Iran: The Unthinkable War

Iran: The Unthinkable War

Part One: Pretending You Didn’t Know

by Juan Santos


“Every nuclear weapon is a portable Auschwitz.” Daniel Ellsberg


The Democrats are silent as the Bush regime prepares for war against Iran – silent in the face of a potential nuclear mass murder – even a global war: silent in the face of an attack that could cause an utter meltdown of the global economy, a 1930s style Depression that would send millions, perhaps billions of people into starvation-level poverty, as the prices of oil and gasoline triple.

The potentials for horror for tens of millions of people in the region are almost unspeakable.

Such a war would quickly spread to Iraq – where Halliburton’s “Green Zone” in Baghdad would be turned to instant rubble by such missiles as were left for an Iranian counterstrike, giving US soldiers in the Zone their own taste of Lebanon, even as Shia Muslims turn a face of cold steel – or wild, inconsolable grief and rage – toward the death of every US and British soldier, mercenary, spy, journalist, and profiteer in Iraq.

According to Agency France-Presse, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said, “The Americans know better than anyone that their troops in the region and in Iraq are vulnerable. I would advise them not to commit such a strategic error. I would advise them to first get out of their quagmire in Iraq before getting into an even bigger one.”

Iraqi Shi’ite leader Moqtada al Sadr has announced that his Mahdi army would retaliate for a US attack on Iran.

A major defeat in Iraq could lead immediately to a military draft, radicalizing, at last, the anti-war movement in the US.
That war would spread throughout the region is all but certain. Whether it could be contained to the region is entirely uncertain.

Militant forces next door in Pakistan could rise up, forcing loose that government’s shaky hold on power, and putting the capacity for a nuclear counterstrike on US targets directly in the hands of the “terrorists” Washington claims to fear and oppose.

40% of the oil on the world market would dry up overnight as Iran shut down the Straights of Hormuz in retaliation. Were a counterstrike aimed at Saudi and other regional oil fields, a tripling of world oil prices might well seem a modest projection.

Seymour Hersch has noted, "Should war break out in the Middle East again… or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability." Ariel Sharon put the matter more directly. "Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches," he said.

In the West, Daniel Ellsberg has suggested a connection between an attack on Iran and rapid developments toward martial law in the US. Gerard Baker put it this way in a pro-war London Times essay called “Prepare yourself for the unthinkable: war against Iran may be a necessity”:

… the kind of society we live in and cherish in the West, a long way from Tehran or Damascus, will change beyond recognition. We balk now at intrusive government measures to tap our phones... Imagine how much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our governments fear we are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or truckload away from another Hiroshima.

By “another Hiroshima,” he means a Hiroshima in the West, of course, - that’s what’s “unthinkable” - not the Hiroshimas and mini-Hiroshimas the US, and in all likelihood, Israel, will rain on the people of Iran.

An attack on Iran would be the farthest thing from “clean” or “surgical.” The reality is that it would bring horrible death to tens, even hundreds of thousands of people who live near US targets.

While the official line is to minimize the death dealing potentials of nuclear “bunker busters” or Earth Penetrating Weapons (EPWs)of the kind sure to come into play against Iran’s deeply buried nuclear energy facilities, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, begs to differ.

An IPPNW study concludes that:

“…even a very low-yield nuclear EPW exploded in or near an urban environment… will inevitably disperse radioactive dirt and debris over several square kilometers and could result in fatal doses of radiation to tens of thousands of victims.”

These tens of thousands “would die excruciating deaths over several days to a week or more.”

Daniel Ellsberg told a gathering of World Can't Wait activists:

“Every nuclear weapon is a portable Auschwitz. The first one that is used may kill only hundreds, depending on where they are used, which would be extremely ominous. People would say, “Ah, they can be used easily.” The use of nuclear weapons even in a deserted field against an underground site by this country would bring us into a new era of history—the consequences of which would so dwarf the Holocaust there would be simply no comparison. The nuclear wars in our future—that would be started by an act now being planned by this country—are Hitler-like to the hundredth degree.”

