The Coming Catastrophe
JULY 01 ,2019
As the US steadily prepares to attack Iran, President Trump gives the impression that this is a spontaneous response to Tehran’s villainy. While we wait, it’s important to recall what’s led to it.
President GW Bush did much the same as Trump before invading Iraq. He authorized the plans to attack Baghdad in his first weeks in the White House. Prime Minister John Howard disingenuously denied that Australia had already offered troops. He had known since July 2002 that we would. He kept up the pretense until March 2003, when Australians learned that their Special Forces had fired the first missiles. It appears that Howard’s conservative successor Scott Morrison will run the same script about Iran, after receiving his orders from Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo at the G20 in Osaka.
Trump’s crab-like creep towards war began in 2016 when he campaigned on a promise to get rid of Obama’s treaties, including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The IAEA certified that Iran had complied with it since 2015 by reporting regularly and not enriching uranium above agreed levels. A year ago, at Netanyahu’s request (Elijah J. Magnier, ‘Iran and allies are ready to confront the US in case of all-out war in the Middle East’, American Herald Tribune, 22 June 2019), Trump abrogated the treaty, imposed economic sanctions on Iran, and threatened other countries which traded with it. In April 2019 he designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. In May he sent a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East, and anticipated deploying 120 000 or more US troops. In June two attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman were blamed on Iran, without robust evidence; a rocket was fired from an unknown source into Baghdad’s Green Zone; and confrontation occurred with US proxy fighters (likely the insurrectionist Muhajedin-e Khalk, MEK) in the Persian Gulf. (MEK was de-listed as a terrorist organization by the US in 2012, and this year Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was listed instead). A US Navy drone was shot down by Iran, probably over Iranian airspace. President Trump has insulted the Ayatollah and got his defiant riposte. Step by step an attack comes closer.
Why take on Iran, a much larger and better-armed target than Syria? Iran is strategically placed; it has the world’s fourth largest deposits of oil; its military plays a significant part in Syria and Iraq. Shia Iran has for years funded Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad in its support of the Palestinians. This, say Israel and the US, makes it ‘the world’s largest state sponsor of terror’: they should know. Although Britain’s Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt declared the UK did not want war with Iran, Australian Shadow Defence spokesman Richard Marles loyally called Iran a ‘destabilizing influence’ (RN Breakfast, 26 June 2019).
Seeking control of Iraq’s oil, the CIA backed a British-instigated coup against Iran’s only elected President Mossadeq in 1953, re-installing Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. In 1979 when the Iranian Revolution expelled the Shah, the US Embassy was besieged and dozens of diplomats were held hostage. President Carter sent a mission to release them, which failed. This humiliation gave the US an enduring motive for revenge. Iran is the last country on the Pentagon list of seven countries to be overthrown by the US in the Middle East, revealed in 2011 by General Wesley Clark.
All are enemies of Israel. The US and Israel inserted the Stuxnet virus in Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz in 2015, destroying 1000 of its centrifuges. The US and Israeli record of destabilization leaves Iran for dead, which literally appears to be the intention. Trump has threatened to ‘obliterate’ parts of Iran if it attacks ‘anything American’.
Iran is the latest target in a long-established American project. In September 2000, neo-con members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) produced ‘Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century’, in which Robert Kagan proposed the need to consolidate US hegemony through multiple wars to secure revolutionary change. To gain public support, ‘a catastrophic catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbour’ would be required. Just such an event occurred a year later, and Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, enabling the wars which are still being fought. In January 2018 John Bolton, a neo-con who would soon become National Security Adviser, also spoke about the need for ‘a major event where people pull together’ (My emphases).
*(Robert Kagan, senior fellow in the Foriegn Policy program in the Project on International Order and Strategy. Credit: Brookings Institution/ flickr)
The PNAC ceased to function in 2006 and was replaced by Foreign Policy Initiative in 2009, the same year as Institute for Statecraft (IfS) began in Britain. With generous government sponsorship, IfS proposed strategies in January 2015 for containing and sanctioning Russia. Its plans appeared to support the arguments in favor of US world domination advanced by Henry Kissinger in 2014. At a meeting in October 2016, Christopher Donnelly of IfS and retired General Sir Richard Barrons agreed that the UK should double its military expenditure ‘to deal with Russia and China’. They suggested the need for a catastrophic event that would generate agreement to spending £7 billion more per year on war, echoing Kagan’s call or a catastrophe to trigger revolutionary change. The links of name, date, and purpose may not be coincidental. Foreign Policy Initiative was dissolved in 2017, and IfS went silent in 2019 after what they claimed was a cyber-attack.
That doesn’t mean the neo-con desire to create a catastrophe has vanished. Religious fundamentalists are as thick on the ground in the US and Israel and across the Middle East. They believe in and welcome the ‘end-times’ and Armageddon, after which the righteous will be raptured to heaven. Iran could be the chosen site. Australia has no interest or obligation to back such aggression.
WRITER
posted by Satish Sharma at
15:08
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