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Bush-Cheney Heading For Nuclear Rendevous At Desert One
Webster Griffin Tarpley
Author - 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA
8-27-5
related map and post: us academy colonel redraws middle east map
- WASHINGTON DC/LOS ANGELES --
With the direct threat of military attack against Iran issued Aug. 13 by Bush, the world has entered a phase of new and acute danger of general war. Bush made the threat in an interview with Israeli television. "All options are on the table," said Bush, speaking from his estate in Crawford, Texas. Asked if that included the use of force, Bush replied: "As I say, all options are on the table. The use of force is the last option for any president and you know, we've used force in the recent past to secure our country." (Reuters, dateline Jerusalem, August 13, 2005)
Bush's comments were ostensibly made in the context of the US campaign to shut down the Iranian nuclear program, but in reality came in the midst of feverish US-UK preparations for a new 9/11 of state-sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism which is intended in the intentions of the terrorist controllers in London and Washington to set the stage for the attack on Iran, as well as for martial law austerity dictatorships throughout the English-speaking world, and beyond.
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Bush and Cheney, and their masters in the US secret government, appeared determined to repeat, on a grand scale, the fiasco of the April 1980 Operation Eagle Claw the attempt to extract the US hostages from Iran which left 8 US dead among a field of burning aircraft at the Iranian site labeled Desert One. This time, the toll would be many orders of magnitude greater.
GERMANY: "EXTREMELY DANGEROUS" "UNCONTROLLED ESCALATION"
That Bush's threats were no mere throw-away lines was shown by the blunt response just a few hours later by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who in August 2002 had been the first NATO head of government to repudiate the then-imminent Iraq war. "Take the military options off the table, since we,ve seen that they are worthless," said Schroeder in a campaign speech in Hanover. He told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag: "I consider the military option extremely dangerousI can definitely exclude that under my leadership this government would be a part of it." Instead, Schroeder spoke in favor of "patient diplomacy," and also of German-Russian reconciliation. Schroeder pointed to the evident limits of the much-touted US "superpower," noting that "in the United States, one should realize that the US might, unilaterally, win wars, but cannot win peace, as we have seen in Afghanistan, and even more so in Iraq." (BamS, August 14, 2005)
German Foreign Minister Fischer warned that military operations against Iran would always bring the risk of uncontrollable escalation. (DPA, August 13) In an irony of history, Schroeder's prompt stand against a wider war has increased the penalty for the aggression now being planned by the Bush-Cheney regime and its backers. If the US attacks Iran before the September 18 German elections, Schroeder might be swept back into office, given the clear inability of his feckless opposition to resist US dictation. When Wolfgang Schaeubele, one of Schroeder's key opponents, visited Bush, Bush told him that "his greatest concern is Iran." However, Bush reassured his guest that there would be no US attack on Iran before the German vote on September 18. (Frankfurter Rundschau, August 18)
The British Foreign Office was compelled to align itself with Schroeder's critique. The Foreign Office spokesman stated: "Our position is clear and has been made very, very clear by the Foreign Secretary. We do not think there are any circumstances where military action would be justified against Iran. It does not form part of British foreign policy." (Sunday Times, August 14, 2005) Thus, according to all present indications, the US would go into Iran utterly alone, without even the window dressing of a sham coalition of the bribed and the blackmailed.
PUTIN: DON'T LOWER THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his own response to Bush from the deck of the Russian battle cruiser Peter the Great in the Barents Sea. Putin's warning addressed the Cheney-Rumsfeld reliance on low-yield nuclear weapons as a key component of US strategy.
"I think that lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear arms is a dangerous trend, because somebody may feel tempted to use nuclear weapons," Putin told journalists. "If that happens, the next step can be taken -- more powerful nuclear arms can be used, which may lead to a nuclear conflict. This extremely dangerous trend is in the back of the mind of some politicians and military officials," the president said. (Interfax, August 17)
This can be read as a nuclear counterthreat in response to Bush's "all options are on the table." The threatening overtone took on consistency over the following hours. Putin flew in a Tupolev-160 strategic bomber with Major General Anatoly Zhikharev, deputy commander of the Russian strategic air force. With Putin on board, this plane was one of two which successfully flight-tested what Russia described as "a new, high-precision, long-range cruise missile." Putin had his picture taken in a flight helmet and, in contrast to Bush's ludicrous "Mission Accomplished" bluster, announced that the cruise missiles had hit their target. A new Russian RSM-54 ICBM, called SS-N-23 Skiff by NATO, was fired from the submerged nuclear sub Yekaterinburg in the Barents Sea and also hit its target on the Kura testing range on the Kamchatka peninsula. All this was in the context of maneuvers by the surface warships and subs of the Russian Northern Fleet.
