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The 0% Doctrine: Obama Breaks New Ground When It Comes to War with Iran
When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice. The tagline was: “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.”
'Obama would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon -- and he would act even if that country were incapable of targeting the United States. That should have been news.'
Those ads came to mind recently when President Obama commented forcefully on war, American-style, in ways that were remarkably radical. Although he was trying to ward off a threatened Israeli preemptive air strike against Iran, his comments should have shocked Americans -- but just about nobody noticed.
I don’t mean, of course, that nobody noticed the president’s statements. Quite the contrary: they were headlined, chewed over in the press and by pundits. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich attacked them. Fox News highlighted their restraint. (“Obama calls for containing Iran, says ‘too much loose talk of war.’”) The Huffington Post highlighted the support for Israel they represented. (“Obama Defends Policies Toward Israel, Fends Off Partisan Critiques.”) Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pushed back against them in a potentially deadly U.S.-Israeli dance that might bring new chaos to the Middle East. But somehow, amid all the headlines, commentary, and analysis, few seemed to notice just what had really changed in our world.
The president had offered a new definition of “aggression” against this country and a new war doctrine to go with it. He would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon -- and he would act even if that country were incapable of targeting the United States. That should have been news.
Consider the most startling of his statements: just before the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, the president gave a 45-minute Oval Office interview to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. A prominent pro-Israeli writer, Goldberg had produced an article in the September issue of that magazine headlined “The Point of No Return.” In it, based on interviews with "roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike," he had given an Israeli air attack on Iran a 50% chance of happening by this July. From the recent interview, here are Obama’s key lines:
“I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff. I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”
Later, he added this chilling note: “I think it's fair to say that the last three years, I've shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct military actions, even when they entail enormous risks.”
The next day, in a speech meant to stop “loose talk about war” in front of a powerful pro-Israeli lobbying outfit, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the president offered an even stronger formula, worth quoting at length. Speaking of seeing the consequences of his decisions to use force “in the eyes of those I meet who’ve come back gravely wounded,” he said:
“And for this reason, as part of my solemn obligation to the American people, I will only use force when the time and circumstances demand it... We all prefer to resolve this issue diplomatically. Having said that, Iran’s leaders should have no doubt about the resolve of the United States -- just as they should not doubt Israel’s sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs. I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power... and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.
“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”
An American president couldn’t come closer to saying that, should American intelligence conclude the Iranians were building a nuclear weapon, we would attack. The next day, again addressing an AIPAC audience, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set the president’s commitment in stone: “No greater threat exists to Israel, to the entire region, and indeed to the United States, than a nuclear-armed Iran... Military action is the last alternative if all else fails, but make no mistake: When all else fails, we will act.”
The Power of Precedents
To understand what’s truly new here, it’s necessary to back up a few years. After all, precedent is a powerful thing and these statements do have a single precedent in the atomic age (though not one the president would profess to admire): the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. After all, one clearly stated reason for the invasion was Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear program as well as one to produce biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
In a series of speeches starting in August 2002, President George W. Bush publicly accused the Iraqi dictator of having an active nuclear program. His vice president hit the news and public affairs talk show circuit with a set of similar accusations, and his secretary of state spoke of the danger of mushroom clouds rising over American cities. (“We do know that [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon... [W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”)
At the same time, the Bush administration made an effort -- now long forgotten -- to convince Congress that the United States was in actual danger of an Iraqi WMD attack, possibly from anthrax, in the immediate future. President Bush suggested publicly that, with unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), Saddam might have the ability to spray East Coast cities with chemical or biological weapons. And Congress was given fear-inducing classified private briefings on this.
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, claimed that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."
Driving the need to produce evidence, however fantastic or fabricated, of a possible threat to the U.S. was a radical new twist on war-making 101. In the days after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed that even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty. Journalist Ron Suskind dubbed it “the one percent doctrine.” It may have been the rashest formula for "preventive" or "aggressive" war offered in the modern era.
Of course, the fact that Saddam’s Iraq had no nuclear program, no biological or chemical weapons, no functioning drones, and no way of reaching the East Coast of the United States proved strike three for critics of the Bush administration. Missed was what was truly new in the invasion: not just the 1% doctrine itself, but the idea -- a first on planet Earth -- of going to war over the possibility that another country might be in possession of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.
