Iran: Imperialism finds new pretext for threats
international |
anti-war / imperialism |
other press 
Tuesday May 15, 2012 23:30
by Yassamine Mather - Hands Off the People of Iran
Another day, another provocation. Yes, the US led GCC is carrying out War Games around disputed Isles in the Persian Gulf, Isles first seized by the Shah in 1971. Funnily enough the US had no objections to that. Yassamine Mather writes on this and May Day demonstrations in Iran. Full text at link.
However, then came news of another conflict in the Persian Gulf - this time between Iran on the one side and Saudi Arabia and Gulf Cooperation Council countries on the other. Arab and US media reported that the Peninsula Shield Force, the military coordinating army of the GCC, had been carrying out military manoeuvres to “test harmony and coordination among ground, air and naval forces and their readiness”.
The military exercise was seen as a response to Iran’s continued occupation of three islands in the Gulf - the tiny Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunb islets, near the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz, that was seized in 1971 by the shah after British forces left the region. Abu Musa, the only inhabited island of the three, was placed under joint administration in a deal with Sharjah, now part of the United Arab Emirates. They have since been a bone of contention with the UAE, which claims sovereignty over them.
Comments (5 of 5)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5As Hopi predicted, the so-called “5+1 talks” in Baghdad have not been able to resolve the stand-off between Iran and western imperialism. For some background on this, see this article by Yassamine Mather: ‘Imperialism finds new pretext for threats’, above.
Worryingly, even before the talks had started, UK ministers were already discussing how to get involved in an attack on Iran.
Hopi condemns the drive towards war and supports all those who are fighting against the theocratic regime. We campaign for the empowerment of the women, students, workers and unemployed in Iran – the only ones who can bring real democracy, from below.
heres an example of the foreplay
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31184
PNAC unfolds from its blueprint.
Another piece by Yassmine Mather on Z communications is pessimistic, but nonetheless well worth reading . The HOPI chairperson explains how the policies of Iran’s Islamic regime are actually in line with the war plans being hatched in Washington and Tel Aviv .The beleagured regime is desperate for a diversion to offset demands for regime change coming from below from the Iranian working class . According to Yassmine, severe suppression of dissent in Iran is not enough for the cowardly Islamic regime , which .........
“......frightened of its own population and faced with continuing anti-dictatorial protests, seems incapable of stepping away from the abyss. Tehran needs a war, or at least an ongoing conflict situation, as much as does the U.S. and Israel. What better diversion from the terrible economic political situation sustained by severe repression. In Tehran people say the regime is playing a dangerous game of chicken with a superpower.
http://www.zcommunications.org/military-threats-opposit...ather .
More on the Cyber War against Iran. Any chance of UN sanctions against this? Full text at link.
From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.
Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium. ...
a