From Volume 4, Issue Number 5 of EIR Online, Published Feb. 1, 2005

This Week You Need To Know

LaRouche Warned: Bush-Cheney Re-Election Means Perpetual War

by Jeffrey Steinberg

At a conference in Dubai, on Jan. 5-6, Patrick Clawson, speaking on behalf of the Bush-Cheney Administration, announced that Washington is hell-bent on taking out Iran's "nuclear weapons sites." Clawson, the vice president of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and a leading Beltway neo-con, was part of an American delegation to a conference sponsored by the Gulf Research Center.

One Arab participant in the event told this news service: "It was not a conference. It was a notification by the Bush people, of their intentions to attack Iran." The source continued, "There were several scenarios for the attack, from a military strike to a political destabilization."

While Clawson's claim to be speaking for the Bush Administration may have contained more than a little hubris, the fact is, in a television interview with Don Imus just hours before the Bush-Cheney Inauguration on Jan. 20, Vice President Dick Cheney made similar threats of military action against Iran, going so far as to cite Israel's bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, with a warning: If Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon is not stopped by Washington and Europe, Israel will strike unilaterally and let the rest of the world sort out the mess.

Washington sources confirm that a battle royal is raging behind the scenes within the intelligence community, over the Bush Administration's zeal to bomb Iran and, as some neo-cons fantasize, trigger a "velvet revolution" by Gap-Jeans-clad, Internet-savvy Iranian youth. Even with Cheney stooge Porter Goss installed as the Director, Central Intelligence Agency analysts insist that the United States does not have the ability to take out Iran's purported nuclear weapons program; and a failed bombing and commando attack would trigger a deep anti-American backlash among all sectors of the Iranian population, strengthen the hand of the hard-line clerics, and dash any prospects of a diplomatic solution, through Euro-Russian negotiations, which have already led to a six-to-nine-month freeze in reprocessing of nuclear material....

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