Until then, such a concept hadn’t been in the strategic vocabulary. Quite the opposite: in the Cold War years, nuclear weapons were thought of as “deterrence” or, in the case of the two massively nuclear-armed superpowers of that era, “mutually assured destruction” (with its fabulously grim acronym MAD). Those weapons, that is, were considered guarantors, however counterintuitively, against an outbreak of war. Their possession was a kind of grisly assurance that your opponent wouldn’t attack you, lest you both be destroyed.
In that spirit, between the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the Iraqi invasion of March 2003, seven countries -- the Soviet Union, England, France, China, Israel (though its large nuclear arsenal remains unacknowledged), India, and Pakistan -- all went nuclear without anybody suggesting that they be attacked simply for possessing such weapons. An eighth country -- white-ruled South Africa -- actually assembled six nuclear weapons, and later became the only country to de-nuclearize itself. South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, and Brazil all had incipient nuclear programs, though none produced weapons. Japan is today considered to be at a point the Iranians have not yet reached: “breakout capacity,” or the ability to build a nuclear weapon relatively quickly if a decision to do so were made. In 2006, North Korea set off its first nuclear test and, within years, had become the ninth active nuclear power.
In other words, in 2003, the idea that the possession of nuclear weapons or simply of an "active" nuclear program that might one day produce such weapons was a casus belli represented something new. And when it became clear that Saddam had no nuclear program, no weapons of mass destruction at all, that explanation for American war-making, for what Jonathan Schell once dubbed “disarmament wars” -- so visibly fraudulent -- seemed to disappear into the dustbin of history.
War and the Presidential “I”
Until now, that is.
Whether he meant to or not, in his latest version of Iran war policy President Obama has built on the Bush precedent. His represents, however, an even more extreme version, which should perhaps be labeled the 0% Doctrine. In holding off an Israeli strike that may itself be nothing but a bluff, he has defined a future Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon as a new form of aggression against the United States. We would, as the president explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, be committing our military power against Iran not to prevent an attack on the U.S. itself, but a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
And by the way, note that he didn’t say, “We don’t bluff.” His formulation was: “I don’t bluff.” And that “I” should not be ignored. The Bush administration promoted a cult of presidential power, of (as they called it at the time) a “unitary executive.” No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term “Global War on Terror,” but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena they named have only intensified.
The Global War on Terror, with its burgeoning secret military, the elite special operations forces, and its growing drone air force, controlled in part by the CIA, should be thought of as the president’s private war. In addition, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote recently, when it comes to drone assassinations (or “targeted killings” as they are now more politely known), Attorney General Eric Holder has just claimed for the president the “authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation.” In doing so, added Turley, “Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a ‘trust me’ pledge.” With terror in its crosshairs, war, in other words, is increasingly becoming the president’s private preserve and strikes on the enemy, however defined, a matter of his own private judgment.
It is no longer a matter of “we,” but of a presidential “I” when it comes to unleashing attacks in what has become a global free fire zone for those drones and special ops forces. War, in other words, is increasingly lodged in the Oval Office and a commander-in-chief executive. As the Libyan intervention suggested, like the American people, Congress is, at best, an afterthought -- even though this Congress would rubber-stamp a presidential act of war against Iran without a second thought.
The irony is that the president has propounded a war-making policy of unprecedented extremity at a moment when there is no evidence that the Iranians are pursuing a bomb -- not yet at least. The “supreme leader” of their theocratic state has termed the possession of nuclear weapons “a grave sin” and U.S. national intelligence estimates have repeatedly concluded that the Iranians are not, in fact, moving to build nuclear weapons. If, however -- and it’s a giant if -- Iran actually got the bomb, if a 10th country joined the nuclear club (with others to follow), it would be bad news, and the world would be a worse place for it, but not necessarily that greatly changed.
What could change the world in a radical way, however, is the 0% doctrine -- and the trend more generally to make war the personal prerogative of an American president, while ceding to the U.S. military what was once the province and power of diplomacy.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. His other most recent book is The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books). Previous books include: The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
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58 Comments so far
Show AllBrilliant article as usual.
