Article: Do the Bomb Iran Shuffle

Get ready for a flurry of fuzzy satellite ''intelligence'' of generic
warehouses all across Iran frantically described as segments of a nuclear bomb
assembly line (Remember a famous ''secret nuclear facility'' in Syria not long
ago? It was a textile factory.)

Get ready for a flurry of crude diagrams depicting suspect devices, or the
containers that hide them, all capable of reaching Europe in 45 minutes.

Get ready for a flurry of ''experts'' on Fox, CNN and the BBC endlessly
dissecting all this extended black ops dressed up as ''evidence." For
instance, former UN weapons inspector David Albright, now at the Institute for
Science and International Security (ISIS), has already pulled his return of the living dead stunt,
displaying his ''bomb Iran'' credentials complete with diagrams and satellite
intel.

Forget Iraq -- it's sooo 2003. Hit the new groove; hyping overdrive for the war
on Iran.

Turning Japanese

First of all, ditch common sense.

If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, it would be diverting uranium for it.
The report released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this week
-- as politicized as it may be -- flatly denies it.

If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, UN inspectors working for the IAEA
would have been thrown out of the country.

Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 2002. And yet it was shocked and
awed. The same rationale applies to Iran.

What Tehran may have conducted -- if the compromised intel used in the IAEA
report is to be believed -- is a bunch of experiments and computer simulations.
Everybody does it -- for instance countries which have renounced the bomb, such
as Brazil and South Africa.

What the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) -- in charge of the civilian
nuclear program -- certainly wants is a deterrent.

That is, the possibility of building up a nuclear bomb in case they face an
unequivocally established threat of regime change, provoked, most likely, by a
US attack and invasion.

Doubts swirl about the competence -- or the impartiality -- of the new IAEA head,
the meek Japanese Yukya Amano. The best answer is in this WikiLeaks
cable.

As for the origin of most of the IAEA's self-described ''credible'' intel, even
the New York Times was forced to report that ''some of that information came
from the United States, Israel and Europe.'' Gareth Porter offers the
definitive debunking of the report.

Moreover, expect major pressure on the CIA to renege the crucial 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which established -- irrefutably -- that Tehran had
ditched a nuclear weapons program way back in 2003.

All this dovetails with the dogs of war already barking.

European minions may be incompetent enough to win a war in Libya (they did it
only when the Pentagon took over satellite intelligence).

They may be incompetent enough to manage Europe's financial disaster. But
France, Germany and the UK have already started barking -- calling for further
stringent sanctions on Iran.

In the US, Democrats and Republicans alike are calling not only for sanctions;
in the case of wacko Republicans, which of course, is an oxymoron, they're
calling for a new version of Shock and Awe.

It's never enough to repeat how things work in Washington. The Banjamin
Netanyahu government in Israel tells the powerful American Israel Public
Affairs Committee what to do, and the AIPAC orders the US Congress what to do.

That's how the House Foreign Affairs Committee is considering a bipartisan bill
that is essentially a declaration of war.

According to the bill, neither President Barack Obama, nor Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, nor in fact any US diplomat can engage in any kind of
diplomacy with Iran -- unless Obama convinces the ''appropriate congressional
committees'' that not talking would mean an ''extraordinary threat to the vital
national security interests of the United States."

''Appropriate congressional committees'' happens to define exactly the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, which gets its martial marching orders from Bibi in
Israel via AIPAC in Washington.

Try telling any of these Israeli-firsters at the United States Congress what
are the real immediate consequences of an attack on Iran; the Strait of Hormuz
closed within minutes, at least 6 million barrels of oil out of the world
economy (already in recession in the industrialized North), a barrel of oil
hitting $300 or $400.

It doesn't matter; they're incapable of doing the math.

Prep well, and stick to the agenda

Rumors swirl about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) recently
claiming, according to the Fars news agency, that only four Iranian missiles
can deter Israel.

These missiles might -- or might not -- be Soviet Kh-55 nuclear cruise missiles
from the Ukraine and Belarus, with a maximum range of 2,500 kilometers, that
Iran may have bought years ago in the black market.

The IRGC, of course, is mum. That only feeds the fog of (pre)war -- as nobody
exactly knows how well defended Iran is.

It's an open secret in Washington that regime change in Iran is being war-gamed
by the Pentagon since at least 2004.

The favorite neo-con 2002 road map still applies, the targets being Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan -- all key nodes in the
Pentagon-coined ''arc of instability."

Imagine PhDs in warmongering examining the chessboard. Iraq was duly shocked
and awed (even though the US is now being booted out). Syria is too hard to
crack for the incompetent North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Lebanon (Hezbollah)
can only be captured if Syria falls first. Libya was a victory (forget about a
protracted civil war). Somalia is containable with Uganda and drones. And South
Sudan is in the bag.

That leaves -- for hardcore practitioners of Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine --
the enticing possibility of a successful attack on Iran as the ultimate
creative destruction move, reshuffling all the cards from the Middle East to
Central Asia. The ''arc of instability'' terminally destabilized.

How to accomplish it? So simple -- as the warmongers see it. Convince Obama that
instead of being whacked around, conservatives will kiss his brogues and he'll
be canonized as the re-energizer of the US economy if he just went to fight
another war.

Anyone for Occupy Iran -- literally?

Cross-posted from Asia Times