Even if the messianic Bush regime gets cold feet – an unlikely proposition – the Jerusalem Post assures us that Israel, with its 200 nuclear weapons, may well “go it alone” against Iran.

In his 1997 book Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies, Israel Shahak wrote, "Israel is preparing for a war, nuclear if need be, for the sake of averting domestic change not to its liking, if it occurs in some or any Middle Eastern states.... Israel clearly prepares itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle East..., without hesitating to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."

They would no doubt have the backing of Ariel Sharon sycophant Hillary Clinton and the House Democrats who all but unanimously voted for a resolution supporting Israel’s most recent war crimes in the devastation of Lebanon. Only 8 Democrats could be found to oppose it.

With respect to Iran, one House member told Seymour Hersch, “There’s no pressure from Congress” to avoid military action.

“The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” The coming war is an imperative of Empire, not just Republican extremism or the compulsion of Christian fascists courting Armageddon.

In fact, an attack on Iran is straight out of the Democrat’s playbook.
Stephen Zunes, Middle East Editor for Foreign Policy in Focus, remarked on the Democratic Party’s 2004 platform:

“One possible target for American forces under a Kerry administration is Iran. The platform implies an American right to such military intervention by stating that “a nuclear-armed Iran is an unacceptable risk to us and our allies.” No concern is expressed, however, about the already-existing nuclear arsenals of Iran’s neighbor Pakistan or of nearby Israel. Iran has called for a nuclear-free zone in the region, which the Democrats appear to reject, apparently because it would require America’s regional allies to get rid of their nuclear arsenals as well. The Democrats, like the Republicans, believe that instead of pushing for multilateral and verifiable arms control treaties, the United States can effectively impose a kind of nuclear apartheid, unilaterally determining which countries can have nuclear weapons and which countries cannot.”

Get that: Iran has called for a nuclear free Middle East and the Democrats and Republicans alike have rejected that call.

From Lieberman to Obama to Clinton to Kerry to Harman to Bayh to Dean, the story is the same. Robert Dreyfuss writes that “…just as the Democrats meekly got in line to support the invasion of Iraq, many (perhaps most) elected Democrats are demanding a confrontation with Iran, too. Some, such as Hillary Clinton, are even trying to out-Bush the president in demanding a showdown with Iran.”

The Democrat’s position paper on “defense,” “Real Security: Protecting America and Restoring Our Leadership in the World”, says Democrats will “roll back the nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea.” The document, gangster style, literally states that Democrats in power would make “an offer Iran cannot refuse” adding, “Iran should understand the existential threat of military response…”

“Real Security” calls for massively beefing up spending both on the military and on so-called “Homeland Security,” while offering an ever-so-slightly altered version of Bush’s policy of “staying the course” in the occupation of Iraq.

The Democrats are the furthest thing from a “peace” party.

Even liberal Democrat stalwarts like Barbara Boxer have the mad gleam of war in their eyes. Boxer, faced with a claim by Iran that it has no interest in developing nuclear weapons, recently raged on The Ed Schultz Show that Iran should prove the point by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran of course, is a signatory to that treaty, and Boxer’s comments were the kind of rabid lie – let’s not be polite and call it “misinformation” – that would have left liberals in a rage if it came from the mouth of a Bush or Cheney.

The Democrats refuse even to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq – although a recent poll by Zogby International showed that 72% of U.S. troops serving in Iraq believe that the United States should end its occupation of Iraq by the end of this year, and even though 61% of Iraqis support Iraqi resistance attacks on US troops. Oddly, the Christian Science Monitor says that the same percentage - 61% of people in the US - oppose the war in Iraq. 87% of Iraqis want the US out of their country.

A new poll from Reuters shows that only 9% of people in the US favor air strikes on selected military targets in Iran.

