STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Obama's Contribution to Peace: Congress Declares War on Iran?
By Staff News & Analysis - June 29, 2010

Obama DOCTRINE: Congress Just Declared Preemptive WAR On Iran … War with Iran has already been decided by the powers that be and the modern-day quasi-declaration happened last Thursday. Using the same legislative and propaganda playbook that led to the Iraq War, the U.S. Government has just officially declared War on Iran. Reuters reported "Congress on Thursday approved tough new unilateral sanctions aimed at squeezing Iran's energy and banking sectors, which could also hurt companies from other countries doing business with Tehran. The House of Representatives passed the bill 408-8 and sent it to President Barack Obama (left) for signing into law. The Senate had approved it 99-0 earlier in the day." Congress hasn't officially voted for a Declaration of War since World War II. In modern times they use creative wording in bills that authorize the broad use of force across borders in the sweeping "War on Terror." The Bush Doctrine of preemptively attacking countries because they may pose a threat to America in the future was universally trashed by progressives, but is alive and well under Obama, the Prince of Peace, without one dissenting vote in the Senate. This authority is what the Obama Administration claims also gives them the legal argument to bomb sovereign countries like Pakistan. – Before It's News

Dominant Social Theme: Don't look at the man behind the curtain. He's holding a gun, but he doesn't exist.

Free-Market Analysis: We write a lot about the alternative press, but when it comes to analyzing the dominant social themes of the power elite, we try to take excerpts from mainstream publications to show how these fear-based memes are disseminated and the ways the are positioned by the elite-controlled media for maximum impact.

But sometimes, as in this case, using an excerpt from an alternative news sources points up another salient factor about power elite themes – what is left unsaid is often as important as what is reported. In this case, the alternative website Before It's News makes a good argument that the US is actually already at war with Iran and that the West is simply in a transitional military phase prior to beginning the shooting and bombing.

We have actually written about this ourselves, pointing out in the past that the Draconian sanctions on Japan prior to World War II induced the Japanese to attack the United States. Sanctions, in fact, are indeed a kind of warfare because they take state power – and the threat of state violence – to enforce. Here's some more from the article:

This unilateral decision by the United States Congress comes on the heels of a 12-2 U.N. Security Council vote on June 8th to impose a "modest tightening of sanctions" against Iran. Of course, Russia and China have been assured that sanctions won't apply to their energy needs in order to secure their votes. After the vote President Obama asserted that, "these sanctions do not close the door on diplomacy."

However, the United States preempted this embargo vote in Congress by taking up an aggressive posture in tandem with Israel by deploying an Armada of Battleships to the Red Sea. There are now reports from the Israeli National News that, "The Israeli Air Force recently unloaded military equipment at a Saudi Arabia base, a semi-official Iranian news agency claimed Wednesday, while a large American force has massed in Azerbaijan, which is on the northwest border of Iran."

Now, it seems that the United States is working overtime to sell their war plans to potential allies. CIA chief, Leon Panetta appeared on ABC's This Week and announced that the Iranians, "have enough low-enriched uranium right now for two weapons. They do have to enrich it, fully, in order to get there. And we would estimate that if they made that decision, it would probably take a year to get there, probably another year to develop the kind of weapon delivery system in order to make that viable."

While world leaders negotiate their piece of the Iranian pie in G8 negotiations, the multi-nation fear campaign has begun. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Sunday that a CIA warning that Iran has enough uranium to build two atomic bombs was "worrying," and criticized Tehran's secrecy over its nuclear program.

This is excellent analysis, pulling together a number of news strands to provide "the big picture" about what is going on. But where's the mainstream reporting? Why wouldn't the mainstream press want to cover such a military build up as prelude to the biggest war the West has waged since World War II? Is it because the idea likely is to provoke Iran into a military move of some sort? Perhaps the West's military planners do not want publicity because it begins to look as if the West, especially US and Israel, are in some sense the agressors.

