Category: Archive

New Statesman

Monday 23rd May 2005

We are all being taken in by a carefully planned public relations strategy. Its mission: to push nuclear power back on the political agenda, rebranded as the new "green" alternative.

By Jonathan Leake and Dan Box

In the plush surroundings of the Army & Navy Club on London’s Pall Mall, Mike Alexander, chief executive of British Energy, was holding court. Assembled before him were more than a hundred leading figures from the UK’s energy industry – all there at the behest of the Energy Industries Club, an industry body that keeps its membership secret.

But in recent weeks, as Tehran’s uranium enrichment dispute with the US, Britain and other western European countries has moved towards a denouement, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has launched an energetic diplomatic counter-offensive. Defying US containment efforts, Iran is pursuing its own policy of regional engagement. And to Washington’s growing unease, it seems to be working.

"The Americans are making a big push to isolate Iran. But they are making a big mistake. We are not Burma," said Vahid Karimi of the government-funded Institute for Political and International Studies. "We have plenty of friends."

Did a central controller with "super user" privileges of the command and control systems of the Department of Defense, NORAD, the Air Force, and the FAA, control the aerial attacks of 9/11? There is only one agency that has that capability – a little-known private company known as MITRE Corp.

There are basically two versions of events surrounding the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. There is the government version, propagated by the controlled media, which claims that 19 Arab terrorists, organized by Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hijacked 4 passenger aircraft and used them to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This version, used to launch the "war on terror" and two invasions in the Middle East, is challenged by a lack of evidence.

On the other hand, a host of unofficial explanations, based on available evidence, make up what can be called the "inside job" or anti-government version. This version basically claims that agents embedded within the U.S. military and intelligence organizations conspired to carry out the terror attacks.

The two foreign nations most often implicated in the unofficial explanations of 9/11 are Israel and Britain. Both countries are supporters and beneficiaries of the Bush administration’s "war on terror."

For the Israelis, Iraq, a major threat, was drastically reduced in power and put under military occupation. For the British, a oil-rich territory, Iraq’s southern region of Basra, which it originally occupied in 1914, was reoccupied and its immense oil assets put under control of the Crown.

Royal Dutch Shell and BP, formerly named British Petroleum, are two companies said to be controlled by the Crown, which have posted record profits since 9/11.

Three long years into this war of choice, most Americans and Arabs are still trying to figure out why George Bush wasted so many chips playing Iraqi roulette.

If the nasty Mess on Potamia wasn’t about the phantom weapons of mass destruction, it certainly had nothing to do with spreading the blessings of democracy to the region. "Liberating foreigners from the yoke of repression" is the last refuge of scoundrels without a good alibi for an unprovoked unilateral war of aggression against a sovereign state.

The United States had fifteen long years to encourage the development of a model democracy in Kuwait — which remains a family ruled oil plantation with a rubber stamp parliament. Uncle Sam could have leaned on the Saudis to get with the program. So far, the custodians of the oil plantations in the kingdom of oil have managed to stage male-only elections to contest half the seats in a few city councils.

By now, it should be clear to one and all that war in Iraq has done nothing but create more willing and eager adversaries in the "war on terror." As a result of Bush’s escapade, a nasty sectarian civil war has converted Baghdad into the most dangerous city on earth. There is no other place in the planet where fifty mutilated bodies are dumped in the municipal morgue on a regular daily basis. Every Iraqi is a potential victim in a chaotic landscape where a guy wearing a cop uniform by day moonlights as a member of a death squad by night.

The occupation army led by American forces has abandoned its legal responsibility to ensure the safety of their colonial subjects and focused their effort on "force protection." These days, Washington is more concerned with conducting behind the scenes haggling with Tehran to come up with a face saving exit strategy. Most likely, Bush will try to work out a deal where he ends up ceding Iraq to theocrats beholden to the clerics in Iran in exchange for a pledge from Tehran to forget about joining the nuclear club.

To achieve this spectacular result, Cpl. Michael Estrella made the ultimate sacrifice. As White House press secretary Tony Snow put it, the twenty-year-old marine from California became "just a number" — number 2500 to be precise. No one is counting the number of Iraqi casualties — but some are forecasting that the dollar tab for this venture will eventually add up to a trillion plus in borrowed greenbacks.