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Back in circa 2006, when everybody thought they were gonna do it--nuke Iran (before Rumsfeld resigned), I happened upon a newsbit from I think an Asian news source. Very short bit. Didn't save it. (Wish I had.) And it said that China, Russia and, as I recall, India, were having a meeting to figure out what to do about the U.S. bully. That's it. Never heard another thing about it. The issue on everybody's minds at that time was Iran. Not a day went by without more Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld saber-rattling at Iran.
So what happened on Iran? Remember all that? The war drums were beating and beating and beating, louder and louder and louder, and, then...poof! The Iranians smilingly gave the British sailors back (no 'Gulf of Tonkin' to spark the war), and it all went away within a couple of months of Rumsfeld's resignation from the Pentagon. Somehow Iran got taken "off the table."
Rumsfeld resigned just after the Dems won Congress, and a lot of people assumed that Rumsfeld, man of the people that he is, bowed to the voters on Iraq (the no. 1 issue in the 2006 congressional elections). But there was no change of policy on Iraq. The new Dem congress soon fully funded the "surge," etc. So why did Rumsfeld resign? (I was just kidding about "man of the people"--Rumsfeld didn't give a fuck what the American people thought.)
One other thing: I read in a number of places at the time that the U.S. military brass were balking at using nukes to attack Iran. This was framed as, what would be needed to take out Iranian underground nuclear facilities? But I doubt that that is all Cheney-Rumsfeld intended. I don't think they gave a fuck who has nukes. (They just want to be ones to SELL the nukes.) (Bear in mind that they had outed and completely disabled the CIA's top counter-proliferation expert and her entire network of agents/contacts around the world which was monitoring and trying to prevent nuke and other WMD proliferation. So, clearly, they did not give a fuck about that. Their thing was control of the oil.)
So the question maybe really was: how to take down Iran (topple its government, invade/occupy, get control of the oil)? Iran is well defended--unlike Iraq (which was a basketcase, and didn't even have an air force, when the Bushwhacks bombed Baghdad, slaugthering a hundred thousand innocent people). Nukes are probably the only 'realistic' way to invade/occupy Iran, Were these rumors of a military revolt against Cheney-Rumsfeld really about the risk of armageddon, should nuclear powers China and/or Russia--which both get a lot of oil from Iran--come into it, on Iran's side? And did they threaten to do that?
Another thing that was occurring during that period was Daddy Bush's "Iraq Study Group," whereby he assembled a bunch of mucky-mucks (including Leon Panetta, future CIA director) to make a bunch of mucky-muck recommendations about Iraq. But what if the ISG was really about Iran, or also about Iran (i.e., nuking Iran at the risk of China or Russia retaliating)? Did the brass warn Rumsfeld-Cheney about the risks of armageddon but Rumsfeld/Cheney were going to order them to do it anyway? And did Daddy Bush intervene and rescue Junior from this madness, and/or from a military insurrection? (It's probable, too, that, if Rumsfeld/Cheney were going to order an attack on Iran, that they had plans to declare martial law here, to contain a military or peoples' revolt against nuclear warfare. And this would have ripped the last veil off of our corpo-fascist rulers. Daddy Bush is very much into veils--controlling this big, sprawling, diverse, difficult-to-control country behind an illusion of democracy.)
When I read that newsbit about the China-Russia-India meeting, I remember thinking: Well, how are they going to do that (contain the U.S./Bushwhack bully)? And my first thought was financial (say, China threatening to call in our debts). This is why this article (the OP) interests me. Though the time-frame is a bit later, it suggests a strategy to curtail the U.S. (Bushwhacks) who were clearly on a path to corner the world's oil supplies, at any cost--in their "Project For A New American Century"--and were not content with a "balance of power" in the world, or "spheres of influence," but were aggressively using the U.S. war machine to grab and control as much of the resource as they could. In the later circumstance--post-Rumsfeld--it appears that the U.S. was inciting Georgia against Russia. So there were vestiges of Rumsfeldianism (war madness, war as the first resort) still around, post-Rumsfeld. Maybe China-Russia were still concerned that Cheney wouldn't leave office--that there would be a counter-counter putsch--which prompted them to contribute to the Bushwhack Financial 9/11 of September 2008 (just before Junior & Darth were supposed to leave office)? I had thought of the September 2008 events as the Bushwhacks' "final looting." They couldn't have Iran so they were taking all of our money. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe China-Russia had something to do with it--to give Cheney and any remaining Rumsfeldians the final boot out the door.
Is it possible that we have China and Russia (and Daddy Bush?) to thank for retaining some vestige of democracy here? That would be ironical. Broke as we are, at least our government is not incinerating the Middle East in an insane quest for more oil profits, and more power, for a few "lords of the earth."
Naw, it's just more veils. The truth is we don't have much of a clue who is running things, and we certainly have absolutely no power to influence them. That movie, "The Matrix," had it right. The question we need to ask is, how did things come to such as pass, that the Bushwhacks could drag us into two wars and almost into a third (--and what might have been the "last war," truly), when, in Feb 2003, nearly 60% of the American people opposed the second war, and in Nov 2008, voted overwhelmingly to end it-- yet, two years later, we're still there (and never will be gone, believe me), and when the great majority of Americans now want us out of the first war, yet 30,000 more troops are on their way there.
These are vital questions for a peace-minded people who believe in democracy even if that democracy is in tatters. We need to address this in very practical terms. Where does our power as a people reside? I'd look first to the voting machines--all run on corporate-owned 'TRADE SECRET' code, with zero or flimsy audit/recount controls, and with one corporation--the worst--ES&S--now having a 70% monopoly of these 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting systems. Do you know what they do with your vote, after you cast it? 99% of the the votes are not seen or counted by any human being, and that's in the best states. In half the states in the US, it's 100%. No audit at all. Nothing to count. A far rightwing corporation will be telling you what the result is, based on proprietary programming code that you are not permitted to review. This is not the only thing wrong with our democracy, by any means. But it's a practical place to start peeling back the veils.
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