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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 10:00 am Post subject: Long Live 2003 |
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drum, drum, drum
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092802484_pf.html
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Time to Act Like a President
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.
Take last week's Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh. There, the candidate-in-full commandeered the television networks and the leaders of Britain and France to give the Iranians a dramatic warning. Yet another of their secret nuclear facilities had been revealed and Obama, as anyone could see, was determined to do something about it -- just don't ask what.
The entire episode had a faux Cuban missile crisis quality to it. Something menacing had been discovered -- not Soviet missiles a mere 100 miles or so off Florida but an Iranian nuclear installation about 100 miles from Tehran. As befitting the occasion, various publications supplied us with nearly minute-by-minute descriptions of the crisis atmosphere earlier in the week at the U.N. session -- the rushing from room to room, presidential aides conferring, undoubtedly aware that they were in the middle of a book they had yet to write. I scanned the accounts looking for familiar names. Where was McNamara? Where was Bundy? Where, in fact, was the crisis?
No one should believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran seems intent on developing a nuclear weapons program and the missiles capable of delivering them. This -- not the public revelations of a known installation -- is the real crisis, possibly one that can only end in war. It is entirely possible that Israel, faced with that chilling cliche -- an existential threat -- will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. What would happen next is anyone's guess -- retaliation by Hamas and Hezbollah, an unprecedented spike in oil prices and then, after a few years or less, a resumption of Iran's nuclear program. Only the United States has the capability to obliterate Tehran's underground facilities. Washington may have to act.
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To act like a president = bomb stuff.
Did the WaPo have a meeting of the serious douchebags and decide their theme for the run up for the next war will be Cuban Missile Crises Part Deux? This is the second time I've seen the comparison in the WaPo in a week.
Though, we wouldn't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud...
You'd think that Richard Cohen would have learned his lesson: Don't be a hysterical war-mongering degenerate.
http://www.slate.com/id/2186766/
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How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region, and�I admit it�I wanted to strike back.
By Richard CohenPosted Tuesday, March 18, 2008, at 7:47 AM ET
I was miserably wrong in my judgment and somewhat emotional, and whenever my resolve weakened, as it did over time, I steadied myself by downing belts of inane criticism from the likes of Michael Moore or "realists" like Brent Scowcroft, who had presided over the slaughter of the Shiites. I favored the war not for oil or empire (what silliness!) or Israel but for all the reasons that made me regret Bosnia, Rwanda, and every other time when innocents were being killed and nothing was done to stop it. I owe it to Tony Judt for giving me the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade, who, wrongheaded though he might have been, neatly sums it all up for me: "You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong." |
So tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead American soldiers and tens of thousands of wounded American soldiers. And hundreds of billions pissed away. And Cohen still has his job. And now he wants to attack Iran!!! Oh Jesus this is sick. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 1:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Next up Eric Margolis. |
I very much appreciate the post-Cold War Margolis. I remember a day or two after 9-11, he was interviewed on American TV, and said something to the effect that before the US goes into Afghanistan to get Osama, "speaking as a native New Yorker and as someone who has been on a hijacked airplane, I'd like to see the evidence". Like I say, this was immediately after 9-11. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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| On the other hand wrote: |
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| Next up Eric Margolis. |
I very much appreciate the post-Cold War Margolis |
I was busy with other things during the cold war. What was the cold war Margolis like? |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 4:21 am Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| On the other hand wrote: |
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| Next up Eric Margolis. |
I very much appreciate the post-Cold War Margolis |
I was busy with other things during the cold war. What was the cold war Margolis like? |
A Reaganite hawk, basically. Pro-arms buildup, pro-contras, pretty much pro-any right-wing anti-communist guerrilla group anywhere. That was the main focus of his writing in those days.
But he always had his idiosyncrasies. He was always pro-Palestinian(possibly as a result of someone threatening to throw acid in his face as a child because of his journalist mother's similar position), and highly critical of Israel, much moreso than many on the mainstream left.
As well, while he supported the right-wing Inkatha group in South Africa, he eventually came around to being a big booster of Nelson Mandela.
He's also been generally very pro-French(he even defended their blowing up of the Rainbow Warrior). This probably made his support for their anti-Iraq war position a very easy fit. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 5:08 pm Post subject: |
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^ When you first referenced Cold War EM I figured he was the exact opposite of how you describe him.
Back during the runup to the 2003 war I read him in the Sunday Edmonton Sun. He was very accurate, looking back. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 7:34 am Post subject: |
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| ^ When you first referenced Cold War EM I figured he was the exact opposite of how you describe him. |
Margolis in his own words...
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I�ve been called a lot of things in my times, but never a liberal Democrat - until recently. In American political argot, `liberal� means leftwing.
But some of my bigwig Republican pals in California have been accusing me of having become a liberal because of my criticism of Calamity George Bush and my evident lack of enthusiasm for Sen. John McCain�s Republicans.
As a lifelong Republican, I am more likely to become a Seventh Day Adventist or Rosicrucian than a liberal Democrat!
Call me a rogue Republican.
I�ve always been a moderate, conservative Eisenhower Republican who believes in small government, low taxes, saving, hard work, individual freedoms, and avoiding overseas adventures.
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I respect and admire Republican candidate Sen. John McCain and believe he would make a fine president. But he showed terrible judgment in picking Sarah Palin as vice presidential running mate, and by surrounding himself with neocon advisors like Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Randy Scheunemann, Elliot Abrams and other extremists who played a major role in creating the frightful foreign affairs mess the US now faces. They have made America hated around the globe.
Equally bad, today�s Republicans are no longer a party of the democratic center. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush and Dick Cheney packed their administration with rabid neocon warmongers who drove the nation and Republican Party so far right it flirted at times with fascism.
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I recommend the rest of the article, Mises. It puts Margolis' overall worldview in some perspective.
link |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 7:41 am Post subject: |
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| I�ve always been a moderate, conservative Eisenhower Republican who believes in small government, low taxes, saving, hard work, individual freedoms, and avoiding overseas adventures. |
No wonder I've always agreed with him. Thanks for the link. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2010 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/17/tehran-aiding-al-qaeda-links-petraeus-says/
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Tehran aiding al Qaeda links, Petraeus says
Iran is assisting al Qaeda by facilitating links between senior terrorist leaders and affiliate groups, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East told Congress on Tuesday. |
I don't believe him. |
Me either, but even if he's right, we still shouldn't invade Iran. We need to learn that these pointless invasions hurt us (and by us I mean the average citizens of the United States) more than al Qaeda ever could. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 4:59 am Post subject: |
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| There won't be an invasion of Iran. It would be political suicide. Well, with one caveat: this is assuming Iran doesn't have a nuclear testing of some sort. And even then, it would be to be a big spectacle for something to happen. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 7:45 am Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
| mises wrote: |
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/17/tehran-aiding-al-qaeda-links-petraeus-says/
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Tehran aiding al Qaeda links, Petraeus says
Iran is assisting al Qaeda by facilitating links between senior terrorist leaders and affiliate groups, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East told Congress on Tuesday. |
I don't believe him. |
Me either, but even if he's right, we still shouldn't invade Iran. We need to learn that these pointless invasions hurt us (and by us I mean the average citizens of the United States) more than al Qaeda ever could. |
So, we should just nuke Iran. Really nuke them. Use up all of our aging nukes so we can save the cost of dismantling them. Kill 'em all - north to south, east to west, carpet bombing with nukes. Start at the edges and work in, so no one gets away.
The Iran problem would be over and the rest of the world would once again respect and fear the mighty US. We'll teach those terrorists not to mess with the good ole USA.
This will have the added benefit of kicking up enough dust to cool the Earth for years and end any thought of global warming saving a lot more money and again lowering future deficits.
After the glow subsides, we can go in and take the oil and other resources. We can use the free oil to prop up the dollar, pay for Obama's national health care, pay for Bush's wars and pay off some of the US government's 99 trillion dollar deficit.
This could slow inflation enough and provide free medical care so that Yata's Korean pension will let him rent an apartment in Cedar Rapids, and he won't have to sleep under a bridge when he finally retires.
And then Fox can point to this fine example of how government doesn't always fail, because after all the collateral damage, government will have finally succeeded at something: you see, Yata won't have to sleep under a bridge. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 7:45 am Post subject: |
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2003 won't die.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/31/iran
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Fox News currently has an article at the top of its website that is headlined: "CIA: Iran Moving Closer to Nuclear Weapon." The report, by DOD and State Department correspondent Justin Fishel, begins with this alarming claim:
A recently published report by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iran is still working on building a nuclear weapon despite some technical setbacks and international resistance -- and the Pentagon say it's still concerned about Iran's ambitions.
