In the run-up to the demonstrations against the NATO summit in Chicago this month, Ashley Smith interviewed the State Department official-turned-antiwar activist.

Ashley Smith: You had been a career military officer and State Department official. What compelled you to resign and join the antiwar movement?

Ann Wright: I was in the military for 29 years –13 years on active duty and 16 years in the reserves, and then another 16 years while I was in the State Department as a U.S. diplomat. So I was a part of the system under seven different presidents, from Lyndon Johnson all the way to George Bush Jr.

I didn’t believe in, or agree with, all the policies of all these administrations. I disagreed with many of them, but I never resigned. I always found other things I could work on that I felt were not harming people. It was only at the end of my government career that I finally resigned over something, because there were plenty of things I could have resigned over earlier, but I didn’t. I held my nose about them, like most government employees do.

The tipping point for me was the decision of the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. They used the excuse of weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t believe them. We all knew that there had been two no-fly zones over the country over a period of 10 years. There had been quarantine, a blockade around the country, and there had been endless inspections for weapons of mass destruction.

On top of that, the UN inspectors, most of whom were U.S. intelligence agents, didn’t find anything, or the few weapons they found they destroyed. But, in general, the consensus of the international community was that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in the country.

So I just didn’t believe what the Bush administration was saying. When Colin Powell gave that lengthy address to the General Assembly in February 2003, I remember sitting in our embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. I watched it on live TV with all of our staff around, because we all realized that this was a momentous event, and we knew that our lives would again be changing if the U.S. decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

With the buildup of rhetoric that was coming out of Washington in the fall of 2002, I was very, very uneasy, and I had trouble sleeping. I ended up having to be medically evacuated to Singapore because they thought I was suffering symptoms that are often the precursor of a stroke. I was having all sorts of light-headedness, shortness of breath, and I had arrived at the age where you need to watch out for this sort of stuff.

After an intense week of every type of medical exam possible, the doctor said, “Are you under any particular stress?” And I said, “Well, yes, I’m under stress. My nation is about to blast the hell out of another country.”

I continued waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep, and then staying up and just reading and writing out my concerns about what was going on. Every night I was reading materials, underlining passages and writing comments in the margins like, “This is the stupidest thing they could ever think up!” I was piling up pages and pages of writing detailing all my disagreements with Bush’s policy.

When I finally resigned, I ended up writing what I’ve been told was the longest resignation letter in the history of the State Department. It’s about three pages long and it not only talks about the war in Iraq, but other concerns about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the Bush administration’s lack of effort to engage North Korea, and its unnecessary curtailing of civil liberties under the Patriot Act.

When I resigned, I got over 400 e-mails from friends and colleagues in the State Department and other agencies saying, “You’re doing the right thing. We wish we could resign, but we’ve got kids in college, mortgages, you know, the whole financial thing.” But there are plenty of people in the government I think that have retired early and with severe cases of ulcers from having had to go through all of the horrors of the Bush administration.

AS: After you resigned, you became an antiwar leader while Bush was in office, but you did not stop when Obama was elected. What’s your assessment of Obama and his policies?

AW:  Everyone was hoping for a real change from what George Bush had dished out during his eight-year reign. But let’s remember that even during the campaign, candidate Obama did tell us that he felt the Afghanistan war was a good war, and he intended to escalate it. On that bad promise he’s delivered, but on many other good ones he has not.

He’s not closed Guantánamo. We still have the military commissions trying a few prisoners in Guantánamo. Virtually nobody has been released during the Obama administration, or even put on trial — these people are in imprisoned with no hope of resolution of their cases.

On the issue of curtailing of civil liberties, it’s worse under the Obama administration. Whistleblowers are getting the worst of the raw deals — six people have now been charged with espionage for revealing classified information that shows government malfeasance and criminal acts.

I’ve been very disappointed and displeased with Obama’s tenure. Like many other people, I have been challenging those policies, and writing and speaking and having endless vigils out in front of the White House. I, like many others, have gone to protest the president at various events, disrupting them over a variety of issues and getting arrested, just as we did under the Bush administration.

How to deal with the Obama administration has been a big debate in the movement. At our recent Veterans for Peace convention, we had a long and good discussion about whether we should call for the impeachment of President Obama as we had called for the impeachment of President Bush. While we were hesitant to come out against the first Black president, after we laid out all the evidence we decided that we had no choice but to call for Obama’s impeachment.

AS: What do you think of Obama’s policies in his Afghanistan?

AW: I think his escalation of the war in Afghanistan is perhaps his worst decision. He’s caused a huge number of civilian casualties, wasted a tremendous amount of money on sweetheart deals for private contractors, and enabled enormous amounts of corruption among Afghan businessmen as well as in the Afghan government itself.

Many of these Afghan corporate and governmental elites are part of the warlord class. We’re training and equipping their militias in the police and army. They will be there to fight not for the country of Afghanistan, but for the warlords to whom they belong.

Obama has decided to extend his patronage of the corrupt Afghan elite with this new 10-year strategic pact. He’s supposedly closing the door in Afghanistan as he supposedly had closed the door in Iraq. This is all, in fact, a public relations ploy. Behind the supposedly closed door, the U.S. is spending billions of dollars in Iraq and there will be billions for the next 10 years in Afghanistan.

AS: What’s your analysis of Obama’s new focus on Asia to contain Chinese power?

AW: Obama sees China as a rising rival, a huge economic powerhouse as well as a regional military power with the largest land army in the world and with an increasingly advanced air force and the navy. As you said, he wants to contain it.

He and the Congress are whipping up anti-Chinese rhetoric here in the U.S. Just recently the administration denounced the Chinese for building their first aircraft carrier. This is pure hypocrisy. The U.S. already has 14 of them. And for the first time, the Chinese have one, and they talk about it as that’s the greatest threat to all of the world.

That’s not to absolve the Chinese government of its problems and its own bad policies. But the U.S. should not be adding them to the “axis of evil.” This pivot to Asia will only push China into a corner and may lead them to do something that will give the excuse for the U.S. to make even more hostile policies.

And the U.S. pivot seems almost designed to provoke China. Obama has increased the military to military relationships with the Philippines. We still have a huge number of soldiers stationed in Okinawa in Japan.

He’s opened a new base for 2,500 Marines in Australia and an airfield that will be dedicated toward big Global Hawk drones that can stay indefinitely in the air for surveillance in Asia. And in South Korea, we still have over 30,000 troops and he’s pushing for a new naval base in a pristine place called Jeju Island. Obama wants that to be the homeport for Asia’s part of America’s worldwide missile defense system.

This last decision is very significant since it will increase tensions with not only the Chinese but also Russians. The missile shield in Europe as well as the new one proposed for Asia is one of the reasons that Putin did not attend the G8 meeting. He wanted to send a signal that he is going to be putting more and more pressure on the U.S. to stop this missile defense system. Otherwise, he’s going to put one in, too, which will not be good for world security.

AS: Why is the U.S. putting an increasing emphasis on drones as a central part of its new strategy?

AW: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are an easy, clean way for the U.S. to wage war. You don’t have to have your own military on the ground. These drones are capable of flying long distances, they can be refueled in the air, and they can do the dirty work of the U.S. without any American’s life being risked.

They are automating warfare. Some of these drones are as large as the 727 and can carry payloads that are enormous. They can put big bunker buster bombs under these things and fly them over and just drop wherever they want.

But this new automated military will not, in fact, protect American lives. Just like traditional military actions or missile strikes, drone warfare will inevitably precipitate blowback. We’ve already seen attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates specifically in response to drone attacks. So, the administration’s claim that these are the safest things that we could be using isn’t true.

We’ve already had examples of blowback from Obama’s drone war. Remember the young Pakistani-American guy who had planned to detonate a carload of explosive in Times Square. Luckily a hot-dog vendor thwarted his plot, but afterward when he was asked why he planned the attack, he explained, “Well, it’s the drones. The U.S. is using them to kill families in Pakistan.”

We also have the incident of the Jordanian doctor who was recruited to be an asset of the CIA. The CIA wanted him to infiltrate al-Qaeda and bring back information. But, this agent became horrified by the U.S. drone war. So he went to a CIA base in Afghanistan and blew himself up and killed all eight CIA agents.

Afterward it came out that he left a letter for his wife saying, “I am so horrified about what the U.S. is doing with these drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I refuse to work with them anymore.”

The drone war is even complicating U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the main supply route for over three months in protest against CIA drone strikes. The U.S. has been forced to bring in equipment into Afghanistan through the northern road network from Latvia, which is extraordinarily expensive. Despite Obama’s hopes, war, including drone war, will never be bloodless and clean.

AS:  A lot of people think that Obama is bringing an end to the wars Bush’s started. What is the real picture of U.S. militarism today?

AW: First of all, we have to be very watchful of what the Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is he has not really ended the U.S. domination over either of those countries. The U.S. has hoards of American private contractors in each of those countries, and many of them are private security firms who have every bit as much firepower as the U.S. military.

Beyond that, the U.S. has increased its bases throughout the Middle East. We don’t even know the total number of bases, outposts, runways and landing strips in Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We do know that there are CIA and U.S. military bases in Yemen. There’s a huge base in Qatar. There are, I think, seven bases now in Oman.

In Africa, the U.S. has established a military base in Somalia. They are using various alibis to justify increased military presence throughout the continent. The U.S. is sending the military into Ethiopia all the time. We have U.S. military forces in Kenya. And then we have U.S. Special Forces in Uganda to supposedly to go after Kony. Well, you can be sure that once they’re in, they’ll never leave.

Over in Mali and West Africa, the U.S. always has what they call mobile training teams, groups of Special Forces that will come in and do specialized training for militaries. That’s their way to establish relationships between senior leaders of the military, to try to get some sort of compatibility with the military in case the U.S. decides it needs to go in there. So the U.S. has a large number of small groups of military all over Africa.

In Asia, the U.S. pivot against China is ratcheting up tensions throughout the region. We have Special Forces in the Philippines, down in the island of Mindanao that are using drones and have assassinated 11 people already. And there are members of the Philippine government and legislature, their parliament, who are outraged about what’s going on.

Walden Bello, one of the wonderful international activists and member of the Philippine parliament, has already written to his government saying, “What’s going on? These are things you’re doing without any consultation — allowing U.S. military and armies, military operations that are killing Filipino people.”

And then, of course, we have many U.S. military forces in Korea, Japan and Okinawa. We’ve had a large naval base down in Singapore for a long time. We do have military to military relationships now with Vietnam, with Laos, Cambodia. So, the U.S. has its tentacles everywhere and, depending on who gets out of line, the U.S. may put great military as well as economic pressure on that country. And the U.S. will use the global “war on terror” to declare its right to go anywhere, anytime, do anything.

AS: So what do you think the key tasks for the antiwar movement today?

AW: Well, to be vigilant, to be vocal, to be on the streets, to keep after the issues of Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t let them fade out of view. And one can use a variety of levers on it, because we’ve got to have some hook to make the public aware. In Iraq, we have to call attention to the issue of private contractors and the numbers that are there — who they are and what they’re doing — and also where U.S. oil companies are and what sort of contracts they’ve got there.

And in Afghanistan, we will be seeing war sponsored by the U.S. well after 2014. We have to debunk the idea that U.S. forces will be leaving behind an independent country. I think that the next 10-year period we will see U.S. forces there in large numbers fighting Taliban, conducting night raids and drone strikes, and violating the sovereignty of Pakistan. We should also watch out for U.S. using its power to control pipeline routes in the region as well as exploit the natural resources of Afghanistan.

Pakistan will likely be the most volatile of all of the areas. What the U.S. is doing there just has the potential to be a greater catastrophe than even Afghanistan. The U.S. is killing untold numbers of people with drones and essentially thumbing its nose at the Pakistani government, which has pleaded with us to stop because of the reaction that they are getting from their own people.

I mean it could explode in just so many horrific ways. People are furious with the U.S. The U.S. embassy in Pakistan has already been burned twice over the past decades.

We really have to follow what the U.S. is up to in Asia and the Pacific. We have to be watchful of the rhetoric of the administration and do everything we can to tamp it down, to call the hand of the government.

We also need to keep agitating against the occupation of Palestine. We need all sorts of international citizen activism to highlight the illegal settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid wall, and the treatment of Palestinians within Israel and the blockade of Gaza. I think that campus activists have played a key role doing all sorts of things like building walls to bring home what the apartheid structure of Israel is like.

We have to keep up the international effort to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Very soon, we’ll be announcing a new project called Gaza’s Ark. Rather than trying to get boats to break the blockade from outside, we are going to work with Palestinians to break the blockade from the inside. We’re going to help sponsor a Gaza boat building and sailing school. This will provide some much needed jobs for the people of Gaza.

This is an important shift. We all have felt badly about spending so much money on flotillas from the outside that gets a lot of publicity for the issue but they don’t really help the people inside Gaza that much. With this new approach, we can get work for people and help stimulate the economy to a small degree.

Once the boats get built, we’ll solicit people all over the world to order products from Gaza. We’ll put these products on the boat and have them set sail from Gaza to deliver them to the world. Everyone will know that the probability of ever getting this stuff is pretty low, but they can be a part of helping break the blockade and also help the people of Gaza earn money for the beautiful work that they do. It’s an important new step for the continuing struggle to liberate Palestinians from Israeli occupation.

Finally, we need to keep the pressure on the American government and the Israeli government to stop any drive to war against Iran. We really need to pester the hell out of the Obama administration on this rhetoric that they’ve been saying about Iran developing weapons of mass destruction.

I mean we’ve heard all of this before. These same allegations against Iraq lead me to resign my post. Instead we should be encouraging them to talk with Iran. We should be in dialogue, not in military confrontation.

*  This article first appeared at Socialist Worker.

1. If President Barack Obama is re-elected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like “a moderate Republican circa 1992″. Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected “creeping fascism.”

In today’s society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections — when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate — masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street’s depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism — the economic holy of holies — is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall St. last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces. Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins. If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change — but it’s still a big “if.”

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year’s election because both ruling parties basically agree  about them and there’s little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, “up to the shoulders!” Here are some issues the voters won’t be able to influence at the ballot box:

• President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing “terrorist suspects” in Somalia and wherever the CIA’s drones wander. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10-year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% — many of whom want it terminated now — are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama, days earlier, announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his “final” pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will “defend” the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills — several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington’s penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.

• Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.

• Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (which requires fracking), “clean” coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power, and dirty tar sands fuel. The Obama Administration’s support for alternative non-carbon development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. — which demands to be recognized as world leader — is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.

• Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of from Occupy, President Obama has finally at least mentioned poverty, inequality and low wages, but he has done nothing about this situation since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected. The United States is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or health care. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only “income” for six million of them. This has not come about by mistake; it’s the political system’s payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy and its minions.

• The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half  way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy — whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure — it’s always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There’s a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says “we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion.” This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.

• President Obama has retained all former President Bush’s many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that “30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country.”

• Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What’s the “pivot” to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process? Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela?

Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi’ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen, other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords? Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world’s oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office’s new “scramble for Africa,” other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama’s abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the “greater evil.”

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite Don’t-tread-on-me Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record. Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of “governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats.” Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change and support for unnecessary wars — a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House — should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a “C” (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy —  the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters — the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain’s conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered “What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?” The article quotes the following from the new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Many right wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the “big government socialist” whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his “true” nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that — as opposed to 2008 — the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns. Now he’s in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama’s presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending and the huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall St. that set the stage for what by now had become a “winner take all” economic system.)

Romney’s nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero…. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that “the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.” AP didn’t mention Romney’s political characterization of Obama, but he’s hardly a liberal — as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to “free enterprise” capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign — health care and the Afghan war —  despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama’s health care plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican’s views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist, April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that  Obama’s “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program…. As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: ‘Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,’ he said in 2002…. Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.” It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These “coincidences” are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. “Far right” Romney and “liberal populist” Obama have both resembled “moderate Republicans” when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were “weak on defense,” including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can’t work this year.

The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters — then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president. He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a “peace candidate” of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama’s “peace” record:

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars. • He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security. • He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan. • He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. • He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad. • He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist. • He expanded drone attacks into Somalia. • He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia. • He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America. • He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism. • He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.”

No matter who wins in November nothing listed above will change, except perhaps for the worse. If Obama returns to the White House, it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today, along with the wars, inequality and hardship. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The informal people’s struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy’s left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, has the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But such broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history. It may be a long, arduous struggle, but that’s the light at the end of this dismal electoral tunnel.

Affirms that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening. Urges increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to secure an agreement that includes: (1) suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, (2) complete cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran’s nuclear activities, and (3) a permanent agreement that verifiably assures that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful. Supports: (1) the universal rights and democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, and (2) U.S. policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. Rejects any U.S. policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran. Urges the President to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat. (emphasis mine)

The resolution passed the House 401-11, with a few representatives absent and a few abstaining. This means it had massive bipartisan support – for those of you who only consider Republicans to be warmongers: 166 of 190 Democrats voted in support, including some of its ostensibly most progressive members, such as Barney Frank and Rush Holt.

The language used bodes terribly for the United States’ already disastrous and destructive foreign policy. The House affirms not merely that Iran will not be allowed to manufacture nuclear weapons, but that it will not be permitted the capability of said manufacturing. Never mind that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta observed that Iran is not actually pursuing these weapons; given the extreme and persistent threats from the nuclear-armed Israel and United States, coupled with the U.S. forces surrounding Iran, we would have no right to prevent them if they were.

Further, examining the House’s reasoning for denouncing Iran as a repressive regime highlights severe hypocrisy:

Whereas, on December 26, 2011, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution denouncing the serious human rights abuses occurring in Iran, including torture, cruel and degrading treatment in detention, the targeting of human rights defenders, violence against women, and ‘the systematic and serious restrictions on freedom of peaceful assembly’, as well as severe restrictions on the rights to ‘freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.’

Switch in that paragraph “the United States” for “Iran” and you might think we should be sanctioning ourselves. Regarding the first several accusations, consider this: the United States tortures foreign adversaries by proxy, abuses accused whistle-blowers in prison before trial, detains more prisoners than any country on Earth, and continues to pass state laws assaulting women’s rights. Perhaps the most hypocritical, though, is the accusation of the repression of peaceful assembly. Just two days after the House passed this resolution, Chicago riot police beat protesters with nightsticks, hit others with CPD vehicles, and used sound canons to disrupt peaceful demonstrators against the NATO summit. So the idea that the U.S. deems Iran a barbaric nation that represses political speech is extremely two-faced at best.

