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Editor vs. Editor: New York Times’ Rosenthal Ignores Ombudsman’s Advice on Responsible Journalism Regarding Iranian Nuclear Program

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | August 25, 2012

(Alexander Torrenegra, Flickr)

In response to the recent announcement that Ban Ki-moon will attend the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran, New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal wrote this week:

I was appalled that the U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has decided to attend an international gathering in Iran, despite the vociferous objections of the United States. Mr. Ban can accomplish nothing with this trip beyond hindering efforts to pressure Iran into giving up its nuclear weapons program.

Never mind Mr. Rosenthal’s imperial, we-own-the-world mentality that expects senior officials of international bodies to dutifully adhere to American commands.

Leave aside the clear fact that the United States intelligence community and its allies have long assessed that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program and that the IAEA has stated it has “no concrete proof” Iran “has ever had” such a program.

And ignore that U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Ronald Burgess, President Barack Obama and his National Security Council have all agreed Iran isn’t building nuclear weapons.  And that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, and Military Intelligence Director Aviv Kochavi have said the same thing.

What is most surprising is that Rosenthal, who has held his post since 2007 and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, apparently doesn’t read his own paper.

Back in January, New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane responded to reader complaints that the paper’s reporting on Iran’s nuclear program was misleading and that “The Times should avoid closing the gap with a shorthand phrase that says the IAEA thinks Iran’s program ‘has a military objective.'”

Brisbane agreed:

I think the readers are correct on this. The Times hasn’t corrected the story but it should because this is a case of when a shorthand phrase doesn’t do justice to a nuanced set of facts. In this case, the distinction between the two [a nuclear energy program and a nuclear weapons program] is important because the Iranian program has emerged as a possible casus belli.

Just days later, National Public Radio‘s ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos concurred with this assessment.  “Shorthand references are often dangerous in journalism, and listeners are correct to be on the alert for them,” he wrote. “Repeated enough as fact – “Iran’s nuclear weapons program“– they take on a life of their own.”  He added that, at the behest of NPR’s Senior Editor for National Security Bruce Auster, “NPR’s policy is to refer in shorthand to Iran’s ‘nuclear program’ and not ‘nuclear weapons program'” and concluded, “This is a correct formula.”

Perhaps Rosenthal could have read the statement by Brisbane and Schumacher-Matos’ counterpart at The Washington Post, ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton, who challenged his own paper’s irresponsible reporting in December 2011, writing that the IAEA “does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one,” and warned that such misleading characterizations of such an important issue “can also play into the hands of those who are seeking further confrontation with Iran.”

Clearly, by expressly ignoring the advice of his own public editor, Andrew Rosenthal – and presumably the editorial page of the most influential newspaper in the country which he runs – has no problem playing into the hands of warmongers.  Regrettably, it appears quite clear that he is, in fact, one of them.

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August 25, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Iranian Rhetoric and the History of the Cancer Analogy

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | August 24, 2012

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., April 16, 1963

The rhetoric used in recent speeches by top Iranian officials has garnered much attention in the mainstream media.  In addition to the outrage expressed over the statement that the Israeli governmental system and guiding Zionist ideology is an “insult to humanity,” comments that the “Zionist regime” is a “cancerous tumor” have also met fierce condemnation.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has compiled a list of recent reported statements made by Iranian officials.  National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told the press that the United States government “strongly condemn[s] the latest series of offensive and reprehensible comments by senior Iranian officials that are aimed at Israel,” adding, “The entire international community should condemn this hateful and divisive rhetoric.”

Rabbi David Wolpe took to the pages of The Los Angeles Times to specifically condemn the cancer analogy. Wolpe incidentally did so by presenting a litany of outrageous statements of his own. He writes that the “state of Israel” is 3000 years old, thus absurdly conflating an ancient Biblical minority community with a modern, settler-colonial nation-state. He insists Israel is not expansionist, a claim that doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory awareness of basic facts, the historical record and current aggressive Israeli policy.

Wolpe also states that the cancer analogy “leads inevitably, inexorably, to the prospect of genocide,” which he obviously follows up by invoking the Holocaust and asserting that “Iran eagerly pursues nuclear weapons,” thereby ignoring the consistent conclusions of U.S. intelligence and IAEA inspections. He concludes by suggesting that, were Israel not to maintain such a destructive military capability, segregationist occupation infrastructure, rampant legal discrimination, and a two-tiered justice system, the result would be the “wholesale slaughter” of Jewish Israelis, presumably by vengeful Arab hordes.

Such a characterization recalls the ludicrous fears that beset the vast majority of white South Africans just years before Apartheid ended, many of whom were consumed by “physical dread” at the prospect of equality and their loss of racial dominance and superiority and foresaw a future full of “violence, total collapse, expulsion and flight.”  Even in 1987, as Apartheid was becoming increasingly untenable, about 75% of white South Africans feared that their “physical safety…would be threatened” as a result of “black rule.”  Nearly 73%, including over 85% of Afrikaners, believed “white women would be molested by blacks.”  Incidentally, as recently pointed out in Ha’aretz, in 1987, “Israel was the only Western nation that upheld diplomatic ties with South Africa” and was one of the last countries to join the international boycott campaign.

Southern whites in the antebellum United States nurtured the same irrational apprehension, fearful that the violent and successful 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti would be replicated across the Gulf of Mexico, especially in states like South Carolina where slaves outnumbered whites two to one.  Following emancipation, and in reaction to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, southern states enacted “black codes” restricting the voting, land ownership, and speech of former slaves. Whites feared that their loss of racial dominance and an enslaved labor force would not only ruin the southern economy, but also that the newly-freed black population would seek revenge on their masters and rape white women; this led to numerous race riots and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan that same year.

In April 1868, Alabama newspaper editor Ryland Randolph praised the Klan for opposing what he called the “galling despotism” of the federal government over the southern states, which he “deemed a fungus growth of military tyranny” with the goal of “degrad[ing] the white man by the establishment of negro supremacy.”

Forrest G. Wood writes in Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction:

Although white men certainly feared for their jobs and income, they were more alarmed by the threat to their physical safety that the “savage African” presented… Pointing to the absence of an advanced (by Western standards) African civilization, extremists described the Negroes as primitive, barbaric, and cruel… Freedom, the white supremacist now asserted, would stimulate the black man’s worst passions, leading him to crimes of arson, murder, and rape.

Newspapers often deliberately published grossly exaggerated or wholly fictitious stories of criminal acts and violence committed by blacks, stoking even more fear in the racist white population. For these white supremacists, rape was “the most frightful crime which negroes commit against white people” and the accusation of sexual assault (or even consensual interracial relationships) was a surefire way to spark a lynch mob.

