By Hannes Artens

Yesterday the nuclear standoff with Iran finally culminated in a nuclear explosion; yet one that didn’t occur in a remote testing ground in the Alborz Mountains but right in Washington DC. The findings of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran should leave no stone standing in American politics: the President of the United was again caught red handed lying to the entire nation and the international community about the WMD program of a Middle Eastern regime, trying to construct a case for war on fraudulent allegations and by being forced to make the NIE public against his will was exposed as no longer in control of his own administration.

While the American public understandably is sighing with relief, the world is left speechless and flabbergasted. Not only did George Bush take America’s closest allies and all major powers for fools, but the ridiculous spin the administration is audaciously trying to give this diplomatic fallout - which European governments are forced to comply with for the time being for not being exposed the naïve halfwits they are - will not be forgotten. Realistically, this NIE, thank goodness, should render war with Iran virtually impossible and new sanctions at the UN heading for obscurity until George Bush leaves office. The repercussions of this bombshell will keep analysts, pundits, and bloggers occupied for months and, in the worst case, may leave this administration almost as internationally isolated as if it had attacked Iran.

Bill Richardson cuts right to the chase of the matter:

“This NIE tells us one of two things. Either the Bush-Cheney administration has been willfully misleading the American public on Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities or they are incompetent and were not aware of the consensus view of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies until yesterday.”

It’s safe to rule out the latter, although it’s often quite hard to tell in this White House where deliberate misinformation ends and blatant incompetence begins. According to all we know at this time, the essence of this NIE was known to President Bush since early summer, and, as Matt Littman demands, it would be the media’s job to hold him accountable for his reckless warmongering since then. Given the fourth estate’s record on Iraq, though, with all due respect, they appear even less capable to defend the public’s right for accurate information and policies based on reason instead of ideological bigotry than the Democratic opposition. Karl Rove recently gave an impressive example on how to rewrite history, and I’m confident in the White House getting off this unprecedented blunder with just a slap on the wrist.

The more so, and this is something the liberal blogsphere seems to miss in their understandable buzz, because making this NIE public must have been greenlighted by the White House, as Robert Baer concludes:

“But there is also no doubt that the Bush White House was behind this NIE. While the 16 intelligence agencies that make up the “intelligence community” contribute to each National Intelligence Estimate, you can bet that an explosive, 180-degree turn on Iran like this one was greenlighted by the President … The real story behind this NIE is that the Bush Administration has finally concluded Iran is a bridge too far.”

The determining factor that finally led the ‘Decider’ to rule to take the military option off the table for the remainder of his tenure is the oil price. Almost shy of $100 per barrel last week it would have dramatically exacerbated the recession the U.S. is heading for, and, almost certainly, would have given the Democrats a landslide victory (how the oil market has immediately reacted on the good news, read here). By silencing the war rhetoric and selling out on the neocons George Bush tries to save the election for his party; “It’s the economy, stupid”, is an ironclad argument the Bush family came to learn all too well. And the neocons are promised jam tomorrow; in case Rudy wins in November we’re back on field one. No matter what the NIE says, as Norman Podhoretz assures us (how serious they were, highlights a just released report by the notorious Washington Institute for Near East Policy discussing in detail U.S.-Isreali cooperation in aerial strikes on Iran).

All these considerations Bush’s European allies, deceived for the second time, give a rat’s ass about. After trying for years to get the Bush administration on board in actively dealing with Iran and even allowing Washington to helm the international effort, they realize they’ve been as duped as every American voter. For London this is a common déjà vu, but for Paris and Berlin – especially the latter, who just agreed to write off it’s annual trade with Iran worth $5 billion for the sake of international solidarity – this is a rude awakening. Just two days ago, at Paris, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns - in full awareness of the NIE, yet claiming to not have let the allies in on it because he didn’t want to pass over Congress – tried to hammer out a third round of sanctions, to which even Beijing considered eventually agreeing to. On the evidence of having been dissed that thoroughly, keeping up this united international front is as likely as the Bush administration now coming around and considering serious all-issues-on-the-table-addressing negotiations and an eventual realignment with Tehran.

