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Iran Timing
As Glenn Greenwald points out, Bush/Cheney believe they do not need congressional authorization to attack Iran. In this they are supported by the legal opinion of the author of the torture memos, John Yoo. He argues:
"As a matter of practice and history, presidents have used force abroad without any congressional authorization, [..] including the war in Kosovo, which I do not recall Senator Biden challenging as a violation of the Constitution."
Yesterday Laura Rozen wrote about possible findings and/or directives Bush may have signed for an attack on Iran.
Bush certainly has signed a finding allowing the CIA to counter Hizbullah in Lebanon. Secretary of State Rice confirmed authorization by Bush to arrest Iranian diplomats in sovereign Iraq. The recent direct military intervention with U.S. special forces on the ground in Somalia was done without specific congressional authorization (and without any protest.) The administration sees that operation as a blueprint for further missions.
Given the above, there is hardly any doubt that Bush would start an attack on Iran without an explicite authorization by Congress. To threaten the administration with "constitutional conflict" like Senator Biden has done will not deter it. The White House already prepared for this when it recently lawyered up with a specialist for presidential conflict with Congress.
While some like Senator Hagel think that an attack on Iran would be comparable to Nixon’s attack on Cambodia, a last "surge" to cover a retreat, I believe the plan is different and bigger.
As Josh Marshall analysed nearly four years ago:
Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.
To me an attack on Iran seems certain, but what has to happen before it can take place?
First the military assets have to be in place. Currently there is no carrier task force in the Persian Gulf. The Eisenhower is near Somalia while the Stennis will leave Bremerton on Tuesday. For both to reach the Gulf, at least some three weeks are needed.
Unlike earlier I now think it does make sense to use two carriers in an attack because some U.S. allies in the Gulf may deny the U.S. the right to use the bases there for direct attacks on Iran. (BTW – these facilities in Turkey, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain are huge.) When we know whereto those Patriot missiles Bush announced to deploy are send, we will also know which air bases will be used in an attack.
The last of the additional five brigades to Iraq (only one is really additional, the others are brigades on extended missions) will deploy in May. As only three of the additional brigades will be needed in Baghdad, the other two may well have the mission to keep the roads from Kuwait to Baghdad open. These are certainly endangered when Iran gets attacked.
That attack will also require the seizure of Iranian oil plattforms and some smaller Iranian islands in the Gulf. Some Special Operation forces and/or Marines will be needed for that. The Expeditionary Strike Group Boxer is currently in the Gulf and just got its deployment extended, but the 15. Marine Expeditionary Unit, i.e. the troops that belong to it, is still in Anbar, Iraq. This element is thereby currently still missing.
On the personal side the military seems to be ready. Even though two ground wars are taking place in the Central Command area, a Navy air power specialist has been installed as CentCom commander.
But I still expect Rice to resign for personal reasons and Negroponte to take her job before the new war gets hot. Especially after the assault on her during last weeks Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, her resignation seems certain. To let it happen after an attack would look like her taking responsibility or showing dissatisfaction and will have to be avoided.
As promised,
the Saudis have lowered the oil price and the world wide strategic
petroleum reserves are filled up. A temporary interuption of the flow
of oil, now or during the summer, will not have a devastating economic
effect.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the Israelis are both pressing for war as are Bush/Cheney and the Neocons. With all the nessessary conditions being in place early this summer, I believe an attack arount June to be very likely.
There are ways for Congress to stop the war on Iraq and to prevent one on Iran. But without massive public counterpressure to the lobbying of AIPAC and Israeli hawks, there is no chance that certain Democrats in Congress will vote for one of the possible measures.
Even if there is such public pressure, a USS Maine event can easily be manufactured on short notice and then propagandizes to turn the public mood to war.
The only way out is the U.S. public to take an active stand against this and to be aware of any attempt of manipulation. I am not hopeful for that to happen.
Professor Richard Heinberg posits a rosy future where all the nations of Earth agree on energy allotments fair to all, with a gradual Power Down according to the decline of petroleum products in our lives. No war, no oil spills, no terrorism.
The real power in this globalized world, which is amassed capital — mountains of money a million miles high in the hands of a tiny group of people — is ten steps ahead of Richard’s idea.
They want to do the same thing, but only share between whichever pirates can dominate the Middle East and the Caspian/Caucasus for their own profit n’ pleasure, arrrrrr.
Economic power, running national governments as proxies, will seek to seize, dominate, control, or deny unto others — the Earth’s petroleum products while they still flow.
Now, the two biggest strategic threats to foreign capital sucking the oil and gas out of the Middle East under the beneficent gaze of suit-wearing local governments are rising Shiite dreams of Power At Last, and abiding nationalism in Iran, Lebanon and Syria. These people want to run their own affairs. As if!
Liberation movements are odious to capital; nationalism is supposed to be a tool of absentee capitalist landlords, not — Good Lord !– a means for indigenous peoples to guide their own destinies.
These things are bad for business. So moves will be made:
Erode and attack the sovereignty of these above mentioned sovereign nations, turning them to internal fighting to weaken them, to make them ripe for regime change; smash them as necessary, but put them into submission to the business interests of foreign capital for the coming decades. Dress their new government leaders in nice suits. Lear jets. F-22’s and howitzers. Forty years will do nicely, and then buh-bye.
