Let me guess: You are a fifth columnist Israel firster on patrol here
for either AIPAC and/or the ADL (or perhaps even JINSA or AEI) and
can't wait for even more Americans to die/get horribly maimed for
Israel in the coming war with Iran (see the following blog entry by
Phil Weiss):

Unreconstructed Neocon Wurmser Decants 'Regime Change,' Holy War, and
'Goodbye to 2-State Solution' to a Thin Crowd

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/03/when-i-signed-u.html

Read about the 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda via the post at
the top of http://NEOCONZIONISTTHREAT.BLOGSPOT.COM

You are a truth distorting/smoke screening con man as the AEI neocon
inspired 'surge' is hardly going to work as Scott Ritter and Chris
Hedges so accurately convey in their articles below:

Iraq's Deeply Tragic Future
By Scott Ritter

Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of
Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates
for president or the major media outlets in the United States for
information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of
the Union address which had everything except a "Mission Accomplished"
banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared
victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the
success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates
to assume a cocky swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the
occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution,
of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic
counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of
the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their
macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep
inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from
nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we're told, is
virtually over. We only need "stay the course" for 10 more years.

This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal
of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to
confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush
administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first
year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also
ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration's overarching
Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not
only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the
president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct
military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President
Bush's departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on
the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data
point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration's
actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an
abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic
trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to
our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the
reality on the ground in the Middle East.

Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president's
rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of
debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no
politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of
American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the
president's words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of
reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that
troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in
view of the "success" of the "surge," but rather holding at current
levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal
of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the
reality that the statistical justification of "surge success," namely
the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull
brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of
fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what
is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the
rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human
suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life
blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The "surge" never addressed
the underlying reasons for Iraq's post-Saddam suffering, and as such
never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the "surge"
offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of
Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from
outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.

Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of
land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any
hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse
people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept
away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their
neighbors is about to become a victim of the "successes" of the
"surge" and the denial of reality. The destruction of Iraq has already
begun. The myth of Kurdish stability-born artificially out of the U.S.-
enforced "no-fly zones" of the 1990s, sustained through the largess of
the Oil-for-Food program (and U.S.-approved sanctions sidestepped by
the various Kurdish groups in Iraq) and given a Frankenstein-like
lease on life in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation-is
rapidly unraveling. Like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, present-day Iraqi
Kurdistan has been exposed as an amalgam of parts incompatible not
only with each other but the region as a whole.

Ongoing Kurdish disdain for the central authority in Baghdad has led
to the Kurds declaring their independence from Iraqi law (especially
any law pertaining to oil present on lands they control). The reality
of the Kurds' quest for independence can be seen in their support of
the Kurdish groups, in particular the PKK, that desire independence
from Turkey. The sentiment has not been lost on their Turkish
neighbors to the north, resulting in an escalation of cross-border
military incursions which will only expand over time, further
destabilizing Kurdish Iraq. Lying dormant, and unmentioned, is the age-
old animosity between the two principle Kurdish factions in Iraq, the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party
(KDP). As recently as 1997, these two factions were engaged in a
virtual civil war against one another. The strains brought on by the
present unraveling have these two factions once again vying for
position inside Iraq, making internecine conflict all but inevitable.
The year 2008 will bring with it a major escalation of Turkish
military operations against northern Iraq, a strategic break between
the Kurdish factions there and with the central government of Baghdad,
and the beginnings of an all-out civil war between the KDP and PUK.

The next unraveling of the "surge" myth will be in western Iraq, where
the much applauded "awakening" was falling apart even as Bush spoke. I
continue to maintain that there is a hidden hand behind the Sunni
resistance that operates unseen and uncommented on by the United
States and its erstwhile Iraqi allies operating out of the Green Zone
in Baghdad. The government of Saddam Hussein never formally
capitulated, and indeed had in place plans for ongoing active
resistance against any occupation of Iraq. In October 2007 the Iraqi
Baath Party held its 13th conference, in which it formally certified
one of Saddam's vice presidents, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, as the
supreme leader of the Sunni resistance.