Russia was also joining with China in Peace Mission 05, an unprecedented joint exercise in the Far East between August 18 and August 26, evidently directed against US-UK meddling in the region. The political basis of this cooperation against hegemonism had been outlined in the July 15 Russo-Chinese joint statement on the world strategic situation. At the same time, intelligence agencies of Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus held a drill involving the prevention of terror attacks on energy assets. Between August 22 and August 30 the combined air defense forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States will drill warding off air attacks around Astrakhan at the northern end of the Caspian Sea. The hypothetical aggressor was, once again, clearly the United States. Russian military sources indicated that the US and NATO had so far not mounted military exercises on this scale in multiple regions. The message of all this is that Russia's military comeback has succeeded to a remarkable degree, with more to come: Putin also announced a 22% increase in the Russian military budget, which is still dwarfed overall by the US. Russia, however, has been able to maintain substantial superiority in a limited number of strategically decisive categories.
As the US has grown weaker under catastrophic neocon misleadership, Putin has grown more assertive: On August 17, Putin met with King Abdullah of Jordan in Sochi and called for a fixed timetable for the gradual departure of foreign forces from Iraq the theme Bush sees as taboo. Putin also called for the convocation before the end of the year of an international conference to stabilize Iraq another Bush bugaboo.
US intentions in the Far East had been made clear by attack dog Zbigniew Brzezinski in a July 29 article in the Moscow Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which boasted that the Russian presence in that region was about to collapse. During August, Pakistan was holding Tri-Service maneuvers along its border with Iran, thus possibly creating a diversion to complicate Iran's situation.
WAR PSYCHOSIS IN WASHINGTON
For weeks, top US officials foolishly ignoring rumblings from many quarters around the world -- have given free rein to their obsession with Iran. When a few days after the London 7/7 attacks, a bomb in Israel claimed the lives of two victims, Rumsfeld placed the blame on Hezbollah and Iran. On August 9, Rumsfeld and outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers complained that Iran was responsible for the availability in Iraq of new types of shaped charge explosive devices, which had played a key roll in the heavy US losses of early August. Press accounts alleged that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards had created a special terror unit for anti-US operations inside Iraq, featuring the use of sophisticated and deadly shaped charges which were capable of easily knocking out the US Abrams tanks. According to one version, the Iranian commander of this irregular warfare group is a certain Abu Mustafa al Sheibani, who leads a score of teams of Iraqi Shiites and Hezbollah fighters who are expert in using the shaped charges. The overall commander of the effort is identified as Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani. (Michael Wane, "Inside Iran's Secret War for Iraq," Time, August 21, 2005) The propaganda value of such stories for whipping up an anti-Iran war psychosis is obvious.
In an article appearing August 1, Rumsfeld went far towards declaring Moslems in general as inferior beings against which crusades could and should be waged. According to Rumsfeld, the terrorists "seek to destroy things they could never build in 1,000 years and kill people they could never persuade." (London Financial Times, August 1, 2005)
These statements were accompanied by a campaign of warmongering hysteria in the reactionary and neofascist media. Arnaud de Borchgrave, the Belgian count who runs United Press International, wrote on August 16 that Iran is responsible for having made Iraq "hell for the US," and that the current Jaafari regime represents a step towards a "greater Iranian Shiite empire." In de Borchgrave's view, the "military option for air strikes is on the table." (UPI, August 16, 2005)
THE GIRALDI SIGNAL PIECE
The acute danger of a US nuclear sneak attack on Iran had been indicated by a signal piece contributed by CIA veteran Philip Giraldi to the magazine The American Conservative. Giraldi is the partner of retired CIA operations man Vince Cannistraro, and can be presumed to be drawing on high-level leaks by those opposed to the Bush-Cheney war scenario. Giraldi wrote: "The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." (The American Conservative, August 1, 2005; reprinted by Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, July 25, 2005)
The notion of a massive nuclear and conventional attack on Iran which is so graphically evoked here should not obscure the other, more immediately important, element of this warning: Cheney is counting on "another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." It is evident that such a determined warmonger as Cheney is hardly likely to leave the coming of that indispensable terrorist provocation to chance: the terror event that provides the pretext for war must be an integral part of the plan being pushed through the US bureaucracy by the secret government, their spokesmen Bush and Cheney, and the neocon faction in general. We are dealing in short with state sponsored terrorism.
