COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

As the world's media convulses over the latest Arab-inflicted massacre against the poor, innocent people of Israel, spare a thought for poor Amira Abu Aser, buried in Gaza on Wednesday after being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house she and her family had been visiting. She spent only twenty days on this earth.


Was she firing rockets into Israel? Did she deserve to die? Is her death not an act of 'terrorism'?

RADICAL OPINIONS AFTER A WEEK AWAY…

After a regrettable and difficult week away from world affairs and away from this blog of mine, I am now officially back and back with a vengeance. (Incidentally, my thanks to the blogger Legal Alien who, in the meantime, left an insightful and passionate comment in response to my earlier posting on Barack Obama).

So, what has been going on in this dark, dank and dismal world we all so passively and effortlessly inhabit over the past few days? Here are the radical opinions – on the major geopolitical events to have rocked the globe over the past week – that the mainstream media have been denying you, but which this particular blog was set up to provide and purvey:

1) Prince Harry’s war in Afghanistan

Thanks to Matt Drudge, we discovered that the third in line to the British throne, Harry Windsor, second son of Diana, has been fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban over the past two months. Some say he is a war hero, while our Prime Minister says we owe him a debt of gratitude – but why? Is a spoiled, ex-Etonian, rich, royal brat who volunteers to fly half way around the world in order to help sustain the invasion and occupation of a poor, defenceless country, populated by brown-skinned Muslim inhabitants (none of whom, by the way, had anything whatsoever to do with the 9-11 attacks!), and to continue fighting a pointless and seemingly endless counter-insurgency war against history’s most stubborn and determined insurgents, really deserving of hero status and deserving of our gratitude?

The media have shown us the usual grainy, black-and-white cockpit videos of ‘coalition’ bombs – ordered and directed by Prince Harry – destroying their ‘terrorist’ targets? But what about the collateral damage? How much innocent Afghan blood does our young prince have on his royal hands? The fact is that US-led and NATO-led ‘coalition’ forces in Afghanistan, including ‘our boys’ from Britain (and including Harry!), have actually killed more civilians there than Taliban insurgents or Al Qaeda terrorists – and continue to do so. Yet our media remain silent on this key point and prefer instead to uncritically idolize Harry and his warmongering ilk.

2) Ongoing violence in Iraq

Despite claims from hawks in the United States that the ‘surge’ in the number of American troops occupying Iraq has led to a verifiable and indisputable decline in the number of civilian casualties in Baghdad and the country’s various other hot spots, the number of Iraqis killed actually rose (!) by 33 percent from January to February, according to official figures released on Saturday. The combined figures obtained by AFP from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January. How many of our newspapers chose to report this horrific yet significant statistic on their front pages? Or with banner headlines on the inside pages? Typically, and depressingly, none at all. Zero.

3) Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians

The cat is now out of the bag: Israel’s deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai admitted on Friday what those of us on the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian left have long believed, i.e. that the Jewish state is bent upon destroying the Palestinian people and is engaged in a genocidal occupation. Vilnai told Israeli army radio,

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

“Shoah” is of course the Hebrew word normally reserved by Israelis for referring only to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during World War II.

Of course, Israel is not gassing the Palestinians en masse, nor is it massacring the residents of Gaza (or the West Bank) on Nazi-like levels. Yet, according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition of genocide includes acts,

“….committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Is there any better or more apt description for an occupying state which chooses to respond to the deaths of two or three of its citizens in rocket attacks over the space of a few months by killing over a hundred of its enemies in the space of a few days, including a six-month-old baby and four boys playing football? Is this a proportionate act of self-defence or a genocidal act of aggression? I have no doubt that it is the latter.

So, the question is: who can reverse – or at least stem – these negative, depressing and bloody geopolitical trends? Will it perhaps be the next President of the United States of America? Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging on the US presidential elections and the Texas and Ohio primaries which conventional wisdom suggests Senator Hillary Clinton must win in order to stay in the race….