Just this past Spring, Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that many Israeli women have been raped by African migrants and refugees, “but do not complain out of fear of being stigmatized as having contracted AIDS,” insisting that “most of the African infiltrators are criminals.”   At an anti-African rally, Tel Aviv resident Carmela Rosner held a sign that read: “They rape girls and elderly women, murder, steal, stab, burglarize. We’re afraid to leave home.”

Yishai said that Africans, “along with the Palestinians, will bring a quick end to the Zionist dream,” while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the growing population of African immigrants “threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state,” as well as “the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity.”  Palestinians in Israel along with their actual and potential offspring are regularly referred to as a “demographic threat” and a “demographic bomb,” a racist construction that exposes the discriminatory and supremacist nature of Zionism itself.

Due to such incitement against minority communities, pogroms, race riots, and violence against non-Jews have become commonplace.

The Israeli Education Ministry is currently attempting to overturn a district court ruling that “migrant children… be fully integrated in the municipal school system and not be taught in a separate school.” The state appeal in favor of segregation claims that the education of Israeli children will suffer if done alongside the children of African immigrants. Meanwhile, extremist Jewish groups continue to try to “rescue” Jewish Israeli girls who date Palestinian men and threaten Palestinians with violence if they flirt with Jews.

In 2008, a Jewish Israeli woman filed a police report after discovering that a man she had just had consensual sex with was Palestinian and not Jewish, as she had assumed. After spending two years under house arrest, an Israeli court convicted the man of “rape by deception” and sentenced him to 18 months in prison. A former senior Justice Ministry official was quoted as saying, “In the context of Israeli society, you can see that some women would feel very strongly that they had been violated by someone who says he is Jewish but is not.”

This is to be expected, as The Palestine Center‘s Yousef Munayyer explains: “An ideology that seeks to build a society around a certain type of people defined by ethnicity or religion is inevitably going to feature racism, supremacy and oppression—especially when the vast majority of native inhabitants where such an ideology is implemented are unwelcomed.”

Unsurprisingly, commentators who routinely denounce cancer analogies when they come from Iranian officials blatantly avoid addressing the use of the identical rhetoric by Israelis themselves when referring to the growing presence of non-Jewish communities within areas controlled by Israel. When IDF chief Moshe Ya’alon referred to Palestinian babies as “cancerous manifestations” and Likud Knesset member Miri Regev called African migrants and refugees “a cancer in our body,” they were silent.

While calling the government and founding ideology of a state a “cancerous tumor” is certainly not a nice thing to say and supporters of that state’s policies have every reason to take offense to such a description, it is quite obviously a political statement.  Iranian rhetoric attacks a political entity, namely the “Zionist regime“, which systematically discriminates against and oppresses people based solely on their ancestry and religious affiliation.  In contrast, Ya’alon and Regev’s statements employ the cancer analogy to defend the concept of ethnic-religious exclusivity and have everything to do with people, whether Palestinian or African, who somehow threaten the continued dominance of a deliberately demographically engineered and maintained state.

To be sure, regardless of its intended target, this kind of rhetoric is purposefully harsh and often gratuitous.  Yet, like Ahmadinejad’s “insult to humanity” line, the cancer analogy is neither new nor original.  While Iranian officials have been employing it since 2000, it has long been wielded for the express purpose of condemning a political system or ideology one vehemently opposes.

In the 1820s, former president John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that “slavery is a cancer to be isolated.”  On October 16, 1854, in an stridently abolitionist speech in Peoria, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln likened the Constitution’s vague references to slavery to a “cancer,” hidden away, which an “afflicted man… dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”

A New York Times article from September 8, 1863 quoted then-Tennessee Governor Andrew Johnson as telling a Nashville crowd in late August, “Slavery is a cancer on our society, and the scalpel of the statesman should be used not simply to pare away the exterior and leave the roots to propagate the disease anew, but to remove it altogether.”  Johnson endorsed the “total eradication” of slavery from Tennessee.

In the final chapter of the first volume of Das Kapital (1867), entitled “The Modern Theory of Colonization,” Karl Marx excoriated British politician Edward Gibbon Wakefield for his efforts “to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies.”

The 1968 platform of Bermuda’s first political party, the Progressive Labor Party, proclaimed, “No government can be either responsible or democratic while under the rule of another country, ” adding, “Colonialism is a cancer.”

A February 23, 1962 article in Time Magazine profiled U.S. General Paul Donal Harkins, the commander of a newly created U.S. Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam, which is described as “the first step in a more broadly based anti-Communist campaign.”  Harkins is quoted early in the piece as defining his mission as “doing all we can to support the South Vietnamese efforts to eradicate the cancer of Communism.”

In early June 1983, just a few months after Ronald Reagan delivered his “Evil Empire” speech in which he declared his belief that “Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written,” Illinois Representative Henry Hyde told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that, because “Communism is a cancer,” Congress should support covert action and assistance to Contras and anti-Sandinista forces in Latin America in an effort to “fight for freedom.”

Hamas reportedly used “Communism is a cancer inside the nation’s body and we will cut it out” as a political slogan in opposition to Fatah soon after its establishment in the late 1980s.

Perhaps most applicable, however, are the comments made by South African Reverend Allan Boesak who, in 1983, formed the United Democratic Front, a legal umbrella organization for hundreds of anti-Apartheid groups.  In his opening address to the UDF, Boesak stated:

Apartheid is a cancer on the body politic of the world. A scourge on our society and on all human kind. Apartheid exists only because of economic greed and political oppression maintained by both systemic and physical violence and a false sense of racial superiority. So many have been forced into exile. So many have been thrown into jail. Too many of our children have been shot down mercilessly on the streets of our nation.

In the same speech, Boesak called Apartheid “a thoroughly evil system” that “can never be modernized or modified, it must be totally eradicated” and, in 1985, denounced the white South Africans who continued to support Apartheid as the “spiritual children of Adolf Hitler.”

In 1988, Jim Murray echoed Boesak in the Los Angeles Times, writing that “apartheid is a cancer on the world body politic–to say nothing of its soul. You combat it the best way you can.”

Just as many others, including numerous Israelis, have described the state of Israel as practicing Apartheid, Boesak himself has endorsed such a comparison, and has gone even further.

In a November 2011 interview, Boesak reaffirmed his statement that the oppression of and discrimination against Palestinians by Israel is “in its practical manifestation even worse than South African apartheid,” adding, “It is worse, not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it, so to speak; sharpened it.”

He cited the physical barriers, travel and employment restrictions, and the “two separate justice systems” for Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank as examples of why “in many ways the Israeli system is worse.”  He offered his wholehearted support for the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions to impel Israel to comply with international law.

