Introduction
For two years now, military plans and movements have been made to support a plan to attack Iran. Unknown to many people, and not generally understood among politicians and journalists, is that there is a trigger for this war, and that trigger is a 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States.
Rarely discussed is the Cheney-Rumsfeld plan, leaked by the military planners in 2005, to blame Iran for a 9/11-type attack, regardless of who carries out the attack, and to "respond" by bombing Iran with nuclear weapons.
Most of you have heard the stated reasons for preparing to attack Iran:
- nuclear weapons research
- support for terrorism
- arming the Iraqi insurgency.
And many of you know that these stated reasons are either fabrications or deliberate mischaracterizations of events, similar to the propaganda campaign that preceded the invasion of Iraq.
In Part I of this diary series, I exposed the real reason that Iran has been targeted for war. Vice President Dick Cheney is negotiating, on behalf of corporate nuclear industry interests, for long term contracts to supply nuclear fuel to China for reactors which China has announced it will build over the next two decades.
The corporate nuclear industry interests that Cheney represents (including Westinghouse and General Electric) are expecting to get $280 billion tax dollars to reprocess nuclear waste into nuclear fuel, which they will then turn around and sell to China. Bush and Cheney have created a consortium called GNEP, under which they are proposing to control the entire international nuclear fuel market. Those corporations which get the nuclear-waste-reprocessing money from the government will sell the fuel at pure profit.
As I pointed out in the first installment, Iran has an nuclear fuel industry, NOT A WEAPONS PROGRAM, and they intend to EXPORT nuclear fuel. Iran represents a threat to decades of locked-in, pure profit for Cheney's cronies in the nuclear industry. This deal could make Cheney (or his heir) a billionaire.
So now, as promised, I will give a timeline, and along the way, I will DEBUNK the pretended pretexts for war with Iran.
Let's start at the beginning.
I could write a long, long diary about where this plan to attack Iran begins. We could go all the way back to the CIA-backed coup against the elected Iranian president in the 1950s to install Shah Pahlavi.
We could start a little more recently, in the 1970s, when the deeply unpopular and brutal Shah brought Iran into the nuclear age with the help of--Dick Cheney, President Ford's Chief of Staff.
We could go back to the 1980s, when the Iran/Contra folks were helping set up the nuclear black market through the Pakistani nuclear weapons program under military dictator General Zia and his favorite nuclear scientist, AQ Khan.
We could go back to the Iran/Iraq war, when Ayatollah Khomeini discovered that some of his military officers were using AQ Khan's network, attempting to acquire the A-bomb, and responded by issuing a FATWA against the use of nuclear weapons.
We could go back to the most recent example of Cheney's self-dealing, unpatriotic corporate agenda, when, in 1996, as CEO of Halliburton, he sold to Iran the very technology Iranians are now using for their nuclear fuel program.
But let's start with Bush jr, who decided as early as 2001 that he was going to initiate a vast nuclear proliferation program, spreading nuclear technology across the globe, with handsome profits for his short-sighted, self-dealing corporate cronies.
As with other Bush agendas, no obstacle was considered to be important or insurmountable. Treaties? Forget it. Laws? Re-interpret them. Executive Orders? Just write new ones.
Kick it off with a good marketing campaign. Pretend that Iran is the same country that it was 20 years ago, and call them part of the "Axis of Evil," as if there were a formal, military alliance between North Korea, Iraq and Iran. As if it's World War II, and 9/11 was "Pearl Harbor."
The marketing worked as planned to start the war in Iraq, and beginning in 2004, the same marketing plan was repackaged to start a war with Iran.
This 2004 article in SFGATE illustrates the contradiction in Bush's nuclear proliferation policies and the emptiness of the accusations against Iran.
The Bush administration continues an escalating spiral toward conflict with Iran, using Iran's nuclear policy as its primary focus. At the same time, the administration is reducing restrictions on other emerging nuclear states that pose a far more serious and immediate threat to world peace
Why was this happening? It was happening because Bush's policy is to undermine international nonproliferation treaties and institutions. Why? Because that makes the nuclear black market more profitable. Bush's antics with regard to Iraq and Iran are theater: he is trying to demonstrate that international institutions DON'T WORK. He deliberately undermines the work of these institutions, and then demands that they do something about the consequences of that, and then undermines their efforts to do something about the consequences.
And his fallback is to go to war. Which is also profitable to his protection racket gangsters. Remember, international institutions aimed at de-escalating arms races, limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other WMDs, arbitrating international disputes, were all created to AVOID WAR. For fifty years after WWII, the United States led this effort. Not always perfectly, due to the likes of Cheney et al, but consistently, surely.
The United States and the other Great Powers at the end of WWII disavowed Hitler's model for international relations. They disavowed international anarchy, pre-emptive warfare, and imperial war policies. Bush has revived all of Hitler's model.