As for the military side, US nuclear sneak attack plans have been in the works for some years under the supervision of the utopian Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In the summer of 2004, Rumsfeld promulgated an "Interim Global Strike Alert Order." "Global strike" is Pentagon jargon for pre-emptive attack or, in plain English, a sneak attack. Under this order, the US STRATCOM (Strategic Command, corresponding to the Cold War Strategic Air Command) in Nebraska revamped its posture to be ready to deliver nuclear and conventional attacks on states alleged to be developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The plans to deal with an alleged threat from North Korea and/or Iran go under the designation CONPLAN (or contingency plan) 8022-22. This planning was ordered by Bush in a January 2003 secret directive in order to provide a "full-spectrum" global strike, including notably "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives." A centerpiece of CONPLAN 8022-22 is the so-called bunker-busting nuclear projectile, a specially configured earth-penetrating bomb designed to destroy deeply buried facilities, command bunkers, and the like. The entire package was foreshadowed in the pre-emptive war clauses of Bush's National Security Strategy published in September 2002, supposedly in response to the 9/11 events. In December 2002, the Pentagon's quadrennial Nuclear Posture Review ordered STRATCOM to prepare for greater flexibility in nuclear attack options against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and China quite an enemies, list. According to Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had been reorganized to be able to carry out such short-notice pre-emptive attacks. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson boasted that his headquarters was the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and were ready to execute an attack "in half a day or less."
In July 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the progress made on CONPLAN 8022-22, gloating that "the president charged you to 'be ready to strike at any moment's notice in any dark corner of the world' [and] that's exactly what you've done."
The May 15, 2005 Washington Post article by William Arkin detailing CONPLAN 8022-22 was an important signal piece and would take an important place in a chronology of the current escalation. CONPLAN 8022-22 appears to ignore the messy experience of defeat in Iraq and rather chooses to harken back to a mythologized version of the Afghan campaign of 2001-2002. It calls for nuclear and conventional air strikes, with limited use of Special Forces teams: the result is practically no "boots on the ground" or "follow-on ground operations," according to published reports. Afghanistan was subdued in 2001-2002 by means of air power to enforce deals made on the ground by CIA negotiators with local warlords and druglords. Something similar involving bribery of Iraqi generals was tried on the way to the bloody morass of present-day Iraq. The CONPLAN 8022-22 strategy is utopian enough to enrage any military traditionalist concerned about logistics, depth, and political factors. It is Blitzkrieg, with the utopian elements accentuated. Wayne Madsen reports information he describes as coming from the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German foreign intelligence service, according to which the nuclear and conventional bombing campaigns already detailed will be supplemented by infrastructure sabotage and other acts of terrorism by the People's Mujaheddin (Mujaheddin e Khalq, MEK), US Special Operations units, and other marauders. (Despite recent talk of a US "war on terror," the Pentagon is not reticent about using the MEK, who are still on the State Department list of terrorist organizations, as auxiliaries. In fact, some of the MEK personnel have been personally rehabilitated by none other than General Geoffrey Miller, one of the principal felons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.)
The goals of the US operations include inciting a rebellion in the Khuzestan province of southwestern Iran, the site of many of Iran's oil fields and refineries, most probably including the critical Kharg Island tanker terminal. The majority of this area's population are Shiite Arabs. According to one scenario, the US would intervene in response to an appeal from the phantomatic Al Ahwaz Popular Democratic Front, whose program would include secession from Iran and the declaration of an independent Arab state calling itself Ahwaz. This simulacrum of Ahwaz corresponds to the new state called simply "Arabistan" in the standard Bernard Lewis Plan for the Balkanization of the Middle East. (see map).
