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ALL FOR ISRAEL

War Without End Forum Index -> Middle East and Asia
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Top
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:26 am    Post subject: ALL FOR ISRAEL

This is so sad. Probably just from one day's work. No expense is spared for Israel's security.

Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 12:50 pm    Post subject: NO MORE WAR FOR ISRAEL

TOP,

Thank you for posting that picture above as you are very correct with your title of this message thread (see the 'War Conceived in Israel' article which is linked under the map of 'greater Israel' after scrolling down to it on the left side at http://www.nowarforisrael.com ).

The following message thread (URL) conveys that JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs)/PNAC (Project for the New American Century) associate Dick Cheney was pushing hard for the invasion of Iraq and convinced Bush, Jr. (the 'Simpleton') to get it done (for Israel and Halliburton and Bechtel, of course):

JINSA/PNAC Neocons Pushed for Iraq War for Israel:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/04/17/wash-post-bush-began-to-plan-war-three-months-after-9-11.php


NO US/UK SOLDIER SHOULD HAVE TO DIE IN IRAQ FOR ISRAEL TO GET OIL (AND PROFIT FROM IT):

http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html

Read Bin Laden's warning to America (back in 1998) that if the US government did not stop its (vast financial) support of Israel (see the US taxpayer billions going to Israel via the ticker at the top left of www.wrmea.com while US states, Medicare and Social Security go broke) which facilitates Israel's brutal oppression of the Palestinian people then he would attack us on US soil (however, the 'protect Israel first' US press/media did not convey this warning to the American people to the extent that it should have):

http://www.investigate911.com/binladensez.htm
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 12:59 pm    Post subject: US SOLDIERS DYING FOR ISRAEL

American Jew Jack Bernstein mentioned in his 'Life of an American Jew in Racist/Marxist Israel' (which one can read via the URL below) that Zionists in Israel and in the USA would try to trick US into fighting wars in the Middle East for Israel's interest (with US soldiers dying in the process):

http://www.rense.com/general31/lifeof.htm
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 1:12 pm    Post subject: Dangerous Times

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/April2004/Pretzlik0415.htm
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 2:27 pm    Post subject: Israel's Status as an Ally in Question

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/04/17/israel-s-standing-as-u-s-ally-questioned.php
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 2:30 pm    Post subject: Zionist extremist racist Elliott Abrams

It would take an Iran contra criminal (who is a Zionist extremist racist) to hatch a criminal plot.

Backroom bureaucrat played key role in US deal with Israel
By James Harding in Washington
Published: April 16 2004 20:29 | Last Updated: April 16 2004 20:29


When George W. Bush was in Britain last November, one of the president's aides was quietly dispatched to Rome for a discreet meeting.


Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, was in Italy and took the opportunity to relay to Mr Bush his plan for unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians. The official the White House sent was Elliott Abrams.

In shaping the Bush administration's historic and highly controversial decision this week to endorse Mr Sharon's Middle East vision, Mr Abrams, the National Security Council official chiefly responsible for Arab-Israeli relations, has played a central, if largely unseen, role.

This does not overstate his influence. Mr Abrams has worked in a trio on Middle East policy that has included his superior, Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and William Burns, the State Department official in charge of Middle East policy.

Israeli and US officials also say that the individuals who forged this week's policy were the protagonists: Mr Sharon and Mr Bush.

Mr Abrams' role, according to a senior administration official, was to "carry out what the president wants". In 10 weeks of consultations before this week's announcement, US officials made three trips to see Mr Sharon and his staff and there were two visits from Israeli delegations to the White House.

Mr Abrams and his colleagms and his colleagues, the official said, were "kept on a short leash. [They] were not dreaming up policy."

The Israeli prime minister was one of the few international figures with whom Mr Bush had a relationship before he became president: Mr Sharon was his guide to Israel in 1998 when he was Texas governor.

"I had the honour of traveling the West Bank with Ariel Sharon by helicopter," Mr Bush told an audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition in 1999. "You can imagine what it was like to be given a history lesson by this great warrior and hero of freedom and democracy."

Mr Sharon also had praise this week for Mr Bush.

"I myself have been fighting terror for many years, and understand the threats and cost from terrorism," he said. "In all these years, I have never met a leader as committed as you are, Mr President, to the struggle for freedom and the need to confront terrorism wherever it exists."

