There is a TON out there to peruse, and much to "chew on".
OF COURSE THis brings up questions about a war with Iran to see Fallon "go".
But no one knows what WILL happen.
Remember that.
I just light smudge for Fallons' soul right now, maybe you could pray for him, too, although just getting rid of Israeli influences in the DoD, in CONgress and in the White House might be the WISEST plan!!
Veeger
Fallon ouster marks crucial Neocon victory and makes
war against Iran very likely
"VineyardSaker"
The Vineyard of the Saker
CENTCOM Commander Admiral William Fallon, the man who had dared to
declare "there will be no war with Iran on my watch", has finally been
fired. The pretext for his dismissal was a recent article in Esquire
magazine. In his (rather sycophantic *) article about Fallon Thomas P.M.
Barnett writes: If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go
to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to
war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of
creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of
strategic brilliance. Setting aside the talk about Fallon's alleged "strategic
brilliance" for a minute, there is no denying that Fallon has been
outspoken against the Neocon plans for an aggression on Iran and against
the Neocon's poster boy, General David Petraeus, whom he called an
"ass-kissing little chickenshit" for cooking up the idiotic "Surge" plan to
please the White House.
As Gareth Porter wrote recently, Fallon clearly knew that he would be
fired and he fully cooperated with the Esquire article precisely
because of this awareness. Although one can only guess at Fallon's deep
motives, I would note here that even though Fallon is rather old for a flag
officer he is still young enough for a political career (he is 63).
Whatever may be the case, Esquire correctly predicted that Fallon would
be fired soon, and indeed he was a couple of days after the publication
of the article. Why did the White House fire a high-profile Admiral,
was it really only over the Iran policy?
The answer can be found in a somewhat less publicized quote by Fallon
made last May: "There are several of us trying to put the crazies back
in the box". You see, "crazies" is a long time "Anglo codeword" for
the (mainly Jewish) Neocons "msitting the basement" as Papa-Bush used to
say (see my previous articles "Daddy - what's a Neocon: ethnic Mafia
wars in the USA" and "Some thoughts on current events"). In this context,
the ouster of Fallon is without any doubt a major Neocon success: not
only has the last senior US commander opposed to an attack on Iran been
fired, but a major player of the "Old Anglo Guard" as been evicted
from his power base. Regardless of who actually succeeds Dubya in the
White House, the entire military command is now firmly back in Neocon
hands. Ditto for both houses of Congress and most of the corporate media.
While many naive observers thought that the resignation of Rumsfeld
marked the end for the Neocons, the fact is that the Neocons have
recovered amazingly fast:
1) All remaining Presidential candidates with a chance to actually
get into the White House are firmly under Neocon control.
2) The vast majority of the political advisers of these candidates
(who will become future key members of the next Administration) are also
Neocons.
3) The Pengaton has been effectively cleared from any Old Anglo Guard
members capable of opposing Neocon plans for more wars in the
Middle-East. Even better, it makes it easier for the Neocons to trigger a
"Persian Gulf of Tonkin" kind of incident to trigger a war with Iran even
before the Presidential election thereby probably propelling the most
beloved candidates of the Neocons (McCain) to power.
4) The efforts of the Old Anglo Guard (Carter, Scheuer, Mearsheimer ,
Walt, Ritter, Odom, etc.) to make the power of the Israel Lobby a
political issue have failed to penetrate the "sound barrier" (to use Amy
Goodman's expression) of the corporate media which remains firmly
pro-Neocon (not a single US new outlet has been willing to interview Sibel
Edmons about her allegations that top US officials were selling nuclear
secrets!).
5) All the major political scandals threatening to expose the Neocons
(the AIPAC espionage trial, Sibel Edmond's revelations, "Scooter"
Libby's case, Valerie Plame, the "lost nukes" headed for the Middle-East,
the Federal Prosecutors scandal, etc.) have effectively been buried and
send down the memory hole.
Does that all mean that, as Justin Raimondo wrote, that "we are
f*cked" and that the USA is headed for war? The short answer is "yes".
