| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 3:16 pm Post subject: |
| US Warns Israel –There Will Be No ‘USS Liberty Pt II’
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/us-warns-israel-there-will-be-no-%e2%80%98uss-liberty-pt-ii%e2%80%99/
July 28, 2008 — crescentandcross
For the last 41 years, Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty has been a taboo topic about which neither the Jewish state nor the US has allowed free and open discussion. Like a paid-off judge in the service of organized crime interests pounding his gavel on the bench, for the last 4 decades Israel and her supporters in the US government have bellowed ‘case closed’ and have raked over the coals anyone–including the survivors of the attack themselves–from arguing otherwise. Realizing the tidal wave of outrage that would occur if the American people were to come of age and lose their innocence in realizing what Israel did in murdering 34 American servicemen 4 decades ago in a premeditated act of war (to say nothing of the cover-up perpetrated by the US government) it has been on the list of forbidden topics……until recently.
McCain, NeoCons, the Israel Lobby Ron Paul Weekly Standard (McCain's role in helping to cover up the USS Liberty mentioned):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfLeZXrluZw
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http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/07/24/if-iran-is-attacking-it-might-really-be-israel/
If Iran is Attacking It Might Really be Israel
By Philip Giraldi
25/07/08 "American Conservative" -- - The Benny Morris op-ed in the NYT last Friday should provide convincing evidence that Israel really really really wants an attack against Iran sooner rather than later. Morris is close to the Israeli government and his case that Iran must be bombed soon and with maximum conventional weaponry to avoid using nukes later was clearly intended to push the United States to do the attacking. The likelihood that Dick Cheney is almost certainly supportive of a US pre-emptive strike and might well be pulling strings behind the scenes, possibly without the knowledge of the Great Decider, makes the next several months particularly significant if a war is to be avoided.
Some intel types are beginning to express concerns that the Israelis might do something completely crazy to get the US involved. There are a number of possible “false flag” scenarios in which the Israelis could insert a commando team in the Persian Gulf or use some of their people inside Iraq to stage an incident that they will make to look Iranian, either by employing Iranian weapons or by leaving a communications footprint that points to Tehran’s involvement.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20300.htm
Israel Planning a September/October Surprise?
By Ray McGovern
17/07/08 "ICH" -- -You say you expected more rhetoric than reality from Senators Obama and McCain yesterday in their speeches on Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, that’s certainly what you got. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2008 7:12 am Post subject: Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide |
| July 31, 2008
Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lubanlobe.php?articleid=13232
by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe
A mushrooming media controversy pitting neoconservatives against a prominent Jewish-American political commentator could mark a new stage in the growing battle over who speaks for the US Jewish community on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the Middle East.
Time columnist Joe Klein's accusations that Jewish neoconservatives, who played a particularly visible role in the drive to war in Iraq and have since pushed for military confrontation in Iran, sacrificed "US lives and money...to make the world safe for Israel," have spurred angry charges of anti-Semitism and personal attacks from critics at such neoconservative strongholds as the Weekly Standard, National Review, and Commentary.
But the fierceness of the controversy surrounding Klein, generally considered a political centrist, highlights the growing antagonism between neoconservative hardliners and prominent US Jews whose more moderate views are aligned more closely with those of the foreign policy establishment.
The controversy began Jun. 24, when Klein argued in a Time blog post that the "fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives – people like [independent Democrat Sen.] Joe Lieberman and the crowd at Commentary – plumped for this war [in Iraq], and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties."
Within a day, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Klein of espousing ,"age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."
The reaction from the right-wing press was even harsher. Commentary editor John Podhoretz reiterated the accusation of "anti-Semitic canards," and called Klein "manifestly intellectually unstable."
Writing in National Review, former George W. Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner called Klein "a man who cannot control his anger and even hatred."
But Klein has refused to back down, accusing his attackers of using charges of anti-Semitism to silence criticism of neoconservative policies.
"When [Commentary writer] Jennifer Rubin or Abe Foxman calls me anti-Semitic, they're wrong," he said in an interview. "I am anti-neoconservative."
In its broad contours, the controversy is a familiar one, as critics accuse neoconservatives of exercizing pernicious influence on US Middle East policy and neoconservatives reply with charges of anti-Semitism and conspiracy-mongering.
What distinguishes the recent furor over Klein, however, is that it involves someone who is widely regarded as an exemplar of the centrist political establishment.
Klein is best known for his 1996 novel Primary Colors a thinly-veiled and largely unflattering portrait of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign that was originally published anonymously and subsequently made into a Hollywood movie. A frequent critic of Clinton, Klein has at times expressed admiration for George W. Bush.
He also endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (although he has since expressed regret for his support) and describes himself as "a strong supporter of Israel."
The Klein dust-up is the latest in a series of events over the last several years that have placed neoconservatives both in the spotlight and on the defensive.
Neoconservatism, a predominantly – but by no means exclusively – Jewish movement, got its start in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a small but influential group of Democrats began distancing themselves from the party which, in their view, had become too dovish toward the Soviet Union and too sympathetic toward Arab demands against Israel.
By 1980, most had become strong supporters of Ronald Reagan. A number of prominent neoconservatives joined his administration, including many who would later play key roles in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
Consigned to the political wilderness under President George H.W. Bush, the neoconservatives became increasingly identified in the 1990s with Israel's right-wing Likud Party. It was also during the same period that they began agitating for "regime change" in Iraq, arguing that such a move would transform the balance of power in the Middle East decisively in favor of both Israel and the US.
They experienced a rebirth with the election of Bush's son in 2000, and particularly after the 9/11 attacks, when they played a major role, both inside the administration and in the media, in rallying the public and Congress behind war in Iraq.
But with the deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the influence of neoconservatives inside and outside the administration began to wane, and critics began charging that they had led the US astray.
A series of incidents also focused critical scrutiny on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying group whose hawkish right-wing leadership has often defied both the views of the broader US Jewish community and the policies of Israeli governments.
In 2004, the Justice Department charged Pentagon staffer Lawrence Franklin with passing classified US government documents to two AIPAC lobbyists, who had then given the documents to an Israeli Embassy official. In January 2006, Franklin was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, while the AIPAC staffers are still awaiting trial.
In March 2006, the well-respected and staunchly realist international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published the article "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books. That article, which charged that the lobby had for decades skewed US policy towards Israel in a direction detrimental to US interests, became the basis for their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis was instantly controversial. Like Klein, they were accused by critics, including the ADL and Commentary, of anti-Semitism and of perpetrating stereotypes about shadowy Jewish conspiracies.
But as a result of their stature, the two authors' work clearly created political space for those, both within the foreign policy establishment and within the US Jewish community, who had been long privately critical of the neoconservatives but had been worried about the consequences of going public with their misgivings.
More recently, AIPAC has come under fire for its close alliance with right-wing Christian Zionists, particularly controversial pastor John Hagee and his organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
Hagee views an undivided Israel as a precondition for precipitating the Armageddon, and his group has accordingly pushed for hawkish US policies in the Middle East that have been consistent with the neoconservatives' own preferences.
Matters came to a head earlier this year, when Republican presidential candidate John McCain was compelled to repudiate Hagee's endorsement after comments came to light in which the pastor suggested that the Holocaust was biblically ordained in order to force Jews to resettle in Israel.
Nonetheless, Hagee and CUFI have maintained close ties with the neoconservatives, and a collection of prominent Israel hawks, including Senator Lieberman, spoke at CUFI's summit in Washington earlier this month.
The belief that AIPAC has failed to accurately represent the views of the US Jewish community led to the foundation earlier this year of J Street, a Jewish lobbying group that aims to push for a more moderate stance on Middle East issues.
In the wake of these developments, many observers have taken Klein's comments – and particularly his refusal to back down in the face of withering criticism from neoconservatives – as a sign that new political space is being created for the public airing of more moderate views on Middle East policy.
M.J. Rosenberg, a former AIPAC staffer now associated with the moderate Israel Policy Forum, expressed the hope that commentators would stop equating neoconservatism with Judaism and start treating it as a political movement subject to political criticism.
