WHY ISRAEL AND THE U.S. MUST EVENTUALLY GO TO WAR WITH IRAN AND SYRIA.

Why must they? The short answer is simple – it is the only way that Israel and the US can affect ‘regime change’ in these countries.

So, why regime change? Again, the answer is simple – it is because these two countries support the organisations that are all that stands between the right-wing Israeli Zionists and their dreams of a Greater Israel that includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Their sights are also set on southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, an area which the Israelis attempted to invade last year. Both Syria and Iran supply the means by which Hizbollah and Hamas protect the Arab peoples of Lebanon and Palestine from Zionist aggression and invasion.

Ever since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in 1947 Israelis have always sought to justify their insidious take-overs of Palestinian lands by finding some casus belli or another by which they can excuse their misdeeds. The Zionists have always been master manipulators of geo-political situations that have provided them with the pretext for their carefully calculated expansionist plans; and their plan to rid themselves of the two regimes that prevent them from achieving their ultimate goal is no less nefarious in its cunning.

Last years attack by Israel on the Lebanese people was one such example of the way Israel manipulates situations in order justify actions in pursuit of their expansionist policies. Israel’s stated casus belli in that case was that two of its soldiers on 12 July 2006 had been ‘kidnapped’ by Hizbollah militia. Within hours the Israelis began massively bombing targets in Lebanon. As far as the world was concerned Israel were simply responding to an attack on their forces. The reality, however, is an entirely different story.

Less than three weeks earlier, on 25 June 2006, an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was captured by Palestinian fighters in the Gaza after an increase of Israeli bombing activities in the Gaza which had resulted in the deaths of many innocent women and children and which culminated in the shelling bombardment of a Gaza beach that killed a Palestinian family holidaying there on 9 June 2006. These events raised the tension levels to the point where there was increased Israeli military activity not just in the Gaza but and also along the borderlands of southern Lebanon where Israeli patrol units darted in and out of Lebanese territory and where they increased their level of incidents of penetration into Lebanese airspace including creating transonic and supersonic booms over the country and over Beirut, actions that were designed specifically to intimidate the Lebanese people. These actions were enough to provoke Hizbollah to respond which they did on 12 July 2006 by launching a rocket attack on two Israeli towns close to the border of Lebanon. At the same time, Hizbollah fighters came into contact with an Israeli patrol just inside the Lebanese border where a number of Israelis were killed and two others captured.

The mainstream media in the West reported all of these events in such a way as to make it seem as though the Israelis were responding to Palestinian and, in particular, Hizbollah aggression, taking care to avoid highlighting any details that might show the reality of Israeli provocation in both the Gaza and southern Lebanon.

The Israeli attacks on the Gazans and especially the Lebanese in fact had been carefully planned months ahead of actual events, a fact that has since been acknowledged by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the Winograd enquiry but was actually first reported in the ‘Jerusalem Post’ on the very day that Israel’s soldiers were captured, 12 July 2006.

Israel’s stated war aim initially was to simply get their two captured soldiers back but this very quickly morphed into something massively more ambitious when the war aims were extended to include the destruction of Hizbollah. As the war progressed it became increasingly obvious that it had been meticulously planned with military jet fuel and hi-tech ordinance having been ordered months earlier from the US and stockpiled well in advance of hostilities and the IDF had spent considerable time in the month or so prior to the war completing exercises that suited this particular war scenario.

In provoking Hizbollah by massively bombing Hizbollah villages and towns the Israelis hope was that they would entice the Syrians to openly show their support of Hizbollah thus providing a pretext for the Israelis to attack Syria knowing, or at least hoping, that in doing so Iran would come to Syria’s aid via a mutual agreement treaty that Syria and Iran have with each other. This, in turn, would have escalated the war to include the US who would then come to Israel’s aid because of the threat to Israel from Iran.

As we now know, of course, the plan failed because Syria simply didn’t bite. Since the Israelis were unable to lure the Syrians into the war by merely massively bombing Lebanon, they decided to up the ante by actually invading southern Lebanon. Despite the invasion, however, Hizbollah managed to continue lobbing rockets into Israel, an action that was eventually to take its toll on the Israelis. The Syrians continued to hold their ground and did not respond to the Israelis provocation of Syria’s allies. As the Israeli civilian casualties began to mount in Israel, and IDF casualties began also to mount because of fighting actually in southern Lebanon, the Israelis decided enough was enough as they could plainly see that their plan of provoking Syria and ultimately Iran into the war was not going to work and so withdrew from the war in a US manipulated UN brokered environment.

As the war had progressed with Israel mercilessly bombing civilian residences and industries in towns and villages throughout southern Lebanon, it became clear to the entire world that Israeli bombing was a massively ‘disproportionate’ response to the Hizbollah rocket bombardment of northern Israel, most of which fell harmlessly in open country. There was a world-wide public outcry that called for the UN to step in and stop the war. The US with its veto power, however, held back in allowing the UN to stop the carnage saying that the Israelis needed more time to defeat Hizbollah because Hizbollah were sending rockets to Israel and killing Israeli civilians and because Hizbollah had ‘kidnapped’ Israeli soldiers. Eventually even the US had to concede to the obvious; that Syria was not going to drawn into the conflict and, therefore, there would be no casus belli for the US to attack Iran. A UN resolution went through effectively stopping the war and forcing Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon. The war was a humiliating defeat for Israel inasmuch that neither its stated war aims of defeating Hizbollah or retrieving their two captured soldiers nor its unstated war aims of provoking Syria and Iran into a final showdown were realised.

The US and the Israelis, while now back to square one, remain, however, just as determined, even in the face of world-wide hostile public opinion, to have their final showdown with Iran. For years, the core of their propaganda and rhetoric for regime change is Israel’s and the Bush administration’s claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons which, so they say, would be both a threat to Israel specifically and the region generally. But this claim remains just that; propaganda and rhetoric, as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no evidence whatsoever that would in any way support the claim that Iran is developing nuclear weapons or material for nuclear weapons.

Once bitten and twice shy of the Bush administrations ability to lie in order to launch wars against nations that were never really any threat to the US or Israel, world public opinion on the matter of Iran’s nuclear plans is at the very least sceptical and to the point where both the US and Israel, while maintaining their propaganda and rhetoric of Iran seeking nuclear arms, have now made additional claims regarding Iranian ill intent toward the US and Israel by claiming that the Iranians are now heavily involved in the insurgency in Iraq and are also supplying arms and material to Syria in increasing amounts, much of which is being passed on to Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza and West Bank.

The problem is; the Bush administration and the Israelis have lied once too often for their lies to be believed by world public opinion anymore. However, since the failure of the Republicans to hang on to Congress at the midterm elections in the US last November, and given that Bush is now both as good as a lame duck President, as well as being a final term President, public opinion in all likelihood is no longer a factor in the decision making process that will determine whether or not Iran will be attacked. President Bush, and in particular his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, have become increasingly more belligerent and desperate as time marches towards their demise at the Presidential elections next year.

Everything is now in place militarily for the US and Israel to launch a final showdown against Iran and Syria. The US battle groups are in the Gulf off Iran and the Israelis have had their exercises in northern Israel close to the Golan Heights. All now seems to be ready. Bush and Cheney have nothing to lose; once launched it will be fait accompli. They may try fearmongering tactics in an effort to ease public opinion against them by either stating that they have uncovered some monstrous Iranian plan to launch a terror attack on the US mainland or they may even create a massive actual ‘terror attack’ on the US mainland which is as likely as it is not. Either way, the US and Israel are determined to have their final showdown with Iran – and they seem determined to have it regardless of the cost to humankind.