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Galloway Warns about Attack on Iran
"It reads like a Hollywood film script" said the FBI Director Robert Mueller at the podium on the breakfast news unveiling what might be an Oscar-Winner at least in the "Wag the Dog" category.
Iran it seems, at least in the script, planned to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to Washington in a restaurant frequented by American senators and scores of other diners. And it contracted, through an Iranian- American citizen ( who appears to have been convicted long before his presumably forthcoming trial) guided by a named "member of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard", a Mexican Drug Cartel to do the job for a price of $1.5 million. Only the hired assassin was in fact an FBI operative, turned by them from his drug-dealing past into a sting operator. Thus the $100,000 down payment the Iranian-American allegedly paid into the agent's bank account goes to the US Treasury to reduce President Obama's deficit. Which may of course be where it came from in the first place. In my long years writing for Private Eye mainly under Richard Ingram he often used to opine as to whether or not a story had the "ring of truth". This one has more than a tinkle of falsehood. If Iran wanted to attack Saudi Arabia - which admittedly wants to "cut the head off the snake ( Iran)" according to Wikileaks- it could do so on its doorstep in Iraq or in the kingdom itself. It could have chosen a more exalted target than the inconsequential commoner installed in Saudi Arabia's US embassy since the mysterious disappearance of Prince Bandar bin-Sultan its former occupant. He's the man George W Bush called "Bandar Bush", so close was he to the long-ruling family in the US. And it would surely have the means to carry out such an attack itself rather than hire a Mexican Drug Cartel which turned out not to be what it seemed. But if Iran for reasons of deniability wanted to appoint a proxy to carry out such an attack, it would surely approach a proxy it knew something about, rather than an undercover American policeman. One scenario being advanced is that a rogue section of the Iranian regime might be involved rather than Ahmedinijad himself. Equally plausible is that the rogue section lies within the American administration itself. Would the Iranian regime really be so stupid as to kill perhaps a hundred diners, including US politicians, in the capital of their most threatening adversary? And for what? Who would gain from such an act of mass murder, and what would they gain? Qui Bono in this story; Iran, or those who wish to make war upon Iran and change its regime? This mangy Wag the Shaggy Dog story may well run out of the same trap as any one of a long line of FBI entrapment tales like the "Breaking News" plot by "Al Qaeda" to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago which started life on CNN as a Bin Laden plot but which turned out be the ravings of a mentally ill Muslim- American, set up to talk about such a plot by the FBI itself. Or in the longer tradition of "False Flag" operations that anyone who has read Graham Greene's "Quiet American" will recognise. The US has never shirked from even the crudest of such operations from the Bay of Pigs and other Cuban adventures through the fake Gulf of Tonkin incident which was used to propel American forces into the disastrous quagmire of Vietnam. This story does seem to mark a stepping up of US preparations for aggression against Iran, involving as it does the highest officials of the Unites States in a claim which the gullible, which includes the British government which was quick to say that Iran must be held "accountable" for this alleged crime, will regard as a legitimate casus belli. After all when George Bush (Senior) was held to be the victim of a plot to assassinate him during a visit to Kuwait it troubled few that a semen-stained Bill Clinton spilled the blood of innocents, including my friend Leila Al-Attar Iraq's pre-eminent woman painter, in both Iraq and at Sudan's pharmaceutical plant in Al-Shiffa. The clearly choreographed statements coming out of Riyadh within moments of the US Attorney General's press conference indicate a way in which this story could now unfold. The Saudi regime says that evidence of Iran's guilt in this plot is "overwhelming" and that action must follow. Of course notwithstanding the hundreds of billions of Saudi Riyals spent on western weaponry the Saudis cannot hope to prevail in any "action" against Iran. But any "action" on which it did embark against Iran could swiftly bring in the United States which has long been pledged to protect Saudi "security". There is an Arabic saying, unique I think to Iraqis, which translated says "you cannot hurt someone who is holding you by the balls". Iran is holding the US by the balls in Iraq and in the Gulf region as a whole. The destruction of the former regime in Iraq, as any half-informed observer must have known, could only have as one of its principal consequences, a surge in the power and influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran next door. Frustration at this, and at the losing battle in Iran's other neighbour Afghanistan, may well have tipped the ailing and failing US administration of Barak Obama into a disastrous attempt to break the logjam. If it has, then they and us as their "shoulder to shoulder" ally, may have plenty of cause to regret it. Iran is not Iraq in 2003, enfeebled by more than a decade of punishing economic sanctions, its regime isolated and hated. Iran is a strong country and whatever its internal divisions likely to unite overwhelmingly against any US aggression. And it has friends, all over the region and the world. The capacity for blowback in such an aggression appears to be being disastrously "misunderestimated" as George W Bush would put it, in both Washington and London. This hoary "restaurant plot" may tip us into a new cauldron in the Muslim world, containing a soup hotter than hell.
George Galloway October 12 2011
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