Category: News

Former CIA analyst and Antiwar.com contributor Ray McGovern spoke with Business Insider about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hankering to bomb Iran and why “delaying Iran’s nuclear capabilities is not the primary concern of a military strike, but simply the pretext.”

“The Israelis want to pretend the Iranians are building up their nuclear capabilities, want to zap them between now and November 6, and the chances are at least even that they will try to do that thinking the U.S. will come in with both feet,” McGovern told us.

McGovern thinks that “Israel does not fear a nuclear weapon in Iran’s hands” because Israel already has a nuclear arsenal and the threat of Iran having a couple of nukes “would not be all that credible except in a limited, deterrent way.”

That deterrent would be important, however, because “since 1967 the Israelis have been able to pretty much do whatever they want in that area” and a nuclear Iran would bring a “different strategic situation because, for the first time, Israel would have to look over their shoulder.”

So even though Israel’s leaders don’t truly fear imminent nuclear annihilation, McGovern says they “would like to end any possibility, however remote, that anytime soon Iran could have that kind of very minimal deterrent capability.”

McGovern believes that Israel’s primary goal is to “have Iran bloodied the same way we did to Iraq” so that Iran “would no longer be able to support Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere.”

And the reason Nov. 6 is an important date, McGovern wrote in a recent article, is that “a second-term Obama would feel much freer not to commit U.S. forces on Israel’s side” and “might use U.S. leverage to force Israeli concessions on thorny issues relating to Palestine.”

While some view an Israeli strike as unlikely, due especially to strong opposition from the Israeli defense establishment, McGovern sees Netanyahu as having significant leverage over Obama at least until the November elections. “Netanyahu feels, with good reason, that he’s got Obama in a corner for these next three months,” he says. “If he’s right about Obama jumping in with both feet — and I think Obama would do that — even though Israeli generals are advising that it could be a disaster, [then] Netanyahu is willing to try it.”

In Foreign Affairs, Alexander Cooley writes about how a less unipolar world is prompting competition for foreign expansion among the great powers, particularly the US, Russia, and China in the Central Asian countries. And it means the American Empire is costing a lot more.

Most dramatically, in 2009, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan, host to the Manas Transit Center, initiated a bidding war between the United States and Russia by threatening to close the base. He extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from both sides, in the form of a Russian assistance package and a renewed lease at a higher rent with the United States. Since 2008, the United States also has paid transit fees, about $500 million annually, to the Uzbek and other Central Asian governments to ship equipment bound for Afghanistan through the Northern Distribution Network.

The same dynamic is playing out elsewhere. The availability of alternative patrons has made U.S. strategic engagement more expensive everywhere, both in terms of dollars and politics. In 2008, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa refused to extend a ten-year lease of the U.S. base at Manta, after having been offered $500 million to upgrade the facility by a Hong Kong port operator. Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has observed that in post-revolutionary Egypt the United States has continued to provide assistance in return for overflight rights and access to the Suez Canal, even as U.S. leverage over the country diminishes. And during Pakistan’s seven-month fallout with Washington, in which it closed Afghanistan-bound supply lanes, Islamabad publicly demanded an increase in transit fees and courted China. Eventually, U.S. officials reportedly agreed to release $1.1 billion for the Pakistani military from the Coalition Support Fund to get the route back open.

Comparisons to the Roman Empire and the overextended expansionism that helped lead to its downfall can sometimes get stale, but all of these examples make it clear that maintaining an empire of military bases and client states is getting increasingly unaffordable for a US government $16 trillion in debt. The Obama administration is also in the process of surging our expensive high-tech military presence in the Persian Gulf and all throughout the Asia Pacific region. And as David Vine recently wrote for TomDispatch, America’s Empire of Bases is growing worldwide. Sooner or later, America will be drained.

Incidentally, the late, great Chalmers Johnson predicted the very scenario Cooley relays. In Baseless Expenditures he wrote: “I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: cash in now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the US Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country.”

