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It now looks like the only lesson the US and Israel learned from past failure is to press on with a new adventure. It appears the likely prime target is the Islamic Republic of Iran, as ill-advised as it will be to attack it. Petras explains that "Israel's political and military leadership have repeatedly and openly declared (their intention) to attack Iran in the immediate future." And once again it looks like the power of the Jewish Lobby in the US has the Bush administration thinking the same way to help its Israeli partner free itself from another "irritant" in the region that stands in the way of both countries' imperial aims. Petras calls Israel's Iran-directed war preparations "the greatest immediate threat to world peace and political stability (today)." It's hard to disagree.That threat was heightened following North Korea's nuclear test which Israeli officials were quick to jump on suggesting it will benefit Iran. It came from an inflammatory statement by Miri Eisin, Prime Minister Olmert's spokeswoman, who told the AP: "We should remind ourselves that the North Koreans have already been suppliers of launching platforms which could reach Europe and certainly Israel. As such, they have already shown their willingness to be suppliers to Iran." Then Israel's UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman went further on Israel's Channel 2 TV referencing North Korea's nuclear activity and adding: "what Iran is about to do could be much worse, much more frightening and much more dangerous." This language practically demands an attack on Iran to destroy its presumed "nuclear threat" even though Iran is no threat to any country and the real threat is a growing likelihood of an Israeli and/or US attack on Iran or any other country in the region targeted as an enemy.
The US and Israel are allowed to get away with these kinds of outrageously stark and provocative statements even though the only pretext either country can fabricate is the baseless claim that Iran's legitimate right to enrich uranium for commercial use means the country has embarked on a nuclear weapons program that will threaten Israel. In fact, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and, from all the evidence uncovered from years of monitoring by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is in full compliance with it. It has every legal right to pursue its commercial nuclear program and nuclear enrichment for it. Israel, on the other hand, never signed the treaty, is known to have two to three hundred or more sophisticated nuclear weapons and launching systems for them, has stated its intention to use them if it chooses to, and is a nuclear outlaw - but one with an important ally the Iranians lack.
Further proof of Iran's intentions came from Grand Ayatollah Khamenei's public pledge never to attack another country. He also condemned the development and use of nuclear weapons as being against Islam. The Western media was careful to suppress Khamenei's pledge and instead published false reports that he threatened the US to heighten the tension between the two countries. It's all part of the scheme to get full US support for Israel's intended war plans and the long held desire of both countries for regime change in Iran.
Petras lays out a dire scenario if a US, Israeli or joint attack is launched. It will be especially bad if the US does it using so-called "mini-nuke robust earth penetrator bunker-buster" munitions which are weapons that can be made to any desired potency and are likely to be from one-third to two-thirds as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. In other words, there's nothing "mini" about them. Aside from the catastrophic level of immediate and long-term casualties from nuclear annihilation and radiation in Iran and beyond, Petras explains such an attack will only be a "pyrrhic victory." If Israel does it alone, it may set off a chain "political conflagration (to) unseat the rulers of Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia." If the US attacks, it "would be even worse: major oil wells burning, US troops in Iraq surrounded (with the catastrophic consequences of far greater loss of life on both sides), long-term relations with Arab regimes undermined and increased oil prices (possibly high enough to cause a worldwide economic calamity) and supplies disrupted." It's almost certain this would inflame or enrage public opinion in the US and Israel that could lead to the ouster of the ruling parties in both countries.
It would also likely undermine Big Oil's existing and desired major oil exploration projects and cause the Israelis to crack down harder on the Palestinians and make them face forced massive ethnic cleansing expulsion from their homeland. Further, it would almost certainly get a response from Hezbollah or other resistance in South Lebanon, reignite the conflict there, unleash the Israeli killing machine all over again and cause more mass displacement and reoccupation by the IDF as the UN Blue Helmets and Lebanese forces evacuate the conflict zone. And it would lead to a growing threat of retaliatory terror attacks in the US, other Western countries and in Israel and would likely strengthen the resolve of other nations feeling potentially threatened by a hostile US, Israel and the West to seek defensive economic and military alliances in a structure like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that was formed in 2001 for political, diplomatic, economic and security reasons to act as a counterweight to NATO which the US dominates.
Still, with all the hazards of attacking Iran clearly in the minds of US policy makers, the momentum for it is moving ahead. It's happening in spite of serious high-level dispute in Washington about undertaking it. The Pentagon has war plans for it to include NATO, Israel and Canada, and it currently has a major US naval strike group deployment in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean. Part of it is permanently stationed in the region, and in early October, The powerful Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group got "prepare to deploy" orders, headed there on October 3 and is now in place for whatever action may be intended. It joins the Enterprise and Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Groups making a total of three US naval task forces in position opposite Iran for whatever purpose may be planned and will shortly be joined by a fourth Boxer Expeditionary Strike Group that left Singapore on October 16 for the region. Naval forces already there have been engaged in what the Iranian foreign ministry calls "dangerous and suspicious" exercises in the Gulf practicing intercepting and searching ships for potential WMDs and missiles.
