Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism:

“The notion of Zionism, as that there is this kind of destiny of the Jewish people to have their own state, is just the wrong idea. And it’s an idea that requires signing onto imperialism. It means signing onto ethnic cleansing. It means — despite everything that has been said about it, it means basically becoming a racist situation, where you’re oppressing an indigenous population and depriving them of their right to existence … I join hands with those people who feel that the time has come to basically think of Israel in the same category as South Africa, as a state that just has gone wrong and needs replacement … the comparison was interesting, because Tutu and other leaders of the freedom struggle in South Africa who visited Palestine have always been asked, well, how does it compare? And he says, well, it’s not the same thing, Israel is actually worse. He actually said, Israel is a worse place than Apartheid South Africa was.”

Thanks Tom Murphy. See also Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism video, and a Message From Howard Zinn

Introducing the Guest Post/ Essay/ column feature. These are contributions sent by the article author expressly for publication at peoplesgeography.com. Occasional contributions are invited and may be on a non-exclusive basis; that is, authors are welcome to cross-post both at their own blog and throughout the alternative press/ blogosphere, and in fact are encouraged to disseminate their work in this way.

Here is Phil Rockstroh on what he terms the “supine liberalism and Viagra conservatism” of the current political climate and the relationship between political discourse and reality. Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at philangie2000 @ yahoo.com

A Conservative’s Garden of False Narratives: Who are you calling a moonbat, anyway?

by Phil Rockstroh

One would think that from the cries of (feigned) indignation and calls for repentance arising from conservatives regarding Move-On.org’s ad in the N.Y. Times that the liberal-leaning group had not simply questioned the insights and intentions of a public servant, promoting, in a public forum, the policy of an illegal and immoral occupation of a sovereign nation; rather, the folks of Move-On.org had committed blasphemy against the holy name of some revered saint — General Mary Petreus, Mother of God.

The false outrage of perpetually offended conservatives serves as cover for the true outrages of our era, including: truncated civil liberties, rising levels of social and economic inequality and injustice, and foreign wars of aggression waged by an insular and secretive executive branch and fought by a permanent underclass. The outrages keep arriving, because the collective imagination of the citizen/consumers of the US, arbitrated by a careerist media elite, has been, for decades, in the thrall of false narratives that serve the interests of the elite of the corporate/militarist classes. Read the rest of this entry »

I happened to bookmark this thoughtful piece by Phil Rockstroh a couple of days ago (see PG Picks). Thanks to Phil sending it, I had the welcome opportunity to re-read it and I’m pleased to feature the full article and not just the link here.

By way of preamble, just in the last few days there have been a number of important articles about the continuing diminution of constitutionally-enshrined rights and the danger of martial law in the United States. Many of you will have seen, for example, Michel Chossudovsky’s piece in the Canadian site Global Research entitled Bush Executive Order: Criminalizing the Antiwar Movement.

In addition to this, see Kurt Nimmo’s Decider Guy Demands Further Erosion of the Fourth, James Bovard’s Martial Law: Waiting for the Clampdown, Dave Lindorff’s The Threat Of Martial Law Is Real, Paul Craig Roberts, My Wake-up Call: Watch For Another 9/11-WMD Experience and Ernest Partridge, A Republic, If We Can Keep It — but a sample of the wake-up call in the last couple of weeks alone.

The dangerous erosion of civil liberties is not of course limited to my dear friends in the States. Here in Australia at Empire’s Edge, and in the UK, draconian new “terror” laws are also being enacted, though the corrosion of constitutional democracy seems most marked in Empire’s Epicentre in the US. Nor is all this intended merely to depress us; rather, we are the informed citizenry upon which a healthy and genuinely functioning democracy depends, and we already have means available for redress and reclamation. The impeachment movement is a start that changes the players, there is more we can each do to better direct the system.

In Fascism Anyone? Lawrence Britt enumerates upon the fourteen common characteristics of fascist regimes (subsequently expanded upon and updated in Heather Wokusch’s Bush and the F-Word in 2006), and their prevalence today, identified as:

Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism; Disdain for the importance of human rights; Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause; The supremacy of the military/avid militarism; Rampant sexism; A controlled mass media; Obsession with national security; Religion and ruling elite tied together; Power of corporations protected; Power of labor suppressed or eliminated; Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts; Obsession with crime and punishment; Rampant cronyism and corruption; and Fraudulent elections.