Featured in our Viewpoints section yesterday, Anand Gopal writes at Harper’s Magazine about how the media have uncritically accepted the word of the US-backed rebel fighters in Syria in order to create “a simple and self-serving narrative” about the murderous Assad regime and the Syrian people yearning for freedom and reform. He opens with what American newspapers reported as a Syrian government massacre in the town of Tremseh last month:

But there was a problem—no one had actually visited the town. The New York Times, for instance, reported the story from Beirut and New York, relying solely on statements and video from anti-Assad activists and the testimony of a man from “a nearby village” who visited the scene afterward. When the first U.N. investigators arrived two days later, they uncovered a very different story. Instead of an unprovoked massacre of civilians, the evidence pointed to a pitched battle between resistance forces and the Syrian army. Despite rebel claims that there had been no opposition fighters in Tremseh, it turned out that guerrillas had bivouacked in the town, and that most of the dead were in fact rebels. Observers also downgraded the death toll to anywhere from forty to a hundred.

We noted this when it happened last month (a similar thing might have happened with June’s Houla massacre). The New York Times published a subsequent report admitting, “Although what actually happened in Tremseh remains murky, the evidence available suggested that events on Thursday more closely followed the Syrian government account.” That is, a battle between regime forces and rebel militias, rather than a slaughter of unarmed civilians, as was claimed by the opposition and subsequently touted by Western sources.

Gopal’s piece is a welcome antidote to the narrative-seeking observers of the Syrian conflict. But he also notes there is narrative-seeking on the other side as well and he challenges a growing chorus of US intelligence officials going to the press to divulge secret information about al-Qaeda’s significant presence among the rebel fighters. Still, the ultimate lesson is that the American news media are predisposed to eat up anything the opposition claims is the truth:

The battles of the Syrian revolution are, among other things, battles of narrative. As I recount in “Welcome to Free Syria,” the regime has indeed committed grievous massacres, including one I saw evidence of in the northern town of Taftanaz. The Assad government also puts forth a narrative—the country is under siege from an alliance of criminal gangs, Al Qaeda, and the CIA—that is quite removed from reality. Yet there is also a powerful pull in the West to order a messy reality into a simple and self-serving narrative. The media, which largely favors the revolution, has at times uncritically accepted rebel statements and videos—which themselves often originate from groups based outside the country—as the whole story. This in turn provides an incentive for revolutionaries to exaggerate. A Damascus-based activist told me that he had inflated casualty numbers to foreign media during the initial protests last year in Daraa, because “otherwise, no one would care about us.”

Despite the unsavory and counterproductive interventions of the Obama administration, which Antiwar.com has been railing against from the start, they are getting hammered from the more crapulous warmongers in Washington who argue our policy should be one of direct military engagement to oust the Assad regime (followed by the requisite affinity for post-war nation-building). Many different factors could precipitate those policies in the near-to-medium term, but one is developing a simplified narrative of humanitarian intervention that goes unquestioned in the media.

In June, a group of academics from around Latin America plus the US wrote a letter to the State Department railing against the US military presence in Honduras and demanding that aid to the country’s abusive law enforcement apparatus be halted. They exposed the drug war as the farce it is, charging “we are the ones providing all the corpses in your war” and arguing that “combatting drug trafficking is not a legitimate justification for the US to fund and train security forces that usurp democratic governments and violently repress our people.”

The Obama administration has expanded the US military’s presence in Honduras considerably, including sending in commando-style DEA troops to kill and capture people involved in drug trafficking. In just the last few months, those DEA agents have been implicated in killings on three separate instances, one of which ended with four dead civilians, two of whom were pregnant women. Increased US-Honduran cooperation has occurred in tandem with widespread human rights abuses and forced disappearances of political opponents and journalists.

The letter slams Washington for supporting the military coup that took place in 2009:

Our country is in shambles; in part thanks to U.S. “support.” We can never know what would have happened, but had the U.S. State Department respected Honduran and Latin American diplomatic processes following the coup, perhaps our country might not today be considered nationally and internationally as an example of a “failed state.”

