The War on Iran is Already Underway - by Leonid Slavin

If the conflict with Iran takes the shape of a protracted bombing campaign and comes as a prologue to the occupation of the country, the US will need to strengthen its positions in adjacent regions, meaning that Washington will be trying to draw the Caucasian republics (Georgia, Azerbaijan) and those of Central Asia into the orbit of its policy and thus tightening the “Anaconda loop” around Russia.

The opposition mounted to the plans underlying the military scenario by China, Russia, and India seems to hold the promise of an alliance of countries seeking to tame US hegemony and raging unilateralism.

The morally charged concepts of humanitarian interventions and war on terror had just as well been invoked to legitimize downright aggressions against Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Matthew H. Kroenig from the Council on Foreign Relations recently went so far as to warn that Iran would some day pass its nuclear technologies to Venezuela. The motivation must be to somehow bundle all critics of the US foreign policy.

Chances are that a part of the oil embargo plan is to make the West encounter oil supply problems and start constructing pipelines across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Qatar, and Iraq as alternative routes reaching the shores of the Arabian, Red, and Mediterranean Seas.

Since the new US military strategy implies focusing on two regions – the Greater Middle East and South East Asia - the issue of the Strait of Hormuz appears coupled to that of the Strait of Malacca which offers the shortest route for the oil supply from the Indian Ocean to China, Japan, South Korea, and the rest of South East Asia.

The EU oil embargo recently slapped on Iran and the threats voiced by the US and other Western countries to come up with further sanctions against the country led watchers to conclude that an armed conflict between Iran and the West has finally became imminent.

The first potential scenario in this context is that the current standoff would eventually escalate into a war. The US forces in the Gulf area currently number 40,000, plus 90,000 are deployed in Afghanistan, just east of Iran, and several thousand support troops are deployed in various Asian countries. That adds up to a considerable military potential which may still fall short of what it takes to keep a lid on everything if armed hostilities break out. For example, Colin H. Kahl argues in a recent paper in Foreign Affairs that, even though “there is no doubt that Washington will win in the narrow operational sense” (1), the US would have to take a vast array of pertinent problems into account.

At the moment, maintaining the status quo is not in US interests, holds Stratfor, a US-based global intelligence agency: “If al Assad survives and if the situation in Iraq proceeds as it has been proceeding, then Iran is creating a reality that will define the region. The United States does not have a broad and effective coalition, and certainly not one that would rally in the event of war. It has only Israel...” (2) If the conflict with Iran takes the shape of a protracted bombing campaign and comes as a prologue to the occupation of the country, the US will need to strengthen its positions in adjacent regions, meaning that Washington will be trying to draw the Caucasian republics (Georgia, Azerbaijan) and those of Central Asia into the orbit of its policy and thus tightening the “Anaconda loop” around Russia.

An alternative scenario also deserves attention. EU sanctions would surely hurt many of the European economies – notably, those of Greece, Italy, and Spain - by ricochet. In fact, Spanish diplomatic chief José Manuel García-Margallo Y Marfil bluntly described the sanctions decision as a sacrifice (3).

As for Iran, the oil blockade can cause its annual budget to contract by $15-20 billion, which generally should not be critical but, as the country's parliamentary elections and the 2013 presidential poll are drawing closer and the West actively props up its domestic opposition, outbreaks of unrest in Iran would quite possibly ensue. Tehran has already made it clear it would make a serious effort to find buyers for its oil export elsewhere.

China and India, Iran's respective number one and number three clients, brushed off the idea of the US-led sanctions momentarily. Japan pledged support for Washington over the matter but did not post any specific plans to reduce the volume of oil it imports from Iran. Japan, by the way, was badly hit in 1973 when Wall Street provoked an oil crisis and US guarantees turned hollow. Consequently, Tokyo can be expected to approach Washington's sanction suggestions with the utmost caution and to ask the US for unequivocal guarantees that the White House will be unable to provide. Right now the US is courting South Korea with the aim of having it cut off the import of oil from Iran.

The opposition mounted to the plans underlying the military scenario by China, Russia, and India seems to hold the promise of an alliance of countries seeking to tame US hegemony and raging unilateralism. Stratfor analysts have a point saying that time is not on the US side, considering that the BRICs countries have some opportunities to influence the situation in the potential conflict zone by launching joint anti-terrorism and anti-piracy maneuvers in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, etc.

Inducing regime change in Iran, which is Washington's end goal, still takes a pretext. The US has long been eying various factions in Iran in the hope of capitalizing on the country's existing domestic rivalries parallel to the employment of tested color revolution techniques such as the support for the Green Movement or the establishment of a virtual embassy in Iran.

