The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., January 9, 2007: “The Bush gang is now going into a bunker mode. They have a very irate public and Congress against them, threats of Congressional retaliation against all Republicans, very real threats of investigations into massive thefts of money (unbelievable what they have stolen!), gross stupidity, vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with them, and a determination to proceed with their MidEast conquest policy come what may.

One of the worst offenders in all of this is the American media. They have known from the beginning about various nasty matters and have coyly kept it all quiet. It was known that the gay prostitute;,Gannon/Guckert was roaming loose in the White House all night for fourteen different nights but no comment from the press. Rumors floating around D.C. was that Bush was having an affair with Gannon but it never, ever, got into the press.

There were a dozen pictures of Abramoff with Bush in the White House but not one paper or television station ever printed them (although they were readily available,) refusal to even hint at faked casualty figures, muted silence about the gross activities of the sluttish Bush daughters and many, many more subjects.

The media has been pandering to Bush and his corporate supporters until just recently and no doubt we will now see a reversal and Bush will be savagely attacked.

And why?

Because, in part,  Israel wants Bush to fight their wars for them in the MidEast; to attack Iraq (which happened) and then to flatten Iran which they view as a major threat to them (not to us).

Israeli diplomatic agencies and domestic Jewish support groups are daily importuning Bush and Cheney to attack Iran and prevent Iran from possibly attacking them.

Israel doesn’t care if 10,000 GIs get iced as long as we do the bombing for them.  Personally, I think we ought to cut them loose, get out of Iraq, forget about Bush’s nut plans and let Israel take care of itself.

They and they alone have dragged, tricked and pushed us into the war and a moronic pro-Israel Bush has gone right along with them.

And for starters we can round up the neocons like Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle and Kristol and ship them to Israel in a crate. If you have a rotten tooth that is infecting your whole body, you don’t trim your toenails, do you?”

Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence

Partial List of IP Blocks Used by US "Terrorist Surveillance Program"

February 6, 2007

Cryptome

The following, partial list of Internet Provider blocks are routinely used by the U.S. government entitles (supported by private contractors) to gain access to, to monitor, and in some cases, to destroy IT networks. Such activity is related to the U.S. ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program.” Most of the registrants of the blocks listed below are not aware of these activities. Concerned network administrators should examine traffic logs closely. A correlation of traffic from several of these IP blocks likely indicates that a network is under surveillance or has access attempted by the U.S. intelligence community and/or affiliated entities

83.27.0.0 - 83.27.255.255
170.86.0.0 - 170.86.255.255
62.212.234.128 - 62.212.234.255
81.57.102.0 - 81.57.103.255
201.5.0.0 - 201.5.255.255
213.151.160.0 - 213.151.191.255
70.83.15.0 - 70.83.15.255
166.128.0.0 - 166.255.255.255
60.64.0.0 - 60.159.255.255
142.191.0.0 - 142.191.255.255
83.65.121.32 - 83.65.121.39
12.108.2.0 - 12.108.3.255
65.128.0.0 - 65.159.255.255
24.158.208.0 - 24.158.223.255
86.97.64.0 - 86.97.95.255
201.239.128.0 - 201.239.255.255
68.36.0.0 - 68.36.255.255
70.44.0.0 - 70.44.255.255
64.231.200.0 - 64.231.203.255
189.128.0.0 - 189.255.255.255
216.155.192.0 - 216.155.207.255
121.6.0.0 - 121.7.255.255
71.96.0.0 - 71.127.255.255
190.213.196.0 - 190.213.196.255
80.72.230.0 - 80.72.230.255
58.29.0.0 - 58.29.255.255
121.128.0.0 - 121.191.255.255
88.191.3.0 - 88.191.248.255
58.72.0.0 - 58.79.255.255
70.16.0.0 - 70.23.255.255
200.57.192.0 - 200.57.255.255
201.5.0.0 - 201.5.255.255
124.168.0.0 - 124.168.255.255
211.200.0.0 - 211.205.255.255
78.252.0.0 - 78.252.255.255
59.0.0.0 - 59.31.255.255
72.64.0.0 - 72.95.255.255
211.200.0.0 - 211.205.255.255
145.53.0.0 - 145.53.255.255
71.200.0.0 - 71.200.127.255
60.206.0.0 - 60.207.255.255
194.178.125.48 - 194.178.125.55
98.226.0.0 - 98.226.255.255
201.88.0.0 - 201.88.255.255
205.209.128.0 - 205.209.191.255
51.0.0.0 - 51.255.255.255
70.64.0.0 - 70.79.255.255
70.112.0.0 - 70.127.255.255
202.84.96.0 - 202.84.127.255
70.32.0.0 - 70.32.31.255
207.218.192.0 - 207.218.255.255
69.31.88.0 - 69.31.89.255
198.74.0.0 - 198.74.255.255
221.0.0.0 - 221.3.127.255
72.144.0.0 - 72.159.255.255
220.96.0.0 - 220.99.255.255
82.88.0.0 - 82.91.255.255

