It has been a busy couple of weeks for those with blood drenched hands who still tell themselves and anyone within hearing/reading distance that the invasion of Iraq was a totally super idea that went swimmingly. And let’s be blunt who these people are, they are neocons, Zionists, ‘Decents’ and unexamined imperialists and the sad fact is despite being responsible for so much death, for so many war crimes none of them are as shunned (or shunned at all) as those who were right about Iraq and who bear witness to the war crimes. Surely, one might conjecture, that reveals something very wrong with societies that continue to elevate these propagandists to elite privilege and keep them there. You would be right.

However there being no sign of the sickness and corruption whose black heart beats at the centre of our establishments ever being displaced, we have to contend with these unpleasant murder-mongers and the corporate media who promote them. A major ringleader is one Jeffrey Goldberg whose opus on attacking Iran is designed firstly to limit the terms of debate to- when do we attack and by whom. As Paul Woodward puts it ‘You must do what we can’t, because if you don’t, we will‘ a logical fallacy typical (and beloved) of Neocons, the end result is all that is desired- that Iran be attacked that it remain un threatening to US (& its divide and ruled Arab proxies) and Israeli regional hegemony subject to sanctions until such time as it becomes useful or run by a friendly proxy government. An Iran with a viable nuclear industry and if they choose to a breakout capacity for a weapon (much as the Japanese have and this is the model some project Iran is perhaps ultimately aiming for, some not, not to have nuclear weapons but to have the ability at very short notice to produce them, a sort of potential for deterrent that is diplomatically effective yet not as costly as building and maintaining a nuclear strike capability, Trident *cough*). Secondly Goldberg’s real motive is evident in his last couple of paragraphs where he mischievously asserts Israel just wants what is best for the US. It does not, like any state it wants what it thinks is best for it and as it is currently run by an extreme right wing apartheid regime the government thinks what is best is racist dominance.

Readers of Goldberg should also remember he served in the Israeli military and turned a blind eye to torture as ably dissected by Norman Finkelstein, as a journalist he makes a great disgrace to journalism. His job is to push the ‘serious’ minded who went along with the mass murder of Iraqis to consider the urgent need to work with Israel on denying Iran its sovereign right to develop a nuclear energy industry. Read that again because that is what this is about, it is powerful actors seeing their regional hegemony challenged, their sphere of influence reduced by a resurgent Persia able to take a place on the top table with other nuclear powers. If you think this about stopping Mad Mullahs dropping a nuke on Tel Aviv then well done you are a moron, have a copy of The Sun and would you like to buy a bridge?

The nuclear weapon hysteria is but the propaganda icing on the bitter pill of another falsified push to war. Iran is a rational actor in this, it understands mutually assured destruction and it is racist to suggest otherwise. It is not surprising most pro-war propaganda falls into this category, war by necessity requires the dehumanisation of the intended target. Of course Iran is doings itself no favours in the media created ‘court of public opinion’ where human rights is often the medium for… justifying mass murder, which I have to say I find a little odd to say the least. It also makes it far more difficult for human rights campaigns to influence Iran as it further degrades into tyranny, victimising defence lawyers, forced public confessions and ongoing hunger strikes.

I suspect people who agitate for war are ignorant of the random chaotic nature of killing that all wars enable, maybe they see wars as big police actions (Vietnam !?!?) that will swoop upon wrong doers and stop them by overwhelming force. This is a fun idea to have and can make for endless hours of childhood play along with unicorns and starships, it is not however how real warfare actually pans out. There is not a shortage of sources to find out how actual warfare is conducted, even if you can’t find a veteran to talk to there is good literature and cinema, there really is no excuse for holding this ludicrous notion in this day and age. But of course that assumes good faith and honesty on behalf of the hard core, that they are merely ignorant, who promote war to help get their great game playing approved by electorates. Clausewitz’s ‘war is policy pursued by other means’ is only that to the ruling class, politics to most people perhaps at its most basic is the avoidance of violent conflict through informed debate, equal representation, compromise (oh stop laughing). As social creatures a political resolution to conflicts is essential (especially with such powerful weaponry available) and yet such a practical need for peace is actively worked against by ruling classes.

Preeminence of US power and Israeli ‘security’ (or of any nations foreign policy in extremis) can be put simply as- we know we are motherfuckers so logically others will want revenge on us for our crimes, then there are those who want to challenge us for the prize so our solution to that is to preemptively bludgeon to pieces any and all signs of independent, contrary or non-aligned governance.