This is even more unfortunate as this NIE potentially could open the first window of opportunity for constructive talks since the 2003 Iranian offer to break its affiliation with Hezbollah and entirely abandon its nuclear program in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions. I and hundreds of fellow bloggers, together with almost all analysts not funded by AIPAC or PNAC, have repeatedly asserted that Iran, President Ahmadinejad aside, is a rational actor that understands its nuclear program as a bargaining tool and not as a first strike weapon. This view has been fully confirmed by the NIE, in fact, it advocates offering Iran attractive incentives and acknowledging its status as a major power in the Gulf Region:

“Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressure, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might—if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.” [Italics added.]

One can’t put a formal request for direct talks on all issues more explicitly. Yet as much as we rejoice about war with Iran being off the table for the next twelve months, we, alas, shouldn’t have any misgivings about the Bush administration abandoning its confrontational policy towards Iran or this NIE leading to a sustainable détente. To dare such a logic but bold move politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were too blindsided by yesterday’s shockwaves. At the end of the day, it becomes apparent that the most rational actors in this were and still are to be found in Tehran.

By Hannes Artens

Those political pundits not on the run all day to rate Hillary Clinton’s performance at last Thursday’s Democratic debate found ample diversion in downgrading the odds for a military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. Although such a Kentucky Derby-like approach may seem cynical when talking about a cataclysmic showdown, one can’t deny these reappraisals to appear well grounded in a fundamental change of sentiment and rhetoric in both, Washington and Tehran. To Dick Cheney’s and Joe Lieberman’s clear dismay, in a snapshot, war with Iran has become less likely. Until March next year.

What a difference to October, when President Bush and Norman Podhoretz seemed to disagree about nothing but whether war with Iran would constitute WW III or IV, for the first time in U.S. history the armed forces of another country were officially designated a terrorist organization, and President Ahmadinejad managed to sack Ali Larijani, the more conciliatory Iranian chief negotiator in talks with the EU. With the IAEA’s report being released last week – which, to no one’s surprise, declared Iran less willing to oblige to full transparency than in 2006 – one should have expected the bellicose bawling on both sides to turn even shriller. Yet the reckless constant warmongering and 24/7 crying wolf had backfired on chicken hawks in Washington and Tehran.

First, the Cheney/Lieberman faction had to face up to their all out propaganda blitz, blaming Iran for every mischief from arming the Iraqi insurgency to the Houston Texans mucking up the ’06 season, not to resonate well with the American public. According to a November 4 Gallup poll, 73 percent favor diplomatic efforts over military action in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, 55 percent insist on military action being no option even in the face of a diplomatic failure, and 66 percent are very or somewhat concerned that the administration is too trigger-happy in dealing with Iran. Not even Karl Rove could have worked with numbers like these. Second, while overcoming Condi’s resistance was a no-brainer for Cheney, the united front of SecDef Gates, CENTCOM Commander Adm. Fallon and pretty much every brass hat above a pair of silver bars opposing such a madness like Pat Robertson gay pride, proved a nut too hard to crack. Third, with Pakistan on the brink of civil war, the oil price coming within a whisker of $100 per barrel this winter, the US Dollar increasingly turning out as attractive to Asian central banks as Denny Crane to radical feminists, and leading economists just disagreeing about the breadth of the recession the U.S. is about to enter, this may not be the best time to give marching orders for Tehran.

George Bush’s counterpart in Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, isn’t in an enviable position either. If Gallup were allowed to freely operate in Iran, they’d probably find his approval ratings to be lower than Dubya’s. Despite the surge in oil revenues Iranians would clearly answer Ronald Reagan’s famous question whether they’re better off now than two years ago by giving the president a one-finger salute. With a level of corruption, nepotism, and maladministration that couldn’t be worse if Jack Abramoff were to run Iran’s Treasury, Ahmadinejad blazing abroad every single working centrifuge when Iran’s nuclear scientists would have preferred to work in secrecy, and his abhorrent Holocaust remarks costing them all support at the UN when they needed it most, one’s left to wonder which china this unguided bull will brake next. By kicking out Larijani he has carried things too far. When the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, insisted on Larijani accompanying the new chief negotiator Said Jalili, a versed Ahmadinejad bootlicker, to talks with the EU in Rome, and Ali Akbar Velayati, a major foreign policy adviser to the Supreme Leader, commented Larijani’s resignation with, “this better had not happened”, it came close to a motion of censure. The moderate opposition rejoiced, and Ahmadinejad’s main rival, the notorious former President Ayatollah Rafsanjani, openly criticized his ‘imprudent policies” in a nationwide televised speech on October 31; worse the masses cheered for Tehran’s popular mayor, Mohammad Ghalibaf - Ahmadinejad’s most likely opponent in the presidential elections in 2009 – when he joined in the booing.