But no one in the Democratic Party cares what we say, as long as we don’t make real trouble for them – trouble in the streets - any more than they cared about the millions who marched in peaceful demonstrations across the globe in a bid to stop the invasion of Iraq before it started. They voted for it anyway, whatever excuses they offer now.

In a word, a vote for the Democrats is a vote for war – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon or, now, Iran. It is an endorsement of US war crimes, of the policy of “pre-emptive war.” It is a vote in favor of a nuclear Middle East and of US and Israeli nuclear first strikes.

It’s also a matter of pretending you didn’t know.

The truth is that there is no such thing as the lesser of two evils. There is only capitulation to, cooperation with and endorsement of evil, or resistance to it. A slow poison is no better than a fast one, once you’re dead. And the more you swallow, of course, the more you will swallow. Only those who resist merit support.

With respect to war, a vote for the Democrats has one impact only; it changes nothing at all but the voter – turning her into the moral equivalent of a “Good German,” in her relationship to the oppressed peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds, even if she means only to oppose the Christian Fascists and Armageddon mongers on the hard Republican Right.

US strategists are not simple madmen – they are imperialists. There is a method and a strategy to the madness, however insane an attack on Iran might appear, and however immense the potential “blowback” to the Empire.

As Larry Everest notes, the Bush regime “is not unaware of these various concerns. But its view is that delay and equivocation will only make matters worse and give openings to the U.S.’s regional and global rivals, and that it could lose the whole game if it doesn’t maintain the momentum in the so-called ‘war on terror,’ and aggressively move forward.”

“This spring, UN Ambassador John Bolton declared (in clear reference to military attacks possibly including nuclear weapons), ‘The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve… We must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses.’”

End of Part 1:

Next: Part Two: Iraq, Iran, and “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

Iran: The Unthinkable War: Iraq, Iran, and “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

Iran: The Unthinkable War

Part Two: Iraq, Iran, and “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

by Juan Santos

Democrats and Republicans alike claim that Iran is a “terrorist state,” one that can’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.

But there is no evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, any more than there was any proof that Iraq was developing one.

Military sources told journalist Seymour Hersch that the U.S. has no proof at all that Iran is developing nuclear arms. Hersch has said that “The intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and even Israel, have been unable to come up with any specific evidence of what’s known as a parallel or secret weapons program inside Iran.”

One former senior intelligence official told Hersch flatly, “People in the Pentagon were asking, ‘What’s the evidence? We’ve got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys’ (Iran) ‘have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We’re coming up with jack shit.’”

The International Atomic Energy Agency recently blasted a US Congressional report on Iranian weapons as "outrageous and dishonest." It also called the report’s argument that Iran’s nuclear energy program is geared toward developing nuclear weapons "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated."

The IAEA pointed to five significant errors in the Congressional committee's claim that Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence had demonstrated, including a false claim that Iran has enriched weapons grade uranium.

According to the London Guardian, the IAEA “said the report was ‘incorrect’ in its assessment that Iran had made weapons-grade uranium at a site inspected by the agency. Instead, the letter said, the facility had produced only small amounts of uranium, which were below the level necessary for weapons.”

In 2004, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said plainly, “I have seen no nuclear weapons program in Iran. What I have seen is that Iran is trying to gain access to nuclear enrichment technology…” Nothing has changed in the IAEA assessment.

This dispute is an instant replay of the clashes between the IAEA and the US over the question of whether or not Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was trying to develop nuclear arms. The claim that Iraq had or was developing nuclear weapons was the primary excuse for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The US, of course, was lying. There were no such weapons anywhere to be found.

US Congress member Ron Paul cautions that, “Iran has never in modern times invaded her neighbors, yet we worry obsessively that she may develop a nuclear weapon someday.”

Nonetheless, the Project for a New American Century claims that Iran is “rushing to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention...”