"Although most neocons are Jews, few Jews are neocons," he wrote Wednesday. By equating the two groups, "[the neocons] want Americans not to follow the trail of war-mongering that leads not to Jews but to them."
(Inter Press Service)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- July 16, 2008
Turning the Tables
on the Israel-Firsters
http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=13139
by Michael Scheuer
Now that the dust has settled in the spat between journalist Joe Klein and the ideologues at Commentary, it is time to regret the ink spilled over the non-issue of "dual loyalties." The idea that there are U.S. citizens who have equal loyalties to the United States and Israel is passé. American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals – Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal – amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples' religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.
The Israel-firsters' success is, of course, the stuff of which legends are made. Most recently, for example, we heard President Bush echo Sen. Lieberman's insane and subversive contention that the United States has a "duty" to ensure the fulfilling of God's millennia-old promise to Abraham regarding the creation and survival of Israel. Bush told the Knesset all Americans are ready to endlessly bleed and pay to ensure Israel's security. And where does the president derive authority to make such a commitment in the name of his countrymen? From the Constitution? On the basis of America's dominant religion? From – heaven forbid – a thoughtful, hardheaded analysis of U.S. interests?
No, Bush's pledge was based on none of these. Bush's decision to more deeply involve America in the eternal Arab-Israeli war was based on nothing less than the corruption wrought on the American political system by the Israel-firsters, AIPAC's enormous treasury, and the lamentable but growing influence of America's leading evangelical Protestant preachers.
The Israel-firsters started the Iraq war and now have the United States locked into an occupation of that country that may not end in any of our lifetimes. Unless Americans ignore the likes of Hanson, Podhoretz, Lieberman, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, the cost in blood and treasure will ultimately bankrupt America.
AIPAC is a perfectly legal organization, and the wealth of its members is channeled into reliable campaign contributions for any candidate from either party who will put Israel's interests above America's. From McCain to Obama, from Pelosi to Giuliani, from Hillary Clinton to Vice President Cheney, AIPAC pumps money to any and every American politician who is willing to adopt an Israel-first policy.
Leading American Protestant evangelical preachers – men like Hagee, Parsley, and Graham – are the newest and perhaps most anti-American members of this fifth column. They serve two purposes: (1) to reinforce in the minds of their flocks the Bush-Lieberman absurdity that the United States has a "duty" to ensure Israel's survival; and (2) to use religious rhetoric to steadily convince the Muslim world that U.S. leaders are interested only in taming – and if need be, destroying – Islam.
The reality and power of this anti-American, pro-Israel triangle – Israel-first politicians, civil servants, and pundits; AIPAC's corrupting influence; and the warmongering of major evangelical Protestant preachers – is so obvious and palpable that the only way its members can blur reality is to deny the triangle's existence and identify their critics as anti-Semites. Well, the time has come to simply ignore these folks' knee-jerk hurling of that epithet. Indeed, the slur ought to understood for what it is: a sure sign that the Israel-firsters know that their fifth column would be destroyed in a minute if their fellow Americans come to recognize that their sons and daughters are dying in Iraq and soon elsewhere to protect an Israeli state whose existence is just as important to U.S. interests as the creation of a Palestinian state – that is, of no importance whatsoever.
American voters must start using the democratic process to begin removing themselves from the religious war known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Disengagement will take time, hard work, and a steadfast commitment to the rule of law. Three actions are well within the voters' capability, and their use would bring pressure on federal officials to stop killing America's children in wars between Arabs and Israelis.
Voters should press federal representatives to end taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and other such organizations. These organizations' main function is to promote the fallacy that U.S. interests are served by making sure that Israel – "the embattled island of democracy in the Middle East" – is protected, and that the lives of American children should be joyfully spent to bring democracy to foreigners in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Voters should not vote for any candidate for federal office who accepts contributions from AIPAC or any other Israel-first organization. This decision would be an important step in beginning to sweep clean the Augean stable that is American politics.
Voters of all faiths must press their religious leaders to regularly, publicly, and specifically denounce the evangelical Protestant preachers whose fire-and-brimstone support for Israel involves Americans in religious wars in which U.S. interests are not threatened.
Neutralizing the Israel-first fifth column must be done, but it must be accomplished using legitimate democratic tools: voting, lobbying, free speech, and support for candidates pledged to keep America out of other peoples' religious wars. The invocation of the anti-Semite epithet by the Israel-firsters should be ignored. To be silenced by the slurs of the Israel-firsters is to ignominiously invite the end of American independence by subordinating U.S. interests to those of a foreign nation, as well as to forget the warning of the greatest American. "If men are precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind," George Washington said in March 1783, "reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter." As long as the Israel-firsters can define the limits of acceptable public discourse, Americans are on their way to the slaughter.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAehMPVFFE0
Michael Scheuer (former head of CIA Bin Laden unit) was on Bill Maher. He said:
" Israel is not worth an American life or an American dollar." and
"Our unqualified support of Israel has brought the US a great deal of pain and increasingly dead Americans, fighting wars that are not ours to fight." and
" America is fighting a war that does not exist -- our politicians have lied to us-it is not about hating freedom, womens' rights etc.---it is about our policies in the Middle East ."
http://neoconzionistthreat.com
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2008 6:53 pm Post subject: Must-Hear Interview with former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern and |
| Please take a listen to the following interview with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern when you have the time to (listen to what he mentioned about how McConnell's deputy and the nuclear expert for the CIA both made presentations about Iran to the AIPAC spin-off think tank - WINEP).
The USS Liberty attack/cover-up was discussed as well. Take a listen to what Ray mentioned about Shaul Mofaz and how his last meeting (before departing D.C.) was with Cheney (no surprise there either!):
Must-Hear Interview with former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern and the Upcoming War with Iran
August 3, 2008
http://216.240.133.177/archives32/Glenn/2008/08/Glenn_1_080208_100000.mp3
http://216.240.133.177/archives32/Glenn/2008/08/Glenn_2_080208_110000.mp3
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Ray McGovern's article which was mentioned in his interview (via the above referenced audio file links) is included at the beginning of the following URL:
Israel Planning a September/October Surprise?
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2008/07/19/israel-planning-a-september-october-surprise.php
The following article was discussed in the interview as well:
US Warns Israel –There Will Be No ‘USS Liberty Pt II’
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2008/07/28/us-warns-israel-there-will-be-no-uss-liberty-pt-ii.php
Attack on the USS Liberty:
http://tinyurl.com/5l3gtg
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http://NEOCONZIONISTTHREAT.COM
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Cheney weighs fratricide to sell war on Iran
Date: Saturday, August 2, 2008, 4:12 PM
Cheney weighs fratricide to sell war on Iran
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=65445§ionid=3510203
Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:43:56
Prominent journalist Seymour Hersh exposes details of a plan considered by US Vice President Dick Cheney on how to provoke war with Iran.
"There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war [with Iran]," Hersh said recently in reference to the subject of discussion at a meeting held at Cheney's office.
In a July article published in the New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist revealed information about covert US operations carried out in Iran. He did not disclose the content of the talks with Cheney in his article.
In a recent interview with Think Progress, however, Hersh exposed that the meeting witnessed Cheney mulling over a proposal to dress up Navy SEALs as Iranians and shoot them in order to trigger a war with Iran.
"The one (plan) that interested me the most was why don't we build - we in our shipyard - build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy SEALs on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Strait of Hormuz, start a shoot-up," he revealed in his recent interview.
"Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can't have Americans killing Americans. That's the kind of - that's the level of stuff we're talking about. Provocation."
The well-known journalist added that the proposal was ultimately rejected.
"Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We're playing, you know, who's the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran," he continued.
Hersh argues that should Washington engineer 'the right incident', Americans will 'support' going to war with Iran.
Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Myron Hersh first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War.
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EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/31/cheney-proposal-for-iran-war/
Don't forget that David Wurmser (who co-authored the 'A Clean Break/war for Israel agenda for Iraq linked at the right of http://neoconzionistthreat.com) was plotting to have Israel attack Iran in an attempt to get the Iranians to retaliate against US troops in Iraq in order to draw US into more war for Israel in the Middle East.. So no surprise that his boss JINSA associated Cheney would be plotting this as well via his Israel first advisors with a mindset like Wurmser's. When are we going to rise up to take our country back from these fifth columnists who are willing to sacrifice American lives for their nefarious agenda to secure the realm for Israel while profiting in the process as well...
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Considering what Wurmser wanted to do via Cheney's office what Hersh has recently conveyed about Cheney is very plausible...
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/01/politics/animal/main2876877.shtml
Cheney losing David Wurmser:
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2007/07/cheney_losing_david_wurmser.html
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/002240.php
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-dreyfuss/another-cheneylinked-haw_b_57538.html
Wurmser co-wrote the 'A Clean Break/war for Israel' agenda:
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/02/clean-break.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/8/1/13231/91378
Want Lower Gas Prices? Lift AIPAC's Sanctions on Iran
by Robert Naiman
Fri Aug 01, 2008 at 10:05:52 AM PDT
Senator McCain, President Bush, and some of their oil industry friends are urging Americans to support overturning a 26 year ban on offshore drilling as a way to bring down gas prices. Of course, it's snake oil designed for what the Joe Lieberman campaign affectionately called "low information voters."
As Dean Baker and Nichole Szembrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted in a June 2008 paper ,
the Energy Information Agency (EIA) projects that Senator McCain's proposal would have no impact in the near-term since it will be close to a decade before the first oil can be extracted from the currently protected offshore areas. The EIA projects that production will reach 200,000 barrels a day (0.2 percent of projected world production) at peak production in close to twenty years. It describes this amount as too small to have any significant effect on oil prices.
Robert Naiman's diary :: ::
In contrast, if the United States had continued raising auto fuel efficiency standards annually between 1985-2005 by a quarter of the amount it raised them annually from 1980-1985 - instead of leaving them virtually unchanged - the result would have roughly been the equivalent of 3.3 million barrels of oil per day in new production in 2008 - 16 times the impact of McCain's Offshore Drilling [MOD], CEPR reports.
What about the impact of lifting sanctions on Iran?
"Sanctions are pushing up the cost of oil," notes Juan Cole in a recent piece on Salon.
I asked Cole what his estimate of the scale of this effect was. If Iran could have expanded production of oil from 4 million barrels a day in the late 1990s to 6 million barrels a day today, that would be an extra 2 million barrels a day, i.e. 88 million barrels a day globally instead of 86, Cole says.
I asked Dean Baker of CEPR what could be the impact of lifting sanctions on Iran, and he wrote:
"Suppose they open up to foreign investment and production goes up 1-2 million barrels a day after a few years...It's 5 to 10 times McCain's offshore drilling."
So, summarizing in a table, using MOD ["McCain's Offshore Drilling"] as our "numeraire," as the economists say, we have the following:
Modest Conservation: 16 MOD
Lift Sanctions on Iran: 5-10 MOD
McCain's Offshore Drilling: 1 MOD
Now, some would surely argue that simply lifting sanctions on Iran is not politically feasible, because there is currently a "Washington Consensus" for sanctions on Iran supported by groups like AIPAC, linked to its nuclear program, relations with Iraq, Hamas, Hizbollah, etc.
Let's concede for the sake of discussion that that is true. What about the lifting of sanctions in the context of a real, negotiated deal with Iran? Would such a deal be more likely if Americans realized that the likely effect of such a deal would include an increase in world oil production roughly equivalent to 5-10 MODs?
Consider the following.
First, insofar as the sanctions were aimed at stopping Iran from having a nuclear program, or having relations with Iraq, Hamas, or Hizbollah that the US doesn't like, they have obviously not achieved their goals. If sanctions are expanded, (for example, by trying to ban Iran's gas imports, through what effectively amounts to an international blockade, as AIPAC has proposed) then they will drive up the price of oil still further, and it seems unlikely that the U.S. will be able to get Russia and China and Germany to agree to expand the sanctions to the degree necessary to achieve any of those goals.
Second, a key reason that the U.S. can't win support for the effective expansion of sanctions is that current U.S. policies are based on goals that are not widely seen internationally as legitimate. It's one thing to say you don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. For that goal there is widespread international support (including - according to their repeated public statements - all the leaders of Iran, and the majority of Iranian public opinion.) But the current U.S. goal is to prevent Iran from having any nuclear program at all that involves the enrichment of uranium, and that goal has weak international support.
Suppose the U.S. changed its goals with respect to Iran to make them more realistic. Suppose, for example, that instead of trying to ban enrichment of uranium in Iran entirely - a nonstarter for the overwhelming majority of Iranian public opinion - the US were to seek to put Iran's uranium enrichment program under full international control, as Ambassador Pickering has proposed.
Suppose that instead of the unrealistic goals of demanding that Iran not "support" allies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine, the US sought Iran's agreement to support its allies only politically and financially, and for Iran to use its influence with its allies to diminish violence and promote national reconciliation in these countries, as Iran has offered to do in the past and indeed has already done in Iraq and Lebanon. Suppose that, as seems quite plausible, as a result of this shift in U.S. policy the U.S. was able to get a deal with Iran, and lift the sanctions.
Should not the fact that such a policy could bring the benefit of 5-10 MODs be part of our debate over policy towards Iran? Would Americans tolerate that AIPAC dictate US policy towards Iran if they realized that it was costing them every time they went to the pump?
Here's a first step: don't let AIPAC drive up gas prices even more. Ask Congress to reject AIPAC's resolution seeking to ban Iran's gas imports.
VIDEO:
Ambassador Pickering calls for talks with Iran without preconditions and advocates for a multinational uranium enrichment consortium in Iran.
-------------------------------------------------------
More On Joe Klein and the Jewish Neoconservatives
Date: Friday, August 1, 2008, 2:01 PM
Joe Klein Speaks Truth to Power
– but how long will they let him get away with it?
by Justin Raimondo
August 1, 2008
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13236
It's been just about a month since Joe Klein's column accusing "Jewish neoconservatives" of having "divided loyalties" appeared in Time magazine, and already the controversy surrounding it is taking on the grand scale of an opera – perhaps a stage adaptation of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." His original sin was writing this:"The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked – still smacks – of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives – people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary – plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question – made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis – of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies. "The surge has reduced violence. We should all be thrilled about that – and honored by the brilliance of those who have served in Iraq. But what we're talking about here is whipped cream on a pile of fertilizer – a regional policy unprecedented in its stupidity and squalor."I cite this passage in its full context, rather than lift out the controversial phrases, because the offending column was, after all, about the surge, and the utter irrelevance of its alleged success – a view I expressed here, just the other day. At any rate, Klein stuck the knife in the neocons' back at the tail end of a long peroration on the complete futility of this war, and he concludes by pointing the finger of blame – not only at "Jewish neoconservatives," but also at Bush's oilmen buddies back home on the range. However, it's difficult to believe Bush launched his "global democratic revolution," first implanting the revolutionary flag in the arid soil of the Middle East, to enrich his cowboy buddies – whose said Iraqi riches, I might add, have yet to materialize. Insofar as these cowboy oilmen were involved, it was as the financial patrons of the neoconservatives: Paul Gottfried and others have documented how the neocons, a relatively small group, grabbed the lion's share of big-time donors among the major conservative foundations.Sure, lots of people made money out of the war, and are continuing to do so, and yet they didn't launch this crusade to transform the Middle East into Kansas with lots of sand. Its original authors, the real intellectual and political sparkplugs who energized Bush's bout of Napoleonic adventurism, were the neocons, who began calling for the "liberation" of Iraq the moment Papa Bush ordered US troops to stop short of taking Baghdad at the close of the first Iraq war. The neocons chafed and griped at this "betrayal" for all the years they spent in the political wilderness, out of power albeit ensconced in lower-level jobs, tucked safely away at the National Endowment for Democracy, where they couldn't do much harm. That changed when Bush II entered the White House: they descended on Washington like a plague of locusts, and settled at the top of the tree. The neocon network, headquartered in the office of the Vice President, extended its tentacles into virtually every major power-center in Washington, with the Department of State and the ranks of the CIA, to some degree, the only holdouts. On September 11, 2001, the neocons were in place, ready to take advantage of the worst terrorist attack in our history. Willing and able to implement their preconceived war plans, deciding to attack Iraq rather than al-Qaeda's Afghan stronghold "because it was doable," as Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual eminence grise of the administration's Israel-firsters, bluntly put it. For a long time there has been a reaction building among Jewish progressives – a phrase that seems oddly redundant – against the domination of pro-Israel and Jewish organizations by right-wing extremists who represent nothing but their own prejudices, and certainly do not represent the American Jewish community. As I have pointed out before, without American Jews the organized antiwar movement would be significantly smaller as well as a lot less organized. That is certainly the case around Antiwar.com's virtual office. In any case, Klein's outspokenness – which, I think, underestimates the power of Christian neoconservatives, and not only evangelicals – is part of this new frankness about the ethnic factor in American politics, which is coming to the fore in this era of Obamamania, and that's all to the good. Now that he has gotten his letter from Abe Foxman – been there, done that – Klein ought to wear it as a badge of honor. Foxman, for his part, has been discredited as an embarrassment and a bit of a buffoon, with his brazen attempts to shut down all criticism of the "correct line" on Israel and its American amen corner. In his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Klein goes on at length about this thesis that a group of individuals with key ties to the far right wing of Israeli politics achieved prominent positions within the administration's foreign policy circles and deliberately plotted a course that was detrimental to the United States in order to further Israel's interests. This isn't disloyalty, as such, but a case, as Klein puts it, of "divided loyalties," one in which too many allowed their sympathies for the Jewish state to override common sense, simple logic, and the lessons of history. Klein really has the neocons in a lather, and it's a wonderful sight to behold: they hate stuff like this, and they're baring their teeth fangs first, like Jennifer Rubin of Commentary:"Try as I might to formulate a further response to Joe Klein's rant, I cannot. One can argue facts, one can differ on interpretation of events, or one can discuss policy. But one cannot debate raging venom."Rubin's invective amounts, in effect, to the position taken by radical leftists who regularly disrupt far right-wing meetings and other events they consider beyond the pale, which is: you can't debate fascists. You fight them in the streets, and enact anti-hate laws to shut them up: you jail them and beat them up. But you don't sit down to tea with them and have a serious discussion. Rubin's is a neocon version of this "no platform for fascists" stance: she purports to be shocked that such views as Klein's are allowed to be expressed at all: "More disconcerting than Klein's raving," she moans, "is that the canard of Jewish disloyalty has now apparently found a home at a major MSM publication." Why, the poor dear has a case of the vapors: won't someone shut that man up?Writing in National Review, Peter Wehner urges Klein to give up interviews as well as blogging:. After characterizing the Time columnist as motivated by "anger and even hatred," and his arguments as expressions of "unfiltered rage," Wehner avers:"Joe Klein is free to say what he wants. And the rest of us are free to point out the foolish and ad hominem nature of his pronouncements, as well as his past words."I have to say that Wehner certainly does a bang-up job of debunking Klein's claim, in the Atlantic interview, that he opposed the Iraq war: Wehner cites chapter and verse, with links, showing that Klein drank the neocon Kool-Aid, too, albeit not as deeply as others. Klein, at least, was able to recover: Wehner is too far gone for that. Ad hominem is the only way to go for the neocons, at this point, and it's always been their weapon of choice: look what they tried to do to Pat Buchanan. Not to mention John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and a long list of others too numerous to mention: in his Atlantic interview, Klein mentions one poor guy who served for a time on Barack Obama's advisory group:"They seem to have the power to hurt people's careers. I was really angry about what happened with Rob Malley. You know, it's amazing to be attacked as an antisemite by extremists who I think are very dangerous. And they seem to think, when you look at what Pete Wehner said, or what Jennifer Rubin said on their blog a couple of days ago, ‘I can't imagine why Time hasn't shut this guy down and fired him and blah blah blah blah blah.' That's what they want to do. They want to stifle opinions that are different from theirs. I'm certainly not going to back down."Good for Joe! – and good for "J Street," and good for Philip Weiss, who has done yeoman's work in this area: people are finally beginning to stand up in the Jewish community, and say: Enough with the extremism. Enough is enough. Let them join with the overwhelming majority of the American people who want to take back our foreign policy from a small but influential minority of Israeli-centric ideologues, and start putting American interests first, in the Middle East and everywhere.~ Justin Raimondo
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On Joe Klein and the Jewish Neoconservatives
This piece also appears at Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-levy/on-joe-klein-and-the-jewi_b_115999.html
You may have missed it, but renowned Time columnist Joe Klein and the Jewish neoconservative blogosphere are at war with one another. The reason this is more important than an argument on who sits where in shul is that Klein has refused to cower, and as a respected member of the mainstream media is pushing back against one of the uglier and more debate-restricting phenomena of recent years. Here is what Joe had to say on ‘Swampland’, his blog on the Time website:
There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003… Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country…I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel…But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek…I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them.
It came in response to the latest outburst from Podhoretz Jr. at the Commentary blog: “As for his [Klein] use of classic anti-Semitic canards, I am happy to report that the Jewish people will long survive Joe Klein”. Mazal Tov, Joe, you have became a thing that the Jewish people will survive, no less.
All of this came on the heels of an earlier and none-too-friendly exchange of letters between Klein and the Anti-Defamation League, when the latter saw fit to attack Klein over his characterization of the role of the Jewish neoconservatives in the run-up to the Iraq War. Joe stood his ground then, too, effectively dismissing the claim of anti-Semitism and explaining that “most Jews disagree with their [the Jewish neocons] politics and many Jews are disgusted with their behavior.”
I would suggest that this is not just Klein’s private kerfuffle: it matters to Jewish America, to America and Israel too, and to being able to have a more serious conversation about anti-Semitism in the future.
The Klein thesis shared by a great many commentators and analysts (this writer included) goes something like this: Bush administration policies in the Middle East have had disastrous consequences for the US; Israel too is in a less secure and worse place as a result of these policies; ultimate responsibility for all this lies with the President himself and his hawkish and close group of senior aides—principal among them Veep Cheney; the neoconservatives played an important role in providing an ideological framing for these policies; within that neoconservative world there operates a prominent and tight-knit group of Jewish neocons who are ideologically driven in part by an old school Likudist view of Israeli interests.
Were the Jewish neocons in control and did they make the fatal decisions? No. Are all Jews neoconservatives or are all neoconservatives Jews? Please! Are the Jews or Israel to blame for the Bush Middle East debacle? Get outta here.
Something did happen though—there was a failure within the mainstream, Jewish and non-Jewish, to identify the existence of a particular Jewish neoconservative narrative and then to challenge that narrative as being fundamentally flawed in its reading of both American and Israeli interests. One of the causes of that vacuum was the abuse and cheapening of the term anti-Semitism as it was hurled at many who went after Podhoretz, Perle, Feith, and co. They tried, and sadly rather successfully, built a wall of untouchability. Klein is taking his shofar, or trumpet, to that wall, as many have done before, but Joe is particularly MSM, and therefore important.
Too many Jewish communal leaders and institutions made the mistake of not standing up and speaking out more against the right-wing excesses of a small minority of their co-religionists. Some even embraced and feted the neocons—a mistake AIPAC particularly excelled in and something I get the impression that AIPAC is at least partially trying to walk itself back from. Israeli leaders, interestingly enough, appear to be less enthusiastic—there is evidence that Prime Minister Sharon thought the Iraq War not to be a good idea and outgoing Prime Minister Olmert has begun proximity talks with the Syrians.
Similar mistakes are being made with the far-right Christian Evangelical Zionists, and John Hagee’s group CUFI. Can there be a more vile poster-boy for Israel than Hagee?!
Polls consistently show that American Jewish opinion is in a very different place. Over a decade ago, J.J. Goldberg described how what he called the “new Jews”, who were out of sync with the majority, assumed the mantle of leadership in the American Jewish community. In his book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, Goldberg claimed that a set of facts had emerged by the mid-1970s that transformed organized Jewry, based around the 1967 Israeli military victory, the role of the Soviet Jewry campaign in Soviet-US relations, and the belated rise of popular Holocaust awareness with its attendant “never again” maxim. This created the counter-revolution of the “new Jews”—a passionate minority of defensive nationalists, driven by a terrible vision, living amidst an overwhelming majority of still optimistic Jewish liberals. To quote J.J. Goldberg, “their defiance was so strident, and their anger so intense, that the rest of the Jewish community respectfully stood back and let the new Jews take the lead.”
The “new Jews” of Goldberg’s 1997 book are today’s Jewish neoconservatives, and the reason this is so important right now is the issue raised by Joe Klein—their aggressive advocacy of a military strike against Iran, a position that again places them out of step with the majority of American Jews. There have been a series of articles advocating such military action. It is true that such voices are also heard in Israel (and some even appear in the NY Times op-ed page, most notably this truly horrific and pathetically argued piece by Benny Morris).
I would argue that Israel has made a strategic mistake in making the gevalt approach so central in its response to suspected Iranian nuclear ambitions. Israel is stronger than that and it also has the capacity to deter Iran. It also has U.S. support. It is worth remembering that Israel, evidently, has not attacked Iran, so in practice, at least so far, the military is not the preferred option. In their declarations, Israeli leaders express a preference for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear question. And prominent ex- and even current officials have endorsed American engagement with Iran as the best option, including ex-Mossad chief Efraim Halevy and ex-Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. In private, Israeli leaders are apparently more circumspect. This report appeared some time ago in Haaretz about Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni:
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel…Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.
I will not go too deeply into the Iran policy debate, but a more compelling case than that of Podhoretz and co. is that military action would be a disaster for Israel, for America, and for the American Jewish community, too.
The problem for the American Jewish community would not seem to be with exposing the objectionable positions of Jewish neoconservatives and then having a debate. The danger is in the opposite approach—in creating the impression that the Jewish neoconservative voice is the Jewish voice, or that of the “pro-Israel” lobby, and in drowning out, or more accurately, suppressing the voice of the majority. That would be a way to not only increase the risk of an extremely dangerous policy being pursued and to make support for Israel the partisan domain of the far-right bomb-bomb-bomb Iran crowd, but it would also cede the ground to those who are emptying the charge of anti-Semitism of all meaning. And those are good enough reasons for Joe Klein’s cause to be our cause too.
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Joe Klein: Neocons Trying To Have Me Fired From Time
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/30/joe-klein-neocons-trying_n_115775.html
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/07/when_extremists_attack.html
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July 31, 2008
Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lubanlobe.php?articleid=13232
by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe
A mushrooming media controversy pitting neoconservatives against a prominent Jewish-American political commentator could mark a new stage in the growing battle over who speaks for the US Jewish community on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the Middle East.
Time columnist Joe Klein's accusations that Jewish neoconservatives, who played a particularly visible role in the drive to war in Iraq and have since pushed for military confrontation in Iran, sacrificed "US lives and money...to make the world safe for Israel," have spurred angry charges of anti-Semitism and personal attacks from critics at such neoconservative strongholds as the Weekly Standard, National Review, and Commentary.
But the fierceness of the controversy surrounding Klein, generally considered a political centrist, highlights the growing antagonism between neoconservative hardliners and prominent US Jews whose more moderate views are aligned more closely with those of the foreign policy establishment.
The controversy began Jun. 24, when Klein argued in a Time blog post that the "fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives – people like [independent Democrat Sen.] Joe Lieberman and the crowd at Commentary – plumped for this war [in Iraq], and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties."
Within a day, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Klein of espousing ,"age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."
The reaction from the right-wing press was even harsher. Commentary editor John Podhoretz reiterated the accusation of "anti-Semitic canards," and called Klein "manifestly intellectually unstable."
Writing in National Review, former George W. Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner called Klein "a man who cannot control his anger and even hatred."
But Klein has refused to back down, accusing his attackers of using charges of anti-Semitism to silence criticism of neoconservative policies.
"When [Commentary writer] Jennifer Rubin or Abe Foxman calls me anti-Semitic, they're wrong," he said in an interview. "I am anti-neoconservative."
In its broad contours, the controversy is a familiar one, as critics accuse neoconservatives of exercizing pernicious influence on US Middle East policy and neoconservatives reply with charges of anti-Semitism and conspiracy-mongering.
What distinguishes the recent furor over Klein, however, is that it involves someone who is widely regarded as an exemplar of the centrist political establishment.
Klein is best known for his 1996 novel Primary Colors a thinly-veiled and largely unflattering portrait of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign that was originally published anonymously and subsequently made into a Hollywood movie. A frequent critic of Clinton, Klein has at times expressed admiration for George W. Bush.
He also endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (although he has since expressed regret for his support) and describes himself as "a strong supporter of Israel."
The Klein dust-up is the latest in a series of events over the last several years that have placed neoconservatives both in the spotlight and on the defensive.
Neoconservatism, a predominantly – but by no means exclusively – Jewish movement, got its start in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a small but influential group of Democrats began distancing themselves from the party which, in their view, had become too dovish toward the Soviet Union and too sympathetic toward Arab demands against Israel.
By 1980, most had become strong supporters of Ronald Reagan. A number of prominent neoconservatives joined his administration, including many who would later play key roles in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
Consigned to the political wilderness under President George H.W. Bush, the neoconservatives became increasingly identified in the 1990s with Israel's right-wing Likud Party. It was also during the same period that they began agitating for "regime change" in Iraq, arguing that such a move would transform the balance of power in the Middle East decisively in favor of both Israel and the US.
They experienced a rebirth with the election of Bush's son in 2000, and particularly after the 9/11 attacks, when they played a major role, both inside the administration and in the media, in rallying the public and Congress behind war in Iraq.
But with the deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the influence of neoconservatives inside and outside the administration began to wane, and critics began charging that they had led the US astray.
A series of incidents also focused critical scrutiny on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying group whose hawkish right-wing leadership has often defied both the views of the broader US Jewish community and the policies of Israeli governments.
In 2004, the Justice Department charged Pentagon staffer Lawrence Franklin with passing classified US government documents to two AIPAC lobbyists, who had then given the documents to an Israeli Embassy official. In January 2006, Franklin was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, while the AIPAC staffers are still awaiting trial.
In March 2006, the well-respected and staunchly realist international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published the article "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books. That article, which charged that the lobby had for decades skewed US policy towards Israel in a direction detrimental to US interests, became the basis for their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis was instantly controversial. Like Klein, they were accused by critics, including the ADL and Commentary, of anti-Semitism and of perpetrating stereotypes about shadowy Jewish conspiracies.
But as a result of their stature, the two authors' work clearly created political space for those, both within the foreign policy establishment and within the US Jewish community, who had been long privately critical of the neoconservatives but had been worried about the consequences of going public with their misgivings.
More recently, AIPAC has come under fire for its close alliance with right-wing Christian Zionists, particularly controversial pastor John Hagee and his organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
Hagee views an undivided Israel as a precondition for precipitating the Armageddon, and his group has accordingly pushed for hawkish US policies in the Middle East that have been consistent with the neoconservatives' own preferences.
Matters came to a head earlier this year, when Republican presidential candidate John McCain was compelled to repudiate Hagee's endorsement after comments came to light in which the pastor suggested that the Holocaust was biblically ordained in order to force Jews to resettle in Israel.
Nonetheless, Hagee and CUFI have maintained close ties with the neoconservatives, and a collection of prominent Israel hawks, including Senator Lieberman, spoke at CUFI's summit in Washington earlier this month.
The belief that AIPAC has failed to accurately represent the views of the US Jewish community led to the foundation earlier this year of J Street, a Jewish lobbying group that aims to push for a more moderate stance on Middle East issues.
In the wake of these developments, many observers have taken Klein's comments – and particularly his refusal to back down in the face of withering criticism from neoconservatives – as a sign that new political space is being created for the public airing of more moderate views on Middle East policy.
M.J. Rosenberg, a former AIPAC staffer now associated with the moderate Israel Policy Forum, expressed the hope that commentators would stop equating neoconservatism with Judaism and start treating it as a political movement subject to political criticism.
"Although most neocons are Jews, few Jews are neocons," he wrote Wednesday. By equating the two groups, "[the neocons] want Americans not to follow the trail of war-mongering that leads not to Jews but to them."
(Inter Press Service)
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July 16, 2008
Turning the Tables
on the Israel-Firsters
http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=13139
by Michael Scheuer
Now that the dust has settled in the spat between journalist Joe Klein and the ideologues at Commentary, it is time to regret the ink spilled over the non-issue of "dual loyalties." The idea that there are U.S. citizens who have equal loyalties to the United States and Israel is passé. American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals – Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal – amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples' religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.
The Israel-firsters' success is, of course, the stuff of which legends are made. Most recently, for example, we heard President Bush echo Sen. Lieberman's insane and subversive contention that the United States has a "duty" to ensure the fulfilling of God's millennia-old promise to Abraham regarding the creation and survival of Israel. Bush told the Knesset all Americans are ready to endlessly bleed and pay to ensure Israel's security. And where does the president derive authority to make such a commitment in the name of his countrymen? From the Constitution? On the basis of America's dominant religion? From – heaven forbid – a thoughtful, hardheaded analysis of U.S. interests?
No, Bush's pledge was based on none of these. Bush's decision to more deeply involve America in the eternal Arab-Israeli war was based on nothing less than the corruption wrought on the American political system by the Israel-firsters, AIPAC's enormous treasury, and the lamentable but growing influence of America's leading evangelical Protestant preachers.
The Israel-firsters started the Iraq war and now have the United States locked into an occupation of that country that may not end in any of our lifetimes. Unless Americans ignore the likes of Hanson, Podhoretz, Lieberman, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, the cost in blood and treasure will ultimately bankrupt America.
AIPAC is a perfectly legal organization, and the wealth of its members is channeled into reliable campaign contributions for any candidate from either party who will put Israel's interests above America's. From McCain to Obama, from Pelosi to Giuliani, from Hillary Clinton to Vice President Cheney, AIPAC pumps money to any and every American politician who is willing to adopt an Israel-first policy.
Leading American Protestant evangelical preachers – men like Hagee, Parsley, and Graham – are the newest and perhaps most anti-American members of this fifth column. They serve two purposes: (1) to reinforce in the minds of their flocks the Bush-Lieberman absurdity that the United States has a "duty" to ensure Israel's survival; and (2) to use religious rhetoric to steadily convince the Muslim world that U.S. leaders are interested only in taming – and if need be, destroying – Islam.
The reality and power of this anti-American, pro-Israel triangle – Israel-first politicians, civil servants, and pundits; AIPAC's corrupting influence; and the warmongering of major evangelical Protestant preachers – is so obvious and palpable that the only way its members can blur reality is to deny the triangle's existence and identify their critics as anti-Semites. Well, the time has come to simply ignore these folks' knee-jerk hurling of that epithet. Indeed, the slur ought to understood for what it is: a sure sign that the Israel-firsters know that their fifth column would be destroyed in a minute if their fellow Americans come to recognize that their sons and daughters are dying in Iraq and soon elsewhere to protect an Israeli state whose existence is just as important to U.S. interests as the creation of a Palestinian state – that is, of no importance whatsoever.
American voters must start using the democratic process to begin removing themselves from the religious war known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Disengagement will take time, hard work, and a steadfast commitment to the rule of law. Three actions are well within the voters' capability, and their use would bring pressure on federal officials to stop killing America's children in wars between Arabs and Israelis.
Voters should press federal representatives to end taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and other such organizations. These organizations' main function is to promote the fallacy that U.S. interests are served by making sure that Israel – "the embattled island of democracy in the Middle East" – is protected, and that the lives of American children should be joyfully spent to bring democracy to foreigners in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Voters should not vote for any candidate for federal office who accepts contributions from AIPAC or any other Israel-first organization. This decision would be an important step in beginning to sweep clean the Augean stable that is American politics.
Voters of all faiths must press their religious leaders to regularly, publicly, and specifically denounce the evangelical Protestant preachers whose fire-and-brimstone support for Israel involves Americans in religious wars in which U.S. interests are not threatened.
Neutralizing the Israel-first fifth column must be done, but it must be accomplished using legitimate democratic tools: voting, lobbying, free speech, and support for candidates pledged to keep America out of other peoples' religious wars. The invocation of the anti-Semite epithet by the Israel-firsters should be ignored. To be silenced by the slurs of the Israel-firsters is to ignominiously invite the end of American independence by subordinating U.S. interests to those of a foreign nation, as well as to forget the warning of the greatest American. "If men are precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind," George Washington said in March 1783, "reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter." As long as the Israel-firsters can define the limits of acceptable public discourse, Americans are on their way to the slaughter.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAehMPVFFE0
Michael Scheuer (former head of CIA Bin Laden unit) was on Bill Maher. He said:
" Israel is not worth an American life or an American dollar." and
"Our unqualified support of Israel has brought the US a great deal of pain and increasingly dead Americans, fighting wars that are not ours to fight." and
" America is fighting a war that does not exist -- our politicians have lied to us-it is not about hating freedom, womens' rights etc.---it is about our policies in the Middle East ."
http://neoconzionistthreat.com
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 1:36 am Post subject: |
| More war for Israel coming right at US:
http://nowarforisrael.com
http://NEOCONZIONISTTHREAT.COM
http://NOMOREWARFORISRAEL.BLOGSPOT.COM
'2 US aircraft carriers headed for Gulf'
Aug. 7, 2008
Adam Gonn, The Media Line News Agency , THE JERUSALEM POST
Two additional United States naval aircraft carriers are heading to the Gulf and the Red Sea, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Kuwait Times.
Kuwait began finalizing its "emergency war plan" on being told the vessels were bound for the region.
The US Navy would neither confirm nor deny that carriers were en route. US Fifth Fleet Combined Maritime Command located in Bahrain said it could not comment due to what a spokesman termed "force-protection policy."
While the Kuwaiti daily did not name the ships it believed were heading for the Middle East, The Media Line's defense analyst said they could be the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Ronald Reagan.
Within the last month, the Roosevelt completed an exercise along the US east coast focusing on communication among navies of different countries. It has since been declared ready for operational duties. The Reagan, currently with the Seventh Fleet, had just set sail from Japan.
The Seventh Fleet area of operation stretches from the East Coast of Africa to the International Date Line.
Meanwhile, the Arabic news agency Moheet reported at the end of July that an unnamed American destroyer, accompanied by two Israeli naval vessels traveled through the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean. A week earlier, a US nuclear submarine accompanied by a destroyer and a supply ship moved into the Mediterranean, according to Moheet.
Currently there are two US naval battle groups operating in the Gulf: one is an aircraft carrier group, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln, which carries some 65 fighter aircraft. The other group is headed by the USS Peleliu which maintains a variety of planes and strike helicopters.
The ship movements coincide with the latest downturn in relations between Washington and Teheran. The US and Iran are at odds over Iran's nuclear program, which the Bush administration claims is aimed at producing material for nuclear weapons; however, Teheran argues it is only for power generation.
Kuwait, like other Arab countries in the Gulf, fears it will be caught in the middle should the US decide to launch an air strike against Iran if negotiations fail. The Kuwaitis are finalizing details of their security, humanitarian and vital services, the newspaper reported.
The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman - lie just across the Gulf from Iran. Generals in the Iranian military have repeatedly warned that American interests in the region would be targeted if Iran is subjected to any military strike by the US or its Western allies.
Bahrain hosts the US Fifth Fleet, while there is a sizeable American base in Qatar. It is assumed the US also has military personnel in the other Gulf states, The Media Line's defense analyst said.
Iran is thought to have intelligence operatives working in the GCC states, according to Dubai-based military analysts.
The standoff between the US and Iran has left the Arab nations' political leaders in something of a bind, as they were being used as pawns by Washington and Teheran, according to The Media Line analyst.
Iran has offered them economic and industrial sweeteners, while the US is boosting their defense capabilities. US President George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have paid visits to the GCC states in a bid to win their support.
