Can U.S. Patriots Stop Maniac
Obama/British Drive for War?
by Michele Steinberg
March 13—On March 6, a seemingly breathless British Prime Minister David Cameron, having just been briefed, with his Cabinet, by the imperial National Security Advisor Sir Kim Darroch, told his Parliament that Iran posed a danger far beyond just the Middle East. Iran
"is a danger more broadly, not least because there are signs that the Iranians want to have some sort of inter-continental missile capability. We have to be clear this is a threat potentially much wider than just Israel and the region."
Just prior to Cameron's speech, Darroch had warned Cameron and the Cabinet about "the imminence of the threat to the UK posed by Iran," reported the Guardian March 6. It was the first time that a Western head of state had claimed—as the Israeli warhawks do regularly—that Iran poses an "imminent" threat to the West. It was a performance at Parliament that chillingly recalled Tony Blair's 2002 speech, in which he asserted that, in "45 minutes," Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction against the West—a speech that pushed the world over the edge to accepting the Anglo-American preemptive war against Iraq.
The issue is thus put again squarely on the table: Will Her Majesty's government once again drive the United States to war, this time a thermonuclear World War III? Indeed, Obama appears prepared to proceed.
At almost the same time that Cameron was engaging in his hysterical tirade, on March 5, during a series of White House meetings with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama pronounced Iran to be a "threat to the national security of the United States." At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on March 4, Obama had declared the U.S.-Israel alliance is "sacrosanct."
"My administration's commitment to Israel's security has been unprecedented. Our military and intelligence cooperation has never been closer."
"Our joint exercises and training have never been more robust. Despite a tough budget environment, our security assistance has increased every single year. We are investing in new capabilities. We're providing Israel with more advanced technology—the types of products and systems that only go to our closest friends and allies. And make no mistake: We will do what it takes to preserve Israel's qualitative military edge—because Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat (emphasis added)."
But at the same AIPAC meeting, and in later interviews, Netanyahu insisted that Israel alone, not the United States, will determine when it is necessary to attack Iran, and that it could happen within months. "We're not standing with a stopwatch in hand," he said in an Israeli TV interview, one of three he gave after returning from the United States. "It's not a matter of days or weeks, but also not of years," he said.
The British Deciders
On March 13, the day the prime minister arrived for an "official visit with state dinner" in Washington, Cameron and Obama had co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which they invoke the war-time Winston Churchill, in proclaiming the unbreakable alliance of "hand and heart," which today is triumphing in wars around the globe. The two puppet heads of state praise the mission in Afghanistan, where the U.S. and the U.K. are the "largest contributors" to the war; boast of how they will spend the "next few days" consulting about the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago, where "our alliance" will determine the next phase of NATO operations; and crow that
"we'll continue to tighten the noose around Bashar al-Assad and his cohorts, and we'll work with the opposition and the United Nations-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan to plan for the transition that will follow Assad's departure from power" (emphasis added).
Not least of all, Obama and Cameron jointly threaten Iran to "meet your international obligations or face the consequences," all the while, paying lip service to the empty phrase
"We believe there is time and space to pursue a diplomatic solution."
The Cameron-Obama threats underline the March 4 warning from American statesman Lyndon LaRouche that Obama's commitment to "a diplomatic solution" is a lie:
"We know what the program is. The British policy is known, and it is not limited to Iran. The British are the ones defining the so-called 'red line,' not Israel or Obama. They are gunning for global nuclear war....
"Netanyahu will meet with Obama tomorrow, and will reportedly 'pressure' him to take a hard line on Iran. That is just cover for Obama, so that he can 'appear' to oppose certain things that he can then agree to, 'under pressure,' " LaRouche added. "Basically, Obama doesn't give a damn. He won't risk his own options, by bothering to tell the truth."
LaRouche insists that the only way to truly prevent war is to remove Obama from the Presidency under the provisions of the U.S. Constitution, either by impeachment, or for mental unfitness under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.
