The Crime of Lebanon and Palestine - Are Iran and
Syria Next? - Part II

by Stephen Lendman

On July 26, Aljazeerah reported a story headlined -
“Israeli invasion of Lebanon planned by neocons in
June (2006).”  It was done at a June 17 and 18
meeting at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado at which former
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud
Knesset member Natan Sharansky met with US Vice
President Dick Cheney.  The purpose was to discuss the
planned and impending Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)
invasions of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.  Cheney
was thoroughly briefed and approved the coming
assaults - before Hamas’ capture of an IDF soldier on
June 25 or Hezbollah’s capturing of two others in an
exchange first reported as occurring in Israel and now
believed to have happened inside Lebanon after IDF
forces illegally entered the country.

Following the Colorado meeting, Netanyahu returned to
Israel for a special “Ex-Prime Ministers” meeting in
which he conveyed the message of US support to carry
out the “Clean Break” policy officially ending all
past peace accords including Oslo.  At the meeting in
Israel in addition to Binyamin Netanyahu were current
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Prime Ministers
Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres.

Aljazeerah also reported that after the Colorado AEI
conference Natan Sharansky met with the right wing
Heritage Foundation in Washington and then attended a
June 29 seminar at Haverford College in suburban
Philadelphia sponsored by the Middle East Forum led by
US Israeli hawk Daniel Pipes.  Sharansky appeared
there with Republican Senator Rick Santorum who on
July 20 was hawkishly advocating war against Syria,
Iran, and “Islamo-fascism” in an inflamatory speech at
the National Press Club attended by a cheering section
of supporters composed of members of the neocon Israel
Project, on whose Board Santorum serves along with
Georgia Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss and
Virginia Republican Representative Tom Davis.

Aljazeerah reported further that in a published
interview in the Spanish newspaper ABC on July 23,
Syrian Information Minister Moshen Bilal warned Israel
that his country would enter the Lebanon conflict if
Israel launched a major incursion into the country.
He said: “If Israel makes a land entry into Lebanon,
they can get to within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of
Damascus.  What will we do? Stand by with our arms
folded? Absolutely not. Without any doubt Syria will
intervene in the conflict.”  Bilal said his country
wanted above all a ceasefire “as soon as possible”
combined with a prisoner exchange and explained he was
working with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel
Moratinos with whom he had met in Madrid.  Bilal also
criticized the US saying it was “unjustifiable (that)
the superpower is not working for a rapid ceasefire.”
He rejected claims by Washington that
Syria had armed Hezbollah (which contradicted an
earlier admission by the Syrian defense minister that
his country did supply some arms to Hezbollah), saying
it offered “moral support” but not financing for “any
resistance.”

The Aljazeerah report also cited the work of former
intelligence officer and now author/writer James
Bamford who wrote about “going after Syria (and then
Iran) in accordance with the ‘A Clean Break’ war for
Israel agenda” in his book A Pretext for War published
in 2004 which concentrated on the abuse of the US’s
intelligence agencies to invent reasons to attack
Iraq.  If Bamford is right, Syria may soon be drawn
into this conflict, and if so, will Iran be next?

Another Report Believes the “War With Iran is On”

Iran may indeed be next (and Syria too) according to
UK political scientist, human rights activist and
writer Nafeez Ahmed in an article published in OpEd
News on July 23 titled: “UK Govt Sources Confirm War
With Iran Is On.”  In it, Ahmed writes: “In the last
few days, I learned from a credible and informed
source that a former senior Labour government
Minister, who continues to be well-connected to
British military and security officials, confirms that
Britain and the United States ‘will go to war with
Iran before the end of the year.’ “

Ahmed goes on to say that in similar fashion to the
lead-up to the March, 2003 Iraq invasion, current war
plans may change and the scheduled time for it be
begin may be postponed.  But he quoted Vice President
Dick Cheney in an MSNBC interview over a year ago
saying Iran is “right at the top of the list (of)
rogue states (and) Iran has a stated policy that their
objective is the destruction of Israel (so) Israel
might well decide to act first, and let the rest of
the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess
afterwards.”  What the Vice President claimed the
Iranians said was false (the Iranian president was
deliberately misquoted), and he neglected to mention
the immediate mass death and destruction that would
result from this “act,” and the resulting calamity
from destroying commercial nuclear reactor and
facilities sites that would spread devastating
irremediable toxic radiation over a vast area making
those territories uninhabitable forever and eventually
killing an unknown number of people living there from
the cancers and other diseases they will eventually
contract from the deadly contamination.