Your comments are welcome (in fact, requested! demanded!) on any and all of the above issues. And, please, please, keep checking back to this blog for the latest radical opinions on the latest world events.

TIME FOR MUSLIMS TO SAY: 'NOT IN MY NAME'

Muslims often - rightly - accuse the media and the security services of Islamophobia, of hyping the terrorism threat, of distorting intelligence and fabricating evidence, of demonizing ordinary Muslims. In fact, this blog of mine has done so several times, based on solid facts, since its inception in December.

Yet we must remember that there are unquestionaly and undeniably several 'bad apples' (for want of a softer euphemism!) in the Muslim community - men (and women) who do actually (wrongly) believe Islam condones and even sanctifies violence and bloodshed; who do view jihad (mistakenly) as a primarily military, rather than a spiritual, struggle; who do in fact hate the West not simply for its foreign policy but because it is the West; it is non-Muslim, secular and liberal.

One such fanatical Muslim bigot is British-born, Birmingham-based Parviz Khan, who was sentenced to life in prison this week after pleading guilty to a plot to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier serving in the British army. The security services had bugged his home in Alum Rock and the transcripts of the surveillance intercepts make for a chilling and rather disturbing read:

"The MI5 bugging device at Parviz Khan's Birmingham home recorded attempts to indoctrinate Khan's five-year-old son in the ethos of al-Qaida inspired violence.

In one passage co-defendant Hamid Elasmar asks the boy: "How do you cut their neck?"
Khan then prompts the youngster, saying: "How do you cut them with a knife? Show me."
Then Khan is heard saying: "Like this. Good."

Khan was also recorded asking his son: "Who do you love?" "I love sheikh Osama Bin Laden," the child replies. Khan asks his son if he loves anyone else. The boy names extreme Muslim cleric Abu Hamza and Islamic militant sheikh Abdullah Rehman.

Then Khan asks the youngster: "Who do you kill?" The child replies: "America kill." Asked who else, the boy responds "Bush I kill" and "Blair kill." Prompted by his father, the five-year-old says he also wants to kill "kuffar" (a derogatory term for a non- Muslim), "Hindu," and "sharabi" (drunks).

Khan was also recorded discussing his desire that his three-year-old daughter should eventually marry a terrorist. "Inshallah [God willing], she'll marry into them and give birth to them," he told Zahoor Iqbal, a long-time friend. The trial jury was told that Khan then called his daughter towards him and asked her: "What will you cook for the men in the mountains?"

This is not 'jihad'. This is not even simply 'terrorism'. This is child abuse - plain and simple. How any self-proclaimed, so-called 'Muslim' can justify filling their innocent children's heads with such bile, hatred and violence, I simply do not know!

On February 14th 2003, I marched in London with millions of anti-war Muslims, protesting against the impending invasion of Iraq and carrying banners proclaiming 'Not In My Name'. At times like this, when I see the miserable, humourless, hate-filled mug shot of 'Muslims' like Parviz Khan staring out from the TV screen, I have to say to him and to his ilk: 'Not In My Name'. You do not represent my Islam, my Quran or my Prophet. You are a disgrace, a shame, an embarrassment and I disassociate myself and my beliefs from you and yours.

HELP! THE TERRORISTS ARE COMING! (OR ARE THEY?)

Four days till Christmas, and the US government’s national threat level is already at Yellow (i.e. “Elevated”) while the threat level for all domestic and international flights is Orange (i.e. “High). Here in the UK, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, has warned that the threat of terrorist attacks in public places, including from radioactive dirty bombs (!), is “growing” and has asked the public “to remain vigilant over the Christmas period”.

In the press, New Labour lackeys and laptop bombardiers like Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian and David Aaronovitch in the Times have railed this week in their columns against those who would dare suggest that “terrorism isn't that big a threat”. But – rhetorical sweeps, emotive language and instinctive reactions aside – how big is the terrorist threat to all of us ordinary folks, minding our own business, on the streets of London and Birmingham (or, for that matter, on the streets of New York and Los Angeles)?