Defeat on the Ground and in the Air: The ‘Surge’ in the airwar

Bombs over Baghdad

The Pentagon's Secret Air War in Iraq

February 7, 2007

by Nick Turse

TomDispatch

A secret air war is being waged in Iraq -- often in and around that country's population centers -- about which we can find out little. The U.S. military keeps information on the munitions expended in its air efforts under tight wraps, refusing to offer details on the scale of use and so minimizing the importance of air power in Iraq. But expert opinion holds that the forms of aerial assault being employed in that country, though hardly covered in our media, may account for most of the U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths there since the 2003 invasion.

While some aspects of the air war remain a total mystery, Air Force officials do acknowledge that U.S. military and coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of bombs on targets in Iraq in 2006. This figure, 177 bombs in all, does not include guided missiles and unguided rockets fired, or cannon rounds expended; nor, according to a U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) spokesman, does it take into account the munitions used by some Marine Corps and other coalition aircraft or any of the Army's helicopter gunships. Moreover, it does not include munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many private security contractors flying their own missions in Iraq.

Air War, Iraq: 2006

In statistics provided to Tomdispatch, CENTAF reported a total of 10,519 "close air support missions" in Iraq in 2006, during which its aircraft dropped 177 bombs and fired 52 "Hellfire/Maverick missiles." These air strikes presumably included numerous highly publicized missions ranging from the January air strike outside the town of Baiji that reportedly "killed a family of 12," including at least three women and three young children, to the December attack on an insurgent safehouse in the Garma area, near Fallujah, that reportedly killed "two women and a child" in addition to five guerillas. Then there were the even less well remembered events, such as those on July 28th when, according to official reports, an Air Force Predator unmanned aerial vehicle destroyed an "anti-Iraqi forces" vehicle with Hellfire missiles, while Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons "expended a GBU-12, destroying an anti-Iraqi forces location," both in the vicinity of the city of Ramadi.

The latter weapon, Guided Bomb Unit-12, a laser-guided bomb with a 500-pound general purpose warhead, was the most frequently used bomb in Iraq in 2006, according CENTAF statistics provided to Tomdispatch. In addition to the ninety-five GBU-12s "expended," sixty-seven satellite-guided, 500-pound GBU-38s and fifteen 2,000-pound GBU-31/32 munitions were also dropped on Iraqi targets last year, according to official Air Force figures.

One weapon conspicuously left out of this total is rockets -- such as the 2.75-inch Hydra-70 rocket which can be outfitted with various warheads and is fired from fixed-wing aircraft and most helicopters. The number of rockets fired is withheld from the press so as, according to a CENTAF spokesman, not to "skew the tally and present an inaccurate picture of the air campaign." The number of rockets fired may be quite significant as, according to a 2005 press release issued by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who helped secure a $900 million Hydra contract from the Army for General Dynamics, “the widely used Hydra-70 rocket…has seen extensive use in Afghanistan and Iraq…[and] has become the world’s most widely used helicopter-launched weapon system." Early last year, Sandra I. Erwin of National Defense Magazine noted that the U.S. military was looking to the Hydra to serve as a low-cost weapon for Iraq's urban areas. "The Army already buys and stockpiles thousands of the 2.75-inch Hydra rockets, and is seeking to equip as many as 73,000 with the laser kits, under a program called 'advanced precision kill weapon system,' or APKWS. The Navy would purchase 8,000 for Marine Corps helicopters," she wrote.

The number of cannon rounds fired -- some models of the AC-130 gunship, for instance, have a Gatling gun that can fire up to 1,800 rounds in a single minute-- is also a closely guarded secret. The official reason given is that "special forces often use aircraft such as the AC-130" and since "their missions and operations are classified, so therefore these figures are not released."

Repeated inquiries concerning another reporter's statistics on cannon rounds fired by CENTAF aircraft prompted the same official to emphatically state in an email: "WE DO NOT REPORT CANNON ROUNDS." His superior officer, Lt. Col. Johnn Kennedy, the Deputy Director of CENTAF Public Affairs, followed up, noting:

Glad to see you appreciate the tremendous efforts [my subordinate] has already expended on you. Trust me, it's probably much more significant than the relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds.