Richard Sanders, a vocal critic of US foreign policy, opined that, at least since the invasion of Mexico in the late XIX century, the US permanently relied on the mechanism of war pretext incidents to compile justifications for its military interventions (4). US arch-conservative Patrick J. Buchanan cited in his opinion piece titled “Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?” the fairly common view that US financial circles knowingly provoked the Pearl Harbor attack to drag the US into a war with the remote goal of ensuring the dollar empire's global primacy (5).

The lesson to be learned from the history of the Vietnam War, namely the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which USS Maddox entered Vietnam's territorial waters and opened fire on boats of its navy, is that the initial conflict was similarly ignited by the US intelligence community, the result being that the US Congress authorized LBJ to militarily engage Vietnam. (By the way, no retribution followed in June 1967 when the Israelis attacked USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding 172). The morally charged concepts of humanitarian interventions and war on terror had just as well been invoked to legitimize downright aggressions against Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Speaking of the current developments around the Persian Gulf, Washington's choice of pretexts for aggression comprises at least three options, namely (1) Iran's nuclear dossier; (2) an engineered escalation in the Strait of Hormuz; (3) allegations that Iran supports international terrorism. The US objective behind the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program - to make everybody in the world accept Washington's rules of the game – has never been deeply hidden. The abundant alarmist talk is intended to deflect attention from the simple truth that building a nuclear arsenal with the help of civilian nuclear technologies is absolutely impossible, but Matthew H. Kroenig from the Council on Foreign Relations recently went so far as to warn that Iran would some day pass its nuclear technologies to Venezuela (6). The motivation must be to somehow bundle all critics of the US foreign policy.

The Strait of Hormuz, which is the maritime chokepoint of the Persian Gulf, is regarded as the epicenter of the coming new war. It serves as the avenue for oil supplies from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates and is therefore being closely monitored by all likely parties to the conflict. According to the US Department of Energy, 2011 oil transit via the Strait of Hormuz totaled 17 billion barrels, or roughly 20% of the world's total (7). Oil prices are projected to increase by 50% if anything disquieting happens in the Strait of Hormuz (8).

Passing through the Strait of Hormuz takes navigation across the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. Iran grants as a courtesy the right to sail across its waters based on the UN Treaty on Maritime Goods Transportation. It must be understood in connection with Washington's recurrent statements concerning the Strait of Hormuz that in this regard the US and Iran have the same legal status as countries which penned but did not ratify the treaty, and thus the US has no moral right to references to international law. Iran's administration stressed recently after consultations on national legislation that Tehran would possibly subject to a revision the regulations under which foreign vessels are admitted to Iranian territorial waters (9).

Navies are also supposed to observe certain international laws, in particular those defining the minimal distance to be maintained by vessels of other countries. It constantly pops up in the US media that Iranian boats come riskily close to US vessels but, as watchers note, provocateurs like the CIA-sponsored separatists from Iran's Baluchistan could in some cases be pulling off the tricks in disguise.

Chances are that a part of the oil embargo plan is to make the West encounter oil supply problems and start constructing pipelines across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Qatar, and Iraq as alternative routes reaching the shores of the Arabian, Red, and Mediterranean Seas. A few of these projects, the Hashan–Fujairah pipeline, for instance, are as of today in the process of being implemented. If that is the idea, the explanation behind Washington's tendency to convince its allies to create a “safer” pipeline infrastructure is straightforward. Geopolitics being an inescapable reality, it does have to be taken into account, though, that the region's countries remain locked in a variety of conflicts and, due to geographic reasons, Tehran would be a key player even if the pipelines are launched.

Since the new US military strategy implies focusing on two regions – the Greater Middle East and South East Asia - the issue of the Strait of Hormuz appears coupled to that of the Strait of Malacca which offers the shortest route for the oil supply from the Indian Ocean to China, Japan, South Korea, and the rest of South East Asia. The arrangement implicitly factors into the Asian countries' decision-making related to Iran.

The precedent of “the war on terror” - a campaign during which the US occupied under dubious pretexts Iraq and Afghanistan at the costs of thousands of lives – must also be kept in mind. Ages ago, the White House sanctioned subversive activities against various parts of the the Iranian administration, including the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. Former CIA operative Phillip Giraldi writes that US and Israeli agents have been active in Iran for quite some time and are responsible for the epidemic of the Stuxnet virus and the series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear physicists. The groups within Iran which aligned themselves with the country's foes are the People's Mujahedin of Iran, the Baluchistan-based separatist Jundallah, whose leader Abdolmajid Rigi was arrested in February, 2010 by Iranian security forces and admitted to cooperating with the CIA, and the Kurdish Free Life of Kurdistan (10).

In essence, a war against Iran – up to date a secret war – is underway. The problem the parties involved are trying to resolve is to find a way of prevailing without entering the “hot” phase of the conflict.

(Source - http://www.globalresearch.ca)

‘Israel to Give Obama 12 Hours Notice on Attacking Iran’

Israel told visiting US Gen. Dempsey that Obama would get no more than 12 hours notice before an attack on Iran, the London Times reports.