In fact, Ahmadinejad has his back as up against the wall as George Bush. Both were forced to eat humble pie - in Bush’s case, a little jogging by Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel may have finally turned the tide. Through her, the EU made it understood that they would join the U.S. in harsher sanctions, if Bush were to hold his horses and let the warmongers have a break. Till now, Ahmadinejad has been able to count on American hawks and their reckless clamor to procure him with enough public anger to play the nationalist card and portray himself as a man of the people as convincingly as Rudy Giuliani evokes 9/11; American sanctions, he could always use as an excuse, were welcome to cloak his economic incompetence. With the Cheney camp being condemned to an involuntary vow of silence, Ahmadinejad is running risk of his voters realizing that he can no longer deliver neither bread nor games and to punish his party at the parliamentary elections in March 2008. Worse, in Iranian democracy, only candidates approved by the Council of Guardians can make it on the ballot; it may have dawned on him that he’ll hardly make it on the candidates list when ranking prominently on the Supreme Leader’s shit list.

Consequently, Ahmadinejad stunned the world this weekend by announcing that he’s willing to discuss outsourcing uranium enrichment to a neutral country such as Switzerland. On the same day, Micheline Calmy-Rey, the Swiss president and foreign minister, indicated in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung a new Swiss initiative to get the U.S. and Iran at a table for direct, no preconditions, no issues precluded talks. This can’t be mere coincidence. Since the Tehran Embassy Hostage Crisis Switzerland acts as the diplomatic representative for the U.S. in Iran; it would have been a gross violation of diplomatic usance for the Swiss president to announce such a groundbreaking step without discussing it with Washington in advance. Likewise, it’s safe to assume that Ahmadinejad’s offer has the sanctus of the Supreme Leader. After almost thirty years of silent but diligent diplomatic leg work could the Swiss truly act as the icebreaker between America and Iran? Are we currently witnessing the beginning of a rapprochement between the two antagonists? Has the doomsday scenario of war with Iran been avoided and peace saved at the eleventh hour? By two notorious hotheads like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and George Bush (I’m having difficulties even writing this)?

But wait; slowly, slowly catch your monkey! This is a risky gamble at the highest stakes. It has always been the EU’s hope and undeclared strategy to communicate to the true centers of power in Iran that direct talks between Tehran and Washington are possible with any interlocutor but Ahmadinejad - should read as working behind the scenes for him being defeated in 2009. His party cruising to a sound defeat at the polls in March 2008 would have been a first step in this direction. Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, sees his softening in words and deeds as his last chance to minimize losses and thus keep his chances for reelection intact. While both sides will use every opportunity to skillfully outmaneuver each other, we shouldn’t forget the soreheads Cheney and Lieberman. You can bet on them jumping at the chance to cause mischief and support Ahmadinejad at the best of their abilities. As Gareth Porter reports on IPS, Cheney is currently busying himself intimidating intelligence officers who disagree with him on the threat Iran poses and succeeded in the National Intelligence Estimate, which would have invalidated his doomsday scenarios, not to be made public. Make no mistake, the moment of truth on war or peace has just been postponed, not abandoned. Until March next year, when, and that’s the true cause for joy, the Iranian people will have their say.

By Hannes Artens

When asked by The Financial Times to comment on the Bush administration’s recent 24/7 no-holds-barred saber rattling, Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM, made clear that an attack on Iran was not “in the offing.”

“Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book … None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go … It astounds me that so many pundits and others are spending so much time yakking about this topic.”

Well, I’d say the admiral should take his astonishment to Number One Observatory Circle; I’m sure he can have himself informed there. Yet Admiral Fallon is no third-row analyst tasked to take sunk pawns from the board when the O-10s are playing Battleships with the SecNav. His valuation carries weight. The more so as it ties in with other prominent brass-hats declaring against Dick Cheney’s pet project, and President Bush himself striking up shawm sounds with regard to Iran when talking to Germany’s Angela Merkel this weekend. Leaves one to wonder what to make of this sudden change of tune.