When asked whether Palestinians could ever be expected to recognize Israel as a “Jewish State,” Boesak replied:

They can’t. There is no such thing as a specifically Jewish state. You can’t proclaim a Jewish state over the heads and the bodies and the memories of the people who are the ancient people who live there. That is Palestinian land we are talking about. Most of the Jews who are there come from Europe and elsewhere and have no claim on that land and we mustn’t allow it to happen to the Palestinians what happened to my ancestors who were the original people in this land (South Africa) but now there are hardly enough of them to be counted in the census. That is Palestinian land and that should be the point of departure in every political discussion.

Similarly, official Iranian state policy maintains that the international community must “allow the Palestinian nation to decide its own future, to have the right to self-determination for itself” and that in “the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations and the fundamental principles enshrined in it… Jewish Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians and Christian Palestinians [must] determine their own fate themselves through a free referendum.  Whatever they choose as a nation, everybody should accept and respect.”

Hysteria over Iranian phraseology (rhetoric with a long political history) relies solely on the presumption – repeated ad nauseum by politicians and the press – that the nation’s leadership has threatened to attack Israel militarily and wipe it off the map.  But Iran has never made such threats.  Quite the contrary.

Speaking to Wolf Blitzer in April 2006, Iran’s representative to the IAEA, Ali Ashgar Soltanieh directly addressed claims that Iran seeks the physical destruction of Israel (whatever that means).  Blitzer asked, “Should there be a state of Israel?,” to which Soltanieh replied, “If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionist mentality, no.  But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or they have to be massacred, this is a fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is.”

In a June 2006 letter to The Washington Post, a spokesman for the Iranian Mission to the United Nations wrote, “Iran’s position is very clear: We have not threatened to use force nor have we used force against any country or government in the past 250 years. We’ve never done that in the past, and we’ll never do it in the future,” adding, “We wonder whether Israel or the United States can make the same statement.”

The letter also noted that, the same month, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that “We have no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world, and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any state.”

In October 2006, President Ahmadinejad stated, “Nuclear weapons have no place in Iran’s defense doctrine and Iran is not a threat to any country… We are not a threat to anybody; even our solution to the Zionist regime is a referendum.”  The following year, Ahmadinejad was asked by the Associated Press whether Iran “would ever make a first strike against Israel.” He replied, “Iran will not attack any country,” and insisted Iran has “always maintained a defensive policy, not an offensive one” and has no interest in territorial expansion, something Israel could never seriously claim.

In a 2008 CNN interview with Larry King, Ahmadinejad stated bluntly that “we don’t have a problem with the Jewish people,” and added, with specific reference to Israel, “We are opposed to the idea that the people who live there should be thrown into the sea or be burnt.”

The same year, at a news conference during the D8 Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Ahmadinejad told reporters that because he believes the Zionist enterprise of ethnic cleansing and colonization is “inherently doomed” to failure, “there is no need for Iranians to take action” to hasten the inevitable political outcome in Palestine. He also assured the press, “You should not be concerned about a new war.”

He also made his position clear in an NPR interview, saying, “Let me create an analogy here — where exactly is the Soviet Union today? It did disappear — but exactly how? It was through the vote of its own people. So therefore in Palestine too we must allow the people, the Palestinians, to determine their own future.”

During an October 2011 interview, Ahmadinejad told Al Jazeera that Iran “will never enter any war against the U.S. or against any other country. This is our policy… We have never attacked anybody. Why should we do that? Why should we start a war?”

This past July, Mohammad Khazaee, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations said, “We will react if there is any provocative act from the other side. We will not initiate any provocative steps.”

Official assessments by both Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, Director of Defense Intelligence Agency have affirmed that “Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict or launch a preemptive attack.”

The alarmism that inevitably follows boilerplate speeches by Iranian officials serves an agenda of decontextualized demonization that paints the Islamic Republic as a genocidal, eliminationist aggressor and Israel as a victim, just one spinning centrifuge away from eradication.  In fact, it is Israel that consistently threatens Iran with an illegal military assault, not the other way around.

But it is not a military attack that actually threatens the future of Israel, it is exactly the kind of struggle undertaken by those like Allen Boesak, who fought against an unjust system of ethnocentrism and supremacy and prevailed.

Were Israel to finally respect international law, put an end to decades of racism, occupation and Apartheid, and begin to consider each and every human being as equal and worthy of the same human rights and dignity, freedom of movement and opportunity, it would no longer be subject to the harsh analogies that have for so long been directed at the most oppressive and inhumane ideologies the world has ever known.

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August 24, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Ban Ki-moon to attend NAM summit in Tehran: UN spokesman

Press TV – August 22, 2012

The United Nation Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will attend the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Iran despite pressures from the US and Israel, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky says.

Nesirky said that Ban would “discuss frankly” the Syrian crisis but believed that Iran must be part of the solution.

Reuters reported earlier on Wednesday that according to several UN diplomats, Ban would attend the upcoming summit in Iran’s capital, Tehran.

“It’s a very important bloc of nations. Of course the SG [secretary-general] is going. He can’t not go,” Reuters quoted a diplomatic source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying.

This is while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month urged the UN secretary general not to attend the summit.

The US has also been trying to dissuade NAM member states, particularly the UN chief, from attending the summit.

The 16th summit of the NAM member states will be held in the Iranian capital August 26-31.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei will address the Tehran NAM summit during which the Islamic Republic will assume the rotating presidency of the movement for three years.

NAM, an international organization with 120 member states and 21 observer countries, is considered as not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.

NAM’s purpose, as stated in the Havana Declaration of 1979, is to ensure “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries.”

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August 22, 2012 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

Morsi gives solution to Syrian crisis

By M K Bhadrakumar | Rediff | August 18, 2012

I wrote yesterday for Asia Times that in Muslim politics such as the event of the summit meeting of the Organization of Islamic Conference that was held in Jeddah last week over the Syrian crisis, it is invariably the case that the sub-texts turn out to be more important than the narrative.

The narrative in the present case is well-known; it is well-propagated by the Western (especially American) media and it inevitably trickles down to Indian discourses, namely, that the OIC summit in Jeddah was going to be all about the Saudi-Iranian ‘cold war’.

But the devil lies in the details. One point of immense curiosity was about the stance taken by Egypt’s president Mohammad Morsi (who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood) at the OIC summit. Three reasons could be cited for this. One, this was Morsi’s first appearance on the world stage and it became a poignant moment that an elected Islamist leader in a Middle Eastern democracy was taking to the OIC podium.

Two, Egypt had so far shied away from taking a stance on the Syrian situation and Egypt’s formal stance on the Syrian situation holds a lot of significance for the downstream developments, given the unmistakeable longing of that country to reclaim the leadership of the Arab world — in sum, Egypt could be an ally or a competitor for Saudi Arabia.