On the US Constitution: GWB has said that its “just a goddamn piece of paper“ (Nov 2005).

In Friday’s LA Times too, Rosa Brooks recalls Ron Suskind’s oft-quoted passage in his book The One Percent Doctrine on imperial hubris in its presumption of the unilateral construction of reality (see A Really Bad Case of “Reality”; and the ‘aide’ quoted is widely tipped to be Karl Rove):

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.

He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Phil Rockstroh captures the zeitgeist very well and addresses both the imperial imposition of (its version of) reality and its creeping fascism. He is a contributing editor to Cyrano’s Journal Online and is an auto-didactic poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.

Tales of Angst, Alienation and Martial Law: Roasting Marshmallows on the American Reichstag Fire to Come

by Phil Rockstroh

In this summer of angst and grim foreboding about what further assaults against common sense and common decency the Bush administration might inflict upon the people of the world, how many times during the day do those of us — still possessed of mind, heart and conscience — take pause, hoping we’ve seen the worst of it, then, fearing we haven’t yet, attempt to push down the dread rising within us, so that we might simply make it through the day and be able to rest at night?

Accordingly, those who have been paying attention are aware that the outward mechanisms of martial law are in place. We shudder knowing that Bush has issued an executive decree that grants him dictatorial power in the event of some nebulously defined national emergency. In addition, the knowledge nettles us that a vast network of internment camps bristle across the length of the U.S., standing at wait for those who might raise objections to the fascistic fury unloosed by the American empire’s version of the Reichstag fire.

Moreover, a closer look would reveal that the inner processes by which an individual begins the act of acceptance of authoritarian excess — the mixture of chronic passivity, boredom, low grade anxiety and unfocused rage inherent in the citizens/consumers of the corporate state that primes an individual for fascism — have been in place for quite some time within the psyches of the American populace, both elites and hoi polloi alike. Although, don’t look for torch-lit processions thronging the nation’s streets and boulevards; rather, look for a Nuremberg Rally of couch-bound brownshirts. Instead of ogling the serried ranks of jut-jawed, SS soldiers, a contemporary Leni Riefenstahl would be forced to film chubby clusters of double-chinned consumers, saluting the new order with their TV remotes. In the contemporary United States, the elation induced by the immersion of one’s individual will to the mindless intoxication of the mob might only be possible, if Bush seized dictatorial control of the state while simultaneously sending out to all citizens gift certificates to Ikea. Read the rest of this entry »

Silence is not golden, the adapted adage goes, just yellow: speak up! One is reminded about what Orwell said telling the truth in a time of universal deceit, and this spirit informs the Paul Levy piece presented here. A practitioner of integral psychology, Levy is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, available at his website www.awakeninthedream.com.

Here, I feature an excerpt from one of his most recent articles, Breaking the vow of silence, a characteristically thoughtful scholarly-spiritual analytical amalgam that explores the fertile territory between psychology and politics. The piece begins with and then extrapolates from a perceptive anecdote on the psycho-social roots of our political conundrum in western and particularly Anglophone states, where creeping fascism and fearmongering threaten to become more than passing features of our political climate.

BREAKING THE VOW OF SILENCE

by Paul Levy

Certain events play out in our individual lives that reflect back to us situations that are happening in the collective life of our nation or world. One such event happened many years ago in the very synagogue in which I was Bar-Mitzvahed. In what today seems like a dream, I was with my parents on the holiest night of the entire Jewish year, “Kol Nidre”, the night before “Yom Kippur”, the day of atonement. I probably hadn’t been to a synagogue since my Bar-Mitzvah, which was years before. For the sermon, the rabbi gave an impassioned talk about how everybody hates the Jews, and that we all needed to band together against the world. His words were filled with hatred and venom. He was literally preaching fear and separation. His vision had nothing to do with love and compassion, and was certainly not based in wisdom.

I was outraged by the rabbi’s talk. Much to my dismay, when I expressed my feelings to my parents, they not only felt differently but also were very angry with me for having the nerve to be critical of their rabbi. They felt that I was being dis-respectful and sacrilegious by questioning the wisdom of the rabbi, who was, after all, the leader of their congregation.