Ahmed goes on to discount the possibility of Israel
taking the lead in an assault against Iran saying it
prefers to be a “regional proxy force in a US-led
campaign.”  And he reports that writer Seymour Hersh
quotes a former high-level US intelligence official
saying that despite the increasing disaster in Iraq,
overall “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is
just one campaign.  The Bush administration is looking
at this as a huge war zone.  Next, we’re going to have
the Iranian campaign.  We’ve declared war and the bad
guys, wherever they are, are the enemy.  This is the
last hurrah-we’ve got four years, and we want to come
out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
Hersh has been on and off in what his sources are
telling him about the likelihood of war with Iran so
it may be uncertain what conclusion he now has as of
this article’s publication.  But whatever it is, it’s
clear it can change in an instant as things in the
Middle East are so fluid.

Nafeez’s article also reported an analysis of the
Monterey Institute for International Studies on the
likely consequences of a war against Iran in which, if
it happens, the US said it would use “bunker-buster
mini-nukes.”  The language is deceptive as these are
powerful nuclear bombs.  The Institute painted the
dire possibility that an extended conflict with Iran
could catastrophically spin out of control with
irreversible consequences for the global political
economy.  It would affect energy security, relations
with other nations like China and Russia concerned
about their own access to energy supplies in the
region, and the US “dollar-economy” that would be
under pressure, greatly harmed and even potentially
threatened with collapse.

If this scenario is possible, why then would US, UK,
Israeli, and other Western leaders who see what’s
going on, be willing to take the risk?  Ahmed states
what a growing number of knowledgeable observers now
believe - that the Western, mainly US, so-called
neoliberal imperial freewheeling “free-market” model
is failing and may collapse short of a desperate “Hail
Mary” military solution to try to save it even though
the chance for success at best would be uncertain and
in some views unlikely.  And if it fails, the result
may be an unimaginable social, political and economic
calamity.

The fate of the corrupted neoliberal model may be
what’s now at stake.  That model is already unraveling
in Latin America where Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez is proving his alternate Bolivarian
participatory democracy is overwhelmingly popular and
working.  It’s based on a government serving the
people by providing essential social services,
especially to the poor and desperate ones most in need
of it.  Chavez’s success has made him a symbol of hope
and a hero in the region and beyond, it’s allowed his
form of governance to spread to Bolivia, and there’s
every reason to imagine and hope it will continue
spreading unstoppably because people in other Latin
countries are beginning to fight for it.  It’s all
greatly alarmed the ruling authority in Washington
that views Chavez as the threat it most fears, even
above Iran - a powerful good example that will spread
unless the US acts forcibly to stop it, which clearly
is its plan.

Apparently though, with the conflict raging in the
Middle East, including in Iraq, the US attention is
focused there as well as on the upcoming mid-term
elections in which Republicans fear they will lose
their control of the Congress because of their
geopolitical failures that have turned the public
against them.  Politicians never accept defeat without
a determined fight to prevent it including assuming
the added risk of expanding an already out-of-control
conflict in the Middle East to one or more countries
in it hoping to convince a doubting public it’s only
being done to protect our national security.  Up to
now, an unknowledgeable and naive public has bought
the story, and with enough effective packaging of a
new contrived Iranian and Syrian threat, likely may do
it again.  If it happens, the potential calamitous
consequences may be enormous and unimaginable, and the
likely disaster will only be worse if Iran is attacked
with nuclear weapons.  The world, indeed, is holding
its collective breath with no clear idea yet what may
unfold or what will result if the worst happens - a
nuclear terror-war against Iran.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
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