Of course it makes no sense to go to war with Iran to keep oil flowing to America.  We are already facing economic ruin, and that would merely accelerate it.  We will have no homes left, no jobs and no viable economy – the entire reason the government is ratcheting up the TSA. The reason American soil has been declared a 'battlefield'.  Not to protect us, but to control us.  Now we are going to strike Iran.  China, which owns most of our debt, and Russia, have both told the US and Israel not to do it.  They have strategic interests too, and theirs coincide with Iran as well as with us.

What will happen?  The US is already deploying purpose-built (and purpose NAMED) weapons designed to take out Iran's nuclear facilities.  

What is also clear is that Panetta's statements are not quite true.  Every explosives engineer in the world knows how to break rock.  You do that by sequencing explosives to go off at slightly different times to create a rolling shock wave.  It's certainly possible to sequence several warheads in one conventional munition, and one can assume that the additional $82 million dollars Boeing got to 'enhance' the Iran bomb is for that purpose.  But these things are designed to ride two-per B-2, so sequencing a second one down the hole after the first one is likely the strategy. We supposedly have twenty 'Iran' bombs, but we have substantially more than that and multiple delivery systems, although I'd hesitate to put B-52s over Iran. If the Iranian facilities are no deeper than a few hundred feet, that would do it – and we have a cute nuclear bunker buster that could go down third and just about guarantee the result.  

Unfortunately, it's not the result we want.  It's the result Israel wants, but it is a pre-failed strategy.  We are joined at the hip with Israel for many reasons, not the least of which is their willingness to rebuild nuclear warheads for us.  That's necessary because nuclear warheads degrade quite rapidly.  By outsourcing that job, or part of it, Israel insures that it has a stock of nuclear weapons in the pipeline ready to go – at our expense.  And Israel gets the newest technology from us to do it.  In 2006-7, they destroyed some of their old centrifuges testing the STUXNET virus – and got new ones.  Two years later, the Iranian centrifuges (cans) started self-destructing.  The virus had been in their systems for over a year, working slowly.  Stuxnet, a modular design, is brilliant – at least the current 2012 version is.  It is an order of magnitude more advanced than the 2008 versions, most of which are still undiscovered. And which Iran still cannot get rid of so it has resorted to ripping out entire computer and control systems and replacing them. Also a pre-failed strategy.

Still, it's an act of war, and merely makes Iran more determined rather than dissuading them. If they need more nukes, the Pakis have quite a few and their borders adjoin – which is why we are in Afghanistan and trying to be allies with Pakistan (which will never work).  We are trying to keep the lids on too many cans of worms (double pun not intended).

Michael Klare, writing in Tomgram, explains the corner we are painting ourself into and wonders why the President keeps calling for more paint.

<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175496/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_no_exit_in_the_persian_gulf/“>http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175496/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_no_exit_in_the_persian_gulf/

WEEKEND EDITION JANUARY 27-29, 2012

by ROB URIE

Last Fall New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, apparently fearing the early demise of New York’s number one tourist attraction and occasional pain-in-the-ass Occupy Wall Street, set up a series of meetings called “court dates” where we could come together to discuss politics and strategy and generally remember why we rebelled in the first place. With these government facilitated meetings scheduled to last for the foreseeable future, there should remain some residual dissent as the rest of America settles back into meditations on lesser evilism and the frothy mix of fecal matter and lubricant that sometimes results from anal intercourse (google: Santorum).

In one recent government inspired get-together the discussion turned to the upcoming presidential election, with the question put forward: is the goal of voting to microscopically slow the nation’s descent into a militarized, impoverished, plutocratic, terror state (Obama / Romney) or to hand it the quart of Scotch and bottle of Seconal it needs to choke on its own vomit (Santorum / Gingrich)? Your response to this conundrum is most likely a function of your perceived place in the social order. So the follow on question is: which strategy will cause the least harm to the most vulnerable while maximally facilitating the self-immolation of the beast?

The issue at present is this: the U.S. is a behemoth that is armed to the teeth and that has a developed infrastructure of social control. Nothing less than millions of people in the streets willing to bring the thing to the ground will force real change. So (1) where the fuck are you? and (2) passive strategies are an important part of any effort. You can continue to sit on your couch and still push the movement forward. You will eventually be replaced due to natural attrition by actual human beings and we’ll see where things stand then. But until then, you can do your bit to help those actually interested in living without that much effort on your part. Your help is appreciated.

Step one is to understand what America is in 2012. America is a global murder machine run as a business by a bureaucracy that kills without passion for the profit of a few plutocrats. National economic policies are designed to impoverish you as said plutocrats steal your pension, your house and your life and force you through debt penury to work for nothing for their benefit until you die. Enough plutocrat-empire insiders understand the political unsustainability of the current arrangement to have built a surveillance and social control infrastructure including a brutal, intrusive police force for political repression, and to have written laws that falsely accuse you of doing what they do (terrorism) for which you can be arrested without charges and without recourse and sent to an undisclosed location to be tortured until you die. Welcome to America.

But the plutocrats require basic cooperation, even if coerced, with the state-plutocrat apparatus for it to function for their benefit. So the first step to passive resistance is to stop cooperating. All U.S. military adventures are misdirections designed to murder innocent people so that plutocrats can steal their stuff. Don’t believe anything that you hear / read from the plutocrat-empire regarding purported military threats and don’t join the military unless you want to be thrown into the garbage just like the people that you are sent to murder. Stop buying anything but the bare essentials and then buy them used for cash outside of the credit and mainstream goods distribution systems. Stop watching television to clear your mind of plutocrat propaganda. Everything (everything) on television is empty, mindless propaganda selling you the idea that Glorious Leader is your friend and is on your side. Glorious Leader isn’t your friend and only wants for you to shut up and buy crap that you neither want nor need for his benefit. Meat is murder. End oppression where you find it, including on the dinner table.

With respect to the upcoming election, the question is more ethereal / aesthetic than you imagine. I point to the unimpeded growth and trajectory of the empire’s bureaucracy of destruction and despair from Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama to whichever pathetic stooge you delude yourself into believing you helped choose this season. The degree of perceived differentiation denotes your place in the social hierarchy. Obama’s public persona is slightly less grating than Bush Jr.s moronic belligerence. But if you are black or brown, poor or middle class, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or any of a thousand other non-Christian religions the policies are not differentiable. With respect to “don’t ask, don’t tell:” great, now openly gay people can murder poor brown people so that plutocrats can steal their stuff. And how many of those poor brown people that you now get to murder were gay?

So New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has arranged for some of us from Occupy Wall Street to continue meeting in government-owned facilities for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we the people can extend a similar opportunity to his banker and war criminal buddies in the not too distant future. My sense is that OWS will be back in force with warmer weather in the East. Regardless, without the numbers in the streets, and that is millions of people, we can’t change that much. So the invitation is extended. Passive resistance can be constructive if it is persistent and well conceived. Active resistance can change the world. See you in the Spring?

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.