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TARGET IRAN - PREPARATIONS BY ALL

MER - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 13 February 2006: WAR these days is far more than military attack. With the Americans there is first of all a tremendous technological side involving high-tech spying, covert ops, assassinations, internal upheavals, economic punishments, and regime change attempts. In addition war preparations for the Americans in this modern-day interconnected world involve massive propaganda campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion; and this in turn includes everything from planting information and stories to twisting journalists and publications to 'report' in ways that suit the needs of the war planners. Of course we were all witness to this kind of thing in the build-up to the Iraq invasion/occupation -- most egregiously the Judith Miller stories in the New York Times, Colin Powell's unforgiveable hoax testimony before the U.N. Security Council, and the false/misleading statements and speeches (including the State of the Union address) by leading U.S. government officials. But all along the real target was not weak Iraq which had been bombed, sanctioned, and severely diminished over the past decade. The real target in the modern-day Middle East has all along been Iran and those associated forces including Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), and Occupied Palestine (Hamas)...all pledged to stand up to American/Israeli/European military, economic, and political hegemony and control of the vast petro-rich region. This first article in today's Boston Globe helps explain how the Iranians are preparing and how the planned U.S./Israeli attack could spiral out of control, even into World War III. The additional articles are examples of the hysteria raising commentaries that are fanning the flames of Western fear from such publications as TheBusinessOnline and The Washington Star.

Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn
By Bryan Bender
02/12/06 "Boston Globe" -- -- WASHINGTON -- Iran is prepared to launch attacks using long-range missiles, secret commando units, and terrorist allies planted around the globe in retaliation for any strike on the country's nuclear facilities, according to new US intelligence assessments and military specialists.

US and Israeli officials have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to thwart its nuclear ambitions. Among the options are airstrikes on suspected nuclear installations or covert action to sabotage the Iranian program.

But military and intelligence analysts warn that Iran -- which a recent US intelligence report described as ''more confident and assertive" than it has been since the early days of the 1979 Islamic revolution -- could unleash reprisals across the region, and perhaps even inside the United States, if the hard-line regime came under attack.

''When the Americans or Israelis are thinking about [military force], I hope they will sit down and think about everything the ayatollahs could do to make our lives miserable and what we will do to discourage them," said John Pike, director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, referring to Iran's religious leaders.

''There could be a cycle of escalation."

President Bush has said military force should be the last resort in international efforts to deter Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet Bush has stated unequivocally that the United States would not tolerate an Iranian nuclear arsenal, which the CIA estimates could be in place in three to 10 years. Iran maintains its nuclear program is solely aimed at producing electricity, not weapons.

Israel, which Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has threatened to annihilate, asserts that Tehran is much closer to going nuclear and has been far more direct with its counter-threats.

The Israel Defense Forces, which destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, has said it is perfecting ways to launch a preventative strike against Iranian nuclear sites, including outfitting its Air Force with American-made, bunker-busting munitions.

US intelligence officials have said that Iran, which fought a war with Iraq from 1980-1988 that cost one million lives, still has the most threatening armed forces in the immediate region. Its combined ground forces are estimated at about 800,000 personnel. The CIA has concluded that Iran is steadily enhancing its ability to project its military power, including by threatening international shipping.

But it is Iran's unconventional weapons and tactics -- rather than its conventional military -- that would pose the greatest threat, according to the intelligence officials.

Bush's new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, outlining the conclusions reached by a variety of US spy agencies, warned in his first overall annual threat assessment this month to Congress that Iran is capable of sparking a much wider conflict it comes under threat.

A major worry: newly acquired long-range missiles. Obtained with the assistance of North Korea, the Shahab 3 could strike Israel and perhaps even hit the periphery of Europe, according to a recent report by the Pentagon's National Air and Space Intelligence Center.

The missiles could also be tipped with chemical warheads and threaten US military bases in the region.

Iran is believed to have at least 20 launchers that are frequently moved around the country to avoid detection.

''Iran has an extensive missile-development program and has received support from entities in Russia, China, and North Korea," the Pentagon report said, estimating their range to be at least 800 miles.

New missile designs under development could travel 400 miles farther, it said, while Iran purchased at least a dozen X-55 cruise missiles from Ukraine in 2001 that are capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as Italy.

