Who 's Behind the Coming War With Iran? : IMC Maritimes

Who's Behind the Coming War With Iran?
by Scott Horton

Writing in The American Conservative's Aug. 1 issue, former military intelligence and CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi, now a partner in Cannistraro Associates, says that the vice president (who, according to the U.S. Constitution, has no authority but to break a tie vote in the U.S. Senate up to and until the day the president keels over or is removed from office) has instructed the Air Force to begin preparing plans for a full-scale air war against Iran's "suspected" nuclear weapons sites using the excuse of the next terrorist attack. Giraldi's piece is short enough to cite here in its entirety:

"In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq([search]) are preparing to do the same for Iran. 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."

Wow, I guess the neocons took it pretty hard when they found out that Chalabi had played them with all his pro-Israel promises, and had in fact been working for Iran all along. It turns out the mullahs wanted Saddam gone as bad as Bush([search]), Sharon, or bin Laden.

I wanted to know more, and since the reaction of the mass media was deafening silence, I decided to interview Giraldi myself [stream] [download mp3]. (Since then, one reporter asked White House spokesman Scott McClellan about it. He had no comment. There was no follow-up.)

As transcribed by Justin Raimondo earlier in the week, Giraldi confirmed to me that former(?) fascist secret warrior and neoconservative writer Michael Ledeen and his CIA buddies were the origin of the forged Niger uranium documents used by the administration to fool Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq. In answer to my question, "Who forged the Niger documents?" Giraldi said, "[A] couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy."

I said that must be Ledeen, member of the Italian fascist P-2 lodge (I said P-3 in the interview, d'oh!).

Giraldi said, "Mm, hmm."

He added that the still unnamed ex-CIA men "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. … A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing."

It will be interesting to see how long Ledeen and his co-conspirators in and out of the executive branch spend locked in prison. Or is it a crime to fabricate lies to justify a premeditated campaign of mass murder?

In any case, Philip Giraldi seems quite concerned that Cheney and the neocons are pushing for the design of war plans for their next target, Iran, using the excuse of another terrorist attack. These, of course, were the same men who used 9/11 as their excuse to attack Iraq. Giraldi noted the implausibility of Iran working with al-Qaeda, as they have a clear antipathy toward each other. Iran is run by conservative Shi'ite mullahs, while bin Laden and his followers are radical Salafist Sunnis. Further, why would Iran strike at the U.S. with terrorism when they have been doing everything possible to avoid a war that would devastate their country? Yet the U.S. government is following the same script as with Iraq: this Axis of Evil member has ties to terrorism and a nuclear weapons program, the UN won't act, so we have to at least bomb the hell out of them from the air, if not invade and give them democracy.

Also, once again, there is a convergence of interests between those who plan long-term energy strategy and those whose primary objective is protecting Israel. Unfortunately, the Likud First wings of the Republican party think it's the burden of Americans to confront Iran over their funding of Hezbollah, even though Hezbollah has never attacked America. Giraldi notes that the neoconservatives have made no secret of the fact that Iran is next on the hit list, and that they want a full-scale clash of civilizations. An unprovoked nuclear attack on Iran by the U.S., or by Israel itself, as Dick Cheney suggested on Inauguration Day, is a sure way to guarantee one.

Let us not forget how cooperative the Israelis were in creating excuses for invading Iraq. Julian Borger, writing in the Guardian, has said that Ariel Sharon had the same problem with Mossad that Dick Cheney had with the CIA: they'd lie a little but not enough. To solve this problem, he created an Office of Special Plans in Israel to help the boys in our Pentagon's "Gestapo office" get the job done right. In the interview with CIA retiree Giraldi, he offered that this story had been relayed to him separately from the Borger piece, presumably from someone who knew it firsthand. Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski's escorting of Israeli generals to Douglas Feith's office at the Pentagon would seem to further corroborate this claim. An Iran specialist from Feith's office by the name of Larry Franklin has been indicted [.pdf] for passing secret Iran-policy papers to Israel. Two of his co-conspirators, Steve Rosen and Keith Weismann at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee have now also been indicted [.pdf] and may join him in prison.

But back to Iran. Giraldi confirmed information I had heard about Air Force Intelligence currently in Qatar picking targets. He added that the special forces were also already in Iran hunting for "suspected sites."