The United States' embrace of the "awakening" will go down in the
history of the Iraq conflict as one of the gravest strategic errors
made in a field of grave errors. The U.S. military in Iraq has never
fully understood the complex interplay between the Sunni resistance,
al-Qaida in Iraq, and the former government of Saddam Hussein. Saddam
may be dead, but not so his plans for resistance. The massive security
organizations which held sway over Iraq during his rule were never
defeated, and never formally disbanded. The organs of security which
once operated as formal ministries now operate as covert cells,
functioning along internal lines of communication which are virtually
impenetrable by outside forces. These security organs gave birth to al-
Qaida in Iraq, fostered its growth as a proxy, and used it as a means
of sowing chaos and fear among the Iraqi population.

The violence perpetrated by al-Qaida in Iraq is largely responsible
for the inability of the central government in Baghdad to gain any
traction in the form of unified governance. The inability of the
United States to defeat al-Qaida has destroyed any hope of generating
confidence among the Iraqi population in the possibility of stability
emerging from an ongoing American occupation. But al-Qaida in Iraq is
not a physical entity which the United States can get its hands
around, but rather a giant con game being run by Izzat al-Douri and
the Sunni resistance. Because al-Qaida in Iraq is derived from the
Sunni resistance, it can be defeated only when the Sunni resistance is
defeated. And the greatest con game of them all occurred when the
Sunni resistance manipulated the United States into arming it,
training it and turning it against the forces of al-Qaida, which it
controls. Far from subduing the Sunni resistance by Washington's
political and military support of the "awakening," the United States
has further empowered it. It is almost as if we were arming and
training the Viet Cong on the eve of the Tet offensive during the
Vietnam War.

Keeping in mind the fact that the Sunni resistance, led by al-Douri,
operates from the shadows, and that its influence is exerted more
indirectly than directly, there are actual al-Qaida elements in Iraq
which operate independently of central Sunni control, just as there
are Sunni tribal elements which freely joined the "awakening" in an
effort to quash the forces of al-Qaida in Iraq. The diabolical beauty
of the Sunni resistance isn't its ability to exert direct control over
all aspects of the anti-American activity in Sunni Iraq, but rather to
manipulate the overall direction of activity through indirect means in
a manner which achieves its overall strategic aims. The Sunni
resistance continues to use al-Qaida in Iraq as a useful tool for
seizing the strategic focus of the American military occupiers (and
their Iraqi proxies in the Green Zone), as well as controlling Sunni
tribal elements which stray too far off the strategic course (witness
the recent suicide bomb assassination of senior Sunni tribal leaders).
2008 will see the collapse of the Sunni "awakening" movement, and a
return to large-scale anti-American insurgency in western Iraq. It
will also see the continued viability of al-Qaida in Iraq in terms of
being an organization capable of wreaking violence and dictating the
pace of American military involvement in directions beneficial to the
Sunni resistance and detrimental to the United States.

One of the spinoffs of the continued success of the Sunni resistance
is the focus it places on the inability of the Shiite-dominated
government in Baghdad to actually govern. The U.S. decision to arm,
train and facilitate the various Sunni militias in Iraq is a de facto
acknowledgement that the American occupiers have lost confidence in
the high-profile byproduct of the "purple finger revolution" of
January 2005. The sham that was that election has produced a
government trusted by no one, even the Shiites. The ongoing unilateral
cease-fire imposed by the Muqtada al-Sadr on his Mahdi Army prevented
the outbreak of civil war between his movement and that of the Iranian-
backed Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and its
militia, the Badr Brigade.

When Saddam's security forces dissolved on the eve of the fall of
Baghdad in March 2003, the security organs which had been tasked with
infiltrating the Shiite community for the purpose of spying on Shiites
were instead instructed to embed themselves deep within the structures
of that community. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade are
heavily infiltrated with such sleeper elements, which conspire to
create and exploit fractures between these two organizations under the
age-old adage of divide and conquer. A strategic pause in the conflict
between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military on the one hand and the
Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade on the other has served to strengthen
the hand of the Mahdi Army by allowing time for it to rearm and
reorganize, increasing its efficiency as a military organization all
the while its political opposite, the SCIRI-dominated central Iraqi
government, continues to falter.