After it taking almost four years for the U.S. military to slowly recover its breath in Iraq, one doesn’t have to consult an oracle to appreciate the brass hats’ extreme reluctance to embark on another neocon-planned all inclusive trip. The days of Curtis LeMay and William Westmoreland are over. The military has learnt its lessons from past engagements, it’s the chicken hawks and draft dodgers who haven’t. From Anthony Zinni to Sam Gardiner and Joseph Hoar retired commanders not only characterize aerial strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities or surgical strikes against Revolutionary Guard headquarters as ineffective and the results all war games towards these goals yielded so far as highly dissatisfying; but now even active generals dare to rebel? What may count most, though, is Rummy’s successor in the Pentagon, SecDef Robert Gates, who understands his task as being confined to cleaning up the mess in Iraq, wanting no part of such a reckless gamble. If it were up to the military and not the Douglas ‘dumbest fucking guy on the planet (©Tommy Franks)’ Feiths of this world, war with Iran would be a non-issue.

As Chris Hedges writes in yesterday’s TruthDig:

“The battle is between the Cheney camp, which would like to carry out strikes on Iran before Bush leaves office, and Gates and his senior generals. Cheney, who has always been able to push aside the feckless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is having a tougher time with the military. Fallon, for example, was successful in his attempt to block efforts by Cheney to move a third aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf earlier this year and bluntly said that “there would be no war against Iran” as long as he was chief of CENTCOM.”

The same goes for Chancellor Angela Merkel who took great pains this weekend to let her stay at George Bush’s ranch appear a more sober, pragmatic and target-oriented working visit than ‘Speedy Sarko’s’ almost cringing servility earlier last week. In Crawford, roles were reversed and George Bush was reduced to acting as a Pocket-Rick Blaine-like suitor benignly accepted by his Ilsa after uttering the term “diplomatic solution for Iran” more often in twenty-four hours than over the last two years. Due to misreading Merkel’s motives this affair will end like Casablanca: in case of war with Iran, George will have no German mate at his side and all he can count on is the beginning of a beautiful friendship with the French.

Or not even that. The Bush administration shouldn’t let itself be deceived by placating tunes coming from Berlin and Paris. Although Nicolas Sarkozy has put a realignment with America at the core of his efforts to modernize the UMP, adapt no-longer-fitting-the-21st-century-go-it-alone Gaullism to post-9/11 realities and portray himself as the peppy anti-Chirac, when his courtship is called on by sending the Charles de Gaulle to the Gulf, ‘l’Americain’ will prove as opportunistic and ultimately nationalistic as in his economic reforms that so far have not extended beyond slashing out against the European Central Bank. Don’t expect more than lip service from the Élysée when it comes to a showdown with Iran.

Ever since their summit in July 2006, Angela Merkel has tried to talk George Bush into direct negotiations with Iran. In wistfully recalling the special relationship Germany enjoyed and progress they made with Mohammad Khatami – he chaired the Islamic Center in Hamburg prior to the revolution - Berlin hopes by holding out the prospect of a grand bargain between Washington and Tehran to win Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini to back a moderate candidate for president in 2009. Yet when Ali Larijani, the interlocutor and eventual candidate all its hopes were pinned on, was sacked three weeks ago, the German Foreign Office was forced to yield to the reality of the hawks having prevailed in Tehran. Consequently, Merkel announced to consider tightening sanctions – which, with annual trade of $4.5 billion would hurt Germany more than any other European state – in unison with the United States, if Mohamed el Baradei would conclude Iran’s accommodations as insufficient later this month. This hard-headed Franco-German-American accord on Iran - in fear of being left behind amplified by Gordon Brown jumping the bandwagon yesterday - is also aimed at getting Russia on board for a new Security Council Resolution – the West’s preference – or at least UN declared sanctions (on Russia’s role, read an interview with Andrew Kuchins on CFR).

While Europe seems to carry a big stick these days, it, surprisingly, is George Bush, who after imposing the most severe economic sanctions on Iran since 1979 last month, now is dangling out a bagful of carrots to Iran. Not only that the U.S. military released nine prisoners they accused of being Quds Force members, SecDef Gates concedes Iran having a positive influence on the number of road side bomb attacks in Iraq declining significantly during October, now CENTCOM commander Fallon surges ahead by overtly rejecting VP Cheney’s pipe dreams. As no active good soldier would dare to defy his Commander-in-Chief in public, there’s no doubt about the FT interview being choreographed by the Pentagon. Are these overtures part of a European-American quid pro quo? Who are they targeted at? Russia? The moderate faction within Iran’s Council of Guardians? And why, if the latter, wasn’t this done three weeks earlier to save Larijani, better isolate President Ahmadinejad, and allow Iran to react by modifying its stance before the el Baradei report is due?