Third, Egypt’s Brothers are on the horns of a dilemma. They came to power riding the wave of a ‘regime change’ but they also would be conscious that the MB in Syria has certain unique characteristics, as its secretive dealings with the Western powers and Turkey (and some say, with even israeli intelligence) for creating a militia and resorting to the path of violence to force a ‘regime change’ in Damascus would testify. Egypt’s Brothers had, on the contrary, kept to the strait non-violent path in their march to power through the decades in the political wilderness.

Obviously, there is a keen struggle to sway the Brothers of Egypt. Thus, the stunning decision by Qatar to lend a handsome amount of 2 billion dollars to Egypt to help Morsi tide over the economic crisis was not because Doha has a bleeding heart.

Not a few observers could see that Qatar is creating leverage in Cairo at a juncture when the Saudi and American influence is facing uncertainties. Curiously, the Qatari lovefest with Egypt coincided with the OIC summit in Jeddah.

In the event, Morsi rose to the occasion. The narrative is that he called for a transition in Egypt. “it is time for the Syrian regime to leave”, he said. So far so good. The Western media lapped it up. But then came the sub-texts. Morsi called for a non-violent path. In immediate terms, he sought a ceasefire through Ramadan. Besides, he wanted an Islamic solution.

Then came the bombshell. Morsi proposed that a contact group should be formed to resolve the Syrian crisis through peaceful means, discussion and reconciliation. And, pray, who would form this group? Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Iran — he outlined.

In a nutshell, Morsi has rejected the strategm for ‘regime change’ in Syria by the United States in alliance with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (with Israel standing in the shade for undertaking covert operations). Most important, Morsi’s package is almost exactly what Iran espouses, too.

No wonder, Tehran feels greatly elated. In contrast with the deafening silence in Ankara, Riyadh and Doha, Tehran has scrambled to welcome Morsi’s proposal. Saudis will feel perturbed that Cairo is careering away into the trajectory of an independent foreign policy that may have more commonality with Tehran than the course adopted by the GCC states. Turkey will feel downcast that the new Egypt is not exactly in a mood to adopt the so-called islamist leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as its role model.

Indeed, we could anticipate that interesting times lie ahead as Egypt’s Brothers carry forward the impulses of their revolution. We are slowly, steadily getting near to an answer to the question raised in great angst by several quarters (Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh) : Will the new Egypt orient toward Saudi Arabia or Tehran?

The answer is crystallizing: Morsi intends to follow the middle path. Actually, that is also what his latest decision to attend the NAM summit in Tehran underscores.

So, it is about time we move on to the follow-up question: Whom does Morsi’s (and Egypt’s Brothers’) middle path suit better — Saudi Arabia or Iran? I won’t wager for an answer. It’s Iran, Stupid! All that Tehran ever expected in its regional (Arab) milieu all through these past 34 years since the Islamic Revolution was a level playing field. And Egypt is willing to recognize, finally, that it is a legitimate aspiration to have.

August 22, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran roundly denies role in Afghan bombings

Tehran Times | August 20, 2012

TEHRAN – Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast emphatically rejected claims on Sunday that Iran engineered a series of suicide bomb attacks earlier this week that killed at least 28 people in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s spy agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), killed two alleged insurgents and detained three more this week for what they said was their involvement in the bombings this week in Afghanistan’s Nimroz province.

The NDS claimed the five were Iranian citizens, and that they had been trained for suicide bomb missions in Iran, which borders Afghanistan to its west.

August 20, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Egyptian president to attend NAM summit in Tehran

Press TV – August 18, 2012

Egypt’s official news agency, MENA, said on Saturday that President Mohamed Morsi plans to attend the upcoming Non Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran.

Morsi’s trip to Tehran will be the first such visit since Iran and Egypt severed ties more than 30 years ago after Cairo signed the 1978 Camp David Accord with the Israeli regime and offered asylum to the deposed Iranian dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The 16th summit of the NAM member states will be held in the Iranian capital on August 26-31.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei will address the Tehran NAM summit.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is also expected to partake in the event during which the Islamic Republic will assume the rotating presidency of the movement for three years.

NAM, an international organization with 120 member states and 21 observer countries, is considered as not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.

NAM’s purpose, as stated in the Havana Declaration of 1979, is to ensure “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries.”

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August 18, 2012 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Barak’s Blunder

Israeli defense minister misrepresents U.S. intelligence to bolster the case for war

By Philip Giraldi • The American Conservative • August 17, 2012

It should surprise no one to learn that when intelligence agencies talk to other intelligence agencies as part of a liaison relationship there are certain rules in place, even though they are frequently unspoken. During the Cold War the most productive such relationship that the United States had was not with obvious candidates like the British or Germans. It was with the Norwegians, who ran a chain of listening posts that were able to pick up signals and other valuable information drawn from the heart of the Soviet nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The U.S. knew all about the latest Russian technical developments, and both Washington and Oslo kept quiet about what they were up to.

But sometimes the temptation to use highly sensitive classified intelligence obtained from a friend is overwhelming? On August 9, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak confirmed Israeli media reports that a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from the United States on the Iranian nuclear program had “included new and alarming intelligence” that had led to the judgment that “Iran has made surprising, notable progress in the research and development of key components of the military nuclear program.” He described the source as an intelligence report “being passed around senior offices.” Barak concluded that the new report means that Israel and the United States now have the same view of developments in Iran, meaning that both now believe that the country’s nuclear program has a military component which makes Iran unambiguously a threat.

“Militarization” has become something of a buzzword in the debate over Tehran’s intentions. It can mean a couple of things, most obviously that some research or development is taking place that can plausibly only be linked to creation of a nuclear weapon. Or it could mean that certain developments in the nuclear area have been linked to corresponding advances in ballistic missile engineering, meaning that there might be a program to work clandestinely on a bomb while simultaneously upgrading Iran’s missiles to provide a mechanism to deliver the weapon on target as soon as it is available.

Barak’s remarks sparked considerable commentary worldwide, suggesting that Israel and the United States, who appear to have been seeking a casus belli for attacking Iran, at last have found their smoking pistol enabling them to do so.  But there were some serious problems with the story, and the CIA and Office of National Intelligence initiated some immediate pushback over Barak’s apparent exposure of classified information provided to Israel by Washington.

Intelligence insiders noted immediately that there has not, in fact, been a new NIE on Iran. Barak apparently intentionally called the report he had seen an NIE to heighten the impact and veracity of what he was saying. An NIE is the consensus product of the entire U.S. intelligence community and the views contained in it are endorsed by the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Barak clearly felt that he needed the gravitas of an NIE because there have been two previous NIEs, in 2007 and 2011, that have concluded that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and has not made the political decision to initiate one.