…The direct effect of U.S. policy toward Honduras has been to further strengthen the hand of the very people responsible for plotting, carrying out, legitimating, and violently imposing the coup d’état: the armed forces, the court system, the attorney general’s office, the police and powerful business groups. Military officers who led the coup have been assigned top-level positions within the current administration of President Lobo. With “security” as an explanation, Honduran armed forces are no longer required to account for the resources they use and can now make purchases without a tendering process. The current Honduran administration has put our poorly respected civil liberties at greater risk by deputizing soldiers to act as police despite their not being trained for that function but instead having been trained to exterminate the enemy, and giving police, with the new wiretap law, broad powers to audit the personal communication of citizens requiring neither a judge’s nor a DA’s order. All this, in turn, has intensified the climate of insecurity in our country, where citizens often have more reason to fear security forces than they do drug traffickers and gangs.

Then last week the State Department made an announcement that seemed a direct response to the letter, declaring the US would halt aid to Honduras…with some important caveats.

The U.S. government is withholding funds to Honduran law enforcement units directly supervised by their new national police chief until the U.S. can investigate allegations that he ran a death squad a decade ago, according to a State Department report released this week.

The report says the State Department “is aware of allegations of human rights violations related to Police Chief Juan Carlos Bonilla’s service” and that the U.S. government has established a working group to investigate.

The U.S. had pledged $56 million in bilateral security and development assistance for 2012 in Honduras, where tons of drugs pass through each year on their way to the United States. Under the new guidelines, the U.S. is limiting assistance so that it only goes to special Honduran law enforcement units, staffed by Honduran personnel “who receive training, guidance, and advice directly from U.S. law enforcement and are not under Bonilla’s direct supervision,” according to the report.

Nice try, America. So basically the great bulk of US aid to Honduras, which is helping to tear the country apart and steal the rights of the Honduran people, will continue, while some small portion that has some direct connection to a single thuggish police chief is being temporarily halted. The problem is clearly much bigger than one police chief, but the US continues to justify promoting state-terrorism in the name of fighting drugs.

But, as the letter signed by hundreds of academics explained to the State Department “the police and armed forces” that are being armed and trained by Washington “are an integral part of the problem; many of their members are deeply complicit in the drug trade.”

From the Guardian, yet another testimony on how the US-led economic warfare on Iran is tearing people’s lives apart:

For Fatemeh, the pill she takes twice a day in her home in Iran means the difference between life and death. Earlier this summer when she contacted her friend Mohammad in the US to say she was running out of the medicine due to a shortage, the obvious thing for her fellow Iranian to do was to order it from the chemist next door and have it shipped directly to Iran. To the dismay of Fatemeh and Mohammad, the order was rejected because of US sanctions on trade with Iran.

…”My friend suffers from Brugada syndrome [a heart condition] and has abnormal electrocardiogram and is at risk of sudden death,” said Mohammad, who lives in Moorhead, Minnesota. “There is one drug that is very effective in regulating the electrocardiogram, and hence preventing cardiac arrest. It is called quinidine sulfate and is manufactured in the US.”

Mohammad ultimately circumvented the problem by having the medicine ordered to his home address and sent to Iran through friends. “By the time she got the pills, her own supply was finishing within four days, what if we couldn’t send them in time? Who would be responsible if anything had happened to her?” he asked.

The Guardian piece also cites Iran’s Haemophilia Society, which, as Muhammad Sahimi first let Antiwar.com readers know last week, “recently blamed the sanctions for risking thousands of children’s lives due to a lack of proper drugs.” As Sahimi reported, “the sanctions that the United States and its allies have imposed on Iran’s banks and other financial institutions have made importing necessary drugs and medical instruments almost impossible.”

