{"id":200988,"date":"2020-01-18T07:26:18","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T07:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=200988"},"modified":"2020-01-22T07:12:50","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T07:12:50","slug":"washington-continues-war-buildup-against-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=200988","title":{"rendered":"Washington continues war buildup against Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Van Auken \u2013 World Socialist Website Jan 17, 2020<\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

USAF F-15E Strike Eagle drop 2000lbs munitions. A squadroon of F-15Es has been deployed to Saudi Arabia, within striking distance of Iran. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

With a series of new US military deployments, Washington is escalating its preparations for a full-scale war with Iran. The buildup is continuing despite what has been universally described in the media as an easing of tensions following the January 3 US drone missile assassination of Iran\u2019s Gen. Qassem Suleimani and a largely symbolic Iranian retaliation in the form of a casualty-free missile strike against two US-occupied bases in Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Pentagon has dispatched a squadron of F15-E fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, the newspaper Stars & Stripes<\/em>, which covers the US military, reported Thursday. Deployed at the Prince Sultan Air Base, the warplanes are in easy striking distance of ground targets inside Iran. Their deployment follows that of another F15-E squadron to the Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates last October. The US Air Force last month issued a statement announcing that its 378th Expeditionary Air Wing had resurrected what had been a major US air base in Saudi Arabia 15 years ago and that it \u201cgrows daily.\u201d The head of the unit\u2019s operations group, Col. Robert Raymond, said, \u201cWe turned what was just a patch in the desert to a full-up operating location.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said on Wednesday that the Pentagon is preparing to ship new missile defense systems and other assets to the Middle East in preparation for a confrontation with Iran. \u201cThey\u2019re a very capable enemy,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201cThey have capabilities that can strike and kill Americans.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He added, \u201cIt could be a variety of enablers, like missile defense and others, so we\u2019re looking at that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Norwegian military has revealed that Washington has pulled some 3,000 troops out of war games dubbed \u201cCold Response\u201d that are scheduled from March 2 to March 18, citing the need to shift forces toward the conflict with Iran. The biannual exercise, which includes Norwegian forces as well as soldiers from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Latvia, Finland and Sweden, is aimed at preparing for war against Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Pentagon has already sent 4,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division into the region as well as deploying to the Persian Gulf 2,000 Marines aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan. This has been joined by the repositioning of a bomber strike force consisting of six B-52 heavy bombers to the US military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, a British colonial possession that is within striking distance of Iran but beyond the range of Iran\u2019s longest-range missiles.<\/span><\/p>\n

President Donald Trump said that the January 8 Iranian missile strike, which hit the Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq\u2019s Anbar province and a second base at the Erbil airport in Iraqi Kurdistan without killing or wounding a single American, was a sign that Tehran was \u201cstanding down.\u201d He responded by announcing a new round of draconian economic sanctions and demanding that Washington\u2019s NATO allies become more involved in the campaign against Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand, this approach was designed to intensify US imperialism\u2019s \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d campaign against Iran, an effective economic blockade tantamount to war, and to enlist Washington\u2019s erstwhile allies in Europe to ratchet up pressure on Tehran.<\/span><\/p>\n

The governments of the UK, France and Germany\u2014spurred on by fears of US military action as well as economic blackmail in the form of a threatened 25 percent tariff on automobile exports\u2014fell into line this week, threatening to reimpose United Nations sanctions against Iran that were ostensibly lifted as part of Tehran\u2019s 2015 agreement with the major powers to accept limits on its civil nuclear program in exchange for normalization of economic relations. In the face of the three European powers\u2019 failure to counter the sanctions regime imposed by Washington after Trump unilaterally abrogated the nuclear accord in May of 2018, Tehran has progressively reduced its commitments under the accord. President Hassan Rouhani stated on Thursday that Iran is now enriching more uranium than before signing the 2015 agreement.<\/span><\/p>\n