So it became clear that Ehud Barak was talking about something else. It turns out that the CIA routinely shares what is referred to as finished intelligence with Israel, and among those reports there have been several examining possible advances in Iranian missile development, to include an examination of intelligence suggesting that there might be some engineering of a warhead that might be capable of carrying a small nuclear device, if such a weapon were ultimately to become available [emphasis Aletho News]. Finished intelligence consists of reports that are produced in great quantity addressing a variety of issues.  They are not unlike the types of reports generated by the various think tanks in Washington and at major universities, being generally academic in tone though carefully drafted to avoid any revelation of the sources and methods contributing to the document. Finished intelligence is frequently passed by CIA to friendly intelligence liaison services and is generally classified “Secret.”

So Barak was quite possibly misrepresenting a U.S. intelligence-generated report to serve his own purposes, and he was also leaking information that had been given to him in confidence with the understanding that he would only use it to guide internal Israel deliberations, not to discuss it with the media. The CIA was reportedly furious over the leak and, in an unusual move, the White House quickly gave a green light for the National Security Council to actually rebuke Israel, with an NSC spokesman commenting that “We continue to assess that Iran is not on the verge of achieving a nuclear weapon.”

So Israel was saying that the Iranian threat had been demonstrated based on U.S. intelligence while Washington claimed the contrary. It all might have ended there, but intelligence leaks have a tendency to spill over and turn out to be difficult to contain. The Obama White House felt compelled to assuage Israeli fears over Iran’s alleged nukes. On Friday press spokesman Jay Carney told the media (and the Israelis) that the U.S. “would know if and when Iran made” a decision to build a weapon. “We have eyes–we have visibility into the program, and we would know if and when Iran made what’s called a breakout move towards acquiring a weapon.”

Carney’s unnecessary elaboration of United States intelligence capabilities vis-à-vis Iran caused the intel community to go ballistic for a second time in two days. If there is one thing that an intelligence organization never does it is to reveal what it can and cannot do. Now Iran, which already knew that it was being monitored closely, probably has a pretty good idea where its vulnerabilities lie because the White House has told them where to look. Marc Ambinder, a national security specialist who writes for The Atlantic, explains how it works: “the CIA’s ops arm, the National Clandestine Service, along with the US military, are devoting thousands of person-hours per day working along the periphery of the country, scrutinizing and seizing cargo shipments bound for Iran, tapping the black market for nuclear supplies and buying up spare parts, and maximizing the collection of Iranian signal traffic … it has a high-definition picture of the current state of the nuclear program and would be able to much more quickly identify if, say, scientists began to create the material needed to manufacture the lens and tamper system that would induce the fission in a bomb. What’s most valuable here is the US mastery of obscure but vital types of intelligence collection that spooks call ‘MASINT’—or measurement and signature intelligence. MASINT sensors on satellites, drones, and on the ground can detect everything from the electromagnetic signatures created by testing conventional missile systems to disturbances in the soil and geography around a hidden nuclear facility to streams of radioactive particles that are byproducts of the uranium enrichment process. Put together, the US has a good handle on the nuclear supply chain; it knows what Iran has and doesn’t have; it has a good handle on who needs to be where in order for certain things to happen; it knows, probably through National Security Agency signals collection, a lot about the daily lives and stresses of Iran’s nuclear scientists.”

If Marc Ambinder has figured out in some detail how the U.S. collects its most sensitive intelligence on Iran, the Iranians have almost certainly come to the same conclusions. Which means that they can move to address their vulnerabilities and can work harder to shield their intentions if they actually are developing a weapon, possibly doing so with outside technical help from the sophisticated friendly foreign intelligence services of Russia and China. As for the Israelis, a foolish attempt to use U.S.-provided intelligence to further demonize a country that has already been effectively blackened will prove counter-productive. Israel and its friends in Congress have long been demanding that CIA and NSA provide them with raw instead of finished intelligence. Raw intelligence is information that comes in as it is collected, indicating the sources and methods used. It is extremely valuable because it is transparent and not subject to analysis, but it is also highly vulnerable to disruption if it is in any way exposed. The resistance within the intelligence community to providing the Israelis anything of that nature has just hardened, with credit going to Ehud Barak for leaking information in an attempt to obtain some political mileage to bolster his country’s incessant arguments in favor of war.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

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August 18, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

India joins Japan to resume shipping of Iranian oil

MEHRNEWS | August 15, 2012

India has joined Japan in offering government-backed insurance for ships carrying Iranian crude in order to bypass European sanctions, the Washington Post reported.

The first Indian ship to carry oil from Iran with Indian insurance is scheduled to load up in Iran on Wednesday, a shipping company executive said. This is a breakthrough for the Indian government, which has scrambled to maintain vital Iranian oil imports after European sanctions blocked third-party insurance in July.

The MT Omvati Prem — a tanker contracted to carry 85,000 metric tons of crude oil from Iran for Indian state refiner Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd. — is scheduled to arrive in India by Aug. 25, said Kowshik Kuchroo, president of shipping for Mercator Ltd., an Indian shipping company.

“This being a government of India cargo, it has a different sense of importance. We’re not doing it just for business,” Kuchroo said Monday. “India is in definite need of the crude. At a short notice, we can’t just snap the supply.”

Mercator is insuring the ship with $50 million in hull and machinery insurance, which covers physical damage to the ship, from state-owned New India Assurance Co. It’s insuring the vessel with another $50 million in protection and indemnity insurance, which covers a broad range of liabilities, including environmental pollution and cargo damage, from government-backed United India Insurance.

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August 15, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Points of No Return, Zones of Immunity, & Windows of Opportunity: The Constant Israeli Hype Over Iran

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | August 14, 2012

“For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

– President John F. Kennedy, June 1962

“Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions…The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation.”

– Jacques Ellul, 1965

A report in The Times of London, with the headline “Israel steps up plan for air attacks on Iran”, enumerates the various “options” and “military contingency plans” available to the Israeli military in order to “neutralise” Iran’s “nuclear weapons programme.”  Journalist Christopher Walker writes that Israeli “[m]ilitary planners are studying” the possibility of “hitting Iranian missile plants…with the ‘long arm’ of its airforce or targeting foreign scientists at the facilities rather than the buildings themselves.”  He adds that “surgical air strikes” would be carried out by “advanced F-15I fighter planes.”

The piece also quotes the Israeli Defense Minister as warning, “A country like Iran possessing such long range weaponry – a country that lacks stability, that is characterised by Islamic fundamentalism, by an extremist ideology that is striving to become a superpower in the Middle East – is very dangerous.”

Another alarming article, this one in The Washington Times, begins this way:

Reports that Israel is preparing for pre-emptive air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and is now able to fire nuclear missiles from submarines were seen as reflecting deep anxiety in Israel for Tehran’s nuclear program.

Israeli newspapers said officials appear to have leaked the reports in an attempt to focus the attention of the international community on the dangers of Iranian nuclear weapons development.