The worst part about the bill, though, is not what policies it specifically introduces or accusations it announces but rather what it signifies more broadly: the U.S. is taking the next step in the war on Iran that has already begun.

For one thing, Israel has already teamed up with a U.S.-backed terror group within Iran to assassinate nuclear scientists, serving both the temporary, practical purpose of inhibiting Iran’s nuclear progress and the long-term, psychological purpose of instilling fear within Iran and its fledgling nuclear program.

More insidiously, the U.S. has imposed severe sanctions on Iran that most describe as “crippling” and that all should describe as acts of war. Just today, the Senate voted unanimously to escalate those very sanctions. While President Obama may say that sanctions are intended to isolate Iran’s leaders in their nuclear position, it is citizens who bear the burden of these economic moves. Look to Iraq for the devastating effects, where a senior U.N. official estimated that U.N.-imposed sanctions in the 1990s killed a staggering 500,000 children under the age of 5. They don’t call ‘em “crippling” for nothing.

We should also look to Iraq to understand how this bipartisan process of escalation works, from sanctions to bombing to occupation. Arguing against sanctions on Iran in April 2010, Rep. Ron Paul recalled how sanctions on Iraq led inevitably to war:

Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.

The Iraq war did not begin with the 2003 invasion – it began with the 1990s embargo. Sanctions on Iraq not only killed hundreds of thousands, but they structured the narrative on Iraq to winnow out peaceful options on the path to war. And the same is true of Iran. Now debates on Iran focus on whether Ahmadinejad will relent in his pursuit of weapons, whether sanctions are “working” sufficiently, or where the U.S. and Israel should draw “red lines” for attack.

President Obama called last month’s “negotiations” with Iran that country’s “last chance,” effectively threatening to escalate sanctions or initiate an attack if Iran didn’t cease and desist its nuclear enrichment program entirely. How are those “negotiations”? How is that “diplomacy”? Threatening Iran to completely submit to the U.S.’s will to get nothing in return is not a discussion – it’s bullying.

What would Iran have to gain in that situation? Iran is seeking to defend itself from nuclear-armed bullies surrounding it constantly. Passively complying would only speed up the U.S. plan to replace the Iranian regime with one even more compliant.

But the United States will not relent on Iran – just as it did not relent on Iraq. Examine again the House resolution’s first principle:

…it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening.

Compare that with President Bill Clinton’s 1998 remarks on Iraq:

One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.

This is how American bipartisanship – or more accurately, duopoly – works. Both parties want war with Iran, the way both parties wanted war with Iraq. It is in both of their interests – appeasing Israel and its chief lobby, AIPAC, and posturing for their respective bases. Republicans take the hard line on our “enemies,” using blatantly aggressive language, refusing to “apologize for America” and reducing our victims to less than human. Democrats take the more “pragmatic” approach, adopting “national security” rhetoric based in protecting Americans that disguises the exact same policies. The Senate vote to go to war with Iraq, after all, didn’t barely squeak through on Republican support: it passed 96-4. (Now, 9/11 catalyzed the whole process in Iraq and made dissent even less popular, but the biggest antiwar protest in recorded history couldn’t sway more than four measly votes in the Senate.)

This endless posturing is how President Obama can be accused of being “soft on terror” and simultaneously escalate sanctions on Iran and massive drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

This is why, in the interest of war, sanctions by one party is a huge gift to the other. If Mitt Romney is elected this year, he’ll likely announce that Obama’s sanctions were insufficient and encourage an Israeli attack on Iran behind closed doors. If Obama is re-elected, he’ll continue on the path he’s currently on: allowing Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists, officially recognizing the terror group seeking regime change in Iran, and escalating sanctions that cripple the Iranian people and isolate its leaders.

Citing Glenn Greenwald and Greg Sargent on liberal support for Obama’s escalated drone strikes, here’s Stephen Walt on ‘Why Hawks Should Vote for Obama’:

Obama can do hawkish things as a Democrat that a Republican could not (or at least not without facing lots of trouble on the home front). It’s the flipside of the old “Nixon Goes to China” meme: Obama can do hawkish things without facing (much) criticism from the left, because he still retains their sympathy and because liberals and non-interventionists don’t have a credible alternative (sorry, Ron Paul supporters). If someone like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush had spent the past few years escalating drone attacks, sending Special Forces into other countries to kill people without the local government’s permission, prosecuting alleged leakers with great enthusiasm, and ratcheting up sanctions against Iran, without providing much information about exactly why and how we were doing all this, I suspect a lot of Democrats would have raised a stink about some of it. But not when it is the nice Mr. Obama that is doing these things.

So if you vote for Barack Obama because you think that Mitt Romney would put troops on the ground, you’ll only be doing it to make yourself feel better. You’ll be playing right into the partisan posturing that seeks to fabricate a meaningful difference between the two major parties, both with long histories of support for wars of aggression. You’ll be fundamentally misunderstanding how American duopoly works: both parties decry each other for tactically approaching the same policies differently in the interest of electing their own representatives to power. Both parties want war – they just want to play it to their respective bases properly.

If you think Al Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, that Ralph Nader ruined the antiwar movement and George Bush is all to blame, point me to where Gore opposed Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq when he was Vice President. In the meantime, read how Gore argued for regime change in Iraq a few short months before Bush invaded: “Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”

If you think Bush’s war was a terrible mistake that warranted John Kerry’s election in 2004, read Kerry on Iraq two months before the invasion:

Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime … He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation … And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction … So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real…

Find more quotes from Democrats leading up to and supportive of Bush’s 2003 invasion here.

Liberals criticize President Obama for escalating drone strikes, failing to close Guantanamo, aggressively persecuting Bradley Manning, illegally invading Libya, offering cuts to Social Security, and immunizing the war crimes and torture of the Bush administration – but many same liberals say that despite all of these transgressions, the ostensible likelihood of Mitt Romney attacking Iran makes them feel they have to re-elect the president.

If this were true, wouldn’t these liberals be criticizing Obama’s sanctions on Iran? Wouldn’t they have abandoned Clinton, Gore, and Kerry after their comments on Iraq? More to the point, if these liberals despise war so much, why aren’t Obama’s surge in Afghanistan or expanded wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen deal-breakers for re-election?

If you actually don’t want war with Iran, you have to help end duopoly. You can’t support either of the two establishment parties who feed the military-industrial complex and fear-monger voters into submission. We must make it known that the people want peace – meaning no sanctions, no assassinations, no threats of war.

We must make war making and fear mongering unacceptable. Come Election Day, we can vote third party, or boycott the election, or protest to shut down military recruitment centers or drone bases. But we can’t fund or vote for the war parties – our victims can’t afford it. No votes for empire, no money for war. No exceptions.

That demand, coupled with the IAEA’s insistence in the talks on being able to prolong the inquiry on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons work indefinitely, make the failure of the current talks very likely. Iran has made it clear that it wants assurances that the IAEA inquiry on the allegations will allow it to achieve closure on an agreed timetable by responding fully to IAEA questions.

That intention was signaled by IAEA Director General Yukia Amano’s handling of the previous round of negotiations in February in an interview with Michael Adler in The Daily Beast March 11. Amano told Adler that what he called the “standoff” over access to Parchin “has become like a symbol” and vowed to “pursue this objective until there’s a concrete result”.

But the “standoff” was not over access to Parchin itself but whether the IAEA would insist that the cooperation plan be held hostage to such a visit.

Adler cited an “informed source” as saying that the IAEA rejects any linkage between a visit to Parchin and the rest of the plan for cooperation being negotiated and insists that a visit to Parchin must come first before any agreement.

Iran had implicitly been using the IAEA’s desire for the Parchin visit as a bargaining chip in negotiations over the terms of their cooperation – and especially the question of whether the process is to have an agreed endpoint.

Amano and Western officials have justified the insistence on immediate access to the Parchin site to investigate an alleged explosive containment vessel for testing related to a nuclear weapon by suggesting that satellite photographs show Iran may be trying to “clean up” the site.

David Albright, who has frequently passed on information and arguments originating with the IAEA on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, was quoted by the Associated Press Sunday as arguing that a clean-up of the Parchin site “could involve grinding down the surfaces inside the building, collecting the dust and then washing the area thoroughly”.

Albright further suggested that Iran could remove “any dirt around the building thought to contain contaminants”.

But former senior IAEA nuclear inspector Robert Kelley told IPS that IAEA inspectors “will find uranium particles at a site like this if they ever were there.”

Kelley, who worked in U.S. nuclear weapons programmes at Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories and was director of the Remote Sensing Laboratory in Las Vegas, recalled that Syria had been sent to the U.N. Security Council “on the basis of tiny miscroscopic particles found at a site that had been bulldozed a year after the event”.

Access to Parchin has not been the issue in Iran’s negotiations with the IAEA. Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, has said that Iran is willing to grant access to Parchin as part of an agreed plan for Iranian cooperation with the IAEA.

The unfinished text of the agreement as of the end of February round of talks reveals that the real conflict is over whether the IAEA can prolong the process of questioning Iran about allegations of covert nuclear weapons work indefinitely.

On March 8, in response to a presentation by Soltanieh to the IAEA Board of Governors detailing the negotiations, Amano confirmed, in effect, that the agency was insisting on being able to extend the process by coming up with more questions, regardless of Iran’s responses to the IAEA’s questions on the agreed list of topics.

He complained that Iran had sought to force the agency to “present a definitive list of questions” and to deny the agency “the right to revisit issues….”

Amano’s demands for immediate access to Parchin and for a process without any clear endpoint appear to be aimed at allowing the United States and its allies to continue accusing Iran of refusing cooperation with the IAEA during negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group scheduled to resume in Baghdad May 23.

Amano was elected to replace the more independent Mohamed ElBaradei in 2009 with U.S. assistance and pledged to align the agency with U.S. policy on Iran as well as other issues, as revealed by WikiLeaks cables dated July and October 2009.

The draft negotiating text as of February 21, which has been posted on the website of the Arms Control Association, shows Iran seeking a final resolution of the issues within a matter of weeks but the IAEA insisting on an open-ended process with no promise of such an early resolution.

The unfinished negotiating draft explains why Iran is holding on to Parchin access as a bargaining chip to get an agreement which will give Iran some tangible political benefit in return for information responding to a series of IAEA allegations.

The still unfinished draft represents the original draft from the IAEA, as modified by Iran during the last round of talks, according to Soltanieh in an interview with IPS on March 15.

The negotiating draft shows that Iran and the IAEA had proposed, and Iran agreed, that the very first issues on which Iran would respond were “Parchin” and the “foreign expert”.

The issue of whether or not the plan would provide for a clear-cut closure if Iran provided satisfactory answers comes up repeatedly in the draft. The IAEA draft refers to “a number of actions that are to be undertaken before the June 2012 meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, if possible”.

But the draft appears to anticipate a process without any specific terminal point. “Follow up actions that are required of Iran,” it says, “to facilitate the Agency’s conclusions regarding the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme will be identified as this process continues.”

Iran amended that paragraph so that the process would be completed by the June 2012 IAEA board meeting. The entire sentence providing for identification of further actions required of Iran during the process is struck out in the text.

Iran agreed in the draft agreement to “facilitate a conclusive technical assessment of all issues of concern to the Agency.” But Iran inserted the sentence, “There exist no issues other than those reflected in the said annex.”

A crucial element of the plan presented by the IAEA is a provision under which the agency “may adjust the order in which issues and topics are discussed, and return to those that have been discussed earlier, given that the issues and topics are interrelated.” In other words, there would be no promise of closure on an issue, regardless of what information Iran provides on the topic or topics.

Iran deleted the language allowing the return to issues that had been discussed earlier. The IAEA draft envisions a process that would begin with an Iranian “initial declaration”, after which the IAEA would “provide…initial questions and a detailed explain of its concerns”.

But the draft shows an Iranian strike-through on the word “initial”, rejecting the IAEA’s right to come up with more questions even after the initial questions were answered.

The IAEA draft provided that, after Iran had responded to questions and requests, and the IAEA had analysed the responses, “the Agency will discuss with Iran any further actions to be taken.”

But Iran rewrote the sentence to read “(T)he agency will discuss and agree with Iran on actions to be taken on each topic. After implementation of action on each topic, it will be considered concluded and then the work on the next topic will start”.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

Pillar said the recently released bin Laden documents “not only do not demonstrate any agreement in which Iran condoned or facilitated operations by Al-Qaeda, they contradict the notion that there was any such agreement.”

“I’ve never seen anything that suggests that happened,” said another former intelligence official, referring to an Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. “I’m very sceptical about that.”

A third former intelligence official said Treasury’s “secret deal” claim “doesn’t pass the BS test” and noted that it is perfectly aligned with the Obama administration’s policy of pressure on Iran.

The official said the Treasury Department’s push for its “secret deal” line is emblematic of a larger split in the intelligence community between those for whom intelligence is secondary to their role in “counterterrorism” policy and the rest of the community.

“The counterterrorism types are like used car salesmen,” the former official told IPS. “They are always overselling something. They have to show that they are doing important work.”

The actual text of the July 28, 2011 “designation” of Yasin al-Suri suggests that the claim of such a “secret deal” is merely a political spin on the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri on the release of prisoners.

It says that Yasin al Suri is an Al-Qaeda facilitator “living and operating in Iran under agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government”. Iranian authorities, it said, “maintain a relationship with (al-Suri) and have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005″.

The designation offers no other evidence of an “agreement” except for the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri in arranging the releases of Al-Qaeda prisoners from Iranian detention and their transfer to Pakistan.

The official notice of a 10-million-dollar reward for al-Suri on the website of the “Rewards for Justice” programme under the Diplomatic Security office of the State Department also indicates that the only “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda has been to exchange prisoners.

“Working with the Iranian government,” it said, “al-Suri arranges the release of al Qaeda personnel from Iranian prisons. When al Qaeda operatives are released, the Iranian government transfers them to al- Suri, who then facilitates their travel to Pakistan.”

Neither the Treasury Department nor the State Department, which joined the February 2012 press briefing on the reward for finding al- Suri, referred to the fact that Iran had been forced to deal with al- Suri and to release Al-Qaeda detainees in order to obtain the release of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped by Pakistani allies of Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 2008.

In one of the documents taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center last week, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote:

We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).

In response to the IPS request for clarification of the “secret agreement” claim, John Sullivan, a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, declined to answer any questions on the subject or to allow IPS to interview Eytan Fisch, the assistant director of the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office.

In briefing journalists on al-Suri last February, Fisch had again invoked the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda “secret agreement” last February.

Sullivan defended the Treasury Department’s position on the issue, however, against criticism based on the publication of the bin Laden documents. “We based our action on Yasin al-Suri on a broad array of information that far exceeds what was recently made public,” Sullivan said in an e-mail to IPS.

Asked about the hint by the Treasury spokesman that department officials used still-classified material as the basis for the claim of a “secret agreement”, former national intelligence officer Pillar called it “disingenuous”.

The origins of the Treasury Department’s “secret deal” claim indicate that it was intended to generate press stories that would increase political and government support for pressure on Iran through economic sanctions and military threats.

The designation of Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions July 28, 2011 did not have any impact on Al-Qaeda funding. The objective was to allow Treasury to generate press coverage of its charge of a secret Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. The timing of the move coincided with a shift in Obama administration strategy from diplomatic engagement to maximising pressure on Iran.

During the period when neoconservatives were pushing for an explicit policy of support for regime change in Iran during the first George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials frequently talked as though any Al-Qaeda presence in Iran was evidence of Iran’s cooperation with the terrorist organisation.

But as ABC News reported on May 29, 2008, Bush administration officials were acknowledging privately that they were not complaining about Iranian policy toward Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, because Iran had “kept these al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate”.

One official said Al-Qaeda officials under Iranian control, “some of whom are quite important,” were “essentially on ice”.

Israel has continued, however, to use its relations with friendly news media, especially in the UK, to generate disinformation about alleged joint Iranian-Al Qaeda planning for terrorist actions.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a story February 15, 2012 citing “intelligence sources” from an unnamed state as suggesting that Iran had been supplying Al-Qaeda with “training in the use of advanced explosives” as well as some funding and a safe haven “as part of a deal first worked out in 2009….”

The report quoted the intelligence sources as saying that Iran wanted to use the threat of Al-Qaeda retaliation against Western targets as “revenge for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

Former politicians and intelligence bosses have been challenging the conventional wisdom of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu through a series of charged statements and political rhetoric.

A few weeks ago it sounded rather like a political fluke when former chief of the Israeli Mossad, Meir Dagan called an attack on Iran “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” His comment was then widely dismissed, but other voices have since joined the discussion.  Yuval Diskin, former head of the Israeli internal intelligence, the Shin Bet, went even further, as he questioned the abilities of both Netanyahu and Barak, accusing them of promoting ‘messianic sentiments’ regarding Iran.

“I saw them up close, they are not Messiahs… These are not people whose hands I would like to have on the steering- wheel,” he said. Dagan, who remains insistent on the ‘stupidity’ of the Israeli government, came to Diskin’s support. He told the New York Times on April 29 that “Diskin is a very serious man, a very talented man, he has a lot of experience in countering terrorism.”

Netanyahu’s exaggeration of the supposed ‘existential danger’ posed by Iran’s nuclear program is clearly political – ultimately aimed at weakening another regional foe and appeasing his hard-line coalition. The invoking of holocaust analogies over a ‘threat’ that various international agencies have disputed, is a clear sign of the government’s political and moral bankruptcy.

Awareness of Netanyahu’s ineptness is not confined to former heads of Israel’s intelligence, but the military itself. In a highly publicized interview in Haaretz in April, Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz disputed the government’s conventional wisdom – both by attesting to the rationality of Iranians leaders and discounting the very claim that Iran is on the road to manufacturing nuclear weapons. “Iran is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile,” he said.

The timing of this stream of focused criticism, emanating from some of Israel’s most decorated intelligence and army men, is not coincidental. Yes, there may be a major political upheaval underway regarding Iran, but considering the fact that Netanyahu still possesses the upper hand in Israeli politics, one must neither delve too far into optimism nor subsist in perpetual cynicism.