Further exacerbating the situation for the American occupiers of Iraq
is the ongoing tension created by the war of wills between the United
States and Iran. The Sunni resistance has no love for the Shiite
theocracy in Tehran, or its proxies in Iraq, and views creating a rift
between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade as a strategic imperative
on the road to a Sunni resurgence. Any U.S. military strike against
Iran will bring with it the inevitable Shiite backlash in Iraq. The
Shiite forces that emerge as the most independent of the American
occupier will be, in the minds of the Sunni resistance, the most
capable of winning the support of the Shiites of Iraq. Given the past
record of cooperation between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni resistance,
and the ongoing antipathy between Sunnis and SCIRI, there can be
little doubt which Shiite entity the Sunnis will side with when it
comes time for a decisive conflict between the Mahdi Army and the Badr
Brigade, and 2008 will be the year which witnesses such a conflict.

The big loser in all of this, besides the people of Iraq, is of course
the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. Betrayed
by the Bush administration, abandoned by Congress and all but
forgotten by a complacent American population and those who are
positioning themselves for national leadership in the next
administration, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who so
proudly wear the uniform of the United States continue to fight and
die, kill and be maimed in a war which was never justified and long
ago lost its luster. Played as pawns in a giant game of three-
dimensional chess, these brave Americans find themselves being
needlessly sacrificed in a game where there can be no winner, only
losers.

The continued ambivalence of the American population as a whole toward
the war in Iraq, perhaps best manifested by the superficiality of the
slogan "Support the Troops," all the while remaining ignorant of what
the troops are actually doing, has led to a similar amnesia among
politicians all too willing to allow themselves to seek political
advantage at the expense of American life and treasure. January 2008
cost the United States nearly 40 lives in Iraq. The current military
budget is unprecedented in its size, and doesn't even come close to
paying for ongoing military operations in Iraq. The war in Iraq has
bankrupted Americans morally and fiscally, and yet the American public
continues to shake the hands of aspiring politicians who ignore Iraq,
pretending that the blood which soaks the hands of these political
aspirants hasn't stained their own. In the sick kabuki dance that is
American politics, this refusal to call a spade a spade is deserving
of little more than disdain and sorrow.

While the American people, politicians and media may remain mute on
the reality of Iraq, I won't. There is no such thing as a crystal ball
which enables one to see clearly into the future, and I am normally
averse to making sweeping long-term predictions involving a topic as
fluid as the ongoing situation in Iraq. At the risk of being wrong
(and, indeed, I hope very much that I am), I will contradict the rosy
statements of the president in his State of the Union address and will
throw down a gauntlet in the face of ongoing public and media
ambivalence by predicting that 2008 will be the year the "surge" in
Iraq is exposed as a grand debacle. The cosmetic bandage placed over
the gravely wounded Iraq will fall off, and the damaged body that is
Iraq will continue its painful decline toward death.

If there is any winner in all of this it will be the Sunni resistance,
or at least its leadership hiding in the shadow of the American
occupation, as it continues to exploit the chaotic death spiral of
post-Saddam Iraq for its own long-term plan of a Sunni resurgence in
Iraq. That the Sunni resistance will continue to fight an American
occupation is a guarantee. That it will continue to persevere is
highly probable. That the United States will be able to stop it is
unlikely. And so, the reality that the only policy direction worthy of
consideration here in the United States concerning Iraq is the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces continues to
hold true. And the fact that this option is given short shrift by all
capable of making or influencing such a decision guarantees that this
bloody war will go on, inconclusively and incomprehensibly, for many
more years. That is the one image in my crystal ball that emerges in
full focus, and which will serve as the basis of defining a national
nightmare for generations to come.

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991
and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He
is the author of numerous books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation
Books, 2005) , "Target Iran" (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest,
"Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement" (Nation Books,
April 2007).

(c) 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/76318/

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19421.htm

The Calm Before the Conflagration

By Chris Hedges

25/02/08 "Truthdig" -- - The United States is funding and in many
cases arming the three ethnic factions in Iraq-the Kurds, the Shiites
and the Sunni Arabs. These factions rule over partitioned patches of
Iraqi territory and brutally purge rival ethnic groups from their
midst. Iraq no longer exists as a unified state. It is a series of
heavily armed fiefdoms run by thugs, gangs, militias, radical
Islamists and warlords who are often paid wages of $300 a month by the
U.S. military. Iraq is Yugoslavia before the storm. It is a caldron of
weapons, lawlessness, hate and criminality that is destined to
implode. And the current U.S. policy, born of desperation and defeat,
means that when Iraq goes up, the U.S. military will have to scurry
like rats for cover.