Former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote an article last April saying that Air Force officers had told him that they were working on plans for war against Iran that were to be ready by June of this year. When I asked Giraldi about this he said these were different "tactical" plans as opposed to the ones being drawn up by the Strategic Air Command that were leaked to him. Ritter has also written that the plans he was briefed on have already been put into motion, that the invasion will come from U.S. bases in Azerbaijan, that the U.S. is already flying drones in Iranian airspace, and that the Marxist terrorist cult, Mujahedin e-Khalq, is committing terror bombings against civilians in Iran on U.S. orders. He writes

"Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

"As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream."

Do they get al-Jazeera in Persia? It's hard to believe they elected the hardliner.

We face the very real possibility that individuals in charge of the government actually intend to launch a major air war on "hundreds of possible sites" inside Iran, even, according to Giraldi, to use tactical nuclear weapons. A land invasion is – or at least ought to be – out of the question. Iran is four times the size and has three times the population of Iraq, where U.S. forces have had plenty of trouble despite the majority Shia, for the most part, not even fighting. Demographics suggest Iran's population is heavy on fighting-age males. Most of the country is mountainous. To invade from Iraq can't be done, as the Shia would finally be unleashed against U.S. forces, who would then have to fight from both front and rear. A general Shia uprising in Iraq would be a likely result of bombing Iran, with or without ground troops. Land invasion would definitely require the mass enslavement known as conscription, and the soccer moms won't like that – fighting is for poor people.

The aforementioned felon Michael Ledeen and his neoconservative friends have a theory that if the U.S. bombs untold thousands of Iranians to death, the rest, seeing their government's weakness, will rise up, regime-change the government and install an America-friendly, nuclear-free puppet dictator in their place.

Reasonable people, at this point in the article, must be thinking this is crazy. And it is. There are many reasons why invading Iran is unwise. For starters, Iran has never attacked America. That ought to be the end of it, but let's go ahead and add that "experts" have come out and said what Antiwar.com's Gordon Prather has been saying all along: Iran is 10 years away from being able to make their own nuclear weapons – if they were to begin trying, which they haven't. The only exception to this is the possibility that they have obtained all the necessary ingredients, already prepared, from the black market. If they scored plutonium, Prather tells me, this would necessitate the construction of much more complicated weapons than a "gun"-type uranium fission bomb. The state may say it's so, but for some reason, I don't believe them. In any case, Iran still wouldn't be able to deliver a nuke to North America. According to Giraldi (and to those who still use common sense), the only incentive Iran has to make nukes is its own defense from aggressors – namely, us.

Innocent people would be killed – many of them. The Iraqi Shia majority, who have been relatively cooperative with our unprovoked invasion and occupation of that country, would undoubtedly turn on the U.S. soldiers there. Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari recently went to Iran to lay a wreath at the grave of his hero, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who protected the SCIRI and the Da'wa Party from Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. (This failure on the part of the U.S., having basically handed Iraq over to Iran, may be another reason for the hawks to push for war. Maybe they could break them back up before anyone at CNN notices?)

Think of Iran as a fancy Western word for Persia, its coastline comprising one side of the Persian Gulf. Access to Saudi oil and the Arabian Sea could be easily halted, which would destroy the world economy, and quickly.

If the U.S. were to bomb the Bushehr reactor, not only would radioactive particles blast into the air to fall back down to earth and coat the local environment (think dirty bomb), but numerous Russians would also undoubtedly be killed. How might the U.S. react if the Russians were to bomb a reactor full of Americans in, say, India?

According to Newsweek's article from last September, "War Gaming the Mullahs":

"Newsweek has learned that the CIA and DIA have war-gamed the likely consequences of a U.S. preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. No one liked the outcome. As an Air Force source tells it, 'The war games were unsuccessful at preventing the conflict from escalating.'"

