'War on terror' is now war on Iran

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"......The demonization of Iran drags on relentlessly as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been officially branded a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and its elite Quds Force a supporter of terrorism. The latter has for months been accused of supplying Shi'ite militias in Iraq with weapons that are killing US soldiers......

Sanctions do bite - as some Iranian conservatives have started to publicly admit. But Tehran won't be in a hurry to mount a hug-and-kiss expedition to Washington. Cuba has been fighting a US blockade and sanctions for almost five decades - and has managed to survive with dignity......

This new round of sanctions is just one side of the demonization of Iran campaign - as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was once again spinning the other side of the same old scratched vinyl, that of preventing "one of the world's worst regimes from acquiring the world's most dangerous weapons".....

It is the Quds Force that trained Iraq's Badr Brigades, the paramilitary arm of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the party of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim allied with the US. The Badr are firmly ensconced at the Iraqi Ministry of Interior - and it is they who have spawned death squads and accelerated ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. Instead of accusing Iran without any evidence, Washington should take a good look at what its Iraqi allies are up to......

The business-minded IRGC thrived during the 1990s. Today it controls more than 100 large companies involved in telecoms, road and dam construction, luxury hotels, the auto industry (the Mazda assembly line in Iran) and, crucially, oil and gas exploitation at the giant South Pars field......

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is an ex-pasdaran himself - thus also a "terrorist" according to Bush administration logic. The same applies to no fewer than two-thirds of the members of the Majlis (parliament). Most of the leadership at the Ministry of Interior is also ex-pasdaran. Five IRGC generals are already under United Nations sanctions, as they are responsible for Iran's nuclear and missile program.....

Even well-positioned Iranians cannot clearly distinguish who is manipulating whom in the wide net involving the Supreme Leader, the IRGC, the fervent bassiji masses and business and national security interests. By branding the IRGC as terrorist, Washington has in fact declared war on the Iranian power elite.

One can imagine what would happen if any developing country branded the US industrial-military complex as "terrorists" - and any number of countries would have plenty of reasons to do so. By stretching its "war on terror" logic to actually naming names, the Bush administration has boxed itself into no other option than regime change in Iran. "