{"id":8448,"date":"2012-04-10T06:55:42","date_gmt":"2012-04-10T13:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=8448"},"modified":"2012-04-10T06:55:42","modified_gmt":"2012-04-10T13:55:42","slug":"iran-another-war-for-the-one-percent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=8448","title":{"rendered":"Iran, Another War for the One Percent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Surrender now or we&#8217;ll bomb you later<\/strong><br \/>\nTHE ROVING EYE By Pepe Escobar &#8211; 11 April, 2012 &#8211; Asia Times<\/p>\n<p>Former United States president George W Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein before bombing and invading Iraq.<\/p>\n<p>Nine years later, US President Barack Obama has issued an ultimatum to the leadership in Tehran before &#8230; setting optimal conditions for an &#8220;all options on the table&#8221; exercise.<\/p>\n<p>Obama has made an offer to Tehran to &#8220;negotiate&#8221; its nuclear program &#8211; ahead of long-delayed talks between the &#8220;Iran Six&#8221; (P5+1 &#8211; the five permanent members of the UN Security Council &#8211; the US, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and France &#8211; plus Germany) and Iran scheduled for Istanbul on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>For starters, it&#8217;s not an offer; it&#8217;s a list of demands &#8211; even before any negotiation takes place. And these &#8220;near term&#8221; concessions are packaged &#8211; according to the president&#8217;s own rhetoric &#8211; as a &#8220;last chance&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In modern times, this used to be known as an ultimatum. In the post-everything era, it passes for &#8220;international diplomacy&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Obama wants Tehran to shut down and in fact destroy the Fordow enrichment plant, built under a mountain outside the holy city of Qom; he wants Tehran to definitely renounce and &#8220;surrender&#8221; its entire stockpile of uranium enriched to 20%; to stop any sort of enrichment, even to harmless 5% (which means Iran renouncing its whole civilian nuclear program, to which it has a right according to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ); to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors full access to all Iranian nuclear sites (they already have it); and to let the inspectors talk to all top Iranian nuclear scientists (that&#8217;s not exactly possible; quite a few have been assassinated by Israel&#8217;s Mossad).<\/p>\n<p>So welcome to the &#8220;roll over and die&#8221; school of diplomacy &#8211; as perfected by the Obama administration, with vital input from the Israel lobby in Washington. It&#8217;s our way of the highway. And the highway is to hell &#8211; to the sound of &#8220;Bomb Bomb Iran&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Another war for the 1%<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>No wonder the proverbial &#8220;Israeli officials&#8221; are delighted that Iran &#8211; via its Foreign Ministry &#8211; has rejected all these demands as &#8220;irrational&#8221;; for Tel Aviv, the Iranian response is &#8220;good&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Good&#8221; means the list of demands spells out the inevitable failure of the talks &#8211; which is the core of the Israeli strategy. Afterwards Obama may (will) use the failure as the perfect excuse to apply even harsher sanctions &#8211; and who knows what else.<\/p>\n<p>The whole Israeli official apparatus for months have been brainwashing Israeli, American and European public opinion for war on Iran by all means necessary &#8211; manipulating everything from a nonsensical &#8220;existential threat&#8221; to the coming of a &#8220;second Holocaust&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Now the whole Fordow controversy is linked to the Israeli spin of another shady concept &#8211; known as &#8220;sphere of immunity&#8221;. Tel Aviv insists Fordow will allow Tehran to protect the more sensitive elements of its nuclear program literally inside a mountain &#8211; immune from the most powerful GBU-28 bunker buster bombs (which Obama, by the way, agreed to sell to Israel). <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atimes.com\/atimes\/Middle_East\/ND11Ak02.html\" target=\"_blank\">  &#8230;more<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"igit_tsb_button\" style=\"float: left; margin-right: 10px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crookedbough.com%2F%3Fp%3D8448&amp;text=Iran%2C+Another+War+for+the+One+Percent&amp;count=horizontal&amp;via=\" style=\"\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Surrender now or we&#8217;ll bomb you later THE ROVING EYE By Pepe Escobar &#8211; 11 April, 2012 &#8211; Asia Times Former United States president George W Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein before bombing and invading Iraq. Nine years later, US President Barack Obama has issued an ultimatum to the leadership in Tehran before <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=8448#more-'\" class=\"more-link\">more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[1469],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8448"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8450,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8448\/revisions\/8450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}