A couple of months later, the rabbi got fired. Why? It was because he was consistently giving fear-inducing and hate-filled talks to his congregation. My parents told me about the rabbi being fired, and asked me, totally incredulous “How did you know”? Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATED

A great anonymously written allegory, illustrating how “development” is a loaded term and concept. It also is a nice simple parable that illustrates the value of taking time to enjoy life as we pass through it, rather than relegating enjoyment to a retirement endpoint. Working hard and just getting by economically, as many of us do, does not preclude enjoying the scenery or the need to “follow one’s bliss” in Joseph Campbell’s famous phrase. I originally presented the parable as is but have since substituted nationalities for job identifiers at 99’s wise suggestion, since the story is certainly not meant to impugn the American (who happens to be the investment banker: its not as if Mexico doesn’t have investment bankers) as somehow supremely representative of corporate managerialism nor romanticise the Mexican as uniquely representative of an idyllic autarkic lifestyle (one could easily substitute other nationalities, such as Australian and East Timorese, for example); the characters simply represent systems of thought and practice whose interaction serves to question development orthodoxy and point the need for a more enlarged understanding. Indeed, the nationalities is a distraction and buys into the divisive separation of pitting one nation against another instead of solidarity and connection for what is a cross-border, transnational issue.

Part Two forthcoming: Is Geographic Space Developmental Time?

***

“Development”: The Investment Banker and the Fisherman (amended)

The investment banker (hereafter the Banker) was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.

Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The Banker complimented the Fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Fisherman replied, only a little while.

The Banker then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The Banker then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life.”

The Banker scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats.

Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the Banker replied, “15-20 years.”

“But what then?”

The Banker laughed and said that’s the best part. “When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”

“Millions … Then what?”

The Banker said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

A very accessible overview about the role of money and the importance of currency and credit and its relationship with political events.

With an American focus, it features fascinating facts about the money-changers throughout history from the time of Christ to the Rothschilds in Europe to the American Revolution and closer to the present day.

Thanks to Jack for the heads up about this documentary, previously only linked to but now embedded here. Its available to watch both in one sitting as well as in 2 parts (below).

Worth a look: Carolyn Baker, ‘Unless you change the way money works, you change nothing’ (Feb 2007).

UPDATE: If you enjoyed this video, you may also like The Story of Money Animation: ‘Money As Debt’ - an informative animation suitable for a wide age group. It provides an excellent overview that explains complex concepts in a clear and straightforward manner.

Part One:

Part Two:

Brzezinski on the cultivation and exploitation of a corrosive culture of fear for political purposes in the US and how it is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Terrorized by ‘War on Terror’:
How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America

By Zbigniew Brzezinski :: Washington Post
Sunday, March 25, 2007; Page B01

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants. Read the rest of this entry »

The panel is a debate (two-person per side parliamentary style) arguing the proposition that ‘This House believes that only a new dictator can end the violence in Iraq’.

Arguing against the motion is George Galloway (UK RESPECT MP) and Adnan Pachachi (former President, Iraqi Governing Council); arguing for the motion is Sabah Al-Mukhtar (Iraqi lawyer) and Robert Bear (former CIA officer and consultant on Syriana). The moderator also swings in to challenge the debators in a rather combative style.

The individual runs are actually quite short, and this debate but skims the surface. Nevertheless,  may be worth a listen.

RT 45 minutes.

Are you a liberal? Been told you’re somewhere to the Right of Genghis Khan? ;) Are you libertarian or a radical? Or radically libertarian (and is there a difference?) Can we really measure and situate our political positions in a way that goes beyond mere labels anyway, and can our political leanings be mapped given that some words mean different things in different parts of the world? ‘Liberal’ is an extremely broad church, for example. It can be used both to describe the ideas of John Stuart Mill and contemporary lefties alike, with a gulf of a couple hundred of years in between and an ambiguity and elasticity of the term, as with many others.

Test time! A conversation with my good blogger friend Jack (who has his own model: check it out) has prompted me to post for your enjoyment and bemusement two quizzes that claim to be able to locate your political positionality. For many, among them the creators of these quizzes, the simple one-dimensional left-right spectrum is increasingly becoming less tenable and more political models are now two- or three-multidimensional with multiple axes.

These tests are imperfect instruments, and are not and can not be “scientific”. I also think a lot of tests can not claim to be value-free themselves and that some of the political proclivities of the creators may sometimes filter through. They also do not so far seem to constitute so much a departure from the traditional L-R axis as simply subsume and add to it. In the two quizzes I’ve featured below too, some of the question set-up and wording may leave something to be desired, but all up I think they’re an interesting experiment nonetheless.