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

Israeli officials told visiting USS Chief Joint of Staffs Martin Dempsey that it would give President Barack Obama no more than 12 hours notice if and when it attacks Iran, The LondonTimes reported Sunday.

The Netanyahu government also will not coordinate with the United States an attack on the Islamic Republic, according to the report, the latest in a number of suposed scenarios concerning cooperation or lack of it between Jerusalem and Washington.

It is left to speculation whether the rumors are based on facts or are leaked by officials to mask the possibility of secret military coordination.

The London Times said its sources explained that that Israel fears that President Obama would try to torpedo an Israel attack if more notice were given because he is concerned that Iran will respond by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, sparking a rise in theprice of oil that could cripple Western economies. If the attack were to occur in the next 10 months, it would put President Obama in a tight spot on the eve of his bid for re-election.

President Shimon Peres told Dempsey, "I am sure that in this fight [against Iran] we will emerge victorious. It is a fight that does not belong exclusively to the United States or Israel, but a global struggle to create a safe world for all peoples.”

Dempsey, on his first official visit to Israel, was wined and dined by Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gants, who went so far as to arrange an IDF orchestra rendition of song made famous by Frank Sinatra, one of Dempsey’s favorite singers.

Dempsey tried to play down the postponement of what was billed as the largest-ever joint military drill between the Israeli and American armies, involving thousands of U.S. Army soldiers.

Published reasons for the delay have ranged from budgetary constraints, logistical problems to a signal from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he distrusts President Obama’s commitment to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Dempsey maintained that the delay, which was announced by Israel, will give both countries more time to prepare and “achieve a better outcome.”

The top American general left Israel on Friday, before the Sabbath began.

(Sources - http://www.israelnationalnews.com)

World War III Has Begun – It`s the First Asymmetric War Long Awaited by Pentagon Think Tanks

The Pentagon has already declared World War III and President Barack Obama and the Congress never even carried out their constitutional duties to approve the use of American military power for war.

One might reasonably conclude that the United States has outsourced war. Presently, World War III is being conducted on two continents – Asia and Africa – with two others – Europe and South America – looming on the horizon. Today, wars are crafted by the upper one percent of wealthy elitists who, using non-governmental organizations, television networks, non — profit “think tanks,” and public relations firms, can declare war on nations without a whimper from elected public officials.

Symmetric warfare is no longer an option for the global elites. World Wars I and II severely affected the investments of many of the global elite families as a result of the destruction of cities, factories, railways, seaports, and other infrastructures. The Korean, Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli, and Iraq wars were messy affairs that also adversely affected markets and destroyed valuable infrastructures. The Cold War never developed into a hot nuclear war because of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which ensured that a nuclear first strike by either the West or the East would result in total annihilation of both sides, along with the rest of the world. Even a western military attack on China would have had disastrous results for the attackers, especially since China could retaliate with a nuclear counter-attack and wipe out the U.S. Seventh Fleet and its East Asian naval bases, including Okinawa and Guam. A new type of warfare was required by the elites: asymmetric warfare – the use of unconventional warfare tactics, including information warfare, by proxies, non-state actors, agents provocateur, and fifth columns.

Largely financed by hedge fund mega-tycoon George Soros and his Central Intelligence Agency interlocutors, our present asymmetric World War III was field tested just like any new product. The “themed” revolutions were market-tested first in Serbia, and then in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, to oust problematic governments that did not want to get on board with the dictates of the unelected and unaccountable real controllers of the financial and political destiny of the world.

Pro-western and pro-European Union governments, comprised of a number of individuals who were funded by Soros and other non-state operations established by the global elites, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, Freedom House, U.S. Institute of Peace, and others funded and supported by the Houses of Rothschild, Rockefeller, Mellon, and others saw to it that new governments took root in Belgrade, Kiev, Tbilisi, and Bishkek. These new governments were not elected but took power as a result of themed street rebellions, a new manifestation of unconventional warfare.

No longer did armies, navies, and air forces have to face each other across battlefields and battle zones and theaters of warfare. One merely had to embed fifth columnists and provocateurs inside a targeted nation's capital city, media, political party apparatus, and "civil society" infrastructure to bring about the defeat of the government outside the normal political process and replace it with a new government beholden to the desires of the central banks and global oligarchs.

The beginnings of the asymmetric world war began in Belgrade, Serbia when Otpor – a Serbian resistance movement dedicated to overthrowing the Slobodon Milosevic regime – launched the first “themed revolution.” Otpor’s symbol was a clenched fist, an emblem that would reappear in the future in other capital cities from Kiev to Cairo. Otpor received massive funding from a network of western contrivances, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the neo-conservative-infiltrated U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, and various European Union-funded NGOs that were intimately linked to Soros’s “democracy engineering” operations.