We are living the birth of empire. The republic has fallen. Déjà vu, Pax Americana. In the time of Caesar the republic fell and empire was born. Emperor, decider, unitary executive, supreme leader, dictator, Duce, Führer - what's in a name.
BC refers to Before Christ or Before the Common Era. I always thought of it as meaning Before Caesar. After the assassination of Caesar, once the dust cleared and Augustus became emperor, around the year zero, the whole world changed. The Roman Empire was born. We may be there again. Others have tried and failed.
First the Right of Preemptive Strike (Bush Doctrine). Then the 0% Doctrine (Obama Doctrine) based on perceived intent. How far till the Right to Use 'Tactical' Nuclear Weapons Doctrine based on perceived intent.
Shock and Awe and two months of surgical strikes may not work on a militarily capable Iran. Western capital is exposed all over the region and is indefensible. Sun Tzu says that it takes ten men to defend against one. In our case it may take twenty men to defend against one. We payed for ten men but half that payment went to the alter of capitalism in the form of profit and profiteering.
We have already contaminated Iraq with depleted uranium shells. We are not giving up on nuclear power, even after Fukushima. Time to ask Obama if Nuclear weapons are off the table. Maybe as emperor that is now his decision to make. We may already be across our Rubicon.
This is the death of a thousand cuts. Americans are as helpless as Afghans. Americans don't want another war. All peoples want to live in peace. 'Blessed are the peacemakers'. Somehow the right of self-defense has morphed into right of preemptive justification for all wrongs. It's good to be God!
"We are living the birth of empire."
Hardly. The United States has been an empire almost since its inception, with its constant westward expansion, the Monroe Doctrine, into the pacific and, after WWII, with economic as well as military invasion.
What we are living through now are the death throws of the American Empire. Our military failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are being paralleled by our economic collapse while we watch China, India and Brazil move to overtake us.
It is the end of empire which is most dangerous to the enemies of empire - both abroad and at home, as civil liberties are tossed aside for the illusion of security and the mandates of state control.
Obama is probably the last emperor with no clothes.
Despair fixes nothing.
But one has to acknowledge the reality to fix it.
The USA is presently a repulsively decadent entity.
Ryan sees this in despair and despair does not fix anything.
Identify what brought the USA to such a low point. In history, as with the Romans, the fault often lies openly visible at the often optimistic start of the failing entity. The embedded fault corrupts whatever is good and pure and turns the future like bad milk over time. If we examine the stinking product we can identify the agent that made it. This is one of the major reasons we read history both forwards and backwards.
In this case, blaming Obama or Bush or Reagan or the politics is just blaming the froth. History is structured on the word; on language. Faults usually lie openly in the defining language of the stinking entity. There are many faults in all identities but the really bad ones are always those held beyond question.
The USA's enshrined fault is the popular, unthinking use of the word American. This use is absurd because all people on the Americas are American. For one group to presume ownership of the word over all others on the Americas is typically to assume the position of the Godhead. Ryan 'its good to be God' recognises this reality
This is the heart of the destructive darkness in the USA. US citizens have to fix their language. For example, Califiornians are Californians and they are no more American than Brazilians.
The weakest and most futile as well as the the most typical argument I have heard against this is the question, Well what must we call ourselves then? I suggest US people work it out. It is their problem. It is what has made them into one of the ugliest laughing stocks in the history of humanity. The USA has become a Joseph Kony. The two are after all inspired by the same God and the title Lord's Resistance Army suits the US army to a T. To underemphasise the difference let me say that of the two the USA is the most dangerous and destructive.
Well said. Good points. Thank you for the well thought out response. There is intelligent life on the internet!
*Comment deleted by site administrators for violating our Comment Policy*
see: http://www.commondreams.org/comment-policy
"medmedude"
You are on the wrong track when you focus on a single religion.
Almost all mainstream religions share the same love of greed and domination.
Do you really believe the Saudi's and the Popes have a different agenda?
Well said. The only ideology is 'The Money'.
I don't see any other religion do it save for christianity and judaism right now. And it was the same culprits before the lead up to WW2.
