Is CENTCOM Commander Fallon standing between us and an attack on Iran?

gareth porter, writing for ips, offers some points of perspective...

• [In] a meeting between Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Dec. 13, 2006 ... the uniformed military leaders rejected a strike against Iran's nuclear programme.

• The Joint Chiefs were soon joined in opposition to a strike on Iran by Admiral William Fallon, who was nominated to become CENTCOM commander in January.

• A source who met with Fallon at the time of his confirmation hearing quoted him as vowing that there would be "no war with Iran" while he was CENTCOM commander and as hinting very strongly that he would quit rather than go along with an attack.

• Fallon also suggested that other military leaders were opposing a strike against Iran, saying, "There are several of us who are trying to put the crazies back in the box," according to the same source.

• The possibility that Fallon might object to an unprovoked attack on Iran or even resign over the issue represents a significant deterrent to such an attack.

so, with heavy senior level military opposition to a strike against iran's nuclear facilities, the purpose and scope of an attack on iran was reframed...

The George W. Bush administration's shift from the military option of a massive strategic attack against Iran to a surgical strike against selected targets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker earlier this month, appears to have been prompted not by new alarm at Iran's role in Iraq but by the explicit opposition of the nation's top military leaders to an unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

porter speculates on where fallon stands in light of the revised strategy...

Fallon is unlikely to refuse to carry out such a limited strike under those circumstances.

is the strategy working...?

After several months of trying to establish specific links between Iraqis suspected of trafficking in weapons to a specific Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard contact, the U.S. command has not claimed a single case of such a link. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. commander for southern Iraq, where most of the Shiite militias operate, admitted in a Jul. 6 briefing that his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran".

we all know what darth wants...

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Today is the World Day of Indigenous People

9 august 2007...

The planet's roughly 350 million indigenous peoples took notable steps on the international stage in the last decade. They got the world's governments to agree to create a body to represent them at the United Nations, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and to appoint a special rapporteur responsible for their human rights. Yet the years 1995-2004, named by the UN as the Indigenous Decade, did not see a significant change in the living conditions of most "tribal", "aboriginal", "native" or "first" peoples. Calling those conditions "precarious", the UN has declared 2005-2014 a second Indigenous Decade. IPS, with its network of contributors at the UN and linked to indigenous communities worldwide, is committed to tracking the world community's efforts to do justice to the rights and aspirations of these peoples.

ips, an outstanding alternative news source that i too often neglect, has a terrific compilation of current articles about native peoples here...

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