While the PNAC claim about Iranian intentions has no factual basis, it is also an open admission that, if Iran were developing a nuclear weapons capability, it would be for Iran’s own self defense in the face of a pattern of US invasions in the region, including invasions and occupations of Iraq on its western flank and Afghanistan on its eastern flank.

Iran has an obvious and legitimate interest in deterring such “intervention.”

The insanity of the Cold War, with its policies of deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction, almost starts looking like the good old days.

To get a picture of the hypocritical extremity, even the absurdity of the US position on Iran, imagine if you will an equivalent scenario: A Chinese invasion and military occupation of Mexico to the south of the US, and of Canada to its north.

China then, bristling with military might on the US borders, begins, in this imagined scenario, to issue threats against the US, demanding it rid itself immediately of nuclear weapons, calling the US a threat to regional stability in the Americas.

Polls show, then, that a majority of Chinese agree: if the US, a known international war criminal and the only power to launch a nuclear attack against another nation – ever – won’t unilaterally surrender its nukes and suspend operations of its nuclear power plants, then US nuclear facilities, all of them, should be taken out in a Chinese nuclear first strike.

The difference in the two stories should be obvious: there is an absolutely solid historical and factual basis for the Chinese charges against the US in this scenario: there is no factual basis whatsoever for US claims against Iran.

Iran, like Iraq before it, has no nuclear weapons, and there is zero proof that they are developing them. In Iran, just like in Iraq, there are only US “suspicions” - the kind based in lies; lies that have already led to one devastating war. Lies that serve today as the rationale for launching another.

End of Part Two:

Next: Part Three: Why They “Hate Us”: Bringing “Regime Change” and “Democracy” to Iran

Iran: The Unthinkable War: Why They “Hate Us”

Part Three: Why They “Hate Us”: Bringing “Regime Change” and “Democracy” to Iran

by Juan Santos

Larry Everest suggests that “…it would be willful disbelief to ignore the growing danger of a U.S. attack on Iran. One reason: its objectives are not limited to disarming Iran—its goal is regime change, as in Iraq.”

“[Seymour]Hersh reports that one former defense official told him that “military planning was premised on a belief that ‘a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.’” A Pentagon adviser told Hersh, “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.” He said that the U.S. was planning to “strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that ‘ninety-nine percent of them have nothing to do with proliferation.’”

The Bush regime understands clearly that simply obliterating Iran’s nuclear energy infrastructure won’t solve the Empire’s strategic dilemma in Iran, any more than invading Iraq solved the imperial dilemma there. So, Bush claims he wants to bring “democracy” and regime change to the Iranian people, to “liberate” them from a repressive fundamentalist state.

But Iran has direct experience with US sponsored “regime change,” and its people are utterly unlikely to rise up against the nation’s leadership in support of a US attack.

In the early 1950s the US and Britain overthrew Iran’s elected, democratic government: its elected leaders had determined to nationalize Iran’s oil.
Afterward, under the totalitarian reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi, the US created one of the most brutal absolute dictatorships and torture regimes of the 20th century.

Its instrument was the secret police agency SAVAK, created and supplied by the CIA, and whose 15,000 agents were trained by Israel’s Mossad and by the British.
SAVAK censored the media and gathered intelligence, spying on every aspect of Iranian political life, while annihilating political dissidents by assassination and execution. Amnesty International estimated that there were as many as 100,000 political prisoners in Iran by 1976.

The methods of torture used in SAVAK’s special prisons and torture chambers included inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, brutally pulling teeth and nails, beatings, anal rape, tying weights to the genitals, electric shock, whipping, and many others.

Amnesty reported that during the Shah’s reign Iran had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran."

As one critic noted “Poverty, despair, and torture defined the lives of Iran’s millions of citizens.” The US backed and propped up the Shah to the bitter end, when mass uprisings in the late 70s drove the ruler from power.

Eight U.S. administrations supported the Shah with intelligence, military and economic aid. In return, the US received an apparently endless flow of cheap oil, a strategic perch on the border of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, and a terrorized, subdued and “politically stable” populace in Iran itself.