The US and Israel do not want to have to deal with a regional power that means they lose some degree of influence and control over region with lots of lovely oil, gas and associated trade routes still. Not to mention religious issues of hotly contested traditions and its use in justifying various outrages. Most of the player are rational however but warfare is used easily by them- only the US and Israel have invaded other’s territory in the last 100 years, only the US and Israel posses nuclear weapons and only the US has used them in warfare. Only Iran has had a coup inflicted upon it by outside forces (the UK & US) only Iran has had a neighbouring dictator encouraged and armed by the US invade it leading to 8 years of long war described as seeing the worst of trench combat since World War One. So maybe, think the warmongers, Iran might be looking for payback, we go back to one of the reasonings for hegemony, that knowing your crimes cause resentment you assume others will be coming to get you –paranoia- that only absolute suppression of any emerging competition for power keeps you safe. It is depressing that the more you read of history, geopolitics and diplomacy the more the politics of a particularly nasty playground seem fairly indistinguishable. But Iran has shown not an expansionist aggression but a determination to stop being fucked with and if what that takes is entry to the nuclear club then so be it. There are also reasons of energy security, Iran has little refinery capacity, oil will run out at some point and as with most countries it is seeing the need for a generating capacity met with nuclear. However control of the uranium market and nuclear fuel refining is a massively important global market that established players do not want extra competition in.

Meanwhile…proliferation, lots of nuclear weapons lying around the Earth is a bad thing, but when a power with lots of nuclear weapons is telling nations with none that they can’t have any under threat of attack that is not really about proliferation is it? It’s about maintaining ones power, if you want to reduce the number and spread of nuclear weapons, ending that kind of foreign policy behaviour is one key element of an anti-proliferation strategy. People want weapons to defend themselves when they are threatened, turning that into an overly complex conveniently forgotten fact in ‘national security’ calculations is a masterstroke of the warmonger. Game theory has lot to answer for, no wonder its key role in both foreign policy and economics came from US corporate studies where John Nash lead the way …while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. A corporation behaves as a sociopath, a corporate state more so and it pays to rationalise its behaviour through academic means, money being so very persuasive of evidence and conclusions. See how that works? (What next a financier paid to create welfare reform, oh they already did that, which actually is quite telling, in the past they had to launder bullshit through academia now they hardly even need to bother).

However even if you reject being asked to step outside your tribal nationalist, religious assumptions and media lead opinions (and surely no one falls into that bracket wise enough to read this) the simple pragmatism of the argument is this- Iran’s response will not be that of a submissive yet momentarily disobedient child that gets spanked (and argue with those words all you want but having for years seen the media presentation of this issues that in essence is what the pro-attack people present as the response they want us to believe will be forthcoming- they will knock naughty Iran into line, hurray, the end). Iran’s response will cause a global increase of conflict, fuel and food price rises and the US and Israel further distrusted and disliked by most people. The consequences were best laid out on Juan Cole’s blog by Mahan Abedin: The Illusion of a ‘limited war’ against Iran-

A top priority for the IRGC high command is to respond so harshly and decisively so as to deter the Americans from a second set of strikes at a future point. The idea here is to avoid what happened to Iraq in the period 1991-2003, when the former Baathist regime was so weakened by sanctions and repeated small-scale military attacks that it quickly collapsed in the face of American and British invading armies.

The range of predictable responses available to the IRGC high command include dramatic hit ad run attacks against military and commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, the use of mid-range ballistic missiles against American bases in the region and Israel and a direct assault on American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. All these options are likely to be used within 48 hours of the start of hostilities.

What is less predictable is the response of the IRGC Qods Force, which is likely to be at the forefront of the Pasdaran’s counter-attack. One possible response by the Qods force is spectacular terrorist-style attacks against American intelligence bases and assets throughout the region. The IRGC Qods Force is believed to have identified every key component of the American intelligence apparatus in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are likely to put this information to good use, especially since the Qods Force suspects that the CIA had a hand in last October’s Jundullah-organised suicide bombing targeting IRGC commanders in Iran’s volatile Sistan va Baluchistan province.

The IRGC navy will also play a key asymmetrical role in the conflict by organising maritime suicide bombings on an industrial scale. By manning its fleet of speedboats with suicide bombers and ramming them into American warships and even neutral commercial shipping, the Pasdaran will hope to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly 40 percent of world crude oil supplies pass.

Jim Lobe and his co-bloggers who track the machinations of the neocon/Zionist axis has Eli Clifton wonder- ‘Is Jeffrey Goldberg Trying To Rationalize Another Preemptive War In The Middle East?‘

Steve Clemons has a sober realist beltway aware analysis of Goldberg’s piece, I think he downplays Goldberg’s ulterior motives somewhat but, his analysis is not unreasonable yet the alarming thing is he would be considered perhaps at the limits of mainstream media discourse on this issue (given that US media has already succesfully convinced Americans that Iran has a bomb and needs to be attacked).