In ‘Changing Course in Israel’ (Gulf News, May 4), Patrick Seale wrote:

The challenge to Netanyahu could have far-reaching consequences. For one thing, it appears to have removed any likelihood of an early Israeli attack on Iran, such as Netanyahu has threatened and trumpeted for a year and more; for another, it has revived the possibility of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a solution many had thought moribund, if not actually dead.

It is difficult to ascertain whether the threat of war against Iran has been ‘removed’ based on statements made during an election season in Israel. Israeli politics is particularly known for its underhandedness, and parties vying for power understand that focusing their attack on Netanyahu is the only way to reinforce their candidate’s chances in the upcoming elections. This is not the first time that former heads of Israel’s intelligence and military have adopted such a charged position against a standing prime minister.

Yet, regardless of the motive, the move against Netanyahu may be backfiring. According to a recent Haaretz poll, Netanyahu is ‘the clear favorite heading into Israel’s upcoming elections.’ Yossi Verter wrote on May 5:

Netanyahu can rest easy after reading the results of the latest Haaretz-Dialog poll: Not only does he trounce all his rivals on the question of who is most fit to lead the country, but an absolute majority of Israelis reject the aspersions cast on him last week by former Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin.

The poll indicates that the clearly coordinated statements regarding Iran are yet to shake Netanyahu’s throne. That said, such criticism could represent the start of political friction around Iran’s war. The friction could either move the next government further to the right or to the center. Until the nature of the next Israeli political formation becomes clearer, German commentator Ludwig Watzal is maybe closest to the right assessment. “The power struggle between Israel’s security establishments should tell the international public that an attack on Iran’s civilian nuclear program would be highly dangerous and politically irresponsible,” he wrote.

Iran aside, what about other major maneuvers in Israeli politics preceding the probable elections a few months from now? [Ramzy Baroud to DV Editor: "The article was written couple of days before Netanyahu's call for early elections was cancelled, and replaced with a coalition with Kadima. My reference to 'few months from now' were based on Netanyahu's own call for early elections, which were expected to take place anytime between August and October. So that bit is outdated."]

Tzipi Livni, former head of Israel’s biggest opposition party, Kadima, has left the Knesset with a bang, although her resignation had been anticipated following her major defeat by challenger Shaul Mofaz in primary party elections last March. Once more, Livni assigned herself the role of the visionary, warning that Israel was sitting ‘on a volcano’. “The international clock is ticking and the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is in danger,” she suggested.

Livni may have left the Knesset, but she has not left ‘political life.’ That declaration was enticing to the media which began speculating on what role Livni now sees for herself. According to the Haaretz poll, Mofaz, who defeated Livni, enjoys a minuscule approval rating of 6 percent.

The frenzy of statements and political realignments preceding Israel’s elections are typical, and should not indicate major shifts in policies. Mistaking all of this to signal the return of the two state options is too hopeful, to say at least.

The fact remains that Israel is unlikely to shift its aggressive policies from within. What is being promoted as the moral awakening, or political sensibility of some influential Israelis might merely be political maneuvers aimed at helping Israel find an exit strategy from delving further into war rhetoric. It could also be an attempt to challenge Netanyahu’s stronghold on Israeli politics. Quarreling within the ruling class in Israel during an election is almost a requirement. It neither ushers a new era of peace, nor does it signal a serious change from the constant saber-rattling against Iran.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians began to feel that the struggle for armaments had exhausted them, especially in the absence of the necessary energy sources needed by any industrial country. The American presence in the oil zones had for some decades enabled them to grow and have control over international political decision-making without much struggle. Therefore, the Russians turned toward energy sources, oil and gas. Since the international apportionment does not bear much competition in oil sectors, Moscow sought to manipulate gas in the areas of gas production, transportation, and marketing on a large scale.

The starting point was in 1995 when Putin set the strategy of Gasprom Co. to move within the area in which gas exists starting from Russia through Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iran (for marketing), and the Middle East. Certainly, the projects of the Nord Stream and South Stream will be a historical order of merit/insignia given to Vladimir Putin for his efforts in bringing Russia back to the international arena and for tightening the grip on the European economy which will depend, for decades, on gas as an alternative for oil or gas as well as oil, yet with prioritizing the first; i.e., gas. At this point, it was a must for Washington to hasten to create its peer project, Nabucco, to compete against the Russian project as to gain an international apportionment on the basis of which the next century will be politically and strategically determined.

Gas is the main source of energy in the twenty-first century whether as an alternative for oil, due to recession in oil reserves, or as a source of clean energy. Therefore, having control over the zones of gas reserves in the world is considered to be, for the old as well as modern powers, the basis of international conflict in its regional manifestation.

Obviously, Russia read the map well and learnt the lessons well, for the lack of world energy resources that are needed to inject industrial institutions with money and energy, and which were not under the control of the Soviet Union, was the reason behind its collapse. Therefore, Russia learnt that the source of energy of the coming century; i.e., the 21st Century, was GAS.

An initial reading of the gas map reveals that gas locates in the following areas, in terms of quantity and access to consumption areas:

1. Russia: beginning with Vyborg and Beregvya.

2. Annexed to Russia: Turkmenistan.

3. The near and further roundabouts of Russia: Azerbaijan and Iran.

4. Captured from Russia: Georgia.

5. Eastern Mediterranean: Syria and Lebanon.

6. Qatar and Egypt.

Moscow hastened to work on two strategic lines; the first of which is setting up a Russian-Chinese (Shanghai) century based on the economic growth of the Shanghai Bloc, on the one hand, and the control of gas resources, on the other hand.

Thus, Moscow set the grounds for two projects: the South Stream and the Nord (North) Stream in an attempt to face an American project that aimed at seizing the gas of the Black Sea and the gas of Azerbaijan; the Nabucco Project.

There is, then, a strategic race between two projects so as to have control over Europe and the gas resources.

• The American Project (Nabucco) which centres in Central Asia and the Black Sea and its surroundings. Its storage places are in Turkey while its path starts in Bulgaria, and moves through Romania, Hungary, Czech, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. It was due to pass through Greece, but this idea was dropped for the sake of Turkey.
• The Russian projects — the Nord and South Streams:
a) Nord Stream: It starts in Russia and goes directly to Germany, and from Weinberg to Sasnetz across the Baltic Sea without penetrating Belarus. This helped ease the American pressure there.
b) South Stream: It starts in Russia and moves towards the Black Sea and Bulgaria, then it goes into Greece and then goes towards South Italy, Hungary, and Austria.

The Nabucco project was supposed to compete with the two Russian projects, but due to technical problems the project was delayed until 2017 though it was scheduled for 2014. This resolved the race in favor of Russia, at this stage in particular, and urged for the search of supplementary areas supporting either project:

1) The Iranian gas which the U.S. insists on making supportive of the Nabucco gas pipeline in the sense that it passes in parallel by Georgia’s gas pipeline (and Azerbaijan if possible) to reach an assembling point in Erzurum, Turkey. 2) Gas of the Eastern Mediterranean: Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

Iran took a decision, the result of which was signing a number of agreements in July 2011, to transport gas through Iraq to Syria. These agreements make Syria the centre of assembly and production in conjunction with the reserves of Lebanon. This is a space of strategy and energy that geographically opens for the first time and extends from Iran to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Though it was banned and was not allowed for many years, it now shows the degree of struggle over Syria and Lebanon at this phase, and shows the emerging role of France that considers the Eastern Mediterranean as a historical region of influence and everlasting interests. The French role now goes along with the French absence ever since the World War II. In other words, France wants to have a role in the world of (gas) from which it has gained (a health insurance) in Libya and wants to gain (a life insurance) in both Syria and Lebanon.

Now, Turkey feels it is going to be lost amid the struggle for gas as long as the Nabucco project is late. Since the Nord and South Streams exclude Turkey, Turkey knows quite well that the gas of the Eastern Mediterranean has become distant from the influence of Nabucco, and so has Turkey.

History of the Game

For the Nord and South Stream Projects, Moscow established the company of Gazprom in the early 1990s. Remarkably, Germany who wanted to escape, once and for all, the repercussions of the World War II, prepared itself to be a party to the project and a partner of it, whether in terms of establishment, a terminus of the north pipeline or the storage places of the south Stream in the Germanic roundabouts, especially Austria.

Gazprom

Gazprom was founded with the cooperation of Hans-Joachim Gornig, Moscow’s German friend, who was a former vice president of the German Oil and Gas Industrial Company and who supervised the construction of the pipeline network of GDR. The one who headed Gazprom until October 2011 was Vladimir Kotenev who was a former Russian ambassador to Germany.

Gazprom signed qualitative and easy transactions with German companies, on top of which comes the companies cooperating with the Nord Stream as the giant (E.ON) company for energy, and the giant (BASF) for chemicals where the (E.ON) gets preference to buy amounts of gas at the expense of Gazprom when gas prices go up. This is considered to be a kind of (political) support of the German energy companies.

Moscow benefited from the liberalization of the European gas markets monopoly to force those markets to disconnect the distribution networks from production facilities. These clashes between Russia and Berlin turn a page of historic hostility to start a new phase of cooperation on the basis of economy as well as repudiation of a heavy weight put on Germany’s shoulders; i.e., the heavy weight of the debt-overburdened Europe that is under the thumb of the U.S. Germany considers that the Germanic Group — Germany, Austria, Czech and Switzerland — has the priority in being the core of Europe, but it should not bear the consequences of the aging of a continent nor the fall of another giant.

Gazprom’s German ventures include its Wingas joint venture with Wintershall, a subsidiary of BASF which is Germany’s largest oil and gas producer and controls 18% of the gas market. Gazprom has given its top German partners unrivaled stakes in its Russian assets. BASF and E.ON each control almost one-quarter of the Yuzhno-Russkoye gas fields that will provide most of the supplies for Nord Stream at a time, which is not a mere coincidence or simulation, when the peer of Gazprom in Germany — called “The Germanic Gazprom” — expands to own 40% of the Austrian Centrex Co., which is specialized in gas storage. The latter has qualitative expansion into Cyprus, an expansion with which Turkey may not be content.

Turkey dearly misses assuming a tardy role in the Nabucco Gas Company whereby it is supposed to start storing, marketing, and transferring about 31 billion m³ of gas which can go up to 40 billion m³ — at a later stage — in a project that makes Ankara more and more subjugated to Washington and Nato decisions without having the right to insist on joining the European Union that has rejected it several times.

As a matter of fact, the strategic ties through gas become even more strategic in politics where Moscow lobbies effectively on the Social Democratic Party of Germany in North-Rhine Westphalia, the major industrial base that is home to the RWE (Neurath power plant) for electricity utilities and E.ON subsidiary.

Such an influence is recognized by the head of energy policies in the Green Party, Hans Joseph Fell, that four German companies related to Russia play a role in formulating the German Energy Policy through a very complicated network that lobbies ministers and manipulates the public opinion via the Eastern European Economic Relations Committee that represents German companies and has close business relations in Russia and countries of the Former Soviet Union Bloc.

Therefore, there is an indispensible silence on the part of Germany vis-à-vis the accelerating Russian influence. This silence is based on the necessity to improve the so-called “energy security” in Europe.

Remarkably, Germany now considers the policy of “easing and pacifying,” suggested by the European Union to cover the Euro crisis, will hinder the Russian-German investments for a long time. This reason, together with other reasons – e.g., German dawdling in saving the Euro laden with European debts. However, it should be taken into consideration that Germany and its Germanic bloc can bear those debts alone.

Every time Europeans oppose Germany and its policy regarding Russia, Berlin asserts that the Europe’s Utopian plans are unenforceable and may push Russia to sell its gas in Asia. This will, definitely, eighty-six energy security in Europe.

This Russian-German engagement was not simple when Putin could employ the legacy of the Cold War regarding the presence of three million Russian-speakers living in Germany who comprised the second largest group after the Turks. Putin was also adept at employing a network of Eastern German officials who had been recruited to look after the interests of the Russian companies in Germany, let alone recruiting a number of ex-Eastern German State Security Service agents (ex-Stasi agents). This includes Gazprom Germania’s director of personnel and its director of finance and director of finance of the Nord Stream Consortium, Matthias Warnig, who the Wall Street Journal reported as having helped Putin recruit spies in the eastern Germany City of Dresden when Putin was a young KGB operative.

To be fair, Russia’s employment of its former relations was not unripe; rather, it was for the benefit of Germany as a whole. That made the clash between the two countries not possible as long as interests were attained by both parties without having one dominating the other.

The Nord Stream Project, the major link between Russia and Germany, has been inaugurated recently with pipeline costing 4.7 billion euros. Although the Nord Stream Pipeline links Russia and Germany, Europeans’ recognition that such a project would be part of their Energy Security made France and Holland hasten to declare it a European project. In this regard, it is good to mention that Lindner of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations said without hesitation that it was a European not a German project and that they would not lock Germany into greater dependence on Russia. Such a declaration indicates the apprehension of the expanding Russian influence in Germany; however, the project of the Nord Stream, in structure, represents Moscow’s plan not the EU’s.

Russians can cripple energy distribution to Poland and other countries the way they like and will be able to sell gas to whoever pays more. However, the importance of Germany to Russia lies, practically, in the fact that it constitutes a platform from which to launch its strategy across the continent where Gazprom Germania has stakes in twenty-five joint projects in Britain, Italy, Turkey, Hungary, and other countries. This — actually — leads us to say that Gazprom will — after a while — become one of the largest companies of the world if not the largest.

Not only did Gazprom leaders build this project, they also tried to interfere in the Nabucco Project that will — as aforementioned — be delayed until 2017, taking into consideration that the latter constitutes a serious challenge. Therefore, Gazprom — which owns 30% of a project designed for building a second major huge pipeline that reaches Europe roughly along Nabucco’s route; a project even Gazprom supporters call “political” — began a political auctioneering to show its muscles by stopping Nabucco or crippling it.

Nevertheless, Moscow hastened to buy up gas in Central Asia and the Caspian in a bid to starve Nabucco at the same time it is ridiculing Washington politically, economically, and strategically.

Outlining Europe’s and – later – the world’s Map

Gazprom operates gas facilities in Austria; i.e., facilities in the strategic Germanic roundabouts. It also leases facilities in Britain and France. However, the growing number of storage facilities in Austria will be the basis for drawing the energy map of Europe since it is going to provide the Slovenian, Slovakian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, and somewhat German benefiting from a newly established repository called Katrina, which Gazprom builds in cooperation with Germany with the aim of exporting gas to the hubs of Western Europe.

Gazprom established a joint storage facility with Serbia to export gas to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia itself. Feasibility studies have been conducted on similar storage ventures in the Czech Republic, Romania, Belgium, Britain, Slovakia, Turkey, Greece, and even France. Such a venture, on the part of Gazprom, strengthens Moscow’s position as a provider of 41% of Europe’s needed supplies of gas. This, undoubtedly, means an substantial change in the relations between the East and the West in the short, mid, and long runs. It also indicates an ebb in the American influence or a collision being prepared, considering the missile shield to establish a new world order where gas is the most essential pillar of its formation. This is a clear indication of the heating struggle in the Middle East over the gas of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.

Nabucco in a tight spot

Nabucco was conceived to funnel gas 3,900 kilometers from Turkey to Austria and was designed to carry 31 bcm of natural gas annually from the Middle East and the Caspian region to markets in Europe. The Nato-American-French hastening towards decisively ending all matters in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Lebanon, in a way that harmonizes with their interests, lies in the necessity to maintain calm situations supporting the investment and transportation of gas. Syria responded by signing a contract that aims at transferring gas from Iran to Syria passing by Iraq. As a matter of fact, it is the very Syrian and Lebanese gas that is the focal point of the struggle that aims at annexing it either to the Nabucco gas reserves or Gazprom, thus, the South Stream.

The consortium of Nabucco consists of the German energy companies REW, Austrian OML, Turkish Botas, Bulgarian Energy Holding Company, and Romanian Transgaz.

Five years ago, the initial costs of the rival project of Gazprom were estimated to be $ 11.2 billion and the project was expected to cost less than the Russian one. The costs, however, could reach $21.4 billion by 2017. This raises many questions about the viability of this economic project, in particular taking into consideration that Gazprom has enough deals in various regions — in an attempt to encompass Nabucco — that would feed on the surplus capacity of the gas of Turkmenistan, especially when we know that the ineffective pursuit of the Iranian gas precludes the possibility of achieving the Nabucco dream. This is, in fact, one of the unknown secrets of the struggle over Iran that has gone too far into defiance by choosing Iraq and Syria to be routes for its gas transport, or – at least – part of that route.

Thus, Nabucco’s best hope lies in gas supplies from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz 2 field which would almost be the only source of a project that seems to be stumbling from the very beginning. This manifests in the accelerating deals and in Moscow’s success in buying the sources of Nabucco, on the one hand, and the hardships encountered in achieving geopolitical changes in Iran and the Mediterranean (Syria and Lebanon), on the other hand. This comes at a time in which Turkey hastens to claim a share in the Nabucco Project either through signing a contract with Azerbaijan to buy 6 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas in 2017 or trying to lay hands on Syria and Lebanon with the aim of hampering the transfer of Iranian oil or receiving a share of the Lebanese or Syrian gas affluence (or Syria and Lebanon altogether). The race towards occupying a position in the New World Order escalates through gas and other things ranging from small military services to the strategic domes of the missile shield.

Perhaps what poses a threat to Nabucco most is Russia’s attempt to ditch it through negotiating over more advantageous and competitive contracts of gas supplies in favor of Gazprom’s Nord and South Streams, hampering, thus, any effort to endow the United States and Europe with any kind of influence, political- and energy-wise, whether in Iran or the Mediterranean. Moreover, Gazprom could be one of the most important investors or operators of the new gas fields in Syria or Lebanon. The date of August 16, 2011 was not randomly chosen by the Syrian Ministry of Oil to announce the discovery of a gas well in the Area of Qarah in the Central Region of Syria near Homs. The well has the capacity of producing 400.000 cubic metres a day (146 million cubic metres a year). However, the Syrian Ministry of Oil did not breathe a syllable about the Mediterranean Gas.

