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Escalation of the covert US-Israeli campaign against Tehran risks a global storm. Opposition has to get more serious ››read more

Bolton and RajavisWhile the media credits “the Israelis” in the assassinations of Iranian scientists, the reality is that no Israeli (or American) intelligence officer could possibly operate effectively inside Iran to carry out a killing. The assassinations, which are acts of war, have actually been carried out by followers of the dissident Iranian Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), the separatist Baluch Jundallah, and the Kurdish PJAK, all acting under direction from American and Israeli intelligence officers. The MEK’s role in doing the CIA’s and Mossad’s dirty work is one reason so many neoconservatives and national security experts have been calling for the group to be removed from the U.S. terrorist group list. ››read more

Two decades ago I picked up an in-house magazine for the arms industry. Its editorial was headed "Thank God For Saddam". It explained that, since the collapse of communism and end of the cold war, the order books of the arms industry had been empty. But now there was a new enemy, the industry could look forward to a bonanza. The invasion of Iraq was built around a lie: Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, but the defence industry needed an enemy, and the politicians duly supplied one.

And now the same war drums, encouraged by the storming of the British embassy last week, are beating for an attack on Iran. Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker: "All of the low enriched uranium now known to be produced inside Iran is accounted for." The recent IAEA report which provoked such outcry against Iran's nuclear ambitions, he continues, contains nothing that proves that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

In the 14th century it was the church that lived in symbiosis with the military. Nowadays it is the politicians. The US government spent a staggering $687bn on "defence" in 2010. Think what could be done with that money if it were put into hospitals, schools or to pay off foreclosed mortgages. ››read more

LONDON: EU sanctions on Iran's oil exports will hurt European refiners which rely on crude from the Islamic republic to help power ailing economies such as Greece, Italy and Spain, according to analysts. ››read more