But the number of cannon rounds and rockets fired by U.S. aircraft is not an insignificant matter, according to Les Roberts, formerly an epidemiologist for the World Health Organization in Rwanda during that country's civil war and an expert on the human costs of the war in Iraq. According to Roberts, who was last in Iraq in 2004 (where, he says, he personally witnessed "the shredding of entire blocks" in Baghdad's Sadr City by aerial cannon fire), "rocket and cannon fire could account for most coalition-attributed civilian deaths." He adds, "I find it disturbing that they will not release this [figure], but even more disturbing that they have not released such information to Congressmen who have requested it."

Non-CENTAF military officials were equally tight-lipped about such munitions -- at least with me. A Public Affairs officer from U.S. Central Command told me that the Command didn't track such information. When I questioned a coalition spokesman in Baghdad about the number of rockets and cannon rounds fired by Army and Marine Corps helicopters in Iraq in 2006, I was told, "We cannot comment on your inquiry due to operational security."

I then pointed out that just last month, in National Defense Magazine, Col. Robert A. Fitzgerald, the Marine Corps' head of aviation plans and policy, was quoted as saying that, in 2006, "Marine rotary-wing aircraft flew more than 60,000 combat flight hours, and fixed-wing platforms completed 31,000. They dropped 80 tons of bombs and fired 80 missiles, 3,532 rockets and more than 2 million rounds of smaller ammunition."

When asked if this admission had endangered operational security, the spokesman responded, "I cannot comment on the policies or release authority of a Marine colonel."

While the Marine Corps' statistics presumably include totals of munitions used in Afghanistan, where American air power has played a large role in the fighting, they do remind us that the minimal figures given out by CENTAF don't give an accurate picture of the air war in Iraq. These particular totals are, according CENTAF, "separate from the data provided" to Tomdispatch on Iraqi bomb and missile expenditure in 2006.

"Relentless Pursuit"

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the American air war in Iraq, often targeting urban areas, has been given remarkably short shrift in the media. In 2004, Tom Engelhardt, writing at Tomdispatch, called attention to this glaring absence. Seymour Hersh's seminal piece of reportage, "Up in the Air," published in the New Yorker in late 2005, ushered in some mainstream attention to the subject. Articles by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who covered the American occupation and war in Iraq, before and after the Hersh piece, are among the smattering of pieces that have offered glimpses of the air campaign and its impact. To date, however, the mainstream media has not, to use the words of Lt. Col. Kennedy, engaged in a "relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds" fired or any other aspect of the air war or its consequences for the people of Iraq.

While we will undoubtedly never know the full extent of the human costs of the U.S. air campaign, just a few dogged reporters assigned to the air-power beat might, at the very least, have offered some sense of this one-sided air war. Since this has not been the case, we must rely on the best available evidence. One valuable source is a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, it estimated 655,000 "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." The study, published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, in October 2006, found that from March 2003 to June 2006, 13% of violent deaths in Iraq were caused by coalition air strikes. If the 655,000 figure, including over 601,000 violent deaths, is anywhere close to accurate -- and the study offered a possible range of civilian deaths that ran from 392,979 to 942,636 -- this would equal approximately 78,133 Iraqis killed by bombs, missiles, rockets, or cannon rounds from coalition aircraft between March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began and last June when the study concluded.

There are indications that the U.S. air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. According to statistics provided to Tomdispatch by The Lancet study's authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes.

The Lancet study used well-established survey methods, which have been proven in conflict zones from Kosovo to the Congo, and interviewers actually inspected death certificates from 92% of the households surveyed where they were requested (which they did 87% of the time). The Iraq Body Count Project, a group of researchers based in the United Kingdom who maintain a public database of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the war, carefully restricts itself to the sparser media reports of civilian fatalities that come out of Iraq. While a much lower number (currently the range of media-reported deaths stands at: 55,441-61,133) than the The Lancet's findings, an analysis of their carefully limited data also offers a glimpse of the human costs of the air war.

Statistics provided to Tomdispatch by the Iraq Body Count Project show that since the U.S. invasion in 2003, coalition air strikes have, according to media sources alone -- which as we know have covered the air war poorly -- caused between 15,593-17,067 Iraqi civilian casualties, including 3,625-4,093 deaths. Last year, media reports listed between 169-200 Iraqis killed and 111-112 injured in twenty-eight separate coalition air strikes, according to the IBC project.

These numbers also appear to be on the rise. In an email message to Tomdispatch last month, John Sloboda, the co-founder and spokesperson for the IBC Project, notes that the "vast majority [of lethal air strikes] have been in the last half of the year."

