IHT:
The U.S. military on Wednesday wrapped up a massive air-and-sea exercise meant as a public warning to Iran, as a skittish American ally — the United Arab Emirates — joined a list of Gulf countries declaring they would take no part in any attack on Iran.Op-Ed News:
The U.S. has denied any intention to attack Iran. But the public refusals of several countries to allow the United States to use their lands if any such action looms could affect U.S. military options, or require shifting of resources, if tensions did seriously escalate.
The United States has close to 40,000 troops in the Gulf, including 25,000 in Kuwait, 3,000 in Bahrain, 1,300 in the United Arab Emirates and a few hundred in Oman and Saudi Arabia, according to figures from the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.
Qatar — home to 6,500 U.S. troops and the enormous al-Udeid air base, headquarters of all American air operations in the Middle East — has already said it would not permit an attack on Iran from its soil.
The Gulf Cooperation Council, a loose alliance of six Gulf Arab states, has also called on its members not to offer support to any U.S. action against Iran.
there are reports in the European press that American forces are massing along the Iraq border with Iran, even as the U.S. is conducting war games in the Gulf simulating an attack on Iran. There have also been reports for some time that US special forces have been operating in Iran, gathering intelligence and establishing coordinates on likely bombing targets, and perhaps linking with anti-government groups inside Iran that have been conducting terror attacks there. More recently there have been reports that the Bush administration has been using misappropriated Iraq reconstruction funds to finance Kurdish and Al Qaeda group attacks inside Iran.
Back in the U.S., the Bush administration succeeded in getting Congress to back off of attempts to include legislation barring the White House from attacking Iran without prior Congressional approval. Bush has already claimed that Iran is a terrorist nation and that he thus has the authority to attack that country at will because of the 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force which was actually an authorization for the US attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
It all would seem to point to the real possibility of an attack on Iran—a move that would be a war crime, that would be a disaster for the U.S., that would spark a global recession, and that would inflame the entire Middle East for years to come.
Do the oil traders know something that we in America should be knowing?
And why aren’t Congress and the US media discussing all this?
1 comment:
Re: the Iraq war in general
(also see this post)
Ever since the months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been a few reports in the newspapers that the Central Intelligence Agency was casting aspersions on the intelligence the White House was relying on to justify the war. The CIA has never given a position on whether the war is needed or justified or said that Bush is wrong to go to war. But doesn't it seem much more likely that the CIA is an extremely right wing organization than a left wing one? After all, even if the people working for them and at least a lot of the leadership really wanted a war for their own reasons, there are a lot of reasons for them to not want to tie their credibility to what they know is faulty information. They and their personnel, present and former, could use other means of promoting the Iraq war, and still be motivated to make the statements in the media. If the CIA got behind faulty information, they would have to make a choice between whether they would be involved in scamming the American people and the world once the military had invaded Iraq and no weapons were found- so: 1) Imagine the incredible difficulties involved in pulling off a hoax that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Imagine all the people you would have to be able to show the weapons to- the inspectors from the UN / the international community, the American press, statesmen, etc. Then imagine the difficulties of substantiating that story to people who would examine it- the lack of witnesses to a production plant that made the weapons or to transportation operations or storage of the weapons during Hussein's regime of them. 2) If the story fell apart upon inspection or the CIA tried not to hoax it at all, imagine the loss of credibility they would suffer. The CIA, it is safe to bet, does not want to be known to the American people as a group that lies to them to send them to war. Even within the CIA there could be disagreement among people about how involved they should be in promoting the war or the neo-con agenda more broadly, so the CIA would have to worry about lying to and managing its own people after trying so hard to get them to trust their superiors in the agency, and perhaps there simply might be too many people in the agency who knew enough about what was going on in Iraq to know if someone was deceiving people to promote this war.
So there is a lot of reason to be cautious against being seen as endorsing what they knew was false intelligence even if they were very strong supporters of going to war.
Re: prosecutor-purgegate
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10349.html
What explains the failure of the mainstream media to cover the purge scandal for so long, and so many other scandals? Do you think somebody just set up newspaper editors to cheat on their wives, and threatened to tell if the editors wouldn’t play ball when they come back some day and ask for something?
It wouldn’t be that hard to do, when you think about it. People wouldn’t talk about it.
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