Iran and Syria Still in the Crosshairs

[kliljedahl]

by Gary Leupp
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 29, 2005

Another year over, and we still haven’t seen the widely predicted U.S. (or U.S.-Israeli) attacks on Syria and Iran. But keep paying attention. The Turkish press reports that in a December trip to Turkey, CIA Director Porter Goss “asked Ankara to be ready for a possible US air operation against Iran and Syria.” Coming hot on the heels of FBI Director Robert Mueller, he brought with him a large delegation and three dossiers laying out the case against Iran. The first purportedly documents the existence of Iranian nuclear weapons, the second of Iranian ties to al-Qaeda and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), and the third depicts Iran as a mortal enemy of the secular Turkish state. Apparently the PKK issue was central to the discussions. This account follows Philip Giraldi’s report in the American Conservative last July that Vice President Cheney has asked the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to draw up concrete, short term contingency plans for an attack on Iran, to involve “a large-scale air assault employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.” This would occur in the aftermath of a terror attack on the U.S. which, whatever its origins, would be politically used to justify an attack on Iran, just as the al-Qaeda attack was used to justify the attack on Iraq. Cheney has also declared matter-of-factly that if the U.S. doesn’t attack Iran, Israel might do so. (James Petras persuasively documents Israeli intentions)

As Kurt Nimmo notes, the full import of the Turkish story hasn’t been echoed in the U.S. press. But inquiring journalistic minds should be asking, “What does it mean for Turkey to be ready for U.S. actions against two more Muslim states?” In March 2003, the Turkish legislature refused to allow the deployment of U.S. troops from Turkey to Iraq in advance of the invasion. The then Prime Minister Abdullah Gul was on board the program, but the parliamentarians backed up by public opinion narrowly voted against it. Goss must have met with current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a bid to avoid more embarrassment in future. Are Turkish rulers being asked to support air strikes from Incirlik Air Force Base to contain mass protests as the Terror War widens? Are they being offered carrots in return for cooperation, such as a green light to operate against the PKK in Iran, as the German news agency DPP has claimed? Or in Syria and northern Iraq? Are the Turks buying the arguments for attacks?

Turkey seems a country of vital significance to the neocons, as it is for Israel. An overwhelmingly Muslim but secularist state, with strong military and political ties to Israel, it has received two neocon U.S. ambassadors in recent years (former State Department official Marc Grossman and “Scooter” Libby deputy Eric Edelman). It’s been suggested that Valerie Plame was outed to impede her investigation of links between the neocons, the American-Turkish Council, and a Turkish nuclear program. As the only Muslim NATO country, supportive of U.S. policy in Afghanistan if not Iraq, it could play a key role in the planned attacks on Iran and Syria. The CIA, more inclined than before to “fix the intelligence around policy,” naturally gets sent to show the Turks that there are multiple reasons to support an expansion of the American war in its part of the world. (This is the CIA headed by Goss, who once pronounced himself unsuitable for the agency chief post, and who a top outgoing CIA official, Robert Richer, told a Senate committee is out of touch with reality.)

His argument to the Turks seems to have hinged on the Kurdish issue.



Keith’s Barbeque Central

[tatertop]

1. You better believe it.

[RDANGELO]

2. Air strikes, which will make everything worse.

This will turn the Iranian people completely against us. Most of the people in the Middle East already hate us. Their are indications that the Iranians are aiding the insurgency. I think the only theoretical way to stop this would be an invasion, but the results of that could be catastrophic. I suspect that the reason they appear to have backed away from the invasion is the Iranians growing relationships with China and Russia. They can't risk a confrontation with these two nuclear powers. In a nutshell, what these fools have is Iraq about to be run by people with the same mentality as those who are running Iran, and there is nothing we can do about it short of a civil war.