When asked about the modest air power casualty figures provided by the Iraq Body Count Project and whether CENTAF accepts them, Lt. Col. Kennedy dodged the question, telling Tomdispatch, "We do not track such numbers and so cannot comment on the Project's efforts or validity." He had a similar answer when it came to The Lancet study's findings.

Asked about the assertion that the second half of 2006 was much deadlier for Iraqis due to U.S. air strikes and the possible reasons for this, Kennedy waxed eloquent, "War, by its very nature has ebbs and flows, and we constantly review the application of airpower to best support the forces on the ground in theater. We view this as simply part of our contract to the warfighters. As we do not discuss operational aspects of missions, I'll decline further comment."

Kennedy went on to say that the U.S. makes "every effort" to "minimize collateral damage regardless of whether the enemy is on open ground or within the confines of a city." Just days ago, in the Los Angeles Times, Lt. Gen. Carrol H. "Howie" Chandler, the Air Force's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Requirements, expanded on this line of thought, noting, "I wouldn't automatically write off air power in an urban environment for fear of collateral damage….We have the capability with precision targeting and the new weapons to operate in an urban environment.”

Sarah Sewall, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993 to 1996 and is now Director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, agrees that air power has a role to play in urban operations, and may even mitigate civilian harm in certain instances. She warns, however, "I have a lot of skepticism about the applicability of air power for all types of problems and particularly for the types of problems that we see commonly, on a day to day basis, in Iraq today." As she told Tomdispatch, "The problem comes when you think it is the functional equivalent of ground forces."

The Pace Quickens

In 2005, CENTAF reported using 404 bombs and missiles in Iraq. In 2006, an apparent lull (whether in lethal attacks or just in their reporting) in the first half of the year seems to have given way to a rise in deadly attacks during the second half. Only days into 2007, the U.S. military had already conducted air strikes in three nations -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. And in Iraq, the air war may be increasing in pace and ferocity. For example, on January 9th, the U.S. unleashed its air power on Baghdad's Haifa Street, a "mostly Sunni Arab enclave of residential buildings and shops." According to the Washington Post, "F-15 fighter jets strafed rooftops with cannons, while the Apache[ helicopter]s fired Hellfire missiles." Elsewhere in Iraq that day, according to Air Force reports, F-16s strafed targets near Bayji with cannon fire, while others dropped GBU-38s on targets near Turki Village; and F-15Es provided "close-air support" to troops near Basrah.

That same evening, back in the U.S., a broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume" offered a brief glimpse of the air war in a story by reporter David Macdougall who was, said Hume, "embedded with the Air Force in a location we cannot identify, where not only fighter jets, but bombers roared into the air headed for other targets in Iraq." Macdougall reported that the B-1B Lancer, the long-range bomber that carries the largest payload of weapons in the Air Force was, for the first time in over a year, again being employed in combat in Iraq.

"These B-1 bombers were central to the raid. We're told they flew a ten-hour mission, and by the looks of their empty bomb bays, these planes dropped thousands of pounds of munitions. They bombed 25 targets deep inside Iraq," he said. At one of these sites, he reported, Army troops sent in after the air strike reportedly found a "command and control center, insurgent hospital, and a closet-sized room covered in blood." We may never know if that "room covered in blood" was a torture center, part of the hospital, or if it became "covered" in the same manner that caused the 280 Iraqi civilian casualties from air strikes reported in the media, and the many more that undoubtedly went unreported and ignored, last year. This is yet another facet of the air war that will remain a mystery.

The Secret Air War

While reporting on the air war has often been barely evident, except as the odd paragraph in daily round-up battle pieces from Iraq (which rely mainly on military handouts or press briefings), the gaps in our knowledge about the air war have been facilitated by the U.S. military's failure to be honest and forthcoming with both data and doctrine. In this respect, the military has been the media's enabler.

Given CENTAF's knowledge that, no matter how "smart" their munitions or how precise their targeting, noncombatants, especially in urban neighborhoods, are sure to die in air strikes, I had a question for Lt. Col. Kennedy: Could he explain how CENTAF decided what was an acceptable level of civilian caualties it was willing to sacrifice for military aims? His answer: "Not in a sufficient manner that you would be happy with."

Kennedy's response echoed a running theme in his replies to my questions. At one point in our exchanges, he actually suggested that an article on the air war in Iraq was not "a viable story" and told me not to contact him again until I was under contract to produce an article that met his standards. He later claimed that his viability comment was due to my "apparent freelance status" and the fact I had not provided "a copy of any contract, nor contacts with a publisher."

"When you provide such information I'll be happy to entertain your questions," he wrote. After providing proof that I was, indeed, a journalist, he deigned to answer me again, concluding, "This is the last email I will respond to from you."

