Keffiyeh-wearers were out in force at a talk by anti-war academic Michel Chossudovsky on Tuesday. The talk centered on America’s purported plan to attack Iran, a move that would open another front in what he termed “the Middle East war.”

“The anti-war movement tends to view this region in terms of several war theatres.” In reality, Chossudovsky claimed, “It involves sequential military operations planned in advance.”

America and its ally, Britain, have their eyes set on the region’s oil, and the aim of Western corporations, he said, is the “confiscation through privatization of the oil wealth of Muslim countries,” and the transformation of these countries into territories.

Chossudovsky, an economics professor at the University of Ottawa, is a leading anti-war voice in Canada and one of the brains behind GlobalResearch.ca, an anti-globalization think-tank.

He bragged about being the first to challenge the accepted view that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks, which he did in an article published on Sept. 12, 2001.

“Al Qaeda and bin Laden are constructs of U.S. intelligence,” he said Tuesday.

Chossudovsky also showed a redrawn map of the region meant to present the West’s plans for Middle East transformation (see picture). States such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia would be dismembered. Iraq would be splintered into Kurdistan, Sunni Iraq, and an Arab Shia State. Parts of Saudi Arabia would be gobbled up by Jordan. Pakistan and Lebanon would also change shape, and a clutch of new statelets, such as Free Baluchistan and the Islamic Sacred State would also appear.

The hottest speculation was that America is contemplating a “Shock and Awe Blitzkrieg,” as Chossudovsky put it, a bombing campaign code-named TIRANNT (Target Iran Near Term) that the Pentagon is said to be planning, which could unfold sometime between now and the end of April.

Even worse, “The U.S. is now contemplating developing tactical nuclear weapons for use in the Middle East,” Chokussovsky warned. These would be designed to explode underground.

“We are at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in history,” Chossudovsky proclaimed. “It threatens the future of humanity.”