Although the alleys of foreign offices from Washington to Berlin are abuzz with hectic activity to get Russia to mediate in the stalemate with Iran, no one – perhaps not even the protagonists - can tell where these new tunes and shifting fronts on Iran are leading them before the el Baradei report has either backed or weakened their positions. As in the run up to war with Iraq, a decisive role has devolved on the head of the IAEA (and to a lesser extent on Javier Solana, the EU’s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, on whose findings, presented a few days after el Baradei’s, the EU will base her policy). If we play on the analogy to Iraq, we may now have reached early November 2002, the crucial days after the Senate had voted on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (in the Iranian case, the Senate designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization) and before the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441.

There are two major differences to 2002, though: back then the global anti-war movement could count on the active support of the governments of Germany and France. If it comes to war next year, Merkel and Sarkozy will resign themselves to the inevitable, yet stir no finger but praying for it to be over soon. On the other hand, contrary to November 2002, war hasn’t been decided on yet. Robert Gates and the U.S. military are hell-bent on standing their ground this time and, as bizarre as this may appear to some, are our closest allies in preventing this nightmare from eventuating. The inner-Bush-administration battle over Iran is in full swing, in fact, it has just begun.

By Hannes Artens

This week, two political novels about the looming confrontation with Iran hit bookstores: Vince Flynn’s Protect and Defend and my The Writing on the Wall. For the first time in recent American literary history two political novels dealing with exactly the same subject, yet advancing two world views that couldn’t be more different, are directly competing against each other. While next year’s presidential race between the current front runners appears to regress into a duel between moderates and ultra-Republicans pandering to the same constituency, this dispute about foreign policy and the future of “the war on terror” held on the stage of fiction truly sets research and facts based scenarios against ‘Mission Accomplished’-like pipe dreams. And while one shouldn’t delude himself about this contest being already decided long before it begun in terms of sales figures, in bookstores, at least, customers are given the clear choice American voters are denied.

Gary Kamiya despairs in yesterday’s Salon.com:

The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. Let’s repeat that. The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America’s political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking … This is surreal. It’s as if we’re back on Sept. 12 and Iraq never happened.

Thankfully, Vince Flynn’s Protect and Defend neither belongs to the lunatic fringe’s concoctions, nor was it co-authored by Joe Lieberman and Norman Podhoretz. After Mossad’s special operations having pancaked the main Iranian nuclear enrichment facility, the U.S. government persuades the notorious Mujahideen e-Kalq, MEK, the courted-all-across-Washington equivalent of Ahmed Chalabi in the run up to this war, to claim responsibility with the intention to name and shame the Iranian government. The CIA counts on this public embarrassment to lead to a variation of Eastern Europe’s color revolutions in Tehran. The second half of the book is dedicated to American secret service agents torturing Hezbollah fighters and Hezbollah fighters torturing American secret service agents until the ultra-evil, Holocaust-denying, Iranian president is deposed in a bloodless coup by the moderate faction within the Council of Guardians. Although, as usual in American media, he overstates the sway President Ahmatullah (Ahmadinejad) has over Iranian politics, one has to give Flynn credit for doing a fairly decent job in portraying the various competing factions within Iran’s government and not beating the war drums too excessively. In fact he even hints the possibility for a détente between the two antagonists, yet the negotiations described, remind one of Peter Minuit acquiring Manhattan for some glass beads - old colonial attitudes never seem to die. His hero Mitch Rapp indulging with self-righteous gusto in the torture of alleged Islamist fundamentalists and pillorying ethical doubters as “don’t tell me you’ve gone soft”-milksops is a common feature in all of Flynn’s recent novels. Here, “the war on terror” is fought as it ought to be fought, according to Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez and Michael ‘Waterboarding?’ Mukasey, no matter whether Abu Ghraib has done more damage to the perception of America in the Arab world than the whole Iraq invasion. The deliberate sexual humiliation of the Iranian prisoners remind one of techniques taken from “Copper Green” manuals and, I can’t help myself, but come across as ex post vindications of Lynndie England and Charles Graner.