The supporters of the war, from the Bush White House to Sen. John
McCain, tout the surge as the magic solution. But the surge, which
primarily deployed 30,000 troops in and around Baghdad, did little to
thwart the sectarian violence. The decline in attacks began only when
we bought off the Sunni Arabs. U.S. commanders in the bleak fall of
2006 had little choice. It was that or defeat. The steady rise in U.S.
casualties, the massive car bombs that tore apart city squares in
Baghdad and left hundreds dead, the brutal ethnic cleansing that was
creating independent ethnic enclaves beyond our control throughout
Iraq, the death squads that carried out mass executions and a central
government that was as corrupt as it was impotent signaled
catastrophic failure.

The United States cut a deal with its Sunni Arab enemies. It would pay
the former insurgents. It would allow them to arm and form military
units and give them control of their ethnic enclaves. The Sunni Arabs,
in exchange, would halt attacks on U.S. troops. The Sunnis Arabs
agreed.

The U.S. is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pay
the monthly salaries of some 600,000 armed fighters in the three rival
ethnic camps in Iraq. These fighters-Shiite, Kurd and Sunni Arab-are
not only antagonistic but deeply unreliable allies. The Sunni Arab
militias have replaced central government officials, including police,
and taken over local administration and security in the pockets of
Iraq under their control. They have no loyalty outside of their own
ethnic community. Once the money runs out, or once they feel strong
enough to make a thrust for power, the civil war in Iraq will
accelerate with deadly speed. The tactic of money-for-peace failed in
Afghanistan. The U.S. doled out funds and weapons to tribal groups in
Afghanistan to buy their loyalty, but when the payments and weapons
shipments ceased, the tribal groups headed back into the embrace of
the Taliban.

The Sunni Arab militias are known by a variety of names: the Iraqi
Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local
Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias call
themselves "sahwas" ("sahwa" being the Arabic word for awakening).
There are now 80,000 militia fighters, nearly all Sunni Arabs, paid by
the United States to control their squalid patches of Iraq. They are
expected to reach 100,000. The Sunni Arab militias have more fighters
under arms than the Shiite Mahdi Army and are about half the size of
the feeble Iraqi army. The Sunni Awakening groups, which fly a yellow
satin flag, are forming a political party.

The Sunni Arab militias, though they have ended attacks on U.S.
forces, detest the Shiite-Kurdish government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki and abhor the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil. They
take the money and the support with clenched teeth because with it
they are able to build a renegade Sunni army, a third force inside
Iraq, which they believe will make it possible to overthrow the
central government. The Sunni Arabs, who make up about 40 percent of
Iraq's population, held most positions of power under Saddam Hussein.
They dominated Iraq's old officer corps. They made up its elite units,
including the Republic Guard divisions and the Special Forces
regiments. They controlled the intelligence agencies. There are
several hundred thousand well-trained Sunni Arabs who lack only an
organizational structure. We have now made the formation of this
structure possible. These militias are the foundation for a deadlier
insurgent force, one that will dwarf anything the United States faced
in the past. The U.S. is arming, funding and equipping its own
assassins.

There have been isolated clashes that point to a looming
conflagration. A Shiite-dominated unit of the regular army in the late
summer of 2007 attacked a strong Sunni Arab force west of Baghdad.
U.S. troops thrust themselves between the two factions. The enraged
Shiites, thwarted in their attack, kidnapped relatives of the
commander of the Sunni Arab force, and American negotiators had to
plead frantically for their release. There have been scattered
incidents like this one throughout Iraq.

If the U.S. begins, as promised, to withdraw troops it will be harder
to keep these antagonistic factions apart. The cease-fire by the
radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, extended a few days ago, could
collapse. And if that happens a civil war, unlike anything U.S. forces
have experienced in Iraq, will begin. Such a conflagration, with the
potential to draw in neighboring states and lead to the dismemberment
of Iraq, would be the final chapter of the worst foreign policy
blunder in American history.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for
nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is
the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America."