Iran Nuclear Talks Threatened
In the face of all the war talk, sane forces in Russia and elsewhere have succeeded in achieving an agreement for new talks on Iran's nuclear program, between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany).
One of the biggest dangers to the success of the P5+1 talks is that no Western country—not the United States, nor any nation in Western Europe—will openly tell the truth: that there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and that, as even the most fanatical among the Israelis know, Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. Instead, disinformation in the Anglo-American media, and corruption of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s integrity through lack of transparency and the planting of evidence by countries desiring to start a military confrontation with Iran, drive the campaign for war.
However, the game is being called by highly qualified commentators. On March 6, writing in the National Journal, former Special Forces Col. W. Patrick Lang (ret.) stated:
"Contrary to the propaganda drivel in the media, the US Government has believed since 2007 that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and has not had one since the Autumn of 2003. That remains the US Government position, expressed recently by James Clapper, the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], in testimony before the Senate. The 'rent a media' crowd keep trying to make a separate case for the existence of such a weapons program. Most recently the failure of the IAEA to inspect the facility at Parchin has been held up as evidence of dark secrets. Iran today offered to allow the IAEA to inspect the facility."
Lang, the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense HUMINT (human intelligence) Service, is no ordinary commentator; his analysis of current military problems in Southwest Asia have been prescient. In 2004, he wrote "Drinking the Kool-Aid," about how, in the run-up to the Iraq War, intelligence personnel who did not agree that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were driven from government, and "bullied and undermined," until "they, too, had drunk from the vat," of Kool-Aid.[1]
Lang is one of the few commentators who constantly reminds the U.S. public, elected officials, and the media, that the United States intelligence estimate is that Iran has no current nuclear weapons program, a reality that has been buried, because the 2010 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has never been released in declassified form, unlike the 2007 NIE. The decision to keep the positive 2010 finding about Iran under wraps is a political decision by the Obama Administration, and it has kept the world on the brink of war with Iran, every time a new faked intelligence report surfaces.
At the same time, there has been a concerted effort to influence the IAEA under its current director (since 2009), Yukiyo Amano, to use the agency as a propaganda tool.
According to former IAEA Chief Inspector Robert Kelley, the treatment of Iran by the IAEA is "déjà vu," from the disinformation of 2002-03 against Iraq. "The same thing is going on again," Kelley told EIR on Feb. 28.
"A very small group of people, if not down to individuals, are doing analysis and putting forth their opinions, and those opinions are not being checked."[2]
Former Director General of the IAEA, Dr. Hans Blix, speaking to a standing-room-only audience at the Rayburn House Office Building Feb. 21, also criticized the indiscriminate use of "intelligence" from "third parties," i.e., individual countries to the IAEA. Referring to criticisms of the November 2011 report of the IAEA, Blix said:
"I think that if we haven't seen the real evidence [underlying the intelligence report submitted to the IAEA], then the IAEA should be reticent in its use of it. And the intelligence—if Obama doesn't want to cite it, well, then, let them bring it out themselves, to the public...."
International Fightback
There is hope that the British duplicity is being cracked, through the concerted mobilization by the LaRouche movement against a new British imperial thermonuclear war, and by the continued resistance by Russia and China, to any further misuse of the United Nations resolutions or IAEA reports to go to war against Iran or Syria.
On March 12, an effort by the U.S., Britain, and France, to push through a resolution against Syria, justifying the regime change called for by the Obama/Cameron duo, was never even voted on, due to the clear opposition from Russia, which sent Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the UN meeting.
And, as of now, the P5+1 talks are being planned, with the West's acceptance of a series of Iran's offers to cooperate with the IAEA.
And Iran is calling the question on dirty tricks by some members of the IAEA.
