The Push to Attack Iran Continues

“Real men go to Tehran"

-Anonymous Bush Administration Official

With the Syrian attack relegated to the back burner for the immediate future thanks to Putin’s brilliant humiliation of Barry and Kerry it has become incumbent for the warmongers to once again try to sell an attack on Iran. This has been ongoing for at least a decade now, it ebbs and flows but is always the apple of the eye of neocons, the weapons industry, oil and natural gas cartels and the entourage of millions on their payroll to push for this most lucrative and ultimately disastrous of wars.  While the strikes on Syria despite weeks of political class hysteria over the gassing of civilians at Ghouta was a deal that Barry and the boys just could not close and one that could have potentially lead to WW III at least Assad had no real ability to militarily threaten the Empire. With Iran that is not the case, it would be an unbelievably stupid, ugly and rapidly escalating series of reactions and counter-reactions that only a lunatic would risk. The bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities would lead to attacks on U.S. ships in the Straits of Hormuz that could effectively close down that key transit point and quadruple oil prices virtually overnight - futures traders would love this. There would be the radioactive fallout from the strikes as well, poisoning thousands of Iranian civilians in ways that would make the still mysterious sarin gassings at Ghouta seem humanitarian by comparison. There is nothing like the damage wrought by radiation poisoning and it lasts, does not dissipate and causes deformations upon the as yet unborn. The Muslim world would immediately be galvanized against the west and Russia and China would not likely be bystanders. Only a lunatic would risk something like this.

Enter one Benjamin Netanyahu, current ruler of Israel and a megalomaniac paranoid with an eye on history and visions of Sir Winston Churchill dancing in his head.  Bibi spent last week engaged in a public relations campaign on American soil to pander to the political foot soldiers who could make that attack on Iran a reality. While difficult to follow up last year's United Nations speech with that ridiculous cartoon bomb the Israeli leader denounced newly minted Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as a "wolf in sheep's clothing" before the world body. Never mind that Rouhani has toned down the incendiary Holocaust denial rhetoric that his predecessor, the freakish Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  used to bait Bibi and which the big man never failed to bite on while in the process legitimizing Ahmadinejad with large percentage of Islamics.  The greatest fear of Netanyahu, a man who relies on the threat of war for his own political survival is that there would be a more moderate approach towards Iran under the new leadership. Obama and Rouhani's much hyped phone call scared the hell of Netanyahu and the tantrum toward's Barry's failure to adequately condemn Iran royally pissed off Israeli officials who have along with their boss spent years trying to get the U.S. to do the heavy lifting as well as bear the burden of any of the blowback of the attack.  Obama's waffling has resulted in the Netanyahu regime's attempt to line up support for an attack by creating an alliance of other Gulf countries, a first strike that would inevitably suck the U.S. into the conflict and trigger the global conflagration that was avoided thanks to Putin's intervention last month.

I would imagine that any such alliance would of course include the aforementioned Bandar Bush and the House of Saud who were reportedly apoplectic that they were unable to goad Obama into attacking the Assad regime in Damascus and are also chafing at a moderated stance towards Iran. The propagandizing will continue in the U.S. corporate-state media which never calls Netanyahu on his horseshit, such as this whopper that Iran is building ICBM's to launch nukes at the American Homeland - this is about as credible as Saddam's trans-Atlantic fleet of chemical weapon spewing drones. There was the rare column this time that Bibi had finally overreached, notably columnist Roger Cohen in the New York Times in the piece entitled Bibi's Tired Iranian Lines from which I excerpt:

Never has it been more difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to convince the world that, as he put it in 2006: “It’s 1938. Iran is Germany.” He tried again at the United Nations this week. In a speech that strained for effect, he likened Iran to a 20th-century “radical regime” of “awesome power.” That would be the Third Reich.

Among those who question this approach is David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. Referring to the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, he wrote in the Israeli daily Haaretz that, “Simply implying, for instance, that anyone who sits down with Rouhani is a modern-day Neville Chamberlain or Édouard Daladier won’t do the trick. To the contrary, it will only give offense and alienate.”

When Netanyahu’s staunchest supporters — the leaders of the American Jewish community — question his approach to Iran, the Israeli prime minister needs to stop calling Rouhani “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” his favored epithet, and start worrying about crying wolf.

I suppose that it's at least something but the disproportionate amount of coverage to non-Israeli regime friendly reportage in this country is astounding - I read Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post quite regularly and there is no shortage of reporting and viewpoints that aren't in lockstep with the extreme right-wing Netanyahu government. I am also pretty sure that the New York Times ombudsman will be getting a call from Alan Dershowitz or some other deranged war pimp threatening boycotts and smearing for Cohen's intransigence. This is yet one more example of the shameful enabling of the dumbing down of America that the mass media has been culpable in and it really isn't getting any better considering that as of this afternoon some of the top 'stories' being promoted are Tiger at Zoo Bites Woman's Arm, 9 Year Old Boy Sneaks onto Flight to Vegas and 2,000 Lashes For Nude Dancing. The last one is of interest only because it took place in Saudi Arabia, our 'partners in peace' and the paragon for a tolerant society as well as the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. weapons deals. With friends like these who needs enemies?

And of course the genesis of the entire U.S.-Iran problem as it actually exists is that 1953 coup d'etat that the CIA and the Brits engineered to overthrow democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh giving way to decades of tyranny by the U.S. backed despot the Shah of Iran and his SAVAK goon squads. Despite the CIA itself's recent copping to this and the subsequent documentation released it is always through the lens of the 1978-1980 Iranian hostage crisis that is used to portray Iran as an enemy of American freedom (not that we actually have any), mom and apple pie. The Ayatollah Khomeini is a scary looking guy, just like Ahmadinejad and it is always easier to boil down historical and geopolitical issues of enormous complexity into easily digested gruel to feed to the sheeple when you have that ready made devil that can be trotted out.  

The business of America after all is war, we are addicted to it but like all doomed junkies the only endgame is sorrow and self-destruction.