These two quizzes are in some respects a study in contrasts. One asks many interesting questions, the other distills it into just ten short ones. I only just took the latter test a few minutes ago while I took the Political Compass several years ago. Anyway, without much more commentary, here they are and I’d be interested in your results (mine follow).

Have a go: -

1. The World’s Smallest Political Quiz (more on the background of this quiz here and political spectrums in general here)
2. The Political Compass

My Results:

1. The World’s Smallest Political Quiz:

2. The Political Compass

Scores along these axes:

Economic Left/Right: -6.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.31

(unfortunately the graphic goes all askew when I attempt to insert it here)

Enjoy the weekend and if there is a peace rally for Iraq in your city tomorrow, please consider attending. I will be participating in the march here. Its the 4th Anniversary of this terrible war.

I first wrote about this in a post in November, but am recycling this great letter I found in the Nov-Dec issue of Tikkun magazine — the thoughtful commentary by Peter Gabel is worth a second run:

“War is about socially induced paranoia that reciprocates back and forth via imaginary threats to humiliated beings who cannot make authentic contact with one another.

Each person on each ’side’ is withdrawn into him/herself fearing the anxious ping of rejection and humiliation, then hyper-identifies with an imaginary ‘we’ under threat from an endlessly projected imaginary ‘them’. There is no grounded Thou, just repetition of skidding off into collective flight out of fear of humiliation, on both ’sides’.

This can lead to a realpolitik ‘need’ to get your hands on the other guy’s oil. That can be a subordinate part of the rotating paranoia, where ‘they’ have the oil and ‘we’ need to keep our self-owned machines going.

But if it were really just about oil, we would adopt a different course–namely, we would seek to calm things down and make peace with the big oil countries, and extend generosity and human recognition toward them, appreciating the human beings there in their true humanity, in which case they would share the oil with us. They would! (Yes, via the market at present, but so what).

So its not about oil. Its about the fear of humiliation and the attendant pathologies that come from fear, not as a mere psychological matter, but as a legacy of a profound collective, mutually enforcing isolation.

When the Left keeps repeating that it’s all about oil, it participates in the schizophrenia which treats the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld types as craven materialist robots, instead of leaders of a disposition, a frightened way of relating to the world.

Instead of kicking the Bush administration out of office and replacing it with correct geo-political robots whom we would approve of who would, say, recognise the sovereignty of oil-producing countries, we must heal the distorted human consciousness that produces it by thawing out the paranoid dynamic I describe with love, authenticity and an appeal to the spontaneous desire within social space to recover from the bad dream of paranoid existence and actually Be Here Now with the other beautiful human beings on the planet.”

© Benjamin Heine

Run-time 1 min:50. Thanks to my good friend Paul for forwarding these.

Rep Ron Paul displays a canny concern for the appearance of a Gulf of Tonkin style incident, and he sensibly doesn’t buy into the propagated fear-mongering about Iran.

See also Congress transcripts here (15 Jan 2007) and here (11 Jan) for snippets of this Texas Republican (I think he’s a libertarian at heart) member’s good sense.

And he’s a Republican! There’s hope yet. Ron Paul, I salute you.

Meanwhile, an upbeat article on the newly Democratic controlled Congress by William Rivers Pitt: “Something really weird is going on here. All of a sudden, the folks in Congress are behaving as if they actually represent … well … the people. Aren’t they supposed to be hauling water for President Bush? What happened to all those arm-twisting, rule-changing, ethics-shredding shows on C-SPAN?”

The Likudnik neocons in the US are refusing diplomacy, are shunning the advice of better, more level-headed people both within the administration and from other governments trying to help broker talks; they continue their propagations of paranoia, fear and disinformation because they are intent upon another conflagration, regardless. They have control of oil, gas, and maintaining Israel’s regional nuclear balance-of-power at stake.

We can not let this war happen.

See also Virgina Tilley’s excellent piece posted here recently.

[] BBC Newsnight: Cheney Rejected Iran’s Help: Washington ’snubbed Iran offer’, watch at ICH, or at BBC:

Iran offered the US a package of concessions in 2003, but it was rejected, a senior former US official has told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion. Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility. But Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office rejected the plan, the official said.

