As covert operations to fracture Iraq are escalating, the humanitarian crisis in Lebanon is deepening. Evidence mounts that Israel is planning a wider regional war using nuclear weapons. As ceasefire negotiations continued last week, the Israeli Committee for a Middle East Free from Atomic, Biological & Chemical Weapons reported (5.8.06) that:
"The Government of Israel has recently purchased from the United States bunker-busting bombs (GBU-28), for use in its war in Lebanon. These bombs contain depleted uranium -- a carcinogenic substance that spreads in the form of a toxic and radioactive dust, which enters the lungs and bones and is especially harmful to babies and young children."
The invention of bunker-busting bombs are a brazen attempt to make nuclear devices a viable weapons of warfare without automatically implying Mutually Assured Destruction. In late May 2003, at President Bush's insistence, Congress voted to end the 10-year ban on the development of tactical nuclear weapons -- also known as 'mini-nukes' or 'bunker-busting' bombs - that range up to a third the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The new nuclear devices are designed to "produce small amounts of radiation, earth-penetrating weapons to attack underground bunkers, larger devices with greater radiation effects and weapons to destroy chemical and biological agents." These measures conflict with US treaty obligations -- the US is a signatory to both the comprehensive test ban treaty (although has not ratified it) and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Despite being designed to concentrate the impact in order to limit the nuclear fallout to the intended target, tactical nuclear weapons remain extremely dangerous and inherently indiscriminate -- and of course far more devastating for civilian populations than conventional weapons. For example, according to Council on Foreign Relations scientist Robert Nelson in Physics Today, "anyone within the roughly 3W0.6 km2 area covered by the base surge would receive a fatal dose of radiation. (W is the explosive energy yield in kilotons of TNT.)." Estimating a typical third-world urban population density of 6000/km2, this implies that a single "1-kt weapon would kill tens of thousands", whereas a single more powerful "100-kt weapon would kill hundreds of thousands of people."
Nukes, in other words, are still nukes.
Have No Doubt: They Want War... on Four Fronts
Israeli's acquirement of tactical nuclear weapons within the last few days is therefore of urgent concern, and indicates that the regime is stepping-up its planning for an impending wider regional conflict. It must be remembered that Israel has long planned this war. The "clean break" strategy advocated a decade ago by Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser David Wurmser -- which "is progressing as planned" according to Pentagon whistleblower Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatowski PhD -- sees a conflict with Lebanon as an integral dimension of a war to expand Israeli influence over Syria and Iran: "An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."
As the US, UK, and other powers scuttle around shouting for a ceasefire agreement, according to former senior advisor to President Clinton Sidney Blumenthal, neither the US nor Israel want peace:
"The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah ... neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries... The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war."
The ceasefire rhetoric is being used deliberately by Anglo-American and Israeli officials to manufacture a justification for opening multiple theatres of war in the region. As Robert Fisk at the Independent observes, the draft resolution is absurdly pro-Israel, failing to even call on Israeli troops to withdraw from Lebanon, and guaranteed to be rejected by Hizbullah as merely an exercise in imperial hubris.
Carving Lebanon?
Meanwhile, US efforts are currently designed to facilitate the political divisions in Lebanon. While supporting Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and condemning Hizbullah's resistance, the Bush administration is simultaneously planning "to help train and equip the Lebanese army so it can take control of all of the nation's territory". The plan is motivated by Hizbollah's growing popularity as the only force in Lebanon capable of attempting to defend its people.
Indeed, the strategic planning behind the "clean break" onslaught now in motion was already in place in the 1980s and is mentioned in the Kivunim article cited previously, which advises that: "Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track." Moreover, this is part of a broader process of reconfiguration of the entire Middle East. "The entire Arabian peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia", the article continues.
"Low Intensity Warfare" in Iran and Somalia
It should not come as a surprise then to learn that the War on Iran has, in fact, already begun -- as early as June 2005. Former US marine and chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, revealed citing confidential sources secret US military flights in Iran "using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities." The CIA's Directorate of Operations was financing and directing the Mujahadeen el-Khalq (MEK), the notorious Iranian opposition group (formerly run by Saddam Hussein's intelligence services) still categorized by the State Department as a "terrorist organization." CIA-sponsored MEK terrorist operations currently include "remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq." Additionally, the US military had prepared a base of operations in neighbouring Azerbaijan "for a massive military presence" designed to facilitate a "major land-based campaign" to conquer Tehran. CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of "operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilizing indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran."
Covert operations are escalating in other potentially oil-rich regions. In February this year, CIA planes reportedly "delivered large amounts of money and guns" to three warlords in Somalia who dominated Mogadishu. "They named themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism" and began fighting against the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a loose legal federation of Somali clans supported "by local businessmen, to restore order by using religious law to settle disputes and punish criminals. Each clan's court has jurisdiction only over its own clan members, but it was a start on rebuilding a law-abiding society." The BBC describes the UIC as "a grassroots movement" which has "become increasingly popular among city residents and the business community desperate to see an end to the rule of the gun." An initiative that Washington was not happy with. In late July this year, the US "let Ethiopia send troops in to protect the isolated 'Interim Government' in Baidoa. That probably means renewed war, and across borders this time... Just when Somalia was about to escape from its long nightmare, a new and worse one has appeared: the prospect of a war that would consume the entire Horn of Africa."