Here are some facts and figures – often so overlooked and/or misunderstood by our political and journalistic classes who tend to avoid facts and figures, especially those which don’t fit into their pre-conceived view of the world – courtesy of the very brilliant American academic, John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University and author of the excellent book, ‘Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them’:

“Those adept at hyperbole like to proclaim that we live in "the age of terror." However…the number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism by this definition is generally a few hundred a year. In fact, until 2001 far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning. Moreover, except for 2001, virtually none of these terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Indeed, outside of 2001, fewer people have died in America from international terrorism than have drowned in toilets.

“Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, however, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism over the period is not a great deal more than the number killed by lightning--or by accident-causing deer or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts over the same period. In almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States--some 300-400.

“Americans worry intensely about "another 9/11," but if one of these were to occur every three months for the next five years, the chance of being killed in one of them is two one-hundredths of one percent: the posited attacks would kill 60,000 which is about .02 percent of 300,000,000. This would be, of course, an extended and major tragedy, but an individual's chances of being killed, while no longer microscopic, would still remain small even under this extreme scenario.

“Another assessment comes from astronomer Alan Harris. Using State Department figures, he assumes a worldwide death rate from international terrorism of 1000 per year--that is, he assumes in his estimate that there would be another 9/11 somewhere in the world every several years. Over an 80 year period under those conditions some 80,000 deaths would occur which would mean that the lifetime probability that a resident of the globe will die at the hands of international terrorists is about one in 75,000 (6 billion divided by 80,000). This, he points out, is about the same likelihood that one would die over the same interval from the impact on the earth of an especially ill-directed asteroid or comet. If there are no repeats of 9/11, the lifetime probability of being killed by an international terrorist becomes about one in 120,000.”

To summarize Mueller: more people drown in bathtubs than are killed by international terrorists, and we are more likely to be killed by an asteroid, Hollywood-style a la Armageddon or Deep Impact, than we are to die at the hands of Osama and co.

Over to you, David and Tim…

CHEERLEADERS FOR INTERNMENT

The government has announced plans to extend the period that terrorism suspects can be held without charge from 28 days to 42 days – the equivalent of a six-week prison sentence for someone only suspected (not convicted, not even charged) of planning or committing an act of terrorism. If passed, such a law would be the latest in a long, dark and dismal line of relentless New Labour attacks on our once-cherished civil liberties.

The move has been met with opposition from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, criticism from the press and – thankfully – scepticism from the British public. So now, right on cue, the government’s media acolytes have been given the nod to start defending the indefensible, employing rhetorical red herrings and scare-crow arguments.

First out of the starting blocks was Blair biographer (hagiographer?) and New Labour cheerleader, John Rentoul in the Independent, who described the controversial 42-day proposal as “perfectly sensible” and drew attention to comments by Lord Carlile, the ‘independent’ reviewer of the government’s anti-terrorism legislation, decrying the use of the word “internment” to describe the 42-day upper limit.

Then, yesterday, New Labour apologist David Aaronovitch chose to devote his entire column in the Times to debunking the claim by human-rights group Liberty that Britain had, in effect, “the most draconian detention laws in the Western world”. Spain and Italy, claims Aaronovitch, are far worse.

Yet, conveniently, neither Aaronovitch nor Rentoul bother to address the substance of the arguments put forward by opponents of the 42-day proposal. For example, what about the sheer arbitrariness of the number 42? Why 42? Not 52? Or 38? Or 49? As columnist Seamas Milne has written in the Guardian:

“What started a generation ago as a two-day limit on detention without charge, as exists for American citizens in the US, was fixed at seven days in 2000; ratcheted up to 14 in 2003; raised again to 28 in 2006; and is now heading for two months of effective internment. The arbitrariness of this ratcheting-up is obvious: in spite of the fact that we're talking about the country's most basic civil liberties, it has clearly been a matter of think of a number and double it.”