Crisis Over Teheran's Alleged Nuclear Plans Nearing Climax
By BILL AND KATHY CHRISTISON
This article came out on CounterPunch this morning:

Reference: http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03082008.html

March 8-9, 2008

Time after time we have heard statements from Israeli officials,
spokesmen of the Israel lobby in the U.S., and Israel's supporters in
Congress that Iran "must" never obtain nuclear weapons. On March 3,
2008, all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus
nine of the ten non-permanent members approved a new round of
sanctions against Iran. Chalk up the final vote of 14-0 with one
abstention (the Muslim nation of Indonesia) as another victory at the
U.N. for the Israel-U.S. partnership.

The spectacle of the five "permanents" in the antiquated Security
Council hierarchy -- all of whom refuse to eliminate their own nuclear
weapons -- adopting a double standard with respect to Iran does not,
of course, raise more than a peep in the mainstream media of the U.S.
Iran, a nation of proud people in a neighborhood of proud peoples,
sees only absurdity in the discrimination against it when the nearby
nations of India, Pakistan, and Israel have all developed their own
nuclear weapons without the U.S. stopping them. Israel's nuclear
weapons program particularly sticks in the Iranian craw, because
Iranians know that Israel, an enemy but a far smaller country,
acquired nuclear weapons over 40 years ago, considerably earlier than
either India or Pakistan. Most Iranians also know that Israel
accomplished this only with public and/or private aid from the U.S.
It's all seen as just one more example of the U.S. favoring Israel and
picking on Iran.

The issue of the moment is not even actual production of nuclear
weapons by Iran, but the "enrichment" of natural uranium so that it
contains a higher percentage of one particular uranium isotope, U-235,
than is found in nature when the ore called "uranium" is first mined.
Such enrichment provides the single most-difficult-to-obtain product
used in most nuclear weapons. (In the natural state, the raw ore
contains other uranium isotopes as well, and usually has by volume
less than one percent U-235. When concentrated to around three
percent U-235, the product is widely used in common forms of nuclear
power reactors. When concentrated to much higher levels -- 90 percent
is the figure often cited -- the product becomes the "weapons-grade"
material used in nuclear weapons. The equipment used in this
"enrichment" process is not only complicated to build, manage and
maintain; it also requires large amounts of electric power to
operate. But all of this is within the capabilities of numerous
nations and, probably increasingly, some subnational groups as well.)

Iran now possesses, has tested, and is using all the equipment
required, and it has the necessary electric power, to produce enriched
uranium. It claims it has already reached an enrichment level of
around four percent U-235 in early tests. It also claims that it does
not want nuclear weapons and will use the enriched uranium only to
produce larger amounts of electric power for the nation in a series of
nuclear power plants. But if one chooses to believe that Iran really
wants nuclear weapons, another element comes into the equation: the
ease with which an enrichment operation can be converted to produce
weapons-grade uranium. Various Western experts commonly believe that
if a nation or group is capable of going from less than one percent to
a three or four percent enrichment level, then the technical
difficulties of moving from three or four to 90 percent enrichment are
not at all major.

The actual design and manufacture of the explosive device, and then of
a deliverable weapon, would not be a simple task, but neither would it
be terribly difficult. Precise estimates of the time the entire
process might take are generally useless. There are too many
variables. All such estimates depend heavily on the types of delivery
systems available, the degree of targeting accuracy demanded, and the
redundancy, or lack, of safety features assumed necessary to prevent
unauthorized or accidental use. But for Iran, a simple guess of three
or four years probably would be in the ball park.

While the U.S. and other nations demand that Iran cease all production
of enriched uranium, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that
came into effect in 1970 does not prevent anyone from enriching
uranium for peaceful purposes. Iran, as already noted, claims that is
all it is presently doing, and there is no hard evidence to the
contrary. The U.S., however, and most other signatories of the treaty
who already possess nuclear weapons have made no serious efforts to
work toward global nuclear and general disarmament as called for in
the NPT. The treaty, of course, has no timetable or deadlines in it.
But the fact that the major powers who signed the treaty have not even
begun multilateral negotiations on nuclear disarmament in 38 years
gives Iran a good excuse, if it needs one, to abrogate its
participation in the treaty. Some day Iran may do just that. The
fact that Israel, India, and Pakistan, who have refused to sign the
treaty from the start, have now become known nuclear powers, gives
leaders in Teheran yet another excuse to get out of the NPT if it
wishes.

