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TARGET IRAN - PREPARATIONS BY ALL
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Iran makes its bid for regional hegemony12 February 2006: The rise of Iran as the regional superpower of the Middle East is the most significant (and most under-reported) geopolitical development of the early 21st century. That part of the world which contains most of the world’s hydrocarbon energy is increasingly falling under the shadow of an oil-rich, barbarically fundamentalist, pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic and soon-to-be nuclear-armed regime in Tehran, with potentially horrendous consequences for the rest of the world. The influence of Iran now seeps through the region in a poisonous crescent which stretches from Iran into southern Iraq, on to Syria, then, through Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, to the shores of the Mediterranean. But its ability to intimidate goes far wider, spilling into Saudi Arabia and along the southern shores of the Gulf. Iran’s rise has been facilitated by the removal of Iraq, the traditional bulwark against Iranian expansion, after an Anglo-American invasion which now looks like going down in history as an act of supreme geopolitical folly. With Iraq sidelined (and increasingly under Iranian control itself), Iran is now in a race with Saudi Arabia for the leadership of Political Islam. It is already winning; but Tehran believes victory will be guaranteed and its Islamic leadership made impregnable when it has a nuclear arsenal to rattle. The rest of the region is already cowering at the prospect, while the United States and its allies look on, bereft of either the policies or the power to thwart the inexorable rise of Iran. This is a story with no good news. The theocracy which grips Iran is now prepared to say anything in its bid to lead political Islam, from fanning the flames of Holocaust denial to demanding the destruction of Israel. Its propaganda is clearly inspired by Jospeh Gobbels, who pioneered the cult of the “Big Lie” for the Nazis. For example, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, always wrongly described in the ignorant Western media as the country’s “moderate” Supreme Leader, last week claimed that the publication of the now-notorious cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad was an Israeli conspiracy motivated by anger over the victory of Hamas in last month’s Palestinian elections. Of course the cartoons were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September last year while the Iranian-funded terrorists of Hamas won the Palestinian elections only last month; but propaganda has always been a stranger to fact. Mr Khamenei’s absurd claim, which was curiously under-reported in the West, was important for two reasons: it reaffirmed that the whole of the Iranian regime – not just the newish President Ahmadinejad – is deeply anti-Semitic in its pandering to Political Islam; and it confirmed that anything to do with Islam – even the publishing of a few unremarkable cartoons – will now be manipulated on a grand scale to gain advantage for the hearts and minds of Political Islam. The international row over the cartoons is a classic case study of this phenomenon. It is now clear that the global Islamic outrage over the cartoons was far from the spontaneous outburst originally depicted by a duped Western media: it has been fanned and fuelled by Islamic extremists for there own ends. It is significant that no demonstrations greeted their original publication in Denmark last September; nor when, remarkably, even an Egyptian newspaper, Al Fager, reprinted them on its front page on 17 October. But a delegation of hardline Danish Muslim leaders was soon touring the Middle East to drum up support for a “spontaneous” protest. To spice their case, they took along, in addition to the original 12 cartoons, three other cartoons that had never been published in the West. These cartoons, of course, were hugely more offensive to Islam than the published ones; as they were passed around the Islamic world, they were accompanied by malicious rumours of further Western outrages against Islam, such as burnings of the Koran, none of them true. But truth is a fragile flower in an Islamic world in which lies are spread daily by e-mail and text to populations that have been brainwashed for years by extremist clerics and hateful state-controlled media. Tehran, for a change, was initially slow to see the potential for mischief in the cartoons. The Saudis and the Syrians were quicker to pump up the outrage (Damascus even played host to the world’s great oxymoron, the “spontaneous Syrian demonstration”). But Iran soon caught up: hence the claim that the cartoons were all an Israeli conspiracy. This weekend President Ahmadinejad, echoing his Supreme Leader, was accusing European countries of being Israeli puppets for publishing them. They had become a weapon in the war for the leadership of Political Islam. But the cartoons are a sideshow for Iran. The real thrust of policy is to exploit the power vacuum in the Gulf following the invasion of Iraq, from which Iran is now emerging as the clear victor. The demise of Iraq and its subsequent slipping into the Iranian sphere of influence, coupled with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, is producing a fundamental shift of the balance of power in the Middle East which is leading to Iran’s ascendancy. On present trends, as Iraq comes under its wing and it begins