Canned Revolution – Invading Iraq

The eternal tinderbox

Your Tax Dollars At Work

“It doesn’t take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin,” remarked The Independent’s Robert Fisk following the killing of the Hamas leader, a man who died with no shortage of blood on his hands.

Could the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin be the harbinger of the next front on the War on Terror™, namely an attack on Syria? Sharon attacked Syria last October, the first Israeli strikes in Syria for thirty years, notes Gary Leupp.

Bush with his characteristic distance from the real world has dubbed Sharon, the Israeli Butcher-in-Chief, as a "a man of peace."

Leupp appears to see the tried and trusted hands of the CIA at work in Damascus, laying the good old fashioned plumming work that has been honed down the generations. Leupp reports that this March saw a "human rights" demonstration in the Jordanian capital and a couple days of Arab-Kurdish ethnic rioting following a football game “unusual events in tightly-controlled Syria. There may be an outside hand in them, endeavouring to destabilize the Syrian regime preparatory to some major, externally organized action.”

In a desperate electioneering trick rigged by the Cheney, Rumsfeld hegemony Leupp warns: “Even if Israeli action provides the context, Israeli forces won’t be needed, and US action will be lent some thin international legitimacy if a few hundred "coalition" troops participate. Thus a second Arab nation will become Americanizedly "free," while Palestinians infuriated by these events will commit acts that will justify the "ethnic cleansing" of the West Bank.”

No wonder John Pilger refers to Israel as “the guard dog of America’s plans for the Middle East.”

Still, if you thought that predicament was gloomy, this high placed source fears Armageddon.

"We have to sort out the cards again — the war on terror, the question of Palestine, the question of Iraq, the question of Afghanistan, WMD, Iran. It is such a hotch-potch at the present time that I’m afraid the making of a third world war is actually taking place in front of our very eyes." The words of Prince Hassan of Jordan talking to BBC Radio Four.

Ethical foreign policy

The British Foreign Office’s latest human rights report (something that must suffer serious censorship from the Ministry of Defence) blasts Israel for its “worrying disregard for human rights” and “the impact that the continuing Israeli occupation and the associated military occupations have had on the lives of ordinary Palestinians.”

That doesn’t stop Tony Bliar and the crack salesmen at Defence selling all manner of murderous tools including leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents to the country with the UN’s worst human rights record since the Second World War.

Best friends

After being kept waiting for 45 minutes while French president Jacques Chirac concluded his meeting, Bliar got to shake hands with one of the West’s favourite monsters, Colonel Muhumar Gaddafi, welcoming him back into the club with a trademark Bliar grin. Tony used the age ol’ War on Terror™ card, as a pretence to reopen ties, saying Gadaffi was prepared to fight the evil forces of terrorism. A slobbering foreign secretary, Jack Straw, describe the previously labelled terrorist as "statesmanlike and courageous". Good thing the government didn’t pop him when they had a chance. Former MI5 agent David Shayler, hauled over the coals for breaking the Official Secrets Act, paid £100,000 to an al-Qaida cell in Libya to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996.

Just like everything else though in the current Anglo-US Middle East policy, spun as the War on Terror™, the real reason for the rekindling of ties took place behind closed doors with no cameras in sight. Shaking hands after Tony with the leader who had come in from the cold were suits from energy giant Shell and BAE, the weapons and aerospace conglomerate formerly called British Aerospace. So let’s just make this clear right now Tony’s fleeting visit to Tripoli was nothing to do with the fact that Libya has 3% of the world’s oil reserves and significant gas reserves to boot while the UK has just 5.4 years worth of oil left, according to recent BP statistics.

Robert Fisk summed up Blair’s desert adventure best. “Of course, it’s not difficult to see what lies behind today’s charade,” he wrote on the day of the meeting. “Having taken his country to war on a cocktail of lies and distortion, Lord Blair must commit yet another fraud by claiming that the "defanging" of Libya is a direct result of the illegal invasion of Iraq — and thus justifies the whole disastrous occupation of Mesopotamia. I don’t blame him for trying. Anyone with the conscience which our PM should be suffering is bound to search for a get-out. What does amaze me is his choice of fall-guy: one of the weirdest, battiest, funniest, deadliest Arab dictators of them all.