These words, say some Middle East experts, may resonate favourably for Mr Bush among Jewish and conservative Christian voters in an election year. Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel, says: "The president is in a tight spot and Jewish votes matter, particularly in some key states such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio."

The White House insists election year politics did not play a part. "The poll data suggest that there is hardly anything that a Republican president can do to move his support among the Jewish community," the senior administration official says.

But to appreciate the internal intellectual argument within the White House for supporting the Sharon plan, diplomats and officials generally agree with a former US official who says: "Elliott was instrumental."

It was Mr Abrams, a senior White House official says, who reasoned that Mr Bush should not be bound by "myths and taboos". It was not helpful for Arab and Palestinian leaders to continue to perpetuate the "myth" that Palestinian refugees would one day return to their homes in Israel.

It was important to create the precedent of withdrawal from the settlements, the official says, rather than making settlements untouchable. And, the official says, it was important to get things moving when there had been no progress since last August.

Mr Abrams, a Reagan official implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, in 1991 admitted withholding information from Congress. He was sentenced to two years' probation and community service.

In the years after he was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, Mr Abrams wrote a book calling for Jews to return to their faith to stem assimilation. He also helped found the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank that included Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr Abrams supported Mr Sharon, a leader, he once wrote, who knows "the road to peace lies through strength instead of weakness". He is seen as one of the most effective operators in modern American government.

"Elliott Abrams is one of the best bureaucratic artists in Washington. He has traditionally taken bureaucratic positions and turned them into strong positions, because he reads the president and knows what he wants," says Jon Alterman, who was on the State Department's policy and planning staff.

"Elliott Abrams is the person who got the Middle East to talk about reform. [The US] cannot micromanage the universe, but you can force items on to the agenda. He has done a masterful job of that."



http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1079420404675



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Excellent Asia Times article on Zionist extremist racist Elliott Abrams:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DL19Ak01.html


The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/19/the-bush-administration-s-dual-loyalties.php

More on Zionist extremist Elliott Abrams:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/12/10/abrams/index_np.html
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 2:33 pm    Post subject: NEOCON WARMONGERS are mostly Jewish Zionist extremists

NEOCON WARMONGERS are mostly Jewish Zionist extremists




http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/04/09/neocon-warmongers-are-mostly-jewish-zionist-extremists.php
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 2:35 pm    Post subject: Re: Zionist extremist racist Elliott Abrams

Alpha wrote:
It would take an Iran contra criminal (who is a Zionist extremist racist) to hatch a criminal plot.

Backroom bureaucrat played key role in US deal with Israel
By James Harding in Washington
Published: April 16 2004 20:29 | Last Updated: April 16 2004 20:29


When George W. Bush was in Britain last November, one of the president's aides was quietly dispatched to Rome for a discreet meeting.


Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, was in Italy and took the opportunity to relay to Mr Bush his plan for unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians. The official the White House sent was Elliott Abrams.

In shaping the Bush administration's historic and highly controversial decision this week to endorse Mr Sharon's Middle East vision, Mr Abrams, the National Security Council official chiefly responsible for Arab-Israeli relations, has played a central, if largely unseen, role.

This does not overstate his influence. Mr Abrams has worked in a trio on Middle East policy that has included his superior, Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and William Burns, the State Department official in charge of Middle East policy.

Israeli and US officials also say that the individuals who forged this week's policy were the protagonists: Mr Sharon and Mr Bush.

Mr Abrams' role, according to a senior administration official, was to "carry out what the president wants". In 10 weeks of consultations before this week's announcement, US officials made three trips to see Mr Sharon and his staff and there were two visits from Israeli delegations to the White House.

Mr Abrams and his colleagms and his colleagues, the official said, were "kept on a short leash. [They] were not dreaming up policy."

The Israeli prime minister was one of the few international figures with whom Mr Bush had a relationship before he became president: Mr Sharon was his guide to Israel in 1998 when he was Texas governor.

"I had the honour of traveling the West Bank with Ariel Sharon by helicopter," Mr Bush told an audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition in 1999. "You can imagine what it was like to be given a history lesson by this great warrior and hero of freedom and democracy."

Mr Sharon also had praise this week for Mr Bush.