Once the Shah was gone, the US unleashed its Iraqi puppet Saddam Hussein to launch a proxy war against Iran in a desperate bid to destabilize and remove the new Iranian regime. It was one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th century.

George W. Bush now claims the Iranians are a backward people who hate the US for its “freedoms.”

Armed with the facts, one might conclude otherwise; that Iran has already experienced a US sponsored “regime change” and that there are altogether different reasons why any Iranian in her or his right mind would hate and oppose the US Empire.

It comes as no surprise that, having had their own democracy overthrown by the US, Iranians would offer a flat “No” to US claims that it’s exporting “democracy” and “freedom” rather than torture, degradation, poverty and regional dominion.

If many Iranians want nothing to do with the West at all, that’s no wonder, either.

End of Part Three:

Next: Part 4: What Makes for a Real “Terrorist State”?

Iran: The Unthinkable War: What Makes for a Real “Terrorist State”?

Iran: The Unthinkable War

Part Four: What Makes for a Real “Terrorist State”?

by Juan Santos

It’s difficult to analyze claims that Iran is a “rogue state” or a “state sponsor of terror.” So much depends on definitions, and the definitions themselves depend on actual – not theoretical - comparisons with the practices of other states. Another difficulty is the depth of xenophobic, knee jerk conditioning of people in the West with respect to Iran.

It’s been almost 30 years since the so-called Iran hostage crisis, when, at the crescendo of the overthrow of the US sponsored torture state of Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iranian students seized the US embassy in Teheran, holding captive the US personnel whose job it had been to support the dictator’s regime, and to assure its compliance with US mandates.

The seizure of the embassy was precipitated by a report from Radio Turkey that yet another US sponsored coup was on the verge of overthrowing Iran’s new leadership.

It’s been almost 30 years since radio stations in the US began playing the “novelty song” Bomb Iran – to the tune of an old Beach Boys hit, Barbara Ann.
Rambo, Reagan and “Bomb Iran” were only the beginning.

The psycho-cultural stage for the entire development of overt neo-fascism in the US was established by the “humiliations” of Viet Nam and the Iran “hostage crisis.”

It is all but impossible to separate what the US has become from its relationship to Iran as its international opposite and “Other,” just as it is all but impossible to separate white cultural psychology in the US from its Black and Native American opposite and “Other.” Iran is, by every standard of the white empire, the modern image of the anti-colonial “savage.”

This is the image of the international “savage” that neo-cowboys like Ronald Reagan and Rambo set out to re-conquer in the popular white imagination of the early 1980s, even as the rulers set about re-conquering a rebellious Black population through the “War on Drugs” in the wake of the Black Power Movement, and American Indians in the wake of Wounded Knee.

Thirty years later, these two groups, along with Chicanos, share the distinction of suffering the highest incarceration rates of any peoples on Earth.

All stigmas and stereotypes are used to tell a story that justifies violence against a target. If Blacks are “criminals” and Indians are “drunken” then Iranians are “terrorists” who present a clear and present danger to white capitalist Western “civilization.” And it is this simple image of “danger” that will ultimately be used to justify a nuclear attack on Iran.

If you clutch your metaphorical purse when the word “terrorist” comes walking down the sidewalk toward you, or gets on the elevator with you, then the past thirty years of deliberate conditioning has impacted you, and it’s going to be hard to speak with you objectively about Iranian “terror.” It may prove impossible.

But there’s no risk quite like the risk of being declared an unlawful enemy combatant, so with that proviso, let’s move forward.

First, for the sake of having a sense of proportion, let’s talk about what really rates as international crimes that might, properly, cause a nation to be deemed a rogue state, or a terrorist state.