What’s most troubling about Flynn’s approach, though, is him acting as the imprudent mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s favorite alternative to war: the Iranian people rising against the odious theocracy with a lil’ help from their good friends in Langley and Camp Ashraf (MEK’s headquarter in Iraq twelve miles west of the Iranian border, where they’re guarded and nurtured by the U.S. Army). Let me get this straight. This master plan from cloud-cuckoo-land equates to you bloggers, motivated by several Oklahoma City bombing-like terrorist attacks on innocent Americans - you know darn well to have been funded by, and orchestrated in Moscow or Beijing - to storm Washington and topple George Bush. It’s just plainly ridiculous to believe that the American people at large would support you in such an uprising, and what was planned to broaden into a nation wide mass protest soon will have you and your co-conspirers face a firing squad as the curtain falls to your pathetic act. The fact is, in Iran, MEK is less popular than Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf are at the moment in Pakistan; these former water boys of Khomeini’s revolution, who turned against their allies when they couldn’t accumulate the sinecures they had dreamed of, hardly are qualified to rally the masses behind their cause, neither ideologically nor in terms of public outreach. These Pentagon-funded minions acting as a spearhead for a counter-revolution in Iran is as likely as a statue of Timothy McVeigh being erected in downtown Oklahoma. This policy guided by wishful thinking instead of facts, reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld promising that U.S. soldiers will be as genially welcome in liberated Baghdad as they were in Germany during WW II, perfectly highlights the neocons’ schizophrenia, though. On the one hand they portray Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerics as the personification of evil capable of annihilating Israel and triggering WW III, on the other hand they’re a regime rotten from within on the brink of crack-up that just requires a little pushing from MEK and Delta Forces (with Vince Flynn writing the script) to collapse like a house of cards. Please Decider, decide as what you want to sell them to us.

Instead of Guantanamo-seasoned torture dabsters riding into the sunset in their Gulfstreams after having saved the free world, at the end of The Writing on the Wall, inexperienced, drafted U.S. soldiers ride into the nuclear wasteland that used to be Pakistan. For war with Iran doesn’t only serve as a mayhem I give a forceful premonition of, but also acts as a parable in my book. By depicting how maverick, straight-talking, Southwestern Senator become President in 2008, Jim Whitman, no longer able to control the forces he has pandered to on his road to the White House, is manipulated into war by a coalition of aching for Armageddon televangelists, big oil, and reckless neocons, I deliver my accounting for the road to war with Iraq. And the negotiations about the future of civil war-torn, occupied-at-horrendous-costs Iran are used for expounding the dilemma the next president faces with Iraq, thus taking along readers on a tour de force through the whole present day Middle East they surely won’t remember as a joyride.

Hands down, this book isn’t based on wishful thinking, nor does it qualify for what you may call a good-feel-title. I deliberately depict a worst case, yet realistic, scenario of the repercussions of an attack on Iran to demonstrate quite plainly that all talking about this being limitable to aerial strikes are irresponsible bogus. How do ‘Fighting Joe’ Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz and other advocates of this shock and awe strategy (implemented to such a stunning long term success in Iraq) believe Iran to react? Sit back and take things easy, counting bombs raining down on them like sheep, drifting off into peaceful slumber? During the eight years long Iran-Iraq war, at 750,000 military and civilian casualties for the former - that’s almost two hundred times the current U.S. losses in Iraq - which had ten year old basij clearing mind fields with their bodies for the revolution’s tanks to advance unimpaired, Iran established quite a reputation for exactly the contrary. Make no mistake, if attacked, the Iranian people, as much as they loathe the regime misgoverning them, will rise like one to its defense. Iran is bloody aware of this being a fight for its mere survival, and they will retaliate with all they have. First, all U.S. forces in Iraq will become prime targets served on a silver tray, then missiles will be fired on oil refineries in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar (remember that five weeks into the Gulf War, despite an average of 1,000 sorties flown per day, Iraq was still able to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia with SCUDS); if that were to prove ineffective, Iran will draw on the Shiite population in neighboring countries, who all maintain a more or less active branch of Hezbollah. Dhahran, the headquarter of Saudi Aramco, Abqaiq, the major oil processing plant, connected to the port of Yanbu with an uphill pipeline, and Ras Tanura, the world’s largest oil refinery, are all conveniently located in a Saudi Arabian province with a Shiite majority. Bahrain, a predominantly Shiite tiny island connected to the mainland via the King Fahd Causeway, and its main refinery in Sitra that also handles all crude coming in from Saudi Arabia’s northeastern fields, will be next. But these are just pinpricks. The coup de grace will be sinking two tankers in the 27 miles wide at its narrowest point, shallow Strait of Hormuz, thus cutting off the entire Persian Gulf from the outer world for at least a month. You better not attack Iran either in winter or around the dog days, cause this season you’ll have to dispense with your heating and air condition; ah yeah, no trips to Disney Land in the family-SUV either.