"I myself have been fighting terror for many years, and understand the threats and cost from terrorism," he said. "In all these years, I have never met a leader as committed as you are, Mr President, to the struggle for freedom and the need to confront terrorism wherever it exists."

These words, say some Middle East experts, may resonate favourably for Mr Bush among Jewish and conservative Christian voters in an election year. Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel, says: "The president is in a tight spot and Jewish votes matter, particularly in some key states such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio."

The White House insists election year politics did not play a part. "The poll data suggest that there is hardly anything that a Republican president can do to move his support among the Jewish community," the senior administration official says.

But to appreciate the internal intellectual argument within the White House for supporting the Sharon plan, diplomats and officials generally agree with a former US official who says: "Elliott was instrumental."

It was Mr Abrams, a senior White House official says, who reasoned that Mr Bush should not be bound by "myths and taboos". It was not helpful for Arab and Palestinian leaders to continue to perpetuate the "myth" that Palestinian refugees would one day return to their homes in Israel.

It was important to create the precedent of withdrawal from the settlements, the official says, rather than making settlements untouchable. And, the official says, it was important to get things moving when there had been no progress since last August.

Mr Abrams, a Reagan official implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, in 1991 admitted withholding information from Congress. He was sentenced to two years' probation and community service.

In the years after he was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, Mr Abrams wrote a book calling for Jews to return to their faith to stem assimilation. He also helped found the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank that included Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr Abrams supported Mr Sharon, a leader, he once wrote, who knows "the road to peace lies through strength instead of weakness". He is seen as one of the most effective operators in modern American government.

"Elliott Abrams is one of the best bureaucratic artists in Washington. He has traditionally taken bureaucratic positions and turned them into strong positions, because he reads the president and knows what he wants," says Jon Alterman, who was on the State Department's policy and planning staff.

"Elliott Abrams is the person who got the Middle East to talk about reform. [The US] cannot micromanage the universe, but you can force items on to the agenda. He has done a masterful job of that."



http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1079420404675



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Excellent Asia Times article on Zionist extremist racist Elliott Abrams:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DL19Ak01.html


The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/19/the-bush-administration-s-dual-loyalties.php

More on Zionist extremist Elliott Abrams:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/12/10/abrams/index_np.html


Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 1:38 pm Post subject: Fisk: Bush Legitimizes Terrorism

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Weekend Edition
April 16 / 18, 2004

Sharon's "Courageous" Plan
Bush Legitimizes Terrorism
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

So President George Bush tears up the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and that's okay. Israeli settlements for Jews and Jews only on the West Bank. That's okay. Taking land from Palestinians who have owned that land for generations, that's okay. UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that land cannot be acquired by war. Forget it. That's okay.

Does President George Bush actually work for al-Qa'ida? What does this mean? That George Bush cares more about his re-election than he does about the Middle East? Or that George Bush is more frightened of the Israeli lobby than he is of his own electorate. Fear not, it is the latter.

His language, his narrative, his discourse on history, has been such a lie these past three weeks that I wonder why we bother to listen to his boring press conferences. Ariel Sharon, the perpetrator of the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1,700 Palestinian civilians dead) is a "man of peace" - even though the official 1993 Israeli report on the massacre said he was "personally responsible" for it. Now, Mr Bush is praising Mr Sharon's plan to steal yet more Palestinian land as a "historic and courageous act".

Heaven spare us all. Give up the puny illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza and everything's okay: the theft of land by colonial settlers, the denial of any right of return to Israel by those Palestinians who lived there, that's okay. Mr Bush, who claimed he changed the Middle East by invading Iraq, says he is now changing the world by invading Iraq! Okay! Is there no one to cry "Stop! Enough!"?

Two nights ago, this most dangerous man, George Bush, talked about "freedom in Iraq". Not "democracy" in Iraq. No, "democracy" was no longer mentioned. "Democracy" was simply left out of the equation. Now it was just "freedom"--freedom from Saddam rather than freedom to have elections. And what is this "freedom" supposed to involve? One group of American-appointed Iraqis will cede power to another group of American-appointed Iraqis. That will be the "historic handover" of Iraqi "sovereignty". Yes, I can well see why George Bush wants to witness a "handover" of sovereignty. "Our boys" must be out of the firing line--let the Iraqis be the sandbags.

