Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Oil, Israel, Iran, America

Dave Lindorff on what might happen if Bush or some crazy Air Force brass attack Iran:

One remark by a minor Israeli cabinet officer hinting at a possible U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran sent oil prices up by a record $11/barrel to a record $139 per barrel Friday. That should tell us what would happen if the Bush Administration were crazy enough to attack Iran, or to let its vassal state of Israel do it.

America, which runs on oil, would grind to a halt. Gasoline and home heating oil would double or triple in price, leading to desperation in the coming winter for those living north of the Mason-Dixon line, and to a mass exodus of the elderly from Florida and Arizona, where air-conditioning would no longer be affordable.

It makes you wonder what is going on in the higher reaches of the U.S. bureaucracy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has in the past intimated that he's no fan of war with Iran, just sacked the two top men in the Air Force -- the most gung-ho of the service branches in terms of Iran war mongering. The unprecedent surprise firing of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and the Air Force's top officer, Gen. T Michael "Buzz" Moseley, was officially blamed on their poor handling of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal, in the wake of last year's unauthorized and improper removal from storage and cross-country aerial transfer of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles in launch position on a B-52 Stratofortress, and the discovery this year of an earlier "inadvertent" shipment of ICBM missile warhead nuclear triggers to Taiwan. While it is possible that those two incidents were the cause of the firings, there remain serious unanswered questions about both incidents, and particularly about the cruise missile flight.

As I reported earlier and in Counterpunch magazine and American Conservative magazine, there were a half dozen unexplained deaths of U.S. airmen, including two suicides, which occurred just before and after that flight last August 30, none of which were investigated at least publicly by the Pentagon or the FBI, according to local prosecutors and medical examiners contacted. A number of experts in nuclear weapons handling have said that it would be "impossible" for the six warheads to have been removed from guarded bunkers at Minot AFB in North Dakota, mounted on cruise missiles, loaded onto launch pylons under the wing of a B-52, and flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, all as a "mistake."

This leads inexorably to the question: What was being planned for those warheads, if they were not being removed from storage by mistake, and if they were being moved without the knowledge of the top brass, including Gates, at the Pentagon? Recall that the only reason anyone learned about the incident was that it was reported outside the military chain of command to a reporter at Military Times newspaper by several Air Force whistleblowers upset by what they were seeing.

We already witnessed the sudden resignation from the post of CentCom Command of Adm. William Fallon, whose outspoken opposition to the Bush/Cheney Administration's talk of attacking Iran led to his being pushed aside in favor of the more pliant Gen. David Petraeus. Fallon was pushed out by Iran war hawks because of his opposition to an attack. Were the Air Force Secretary and Chief of Staff forced out by Gates because of their pro-attack position?

Why do I keep thinking Cheney has the big hand in all of this? If there's a war between SecDef and OVP, I hope Gates wins.

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