Neither the Old Anglo Guard nor the peace movement has been able to
tackle the Neocon's power and influence. Sure, here and there, attempts
were made, but none of that represented anything more than a nuisance
for the formidable Israel Lobby and its absolutely submissive corporate
media. As Friedrich Nietzsche said: "What does not kill me, makes me
stronger". The Neocons and the Israel Lobby only came out stronger from
all the half-hearted, if often sincere, efforts to expose them and their
hijacking of the USA's polity.
As I have written many times in the past, the USA is not run by a
political party, or by a President or even by the collective power of its
corporations. The USA is, in reality, controlled and run by a
Soviet-style "Nomenklatura", a not so small subset of the US economic elite,
whose agenda has nothing to do with pragmatic US national interests. It is
important to stress here that the USA is *not* run and controlled by
"the Jews" as, in reality, major Jewish organizations are not truly
representative of US Jewry (I repeat this here not out of some sense of
"political correctness" but because, as any doctor knows, any
mis-diagnosis makes it impossible to find a cure and risks making the problem even
worse; besides the same could be said of the Anglo elite who does not
represent the interests of most Americans). This is why it should be
called the "Israel Lobby" and not the "Jewish Lobby".
The highest visible political expression of this Nomenklatura are the
Neocons and their policies who can be summed up as "Israel �ber Alles"
or, as Israel Shahak used to say, "think locally, act globally".
Consider that even a so-called "moderate" and "progressive" Israeli
media outlet like Ha'aretz writes that "the road to Gaza runs through
Tehran" and just imagine what the so-called "security establishment"
thinks. Make no mistake: the Empire will attack Iran.
Since the US Army is already bogged down, overextended and
essentially already defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Imperial High Command
will use the Air Force and, even more so, the US Navy to attack Iran. As
I have analyzed in detail in my article "Iran's asymmetrical response
options" (original link here), the Empire cannot win such a conflict.
But neither did Israel have any real chance of winning its war against
Hezbollah in 2006. It's not about "winning" - its about perpetual war
and remaining in power. Besides, you can be confident that at the end of
the day, most dead will be Iranian and American - very few Israelis
will suffer from such a conflict, or at least this is what the Israelis
hope for.
I will repeat this over and over and over again: neither the Israelis
nor the Neocons are capable of long-term strategic thinking and even
though most people mistake their arrogance for intelligence, they are
not nearly as smart as they think they are. Furthermore, the US and the
Israeli intelligence community is amazingly incompetent (in particular
in HUMINT) and it has a long history of baffling SNAFUs behind it. The
US intelligence community is bloated beyond belief, poorly coordinated,
it is mostly staffed by bureaucrats and it sorely lacks analysts which
actually understand the countries they are supposed to provide expert
analysis for. As for the Israelis, they are way too arrogant in their
anti-Arab, if not anti-Gentile, racism to even imagine that they could
actually get their butts kicked, hence the long list of Mossad screw-ups.
Tom Clancy novels are one thing, the real world is something quite
different. The bottom line is that it would be folly to expect the
US or Israeli intelligence officials to speak up against a war with
Iran. They will do not such thing, if only because that would end their
careers.
As for the so-called "US allies" (whether of the "New Europe" or the
"Old Europe" persuasion), they will stay away from any such war, but
they will do nothing meaningful to oppose it either: they all well know
that the Neocons will not listen and that being the "true believers"
that they are, they operate from a messianic point of view which cannot be
affected by either facts on the ground or rational analysis.
Fallon's ouster marks the removal of the last possible impediment to
a smooth going to war with Iran and while that this does not
necessarily mean that the war is imminent, or even truly inevitable, it makes it
very, very likely.
---
* For a good article on Fallon check out Crushing the Ants: The
Admiral and the Empire by Chris Floyd. For more analyses of the meaning of
the firing of Fallon listen to the interviews of Gareth Porter and Ray
McGovern.