“Nor does the narrative of history make our Prime Minister’s voyage to the Orient any saner. First of all, he sends our soldiers into Iraq because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which no longer exist; then he pays a social call on Libya because Gaddafi really has had weapons of mass destruction all along. Or has he?”

At least the British trade minister Patricia Hewitt came close to acknowledging the reality of oil diplomacy on British TV days after Tony returned from the North African desert. She admitted that “oil, of course, is important and in the next few years — the next decade or so — Britain is going to become an importer of gas and then of oil” adding that the UK will “have to make sure that we can get secure oil and energy supplies from many different parts of the world".

The race for oil has heated up with the world’s most populous nation, China, having pressing energy needs and willing to pay top dollar to establish strategic reserves. The world is moving to shore up its future energy supply, a potentially dangerous clash of the titans.

Biting the hand that feeds it Michael Meacher, a minister in the Bliar government until 2000, writes eloquently in the Guardian on the farcical terror façade. In particular he discusses the “US backing of Islamic terrorism in the Balkans” in the 1980s and 1990s. “A vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling through Croatia was organised by US, Turkish and Iranian clandestine agencies, together with Afghan mojahedin and pro-Iranian Hizbollah. Aircraft from Iran Air were used, joined by a US-sponsored fleet of C-130 Hercules,” he writes.
Among a litany of massacres “retired US officers heading Military Professional Resources Inc, a private paramilitary firm based in Virginia, planned the bloody Croatian ‘liberation’ of the Serb-held Krajina enclave, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs.”
Need we ask "why"? The former minister explains that from the 1980s, one aim of US energy strategy was to “break Russia’s monopoly over oil and gas transport routes and secure pro-western governments in the strategic Black Sea-Caspian Sea oil-rich basin. A crucial oil corridor, called the Trans-Balkan pipeline, designed to become the main route to the west for oil and gas extracted in central Asia, was to run from the Black Sea to the Adriatic via Bulgaria, Macedonia near the border with Kosovo, and Albania. Another was to run across Serbia to Adriatic ports in Croatia and Italy, fed by a pipeline running from a Black Sea port in Romania.”
Go back further and you’ll see the US supplying and training the Mujahedeen. If the government wasn’t part of the military industrial complex, there’d be a simple lesson to learn from its efforts to manipulate through the provision of arms: Give ‘em teeth and sooner or later they’ll always bite you back.

Clustering around IraqIn what should be, and in any other political climate would be, another nail in the impeachment coffin of Dubya, former FBI wire tapper Sibel Edmonds told the 9/11 commission that the government had been alerted to the likelihood of an attack in the US using passenger aircraft as early as May, 2001.
Ms Edmonds branded Condoleeza Rice’s claims of receiving no specific information of a domestic threat or of an attack using airplanes prior to 11 September “an outrageous lie” in an interview with Salon.
Ms Edmonds blew the whistle on the FBI’s wire tapping department in 2002 over its slack operations in the wake of the airplane attacks.
The allegations follow the damaging testimony and book by Richard Clarke who warned the Bush administration of the al-Qaida threat in January 2001 only to see it relegated to subordinates. Then just the day after the attacks took place Bush openly challenged his counter-terrorism adviser to unearth a thread between them and Iraq.
"By invading Iraq," Clarke told the commission, "the president of the United States has greatly undermined the War on Terror™."
Commissions regrettably are always a way for politicians to officially, tidily sweep under the carpet any lingering national security debate (See the Warren Commission post JFK, and Nixon’s let off) and we do not expect this piece of official public relations to be any different, but scutinise what some have said at these hearings and the blatant disregard for logic, humanity and respect becomes more apparent across the Bush regime.

It’s all about hearts & minds

Revolution War Sources

Corporate War Sources

The eternal tinderbox

Best friends

It’s all about hearts & minds

Revolution War Sources

Corporate War Sources

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