All of what I have said above was in play in 2004 when Bush began his saber-rattling accusations about Iran's nuclear industry. Iran's response?
From the above SF Gate article:
Iranian President Khatami said on Sept. 20 [2004], "They [the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United States] have to explicitly recognize our natural and legal right [to peaceful nuclear energy] to open the way for greater understanding and cooperation." He added, "We've made our choice. Now it is up to others to make their choice." Iran then resumed its nuclear enrichment program.
Not long after that, Khatami was defeated in the presidential election by Ahmadinejad. The new Iranian president was elected promising to take a harder line. That's what Bush's saber-rattling did: helped elect a harder-line Iranian president. Before the new president took office in June 2005, though, Iran VOLUNTARILY and without sanction suspended it's nuclear fuel program for nine months, beginning in November 2004.
During that time, as I pointed out in Part I, the Bush Administration began crafting their plan to attack Iran. During that time, too, the IAEA investigated claims made by the Bush Administration.
In August of 2005, Iran resumed it's nuclear fuel program. The Bush Administration began it's saber rattling again. The IAEA pleaded with both parties for more time.
US President George W Bush says he still has not ruled out the option of using force against Iran, after it resumed work on its nuclear programme.
He said he was working on a diplomatic solution, but was sceptical that one could be found.
The UN's atomic watchdog has called on Iran to halt nuclear fuel development.
And thus the frame was made.
"All options are on the table," said Mr Bush, when asked about the possible use of force during an interview for Israeli TV.
Since that time, Bush has attempted to "wrongfoot" Iran by pushing for sanctions and resolutions based upon accusations that Iran's nuclear fuel industry is a secret attempt to build nuclear weapons. Since that time, the accusations have been shown to be BASELESS..
Basically, the construction that would be necessary to hide the heat signature from a covert reactor would, itself, be conspicous. In addition to that, specific isotopes and gases would be released which have specific, detectable signatures. As the author of the globalresearch article says, the facilities WHICH EXIST are under inspection, and attempting to HIDE a covert program would involve USING the existing infrastructure to hide the activities of the covert infrastructure.
Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. They do not have a program to build the necessary facilities to divert their efforts to make nuclear reactor fuel, to a weapons program. At least TWO MORE large scale facilities are necessary to create the materials needed for a bomb. And then, they would have to construct the bomb-assembly facility.
For further reference, see the dkospedia. There is a very good timeline detailing the back and forth between the US, Iran, the IAEA, Russia and the European Powers.
The arguments that have been made by the Bush Administration are being investigated. Arak and Nantaz are being inspected. Has a secret nuclear weapons program been discovered? NO. Do we hear ANYTHING AT ALL, in daily news reports, about the international nuclear fuel consortium being pushed by Bush and Cheney? NO WE DO NOT.
And here is some first hand reporting for you. In direct correspondence, Senator Lugar and Senator Bayh have told ME that they are working in a bipartisan fashion to INCLUDE Iran in an international nuclear fuel bank. They HAVE publicly announced this effort. Senator Lugar has assured me, personally, that he is working directly with Condileeza Rice to push this alternative to WAR with Iran. He has also told me that he has confidence that Rice IS pushing this alternative.
But the news media do not tell you that, do they? No, they just say that the contest is between Rice and Cheney and that Rice, for the moment is winning, and that Rice is pushing "diplomacy." There is no reporting about Cheney's nuclear deal with China. There is no mention of the Senators' policy proposal regarding the international nuclear fuel bank.
Instead, the news media is following Bush's frame, reporting on the escalating sanctions and resolutions trying to push Iran out of the nuclear fuel market, and pretending that it is an attempt to prevent Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. They pretend that Bush's claims have credibility, out of ignorance, or by design.
To me, this just nails the reason why war is being planned. It is ALL ABOUT Cheney and his corporate cronies' self-dealing corruption.
A nuclear weapons program requires uranium enriched to 90%. Is Iran's nuclear fuel industry enriching uranium to that level? NO. The enrichment process in the Iranian program enriches uranium 3-5%..
To sum it up, the highest levels of the Iranian government have issued legally binding and religiously binding edicts prohibiting the creation or use of nuclear weapons. There is no program to develop nuclear weapons in Iran. There are 150 inspectors monitoring the nuclear fuel industry, and NONE of Bush's claims that there is a secret program have been verified. The process of Iran's nuclear program will not produce nuclear weapons, and the products of that program aren't usable for nuclear weapons.
All of the estimates about Iran being 2-5 years or ten years away from gaining a nuclear weapon are premised upon there actually BEING such an effort in existence today.
In my next installment, I'll give more of the timeline showing the military preparations and plans taken over the last two years in pursuit of war with Iran. I'll also debunk the more recent propaganda about "Iranian weapons" in Iraq.
