Bloom!!!

Iran Makes Us An Offer

By Howard Bloom

Iran has just offered to take Iraq off our hands...for a price.

What is it asking for? That the U.S. drops its "bullying" policy toward Tehran and that we act with "justice." In other words, that we let Iran develop nuclear weapons in peace. That we stop asking for economic sanctions. And that we give Iran whatever it wants from Israel this month--short of utter oblivion.

Yes, Iran is asking us to hand them Iraq and to pay them for accepting it. What a twist! We've done Iraq's work for it.

We've spent nearly a trillion dollars and over 2,000 lives swinging Iraq into Iran's hands.

And Iraq wants us to pay them? Shouldn't it be the other way around? If we give Iraq away, we pay a price we can not afford. We lose our stature, our power, and our ability to influence this world, to turn this globe toward free speech, gender equality, tolerance, and pluralism--all values Iran is definitely NOT promoting as part of its global agenda.

And Iran DOES have a global agenda. But more about that in a minute. First, here's why Iran should be paying us, not the other way around. Iran spent close to a billion dollars, 500,000 lives, and eight years trying to take Iraq militarily in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. And it failed.

If we reverse that failure by handing Iraq over on a depleted-uranium platter, we will prove to the world that we are historically ignorant and geopolitically blind. We will demonstrate to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East that we are no longer a superpower…in fact that we are a toothless tiger, a people of retreat. And it will open a power vacuum to others.

In that vacuum, Iran will use its uranium-and-missile-waving face-offs with America to establish hegemony and control in the Persian Gulf, control over 66% of the world's oil reserves, control over the sea lanes through which 40% of our oil travels daily, control over the world's economy via a stranglehold over oil prices, and the first step toward a role as the Middle East's new land superpower.

Iran will turn Iraq into an Islamic Revolutionary power following the truths of the Ayatollah.

This will give Iran a puppet government and a de facto province that increases its size 27%, bulks up its population by 42%, nearly doubles its oil reserves, and whose military adds manpower-complete with US weapons and training--to the Iranian combat and doomsday machine.

It will hand Iran a victory. A victory in its patient 28 year struggle to topple the Great Satan. A victory in its 28 year long attempt to follow the dictates of the Iranian Islamic Revolution's founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said: "We will export our revolution throughout the world...until the calls 'there is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God' are echoed all over the world." The first nation the Ayatollah wanted to export his revolution to was Iraq. And we will give him his wish.

We will add heft to a claim made a mere two months ago by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a claim that mixes partial truths with an aim that I find ominous:

"The great powers…kill the peoples in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and turn them into refugees… They operate all the terrorist groups in Iraq and Palestine, …They fill all their warehouses with atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. …they cause the greatest damage to natural resources …The powers are willing to destroy the planet several times over, in order to line the pockets of the world's capitalists, parties, and great powers. …they have failed in the proper management of the world. …Today, the Iranian people is recognized as a model for all the peoples of the world. …the world is left with only one light, one banner, and one people, which has preserved the hope in the hearts of all the peoples. This is the great and courageous people of Iran. …the Iranian people--because of its past culture, its past civilization, its intelligent youth, its human and material potential--has the capacity to quickly become an invincible global power. This will happen as soon as it achieves advanced technologies."

Those technologies may already be in Iranian hands. And, thanks to us, Iraq may soon be in Iranian hands as well.

Don't Let Iran Outsmart Us

By Howard Bloom

The balance of power has been shifting in Iraq nearly every day. But it takes a keen eye--and a potent knowledge of history--to see it.

The Iranians have made nearly every move right. But they stumbled ever so slightly this last weekend. They invited the Iraqis and the Syrians in to settle the violence, something that should be easy since Iran is sponsoring the Shiite violence and Syria, Iran's ally, is sponsoring the Sunni violence. The Iranians suckered us into the war in Iraq.[vii] It was they who sent us definitive, detailed eyewitness accounts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

From 2001 to 2003, they shipped us what the New York Times' Chris Hedges calls an "endless supply" of "Iraqi defectors," defectors, says Hedges, "for any story you wanted."[i] What did those "defectors" tell us? One "Iraqi civil engineer"[ii] detailed his visit to 20 weapons sites hidden under Iraqi hospitals and behind Saddam's enormous palaces. [iii]

Another, an "Iraqi intelligence officer," explained how he'd bought seven refrigerated trucks[iv] for conversion to mobile bio-weapons labs. He also spilled the beans on a new long-range missile Saddam was developing, told about his trip to Africa to buy the radioactive fillings for a dirty bomb from rogue Russian scientists, described a chemical weapons factory in Samarra, and told of a bioweapons lab on the outskirts of Baghdad. [v]

Most important was the defector who described how Saddam was producing nuclear bomb materials daily in 400 facilities deliberately scattered from one end of Iraq to another, scattered so they could not be taken out with a single attack.[vi] Some said these weapons of mass destruction could be mobilized in 48 hours to obliterate the West.

