Today's
Stories
February 10, 2006
Saree Makdisi
The Tempest Over the Hamas Charter
February 9,
2006
Dave Lindorff
Bush
and Yamashita: War Crimes and Commanders-in-Chief
Mike Marqusee
The
Human Majority was Right About Iraq
Paul Craig Roberts
How Conservatives Went Crazy: the Rightwing Press
Peter Phillips
Inside
the Global Dominance Group: 200 Insiders Against the World
William S. Lind
Rumsfeld the Maximalist: the Long War
Christine Tomlinson Innocent
Targets in the "Long War": False Positives and Bush's
Eavesdropping Program
Will Youmans
Church of England Votes to Divest from Israel
Robert Robideau
An American Indian's View of the Cartoons
Richard Neville
The Cartoons That Shook the World: All This from the Danes, the
Least Funny People on Earth
Peter Rost
The New Robber Barons
Website of the Day
Eyes Wide Open
February 8,
2006
Ron Jacobs
The
Once and Future Sly Stone: Soundtrack to a Riot
Stan Cox
Making
and Unmaking History with General Myers
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why
Bush's Wiretapping Program is Illegal and Unconstitutional
Robert Jensen
Horowitz's
Academic Hit List: Take a Class from One of the CounterPunch
16
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Bush Should Have Wiretapped FEMA and Chertoff
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Alberto Gonzales Channels Mark Twain
Don Monkerud
Covenant Marriage on the Rocks
David Swanson
Inequality and War
C.L. Cook
Nuking Ontario
Christopher
Fons
Chill Out Jihadis: They're Just Cartoons!
Jeffrey Ballinger
The Other Side of Nike and Social Responsibility
Website of
the Day
Encyclopedia of Terrorism in the Americas
February 7,
2006
Edward Lucie-Smith
An
Urgent Plea to Save a Small Estonian Museum from Neo-Nazis
Robert Fisk
The Fury: Now Lebanon is Burning
Paul Craig Roberts
Colin Powell's Career as a "Yes Man"
Neve Gordon
Why Hamas Won
Joshua Frank
The Hillary and George Show: Partners in War
Peter Montague
The Problem with Mercury: a History of Regulatory Capitulation
Jackie Corr
The
Last Best Choice: Public Power and Montana
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Rumsfeld's
Enforcer: the Secret World of Stephen Cambone
Website of the Day
Negroes with Guns
February 6,
2006
Christopher
Brauchli
Spilling
Blood: Two Sentences
Robert Fisk
Don't
Be Fooled: This Isn't About Islam vs. Secularism
John Chuckman
What Did Stephen Harper Actually Win?
Jenna Orkin
Judge Slams EPA for Lying About 9/11's Toxic Air
Paul Craig
Roberts
Who
Will Save America: My Epiphany
February 4
/ 5, 2006
Alexander Cockburn
"Lights
Out in Tehran": McCain Starts Bombing Run
Mike Ferner
Pentagon
Database Leaves No Kid Alone
James Petras
Evo Morales's Cabinet: a Bizarre Beginning in Bolivia
Alan Maass
Scare of the Union: Dems Collaborate with Bush on Surveillance
Fred Gardner
Annals of Law Enforcement: a Look Inside the San Francisco DA's
Office
Ralph Nader
Bush's
Energy Escapades
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Speaking in Tongues
Saul Landau
Freedom 2006: Buying Sex on the Net or Those Older Freedoms?
Laura Carlsen
Bad Blood on the Border: Killing Guillermo Martinez
James Brooks
Our Little Shop of Diplomatic Horrors
Mike Roselle
Hippies and Revolutionaries in Carcacas
John Holt
Black Gold, Black Death: Canada's Oil Sands Frenzy
Sarah Ferguson
Cops Suing Cops ... for Spying on Cops
William S.
Lind
Beware the Ides of March
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Price of Globalization: Free Trade or Free Speech?
Seth Sandronsky
The Color of Job Cuts in the Auto Industry
Derrick O'Keefe
Rumsfeld's Hitler Analogy
Michael Donnelly
Hop on the Bus
Ron Jacobs
Religion and Political Power
Elisa Salasin
RSVP to Bush
St. Clair / Vest
Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week
Stew Albert
God's Curse: Selected Poems
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, LaMorticella and Engel
Website of
the Weekend
Killer
Tells All!
February 3,
2006
Toufic Haddad
A
Parliament of Prisoners
Heather Gray
Working with Coretta Scott King
Tim Wise
Racism,
Neo-Confederacy and the Raising of Historical Illiterates
Conn Hallinan
Nuclear Proliferation: the Gathering Storm
Eva Golinger
Rumsfeld and Negroponte Amp Up Hositility Toward Venezuela
Daniel Ellsberg
The World Can't Wait: Invitation to a Demonstration
Dave Zirin
Detroit: Super Bowl City on the Brink
Robert Bryce
The
Problem with Cutting US Oil Imports from the Middle East
Website of
the Day
The Chavez Code
February 2,
2006
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Pentagon
Pork: How to Eliminate It
Stan Cox
Outsourcing
the Golden Years
Rachard Itani
Danes
(Finally) Apologize to Muslims (For the Wrong Reasons)
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan Five Years Later: Buildings Down, Heroin Up
Amira Hass
In
the Footsteps of Arafat: an Interview with Hamas' Ismail Haniya
Norman Solomon
When Praise is Desecration: Smothering King's Legacy with Kind
Words
Michael Simmons
Stew Lives!
