Informant38

many people actually believe:

I do not believe that the U.S. can launch a new war on Iran because they haven’t the troops. Secondly, if they do that they will be fighting the Iranians on three fronts — Iraq, Afghanistan and in Iran itself. So I think it is very unlikely that a war against Iran will happen.

Tariq Ali i.v. quoted at Fanonite 17.Sep.07
original interview at IPS
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xymphora's consistently pooped on the idea of an Iranian invasion/war, but he suffers from an excess of John-the-Baptistism, the lone voice in the wilderness thing, if he didn't have all that irritating confidence in his own opinions the opposition would bury him. Tariq Ali has big credentials, a proven record of accuracy and compassionate dialogue, and a good clear reasonable voice.
The problem with being logical and reasonable about this is the factors are so large and complex logic can only proceed with a lot of surmise and assumption.
It doesn't seem that implausible that people as whacked-out on their own superiority and the paranoia created by living that superiority out against people you've got your little shiny boots on the necks of as the Israeli government and its millions of fans in the so-called Free World are - where was I? - ah, yes, the idea of Israel using its very considerable array of nuclear weapons to reduce Iran to a parking lot, especially doing that just as the world economy meltdown hits runaway velocity, doesn't seem that far-fetched, once you get into the architecture of things a little further.
You just know there's all kinds of clairvoyants and economists and sundry other forecasting ilk down there in the Negev or elsewhere working away on potential outcomes of various scenarios. And it is beyond obvious that France has been taken over by those same people. Which reminds me of a thing I've wanted to put up here for a while.
In earlier days I relied on AFP's photos for some visual reference to world events. They were obviously paying well enough that some great photojournalists were getting their stuff up every day. This image of Paul Bremer, pro-consul for the US in Iraq, staring fascinated at some of the treasure of Nimrod is remarkable in a lot of ways. Not least that it symbolizes a sub-text that was working in the invasion and occupation. But then you'd have to have a context for "Nimrod" and "Babylon" and the whole exile of the Chosen People thing, and you'd have to have known that Bremer was a Jew, which hardly anyone did, and hardly anyone does, now, still.
And, if you decided to check wikipedia about that, and managed to work your way through to "Babylon", you might come across this enigmatic sentence:

"Cyrus later issued a decree permitting the exiled Jews to return to their own land, and allowed their temple to be rebuilt."

Straightforawrd enough in its own way, informationally clear, but it has no antecedent in the text. None whatsoever, just sits there like a little cupcake of words, at least at 10:30 p.m. on September 19th.
It makes no sense at all for it to be there, unless the previous and removed text was that the Jews were defeated by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar and taken prisoner in Jerusalem, their temple was torn down, and they were moved en masse into exile and slavery, in Babylon, which is Iraq, today. Which is why reggae music's got all them references to Babylon, not because of Iraq, because of the Bible, which is, in the Old Testament at least, the history of the Jews. So the idea that revenge might have been a factor as well as military security figures in there. The plausibility of millenia-old revenge come to fruition, cold and gratifying to that thing that drives so much of the sick world's engines now.
There's another one from a couple of years back of a Jewish settler slapping Abbas in the face that's pretty chilling as well, but I have to dig it up from wherever it is.
Anyway, suddenly the whole AFP site went into a revamp, and when it emerged from that there were no more pictures of Sarkozy looking like the cunning little bastard he appears to have been all along, no more soulful heart-breaking images from Iraq, and a lot of the photos that were there seemed much closer to the US tight-agenda-driven editorial concerns, where it's more important to please your Masters than it is to get the news out.
So boom there went AFP. And then boom here came Sarkozy, running the same France that got its pommes frites handed to it in the American agora Senate House of Representatives, and now this Kouchner individual with his Zion-loving posturing and noises. Which you can mention Kouchner, as he salivates toward the attacking of Iran, as a founder of MSF, or Doctors Without Borders, but you can't say he's a Jew, and you can't say he's a Zionist, because that's anti-Semitic, because at this point saying that there are Jewish men in the world, in concert, working together doing terrible things that can only harm the rest of us and worse, can only harm those to come - that thing that's only possible as what came through us, what we build now and pass on to the future - you can't say that because it will create a climate of intolerance and bigotry toward Jews generally, and that would be worse than letting them take over the world and run it to their own selfish ends.
People who think "the Jews" are taking over the world are not being particularly calmed by these events. People who think the US invaded Iraq at the command of its Israeli masters are not being dissuaded by these events.
If I pay a junkie $2000 to kill someone because they have some information or some evidence that could get in my way, you could say afterward, if the killer was caught, that it was done for the money. If I threw in an ounce of heroin along with the money, you could then say it was done for the drugs and for the money and this would be true, but only partially true.
Oil is playing a similar role in some ways in all this. Various secondary characters and organizations are operating out of greed that's based on and around oil and natural gas, or energy, which is in turn about power for the individuals involved. There's a lot of sub-sets of that working more or less together, but at the top of the food chain it doesn't seem to be so much the case. It's more like some kind of insect, or colony, reaching down to its origins, pulling itself into being, defending what it is and what it wants to become, and it has about as much regard for us, even the youngest and cutest and most innocent of us, as a hive of wasps does.