What has who COULD do it have to do with who IS doing it?
Birdbrain you must truly be.
All human institutions of power strive for domination, whether secular or religious. All mainstream religions share one and only one foundational tenet: The Golden Rule.
Medmedue,
Read "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution" by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, particularly the chapter on the evolution of intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465020429/ref=oh_o02_s00_i00_details
The authors don't extrapolate the social consequences of their genetic evidence, but you can and have, without their data.
Basically a small group of people became super smart, but not super ethical and instead became the opposite, super self-centered and opposed to all outside the inner circle. They came to dominate the Empire, along with other very intelligent, super rich, super unethical people.
Bigots of all stripes will tend to see through the most narrow blinders and see only what supports their preconceived bias.
I come from a long line of Ashkenazi Jews, and (though I vociferously disagreed with my parents about Zionism and Israel), the primary lesson I was taught from that tradition was ethical humanism.
What I find to be striking about this article (and this is typical) is the seeming acceptance of the lie that all of this saber rattling is because of possible nuclear weapons.
When Obama said,
"Iran's leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment"
his words hint at the real agenda.
The agenda is not to "contain," but it is to rip the Iranian state open so that corporate interests can gorge themselves on the carcass as it decays from their assault,
just like they are doing in this nation.
As Tom Engelhardt indicates here, it is the same agenda the corporate owned politicians had in Iraq. There is no benefit however if we see these acts of corporate aggression as if they are about what the aggressors want us to believe they are about.
The greatest problem wasn't Bush and Cheney and it isn't Obama. The greatest threat to the world is what their political parties as a whole are about. The greatest threat is what underlies and motivates the vast majority of democrats and republicans.
It is not security.
It is not democracy.
It is not preventing war.
It is the worship of the religion of so-called Free Market Economics above all else.
Yes, there is huge insecurity beneath all of this, but it is the heightening of the feelings of insecurity from which these corporate criminals are benefitting while they terrorize the world.
They will say anything and do ANYTHING for private profits.
There is no good reason to trust anything they say.
They are mechanical voices which have been programmed by their devotion to inhumanity.
Thankyou. I appreciate your post. There is no Iran "threat". None. Only a non-existent one being used to perpetuate war.
On the button Alley!
Why do "liberals" keep supporting this malevolent, anti-democracy asshole? From a socialist perspective I can't see the Republicans as creating any more harm than Obama has (and will). In fact, if Romney were elected at least there might be a vigorous opposition from the Democrats against the most outrageous aspects of his economic, foreign policy and social agenda. Instead, we would have another four years of this monster getting a free pass from the impotent left while implementing most the destructive programs of the demented right.
Yes. I ask these "liberals", many of them dear friends, the same question I asked the Bush robots: "Is there anything this guy could do that would make you finally say, no more; I can support you no more?". The answer, if I get one at all, is ALWAYS in a lesser-or-two-evils format. And so it goes -- this country spirals deeper and deeper into evil.
You don't think this psychopath knows you will always be his pal? Why should he give a rat's ass what the hell you think or want? Y'all justly deserve the moniker "fucking retards".
Better yet - tell your democratic friends they ARE NOT progressives......
No true progressive could vote for this sob in the white house - no more than they could vote for a bush.
Democrats have obviously learned something from the republicans - the ability to change the very definitions of words to the general public.
Aka - a progressive is for Obama.
I tell people who say they are progressive and voting for Obama - YOU are not a progressive -
The dems and the rethugs are now both on the same page with their use of double-speak and the changing and pimping out of Language.
As I've written many times on this site, the one thing Obama has accomplished is to prove that koolaid comes in two colors -- red AND blue.
Just as with alcoholism, you can't TELL someone they are afflicted with koolaidism. They have to ultimately realize it themselves before any positive steps are taken. I feel my question to them opens up the possibility of that resurrection.
During the Time of Dubya, a common technique from "liberals" was to ask the Dubyabots to substitute the other guy's name in some of their rants and ask them to honestly evaluate how they would react. That formula should be used now with the Obamabots.