Kennedy was just one of a number of U.S. military officials who thwarted attempts to uncover the barest outline of the real extent and nature of the American air war and its toll on Iraqis. Aside from the Air Force's daily release of airpower summaries of dubious worth, the military's efforts have kept almost all substantive aspects of the air war essentially a secret from Americans at home.

During the Vietnam War, the United States conducted a clandestine air war in Cambodia, lied about it to the press, and hid it from the American public. In Iraq, the military has, these last years, engaged in a different kind of secretive air campaign, but their methods of keeping it a mystery appear to have certain similarities. A few years ago, at a meeting at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event, Les Roberts, a co-author of The Lancet study and now on faculty at Columbia University's Program on Forced Migration and Health, recalls a Pentagon spokesman's declaration that, aside from some sites in Najaf and al-Anbar province, the military had refrained from any attacks on mosques in Iraq. Roberts said that the spokesman's rhetoric differed markedly from the facts on the ground, recalling that "just weeks before I had seen helicopter gunships destroy a beautiful Mosque about an hour south of Baghdad."

When I asked Lt. Col. Kennedy why CENTAF did not track figures on civilian casualties of the air war, he laid the blame on higher headquarters, namely the Office of the Secretary of Defense: "Go ask OSD as we do not set policy here," he wrote.

"I think that it's a red herring," Sewall, the former Pentagon official, told Tomdispatch. "They spend a tremendous amount of energy using computer models to predict where the glass shards are going to go, and then they don't actually care about whether or not that effort to control the direction of the glass shards results in killing fewer people, because they've never bothered to find out whether it, in fact, succeeded in killing fewer people." As she pointed out in a telephone interview, it is "a rather absurd position."

"If they wanted to, they could certainly, as a matter of their own internal procedures, do it," Sewall said of tracking civilian casualties. "I think it's inexcusable that they don't do a better job."

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.

The Coming Day of Wrath

Over the Cliff with George and Dick?

by Tom Engelhardt

Let me make an argument about Bush administration Iran policy -- about the possibility that a regime-change-style, shock-and-awe air assault might someday be launched on Iranian nuclear facilities and associated targets -- based on no insider knowledge, just the logic of George-and-Dick's Thelma-and-Louise-style imperialism.

Of course, we all know at least half the story by now. Is there anybody in official Washington -- other than our President, Vice President, the Vice President's secretive imperial staff, assorted backs-against-the-wall neocon supporters lodged in the federal bureaucracy, and associated right-wing think tanks -- who isn't sweating blood, popping pills, and wondering what in the world to do about our delusional leaders?

You only have to pick up the morning paper to find the most mainstream of official types in an over-the-top mode that, bare months ago, would have been confined to the distant peripheries of political argument. There's Senator Joe Biden, the very definition of a mainstream man, grilling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about whether she believes the administration already has the authority to attack Iran and swearing, if she does, that it "will generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate, I predict to you." (You can add the exclamation point to that comment or to similar ones from the likes of Senators James Webb and Chuck Hagel among others.) Or how about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on presidential pronouncements in January?

"Much has been made about President Bush's recent saber rattling toward Iran. This morning, I'd like to be clear: The President does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking Congressional authorization -- the current use of force resolution for Iraq does not give him such authorization."

Former officials are now crawling out of the Washington woodwork to denounce

Bush/Cheney policy in Iraq and Iran with the fervor (however masked by official Washington language) of an exorcism. There, for instance, is former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in front of Congress, more or less predicting the end of the Roman… sorry, the American empire:

"The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability… If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large… A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated…"

There are three retired high military officials, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Gard (former assistant to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara), U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Hoar (former Centcom commander), and Navy Vice Adm. Jack Shanahan issuing a public letter insisting that attacking Iran "would have disastrous consequences for security in the region, coalition forces in Iraq and would further exacerbate regional and global tensions." There's Paul Pillar, former CIA analyst for the Middle East, in the Washington Post warning: "Avoiding the next military folly in the Middle East requires that the agenda for analysis and debate not be so severely and tendentiously truncated as before Iraq."

Even Secretary of State Rice, new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and hardline National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley seem to be exhibiting a certain degree of anxiety, sending back the intelligence dossier gathered by our embassy in Baghdad on Iranian interference in America's Iraq. (You know, "foreign" interference on our home turf.) Assumedly, this was because the latest doctored intelligence, claiming the Iranians are supplying advanced IED technology that is causing American deaths looks as hollow as the administration's cherry-picked and doctored intelligence on Iraqi WMDs before the 2003 invasion.