But, as blogger George Maschke notes, that statement is categorically false. The actual report, to which the Fox article links and which the DNI was required by Congress to submit, says no such thing. Rather, this is its core finding:
The report says the opposite of Fox's statement that "Iran is still working on building a nuclear weapon." And, of course, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate which concluded that Iran ceased development of its weapons program has never been rescinded, and even the most hawkish anonymous leaks from inside the intelligence community, when bashing the 2007 NIE, merely claim that analysts "now believe that Iran may well have resumed 'research' on nuclear weapons -- theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb -- but that Tehran is not engaged in 'development' -- actually trying to build a weapon."
This misleading "reporting" is hardly confined to Fox News. Reporting on Obama's efforts to secure international sanctions, Reuters today makes this claim:
[E]evidence has mounted raising doubts about whether Tehran is telling the truth when it says its nuclear program is only to produce peaceful atomic energy.
Particularly damning was a report in February from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that said Iran may be working to develop a nuclear-armed missile.
But as Juan Cole correctly notes:
This Reuters article also misinterprets the stance of the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN, which continues to certify that none of Iran's nuclear material, being enriched for civilian purposes, has been diverted to military uses. The IAEA has all along said it cannot give 100% assurance that Iran has no weapons program, because it is not being given complete access. But nagging doubt is not the same as an affirmation. We should learn a lesson from the Iraq debacle.
Meanwhile, The New York Times' David Sanger -- who is the Judy Miller of Iran when it comes to hyping the "threat" based overwhelmingly, often exclusively, on anonymous sources -- continues his drum beat this week. In an article co-written with William Broad, Sanger warns -- "based on interviews with officials of several governments and international agencies" ("all" of whom "insisted on anonymity") -- that "international inspectors and Western intelligence agencies say they suspect that Tehran is preparing to build more sites in defiance of United Nations demands." But rather than the secret, nefarious scheme which the NYT depicts this as being, these plans for additional sites were publicly announced -- by the Iranian government itself -- many weeks ago.
As I've noted before, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Iran wanted a nuclear weapons capability. If anything, it would be irrational for them not to want one. What else would a rational Iranian leader conclude as they look at the U.S. military's having destructively invaded and continuing to occupy two of its neighboring, non-nuclear countries (i.e., being surrounded by an invading American army on both its Eastern and Western borders)? Add to that the fact that barely a day goes by without Western media outlets and various Western elites threatening them with a bombing attack by the U.S. or the Israel (which itself has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and categorically refuses any inspections or other monitoring). If our goal were to create a world where Iran was incentivized to obtain nuclear weapons, we couldn't do a better job than we're doing now.
But regardless of one's views on that question, or on the question of what the U.S. should do (if anything) about Iranian proliferation, the first order of business ought to be ensuring that the reporting on which we base our views is accurate. A CNN poll from February found that 59% of Americans favor military action against Iran if negotiations over their nuclear program fail (see questions 31-32) -- and that's without the White House even advocating such a step. As the invasion of Iraq demonstrated, the kind of fear-mongering, reckless, and outright false "reporting" we're seeing already -- and have been seeing for awhile -- over Iran's nuclear program poses a far greater danger to the U.S. than anything Iran could do. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 8:06 pm Post subject: |
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http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/02/obama-claims-all-evidence-supports-allegations-iran-developing-nukes/
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Speaking today in an interview broadcast on CBS, President Barack Obama alleged that �all the evidence� available to him showed that Iran�s civilian nuclear program was secretly aimed at developing nuclear weapons.
The claim was just the latest in a long line of similar allegations by the Obama Administration and, as with the previous claims, did not come with any details on what all this evidence was, nor any explanation for why all the evidence available to the American public, up to and including the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, points in exactly the opposite direction.
Indeed, less than two months ago Obama�s own spokesman Robert Gibbs claimed Iran didn�t even have the ability to enrich uranium beyond 20 percent, let alone to rich to weapons grade, which would be above 90 percent. Just days after Gibbs made this statement he insisted that the US would not rule out attacking Iran.
In addition to the usual unsourced allegations, President Obama reiterated the repeated false claims from the State Department that the international community was �unified� against Iran, a claim which flies in the face of opposition to the US position by China, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, and other UN Security Council members. |
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