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Coming War on Iran? :late June events added to picture

Epimenedes | 21.06.2004 15:56

There is a major Anglo-American naval/military mobilization at the moment. This was discussed in an earlier thread. I add here some collateral events which have emerged and invite you to make relevant postings.

In an earlier thread I discussed the ongoing massive naval mobilization, which has almost all of the US Surface fleet out of its home ports, and with a discreet coordinated Royal Navy involvement in exercises

for this see
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/06/293473.html

Today eight British naval personnel -- SBS? -- were arrested in Iran's territorial waters
we http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1244030,00.html

Bear in mind the pressure on Iran from the IAEA, which is itself being driven by pressure from the Germans, French, and perfidious Albion (which is invariably these days the proxy of American policy)

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1242489,00.html

Epimenedes

Comments

Hide the following 9 comments

In the background you can hear the drums beginning to beat ......

21.06.2004 17:45

Jerusalem Post June 20, 2004 "Israeli intelligence agents infiltrating Iran - report"
 http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1087725480384


June 20 article: "Iran on the Verge" from AMERICAN DAILY
urges immediate economic sanctions on Iran, if not more muscular action (article written putatively by 21 year old student, but who knows who assisted with it?_
 http://www.americandaily.com/article/1561

eco-maverick (okay, worse, wierd Libertarian Born-again Christian), but interesting all the same: speculates that the reason for the unexpected opening up of Fed liquidity in the US banking system over the last few weeks has to do with a pro-active attempt to innoculate against systemic economic risk in the event of some July crisis; he speculates Iran
 http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39063

June 20 again,
"The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday that al-Qaida had much more interaction with Iran and Pakistan than it did with Iraq...." logical continuation of War on Terror
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56518-2004Jun20.html


Epimenedes


unlikely

21.06.2004 22:29

If Iran were going to be next the Iranians would, quite obviously, have opposed the Iraq war. They did not. They were the only one of Iraq's neighbours to fully support it, in fact, they had been after it for years. If they had opposed it, they could have caused huge problems for the Americans and America would have been screwed and probably failed utterly. I doubt Iran is "next".

hj


Iran did oppose the American attack on Iraq ..

21.06.2004 23:26

hj, I don't know what or why is the source of your information, but it is simply not true that Iran "fully supported" the Iraq War.

Turkeys don't vote for Christmas. They were well aware that Iraq, Iran and Syria were joined up targets for the Israelis and the US neo-cons. US bases in Afghanistan and Iraq would allow a pincer move on Iran, with attacks from both East and West.

Iraq vehemently denounced the Afghanistan War, and refused to lend any help in 2001. They certainly lent no assistance other than non-intervention to the invasion of Iran in 2003. They have their own interests in the south of Iraq, but remain extremely wary of the Americans.

The only "full support" the Americans got was from Israel and (mostly) Kuwait.

Epimenedes


wrong

22.06.2004 10:37

That's just propaganda, the only evidence that Iran opposed the war is Iranian propaganda about how evil it was, and US propaganda about how Iran is afraid of democracy in Iraq. In fact:

1) Leader of council for islamic revolution in Iraq, an Iranian puppet, said openly on Iranian TV that the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans as liberators even if it meant destruction of infrastructure and heavy civilian casualties.

2) Iran has long been enemies of Saddam, who was the obstacle to Iranian expansion and subversion in the region. They had been trying to overthrow him for decades.

3) Chalabi etc, who the CIA, Pentagon, etc works with, have long been working with the Iranians. Chalabi himself may have been funding the Iranian war against Iraq. Iran was one of the main sources, working with the INC, of false intelligence reports about WMD to justify war.

4) Chalabi made numerous trips to Teheran before, during and after the war, actually along with someone else who co-operates a lot with the Americans. The US knew of these meetings and approved. Chalabi reportedly said in one meeting that the alliance with Iran was not temporary.

5) The US bombed Muslim Marxist fighters who had been fighting the Iranian regime from Iraq, despite the fact that they were causing real problems for the Iranians and their fundamentalist allies. These guys were assured by the US they would not be bombed, so they all went North, and were bombed. The Iranian-sponsored fundamentalist forces now got a free hand in Northern Iraq because this lot no longer opposing them.

6) When Chalabi was flown in by America with his "freedom fighters", most of them were in fact Iranian-trained fundamentalists, because Chalabi had difficulty raising troops.

7) Iran captured several Iraqi boats which appeared to be suicide bombers. They could have just let them go, in which case whole US ships could have been destroyed. They captured them and saved the Americans.

8) Iranians also see having great satan on their borders as a good excuse for cracking down and repression.


The idea that Iran supported the war is backed up by substantial amounts of evidence. Where exactly is the evidence that Israel was pushing for war? The Israelis made it clear on numerous occasions that Iran was the threat to Israel's existence, as was Syria, and Iraq was a lesser threat. This war will increase the power of Israel's deadly enemy, Iran.

hj


HJ lives on another planet

22.06.2004 16:04

HJ, where do I begin to unravel the cobweb of disinformation that you are tossing here? I begin to wonder about your motives.