Christopher
Reed
Japan's
Dirty Secret: One Million Korean Slaves
Website of the Day
State of Nature
February 1,
2006
Sharon Smith
The
Bluff and Bluster Dems: Alito and the Faux Filibuster
Jason Leopold
Enron and the Bush Administration
Cindy Sheehan
Getting
Busted at the State of the Union: What Really Happened
Joseph Grosso
Oprah
and Elie Wiesel: a Match Made in "Neutrality"
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Coretta Scott King was More Than Just Dr. King's Wife
Steven Higgs
Life After Roe. v. Wade
Robert Robideau
"God Given Rights": Palestine and Native America
R. Siddharth
Tales of Power: When Gandhi Rejected a Faustian Bargain with
Henry Ford
Jim Retherford
Remembering Stew Albert: the Quiet Genius
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
The Legacy of Coretta Scott King
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
True State of the Union
Website of
the Day
Candide's Notebooks
| February
10, 2006
All Eyes on Khuzestan
A U.S. War Plan?
By CARL G. ESTABROOK
There's
now a serious possibility that the Republicans could lose control
of the House of Representatives this fall, and at least a statistical
possibility that they could lose the Senate.
Meanwhile,
approval of the administration's foreign policy, principally in
regard to Iraq, has fallen well below 50% and continues to decline,
while the Medicare drug fiasco has driven approval of their domestic
policy, never high, to new lows. Moreover, the legal difficulties
of the administration's Gauleiters, notably Libby and Rove, are
serious, and the bottom could fall out of the ramshackle structure
that supports the administration's felonious wiretapping (with some
people thinking that there are further revelations to come about
that curious episode: why did they bypass FISA, after all?). And
it's SRO in the closet for all the Abramoff skeletons.
Cornered
rats proverbially fight, however, and if things really get bad as
2006 goes on, with mid-term elections looming, the administration
always has their ace in the hole: an emergency, preferably violent.
(Imagine where the Bush administration would be, had there been
no 9/11/01 attack.) Bush this week produced a suspect account of
an almost-emergency, a putative foiled attack on Los Angeles in
'02. (Again, the question: why mention it now? Why didn't they prosecute
the conspirators at the time?)
Andrew
Cockburn has demonstrated in these pages why a full-scale attack
on Iran (four times the size of Iraq and not defenseless, as Iraq
was) is out of the question. But, acting on the advice of the Truman-era
senator who observed that "You can do anything you want with
the American people if you scare them enough," the administration
has been making headway among Americans with its scare campaign
about Iran -- despite the uncomfortable resemblance to the campaign
for the Iraq invasion (madmen armed with nuclear weapons, etc.)
As our boy emperor himself once memorably put it, "Fool me
once, shame on you; fool me -- you can't get fooled again."
Perhaps not, but the administration is surely trying...
But
the administration may have choices other than a full-scale attack
on Iran or an increasingly less credible viewing-with-alarm. If
things get desperate enough that they need a military emergency
to rally support for a beleaguered Bush and Co, there are things
that they could do, short of all-out war. (In the New Yorker, Seymour
Hersh has described military intrusions -- "special operations"
-- by the U.S. and Israel that have been underway in Iran for some
time; the administration's new budget, just submitted to Congress,
calls for a substantial increase in money for "special ops
and psy-ops.")
John
Pilger notes that, while the Pentagon cannot seriously plan to occupy
Iran, it may be that "it has in its sights a strip of land
that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to
90 per cent of Iran's oil. 'The first step taken by an invading
force,' reported Beirut's Daily Star, 'would be to occupy Iran's
oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz
and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply.' On 28 January
the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover
attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year."
Last year, the Iranian government announced that it would build
the country's second nuclear reactor in Khuzestan...
A
U.S. attack by land, sea, and/or air would of course be an act of
desperation, driven as much or more by failing domestic politics
as by America's long-term policy to control Middle East energy resources.
But given that the U.S. has malgre lui constructed a vast self-conscious
Shi'ite region (Iran, Iraq, and the oil-producing parts of Saudi
Arabia) that is at once in possession of most of the world's oil
and hostile to the U.S., a further attempt to control it in this
fashion may recommend itself.
Remember
that the U.S. doesn't need Mideast oil for its own consumption (one
reason that Bush's comments on it in the SOTU speech were so odd),
but has for decades insisted on control of it as a way to control
its major economic rivals, Europe and northeast Asia. The U.S. will
not easily give up control of the spigot. And Khuzestan may be the
handle of the spigot.
Carl
G. Estabrook is a visiting scholar at the University of
Illinois. He can be reached at: galliher@uiuc.edu |
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