Describing these consequences isn’t meeting trouble halfway and may not be commercially lucrative, but these scenarios are based on military analysts’ estimations. Estimations the American public is preferred to be left in the dark about. After the Iraq debacle it’s hard enough anyway for Karl Rove’s heirs to sell the public another all-inclusive trip to the Middle East. If you tell them that they’ll have to spend $5 per gallon at their next stop at the gas station and will finance Rex Tillerson’s new yacht, you may as well try to sell chastity belts to Hugh Heffner.

That is the writing on the wall, apparent for anybody with eyes to see: a war with Iran can only lead into unprecedented disaster, setting the whole Middle East afire and triggering vast global recession. That’s common consensus at every military academy, from Carlisle to Sandhurst, from Guer to Kingston. Dozens of bloggers on this site are doing a formidable job in informing the public about these truths; I try to contribute my mite to it through fiction, in the hope to reach an audience beyond the liberal choir usually preached to, and aspire to transform my author’s tour this January into a cost-to-cost anti-Iran war campaign. I look forward to seeing you there and us all working together in preventing The Writing on the Wall from coming true.

Vince Flynn’s Protect and Defend and my The Writing on the Wall are both available on Amazon and in bookstores all across the nation. Vince Flynn already has his own fan-site, The Third Option, I feature a new podcast on mine. If after listening to it you become hell-bent on hosting a fan-site for me, you know how to contact me.

By Hannes Artens




Remember, remember the fifth of November
The warmongering, treason, and plot,
I know of no reason why the Bush treason
Should ever be forgot.

No, this fifth of November, President Bush won’t sneak into the cellars of Congress to blow the House and Senate up (why should he, with them doing his bidding like a collective Sancho Panza for a modern Don Quixote chasing windmills with cruise missiles?). There are other reasons for this fifth of November not being forgotten. When President Bush meets Recep Tayyip Erdogan on this day, not only the future of Turkey’s policy towards Northern Iraq and the PKK but also the course for war with Iran will be decided on. November 5, 2007, may not culminate in a firework but carry destruction through the diplomatic backdoor and entail future conflagration of historic dimensions. Guy Fawkes heroically failed to set the British Parliament afire, but if George Bush succeeds in talking the Turkish Prime Minister into accepting a deal, he may set the whole Middle East afire.

It may disgruntle Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (although I doubt them believing it themselves) but not the Democratic-led Congress, nor soft-power-glorifying Europe see-sawing between Angela Merkel’s pragmatism, Gordon Brown’s lack of leadership, and Nicolas Sarkozy seeking a place under America’s sun, and certainly not the current Democratic presidential hopeful are the biggest obstacles for George Bush to unleash shock and awe against Tehran. With their overt challenge against Turkey’s moderate-Islamist government the roughly 5,000 rabble-rousers of the PKK, who can claim as much legitimacy to represent the Kurdish people’s majority will as Tom Tancredo America’s, are the prime spoilers for George Bush to crown himself with the laurel of a third war lost.

To attack Iran George Bush relies on the vital Incirlik Air Base, home to the 39 ABW, as a strategic hub, unimpaired flow of supplies across the Iraqi-Turkish border, the cooperation of the Kurdish Regional Government in Arbil as well as the Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê (PJAK), PKK’s less radical equivalent in Iran, to launch an all-out guerilla war tying as many Pasdaran, Islamic Revolutionary Guards, in the inhospitable Zagros Mountains as they can. The latter alliance was given a rehearsal with this August’s PJAK offensive in Iran and its leader Rahman Haj-Ahmadi at the same time visiting Washington – on no official mission, of course. With the Shiite south of Iraq rising up in case of an attack on Iran being a given, the northern front gains even more prominence in the Pentagon’s contingency plans. The least George Bush and the Podhoretz-faction of chickenhawks need now is their carefully crafted alliance among the various Kurdish groups to fall apart and their prime theater of war turning into a Lebanon-like quicksand-mass-grave for the Turkish army.

