Iran: a quickly evolving geopolitical imbroglio – part VIII

By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the Lie
January 26, 2012

It gives me no pleasure to report that the situation with Iran is only getting more heated and the push for war continues to get stronger.

An Israeli investigative journalist and highly connected analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Ronen Bergman, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine which states that indeed Israel will strike Iran in 2012.

Bergman bases his analysis and conclusions on meetings with “many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and intelligence.”

He says that the United States may choose to intervene, something which I think is quite likely, but he does say that “from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that.”

I am not quite sure why they would think that the United States would take a back seat in this conflict given the unmatched power the Israel lobby has in Washington coupled with the growing American presence in region of the Persian Gulf, which I have been detailing in this series.

However, the British Guardian rightly points out that Bergman’s words are more significant than those coming from most analysts and pundits given his close ties to political, military and intelligence figures in Israel.

The Guardian writes that since he spends “a significant amount of time with the politicians, spies and generals who are going to make the ultimate decision … his assessment carries more weigh[t] tha[n] your average Israel-Iran analyst.”

Note: I had to modify the above text (and other excerpts), as for some reason the Guardian’s article had an egregious amount of errors which one would think might be caught by the editor of a large news outlet but apparently not. It’s always humorous to me when a one-man-operation like End the Lie churns out higher quality content than a large-scale enterprise like Guardian.co.uk which recorded £1 million in profits in 2006 and is owned by the Scott Trust.

Bergman says that the Israelis are already preparing for the strike, something which I think is quite obvious and mirrored in the actions of the United States’ military as well.

Bergman writes, “The Israeli Air Force is where most of the preparations are taking place. It maintains planes with the long-range capacity required to deliver ordnance to targets in Iran, as well as unmanned aircraft capable of carrying bombs to those targets and remaining airborne for up to 48 hours. Israel believes that these platforms have the capacity to cause enough damage to set the Iranian nuclear project back by three to five years.”

Other estimates are much more conservative, but I honestly think that the Israeli estimate isn’t too wildly off the mark, although the author of the Guardian piece characterizes it as “very confident.”

This is mostly due to estimates from the likes of United States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta who estimated one to two years in a best case scenario and Rafi Eitan, a Mossad veteran, who told Bergman it would set them back “not even three months.”

The two factors at play here are Iran’s physical capability to continue the nuclear program after taking a massive hit along with Iran’s drive to become self-sufficient and a scientific leader in the region.

It seems that Iran has been able to survive and continue their efforts in the face of tough sanctions, something which the country’s Supreme Leader Khamenei boasted about not too long ago.

There were also reports of roughly 1,300 students switching their major over to the field of nuclear sciences due to the most recent assassination and the many others that have occurred as of late.

It seems to me that the Western world’s hyperfocus on Iran has only served to embolden their efforts, as they feel they’re being unfairly targeted and thus should fight back by doing exactly what the West is trying to stop them from doing.

However, I must emphasize that this does not mean that I believe Iran will use a nuclear weapon against Israel or any other target, as I think it is quite clear that they are not, in fact, pursuing any nuclear weapons program at all.

Indeed Leon Panetta himself said as much on national television, yet the talking heads in the establishment media and the bought-and-paid-for politicians in Washington continue to spread disinformation about their nuclear ambitions.

I think that continued strikes and sanctions will in fact serve to embolden the Iranians and drive them to work even harder on their nuclear program.

A direct strike on their facilities would likely have a similar effect but the larger question is if they actually have the money and material capability to continue at this rate after an attack.

While they have indeed announced that they have created an underground enrichment facility which would be much harder to take out from the air, this is only one facility and I doubt that they have enough facilities which are sufficiently protected from air strikes to sustain their program after an Israeli assault.

If Israel managed to strike all above-ground facilities and take them out completely, perhaps even damaging their underground facilities with the use of so-called “bunker buster” bombs, I seriously doubt that they would be able to recover in the “not even three months” cited by Eitan.

Honestly, I think Eitan’s statement very likely represents the ever-present Israeli fearmongering about Iran which is intended to make us believe that Iran is some bloodthirsty nation itching to pull the trigger and nuke Israel and/or the West.

I think this assertion is laughable in its inaccuracy given that Iran is more peaceful than both Israel and the United States and they likely are well aware of the fact that any strike would be seen as justification for an attack on their nation.

I seriously doubt that the Iranian leadership is clueless enough to think that the West wouldn’t take any attack as an opportunity to utterly destroy Iran.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, spent a great deal of time with Bergman which allows us to get a peek into how the Israeli leadership views Iran.