And, since the pre-charge detention period was outrageously increased to 28 over a year ago, have the police had to hold any terror suspect for longer than 28 days? Have any of their investigations been undermined by the current 28-day upper limit? The answer, as the Home Office itself concedes, is no.

What do Aaronovitch and Rentoul have to say about all of this? Nothing. Not even 28 words.

In fact, while lazily focusing their rhetorical guns on the ‘usual suspects’ at campaigning organizations like Liberty, they choose to ignore substantive and widespread opposition to the proposed 42-day detention limit from the more credible likes of Sir Ken MacDonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS); Jonathan Evans, the head of the Security Service (MI5); the Home Affairs Select Committee; Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General; and – belatedly – Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary.

Who should we trust on this? MI5 and the CPS, or Aaronovitch and Rentoul?

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE WE KILLING IN IRAQ?

Of the many moral outrages associated with the unprovoked, illegal and unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq, perhaps the most egregious and unforgivable is our continuing failure to take responsibility for the ongoing carnage and loss of lives there. From the very outset of the conflict, Anglo-American commanders on the ground paid little attention to the so-called ‘collateral damage’ inflicted on the Iraqi civilian populace by their invading forces. The infamous declaration by US general Tommy Franks – "We don't do body counts" – set the cold-blooded tone for things to come.

In fact, earlier this year, an internal army investigation by Major General Eldon Bargewell – commissioned in the wake of the notorious Haditha massacre - was scathing in its criticisms of the US Marine Corps in Iraq and, in particular, the deliberate indifference by Marines to the massive loss of innocent Iraqi lives resulting from their trigger-happy actions. From the Washington Post's report:

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics," Bargewell wrote. He condemned that approach because it could desensitize Marines to the welfare of noncombatants. "Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

It is this casual indifference to the spilling of innocent blood, this view of civilian deaths as routine and natural, this primacy on the value of American lives over Iraqi lives – all testified to by a senior US general – which reminds those of us who opposed the war that we were right to do so and are right to continue to oppose the subsequent and ongoing occupation. One such anti-war protestor, who has managed to both become a moral beacon as well as sharp thorn in the side of our warmongering government, is Brian Haw, who has (literally) been camped outside of Parliament for over six years now, single-handedly manning his 24-hour vigil there in opposition to the militaristic foreign policies of our elected politicians.

On Sunday, however, so-called ‘liberal hawk’ (and ex-left-winger) Nick Cohen, chose to use his Observer column to excoriate, defame and patronize Haw, while deliberately distorting the situation vis a vis killings in Iraq. Cohen claims:

“Like so many others, Haw can't ask who is killing whom in Iraq. There are no slogans expressing his disgust at the death squads of the Baathists and Iranian-backed Shia militias, nor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq…The best justification for Haw's morality is that if British and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot guarantee order, they are indirectly responsible for atrocities committed by their opponents."

Notice here the key planks in Cohen’s non-argument. 1) Blame everyone else. He spits out the names of the usual suspects – Baathists, militias, Al Qaeda, etc – without recognizing the rather obvious and straightforward point that the fact that terrorists, insurgents and criminals are nowadays responsible for the bulk of the bloodshed in Iraq does not mean that we (the British, the Americans, the ‘allies’) are not also responsible for some share in that same bloodshed. After all, their killing of innocents do not preclude our own killing of innocents. 2) Assume only indirect responsibility. Cohen is willing to accept only that the occupying troops should be doing more to stem the violence (of others), rather than acknowledge our pro-active role in spreading violence, and his solution is for US and UK troops to inflict even more violence in the name of ‘counter-insurgency’, although he pretends that our violence has no consequences for the innocents of Iraq, no ‘collateral damage’ to apologize or be ashamed for.

As the massacres in Haditha and elsewhere reveal, however, the reality on the ground is a far cry from the distorted, deceptive and dishonest vision of Iraq promulgated by liberal hawks like Cohen.