I’d add to this list on the U.S. ledger that China and Russia may exploit the incident and provide a back door to Iran – thus potentially breaking the back of US dominance of the world’s oil and natural gas regimes. Supply of Iranian oil to Japan and Europe may be curtailed without immediate clear and easy supply offsets – thus potentially putting serious pressure on America’s other alliances.

Iran could also animate assets it controls inside Afghanistan and Iraq to threaten and undermine US military operations in those theaters. Also, according to a new poll funded by the Carnegie Corporation and done by the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami, the Arab street may actually support Iran’s nuclear program and could after an Israeli strike for which their leaders were “secretly sympathetic”, as Goldberg writes, begin agitating against and even toppling their regimes. Wars are full of unanticipated, unexpected blowback — consequences perhaps above and beyond what is already expected.

Goldberg is naught but a Zionist hawk and propagandist and that his piece is being read as an objective assessment by many is very problematic for prospects of a sane resolution. Clemons does ask why if Israel wants this attack so badly does it no capitulate on Palestinian issues, this I think underestimates the irrational approach to Palestinians now prevalent in Israel, racism precludes Zionists seeing Palestinians as deserving of equal rights. Certainly the discourse in the US is opening up but that is on perceptions of Israel and the awareness of Palestinian human rights, as has been observed by many foreign policy is an elite issues and on this the White house answers to a very different constituency than the voters. Part of this different calculation will be the Israel Lobby, especially with mid terms approaching, arms manufactures and the ‘security ‘ industry that has expanded so dramatically in the post 911 paranoia and authoritarianism will have no objections to the years of strife born from Iran’s response to the act of war an attack on it is. Yet while elites plot their moves largely personally free of consequence we will suffer the consequences, much as 7/7 was mostly a homicidal response to Tony Blair throwing in his lot with the Bush White house’s wars of aggression. A wars that also meant the window of opportunity, of the slim chance of reconstruction in Afghanistan under a regime that bolstered civil society was dumped in order to destroy some other lands infrastructure and people (though in honesty there is little evidence they might even of tried that, neocon Zalmay Khalilzad was making deals with warlords, just as he did previously with the Taliban for Unocal, before the first bomber deployed over Kabul).

And thus we find ourselves cyclically back to where we came from, because we never made the war criminals and their propagandist pay for what they did over Iraq they are here to play it out again with just one letter changed. Why are our elites’ libidos to be satisfied in the shedding of others blood? That should be a personal problem worked out over decades with regular medical intervention however as they are the people who make up the ruling class their personal problems become all our problems. They have already manoeuvred Iran into a position where whatever it does can be called ‘not enough’ and the media will not look too closely, much as this Guardian piece completely left out the Turkey Brazil agreement as if that happened in some other world and had no bearing on this world (how illusory is the mediated ‘truth’ becoming?). Will they calculate whether to attack on the consequences, which as seen are massive and terrible, by any reasonable measure that would make this an open and shut case- no attack. Or as before never mind the aftermath, action is its own justification when consequences are for others to deal with. Maybe I could have saved all this rambling guff by just saying- stop the delusion military action and warfare is based in a moral calculation, which is how this attack is being sold, Iran is a threat so it is necessary to attack it. The number of times warfare was justified can be counted on one hand (and even with some fingers missing due to unexploded ordnance perhaps) this isn’t one of them by any stretch of the propagandist’s imagination. If you make a realist argument the attack scenario also fails, so really all you have left is belligerent tribalism and really that isn’t an argument so much as a …personal failing. And seriously if you think military action improves human rights then please bomb the UK, our police can murder people on camera in broad daylight and gett away with it, our migrant jails hold people without charges for years and the media ignore their hunger strikes, our leaders lied to get in and are now dismantling services to enrich the already wealthy while we will die and suffer from the lack of health & welfare, so please, if bombing solves this then hey- charity begins at home right?

PS. Israel seems inconsolable on this and as the consequences of the war crime of Iraq on the war pimps was-um, that they all did even better in their careers, the elite will find little personal cost in enacting this madness, so I think the case needs to be repeatedly made that the consequences are not just what Iran does in response but what we do to the warmongers, this time it has to be the end of the hack careers of their glossy mags/websites/university appointments, the end of their political careers and their shitty books will not sell and they will be hounded from every corner of this earth until the actually ask for the relative peace and quiet of a cell at the Hague. Like that would ever happen, too radical (not least for the ICC), unlike crossing into another country and killing many of its people and blowing up their buildings, that’s like normal and fine, not at all psychotic?