by Jeffrey Steinberg

April 24—The U.S. Navy, under orders from President Obama, is scrambling to pre-position sufficient military forces in the Persian Gulf region to launch a full-scale attack on Iran at any time between now and early Autumn. While the U.S. military—led by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey—has made its opposition to any military action against Iran at this time clearly known to the President, his top national security advisors, and to top Israeli government, military, and intelligence officials, senior Pentagon sources confirm that there is no confidence among the top American military brass that the President is paying any attention.

According to one senior Pentagon source, the nightmare fear is that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders an attack by the Israeli Defense Forces against targets in Iran, President Obama will order the U.S. military to "finish the job." These fears are based on three years of experience with this President, and the growing recognition that he is in a reckless "Emperor Nero" frame of mind.

And that is the precise equation that the British Crown circles that own Obama are playing on. While details remain scant, top Democratic Party sources have reported that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in the United States all of last week on a secret assignment for the British Crown—an assignment undoubtedly linked to the war plans against Iran and Syria, which are ultimately being steered out of London. Blair, according to the sources, met with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, other Congressional leaders, with UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and, likely, with Obama.

As was the case with President George W. Bush and the 2003 Iraq invasion, Blair is again playing a critical role, steering Washington into another disastrous war. Except this time around, the prime targets are Russia and China—and the war will be, in all likelihood, a thermonuclear war that could lead to the extinction of humanity.

No sane military commander in the U.S., Russia, or China has any interest in such madness. But President Obama is in a full-blown Narcissist flight-forward, and that is why the danger of a sudden launch of military action in the Persian Gulf cockpit can rapidly escalate into the kind of superpower confrontation that puts humanity in the greatest conceivable peril.

According to several recent news accounts, the U.S. Navy now has as many as 430 Tomahawk missiles forward deployed in the Persian Gulf region. There are now two U.S. aircraft carrier groups—the USS Enterprise and the USS Abraham Lincoln—in the vicinity of the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. And the missile-launch submarine, the USS Georgia, is also in the area. A senior Pentagon official further confirmed to EIR that any attack on Iran ordered by the President will also involve the U.S. Global Strike Forces, including B-2 long-range bombers that can be deployed from the continental United States.

In the range of 60% of the entire U.S. arsenal of nuclear warheads are deployable through the Navy's submarine fleet, which is heavily concentrated in the Persian Gulf and Pacific Ocean regions.

As of May 7, the U.S. and Jordan will be hosting joint maneuvers that will run until the end of the month, involving thousands of soldiers and sailors, and the participation of 17 other countries.

Russia and China have repeatedly warned that the U.S. and NATO deployments, including the unilateral deployment of missile defense systems in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region, pose the threat of a new thermonuclear arms race—and worse.

In response to the growing threat level, Russia and China are tightening their military cooperation, as well as their joint war-avoidance diplomacy. Beginning April 23, the Russian and Chinese navies began the largest-ever joint maneuvers in the Yellow Sea. At the same time, the United States, along with the Philippines, Japan, and Australia are conducting their first-ever joint maneuvers in a contested area in the South China Sea.

Addressing midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made every effort to push back the war clouds. She dismissed the idea that there was any danger of a new Cold War between the United States and China, arguing that trade and diplomatic collaboration between the two powers was so developed that all areas of dispute could and would be resolved through deeper understanding and diplomacy. Unfortunately, her words were drowned out by the behavior of her boss, President Obama.

'Humanitarian' Interventionism on Steroids

On April 23, President Obama used the occasion of a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington to launch his latest and most ambitious assault on the U.S. Constitution and the United Nations Charter. Ignoring the ongoing efforts of UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan to reach a negotiated ceasefire and political reform in Syria, and the recent successful opening round of the P5+1 (UN Security Council Permanent Five plus Germany) negotiations with Iran, Obama announced a new Executive Order, imposing additional sanctions on the two countries, accusing them of conducting cyber-warfare against their own populations in violation of human rights.

Later in the day, top Obama aides Valerie Jarrett and Samantha Power hosted a White House event, initiating the Atrocities Prevention Board, a new National Security Council and Cabinet-wide body that will target foreign governments who are alleged to be planning future "mass atrocities" against their own populations. Obama declared, in his August 2011 Presidential Study Directive 10, that the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide is a "core interest" of the United States. Under the guise of this doctrine, which has been called "R2P" ("Responsibility to Protect"), President Obama is asserting the right to take the United States to war without any consultation or approval by the Congress, in clear violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. In the same light, the President is also asserting that previous notions of national sovereignty, and the barring of preventive war—both core principles of the United Nations Charter—are null and void.

The President is working from a script first spelled out in public in April 1999 by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Chicago. Blair, speaking during the Kosovo War, declared that the world had entered a post-Westphalian and post-national-sovereignty phase, in which the collective authority of the international community could dispose of any government under the guise of "humanitarian interventionism." This is an imperial doctrine as old as the Roman Empire. This is the British Imperial doctrine driving President Obama's national security and foreign policy.

To put it in blunt terms: The President of the United States is asserting the right to wage preventive war—the very crime for which the Nazis were tried and convicted at Nuremberg. In his speech at the Holocaust Museum, and then in a Fact Sheet announcing the establishment of the Atrocities Prevention Board (APB), the President cited the illegal Libya War as the precedent for what will now be an all-agency Executive Branch crusade. Sources close to the White House report that the National Security Council staff who worked on the founding of the APB has already assembled a list of 80 countries that could be on the target list. Without a doubt, both Russia and China are near the top of the list.

The President has already announced that he has ordered the Director of National Intelligence to prepare a first-ever National Intelligence Estimate on the prospects of mass atrocities around the globe.

The APB will convene at least once a month, under the chairmanship of Samantha Power, a George Soros asset, who made her career promoting "humanitarian interventionism" in Africa. Another leading proponent of the R2P doctrine of preventive war and the end of national sovereignty, Derek Chollet, is scheduled to be confirmed later this week as Under Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, a top Pentagon planning post. Chollet is currently at the National Security Council, where he was recently put in charge of the "Plan B" task force plotting a Libya-style foreign military intervention into Syria, to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad government.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned repeatedly in recent days that those who proclaim the Kofi Annan mission a failure are, in fact, attempting to create a fait accompli, by arming the opposition to the Assad government and waging an international propaganda campaign.

Russia has announced the permanent deployment of its naval vessels to the eastern Mediterranean waters off the coast of Syria.

Any provocation by British stooges in Washington or Tel Aviv at this point is a spark that can ignite thermonuclear World War III. The top Pentagon brass has every reason to lose sleep.

The only sane option is the immediate ouster of President Obama by impeachment or by invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Anything less ensures that the British finger remains on the U.S. nuclear war trigger, and that means the potential extinction of all life on this planet.

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by Jeffrey Steinberg http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2012/3917nuke_war_danger_ir_sy.html