[Marxism] Pilger focuses on continuing threat of war against Iran

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I sent this article in this morning, forgetting to include a headline.  To
cover that, I sent in a correction, which was, of course, the only item that
appeared.  So I am sending this edited version, even though it is possible
(though, after this much time, not probable) that an earlier version will
appear on the list later. My intro and the selections from the press item
follows:

Anything Pilger deserves to be taken very seriously.  The danger to Iran is
very real, not just because of the longing of the Bush administration to be
the conquerors of Iran (?real men want to go to Tehran? and all that) but
because ? much more than was ever the case in Iraq ? there is real
competition and conflict between Washington Tehran as POWERS in this region.
Although the Tehran regime is more than willing, Washington is unwilling to
accept the idea of actually sharing power in the region with a local ruling
class. The whole business of restructuring the Middle East is about
eliminating the necessity of such arrangements with the ?natives? as well as
assuring a monopoly relative to other imperialists (other than current
sub-junior partner Britain).


 

But I think that Pilger is too mechanical in deriving the likelihood of an
attack on Iran now from the strong desire of this administration to do so
from its inception (and the preparations for this that were made by the
Clinton administration).  Since the heady ?victory? in Iraq in April 2003,
the government?s position has done nothing but deteriorate.  The political
stance of most of the military leadership in both the US and Britain has
shifted radically as a result.

 

And in this context, public opinion starts having a much greater weight in
the scales, even short of giant demonstrations, much less a socialist
revolution.



The Militant, a few weeks ago, made a partly valid point as part of its
current efforts to try to see the bright side of every situation for US
imperialism. 

(This is a product of becoming embittered by the disappointments which have
soured quite a few leftists since the potential for revolution that was
indicated in the 1960s ? some of us still think this is a potential yet to
be fulfilled but was not at all a fantasy. I sometimes think  the Militant
should replace ?published in the interests of working people? on its banner
with ?we won?t be fooled again!?).

 

The paper pointed out that there was much more support for war against Iran
than for the war in Iraq. (They slightly fouled up this point by
simulaltaneously  claiming that there is no opposition at all in Congress to
continuing the US war in Iraq.)

 

This is true, because the conflicts with Iran really are fundamental whereas
the conflicts with Iraq were mostly pretexts and outright fakery.  But I see
no sign that the Democrats are ready  to throw behind an attack on Iran by
this basically disintegrating and defeated administration -- the
discreditment of Paul Wolfowitz is the latest symptom being publicized, not
to say  celebrated, in the New York Times.  They see Iran as the business of
the next administration, just as Hilary Clinton votes to withdraw troops
from Iraq from Iraq now, while stating she will not do so if she becomes
president.

The Times keeps the anti-Iran fires burning, Judith Miller-style, not
because they want Bush to go after Iran hammer and tongs, but because they
want his successor (I think they tilt toward Clinton though their coverage
of Obama is quite friendly).

The possibility of a truly mad adventure against Iran under Bush remains,
but I don?t think a ?mad adventure? can become the basis of our
expectations. Under present circumstances a Bush attack on Iran would
probably collapse in a humiliating way, accomplishing not even the most
minimal of its goals, let alone "regime change."

Of course that doesn't mean an adventure under Clinton, Obama, or Edwards is
likely to be a success.  Although I suspect they may really be more
competent than Bush (as husband Clinton definitely was), I don't believe the
fundamental problem has actually been competence.  I think that is basically
a current illusion of the ruling class, much more comfortable than admitting
the need to really adjust its sights and its ambitions to its actual power
-- a very hard decision for an imperialist power to make in a more
desperately competitive world.

(Useful to keep in mind here is Marx's comment that the declining rate of
profit is not a product of capitalist competition but the main driving force
of capitalist and imperialist competition and, over the long haul, this can
only grow more intense -- now including sections of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America as competitors though not (except for Japan) as imperialists. The
declining rate of profit is an objective tendency arising from the capacity
of capitalist industry to increase productivity while decreasing the labor
time required for it. It pre-exists and gives rise to inter-imperialist and
also imperialist-semi-colonial competition as we know them.)

Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are campaigning to become the warmakers against
Iran, and the rulers simply do not trust this disintegrating administration
to pull off that job with any success at all.

Fred Feldman

 

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/200704160013

 

Iran: the war ahead John Pilger

Published 16 April 2007

 

The sailors' ordeal was a diversion from the bigger danger. The US and UK
identified their new enemy long ago and are preparing the propaganda for the
war ahead.

 

Plus Rageh Omaar on how the Iran affair has weakened Britain's hand

 

 

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah,
was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some were dying," she says. "Then my
mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This
image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from
the side'."

 

It is time we in Britain stopped looking from the side. We are being led
towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the
Bush-Cheney-Blair "long war" edges closer to Iran for no reason other than
that nation's independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the
15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals (with
tales of their "ordeal" almost certainly authored by the Ministry of Defence
- until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a distraction. The Bush
administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has spent four years
preparing for "Operation Iranian Freedom". Forty-five cruise missiles are
primed to strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General
Leonid Ivashov: "Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets . . . at least
20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear weapons may be used.
This will result in the radioactive contamination of all the Iranian
territory, and beyond."

 

And yet there is a surreal silence in Britain, save for the noise of "news"
in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but
dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us
and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be
revealed. John Bolton, formerly Bush's man at the United Nations, recently
spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East
is "an agenda to maintain division and ethnic tension and the only way to
finally capture and enslave a country that has historically thrown out its
occupiers on every occasion". He was referring to Iraq, but he also meant
Iran, which would be next. That is the news.

 

One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair
get out of their homeland - that is the news: not our nabbed sailor-spies,
nor the political danse macabre of the pretenders to Blair's Duce delusions.
Whether it is Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John
Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of
the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his
acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them
now. They knew about Blair's plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake
45-minute "warning". They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next
"enemy".

 

Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: "The days of Britain having to apo logise
for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past
rather than apologise for it." In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian
Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily
in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since
the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it
clear that British governments have borne "significant responsibility" for
the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people
throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes
strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims
"unpeople". Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the
difference.

 

Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other
warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on
Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East to "our interests" - and
Israel's, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed
Iran's democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose
regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid
system of civilian courts and a history of torture" that was "beyond belief"
(Amnesty).

 

[snip]

 

 

As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According to the
former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack
Iraq on "day one" of Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001.
The main reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled
"Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts", which outlined the carve-up
of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law
written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to
hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to
Anglo-American companies.

 

Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern Middle East,
where Opec has ensured that oil business is conducted between states. Across
the Shatt al-Arab waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as
non existent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy
had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so non-existent nuclear weapons
have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel
and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has
allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations. The International
Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian
programme to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have
said they have been allowed to "go anywhere". The recent UN Security Council
sanctions against Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.

 

Until recently, the British were unaware that their government was one of
the world's most consistent abusers of human rights and backers of state
terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of
al-Qaeda, was sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically
destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British
Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed jihad against
the Soviet Union known as "Operation Cyclone". In 2001, few Britons knew
that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for the
attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin towers, only
citizens of Saudi Arabia, Britain's biggest arms client, which was not
bombed. Thanks to Bush and Blair, awareness in Britain and all over the
world has risen as never before. When home-grown terrorists struck London in
July 2005, few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity and
that the bombs which killed 52 Londoners were, in effect, Blair's bombs.

 

In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and cruelty of
the "rules" of rampant power. They do not contort their morality and
intellect to comply with double standards and the notion of approved evil,
of worthy and unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the
lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The
sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the 2004
tsunami, shaming that of the government.

 

Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H Jackson, chief of
counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the
end of the Second World War. "Crimes are crimes," he said, "whether the
United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not
prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be
willing to have invoked against us."

 

As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel to certain
countries for fear of being prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private
citizen may no longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the
tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments
against those responsible for "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable
episodes in recent human history" - Iraq. Five days later, the chief
prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a
signatory, said that Blair could one day face war-crimes charges.

 

[snip]

John Pilger's new film "The War on Democracy" will be previewed at the
National Film Theatre, London SE1, on 11 May. http://www.bfi.org.uk/nft

 

http://www.johnpilger.com





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