In our list let’s include some of the universally acknowledged crimes a state might sponsor: genocide, the use of death squads, the widespread use of torture, the unprovoked or needless use of nuclear weapons, the crime of Apartheid, spreading chemical and biological weapons to those who use them to kill the innocent, the launching of unprovoked wars of aggression, and, of course, the deliberate starvation of mass numbers of civilians and the bombing of civilians. Since it’s germane, let’s include the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a crime.

These are things I think any reasoning human would agree are among the vilest of crimes a state is capable of, crimes against humanity.

In terms of the commission of these kinds of national and international crimes, the current regime in Iran hardly rates a nod. Jointly if not singly, however, other players on the Middle East stage are guilty of every crime listed. Every one of them. The players in question are the US and Israel.

US sponsored death squads committed genocide against the Mayan Indians in Guatemala, slaughtering 250,000 people in the 1980s.

The US led sanctions in Iraq in the 90s killed a million innocent civilians – half of them children. Edward S. Herman has called it “possibly the greatest genocide of the post-World War II era (with only the Congo and Rwanda serious rivals).”

The US has trained torturers and sponsored torture around the globe – from Iran, to South Africa to El Salvador and Argentina. Torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is routine.

The US and Israel backed the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and Israel is still an Apartheid state today, as the US once was under Jim Crow. The US has the world’s highest incarceration rate – and most of its imprisoned people are peoples of color.

The US has spread biological and chemical weapons to states like Iraq, and passed the matter off when Saddam Hussein used them against the Kurdish minority of Iraq, and others.

The US bombed Yugoslavian civilians for 78 straight days and backed Israel in its recent war crimes against Lebanon, which targeted civilian populations, taking a special toll among children.

The US has carried out dozens of unprovoked invasions, most recently including Iraq, Panama, Grenada, and Haiti, but also including Mexico, the Phillipines, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, just to name a bare few. Israel has invaded Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and every inch of land it sits on. The US, another white colonial settler state, also invaded and occupied every square inch it sits on.

The US is the only nation in history to have used nuclear weapons – and it used them against civilians. Israel’s nukes were acquired in gross violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

That’s what I mean by a sense of proportion. Nothing that Iran has done remotely compares to these even one of these crimes.

It practices nothing close to Apartheid, it’s launched no wars of aggression - it’s invaded no one at all, it’s starved no one, bombed no cities, sponsored no genocide, trained no torturers or death squads, it’s seized no one’s land, exported no chemical weapons, has never used a nuclear weapon, has none, and is in compliance with the Non-Proliferation treaty.

But those who have committed just these crimes against humanity label Iran a rogue state and a terrorist state.

Sadly, the main thing Iran is guilty of is the same thing it was guilty of in 1953: having too much oil, and intending to defend it.
The U.S. government has listed Iran as a sponsor of terrorism since 1984. Typical of some of the main charges have been the following, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

• In late 1979, Iranian students thought to be backed by the government occupied the US Embassy in Tehran. They held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days.

This was an act of war and popular revolution, not terrorism. Most, if not all of the embassy workers were actively complicit in crimes of the Shah against the Iranian people. They were, in any case, hardly innocent bystanders.

• Observers say Iran had prior knowledge of Hezbollah attacks, such as the 1988 kidnapping and murder of Colonel William Higgins, a U.S. Marine involved in a U.N. observer mission in Lebanon, and the 1992 and 1994 bombings of Jewish cultural institutions in Argentina.

Attacks against military targets are, by definition not terrorist attacks, they are military attacks. The alleged Iranian links to the Argentinian bombing have never been proven.

• Iran still has a price on the head of the Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie for what Iranian leaders call blasphemous writings about Islam in his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses.

Very well, then, but is every state that targets a writer a state terrorist regime? If so, the Bush administration’s going to have a lot of wars on its hands. Just ask the worldwide association of writers, International PEN. Bush will need to invade Turkey, China, Niger, and a dozen others. He’ll also need to send in a commando unit to free Mumia Abu Jamal, an African American writer on death row in Pennsylvania.

• U.S. officials say Iran supported the group behind the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military residence in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen.