Why would the US and Israel, especially, want a war with Iran? In fact, in our opinion, the fear of a nuclear weapon in Iran's hands is overblown. Iran's leaders would no more lob a nuclear device at Israel than Israel would send a bomb toward Iran. In Israel's case, the resultant global firestorm of anger would be so intense that it would likely threaten the fabric of the state itself. In Iran's case, the blowback might be nuclear and the US and Israel have terrible arsenals indeed.

There must be some other reason why the West – and specifically the Anglo-American axis – is apparently set on attacking Iran. We think the larger reason has to do with culture itself – specifically Persian culture and the ability of the Muslim world to compete militarily in any way with the West. The Muslim culture, especially after decades of Western initiated aggression, is still antithetical to Western business practices and financial methodologies.

Using this logic, one may arrive at the conclusion that the violence the West has aimed at the Middle East is part of a larger campaign to transmute Muslim culture and make it possible for the West to absorb hundreds of millions Muslims on its way to a kind of world governance. In fact, we cannot think of a Muslim country that has a nuclear device save Pakistan, and Pakistan nuclear devices we have read are in large part secured by US army and intelligence forces. Iran would be a different story.

In fact, were Muslim cultures generally to possess weapons "of mass destruction," then it would be a great deal more difficult for the West to bring transformative violence to bear. Of course, there are other more mundane reasons why the West seeks a war with Iran. In the case of Israel, a successful war against Iran would remove a powerful and tenacious adversary to Israel's dominance in the region.

The Anglo-American axis has other reasons as well, we think. Iran borders Afghanistan and a successful war against Iran would likely allow a military buildup there that might complement similar buildups in Pakistan and elsewhere. The West then would virtually ring Afghanistan and while this might not be advantageous from a strategic standpoint, it would certainly help in terms of supply routs, aircraft corridors, command and control of drone attacks, etc.

But is it practical? It seems to us, and we wrote this just yesterday in our further analysis of the war in Afghanistan, that much the elite is doing these days is being driven by a kind of weakness and desperation. The Iraq "war" is not yet settled from what we can tell (mainstream reporting aside), but the Pentagon is racing to remove soldiers from Iraq to bring them over to Afghanistan.

As Afghanistan is not going well either, we imagine that Anglo-American elite may have in mind widening the war in the hopes of polarizing world sentiment and draining antagonism on the home-front. (In a sense this approach might be likened to making war "too big to fail.") We've always had the suspicions that this was what the power elite had in mind because of various bellicose statements made by such Western leaders as Dick Cheney. Here's something on the so-called Long War paradigm, apparently written by famous leftist Tom Hayden. (We found the article posted on a "Let's Roll" Internet forum site, though it may have appeared in early April in the LA Times, and also appears at Information Clearinghouse.) Excerpt as follows:

Your Government Is Planning to Stay at War for the Next 80 Years Anyone Got a Problem with That? Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that's 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat. The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield "virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors," according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today's younger generation of resources for their future.

The term "Long War" was first applied to America's post-9/11 conflicts in 2004 by Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, and by the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Richard B. Myers, in 2005. According to David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and a proponent of the Long War doctrine, the concept was polished in "a series of windowless offices deep inside the Pentagon" by a small team that successfully lobbied to incorporate the term into the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the nation's long-term military blueprint. President George W. Bush declared in his 2006 State of the Union message that "our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy." …

President Obama has implied his own disagreement with the Long War doctrine without openly repudiating the term. He has pledged to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2012, differing with those like Ricks who predict continuing combat, resulting in a Korean-style occupation. Obama also pledges to "begin" American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by summer 2011, in contrast to those who demand we remain until an undefined victory. Obama told West Point cadets that "our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own."

We have many differences of opinion with Tom Hayden from an economic standpoint, but we share his distaste for the prospect of a century's worth of "anti-terror" conflict. We do grant its possibility though, based not on modern-day planning but on what we understand of the elite's reaction to the Gutenberg press 500 years ago. While the ascension of this communications technology was relative bloodless, the social and religious changes it sparked provided the rationale for numerous skirmishes and wars, including the so-called Peasant War that roiled Europe for over 30 years.