In The New York Times, Hebrew University professor Martin van Creveld writes of the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, explaining, “With the United States now in the midst of a hotly disputed election campaign,” if the Israeli Prime Minister “wanted to act, the time to do so would be between now and November.”

The first report is from December 9, 1997.  The second from October 13, 2003.  The third was published on August 21, 2004.

It is now August 2012.  Another election cycle is nearing an end and with it as always comes the same tired fearmongering and war hysteria.  Threats and predictions of an unprovoked, illegal Israeli assault on Iran are once again flooding the media with dire warnings of fabricated and meaningless – but sufficiently spooky – phrases such as Iran’s supposedly looming “zone of immunity,” which until recently was ominously dubbed the “point of no return.”  We’ve been through this charade for three decades with no end in sight.

Early this month, Israeli national security adviser Ephraim Halevy, who was once director of Mossad, was quoted as saying that if he were Iranian he “would be very fearful of the next 12 weeks.”  Meanwhile, Iranian diplomats continue to assert that the Islamic Republic has no intention of attacking Israel.  “We will react if there is any provocative act from the other side,” Mohammad Khazaee, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, told reporter Laura Rozen just a month ago. “We will not initiate any provocative steps.”

Iran’s defense doctrine has been reaffirmed at the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence community.  Earlier this year, Defense Intelligence Agency chief Ronald Burgess told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his agency continues to assess that “Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.”

On the very same day that the editors of the New York Daily News took their cues from Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren to warn that “Tehran is on the verge of being able to produce a bomb,” a spokesman for the White House National Security Council maintained that U.S. intelligence “continue[s] to assess that Iran is not on the verge of achieving a nuclear weapon.”

Last week, reliable Netanyahu administration mouthpiece Barak Ravid reported in Ha’aretz that “[n]ew intelligence information obtained by Israel and four Western countries indicates that Iran has made greater progress on developing components for its nuclear weapons program than the West had previously realized.”  He also published an article claiming that “President Barack Obama recently received a new National Intelligence Estimate report on the Iranian nuclear program, which shares Israel’s view that Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability,” adding that the alleged report contains “new and alarming intelligence information about military components of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Not only was Ravid’s reporting – tactlessly and transparently planted by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak – full of evidence-free claims by the MEK and over-hyped falsehoods about a secret detonation chamber and atomic particles washed away from an Iranian military installation legally off-limits to IAEA inspectors that have long been debunked, it’s main scoop was immediately denied by the Obama administration.  In response to Ravid’s claims, Reuters reported a National Security Council spokesman as saying that “U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear activities had not changed since intelligence officials delivered testimony to Congress on the issue earlier this year.”  Both the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Ronald Burgess have consistently assessed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

Essentially confirming suspicions that he was the source of Ravid’s information, Ehud Barak told Israel Radio,  “There probably really is such an American intelligence report…making its way around senior offices” in Washington that, “makes the Iranian issue even more urgent and (shows it is) less clear and certain that we will know everything in time about their steady progress toward military nuclear capability.”

That’s right: probably really.

Ehud Barak even resorted to totally inapplicable and inappropriate historical analogies to anonymously fear-monger about Iran.  Utilizing the ultimate in Zionist emotional blackmail and hasbara, Barak evoked the threat of Nazi Germany: “What happened in the Rhine in 1936 will be child’s play compared to what will happen with Iran,” he declared.

Seemingly responding to former Mossad head Meir Dagan’s January 2011 determination that Israel “should use military force only if it is attacked, or if it has ‘a sword at its neck,'” Barak also pulled the phony, back-up-against-a-corner, self-defense card: “The sword at our throat is a lot sharper than the sword at our throat before the Six-Day War,” he told Ha’aretz.

Neither of these claims makes any sense.  That Iran is not the industrialized, military powerhouse that Nazi Germany was, nor does it have any expansionist or genocidal goals, hardly merits attention.  With regard to the Six-Day War, Barak is hoping his audience knows nothing of history.  The Israeli attack on Egypt that began the war was not a preemptive act of self-defense, but rather an aggressive military action.  Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin even admitted in 1982, “In June 1967 we again had a choice.  The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us.  We must be honest with ourselves.  We decided to attack him.”

Speaking to reporters on August 10, White House spokesman Jay Carney revealed that, with regard to U.S. intelligence on the Iranian nuclear energy program, “we have eyes, we have visibility into the program, and we would know if and when Iran made a — what’s called a ‘breakout move’ towards acquiring a weapon.”

Furthermore, Carney bragged about his administration’s deliberate imposition upon the Iranian people of “the most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country,” which he said are “designed to take advantage of what we believe remains to be a window of opportunity to persuade Iran through these sanctions and through diplomatic efforts to forego its nuclear weapons ambitions.”

Window of opportunity. Zone of immunity.  Point of no return.  All options on the table.  Credible military threat.

Such hype, based on dubious claims and false information, is nothing new when it comes to American and Israeli warmongering.  For instance, a CBS News report from August 18, 2002 stated, “Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, said [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin.”  The article quotes Gissin: “Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose.  It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction.”

Similarly, this past weekend, The New York Times reported that Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon called upon the P5+1 (the five nuclear-armed permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) to “declare today that the talks [with Iran] have failed” and demand Iran cease all nuclear activity within a matter of “weeks.”  When Iran obviously does not comply, as such a demand is ludicrous and a direct abrogation of Iran’s inalienable rights, Ayalon said “it will be clear that all options are on the table.”

The threats of war come not only from politicians, but also – as it has before – from pundits and the press.

In a memorandum highlighting a particularly alarmist and dishonest speech delivered by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention on August 26, 2002, neoconservative rainmaker Bill Kristol wrote, “The time for action grows near. Congressional leaders should seriously consider a resolution authorizing use of force when they return next week. Passing such a resolution as soon as possible would provide the president with maximum flexibility and an opportunity for tactical surprise, would strengthen his hand vis-a-vis our allies, and might embolden internal opposition in Iraq.”

Nearly a decade later, a Weekly Standard opinion piece published July 2, 2012 and co-authored by Kristol declared, “Time is running out and the consequences of inaction for the United States, Israel, and the free world will only increase in the weeks and months ahead. It’s time for Congress to seriously explore an Authorization of Military Force to halt Iran’s nuclear program.”

The repetition of rhetoric advocating military violence in the form of initiating a “war of aggression” – long considered “the supreme international crime” – has never been limited only to neoconservative hawks.  For example, the warmongering of so-called “liberal” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is virtually indistinguishable from that of Kristol.

In February 2003, following Colin Powell’s dazzling display of lies before the United Nations Security Council, Cohen wrote that Iraq “without a doubt” maintained an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Such was Cohen’s certainty that he added, “Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.”

