that things have gone terribly wrong when brazen imperialists like Brzezinski are sending up the red flag.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the “decisive ideological struggle” of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.

This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran — though gaining in regional influence — is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Quite the conspiracy theorist it would seem. One must not forget that this is one of the foremost US technocrats of empire after all and one that has been privy to some of the darkest secrets of the land. And if anyone knows radical Islam it would be Brzezinski, since he helped set them up in the first place.

Meanwhile, Putin, or as we like to call him — captain obvious — notes that America’s influence has to stop expanding and that the US has overstepped its bounds in nearly every field. I guess you could say the same for Russia though fortunately they don’t project force or export ideology across the globe. I don’t see them subverting elections in Mexico or Canada for instance which would be the equivalent of what the US is doing in Ukraine and elsewhere. And while mentioning Brzezinski, it worth remembering who got the Soviet Union involved in Afghanistan and how by and large Brzezinski’s successors copied the same approach when urging former satellite states to turn on Russia and fuelling the conflict in Chechnya. All in all, the hypocrisy across the board is quite staggering.

Entry 681 filed under: North America. This entry was posted 1 year, 3 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.