Canary In The Coal Mine

From ThinkProgress:-

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon “one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today.” Fallon opposed the “surge” in Iraq and has consistently battled the Bush administration to avoid a confrontation with Iran, calling officials’ war-mongering “not helpful.” Privately, he has vowed that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch.”
According to a new article by Thomas P.M. Barnett in the April issue of Esquire magazine (on newsstands March 12), Fallon may be prematurely “relieved of his command” as soon as this summer:

[W]ell-placed observers now say that it will come as no surprise if Fallon is relieved of his command before his time is up next spring, maybe as early as this summer, in favor of a commander the White House considers to be more pliable. If that were to happen, it may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don’t want a commander standing in their way.

Update: Not so fast, Chris Floyd says-

There has been quite a buzz in "progressive" circles over the new Esquire article about Admiral William Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command, the military satrapy that covers the entire "arc of crisis" at the heart of the "War on Terror," from east Africa, across the Middle East, and on to the borders of China. Much has been made of Fallon's alleged apostasy from the Bush regime's bellicosity toward Tehran; indeed, the article paints Fallon as the sole bulwark against an American attack on Iran – and hints ominously that the good admiral may be forced out by George W. Bush this summer, clearing the way for one last murderous hurrah by the lame duck president. The general reaction to the article seems to be: God preserve this honorable man, and keep him as our shield and defender against the wicked tyrant.

But this is most curious. For behind the melodramatic framing and gushing hero-worship of the article – written by Thomas Barnett (of whom more later) – we find nothing but a few mild disagreements between Fallon and the White House over certain questions of tactics, timing and presentation in regard to American domination of a vast range of nations and peoples.

Fallon himself has long denied the hearsay evidence that he had declared, upon taking over Central Command, that a war on Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch." And in fact, the article itself depicts Fallon's true attitude toward the idea of an attack on Iran right up front, in his own words. After noting Fallon's concerns about focusing too much on Iran to the exclusion of the other "pots boiling over" in the region, Barnett presses the point and asks: And if it comes to war? Fallon replies with stark, brutal clarity:

"'Get serious,' the admiral says. 'These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.'"

NIE LIE

"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," says the unclassified summary of the secret report.Rand Beers, who resigned from Bush's National Security Council just before the Iraq war, said the report should derail any appetite for war on the administration's part, and should reinvigorate regional diplomacy. "The new NIE throws cold water on the efforts of those urging military confrontation with Iran," he said.

The spooks say Iran halted its nuclear weapon program in 2003, incidentally the year it proposed unconditional talks with the US and which the White house rejected point blank. They want war, ok, the Bush administration in the United States of America want war with Iran. So with this latest piece of reality impinging on their war pimping they spin it thusly- as they continue to enrich uranium (which they need for nuclear power) that means they actually are pursuing weapons. Lying war mongering bastard says-

U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, said the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains "a serious problem." The estimate suggests Bush "has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests, while ensuring the world will never have to face a nuclear armed Iran," Hadley said. He was less interested in what the 2005 assessment missed than what it got right: that Iran had a covert nuclear program.

So even the entire intelligence community of the empire is saying for fuck's sake do not attack Iran, it poses no threat and the consequences of attacking to America would be disastrous. This is the NIE Cheney delayed for a year to force it to include as much anti Iranian propaganda as possible-

• intelligence analysts have had to review and rewrite their findings three times, because of pressure from the White House.


• The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.


• Frank J. Gaffney, a protégé of neoconservative heavyweight Richard Perle, complained that Negroponte was “absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons”.


• an unsubtle signal to the intelligence community that the White House was determined to obtain a more alarmist conclusion on the Iranian nuclear programme.

So even with that, look at what it concludes- they stopped 4 years ago. The cabal in charge are the same mental patients who deliberately exaggerated the threat from the Soviets in the cold war, they lied us into the Iraq invasion, at exactly which fucking point do we stop them?

PS. As Hass a commenter at my blog added-

From IranAffairs.com:

Iran NIE report - Are you lying now, or were you lying then? If the 2005 NIE report was wrong, why should the 2007 NIE report be any more credible? If Iran really had a nuclear weapons program until 2003 as the new NIE says, then why has the IAEA found no evidence of it? WHy should we believe that Iran EVER had a nuclear weapons program at all?