DebateGate

I'd like to start off by thanking my most tireless opponents, sirs particularlly, also plane and Ami, for helping me crystallize my thoughts around the issue of "Bush Lied, They Died."  You forced me to think hard, discard some of my previous patterns of thinking and ultimately to understand how it is that I, and probably millions of others, just "know" that Bush lied.

No, there isn't a "smoking gun."  At least, none that I'm aware of.  You can't find the lie by painstakingly parsing Bush's public statements and comparing them with events on a timeline.  (Or maybe you can, but I didn't.)

It is really very simple.  The elephant and the mouse.  A nation of 300,000,000 people with the world's most powerful, expensive and technologically advanced military and a world-wide empire of bases to support it, "afraid" of a Third World, boycotted-to-breakdown, nation of 23 million?  COME ON.  There is the lie in all its glory.  There never was a threat, there never could have been a threat, and NOBODY in a position of authority could have reasonably believed there was a threat.

How did this lie, this bullshit, so totally absurd on the face of it, achieve the success that it did?  If you study the posts of sirs in particular, you will see one of the reasons.  sirs argues gamely that Bush couldn't have been lying because "almost all the intelligence agencies of the world" believed as Bush was led to believe by his own "intelligence community."  [Note, I am using quotes here to indicate a paraphrase of sirs' arguments, not an exact quote of sirs' own words, so I will apologize in advance if I have inadvertently misrepresented any of sirs' ideas, particularly those in quotes.]  In a nutshell, it's deference to "expert opinion" taken to a slavish extreme.  It has to be a reasonable opinion because the experts all say so.

Of course, the "experts" probably would not go so far as to say, "Invade Iraq."  Supposedly, they only report on what kind of weapons Saddam has or is working on.  They can assess the "threat" of weapons like that in Saddam's hands, i.e., what he would be likely to do with them.  They might even go so far as to make policy recommendations or at least present a range of policy options for the "President's" to choose from.

Well, as we all know now, Bush reviewed the "intelligence" (or some of it) and decided to invade.  What Bush and his administration told the nation to justify the invasion was that he had seen the intelligence, that it indicated that Saddam had WMD and was working on getting more and that the country could not risk waiting any longer for a diplomatic resolution of the "problem."  The unmistakeable inference was that there was a threat in Saddam's remaining undisturbed in the possession of what WMD he had and in the work on developing and/or acquiring more of them.  Common sense alone would tell any sane, normal intelligent human being that none of the weapons Saddam had or might have could possibly match the U.S. arsenal, and that at the first attack or even sign of an attack, that Saddam and his 23 million fellow citizens would be vaporized. 

That same common sense must have suggested the same conclusions to Bush and his cabinet members.  They MUST have known, even as they were putting out the word that a great "threat" existed, which had to be met with the most drastic action, that it was absurd and a lie.  But to millions of Americans, trust in their institutions, fear of the alien, natural ignorance and probably xenophobia too all combined to blot out common sense and "buy into" the bogus justification for war that I am sure the administration itself knew was a crock.

In a sizeable element of the American public, a complete absence of common sense and critical thinking leaves a large number of citizens defenceless against the manipulation of demagogues like Bush, representing the most sinister influences in the nation.  It's frightening. 

I've got a really sick feeling in the pit of my stomack that this guy knows what he is talking about.  I just can't imagine, with all the horrors of the Iraq war still playing out in front of our eyes that these sick criminal fucking bastards are planning another one as we speak, but I just know that this is true.  Pilger has got this one nailed.

Nobody can stop this coming.  Jesus Christ, what a fucking world.  What a fucking country.




February 3, 2007
Iran: A War Is Coming
 
by John Pilger
The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W. Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush's and Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shi'ite majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neocon" fanatics such as Vice President Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest.

Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations – until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear program to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything." They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power with thermonuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets, an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions and the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation, Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions," just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonizing that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "has done yeoman service in facilitating this"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals its distortion. According to Juan Cole, American professor of Modern Middle East History, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map." He said, "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all." Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Jerusalem regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.

The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American naval buildup in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization, was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorized the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in the Middle East. This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear weapons is being openly discussed in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and Central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions...since last summer."

The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by Cruise missiles launched in the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilization. It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes. Posing as victims, the Israelis will suffer some tolerable damage and then an outraged US will destabilize Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian hysteria, leaks, disinformation etcetera . . . It remains unclear whether the US Congress is going to authorize the war."

Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the "surge" of US troops to Iraq, Vice President Cheney said, "It won't stop us." Last November, a majority of the American electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq. Apart from insipid speeches of "disapproval," this has not happened and is unlikely to happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a "liberal." He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in Herzilya, where he spoke about "an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel (sic). At the top of these threats is Iran.... All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon." Hillary Clinton has said, "US policy must be unequivocal.... We have to keep all options on the table." Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have distinguished themselves by attacking former President Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a truthful book accusing Israel of becoming an "apartheid state." Pelosi said, "Carter does not speak for the Democratic Party." She is right, alas.

In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled "Answering the Charges" by Professor Abbas Edalal of Imperial College, London, on behalf of others seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual honorable exceptions, Parliament remains shamefully silent.

Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq which has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked? North Korea has nuclear weapons. That is the message, loud and clear, for the Iranians.

In numerous surveys, such as that conducted this month by BBC World Service, "we," the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out, apart from Professor Edalal and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists, writers and thespians who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech" are as silent as a dark West End theater. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?
 