On March 6, Iran made public a communiqué to the IAEA, that accused—in very polite, calm language—Agency head Amano of ordering the IAEA inspectors who went to Iran on Feb. 20-21 to resolve outstanding issues, to break an agreed-upon framework that had just been negotiated in Tehran and Vienna. In the communiqué, delivered to the 35 member countries of the IAEA board of governors, Iran says that the visit to Parchin—a military base alleged to be engaged in illegal activities—had been put off to a later date, by joint agreement, before the inspectors got to Tehran. Issuing this communiqué, and making it public through the official government news agency, could counter British attempts to use the IAEA as a vehicle for pushing war.
The communiqué shows duplicity by Amano and the IAEA Iran team; Amano, in his provocative briefing on March 5, left out the fact that Iran has worked out a plan with the IAEA for the specific modes in which the Agency can inspect, and how they should report. The sites like Parchin that the IAEA wants to visit are outside the scope of the treaty obligations to the IAEA.
In a detailed Prelude, Iran's communiqué says that the IAEA "based on [a] work plan [that had been formally agreed to between Iran and the IAEA in 2007,]" acted "quite against the formerly reached agreement and did not declare the end of its job in Iran," as had been agreed, in 2011. Instead, Amano's IAEA, in 2011, demanded further visits, in response to which Iran, in good faith, "invited the agency's team of inspectors to visit Iran on October 30th, 2011," to survey the remaining issues and end the process "which seemed to be an endless one...."
The important basics of the communiqué show that in the first meetings of Jan. 29-31, 2012, there was an exchange of drafts between Iran and the IAEA regarding the modality for the continued inspections. There were "two rounds of talks" in Tehran, and "three rounds in Vienna," at which agreements were reached. The main points of these agreements were that the matters would be surveyed "issue by issue"; and that "related technical matters would be classified under same topics, in order to facilitate the process of the intensive work," i.e., instead of carte blanche for inspection of a given location.
The IAEA also "declared that the entire remaining issues are exclusively those mentioned in document GOV/2011/65," which was the November 2011 IAEA report.
The communiqué, in highly formal language, speaks about the first and second modalities, but it is important that "it was agreed that the agency would deliver the documents that prove that Iran is involved in the claimed activities to Tehran officials." (Apparently the delivery of these documents—presumably reports from some nation's intelligence agencies—did not happen.)
The Parchin 'Issue'
Of particular note is the flap around the site of Parchin, which provocateurs such as Cameron are pointing to as a site for illegal activities, and claiming that Iran's recent refusal to permit a visit proves something bad is happening there. Yet, Iran and the IAEA had already agreed on a later visit.
Regarding Parchin, the communiqué says "it was also agreed that ... the request on having access to Parchin facilities, in accordance with the issue-by-issue approach, would be delayed till after the March session of the IAEA Board of Governors," but this agreement was broken on orders from Amano.
The communiqué says:
"Despite the reached agreement in Vienna (referred to under letter B above), and even contrary to the agreed text with the agency, referred to before, the IAEA team based on the agency secretary general's order, asked for having access to Parchin facilities.
"It should be noted that Parchin facilities were inspected twice in the year 2005 by the agency, following which the former secretary general (Dr. ElBaradei) announced that the matter is finalized and would be part of history, and he reported the matter to the Board of Directors."
U.S. intelligence sources say that the U.S. intelligence services believe that Iran's offer concerning the Parchin site inspections is genuine.
But, unless British puppet Obama is out, it is the Churchillian alliance that determines U.S. policy, not the U.S. Constitution. The alliance of the U.S. patriotic military, the Russians and Chinese, and the LaRouche movement have held off disaster so far—but the crucial step remains to be taken.
[1] W. Patrick Lang, "Drinking the Kool-Aid," Middle East Policy, vol. 11, no. 2, June 2004.
[2] Michele Steinberg, "Robert Kelley: IAEA Should Investigate November 2011 Report on Iran for Forgeries, Lie," EIR, March 9, 2012.