Iran has been accused of being behind the attack on US soldiers in Saudi Arabia – although the matter has never been proven. But, again, US soldiers are by definition a military target, not “innocents.”

Innocents don’t carry weapons or act as occupation forces in foreign countries. For the same reason, and by definition, there can be no such thing as a “terrorist” attack against the US occupation forces in Iraq, for example.

Is Iran a criminal regime? Perhaps. Ask the Iranian people, not George Bush.

Should theocracies be embraced? No. But those of us in the West have our own emergent theocracy to combat: the one in Washington DC. If the people of Iran want to do battle with their theocracy, they will.

Can anything Iran has done warrant reducing the nation to rubble, or attacking the Iranian people with nuclear weapons? No.

Does Iran have nuclear weapons? No.

Is it developing them? No. Not according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Is Iran a terrorist state? Ask the Mayan people of Guatemala, the survivors of the death squads of El Salvador, the survivors of Hiroshima or the free fire zones of Viet Nam for their answers.

Compare anything Iran has done to the recent Israeli / US bombing of Beirut.
There is, of course, a somewhat longer list of claims against Iran, the bulk of which relate to Iranian support for anti-Israeli resistance groups. These are dealt with somewhat even-handedly in a piece by Gary Sick called Iran: Confronting Terrorism, written for The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and published in The Washington Quarterly.

None of the claims has much more substance than those dealt with here, but for those inclined toward an academic source that treats the matter with the requisite dispassion, it’s worth reading.

End of Part Four:

Next: Part Five: The Apocalypse Factor

Iran: The Unthinkable War : The Apocalypse Factor

Iran: The Unthinkable War

Part Five: The Apocalypse Factor

by Juan Santos

"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and rid the world of evil."
- George W. Bush, quoted by Bob Woodward in Bush at War


The Apocalypse, The Revelation, The Uncovering, The Tribulation, The Affliction: these and similar terms comprise a fundamental underlying cultural script that weds Islam, Christianity and Judaism in a singular tale that explains history, human purpose and the development of current events for believers.

The veil of belief in Armaggedon hangs quietly behind developments in the region: the Jewish prophecy of the War of Gog and Magog and of the Third Temple; the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelations from the New Testament; and Islam’s Return of the Mahdi.

Newspapers across the globe carry the names of two leaders who have embraced the unfolding of Christian and Islamic prophecies, the doom and the “victory” they foretell: George Bush of the US and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. These men are believers. This is their lens, how they make sense of the world and of their actions on the world stage.

Biblical fundamentalist and “End Times” preacher Jack Van Impe writes that he “was contacted… by the Office of Public Liaison for the White House and by the National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to make an outline” for Bush on matters pertaining to the End Times. “And I’ve spent hours preparing it… it’s in his hands.”

Bush has remarked, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did..." He believes that he was “called” to be President.

Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, authors of The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, say that Bush reads the Bible every morning and that it affects his decisions and the tone of his public comments.
Soon after Sept. 11, Bush woke up and read Proverbs 21:15: "When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers."

"For several weeks after the attacks, he referred to the terrorists and their sponsors as 'evildoers,' with that passage firmly fixed in his mind," the Schweizers report.
Max Blumenthal recently wrote in The Nation, “Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of off-the-record meetings about its policies in the Middle East with leaders of Christians United for Israel,” a new lobbying group headed by Texas televangelist John Hagee, author of Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World.

Hagee’s book urges the US to launch a first strike against Iran in order to bring about the onset of Armageddon.

According to Blumenthal, Haggee has said that the “only way to defeat the Iranian evildoers… is a full-scale military assault” and that a "coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty," a biblical certainty.

High powered Republican Congress member Dick Armey recently admitted to the BBC that both Bush and he are believers in the End Times, but denied that they were trying to push the world toward an apocalyptic conflagration.

