Dear New York Times,
OK, OK, we get the picture: you
want the United States to attack Iran. Why don't you go ahead and put a
permanent banner across the top of the front page with the Cato-like adjuration:
"Iran Must Be Destroyed!" Or maybe you could just tack it on to every single
story: "Yankees Trade to Bolster Outfield; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "Mixed
Results for Apple I-Pad; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "Markets Anxious Over Health
Care Vote; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "New Bistro Revels in Bohemian Ambience;
Iran Must Be Destroyed."
After all, hardly a week goes by now without
some big juicy piece of Times scaremongery about Iran's nuclear program, usually
with the same image of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a lab coat looking blankly at
metal tubes. The thrust of these stories is always the same: Iran is galloping
toward nuclear weaponhood -- a "global threat" that "cannot be allowed to
stand." Last week, it was Bill Broad, goosing the rubes with this little number,
a supposed "science" piece: For
Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier.
For a moment, let's put aside the fact of Iran's
persistent denials of a desire for nuclear weapons -- including the explicit,
repeated statements of the theocracy's supreme religious and political leader
that such weapons are anathema. And let's put aside the fact that despite the
most extensive and intrusive inspection regime in the history of atomic energy
development, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran is not doing exactly what
it says it is doing: developing non-weaponized nuclear power for peaceful
purposes. These are just facts, after all -- and facts, as the sainted Ronald
Reagan once told us, are stupid things.
Or to put it another way, in the immortal words of Arthur
Silber: "So Iran Gets Nukes. So What?" (For more, see note
below.)
But as we've mentioned here often before, "there is literally nothing that
Iran can do or not do to divert the American elite's desire to strike at
their land and bring it under domination." They are of course already waging
secret, slow-motion war against Iran right now, and have been for many years,
with sanctions, terrorist campaigns and covert operations. The only real debate
within the power structure is when and how to accelerate -- or "surge" -- this
war into a broader, more overt campaign. "Moderates" opt for continuing the
gradualist approach until such time as the bond markets -- and other financial
arbiters of our fate -- signal their relative comfort with the move; "hawks" --
many of whom have vested interests in the "security industry" which reaps such
vast profit from war and rumors of war -- press relentlessly for immediate
action.
But whatever their stripe, there is no third way among our elites
on the question of Iran, nothing beyond the notion that Iran must be "dealt
with" -- harshly, stringently -- until it is once more under Western sway. And
it is this latter recalcitrance -- which is shared both by the present Tehran
regime and its dissidents -- that makes Iran a "rogue" nation, not its
internal political repression (which is less severe than some staunch American
allies) nor its reputed "support for terrorism" (an oft-used tool of the United
States and its allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia), nor even Ahmadinejad's
non-existent calls for Israel to be "destroyed" or his Holocaust revisionism
(both of which have long been propagated in far more virulent forms among
staunch American allies such as Saudi Arabia, or America's favorite partner for
Middle East peace talks, the unelected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a
vile Holocaust revisionist for decades -- but now regarded as the most "genuine
and serious" partner imaginable for the Jewish state, according to no less
than Tom "Suck On This" Friedman).
But these facts do not
matter in the slightest. The American media -- corporatized and homogenized to a
fare-thee-well -- simply regurgitate whatever fantasy scenario our masters come
up with to keep the domination agenda careening drunkenly down the road. These
scenarios don't have to be plausible; they don't even have to make sense or have
the slightest bit of internal consistency. And they can change literally
overnight -- as we all remember when Saddam Hussein went from staunch American
ally, bulwark against the rabid Shiite menace, to "the new Hitler," bent on
world domination, the day after he attacked the American elite's business
partners, the repressive, anti-Semitic Kuwaiti royals.
This very
interesting -- and very crucial -- passage in American history is now almost
forgotten. But as we careen deeper into conflict with Iran, it is a history well
worth remembering. Here is
just a bit of it, from a piece I wrote a few years ago. Take special note of
one bit player, whose significance I was not aware of at the time: Jay Bybee, a
longtime factotum who first helped facilitate Daddy Bush's covert arming of
Saddam Hussein, then later, as we now know, helped L'il Georgie perpetrate
the capital crime of torture:
Bush [Senior] also used the global criminal network of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to secretly funnel cash and weaponry to Saddam then intervened to quash federal investigations of the scam. What was BCCI? Only "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history," according to the United States Senate. What did BCCI do? "It engaged in pandemic bribery of officials in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas," says journalist Christopher Bryon, who first exposed the operation. "It laundered money on a global scale, intimidated witnesses and law officers, engaged in extortion and blackmail. It supplied the financing for illegal arms trafficking and global terrorism. It financed and facilitated income tax evasion, smuggling and prostitution." Sort of an early version of the Bush Regime, then.
The Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary funnel used to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly chemicals and other WMD materials supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen and various politically-connected operators in the United States like, weapons merchant Matrix Churchill.
As soon as the BNL case broke, Bush moved to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and Matrix to top Justice Department posts where they supervised the officials investigating their old companies. The overall probe was directed by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller. Meanwhile, White House aides applied heavy pressure on other prosecutors to restrict the range of the probe especially the fact that Bush cabinet officials Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger had served as consultants for BNL during their pre-White House days as spear-carriers for yet another secretive international front that profits from war, weapons, and the avid greasing of highly-placed palms: Kissinger Associates. The U.S. Senate later found that the probe had been unaccountably "botched" witnesses went missing, CIA records got "lost," all sorts of bad luck. Most of the big BCCI players went unpunished or got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions.
One of the White House aides who unlawfully intervened in the BNL prosecution was a certain factotum named Jay S. Bybee. In 2004, said factotum was appointed by George W. Bush to a place on the federal appeals court a lifetime sinecure of perks and power. Mueller, meanwhile wound up as head of the FBI, appointed to the post in by George W. in July 2001. Well done, thou good and faithful servants!
Then came Bush's "Gulf War," when he turned on his protà ©gà © after Saddam made the foolish move of threatening the Kuwaiti royals Bush's long-time business partners, going back to the early 1960s. Saddam's conflict with Kuwait centered on two main issues: first, his claim that the billions of dollars Kuwait had given Iraq during the war with Iran was simply straightforward aid to the nation that was defending the Sunni Arab world from the aggressive onslaught of the Shiite Persians. The Kuwaitis insisted the money had been a loan, and demanded that Saddam pay off. There was also Saddam's claim that Kuwait was "slant-drilling" into Iraqi oilfields, siphoning off underground reserves from across the border. These disputes raged for months; a deal to resolve them was brokered by the Arab League, but fell apart at the last minute when Kuwait suddenly rejected the agreement, saying, "We will call in the Americans."
How worried was Bush about the situation? Let's look at the historical record. In the two weeks before the invasion of Kuwait, Bush approved the sale of an additional $4.8 million in "dual-use" technology to factories identified by the CIA as linchpins of Hussein's illicit nuclear and biochemical programs, the Los Angeles Times reports. The day before Saddam sent his tanks across the border, Bush obligingly sold him more than $600 million worth of advanced communications technology. A week later, he was declaring that his long-time ally was "worse than Hitler."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
