This
article is part of the DaanSpeak-series
Why
war?
Serious implications feared
The coming war against Iran
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26Sept2005 - 
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The Dutch in the original
article has been translated into English
by Ben Kearney.
The
natural disasters in the United States have not managed to keep plans
for attacking Iran from becoming any less of a reality. A war against
Iran is seen by the US and Israel as a way to achieve otherwise divergent
strategic goals. Military plans, legislation and psychological manipulation
are now being fine-tuned and put into place in order to carry out a war
against Iran.
In two recent articles, author Webster
Tarpley observes 'feverish
US-UK preparations for a new 9/11 of state-sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism
which is intended in the intentions of the terrorist controllers in London and
Washington to set the stage for the attack on Iran, as well as for martial law
austerity dictatorships throughout the English-speaking world, and beyond.' Tarpley
is the author of a book that deals with the role secret services played in the
creation of cover stories for September 11th, as well as how what actually
happened on that day was carried out. The book is
entitled 9/11 - Synthetic Terror - Made in USA; 'synthetic terror' because
the terror on 9/11 has its origins not in "real terrorism" but in the United
States itself. He also spoke in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands during Jimmy Walters' European
tour,
which sought to expose the truth of September 11th. DaanSpeak spoke there
also.
US says military force an option
In a wide-ranging article
Tarpley points to a statement made
by Bush in mid-August in which he asserts that the US will not shy away from
the use of military force against Iran: 'As
I say, all options are on the table. The use of force is the last option
for any president and you know, we've used force in the recent past to secure
our country'. Bush's vice-president began banging the drums of war earlier when
he said that
'stronger action' was needed if Iran did not comply with demands. Tehran has
been just as stern in its pronouncements, notes the
BBC: '[Former president of Iran] Mr Rafsanjani said western opposition to
Iran's decision to resume its nuclear programme would, as he put it, cost them
dearly.' All this talk may be less threatening than it seems. Iran is a large
and powerful country, and as we reported earlier
under the heading Downing Street Memo's: Iraq war begun before it began,
that country has not been slowly ground to a pulp by years of attacks conducted
prior to the start of the war, as was the case with Iraq. It is unlikely that
a confrontation with Iran will remain a regional matter.
Insiders anticipate war against Iran
After the US elections secured
a second term for Bush, Seymour Hersh made this observation in an article entitled The
Coming Wars: ''This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign.
The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level
intelligence official told me. “Next, we're going to have
the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they
are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we've got four years, and want to
come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism''.' Hersh:
'In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. 'Everyone
is saying, "You can't be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,"' the former
intelligence official told me. 'But they say, "We've got some lessons learned—not
militarily, but how we did it politically. We're not going to rely on agency
pissants." No loose ends, and that's why the C.I.A. is out of there.' [...] The
hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans'
negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration
will act. 'We're not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers
here,' the former high-level intelligence official told me. 'They've already
passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're
doing it.'"
Military planning for US attack underway
A compelling argument to support the premise that a US attack on Iran is not
far off can be found in an excerpt from
a column entitled Deep
Background by Philip Giraldi. Giraldi is an ex-CIA agent and employee of Cannistraro
Associates, a company run by Vince
Cannistraro, a one-time counter-terrorism chief for the CIA who in his work
as a consultant for ABC News reported on the Bush Administration's pattern of
deception during the lead-up to
the Iraq war. Giraldi wrote his column for The American Conservative, a publication
by conservatives who disagree with
the neoconservative course of the Bush Administration. 
He
describes how the military
planners of
USSTRATCOM, at the direction of the administration, are
preparing a conventional and/or nuclear response (i.e., an attack on Iran) to
an anticipated hostile act by Iran: 'In Washington it is hardly a secret that
the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing
to do the same for Iran.
The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office,
has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM)
with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type
terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault
on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. [...] As in
the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved
in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. [...]'.
Preparations for war on Iran in full gear
Hersh writes: 'The
Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran
at least since last summer [2004]. Much of the focus is on the accumulation
of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and
missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate
three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision
strikes and short-term commando raids. 'The civilians in the Pentagon
want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as
possible,' the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.
Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the
former high-level intelligence official told me that an
American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working
closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had
dealt with Iranian counterparts."
"There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation
with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said
that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith,
have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine
potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. [...] 'They
believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from
the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep,
to be targeted,' the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites
need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground
surveillance—before being targeted.'
In
February The
Washingon Post writes: 'The
Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly
a year to seek evidence of nuclear
weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, according to three U.S.
officials with detailed knowledge of the secret effort. [...] The aerial espionage
is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack and is also employed
as a tool for intimidation.' But also: '"It
was clear to our air force that the entire intention here was to get us to turn
on our radar," the official said. That tactic, designed to contribute information
to what the military calls an "enemy order of battle," was used by the U.S. military
in the Korean and Vietnam wars, against the Soviets and the Chinese, and in both
Iraq wars. "By coaxing the Iranians to turn on their radar, we can learn all
about their defense systems, including the frequencies they are operating on,
the range of their radar and, of course, where their weaknesses lie," said Thomas
Keaney, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and executive director of the Foreign
Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University. But it did not work. "The United
States must have forgotten that they trained half our guys," the Iranian official
said.'
Ex-Labour Minister Tony Benn writes in an editorial in
The Guardian about the mode of attack: 'It is inconceivable that the White
House can be contemplating an invasion of Iran, and what must be intended is
a US airstrike, or airstrikes, on Iranian nuclear installations, comparable to
Israel's bombing of Iraq in 1981. Israel has publicly hinted that it might do
the same again to prevent Iran developing nuclear nuclear weapons. Such an attack,
whether by the US or Israel, would be in breach of the UN Charter, as was the
invasion of Iraq. But neither Bush, Sharon nor Blair would take any notice of
that.'
DaanSpeak
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