US imperialism seeks to exploit this gang-up against Iran to compel the country\u2019s Shia cleric-led bourgeois nationalist government to capitulate and accept a new \u201cTrump deal.\u201d This would entail not only effectively ending Iran\u2019s nuclear program, but also disarming the country by scrapping its ballistic missiles and rolling back its influence throughout the Middle East. Washington and its allies are calculating that they can manipulate divisions within Iran\u2019s ruling establishment and, above all, the Iranian bourgeoisie\u2019s fears of a social revolt from below, to force Tehran to capitulate.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, however, the Pentagon is actively preparing for the escalation of a war that has already been initiated with the murder of Suleimani together with nine other Iranians and Iraqis at Baghdad\u2019s international airport, a killing spree that constituted both an act of war and a war crime.<\/span><\/p>\n

It has since been revealed that the killing of Suleimani had been adopted as US policy last June, following the Iranian downing of an American spy drone over the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Trump\u2019s order to execute this policy following the storming of the US embassy in Baghdad by Iraqi protesters, however, caught the US military unprepared for an uncontrolled spiral of retaliations and counter-retaliations. The latest deployments indicate that preparations for all-out conflict are now well underway.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether achieved through \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d or all-out war, US imperialism\u2019s aims are the same: the imposition of a pliant puppet regime in a geostrategically critical country that links Europe and Asia, commands the crucial \u201cchoke point\u201d of the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world\u2019s traded oil flows, and possesses the world\u2019s fourth-largest proven reserves of oil and second-largest of natural gas. The conquest of Iran is viewed by Washington as an indispensable strategic preparation for direct conflict with its \u201cgreat power\u201d rivals, China and Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

The extent to which US imperialism is prepared to go to achieve this aim was indicated in a chilling article by longtime military analyst William Arkin published this week by Newsweek<\/em> titled \u201cWith New Weapon in Donald Trump\u2019s Hands, the Iran Crisis Risks Going Nuclear.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Arkin cites previously classified information that in 2016, before Trump\u2019s inauguration, the US military carried out an exercise dubbed \u201cGlobal Thunder 17\u201d that simulated a US nuclear response against Iran in retaliation for the sinking of an American aircraft carrier and the use of chemical weapons against US troops. He cites a government contractor who helped write the war scenario as saying that it was chosen because it \u201callowed the greatest integration of nuclear weapons, conventional military, missile defense, cyber, and space into what nuclear strategists call \u201821st Century deterrence.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Since those war games, Arkin writes, the Pentagon \u201chas deployed a new nuclear weapon which increases the prospects for nuclear war. The new nuclear weapon, called the W76\u20132, is a \u2018low yield\u2019 missile warhead intended for exactly the type of Iran scenario that played out in the last days of the Obama administration.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

These weapons, deliverable by Trident II missiles fired from submarines, are considered a more \u201ccredible deterrent\u201d because they are more \u201cusable\u201d than larger warheads.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs the current nuclear war plans are written,\u201d Arkin warns, \u201cthe use of such a weapon could also be justified almost Hiroshima-like, as a shocking thunderclap to forestall a wider and theoretically more destructive all-out war.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Arkin\u2019s article cites four unnamed senior military officers as expressing concern over a \u201cDonald Trump\u201d factor, i.e., \u201cthat there is something about this president and the new weapons that makes contemplating crossing the nuclear threshold a unique danger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The reality is that the doctrine providing for a \u201cpreemptive\u201d nuclear strike against Iran was inherited by the Trump administration from the Democratic administration of Obama. The criminality of US imperialism, expressed in the Suleimani assassination and on a far wider scale in the threat of a \u201cpreemptive\u201d nuclear strike against Iran, is a measure of the crisis of US imperialism, which is driven to offset the decline of its global hegemony by a resort to devastating military force.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With little publicity and in spite of the apparent easing of tensions, Washington continues its military build-up in the region. Is it preparing for full-scale war? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,58,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Behind_The_News","category-Current_Affairs","category-Iran"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200988"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200991,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200988\/revisions\/200991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}