Iraqi history is already being written. In revenge for the brutal killing of four American mercenaries - for that is what they were - US Marines carried out a massacre of hundreds of women and children and guerillas in the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah. The US military says that the vast majority of the dead were militants. Untrue, say the doctors. But the hundreds of dead, many of whom were indeed civilians, were a shameful reflection on the rabble of American soldiery who conducted these undisciplined attacks on Fallujah. Many Baghdadi Sunnis say that in the "New Iraq"--the Iraqi version, not the Paul Bremer version - Fallujah should be given the status of a new Iraqi capital.

Vast areas of the Palestinian West Bank will now become Israel, courtesy of President Bush. Land which belongs to people other than Israelis must now be stolen by Israelis because it is "unrealistic" to accept otherwise. Is Mr Bush a thief? Is he a criminal? Can he be charged with abetting a criminal act? Can Iraq now claim to Kuwait that it is "unrealistic" that the Ottoman borders can be changed? Palestinian land once included all of what is now Israel. It is not, apparently, "realistic" to change this, even to two per cent?

Is Saddam Hussein to be re-bottled and put back in charge of Iraq on the basis that his 1990 invasion of Kuwait was "realistic"? Or that his invasion of Iran--when we helped him try to destroy Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution--was "realistic" because he initially attacked only the Arabic-speaking (and thus "Iraqi") parts of Iran?
Or, since President Bush now seems to be a history buff, are the Germans to be given back Danzig or the Sudetenland? Or Austria? Or should we perhaps recreate the colonial possessions of the past 100 years? Is it not "realistic" that the French should retake Algeria - or part of Algeria - on the basis that the people all speak French, on the basis that this was once part of the French nation? Or should the British retake Cyprus? Or Aden? Or Egypt? Shouldn't the French be allowed to take back Lebanon and Syria? Why shouldn't the British re-take America and boot out those pesky "terrorists" who oppose the rule of King George's democracy well over 200 years ago?

Because this is what George Bush's lunacy and weakness can lead to. We all have lands that "God" gave us. Didn't Queen Mary die with "Calais" engraved on her heart? Doesn't Spain have a legitimate right to the Netherlands? Or Sweden the right to Norway and Denmark? Every colonial power, including Israel can put forward these preposterous demands.

What Bush has actually done is give way to the crazed world of Christian Zionism. The fundamentalist Christians who support Israel's theft of the West Bank on the grounds that the state of Israel must exist there according to God's law until the second coming, believe that Jesus will return to earth and the Israelis--for this is the Bush "Christian Sundie" belief--will then have to convert to Christianity or die in the battle of Amargeddon.

I kid thee not. This is the Christian fundamentalist belief, which even the Israeli embassy in Washington go along with--without comment, of course--in their weekly Christian Zionist prayer meetings. Every claim by Osama bin Laden, every statement that the United States represents Zionism and supports the theft of Arab lands will now have been proved true to millions of Arabs, even those who had no time for Bin Laden. What better recruiting sergeant could Bin Laden have than George Bush. Doesn't he realise what this means for young American soldiers in Iraq or are Israelis more important than American lives in Mesopotamia?

Everything the US government has done to preserve its name as a "middle-man" in the Middle East has now been thrown away by this gutless, cowardly US President, George W Bush. That it will place his soldiers at greater risk doesn't worry him--anyway, he doesn't do funerals. That it goes against natural justice doesn't worry him. That his statements are against international law is of no consequence.

And still we have to cow-tow to this man. If we are struck by al-Qa'ida it is our fault. And if 90 per cent of the population of Spain point out that they opposed the war, then they are pro-terrorists to complain that 200 of their civilians were killed by al-Qa'ida. First the Spanish complain about the war, then they are made to suffer for it--and then they are condemned as "appeasers" by the Bush regime and its craven journalists when they complain that their husbands and wives and sons did not deserve to die.

