Deception

The U.S. is preparing a savage air attack on Iran – not excluding the use of tactical nuclear weapons – to prevent it from acquiring an atom bomb. Never mind that Iran and the UN atomic energy agency on August 21 agreed on a timetable for Tehran to clarify outstanding concerns about its nuclear program. If the ghost of the atom bomb is insufficient to justify war, the U.S. will engineer an incident “proving” that Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. “The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days,” The Times writes. (“Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran”) Not “pinprick strikes”, but “taking out the entire Iranian military”.

But in the same edition The Times (“How the West summoned up a nuclear nightmare in Pakistan”) published an extract from a forthcoming book, written by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, showing how the U.S. covered up Pakistan's quest for the bomb. So here we have the U.S. of A. turning a blind eye to Islamic Pakistan getting the bomb and preparing to strike at Islamic Iran to prevent it from getting the bomb. So what's the bottom line? It's not about nuclear non-proliferation. If you are a U.S. ally, you may have all the forbidden toys you want, but if you are not, you're gonna be bombed back to the Stone Age if the U.S. president only presumes that perhaps you would be tempted to acquire forbidden toys.

Bush accused Iran of “putting the Middle East under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. Iran doesn't even have a bomb. But Pakistan does have several. Moreover, president's Musharraf's grip on the country is slipping and it could fall into the hands of Islamic militants, the very same who have trained and supported the Taliban. The authors of “Deception” describe Pakistan as a “desperately unstable country” [...] “on the failed states index at position 12, just below Haiti, in worse shape than North Korea and Burma”. Finally, Iran's Ahmadinejad was democratically elected (he was not even the candidate of the conservative clergy), while Musharraf took power in a coup.

To Bush that doesn't matter, you're with us or against us.

The book “Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons” will be published in Britain in September (Amazon.co.uk) and in the U.S. in October (Amazon.com).