The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon
By John Pilger
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021006A.shtml
Friday 10 February 2006
Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and
brought carnage to a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth
British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious
abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, the great American
historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in
Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for
reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his
conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless
capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of
action, to any contradictions."
That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there
is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious.
And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to
ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his
destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of
defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the
Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response." you sense he means it. Listen to Blair in the House of Commons:
"It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting
terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations." Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbor,
scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these
are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.
However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In
both crucial debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or similar
expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the
prospect of voluntary disarmament ..." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale
of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.
Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's
imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic
Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and
bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991. Iran offers no "nuclear threat." There is not the
slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the
IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims.
Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a
foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter
has refused to recognize the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle
Eastern states.
Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have
developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly
exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of
purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate
the US and show that it was "above suspicion." Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some
say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under the NPT.
Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.
There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and
conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European
governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.
For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic
government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed
the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern
era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular
pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world - in spite of having sustained
an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.
At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which
the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van
Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but
if they're not developing them, they're crazy."
It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons,
has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent"
strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they
said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran,
which is very real and probably imminent.
Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran
is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be
significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the
burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone,
according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars
and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.
That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush
regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader
breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect,
dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.
While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border
with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported
Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz
and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of
British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labor MPs
pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush
begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what
Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all."
But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to
Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive"
attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to
demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple,
simultaneous major-theatre wars," as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum
of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.
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With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in June.