Substitute "McCain" or "Bush" in statements about Obama and ask how you would react. "McCain today signed a bill authorizing the unlimited right for the President to indefinitely incarcerate ( ... or incinerate ...) American citizens." "Bush escalated the use of drone attacks on Pakistani citizens ..." ... and so on ...
Of course, anyone who casually tosses off the moniker "fucking retards" is almost certainly looking in the mirror.
You're quite right that Obama is just a mirror image of Bush and that no true progressive should have ever supported him. But it's far to cavalier (and "retarded") to dismiss Obama as a "psychopath" - which he in no way approximates. The problem, rather, is that he is far too sane and rational and that he almost perfectly represents what the American character has come to be.
That is become both "conservatives" and "progressives" share the same fundamental philosophy about the American Way of Life - that it is founded on the notion of eternal progress, growth and improvement. That is the ethic of a cancer, not of any sustainable system.
We need, in fact, to stop being "conservative" - desperately trying to hold on to some mythical idea of past greatness - or "progressive" - unflinchingly believing in a new and improved tomorrow.
We have to learn to be regressive - returning to the fundamental principles of balance, harmony and cooperation upon which all life, all species, and all ecosystems are based.
With all due respect, RR, it is far from cavalier to call Obama a psychopath.
The following are from two of the world's most respected analysts of psychotic behavior.
From Hervey Cleckley's ('The Mask of Sanity') checklist:
1. Considerable superficial charm and average or above average intelligence.
2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
3. Absence of anxiety or other "neurotic" symptoms considerable poise, calmness, and verbal facility.
4. Unreliability, disregard for obligations no sense of responsibility, in matters of little and great import.
5.Untruthfulness and insincerity.
6. Antisocial behavior which is inadequately motivated and poorly planned, seeming to stem from an inexplicable impulsiveness.
7.Poor judgment and failure to learn from experience.
8. Pathological egocentricity. Total self-centeredness incapacity for real love and attachment.
9. General poverty ot deep and lasting emotions.
10. Lack of any true insight, inability to see oneself as others do.
"...More often than not, the typical psychopath will seem particularly agreeable and make a distinctly positive impression when he is first encountered. Alert and friendly in his attitude, he is easy to talk with and seems to have a good many genuine interests. There is nothing at all odd or queer about him, and in every respect he tends to embody the concept of a well-adjusted, happy person ... He looks like the real thing."
And from Dr. Hare's ('The Hare Psychopathy Checklist') Checklist:
1. GLIB and SUPERFICIAL CHARM.
2. GRANDIOSE SELF-WORTH.
3. PATHOLOGICAL LYING.
4. CONNING AND MANIPULATIVENESS
5. LACK OF REMORSE OR GUILT
6. SHALLOW AFFECT.
7. CALLOUSNESS and LACK OF EMPATHY
8. LACK OF REALISTIC, LONG-TERM GOALS
9. IRRESPONSIBILITY.
10. FAILURE TO ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR OWN ACTIONS.
... And by the way, Robert -- the "fucking retard" moniker came from Rahm Emanuel.
- No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term “Global War on Terror,” -
(next paragraph)
- The Global War on Terror, with -
Tom, so why do YOU use this term, still?
It was an invention of Bush's marketing team. Obviously, you have bought what they were selling, hook, line and sinker.
Why do you repeat the words that Bush invented in order to sell the insanity of the DAFT war to us?
You still use their terminology because you are conditioned by Bush and programmed by the corporate media?
Baaaaaaa.
You bought into their world-view and you remain there. Instead of that losing paradigm...
Occupy Language!
War-mongers call it the "GWOT".
Peace-mongers should call it as it is, the DAFT war.
locust,
I think you missed his point. He wrote "No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term “Global War on Terror,” but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena they named have only intensified."
The phenomena named by the "GWOT" or the "WOT" have not changed just because Obomber never uses those terms. In fact those phenomena have only intensified. I'm with you on being mindful of the importance of language, but the so-called "War on Terror"--for all its mendacity, is here to stay. Insofar as the left, the right and the center bought into all the many manifest lies of Nine Eleven, they made that inevitable. The mantra that the events of that day "changed everything" was intoned so many times that Americans came to believe it.