It was Iran who conned us into committing the heart and soul of our military, 200,000 men and women to a vast morass of land and a hatred in which we'd sink like a mammoth in a tar pit, in which we would spend our money and run up an extra trillion dollars in debt, in which we would lose our credibility, our integrity and our dignity.

It was Iran who lured us into the Iraq trap.

Now it's Iran that is readying itself for the prizes it will get by busting the American piñata. Prize number one will be the sheer fact that Iran spent nearly a trillion dollars, a million lives and eight long years trying to conquer Iraq on behalf of the Islamic Revolution. When the war ended in a stalemate that Iran found intolerable, the religious leaders of Tehran flailed around for three years, then finally found a faster, cheaper, better way to add Iraq to Tehran's possessions.

The better way was us, the USA. And the phony Iraqi defectors with their plausible but ever-so-false weapons of mass destruction tales were all that was needed to prod us into motion. After all, we'd learned a simple lesson from 9/11--connect the dots.

It's three years later and Iran has let us wallow in the blood of Iran until we couldn't take it any longer. It has waited patiently for us to do what we do so well. We call it finding an exit strategy. Other folks call it giving up.

That moment has finally arrived.

We are about to beg Iran to take Iraq off our hands. We may even be foolish enough to offer up something in exchange for this great favor. Most likely we will pay by extracting concessions from Israel. Concessions that may threaten Israel's survival.

But who cares? Israel is way over there, and we have things back home to worry about. Iran has built its trap beautifully and has played us like a harp until last weekend, when it slipped just the tiniest bit.

It offered to host Syria and Iran in a private session in Tehran where the violence would be considered carefully and ended, not a difficult process, since Iran is sponsoring the Shiite militias and their killing and since Syria is sponsoring the Sunni mass murderers. Calling off your employees, your goons, is not a difficult task.

But Iran asked at the wrong time and in the wrong way. It tried to upstage the USA. It almost prevented us from stepping into the spotlight and making total fools of ourselves. We were about to grab the microphone and beg Iran to take what it's been trying to get ever since 1980--Iraq.

Iraq free and clear, no strings attached. Just take the violence and the embarrassment off of our hands and out of our media. Out of the headlines of the New York Times and out of the news spots on CNN and Fox TV. The Baker Commission was about to tell us that handing Iraq over to Iran is our best solution.

And many of us Democrats, the people of my political party, were about to agree. Fortunately, Iran's kind invitation to Syria and Iraq, its attempt to show that only it could rule the unruly and the unruleable--the Middle East--was ignored. No one came to the party. Syria and Iraq did not show up. But this was not big news in the United States. It was not big news for a reason.

We were about to initiate our own plan to give Iraq away. And that's what we are likely to do in the next week or two.

The story in Iraq changes every day. So does the balance of power. Iran is out to make itself a superstate. It has already made us do its bidding--deposing the secular head of a neighboring country. Now it is about to watch as we turn that coveted country over and announce to the world that we have been beaten, outlasted, and shamed.

Iran is out to make us look like has-beens in the world's power games. And it is about to achieve what its president, the loveable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stated as his goal--demonstrating that Iran is "an invincible global power."

Every day, the balance of power shifts in the Middle East, and on this planet. There will be more in store tomorrow. And it will be more than simply an unfolding tale. It will determine the direction of the rest of our lives.

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[i] http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review THE LIST Judith Miller is on it, but she's hardly alone. Ahmad Chalabi's defectors told stories to a lot of reporters who now wish they'd kept their distance How Chalabi Played the Press BY DOUGLAS McCOLLAM

[ii]http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review

[iii] http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review

[iv] http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review THE LIST Judith Miller is on it, but she's hardly alone. Ahmad Chalabi's defectors told stories to a lot of reporters who now wish they'd kept their distance How Chalabi Played the Press BY DOUGLAS McCOLLAM

[v] Retrieved November 3, 2006, from the World Wide Web http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review THE LIST Judith Miller is on it, but she's hardly alone. Ahmad Chalabi's defectors told stories to a lot of reporters who now wish they'd kept their distance How Chalabi Played the Press BY DOUGLAS McCOLLAM

[vi] Retrieved November 7, 2006, from the World Wide Web http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/031027fa_fact THE STOVEPIPE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq's weapons. Issue of 2003-10-27 Posted 2003-10-20. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224075,00.html US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war. Inquiry into Tehran's role in starting conflict. Top Pentagon ally Chalabi accused Julian Borger in Washington Tuesday May 25, 2004 The Guardian

[vii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224075,00.html US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war • Inquiry into Tehran's role in starting conflict • Top Pentagon ally Chalabi accused Julian Borger in Washington Tuesday May 25, 2004 The Guardian