The Nord and South Streams lessened the importance of the American policy that appeared to be lagging behind. The bad history between the states of Central Europe and Russia has ebbed, Poland is slowly coming round, and the US seem willing to reconsider since it announced in late October 2011 the shift in the energy policies after the discovery of coal mines in Europe which will lessen dependence on Russia … and the Middle East. This seems to be a far-reaching or long-term goal due to the fact that there is a number of procedures to be taken before starting commercial production of coal. This coal can be attained from unconventional sources in the rocks found at thousands of feet underground by using the techniques of rock fracturing and the hydraulic fracturing of high pressure water. Those techniques are used to pump liquids and sand into a well to release gas. This issue, however, is coated with environmental risks due to the impacts of the fracturing techniques on water reserves.

China’s Participation

Sino-Russian cooperation in the field of energy is the power orienting the Sino-Russian strategic partnership. This is, in fact, what experts point to as the “base” for the double veto in the UNSC that came in favour of Syria.

Cooperation in the energy field is what lubricates the acceleration of the partnership between the two giants. It is not only a matter of gas supplies with preferences to China but it is a process that urges China to participate in gas distribution through selling new assets and facilities, in addition to attempting to have joint control over the executive administrations of the gas distribution networks where Moscow currently shows resilience in prices of gas supplies provided that they are allowed to access the local Chinese markets because of the profits there. It was agreed that Russian and Chinese experts could work together in the following domains:

“coordinating energy strategies in Russia and china; predicting and outlining prospective scenarios; and developing market infrastructure, energy efficiency and sources of alternative energy.”

Despite cooperation in the field of energy, there are other strategic interests that represent in the mutual Chinese-Russian conception of the risks of the American so-called project “Missile Shield.” Not only has Washington involved Japan and South Korea in the Missile Shield, but it has also sent an invitation to India in early September 2011 to be a partner in the very project. Moscow’s concerns intersect with Beijing’s, regarding Washington’s moves to revive the Strategy of Central Asia: i.e., the Silk Road. This project is the same as that initiated by George Bush (Greater Central Asia Project) to roll back Russia and China’s influence in Central Asia in collaboration with Turkey to resolve the situation in Afghanistan by 2014 so as to arrange for the Nato influence there. There are increasing allusions from Uzbekistan to play host of Nato for such a project. Vladimir Putin estimates what can foil the Western invasion on Russia’s back scenes in Central Asia will be the expansion of the joint Russian-Kazakhstani-Belarusian economic space in cooperation with Beijing.

This image of the international struggle mechanisms allows access to see one side of the process of the New World Order Formation based on struggling for military influence and on holding the backbone of age; namely, energy, on top of which comes gas.

The Gas of Syria

As Israel started oil and gas extraction, it was clear that the basin of the Mediterranean had entered the game and that Syria was either to be attacked or that the whole region was going to enjoy peace since the twenty-first century was the century of clean energy.

What we know about this issue is that the Mediterranean basin is the wealthiest in gas and that Syria would be the wealthiest state, according to the Washington Institute which also speculates that struggle between Turkey and Cyprus would heat due to Ankara’s inability to bear its losses of the Nabucco gas despite the contract Moscow signed with Ankara on December 2011 to transport part of the South Stream gas via Turkey.

Embracing the secret of the Syrian gas will let all know how big the game over gas is. According to China, who controls Syria could control the Middle East, grip on the Gateway to Asia, possess the Key to Russia’ house (as Catherine the 2nd put it), and could set foot on the Silk Road. Most importantly, they who could penetrate Syria for gas have the ability to dominate the world, especially since the coming century will be the Century of Gas. With the contract Damascus signed to transport Iranian gas to the Mediterranean through Iraq, the geopolitical space would open and the gas space would close on the scene of Nabucco that used to be Europe and Turkey’s lifeline. Syria, undoubtedly, would be the key to the coming epoch.

“The logical position the Iranians are bound to take,” he wrote in a post on the Council’s website, “is:  ‘We’re happy to talk forever, as long as we can keep building centrifuges.’”

A few days later, Samore was named President Barack Obama’s top adviser on nuclear proliferation, making him one of the most influential figures in the administration with regards to diplomacy toward Iran.

The strategy he attributed to Tehran of using negotiations to “play for time” while advancing to the goal of enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapons has been clearly expressed in recent statements by Obama and other senior administration officials in anticipation of new nuclear talks with Tehran.

‘Coercive diplomacy’

For Obama’s advisers, assuming Iran was simply “playing for time” justifies a heavy reliance on “coercive diplomacy”, which combines a boycott of the country’s crude oil exports and hints that an Iranian failure to come to agreement would open the way for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. But that conventional wisdom, which the Obama administration inherited from the Bush administration, ignores the accumulated evidence that Iran’s diplomacy strategy is to accumulate centrifuges, not in order to support a weapons programme, but rather to negotiate a larger bargain with the United States.

That strategy, gleaned from sources in direct contact with Iranian national security officials and from Iran’s actual diplomatic record, can be summed up in three principles:

1. Iran should negotiate with the United States only when it has achieved sufficient negotiating leverage to achieve substantial concessions.
2. The objective of negotiations with the United States is to end US policies of overt hostility to the Islamic Republic and have them accept Iran’s legitimate role in the regional politics of the Middle East.
3. Iran’s primary negotiating chip in any talks is a stockpile of enriched uranium.

Contrary to the convenient argument that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei resists agreement with the United States, he and leading officials on the Supreme National Security Council have long viewed negotiations with the United States as the only way that Iran can achieve full security and emerge as a full-fledged regional power.

But Khamenei has very decided views about the timing of such negotiations. The proposal by then President Mohammed Khatemi to engage the United States in a political dialogue in January 1998 was sharply criticised by Khamenei. However, Khamenei’s argument was not that negotiations with the United States were unacceptable in principle, but rather that Iran was not yet in a strong enough bargaining position to achieve a favourable outcome.

Soon after George W Bush demonised Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” in late 2001 and early 2002, Khamenei again denounced the idea of negotiations with the United States under those conditions as useless. But a series of seismic changes over the next year altered the Supreme Leader’s strategic assessment.

Increased bargaining power

The first such change was the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In the short run, US military presence on Iran’s border posed the threat of a possible US invasion of Iran. But if Iran had only been afraid of such an invasion, it would certainly have mobilised public opinion to prepare to defend the country.

Instead Khamenei prepared for a complex diplomatic engagement with the United States on the assumption that Iran now had new diplomatic leverage. The proposal Iran made to the Bush administration in May 2003 clearly assumed that the United States would be unable to gain control over Iraq without Iran’s help. It offered “Iranian influence for activity supporting political stabilisation and the establishment of democratic institutions and a nonreligious government”.

The Iranian national security elite believed two other developments in 2002 and early 2003 gave Iran bargaining chips it could use in negotiations with Washington. One was the Bush administration’s need for Iran’s cooperation in interrogating al-Qaeda leaders who had been detained in Iran after fleeing from Afghanistan. But the biggest source of leverage, the Iranians believed, was the Bush administration’s dramatically increased concern about Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, which had taken US intelligence by surprise. After the first IAEA visit to the uranium facility at Natanz in February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed alarm, saying Natanz showed that “Iran is much further along, with a far more robust nuclear weapons development program than anyone said it had”.

The convergence of those three new developments convinced Khamenei that the moment had come to engage the United States diplomatically. Khamenei approved a secret proposal to the Bush administration in April 2003 for negotiations on the full range of issues dividing the two countries.

Despite the Bush administration’s refusal to even acknowledge it, that proposal reveals the broad outlines of what Iran hopes to accomplish in negotiations with Washington. It offered to establish three parallel working groups to negotiate “road maps” on the three main areas of contention: the nuclear programme, “terrorism and regional security”, and “economic cooperation”. On the issue of its nuclear programme, the Iranian proposal offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), including the adoption of new IAEA protocol that would guarantee the IAEA access to any facility, whether declared or undeclared, on short notice – in return for “full access to peaceful nuclear technology”.

Iran’s negotiating document also offered to accept, as part of a “grand bargain” with the United States, the March 2002 Arab League declaration embracing the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Beyond that diplomatic position, Iran offered to stop “any material support to Palestinian opposition groups [Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc] from Iranian territory” and to put “pressure on these organisations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967″.  And it even offered to “take action on Hezbollah to become a mere political organisation within Lebanon”.

The 2003 proposal thus made it clear that, in the end, Iranian support for Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel represented valued bargaining chips to be played in ultimate negotiations with the United States.

Finally, the secret proposal revealed what Iran hoped to obtain in return for giving up its negotiating chips. The list of Iranian aims included an end to US “hostile behaviour and rectification of status of Iran in the US”, including its removal from the “axis of evil” and the “terrorism list”, as well as an end to all economic sanctions against Iran. It also sought “recognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region” and Iran’s right to have an “appropriate defence capacity” – presumably meaning the deterrent capability conferred by ballistic missiles.

Ultimate aims

The demands for an end to official US enmity towards Iran and for a seat at the table in future regional security discussions have continued to be the ultimate aims behind Iranian efforts to manoeuvre the United States into serious negotiations.

The Bush administration remained hostile to serious negotiations with Iran. Negotiations with the British, French and German governments could only advance Iran’s interests if the Europeans were willing to press the United States on direct talks. But the Europeans offered only narrow economic benefits in return for ending Iran’s uranium enrichment and refused, at the insistence of the Bush administration, to talk about Iran’s broader security interests.

By mid-2006, after Iran had resumed uranium enrichment, Khamenei and his advisers were convinced that Iran’s diplomatic leverage had increased significantly. Khamenei’s top foreign-policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran’s foreign minister from 1981 to 1997, offered a rare glimpse of Iran’s strategic assessment at a seminar in Tehran on May 18, 2006. Addressing the evolution of Iran’s bargaining position in relation to the United States, he said: “We have at no time until now had such powerful means for haggling.”

Velayati referred specifically to “the influence we have now in Iraq and Palestine”.

What he did not say was that Iran was seeking to rapidly increase the number of centrifuges at Natanz in order to create “facts on the ground” that would give the US a motive to come to the negotiating table. As top officials of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council told one observer in Tehran, the stockpile of low-enriched uranium Iran would be accumulating were bargaining chips to be used in the eventual negotiations with Washington.

Velyati was not coy about drawing the policy conclusion. “Now that we have the power to haggle”, he said, “Why don’t we haggle?”

Failed diplomatic triumph

The Obama administration’s failure to grasp the logic underlying Iran’s negotiating strategy ensured the failure of the first round of US-Iran negotiations in October 2009. The US proposal for a swap of roughly three quarters of all the low-enriched uranium Iran had accumulated to fuel Iran’s Tehran Research Reactor was aimed at stripping Iran of most of its low-enriched uranium.

For the United States, that was viewed as a diplomatic triumph. But all of Iran’s political factions united in objecting to the demand on the grounds that it would deprive Iran of the leverage it had gained from its LEU stockpile. Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s rival in the June 2009 presidential election, expressed that complaint indirectly, observing that if Iran agreed to give up so much of its LEU, the efforts of thousands of scientists would “go up in smoke”.

After no agreement was reached on a fuel swap plan, Iran began enriching uranium to 20 per cent, to serve as fuel for its research reactor. That was regarded by the West as a big step closer to weapons grade enrichment, partly on the ground that Iran could not fabricate the fuel rods needed for the reactor. But Iran was really accumulating more bargaining chips for the negotiations it still hoped to have eventually with Washington.

In the present negotiations with the P5+1, Iran is still pursuing the same objectives with the same hope of cashing in its accumulated negotiating chips. That is why Syed Hossein Mousavian, who was spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team between 2003 and 2005 and foreign policy adviser to the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has warned that the “piecemeal approach” so dear to the hearts of US officials is a formula for diplomatic failure.

Iran “needs to know the entire game plan, including the end goal, before committing itself to anything”, Mousavian wrote. The history of Iranian efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement supports Mousavian’s warning. It is time for the United States to shed its shallow propagandistic view of Iranian strategy, and accept the necessity for real bargaining with Iran on fundamental issues.

The “Bomb Iran” crowd has had input into the demands presented to the Iranians by the U.S.: they must suspend higher uranium enrichment, close down the Fordow  enrichment facility, and “surrender” their stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 per cent purity. Iran is unlikely to agree to all of these, but this mix of demands allows for negotiations that might lead to a peaceful resolution to the stand-off. David Ignatius has intimated in a Washington Post column that a deal has already been negotiated behind the scenes.

The deal would center on the recognition by the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany that Iran indeed has the right to enrich uranium, a right made very clear (and described as “inalienable”) in the Non-Proliferation Treaty but one that Israel (with its extensive, secret nuclear program) refuses to recognize, period.

If a deal is struck, it would delight the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (In 2007 the Times of London reported that “Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.”) Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned while in office, “If you think the Iraq War was hard, an attack on Iran in my opinion would be a catastrophe.” His successor Leon Panetta has voiced a similar opinion.

A deal would satisfy the intelligence community, which has repeatedly reported with “high confidence” that Iran has not had a military nuclear research program since 2003. (Despite this, and showing the power of systematically disseminated disinformation, a new Washington Post-ABC news poll finds that 84% of people in this country believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program.)

It would please Obama’s original electoral base, the antiwar community that appreciated his opposition to the Iraq War, but has become largely disillusioned with him due (among other reasons) to the endless, hopeless war in Afghanistan which he has made wholly his.

It would enrage the Likudists in Israel, who would view it as a betrayal. Perhaps Israel would then act alone (as it did in bombing Iraq’s French-built reactor in 1981), risking a crisis in the relationship with the U.S. A deal leaving the Iranian regime intact would disgust Republican leaders who would accuse Obama of weakness, and Romney would repeat his charge that Obama has “thrown Israel under the bus.” (The Republican presidential frontrunner said this in January, when Obama stated, “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” That mere reiteration of longstanding U.S. policy constitutes betrayal for the most profoundly loyal to Israel.)

A deal would infuriate many, if not most, of the Israel Lobby who would talk about the “appeasement” of today’s “Hitler,” etc.

But Obama would be able to reply, “We got what we wanted, firm, verifiable assurances from Iran that Iran will not enrich uranium beyond such-and-such a level and will never be diverted to a military program. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has given us his word. . . The following enhanced IAEA monitoring measures have been set in place… To those demanding an attack, I ask: Do you really think it’s worth it to place more young American lives in jeopardy, see the price of oil rise by a third, risk inviting a Security Council resolution denouncing our action as a violation of international law that we’ll have to veto, and produce further turmoil throughout the region — in order to destroy a non-military nuclear program, the sort that any Non-Proliferation Treaty signatory nation is entitled to by international law?”

He would be able to detail how all the U.S. intelligence agencies, in 2007 and 2010, declared that Iran had no nuclear weapons program, and ask, “Is it worth war and sacrifice for our people weary of war to try to destroy a nuclear program that isn’t a threat to us, just because some people have decided that even such a program, like those of Japan or Brazil, might develop into a military program and threaten them sometime in the future? Is that logical?”

That would mean directly confronting the wildly paranoid rhetoric of those talking about an imminent “existential threat” and “nuclear holocaust.” Obama has already begun this by denouncing “loose talk of war” by his opponents, and defending the ongoing talks with Iran which, all parties seem to agree, went very smoothly in Istanbul and will resume in Baghdad next month. When the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu fumed on April 15 that Iran was getting “a freebie” (in the form of more time to develop its imaginary plan to build a bomb and attack Israel with its nuclear arsenal), Obama responded within hours with this riposte:

The notion that somehow we’ve given something away or a `freebie’ would indicate Iran has gotten something. In fact, they’ve got some of the toughest sanctions that they’re going to be facing coming up in just a few months if they don’t take advantage of these talks.

This statement was widely interpreted as “exposing a rift with Israel,” something confirmed by later remarks out of Netanyahu’s office indicating that he favors Romney in the U.S. presidential race.

Such a rift is excellent; may it widen! It’s certainly preferable to conducting an illegal attack that the Israeli leadership, neocon network, some Republican leaders and perhaps evangelical Christian factions pray for but most people in this country oppose. An attack that as Gates noted would be a “catastrophe.” An attack that the former chief of Mossad, who headed the Israeli intelligence agency from 2002 to 2009, calls “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”

The question is, does Obama have the will and the power to agree to a deal? Or is it politically impossible to do so? Perhaps the next few months will show the extent and limits of the power of the Lobby.

Senior Obama administration officials have decided to cite the fatwa as an Iranian claim to be tested in negotiations, posing a new challenge to the news media to report accurately on the background to the issue. But the April 13 New York Times article by James Risen rehashed old arguments by Iran’s adversaries and even added some new ones.

Former Obama White House Iran policy coordinator Dennis B. Ross, known for his close ties with Israel and hardline views on Iran, was quoted as suggesting that Khamenei may not be committed to nuclear weapons after all. But Ross implies that the reason is U.S. sanctions and perhaps the threat of war rather than that the 2004 fatwa was a genuine expression of policy.

The Times report repeated a familiar allegation, attributed to unnamed “analysts”, that the fatwa is merely a conscious deception justified by the traditional Shi’a legal principle called “Taqiyyah”. But a quick fact check would have shown that “Taqiyyah” is specifically limited to hiding one’s Shi’a faith to avoid being killed or otherwise seriously harmed if it were acknowledged.

Risen also cited unnamed “analysts” who argued that Khamenei’s recent statements that Iran had not and would not develop nuclear weapons were contradicted by remarks he had made last year “that it was a mistake for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to give up his nuclear weapons program”.

But the quote from Khamenei complained that “this gentleman wrapped up all his nuclear facilities, packed them on a ship and delivered them to the West and said, ‘Take them!’ ” Khamenei then added,”Look where we are, and in what position they are now.”

Khamenei’s references to “all his nuclear facilities” – not to his nuclear weapons programme, as claimed by Risen – and to the contrast between the ultimate fate of the Gaddafi regime and the Islamic Republic’s survival appear to have been suggesting that merely having a nuclear programme without nuclear weapons can be a deterrent to attack.

That same point has been made by other Iranian officials who cite the Japanese model as one for Iran to emulate.

In another effort to discredit the fatwa, Risen wrote that Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, reversed his initial opposition to the Shah’s nuclear programme as inconsistent with Islam in 1984, and “secretly decided to restart the nuclear weapons program”.

Risen cited no source for that statement, but it is apparently based on an article by David Albright in the Tehran Bureau’s “Iran Primer”. Albright wrote: “A 2009 internal IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) working document reports that in April 1984, then President Ali Khamenei announced to top Iranian officials that Khomeini had decided to reactivate the nuclear program as the only way to secure the Islamic Revolution from the schemes of its enemies, especially the United States and Israel.”