Is it realistic to think, as Giraldi said, that neoconservatives really believe their own lies about Western values being embraced throughout the Middle East by our invasion of Iraq? Paul Craig Roberts has suggested that spreading further destruction is their means if not their end. As Justin Raimondo and Juan Cole have pointed out, we have – conveniently enough for Likudniks – set up the makings of a perfect storm between the Shia in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and the Sunnis in Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

The Israelis seem to be doing their part. As Seymour Hersh reported in a June 2004 New Yorker article entitled "Plan B: As June 30th Approaches, Israel Looks to the Kurds," for which Giraldi was a source, the Israelis, apparently having decided the Iraq war was a total debacle only a month or so after Bush announced "mission accomplished," immediately moved to send in intelligence agents to start buying up Kurds. Giraldi told me he's heard reports that up to 800 Israeli agents are combing Iraq. The story is that our soldiers train together. (Remember the story about Israelis at Abu Ghraib?) According to Giraldi, however, their true purpose is to sow instability and pressure for Kurdish autonomy. This is another looming fault line in the brewing intra-Muslim conflict.

It seems that a lot of what we are learning about this war is coming from those CIA retirees who fled during the neocons' great purge of '04. Although I'm not typically a CIA fan, my favorite kind of government employee, as I've written before, is the kind who rats on current or former bosses. The steady flow of quality information to us regular folks from insider enemies of the former Trotskyite set in the Department of Defense and the vice president's office has been incredibly damaging to the administration and their policy. The CIA refugees can't stand to see their former covert operations roles taken over by soldiers, and they are having their revenge. Should it continue, the pressure might just be able to stop these crazies from expanding the conflict.

We must be careful not to give Bush and his team any more reason for war. Even bashing them could backfire on us. If it is generally agreed this early in the second term that George W. Bush is the worst president since Richard Nixon, or even since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that he is destined to sit as a lame-duck loser for the next three and a half years, then he may see only one chance left to save his legacy: nuking Iran.

To the reporters who spend desperate, sleepless nights wondering how they could have been such suckers, so miserably and with such undying credulity failing to uncover the lies that led to the last bloody war: an opportunity for redemption now awaits.

Squawk...the US did it...Squawk...the Israelis did it...Squawk...I have no evidence but I will trot out the same old lies...Squawk!

Egyptian Professor Abd Al-Sabour Shahin: Muslims Had Nothing to Do with 9/11 Attack on the Empire State Building
The following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian professor Abd Al-Sabour Shahin, which aired on Saudi Channel 1 on August 8, 2005.
Shahin: Our enemies weave many lies about us, which we are not necessarily aware of. For example: One day, we awoke to the crime of 9/11, which hit the tallest buildings in New York, the Empire State Building (sic). There is no doubt that not a single Arab or Muslim had anything to do with these events. The incident was fabricated as a pretext to attack Islam and Muslims. The plan was to take over the world's energy sources, and to achieve this control by force and not by agreement or negotiations, by interests, free trade, or anything like that. This is what they wanted.
So this incident was fabricated - and Allah knows that the Arabs and Muslims are innocent of it - in order to serve as a pretext to attack Islam and the Muslims.
All of a sudden, after we were used to consider America to be a rational and balanced country... All of a sudden, it violates international conventions, cancels treaties, ignores the U.N., acts on its own accord, attacks nations, kills innocent people, and claims it has the right to do so - and all this is based on lies. These were lies from beginning to end, and we were not used to lying - not in policy, not in our discourse, and not in the media. Imagine what crisis the Arab and Islam nation finds itself in, in the midst of these peculiar events, which we cannot explain or believe. All of a sudden, we were framed for an international crime, on the basis of lies.
I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried out this act. Zionism has taken the opportunity to escalate the war in Palestine, killing hundreds of thousands so far, while we watch from the sidelines in astonishment and ask: What's going on?
http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=800

August 10, 2005 -- U.S. prepared to grab Iran's southwestern majority Arab and oil-rich province after saturation bombing of Iranian nuclear, chemical, and command, control, communications & intelligence (C3I) targets. According to sources within the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND), the Bush administration has drawn up plans to hit Iran's nuclear, other WMD, and military sites with heavy saturation bombing using bunker buster bombs and tactical nuclear weapons. The attack will be coordinated with urban and rural critical infrastructure sabotage carried out by elements of the People's Mujaheddin (MEK), Pentagon Special Operations units, and other Iranian dissident groups. The German intelligence comes from classified briefings provided by elements within the CIA that are concerned the neocons in the Bush administration will, in attacking Iran, set off a chain of events that will lead to world war.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

CIA insiders have floated the idea that the US/Israel have decided upon nukes, because these would destroy the evidence proving that Iran was NOT in the process of creating nuclear weapons.