"The Government of Israel has recently purchased from the United States bunker-busting bombs (GBU-28), for use in its war in Lebanon. These bombs contain depleted uranium -- a carcinogenic substance that spreads in the form of a toxic and radioactive dust, which enters the lungs and bones and is especially harmful to babies and young children."
The invention of bunker-busting bombs are a brazen attempt to make nuclear devices a viable weapons of warfare without automatically implying Mutually Assured Destruction. In late May 2003, at President Bush's insistence, Congress voted to end the 10-year ban on the development of tactical nuclear weapons -- also known as 'mini-nukes' or 'bunker-busting' bombs - that range up to a third the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The new nuclear devices are designed to "produce small amounts of radiation, earth-penetrating weapons to attack underground bunkers, larger devices with greater radiation effects and weapons to destroy chemical and biological agents." These measures conflict with US treaty obligations -- the US is a signatory to both the comprehensive test ban treaty (although has not ratified it) and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Despite being designed to concentrate the impact in order to limit the nuclear fallout to the intended target, tactical nuclear weapons remain extremely dangerous and inherently indiscriminate -- and of course far more devastating for civilian populations than conventional weapons. For example, according to Council on Foreign Relations scientist Robert Nelson in Physics Today, "anyone within the roughly 3W0.6 km2 area covered by the base surge would receive a fatal dose of radiation. (W is the explosive energy yield in kilotons of TNT.)." Estimating a typical third-world urban population density of 6000/km2, this implies that a single "1-kt weapon would kill tens of thousands", whereas a single more powerful "100-kt weapon would kill hundreds of thousands of people."
Have No Doubt: They Want War... on Four Fronts
Israeli's acquirement of tactical nuclear weapons within the last few days is therefore of urgent concern, and indicates that the regime is stepping-up its planning for an impending wider regional conflict. It must be remembered that Israel has long planned this war. The "clean break" strategy advocated a decade ago by Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser David Wurmser -- which "is progressing as planned" according to Pentagon whistleblower Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatowski PhD -- sees a conflict with Lebanon as an integral dimension of a war to expand Israeli influence over Syria and Iran: "An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."
As the US, UK, and other powers scuttle around shouting for a ceasefire agreement, according to former senior advisor to President Clinton Sidney Blumenthal, neither the US nor Israel want peace:
"The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah ... neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries... The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war."
The ceasefire rhetoric is being used deliberately by Anglo-American and Israeli officials to manufacture a justification for opening multiple theatres of war in the region. As Robert Fisk at the Independent observes, the draft resolution is absurdly pro-Israel, failing to even call on Israeli troops to withdraw from Lebanon, and guaranteed to be rejected by Hizbullah as merely an exercise in imperial hubris.
Carving Lebanon?
Meanwhile, US efforts are currently designed to facilitate the political divisions in Lebanon. While supporting Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and condemning Hizbullah's resistance, the Bush administration is simultaneously planning "to help train and equip the Lebanese army so it can take control of all of the nation's territory". The plan is motivated by Hizbollah's growing popularity as the only force in Lebanon capable of attempting to defend its people.
Indeed, the strategic planning behind the "clean break" onslaught now in motion was already in place in the 1980s and is mentioned in the Kivunim article cited previously, which advises that: "Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track." Moreover, this is part of a broader process of reconfiguration of the entire Middle East. "The entire Arabian peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia", the article continues.
"Low Intensity Warfare" in Iran and Somalia
It should not come as a surprise then to learn that the War on Iran has, in fact, already begun -- as early as June 2005. Former US marine and chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, revealed citing confidential sources secret US military flights in Iran "using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities." The CIA's Directorate of Operations was financing and directing the Mujahadeen el-Khalq (MEK), the notorious Iranian opposition group (formerly run by Saddam Hussein's intelligence services) still categorized by the State Department as a "terrorist organization." CIA-sponsored MEK terrorist operations currently include "remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq." Additionally, the US military had prepared a base of operations in neighbouring Azerbaijan "for a massive military presence" designed to facilitate a "major land-based campaign" to conquer Tehran. CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of "operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilizing indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran."
Covert operations are escalating in other potentially oil-rich regions. In February this year, CIA planes reportedly "delivered large amounts of money and guns" to three warlords in Somalia who dominated Mogadishu. "They named themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism" and began fighting against the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a loose legal federation of Somali clans supported "by local businessmen, to restore order by using religious law to settle disputes and punish criminals. Each clan's court has jurisdiction only over its own clan members, but it was a start on rebuilding a law-abiding society." The BBC describes the UIC as "a grassroots movement" which has "become increasingly popular among city residents and the business community desperate to see an end to the rule of the gun." An initiative that Washington was not happy with. In late July this year, the US "let Ethiopia send troops in to protect the isolated 'Interim Government' in Baidoa. That probably means renewed war, and across borders this time... Just when Somalia was about to escape from its long nightmare, a new and worse one has appeared: the prospect of a war that would consume the entire Horn of Africa."
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