US Senate: Will back Israeli attack on Iran

[Octafish]

36. ''Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.''

Did al-Qaeda's Gambit Work? Have They Baited Bush into Disastrous Missteps in the Middle East?

Real Men Go to Tehran

by M. SHAHID ALAM
CounterPunch, JANUARY 17, 2006

"Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran." -- Senior Bush Official, May 2003

EXCERPT...

The war between Iran and Iraq served the United States and Israel quite well. It blunted the energies of Iran, diverting it from any serious attempts to export the revolution, or challenging American influence in the region. The Israeli gains were more substantial. With Egypt neutered at Camp David, and Iraq and Iran locked in a bloody war, Israel was free during the 1980s to do what it pleased. It expanded its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, expelled the Palestinian fighters from Lebanon, and established a long-term occupation over much of Southern Lebanon. Israel was closer to its goal of commanding unchallenged power over the Middle East.

The end of the Cold War in 1990 offered a bigger opening to the United States and Israel. Freed from the Soviet check on their ambitions, and with Iran devastated by the war, the United States began working on plans to establish a military control over the region, in the style of earlier colonial empires. This happened quickly when, with American assurance of non-intervention in intra-Arab conflicts, Iraq invaded Kuwaiti in August 1990.

The US response was massive and swift. In January 1990, after assembling 600,000 allied troops in Saudi Arabia ­ about half of them American ­ it pushed Iraq out of Kuwait, and mounted massive air strikes against Iraq itself, destroying much of its industry, power-generating capacity and infrastructure. The US had now established a massive military beachhead in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. It established permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia, continued its economic sanctions against Iraq, created a Kurdish autonomous zone in the north of Iraq, and, together with Britain, continued to bomb Iraq on a nearly daily basis for the next thirteen years.

With the US beachhead in place, where did the real men in the US and Israel want to go next? There was no secrecy about their plans. At a minimum, the Neoconservatives in the US and their Likud allies in Israel wanted ‘regime change’ in Iraq, Syria and Iran. This would be delivered by covert action, air strikes, or invasion ­ whatever it took ­ to be mounted by the US military. Israel would stay out of these wars, ready to reap the benefits of their aftermath.

The Likud plans were more ambitious. They wanted to redraw the map of the Middle East, using ethnic, sectarian, and religious differences to carve up the existing states in the region into weak micro-states that could be easily bullied by Israel. This was the Kivunim plan first made public in 1982. It would give Israel a thousand years of dominance over the Middle East.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/17/real-men-go-to-tehran/