Very Important New Article by Richard Falk

In the first number of the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies there is a must-read article by Richard Falk on the Bush administration/neo-con/Israeli strategy to dominate the entire Middle East. (You can get a free PDF copy of the article by registering.) This is one of the best articles I've read because it ties together the neo-con, pro-Israeli right's plans--by emphasizing the 1996 Clean Break document as well as the Project for the New American Century document of 2000--with the Bush administration's war in Iraq and current threats toward Iran and Syria.

There REALLY is a plan by extremist neo-cons who are rabidly pro-Israeli (not just pro-Israel but aggressively supportive of the most expansionist right-wing Likud agenda) to see the US and Israel dominate the Middle East and get rid of any Middle Eastern governments of which they disapprove. As Falk points out the Iraq War was to be merely the first step in this strategy. Falk writes that even though the Iraq War has gone catastrophically these people have not at all given up and the Israeli attack upon Lebanon last summer was another step in this strategy which now turns to trying to drum up support for some kind of attack upon Iran. I suspect that the saber rattling of the Bush administration toward Iran in the last few days shows that they are trying to set the stage for either an American attack upon Iran--justified as part of 'hot pursuit' of alleged Iranians across the Iraqi-Iranian border--or an Israeli attack upon Iran's nuclear plants. As Falk writes:

But rather than abandon geopolitical ambitions, it appears from recent developments that Israel is testing the waters for an all-out regional war, with strong encouragement by the US government taking a variety of overt forms: a public build-up of deployed air strike forces backed by war plans for the destruction of up to 10,000 targets in Iran (See Plesch 2006); unconditional diplomatic support for Israel’s responses, including blocking for several weeks in the UN Security Council and elsewhere widely favoured calls for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon; and the undisguised provision to Israel in the midst of the war of large quantities of aviation fuel and a rushed shipment of additional bombs.

This, unfortunately, is an EXTREMELY SERIOUS matter to which too few Americans are paying attention. Given what I know about the extremism of Bush and Cheney and their extremist pseudo-conservative advisors I believe there is a very significant chance that Bush/Cheney will either do something to initiate war with Iran or support the Israelis in attacking Iran. As Falk says, this risks the chance of a regional Middle Eastern war which could have devastating consequences domestically (oil prices and our whole economy) and internationally.