Kurt Nimmo

Infowars

April 6, 2008

Get ready for the neocons to bang the drums of war this week. “Iranian forces were involved in the recent battle for Basra, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, is expected to tell Congress this week,” reports the Times Online. “Military and intelligence sources believe Iranians were operating at a tactical command level with the Shi’ite militias fighting Iraqi security forces; some were directing operations on the ground, they think.”

Of course, Petraeus and the Pentagon have no evidence of this. But then evidence is not required. All that is needed is the echo chamber corporate media. Run a few banner headlines and get the talking heads on Faux to talk about this and you have a ready-made Iranian incursion into Iraq. It works like a charm, especially for Americans unable to find Iraq or Iran on a map.

“Petraeus intends to use the evidence of Iranian involvement to argue against any reductions in US forces.” In other words, the neocons made up a story in order to avoid the will of the American people, who want the troops to come home. Petraeus is working hard to prevent a reduction in troop levels from 160,000 to 140,000 by July.

“It is one thing to withdraw troops when there is purely sectarian fighting but it is another thing if it leaves the Iranians to move in,” Dr. Daniel Gouré, a “defense analyst” at the Lexington Institute in Virginia told Times Online. Gouré is a neocon connected to the Project for the New American Century and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. PNAC and Gaffney advocate the so-called “peace through strength” credo, that is to say “peace” through mass murder. In Basra, this policy resulted in the murder of more than 300 civilians.

Petraeus and the neocons are worried about the Shia uprising currently underway in Iraq. It is said Petraeus is “furious” at puppet al-Maliki for the bungled move against Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in Basra without consulting the occupiers. Of course, this is nonsense, as al-Maliki and his installed government are on a short leash and do not move without permission. In fact, as the corporate media was obliged to report, more “than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen either refused to fight or simply abandoned their posts during the inconclusive assault against Shiite militias in Basra,” as the New York Times put it.

As William H. White of the Concord Bridge Coalition writes, the “Basra offensive, having failed spectacularly, undermined the Iraqi government’s already diminished political authority, along with the Shiite Dawa Party faction it represents, and any hope the Nouri al-Maliki government had of weakening the Sadr movement before the scheduled October elections. So rather than strengthening the US military’s Shiite flank in Iraq, the failed offensive has weakened it, while concomitantly enhancing the standing of the rival Shiite Mahdi Army faction and its leader Moktada al Sadr, much as Israel’s attacks on Lebanon failed to weaken the Hezbollah.”

In order to portray Moktada al-Sadr as an Iranian sock puppet, last week the corporate media reported that he was in Tehran, an accusation denied by the Iranians. “Addressing reporters at his weekly press conference, [government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham] said those reports were released by the occupation forces to put the blames for current insecurity in Iraq on other sides,” reports IRNA. “Referring to good relations between Iran and Iraq, Elham said by releasing such reports, the occupation forces were trying to harm Tehran-Baghdad cordial ties.”

In fact, they are paving the way for an attack against Iran. It is, however, unclear if the neocons will be able to pull off such an attack, promised to go down before decider-commander Bush leaves office.

As a possible indicator something is up, the Mehr News Agency reports that “around 8,000 Iranian pilgrims were returned home” from Iraq’s holy places. “As part of the country’s new security plan even Iraqis are not allowed to enter or exit through the border,” Deputy Head of Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization Hossein Akbari told the news agency. “The Iranian official stated that dispatch of Iranian pilgrims would resume as soon as security is restored to the country.”

But forget Petraeus. Consider the words of Lt. General (ret.) William E. Odom, who on April 2 testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In addition to warning about “the steady violence in the Mosul area, and the tensions in Kirkuk between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen,” Odom said “it gives me pause to learn that our vice president and some members of the Senate are aligned with al Qaeda on spreading the war to Iran.” But of course, as al-Qaeda is a CIA contrivance. Not that the American people understand this. Even John McCain was clueless, stating that al-Qaeda had teamed up with the Iranian mullahs to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Finally, it should be remembered that Iran offered to help the United States unseat the Taliban in Afghanistan. “In October 2001, as the United States was just beginning its military operations in Afghanistan, State Department and NSC officials began meeting secretly with Iranian diplomats in Paris and Geneva, under the sponsorship of Lakhdar Brahimi, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan,” writes Gareth Porter. “It was thanks to the Northern Alliance Afghan troops, which were supported primarily by the Iranians, that the Taliban was driven out of Kabul in mid-November.” In response, the neocon “hardliners presented Iranian policy to Bush and the public as hostile to U.S. aims in Afghanistan and refusing to cooperate with the war on terror – the opposite of what officials directly involved had witnessed.”

But does the corporate media balance its reporting with this historical fact? Of course not. Instead, we get the standard propaganda out of the Pentagon. “U.S. officials… have been building a case against Iran for allegedly trying to destabilize Afghanistan by supplying weapons to the Taliban, an extremist Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun group,” the Washington Post reported on September 21, 2007. “Many independent analysts have questioned U.S. allegations that Iran is shipping arms to the Taliban and have suggested the accusations are part of a campaign by the Bush administration to push for military action against Iran. European officials have said they see no evidence of a large or sustained effort by Iran to supply the Taliban with weapons.”

It makes no sense for Iran to support a CIA-ISI contrived “movement” of Talibs, cooked up in religious schools in Pakistan. The Taliban was central to Pakistan’s pan-Islamic vision and the CIA was more than happy to support them, knowing full well such fanaticism would be used down the road.

Now that Petraeus will answer questions in Congress this week, we can expect to hear more Brothers Grimm stories about Iran. It matters not what the truth is. Because the neocons are determined to attack Iran and reduce it to the sort of paralyzing chaos now at work in Iraq. It is part and parcel of the neocon vision – the ultimate destruction of Islamic society, culture, and nation-states.

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