Bangkok joins the list of cities playing host to “Iranian” bombings.

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer

Activist Post

Not even 24 hours have passed and “Thai officials” have already determined not only that Bangkok’s bomb blasts were the work of Iranians, but that they intended to target Israelis, this according to the Jerusalem Post. Anyone familiar with Thailand’s police and government would realize the utter impossibility of such a crime being solved in a single afternoon — let alone being able to draw conclusions carrying possibly war-triggering implications.

February 14, 2012 – Already, the corporate-media and certified warmongers alike are pinning the recent bombings in Bangkok, Thailand on “bungling” Iranian terrorists.

US policy consultant, Max Boot, a Neo-Con Project for a New American Century (PNAC) signatory and a member of various corporate-funded think-tanks that endlessly conjure up and promote wars to expand Wall Street and London’s global reach, immediately linked the incident in Bangkok with 2 failed bombings in India and Georgia in his recent article, “Self-Defeating, But Dangerous Terror Acts.”

He concludes his baseless appraisal of the string of attacks by stating:

On one level these events are comforting because they suggest that Iran and its proxies in Hezbollah are not as skillful as generally assumed. But on another level these events should be deeply discomfiting to anyone who subscribes to the notion that the Iranians are calculating Realpolitikers who act so cautiously they can even be trusted with the possession of nuclear weapons. Au contraire: The events of the last two days suggest the Iranian regime, assuming it is responsible for these attacks, is capable of acting in self-defeating, irrational but dangerous ways. In short, hardly the sort of people we should trust with a BB gun–much less nuclear weapons.

Boot manages to both bolster the untenable theory that Iran was behind these attacks, while using their reckless, bungling nature to illustrate just how necessary a war is in order to disarm Iran of its alleged nuclear ambitions — a war these attacks provide the perfect pretext for.

Manufacturing a Pretext for War

Of course, Boot and the corporate-media never mention that Western policy makers for years have been conspiring to provoke Iran into a war it neither wants nor will benefit from in any conceivable way. This is best encapsulated in this often cited quote from US policy think-tank, Brookings Institution:

…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.) — Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, pages 84-85.

The same report would go on to say:

In a similar vein, any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians ‘brought it on themselves’ by refusing a very good deal. — Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, page 52.

Clearly those in the West intent on striking Iran realize both the difficulty of obtaining a plausible justification, and the utter lack of support they have globally to carry out an attack even if they manage to find a suitable pretext.

Brookings would continue throughout their report enumerating methods of provoking Iran, including conspiring to fund opposition groups to overthrow the Iranian government, crippling Iran’s economy, and funding US State Department-listed terrorist organizations to carry deadly attacks within Iran itself.

Despite these overt acts of war, and even considering an option to unilaterally conduct limited airstrikes against Iranian targets, Brookings noted there was still the strong possibility Iran would not allow itself to be sufficiently provoked:

It would not be inevitable that Iran would lash out violently in response to an American air campaign, but no American president should blithely assume that it would not.

The report continues:

However, because many Iranian leaders would likely be looking to emerge from the fighting in as advantageous a strategic position as possible, and because they would likely calculate that playing the victim would be their best route to that goal, they might well refrain from such retaliatory missile attacks. — Brookings Institution’s 2009 ‘Which Path to Persia?‘ report, page 95.

The depths of depravity and overt criminality exhibited around the tables of US policy makers like the Brookings Institution opens the door to literally any and all options conceivable to garner the support of global public opinion and procure the necessary pretext for war with Iran. If the Brookings Institution is willing to propose the use of listed terrorist organizations to wage a campaign of terror inside Iran against its government, military, and citizens, why not back terrorists to carry out attacks in India, Georgia, and more recently in Bangkok, Thailand?

Boot also fails to mention that the current government ruling Thailand, is through proxy by Thaksin Shinawatra, a former Carlyle Group adviser, and recipient of extensive US backing, including lobbying services from fellow Carlyle member James Baker and his firm Baker Botts, warmonger Robert Blackwill of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, and PNAC signatory Kenneth Adelman of Edelman. During Thaksin’s term in office from 2001 until a coup ousted him in 2006, upon the eve of which he was literally reporting to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he had committed Thai troops to the US invasion of Iraq and allowed the CIA to use Thailand for its abhorrent rendition program.

There would be no US ally more willing to sow terror in the streets of his own nation than Thaksin Shinawatra who while currently living in self-imposed exile to escape a two-year prison sentence for corruption, is running the government by proxy through his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra recently elected as Thailand’s Prime Minister.

In 2010, in a bid to return to power, Thaksin called for a people’s war, fielding approximately 300 armed militants amongst a mob of approximately 15-30 thousand protesters in the streets of Bangkok and leading 2 months of violence that left 91 dead, thousands injured and wide scale arson called on by Thaksin’s political lieutenants in the streets.

With many of the very men who helped Thaksin facilitate this violence, politically if not logistically, now holding key positions of power throughout his proxy government, coordinating with foreign intelligence and local patsies to carry out a staged provocation would be an effortless task. Thaksin’s deputy prime minister Chalerm Yoobamrung had already begun playing along with US claims of Hezbollah operating in, of all places, in Bangkok, and even arrested suspects allegedly linked to Hezbollah.

A Problem of Credibility

The problem ultimately is that the United States and Israel have put to paper a conspiracy to provoke a war with Iran by crushing it economically, attacking it covertly, surrounding it militarily, undermining it politically, and even going as far as funding, training, and arming terrorists to murder the Iranian people themselves. Nothing the West says now, even if it were true, without absolute, irrefutable evidence to back it up, is worth the paper it is written on. Every alleged attack, every pretext they put forward, every excuse for this clearly unprovoked war, must first be suspected as a manufactured provocation until otherwise proven by independent sources — excluding Wall Street proxies like Thailand’s current government and the NATO-bent officials of Tbilisi, Georgia.

What should worry readers the most is that if the US and Israel really are carrying out a global campaign of false-flag attacks to finally garner their elusive justification for an otherwise indefensible act of aggression, how far they are willing to go if public opinion fails to be swayed by these suspicious incidents?

The West is now collectively reaping the misfortune President Dwight Eisenhower warned us against in allowing the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. These corporate-financier interests have bent the will of nations with that influence to assume an increasingly reckless and self-destructive course, financially, socially, and now militarily. When we read policy papers from our own nation’s policy makers conspiring to arm terrorists and unleash them on an unwilling adversary, we have become the very evil we had long believed ourselves to be the guards against.

By undermining, dismantling, and ultimately replacing this unwarranted influence through boycotts and local, pragmatic solutions, we can adjust our course back toward one that suits our own collective destiny rather than that of an increasingly depraved, parasitic oligarchical elite.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at

Land Destroyer Report. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.