This article may also be of interest: 6 Signs the U.S. May Be Headed
for War in Iran
SOURCE:
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2008/03/fallon-ouster-marks-
crucial-neocon.html
URL:
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/03
/13/fallon_ouster_marks_crucial_neocon_victo
First Casualty Of The Iran War
On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that CentCom commander Adm. William Fallon, who had been in the position for roughly a year, had submitted his resignation. Fallon's resignation came a week after news first leaked of an article in Esquire magazine by former Naval War College professor Thomas P.M. Barnett that suggested Fallon was the "one man" standing between the Bush administration and war with Iran and that it could cost him his job. "Well-placed observers now say that it will come as no surprise if Fallon is relieved of his command before his time is up next spring," wrote Barnett. Though Fallon publicly rejected the article, he told Gates upon resigning that "the current embarrassing situation, public perception of differences between my views and administration policy, and the distraction this causes from the mission make this the right thing to do." White House aides told the Wall Street Journal that "senior Bush administration officials saw the article as a sign that Adm. Fallon was trying to publicly undercut" President Bush. "It was seen as a form of insubordination," said one White House aide. While Iran has been the focus of much of the commentary surrounding Fallon's exit, Gates called Fallon's resignation "a cumulative kind of thing" that "isn't the result of any one article or any one issue." In fact, Fallon's public disagreements with the administration over Iraq may have had as much influence on his falling out of favor.
A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW: "There was no question that the admiral's premature departure stemmed from what were perceived to be policy differences with the administration on Iran and Iraq," writes Thom Shanker in the New York Times. Especially "where his views competed with those of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, who is a favorite of the White House." As a nominee for the CentCom position in January 2007, Fallon refused to endorse Bush's surge strategy, saying that he's "always been someone who felt more comfortable in smaller numbers." Since then, he has been a proponent of "developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops" in Iraq in order to "balance deployments across the volatile region" he commanded. Last month, after Gates endorsed a "pause" in troop withdrawals this summer, Fallon told the New York Times that it should only be "temporary and brief" and that U.S. strategy should shift focus to a "supporting, sustaining, advising, training and mentoring role." A "senior Pentagon official" told Slate's Fred Kaplan that Fallon's comments were "unauthorized," which Kaplan says amounts to "challenging the president's policy...at his own initiative."
'NOT HELPFUL' WHEN IT COMES TO IRAN: Although Fallon's preference for diplomatic engagement with Iran rather than saber-rattling has been echoed by Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, Fallon's manner of delivering that message differed considerably from the administration script. In Barnett's Esquire article, Fallon says a narrow focus on Iran is not wise because "in a part of the world with 'five or six pots boiling over, our nation can't afford to be mesmerized by one problem.'" "This constant drumbeat of conflict" with Iran "is not helpful and not useful," Fallon told al Jazeera in September 2007. In December 2007, he told the Financial Times, "Another war is just not where we want to go." Last year, he was quoted as saying an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch." In November, after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Fallon allowed it to be reported that he had "ruled out a possible strike against Iran and said Washington was mulling nonmilitary options instead." According to Newsweek, Fallon's main mistake was that he never included the caveat "of course, no options are off the table" in order to stay within administration policy.
RIGHT WING REJOICES: Right-wing war hawks are glad to see Fallon go. The Wall Street Journal Editorial board wrote yesterday that Fallon's resignation is "good news" because it will allow Bush to begin "to pay attention to the internal Pentagon dispute" over Iraq withdrawal. The New York Sun editorial board concurred, arguing that the "real news" of Fallon's resignation is that Petraeus might get to take over as CentCom commander. Writing an op-ed titled "Fallon didn't get it" in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot ridiculed Fallon as one of the "guys who think they're smart" and is "undermining" Bush's Iran strategy. "Fallon makes it more likely, not less, that there will ultimately be an armed confrontation with Iran," wrote Boot. Writing for National Review, conservative hawk Frank Gaffney attacked Fallon as "a military man who has proven himself utterly unserious about the Iranian threat" and "had engaged in serial acts of insubordination and sabotage."
See also:
From ICH
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tf2777/article19517_htm/?a=48338
http://www.esquire.com/features/fox-fallon
Defense chief says Fallon’s leaving is not precursor to war with Iran
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