Ian Gurney: Next Stop Iran?

On July 14 Reuters newsagency reported that Abolasan Khamoushi, general director of Iran’s Oil Development and Engineering Company had announced that Iran had made a major new oil find in the south of the country, containing estimated reserves of more than 38 billion barrels. The find could rival the world’s two other leading undeveloped fields in Kazakhstan and, coincidentally, Iran. Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar oil field, brought on stream in 1951, is the world’s biggest, still containing 70 billion barrels of recoverable reserves.

The news that Iran is sitting on such huge reserves of crude oil, bigger than Iraq's oil reserves some say, must have the Bush regime salivating over their cornflakes and morning newspapers. Companies like Haliburton and Bechtel must also be relishing the prospect of more millions to come once the Bush team have managed to convince the American public that Iran is a "credible and current" threat to the USA and is harbouring Al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorists. This, of course, shouldn't be too hard. The compliant US mainstream media will once again be full of lies emanating from the neo-cons and warmongers (one and the same people) in the Bush administration, who will claim that the Iranian people must be "liberated" from the Mullahs who rule them. They will also, no doubt, tell the world that Iran has weapons of mass destruction which it is able to deploy within 45 minutes, and nuclear weapons and ICBM's with the capability of reaching the USA and its allies (Israel) in the "free" world.

Perhaps this time the American public will be a little less naive. Perhaps the fact that the "liberation" of Iraq is starting to look more and more like an "occupation" has lessened the American public's appetite for another pre-emptive invasion of a country most can't point to on a map. Perhaps with American forces in Iraq now being told they can't go home yet and the US death toll rising by at least one a day, Joe Public has realised that, once again, he's been lied and conned into a war which had nothing to do with 9/11, WMD's or "liberation". Perhaps not.

What of the United Nations and America's allies? Already the media and the public in the United Kingdom are asking difficult questions about their governments intelligence sources and indeed the whole probity and veracity of the Blair administration. Slowly this has been picked up by a reluctant US media and now even the New York Times is questioning the truth of statements issued by senior members of the Bush cabal in the build up to the pre-emptive strike on Iraq. Just exactly where are those weapons of mass destruction, Mr. President? Where is the uranium from Niger? Where is the anthrax and VX nerve gas? Where the hell is Saddam?

What if nobody wants to fight another war? Considering the worsening debacle which is now Iraq and Afghanistan, would the American public willingly back Bush and his pals plans to attack Iran, a country far more formidable as a foe than Iraq? Perhaps not.

So, with all that lovely oil in Iran to be "liberated", how best for the neo-cons in the Bush regime to convince Americans that Iran poses a "clear and present" threat to the United States and has to be pre-emptively attacked.

The answer is simple and was articulated by none other than Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Back in 1998 when he was a member of the Project for a New American Century* he said that it would take a "Pearl Harbour" event to awaken the America public to the threat from Arab terrorism. And then, when Wolfowitz and his other PNAC cronies, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Abrams, Bolton, Woolsey, Libby et al got into power, along came September 11. Coincidence?

These people are now embarking on a foreign policy that envisages the complete take over of middle eastern oil, using Iraq as a forward base for their forces and weaponry in order to "liberate" Iran, Syria and perhaps even Saudi Arabia. Their stated aims are eventual American global domination and such is their fervour that they will allow nothing to get in the way of their aims and ambitions. If the American public are unwilling to back Bush in his stated ambition of "liberating" Iran, what "Pearl Harbour" event are the neo-cons cooking up next?

* http://www.newamericancentury.org

- Ian Gurney is a broadcaster, journalist and the author of the bestseller "The Cassandra Prophecy-Armageddon Approaches" published by International Global Press. ISBN: 0953581314. ( http://www.caspro.com) Ian welcomes your comments at info@caspro.com

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