Also, one cannot critique this mind-bending and mendacious use of language without uttering the Orwellian terminology. Many (including myself) who have rejected the government's fairy tale story of that day frequently use the terms GWOT and WOT because there is no other way to expose the lies and deception they represent.
Hmmm
The point being made above is that one particular group representing less than 3% of the population has in fact through government fiat control of the finances of the United States and therefore the people of this country. It is not an indictment of the religion but of a system that allows such a tiny minority to have so much control over the rest of the people. It totally destroys the myth of our Republic being a representative Democracy when everyone in government answers not to the people but a small group of like minded people that owe their allegiance to a foreign power. A group that is rewarded for this treason by being showered with money, power and position. It should be noted that most of the individuals listed have something else in common beyond evil, greed, avarice and treason....most of them are also israeli citizens. Given the positions they hold this alone should have disqualified them automatically. This begs the question: Why are they allowed to hold these positions when their actions continually demonstrate their duplicity?
Hear, Hear ! Well and Truly spoken.
While I couldn't agree more that Israeli citizens shouldn't be determining US foreign or domestic policy, or be serving as White House advisers, propagating the fictions of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the wealthy Jews control the world (or America) serves nothing but to distract from the real issues.
"I don't bluff" ---That's a good one. It seems to me he bluffed his way right into the Oval Office. Also, funny how North Korea used to be a "threat" until they actually became a nuclear power. Hmmm...
The charlatan who pompously declaims, "I don't bluff" superciliously presumes that his audience is so gullible or stupid that it won't dawn on them that the phrase is an utterly bogus paradox-- because, likely as not, it's the ultimate bluff.
Presumes or recognizes?
FWIW....
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-09-24-233876745_x.htm
{By his poker buddies' accounts, Obama is careful and focused. He's not easily distracted and doesn't give away his intentions unless it's to his advantage. He's not prone to taking risky chances, preferring to play it safe. But he's also serious and competitive: When he plays, he plays to win.
"It's a fun way for people to relax and share stories and give each other a hard time over friendly competition," Obama said by e-mail. "In Springfield, it was a way to get to know other senators -- including Republicans."
Obama, then a state senator, was a founding member of the group. He became known as a cautious player with a good poker face, someone who paid more attention to the game than to the chatter and laughter that accompanied it.
Obama studied the odds carefully, friends say. If he had strong cards, he'd play. If he didn't, he would fold rather than bet good money on the chance the right card would show up when he needed it.
That reputation meant that he often succeeded when he decided to bluff.
"When Barack stayed in, you pretty much figured he's got a good hand," said Larry Walsh, a former senator.
More than one lawmaker teased Obama about his careful style of play.}
...peace...
Anyone who carefully followed and analyzed candidate Obama during the primaries and the actual election run of 2008 cannot be surprised by the use of "I" by this neo-imperialist. Expect more of the same if he is re-elected this year because he has barred every path of a rational retreat in the Middle East already. Once Caesar escalates as Nixon did in Vietnam, Bush did in Iraq, and Obama did in Afghanistan Caesar cannot admit that it was a mistake for which soldiers and wealth were sacrificed. Caesar can only hold on for "victory" or open a new theater of political and military campaigns.
Call the Office of the President 202-456-1111 and tell them that we are so done with war. Whatever happened to diplomacy? I hope to God that neither the US or Israel are thinking of nuking Iran in order to stop them from allegedly developing a nuclear bomb!!!
and call Congress too!
"It's called dishonest hypocrisy in the civilized world."
You mean like what the zionazis do in Israel?
"It's called dishonest hypocrisy in the civilized world."
Lanista.
Yes indeed. Hypocrisy is the word, Hypocrisy in the beginning and hypocrisy in the end. So much hypocrisy throughout history that it would be almost impossible to list them all on this thread.
Law? We are learning that the will of the sovereign is law. (Nixon got it right but too early) The question is: Who or what exactly is the sovereign? Where does the power rest. It certainly does not rest with the people. The sovereign (power) is acting in its own interests and certainly not in the interests of the people. In theory, does not the legitimacy of the sovereign come from the people? Can we now conclude that what passes for representative government in this country (and many others) is not legitimate? That would be the ultimate hypocrisy...