On the face of it, as Juan Cole long ago pointed out at his Informed Comment website, there's something suitably George-and-Dick wacky about claims like this, implying that the Iranians are arming the Sunni insurgency. How times have changed, however. Unlike in 2002-2003, officials and former officials are finally making such points in very public ways. Take, for instance, Bruce Riedel, a former top Middle East expert on the National Security Council, who recently bluntly told USA Today, "There is no evidence that the Sunnis are being assisted by Iran."

The Rice/Gates/Hadley send-back may, of course, turn out to be little more than the Iranian equivalent of Secretary of State Colin Powell sending back similarly wacky administration claims about Iraqi WMD before preparing his infamous UN presentation that led to the invasion of 2003. But if so, there's certain to be a lot more mainstream skepticism, criticism, and noise this time around.

After all, to anyone not delusional -- which leaves out you-know-who and his Vice President -- a massive air assault on Iran, surely involving bunker-busting missiles with staggering explosive power, would seem to be an act of madness. It would be immensely destructive to Iran (and yet almost surely a rallying point for its fundamentalist regime); bloody in its repercussions for the U.S. (especially our troops in Iraq); imperiling to U.S, allies in the region; and, for the global economy, a potential energy catastrophe. A series of explosive events -- some thoroughly unexpected and so never war-gamed by U.S. military strategists -- could unravel the oil heartlands of the planet, making the administration's last several years in Iraq little more than an hors d'oeuvre before a banquet of catastrophe. The decision to attack Iran would be the equivalent of setting off an advanced IED directly under the main highway of what's left of global order.

You don't have to rely on me for this. In his confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates -- claiming that any attack on Iran would be a "very last resort" (when Bush administration officials have regularly called it a "last resort" or insisted "all options are on the table") -- offered his own bloodcurdling scenario for the aftermath of such an assault:

"It's always awkward to talk about hypotheticals in this case. But I think that while Iran cannot attack us directly militarily, I think that their capacity to potentially close off the Persian Gulf to all exports of oil, their potential to unleash a significant wave of terror both in the -- well, in the Middle East and in Europe and even here in this country is very real… Their ability to get Hezbollah to further destabilize Lebanon I think is very real. So I think that while their ability to retaliate against us in a conventional military way is quite limited, they have the capacity to do all of the things, and perhaps more, that I just described."

And that's just a smattering of the hair-raising news from a hair-tearing town in crisis.

Fatwa Time

The possibility of an attack on Iran has been a long time on the horizon. You'd have to start back at that moment before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when, as Newsweek reminded us, one quip of the bolder neocons was: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." You'd have to go back to January 2005, when reporter Seymour Hersh, in a New Yorker piece, "The Coming Wars," wrote, "In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran," and added that, in close cooperation with the Israelis, "the Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer."

You'd have to go back to March 2005, when ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern pointed out at Tomdispatch.com that “Bush administration policy towards the Middle East is being run by men…who were routinely referred to in high circles in Washington during the 1980s as ‘the crazies” and who, he warned, might head for an Iran next.

You'd have to go back to August 2005 when, in the American Conservative magazine, former CIA official Philip Giraldi warned: "In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran" -- possibly involving an "unprovoked nuclear attack" on that country. A contingency plan was, he claimed, being drawn up in the Pentagon, "acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office."

You'd have to check out a second Hersh New Yorker piece from April 2006, "The Iran Plans," in which he reported: "Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups." He added that, increasingly, insiders believed the President's goal was not simply aborting the Iranian nuclear program, but Iraq-style "regime change," and that, against Pentagon opposition, "the nuclear option" -- the possibility of using a "bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon" -- had made it into initial planning for a full-scale air assault on Iran. You'd have to check out the work of former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter (who was laughed out of the room in 2002-2003 for claiming that Saddam Hussein probably had no stocks of WMD, or even WMD programs, left), and who recently published a book whose title says it all: Target Iran.

These men- some classic conservatives- and other like them are now, if anything, even more passionately convinced that the Bush administration is headed for the Iranian cliff before its time in office ends, possibly as early as this spring.