“From our point of view,” Barak said, “a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, which has over 50,000 rockets that threaten the whole area of Israel, including several thousand that can reach Tel Aviv. A nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations.”

“And if a nuclear Iran covets and occupies some gulf state, who will liberate it?” Barak asked. “The bottom line is that we must deal with the problem now.”

This is a prime example of the Israeli approach: propagandize, instill fear, posit hypothetical situations with no basis in reality, then once you have your subject completely fearful and looking for a solution, you offer the solution which is inevitably a strike on Iran.

The problem here is that all of what Barak said is completely divorced from reality.

Since when was Iran threatening to occupy a gulf state? In reality, it is the United States and the West in general which poses a greater threat of occupying a gulf state.

Furthermore, if anyone is guilty of occupation, it is Israel, which has illegally occupied Palestinian land for decades and committed egregious war crimes in the process.

Has Iran done such a thing? Is Iran flouting international law on a daily basis by illegally occupying territory captured during a war?

However, not all individuals are easily duped by this type of psychological operation which is exemplified by Barak.

Take, for instance, Bruce Riedel, a former Middle East specialist for the CIA.

In a recent piece published in the Lebanese Daily Star, Riedel argued that even if Iran had a nuclear bomb (which it doesn’t) it would still not be an existential threat to Israel.

The Guardian thinks that Riedel’s view is representative of the majority opinion of the CIA and White House, even though there are no indications that this is the case.

Bergman goes on to examine this supposed divergence between the approaches of the United States and Israel (something which I think is wholly superficial) and wonders what notice, if any, Israel would give Washington of an attack on Iran.

Israel has previously said that they will not necessarily warn the United States of an upcoming attack on Iran, but I do not think that Israel would actually carry out a large-scale attack without telling the United States.

First of all, these two nations are the closest of allies, secondly the United States would likely be aware of an Israeli air campaign the second it began due to the presence of carrier strike groups in the region which have advanced radar capabilities.

However, a piece recently published in Mondoweiss claimed that Israel would give the United States 12 hours of warning before an attack on Iran because Netanyahu supposedly doesn’t trust Obama. This seems a bit off to me given that 12 hours is enough time to mobilize the troops in the region to some extent.

On the other hand, Matthew Kroenig, who was formerly an advisor at the Pentagon, now serving at the infamous Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), thinks that Israel’s warning will be “an hour or two [before the attack], just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.”

This is borderline absurd to me, given that the United States has no ostensible interest in preventing an attack on Iran.

Figures in the United States’ military establishment have been pushing for an attack on Iran for years, leading many analysts to believe that an attack was imminent even though it never materialized.

What’s more, the increasing American military presence in the region surrounding Iran, which you can read about in painstaking detail in the previous installments of this series (a list of which can be found at the bottom of this article), indicates that the United States is indeed preparing for an assault on Iran.

In writing for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg rightly points out that the same individuals giving intelligence to Bergman had convinced Goldberg that an attack on Iran would come last summer.

Goldberg blames his miscalculation on the success of the Stuxnet attack, although honestly I think this is more of an attempt to keep whatever scrap of reputation he has left untarnished.

This makes me wonder, why would Israeli military and intelligence figures be trying to convince individuals in the media that a strike on Iran is imminent?

I believe that this very well might be in an attempt to pressure individuals in America to preemptively strike Iran or prepare for such a strike in order to make the Israeli job easier.

My impression is reflected in the Guardian piece in the passage which reads, “Clearly, [Israel] has a motive in conveying the impression that an attack might be imminent, to stir up urgency in the West to confront Iran.”

In my analysis of the events surrounding Iran, I have found that this is very likely the case and the constant “leaks” regarding plans to attack Iran are meant to push the United States into taking action first.

The military buildup in the region very well might be proof that this approach being taken by Israel is working.

There is also the issue of a third carrier strike group making its way into the Persian Gulf region, a group which would include the aging USS Enterprise.

In the previous installment of this series, I discussed the possibility that the “Big E” could be used as a target for a false flag attack which would give the West free license to assault Iran.

I find this to be likely because it would not only give the West the justification they so desperately have been seeking which has been proving difficult to achieve through pure propaganda, but it would also save the United States a great deal of money in decommissioning the vessel.

While I went over this in some detail before, I believe it is worth exploring more closely in an article devoted entirely to the subject, something which I plan to do in the near future.

If you have any information to share which could help me in this series or in my analysis of a possible false flag attack on the USS Enterprise, please do not hesitate to e-mail me at admin@EndtheLie.com with whatever you have to share.

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