While some U.S. empire builders talk about the need to change the
global system, the world today is still composed of legally
independent states where nationalism is the dominant force underlying
relationships among states. In such a world, it is logical to assume
that Iranian leaders either already secretly want nuclear weapons or
will soon come to want them. They will not indefinitely accept that
the smaller state of Israel has any greater right to nuclear weapons
than they have. Nor will they even accept that the much larger U.S.
has a greater right to such weapons. Short of being forced abjectly
to surrender to the U.S.-Israeli partnership, no Iranian government
leaders could accept such views.

The possibility of negotiating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East
(including Israel), or even, conceivably, a nuclear-free world, is
often suggested as the only true final solution to the Middle East's
or the entire globe's nuclear dilemma. And the people who make such
suggestions can often cite polls or surveys showing that a majority of
people everywhere support these ideas. The tragedy is that at the
moment there is simply not enough trust among the governments of the
globe, or even within one region thereof. Take the United States
alone, or the U.S.-Israel partnership. It is inconceivable that the
present government of either partner would be able even to begin
negotiations on eliminating its nuclear weapons, no matter what the
possible benefits might be. The same would apply to China, Russia,
Britain, France, India, and Pakistan to greater or lesser degrees.

Even in this time of distrust, however, the U.N. should set up a
permanent conference of ambassador-level experts on Disarmament and
Global Crises. Once it is up and running, spokespeople for this
conference should direct public attention on a daily basis to the
relationship between arms spending and the three major crises facing
the globe -- the energy, climate, and water crises that will make it
increasingly necessary for the peoples of the world to work together
in overcoming the crises and drastically cutting back the outrageous
and wasteful military expenditures of too many nations. The immediate
task of the conference should be to define areas of agreement and
disagreement on disarmament and on the other three issues in different
regions of the world. The chairperson should be a very senior U.N.
official, and the unusual feature of the conference -- its permanence
-- should receive great emphasis on every public occasion.

It is likely that before long new and unforeseen developments will
occur in one or more of the three crises that will intensify thinking
among at least some people about the wastefulness of present military
spending. Costly new difficulties in any of the three areas might
even lead in fairly short order to a rolling snowball of global
opposition and disgust over new nuclear spending. No one can foresee
how great will be the changes in daily life caused by the three crises
but we should, as best we can, work to make the changes add to rather
than detract from harmony among the world's peoples. We should all
specifically try to use these crises to encourage everyone to think
first as citizens of the world, only second as citizens of a
particular nation or region.

But none of this deals with the present -- or with the remaining
months of Bush's presidency. Since the present group of Republicans
and copycat Democrats in Congress refuses to impeach Bush and Cheney,
the danger of a war against Iran instigated by the U.S. and Israel
remains real. The overextended state of U.S. ground forces, and Bush's
probable willingness to treat at least small nuclear weapons as
ordinary weapons, mean that a war would possibly not be a ground war
at all, but would begin with large air attacks and early use of
nuclear weapons. While the longer term results of using nuclear
weapons would be utterly disastrous, both for the world and for the
U.S., the immediate results might be seen as a quick and cheap victory
for the U.S. If the apparent military victory occurred before the
November 2008 U.S. election, it would probably guarantee a Republican
electoral victory. Given Bush's interest in his own place in history,
such a scenario could easily appeal to his gambling instincts.

Noise, and lots of it, seems to be the only weapon we have to make it
less likely that such a scenario actually happens. Let's make that
noise, do it globally, and do it every day. Pound out the message
through every medium we can access, including music and literature,
that ordinary people around the world DO NOT WANT THE U.S. AND ISRAEL
TO KILL A SINGLE PERSON IN IRAN, regardless of the status of Iran's
nuclear weapons program.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a
National Intelligence officer and as director of the CIA's Office of
Regional and Political Analysis.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked
on Middle East issues for 35 years. She is the author of Perceptions
of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
They can both be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.
----------------------------------------------------------

Fallon 'may lose job over Iran war'

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=85895

Rep. Ron Paul Stands Alone (defying AIPAC) in Voting Against Gaza
Bill:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=85866

On Mar 8, 9:20 pm, Ian MacLure svpal.org> wrote: