| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 9:31 am Post subject: Bombing Iran for Israel |
| War with Iran is imminent (for Israel, of course!):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/01/11/war-with-iran-is-imminent-for-israel-of-course.php
Don't Let Them Trick US into Another War for Israel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsyXGplC9NI
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A second aircraft carrier is headed to the Persian Gulf this month as a warning to both Iran and Syria
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/04/ldt.01.html
LOU DOBBS: A second aircraft carrier is headed to the Persian Gulf this month as a warning to both Iran and Syria. The USS John C. Stennis and its support ships will be deployed to bolster the aircraft carrier group already on station already in the Gulf. The move is, we're told, intended to show U.S. resolve in the face of possible provocative acts by either Iran, or Syria or both.
Read about the 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda as discussed by esteemed US intelligence author/writer James Bamford on pages 261-269/321 of his 'A Pretext for War' book via the following URL (the paperback version of 'A Pretext for War' includes an additional section at the end about the ongoing AIPAC espionage case which is hardly being covered either in the pro-Israel biased US press/media just as the Mearsheimer/Walt paper hasn't been for the most part):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
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http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20070102-125318-7565r
Analysis: Never again?
Date: Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Analysis: Never again?
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON , Jan. 2 (UPI) -- Through history, rulers, despots, nations and empires have humbled and humiliated, and with the advent of Adolph Hitler, massacred Jews by the millions. From the Exodus from ancient Egypt to the First Crusade, which didn't distinguish between Jews and Arabs, to the Spanish Inquisition under Tomas de Torquemada, to Czarist pogroms, to the World War II Nazi genocide, some historians calculate that had Jews been treated like other citizens through the ages, they would number at least 200 million today. They now number less than 15 million. And from right to left, the five million Jews in Israel now feel threatened with extinction yet again.
In today's Israel , the overwhelming majority is now convinced Iran 's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is synonymous with a 2nd holocaust. "We stood idly by as we were led to slaughter in Hitler's concentration camps and gas chambers in the 1930s and 40s," is a refrain frequently heard in Israel these days, "but never again." In a New Year's Day message, superhawk and former Prime Minister Netanyahu Binyamin accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the kind of appeasement that threatened Israel 's very existence.
Ahmadinejad recently held an international conference of holocaust deniers. And Israelis are now reminded daily that the Iranian president is a new Hitler who has to be terminated "with maximum prejudice" before a Persian nuclear weapon terminates Israel . The existential threat to Israel looms even larger, in Netanyahu's view, with the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group (ISG) report. His critique's main points:
? The ISG report smacks of rank appeasement when it recommends talking to Syria and Iran at a time when Iran has been handed the whip hand in Iraq by the U.S. with a U.S.-facilitated, pro-Iranian Shiite-led government.
? ISG says a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a sine qua non to stabilizing the rest of the Middle East . The implied suggestion that it's now up to Israel to make further concessions to the Palestinians is yet another manifestation of appeasement. Israel must reject any perceived sign of weakness.
? In reality, if the problem of Iran, which Israel's enemies call "the strategic backbone of Hezbollah and Hamas," were solved by the forceful elimination of its nuclear facilities, or a highly unlikely voluntary return to nuclear power for peaceful purposes under U.N. inspection, the conflict with the Palestinians would become easier to tackle.
? Hezbollah and Hamas are rapidly arming themselves thanks to the Israeli government's decision to refrain from further action against them. Since the cease-fire was declared, dozens of Kassam rockets have been fired at targets in the western Negev .
? If Olmert's government reacts limply to Iran 's statements about its intentions to destroy Israel , "why should we expect the world to act against them?"
? ISG says, "The majority of the political establishment in Israel has grown tired of a continuous state of a nation at war." When even Israel 's leadership sends out a message of fatigue and weakness, "why should we be surprised that the world agrees?"
Netanyahu then said Israel "must immediately launch an intense, international, public relations front first and foremost on the U.S. The goal being to encourage President Bush to live up to specific pledges he would not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons. We must make clear to the government, the Congress and the American public that a nuclear Iran is a threat to the U.S. and the entire world, not only Israel ."
There are signs this is already happening in Washington . Before the invasion of Iraq , the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika decided the ousting of Saddam Hussein had to become an integral part of the "war on terror." Eventually 60 percent of Americans thought Saddam was behind 9/11, even though there was no link between the two. Today, the Bush-Cheney team faces the same spin scenario: how to weave the global war on terror and the Shiite powers that be in Iran . This one is relatively simple: Iran trains and funds Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories.
Anticipating the new line, Sen. Joe Lieberman (Independent-CT) referred to " Iran and al-Qaida" on Wolf Blitzer's Sunday program on CNN. That Iran is Shiite and al-Qaida Sunni becomes irrelevant in the new game plan that will most probably lead to U.S. air strikes against Iran 's nuclear facilities in 2007/08. Can a Democratic Congress be bypassed under a blanket authorization already secured to hunt down transnational terrorists wherever they may be hiding?
The "neocons" who work closely with Netanyahu on what could be the next phase of a nascent regional war in the Middle East, say Bush has the authority to take out Iran 's nuclear threat. Because it has only one purpose -- to take out Israel . One Hiroshima-type nuclear weapon and Israel ceases to exit.
There is little doubt president Bush's geopolitical legacy as it stands today is unacceptable to someone who identifies with Winston Churchill roaring against appeasement in the 1930s. Iraq is either an unmitigated or mitigated disaster. And year-end analyses widely published at home and abroad listed Bush among the four worst presidents in U.S. history.
And if Bush doesn't take on Iran , prominent Israelis are speculating that president Clinton 2 (Hillary) will do so. Oded Tira, the chairman of Israel 's Association of Industrial Manufacturers, and former chief artillery office in the IDF, said, "Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran . As an American air strike in Iran is essential for our existence, we must help pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party, which is conducting itself foolishly, and U.S. newspaper editors."
Writing in Ynet News (online Yedioth Ahronoth), Tira said, "We need to turn the Iranian issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure. Hillary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party (must) publicly support immediate action by Bush again Iran ."
As for target Iran , Tira voiced widespread belief in Israel that the Jewish state must coordinate strikes with the U.S. -- "and prepare for the Iranian response." Fearless forecast: It will be formidable.
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Charlie Reese: Israel's Bad Influence:
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=10276
Book: Israel, Lobby Pushing Iran War
Nathan Guttman | Fri. Dec 29, 2006
http://www.forward.com/articles/book-israel-lobby-pushing-iran-war/
A former United Nations weapons inspector and leading Iraq War opponent has written a new book alleging that Jerusalem is pushing the Bush administration into war with Iran, and accusing the pro-Israel lobby of dual loyalty and “outright espionage.”
In the new book, called “Target Iran,” Scott Ritter, who served as a senior U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and later became one of the war’s staunchest critics, argues that the United States is readying for military action against Iran, using its nuclear program as a pretext for pursuing regime change in Tehran.
“The Bush administration, with the able help of the Israeli government and the pro-Israel Lobby, has succeeded,” Ritter writes, “in exploiting the ignorance of the American people about nuclear technology and nuclear weapons so as to engender enough fear that the American public has more or less been pre-programmed to accept the notion of the need to militarily confront a nuclear armed Iran.”
Later in the book, Ritter adds: “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else.”
Ritter’s book echoes recent high-profile attacks on the pro-Israel lobby by former President Jimmy Carter and by scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Ritter, who recently returned from a weeklong speaking engagement on The Nation cruise, speaks of a “network of individuals” that pursues Israel’s interests in the United States. The former weapons inspector alleges that some of the pro-Israel lobby’s activities “can only be described as outright espionage and interference in domestic policies.” Ritter also accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of having an inherent dual loyalty. He called for the organization to be registered as a foreign agent.
Representatives for both Aipac and the Israeli Embassy in Washington declined to comment on Ritter’s accusations.
In his book, Ritter also accuses the pro-Israel lobby of invoking the memory of the Holocaust and of crying antisemitism whenever Israel is accused of betraying America. “This is a sickening and deeply disturbing trend that must end,” Ritter writes.
According to Ritter, Iran is far from developing a nuclear weapons program and will not do so in the future if the world makes sure that stringent inspections are in place to verify that the Iranians live up to the requirements of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“If Iran does make a political decision to develop nuclear weapons, it will take them a decade and it won’t go undetected,” Ritter said. “But it will take the U.S. only five weeks to build up a force capable of destroying Iran by air strikes. It’s a timeline of five weeks compared to a decade, so I’m not worried about taking a risk.”
As for Israeli and American fears regarding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president who vowed to “wipe Israel off the map,” Ritter dubbed the leader a “sick joke” and asserted that he does not make the decisions in Tehran.
Ritter argues that the Bush administration knows that inspections can solve the Iranian nuclear problem but, at the urging of Jerusalem and its American allies, is in reality pursuing a different goal: regime change in Tehran.
“Israel has, through a combination of ignorance, fear and paranoia, elevated Iran to a status that it finds unacceptable,” Ritter writes in his book. “Israel has engaged in policies that have further inflamed this situation. Israel displays arrogance and rigidity when it comes to developing any diplomatic solution to the Iranian issue.”
Ritter is no stranger to controversy.
As a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, he headed several surprise inspection missions that were denied access to suspicious sites, and led to the Saddam Hussein regime accusing Ritter of being an American spy. The frequent refusal of the Iraqis to provide Ritter and his team access to sites of interest led eventually to the abandonment of the inspection regime in Iraq. Ritter resigned his post in 1998, accusing the United States and the U.N. of caving in to the Iraqis.
But Ritter later became a leading voice warning against taking military action against Iraq, arguing that a resumption of inspections would be sufficient to contain Hussein. He accused the United States of trying to use the U.N. inspection force for spying purposes and claimed that Iraq was deliberately held to higher standards than other countries in order to justify a military invasion.
In early 2004, Ritter charged in an interview on the Web site Ynet, operated by the daily Yediot Aharonot, that Israeli intelligence had deliberately overstated what it knew to be a minimal threat from Iraq in an effort to push America and Britain to launch a war. Ritter’s accusations were roundly rejected across the Israeli political spectrum. Security officials interviewed by the Forward insisted that no branch of the military could or would deliberately skew the findings in that way, but they also said that Israeli intelligence tended to exaggerate threats because it was operating under flawed assumptions.
Now Ritter is arguing that a similar effort is under way to produce an attack against Iran.
Speaking to the Forward this week, Ritter stressed that he is not accusing all American Jews of having dual loyalty, saying that “at the end of the day, I would like to believe that most of American Jews will side with America.”
Ritter is already working on his next book, due for publication in March 2007. In this tome, he sets out to teach the anti-war movements that he supports how to wage an effective campaign to win over American public opinion.
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Israel's influence of US policy & the Israeli lobby:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O125hGt9qt4&NR
AIPAC and NeoCon Policy
on bombing Iran for Israel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rf16XjbOUs
Rogue State of Israel Threatens Tactical Nuke Strikes on Iran
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/01/07/rogue-state-of-israel-threatens-nuke-strikes-on-iran.php
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Thursday, December 21st, 2006
Target Iran: Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh on White House Plans for Regime Change
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/21/143259
Former Mossad operative (Ostrovsky) who wrote the 'By Way of Deception' book about the Mossad nails the dual loyality issue and use of the 'anti-Semite' smear via the you tube video short URLs below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-PnQ3iVaZE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXwuOAL5yEE
Netanyahu - Warmongering (Snip)
…. We must immediately launch an intense, international, public relations front focusing first and foremost on the US. The goal being to encourage President Bush to take up his specific promises not to allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons. We must make it clear to the government, the Congress and the American public that a nuclear Iran is a threat to the US and the entire world, not only Israel. …
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1167467638061&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
The 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel document was written for Netanyahu by Jewish JINSA/PNAC Neocons Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmer as more about 'A Clean Break' is included via the following URL from pages 261-269/321 of esteemed US intelligence author/writer James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
Can read via the following Seymour Hersh article how Wurmser (who is currently working for JINSA/PNAC associated Dick Cheney) is pushing for regime change in Iran next (which would be right in accordance with the 'A Clean Break' agenda as well) via Cheney's office:
The Annals of National Security: The Next Act
Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1120-20.htm
Fri. Dec 29, 2006
Pro-Israel Lobby Pushing US to Attack Iran:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
Crime of the Century: Are Bush & Cheney Planning Early Attack on Iran?
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/12/25/crime-of-the-century-are-bush-cheney-planning-iran-att.php
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Just saw the following at http://www.juancole.com
Alexandrovna Guest Op-Ed:
Saddam's Execution and the Campaign Against Iran
Saddam's Execution is about Iran
Larisa Alexandrovna
'PROLOGUE:
When someone does something obviously egregious, we tend to look past it because it is our nature to believe that people are naturally sane, good, and honest. We cannot imagine that anyone would willfully destroy their own country, violate their own laws, trample on their own people, and do it with such naked bravado while the world looked on.
But people have done it and do it even still, because there is also a darker side to human nature. Those of us who see the good in people look past actions that appear to be willfully evil not only because it is in our nature but it is also a foundation of our culture, as Americans, we believe guilt must be proved.
So we do not see what is going on before our eyes and directly in front of us. We look past it, around it, through it, but not at it. We cannot look directly at it, because if we do, we lose the vision of our beloved America and see something so sinister, that our minds would rather collapse than accept it.
But chess forces us to abandon our preconceptions and emotions. It pushes us to think in terms of cause and effect and it forces us to consider each action and counteraction in terms of the whole game. That is to say, chess forces us to think beyond our own present and fixed position, forcing us to reason every possible outcome of each action and counteraction.
Furthermore, chess teaches us to calculate not against a person, or a group, or a nation, but against a strategy that has no inherent religious, moral, or human characteristics. Master players can suspend their fixated self at will. Sadly, I am no master, and so I continue to struggle in seeing the game despite my human nature as an obstacle.
But sometimes, it just happens, something sets it off and there you are, inside the board, walking each action out in your mind and seeing the whole from beginning to end.
QUESTIONS AND SEEING THE BOARD
Sometime this morning, all the various and truly bizarre events the Bush administration has been engaged in recently with regard to troop levels and surges suddenly crystallized for me, as though I were sitting at a chess board and seeing the entire strategy unfold before my eyes.
This is of course my opinion and I may very well be wrong. In fact, I hope I am wrong. But the news that Saddam Hussein would be executed soon, and then the news that it would be in the next 48 hours, boggled my mind. Why on earth would anyone want to set off an ideological bomb during an already chaotic situation? I do not defend Saddam Hussein, not by any measure. But when Iraq is falling into total chaos and civil war, and as American troops continue to die, why would anyone want to add fuel to that fire, enough fuel to destroy what is left?
Suspend your emotions and think strategically. Now look at the question again and in context.
The administration is stalling as it supposedly weighs its Iraq options, when in fact they have already made their decision. How do I know they have made their decision? One need only look at the slow leaks coming out, not the least of which was Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Washington Post, to understand that we are going to be sending more troops to Iraq. So why does the administration wait to tell us this?
In the meantime, naval carriers are deployed to send Iran “a warning,” as though the threats thus far and the passing of sanctions are not warning enough. Add to that the detainment of Iranian diplomats invited to Iraq by the Iraqi leadership. Why is the US arresting diplomats invited to a country that the US claims is a sovereign nation governing itself?
And what about those sanctions, which ultimately mean nothing and sadly mean everything? The sanctions are so watered down as to have no real effect on the Iranian population or economy. Why even bother passing them?
Why censor Dr. Leverett's opinion piece on Iran when the CIA already cleared it?
Now given this entire context, ask yourself again why Saddam Hussein is being executed now, during Hajj even? What is the urgency?
THE UGLY STRATEGY I SEE
This is what I think may be playing out, my opinion of course. And yes, the strategy is so brazenly obvious, arrogant, and antithetical to everything America is supposed to be and stand for that it will be difficult to digest.
What the Bush administration appears to be waiting for, stalling for, while they allegedly mull over the Iraq question, is for the naval carriers and other key assets to fall into position. This will happen in the first week of January. Saddam Hussein is being executed (and I would not be surprised if every major network aired it) to enrage tempers and fuel more violence in Iraq. This violence will justify an immediate need for a troop surge, although I think it will be described as temporary. Remember too that the British press has for the past week done nothing but report that Britain will be attacked by the New Year. Clearly they are preparing themselves for a contingency, and that contingency is the massive violence that will erupt across the Muslim world as they watch (and I really believe it will be televised) Saddam’s hanging just before the New Year.
Why is the rush to execute Saddam Hussein not account for Hajj? Or does it?
The carriers will be in position. I imaging there will be an event of some sort in Iraq, or the violence will spill into friendly (our friends) territory. It will be dramatic, even more so than the immediate violence.
The attacks will be blamed on Iran, with the help of the Saudis and Pakistan. Iran will be blamed for something that happens in Iran. The naval carriers, again, will be in position. The sanctions, as watered down as they are, have given the administration the blank check they needed from the world (and they still have their blank check from Congress) to order aerial strikes. The surge troops will be in position, and I estimate that ground support will begin around late February, early March.
Saddam’s execution and the violence will also be a convenient cover while the administration moves pieces into position.
But what the planners in the administration don’t seem to realize is that the Persians are the most expert of chess players, and they are a patient, strategy minded opponent. They are watching this develop, all of it, and they too are planning their counteraction. They know better than to strike first, because in doing so, they would lose the moral argument in the eyes of the world, as well as the advantage of counteraction. The US has a superior air force, but Iran has a formidable navy, and while the house of Saud will fuel this, the fallout will be fatal. Why?
Here is why: Because the US is too stretched to be able to protect Israel, and Israel cannot sustain a long term attack. They can sustain a few hits, but they will not be able to sustain a full blown attack.
If you have any doubt, go back to the recent war with Lebanon. The British will pull out, despite promises of support. Blair is on his way out, and the British public will not tolerate support for Israel, because of its help in supporting US imperialistic aggression. Whatever terrorist cells lurk in the US, and make no mistake, our administration has done little to address this issue, will be activated.
Also consider that the house of Saud is not prepared to defend itself against an uprising, and that the US cannot protect it while simultaneously operating on three different fronts and covertly in god knows how many. Despite the various sectarian differences in the Muslim world, there are two enemies that they all agree to fight and die fighting against: the US and Israel. This attack will set off a Muslim counterattack so large, that nothing will be able to stop it or contain it.
But our leadership does not see this, because they cannot think strategically and won't think in human terms, so they are left with nothing but arrogance. And we ae left with a world ablaze. '
Larisa Alexandrovna maintains the blog At-Largely and is Managing Editor - of Raw Story.
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Jan 12, 2007 12:44 am; edited 10 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 9:03 pm Post subject: A BUSH-SHARON DOCTRINE |
| A BUSH-SHARON DOCTRINE
2/10/2003
COMMENTARY
by Arnaud de Borchgrave
Israel is asking the U.S. for $4 billion in additional military assistance - in addition, that is, to the just under $3 billion a year a year it receives automatically - plus $8 billion in commercial-loan guarantees. The $12 billion question about the $15 billion grant-and-loan package is "What is the quid pro quo?" Is it tied to a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum? The beginning of a dismantlement of 145 Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank? A freeze on new settlements? A timetable, however vague, for the establishment of a Palestinian state within five years?
None of the above. The strategic objectives of the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East have gradually merged into a now cohesive Bush-Sharon Doctrine. But this gets lost in the deafening cacophony of talking heads playing armchair generals in the coming war to change regimes in Baghdad. The Washington Post's Bob Kaiser finally broke through the sound barrier to document (2/9) what has long been reported in encrypted diplomatic e-mails from foreign embassies to dozens of foreign governments: Washington's "Likudniks" - Ariel Sharon's powerful backers in the Bush Administration - have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since president Bush was sworn into office.
In alliance with Evangelical Christians, these policy-makers include some of the most powerful players in the Bush Administration. The course they plotted for Mr. Bush began with benign neglect of the Mideast peace process as Intifada II escalated. 9/11 provided the impulse for a military campaign to consign Saddam Hussein to the dustbin of history. Sharon provided the geopolitical ammo by convincing Mr. Bush that the war on Palestinian terrorism was identical to the global war on terror. Next came a campaign to convince U.S. public opinion that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were allies in their war against America. An alleged secret meeting in Prague in April 2001 between Mohamed Atta - the lead suicide bomber on 9/11 - and an Iraqi intelligence agent got the ball rolling. Since then stories about the Saddam-Al Qaeda nexus have become a cottage industry.
But this was barely step one in the Bush-Sharon Doctrine. The strategic objective is the antithesis of Middle Eastern stability. The destabilization of "despotic regimes" comes next. In the Arab bowling alley, one ball aimed at Saddam is designed to achieve a ten-strike that would discombobulate authoritarian and/or despotic regimes in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Emirates and Sheikhdoms.
The ultimate phase would see Israel surrounded by democratic regimes that would provide five million Israelis - soon to be surrounded by 300 million Arabs - with peace and security for at least a generation. A meritorious plan if it achieves all its objectives.
Close U.S. allies Jordan and Turkey were to form an axis along with Israel to weaken and "roll back" Syria. Turkey was the first Middle Eastern state to recognize Israel in 1949. In 1996, the two countries also signed a strategic partnership that allows the Israeli air force to train in Turkish air space.
The roots of the overall strategy can be traced to a paper published in 1996 by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think tank. The document was titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" and was designed as a political blueprint for the incoming government of Binyamin Netanyahu, a super hawk in the Israeli political aviary. The complete break with the past was to be a new strategy "based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism."
Israel, according to the 1996 paper, would "shape its strategic environment,"beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in a military coup in 1958 when young King Faisal, a cousin of Jordan's late King Hussein, was assassinated.
Last year, Jordan's former Crown Prince Hassan shocked King Abdullah by failing to inform him he was journeying to London to attend a conference of exiled dissident Iraqi officers. Hassan speaks Hebrew and is known to be bitter over his removal as Crown Prince by his brother Hussein a few days before the king lost his battle to cancer.
The rebuilding of Zionism, as the paper urged, must at the same time abandon any thought of trading land for peace with the Arabs, which it described as "cultural, economic, political, diplomatic and military retreat."
The strategic roadmap - which has been followed faithfully thus far by both Netanyahu and his successor Sharon - called for the abandonment of the Oslo accords "under which Israel has no obligations if the PLO does not fulfill its obligations." Yassir Arafat blundered by obliging Israel.
"Our claim to the land [of the West Bank] - to which we have clung for 2,000 years - is legitimate and noble," the paper continued. "Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, is a solid basis for the future."
For the strategy to succeed, the paper suggested, Israel would have to win broad American support for these new policies. And to ensure support in Washington, Netanyahu was advised to use "language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of past U.S. administrations during the Cold War, which apply as well to Israel."
Prominent American opinion makers who are now senior members of the Bush Administration participated in the discussions and the drafting that led to this 1996 blueprint. Prime Minister Sharon has flown to Washington seven times in two years to meet with Mr. Bush, more frequently than any other head of state or government.
Sharon quickly convinced a receptive and deeply religious Mr. Bush that Palestinian terrorism, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were part of a three-pronged offensive against the Judeo-Christian civilization.
The destabilization part of the strategy appears to be working. The Arab League seems to have reached a dead end. And it has no idea how to turn around. Arabs states are the only ones in the world with living standards that have declined steadily for the past two decades. Even the richest one - Saudi Arabia -- has fallen from per capita incomes of some $20,000 plus to $7,000 since 1983. Saudi royals know they have to open up their private fiefdom to participatory democracy. Eight other Arab states are committed to political pluralism and market economies. How to keep politico-religious extremists from winning elections is now their common problem. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:26 am Post subject: Neocon Surge - The Real Iraq Study Group |
| The real Iraq Study Group
Forget Jim Baker's crew. The neocon hawks who sold the war, joined by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, unveiled their new plan for "victory": At least 25,000 new troops in combat roles well into 2008.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/01/06/aei/print.html
By Mark Benjamin
Jan. 06, 2007 | Hawks gathered in the plush, carpeted suites of the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Friday to discuss a new course in Iraq they say should be spearheaded by tens of thousands of new troops camped out in Baghdad neighborhoods in active combat roles well into 2008.
The plan is not to be dismissed. Unlike the much ballyhooed Iraq Study Group, these are the people President Bush listens to, many of them the same influential voices who were predicting in 2002 that the war would establish a flower of democracy in the Middle East. Sitting in the overheated, standing-room-only conference hall, a Department of Homeland Security official leaned over to me to note the irony that reporters had paid so much attention to the workings of the Iraq Study Group, as opposed to the troop-surge plans being cooked up at AEI. "This is the Iraq Study Group," he quipped.
Bush is expected to release a new Iraq strategy next week that reportedly hinges on a troop increase, and many have said his thinking has been influenced by the AEI experts who gathered on Friday.
The think tank's plan is not for the lighthearted. The glossy 47-page AEI report, titled "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq," envisions sending 25,000 additional troops to clear Baghdad house by house. Then, as report author Frederick W. Kagan put it, those soldiers would not pull back to their bases but remain stationed in Baghdad neighborhoods, providing security for civilians. "We can clear and hold critical terrain in Baghdad," Kagan told the crowd.
This is no small surge, nor a temporary one. For better or for worse, it is an escalation of the war. Supporters envision a last-ditch effort to forget about all the mistakes of the past and return, four years into the war, to the overwhelming force envisioned in the so-called Powell doctrine, which held that the United States should never commit less than the overwhelming force needed for a decisive military victory. For die-hard supporters of the war, this is a chance to finally do it right. The plan calls for increased troop levels for at least another 18 months.
This plan also flips on their head the key ideas emphasized by the Iraq Study Group: that the solution in Iraq is political and not military, and that U.S. forces must transition quickly away from combat roles and into training Iraqis. In the AEI plan, the United States would force a military solution that would, in turn, enable a political compromise. Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a plan supporter, called a military victory "the precondition for political, social and economic development."
And there is flat-out disagreement between the war-escalation crowd and a growing chorus of military experts on whether the stressed-out Army can muster this many boots on the ground. While former Secretary of State Colin Powell last month argued against a surge of troops into Iraq because the "active Army is about broken," Kagan said flatly that his analysis shows that the additional tens of thousands of troops "do exist." Supporters readily admit that more troops, in the short term, will mean more bloodshed. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, a big supporter of the plan, warned the crowd to expect more casualties and said that things in Iraq "will get worse before they get better."
McCain and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman -- who delivered a neoconservative pep talk that could have come off former Bush speechwriter David Frum's hard drive -- were there to formally embrace the plan.
"We have got to see it in the broader context of the war against Islamic extremism and terrorism," Lieberman said about Iraq. "The Middle East is dividing along new lines. I'm speaking here about the Arab world. And the lines are ever clearer and more intense between what I would call moderates and extremists, dictators and democrats," he intoned. "The fact is that we are engaged against an axis of Islamist extremists and terrorists. It is an axis of evil," he warned.
Lieberman made sweeping historical comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Spanish Civil War, the failure to grasp the growing threat of fascism in Europe in the late 1930s and the start of World War II for America. "Pearl Harbor has already happened on 9-11-01," Lieberman said darkly.
McCain and Lieberman emphasized that they are not advocating a plan to blindly throw more troops into the Baghdad meat grinder. Kagan's report appears to be meticulously thought out, detailing the specific forces that will be required to clear and hold Baghdad. The operation would start with securing the Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods closest to the Green Zone and between there and Baghdad International Airport. "Choosing Victory" comes complete with color-coded maps to help envision the neighborhood-by-neighborhood process of successfully pacifying the capital once and for all.
To Kagan and McCain, eliminating insurgents, holding territory and protecting the civilian population in the capital represent a return to classic counterinsurgency tactics that should have been employed long ago, rather than more of the same bumbling around Iraq in Humvees. Such stability then provides the breathing room for enhanced economic development activities and a new focus on forging a lasting political settlement.
The plan looks good on paper, just as the plans to establish democracy in Iraq did back in 2002. But its framers failed to explain how, after three years of shocking mismanagement, the Bush administration would somehow now be stricken with a case of icy competence. Nobody explained how the White House would better manage the war with more troops. McCain said the war had been "very badly mishandled" but said that might be all over now. "I believe that the war is still winnable," he announced. "But to prevail, we will need to do everything right and the Iraqis will have to do their part. Are we concerned about doing everything right and having the Iraqis do their part?" he asked rhetorically. "Of course we are."
At AEI on Friday, there was some palpable concern that even with the color-coded road map to victory the White House might still screw things up. Half measures would lead to failure, according to supporters of this escalation. The Iraq Study Group warned last month against adopting only part of its plan. The same was true of the hawks in the AEI conference room. "This troop surge must be significant and sustained," McCain said. "Otherwise, do not do it. Otherwise, there will be more needless loss of American lives."
That kind of messy carnage couldn't have felt more removed from the posh 12th-floor AEI offices in downtown Washington. Even the roughly 120 war protesters marching out front seemed far away, as reporters and think tank experts snacked on delicately rolled sandwich wraps and a chilled pasta salad, coolly chatting about sending another 25,000 troops into a war that has already cost more than 3,000 American lives.
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VDARE.COM - http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070105_surge.htm
January 05, 2007
The Surge: Political Cover or Escalation?
By Paul Craig Roberts
The New Year began on the hopeful note that Bush’s illegal war in Iraq would soon be ended. The repudiation of Bush and the Republicans in the November congressional election, the Iraq Study Group’s unanimous conclusion that the US needs to remove its troops from the sectarian strife Bush set in motion by invading Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld’s removal as defense secretary and his replacement by Iraqi Study Group member Robert Gates, the thumbs down given by America’s top military commanders to the neoconservatives’ plan to send more US troops to Iraq, and new polls of the US military that reveal that only a minority supports Bush’s Iraq policy, thus giving new meaning to "support the troops," are all indications that Americans have shed the stupor that has given carte blanche to George W. Bush.
When word leaked that Bush was inclined toward the "surge option" of committing more troops by keeping existing troops deployed in Iraq after their replacements had arrived, NBC News reported that an administration official "admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one." It is a clear sign of exasperation with Bush when an administration official admits that Bush is willing to sacrifice American troops and Iraqi civilians in order to protect his own delusions.
The American Establishment, concerned by Bush’s egregious mismanagement, moved to take control of Iraq policy away from him. However, recent news reports and analysis suggest that Bush has turned his back to the American establishment and his military advisers and is throwing in his lot with the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby. This will further isolate Bush and make him more vulnerable to impeachment.
In the January 5 issue of CounterPunch John Walsh gives a good description of the struggle between the American establishment and the neocons.
Peter Spiegel, the Pentagon correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reported on January 4 that the neocons have used the failure of the administration’s policy in Iraq to convince Bush to launch an aggressive counterinsurgency requiring the buildup of troop levels by extending deployments beyond the agreed terms. [Old guard back on Iraq policy, January 4, 2007]
Raed Jarrar (CounterPunch, January 4) suggests that the Shi’ite militias, such as the one led by Al-Sadr, are the intended targets of the "surge option." There seems no surer way to escalate the conflict in Iraq than to attack the Shi’ite militias. For longer than the US fought Germany in WW II, 150,000 US troops in Iraq have been thwarted by a small insurgency drawn from Iraq’s minority population of Sunnis. It hardly seems feasible that 30,000 additional US troops, demoralized by extended deployment, can succeed in a surge against the Shi’ite militias when 150,000 US troops cannot succeed against the minority Sunnis.
The reason the US has not been driven out of Iraq is that the majority Shi’ites have not been part of the insurgency. The Shi’ites are attacking the Sunnis, who are forced to fight a two-front war against US troops and Shi’ite militias and death squads.
The US owes its presence in Iraq, just as the colonial powers always owed their presence in the Middle East, to the disunity of Arabs. Western domination of the Muslim world succeeded by not picking a fight with all of the disunited Arabs at the same time.
Attacking the Shi’ite militias while fighting a Sunni insurgency would violate this rule. If Bush ignores US military commanders and expert opinion and accepts the surge option advanced by the delusional neocon allies of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, US troops will be engulfed in general insurgency. This is why General John Abizaid resigned on January 5. He wants no part of the Republican Party’s sacrifice of US soldiers to sectarian conflict.
In recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, Republican Senator John McCain, who believes in the efficacy of violence and not in diplomacy, pressed General Abizaid to request more US troops to be sent to Iraq. General Abizaid replied as follows:
"Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the core commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no."
Bush is like Hitler. He blames defeats on his military commanders, not on his own insane policy. Like Hitler, he protects himself from reality with delusion. In his last hours, Hitler was ordering non-existent German armies to drive the Russians from Berlin.
By manipulating Bush and provoking a military crisis in which the US stands to lose its army in Iraq, the neoconservatives hope to revive the implementation of their plan for US conquest of the Middle East. They believe they can use fear, "honor," and the aversion of macho Americans to ignoble defeat to expand the conflict in response to military disaster.
The neocons believe that the loss of an American army would be met with the electorate’s demand for revenge. The barriers to the draft would fall, as would the barriers to the use of nuclear weapons.
Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz set out the plan for Middle East conquest several years ago in Commentary Magazine. It is a plan for Muslim genocide. In place of physical extermination of Muslims, Podhoretz advocates their cultural destruction by deracination. Islam is to be torn out by the roots and reduced to a purely formal shell devoid of any real beliefs.
Podhoretz disguises the neoconservative attack against diversity with contrived arguments, but its real purpose is to use the US military to subdue Arabs and to create space for Israel to expand.
Not enough Americans are aware that this is what the "war on terror" is all about.
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Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/06/neoconservatism-as-a-jewish-movement.php
Israel's Olmert Counting on Jewish lobby to foil Baker-Hamilton:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/11/20/olmert-counting-on-jewish-lobby-to-foil-baker-hamilton.php
BBC: Bush 'to reveal Iraq troop boost' (for Israel!):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/01/02/bbc-bush-to-reveal-iraq-troop-boost-for-israel.php
Bombing Iran for Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/01/04/bombing-iran-for-israel.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 4:13 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16069.htm
Can We Let Intelligence Officials Lie With Impunity?”
By Ray McGovern and W. Patrick Lang
01/05/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Lies have consequences . All those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression—termed by Nuremberg “the supreme international crime”—have blood on their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same service in facilitating war on Iran.
“They should have been shot,” said former State Department intelligence director, Carl Ford, referring to ex-CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin, for their “fundamentally dishonest” cooking of intelligence to please the White House. Ford was alluding to “intelligence” on the menacing but non-existent mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq.
Ford was angry that Tenet and McLaughlin persisted in portraying the labs as real several months after they had been duly warned that they existed only in the imagination of intelligence analysts who, in their own eagerness to please, had glommed onto second-hand tales told by a con-man appropriately dubbed “Curveball.” In fact, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Colin Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball’s wares at the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003.
After the war began, those same analysts, still “leaning forward,” misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, then working for NBC News, obliged by pointing out the equipment “where the biological process took place... Literally, there is nothing else for which it could be used.”
George Tenet knows a good man when he sees him. A few weeks later he hired Kay to lead the Pentagon-created Iraq Survey Group in the famous search to find other (equally non-existent, it turned out) “weapons of mass destruction.” (Eventually Kay, a scientist given to empirical evidence more than faith-based intelligence, became the skunk at the picnic when, in January 2004, he insisted on telling senators the truth: “We were almost all wrong—and I certainly include myself here.” But that came later.)
On May 28, 2003, CIA’s intrepid analysts cooked up a fraudulent six-page report claiming that the trailer discovered earlier in May was proof they had been right about Iraq’s “bio-weapons labs.” They then performed what could be called a “night-time requisition,” getting the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position to provide DIA “coordination,” (which was subsequently withdrawn by DIA). On May 29, President George W. Bush, visiting Poland, proudly announced on Polish TV, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
When the State Department's Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts realized that this was not some kind of Polish joke, they “went ballistic,” according to Ford, who immediately warned Colin Powell that there was a problem. Tenet must have learned of this quickly, for he called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground. He told Tenet and McLaughlin, “That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I’ve ever read.”
This vignette—and several like it—are found in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say Ford is still angry over the fraudulent paper. Ford told the authors:
It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the report... It wasn’t just that it was wrong. They lied.
This, of course, was just one episode in the long drama of deliberate perversion of intelligence to grease the skids for justifying the invasion of Iraq—the most serious foreign policy blunder in our nation’s 230-year history.
“Hubris,” the overweening arrogance that brought down many a protagonist of the Greek tragedies, is an aptly-chosen title for the revealing Isikoff/Corn study. Some of the ground they cover is familiar to us Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), who well before the war started chronicling the Bush administration’s lies. What makes the book different is its cumulative impact—the detailed, first-hand accounts of lie and cover-up, lie and cover-up, ad nauseam .
Protagonists need a supporting cast. And many of the dramatis personae were intelligence analysts—former colleagues of mine. The question lingers: How could they allow themselves to be seduced into enlisting in the meretricious march to mayhem in Iraq? Much of the answer (and much of the reason this misguided war is allowed to continue) lies in the fact that those planning and facilitating the war in Iraq are not fighting it. Unlike Vietnam, no one “important” is being asked to put life and limb at risk; nor, generally speaking, are their children. Interestingly, most of our troops come from towns with populations of less than 10,000.
Theirs Not To Reason Why
Into the valley of death rode the 3,000. “U.S. Toll in Iraq Reaches 3,000” screamed The Washington Post ’s lead story on New Year’s Day, which included the Pentagon’s count of more than 22,000 troops injured. As is known, the Pentagon does not count dead Iraqis, but reputable estimates put that number at about 650,000. As we pass this sad milestone, it behooves us to pause and consider the enormity of what has been allowed to happen—and how to prevent it from happening again. The House and Senate Intelligence committees in the new Congress need to reinstitute genuine oversight, including a close look at why so many intelligence officers cooperated in the dishonesty leading to war. We owe that to the 25,000, not to mention the 650,000.
Start with Tenet and McLaughlin and include Alan Foley, the retired chief of CIA’s Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC) and devotee of imaginative intelligence on bio-labs, uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes and other artifices to justify an unnecessary war. Most of the suspects owe their meteoric careers in large measure to Defense Secretary Robert Gates who, as head of CIA analysis and later as CIA director, institutionalized the politicization of CIA analysis more than 20 years ago, mostly by moving malleable managers up the pay scale.
Another beneficiary of Gates is George Tenet who, as staff director of the Senate Intelligence committee in 1991, helped Gates overcome strong opposition to his confirmation as director. It is a safe bet that Gates returned the favor by recommending that Tenet be kept on as director when George W. Bush became president in 2001.
Gates learned well at the knee of his original mentor, William Casey, President Ronald Reagan’s CIA director. They and those that followed had remarkable success in perpetrating the dual crime of which, long ago, Socrates was accused: making the worse case appear the better and corrupting the youth. Thus, in September 2002 when Senate Intelligence committee Democrats Dick Durban and Bob Graham insisted on a National Intelligence Estimate on “weapons of mass destruction” before Congress voted for war, George Tenet found himself the ultimate beneficiary of Robert Gates’ finely tuned Geiger counter for corruptibility. The pliant managers promoted originally by Gates were happy to conjure up a formal estimate written to the specifications of their frequent visitor, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Those who tell consequential lies need to be held accountable. That includes, of course, Colin Powell. Congress needs to ask the former Secretary of State why he decided to disregard the objections of his own intelligence analysts and turned instead to faith-based intelligence for war. He has expressed regret for his scandalous performance at the U.N., but only because it put “a blot on my record.” I would like to see him try that out on Cindy Sheehan and 3,000 other bereaved mothers.
Powell and I grew up a mile from each other in the Bronx. There we had a word for his forte, which remains a ubiquitous scourge in Washington. It was both noun and verb: “brownnose.” And it has nothing to do with skin color. It was a familiar word before I learned “sycophant.” Webster’s provides this meaning: “To ingratiate oneself with, to curry favor with; from the implication that servility is equivalent to kissing the hinder parts of the person from whom advancement is sought.”
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D, Texas, put the effects of all this most succinctly in a floor speech last year:
This war was launched without an immediate threat to our families... Radical "know-it-all" ideologues here in Washington bent facts, distorted intelligence and perpetrated lies designed to mislead the American people into believing a third-rate thug had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy and was soon to unleash a mushroom cloud.
Much is being said today about honoring the sacrifices of our fallen soldiers. Perhaps the best way to do that is to find out who did the misleading and hold them to account before they do it again
Ray McGovern was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before his 27-year career as a CIA analyst. W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel, served with Special Forces in Vietnam, as a professor at West Point and as Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East (DIA). Both are with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
First published at TomPaine.com
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comments (56) | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 10:27 am Post subject: Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel? |
| http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/weekinreview/11bronner.html?ei=5088&en=efa2bd266224e880&ex=1307678400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
June 11, 2006
The World
Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel?
By ETHAN BRONNER
EVER since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map." Iran's nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.
Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran."
But is that what Mr. Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war? For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq — building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise.
"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."
Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: "The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon."
Mr. Steele added that neither Khomeini nor Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that Israel's "vanishing" was imminent or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about. "But the propaganda damage was done," he wrote, "and Western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews."
If Mr. Steele and Mr. Cole are right, not one word of the quotation — Israel should be wiped off the map — is accurate.
But translators in Tehran who work for the president's office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his Web site (www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say "wipe off" or "wipe away" is more accurate than "vanish" because the Persian verb is active and transitive.
The second translation issue concerns the word "map." Khomeini's words were abstract: "Sahneh roozgar." Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as "map," and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr. Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not "Sahneh roozgar" but "Safheh roozgar," meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word "map" again.
Ahmad Zeidabadi, a professor of political science in Tehran whose specialty is Iran-Israel relations, explained: "It seems that in the early days of the revolution the word 'map' was used because it appeared to be the best meaningful translation for what he said. The words 'sahneh roozgar' are metaphorical and do not refer to anything specific. Maybe it was interpreted as 'book of countries,' and the closest thing to that was a map. Since then, we have often heard 'Israel bayad az naghshe jographya mahv gardad' — Israel must be wiped off the geographical map. Hard-liners have used it in their speeches."
The final translation issue is Mr. Ahmadinejad's use of "occupying regime of Jerusalem" rather than "Israel."
To some analysts, this means he is calling for regime change, not war, and therefore it need not be regarded as a call for military action. Professor Cole, for example, says: "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."
But to others, "occupying regime" signals more than opposition to a certain government; the phrase indicates the depth of the Iranian president's rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East because he refuses even to utter the name Israel. He has said that the Palestinian issue "does not lend itself to a partial territorial solution" and has called Israel "a stain" on Islam that must be erased. By contrast, Mr. Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, said that if the Palestinians accepted Israel's existence, Iran would go along.
When combined with Iran's longstanding support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah of Lebanon, two groups that have killed numerous Israelis, and Mr. Ahmadinejad's refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust, it is hard to argue that, from Israel's point of view, Mr. Ahmadinejad poses no threat. Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel.
So did Iran's president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