to amass a nuclear arsenal, Iran is heading to be the uncontested hegemon of the Gulf region as well as the undisputed champion of Political Islam. For the world’s most active state sponsor and paymaster of terrorism to emerge as the nuclear-armed regional superpower would be a stunning double victory for Tehran, made all the more delicious for the mullahs because it could not have happened without the unwitting complicity of the United States and its British ally. That Iran is now in the ascendancy is a result of their terrible miscalculation. Strong government in Baghdad has long been the major stumbling block to Iranian expansionism in the region, which is why America and Great Britain rightly backed the odious Saddam during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s (just as America and Britain backed the even more odious Stalin in the war against Hitler). But replacing Saddam with chaos has removed Iraq as the traditional counterweight; worse than that, it has allowed Iran to infiltrate and undermine its old enemy. Police and local militias controlled by Tehran effectively run the South of Iraq while Iranian-backed terrorist groups are responsible for the murder of scores of innocent Iraqis every week. The British troops supposedly in charge of the South are now merely garrisoned there. The already growing influence of Iran, a Shia Muslim country, has been further boosted by Iraq’s elections, which returned a Shia majority with a mandate to create an Islamic Republic, a far cry from Saddam’s secularism, which favoured the Sunni minority. All this is the consequence of the invasion, which a former leading Republican in the US State Department last week described to our sister publication, The Spectator, as “the single biggest strategic blunder in modern US foreign policy”. This newspaper turned against the invasion of Iraq when it became clear we had been misled by London and Washington about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and because it soon became apparent that, disgracefully, the invaders had no credible plan to rebuild the country. But, with hindsight, it is now clear that the fundamental reason the war was wrong is because it changed the regional balance of power overwhelmingly in Iran’s favour. The invasion of Iraq has unleashed a hostile regional superpower which the West is now unable (or unwilling) to contain. In Iraq, Iranian agents are backing the anti-American Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters grabbed 30 seats in the new parliament and who openly supports Iran. The Iranian aim is to position Mr al-Sadr to take over from the moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is suffering from heart trouble, and swing the Shia behind Iran. As Iraq succumbs to becoming an Iranian protectorate, Tehran is also reinforcing its position across the Middle East. Last month President Ahmadinejad went to Damascus to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The two have worked closely together to support Hezbollah; but Iranian influence has never been stronger in Damascus than it is today, now that the Syrian president is in need of a like-minded, oil-rich friend. The small, oil-rich Gulf states need nothing from Iran but they fear its rise because of its size and power; and they would inevitably kowtow to a nuclear-armed Tehran, especially since all the Sunni-ruled Gulf states have sizeable Shia populations which Iran could turn against them. Iran’s potential ascendancy over the entire region is clearly within its grasp. With Iraq neutralized and America mired in Iraq, Saudi Arabia is the sole remaining bulwark to Iranian expansion; it is clearly not up to the task. The Saudis still compete with Iran for the leadership of Political Islam. But it is a competition they are losing; they are terrified at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran (the Saudis are even rumoured to be considering purchasing nuclear weapons from Pakistan when Iran goes nuclear); and they are apprehensive at the mischief Tehran could cause among the Shia population that just happens to be a majority in the Saudis’ eastern oil fields. The normally reticent Saudis are already speaking aloud about their concerns. Muhammad Abdullah al-Zulfa, a member of the Shura Council of Saudi Arabia, warned last weekend that “as a Gulf area, we don’t want to see Iran as the major power in the area. And we don’t want to see Iran having this nuclear weapon, where it will be a major threat to the stability of the Gulf area and even to the Arab world altogether.” King Abdullah II of Jordan has been even more outspoken, warning that a Shia-led Iraq would develop a special relationship with Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Lebanese Hezbollah (and now also Hamas-run Palestine) to create a “crescent . . . that will be very destabilising for the Gulf countries and for the whole region”. These are warnings that much of the Western media and foreign-policy establishment seem determined to ignore, perhaps because Western leaders feel increasingly powerless to affect events in the Middle East. But the West’s failure to contain a nuclear-armed and oil-rich Iran, led by fundamentalist mullahs anxious to spread their creed throughout the region, is a geopolitical disaster in the making. The European Union, as
usual, has neither the power nor the inclination to act; it is more
likely to accommodate the rise of Iran. But Washington and London are
also paralysed by the aftermath of their strategic blunder in Iraq.