[] Gareth Porter, Neo-con cabal blocked 2003 nuclear talks, Asia Times, 30 March 2006:

WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration failed to enter into negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program in May 2003 because neo-conservatives who advocated destabilization and regime change were able to block any serious diplomatic engagement with Tehran, according to former administration officials. … Lawrence Wilkerson, then chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell, said the failure to adopt a formal Iran policy in 2002-03 was the result of obstruction by a “secret cabal” of neo-conservatives in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Read the rest of this important article about the neocons veto and their prevalance over the ones with good sense in the US administration here

Also see Gareth Porter, How Neo-Cons Sabotaged Iran’s Help on al Qaeda, IPS, 21 Feb 2006

[] Meir Stieglitz, Israel ON the Brink, ICH, 10 Jan 2007

Galvanized by the mounting Iranian nuclear crisis, the “survival” word and its synonymies is the talk of Israel, rising in volume from day to day and spilling to almost all sectors of Israeli life. The prevailing dark mood is epitomized by Prime Minister Olmert rush to publicly stress, for all the world to hear, that for the first time in his life he feels that there is an existential threat against the State of Israel. On this background, an analysis of the Israeli open discourse indicates that the national security paranoia is dangerously nearing “a point of no cure”.

Did Israel really cross the line between legitimate strategic security concerns and existential obsession? Yes, and perilously so. How did it get there? Well, in the last two decades, sowing WMD security alarms was a rather expedient move for the Israeli politicians and media and recently it has reached an exceptional intensity. It is imperative to remember that Israel is a country with long-range strategic capabilities and as such an injection of non-rational survival fears can turn it, in a short time, into a source of global hazard. Read the rest of the article here

[] Salim Lone, Who will stop the US from attacking Iran? National Media, (19 Jan 2007)

HARD AS IT IS TO IMAGINE, it is likely that another major war is being planned by the US, this time against Iran. And the arguments being marshalled by the Bush administration are exactly identical to what was being said against Iraq in the build-up to that war in 2003.

The President and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are accusing Iran of developing weapons of mass destruction and of exporting terrorism, just as Saddam Hussein was allegedly doing.

Iran is also being accused of refusing to abide by United Nations resolutions on its nuclear weapons programme, which, like Iraq then, it denies it has.

Word of American preparations for war against Iran has been rife for months, with renowned US journalist Seymour Hersh revealing covert activities which include the presence within Iran’s borders of US special forces fomenting rebellion against the regime.

But for the first time, President Bush’s war-like words against Iran have now been backed up by overt actions. An Iranian consulate was raided in Iraq’s Kurdistan and five diplomats arrested, in violation of international diplomatic protocols. A new aircraft carrier left the US on Wednesday for Iranian waters. Read the rest of the article here

A very important and alarming article from Virginia Tilley in Counterpunch (18 Jan), slightly truncated here. Though many good articles deal with US foreign policy toward Iran and the idiocy of this gang of neocon criminals, Tilley sets out their mentality (the madness to their method, to reverse the phrase) very clearly. If you’ve ever wondered why on earth they would be stupid to want to attack Iran and what on earth are they thinking, herein lies a summary of their worldview and motives, and their slimey manoevrings and machinations to achieve it in what’s left of their term of unelected office.

Also see by Conn Hallinan, ‘Iran: THinking the Unthinkable’, Foreign Policy In Focus (15 January, 2007).

The Steady March to War on Iran:

What It Would Take to Stop It

… From the beginning, the Bush neocons viewed the region through an Orientalist lens, and therefore saw tribes everywhere, as mentors like Daniel Pipes encouraged them to do. Viewing the Middle East also through an Israeli lens, they saw ethnicity as the best way to break up national and pan-Arab solidarities. Their staggering ignorance of the region was perhaps best exposed by their early faith in the charlatan Ahmed Chalabi, who promised a pro-Israeli Shi’a-led Iraqi government. On such rampant idiocy were their enthusiasm and deceitful arguments for war fueled.