If this is to be their fate, excuse me, but I would like to have a Spanish passport so that I can share the Spanish people's "cowardice"! If Mr Sharon is "historic" and "courageous", then the murderers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will be able to claim the same. Mr Bush legitimised "terrorism" this week--and everyone who loses a limb or a life can thank him for his yellow streak. And, I fear, they can thank Mr Blair for his cowardice too.
http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk04162004.html
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 2:57 pm    Post subject: Neoconservatives Try to Suggest that Sadr Uprising is “Mad

Neoconservatives Try to Suggest that Sadr Uprising is “Made in Teheran”

By Jim Lobe
April 9, 2004

Despite the growing number of reports that depict the past week's uprising by the radical Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Mahdi Army as a spontaneous and indigenous revolt, some influential U.S. neoconservatives are insisting that Iran is behind it. They are calling on the Bush administration to warn Teheran to cease its alleged backing for al-Sadr and other Shia militias or face retaliation, ranging from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to covert action designed to overthrow the government.

But independent experts on both Iran and Iraq say that, while Iran has no doubt provided various forms of assistance to Shia factions in Iraq since Hussein's ouster one year ago, its relations with Sadr have long been rocky and that it has opposed radical actions that could destabilize the situation. “Those elements closest to Iran among the Shiite clerics (in Iraq) have been the most moderate through all of this,” according to Shaul Bakhash, an Iran expert at George Mason University. Indeed, many regional specialists agree that Iran has a strategic interest in avoiding any train of events that risks plunging Iraq into chaos or civil war and partition.

Neoconservatives centered in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and among the civilian leadership in the Pentagon have strongly opposed any détente with Iran and have frequently blamed it for problems it has encountered in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Neoconservatives outside the administration, such as former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht, called even before the Iraq war for Washington to support indigenous efforts to oust the “mullahcracy” in Teheran, which is seen as an arch-enemy of both the U.S. and Israel.



Raising Tensions with Iran
Some neoconservatives have seized on Sadr’s uprising as a new opportunity both to raise tensions against Iran and to divert attention from their own bungling of relations with the Shia community in Iraq.

Top U.S. officials both in the U.S. and in Iraq have not yet named Iran as the hidden hand behind Sadr, although a senior reporter at the right-wing Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough, quoted unnamed “military sources” April 7 th as telling him that Sadr “is being aided directly by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard … and by Hezbollah, an Iranian-created terrorist group based in Lebanon.” Unnamed “Pentagon officials” gave a similar account to the New York Times, although the Times reporter, James Risen, stressed that CIA officials disagreed with that analysis, adding: “Some intelligence officials believe that the Pentagon has been eager to link Hezbollah to the violence in Iraq to link the Iranian regime more closely to anti-American terrorism.”

The Iran hand was first raised in connection with Sadr’s revolt by Michael Rubin, who just returned from a stint as a “governance team adviser” for the CPA in Iraq to his previous position as a resident fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In a column published in the Los Angeles Times on April 4 th, he complained that Washington and the CPA had failed to provide liberal and democratic Iraqi leaders with anything like the kind of support that Iran was supplying to radical Shia leaders and their “gangs.”

On a visit to the Shia-dominated south, according to Rubin, he found that Iranians were pouring money and arms to key Islamist parties, including the Da’wa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Sadr himself whose rise over the past year, according to Rubin, is explained by the “ample funding he receives through Iran-based cleric Ayatollah Kazem al Haeri, a close associate of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini.”

Similarly, another senior CPA adviser, Larry Diamond, a neoconservative who specializes in democratization at the California-based Hoover Institution, told IPS this week that Sadr’s Mahdi Army, as well as other Shia militias, are being armed and financed by Iran with the aim of imposing “another Iranian-style theocracy.”

" Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever, lavishly resourced campaign to defeat any effort for any genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq,” said Diamond. “The longer we wait to confront the thug, the more troops he’ll have in his army, the more arms he’ll have and financial support, virtually all coming from Iran, the more he will intimidate and kill sincere democratic actors in the country, and the more impossible our task at building democracy will become.” He added, “I think we should tell the Iranian regime that if they don't cease and desist, we will play the same game, that we will destabilize them.”

On Tuesday, April 6 th, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page took up the same theme, noting that Sadr has talked “openly of creating an Iranian-style Islamic Republic in Iraq (and) has visited Tehran since the fall of Saddam. … (H)is Mahdi militia is almost certainly financed and trained by Iranians,” the editorial went on, adding, “Revolutionary Guards may be instigating some of the current unrest.”