Meanwhile, Iranian agents and members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, widely believed to have a large presence in Iraq, could attempt to foment an uprising by the their fellow Shi'ite majority in Iraq or join insurgents in directly attacking US troops there, Negroponte warned.

He reported that Tehran has ''constrained" itself in Iraq because it is generally satisfied with the political trends in favor of the Shi'ite majority and to avoid giving the United States another excuse to attack Iran. But that could change if Iran were targeted militarily.

A leading Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia has clashed with US troops and rival Shi'ite groups, vowed in a visit to Tehran last month to defend Iran if it were attacked.

The assessment presented by Negroponte said the Iranian regime already provides ''guidance and training" to militant groups in Iraq and ''has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anticoalition attacks by providing Shia militants with the capability to build" improvised explosive devices.

Government and private analysts assert that Iran's intelligence apparatus and Revolutionary Guard Corps could cause serious damage to US efforts to pacify Iraq.

''The Iranian ayatollahs may deploy an 'asymmetric' answer and incite a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq," the respected Russian military publication ''Defense and Security," warned last month, referring to a military strategy that employs such tactics as guerrilla warfare. ''That would be disastrous for the United States."

Iran, believed to be responsible for the bombing of a US Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, also would be expected to enlist its terrorist allies around the world to come to its aid if attacked, US officials and private specialists contend.

''Tehran continues to support a number of terrorist groups, viewing this capability as a critical regime safeguard by deterring US and Israeli attacks, distracting and weakening Israel, and enhancing Iran's regional influence through intimidation," according to Negroponte's assessment to Congress.

Primary among them is Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group that killed 241 US Marines when it bombed a Beirut barracks in 1983.

''Lebanese Hezbollah is Iran's main terrorist ally, which . . . has a worldwide support network and is capable of attacks against US interests if it feels its Iranian patron is threatened," according to the report.

''They have all kinds of people that would like to embrace martyrdom," Pike said of Iran, raising the specter that a terrorist group allied with Iran would be capable of launching attacks inside the United States to avenge a strike against Iran.

Intelligence officials also point out that Iran controls a small island at the mouth the Strait of Hormuz and could use missiles and gunboats to temporarily shut off access to the economically vital Persian Gulf, sparking an oil crisis.

''Military attack is not the solution to this problem," Mohammad Mohaddessin, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the leading dissident group, said in a telephone interview from Paris. ''The regime is absolutely focusing on nonconventional responses. Missiles and terrorist operations are the strong points."


Iran makes its bid for regional hegemony

12 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.

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.




February 2006


Magazine






World War III?
(February 28, 2006)
“The threat from the White House is to go in anyway... I see the possibility if we do that of really setting forth World War III.” - Walter Cronkite, 27 Oct 2002.

Huge Death Toll in Iraq In Week - Equivalent to Five 9/11s
(February 27, 2006)
As usual the information coming from the Pentagon and State Department, and from the many who work for them either overtly and covertly, is again unreliable and deceptive, off by an order of magnitude in fact. After independent investigations it appears the Americans, and their associated regime in Baghdad, tremendously downplayed the actual death and destruction toll in the last week in Iraq since the bombing of the Golden Dome. Indeed, adjusting for population size, it is as if in just the past week alone Iraq has suffered deaths amounting to five 9/11s!

Palestine Articles - 26 Feb
(February 26, 2006)
Palestine Articles - 26 Feb

ISRAEL ARTICLES on 26 Feb
(February 26, 2006)
ISRAEL ARTICLES on 26 Feb

Who really bombed the Golden Dome is in much doubt
(February 26, 2006)
Just who really bombed the Golden Dome in Samarra a few days ago? Just who really benefits the most from this historic act that may have reshuffled the political geostrategic deck in Iraq and in the region? There's a long history now in the Middle East of covert operations blamed on others in order to justify actions the powers that be are determined to pursue.

From the "PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES"....to the Jewish Territories of Oscars Hollywood
(February 25, 2006)
PARADISE NOW: "The nomination probably won't be rescinded, but with 70 being the median academy voter age, and Judaism the predominant religion, it is something of a surprise, even to insiders, that the film has been nominated at all, let alone that it is a strong prospect to win."

