NEW TOP NEO-CONMAN SAYS IRAN’S A THREAT

Fallon Says He’ll Pick a Fight with Iran If That’s What Makes Bosses Happy

By James P. Tucker Jr.

Adm. William Fallon, President Bush’s new commander of military forces in the Middle East, is looking for an “incident” that would excuse a U.S. attack on Iran, according to sources within the Pentagon, Congress and the White House.

They cite Fallon’s blind faith in Israel, and its constant lobbying for an attack on Iran. Efraim Eitan, a member of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, bluntly told The Washington Times that Israel will attack unless the U.S. or some other foreign power stops Iran from developing nuclear arms or other powerful weapons.

These sources expect the U.S. military attack to be solely from the air and with no ground troops involved. Not only are the suspected sites of nuclear development to be targeted, but missiles and bombs will strike “great swaths” of Iran, sources said. Their claim has been independently substantiated by recent reports from Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker.

Vice President Dick Cheney has parroted claims made by Israeli officials that Iran is working on nuclear weapons that would be turned on Israel. This is similar to the discredited claims of “weapons of mass destruction” in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq.

U.S. officials deny that an attack on Iran is imminent even as Bush repeats that “No options are off the table” when it comes to Iran. At the same time, however, Bush was provoking Iran by ordering the nuclear-equipped aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower into the Persian Gulf and otherwise building up the military presence in the region, where it has no business.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates reportedly wanted Fallon in charge because he would establish a “new focus on regional initiatives to reassure allies and deter adversaries, particularly Iran,” The New York Times reports.

“If Iran is dumb enough to shoot down some helicopters and kill some of our soldiers, it could help justify a ‘quick response’ that could quickly evolve into all-out war,” one source said. “[The Bush administration] could be arranging that.”

One source asked: “Remember how we all believed that the Gulf of Tonkin incident really occurred when President (Lyndon) Johnson made a speech in 1964? Years later, after being discharged, sailors aboard the ship all said it had never happened.”

Could explosives found by U.S. forces in Iraq and attributed to Iran be part of that set up for war?

The original hawk, Donald Rumsfeld, did not disappear when he resigned as secretary of defense. He still maintains an office at the Pentagon with a staff of 14. They are busy planning an attack on Iran while Gates calms Congress.

Working with Rumsfeld to bring the United States into a war with Iran are the usual cast of neo-conservatives and high priests of war*: Douglas Feith, Rummy’s former No. 3 man and a Bilderberg regular; Richard Perle, another Bilderberg boy; David Wurmser; and Elliot Abrams, now a Middle East specialist at the National Security Council.

It was this group and others in the Israeli lobby who exposed their motives in a revealing paper for former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”

It called for Israel to continue to occupy Palestinian lands, for escalating the
fight with the Palestinians and their Arab supporters and for encouraging the United States to attack Iran so Israel “will not only contain its foes, it will transcend them.”

Journalist George Packer’s book, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq concludes that “For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover.”

On Feb. 13, the Beltway think tank Strategic Policy Consulting sponsored an event in Washington to promote a book by Iranian “dissident” Alireza Jafarzadeh, titled The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis. Jafarzadeh denies that he is explicitly calling for war but threatens a mushroom cloud if nothing is done.

Sound familiar? It should. It was the same technique used to inflame public opinion for a war with Iraq. The book drew lavish praise from Sen. May Landrieu (D-La.) and Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.), among others.

Significantly, a new caucus has been established in Congress, calling itself the “Congressional Christian Allies Caucus,” a bipartisan group of 14 members formed to work with Israel-first Christian leaders on Israeli security. It was founded by Reps. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.) and Eliot Engel (DN. Y.).

The caucus met Feb. 14 with members of the Israeli Knesset and representatives from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. They discussed Israeli security, which translates into attacking Iran for the benefit of Israel and multinational oil companies.

Israel wants to know about Iranian influence in the Middle East which has grown since the United States eliminated two enemies, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, in Afghanistan. The official policy of Israel and its supporters in the United States is to sow confusion and infighting among Arabs and Persians in the Middle East so that it can establish control over the entire region, including the invaluable oil deposits.

The neo-conservatives who control U.S. policy are using the powerful U.S. military to facilitate this. American Free Press readers learned of this impending disaster months ago through the weekly column of Paul Craig Roberts. But his work is being forced into the mainstream. Syndicate columnist Georgie Anne Geyer says frankly that the neo-cons “are now pushing us into war with Iran.”

(Issue #12, March 19, 2007)

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