The war President

The fact that Barack Obama is currently engaged in six destabilisations the world over, I refuse to call them wars, the White House announced on Wednesday that it was imposing a new round of economic sanctions against Iran, while Obama's second in command, Joe Biden warned that "nothing has been taken off the table" in regard to Washington's response to an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, suggesting the possibility of military strikes against Iran.

In Shona we say "munodei pahuku yemweni?" Assuming it was true that Iran wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador, what has that got to do with the US?

Among the new targets of US sanctions is Mahan Air, Iran's first privately owned airline, which flies to 12 countries. US officials claimed that the airline was involved in "secretly ferrying" members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Washington has seized upon the alleged plot to attempt to terrorise the Americans, issuing a global travel warning against unspecified threats supposedly emanating from Iran while cautioning that attacks within the US itself are also possible.

The supposed terrorist plot was announced to the public by US Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday in Washington. The Justice Department's case involves a wildly unlikely scenario involving a failed Iranian-

American used car dealer from Texas, Manssor Arbabsiar, organising to kill the Saudi envoy.

During Tuesday's press conference, FBI Director Robert Mueller felt compelled to note that the government's case "reads like the pages of a Hollywood script."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented to the Associated Press: "The idea that they would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?"

That is precisely the question raised by the entire affair. It has all the earmarks of the type of conspiracy that has been "made up" by the US government repeatedly in the course of its "global war on terrorism," using covert agents to ensnare hapless individuals in terrorist plots that never existed before US agencies invented it.

In this case, however, the alleged plot has been fashioned to implicate not merely a few individuals, but a nation of 75 million people and its government, setting the stage for a potential war that would prove far more catastrophic than the US interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What evidence Uncle Sam claims to have, while wrapping the case in the mantle of national security secrecy, is of the flimsiest character and none of it indicates direct involvement in or even knowledge of the alleged plot by the Iranian government. Virtually all of it stems from a confession extracted from Arbabsiar, who was described by a former business partner as "sort of a hustler . . . albeit a bit lazy" and "no mastermind." Nonetheless, by Wednesday, US officials, "speaking on condition of anonymity," were claiming that it was "more than likely" that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, knew of the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador. Such involvement was taken for granted by the US corporate media, which has treated the Iranian government as already tried, convicted and waiting for its sentence to be imposed. Well-trained CIA assets such as CNN's Wolf Blitzer have jumped on the case, stressing the most lurid elements of the government's charges, which are accepted as proven.

The media's response only proves that it is organically incapable of learning anything from its reaction to the similarly unproven charges concerning "weapons of mass destruction" that played such a crucial role in paving the way for the war against Iraq. Once again, the establishment media serves as a jingoistic instrument of war propaganda.

One of the details played up in most media reports about the supposed plot to kill the Saudi envoy by planting a bomb in his favourite Washington restaurant is the indifference of the plotters to potentially killing scores of others.

Few of the reports have bothered to accurately quote Justice Department officials, who referred to the bomb plot targeting a "fictional restaurant" because the scheme was invented by the government agents and referred to no real eatery frequented by Mr al-Jubeir. US Attorney Preet Bharara clarified that no explosives were involved and "no one was actually ever in any danger."

The announcement of the supposed assassination conspiracy has provoked a flurry of demands from US politicians for retaliation. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed that the case proved that the "threat posed by Iran becomes more severe every day." She said it had to be met with "crippling pressure on the Iranian regime and its enablers."

Representative Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called the alleged plot an "act of war" and called on the Obama administration to deport any Iranian officials present in the US Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, affirmed that the supposed conspiracy had to involve top levels of the Iranian government. For his part, President Obama called the alleged plot a "flagrant violation of US and international law."

Vice President Biden called it "an outrageous act, where the Iranians will have to be held accountable."

Well, well, who will bell the cat?