Of course, Cohen is only the latest in a long line of pro-war liberal pundits (think Aaronovitch, think Hitchens, think Hari) who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the fact that civilian deaths in Iraq are not simply the ‘indirect’ responsibility of the ‘benign’ occupying forces (i.e. the Americans and the Brits) but, in hundreds, nay thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of cases, the direct moral responsibility of the marauding militaries of the United States and United Kingdom.

Take the report from the leading epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, published late last year in the renowned British medical journal the Lancet. It estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. According to the study, of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes. Crucially, out of those violent deaths, Iraqi households attributed 31 percent of the deaths to coalition forces – i.e. American and British troops, our troops, the ‘liberators’ of Iraq, have the blood of around 186,000 innocent Iraqi civilians on their hands.

There is simply no avoiding this fact. You can try and question the credibility of this report. You can try. But you’ll fail. One of the first to do so was George W. Bush, who said at the time: "Six-hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at is just... it's not credible." Of course, it is difficult to take lessons in credibility, science or statistics from a man who is virtually illiterate and innumerate and who has publicly described the inhabitants of Athens as "Grecians". It is especially difficult in light of the fact that the epidemiologists at John Hopkins University are amongst the finest in the world and their study was peer-reviewed before being published in the world-renowned Lancet to the widespread acclaim and approval of their academic colleagues – Professor Ronald Waldman, for example, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have." And despite the British government’s own pathetic public attempts to cast doubt on the report’s findings, the Ministry of Defence’s own chief scientific advisor said in an internal memo that the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study was "robust".

So that’s 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq, for which we are indirectly responsible. And 186,000 for which we are directly responsible. Yet, tragically, depressingly, we, the great British public, the great American public, the inhabitants of the self-proclaimed free world remain – like those Marines castigated for Haditha by General Bargewell in April – almost totally indifferent to and unmoved by the death and destruction that we have inflicted on the poor people of that castrated and defenceless nation.

Madeleine Bunting wrote in the Guardian in November:

“Can we claim innocence of the chaotic violence of Iraq now normalised into the background of our lives? …We’re numbed to the atrocities; except for some stalwarts, the initial anti-war activism has been crowded out by other responsibilities. Life goes on, even if in Baghdad it frequently doesn’t."

We are indeed numbed. Apathetic even. Uncaring and seemingly blind to the suffering we have caused. The responsibility for 186,000 deaths lies squarely at our own doorstep. Imagine: the equivalent of the entire population of Portsmouth or Luton wiped out by members of the US and UK armed forces in Iraq in less than four years. Should that not bother us? Should that not shame us? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is understandably difficult to envisage and fathom – after all, in the notorious words of Joseph Stalin “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

So let us consider an individual incident. Not a faceless statistic, but the real story of real deaths. The latest edition of the New York Review of Books includes an essay by the brilliant Michael Massing, in which he casts a light on a whole host of new books that he hopes will "impress on Americans the terrible human costs of the invasion". Massing quotes from one such book – House to House: An Epic Memoir of War – at the start of his essay, in which the author, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, a gung-ho supporter of the war, casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,

“…a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.”

Shocked? You should be. It’s not for no reason that the fiercely independent US journalist, Dahr Jamail, has written that “if the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended”. Of course, it has become the ideologically-charged job of pro-war, pro-government flacks like Nick Cohen in the Observer to prevent us from getting to grips with the truth of this “real story”; of death, destruction and destitution on a countrywide scale. In fact, how people like him sleep at night, I’ll never know.

Ironically, Cohen concludes Sunday’s article with this gem of a line: “I don't think the moral blindness of the intelligentsia can last much longer. Obviously, some who have lost their bearings after Iraq will never find them again and stagger around bellowing for the rest of their days…”

Thanks Nick - I couldn’t possibly have written a better description of you and your liberal, hawkish friends myself.