(I)n setting out its package of recommendations, the supremely pragmatic Iraq Study Group neglected one glaring political fact. It assumed that the package was a real possibility — i.e., that the Bush administration could muster the necessary energy and faith to engage in the multilateral diplomacy essential to it. The Bush neocons have no talent or faith in multilateral politics and indeed openly deride them. And they are still in charge, whatever the changing political climate in Washington and mounting popular hostility to the Iraq war. The Great Decider is still the president. Mr. Cheney is still the Vice-President. All the old villains, like Douglas Feith and David Wurmser and the scary Michael Ledeen, are still in government or guiding events from Isengards like the American Enterprise Institute. They have exactly two years to complete the agenda they formulated in the 1990s: that is, reshape the entire Middle East, in the interest of Israel and their own construction, security, and oil companies, by taking out any regional rival to Israel’s uncontested military hegemony. Hence we have increasingly clear signals that, far from withdrawing troops, the US plans to take the next disastrous step in their program: bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and, they hope, change Iran’s regime.

Long in the making, a US attack on Iran has been maturing over the past year. Most graphic, although not catching much public alarm until now, was the transfer last year of two US naval carrier groups to the Persian Gulf (each flanked by nuclear submarines and battleships, carrying fleets of attack jets, and holding special Marine landing forces). Now some staff changes in the US security and command staff are drawing worried comment. One change is the replacement of General Abizaid (who did not favor a troop increase) with the Pacific theatre’s top naval commander, Admiral Fallon, hitherto in charge of those same carrier groups (which were posted in the Pacific). Another signal, less widely noted, is that Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who downplayed the nuclear threat from Iran, has been replaced by Vice Admiral John Michael “Mike” McConnell, also a Navy man seen as much more compliant (having already facilitated the Bush administration’s programs to monitor international financial transfers).

It is over-obvious that, while the Navy is a vital support to US operations throughout the Middle East, a massive carrier build-up in the Gulf cannot possibly assist the US occupation in Iraq. But it is absolutely pivotal to launching an attack on Iran and containing Iran’s retaliation. In this context, even Bush’s proposed troop “surge”, otherwise puzzlingly meaningless, may be intended to support an attack on Iran, as the US will need more ground troops to consolidate its transportation lines in the event of Iranian or allied Iraqi-guerrilla reprisals. (That the “surge” itself can only prolong and worsen Iraq’s suffering and further demolish US standing in the region is relatively unimportant.)

Bombing Iran will cast the Middle East into such a frenzy of violence, however, that desperate editorials denouncing it are starting to appear all over the world press. But the Bush neocons — and, of course, Israel - also have utter contempt for world opinion and indeed any analysis outside their immediate crazed circle. Certainly the little question of international law, which makes a preemptive strike on Iran entirely illegal, does not figure for them in the slightest. (It did not stop them from raiding and seizing Iranian consular staff and archives in Arbil, which was also entirely illegal and has recklessly imperiled US consular relations globally.)

The only hope of stopping a US strike on Iran is therefore the Democrats, who now control the purse strings for US war-making and are already sending signals that the troop “surge” might be in trouble. Whether they have sufficient spine to stop the attack on Iran is universally questioned. But even if a US attack is somehow stalled by domestic action, Israel can always strike Iran instead. It is still not widely debated that, over the past few years, Israel has purchased a cluster of advanced German Dolphin submarines, which would allow sea-based missile launches on Iran from the Indian Ocean, as well as a new fleet of attack jets and thousands of “bunker-busting” bombs. Or that last year Israel was running test bombing runs on a mock-up site of the Natanz reactor, well ahead of its recently revealed long-distance bombing test flights to Gibraltar.

Why such a dangerous US-Israeli alliance in such a clearly crazed mission? The old necon strategy of A Clean Break is one obvious answer. But the goals may go further. A strike on Iran by Israel might be the magic bullet for the sinking US neocons and their stumbling military global mission. No Democrat now breathing is going to vote to withhold the US funds necessary to “defending Israel” from an Iranian counter-attack. Generating a direct threat to Israel may indeed now be their only way to ensure that war funding continues to flow lavishly.

If an Israeli attack is indeed pending, only something close to a coup in Washington can stop it. The real question now, therefore, is whether the same pragmatists who entered US politics unbidden to comprise the Iraq Study Group (led by Baker but representing the old Cold-War guard, including now-frightened Pentagon officers, desperate State Department experts, and even alarmed oil men) will conclude that the US national interest is indeed in such imminent peril that they must launch emergency political measures to preclude a US or Israeli attack. This effort could take several shapes, but the normal options are not promising. Hearings to expose White House malfeasance (lying, fraud, graft) in the Iraq war, leading even to an impeachment process, could fatally cripple the attack plan, but would take more time than we have and would not stop Israel in any case. Hearings to expose Israeli espionage and discredit Israel’s role in US foreign p