War is the elite's answer to social enlightenment as well as transformative technology in our opinion. Internet censorship itself is obviously on the table. But the larger strategy is a pincer-like movement that uses both military conflicts and censorship to control the flow of knowledge and the growing comprehension of just how manipulated Western societies have been over the past century.

Will it work? We are on record as saying that likely it will not, or not in the long run. Human beings are "naked apes," and the difference between the human ape and any other species is mostly in the dexterity with which we wield tools. We would argue that, in a sense, humanity has evolved along with such tools, and that perhaps our brains have even adapted to their advancing complexity. Young people, especially, mostly males in the sexual prime, see the utilization of the most advanced toolkits as a way of enhancing genetic desirability.

This may be seem far-fetched to some, but we would argue it is a salient trait of "humanness" and that if the power elite believes it can control such cutting edge technologies, it is going to end up battling human biology. (Given that the power elite is indeed the power elite, it will do so anyway, we have no doubt.)

We also have questions about the desirability of going to war with Iran. We found a terrific article on this subject in The American Chronicle where an Iranian-born writer analyzed the practicality of a Western war against Iran in an article entitled, "How can we win without going to war with Iran?" The writer, Ghazal Omid, argued that the West would be far better off encouraging democratic trends in Iran than attacking it. Here's an excerpt from the article that best sums up Omid's warning in our opinion:

The Government of Iran prays for a war with the USA. War would be a death sentence, not only for the Iranian opposition but also potentially for millions of innocent others. The Iranian regime sees war as necessary if it is to continue in power and disregards "collateral damage" as insignificant. The initiation of war with Iran would be Armageddon.

If not for the eight year Iraq/Iran war, the Iranian regime would not have remained in power as long it has. This time, they are wishing for a global Jihad, a holy war of Muslims against Americans, the so-called "infidels." Has anyone in America noticed that Ahmadinejad has been coached to smile frequently? Why? It is because he is using the opportunity given him by American media and freedom to appeal to Iranians and Muslims around the world.

His fake smile and body language says, "I did what I could to stop a war but despite all my gallant efforts, America wants Iranian children dead. America wants you to die." This is his message to the children in Iran. With this message, everybody in Iran would pick up a flag. Hell, even political prisoners who are now fighting the Iranian government, paying with their lives in its medieval prisons would pick up a flag to go to war, even though Iranians hate its central logo. Americans don't know the Iranian government is using human shields to protect the nuclear sites. Ahmadinejad himself has said ten thousand school children have been placed near the sites …

It would seem now that war with Iran is definitely on the horizon, though we still have a hard time believing that it will actually occur. Perhaps the buildups are merely "messages," but in any case, we would tend to believe that what is happening is indicative, in some sense, of weakness not strength. The memes of the elite are failing. Fear-based manipulations have lost credibility throughout the West. There is general rebellion against elite-initiated "austerity" in Europe and a Tea Party movement has ignited in the US.

The Internet itself, along with the invention of nuclear weapons, has considerably depleted the applicability of tried-and-true elite strategies of command and control that were used with such great effectiveness in the 20th century. If the Anglo-American elite does intend to "double down" once more with a war against Iran, there is little that Western citizens can do for the moment to stop such hostilities. But in the long run, we would argue, there will probably be a lot that can be done, and a lot will be.

After Thoughts

A war against Iran would probably turn regional conflicts into a war against the Muslim world. At least it might be perceived this way by Shias and Sunnis alike, as the West would then be at war with both sects – a billion and a half Muslims. There is no telling how such a war would turn out. The elite may believe that such militarism is both controllable and sanitary; war being just another methodology of domestic control designed to reassert dominance within the West itself, as wars are almost always directed at the citizens of those states waging it (by their own governments). But those who plan these sorts of engagements may not be thinking clearly. The 21st century is not the 20th.

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