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218104233164&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[ Back to the Article ]
Last edited by Alpha on Sat Aug 09, 2008 4:52 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 9:09 am Post subject: |
| War Alert (Edgar Steele incorrectly mentioned that Georgia is part of NATO which fortunately isn't the case as of yet as a vote on admitting Georgia wasn't scheduled to take place until next year):
http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/rants/ww3.htm | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 5:47 pm Post subject: |
| Israel: Iran war not okayed by US
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:07:51
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=66457§ionid=351020101
Israel's defense minister says the regime has not received approval from the US to carry out a strike against Iran's nuclear sites.
"The Americans are not ready to allow us to attack Iran," Ehud Barak told army radio on Wednesday.
"Our position is that no option is to be taken off the table but in the meantime we have to make diplomatic progress," he added.
Israel, which is widely believed to have over 200 ready-to-use atomic warheads, says Iran's nuclear program is a main strategic threat, although the UN nuclear watchdog has confirmed that Tehran's uranium enrichment activities are within the limits of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Barak's comments follow reports about an armada of US naval battle groups heading toward the Persian Gulf with the aim of reinforcing US strike forces in the region.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt, the USS Ronald Reagan, and the USS Iwo Jima are sailing toward the Persian Gulf accompanied by the British Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and the French nuclear hunter-killer submarine Ametlyste.
The deployment comes almost a week after Operation Brimstone, which was conducted by the US, British and French naval forces in the Atlantic Ocean. Apparently, the 12 warships taking part in the war games were preparing for a possible confrontation with Iran.
Iran has reacted to threats of a military strike by enhancing its defense capabilities, conducting several maneuvers, and testing new homemade weaponry.
Tehran has also pledged to give the 'maximum response' to any threat against the country's security.
On Tuesday, Iran's Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar warned that Tehran's response to a surprise enemy attack would turn into a greater surprise for the aggressor.
MJ/BGH
Count of views : 1396 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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Rep. Ackerman Defends Iran Sanctions Measure, But Critics Call it An Act of War
Written by Jason Leopold
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
by Jason Leopold
Three weeks ago, Rep. Gary Ackerman, the Democrat from New York, delivered an impassioned speech on the House floor defending a controversial resolution he co-sponsored calling on President George W. Bush “to increase economic, political and diplomatic pressure on Iran.”
Since May, when the resolution was introduced, 247 members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors, including numerous Democrats who are staunch critics of the Bush administration’s prewar Iraq intelligence. Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., introduced a companion resolution in the Senate on June 2 that is also on the fast track toward approval.
The non-binding resolution, H. Con. Res 362, was introduced just days before the annual American Israel Public Affairs policy meeting in which Iran was the main topic. AIPAC has lobbied Congress heavily to implement sanctions against Iran in language nearly identical to the provisions outlined in Ackerman’s House resolution.
Progressive activists and policy analysts have criticized Ackerman and many of his Democratic colleagues claiming they have adopted a hawkish stance against Tehran due in large part to pressure from AIPAC.
Carah Ong, the Iran policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said in an interview that Congressional Democrats want to prove they are tough on national security and are using Iran as their “scapegoat.”
“Democrats are talking tougher on Iran because they perceive it as a political necessity in my opinion,” she said.
But she said that sort of political posturing could backfire.
Ackerman’s “resolution could provide political cover if this administration decides to take action against Iran,” Ong said. “It doesn’t help in terms of trying to deal with Iran when you have an administration advocating attacks against Iran.”
The United Nations has imposed three sets of sanctions against Iran over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. The U.S. and the and the European Union have implemented sanctions against Iran’s banks. Iran, meanwhile has vehemently denied that it is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Iranian officials have said its uranium enrichment program is to meet the country’s growing demand for energy.
Washington lawmakers, however, aren’t buying it.
They are responding to the impasse with several resolutions and bills intended to pressure the Iranian regime to abandon its nuclear activities.
The most notable of the measures currently working its way through Congress is H. Con. Res 362 introduced in May by Ackerman.
Critics of the resolution say it’s tantamount to declaring an act of war against Iran due to the fact that many of the provisions cannot be enforced without military intervention.
H. Con. Res. 362 “demands that the President initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran's nuclear program.”
Indeed, two weeks ago, three retired military officials urged Congress to abandon its support for H. Con Res 362 stating that the measure is “poorly conceived, poorly timed, and potentially dangerous.”
“The language demanding the President initiate an international effort "prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran," is of particular concern because despite the protestations of its sponsors, we believe that implementation of inspections of this nature could not be accomplished without a blockade or the use of force,” said the July 10 letter signed by U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, and U.S. Army Lt. General Robert G. Gard, Jr., currently the chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
They added that Ackerman and his Republican co-sponsor, Congressman Mike Pence, R-Ind., had drafted the resolution in such a way that “immense military resources would be required to implement such inspections of cargo moving through the seas, on the ground, and in the air.”
“The international community has shown no willingness to join in such an activity. Without a Security Council Resolution, implementation of these measures could be construed as an act of war,” their letter said. “Implementation of measures called for in the resolution could complicate our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and could cause oil prices to soar.”
Ackerman, in a July 9 statement during a meeting of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said, “assertions that the resolution constitutes a declaration of war are just absurd.”
“It is with puzzlement that I find that some have described a non-binding resolution that I have introduced, along with Mr. Pence and cosponsored by a majority of the House... as a resolution declaring war and calling for a naval blockade,” Ackerman said. “Nothing could be further from the truth or my intent.”
“As my colleagues know, [the resolution] doesn't get presented to the President, and it doesn't get signed, and it thus does not either become law or have the force of law. It's the sense of Congress. The final whereas clause of the resolution states as explicitly as the English language will allow, "Whereas nothing in this resolution shall be construed as an authorization of the use of force against Iran.” Since a naval blockade is by definition the use of force, the language of this resolution renders the prospect of a naval blockade simply out of the question. This resolution should not be the straw man that some would seek...Put simply, the only way to find a blockade or a declaration of war in the text of H. Con. Res. 362 is to insert them by the amending power of imagination alone. “
But the retired military officials said the resolution does not have to include clear-cut language declaring war against Iran for it to be interpreted that way.
“The sponsors argue that H. Con. Res. 362 as a concurrent resolution does not have the force of law, which is true, but it clearly risks sending a message to the Iranians, the Bush Administration, and the world that Congress supports a more belligerent policy toward, and, potentially, belligerent actions against, Iran,” the letter signed by the retires military officials says.
Implementation and Interpretation
Ong said she queried several international and constitutional lawyers to get their interpretation on Ackerman’s resolution. She said the responses she received were mixed, but all agreed that comes down to how the resolution would be interpreted and implemented.
One unidentified international attorney told Ong “it is difficult to see how ships 'entering' Iran could be subjected to 'stringent inspection' without the use of force.”
“Here the concurrent resolution is asking the President to do something which cannot possibly be done effectively without the use of force while disclaiming that it authorizes the use of force. Nice try, but no cigar,” the international attorney told Ong, according to a copy of their exchange Ong posted on her blog, Iran Nuclear Watch.
"If the US were to do unilaterally what clause 3 of H. Con. Res. 362 demands, it would clearly be a violation of international law on any number of grounds, the main one being the principle of freedom of the seas. But it doesn't do that; it only asks the President 'to initiate an international effort.' If that effort were successful and the Security Council passed a resolution calling on all UN members to implement clause 3 as a threat to the peace under Ch. VII of the UN Charter, that could conceivably be legal, since the International Court of Justice has ruled in the Libyan case that anything the Security Council does is legal. But I don't see that happening.
"The same thing goes for the sanctions called for in Clause 2, i.e. they would constitute violations of the international law if applied unilaterally by the US. That, however, is something the US could do unilaterally, since it wouldn't require a Security Council resolution and the US doesn't give a damn about international law. It would merely require an extension of the Iran Sanctions Act,” the lawyer said, according to Ong.
Fanning the Flames
Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, agreed. He said Ackerman’s resolution would only lead to further conflict with Iran.
In an interview June 7 with the Real News Network, Wilkerson said, “Iran has already gained the regional power that these resolutions seek to prevent, leaving diplomatic engagement the only way to proceed.”
