What a hell of a year that was, huh? Lots of killing. I’m hoping for less this year, though the number of people who can adequately debunk the State’s case for Iran building nukes is down to the Iranians themselves, and Dr. Gordon Prather of Antiwar.com and World Net Daily. (“I’m not a defender of Iran!! It’s just that Cheney-Rice are lying about everything,” he tells me.)
For those not familiar, Prather’s case is that there is no evidence, after 2 years of carte blanche inspections by the IAEA, that Iran has imported any ready made bomb materiel or begun to enrich uranium – which is their right under the nonproliferation treaty and all their “additional protocols” to their various “safeguards agreements” with the IAEA anyway – and that if they were to begin enriching uranium for the purpose of making a nuke, it would take them at least 10 years, since the centrifuges they have are old pieces of crap. My interviews of him on the subject, here.
A California professor named Jorge Hirsch has also been writing in a most exasperated tones about the threat of a war in Persia.
Most who imagine the various scenarios for war see major airstrikes by us and/or Israel on the supposed nuclear weapons sites, but not a full scale invasion, as that would be absolutely impossible, whether the slavery of mass conscription were imposed here or not.
Some of the neo-crazies have a belief [.wmv] that if they strike at the Ayatollah the people will then rise up and finish them off. A proverbial “cakewalk.”
For some reason that doesn’t seem very likely to me.
Whether or not the fact that Khamenei helped the Israelis fool the Republicans into invading Iraq is a cause for them to be spiteful or thankful is an open question, but the fact that the Iran-backed SCIRI and Da’wa factions rule the place now just serves as all the more reason to bomb them – unless of course, they care in the slightest that 150-something thousand American soldiers are sitting like ducks among their Shia “allies” in Iraq.
In my second interview of former CIA operative and journalist for the American Conservative magazine, Philip Giraldi, who last August wrote a brief entitled “In Case of Emergency: Nuke Iran,” he said the idea that they could get away with it’s time had passed. On December 3rd, Seymour Hersh agreed, saying that the world’s dependence on Iranian oil flows and the loss of government credibility after Katrina will keep us out.
Now, Martin Walker at UPI, citing the German paper Der Tagesspiegel, and other reports in the Turkish press says:
“The German news agency DDP cited “Western security sources” to claim that CIA Director Porter Goss asked Turkey’s premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets. Goss, who visited Ankara and met Erdogan on Dec. 12, was also reported to have to have asked for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation.
The DDP report added that Goss had delivered to the Turkish prime minister and his security aides a series of dossiers, one on the latest status of Iran’s nuclear development and another containing intelligence on new links between Iran and al-Qaida.
DDP cited German security sources who added that the Turks had been assured of a warning in advance if and when the military strikes took place, and had also been given “a green light” to mount their own attacks on the bases in Iran of the PKK, (Kurdish Workers party), which Turkey sees as a separatist group responsible for terrorist attacks inside Turkey.”
The Jerusalem Post claims the same. As Scott Ritter wrote back in June,
“The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.
The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.
President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.”
If the plan referred to in Giraldi’s August piece is still the one they’d use if the silent war escalates to a full scale conflict, we’re talking about using nukes on their underground facilities. Which would be the second time that the US had used nuclear weapons on a country that was no threat to us.
What would Iran be like after being nuked?
What would America be like after nuking them?
I don’t think you could set us up for a fall any better if that was the purpose.
Perhaps reason can trump ideology in ’06.