"As for Teheran, we would hope the Sadr uprising puts to rest the illusion that the mullahs (in Teheran) can be appeased. As Bernard Lewis teaches, Middle Eastern leaders interpret American restraint as weakness. Iran's mullahs fear a Muslim democracy in Iraq because is it a direct threat to their own rule. If warnings to Teheran from Washington don't impress them, perhaps some cruise missiles aimed at the Bushehr nuclear site will concentrate their minds,” the Journal suggested.

On Wednesday, New York Times columnist William Safire asserted the existence of an axis involving Sadr, Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria, as well. “We should break the Iranian-Hezbollah-Sadr connection in ways that our special forces know how to do,” he wrote. “Plenty of Iraqi Shiites, who are Arab, distrust the Persian ayatollahs in Iran and can provide actionable intelligence about a Syrian transmission belt” that presumably is used to infiltrate Hezbollah members into Iraq to link up with the Sadr’s partisans.



A Predictable Conflagration
This line of reasoning, however, appears particularly curious to Bakhash who notes that the Sadr family, including Moqtada himself, is precisely the kind Iraqi Shiite who would be deeply suspicious of Teheran. “Sadr’s father was a strong Iraqi nationalist, like Moqtada himself,” he said. “He often used to question why there were in Iraq ayatollahs who spoke Arabic with a Persian accent.”

Like other experts, Bakhash believes that Iran has indeed been heavily involved with the Iraqi Shia community, but sees the leadership providing far more support to SCIRI and its Badr brigades than to Sadr, who, from Teheran’s point of view, is seen as untrustworthy.

Bakhash also questions the neoconservative assumption that Iran wants to destabilize Iraq at this point. “Obviously the Iranians are not unhappy to see the Americans discomfited in Iraq, but I don’t think it’s the policy of the Iranian government to destabilize Iraq right along its own border,” he said.

Middle East historian Juan Cole of the University of Michigan also questions the notion of a link between Iran and Sadr in the current uprising. While Sadr’s views on theocratic government are consistent with those of Iranian hardliners, according to Cole, his outspoken Iraqi nationalism poses a major challenge to Khameini’s claim to authority over all Shiite religious communities, including those outside Iran. Contrary to the Journal’s assumptions, according to Cole, Sadr did not receive much encouragement from the Iranians leaders with whom he met in Teheran. “The message he got … was that he should top being so divisive and should cooperate more with the other Shiite leaders.”

Geoffrey Kemp, an Iran specialist at the Nixon Center and Middle East adviser on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, says he has little doubt that the Iranians have influence with several different Shiite groups and that there may even be “rogue elements” inside Iran who back Sadr. But he agrees that Teheran’s strongest ties are with SCIRI and the Badr Brigades, who were trained by the Revolutionary Guard inside Iran during Saddam Hussein’s rule. “Iran has a huge strategic stake in what happens in Iraq, but I don’t think it is trying to provoke a direct confrontation (with the U.S.) at this time,” he said. “The situation is far too complex to make simplistic statements about what Iran is or is not doing,” Kemp said, “But to suggest that this is an Iranian-inspired insurrection is a stretch.”

“The neoconservatives are all so heavily invested in the success of Iraq that, instead of blaming the Pentagon for some extraordinary blunders, they want to blame everyone else--the State Department, the Iranians, the Syrians for the mess that was partly of their own making,” according to Kemp.

Cole, in fact, has raised questions about how some of those blunders--including the CPA’s decision to close Sadr’s newspaper--came to be committed, suggesting that some neoconservatives in the CPA may themselves have been pushing for a crisis for “all sorts of ulterior motives,” such as moving Iraq closer to partition--a move that would could also lead to the destabilization of Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Cole noted that Sadr’s expression of solidarity with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas whose spiritual and political leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated in an Israeli rocket attack late last month, may have moved the CPA to provoke a confrontation. The following day, Sadr’s top aide and 13 of his followers were suddenly arrested on a six-month-old warrant, touching off the insurrection. “Who provoked (the arrests) and why?” asked Cole, who adds that the conflagration that followed was entirely predictable.

(Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)
Alpha
Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:16 pm    Post subject: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration

Hamas' Rantisi Assassinated (this kind of thing greatly contributed to our terror as it is time to cut Israel loose ASAP in order to save the USA):

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/04/17/hamas-rantisi-assassinated.php

Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/02/29/neo-cons-israel-and-the-bush-administration.php
 

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