Also in correspondence with the Bernard Lewis Plan, the CIA is agitating among Kurds and Turkmen along the border with Iraq and Turkey and among Baluchis along the border with Pakistan by promising them their own balkanized homelands. The Persians, according to this report, would be relegated to an oil-poor "Irani triangle" (or "Iranistan," in classic Bernard Lewis Plan terminology) around Teheran, Isfahan, and Qom. According to the BND, the US Navy is tapping Iranian undersea cables, while US Task Force 121 covert action teams are swarming over sensitive points inside Iran. The presence of US special forces teams on Iranian territory has been an open secret since the beginning of 2005, along with numerous violations of US airspace by US military aircraft. (See
US WAR AIMS: THE BERNARD LEWIS PLAN
To clarify these points, a map reflecting the Bernard Lewis Plan for the Balkanization of the Middle East is included with this article. This map is based on one published in Linda de Hoyos, Derivative Assassination: Who Killed Indira Ghandi? (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985), with some changes.
Bernard Lewis served during World War II as an agent of the British Arab Bureau, the imperialist agency charged with keeping the Arab world weak so as to preserve London's domination. Bernard Lewis is associated with two principal ideas about the Moslem and Arab world. The first is that the real basis of Islam is not at all to be found in the luminous Baghdad Renaissance of the Caliph Haroun al Rashid around 800 AD, in its time the most advanced civilization in the world, but is to be sought rather in the benighted irrationalism of al Ghazali and his Destruction of Philosophy the world of dervishes, sheikhs, and necromancers.
Over more than a century, the British have sought to control the Arab and Islamic sense of identity by finding, publicizing, and glorifying the most backward and self-destructive tendencies in one and a half millennia of Moslem history, attempting to accredit these as the true essence of Islam. Bernard Lewis, glorification of Moslem irrationalism thus prepares the way for the ideology attributed to al Qaeda.
Lewis, second idea is that the existing Arab countries are illegitimate, and need to be carved up into a crazy quilt of ridiculous petty states who will be unable to threaten any important interest of Anglo-American imperialism.
In a 1992 Foreign Affairs article in which he surveyed the region in the aftermath of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, Lewis offered the following prophecy of the coming Lebanization of the entire Middle East on the lines of the post-1975 Lebanese civil war:
"The eclipse of pan-Arabism has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something better, truer and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates"as happened in Lebanon"into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties." Of course, Bernard Lewis only repeats with his usual arid banality the geopolitical nostrums which his British imperialist predecessors had expressed with far greater panache. T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), for example, who was a far more colorful operative than Lewis, developed similar ideas in an October 29, 1918 meeting with Lord Cecil, Lord Curzon, Lord Balfour, General Smuts, and Mark Sykes of the Foreign Office, who helped draw up the map of the modern Middle East in the infamous Sykes-Picot deal. At that time the British effort was to break up and balkanize a Caliphate that actually existed, with its center in Constantinople. Lawrence stated: "If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear, then the Caliphate by the common consent of Islam would fall to the family of the prophet, the present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca. Hussein's activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states he would set up to succeed the Turks would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If properly handled the Arab states would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to combine against an outside force." In other words, the eternal British mantra of divide and conquer, now embraced with giddy enthusiasm by fanatical parvenu neocons, greedy barbarian Bushmen, and cost-plus arrivistes along the Potomac.
The Bernard Lewis Plan represents the real US-UK war aims in the Middle East. This map is what Appalachian poor whites, no-future rural youth, and black and Hispanic ghetto victims are dying for in Iraq. The hogwash spouted by neocons about democracy, or Bush's pledge to bring reform and modernization to Arab societies, are cynical subterfuges to achieve this goal. In the light of this analysis, the basic purpose of Bush's Iraq invasion was quite simply the destruction of that society, and the deliberate provoking of a three-way civil war. This is, after all, what we are observing empirically. Maybe it is now clear why, despite an alleged $20 billion in reconstruction funds available, there is so little electricity in Baghdad.
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