Backlash Builds Against
Cheney's 'Guns Of August'
By Jeffrey Steinberg
8-9-5

As millions of copies of Lyndon LaRouche's July 27 "Cheney's Guns of August" statement circulate worldwide (see http://www.larouchepac.com), a Washington policy brawl has erupted into public view, over the Bush Administration's now-confirmed contingency plans to stage a pre-emptive military strike against Iran-possibly using nuclear weapons. The report that Vice President Dick Cheney had tasked the Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to develop military contingencies for a massive aerial bombardment campaign against Iran, in the event of a new 9/11 attack, was first revealed in The American Conservative magazine's Aug. 1 edition. The story highlighted the likely use of nuclear weapons, and the widespread military opposition to the pre-emptive nuclear war scheme.

Since that initial story by former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, this news service has confirmed the accuracy of the report from a significant number of horrified U.S. government officials-from Senators on both sides of the aisle, to military officers, diplomats, and spies. One former U.S. ambassador in the Persian Gulf reported that he had received angry reports from officials of the Central Command (CENTCOM), who have been tasked as part of the contingency planning.

Another military source suggested that there are probably pre-positioned tactical nuclear weapons at the U.S. military base at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, under the new military reorganization, which created a "Global Strike" plan for rapid, massive assaults anywhere on the planet.

The bottom line: Vice President Cheney, the architect of the pre-emptive nuclear attack plan, has gone stark raving mad, and is prepared to bring the world to the brink of chaos, before he is driven from power. Democratic Party figure Lyndon LaRouche describes Cheney's state of mind as "like Hitler in the bunker."

White House De Facto Confirms

In response to a question from EIR's White House correspondent Bill Jones, Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan let the cat out of the bag on July 28. Asked by Jones about the American Conservative report on the bombing contingencies, McClellan pointedly chose not to deny the charges, and instead, after telling Jones he "appreciated the question," went into a discussion of Iran's alleged secret nuclear program, threatening United Nations sanctions and other actions, should Iran fail to shut down its nuclear reprocessing efforts.

In response to a follow-up question by CBS reporter John Roberts about whether an attack on Iran might fall under the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive action against "terror states," given the new Iranian President's former position in the Revolutionary Guard, McClellan again refused to reject the possibility, reminding the press that the Administration still considered Iran a "state sponsor of terrorism."

It should be recalled that on Jan. 20, 2005, the day of the Bush-Cheney second inauguration, the Vice President appeared on the Don Imus show on MSNBC cable TV, to target Iran. Using language identical to his earlier lies about Iraq, Cheney accused Iran of pursuing "a fairly robust nuclear program" and of sponsoring terrorism. "That combination is of great concern," he declared, warning that Israel could be expected to launch preventive bombing attacks on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons sites, if the Iranians don't abandon those supposed nuclear efforts.

NIE Leaked

One of the most dramatic signs of the ferocious behind-the-scenes fight was the Aug. 2 lead story of the Washington Post, which leaked a recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluding that, far from being on the verge of achieving a nuclear bomb, Iran was at least ten years away from such a capability. The story, by staff writer Dafna Linzer, noted that "the carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House. Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof, that Tehran is moving determinedly toward a nuclear arsenal."

The last time an NIE was prepared on Iran, it was estimated that Iran was five years away from obtaining a nuclear bomb, and that was in 2002. When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited President Bush at his Crawford, Texas ranch this past April, his top military aide, Gen. Yoav Galant, presented an Israeli assessment that Iran had a "very advanced" nuclear weapons program, could have a bomb within 12-18 months, and was near to reaching a "point of no return," when "it could not be any longer stopped."

The leak of the NIE, which was carefully prepared over a six-month period, beginning in January of this year, was widely hailed as a direct factional move, from high-level intelligence community circles, against the Cheney madness. One former Cabinet official noted that the mass circulation of LaRouche's "Guns of August" statement had created the necessary political conditions for the leak to occur, seriously undermining Cheney and the neo-conservatives' race to a new confrontation with Tehran.