“Demographically, militarily, every way you want to measure hegemony, Iran is the dominant power in the Persian Gulf,” he said. “Therefore we’ve got to come to recognize that, we’ve got to deal with that and hope we can shape that to a responsible role in the gulf and the region, and ultimately in the world. The only way you do that is through diplomacy."
Ong, the Iran policy analyst, said that one of the troubling aspects of Ackerman’s resolution is that it “cherry-picked” the findings of the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and the International Atomic Energy Agency to make the case that Iran is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
The resolution states as fact that “the IAEA has confirmed such illicit covert nuclear activities as the importation of uranium hexafluoride, construction of a uranium enrichment facility, experimentation with plutonium, importation of centrifuge technology, construction of centrifuges, and importation of designs to convert highly enriched uranium gas into metal and shape it into the core of a nuclear weapon; Iran continues to expand the number of centrifuges at its enrichment facility, as made evident by its announced intention to begin installation of 6,000 advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium, in defiance of binding United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding Iran suspend enrichment activities; The November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reported that Iran was secretly working on the design and manufacture of a nuclear warhead until at least 2003, but that Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon as soon as late 2009.”
The NIE concluded that Iran had abandoned its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003, a fact not mentioned in Ackerman’s resolution.
Moreover, Ackerman’s resolution does not cite of a key finding in the NIE, which said “Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might - if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible - prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.
The resolution also ignores the findings of IAEA Director Mohammed ElBaradei, who has consistently said there is no evidence to support claims that Iran is diverting nuclear materials for a weapons program.
H. Con. Res. 362 fails to reflect a key finding of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that
IAEA Report Not Reviewed
Scott Ritter, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector in Iraq, has been highly critical of how Congress has characterized an IAEA report issued in May on Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which AIPAC and the Bush administration held up that as smoking-gun evidence that Iran is a grave threat to the United States and Israel.
Ritter said lawmakers have not thoroughly reviewed the report’s findings.
“We have a situation where the IAEA has published several technical reports all of which state there is no evidence Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. None. Zero,” Ritter said in an interview. “Information has been provided to the IAEA by member nations, intelligence information. Now the IAEA has to be very circumspect when it says this but we all know that it’s basically intelligence provided to the agency by the United States of America, a nation openly hostile to Iran, a nation that has a track record of fabricating, exaggerating, and misrepresenting intelligence data. The data that’s been provided to the IAEA has derived from a laptop computer which even the IAEA claims is of questionable providence.”
Ritter said that because the United States has such a dominating role in the United Nations Security Council and in the Board of Governors the IAEA couldn’t ignore the information it receives from the United States about Iran.
“The IAEA can’t go to Iran with information that isn’t serious. So they say it’s serious and it needs to be investigated. So they go to Iran and the Iranians say, correctly so, ‘this is bullshit.’ You’re basically serving as a front to the CIA. The CIA is asking intelligence based questions about issues that are not relevant to the safeguards agreement, which, by the way, is the legally binding mandate that gives the IAEA the authority to do its work in Iran. You have to read the small print.
“The IAEA acknowledges that what it’s asking Iran to answer has nothing to do with its mandate of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It is related to Security Council resolutions calling for the suspension of uranium and an investigation into a nuclear weapons program but the bottom line is what the IAEA has said is that Iran has not been forthcoming and Iran is saying it’s not their job to answer the CIA’s questions. So the IAEA reports that Iran is not being forthcoming on these issues and now it’s unnamed diplomats, i.e. American and British diplomats, who say they are very concerned because Iran’s refusal to cooperate only reinforces their concern that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
"This is purely CIA instigated tripe. When we get down to the nuts and bolts of the technical question of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and whether or not there’s any infrastructure in Iran that supports a nuclear weapons program and the IAEA technical find says there is none,” Ritter said.
Language Under Scrutiny
Ambassador William H. Luers, president of the United Nations Association of the USA, issued a statement July 9 opposing H. Con. Res. 362 stating that while his organization “recognizes” that Iran is not in compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding its nuclear program the resolution, as written, “can be construed to authorize forcible actions that violate fundamental principles of international law.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, D-CA, said the concerns of policy analysts have led him to take the position that the resolution won’t move through his committee until the language is changed so as not to be construed as authorizing a military strike against Iran.
But the resolution may not be marked up in Berman’s committee if it gains enough co-sponsors. In that scenario, the resolution would go directly to the floor for a vote, likely on suspension, meaning no amendments and it has two-thirds of members of Congress co-sponsoring.
However, some congressional aides have indicated that is unlikely to happen prior to the August recess.
Wexler Withdraws Support
Still, Ong said the widespread support for H. Con Res 362 leads her to believe that it’s unlikely “the bill's co-sponsors really know what they've signed onto.”
“I don’t believe most members of Congress read the language of the resolution,” Ong said. “If they did they would have realized that it’s sloppily written.”
Congressman Robert Wexler, D-Fla., appears to have been one of the lawmakers who fit that description.
Wexler’s support for a resolution seen as leading to increased tensions with Iran contradicted the congressman’s support for diplomatic talks with the Iranian government on the nuclear issue and surprised many of the lawmaker’s strongest supporters in the progressive community.
Moreover, Wexler had been the first Representative to sign on as a co-sponsor to Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment against President Bush. Earlier this year, Wexler called for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney for using bogus intelligence to win support for a war against Iraq.
On July 9, however, the same day Ackerman took to the House floor to defend H. Con. Res. 362, Wexler suddenly changed his position on the resolution.
“Over the past several weeks, there has been a growing debate in Congress, the blogosphere and throughout the media about a controversial non-binding resolution (House Concurrent Resolution 362), which expresses the sense of Congress regarding the threat Iran's nuclear pursuit poses to international peace, stability in the Middle East, and the vital national security interests of the United States,” Wexler wrote in a column published in The Huffington Post.
“In the coming weeks, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, of which I am a member, may vote on House Concurrent Resolution 362. Given my growing concerns regarding this resolution, including its failure to advocate for direct American engagement with Tehran and open language that could lead to a US blockade of Iran, I will lead an effort to make changes to this resolution before it comes to the Foreign Affairs committee for a vote. Despite being a cosponsor of this resolution -- these changes will ultimately determine whether or not I will continue to support H. Con. Res. 362.
“My rationale for originally supporting H. Con. Res. 362... was to urge the Bush administration to pursue a policy to place additional economic, political and diplomatic pressure on Iran as part of an international endeavor to prevent Tehran from moving forward on its nuclear program,” Wexler wrote. “It is clear that despite carefully worded language in H. Con. Res. 362 that "nothing in this resolution should be construed as an authorization of the use of force against Iran" that many Americans across the country continue to express real concerns that sections of this resolution will be interpreted by President Bush as "a green light" to use force against Iran.
“To that end, I am not willing to leave even the "slightest crack" open for this president to unilaterally set this nation down another disastrous path of war in Iran. Therefore, I am preparing to offer amendments to H. Con. Res. 362 and articulate a responsible policy that places America in the strongest possible diplomatic position to thwart Iran's nuclear program and the difficult security challenges we face.”
Act of War
Cyrus Bina, a professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota, author of the book "The Economics of the Oil Crisis," and Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel, who taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, said H. Con. Res. 362 could also roil oil markets and lead to sky-high gasoline prices.
“By recommending a naval blockade in the Persian Gulf, Congress could likely be responsible for oil prices approaching $200 a barrel, which translates to nearly $7.50 a gallon of gas,” Bina and Gardiner wrote in a July 5 Op-Ed published in the ultra conservative Washington Times. “If [Congress passes] this resolution, [it] will make a bad situation worse not only for the American economy, but also for stability in Middle East. Among factors contributing to short-term oil prices are supply and demand, market speculation and the value of the dollar. Risk of a natural or political catastrophe jeopardizes the production and flow of oil which also plays a major role in the price Americans will have to pay at the pump.”
The authors added that Ackerman and other lawmakers who are backing the resolution claim sanctions and diplomacy have failed and “the naval blockade is the next step short of war.”
“They are wrong on both counts: Proper diplomacy — direct talks between the U.S. and Iran — has neither failed nor succeeded, because it has yet to be tried,” Bina and Gardiner wrote. “And the blockade is not a step short of war; it is war.” | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