Those in the Middle East who want to counter the emergence of Iran as
the regional superpower look like they will be left to their own
devices; and those in the West who claim the War on Terror is being won
will have to think again. |
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http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Stories.aspx?Iran%20makes%20its%20bid%20for%20regional%20hegemony&
StoryID=B71841AE-0E76-4836-B83B-EE6E0D3D25FF&SectionID=803597D7-4BD5-45D5-BF88-E1AC85BF7FDF Cartoon war or global intifada?By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Published February 11, 2006 The combustible cartoon war quickly became shorthand for what radical Muslim clerics had been planning for months -- a clash of civilizations. The offending Danish cartoons, first published almost five months ago, were mild compared to how some cartoonists in Western democracies slash and singe organized religion. One late-night comedian did a skit of a TV news anchor announcing Moses had just come down with the Ten Commandments. "And now to Sam Donaldson in the foothills of Mount Sinai to report on the three most important ones." As for Prophet Muhammad wearing a smoking, turban-mounted bomb, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, and their Islamist terrorist fan club the world over, invoke and hail his name five times daily as their leader in their war against the "crusader infidels." That's us Judeo-Christians The countless millions of Muslims in some 50 Muslim countries who tell pollsters bin Laden is more trustworthy than President Bush are deeply religious. They scoff at the widely held notion in the U.S. that a tiny minority of terrorists has hijacked Islam. These same Muslim faithful approve of Islamist terrorist leaders who promise brainwashed volunteer suicide bombers the reward offered by the prophet -- the keys to paradise and 72 virgins to keep them busy for a while, if not eternity. The Danish cartoonist elicited a few chuckles with his drawing of tattered suicide bombers, bits of clothing still smoking, greeted at the Muslim pearly gates by a frantic gatekeeper waving them away and shouting -- "Get lost, we've run out of virgins." More seriously, the "spontaneous" protests and riots that ricochet throughout the Muslim world from Iraq to Indonesia and on to Denmark and Norway, peaceful countries that give a wide berth to international rumbles, were carefully prepared over several months. Following publication of the cartoons in a Danish newspaper last September, a group of fundamentalist clerics flew to the Middle East to arouse indignation and anger among other radical imams and mullahs in both Sunni Islam and Shi'ite Islam, from Cairo's al-Azhar University, Islam's oldest, to the holy cities of Najaf in Iraq and Qum in Iran. The delegation of Danish Muslim clerics was led by Ahmed Abu-Laban, a fundamentalist Palestinian preacher expelled by the United Arab Emirates for his vitriolic Friday sermons. They got a hearing with Arab League chief Amr Moussa at his headquarters in Cairo and persuaded him to move the issue onto the agenda of a December meeting of several Arab heads of state. Next came a fatwa, or religious edict, from Cairo's senior Muslim cleric. The fatwa became a signal for global demos. Meanwhile, back in Denmark, Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten that published the cartoons critical of Islam, which included the forbidden face of the prophet, was warned by a counterterrorism informant there was now a "halal" decree against him. Islam had sanctioned a contract on his life.. Mr. Rose now moves only with bodyguards. When Iran's firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust never happened and Israel should be made to disappear from the map, there are just as many millions of Sunnis as there are Shi'ites who nod their heads in agreement. So all it requires is a match to light the fuse of Islamofascism, much as Adolf Hitler's Brownshirts in the 1930s got an eager populace to demonstrate against Jews -- and ransack their stores. The moderate Muslim majority was again spooked, as it doubtless will be again when another fatwa emanates from Iran authorizing the use of a nuclear weapon against Israel. The cartoon war could be seen as a limbering exercise for a global intifada. It would be a miracle if the Wahhabi and Salafi and Deobandi and Shi'ite clergy leaders didn't see it that way. Iran's Mr. Ahmadinejad, surveying the global cartoon thunderclaps, must have concluded the return of the 12th Imam, known as the Mahdi, is drawing nearer, which means world chaos, death and destruction, before a new era of world peace under Islamic rule. Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for United Press International and for The Washington Times. More Evidence Nuking Iran is on Schedule
Kurt Nimmo Blog - Sunday
February 12th 2006, 3:38 am: In a story appearing in the Sunday
Telegraph, the newspaper once owned by the Canadian criminal finagler
and neocon “Lord” Conrad Black, amoral strategists “at the Pentagon are
drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by
submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran’s nuclear
sites as a ‘last resort’ to block Teheran’s efforts to develop an
atomic bomb.” If not so deadly serious, the idea that the Straussian