Take care
Thomas Gilbert-
Not all American Jews approve of US government funds to pay for Israel to ethnically cleanse and occupy the Palestinians. Not all of our media moguls are Jewish though they are disproportionately so. If you subtract anti-Jewishness from anti-Semitism you are left with the racist anti-Semitism which our print and broadcast media, both commercial and public, directs 24/7 against native Middle Eastern Arabs and Iranians to remind the American public that Israel is a white nation under attack by non-whites. While the world considers the ethnic cleansing and occupation of the Palestinians to be the starting point for the problem to be considered, "liberal" media like the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, NPR, the Nation magazine, etc., are not allowed by their bosses/owners to get to that starting point and instead serve as very important and very active enablers of occupation and ethnic cleansing. As it is, so long as Jews, or anyone else for that matter, who spew their racist anti-Semitism against Arabs and Iranians in our media, we have a problem that won't go away by itself.
Where is the outrage from the "libruls"? Obama signs NDAA, claims to be above the law and last week signed HR 347 and barely a peep out of anyone except for globalresearch and a few so-called libertarians on LewRockwell and DailyPaul.
Now more lies and war talk; as if cut and pasted from the run-up to Iraq in 2003. Imagine if it was Bush Jr. (or Jeb) doing this? Imagine if Bush appointed bankster kleptocrats to high positions and gave trillions to the banks and refused to investigate and prosecute?
Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy (Greenwald)
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/
"take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon"
this aint a new doctrine: see the illegal, criminal invasion of Iraq;
also note: the purported reasons should not never be taken prima facie as they are only a facade.
also note: threats of war or WMD or nukes aint legal casus belli
Good analysis all over, especially the over-prevalence of Jewish control of politics, media, and finance in America, but make no mistake all this bruhaha about Iran is nothing but political posturing. King O's concern about America's security is quite touching - NOT. Barak will do and say anything to be a two-term president!
From the so-called "Mexcan War" to the Vietnam misadventure, a thuggish, blustering element has always been there in the Empire's spokesmen. Each successive President adds more bluster and proudly proclaims his thuggery.Obama is hardly an improvement on Bush, widely recognized as a particularly mindless bully boy. It's becoming clearer what kind of society we really are...
No Jews aren't Israel, and Israel isn't the Jews. Israel simply misrepresents the Jews and a very "bang up job" actually!
"Vietnam misadventure. Misadventure? Maybe for the Vietnamese. The murder of 3 million Vietnamese was by deliberate policy. It certainly wasn't by accident.I suppose the dead Vietnamese were merely accidental collateral damage caused by incoming friendly fire (2.25 million tons of bombs) to liberate them.
PantherM120:
Thank you for the correction. You are dead right: "misadventure" is too tame a word. Words that more accurately describe the Vietnam war are "atrocity," horror," "obscenity," "one of the great crimes of the 20th century."
The 0% doctrine is in the heads of scientifically minded, well-read Americans who live in largely Democratic metropolitan areas. The mainstream media has convinced 58% of Americans that there is a 100% chance that Iran is on the path to building a nuclear weapon :
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29343
The only difference with Bush & Iraq is that after being bombarded with lies about Iran's intentions from the Bush era, through the 2008 elections, we got corrections from the IAEA and US National Intelligence Estimates. Well read CD readers who paid attention to these corrections will be surprised 58% of Americans didn't care enough or did not hear these stories as corrections to the continuous and ongoing pro-war propaganda.
Based on a 0% chance that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons, Obama has implemented:
1) crushing economic sanctions on Iran
2) encouraged right-wing UK, France and Germany to follow suit
3) surrounded Iran with US military bases:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=iran%20surrounded%20by%20us%20military%20bases&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmaps.google.com%2Fmaps%2Fms%3Fie%3DUTF8%26oe%3DUTF8%26msa%3D0%26msid%3D202186767305035287983.0004995f23a58e00370d5&ei=mT9eT8XgJtHJiQLR4NS3Cw&usg=AFQjCNFdDUNSUv-okXyJy0sJJp29jXe6JA&cad=rja
As far as negotiation is concerned, if there is a 0% chance they are building a nuclear bomb, are the mainstream media lies and aggression the US basis for negotiation with Iran? To what end?
