27 March 2006

In Sydney, these days, it threatens to rain a lot, but never really does. We get scattered showers that are never enough to break the drought. But it wasn’t this that sent spasms of foreboding seeping up from my tail – it was an ominous feeling that the neocon madmen were about to plunge the world into chaos with another precipitate move.

I slouched across the lane to the Brushtail Café, where I found Gloomy Janice the journalist hunkered down with the papers and herlaptop.

"What’s news, Gloomy?" I asked, after I’d fetched a cider from the bar. She launched straight into it.

"Have you noticed how Bush, Blair, and the right-wing columnists have shifted their rhetoric over the last few weeks? Not so long ago their whole Iraq dialogue was about evil Sunni Baathist terrorists. Now it’s all about evil Iranian Shiites and they’re saying the Tehran mullahs are supplying the roadside bombs used to target Coalition troops.

"Of course, that’s sillier than absurd. In fact, the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq are currently the Coalition’s only allies – apart from the Kurds – and the puppet Iraqi army is recruited mostly from their followers. The people fighting the occupation are Sunnis and Baathists. Every half-bright person in the world knows that."

"Yeah, but about 40 per cent of Americans think The X Files was a documentary and the world was created 6,000 years ago", I replied. "They’re the people who vote for Bush. They’re so dumb they’ll buy anything. I remember before the invasion, Bush was saying Saddam Hussein was cooperating with al-Qaeda, and of course that turned out to be a lie, but at least the alleged al-Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , was a Sunni like Saddam. Now they’re trying to tell us that the Shiite Iranians are collaborating with the very Sunni Wahabist fanatics who’ve supposedly sworn to wipe them out. Which reminds me, whatever happened to Abu Musab? We haven’t been hearing much about the Tin-leg Terrorist lately."

"Ah, courtesy of The New York Times, there’s a new yarn about the Wicked Wahabist. It seems his legendary 'al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia’ group has sidelined him. They say it’s joined an alliance of resistance groups and it’s sworn off beheadings. Of course there’s no proof of any of this. It’s written by a jerk called Dexter Filkins who’s apparently holed up in the Green Zone."

She scanned a page on her laptop. "His stuff is full journalistic weasel words like 'experts believe’, 'while it is impossible to verify’, 'signals which offer clues’, 'growing indications’, and 'evidence has surfaced’. Slippery formulations like that string together a soup of speculation based on hints from shadowy 'officials’ and 'independent terrorism experts’. In other words it’s the unofficial, official position from the occupation forces.

"But through all this, the al-Qaeda wildmen and the rest of the resistance are sounding, for the first time, vaguely like organised, half-rational, semi-civilized folk the US might be able to do business with."

"Weird. What’s behind this change of line?"

"Well, think of it as an insurance policy. The resistance hate the Iranian leadership and every day now, the Bush regime ratchets up the rhetoric against Iran. Bush’s people are constantly threatening a military solution to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Many people assume, or hope, that the US is just posturing, but bluffing is a dangerous game. If your bluff is called, what do you do then? If Tehran calls Bush’s bluff and he fails to act, US prestige and authority will decline dramatically and that will embolden the nations and movements resisting the super-power’s tyrannical hold over world affairs."

"So what’s going to happen in Iraq if the US does in fact fall upon Iran in an orgy of aerial destruction?"

"Well firstly, the existing Iraqi puppet army and police – based as they are on the most fanatical sectarian Shiite elements – are going to melt away and they’ll reappear as pro-Iranian guerrillas."

"And that would mean that the occupation had no puppet government and no Iraqi allies. Scary."

"Scary is right. So they gotta try and find new allies from amongst the Sunni and Baathist groups that are now their bitter enemies. Step one, re-humanise the folk your spin-doctors were previously de-humanising."

Joadja, who’d been listening with half an ear from behind the bar, came over to join us.

"My head’s spinning", she said. "You mean the Yanks are going to try the weirdest and most blatant side-swapping exercise in the history of politics and warfare?"

"Yeah, if they have to. It all depends on whether their dumb president and his Zionist neocon advisors go completely nuts and order the attack on Iran they’ve been preparing for months."

"And what if they don’t?"

"It’ll mean that Bush tried to stare down the Iranians, but he blinked first. Disaster time for US imperialism; disaster time for the Republican Party. Bush’s presidency would be finished. That’s why, I reckon, he’ll play diplomatic games with Tehran for a few weeks, and then he’ll attack. Most probably, we’re sliding towards the vortex."

"Holy Mother of Marx! What’d happen to the Australian troops there?"

"Things would get very hairy indeed … and for the Brits, the Italians, the Japanese and the Poles. Add all these little contingents up and you’d be lucky to get 15,000 fighting troops spread over a number of small vulnerable bases. They’d be quickly overrun by the Shiite militias, no doubt with a little help from the Iranian army. Their best bet would be to make a dash for the Kuwait border under cover of US air power."

And see also:
The Askariya Mosque job and the coming war on Iran
By GAVIN GATENBY
1 March 2006
So who really did have a motive for the very professional demolition job on Samarra’s Golden Dome Mosque?
Many analysts have pointed to the general advantages that flow to the imperialist occupation from fostering sectarian divisions – the traditional divide-and-rule strategy – but I think we can be a lot more specific. I believe we can reliably point to the United States as the real culprit and see a clear motive in the geo-strategic nightmare created by Washington’s determination to wage war on Iran. READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>>