Even if that report, coming from an unidentified IAEA member country, was accurate, Risen misreported it, again substituting “nuclear weapons program” for “nuclear program”.

But the claim cited in the IAEA working document is also demonstrably false, because it is well documented that the Islamic Republic had decided to continue Iran’s nuclear programme in 1981 and even made a formal request in 1983 for the IAEA to help it convert yellowcake into reactor fuel.

Missing from the Times article was any reference to Iran’s refusal to retaliate with chemical weapons for Iraq’s repeated chemical weapons attacks on Iranian cities, based on U.S. intelligence on Iranian troop concentrations, killing 7,000 immediately and severely injuring at least 100,000.

Although U.S. military officers disseminated reports during the war alleging Iranian use of chemical weapons against Iraq, the most authoritative study of the issue, Joost Hilterman’s 2007 book “A Poisonous Affair”, shows those reports represented U.S. disinformation. Hilterman concludes that no reliable evidence ever surfaced that Iran used such weapons during the war.

In a dispatch from Qom October 31, 2003, Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, one of the highest ranking clerics in Iran, as saying in an interview that Iran never retaliated against Iraqi chemical attacks with its own chemical weapons because of the strong opposition of Iranian clerical authorities to the development of WMD.

“You cannot deliberately kill innocent people,” Saanei said.

The only reference in the Times report to Khamenei’s role in the 2003 nuclear policy turning point was the statement that Khamenei “ordered a suspension of Iran’s nuclear weapons program….”

In fact, however, Khamenei did far more than “suspend” nuclear weapons work. He invoked the illicit nature of such weapons in Islam in order to enforce a policy decision to ban nuclear weapons work.

There is evidence that there was a long-simmering debate within the Islamic Republic behind the scenes over whether Iran should leave the door open to a nuclear weapons programme or not. Both Khamenei and Rafsanjani had publicly opposed the idea of possessing nuclear weapons in the mid-1990s, but pressure for reconsideration of the issue had risen, especially after the aggressive posture of the George W. Bush administration toward Iran.

In 2003, the debate came to a head, because Iran was reaching the stage where it would either have to cooperate fully with the IAEA or be accused of violating its commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, provoking serious international consequences.

The Atomic Energy Organization, which had gotten much more freedom from bureaucratic control in 1999-2000, was dragging its feet on cooperation with the IAEA, and some scientists, engineers and military men did not want to give up the option to develop a nuclear weapons programme.

Under those circumstances, in a March 21, 2003 speech in Mashad, Khamenei began speaking out again on Islam’s opposition to weapons of mass destruction. “We are not interested in an atomic bomb. We are opposed to chemical weapons,” he said, adding, “These things are against our principles.”

In July, he repeated his renunciation of all weapons of mass destruction.

When the IAEA passed a resolution demanding that Iran suspend enrichment and adopt an intrusive monitoring system in September, the Atomic Energy Organization and its bureaucratic and political allies were arguing that there was no danger of being taken to the U.N. Security Council because Russia and China would protect Iran’s interests.

And hardliners were arguing publicly that Iran should withdraw from the NPT rather than make any effort to convince the West that Iran did not intend to make nuclear weapons.

Sometime in September and October, Khamenei ordered the designation of the Secretary of Supreme National Security Council Hassan Rohani, who reported directly to him, as the single individual responsible for coordinating all aspects of nuclear policy.

A key task for Rohani was to enforce Khamenei’s ban on nuclear weapons. Later, Rohani recalled telling then President Mohammed Khatemi that he wasn’t sure all agencies “were willing to cooperate 100 percent” and predicted “both disharmony and sabotage”.

It was Rohani himself who announced on October 25, 2003, that Khamenei believed that nuclear weapons were illegal under Islam.

A few days later, one of Khamenei’s advisers, Hussein Shariatmadari, president of Kayhan newspapers, told Collier, “Those in Iran who clandestinely believed they could develop nuclear weapons have now been forced to admit that it is forbidden under Islam.”

Ever since then, Iranian officials have often referred to Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Sceptics have questioned whether such a fatwa exists, arguing that no published text of the fatwa can be found. But even Mehdi Khalaji of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy acknowledged in an essay published last September that Khamenei’s oral statements are considered fatwas and are binding on believers.

It is unclear, however, whether the administration intends to press that demand regardless of Iran’s rejection or will withdraw it later in the talks. Washington is believed to be interested in obtaining at least an agreement that would keep the talks going through the electoral campaign and beyond.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, has been extremely anxious about the possibility of an agreement that would allow the Iranian enrichment programme to continue. So it hopes the demand for closure and dismantling of Fordow will be a “poison pill” whose introduction could cause the breakdown of the talks with Iran.

In an interview with IPS, Reza Marashi, who worked in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs from 2006 to 2010, said: “If the demand for Fordow’s closure is non-negotiable, the talks will likely fail.”

Iran has already rejected the demand. Responding to the reported demands for halting of 20 percent enrichment and the closure of the Fordow facility, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said: “We see no justification for such a request from the P5+1.”

The Obama administration apparently accepted Israel’s demand for inclusion of the closure of Fordow in the U.S.-European position in return for Israel going along with a focus in the first stage of the talks only on Iran’s 20 percent enrichment.

It is widely believed that a limited agreement could be reached to end Iran’s 20 percent enrichment and to replace existing Iranian stocks of 20 percent enriched uranium with foreign-fabricated fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor if Iran believed it would get some additional substantive benefit from the deal.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak revealed April 4 that he had held talks with U.S. and European officials in late March with the aim of getting them to accept Israeli demands for the closure of Fordow, transfer of all 20 percent enrichment out of Iran, and transfer of most of the low enrichment uranium out of country as well.

Barak did not reveal the results of those talks, but three days later, the New York Times reported U.S. and European officials as saying they would demand the “immediate closure and ultimate dismantling” of the Fordow facility as an “urgent priority”, along with the shipment out of the country of its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent.

Reuters reported Apr. 8 that a “senior U.S. official” said the suspension of 20 percent enrichment and closing the Fordow facility were “near term priorities” for the U.S. and its allies.

Reuters also reported that same day that Israel had agreed in March to a “staged approach” in the nuclear talks that would focus in the first stage on halting Iran’s uranium enrichment to 20 percent.

Nothing has been said by either Israel or Western states about shipping low enrichment uranium out of the country, suggesting that the issue remains unresolved.

The high-level talks and obvious linkage between the positions leaked to the media by U.S., European and Israeli officials leaves little doubt that such an understanding had been reached.

Responding to an IPS query, Erin Pelton, assistant press secretary at the National Security Council, said she was not aware of any explicit U.S. agreement with the Israelis on the U.S. position in the nuclear talks. But she added, “We have very close consultations with them on Iran policy. We don’t have to have an explicit agreement.”

Israel’s main leverage over U.S. and European policy was the continuing threat of an attack on Iran. Only the day before Barak revealed his consultation with U.S. and European officials on negotiating strategy, the Jerusalem Post reported that “senior defense officials” had said the possible attack on Iran “may be postponed until 2013″, because the “defense establishment” was waiting for the outcome of the nuclear talks.

Barak has long pointed to Iran’s ability to move centrifuges into Fordow, which was constructed in a tunnel facility deep in the side of a mountain, as denying Israel’s ability to destroy most of the country’s enrichment capabilities in an airstrike. That has been the sole justification offered in recent months for threatening an Israeli military strike.

In a blog post in The National Interest, Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, wrote that the “Western message to Tehran” seems to be, “(W)e might be willing to tolerate some sort of Iranian nuclear program, but only one consisting of facilities that would suffer significant damage if we or the Israelis later decide to bomb it.”

Greg Thielmann, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association,” said in an interview with IPS, “There are Americans who believe it is important to keep all Iranian facilities at risk in case Tehran decided to build a nuclear weapon.”

But Thielmann, former director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office in the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said the reported demand for the closure and dismantling of the Fordow site “is more an interest of the Israelis than of the United States”.

Reza Marashi, the former State Department specialist on Iran and now research director at the National Iranian-American Council, said U.S. officials have been concerned about Fordow, but that it is the Israelis who have “turned their inability to destroy Fordow into a major issue”.

Thielmann said he hopes the administration is “doing this for the Israelis and that it wouldn’t push it once it is rejected.”

While the demand on Fordow clearly responds to a U.S. need to accommodate Israel, it is also in line with Obama administration efforts to intimidate Iran by emphasising that it has only a limited time “window” in which to solve the issue diplomatically. The administration has implied in recent weeks that Israel would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in the absence of progress toward an agreement guaranteeing Iran would not go nuclear.

That emphasis on threat corresponds to the approach championed by hardliners since the beginning of the Obama administration. Former Obama adviser Dennis Ross, who is still believed to maintain personal contact with Obama, was quoted in the New York Times March 29 as saying: “For diplomacy to work there has to be a coercive side. If the Iranians think this is a bluff, you can’t be as effective.”

In a recent article, Ross makes clear that what he calls “coercive diplomacy” would not involve the promise of lifting sanctions, because the U.S. would continue to demand change in Iran’s “behavior toward terrorism, its neighbors and its own citizens”.

If such a “coercive diplomacy” underlies the administration’s negotiating strategy, it would explain the absence of any leaks to the press about what it plans to offer the Iranians in return for the concessions being demanded. Reza Marashi noted that administration officials have been “holding their cards very close to their chest” in regard to what they intend to offer Iran.

The absence of any groundwork for significant incentives leads Marashi to believe the administration plans to rely on threats rather than incentives to get Iran to agree to its demands.

The Obama administration appears to be counting heavily on the one incentive it is prepared to offer in the talks: the recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium on Iranian soil. The U.S. and Europeans will certainly demand strict limits on the number of centrifuges and the level of enriched uranium Iran could maintain.

Iranian agreement to such limits would require major changes in U.S. policy toward Iran, including dismantling sanctions and accepting a major Iranian political-diplomatic role in the region as legitimate.

Seasoned U.S. analysts seem to agree with the Iranian assessment. Stephen M Walt writes in Foreign Policy, “For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the Obama administration is thinking about Iran… I’m puzzled.” Gary Sick, writing for CNN, predicts dire consequences of an attack on Iran and seems to question its wisdom. So why is Obama being so confrontational? So irrational?

The president as usual tries to position himself in the middle, chiding Republican opponents for “loose talk” about war while assuring Israeli prime minister Netanyahu that the U.S. will move in “lock step” with Israel. But what is the logic of offering Iran a “last chance” to stop doing what it is legally entitled to do? The only logic I can see here–and it is a perverse form–resides in the assumption that as the bombs start to fall Washington will be able to say, “We were patient, we went that last mile, and gave them their opportunity, but they defied the international community and so we (or Israel) had to attack.” It is 2003 all over again.

Recall that Obama was elected in large part due to his opposition to the war in Iraq. In a 2002 speech he declared that he opposed “the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” But he never really denounced the campaign of lies, or expressed moral indignation at the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, the uprooting of millions, the spread of ethnic and sectarian conflicts following the U.S. attack Rather, he saw the war as a “strategic blunder.” Still, he was widely regarded as the “anti-war” candidate.

Once elected, however, he proved to be a virtual Bush clone in foreign affairs. He chose hawkish Hilary Clinton (who had strongly supported the attack on Iraq and defended her position until late in her campaign) as Secretary of State, to the applause of the neocons who correctly anticipated that she would provide continuity with their own regime-change policies. He ordered U.S. troops out of Iraq, but he can’t take credit for the withdrawal. It occurred in accordance with the agreement between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government worked out in 2008. (Indeed Obama attempted to renegotiate the agreement to allow for the continued presence of U.S. troops and bases but was thwarted by the Iraqis who detested the occupation. In other words: it is despite not because of Obama that the U.S. has pulled its troops out of Iraq.)

On Iran, Obama made it clear from his very first post-election press conference that he would maintain a policy of confrontation. Asked about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s message congratulating him on his election, he sidestepped the question but sternly (and obviously according to a script) declared that “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon” is “unacceptable.” And ever since his administration has promoted the assumption that Iran has a secret, active military nuclear program which must be stopped by any means necessary.

(This is the case even when, as in recent days, the White House agrees that there is no hard evidence for the existence of a nuclear weapons program! The more or less open discussion with the Israelis involves the establishment of the “red line” that would justify military action. What seems to really be “unacceptable” is the mere knowledge and ability to produce nuclear weapons. But you can’t say that too often in public. You can’t say, “We will deny Iran the right to reach the technological level that many other countries have done, legally and without our objection–because we don’t like Iran!)

Exactly like George W. Bush, Obama has repeatedly stated that he leaves “no options off the table” including military force.

How have we reached this “last chance” interval? The irrationality is in fact mind-boggling. How is it that while the entire U.S. intelligence community has on the basis of exhaustive research and analysis concluded–twice–that Iran terminated its (incipient) program of research in 2003 and does not have a nuclear weapons program; and while the Joint Chiefs of Staff is firmly opposed to an attack on Iran; and while the IAEA has repeatedly reported no evidence for diversion of enriched uranium for military purposes–Obama can still treat Iran’s civilian program as an imminent danger? And threaten war?

Since 9/11 we have seen how powerful campaigns of misinformation can shape public opinion. Hermann Goering’s observation (that if you tell people they’re under attack you can always drag the people along to support a military response) has been repeatedly confirmed. To justify the attack on Iraq, Madison Avenue techniques were used: coordinated talking-points made in televised interviews (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud over New York City); leaking of dubious “intelligence products” through cooperative journalists like Judith Miller and Jeffrey Goldberg; proliferating charges of “drones of death” carrying biological and chemical weapons, al-Qaeda training camps, meetings between al-Qaeda figures and Baathist officials including Saddam himself, mobile biological weapons factories, etc.

All lies! When no evidence of weapons of mass production or al-Qaeda ties surfaced, the administration brushed it off as the result of “faulty intelligence” and urged people to look forward, not backward.

This is what Obama said too, as he took office. He was urged by some to have the Justice Department prosecute those responsible for the criminal war based on lies. “We need to look forward, not backwards,” he replied. He then moved forward to accelerate the Afghan War, increasing U.S. troops from around 10,000 to over 90,000. He moved on to bomb Pakistan and Yemen with drones, to bomb Libya to achieve regime change, and is now threatening Syria. The current administration is as bloody as the last one.

Preparations for an attack on Iran have been made, like those for the Iraq War, through a media campaign involving terrifying phrases and accusations. “Mushroom cloud over New York” has been replaced with “existential threat,” “nuclear holocaust,” “threats to wipe Israel off the map,” “calls for the destruction of Israel.” This is fear-mongering with a twist. Few are suggesting that Iran constitutes a major threat to the U.S.; instead the focus is on the putative threat to Israel.

Many have pointed out that key architects of the Iraq War (including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser) authored a report under Perle’s leadership in 1996 for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. (They did so presumably in their capacity as U.S.-Israeli dual nationals.) The paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advocated pre-emptive strikes against Iran and Syria, regime change in Iraq, and the abandonment of “land for peace” negotiations with Palestinians. In fact, the Israeli government was delighted with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, a supporter of militant Palestinian groups. But the war propagandists said little about Israel’s interests in regime change. They surely didn’t want to encourage the perception that this would be a “war for Israel.”

This time is different. Obama might tell Jeffrey Goldberg–as he did in an interview last week–that the U.S. would “still be a profound national-security interest of the United States to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon” even if “Israel weren’t in the picture.” But Israel’s plainly at the center of the political discourse on Iran in this country.

Norman Podhoretz, the “father of neoconservativism,” begged the Bush administration to bomb Iran in 2007, arguing that the world was at a crossroads such as 1938, and that appeasement was likely to produce another holocaust. We’ve been hearing this shrill rhetoric for years. It is illogical. Ahmadinejad is not a Hitler. He has limited powers under the Iranian system, and does not control foreign policy. If he was inclined to annihilate Jews, you’d think he’d begin with the 25,000 or so Jews in Iran, but he distinguishes them from Zionists and says he respects their rights.

Let’s dissect some of the sensationalistic language underlying the (joint U.S.-Israeli) drive for confrontation.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If you do a Google search, you’ll find tens of thousands of journalistic references to this concept as though it were a fact. I have not seen a poll showing how many people in this country truly assume that such a program exists, but I’d wager most do. So the Big Lie has been effective.

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• The Iranians have consistently stated that they do not have or want a nuclear weapons program. They want to enrich uranium for nuclear medicine and for electrical power. They are not necessarily doing anything other than what Brazil, Argentina, Japan and other countries have done under IAEA investigation, and as signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they are absolutely entitled to do so. (The language of the treaty is clear: signatory nations have the “inalienable right” to develop civilian Nuclear programs.)

• The chief decision-maker in Iran is Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. His religious edicts (fatwa) are considered binding law by Shiite Muslims. In 2005 he issued a fatwa banning the production, stockpiling or use of nuclear weapons as un-Islamic.

• The entire U.S. intelligence community (CIA, FBI, military intelligence, etc.) in two National Intelligence Estimates (in 2007 and 2010) concluded with a high degree of confidence that Iran does not have an active nuclear program.

• Israeli intelligence has concluded the same thing.

• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has never found any evidence for a nuclear weapons program. It has found some evidence for concealment of information, and complained of some lack of cooperation. But due to political manipulation, and the appointment of Yukiya Amano as director in 2009, the agency has become increasingly critical of Iran, packaging dated and dubious data to put pressure on Tehran. (A U.S. diplomatic cable leaked by the Guardian states that while campaigning for the appointment to replace the independent, respected scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei “Amano reminded [the] ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the developing countries group], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.” The 2005 IAEA resolution leading to UNSC sanctions against Iran was determined by politics, not science. 22 of 35 then-member nations of the Agency voted to declare Iran in “non-compliance” with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was basically a matter of NATO nations voting as a bloc, with Algeria, Brazil, China, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russian Federation, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Yemen opposed or abstaining.)