This year, Cohen has been at it again, this time arguing that Israel has good reason to attack Iran, claiming that, while “the ultimate remedy is Iranian regime change,” which Cohen insists is “not as improbable as it sounds,” in the meantime, an Israeli assault “could accomplish quite a lot.”  His reasoning is based on a total misunderstanding of historical events, wholesale contempt for international law, blind acceptance of selective Israeli and American allegations, and willfully ignoring consistently reaffirmed assessments of U.S. intelligence and IAEA inspections.

Inexplicably, this man still has a job.

As it was, so it is again.  An incumbent president is in full campaign mode and a challenger is pledging eternal fealty to Israeli militarism and Zionist expansionism.  Such was 2004, so it is again.  And through it all, the Israeli government, despite making its preferences clear, feigns neutrality.

In a September 7, 2004 interview with The Jerusalem Post, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared, “I don’t interfere in elections. I never interfere in elections in other countries, and I hope that they will never interfere here either. I have no need to interfere and it is forbidden to interfere.”  He added, “It is no secret that the US is Israel’s devoted friend. There is a traditional friendship between the US and Israel. It is mutual.”

In a letter to The New York Times published on April 12, 2012, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren wrote, “Israel does not interfere in internal political affairs of the United States…and greatly values the wide bipartisan support it enjoys in America.”

And yet Oren continues to insist that the Israeli clock “is ticking faster” and claims “Israel, not the United States, is threatened almost weekly, if not daily, with annihilation by Iranian leaders.”  He declares diplomacy dead and suggests “that truly crippling sanctions together with a credible military threat – and that I stress, that’s a threat; not that we just say that it’s credible, the folks in Tehran have to believe us when we say that – may still deter them. But we also have to be prepared, as President Obama has said, to keep all options on the table, including a military option.”

Oren’s explicit call for not only collective punishment but a “credible military threat” – echoing the demands of his boss Netanyahu – is in fact a direct violation of the Chapter 1, Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter which declares, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

Nevertheless, the threats and speculations continue unabated with Israel always residing safely within its own zone of impunity.  Though highly–credentialed foreign policy experts, in addition to many military and defense officials, warn against the wisdom of an Israeli attack, rarely – if ever – does anyone explain that such action would unequivocally constitute a war crime.  This same scenario repeats year after year.

In his 1997 book Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies, Holocaust survivor and Israeli professor Israel Shahak wrote,

Since the spring of 1992, public opinion in Israel is being prepared for the prospect of a war with Iran, to be fought to bring about Iran’s total military and political defeat. In one version, Israel would attack Iran alone, in another it would ‘persuade’ the West to do the job. The indoctrination campaign to this effect is gaining in intensity. It is accompanied by what could be called semi-official horror scenarios purporting to detail what Iran could do to Israel, the West and the entire world when it acquires nuclear weapons as it is expected to a few years hence. (p.54)

We’ve been seeing exactly this situation play out with increasing frequency.  Last summer, Ha’aretz reporter Ari Shavit, this regarding the constant Israeli “threat of a military attack against Iran,” wrote:

This threat is crucial for scaring the Iranians and for goading on the Americans and the Europeans. It is also crucial for spurring on the Chinese and the Russians. Israel must not behave like an insane country. Rather, it must create the fear that if it is pushed into a corner it will behave insanely. To ensure that Israel is not forced to bomb Iran, it must maintain the impression that it is about to bomb Iran.

Yet the Iranian government isn’t falling for the bluff, despite the fact that, with inhumane sanctions, the murders of Iranian civilians, drone surveillance, covert operations, support for Iranian terrorist groups,  and continuing cyberwar, the United States and Israel are already violating Iranian sovereignty and imposing lethal violence and forced deprivation on the Iranian people and their country.

But even an air strike, let alone a full-scale war, won’t happen.  Probably really.

Aboard Air Force One last week, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that “the President remains committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and that we are leading an international effort to — yes, something exciting happened in soccer.  Sorry, excuse me, now I’m distracted.”

Carney had the right idea.  We should all be so distracted.

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August 15, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

How much will America’s animus against Iran distort U.S. policy toward Syria?

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | Race for Iran | August 13th, 2012

Across most of the American political spectrum, policy elites are urging that the United States double down on the Obama administration’s failing Syria policy.  America’s reliably pro-intervention senatorial trio (Lindsay Graham, Joseph Lieberman, and John McCain) recently argued that the “risks of inaction in Syria,” see here, now outweigh the downsides of American military involvement.  Last week, the Washington Post  prominently featured a piece by Ken Pollack, see here, asserting that negotiated settlements “rarely succeed in ending a civil war” like that in Syria—even though that it precisely what ended the civil war in Lebanon, right next door to Syria.  From this faulty premise, Pollack argues that the only way to end a civil war like that in Syria is through military intervention.  (After his scandalously wrong case for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, we wonder why the Washington Post or anyone else would give Pollack a platform for disseminating his views on virtually any Middle Eastern topic—but especially not for a piece dealing with the advisability of another U.S. military intervention in the region.  In this regard, we note that the bio line at the end of Ken’s op ed makes no mention of his book that made the case for the U.S. invading Iraq, The Threatening Storm, describing him instead as “the author of A Path Out of the Desert:  A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East.)

A more chilling—and, in some ways, more candid—indicator of the direction in which the debate over American policy toward Syria is heading was provided last week in Foreign Policy by Robert Haddick (managing editor of the hawkish blog, Small War Journal), see here.  Remarkably, Haddick argues that,

“rather than attempting to influence the course of Syria’s civil war, something largely beyond Washington’s control, U.S. policymakers should instead focus on strengthening America’s diplomatic position and on building irregular warfare capabilities that will be crucial in future conflicts in the region.  Modest and carefully circumscribed intervention in Syria, in coordination with America’s Sunni allies who are already players in the war, will bolster critical relationships and irregular warfare capabilities the United States and its allies will need for the future.”

And why is bolstering these relationships and capabilities so critical?  Because, as Haddick writes,

“The conflict in Syria is just one front in the ongoing competition between Iran and America’s Sunni allies on the west side of the Persian Gulf… The Sunni countries have a strong interest in stepping up their irregular warfare capabilities if they are to keep pace with Iran during the ongoing security competition.  The civil war in Syria provides an opportunity for the United States and its Sunni allies to do just that… U.S. and GCC intelligence officers and special forces could use an unconventional warfare campaign in Syria as an opportunity to exchange skills and training, share resources, improve trust, and establish combined operational procedures.  Such field experience would be highly useful in future contingencies.  Equally important, it would reassure the Sunni countries that the United States will be a reliable ally against Iran.”