Washington Scene: JUNKETS TO ISRAEL TO CONTINUE AS BEFORE
(February 25, 2006)
"U.S. lawmakers took 163 privately funded trips to Israel; more than one in five current members of Congress have traveled there. That compares with 139 to Mexico, the next most popular foreign destination, 97 to Italy and 87 to Germany... Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II."

Jewish Lobby Enters Arab World - Ariel Sharon's 'Dear Personal Friend' Seduces Qatar
(February 23, 2006)
This appears to be the first time such an Israeli-connected 'think tank' operation is formally setting up shop in an Arab country, however thinly masked as 'The Brookings Institution'. Much more background follows in the MER FlashBack article titled "ISRAELI Influence-Peddling - ON TOP OF ALL THE SPYING AND LOBBYING."

Today at 12pm noon sharp (Washington DC time) join in at MER CHAT - MiddleEast.org/chat
(February 22, 2006)


World Council of Churches Vents Angry
(February 20, 2006)
A coalition of American churches sharply denounced the U.S.-led war in Iraq on Saturday, accusing Washington of "raining down terror" and apologizing to other nations for "the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown." The statement, issued at the largest gathering of Christian churches in nearly a decade, also warned the United States was pushing the world toward environmental catastrophe with a "culture of consumption" and its refusal to back international accords seeking to battle global warming.

DIVESTMENT AHEAD as 'JEWS ONLY' APARTHEID EXPANDS
(February 19, 2006)
Though the church-based 'divestment campaign' still remains very hesitant, embryonic and unlikely to 'catch on' and be 'sustained' as would be required for it to have a serious chance of seriously impacting, the debate is at least underway in limited forums... Meanwhile Israel's barriers, walls, fences, prisons, confuscations, checkpoints, and settlements are all still expanding in a worse than Apartheid every was way.

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY SEVERELY RESTRICTS MEDIA
(February 18, 2006)
The event was the 5th annual Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference -- no well-known speakers and certainly no one who is use to having any serious security. "I saved these two days to be at the conference" the reporter insisted before declaring in obvious frustration that she was going to have a weekend vaction instead and left in a huff.

CRISIS IRAN, CRISIS WORLD
(February 17, 2006)
The crisis with Iran is far more than a confrontation over production of a few nuclear weapons in the years ahead. The crisis with Iran, and indirectly with the growing forces of Arab nationalism and Muslim assertiveness, as well as with the growing counter-U.S. superpower reach of China and to a lesser extent Russia, is about nothing less than world domination.

Iran Articles - 16 Feb
(February 16, 2006)


Sharon The War Criminal - FlashBack to 2001 and BBC 'Accused'
(February 15, 2006)
"I think there is no doubt in my mind that he (Sharon) is indictable (as a war criminal) for the kind of knowledge that he either had, or should have had." - Professor Richard Falk, Princeton University

ISRAEL Articles on 14 Feb
(February 14, 2006)


Articles with keyword PALESTINE
(February 14, 2006)
Articles with keyword PALESTINE

Valentine's Day Plot To Discredit, Destroy Hamas
(February 14, 2006)
Remember it for its day of publication as the Valentine's Day Plot to discredit and destroy Hamas. And if this is what makes it to the pages of the New York Times just imagine what the Americans, the Israelis, and their European allies are really doing (and have already done) behind-the-scenes with all the agents and money not to mention all the bugging, killing, and scheming they are so capable of bringing to bear. But it all comes at a historic cost, and so much the Americans and Israelis do comes back as unexpected forms of blowback even worse for them than what they tried to destroy before.

TARGET IRAN - Preparations By All
(February 13, 2006)
WAR these days is far more than military attack. With the Americans there is first of all a tremendous technological side involving high-tech spying, covert ops, assassinations, internal upheavals, economic punishments, and regime change attempts. In addition war preparations for the Americans in this modern-day interconnected world involve massive propaganda campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion; and this in turn includes everything from planting information and stories to twisting journalists and publications to 'report' in ways that suit the needs of the war planners.