The National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body of the 15 agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community as a whole, is now housed in the office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. Just days before the leak to the Washington Post, Negroponte's deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, had testified before the House Intelligence Committee about the overhaul of the NIE process, to assure that there would be no repetition of the horrid mistakes made in the October 2002 Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. That rushed October 2002 NIE vastly overstated and misrepresented Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, particularly its purported nuclear weapons program, and was a large contributing factor to the U.S. Congress's capitulation to Bush and Cheney, in sanctioning the Iraq pre-emptive invasion-even as United Nations weapons inspectors were continuing their inspections with minimal interference from the Saddam Hussein regime, and were stating that no nuclear weapons production was to be found.

Hayden emphasized that the Estimates would now reflect the views of all the relevant intelligence agencies, would be much more "nuanced," and would not be released without a thorough review process, including an assessment of the quality of the sources of key intelligence findings. According to the New York Times's Douglas Jehl, "Other government officials said the standard had already been applied, to a recent highly classified intelligence report on Iran."

The Usual Suspects

In further probing of the Cheney-led drive for a pretext to bomb Iran, EIR has confirmed that the same cast of neo-con characters who led the disinformation campaign against Iraq, in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, have been tasked to carry out the same effort, this time targetting the regime in Tehran. Furthermore, while some media have portrayed the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month as President of Iran as the trigger for the new war push, the truth is that the campaign was launched, in earnest, within days of the November 2004 dubious re-election of Bush and Cheney.

In November 2004, Dr. Jerome Corsi, a leading player in the Karl Rove-inspired dirty-tricks apparatus known as Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, suddenly emerged as the new head of the Iran Freedom Foundation (IFF), promoting regime change in Tehran. Corsi was touted by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) as being the driving force behind the Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2005, which calls for $10 million in funds to be handed out to Iranian dissident groups. Corsi had co-authored the Rove-inspired propaganda book Unfit To Serve, smearing Bush's Democratic Presidential rival John F. Kerry over his military service in Vietnam. In March 2005, Corsi published another propaganda book, Atomic Iran, peddling scare stories about Iran's imminent possession of nuclear bombs.

From May 15 to May 18, Dr. Corsi led an "Iran Freedom Walk" from Philadelphia to Washington, where a rally was addressed by neo-con Richard Perle, and where Corsi was congratulated, in a written statement, by Dick Cheney.

In April 2005, Regnery Publishing, Inc. released another fractured-fairy-tale propaganda piece, promoting pre-emptive war on Iran, this one by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.). Sources familiar with the book report that Weldon was snookered by ex-CIA Director and leading neo-con war party operative James Woolsey, and self-proclaimed "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen, into buying fake intelligence, pushed through a former Iranian minister under the Shah, who has more recently been a business partner of discredited Iran-Contra gun dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Representative Weldon concealed the identity of his high-level "source," referring to him only as "Ali." But "Ali" was soon identified as Fereidoun Mahdavi, a former commerce minister, who fled Iran shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and never looked back.

In an interview with The American Prospect's Laura Rozan, Mahdavi professed shock and outrage that his "information" had formed the basis for Weldon's shrill book. He confirmed that all of the information he passed on to the Congressman had, in fact, originated with Ghorbanifar, a notorious disinformationist, and Iran-Contra ally of the Washington neo-cons. Weldon's saga with "Ali," as recounted in his book, Countdown to Terror-The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America ... And How the CIA Has Ignored It, began in March 2003, at the very moment that the Bush-Cheney regime was about to launch its Iraq invasion.

In late June of this year, Kenneth Timmerman, a propagandist for the neo-cons and for right-wing Israeli circles around former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, published another book, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, which makes a string of preposterous claims, all based on information provided by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian exile group on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Timmerman asserted that: Iran was behind the 9/11 attacks; Iran is safehousing Osama bin Laden inside the country; and Iran has all of the elements to produce nuclear weapons, and possibly provide them to terrorist cells already infiltrated into American cities.

When the Timmerman book was published, the Washington Times ran three days of excerpts, along with an editorial touting the book and calling for action against Iran.

If all of this sounds remarkably similar to the propaganda run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003, that's because it is. The same Michael Ledeen/Richard Perle/Dick Cheney circles that brought you Operation Iraqi Freedom, are aggressively pushing war against Iran. But this time, with 170,000 American troops bogged down in Iraq, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, et al. are now pushing their decade-old plan to conduct pre-emptive nuclear strikes.

http://www.larouchepub.com/pubs/subscribe.html

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