Reports indicate that advanced drugs for a variety of cancers (particularly leukemia), heart diseases, lung problems, multiple sclerosis, and thalassemia cannot be imported, endangering the lives of tens of thousands of people. There are about 37,000 Iranians with multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease that can be controlled only with advanced medications; without them, the patients will die. And given that, even under the best medical conditions,40,000 Iranians lose their lives to cancer every year, and that it has been predicted by many experts that Iran will have a “cancer tsunami” by 2015, because every year 70,000–80,000 new cases of cancer are identified in Iran, the gravity of the situation becomes even more glaring.

Besides this, unemployment is rising and inflation is spiraling out of control. “Prices of fruit and sugar, among other staples, have soared – in some cases showing threefold and fourfold increases,” Saeed Kamali Dehghan wrote in the Guardian last month. “The price of meat, an essential ingredient of Iranian food, has gone up to such an extent that many now eat it only on special occasions.” This is Iran’s punishment for their non-existent nuclear weapons program.

It’s increasingly obvious that Washington’s aim is to harm the Iranian people. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has admitted they aren’t changing the policies of the regime, but has insisted on their continuance nevertheless. As one of the top supporters of sanctions, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), said, “Critics [of the sanctions] argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people.  Quite frankly, we need to do just that.” Or take Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY): “The goal … is to inflict crippling, unendurable economic pain over there. Iran’s banking sector — especially its central bank — needs to become the financial equivalent of Chernobyl: radioactive, dangerous and most of all, empty.”

One of the major atrocities of all of post-WWII US foreign policy was the American-led sanctions on Iraq, which ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. We heard the same odious rationales for the sanctions on Iraq as we are now hearing for the sanctions on Iran. Denis Halliday, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, insisted the effect of the Iraq sanctions “fit the definition of genocide.” If those on Iran are not stopped soon, it may turn out to be just as deadly.

Stephen Walt has a piece up at Foreign Policy cataloguing the persistent predictions of a US or Israeli war on Iran, which always turn out to be dead wrong. My favorite bit:

In September 2010, for example, The Atlantic published a cover story by Jeffrey Goldberg (“The Point of No Return”) based on interviews with dozens of Israeli officials. Goldberg concluded that the odds of an Israeli attack by July 2012 were greater than 50 percent. Fortunately, this forecast proved to be as accurate as most of Goldberg’s other writings about the Middle East.

The predictions from the elite media figures and journalists typically occur in tandem with direct threats from Israeli officials, of course. The constant bluster is ironic, considering how strongly it influences Iran towards getting the bomb (Iran has cleverly chosen “strategic ambiguity” instead).

But Walt’s piece reminded me of this timeline from the Christian Science Monitor back in November of last year listing official warnings of an imminent Iranian nuke for about thirty years now. According to western intelligence, they’ve pretty much always been on the verge of having the bomb. Below is a summary:

• 1984: West German intelligence sources say Iran’s production of a bomb “is entering its final stages.”
• 1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999.
• 1995: New York Times reports US and Israeli concerns that ”Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought” – about five years away.
• 1998: New York Times reports that long-range missile development indicates that “Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years. The CIA gave a timeframe of 12 years.
• 2002: CIA warns that the danger from nuclear-tipped missiles from Iran is higher than during the Cold War. Dubious claims from the MeK (now widely believed to be passed on by Israeli intelligence) say that Iran has undisclosed uranium enrichment facilities in breach of IAEA safeguards.
• 2004: Secretary of State Colin Powell claims Iran is working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. “We are talking about information that says they not only have [the] missiles but information that suggests they are working hard about how to put the two together,” he said.
• 2005: U.S. presents 1,000 pages documentation allegedly retrieved from a computer laptop in Iran, which detail high-explosives testing and a nuclear-capable missile warhead.
• 2006: New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh quotes US sources saying that a preemptive strike on Iran is all but inevitable.
• 2007: Bush and Cheney imply an impending attack on Iran if it doesn’t give up it’s nuclear program. A month later, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is released, which controversially judges with “high confidence” that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons effort in fall 2003.

Yet, in the shadow of Ehud Barak’s bluster yesterday, people are still gullible enough to believe these clowns.