<<"You Persian shoe!" politician Mishan al-Jabouri shouted at journalist Sadeq al-Musawi during a panel discussion earlier this month on al-Jazeera television.>>

<< "I will do things to you that you cannot even imagine.">>

The former kind of obscure and kind of limited in place and time; the latter truly universal, and open-ended.

from Pat Buchanan, but I didn't trust Pat Buchanan so I verified the quotes from the UPI at http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20070102-125318-7565r

 <<Said Netanyahu, Israel "must immediately launch an intense, international public relations front first and foremost on the U.S. The goal being to encourage President Bush to live up to specific pledges he would not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons. We must make clear to the (U.S.) government, the Congress and the American public that a nuclear Iran is a threat to the U.S. and the entire world, not only Israel."

<<Israel's war, says Bibi, must be sold as America's war.

<<We are thus forewarned. A propaganda campaign, using Israeli agents and their neocon auxiliaries and sympathizers, who stampeded us into war in Iraq, is being prepared to stampede us into war on Iran.

<<We are to be convinced that Iran, with no air force or navy to speak of, an economy not 2 percent of ours, which has not started a single war since the revolution, 27 years ago, is about to give to terrorists, to use on us, a nuclear bomb it may be 10 years away from even being able to build.

<<Will Congress be duped again into giving Bush a blank check for war? . . . >>

Title of an article by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh in CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/

interesting

From today's Huffington Post:  www.huffingtonpost.com

The Democrats will have their asses handed to them in the 2008 elections; and they will have deserved it. My prediction is that the Dems will lose the House, the Senate, and the White House by fairly substantial margins, and the Repugs will not even have to cheat to accomplish this result.


The reason? Look around.

The Bush administration was just delivered an unequivocal message from the general electorate about the disastrous and criminal war in Iraq. That message was co-delivered to the Democratic Party.

Now Bush has conducted his own Night of the Long Knives against Generals and bureaucrats, placed John Negroponte in a position to tell Condi Rice what to do, killed 27 Somali civilians with an airstrike ostensibly intended for a terrorist, and let it be known that he is about to "surge" in Iraq. "Surge" is some Bushist euphemism for "escalate troop levels"... include your own psychoanalysis of word choice -- Bush is a blueblood frat-boy, after all.

The Democrats have one weapon in their arsenal to do the People's bidding: the power of the purse. But here is their... "logic."

The war they co-signed has slaughtered around 700,000 Iraqis and over 3,000 Americans. It has not yet politically secured permanent bases in the region (the real goal of the war, which many Democrats shared). It has not reinforced the myth of American military supremacy... al contrario. It has not reduced the precarious US dependence on oil imports to ensure business as usual for criminal conspiracies like Lockheed-Martin and Archer-Daniels-Midland. It has not created the desired outcome of putting the imperial hand on the oil tap to control China and Russia. It has not sown democracy in Iraq. It hasn't even managed to implant a puppet regime that can leave the Green Zone without gunship escorts. The war has turned Iran into the regional power broker and set the stage for the destabilization of Saudi Arabia (I don't object to either of these outcomes, but they were definintely not the outcomes desired by Cheney's Raiders.) It has isolated pro-US political forces in Turkey (also not a bad thing, in my view, but...).

At any rate, the conduct of the war so far has been equivalent to the administration throwing itself (actually, it throws other people... like soldiers) out of a tree and into a blackberry thicket. And since that has worked so well, the new plan is to send 20,000 more worn-out, whacked-out, divorced, and disgruntled troops in to do exactly the same thing.. only more of it.

Red-meat rightists like Joe Scarborough are calling for withdrawal. The Buchananite wing of the Republican Party is about to experience a growth spurt -- fertilized in the ashes of neoconservatism, and shifting the focus of their animosity onto undocumented workers. Good news and bad news: the war is unpopular, and xenophobia is popular as hell (thanks to fascist twits like Lou Dobbs); so this faction will win the 2008 elections by posing as "populists" opposing the war.

But the Democrats? Well, they are "opposed to the surge," but they certainly won't vote to de-fund the administration's war. They have pushed through a minium wage increase, a very good thing. But the economy will tank around Summer 2008, and the Republicans will successfully blame that on the Democrats, even as the Democrats continue to vacillate about the war while the corpses continue to accumulate.

The excuse is that the Iraqis will tumble headlong into a mass Rwanda scenario when the US leaves. This is, of course, bullshit, and they know it. The so-called sectarian violence is dierectly traceable to the US occupation there, and whatever violence happens after the US leaves will quickly lead to an Iraqi solution (the real fear of R's and D's, who are slavishly attached to the big money that doesn't want Iraq or anyplace else to determine its own future apart from the Washington Consensus... that is, unlimited access to national economies by Wall Street).

I voted for Dems in the last election, just to help throw a speedbump in the road to ruin. And they will make problems for the Bush administration... just not on the war. Why, aside from who pays for their campaigns? Well, because, with a few exceptions, that party has more gutless cowards in residence than a pack of possums has lice. People don't vote for vacillators. They'll vote for a crazy person before they vote for someone who can't seem to make up his or her mind.

That's not smart, but it's how things are. Democrats need to say, hey, we fucked up supporting this war. Let's get out, and do it right now. That would win the 2008 elections. But instead, they are setting themselves up to do what they do best: snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

http://www.counterpunch.com/weill12302006.html

rendition and torture - - what America's really all about.  just a few odd-balls here and there.  how could the government possibly be involved?