How long are US taxpayers going to pay for the escalation of military bases surrounding Iran as a falsely perceived benefit for Israel but a real benefit for the US Military Industrial Complex and the Big Oil companies that are jacking up the cost of oil for Americans even though we don't use Oil from Iran and are net self sufficient in Oil production for domestic use?
Israel is claiming now is the right time to attack them before they develop nuclear weapons and Obama is asking to hold off until they are perceived to have a bomb [Read: after the Nov. US elections and based on the fabricated US public opinion that Iran already has these bombs].
The biggest insanity is that the mainstream press is not covering the details of the threats to attack Iran's nuclear facilities:
A dirty nuclear bomb is defined as essentially a conventional bomb dispersing nuclear material.
If the US or Israel drops a conventional bomb on Iran's nuclear facilities, it is exactly like detonating a "dirty" nuclear bomb that will make Fukushima look like a picnic in comparison.
Radioactive dust clouds and nuclear contamination of waterways will poison the air and water supplies for all those downwind or downstream of the bombed areas. Certainly neighboring countries like Russia, Pakistan, Iraq and Turkey don't want that to happen.
Russia and China have already prevented UN Security council resolutions to endorse such an attack.
As Panetta has been indicating recently, NATO will have to agree to such an attack so close to Russian interests. It will be a hard sell.
This is a stark analysis. What strikes me about this-the global financial collapse, the myraid of oppressive laws against immigrants, unions, woman..and more- is how immune the oppressor is from the consequences of their actions. By definition this is endemic of a broken and corrupt system.
Is there even such a thing as international law? The President and Congress has no legal or moral right to preemptively authorize an attack against another nation unless there is an imminent and direct threat to the nation's security. Sophistry and propaganda cannot manipulate this to mean whatever a unitary executive or a supplicant legislature says is the case- without hard evidence and without severe consequences if actions are found wrongful.
Without impartial international courts and enforcement bodies, the world is ruled by elites and oligarchs- beholden only to themselves. Then law becomes a vehicle of oppression, instead of a defender of minorities and the weak.
Even, if what I just stated some would consider naive- the more unfair the application of power, the more corrupt society's institutions, the more likely those institutions will implode- taking all of us down with it.
What the Liberal elite don't get or don't care to get, is that no single issue solution can address the issue of global corporate, military and governmental abuse of power. The real issue is systemic.
None if this is new in human history. What is new is that the consequences of this abuse of power is a level of destruction heretofore never seen.
The issue ihas never been whether there are solutions to what I described. Of course there are. The issue is whether society as it is presently structured will allow solutions to the world's economic, political, environmental problems. Can new , truly democratic global structures arise that unleash human creativity and compassion?
It is no wonder we are all afraid of attack. It's because there are so many millions of people in this world who have reason to hate us, for all the cruel things we have done. Just recently is good example, burning Koran and soldiers rampage murdering civilians.And don't forget Vietnam tragedies. We are hated, really hated, not only for physical cruelty, but for the cruelty with which global banking system is forcing austerity around the world in face of severe global recession. It is miserable to me to be among "hated" people. Citizens have an obligation to revolt against corrupt government, but where is our courage. Easy to pen threats; harder to do bloody revolt when needed.
Obama doesn't bluff; he lies. Which begs the question: What's the difference?
Personally, I prefer a optimistic scenario. Since Achmadinajad(sp?) suffered substaintial losses in Iran's election, AND the Ayatolla there recently emphasized that nuclear weapons are against Sharia law, that, even as Obama was decrying loose talk of war, he was being slyly bombasitic in his threats. Within months Iran could agree to a vigorous nuclear inspections protocol during the talks Iran recently initiated. This will have the effect of lifting all the sanctions against Iran as well as lowering the price of oil that speculators have driven up, because of fears of a war with Iran. Obama will get credit for being "tough", as well as the resulting lower gasoline prices prior to the election. We'll see....>>Carmon
I noticed the bizarre dual statement the moment I heard it on NPR.
It's remarkable to see this in real time while so many still cannot.