This all may be just a saber-ratling bluff, but if it's more than that it could unfold as a late October or early November "surprise" ahead of the November 7 congressional elections now only days away and be initiated in response to a manufactured incident on the order of the August, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin one or the blowing up of the USS Maine in February, 1898 in Havana Harbor. It's never hard for an aggressor to find reasons for war if it wants one and just needs a convenient excuse to start it.
The Bush administration and Israelis may get their wish if the Navy goes ahead with its reported plans to blockade Iranian oil ports. This action will be an act of war if it's done that Iran will have a legal right to respond to in self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter but will surely be met with a "shock and awe" counterattack against about 400 Iranian target sites already designated as ones to destroy in the event of hostilities. None of this guarantees an attack is imminent, but it shows a real possibility one may be coming. It also shows the power of the Jewish Lobby in the US that supports Israel's long-term aim to attack Iran no matter how grim the fallout from it may be. There's so much open speculation about this, it's gotten saner military, political and economic analysts here to believe this would be an act of insanity with the kind of potentially catastrophic consequences Petras outlined above. Will it happen? We can only hold our breathe waiting to find out, but it may not be long before we do.
Part III - Experts on Terror or Terrorist Experts
In this part of his book, Petras goes head-to-head with the so-called self-styled "terrorist experts" (TE) and clearly comes out ahead with his incisive dissection of them explaining why they're prominently featured in the major media. He calls them the "set-up" people - there to play a role to "motivate the colonial and imperial conquerors and reinforce their idea that the terrorists are not worthy of ruling or being ruled," so we have to get rid of them. It doesn't matter that the so-called "war on terrorism" is a shameless overused but very effective ruse scare tactic. It's always used because the public never catches on no matter how many times before supposed threats turned out to be another scam to get them to go along with whatever schemes our government had in mind to undertake. It never ceases to amaze how short an attention span the public has, but it's clear the power of the corporate-run media has a lot to do with it. It led author Studs Terkel to refer to a national Altzeimer's disease and author and political critic Gore Vidal to subtitle his 2004 book Imperial America - Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.
It gives the whole propaganda apparatus and the TE an open field to manipulate the public mind and get it to believe most anything. Petras calls these people "verbal assassins" who can't or won't understand that people pummelled by "shock and awe" attacks, their countries plundered in the name of "liberation," their people mass-murdered, raped, arrested and tortured might be desperate and motivated enough to strike back in retaliatory self-defense. It follows logically from Newton's law that for every action there's a corresponding reaction. In 1954, the CIA understood this and invented a term for it (no self-respecting TE will touch). The agency called it "blowback" referring to the unintended consequences from US hostile acts abroad like overthrowing legitimate or otherwise constituted governments as it did against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 ushering in the 25 year terror reign of the Shah. It finally led to the "blowback" 1979 revolution, and it causes other instances of retaliation now ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and for nearly six decades in Palestine.
But prominent TE featured in the major media have a different diagnosis of resistance fighters. They call them "incurable psychopaths (who are) extremely dangerous when at large (so we must flush them out to) capture, confine, torture or kill (them)." A convenient division of labor is then arranged to do it and the TE play their assigned role along with the military, recruited satraps, prison commandants, interrogators, guards and assorted other functionaries. They're team member hegemon-devil's disciples turning "victims into executioners and the executioners into victims." They do it by dehumanizing the legitimate resistance they label Islamo-fascists, Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists or other invented designations of inferiority or implied threat that must be destroyed.
It's incomprehensible to the TE that almost any act of retaliatory self-defense might be justifiable resistance given the level of state-directed violence used against them mercilessly. In Israel, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan it led to the phenomenon of suicide bombings which Petras calls "a form of individual sacrifice, of individual resistance taken in the name of the collective." He explains further that in the West individual sacrifice is rewarded with medals, but in the Middle East and specifically in the case of suicide bombers the reward is martyrdom for giving their lives in the cause of national liberation against a superior hostile force. This is a phenomenon common throughout history when a people face an overpowering conquerer and occupier. Petras explains "there have always been and always will be self-sacrificing individuals or (whole populations)....prepared to defend nation and home....and to use (their) body as a missile or weapon (to do it)."
Petras also explains there are different forms of imperial conquest and subjugation, and the one the US uses in Iraq and Afghanistan and that Israel uses against the Palestinians is a cruel and dehumanizing "process of destruction, degradation, and exploitation followed by efforts to 'reconstruct' a colonized military, police, and political structure willing and able to repress and contain anti-colonial resistance." It's a doctrine of "total war" against target nations too weak to fight back except by asymmetrical guerilla warfare means that include tactics like car and suicide bombings. Petras calls this practice "one of the ultimate forms of rejection of tryanny" that will only end when "total war" does. And that will only happen when the "colonial revivalist strand of imperialism in....its US, European and Israel variants" are defeated....Peace and reconciliation is only possible if justice is meted to the architects and practitioners of total war and human degradation." A long and painful struggle for liberation may be ahead before that goal is ever achieved.
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