The playbook used for Otpor in Serbia and by similar organizations in toppling the governments of Georgia in the Rose Revolution, Ukraine in the Orange Revolution, and Kyrgyzstan in the Tulip Revolution, was developed by University of Massachusetts professor Gene Sharp, the founder of the Boston-based NGO, the Albert Einstein Institute, which helped train Otpor activists in civil disobedience and popular resistance campaigns designed to overthrow governments, those democratically-elected and those not. Albert Einstein Institute-trained provocateurs launched popular resistance campaigns around the world aimed at replacing governments unwilling to acquiesce to the dictates of Western elites. Internal opposition forces, all acolytes of Sharp, for instance Kmara, which helped install the pro-Western and pro-Israeli Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia; Pora in Ukraine that propelled pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into the presidency; and KelKel in Kyrgyzstan that replaced Askar Akayev with the corrupt Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

The domino effect of the themed revolutions saw Serbs helping to overthrow the Georgian government, then Serbs and Georgians flocking to Kiev to oust the Ukrainian government, and Georgians and Ukrainians being directly involved in the insurrection in Bishkek. The neo-conservatives and Sharp had borrowed a page from the Communists and the international proletarian movement that saw Communist cadres fight against capitalists and fascists in foreign civil wars, for example, the Spanish Civil War and conflicts in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Sharp was an alumnus of Harvard University’s CIA-linked Center for International Affairs, also abbreviated “CIA,” which is not coincidental. Harvard and the CIA of Langley, Virginia have long maintained a close relationship. In fact, Sharp was never interested in ensuring the will of the people to map out their own future but was putting into practice the theory of asymmetric warfare – the vanquishing of enemies through the use of proxy internal forces without the requirement for invading foreign armies and the massive death and destruction associated with such action.

Many of Sharp’s tactics have been seen in practice in many asymmetric warfare targets. These include the creation of a perception of a successful movement, even if there is not one. The use of western-controlled news networks like Fox News that showed a video clip of anti-austerity Greek rioters in Athens falsely depicted as anti-government protesters in Moscow and Al Jazeera’s use of a video erroneously showing a U.S.- and Saudi-backed bloody crackdown of pro-democracy protesters by Bahrain’s security forces as the bloody repression of protesters by Syria’s government are examples of Sharp’s propaganda and disinformation tactics.

Cultivating foreign support is another key element of Sharp’s asymmetric warfare tactics. The virtual control exercised by Soros over Human Rights Watch after the multi-billionaire hedge fund kingpin donated $100 million to the group is a case in point. The human rights NGO was at the forefront of hyping “atrocities” committed by the Qaddafi regime in Libya but remained largely silent on Libyan rebel atrocities committed against Libyan and African blacks, as well as Qaddafi loyalists. In so doing, Human Rights Watch had a powerful accomplice in the International Criminal Court, which tended to look the other way when CIA- and Saudi- and Qatari’ supported Libyan rebels were committing the massacres.

Another Sharp tactic is to seek change outside the electoral system. This tactic was evident in the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where election results were rejected, and in the recent Russian parliamentary election, where Soros- and U.S. neocon-financed election monitoring groups like Golos rejected the outcome of the election and used shills like former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to call for the nullification of the election. Interference following the Sharp and Soros methodology can also be seen in the presidential candidacies of Russian oligarch and New Jersey Nets basketball owner Mikhail Prokhorov and the backing by western propaganda outlets like the Christian Science Monitor (now derided as the “Christian Zionist Monitor” after its takeover by interests who favor a neo-imperialist U.S. foreign policy) of Moscow street protest veteran Alexei Navalny.

Sharp and Soros are on the same page in calling for the internal opposition forces’ use of the Internet, fax, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter to advance their agendas.

In the next phases of World War III, the asymmetric warriors of the Pentagon and their adjunct non-state actors will continue to turn up the heat in the Arab World, with the revolutions in Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt, after a somewhat shaky start that saw the advancement of Islamist groups, being brought under more western and NATO control. Russia’s presidential election and a turndown in the Chinese economy, with growing village-based dissent among China’s growing middle class, will present further opportunities for the promoters of World War III. The sudden death of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il has also resulted in a call for an expansion of social networking operations, most notably by the CIA- and Soros-infested Washington Post, inside Asia’s hermit kingdom.

Myanmar, China’s restive provinces of Tibet and East Turkestan, Lebanon, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Nepal, Belarus, Ecuador, Bolivia, Pakistan, Laos, and the two Congos also present opportunities for the World War III architects. Those who seek to extend American and global elitist control over the entire planet will not rest until every acre of land comes under the firm control of the oligarchs of Wall Street, the spymasters of the CIA, and the globalist business cartels and families.

(Sources - http://www.strategic-culture.org)