The Monterey Institute for International Studies already showed nearly
two years ago in a detailed analysis that the likely consequences of a
strike on Iran by the US, Israel, or both, would be a regional
conflagaration that could quickly turn nuclear, and spiral out of
control. US and Israeli planners are no doubt aware of what could happen.
Such a catastrophe would have irreversible ramifications for the
global political economy. Energy security would be in tatters,
precipitating the activation of long-standing contingency plans to
invade and occupy all the major resource-rich areas of the Middle East
and elsewhere (see my book published by Clairview, Behind the War on
Terror for references and discussion).
Such action could itself trigger responses from other major powers
with fundamental interests in maintaining their own access to regional
energy supplies, such as Russia and particularly China, which has huge
interests in Iran. Simultaneously, the dollar-economy would be
seriously undermined, most likely facing imminent collapse in the
context of such crises.
.
Wednesday, 26 July 2006, 12:11 pm
Opinion: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
UK Government Sources Confirm War With Iran Is On
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/print.html?path=HL0607/S00393.htm
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
July 23, 2006
www.opednews.com
In the last few days, I learned from a credible and informed source that
a former senior Labour government Minister, who continues to be
well-connected to British military and security officials, confirms that
Britain and the United States
“… will go to war with Iran before the end of the year.”
As we now know from similar reporting prior to the invasion of Iraq,
it’s quite possible that the war planning may indeed change repeatedly,
and the war may again be postponed. In any case, it’s worth noting that
the information from a former Labour Minister corroborates expert
analyses suggesting that Israel, with US and British support, is
deliberately escalating the cycle of retaliation to legitimize the
imminent targeting of Iran before year’s end.
Let us remind ourselves, for instance, of US Vice President Cheney’s
assertions recorded on MSNBC over a year ago. He described Iran as being
“right at the top of the list” of “rogue states”.
He continued: “One of the concerns people have is that Israel might do
it without being asked… Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy
that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might
well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about
cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”
But the emphasis on Israel’s pre-eminent role in a prospective assault
on Iran is not accurate. Israel would rather play the role of a regional
proxy force in a US-led campaign. “Despite the deteriorating security
situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its
basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East…” reportsSeymour Hersh.
He quotes a former high-level US intelligence official as follows:
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The
Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re
going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys,
wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah-we’ve got four
years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
Are these just the fanatical pipedreams of the neoconservative faction
currently occupying (literally) the White House?
Unfortunately, no. The Iraq War was one such fanatical pipedream in the
late 1990s, one that Bush administration officials were eagerly
ruminating over when they were actively and directly involved in the
Project for a New American Century. But that particular pipedream is now
a terrible, gruelling reality for the Iraqi people. Despite the glaring
failures of US efforts in that country, there appears to be a serious
inability to recognize the futility of attempting the same in Iran.
The Monterey Institute for International Studies already showed nearly
two years ago in a detailed analysis that the likely consequences of a
strike on Iran by the US, Israel, or both, would be a regional
conflagaration that could quickly turn nuclear, and spiral out of
control. US and Israeli planners are no doubt aware of what could
happen. Such a catastrophe would have irreversible ramifications for the
global political economy. Energy security would be in tatters,
precipitating the activation of long-standing contingency plans to
invade and occupy all the major resource-rich areas of the Middle East
and elsewhere (see my book published by Clairview, Behind the War on
Terror for references and discussion). Such action could itself trigger
responses from other major powers with fundamental interests in
maintaining their own access to regional energy supplies, such as Russia
and particularly China, which has huge interests in Iran.
Simultaneously, the dollar-economy would be seriously undermined, most
likely facing imminent collapse in the context of such crises.
Which raises pertinent questions about why Britain, the US and Israel
are contemplating such a scenario as a viable way of securing their
interests.
A glimpse of an answer lies in the fact that the post-9/11 military
geostrategy of the “War on Terror” does not spring from aposition of
power, but rather from entirely the opposite. The global system has been
crumbling under the weight of its own unsustainability for many years
now, and we are fast approaching the convergence of multiple crises that
are already interacting fatally as I write. The peak of world oil
production, of which the Bush administration is well aware, either has
already just happened, or is very close to happening. It is a pivotal
event that signals the end of the Oil Age, for all intents and purposes,
with escalating demand placing increasing pressure on dwindling supplies.
Half the world’s oil reserves are, more or less, depleted, which means
that it will be technologically, geophysically, increasingly difficult
to extract conventional oil. I had a chat last week with some scientists
from the Omega Institute in Brighton, directed by my colleague and
friend Graham Ennis, who told me eloquently and powerfully what I
already knew, that while a number of climate “tipping-points” may or may
not have yet been passed, we have about 10-15 years before the
“tipping-point” is breached certainly and irreversibly.
Breaching that point means plunging head-first into full-scale “climate
catastrophe”. Amidst this looming Armageddon of Nature, the
dollar-denominated economy itself has been teetering on the edge of
spiralling collapse for the last seven years or more. This is not idle
speculation. A financial analyst as senior as Paul Volcker, Alan
Greenspan’s immediate predecessor as chairman of the Federal Reserve,
recently confessed “that he thought there was a 75% chance of a currency
crisis in the United States within five years.”
There appears to have been a cold calculation made at senior levels
within the Anglo-American policymaking establishment: that the system is
dying, but the last remaining viable means of sustaining it remains a
fundamentally military solution designed to reconfigure and rehabilitate
the system to continue to meet the requirements of the interlocking
circuits of military-corporate power and profit.
The highly respected US whistleblower, former RAND strategic analyst
Daniel Ellsberg, who was Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of
Defense during the Vietnam conflict and became famous after leaking the
Pentagon Papers, has already warned of his fears that in the event of
“another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack
on Iran, I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within
days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive
detentions in this country, detention camps for middle-easterners and
their quote ‘sympathizers’, critics of the President’s policy and
essentially the wiping-out of the Bill of Rights.”
So is that what all the “emergency preparedness” legislation, here in
the UK as well as in the USA and in Europea, is all about? The US plans
are bad enough, as Ellsberg notes, but the plans UK scene is hardly
better, prompting The Guardian to describe the Civil Contingencies Bill
(passed as an Act in 2004) as “the greatest threat to civil liberty that
any parliament is ever likely to consider.”
As global crises converge over the next few years, we the people are
faced with an unprecedented opportunity to use the growing awareness of
the inherent inhumanity and comprehensive destructiveness of the global
imperial system to establish new, viable, sustainable and humane ways of
living.
*************
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An
Independent Inquiry (London: Duckworth, 2006).
http://www.independentinquiry.co.uk
He teaches courses in International Relations at the School of Social
Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, where he
is doing his PhD studying imperialism and genocide. Since 9/11, he has
authored three other books revealing the realpolitik behind the rhetoric
of the “War on Terror”, The War on Freedom, Behind the War on Terror and
The War on Truth. In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in
US Congress about his research on international terrorism