• The most recent IAEA report, widely reported as damning, really just repeats old charges. The principle one involves the design of a nuclear warhead found on a laptop computer allegedly stolen from a dead Iranian nuclear scientist and presented to the U.S. in 2004. It’s thought to have been provided through the Mujahaddin Khalq (MEK), a militant organization of Iranian exiles (which fought on behalf of Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War, when the U.S. was supporting Saddam’s invasion of the neighboring Country, and which happens to be listed by the State Department as a “terrorist” organization) or by Israeli intelligence. In 2005 after the U.S. shared the find with the IAEA, the New York Times quoted a “senior European diplomat” as stating, “I can fabricate that data”; the material, he said, “is open to doubt.” Iran has stated that the laptop evidence is fake. It does not seem to have caused U.S. intelligence agencies to alter their assessment that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program.

• Last month the IAEA delegation to Iran was denied admission to the Parchin military Base. The IAEA mandate does not include demanding spot checks on military bases, and the Iranians claim that the request last month was inappropriate. Amano depicted this as a matter of serious concern, stoking suspicion of nuclear activity. However Iran consented to thorough examination of base sites by the IAEA in 2004, 2005 (twice) and 2006, and the agency found nothing suspicious.

Iran has called for the destruction of Israel. How many times have we heard that? But what are the specific quotes? The Iranian leadership, along with many and varied forces in the world (including some Israeli Jewish historians), believe that the state of Israel was established through savage violence at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. They believe the refugee problem was due to Zionist terrorism–which is in fact not a terribly controversial thesis on this planet. (There seems little question that between April 9, 1948 when the terror began and May 15 when Arab armies “invaded” on Palestinians’ behalf over 300,000 had fled for their lives, while the Israeli Haganeh forces systematically wiped 170 Palestinian towns and villages off the map.) Iranians like many people around the world do not like the concept of a “Jewish state” established at others’ expense and feel a sense of solidarity with the Palestinians.

Some Iranian leaders address gatherings where the people shout, “Death to Israel!” just as they shout, “Death to America!” But how does the rhetoric translate into action?

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• In the spring of 2003, the Iranian government of President Mohamed Khatami (usually depicted as a “moderate” and advocate of “the dialogue of civilizations”) sent a letter to the U.S. State Department via the Swiss ambassador to Tehran (who handles U.S.-Iranian relations). The letter proposed normalization of U.S.-Iranian relations, and acknowledged the need to discuss Iranian support for groups the U.S. lists as “terrorist” and also its nuclear program. It indicated that Iran would support the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative endorsed by the Arab League. (This entails support for a two-state solution and recognition of Israel.) Vice President Cheney was infuriated, insisted that the administration ignore the letter, and berated the Swiss diplomat for even passing it on.

Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. You even see: “…has repeatedly” called for this. It’s not true.

(Keep in mind that the mainstream media has been inclined to circulate disinformation about him Ahmadinejad from the day he was elected in June 2005. He was falsely identified as one of the students who took U.S. embassy personnel hostage during the 1979-81 Hostage Crisis, and President Bush publicly referred to “his involvement” in it. The CIA subsequently quietly concluded that he hadn’t been involved.)

The key statement was made at a conference in Tehran October 2005. Numerous translators have questioned this rendering of his comments, some arguing that there is no such expression as “wipe off the map” in Persian (Farsi). The statement by Ahmadinejad is actually a paraphrase of a statement by the Ayatollah Khomeni (d. 1989), who declared that Israel would go the way of the Shah of Iran’s regime, and that of the Soviet Union.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor of Middle East history fluent in Farsi, smelled “the whiff of war propaganda” in the widely reproduced quotation. His own translation runs as follows: “the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shaved).”

The vigorously pro-Israel Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated the phrase as “this regime” must be “eliminated from the pages of history.” The word for “page” can also e translated as “stage.” The Khomeini statement seems a prediction, rather than a call for specific action. (And is it not entirely thinkable that demographics, settlement, and culture might produce within the next hundred years a multicultural, multi-ethnic, non-religious state in what is now Israel/Palestine? Even some prominent Israeli Jews have suggested this.)

In any case the Iranian Foreign Ministry responded to the furor with a clarification. In February 2006 the Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, answered a question at a news conference about Ahmadinejad’s statement. “How is it possible to remove a country from the map?” he asked. “[Ahmadinejad] is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime.”

Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly said that his remark was misinterpreted. In January 2006, complaining about the “hue and cry” over his statement, he said “Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.” In July 2008 he told a meeting of the D-8 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) that his country would never initiate military action but that the Israeli regime would eventually collapse on its own.

Later that year he was asked by a journalist: “If the Palestinian leaders agree to a two-state solution, could Iran live with an Israeli state?” His response: “If [the Palestinians] want to keep the Zionists, they can stay … Whatever the people decide, we will respect it. I mean, it’s very much in correspondence with our proposal to allow Palestinian people to decide through free referendums.”

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• Iranian government officials have repeatedly stated that they will defer to the Palestinians in deciding the their future, and expressed openness to the Saudi two-state solution endorsed by the Arab League.

Existential threat. Israeli politicians echoed by U.S. columnists continually refer to the Iranian nuclear program as a threat to the very existence of the state of Israel. But intelligence experts, like Ephraim Halevy, who headed Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad from 1998 to 2002, disagree. “The State of Israel cannot be destroyed,” he told journalists last November. He added: “[Iran is] far from posing an existential threat to Israel” and warned, “An attack on Iran could affect not only Israel, but the entire region for 100 years.” He even declared that Jewish extremism within Israel was a greater problem than Iran: “The growing Haredi radicalization poses a bigger risk than Ahmadinejad.”

Those raising the fear of an existential threat meet with the logical reply: “Given that Israel is armed with (undeclared) nuclear weapons, and could respond many times over to an Iranian attack, why would rational people in Iran ever bomb Israel?” The fear-mongers’ reply is simple: “We’re not dealing with rational people.”

The Iranian leaders, they argue, are Islamist fanatics, eager to court martyrdom and unconcerned about their people’s well-being. They are so driven by anti-Semitism that they would sacrifice millions of Iranians just to wipe out the Jews as Hitler failed to do. The key quote summoned in support of this argument is from former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani in 2001: “If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its possession, the strategy of colonization would face a stalemate because the application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damage in the Muslim world.”

This statement (in a Friday sermon) noted the obvious. At present, Israel enjoys a regional nuclear monopoly (although we should note that Pakistan, a country in “the world of Islam,” already had nuclear weapons at the time Rafsanjani spoke.) If nearby Muslim countries had nuclear weapons, Israel’s freedom of action (“strategy of colonization”) would be limited. The statement, while ambiguous, does not threaten Israel but implies that given its size an relatively small population Israel would fare far worse in a nuclear exchange than a country like Iran—if Iran were to emulate Israel and acquire nukes.

I have seen this quotation reproduced with the significant section “…the strategy of colonization would face a stalemate because…” omitted, making the statement seem more ominous than it is. It has been used too often as “evidence” that the Iranian leadership positively looks forward to incurring damage to Iran so long as it can bomb Israel, leaving nothing.

This of course requires one to believe that the Iranians are not only eager to annihilate Israeli Jews but indifferent to the lives of Palestinians (about 20% of the Israeli total) and the approximately five percent of Israelis who are neither Jews nor Arabs. Rafsanjani is generally considered a “moderate” and political foe of Ahmadinejad. This interpretation of his statement is (once again) fear-mongering.

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• Iran has not attacked another country in several hundred years. It has no territorial claims on its neighbors and enjoys good relations with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iraq. It spends less than two percent of its GDP on military spending, as compared to Israel’s over six percent, and just about half as much in dollar terms as Israel. Iran spends $89 per capita per year on military spending, as opposed to $1,882 in Israel and $2,141 in the U.S. (the highest in the world).

• U.S. and Israeli military and intelligence officials agree that the Iranian leadership is rational and not reckless. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, recently told CNN that “the Iranian regime is a rational actor.” Meir Dagan, another former Mossad chief (Halevy’s successor, from 2002 to 2009), recently told CBS, “The regime in Iran is a very rational regime… No doubt that the Iranian regime is maybe not exactly rational based on what I call Western-thinking, but no doubt they are considering all the implications of their actions.” Dagan meanwhile calls an Israeli attack on Iran “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”

Finally: Nuclear holocaust. A brilliant propaganda expression, combining the terrifying imagery of the mushroom cloud with the memory of systematic round-ups and genocide.

But if the Iranian leadership seeks to imitate the Nazis and effect a “final solution” to the Jewish question, why did Ayatollah Khomeini issue a fatwa in 1979, when he returned to Iran, Requiring respect for the rights of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians? Why does Iran have a community of some 25,000 Jews (the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel)? Why does the Iranian constitution specify (Art. 64), that out of the 270 members of the legislature “the Zoroastrians and Jews will each elect one representative; Assyrian and Chaldean Christians will jointly elect one representative; and Armenian Christians in the north and those in the south of the country will each elect one representative”?

These are surely inconvenient truths to some, who want to exaggerate to oppression of Jews in Iran to support their apocalyptic Chicken Little scenarios. One finds a classic example in two pieces published in the National Post of Canada in May 2006 alleging that the Iranian parliament hadpassed laws requiring “special insignia” for Jews and other religious minorities. Written by the extreme rightwing journalist Amir Taheri, an Iranian expatriate who had firmly supported the Shah, and Chris Wattie, a Canadian journalist who’d been embedded with Canadian forces in Afghanistan and glorified their mission, it was picked up by UPI.

It was published in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Jerusalem Post. U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was asked about it in a press briefing. “Despicable,” he raged, just like “Germany under Hitler.” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, readily accepted the report. “This is reminiscent of the Holocaust,” he stated. “”Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis.” But it was 100% disinformation! It was quickly refuted by (among others) by the Iranian ambassador to Canada and the indignant Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament. The paper retracted the story and apologized, but some damage had been done–as was surely the intention.

Also in 2006, Netanyahu offered this splendid historical analogy: “In 1938,” he averred, “Hitler didn’t say he wanted to destroy [the Jews]; Ahmadinejad is saying clearly that this is his intention, and we aren’t even shouting. At least call it a crime against humanity. We must make the world see that the issue here is a program for genocide.” Outgoing US UN Ambassador John Bolton called on the UN International Court of Criminal Justice to charge Ahmadinejad with “inciting genocide.” “It’s time to take action,” he told a Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations symposium. “We’re being given early warning, unambiguously, on what his intentions are.” A mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv!

What if mainstream journalists made it a point to constantly reiterate the following?

• There are over 30 operating synagogues in Iran, kosher stores and restaurants and Hebrew schools.

• While by law there is one member of parliament elected per 150,000 people, the Jewish community of 25,000 is guaranteed one seat.

• While life is oppressive for everyone in Iran, an Islamist theocracy, Jews hold jobs in government ministries and state-owned firms. Their lot may be unhappy, like the lot of most Iranians. But it hardly resembles the lot of Jews in Hitler’s Germany.

“The stupidest idea I ever heard,” says the former Mossad chief. Still, the U.S. government headed by “hope” and “change” candidate Obama is telling Iran to submit to U.S. diktat while it has the chance, or get bombed.

It is all, as the Iranian diplomats observe, irrational.

Quite predictably, the U.S. propaganda machine has rushed to lay blame for the abortive ceasefire solely at the feet of the Syrian government.  As a New York Times headline averred Monday: “Cease-fire in Doubt as Syria Demands New Conditions.”  These “new” conditions, the article detailed, include “‘written guarantees’ that rebels would stop fighting before it pulled back its troops under the cease-fire plan.”

Of course, the six-point peace initiative proposed by joint United Nations and Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan, which has already been agreed upon by the Syrian government, explicitly calls for the “cessation of violence in all its forms by all parties to protect civilians and stabilize the country.”

In service to propaganda, however, the U.S. media has largely sidestepped such matters in propagating a narrative of one-sided Syrian governmental intransigence.  Thus, the maneuvering over the weekend by the armed Syrian opposition to undermine the Tuesday ceasefire was largely ignored.  Yet as Reuters reported Saturday, “Rebel Free Syrian Army commander Colonel Riad al-Asaad said his men would cease fire, provided ‘the regime … withdraws from the cities and returns to its original barracks.’”  Reuters went on to admit, “Annan’s plan does not stipulate a complete army withdrawal to barracks or mention police.”

Still, the concerted move to undo the Annan peace initiative did not begin this past weekend.  Rather, it began a full week prior.

Imperial “Friends”

In their April 1 meeting in Turkey, the so-called “Friends of Syria” proudly announced their plans to increase foreign aid to the armed Syrian opposition.  At the summit of some 70 nations, Arab states Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (all such bastions of democracy) pledged a total of $100 million to pay the individual salaries of those in the rebel “Free Syrian Army.” As Al Jazeera reported, “One delegate described the fund as a ‘pot of gold’ to undermine Assad’s army.”

Lest one forgets, the armed Syrian opposition, which the self-proclaimed “friends” of the Syrian people so readily laud and seek to now shower with cash, was publicly chided a mere two weeks ago by Human Rights Watch for committing myriad human-rights abuses against the Syrian people.  According to Human Rights Watch, armed opposition groups have been implicated in the “kidnapping, detention, and torture of security force members, government supporters, and people identified as members of pro-government militias, called shabeeha.”

Unmoved by such reports, Washington, too, decided at the April Fools “Friends” summit to offer up its own gold.  In total, the U.S. pledged $12 million for “non-lethal” and “humanitarian” aid to the Syrian rebels.  For good measure, London pitched in an additional $800,000 in “practical non-lethal support.”  But as the New York Times reported, this “non-lethal” support will not only include satellite communications equipment, but night-vision goggles as well.

It ought to be quite clear, then, that despite the official claims to the contrary, such “non-lethal” aid will ultimately be put to lethal use.  Moreover, such equipment will undoubtedly help enhance the coordination between the Syrian rebels and their NATO military advisers, the latter whom are already on the ground inside Syria, according to multiple reports.

Such a torpedoing of the Annan proposed ceasefire and peace plan, though, is the direct aim of the imperial minded “Friends of Syria.”

Orchestrating Continued Violence

By sustaining the rebel fighters, the international imperial alliance forged between NATO and its Arab client states seeks the perpetuation of violence within Syria.  For by maintaining the violence, the calls for the forcible removal of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad will predictably come to reverberate ever-louder throughout the Western press.  The purpose here, we shall see, being to build the necessary momentum for a new U.N. Security Council resolution approving a NATO intervention akin to that which ousted Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

Indeed, for as British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the BBC:

We’re working on coordinating our sanctions together and sending a clear message that there isn’t an unlimited period of time for this, for the Kofi Annan process to work before many of the nations here want us to go back to the U.N. Security Council,

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has added much the same.  As the Washington Post reported:

Once Annan determines that “we’re not getting any results…we would go back to the Security Council,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday in an interview with CBS News. “Now, what would Russia and China say?

Annan, Clinton said, “has gone to Moscow, he’s gone to Beijing, he’s met with them. They support his plan. They have urged publicly that Assad follow the plan.

So, if we have to go back to the Security Council to get authority” for more assistance to the Syrian opposition, she said, “I think we’ll be in a stronger position than we would if [Annan] hadn’t had a chance to go and try to negotiate.

Setting the Table for a Protracted Proxy War

Whether Russia and China shall feel pressured to capitulate to a NATO sponsored “regime change” resolution in the Security Council analogous to the one they vetoed back in February remains doubtful.  For even as some Western news outlets, like the Associated Press, eagerly report that Russia has begun to soften its alliance with Damascus, Moscow is unlikely to abandon its lone Arab ally.

In fact, as Reuters reported, on April 4, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bluntly warned:

It is clear as day that even if the opposition is armed to the teeth, it will not defeat the Syrian army, and there will simply be slaughter and mutual destruction for long, long years,

Instead then, the maneuvering of the international “Friends of Syria” shall likely bring the specter of a protracted proxy war nearer.  As the New York Times cautions:

The offer to provide salaries and communications equipment to rebel fighters known as the Free Syrian Army — with the hopes that the money might encourage government soldiers to defect, officials said — is bringing the loose Friends of Syria coalition to the edge of a proxy war against Mr. Assad’s government and its international supporters, principally Iran and Russia.

And it is Iran, of course, that colors the NATO and Arab League interest in Syria.  For ousting Assad will no doubt deliver a strategic blow to Tehran: the long favored nemesis of NATO and its Arab clients.  And with a weakened and further isolated Iran, the opportunity will develop for the furtherance of NATO aggression in the Middle East under the auspices of combating the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program.

For the imperialist self-proclaimed “Friends of Syria,” we see ordinary Syrians are merely pawns to be exploited for imperial gains.

Therefore, for those truly seeking to aid the struggle of the Syrian people, work must hasten in building popular resistance to the NATO agenda.  For let there be no doubt: no revolution can proceed under an imperialist military intervention of any sort

The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: (1) the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. This message is directed at Iran and coincides with Israeli announcements of war preparations. (2) The second track targets the ‘liberal public’ with a handful of marginal ‘knowledgeable academics’ (or State Department progressives) playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers in Tel Aviv and Washington are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or any capacity to produce them now or in the near future. The purpose of this liberal backpedaling is to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations, and to derail the burgeoning anti-war movement.

Needless to say the pronouncements of the ‘rational’ warmongers use a ‘double discourse’ based on the facile dismissal of all the historical and empirical evidence to the contrary. When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations – they intend to go to war – just as they did against Iraq in 2003. Under present international political and military conditions an attack on Iran, initially by Israel with US support, is extremely likely, even as world economic conditions should dictate otherwise and even as the negative strategic consequences will most likely reverberate throughout the world for decades to come.

US and Israeli Military Calculations on Iran’s Capability

American and Israeli strategic policy makers do not agree on the consequences of Iran’s retaliation against an attack. For their part, the Israeli leaders minimize Iran’s military capacity to attack and damage the Jewish state, which is their only consideration. They count on their distance, their anti-missile shield and protection from US air and naval forces in the Gulf to cover their sneak attack. On the other hand, US military strategists know the Iranians are capable of inflicting substantial casualties on US warships, which would have to attack Iranian coastal installations in order to support or protect the Israelis.

Israel intelligence is best known for its capacity to organize the assassination of individuals around the world: Mossad has organized successful overseas terrorists acts against Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese leaders. On the other hand Israeli intelligence has a very poor track record with regard to its estimates of major military and political undertakings. They seriously underestimated the popular support, military strength, and organizational capacity of Hezbollah during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Likewise, Israel intelligence misunderstood the strength and capacity of the Egyptian popular democratic movement as it rose up and overthrew Tel Aviv’s strategic regional ally, the Mubarak dictatorship. While Israeli leaders ‘feign paranoia’ – tossing clichés about ‘existential threats’ – they are blinded by their narcissistic arrogance and racism, repeatedly underestimating the technical expertise and political sophistication of their Arab and regional Islamic foes. This is undoubtedly true in their facile dismissal of Iran’s capacity to retaliate against a planned Israeli air assault.

