Grover Norquist: Iran Shock and Awe on Tap
Thursday February 08th 2007, 7:48 pm

It’s strange to be vindicated by Grover Norquist, a neocon flunky connected to the American Enterprise Institute, where Bush gets his criminal “minds,” and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In regard to the Iraq invasion and occupation, Norquist declares: “Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn’t happened. And all the things the critics said would happen have happened.”

Please excuse my fat head. Instead, let us consider other, more portentous items of interest the “conservative” Norquist has said as of late. Bush’s neocons, or rather the neocons that run Bush, are “effectively saying, ‘Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.’ But after you’ve lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?”

I’m not sure what sort of game Norquist is playing here, as he can’t be that stupid. Invasions and mass murder campaigns have nothing to do with a roulette wheel, or “winning” what a fence post understands cannot be won. Instead, it has everything to do with killing Arabs and Muslim, wrecking their countries, breaking said countries up into chunks for later micromanagement, as people set against each other along ethnic and religious lines cannot possibly hope to come together and defeat the invader. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who now warns us of the calamity to come in Iran, said it best: “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

Lately, a lot of squawking over the obvious has emerged, warning us of an Iraq repeat in Iran. Some of us knew about this the day after Bush delivered his now infamous “axis of evil” speech—or that is his neocon handlers and speechwriters (in this case, David Frum) sketched out their plan for “axis of evil” demonization, with Iran figuring prominently.

It takes about five minutes with Google to learn everything you need to know—and wish you didn’t—about the neocons, who are basically Zionists with a Straussian spin. Read Israeli history—not from a library textbook, mind you, but from the perspective of the “new historians” such as Benny Morris, but in particular Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev.

Following these “post-Zionists,” you soon learn that Israel ethnically cleansed the Palestinians and it is not Arab “intransigence” that prevents peace, but the very concept of the Israeli state, predicated on a rather virulent form of racism. In order to get a handle on this, read Israel Shahak, who also translated Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” the game plan for realizing “the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states,” a plan underway with the next target on the list looming on the horizon.

Consider Craig Unger, writing for Vanity Fair, who is about three years too late. “The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war have been using the same tactics—alliances with shady exiles, dubious intelligence on W.M.D.—to push for the bombing of Iran,” he writes.

Already, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the war in Iraq. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people have been killed. Countless more are wounded or living as refugees. Launched with the intention of shoring up Israeli security and replacing rogue regimes in the Middle East with friendly, pro-Western allies, the war in Iraq has instead turned that country into a terrorist training ground. By eliminating Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led coalition has sparked a Sunni-Shiite civil war, which threatens to spread throughout the entire Middle East. And, far from creating a secular democracy, the war has empowered Shiite fundamentalists aligned with Iran.

As we know, Unger’s “tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people” slaughtered is more precisely 650,000, probably well over 700,000 by now with a “civil war” raging, actually a well-engineered effort to deconstruct the country and reduce it to base components. As for Iraqi terrorism, I imagine that depends on your outlook—as well as your heritage, skin color, and who is making your kids sick with depleted uranium. Naturally, no number of Iraqis, supported by Iran and Syria, would be a match for the good old fashion state-sponsored terrorism of the United States, Britain, and Israel, the tripartite of death and destruction.

Indeed, “a Sunni-Shiite civil war … threatens to spread throughout the entire Middle East,” a plan set in motion some time ago, as detailed by Oded Yinon. Next up, Iran.

Unger continues:

The neoconservatives have had Iran in their sights for more than a decade. On July 8, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s newly elected prime minister and the leader of its right-wing Likud Party, paid a visit to the neoconservative luminary Richard Perle in Washington, D.C. The subject of their meeting was a policy paper that Perle and other analysts had written for an Israeli-American think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic Political Studies. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the paper contained the kernel of a breathtakingly radical vision for a new Middle East. By waging wars against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the paper asserted, Israel and the U.S. could stabilize the region. Later, the neoconservatives argued that this policy could democratize the Middle East.

Again, some of us talked of this several years ago and naturally we were routinely dismissed as lunatics and antisemites. Now the whole story—or at least part—is allowed to see the light of day by way of the corporate media, or at least the “lifestyle” wing pushed by Condé Nast. Maybe Si Newhouse thinks he can turn over some cash on such nervy journalism, or maybe the neolibs have finally decided their neocon kissing cousins have gone off the deep end and are truly and sincerely out of control—not that it matters, of course, because the neocons have captured the Pentagon, the soldiers, the bombs, and, gasp, the nukes.

But even if Craig Unger didn’t tell us the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey might have it, at least he added a few confirmatory details, not that we really need such.

“Retired Defense Intelligence official Patrick Lang told Unger that Bush has ordered StratCom—the military command responsible for ‘nuclear weapons, missile defense and protection against weapons of mass destruction’—to draw up plans for a ‘massive strike against Iran.’ Lang noted that the shift away from Central Command ‘to StratCom indicates they are talking about a really punishing air-force and naval air attack [on Iran].’”

As well, Bush nominated, and the Senate confirmed the appointment of William Joseph Fallon, a Navy admiral, to command Centcom, thus adding more speculation to the “punishing air-force and naval air attack” on Iran.

Grover Norquist’s frank admission is simply more evidence the neocons will go full tilt boogie on Iran. Of course, this should not be surprising, at least to those of us who have known for some time now that the neocons mean what they say and say what they mean and this will translate horrifically into a whole lot of dead people.

It’s too late to stop them now.