Welcome to the summer of hate

"elements in the US administration are mulling an attack on Iran"

by Pepe Escobar
Global Research, June 1, 2007
Asia Times - 2007-06-02

Forty years ago, the world seemed to be singing in tune. On June 1, 1967, in London, The Beatles released their eighth and arguably most influential album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It marked the beginning of the Summer of Love - which, apart from Jimi Hendrix mesmerizing flower-power children in Monterey, California, also had room for the escalation of the Vietnam War and Israel's lightning victory in the Six-Day War.

Today, we have the sublime Patti Smith singing covers of Hendrix and The Beatles, Iraq instead of Vietnam, and Israel - along with elements in the administration of US President George W Bush - mulling an attack on Iran. Call it the summer of hate.

There was a huge elephant in that Baghdad room where ambassadors from the United States and Iran smashed a 27-year-old iceberg and met this week - and the name of the elephant is Israel. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, expressed hope, on the record, that talks would continue in case the Bush administration admitted its Middle East policy had "failed".

The conservative Iranian paper Jam e Jam - popular among young Iranians - stressed in an editorial that now "it is not possible anymore to oppose our country ... The United States cannot do without Iran, which is the new power in the Middle East."

Over 66-year-old, four-heart-operations Dick Cheney's body, of course. And what about all those expenses - the Stennis and Nimitz floating armadas now "exercising" in the Persian Gulf, the relentless Central Intelligence Agency black ops in Khuzestan and Balochistan to "destabilize" the Iranian government, and reports of the US attempting industrial sabotage of Iran's nuclear program?