IS IRAN STILL GOING TO GET BOMBED?

One point I failed to consider fully in my first post on this week’s publication of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is how its publication affects the prospects for military action. Much of the commentariat, both on the left and the right, seem certain now, as Slate’s foreign affairs specialist Fred Kaplan puts it, "If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero." Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan's conclusion upon reading the NIE is equally optimistic: “I do think it removes all likelihood of this administration launching a new war in the next year.” Adrian Hamilton's latest column in the Independent is entitled: “Forget any idea of a military strike on Iran”. And Ray Takeyh, author of the recent book ‘Hidden Iran’ and a self-proclaimed expert on the region at the influential Council of Foreign Relations in New York, says that the report “essentially removes the possibility of a military confrontation between the United States and Iran over the nuclear issue…the military option at this point is not on the table.”

Really Ray?

The miserable record of the past seven years suggests that President Bush and his acolytes have never let anything as insignificant as facts or figures get in the way of their policies and prejudices. As one senior Bush aide told the New York Times Magazine in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It is only in this context – of an irrational and arrogant administration which prefers fantasy over reality, and ill-conceived and unilateral actions over reasoned deliberation and empirical evidence – that we can truly understand how and why it is that George Bush is able to stand up, in front of the White House press corps, on the day after the NIE is released (the very same NIE which declares Iran has (i) no nuclear weapons, (ii) no nuclear weapons programme and (iii) no foreseeable plans to launch a nuclear weapons programme) and proclaim, “I still feel strongly that Iran is a danger…I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. My opinion hasn't changed.” What?!?! (I am reminded here of comedian Stephen Colbert's hilarious and sarcastic denunciation of Bush, standing only a few feet away from the President and the First Lady at the White House Press Corespondents Dinner last year: “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.”)

So, Bush feels no differently about Iran. Nor do the media’s most influential neoconservatives (Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Norman Podhoretz). In fact, one of their number, the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan, gave the game away this week:

“The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action. A military strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities was always fraught with risk. For the Bush administration, that option is gone.”

Notice the crucial part of this statement – no, not the “option is gone” part or the “fraught with risk” part. Notice the key caveat: “The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran…unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action.”

So the military option is still on the table, says Bush, and – forget the nukes! - it will be used in response to provocations by the Iranians, say his neocon supporters. It all makes perfect sense. But, what if the Iranians refuse to play ball and ‘provoke’ the Americans, either in Iraq or Lebanon or elsewhere? Simple – the Americans will then do the provoking.

In fact, earlier this year, in February, a former Bush administration official actually suggested that the US government is using the backdrop of sectarian violence in Iraq to deliberately provoke a military conflict with the Iranians. Speaking on CNN, Hillary Mann, the former director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council, warned that the hawks in the Pentagon were “trying to push a provocative, accidental conflict”. She added that the administration hopes to goad the Iranians into an overreaction so that it would then have the justification to carry out “limited strikes” against nuclear infrastructure and Revolutionary Guards buildings inside of Iran.

In the same month, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and one of Washington’s leading foreign policy ‘grandees’, went even further than Mann. Most stunning and shocking was his description of what he called a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

As Barry Grey – one of the few journalists present on Capitol Hill to actually record and report Brzezinski’s damning comments – points out, “this was an unmistakable warning to the US Congress, replete with quotation marks to discount the “defensive” nature of such military action, that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext for an attack on Iran. Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war.”

It is a view shared by (among others) long-time neocon watchers, Jim Lobe of the IPS news agency and Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, as well as the award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the New Yorker only two months ago:

“This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.”

“Counterterrorism”? Hallelujah! God bless 9/11. Everything ultimately comes back to the good old ‘War on Terror’. So, even if Iran has no nukes, and the American intelligence admits they have no nukes, the American government still has a backdoor route (excuse? ruse? pretext?) to launching an attack on the Iranians. If they do, God help us all – because even George W. Bush himself has described a potential conflict with Iran as "World War III."