As a presidential candidate in 2000, Bush submitted to a grilling by Tim LaHaye, co-author of the apocalyptic book series Left Behind, co-founder of the Moral Majority, and a prime mover of the Christian Right. The Left Behind series has sold over 60 million copies; as Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet have pointed out, “one in eight Americans” is “reading all these strange books about the end of the world.”


According to Richard Dreyfus in Rolling Stone, LaHaye believes Saddam Hussein “is ‘a servant of Satan,’ possessed by a demon, and that he could be ‘the forerunner of the Antichrist.’”

Bush passed muster with LaHaye, however, - no matter that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would later call Bush “The Devil” – and his approval by LaHaye was an utterly crucial step in consolidating the Christian Fascist movement behind his candidacy.

The Biblical Apocalypse is the Christian Fascist’s version of Hitler’s evocation of the ancient Nordic and Germanic mythos under the Third Reich, and it serves the same purpose.

It explains the chaos of the current world scene, creates an enemy that can be scapegoated for the chaos, and promises retribution to that enemy and the re-establishment of a strictly repressive “right way” of living. It projects and demands a world of sacrifice and war to achieve a new “normalcy.”

The Christian website Apocalypse Soon promises that there is a “purpose” and a “final destination awaiting all of us,” that can explain who we are, where we are going, where we are heading and what it’s all about.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all very explicit in telling us about the “final destination,” the Final Solution each envisions for the common civilization in which we are immersed.

In the Jewish story “the whole world is to be destroyed, but Israel will be delivered out of it.” In the Islamic story “the believers of Allah will be hidden with the prophet Mohammad, followed by a "wind of destruction" which will kill all the remaining people.” In the Christian version “the church will be raptured (snatched away) and taken to be with the Lord. God's judgment will be poured out on the wicked of the earth” (see Eschatology Comparison).

In each, god saves the “righteous,” grants them victory in this or that version of the battle of Armageddon, and commits genocide against their enemies. That’s the plan “god” has imparted to George Bush, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and to Jewish fundamentalists as well.

Iran’s Ahmadinejad is no less – and no more – a believer than Bush. He believes The Hour, as Muslims call the End Times, is very near. Ahmadinejad, reportedly told his cabinet that he expects the Mahdi – very roughly the Shi’ite equivalent of the Messiah - to arrive within two years, ushering in Armageddon and The Hour. Ahmadinejad prayed openly for the arrival of the Mahdi during his recent speech to the UN General Assembly.

The most dangerous of scripts is being played out – a coming war led by two opposing apocalyptic fundamentalists, each convinced that god and all the logic of a sick civilization is behind him, each believing god will initiate a global genocide on his behalf, and each believing that The Hour is near.

It is simple and obvious which of these two men is more dangerous.

Only one of them has a nuclear arsenal that can destroy all life on Earth.

Stopping the War

There is no justification for war against Iran. The coming war has nothing to do with Iran as a “state sponsor of terrorism” or an Islamic state with nuclear weapons, but everything to do with US strategic plans to seize control of the vast energy resources of the region and military control of Central Asia and the Middle East.

The US intends to stay on top of the world and prevent the rise of a rival bloc that might threaten its global dominance and it means to do so at any price – including nuclear war and global economic depression.

Nothing is unthinkable in the pursuit of a consolidated world empire, not for Republicans, and not for Democrats. The sharpest expressions of this imperial strategy are to be found in the documents of the Republican’s Project for a New American Century and in Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard.

But the risks for the Empire are obviously huge. According to Martin Walker of UPI, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has cold feet over the regime’s plan for striking Iran, while Vice President Dick Cheney is pushing all the harder for war. Walker writes, “This heralds the first important policy breech between the triumvirate of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, sometimes known in Washington as "the iron triangle," in almost six years of the Bush administration.”

There’s only one way to stop this war, and that’s to increase the global political price the Empire will pay if it carries through, and to deepen the emerging divisions within the Empire over its plans.

It’s up to us, and no one else.

End of Part Five.

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Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.