The US government has now overtly committed itself to supporting an Israeli assault on Iran when it is launched. More specifically, Washington claims it will come to Israel’s defense ‘unconditionally’ if it is ‘attacked’. How can Israel avoid being ‘attacked’ when its planes are raining bombs and missiles on Iranian installations, military defenses and support systems, not to mention Iranian cities, ports and strategic infrastructure? Moreover, given the Pentagon’s collaboration and coordinated intelligence systems with the Israel Defense Forces, its role in identifying targets, routes and incoming missiles, as well as integrated weapons and ordinance supply chains will be critical to an IDF attack. There is no way that the US can dissociate itself from the Jewish State’s war on Iran, once the attack has begun.

The Myths of ‘Limited War’: Geography

Washington and Tel Aviv claim and appear to believe that their planned assault on Iran will be a ‘limited war,’ targeting limited objectives and lasting a few days or weeks – with no serious consequences.

We are told Israel’s brilliant generals have identified all the critical nuclear research facilities, which their surgical air strikes will eliminate without horrific collateral damage to the surrounding population. Once the alleged ‘nuclear weapons’ program is destroyed, all Israelis can resume their lives in full security knowing that another ‘existential’ threat has been eliminated. The Israeli notion of a war, limited in ‘time and space,’ is absurd and dangerous – and underlines the arrogance, stupidity and racism of its authors.

To approach Iran’s nuclear facilities Israeli and US forces will confront well-equipped and defended bases, missile installations, maritime defenses and large-scale fortifications directed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Armed Forces. Moreover, the defense systems protecting the nuclear facilities are linked by civilian highways, airfields, ports, and backed by a dual purpose (civilian-military) infrastructure, which includes oil refineries and a huge network of administrative offices. To ‘knock out’ the alleged nuclear sites will require expanding the geographic scope of the war. The scientific-technological capacity of the Iranian civilian nuclear program involves a wide swath of its research facilities, including universities, laboratories, manufacturing sites, and design centers. To destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear program would require Israel (and thus the US) to attack much more than research facilities or laboratories hidden under a remote mountain. It would require multiple, widespread assaults on targets throughout the country, in other words, a generalized war.

Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that Iran will retaliate with a war of equivalence. Iran will match the breadth and scope of any attack with a corresponding counter-attack: ‘We will attack them at the same level as they attack us’. That means Iran will not confine its retaliation to merely trying to shoot down US and Israeli bombers in its airspace or launch missiles at offshore US warships in its waters but will take the war to equivalent targets in Israel and in US-occupied countries in and around the Gulf. Israel’s ‘limited war’ will become a generalized war extending throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Israel’s current delusional fetish about its elaborate missile defense system will be exposed as hundreds of high-powered missiles are launched from Teheran, Southern Lebanon, and just beyond the Golan Heights.

The Myth of Limited War: Time Frame

Israeli military experts confidently expect to polish off their Iranian targets in a few days – some might think a mere weekend – and perhaps without the loss of even a single pilot. They expect the Jewish state will celebrate its brilliant victory in the streets of Tel Aviv and Washington. They are deluded by their own sense of superiority. Iran did not fight a brutal, decade-long war against the US-supplied Iraqi invaders and its western/Israeli military advisers, to just turn over and passively submit to a limited number of air and missile attacks by Israel. Iran is a young, educated, mobilized society, which can draw on millions of reservists from across the political, ethnic, gender, religious spectrum, galvanized in support of their nation under attack. In a war to defend the homeland, all internal differences disappear to confront the unprovoked Israeli-US attack threatening their entire civilization – its 5000-year culture and traditions, as well as its modern scientific advances and institutions. The first wave of US-Israeli attacks will lead to ferocious retaliation, which will not be confined to the original areas of conflict, nor are will any such act of Israeli aggression end when and if Iran’s nuclear research facilities are destroyed and some of its scientists, technicians and skilled workers killed. The war will continue in time and extend geographically.

Multiple Points of Conflict

Just as any US-Israeli attack on Iran will involve multiple targets, the Iranian military will also have a plethora of easily accessible strategic targets. Though it is difficult to predict exactly where and how Iran will retaliate, one thing is clear: The initial US-Israeli strike will not go unanswered.

Given Israeli-US supremacy in long and medium range sea and air power, Iran will probably rely on short-range objectives. These would include the highly valued US military facilities and supply routes in adjoining terrain (Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan) and Israeli targets with missiles launched from Southern Lebanon and possibly Syria. If a few Iranian long-range missiles escape the Jewish State’s much vaunted ‘anti-missile dome,’ Israeli population centers may pay a heavy price for their leaders’ recklessness and arrogance.

The Iranian counter-strike will lead to an escalation by US-Israeli forces, extending and deepening their air and sea war to the entire Iranian national security system – military bases, ports, communication systems, command posts and government administrative centers – many in densely populated cities. Iran will counter by launching its greatest strategic asset: a coordinated ground attack involving the Revolutionary Guards together with their allies among the Iraqi Shia troops, against US forces in Iraq. It will coordinate attacks against US facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the growing nationalist-Islamic armed resistance.

The initial conflict, centered on so-called military objectives (scientific research facilities), will spread rapidly to economic targets, or what US and Israeli military strategists refer to as ‘dual civilian-military’ targets. This would include oil fields, highways, factories, communications networks, television stations, water treatment facilities, reservoirs, power stations and administrative offices, such as the Defense Ministry and headquarters of the Republican Guard. Iran, faced with imminent destruction of its entire economy and infrastructure (which occurred in neighboring Iraq with the unprovoked US invasion of 2003), would retaliate by blocking the Straits of Hormuz and sending short range missiles in the direction of the principle oil fields and refineries of the Gulf States including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a mere 10 minute distance, crippling the flow of oil to Europe, Asia, and the United States — plunging the world economy into deep depression.

It should not be forgotten that the Iranians are probably more aware than anyone in the region of the total devastation suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion, which plunged that nation into total chaos and devastated its advanced infrastructure and civilian administrative apparatus, not to mention the systematic obliteration of its highly educated scientific and technical elite. The waves of Mossad-sponsored assassinations of Iranian scientists, academics and engineers are just a foretaste of what the Israelis have in mind for Iran’s outstanding scientists, intellectuals, and highly skilled technical workers. Iranians should have no illusions about the Americans and Israelis who seek to thrust Iran into the brutal dark ages of Afghanistan and Iraq. They will have no more role in a devastated Iran than their counterparts had in post-Saddam Iraq.

According to US General Mathis, who commands all US forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, ‘an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for the United States there’ (NY Times, 3/19/12). General Mathis “dire cost” estimate only takes account of the US military losses, likely several hundred sailors on warships within missile distance of Iranian gunners.

However the most delusional and self-serving assessment of the outcome and consequences of an Israeli air attack on Iran, emanates from top Israeli leaders, academics and intelligence experts, who claim superior intelligence, superior defenses and supreme (if also racist) insight into the ‘Iranian mind.’ Typical is Israeli Defense Minister Barak who boasts that any Iranian retaliation will at worst inflict minimal casualties on the Israeli population.

The ‘Judeo-centric’ view of re-ordering the balance of power in the region, which is prevalent in leading Israeli war circles, overlooks the likelihood that war will not be decided by Israeli air strikes and anti-missile defenses. Iran’s missiles cannot be easily contained, especially if they arrive several hundred a minute from three directions, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and possibly from Iranian submarines. Secondly, the collapse of its oil imports will devastate Israel’s highly energy dependent economy. Thirdly, Israel’s principle allies, especially the US and the EU, will be severely strained as they are dragged into Israel’s war and find themselves defending the straits of Hormuz, their army garrisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their oil fields and military bases in the Gulf. Such a conflict could ignite the Shia majorities in Bahrain and in the strategic oil-rich provinces of Saudi Arabia. The generalized war will have a devastating effect on the price of oil and the world economy. It will provoke the fury of consumers and workers rage everywhere as factories close and powerful shocks throughout the fragile financial system result in a world depression.

Israel’s pathological ‘superiority complex’ results in its racist leaders consistently overestimating their own intellectual, technical and military capabilities, while underestimating the knowledge, capacity and courage of their regional, Islamic (in this case Iranian) adversaries. They ignore Iran’s proven capacity to sustain a prolonged, complex multi-front defensive war and to recover from an initial assault and develop appropriate modern weaponry to inflict severe damage on its attackers. And Iran will have the unconditional and active support of the world’s Muslim population, and perhaps the diplomatic backing of Russia and China, who will obviously view an attack on Iran as another dress rehearsal to contain their growing power.

Conclusion

War, especially an Israeli-US war against Iran is indissolubly linked to the asymmetrical US-Israeli relationship, which sidelines and censors any critical US military and political analysis. Because Israel’s Zionist power configuration in the US can now harness US military power in support of Israel’s drive for regional dominance, Israeli leaders and most of their military feel free to engage in the most outrageous military and destructive adventures, knowing full well that in the first and last instance they can rely on the US to support them with American blood and treasure. But after all of this grotesque servitude to a racist, isolated country, who will rescue the United States? Who will prevent the sinking of its ships in the Gulf and the death and maiming of hundreds of its sailors and thousands of its soldiers? And where will the Israelis and US Zionists be when Iraq is overrun by elite Iranian troops and their Iraqi Shia allies and a generalized uprising occurs in Afghanistan?

The self-centered Israeli policy-makers overlook the likely collapse of the world oil supply as a result of their planned war against Iran. Do their Zionist agents in the US realize that as a result of dragging the US into Israel’s war, that the Iranian nation will be forced to set the Persian Gulf oilfields ablaze?

How cheap has it become to ‘buy a war’ in the US? For a mere few million dollars in campaign contributions to corrupt politicians, and through the deliberate penetration of Israel-First agents, academics and politicians into the war-making machinery of the US government, and through the moral cowardice and self-censorship of leading critics, writers and journalists who refuse to name Israel and its agents as the key decision makers in our country’s Mid East policy, we head directly toward a war far beyond any regional military conflagration and toward the collapse of the world economy and the brutal impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people North and South, East and West.

On the first day of her campaign, Warren was criticized far and wide, even among those who sympathized with her, for failing to answer questions from the press with anything but the most equivocal bromides. There was one exception, however. She was asked, in what sounded like a planted question, how she felt about the Palestinian effort to put a petition for statehood before the UN General Assembly. Warren’s answer was crisp and certain. She opposed it.

Warren is no anti-interventionist. Here are some examples from the deep recesses of her web site where an issues section can be found:

On Iran:

Iran is a significant threat to the United States and our allies.  Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, it is an active state sponsor of terrorism, and its leaders have consistently challenged Israel’s right to exist. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is unacceptable because a nuclear Iran would be a threat to the United States, our allies, the region, and the world. The United States must take the necessary steps to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. I support strong sanctions against Iran and believe that the United States must also continue to take a leadership role in pushing other countries to implement strong sanctions as well. Iran must not have an escape hatch. (JW’s emphasis.)

What will be the human costs of these sanctions? Warren does not ask; but she could check with Madeleine Albright to see if they are “worth it.”

On Afghanistan:

Our brave service members have done all that we could have asked them for and more in Afghanistan, but it is time for them to come home. We need to get out as quickly as possible, consistent with the safety of our troops and with a transition to Afghan control. I believe that this can be done faster than the current timeline. (JW’s emphasis).

What our government has asked our brave service members to do is to terrorize the population with night raids and bombing runs and to prop up a corrupt and unpopular puppet government. Warren would have us leave Afghanistan, but not until we are assured that the puppet government is secured.

On “Terrorism”:

These threats are not going away.  We must remain vigilant. Al Qaeda has operations or affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere around the world. We need to continue our aggressive efforts against Al Qaeda, and we need to continue to support the efforts of our intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security, and military professionals.

In other words, the drone attacks and clandestine wars will continue if Warren has anything to say about it. The endless, phony “war on terrorism” must go on and on and on, in Warren’s view.

On Israel:

As a United States Senator, I will work to ensure Israel’s security and success.  I believe Israel must maintain a qualitative military edge and defensible borders. The United States must continue to ensure that Israel can defend itself from terrorist organizations and hostile states, including Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others. (JW’s Emphasis.)

Translation:  If Warren gets her way, the flow of billions from the strapped American taxpayer into Israel’s bellicose pocket will go on, allowing Israel to continue its slaughter of Gazans and others, all “terrorists” to be sure. Although Warren goes on to pay lip service to a “two-state solution” in Palestine, she fails to mention on her site that she is dead set against those uppity Palestinians going to the UN to get their mini-state.

Warren’s campaign is increasingly sappy – clear evidence that she does not want a campaign of issues perhaps most especially her interventionist proclivities which are detestable to a big chunk of voters whom she needs. In one appeal for donations, Warren pointed out her links to Girl Scouts and their cookie sales! Given her desire to tighten sanctions, which make life increasingly difficult for the children of Iran, she might adopt as a slogan “Let them eat Girl Scout cookies.”

Warren’s opponent, Scott Brown, is no better. He too has been a poodle for the military industrial complex and for AIPAC in his brief and undistinguished sojourn in the Senate. Brown took office in a special election after the death of Teddy Kennedy at a time when disillusion with Obama was growing ever stronger, and many votes poured in for him as a form of anti-Obama protest. He continued on his merry way with his betrayal of those who supported and donated to him, a lot of them right here in Massachusetts. Warren has his heartfelt support.

These candidates are of not of much importance in and of themselves. But they both illustrate a grand bargain between the two War Parties and the voters who line up behind them. Scott Brown promises to lower taxes, a promise always broken, if the voters will allow him to back the wars of Empire. What kind of morality lies in that bargain, his supporters might well ask themselves.

Elizabeth Warren is the same. I will give you a consumer protection agency she says, which may – or may not – save you a few pennies. In turn by your vote you will allow me to support sanctions on nations that defy the U.S and to support the bombing and wanton slaughter of innocents far and wide in the developing world. That is the bargain she offers those who would vote for her. What kind of morality lies in that bargain, her supporters might well ask themselves.

The video demonstrates that the United States is not a democracy, it is a bribeocracy, largely controlled by Zionists.  But citizens of other nations need not be complacent, for there is much evidence to suggest that the same pressures are being brought to bear on their politicians and officials to support Israel’s excesses, and an Internet search will reveal that the first ever European Jewish Parliament held its inaugural meeting early in February, 2012; something that the mainstream media seemed reluctant to publicise.

But the message that Iran is too weak to threaten an effective counterattack is contradicted by one of Israel’s leading experts on Iranian missiles and the head of its missile defence programme for nearly a decade, who says Iranian missiles are capable of doing significant damage to Israeli targets.

The Israeli population has shown little serious anxiety about the possibility of war with Iran, in large part because they have not been told that it involves a risk of Iranian missiles destroying Israeli neighbourhoods and key economic and administrative targets.

“People are not losing sleep over this,” Yossi Alpher, a consultant and writer on strategic issues and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, told IPS in an interview. “This is not a preoccupation of the public the way the suicide bombers were a decade ago.”

Alpher says one reason for the widespread lack of urgency about a possible war with Iran is that the scenarios involving such a war are “so nebulous in the eyes of the public that it’s difficult for them to focus on it”.

Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of Haaretz, told IPS in an interview, “There is no war mentality,” although he added, “that could change overnight.” One reason for the relative public calm about the issue, he suggested, is the official view that Iran’s ability to retaliate is “very limited”.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in Bloomberg March 20 that “Some Israel officials believe Iran’s leaders might choose to play down the insult of a raid and launch a handful of rockets at Tel Aviv as an angry gesture rather than declare all-out war.”

But Uzi Rubin, who was in charge of Israel’s missile defence from 1991 to 1999 and presided over the development of the Arrow anti- missile system, has a much more sombre view of Iran’s capabilities.

The “bad news” for Israel, Rubin told IPS in an interview, is that the primary factor affecting Iran’s capability to retaliate is the rapidly declining cost of increased precision in ballistic missiles. Within a very short time, Iran has already improved the accuracy of its missiles from a few kilometres from the target to just a few metres, according to Rubin.

That improvement would give Iran the ability to hit key Israeli economic infrastructure and administrative targets, he said. “I’m asking my military friends how they feel about waging war without electricity,” said Rubin.

The consequences of Iranian missile strikes on administrative targets could be even more serious, Rubin believes. “If the civilian government collapses,” he said, “the military will find it difficult to wage a war.”

Rubin is even worried that, if the accuracy of Iranian missiles improves further, which he believes is “bound to happen”, Iran will be able to carry out pinpoint attacks on Israel’s air bases, which are concentrated in just a few places.

Some Israeli analysts have suggested that Israel could hit Iranian missiles in a preemptive strike, but Rubin said Israel can no longer count on being able to hit Iranian missiles before they are launched.

Iran’s longer-range missiles have always been displayed on mobile transporter erector launchers (TELs), as Rubin pointed out in an article in Arms Control Today earlier this year. “The message was clear,” Rubin wrote. “Iran’s missile force is fully mobile, hence, not pre-emptable.”

Rubin, who has argued for more resources to be devoted to the Arrow anti-missile system, acknowledged that it can only limit the number of missiles that get through. In an e-mail to IPS, he cited the Arrow system’s record of more than 80 percent success in various tests over the years, but also noted that such a record “does not assure an identical success rate in real combat”.

The United States and Israel began in 2009 developing a new version of the Arrow missile defence system called “Reshef” — “Flash” — or “Arrow 3″, aimed at intercepting Iranian missiles above the atmosphere and farther away from Israeli territory than the earlier version of the Arrow. The new anti-missile system can alter the trajectory of the defensive missile and distinguish decoys from real missile reentry vehicles.

Until last November, the Arrow 3 system was not expected to become operational until 2015. And that plan was regarded by U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) as probably too ambitious, because such a system would normally take a decade from conception to deployment.

But Xinhua news agency reported in November that Israeli Air Force officials said they expected Arrow 3 to become operational by mid- 2013, cutting even that abbreviated timeline for development of the system in half.

