“So they go forward with the old plan, the only one they've got. Attack Iran.”
“A larger war is looming…and might ultimately consume us.” This was the late Glen Ford in an article titled “Iran And Beyond: Total War Is Still On The Horizon,” published in Black Agenda Report on July 17, 2007. Back then, the regime of George W. Bush, reeling from failure of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was pushing for more war. Ford pointed out that the original plan for the invasion of Iraq was to take over control of West Asia’s vast resources while turning the region’s peoples and governments into US vassals. This has always been the plan. This will always be the US plan: “to change the world balance of power by military force.”
Ford repeatedly warned us about the United States’s incessant calls for war on Iran. (See, for instance, his essays here, here, and here). Ford also showed us that the US call to assert full spectrum dominance in West Asia and throughout the world has been bipartisan. For example, here’s Hillary Clinton in 2015:
If I’m the president, we will attack Iran…Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to, totally, obliterate them.
But when Ford wrote in 2007, he did not mention the zionist entity. He probably could not have foreseen the 2009 Brookings Institute Report, Which Way to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran. The report argued that Iran is a massive threat to the existence of zionist entity, and, therefore, a challenge to US policy in the region. The Brookings Institute called on the US to “leave it to Bibi” to initiate the attack on Iran. Sure enough, this has happened. Already in a 21-month genocidal ravage against the Palestinian people trapped in Gaza and the occupied territories, and concurrently bombing Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, the zionist entity is now also bombing Iran.
In his essay, Ford knew that this attack on Iran was inevitable – because the white west’s thirst for war and for domination is insatiable. Further, he understood that the growing contradictions for the “captains of capital” – with no actual capital – would grow too much to bear, and that these captains would have “no rational way out,” except to forcibly take over the rest of the world’s resources:
And so it is on to Tehran, by sea and by air. It does not matter that the attack may ignite an apocalypse; the ruling parasites cannot envision a world in which they are not supreme, in any case. Why not get it over with?
We reprint Glen Ford’s “Iran And Beyond: Total War Is Still On The Horizon” below.
Iran And Beyond: Total War Is Still On The Horizon
Glen Ford
The mindset that launched the invasion of Iraq remains embedded in the mentality of the ruling circles of the United States - and compels them to lash out at Iran. Actually, Iran was supposed to have been vanquished, already, rolled up in the euphoria of America-Love that the delusional architects of the Iraq operation imagined existed among the people of the Middle East and the rest of the world. It didn't turn out that way, because it could not. Americans are not loved, because they are not lovable. They kill, big time.
More than half a million deaths later, the same Americans imagine that they can resurrect the cemetery they have created, and make the corpses march under the Red, White, and Blue banner. But that is not possible. There are millions of grieving family members who know who the murderers are: the Americans. These sins will never be forgiven, and they are wounds to the entire Arab family. That's a lot of folks.
When the Bush regime told the generals to cross the Kuwaiti border, and introduced the world to hi-tech "Shock and Awe," they fully expected that the dominoes would fall in Tehran, Damascus and throughout the Arab/Persian/Turkik world. Such was their hubris, and their ignorance. They have not gotten any smarter, in defeat. They still savor taking Tehran, the capital of Iran, and are ramping up for an attack on that nation.
The Bush gang's game plan remains the same: to somehow move beyond Iraq into Iran and Central Asia, to secure the geo-resource space that was the original goal of the Iraqi invasion - to change the world balance of power by military force. The Project for the New American Century was their blueprint for world conquest. It would have carried U.S. forces deep into places in Central Asia that most Americans had never heard of. The Americans planned to plant the flag among happy natives trodding atop vast oil and gas fields, and to effectively partition vast stretches of the planet from the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans and anybody else. That was the plan. It failed, and they have no other plan.
So they go forward with the old plan, the only one they've got. Attack Iran.
In this demonic endeavor, the Bush men have many allies. Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and everybody else among the Democratic candidates but Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, act like Dracula when the word Iran comes up. Nuke it! Bomb it! Invade it! Punish it!
By doing so, they give a clear sign to the Bush regime that it's alright to launch another war. Indeed, the Republicans cannot possibly win the 2008 election unless there is another war - something the "American people" can coalesce around. The Iraq war is lost. Let's start another one. Time for a New American Century.
In the corporate media, we hear the same nonsense that we were forced to imbibe in 2003, at the time of the invasion. The same craziness that is rooted in American Manifest Destiny, which maintains that the U.S. is God's gift to the world. God's gift can do no wrong, by definition. America is a good force on the Earth. If half a million people die, that's just collateral damage. On to Tehran.
A larger war is looming. This one will be bigger than the current conflict, and might ultimately consume us. The captains of capital - caught in multiple contradictions of their own making - don't know what to do; they are in a box, with no rational way out. The Great Offensive of 2003, of which the conquest of Baghdad was to have been only phase one, was designed to irrevocably alter the global chess board to establish permanent U.S. hegemony over the earth's most vital resources. China, India and Russia would be reduced to supplicants, begging for entrée to the oil and gas spigots. With the world's actual capital - energy resources - under U.S. control, the artificially inflated dollar would be re-established as the uncontested global currency - monopoly money for the monopoly capitalist class that rules in Washington. No more threat from the euro.
Iraqi nationalists stopped the juggernaut in its tracks, and have broken the back of U.S. ground forces. The Iraq invasion was a wakeup call to the world, a warning that the Americans were determined to enslave...everybody. The warning has been duly noted in every world capital. The elites of Indonesia, Malaysia, Latin America and Europe were shocked and awed into an understanding that the U.S. was out to subjugate them. Since 2003, the Americans have been unwelcome at the table of business, excluded from regional conferences and uninvited from development planning events. Nobody wants the bully in the room. Not even the Europeans.
America has been redlined by the global community. Many American corporations understand that, to their horror. Firms that must cultivate goodwill to do business in foreign lands increasingly view the current regime in Washington as an albatross around their necks, poisoning every prospective deal and soiling the company name. But these companies are not at the heart of the ruling cabal, which is centered on finance and military-industrial capital. These non-productive sectors profit by manipulating markets to create unfair advantage - while creating nothing. They are parasites, retarding global development and standing like George Wallace in the door to prevent the solution of the manifold crises that pose imminent threats to humanity.
Ultimately, the parasitic class can only maintain its rule by force. Manufacturing nothing, creating no value except on paper, they must finally call upon the Armed Forces to impose their unearned advantage on the planet. Such was the logic of March, 2003. The Great Offensive failed, but the contradictions that compelled the captains of finance capital to order their political servants to wage war, remain - and are in fact more acute than four years ago. They must wage war, again, to fight their way out of the box.
And so it is on to Tehran, by sea and by air. It does not matter that the attack may ignite an apocalypse; the ruling parasites cannot envision a world in which they are not supreme, in any case. Why not get it over with?
African Americans have no stake in this coming war, but our misleadership has failed to warn us of its imminence. Stuck in Jim Crow politics, we applaud Senator Barack Obama, a pure imperialist who wants to add 100,000 more troops to the Armed Forces to bolster U.S. capability to shape the world's economies to the advantage of his campaign contributors. Although Black Americans are reflexively suspicious of U.S. motives in the world and have opposed every military adventure since the media decided we were worth polling, we are blind-sided by narrow interests of racial pride.
The crisis of capital is coming to a head. It will be very bloody, not because the people of the world want it so - indeed, everyone wants to avoid it - but because the imperatives of a parasitic class require it. They have unfinished business, and war is their only answer.
Glen Ford, “Iran And Beyond: Total War Is Still On The Horizon,” Black Agenda Report, 17 July, 2007
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