But it took more than their work for so much of official Washington to panic. It took the administration's decision to send the USS John C. Stennis, a second aircraft carrier task force into the Persian Gulf (with hints that a third could follow); it took the announcement of what Juan Cole has termed George Bush's "fatwa," allowing the U.S. military to take out Iranian agents anywhere in Iraq ("Announcing open hunting season on all Iranian visitors to Iraq," Cole wrote, "is like playing Frisbee with nitroglycerin. Bush has gone looking for trouble and is likely to find it…”), it took the detention

by U.S. forces of various Iranian officials in Iraq and the invasion of an Iranian office in Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan; it took the President's announcement of a decision to emplace Patriot anti-missile systems in the smaller Gulf states; it took a sudden, massive, and eerily familiar ratcheting up of administration rhetoric about Iran and Iranian influence in Iraq (as NBC's Tim Russert put it after a meeting with the President, "There's a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue -- in the country and the world -- in a very acute way"); it took rumors that the Air Force was gearing up for an anti-Iranian surge along the Iranian-Iraqi border; it took the refusal of officials like John Negroponte to say whether or not they believed the administration already had the right to whack Iran without returning to Congress for permission; it took reports about the readying of new bases in Bulgaria and Rumania for a future Iranian air campaign; it took rumors that the Pentagon's latest strike plan against Iran includes "more than 2,300 ‘high value’ targets.”

And it took, of course, the administration's ongoing catastrophe in Iraq, which drives everything before it, as well as Bush's pugnacious (if hopeless) "surge plan" reaction to rejection in the November midterm elections; it took the President's insistence on victory in a situation where loss was so obviously on the agenda that you didn't need scads of dollars and the sixteen agencies of the U.S. intelligence Community to make the point in a National Intelligence Estimate; it took Vice President Cheney's delusional insistence, in a duke-it-out interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, that the administration's Iraq policy would be "an enormous success story."

And, of course, it took all those eerie parallels with the administration's behavior in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, not to speak of the realization that this administration, devoted as it is to an unfettered commander-in-chief-style of Presidential power, believed it already had authorization aplenty to attack Iran. It took what increasingly looks like the beginnings of a systemic nervous breakdown in Washington, a feeling that a thoroughly avoidable disaster loomed, along with (as Robert Parry wrote recently) "a sense of futility among many in Washington who doubt they can do anything to stop Bush." It took all of the above and more to bring home the possibility that our leaders might one day actually take the house down with them, that they might indeed gun the car and head directly for the cliff with something between sneers and smiles on their faces.

Over the Cliff?

So feel free to imitate official Washington. Be scared, very scared. An attack on Iran, if it were to happen, promises a special mixture of two fundamentalisms deeply engrained in our top political and military officials that may, in the end, combine into a single lethal brew -- and that will, in the bargain, give American policy in the Middle East the full-blown look of a war on Islam. Though our President is a Christian fundamentalist, neither of these Washington fundamentalisms are, in the normal sense, religious or particularly Christian.

The first -- the bedrock faith of the Bush administration and its neocon supporters since September 12, 2001 -- is the religion of force. Our self-styled "wartime" Commander-in-Chief, and the Vice President head an administration that has long been in love not just with the American armed forces, but with the dazzling military possibilities that seemed open to them as leaders of the last standing superpower. Its high-tech destructive capabilities, they believed, gave them the power to go it alone in the world, shocking and awing a post-Cold War assemblage of lesser states into eternal submission. Force -- the threat of it, the application of it -- was the summa cum laude of their go-it-alone university of power (vividly demonstrated, at a theoretical level, in the single most important strategic document of these last years, their 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America).

At the height of their self-dazzled sense of power back in 20-01-2003, they saw force as their own special Tao, their Way in the world, at their depths- now- reaching back into their problem-solving quiver, they naturally find only the same arrow that’s always been there, a belief system, a religion for all occasions.

In the case of a possible future assault on Iran, the larger fundamentalism of the Church of Force will surely combine with the only significant force the Pentagon has on hand -- air power. The belief in air power's ability to fell regimes and change the political essentials, to bring whole peoples to their knees, is long-lasting and deep-seated. Since well before World War II, we've been living with a belief system in which bombing others, including civilian populations, is a "strategic" thing to do; in which air power can, in relatively swift measure, break the "will" not just of the enemy, but of that enemy's society; and in which air power is the royal path to victory.

That this has not proven so; that, most recently, it did not prove so in Afghanistan, in shock-and-awe Iraq, or in Israel's air assault last summer on Lebanon matters little. Faith in the efficacy of air power (as opposed to its barbarism) is fundamentalist in nature and so not disprovable by the facts on the rubble-strewn, cratered ground.

As a result, the strength of the belief that "it" -- force, air power -- will do the trick the next time, if only you have the nerve not to listen to the Nervous Nellies, if only you double down on your bet, if only you commit to it, should not be underestimated.

Do you remember that period before the invasion of Iraq when the neocons and their various admirers and clustering pundits were proclaiming us quite literally the New Rome and speaking of a Pax Americana globally (and a Pax Republicana domestically) that would last forever and a day? They were, in fact, intent on describing a jungle world of failed states at the peripheries of our globe, the sort of planet that needed an imperial power like…well, like us…for order. That, of course, was before the Bush administration managed to bring a jungle world of chaos to Iraq and so to the heart of the global energy system -- and they all fell imperially silent.