Nevertheless, the ability of the Arrow 3 system to shoot down an incoming missile still has not been announced, although an Israeli official said March 1 that such a test would take place after the meeting between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu.

In December 2008, Western intelligence sources were reported by Israel’s Ynet News as saying the improved version of the Shahab 3 missile had gone into production earlier that year and that Iran was believed to be able to produce 75 of the improved missiles annually.

Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, then IDF chief of staff, told a visiting Congressional delegation in November 2009 that Iran already had 300 missiles capable of hitting Israeli targets, according to a U.S. State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.

Those reports suggest that Iran now has roughly 450 missiles that can reach Israel, half of which are improved models with much greater precision. Even if only one-fifth of those missiles get through Israel’s missile defences, Israeli cities could be hit by at least 100, most of which are able to hit targets with relative accuracy.

The Netanyahu government has sought to minimise the threat of Iranian retaliation for an Israeli strike against Iran in part by likening war with Iran to those fought against Hezbollah and Palestinian rockets in recent years, which have resulted in relatively few Israeli civilian casualties.

That was the message that Israeli military officials conveyed to the Israeli news media after an escalation of violence between the IDF and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza earlier this month.

Columnist Zvi Barel of Haaretz speculated on March 11 that the purpose of the escalation, provoked by the IDF assassination of Zuhair al-Qaisi, the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committee in Gaza, was to show the Israeli public that Israeli missile defence system could protect the population against rockets that the IDF linked to Iran.

Barel went even further. “After Iron Dome demonstrated its 95 percent effectiveness,” he wrote, “there is no better proof to Israel’s citizens that they will not suffer serious damage following an assault on Iran.”

The success of the Iron Dome against short-range rockets from Gaza is irrelevant, however, to what could be expected from a relatively untested Arrow system against Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at Israeli targets.

It all rests too on the imbalance of power and “perils of dominance,”  which Gareth Porter argues was  “the road to war in Vietnam” (title and subtitle of his excellent book). If you have overwhelming power, you think you can get away with anything, and that you can push up against the edge in threatening war, waiting for the target to recognize prospective defeat and surrender in advance. If they don’t surrender, you can hope to win more or less easily with your superior power, and preserve your (or your client’s) ability to ethnically cleanse and/or maintain your prime bullying power in a region, and your credibility.

Given this imbalance and structure of interests and pressures, and this kind of policy calculus, Iran’s getting a nuclear weapon capability would be a benefit to peace, as it would to some modest degree diminish the axis of evil’s freedom to dominate and ethnically cleanse. The West’s support of Israel’s buildup of nuclear weapons was destabilizing and peace-threatening, as well as supportive of  large-scale ethnic cleansing. It was, and remains, a violation of the spirit and letter of the UN Charter and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The claim that Iran poses a threat because of its nuclear activity is valid, but only in the sense that it might slightly weaken U.S. hegemony, Israel’s freedom to dispossess, and U.S. and Israeli aggression rights.

The double standard here is breath-taking. Israel is now openly threatening to attack Iran, and the media report it without the slightest indignation, and a good chunk of the political class openly approves the idea and urges U.S. support  of this planned aggression. The reservations of the liberal media and politicos rest on the possibility that the attack might lead to a really major military conflagration and might cause oil prices to skyrocket and recessionary conditions to intensify. There is no problem for the mainstream that this would be a gross violation of the UN Charter. Ban Ki-Moon is silent about this threatened violation of the Charter that he is supposed to be enforcing (but actually betrays on a daily basis  as he serves as a U.S. puppet). Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels” once again seem to be in hiding.

When Ahmadinejad made his statement that Israel would some day be wiped off the map, this was given huge publicity in the West as showing the sinister quality of the Iran government and the threat it posed to Israel and the West. But Ahjmadinejad never explicitly threatened an Iranian attack on Israel, and there is solid evidence that his much cited and stripped down statement was mistranslated and misinterpreted—that he was actually paraphrasing Khomeini’s earlier statement that Israel would one day be transformed from an ethnically exclusive state to a more tolerant one, as the Soviet Union was transformed, not by force but by political processes. But while Ahmadinejad’s statement outraged Western officials and pundits, although in its valid form and substance it contained no threat of an Iranian attack,  Israel’s very clear and explicit threat to attack Iran arouses not the slightest indignation and demands for counter-action in the Free World. The double standard and associated lying run deep here.

It is also sick comedy that the excuse for this possible attack is that Iran may be close to nuclear weapons capability. That Iran needs this, and needs the weapons themselves, for elementary defense, is made obvious by the Israeli threat and the failure of the West to constrain Israel. In fact, the United States and other Western states have connived to allow Israel to become a nuclear weapons state outside the supervisory reach of the International Atomic Energy Agency, while engaging in righteous indignation and threats over Iran’s imperfect cooperation  with the IAEA, again an object lesson in double standards and hypocrisy.

It is also almost amusing to see how carefully the mainstream media (and politicos) play dumb over Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, as if this is a natural right and raises no questions about inequality of law and rules enforcement and about why only Israel has the right of self-defense. In the “world’s greatest newspaper” (Paul Krugman, referring to the New York Times), David Sanger and David Broad have written literally scores of  articles on IAEA reports and claims about Iran’s nuclear program and Iran’s supposed lack of cooperation, with only the rarest passing mention of Israel’s nuclear arms.  (This same newspaper could also write 70 editorials on the imminent U.S. attack on Iraq, between September 11, 2001 and March 21, 2003, without once mentioning international law or the UN Charter.) This is great war propaganda service.

The same double standard, propaganda service, and just plain poor journalism, is evident in the reports and comments on Israeli and Iranian “terrorism.” A string of Iranian scientists have been assassinated, facilities and military personnel have been bombed, and sophisticated cyber-warfare has been used to damage Iranian nuclear programs. It is fairly openly acknowledged that Israel’s Mossad has been working with the Iranian terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO), in carrying out these assassination and bombing attacks. Although this was admitted by several U.S. officials on NBC news (Brian Williams, “Israel turns to terror gang to kill Iranian scientists, U.S. officials tell NBC News,” February 9, 2012), it is treated in very low key in the mainstream media, with no indignation or calls for action against this state sponsorship of terrorism, perhaps because the United States is the indirect sponsor as the funder-protector of Israel itself.  With this sponsorship, Israel has a right to invade Lebanon, drop and leave perhaps a million cluster bombs there in the few days before its exit in 2006,  ethnically cleanse Palestinians and Bedouins, terrorize Iran, and threaten and perhaps directly bomb Iran.

But Iran is an official (U.S.-official) sponsor of terrorism, so attention, gullibility and indignation are in a different realm altogether when it is charged with terrorism. It will be recalled that it was regularly charged with the crime of  supplying weapons to one of the contesting parties in Iraq at the height of the Iraq fighting, when the only legitimate supplier (and major direct killer) was that distant invader protecting itself from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. So Iran’s behavior there was villainous.

More recently Iran was alleged to be behind an alleged planned assassination attempt against the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington D.C.  Iran officials were supposed to have hired an Iranian expatriate living in the United States to contract with operatives of a Mexican drug cartel to do the assassination job. Amazingly, the man hired was a troubled and incompetent individual, and the Mexican he contacted was a DEA agent, a remarkable coincidence. This effort violated all rational principles of  intelligence operations on the part of Iran, and flew in the face of its recent attempts to spruce up diplomacy and mend its relationships with its Arab neighbors (including Saudi Arabia). This assassination plot, which, of course, never got off the ground, would have been damaging to Iran’s national interests even if successfully carried out. On the other hand, it served well the interests of the powerful war parties in the United States and Israel. This was almost surely another combination false flag and entrapment operation, and as Juan Cole describes it, “falling down funny.”

The follow-up terrorist actions in India, Georgia and Thailand also have the smell of  false flag operations. In the Delhi bombing of an Israeli car, it is notable that nobody was killed or badly injured, and Gareth Porter shows that the bomb effort seemed designed not to do serious bodily injury. (Porter, “Who was behind the Delhi bombing?,” Aljazeera, March 2,  2012.)  Also, Iran has a strong interest in maintaining India’s goodwill, as it is an important outlet for Iranian oil and gas in defiance of Western efforts to get India to cut these off. Contrary to Israeli claims, the Tbilisi and Bangkok bombings  did not use the “same kind of devices,” and as Porter says, these bombing efforts were contrary to Iranian interests but strongly suggestive of Israeli false flag operations. Interestingly, also, these terrorist actions, unlike those carried out by Mossad and MKO in Iran itself, didn’t result in any deaths. But in the Free Press they provided confirmation of Iran’s terrorist proclivities, while the treatment of Israel’s sponsored real killings in Iran have gotten something close to a free pass.

• First published in Z Magazine, April 2012

In Libya — love him or hate him — a man who reinvested a good percentage of the oil wealth into his own people has been unceremoniously ousted, and for what? It’s still unclear, and stability has, of course, yet to return to that land. The oil rich eastern section of the nation is pushing for autonomy and could put the long accepted (high) living standards of the majority of the Libyan people very much in doubt, taking the country back to the days when King Idris served as a pliant tool of the world’s largest oil corporations.

Iran has for some time now been considered to be a villain celebre, yet a report was just released stating that the CIA and Mossad do not believe that Iran has the bomb. Even with a supple US/NATO man at the head of the IAEA (Amano), an attack on that sovereign nation still — as of yet — does not appear to be on the verge,  though the US and Israel do not seem to put any stock in the supreme leader’s long-held fatwa that he (and Iran as a whole) fundamentally reject the bomb.

Putin and Bashar al-Assad have also been under heavy scrutiny/attack, yet the autocracies/dictatorships that the US supports have been sparsely — if at all — reported upon in the pages of the mainstream press (Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkmenistan, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, many more). A recent report of Gaddafi being a prime funder of Sarkozy’s previous election campaign should show that any and all dictatorial governments that are one day in grace with the US/the Western powers ultimately doesn’t necessarily add up to very much at all.  There are certainly no liberal, democratic, moral, or ethical standards when these American, British and continental European “deals with the devil” are made. The key ingredient, however, is a witting partner to go along with whatever the empire and/or its associates should deign.

Unequivocally, it’s very rich for Susan Rice, and others in the Obama regime like her, to portray herself — and the administration that she is representing — as if they are holier than thou. After all, many of the Frankensteinian creations, historically, that the United States has given rise to have found themselves rotting at the bottom of a spider hole — or been at the receiving end — of a fate even worse! Perhaps some would wish that same deleterious impasse upon Madam Rice, but I think that an early retirement should be a sufficient enough castigation for one of the shrillest, and most irascible voices in the Obama clique.

The house of cards, I think, is irretrievably falling. Forever puncturing the notion of a benevolent non-brusque global power that is unalike the British — and others who have come before. Perhaps due to peak oil (the exigency of bringing as much of the world’s oil wealth under the American sphere); perhaps due to the inherent snowballing effect of beguiling (and tantalizing) hubris and greed; perhaps due to the lack of a check or moral force — like the non-existent peace/anti-war movement — that still presumably envisions Obama as more authentically dovish and pacific than he postures, acts, threatens, augurs and maintains.

At least all signs point to OWS re-emerging out of its winter respite/slumber, taking the fight against the two oligarchical parties to the streets once again, exposing the faux rhetoric of democracy and human rights that the United States proselytizes on to other nations and peoples, yet often showing the emperor (Obama) not to be wearing any clothes. And, of course, as Obama sends the nation’s “finest” out to clamp down upon the mostly vernal, twenty-something youth who are only exercising their God and constitutionally given civil liberties and rights, it’s become even questionable if these rights still exist any longer under President Obama’s charge — especially taking into account his signing of HR 347, and the extraordinarily egregious NDAA.

Perhaps notwithstanding, however, the fervor for dumping the exceedingly limited duopolistic, oligarchical power system of the ravenous, insatiable, and the avaricious 1% — can still readily gain a head of steam, to bring about an American Spring, to a nation — that has for far too long been led by a regime — which author and former economic hitman John Perkins, has aptly and effectively referred to as a corporatocracy.

The detailed account given by Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, shows that the talks in February came close to a final agreement, but were hung up primarily over the IAEA insistence on being able to reopen issues even after Iran had answered questions about them to the organisation’s satisfaction.

It also indicates that the IAEA demand to visit Parchin military base during that trip to Tehran reversed a previous agreement that the visit would come later in the process, and that IAEA Director General Yukia Amano ordered his negotiators to break off the talks and return to Vienna rather than accept Iran’s invitation to stay for a third day.

Soltanieh took the unprecedented step of revealing the details of the incomplete negotiations with the IAEA in an interview with IPS in Vienna last week and in a presentation to a closed session of the IAEA’s Board of Governors Mar. 8, which the Iranian mission has now made public.

The Iranian envoy went public with his account of the talks after a series of anonymous statements to the press by the IAEA Secretariat and member states had portrayed Iran as being uncooperative on Parchin as well as in the negotiations on an agreement on cooperation with the agency.

Those statements now appear to have been aimed at building a case for a resolution by the Board condemning Iran’s intransigence in order to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran in advance of talks between the P5+1 and Iran.

Soltanieh’s account suggests that Amano may have switched signals to the IAEA delegation after consultations with the United States and other powerful member states which wanted to be able to cite the Parchin access issue to condemn Iran for its alleged failure to cooperate with the IAEA.

Parchin had been cited in the November 2011 IAEA report as the location of an alleged explosive containment cylinder, said by one or more IAEA member states to have been used for hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons designs.

The detailed Iranian account shows that the IAEA delegation requested a visit to Parchin in the first round of the negotiations in Tehran Jan. 29-31 and that it asked again at the beginning of the three “intercessional” meetings in Vienna for such a visit to take place at a second negotiating round in Tehran Feb. 20-21.

Soltanieh recalled, however, that during three “intercessional” meetings in February with IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards Herman Nackaerts, and Assistant Director General for Political Affairs Rafael Grossi, the two sides had reached agreement that the IAEA request for access to Parchin would be postponed until after the Board of Governors meeting in March.

But when the IAEA delegation arrived Feb. 20, it renewed the demand to visit Parchin, according to Soltanieh’s account.

“At the beginning of the meeting the first day, they said the director general had instructed them to give a message to us that they wanted to go to Parchin today or tomorrow, despite what we had clearly agreed two weeks earlier,” Soltanieh told IPS.

Soltanieh told the Board of Governors that the negotiating text on which the two sides were working at the Feb. 20-21 meeting provided specifically for a visit to Parchin as well as other sites in conjunction with Iran’s actions to clear up the issue of “hydrodynamic experiments” – the allegation by an unnamed member government published in the November 2011 IAEA report.

In response to the renewed request for a visit to Parchin, Soltanieh offered to let the delegation visit the Marivan site, where the same November report said the agency had “credible” evidence Iranian engineers worked on high-explosives testing for a nuclear device.

“We offered Marivan because it was the next priority,” Soltanieh told IPS, referring to the list of priority issues on which Iran was expected to take actions to be specified by the IAEA under the provision of the negotiating text.

But the IAEA delegation rejected the offer, claiming that it had been given too little time.

Soltanieh’s account reveals that the IAEA also turned down a request to stay one additional day to complete the negotiations of the new action plan. “At lunch hour the second day, we wanted them to stay another day,” he told IPS, and the delegation told them it might be possible.

But after consulting with Amano, the IAEA delegation said it could not stay.

Amano’s change of signals on Parchin and refusal to stay for a third day of negotiations were followed by condemnation of Iran as uncooperative by a “senior Western official” shortly before the IAEA Board of Governors meeting.

The official was quoted by Reuters Mar. 2 as saying, “We think there needs to be a resolution that makes clear that Iran needs to do more, a lot more, to comply with the agency’s requests.” The official called Iran’s stance during the talks a “gigantic slap in the face of the IAEA”.

In the end, no resolution was passed by the Board. Instead the P5+1 – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany – issued a joint statement urging Iran to allow access to Parchin but not blaming Iran for the failure to reach agreement.

The negotiating text as it stood at the end of the February round of talks, which Soltanieh showed IPS, had relatively few handwritten deletions and additions.

A key provision in the draft text, which IPS was allowed to quote, says, “Iran agrees to cooperate with the Agency to facilitate a conclusive technical assessment of all issues of concern to the Agency. This cooperation will include inspections by the Agency, additional meetings, including technical meetings and visits, and access to relevant information, documentation and sites, material and personnel.”

The primary issue standing in the way of final agreement, according to Soltanieh, was whether the IAEA could reopen issues once they had been resolved. The text shown to IPS includes a provision that IAEA “may adjust the order” in which issues were to be resolved and “return” to issues even after they had been resolved.

The Iranians accepted the right of the IAEA to adjust the order but did not agree that it could reopen issues once they were completed satisfactorily, Soltanieh recalled, because Iran feared that giving the IAEA that power would lead to “an endless process”.

The other major issue, according to Soltanieh, was Iran’s demand that the IAEA “deliver” all the intelligence documents alleging that it had carried covert weaponisation activities to Iran before asking it for definitive answers to the allegation. The IAEA delegation said they couldn’t produce all the documents at once, he told IPS.

Iran then agreed that the agency could provide only those documents relevant to each issue when it comes up, the Iranian diplomat recalled. It is not clear, however, whether the IAEA has agreed to that compromise.

The United States has refused in the past to agree to turn over the “alleged studies” documents to Iran – a policy that Amano’s predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei had argued made it impossible to demand that Iran be held accountable for explaining those documents.

After Soltanieh’s presentation to the Board of Governors, Amano told reporters that some of Soltanieh’s statements had been inaccurate but appeared to confirm the main points of his presentation. “In fact, the February talks initially took place in a constructive spirit,” he said. “Differences between Iran and the Agency appeared to have narrowed.”

On the second day, Amano said, Iran had “sought to re-impose restrictions on our work,” which he said “included obliging the Agency to present a definitive list of questions and denying us the right to revisit issues, or to deal with certain issues in parallel, to name just a few.”

Amano’s spokesperson Gill Tudor declined to comment on the accuracy of Soltanieh’s account for this story, saying “(W)e would prefer to let the director general’s words speak for themselves.”

In response to a request for comment on this story, the U.S. State Department deferred to Amano’s account on the talks but said, ” (D)espite the IAEA’s best efforts, Iran was unwilling to reach such an agreement” and had “failed an initial test of its good faith and willingness to cooperate by refusing an IAEA request to visit Parchin….”