Update [2005-6-21 18:15:4 by susanhu]: Scott Ritter is on Tucker Carlson’s show on MSNBC now.

Just as the war against Iraq had already begun by early summer 2002, so has the war against Iran begun. It’s begun by “conditioning” the public, thanks to what Ray McGovern calls a “domesticated” media. It’s begun by what Scott Ritter alleges are Bush-ordered “covert offensive operations inside Iran.”

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.


It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.


Although Ritter doesn’t explain, I assume he’s referring to the spate of deadly bombings before Iran’s national elections last week.


Ritter admonishes us not to be solely fixated on the failures of Iraq that are now history, but to look forward to what will happen next … and he warns us not to overlook the strategic importance of Azerbaijan. Rumsfeld hasn’t. Nor has journalist Chris Floyd … Below:

Winter Patriot notes:

From Chris Floyd’s Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation:

More than two years ago, we wrote here of a secret Pentagon plan to foment terrorism: sending covert agents to infiltrate terrorist groups and goad them into action – i.e., committing acts of murder and destruction. The purpose was two-fold: first, to bring the terrorist groups into the open, where they could be counterattacked; and second, to justify U.S. military attacks on the countries where the terrorists were operating – attacks which, in the Pentagon’s words, would put those nations’ “sovereignty at risk.” It was a plan that countenanced – indeed, encouraged – the deliberate murder of innocent people and the imposition of U.S. military rule anywhere in the world that American leaders desired.

This plan is now being activated.

There’s more from Chris Floyd here.

In his June 20 column in Al-Jazeera, Ritter points to the U.S. military build-up in Azebjaijan:

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usTo the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.


Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s interest in Azerbaijan may have escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan’s role in the upcoming war with Iran.


The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.


But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.


In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.


No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Arab Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.


A much shorter route to Tehran now exists – the coastal highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.


US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.


Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and ground power in Azerbaijan.


Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003. …


Map courtesy of BBC News Country Profile of Azerbaijan.


“Most Americans [and] the mainstream American media,” writes Ritter, “are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.”

We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.