Re: SC49

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6726

From Al Qaeda to Al Quds: America prepares for War on Iran

In 2002, in the runup to the war against Iraq, the George W Bush administration changed the subject from its failure to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

In 2007, in the run-up to the coming war against Iran, the administration has changed the subject from its abject failure in Iraq to Iran's also non-existent nuclear weapons. The manufacture-of-consent techniques are exactly the same - the apocalyptic 2007 Bush forecast of an Iranian-orchestrated "nuclear holocaust", echoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's apocalyptic 2002 prediction of a Saddam Hussein-orchestrated "mushroom cloud".

Vastly experienced European diplomats, from Paris to the European Union headquarters in Brussels, confess their helplessness and impotence. They also confirm off the record that Bush's brand-new European poodle, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is convinced the US president will order the bombing of Iran's nuclear sites - not to mention general infrastructure. A number of chancelleries are already working under this premise.

The Democrat-controlled US Congress, for its part, has elevated its irrevocable irrelevance to the starry skies by virtually - and ignominiously - playing itself out of the Bush administration's decision to attack Iran. In the unlikely event Congress would object, Rice already has the anti-virus vaccine: the stamping out of the Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami - known in the West as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - as a "terrorist organization".

It doesn't even matter - from the point of view of the Bush administration - if the whole 125,000-strong IRGC or just its elite Quds Force is branded as terrorists. The transition will be covered by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force issued on September 18, 2001. Moreover, the US Senate has already approved - by a Stalinist 97 votes to 0 - an amendment accusing Iran of committing acts of war against the US.

It also doesn't matter that Gabriel Kolko - arguably the best historian of the Vietnam War - keeps stressing that since 1950, the US has never lost a battle; but it has never won a war either.

And now for the laundry list

Every serious observer of the hysterical manufacture-of-consent rampage is now aware of Vice President Dick Cheney's mandate for US corporate media and selected think-tanks to declare war on Iran - that is, the Office of the Vice President telling the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and assorted usual suspects what to do, all under the aegis of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the de facto policy think-tank of the Bush administration. AEI's stalwart Michael Ledeen's new book - a prodigy of subtlety titled Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealot's Quest for Destruction - is a key part of this package.

Everyone is aware of the shrill Pentagon-concocted blitzkrieg about made-in-Iran explosive devices and roadside bombs penetrating Bradleys and Abrams tanks and killing scores of US soldiers in Iraq - with no proof being volunteered to, or asked for, by cowed mainstream media.

Many are now aware of the report by Daniel Plesch and Martin Butcher summarized last month by the Raw Story website, according to which the Pentagon, in the impossibility of a land invasion, plans a "massive, multi-front, full-spectrum" new "shock and awe" against Iran, destroying not only the Quds force and the IRGC but all nuclear energy sites and the country's whole economic infrastructure. The objective is clearly "regime change" - or at least to reduce Iran to Iraq status, that is, a feeble, failed state...........

...........The to-be-destroyed list certainly includes the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant; the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz; a heavy-water and radioisotope plant in Arak; the nuclear fuel unit in Ardekan; the uranium conversion and nuclear technology center in Isfahan; the Tehran Nuclear Research Center; the Tehran molybdenum, iodine and xenon radioisotope production plant; and the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories. No one of course is talking about "collateral damage", or the fact that hundreds of Russian experts may be obliterated in Bushehr (how about that as a declaration of war?), or the fact that hundreds of thousands of civilian residents of fabled Isfahan may become victims of radiation provoked by US mini-nukes...........

.............The only guiding logic of the US far right in power is permanent war. The hellish mechanism is already in place. Any pretext will do for Bush to order an attack on the Quds force inside Iran. The IRGC will retaliate. And there it is, the precious casus belli for "shock and awe" remixed. First the bombing of Quds; then the bombing of Bushehr, Natanz and Isfahan. The whole of Iran, out of Persian national pride, will rally behind Ahmadinejad, the supreme leader, the IRGC and the theocratic police state. So much for regime change.