neocons will shock and awe Iran only as a “last resort” would be
comical. In fact, they have long planned to bomb Iran—imaginary nukes
or not—and kill as many Iranians as possible and decimate the civilian
infrastructure, as they have done in Iraq (some estimates put the death
toll thus far above 130,000). “Central Command and Strategic Command
planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on
logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.” In fact, the Pentagon has long mapped out its targets, including “secondary targets,” usually civilian airports, radio and TV installations, telecommunications centers, government buildings, conventional power plants, water and waste treatment plants, highways and bridges, and rail lines. In Iraq (twice) this sort of “targeting” resulted in massive suffering and death (coupled with sanctions after the first Bush Iraq Invasion, more than a million Iraqis died of starvation and disease, a stunning crime against humanity). These criminal strategists, basically no different than the German Wehrmacht strategists who planned Operation Barbarossa, “are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic’s nuclear bomb ambitions.” Of course, this “diplomatic offensive” is designed to fail, as the “diplomatic offensive” prior to the Iraqi invasion failed (and the “diplomatic offensive” in Afghanistan failed, even though the Taliban were ready to turn over Osama bin Laden, if only the Americans were able to provide evidence of his complicity in nine eleven, something the Americans were unable and unwilling to do because they did not have compelling evidence and, besides, they had planned to invade Afghanistan well before nine eleven, as plenty of evidence attests). “This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment,” a senior Pentagon adviser told the Telegraph. “This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months.” Indeed, the shock and awe dismemberment of Iranian society is considered more “than just the standard military contingency assessment,” as the PNAC Straussian neocons have long told us. It has “taken on much greater urgency in recent months” because the Bush administration, a front for the Straussian neocon nihilists, is winding down and it will take months to obliterate Iranian culture and civil society. Moreover, the neocons need to fit in Syria, at minimum—they would prefer to do Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, but this is obviously too ambitious, that is unless they can figure out a way to keep Bush in office. “The prospect of military action could put Washington at odds with Britain which fears that an attack would spark violence across the Middle East, reprisals in the West and may not cripple Teheran’s nuclear program. But the steady flow of disclosures about Iran’s secret nuclear operations and the virulent anti-Israeli threats of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has prompted the fresh assessment of military options by Washington. The most likely strategy would involve aerial bombardment by long-distance B2 bombers, each armed with up to 40,000lb of precision weapons, including the latest bunker-busting devices. They would fly from bases in Missouri with mid-air refuelling.” Nonsense, Tony Blair is fully onboard with the plan to reduce the Middle East to a simmering cauldron of violence and dead, mutilated bodies. Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al, are ecstatic over Ahmadinejad’s highly suspect anti-Semitic (or rather, anti-Ashkenazi, since the majority of Jews in Israel are white Europeans and not Semites) declarations, leading more than a few people to believe he is a Mossad agent or has an as of yet unknown reason for egging on the Israelis and Americans. Either way, Ahmadinejad is courting disaster. As former CIA intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi told the American Conservative last July, the United States plans to nuke the be-jesus out of 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.” All of this despite the fact Iran is a non-nuclear country, a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and working with the IAEA, although the latter reported Iran to the UN Security Council last week. So itchy is the Pentagon to use nukes against non-nuke countries, they wrote the “policy” in their “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” (pdf doc). “Senator Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, [said] Mr. Bush is expected to be faced by the decision [to criminally bomb Iran] within two years.” More balderdash—the United States plans to bomb Iran next month, or soon thereafter. It wants Iran wasted sooner before later. Last week Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democrats in Russia, told the Ekho Moskvy radio station “that the Muslim [cartoon] riots were orchestrated by the US to garner European backing for the military strike” and the “war is inevitable because the Americans want this war. Any country claiming a leading position in the world will need to wage wars. Otherwise it will simply not be able to retain its leading position,” as well spelled out by the PNAC maniacs who have captured the flag in Washington. | |
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| Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2006/2/1347.htm |