TARGET IRAN!
(February 12, 2006)
As MER repeatedly predicted in past years, the international situation is proceeding to one of the most dangerous times ever. The mistakes, the lies, the hypocrisy, and all the killing and 'Shock and Awe' of the past is catching up with all of us now. It's not that Iran can seriously withstand a U.S./Israeli attack. Clearly the American Empire has the firepower to destroy and prevail in the short run. But the political, economic, and psychological forces that may be unleashed by what the combined forces of the Neocons, the Evangelicals, and the Zionists are more and more loudly threatening and planning has serious people in Washington and beyond quivering and fearing about the future big time now. This today from the Sunday Telegraph in London:

Princeton University Speech by Mark Bruzonsky
(February 11, 2006)
This speech was given by the publisher of MiddleEast.Org at a forum at Princeton University on 7 February 2006. The other persons on the forum were Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Professor Cornell West.

The Mother of all Hoaxes - And the Disastrous Aftermath
(February 6, 2006)
Yesterday was the third Colin Powell 'Anniversary' of what we have termed 'The Mother of all Hoaxes'. Three years ago he gave what is now one of modern history's most infamous speeches quite literally to the world. What happened that day was a great historic 'haox' perpetrated ' on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council', i.e., the entire world. Yesterday MER republished a FlashBack article calling for the resignation of both Colin Powell and George Tenet -- we did so two long years ago now when it was relevant, timely, necessary, and difficult to do. Remember though, the actual perpertrators responsible for this horrendous hoax and the disastrous consequences which have followed are the President and the Vice-President of the United States.

Colin Powell and The Mother of All Hoaxes
(February 5, 2006)
Last Friday evening Colin Powell's Chief of Staff in the State Department at the time Powell gave his historic speech at the U.N. Security Council came clean. It was that much-heralded speech of course that prepared the way for the launching of the disastrous Iraqi invasion/occupation. Now, Friday evening on the NOW! program on Public Broadcasting, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was right there helping prepare Powell's every move, damns it all as a 'historic hoax'.

HAMAS Taking Center Stage
(February 4, 2006)
Now it's not from Moscow with love...but it is at times at least from Moscow with more realism and insight... Meanwhile it is the same old game in Washington -- politically correct persons associated with the Israeli/Jewish lobby and kosherized persons of Arab background are the only persons given the floor at the numerous forums popping up to speak about the Hamas few of them actually know much about and all of them proclaim their disdain for.

Hamas Speaks
(February 3, 2006)
Tuesday this week, the day the American President gave his State of the Union speech in the evening, the resistance and liberation movement known as Hamas presented its view in the morning... Back in 1996, when MER had a weekly TV program, by special arrangement MER extensively interviewed Moussa Abu Marzook -- today the #2 official in Hamas -- in the federal detention center near Chinatown in New York about Hamas and the 'peace process'. We encourage news media organizations to get in touch with MER if interested in that lengthy multi-hour interview full of insights into how the Hamas victory was carefully orchestrated over the past decade. MER@MiddleEast.Org. 202 362-5266.

MER at Princeton University Next Tuesday 7 February
(February 2, 2006)
MER Publisher Mark Bruzonsky will be speaking on a Panel at Princeton Universty next Tuesday with the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School and Professor Cornell West on "Intellectuals and the Institution: What's in the Service of the Nation?"

The 9/11 Imbroglio
(February 1, 2006)
According to the academic organizer of these scholars, Professor Jim Fetzer of the University of Minnesota in Duluth, it was because of a meeting in Washington with MER Publisher Mark Bruzonsky last week that a major revision was made in their public statement a few days ago. The new aim, as MER had advocated in a June 2005 editorial, is to call on major media organizations around the world to form a unique international coalition to fully investigate 9/11 and to report what really happened and what is in legitimate controversy and doubt.

Drop Principles Now or Drop Dead Soon!
(February 1, 2006)
Israel's notoriously powerfuly Lobby on Capitol Hill is wasting no time trying to lay down the law of money and power to Hamas. But this time it's probably too little, too late, with insufficient understand of or leverage on the now Hamas-led "Palestinian Authority"... And when the Israelis and Americans try to crush the new PA., as now seems all but inevitable sooner or later, probably after more attempts to foment a Palestinian Civil War which are likely to continue to fail, the political and geostrategic price may prove greater than the Americans will be willing to suffer upon themselves.




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