Make no mistake, the PKK has its back to the wall. They want this war, they need this war. Their ultra-Marxist ideology and Shining Path-like leadership cult makes them less and less attractive to ordinary Kurds in Turkey, who for the first time in almost a century are allowed to participate in the current economic boom and were granted first tangible yet always improvable minority rights. They appreciated these reforms by supporting Erdogan at the polls above average, thus turning the Kurdish south into an AKP-heartland. One can hardly imagine a more forceful slap in the face for the PKK. In their despair they hope to pull off a similar stunt as Hezbollah in 2006: draw the Turkish army into the Kandil Mountains, inflict an at least propagandistically exploitable defeat on them, trepan them into brutal excesses that will rally Kurdish-national and international support for them, and, ideally, internationalize the conflict by leaving the Kurdish Regional Government with no choice but to ally with them. Erdogan’s reforms and election victory have made such a high risk gamble mandatory, Washington unable to antagonize them and courting PJAK like a valentine has let it appear accomplishable.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan isn’t in an admirable position either. With its martial rhetoric and the parliament giving carte blanche for an invasion of Northern Iraq the Turkish government has gone out on a limb. Like Hillary Clinton Erdogan has tried to outrun the right on the right and now is expected by the public, whose nationalist pride has been humiliated by the PKK responding to their threats with increased attacks, to walk the talk. After 24 futile raids into Iraq over the last decades Erdogan has no reason to believe the 25th to result in anything but a stalemate at best, him sharing Ehud Olmert’s fate or something even less pleasant at worst. Yet if he doesn’t play the strong-man now, the ultra-hawkish military establishment around Turkey’s Curtis LeMay, Yasar Büyükanit, will have finally found a reason to topple him the public would support. As reluctantly as Dick Cheney would acquiesce in having dinner with Cindy Sheehan, Erdogan will thus walk down the path leading to war, praying for a limited engagement.

He’ll be joined in his prayers by George Bush. Washington augurs recently have interpreted everything from a handful of local chieftains in al-Anbar province entering a temporary alliance with U.S. forces to the flight of birds looking promising this season as signs of President Bush having recovered his mojo. The surge is obviously working and Congress and the Democratic frontrunner have given him carte blanche to attack Iran whenever the next Damascus epiphany strikes him, so why not move on to pastures new and leave the stage with a big bang? Even the most sober-minded analysts admit that over the last weeks the hawks in Washington and Tehran have gained the whip hand over the voices of reason. Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh, one of the leading experts on Iran, sums up the last weeks’ developments as,

“… the administration has been on a unilateralist tear against Iran once again, issuing hawkish rhetoric that far outpaces anything heard in European capitals. On Thursday the White House announced a broad array of sanctions that affect almost the entire Iranian government … The dynamic duo that brought us the war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney, appear to be on the same page once again. In Tehran, meanwhile, the Iranian government now seems united around one idea: Iran will not give up “one iota” of its nuclear program, in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s words. The resignation of chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani this week, and his replacement by a close ally of Ahmadinejad’s, Saeed Jalili (Larijani and the Iranian president were bitter rivals), is one strong sign that this hardened position will continue. As a Larijani ally in Tehran told me Thursday, the hard-line president likes to dominate “inexperienced and unprofessional people” like Jalili.”

On November 5, we’ll know more about how the land lies. President Bush will try to get Turkey to differentiate between the PKK and the Kurdish Regional Government and restrict itself to imposing economic sanctions. Cornered Prime Minister Erdogan will happily accept any reasonable offer that would allow him to save face, even if it comes at the price of tacitly accepting a showdown with Iran. Even hawks like Presidents Talabani and Barzani as well as General Büyükanit appear to have accepted Washington assuming control of events, ideally leading to U.S. troops patrolling the Turkish-Iraqi border to prevent the PKK from crossing it at their leisure. Yet this uncommon role for George Bush as a dove of peace doesn’t come without the hidden agenda to prevent or at least limit one war for being able to wage another. This November 5 could turn out the day when war with Iran was irreversibly put on track. When celebrating President Bush for having defused this powder keg we should keep in mind, though, that he might just have removed the last remaining obstacle to gain free hand to face Tehran in spring.

On a personal note, if I’m allowed to, the triangle, Turkey-Iran-Kurds, in view of the war planning on Iran is at the heart of my new political novel, The Writing on the Wall, available on Amazon and in local bookstores.