Onward To Iran!

That acts of war and elections often coincide should come as no surprise. It’s unfortunate, but electability in fin de siècle America still hinges on projecting bully power around the world—an American leader has to aspire to “protect” borders and people not his own, and if they refuse his advances, he should be prepared to bomb them to kingdom come.

Having used the American military to particularly great political effect—the barefaced Barack Obama may be preparing to blast Iranians with something even “better” than the BLU-82, Bush’s weapon of choice.

Elections are not the only cause for war.

Perverse as this may seem, in its ongoing, reflexive efforts to maintain power and metastasize, the military-media-industrial-congressional complex can’t help but motivate for war. Thus, out of the blue, in January of 2012, before things had heated up with Teheran, the Anglo-American press reported a military milepost. The Pentagon was working on a “13.6 ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP).” It “is the deepest penetrating ‘bunker buster’ currently in the U.S. arsenal,” swanked the DailyMail Online, “designed to take out fortifications built by Iran to hide their alleged nuclear weapons.”

Correlation is not causation, but the case for hitting Iranian installations has since hardened into dogma.

According to the Mail Online, the work on this big boy began because the Pentagon had “identified” a deficit in the US’s military capabilities: “officials believe [the current arsenal] is not capable of destroying Iran’s fortified underground facilities.”

Essentially, the premise for the MOP project was that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching all corners of the world.

Since the president’s reign of terror abroad began, the Iranian currency had lost 65 percent of its value. Or so boasted Fareed Zakaria, CNN’s inane, wishy-washy correspondent, who represents the media’s voice of moderation in the ramp-up to war with Iran. Like all fixtures of mainstream media, the Zombie Zakaria has an appetite for destruction.

Another foreign-policy coup chalked up to Barack Obama is the SWIFT Iranian eviction from the global economy. SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. According to a Reuters report, America has demanded that the SWIFT global network block Iranian bank transactions. Thus will Teheran be prevented from electronically transmitting and receiving payments, causing the country’s oil sales to go kaput.

Besides starving the Iranian people, when has waging economic warfare on a country done anything other than entrench internal monopolies, political and economic?

Small mercies: Judith Miller is no longer lobbing journalistic WMD from the pages of the New York Times.

Western leaders have never ceased to proclaim Arab hustlers as would-be heroes. George W. Bush had his Ahmed Chalabi, who conveniently helped conjure the fantastical “weapons of mass destruction” that served as the pretext for America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. Judith Chalabi Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter at the time, shilled for that war over the pages of the New York Times like there was no tomorrow.

Together with the wily Iraqi exile, friend to the neoconservatives, the Bush White House fed the voracious birdbrain—who fittingly now perches at Fox—with misinformation and lies about Iraqi WMD. The NYT and Miller, as much as Fox News and its hot-for-war hotties, plumped for that immoral, illegitimate, and baseless war.

Whereas the Times was prone to seeing faces in the clouds during the delirium of destruction in Iraq—it is now, thankfully, attempting to cleave to facts with respect to Iran.

“American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb,” the NYT has claimed. “Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.”

Iranian officials who maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes are scoffed at much as Iraqis were when they denied developing WMD.

Nuclear scientist Ali Asghar Soltanieh, also Iran’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has argued forcefully and coherently for his country’s need to produce radio isotopes, a byproduct of the nuclear industry, for Iran’s pharmaceuticals. Talk to the hand, Mr. Soltanieh. Yes, the burden of proof should be on he who proposes the existence of something, not on he who claims that it does not exist. But this is a bully’s universe.

Facts did nothing to sway the U.S. from attacking a prostrate, Third World nation, with no navy or air force, whose military prowess was a fifth of what was smashed in the Gulf War. Rationalizing war crimes in Iraq with lies, post invasion, became de rigueur in the major media.

Facts will not forestall an assault on Iran. In the early days, Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, provided the US with brick-thick “documentary intelligence” showing that “Saddam did not have WMD.” For presenting what turned out to be the only reliable intelligence in the sad saga of Iraq, Sabri was mocked and Saddam murdered.