Re: SC37

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SYM20070225&articleId=4922

US Vice President Cheney menaces Iran with military aggression

...............For all Cheney’s apocalyptic rhetoric about the Iranian threat, the Bush administration’s targeting of Iran has nothing to do with any of these pretexts. Cheney himself hinted at the real reason when he noted Iran’s strategic location. “They occupy one whole side of the Persian Gulf,” he explained to ABC News, “[and] clearly have the capacity to influence the world’s supply of oil—about 20 percent of the daily production comes out through the Straits of Hormuz.”

The purpose of any US war on Iran, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, would be to further longstanding US ambitions to dominate the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. Iran with its own huge reserves of oil and gas, not only lies across the Persian Gulf from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other major producers, but sits between Iraq and the largely unexploited oil and gas fields of the Central Asian republics.

In his interview with ABC News, Cheney again made clear that the Bush administration has a war on Iran under active consideration. He was asked to respond to a recent statement by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that diplomacy was “the only sensible solution” to the Iranian crisis. After repeating the standard White House line that “all options are on the table,” he was asked if a military solution was realistic. Cheney refused to answer the question, declaring: “I am not going to go beyond where I am... ”

Cheney may be coy about publicly declaring his support for a war, but it is a poorly kept secret that within the Bush administration he strongly advocates this incendiary course of action. In an article in yesterday’s London-based Times, “senior British government sources” expressed their fear that President Bush would seek to “settle the Iranian question through military means” next year if diplomatic efforts failed.

The Times explained: “The hawks are led by Dick Cheney, the vice president, who is urging Mr Bush to keep the military option ‘on the table’. He is also pressing the Pentagon to examine specific war plans—including, it is rumoured, covert action.” A string of reports over the past year have revealed advanced plans by both the US and Israel for a military assault on Iran.

The military preparations have been made, but what is still needed is a pretext for war. That is the significance of Cheney’s remarks, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, to yesterday’s breakfast with select members of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. The issue arose of the Democrats’ opposition to the Bush administration’s war policies, and the far more deep-seated hostility of the majority of Americans to the Iraq war.

Cheney was completely unfazed. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “It is understood he said the Democrats in the US were riding public opposition to the war that could end up prejudicing their leadership credentials. He said the mood could easily shift if there was another terrorist attack.”

These remarks reflect more than Cheney’s utter contempt for public opinion and democratic norms. He recognises that the beleaguered Bush administration requires more than its present litany of lies to wage a new war of aggression against Iran. To drown out and intimidate widespread public opposition and to energise its own fascistic social base, the Bush administration desperately needs a new terrorist outrage.

In congressional testimony on February 1, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski openly warned of “some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran culminating in a ‘defensive’ military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

No one should be in any doubt that the gangster cabal in the White House, with Cheney in the lead, is more than capable of exploiting a new terrorist attack as the pretext for launching a reckless and criminal war on Iran................