I've been wondering in their stead, what sort of empire are we? Empires are usually settled and ruled areas (except at their frontiers), not jungle worlds. So if, say, Sudan or the Congo or Afghanistan or Somalia is a failed state, are we then, under George and Dick, simply a failed empire? Do we now rule (as opposed to threaten) anything? Are we an empire at all -- even at home where a vast, ungainly government is being privatized into a new kind of (ever more expensive) chaos and the federal budget is being driven over a military-industrial cliff -- or are we Kong (before he underwent his most recent cinematic transformation into a loving softie)? Or are we a Three Stooges version of the imperial, or is it just that Dick and George, all four hands on the spinning wheel of state, are heading for that cliff intent on liberating us all?

In that over-the-top interview with CNN's Blitzer, Vice President Cheney, in essence, accused him of, as the Washington Post put it, "embracing defeat."

What an apt phrase for Dick himself -- and for his presidential pal! Having long embraced a fantasy of victory, they now show every sign of wrapping their arms around their own Iraq defeat as if it were victory, and -- with the enthusiasm of Thelma and Louise, trapped by all those cop cars -- taking the only path that seems open to them. As the alternatives grow ever starker -- surrender to all those "Democrat" electees, to the reporters and the critics, the cavilers and the antiwar demonstrators, the ragtag insurgents, the alien Mullahs, and even the panicked Republicans in their own ranks -- what's left but that liberating, exhilarating trip over the cliff?

Unlike the movies, where any review can tell you the ending before you even enter the local multiplex, life -- even political life, even geopolitical life -- is a remarkably unsettled, as well as unsettling thing.

Nothing assures us that some predetermined fate will actually drive us all over that cliff. But if, before November 2008, we do head in that direction, a small suggestion: Don't bother to buckle your seatbelt. It's not going to be that sort of a trip to the bottom.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Iran test fires Russian missiles near Strait of Hormuz

February 7, 2007

AP

TEHRAN, Iran: Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards test fired its new Russian defense missile system Wednesday near the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, state radio reported.

The two-day maneuvers are Iran's second since the United Nations Security Council approved economic sanctions against it Dec. 23, which ban selling to Iran materials and technology that it could use in its nuclear and missile programs.

As tensions rise over Iran's nuclear standoff with the West, the United States and Iran have pursued an escalating series of military moves, with Washington sending a second aircraft carrier battle group to the region and Iran responding with more frequent maneuvers.

The Revolutionary Guards' began the games Wednesday in the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea, which flank the strait, through which some 20 percent of the world's oil transits daily.

The goal of the maneuvers, dubbed Saegheh and Badr, is to improve the "defense, stamina and operation" of participating units, state radio reported. The first word of the games' name means lightening, while the second refers to a decisive battle in the early days of Islam.

Tehran warns US against attacks

February 8, 2007

BBC News

Iran will strike against US interests worldwide if it is attacked, the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned.

"The enemies know well that any aggression will lead to a reaction from all sides," he said.

Washington accuses Tehran of secretly trying to develop a nuclear weapon, and has not ruled out using military force.

The Iranians insist their nuclear programme is purely civilian and aimed at meeting their energy needs.

The BBC's Frances Harrison in Tehran says Ayatollah Khamenei was defiant about the prospect of a possible American military strike.

The supreme leader said he hoped nobody would risk attacking Iran because the nation would stand up for itself and only become stronger militarily and economically.

Iran also denounced remarks by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair that Tehran was determined to stir up maximum trouble in the Middle East.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said Mr Blair's comments were "insolent" and "undiplomatic".

Mr Hosseini said Britain had played a key role in sabotaging talks on the nuclear issue in the past and had followed the US and Israel in imposing destructive wars on the Middle East.

War games

Another key Iranian figure, ex-President Hashemi Rafsanjani, has also warned against a strike, saying it would carry a heavy cost for those who tried it.

The warnings came as Iran's navy and air force conducted war games.

Iran said it had successfully test-fired a land-to-sea missile with a range of 350km (220 miles).

Tehran said it had also tested a new Russian-made air defence system.

Officials have refused to confirm whether the system has been deployed around nuclear sites.

At the weekend ambassadors from non-aligned countries were allowed to visit an Iranian nuclear facility, on what was billed as a transparency visit.

The UN's chief nuclear inspector is to report on Tehran's compliance with the UN Security Council's demands later this month.

In December the UN imposed limited sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment