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TechnoratiIraq, Israel, Iran
When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's article on the Israel Lobby appeared in the London Review of Books, after having been commissioned and killed by the Atlantic Monthly, neoconservative publicists launched an all-out campaign to slander the authors as anti-Semites. Now that their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has appeared--a work of considerable scope, carefully documented, and not just an expanded version of the article--the imputation of anti-Semitism will doubtless be repeated more sparingly for readers lower down the educational ladder. Meanwhile, the literate establishment press will (a) ignore it, (b) pretend that it says nothing new or surprising, and (c) rule out the probable inferences from the data, on the ground that the very meaning of the word "lobby" is elusive.
The truth is that many new facts are in this book, and many surprising facts. By reconstructing a trail of meetings and public statements in 2001-2002, for example, the authors show that much of the leadership of Israel was puzzled at first by the boyish enthusiasm for a war on Iraq among their neoconservative allies. Why Iraq? they asked. Why now? They would appear to have obtained assurances, however, that once the "regime change" in Iraq was accomplished, the next war would be against Iran.
A notable pilgrimage followed. One by one they lined up, Netanyahu, Sharon, Peres, and Barak, writing op-eds and issuing flaming warnings to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was a menace of world-historical magnitude. Suddenly the message was that any delay of the president's plan to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq would be seized on by "the terrorists" as a sign of weakness. Regarding the correct treatment of terrorists, as also regarding the avoidance of weakness, Americans look to Israelis as mentors in a class by themselves.
So a war projected years before by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz--a war secured at last by the fixing of the facts around the policy at the Office of the Vice President--was allowed to borrow some prestige at an intermediate stage by the consent of a few well-regarded Israeli politicians. Yet their target of choice had been Iran. They accepted the change of sequence without outward signs of doubt, possibly owing to their acquaintance with the Middle East doctrine espoused by the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--a doctrine which held that to create a viable order after the fall of Iraq, regime change in Iran and Syria would have to follow expeditiously.
To sum up this part: the evidence of Mearsheimer and Walt suggests that Israel was never the prime mover of the Iraq war. Rather, once the Cheney-Wolfowitz design was in place, the Israeli ministers who trooped through American opinion pages and news-talk shows did what they could to heat up the war fever. This war was on the cards before they threw in their lot with Cheney and Bush; by their efforts they merely helped to confer on the plan an aura of legitimacy and worldly wisdom.
But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno, it threatens "to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has "authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." Those words come close to saying not that a war is coming but that it is already here. No lawmaker who reads them can affect the slightest shock at any action the president takes against Iran.
Admittedly, it was a showdown speech, reckless and belligerent, to a soldier audience; but then, this has been just the sort of crowd and message that Cheney and Bush favor when they are about to open a new round of killings. And in a sense, the Senate had given the president his cue when it approved, by a vote of 97-0, the July 11 Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran. It is hardly an accident that the president and his favorite tame senator concurred in their choice of the word "confront." The pretext for the Lieberman amendment, as for the president's order, was the discovery of caches of weapons alleged to belong to Iran, the capture of Iranian advisers said to be operating against American troops, and the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources--claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified. Still, the vote was 97-0. If few Americans took notice, the government of Iran surely did.
That unanimous vote was the latest in a series of capitulations that has included the apparent end of resistance by Nancy Pelosi to the next war. After the election of 2006, the speaker of the house declared her intention to enact into law a requirement that this president seek separate authorization for a war against Iran. On the point of doing so, she addressed the AIPAC convention, and was booed for criticizing the escalation of the Iraq war. Pelosi took the hint, shelved her authorization plan, and went with AIPAC against the anti-war base of the Democratic party.
This much, one might know without the help of Mearsheimer and Walt. But without their record, how many would trace the connection between the removal of Philip Zelikow as policy counselor of the state department, at the end of 2006, and a speech Zelikow had given in September 2006 urging serious negotiation and a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine? The ousting of Zelikow was a blessing to the war party, since it freed them from a skeptical confidant of Secretary of State Rice--perhaps the only person of stature anywhere near the administration whom she treated as an ally and friend. And the meaning of the change was clear when Zelikow's replacement turned out to be Eliot Cohen: a neoconservative war scholar and enthusiast, an early booster of the "surge" on the pundit shows, and incidentally a shameless slanderer of Mearsheimer-Walt ("Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," Washington Post, April 5, 2006).
From Zelikow to Cohen was only a step on the long path of humiliation that now stretched before Condoleeza Rice. When, in March 2007, amid suggestions of a renewal of diplomacy, she intimated that talks might be helpful in dealing with the Hamas-Fatah unity government (whose formation the Arab world had greeted as offering a promise of peace), she was demolished by an AIPAC-backed advisory letter bearing the signatures of 79 senators, which directed her not to speak with a government that had not yet recognized Israel. From that moment Rice was effectively neutralized.
The hottest cries for another war have been coming this summer from Joe Lieberman. He has called for attacks on Iran, and for attacks on Syria. It is as if Lieberman, with his appetite for multiple theaters of conflict, spoke from the congealed memory of all the wars he never fought. But Joe Lieberman is a stalking-horse. He would not say these things without getting permission from Vice President Cheney, a close and admired friend. Nor would Cheney permit a high-profile lawmaker whom he partly controls to set the United States and Israel on so perilous a course unless he had ascertained its acceptability to Ehud Olmert.
Yet the chief orchestrater of the second neoconservative war of aggression is Elliott Abrams. Convicted for deceptions around Iran-Contra, as Lewis Libby was convicted for deceptions stemming from Iraq--and pardoned by the elder Bush just as Libby had his sentence commuted by the younger--Abrams now presides over the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. All of the wildness of this astonishing functionary and all his reckless love of subversion will be required to pump up the "imminent danger" of Iran. For here, as with Iraq, the danger can only be made to look imminent by manipulation and forgery. On all sober estimates, Iran is several months from mastering the nuclear cycle, and several years from producing a weapon. Whereas Israel for decades has been in possession of a substantial nuclear arsenal.
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.
Among many possible lines of inquiry, the senators might begin by recognizing that the United States has other allies in Asia besides Israel. One of those allies is India; and there is a further point of resemblance. In a distinct exception to our anti-proliferation policy, we have allowed India to develop nuclear weapons; just as, in an earlier such exception, we allowed Israel to do the same. But suppose we read tomorrow a statement by the director of the South Asia desk of the National Security Council which declared: "There can be no doubt that Hindus are to stand apart from any nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Hindu to be apart--except in India--from the rest of the population." Suppose, further, we knew this man still held these beliefs at a time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan; and that he had recently channeled 86 million dollars to regional gangs and militias bent on increasing the tension. Would we not conclude that something in our counsels of state had gone seriously out of joint?
The Mearsheimer-Walt study of American policy deserves to be widely read and discussed. It could not be more timely. If the speeches and saber-rattling by the president, the ambassador to Iraq, and several army officers mean anything, they mean that Cheney and Abrams are preparing to do to Iran what Cheney and Wolfowitz did to Iraq. They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran. Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen.
David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale. He has written on politics and culture for The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.
© 2007 Huffington Post
27 Comments so far
Show AllIranians are not Arabs people. Majority of Iranians are Persian and speak Persian/Farsi. Ughhh this gets so annoying. I had to explain the same things after 911 that Afghans are not Arabs. Not only can't Americans find these countries on the map they don't even know who the hell they are attacking.
wangman:
"JConrad, are you not reading your whole history book? Nasser might have radicalized a bunch of Egyptians who disavowed western cultural influence (they were also against Egypt being a colonial subservient before that), but it was the CIA who actively backed those same people once they became radicalized in the hopes of overthrowing the Soviet backed Egypt."
We are on the same page. The CIA has been at work in Egypt for a long time. I was making a long story short and a generalized point. As we know, the CIA was also involved with Bin Laden in Afghanistan which included ex-patriot radical Arabs. Many think 9/11 was an inside job to justify the invasion of Afghanistan Iraq. Who knows ? But we can be sure it all comes down to oil and money from the arms trade.
The process we are talking about is called "Blowback". The unintended (or intended) consequences of covert American foreign policy.For a great history by an ex-CIA man, read Chalmers Johnson's trilogy, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis.
It would be hard to prove, but I have often suspected that other than doing the dirty work of American corporations abroad, the CIA also deliberately destabilizes parts of the world so there is war which then feeds the military industrial Congressional complex who then often arms both sides...etc.
And the taxpayer foots the bill.
let's not forget that the term "terrorist" was first introduced into the world via a conference held in jerusalem and hosted by Netanyahu in 1972. georgie the daddy was there representing the cia as were an impressive host of others.
we see the attitude towards the arabs was a mature mindset even then and from that time onwards we have seen through the various administrations the enactment of that policy.
americans need to finally understand that their country has become merchants of death and decay and the purveyors of so much evil in the world that they now threaten the very continuance of life in this world. on so many levels, not just the israeli thing.
allowing the jews to occupy the then exterminate the palestinians suggest the policy is even older than that and one wonders who drives that - the Illuminati, nwo, whoever.
the fact remains that there is this outstanding injustice gone unheard, that of the palestinians, to the benefit of of jews. they continue to bargain in bad faith, steal land, water and think nothing of sending a few of the boys into an arab neighborhood to kill a few arabs.
settlers constantly taunt the arabs who do have have machine guns in hand.
the jews are building walls all over the place that do not invoke the emotions of the holocaust but rather are the proud children of the hoocaust. the jews ought to know better, ought to be ashamed.
the problem, on the other hand, with the arabs is that they appear to hate each other more than they hate the jews.
if the americans bomb iran they are opening a door that could easily bite them in the ass and if they fall i think it would be safe to say that the arabs would then kill every jew within 3 thousand miles of tel aviv, and really, who could blame them?
the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources–claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified
Well, since the American media and all the Very Serious People have swallowed the lie that Ahmenidjad said Israel should "be wiped off the map" - debunked by Juan Cole at the time - this should hardly be a surprise.
But I suppose, as with both Iraq wars, we can rely on the media and the lawmakers two or three years after the nuclear strikes on Tehran to wake up and say "HEY! Waitaminnit! We were LIED TO! Well! We won't let THAT happen again, nossiree!"
To read more see this link:
http://www.alternet.org/story/47921
Larisa Alexandrovna, Raw Story. Posted February 12, 2007
The motivations for an Iran strike were laid out as far back as 1992. In classified defense planning guidance -- written for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney by then-Pentagon staffers I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, World Bank Chief Paul Wolfowitz, and ambassador-nominee to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad -- Cheney's aides called for the United States to assume the position of lone superpower and act preemptively to prevent the emergence of even regional competitors. The draft document was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post and caused an uproar among Democrats and many in George H. W. Bush's Administration.
In September 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) issued a report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," which espoused similar positions to the 1992 draft and became the basis for the Bush-Cheney Administration's foreign policy. Libby and Wolfowitz were among the participants in this new report; Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent figures in the Bush administration were PNAC members.
The Arabs definitly are not for a war with Iran. However, Israel wants them to be. See this article from the Jerusalem Post:
http://tinyurl.com/2jfcge
After Israel destroys Iran they will march on to Damascus until the whole region is balkanized and looks like this:
http://tinyurl.com/2ce5yk
The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution just put out a report stating that Iraq should be split into 3 states calling it a "soft partition" http://tinyurl.com/3eyh25 . This was always the plan from the get-go.
About Haim Saban the founder of the Saban Center:
Haim Saban is an Israeli-American media-mogul, one of the biggest contributors to the campaigns of pro-Israel politicans in the U.S. and has been described by a New York Times reporter as a "tireless cheerleader for Israel." He has also founded various centers and institutions to produce policy research favorable to Israel. He is a financial donor and founder of the Saban Institute for the Study of the American Political System at the University of Tel Aviv. He is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Brookings Institution. In 2002 he pledged $13 million to found the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution." Saban was one of the major contributors to the former California governor Gray Davis, and in return Davis appointed him to the board of regents of the University of California. However, more recently, Saban, along with Steven Spielberg, have shifted their loyalties to Arnold Schwarzenegger after the new California governor's unequivocal support for Israel's latest invasion of Lebanon. [6]
Earlier, similar contributions had earned Saban rewards from the Clinton administration:
The month this report was released, Saban co-hosted a $3.5 million fundraiser for the Democrats with producer-director Rob Reiner (No. 371, $161,300), Warner Brothers President Alan Horn (No. 139, $290,750), and grocery magnate Ron Burkle (No. 102, $330,000). George W. Bush blasted his opponent for accepting contributions from an industry he had criticized; Gore insisted he was willing to take a stand against his financial supporters. Saban's generosity did not go unrewarded. During the Bill Clinton administration, the entertainment executive served on the President's Export Council, advising the White House on trade issues. He also took an unusual pride in being a top contributor. When Saban learned that another donor had topped his contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee by a quarter-million dollars, he immediately sent the DCCC a check for $250,000, with a $1 bill attached to it. 'I hope this guy doesn't find out,' Saban told the Washington Post. 'He may send another two dollars.'
According to Ha'aretz reporter Ari Shavit:
Since he lost the hold he had in the White House through his good friends Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and the Saban Forum have become his levers of influence on political Washington and on Jerusalem...the ability of the colorful Israeli-American billionaire to bring together Ariel Sharon and Bill Clinton, Shimon Peres and Henry Kissinger, Tzipi Livni and Condoleezza Rice has become one of the achievements of which he is proud.[7]
(From SourceWatch.org)
Madhoosier:"Bush's co-elitists, the Saudi Royals, desperately need Bush to bomb Iran back to the Bronze Age because Bush's Iraqi adventure has gone to hell in a hand cart, but Iran happens to be a client state of both China and Russia."
Where do people get this from? Saudi Arabia nor any other Arab Nation wants another War. That's Israel and America's goal.
I worked for Egypt and United Arab Emirates at the time of Iraq's invasion into Kuwait. The only country in the region to volunteer to join Bush 1st was Egypt. All the other Arab nations wanted to handel it themselves without the aid of the West. Saudi Arabia did not push for America to enter into, it took from August 6 1990 to October for them to be "persuaded" to let us use their country to house our military. Saudi Arabia (by no means a perfect country) seems to be everyones, both left and rights escape goat.
If we had let the Arab's handel it the way they wanted to, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now. Also, Osama bin Laden would not be raging this vendetta. Remember he was our man at the time.
"We also give $Billions in aid every year to Egypt which essentially created Al Qaeda through the brutal oppression of Islamic traditionalists. The early conservative Islamic cultural movement in Egypt was not violent but soon became radicalized before moving to other regions in a new form."
JConrad, are you not reading your whole history book? Nasser might have radicalized a bunch of egyptians who disavowed western cultural influence (they were also against Egypt being a colonial subservient before that), but it was the CIA who actively backed those same people once they became radicalized in the hopes of overthrowing the Soviet backed Egypt. And of course, all those radicals came to the call of the CIA (via its Saudi proxy) in its fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Anyway, the whole sway of the lobby is that it lobbies for what it thinks is good for Israel, not whether they get their direct marching orders from Israel or Israel giving direct orders to Congress. Israel's interest and what the lobby's perception of what's good for Israel are not in lock step, sometimes differing by quite a bit, but rarely in contradiction of each other. Israel might want regime change in Iran, but the neocons wants regime change in Iraq as a first step in a domino effect of regime changes in the ME, including Iran. So their interest are similar enough that Israel can live with it. Look at Christian Zionists, they think what's good for Israel is the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the greater Israel, at which point Armageddon comes and the Jews convert or dies. Israel probably think those guys are crackpots, but as long as step one is of mutual interest, they'll play along with them.
Oh yes, and this disinformation offensive is being launched in preparation for the coming 'regime change' -- the coming administration of War-mongering Democrats will take over the bungled job that The Idiot Prince George started and finish it with the resolve, competence and the expert advice of their own coterie of Israeli agents. It is clear that the goys from Texas will have to take the big blame without a whimper of protest. You wonder, though, how many Mossad agents have successfully trolled for Senators and Congressmen in airport toilets.
This article is part of a dis-information campaign to distance the dominant role of the Israeli government in bringing the US to invade Iraq by blaming the crazy 'Neocons' and implying that the Neocon tail wags both the Israeli and American dogs. This is nonsense. When it comes to policy in the Middle East, the Israeli government has infiltrated the American political and decision making structure to such an extent that it is difficult to separate them. This issue is not lost on the American military brass which is resisting the push to attack Iran. Only the overwhelming and deeply embedded influence of the Israeli government in the US can explain the almost unanimous vote by Congress and the Senate on every pro-Israel legislation - legislation which is, at times, written by AIPAC functionaries. Don't forget, that big cabbage on life-support, Ariel Sharon, bragged that he had Bush mesmerized around his little finger.
The name of the game now for the Israeli government is 'plausible deniability' for a policy which may have negative repercussions among the American public - as the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But it is a 'job well done' for Israel's agents in the administration. The destruction and dismemberment of Iraq has been a wild success for Israeli decision makers who view regional hegemony as a primary policy goal and the ripping apart of any potentially strong adversary as a necessary means. So the Neo-Cons take the 'blame' for the push for war against Iraq and a few will retire in 'disgrace' to their villas in Provence (like Richard Perle) or drop back into the obscurity of the reactionary think tanks or university departments. Don't buy it. Israel was a prime mover for this war. They did not just 'come on board after the decision was made by Bush' as many liberal Zionists would have you believe.
As for Lieberman. He is not Dick Cheney's puppet. He takes his marching orders from Tel Aviv. Only days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Lieberman called for the US to attack Iraq, Iran and Syria!
It all would be an amusing political thriller for some novelist were it not for the unimaginable misery this policy has unleashed.
I agree that the USA should not take sides in the Arab-Israel conflict. I agree that AIPAC is a harmful influence. And I agree with Mearsheimer and Walt that the alliance with Israel is against the US national interest. But the David Bromwich is being unfair when he ascribes a politically sinister meaning to the following words of Elliott Abrams: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except in Israel–from the rest of the population."
Those words are simply the truth, from a Jewish perspective. It is part of the essence of the Jewish religion that Jews are enjoined to maintain an identity distinct from the populations they live amongst. It is part of what it means to be Jewish. Virtually all Jews who take their religion seriously will agree that Jews must "stand apart", as Abrams put it. Circumcision, head-covering, dietary laws, observance of the Sabbath, the prohibition on marrying outside the Jewish community - all these are deeply-rooted aspects of the Jewish religion which add up to an injunction to Jews to maintain a distinct collective identity as Jews, wherever they live. There is nothing particularly sinister about that, politically. Bromwich seems to be confusing the Jewish religion with loyalty to the State of Israel. He seems to think that the religious injunction to maintain a separate collective identity is the same as an injunction to be loyal to the State of Israel. That is not a correct understanding of the Jewish religion. Certainly there are many Jews, in Israel and outside of it, who are loyal to the State of Israel. But there are also many intensely religious Jews who reject Zionism and reject the idea that Jews should be loyal to the State of Israel more than to the states they live in. Abrams may or may not be loyal to the State of Israel, but nothing in the quote Bromwich has given indicates that he is.
Mark Marshall
Toronto
Scott Ritter on Israel and Iran. A discussion about his book "Target Iran".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O125hGt9qt4
Revolution, Problem is try to start one and the turd's will kill you.
Representative democracy is what got us into this mess. Direct democracy can keep us out of them.
The average member of Congress or Presidential candidate is more afraid of offending Israeli interests than they are of stepping on the toes of American voters/taxpayers.
Israel has a European standard of living with national health care yet Americans are presently dying for and subsidizing the agenda of Israeli conservatives via $Billions every year in unaccounted for "foreign aid" and weapons effectively creating new enemies for America.
We also give $Billions in aid every year to Egypt which essentially created Al Qaeda through the brutal oppression of Islamic traditionalists. The early conservative Islamic cultural movement in Egypt was not violent but soon became radicalized before moving to other regions in a new form.
Add the military industrial complex and Big Oil and you have a cornerstone of American foreign policy.
There must be a better way, and opening up an honest dialogue is the beginning.
Aaaah yes!
Do something - Don't just Blog and whine !
David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale and I hope the man has tenure cause Dershowitz and the ADL will send their attack dogs on him otherwise! Glad he spoke out more of us need too right now before its too late!
The US has been doing Israel bidding for years, if you don`t know that your living in a closet.
kwais66
Are you the dumb doctor who took the hippocrates oath or the idiot from NY who is a hypocrite ?
No amount of bitching would hide what is obvious when seen without blinders.
take it easy. It is only a fricking article and a view point. You do not have to become an antigentile.
"They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran. Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen."
It can't happen here.
The NeoCon doctrine of a New American Century requires that the United States prevent any other nation from obtaining enough power to challenge American hegemony and both China, with their massive economic growth and Russia, with their vast energy resources, are both poised to counter America as the world's only superpower in the next decade.
Bush's co-elitists, the Saudi Royals, desperately need Bush to bomb Iran back to the Bronze Age because Bush's Iraqi adventure has gone to hell in a hand cart, but Iran happens to be a client state of both China and Russia. An attack on Iran is also a priority of AIPAC as factions in Israel consider Iran "an existential threat" and the End Times Bush followers want an attack on Iran to hasten the Rapture.
Am I the only person who's picked up a recent media meme on how China is poisoning our pets, our seafood and our kids? Does anybody think that President Bush is frantically trying to place anti-missile missiles in Poland to stop an Iranian missile that's not yet been built and the Iranian nuclear warhead to place atop that missile is 10 years from being miniaturized?
China, since they hold vast quantities of dollars, could retaliate by destroying the dollar if the U.S. decides to take out Iran, but by attacking China Bush could forfeit on that debt and save the dollar
The depraved President Bush knows that the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons are the largest on the planet, and due to some questionable opinions published a while back in Foreign Affairs it's possible that Bush thinks the U.S. could win a nuclear first strike against Russia and China.
http://tinyurl.com/rq3sc
The geography of Iran, with Tehran located 1,000 miles inland from America's Aircraft Carriers makes conventional "shock and awe" logistically difficult, to avoid being trapped in the Persian Gulf American planes would have to fly over more than a thousand miles of enemy territory if launched from the northern Arabian Sea. The closest airfield that the U.S. could use in an attack on Iran, Diego Garcia, is about 3,500 miles from Tehran.
A few hundred cruise missiles tipped with conventional bombs won't provide the type of societal destruction required to keep Iran's Shia from dominating the Middle East. Because the Saudi's require that Iran be decimated, and because genocide will be required to capture the oil fields of Iran, to be "successful" an American attack on Iran will be with nuclear tipped ballistic missiles.
Iran has a fleet of anti-ship cruise missiles capable of blockading the Straits of Hormuz, a thirty seven mile wide passage that a quarter of the world's crude oil flows through every day. Iran's mountainous Persian Gulf shoreline is the perfect terrain to hide these anti-ship missiles. Any attack on Iran must include a way to neutralize these missiles. The only tactic that I am aware of to neutralize these missiles would be to carpet nuke an area the size of Wisconsin along Iran's gulf shore.
I have no doubt that if Bush does launch an attack against Iran and tries to take out Russia and China's nuclear arsenal Bush will also declare a State of Emergency, suspend habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, ban anti-war and anti-Bush protests and implement martial law.
And why is it that some part of my brain is thinking that the massive amounts of depleted uranium that the United States has released in Iraq since 1990 have also served as a real world experiment on the toxic effects of wide spread nuclear war?
It's the Jews that got us into WWII and it's them who will bring us into the next one. I'm sorry to say but these ideas are meritless. This is a Christian nation that votes for war. Iran is the greatest beneficiary of Bush's foreign policy and the ones who are dying are the Israelis and Arabs living in the middle east, not you self-righteous christians playing academic here in America. No question that there are powerful Jews who wanted to fatten their pocket books through this war, or whose zealous ideology wants to see a Greater Israel. But these tired arguments about the Jews are just that, and are in fact anti-Semitic. Call Israel a racist, oppressive state and I can't argue against it. But where is your condemnation of other regimes that exploit, oppress and destroy cultures. Where is your anger against the repression of the Kurds?
Hypocrates.
So perhaps Bromwich, historically a silent coward regarding Zionism and Israel, should attempt to persuade his pals at The New Republic that they've been wrong all along in supporting Israel in the most virulent terms. Fat chance, wouldn't want to offend Marty. But where is the evidence that Israel is calling the shots? Bromwich still doesn't offer any. Instead, he affirms that they did not approve of invading Iraq. Does he think that Cheney wants to invade Iran because he's doing Israel's bidding. Please. Let's focus on ourselves, regarding our crimes and support for Israel's, and let's focus on the atrocity that is the Jewish state. Bromwich doesn't help us out in either case.
If you loved Iraq, you'll go crazy over Iran!!!
The blueprint for the Bush Admin game plan was there for all to see (and still is, although modified to delete Condoleeza's name).
"Rebuilding America's Defenses" – A Summary
Blueprint of the PNAC Plan for U.S. Global Hegemony
this was published by the Project for a New American Century in 1998.
Compare the authors' names with the names of his appointees who drove forces to war in the Bush Admin (including Pentagon office that provide Bush with reasons to attack Iraq.
Welcome to the United States of Israel. The rest of the world already knows. It is the population of the US that is asleep. They are dying for Good's chosen people and still have not realized it. Abrams is a scary dual-citizen traitor. And Lieberman is AIPAC's chief whore.
Dlgreen must be living under a rock in Tel Aviv not to have seen this in the last decade. That megaphone software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool) must be blaring on your computer.
Zoya their new book is very good by the way!
Like I pointed out in a previous discussion; the USA is no longer a representative Democracy. It's about time to start the next revolutionary war to throw out these misfits that have taken control of this nation.