Divide and conquer Shia factions in Iraq and Iran by playing them against one another and against Sunni factions to weaken all of them, to make them ripe for dominance by force of arms. Do not let these people get by, or get along, or they will do just that — which won’t do.
Peace and economic cooperation will break out between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and America/Europe within three years, followed by conjoined diplomatic to military confrontation with Russia in the Caspian Basin and Caucasus. The petro products up there will still be worth fighting over in 2075. Russia will either have to be thoroughly stiffed, or brought in on the provender, if everyone is to get home safely with their gas and oil.
The GWOT, the global war on terra, is actually an accurate caricature of what is coming under this Great Drawdown strategy of the capital class, where the monied people get their share and the little people get to swear.
In plain English, GWOT means “Yo, the folks we are going to be stealing everything from? They are going to come for our effing heads, right up to the day they die, so watch out!”
To my Chinese and European and Indian and Russian and African brothers and sisters under the blue sky and the winter moon I send word that my only solace for living in a vampire nation like mine, is that you live in one, too.
Money piled a million miles high decides how, when, where, how you and I live and die.
We have got to get out from under this, you and me.
Posted by: Antifa | Jan 13 2007 18:55 utc | 24
“Unless the US people take down the current administration, try it and hang the lot of them, they just as complicit in this as the Germans were in 1941.”
That’s a poor analogy, Clueless Joe. The Nazi Party never, ever got anywhere close to a majority of votes in Germany’s Parliament– and this is despite the furious resentment over the Versailles Treaty and economic problems (such as hyperinflation) which were much worse than in France and Britain, which were able to cushion their suffering by stealing resources from their overseas colonies in Asia and Africa.
Hitler got power in 1933 by means of Parliamentary maneuverings and, then, by terror. You seem to forget that there *were* many Germans, hundreds of thousands, who bitterly opposed Hitler and fought against him up to the start of WWII in Europe itself in 1939 and even after– Hitler just threw them into the concentration camps or gunned them down in firing squads. Even after this, countless other Germans continued to oppose Hitler– the White Rose Society, Stauffenberg, Popitz, Schulenberg, the Kreisau Circle and countless others– despite the Nazi terror and terrible risks to their lives.
I say this as a Jew myself, but I am very, very tired at accusations of collective guilt pointed at the German people. They stood up by the hundreds of thousands against Hitler and never gave the Nazis an electoral mandate. After 1933, the Germans no longer had the means to evict Hitler via the ballot box, and they had the Gestapo terror to contend with, and yet they STILL stood up to Hitler in great numbers, even after the war had commenced. This is a major reason that Germany rebuilt so quickly to become Europe’s most economically successful country after WWII with the Wirtschaftswunder, it was because leaders such as Konrad Adenauer and countless others had never supported the Nazis in the first place.
Now, I will say something that may shock you at first but that you will quickly realize as true: The British people and, yes, the Americans bear far more responsibility for their countries’ atrocities, since they indeed had democratic elections and the capacity to put political pressure on their leaders at the time of their worst atrocities. Britain was killing millions of people in India with forced famines during the 1800’s http://tinyurl.com/ykkdm8
wiping out the native populations of Australia and its neighbors (not thru disease– thru deliberate military targeting), brutalizing Ireland, starting their own concentration camps in South Africa (which killed over 30,000 Boers and Zulus mostly children and women), pushing Indian opium onto the Chinese people en masse in the Opium Wars and launching brutal invasions of South America in the Rio de la Plata http://tinyurl.com/y7hxgb and Afghanistan on multiple occasions in the Anglo-Afghan Wars, even though their enemies this time defeated the British.
This was public knowledge in Britain which had become a nation with a participating electorate, yet the British ministers in charge of these atrocities rarely suffered at the ballot box.
Likewise, the American electorate knew full and well what George W. Bush was planning in 2002 and 2004, yet voted for Iraq War supporters in Congress in 2002 and then again in 2004, while reelecting Bush the warmonger in 2004. Anger at Bush right now stems less from moral opposition to the war than frustration at Bush’s practical and logistical failures in waging it. Unlike the German people in 1939 and 1941, who were in a dictatorship by then with no voice at the ballot box, the British and the American people had access to knowledge about their governments’ atrocities and the capacity to vote on them, yet chose largely to condone them.
We need to be careful about facile analogies to the Nazi period– indeed, the most dangerous fallacy (about appeasement in 1938) is largely driving the continuing push to war in the Middle East. In analogy to Godwin’s law, we should really look for analogies elsewhere whenever possible. WWII was just one war in history, and frankly it wasn’t even anywhere near the most influential one despite its scale– it didn’t much change the cultural map of the world as earlier wars had done, and even in the 20th century, WWI had a far greater long-term impact, especially on our current mess: Iraq, after all, was a British colonial creation in the wake of WWI.
In this case, a better analogy might be the US public’s support for the Spanish-American War or the Vietnam War, both launched subsequent to disgusting lies (the Maine explosion and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident) that people all too credulously bought into. This is what we’re currently facing with Iraq, and its probable spreading soon to Iran.
Posted by: Aqua Teen Tom | Jan 14 2007 4:31 utc | 37
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