Is it inevitable?
By Justin Raimondo
"The timing of the recent incident in which 15 British sailors were arrested by Iran at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway for purportedly entering Iranian waters couldn't have been more provocative if it had been planned that way. And perhaps it was. The question is, however, who did the planning?
It happened on the eve of a vote in the UN Security Council to impose stricter sanctions on Iran and in the wake of escalating rhetoric from U.S. government officials blaming Iran for anti-occupation activity in Iraq. On top of that, recent events include the kidnapping of Iranian consular officials in Irbil, Kurdistan, by U.S. forces, reports of covert U.S. support for terrorist attacks inside Iran, the "disappearance" of a major Iranian military figure in the elite Revolutionary Guards unit, and suspicions that the Mossad may have had a hand in killing a renowned Iranian nuclear scientist. Add it all up, and there seems little doubt as to who carried out what seems like a brazen provocation......
Laughing at Her Majesty's sailors, who were guarding the civilized world from the pernicious plots of car smugglers, was surely an act of war. After all, isn't a car a "weapon of mass destruction" in present-day Iraq? The Brits weren't going to let the Iranians off the hook quite so easily, and the next day they returned to the same waters to find the same smugglers plying their trade. The British patrol made a beeline for the smugglers, but this time the smugglers didn't run – and the poor naïve Brits walked right into the trap. No sooner had they boarded the vessel than they were surrounded on all sides by Iranian gunboats. Last anybody heard of their fate, they were in Tehran and the Iranians were talking about putting them on trial for espionage.......
Both Ron Paul and Antiwar.com columnist Philip Giraldi have warned about the likelihood of a Gulf of Tonkin-style incident in the Persian Gulf, and their predictions have, sadly, proved all too accurate. That it involves the British, not the Americans, is a double victory for the on-to-Tehran crowd: the war-weary Brits, who recently announced the withdrawal of their troops from southern Iraq, will presumably be dragged along in the wake of the coming U.S. military assault as their sailors are paraded before the cameras in Tehran. Once again, "coalition" forces are about to take down a Middle Eastern government, and they are already on the move......
On the ground in the Middle East, the forces that will engage in a mighty clash of civilizations are gathering – while, on the home front, the Israel Lobby is preparing the ground by softening up any possible opposition. This means zeroing in on the Democratic Party, lining up the major presidential candidates in support of a strike against Tehran, and smearing any and all war opponents as anti-Semitic enablers of the nuclear-armed, Holocaust-denying Iranian regime......"
No comments:
Post a Comment