Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, an important Iranian nuclear scientist, was killed yesterday by a bomb planted outside his home. Iran has accused Israel and the United States of assassinating Mr. Ali-Mohammadi in an attempt to disrupt Tehran's nuclear program. If true, such short-of-war methods could be seen as a means of preventing a larger conflict or paving the way for more deadly operations. The Obama administration's diplomatic outreach effort is dead, too. The mullahs met President Obama's outstretched hand with an extended middle finger. Iran announced in November that it planned to construct 10 new uranium enrichment facilities, a development former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Hans Blix called "puzzling" because "even big countries don't have ten enrichment plants." Last month, top-secret technical notes from Iran's nuclear program were leaked that detailed research on a neutron initiator, the triggering mechanism for an atomic bomb. It is increasingly difficult to claim that Iran's nuclear effort is intended for peaceful civilian purposes. The Dec. 31 deadline for Iran to reply to a proposed nuclear deal passed with no response. The debate in Washington has shifted toward how best to target sanctions and whether they should – or can – be crafted in a way to support the reform movement in the country. But time is running out. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the Obama White House a year to make progress with Iran, and instead, the situation has grown worse. Israel repeatedly has stated that it will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, and the Jewish state is receiving significant behind-the-scenes encouragement from Sunni Arab states wary of the possibility of Iranian regional hegemony. – Washington Times

Dominant Social Theme: Another front?

Free-Market Analysis: The Washington Times, which never looked in the direction of Iran without seeing military enterprise, is beating the drums for war again. Whenever there is a decisive violent event in Iran the Washington Times trots out another story about the coming Western war with the Shias – now it is claimed on behalf of the Sunnis.

We wonder if this coincidence? Here's an indisputable fact: The French kept Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini sheltered in France just the way they sheltered Lenin before injecting him back into Russia "like a bacillus" during the White/Red war that led to the formation of the communist state. And when we looked into Khomeini's background years ago (an unpleasant task) it became fairly clear that there was a good deal of speculation as to whether his father had worked for British intelligence. (His mother apparently was Indian). Finally, there is a good deal of speculation that the Carter administration was pressuring the Shah over some commercial port facilities and that this is what eventually led to his downfall. You connect the dots, dear reader, if you wish.

We have decided that war with Iran was possibly a process-in-planning that was to be a very long-term enterprise. And we wonder if, after so many years at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public is ready for a third front with Iran. We think maybe the power elite could have gotten away with a three front war five or six years ago, but the public is not just jaded and tired – a significant amount of the American and British public (the two countries fighting the "war on terror") have considerable questions about the war, in our opinion, its antecedents and the seeming public manipulations that have accompanied it.

We were just reading (in the feedback section of another website) what we have maintained for a number of years – that the power elite in its desperation to cement a nascent global government has moved faster in the past decade than in the past fifty years. This will go down in the annals of alternative press coverage and analysis as a decisive mistake and a monumental miscalculation.

Afraid of the Internet and the promotional schemes it was exposing, the elite in our opinion made a calculated bet to try to beat the damaging dispersal of information. But they didn't have nearly enough control. Americans have guns and computers and despite a hundred years of trying, the American culture remained small-r republican. Freedom lived. Even government workers in America ran entrepreneurial businesses on the side. The New World proved recalcitrant and someday it may be seen that it saved the Old. The power elite, with all it's trying, could not socialize the USA.

What have they accomplished? In moving anyway, they have ended up, instead, exposing every single machination on line, where it is endlessly discussed and debated – in America and increasingly in Europe. This is not preternatural power, this power elite, it is a handful of families and powerful individuals who have made a radical miscalculation based on fear and desperation. It is obvious if one chooses to look (obvious to us, anyway).

What can you see? Well … there is more coverage of the Bilderbergers online on any given day than that organization received in its entire 20th century history. Indeed, the powers-that-be have revealed their entire organizational discipline, illustrated how these promotions work and given anyone who wishes to look an education in how one controls a campaign of perpetual fear and promotes authoritarian solutions.

The war on terror is just such a promotion. From questions about the installation of Khomeini in Iran, to whatever really happened on 9/11 (certainly it is not the official story in all its details), to the lies told by the Bush and Blair administrations to justify a war against Iraq, to more government lies that caused the lead attorney of the 9/11 Commission to write about an extensive and unsolved cover-up, to the ongoing fiction that Britain and the US are engaged in a war against "Al Qaeda" (which the BBC claims doesn't exist) when it is obviously the stiff-necked Pashtun tribe that the US, especially, is trying to defeat – the promotion winds its way through a river of blood. War is a racket, Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote.

We are not sure the West, or even Israel, will go to war with Iran. If it does, we think it will not result in an inevitable widening of the war on terror – or not long-term. We think there are already too many questions about the war on terror and its antecedents as a result of Internet exposure. Thus, contrarily (wouldn't you expect it from us?) if an Iran-West faceoff does occur we wonder if it will ultimately have the effect of reducing the rhetoric and activity of the overall war on terror. We think the power elite may realize that they will have no choice eventually but to "dial it back." That would be an ignominious end, or substantive diminishment, of the 100-year war that Dick Cheney seemed to anticipate not so long ago.