Starting with the most important issue: Israel's role in warmongering:
It is well documented that the Israelis security establishment with the Likudniks was pushing for a United States attack on Iraq since the 1990s. This is not an antisemitic canard-- we know that from 1996
American neo-cons Richard Perle and Douglas Feith in "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" -- linked closely via JINSA to the Likud Party in Israel ---urged the repudiation the Oslo Accord, and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. Overthrowing Hussein was described as "an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right".

JINSA -- the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs -- included within its circle all the American neo-cons -- many as gentile as Himmler --who drove the war on Iraq: Richard Cheney (now Vice-President), John Bolton (now Under-Secretary of State), Douglas Feith (now Under-Secretary of Defence), Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defence), Lewis Libby (now Vice-President's Chief of Staff), Zalmay Khalilzad (now special envoy to Iraq and Afghanistan), Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary of State), Elliott Abrams (now National Security Council Adviser), and Richard Pearle (formerly on the Defence Policy Board).

post 9/11
Israeli intelligence -- indeed as early as September 12 2001, was pumping out the information that Iraq had been responsible
 http://www.autentico.org/oa09520.php

Israel through its policy and intelligence people, and with the Zionist foreign policy lobby in the United States applying its own muscle, worked hard to drive the momentum towards an attack on Iraq-- pumping up in particular the WMD threat on the basis of invented humint sources
-- as was admitted in December 2003 in a report  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3294865.stm
which asserted that Israelis 'misread' Iraqi threat: "Israeli intelligence was a full partner with the US and Britain in developing a false picture of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capability," said the author of the report, retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom. "It badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons existed." Israeli intelligence ran deception operations to shore up the illusion within the Anglo-American intelligence community that there was really WMD out there

Likud under Sharon pushed furiously for the United States to attack Iraq, and urged that this be joined to a rapid extension of American force into Syria and Iran.

Israel's interests would have been better served by keeping a strong secular Iraq under Hussein as a bulwhark against Iranian fundamentalism, but the idiots who make foreign policy got impatient

Philip Zelicow who served on Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) was quited candid that Israel was central to the war on Iraq -- in a speech in September 2002 he wrote:

”Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.

”And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell,” said Zelikow.



(2) Iran
(a)Iran lent practical assistance to the Iraqi resistance to the American invasion in March and April 2003. In the Sh'iite south of Iraq -- in UmrQasr, Basra, Najaf, Karbala -- the Iranian supported Shiites slowed down the American and British attack for much longer than the war planners ever expected.
(b) As for the Iran--Chalabi connection, that's just a load of hokey dreamed up by the psy-ops boys in Iraq who would like Iranian Sunnis to believe that Iran was behind the war, and that the Iranian backed Sh'iite militias in the south are not to be trusted. Its a bit of post April gamesmanship. Chalabi worked for Chalabi, and certainly maintained links with Iranians, and they desperately did with him, but don't buy that piece of shite. You know how we know this Chalabi-Iran connection is shite?: because it was put into circulation and propagated by media organizations like Fox, who kept it going on the news cycle, when they are in the habit of killing stories which are not part of the line.


(3) The role of Israel in promoting the possibility of a war on Iran is also clear. If Bush is re-elected, Iran is clearly on the agenda. The links between the Neo-cons and the Likud right are close, and their agenda is linked:

Eliot Cohen i the Wall Street Journal in November 2002: "The enemy in this war is not 'terrorism' ... but militant Islam.... Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign... Cohen called for a U.S. attack on Iraq followed by the elimination of the Islamic regime in Iran, which "would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden"

Epimenedes


Troll comments hidden

22.06.2004 21:40

It's the usual pattern: long paragraphs of disinfo with no supporting evidence, lots of throwing around of "it's a well established fact" and "it's well documented", without any actual documentation or evidence.

The aim is to force you to go and hunt down more and more proof continually, to debunk each point of disinfo they make. But each time you do, they move on, shifting the goalposts, in an effort to gradually wear you down.

There's never any intent on the troll's part to engage in real debate, rather, the intention is to burn up as much of your time as possible, and generate as much pointless anger and emotion as possible. It's a bit like an ITV morning chatshow really.

Flussssssh! And away it goes. :)


cheers

an IMC volunteer


IMC volunteer?

25.06.2004 14:46

i think you are a fascist

your judgments are based on a stereotype of the 'troll'

and are not concerned with the questioning of information

in order to question ALL information
we, first must be able to judge for ourselves,

you have no right to design my reality

you dickhead...

Captain Wardrobe


not my fault

25.06.2004 18:45

it's the dental implants
:)

IMC volunteer


no fun

06.07.2004 13:18

independant?

indy - media

hmmm...

trade descriptions act?
anarchist newswire?

name calling psyops
prejudice
closed minded?

agenda?

left gatekeepers?

got to make cash for the boss upstairs?

Captain Wardrobe


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