Foreign Policy has become arguably the leading online venue for topical discussion of key issues on America’s international agenda.  And it is giving its platform to an argument that Washington should leverage the “opportunity” provided by the civil war in Syria to help its regional allies get better at killing Shi’a.  And Washington should do this for the goal of prevailing in “the ongoing security competition” between the Islamic Republic and the United States (along with America’s “Sunni allies).

Such trends in the American policy debate show an appalling incapacity to learn from either current experience or history.  And these trends are, in fact, influencing actual policy.  Late last week, during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Turkey, Ankara and Washington agreed that “a unified task force with intelligence, military and political leaders from both countries would be formed immediately to track Syria’s present and plan for its future,” see here.  After meeting with her Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Secretary Clinton said that the United States and Turkey are discussing various options for supporting opposition forces working to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad, including the possibility of imposing a no-fly zone over rebel-held territory in Syria, see here.

In the wake of Clinton’s remarks, Flynt appeared on CCTV’s World Insight weekly news magazine to discuss the internal and international dimensions of the Syrian conflict, see here.  Flynt and both of the other guests on the segment—Jia Xiudong from the China Institute of International Studies and our colleague Seyed Mohammad Marandi from the University of Tehran—agreed, contra Pollack, that the only way to resolve what has become a civil war in Syria is through an inclusive political process.

Getting to the heart of the matter, Flynt pointed out that “the United States and its regional partners are trying to use Syria to shift the balance of power in the Middle East in ways that they think will be bad for Iran.”  This strategy is “ultimately doomed to fail”—but, as long as Washington and others are pursuing it, “the international community is going to be challenged to find ways to keep the violence from getting worse and try to get a political process started.”  Flynt also observed that China and other players in the international community have historical grounds for concern about the imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria to create so-called “humanitarian safe havens” could lead to:  since the end of the Cold War, every time that the United States has imposed humanitarian safe havens—in Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, and most recently in Libya—this has ultimately resulted in a heavily militarized intervention by the United States and its partners in pursuit of coercive regime change.

In part, American elites persist in their current course regarding Syria because they continue to persuade themselves that, in the “security competition” between America and Iran, the United States is winning and the Islamic Republic is losing.  At roughly the same time that Pollack and Haddick were holding forth last week, the New York Times offered an Op Ed by Harvey Morris purporting to explain Iran’s “paranoia” over Syria’s civil war by describing “What Syria Looks Like from Tehran,” see here.  Morris claims that

“the impact of regime change in the Arab World has in fact been largely negative from Tehran’s perspective.  The Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Egypt is closer to Saudi Arabia than it is to Iran.  If the Alawite-dominated regime in Damascus were to fall, it would mean the loss of a non-Sunni ally.”

Our analysis—of both Tehran’s perspective on, and the reality of, how the Arab Spring is affecting the regional balance of power—is diametrically opposite to Morris’s.  For an actual (and genuinely informed) Iranian view, we note that Al Jazeera devoted last week’s episode of its Inside Syria series to the topic, “Can Iran Help End the Syrian Crisis?,” see here.  Once again, our colleague from the University of Tehran, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, gave a clear and concise exposition of Iranian views on the imperatives of and requirements for serious mediation of the struggle in (and over) Syria.

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August 14, 2012 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Attack Israel, Not Iran!

By Mahmoud El-Yousseph | The Ugly Truth | August 12, 2012

Last time Iran invaded a country was 216 years ago when the Persian shah, Agha Mohammad Khan, invaded the nation of Georgia. That’s still a great track record, especially compared to other nations.

Israel has repeatedly attacked and invaded numerous counties, and continues to this day to illegally occupy land from three neighboring nations.

Iran has not illegally developed nuclear weapons, whereas Israel has developed an illegal secret nuclear weapons program that has produced hundreds of nuclear warheads.

Iran has signed the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has refused to sign it.

Iran’s spies have not been caught stealing nuclear secrets from the US. Israel’s spies have been repeatedly caught doing this, and Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been implicated in smuggling US nuclear triggers into Israel.

Israel is reported to possess up to 300 nuclear missiles aimed at Arab and European capitals. Some can even hit US cities.Iran has no such weapons and has repeatedly said it does not wish to have them, this being in contravention of basic Islamic principles.

Iran has not sold US weapons and secret weapons technology to a US adversary. Israel has been selling US weapons and secret weapons technology to China for decades. Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard sold vitally important American secrets to the Soviet Union, as did the Rosenbergs.

Iran hasn’t been guilty of getting hundreds of thousands of US troops killed or maimed in expensive wars for Iran. Israel has repeatedly pushed the US into costly wars for Israel, expecting American citizens to fight and die for cowardly Israelis.

Israel has repeatedly been engaged in kidnapping of foreign nationals from other countries and smuggling them into Israel.No record of Iran ever having engaged in such a crime.

Israeli air and sea forces attacked the USS Liberty in international waters off the coast of Egypt for two hours on June 8, 1967. This took place on midsummer day with raised American flags and large English letters painted on the ship. 34 sailors were killed and 174 injured.

Last May, the Iranian Navy foiled an attempted pirate attack on a US cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman. The Iranian warship arrived following a distress call from the ship. The pirates fled upon the arrival of the Iranian Naval ship.

Israel has for the last five years imposed an illegal and inhumane siege over 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, causing unnecessary death, pain, and suffering. In contrast, Iran has sent aid and provided comfort to the besieged Palestinians — the very same thing America did to the Germans during the Berlin Airlift.

One could go on and on forever.

However, as a USMC veteran and activist, Dave Evans, succinctly pointed out: “Anyone who had not sworn an oath for peace could reasonably conclude that the US should be threatening to attack Israel, not Iran!”

It’s about time Americans did something to prove they were the Masters, not the Slaves.

The capital of America is Washington, not Tel Aviv.

Mahmoud El-Yousseph, retired USAF veteran, can be reached at elyousseph6@yahoo.com

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August 13, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Unilateral sanctions against Iran could damage Russian-US ties’ – Foreign Ministry

RT | August 13, 2012

The Foreign Ministry has warned of a possible blow to Russian-American relations if the US pursues unilateral sanctions against Iran that affect Russian economic interests there.

“Washington should understand that our bilateral relations will suffer considerably if the American restrictions affect Russian economic entities cooperating with partners in the Islamic Republic of Iran in strict compliance with our legislation and UN Security Council resolutions,” the ministry said on its website on Monday.

Late Friday, US President Barack Obama signed into law new sanctions against Iran which aims to penalize those parties aiding Iran’s insurance, financial, petroleum, petrochemical and shipping sectors.

Moscow considers US sanctions against Iran unacceptable, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariya Zakharova said on Monday.

“Russia is fully committed to the restrictions on cooperation with Iran that were established by the UN Security Council,” the spokeswoman said. “However, we do not recognize the unilateral sanctions that were imposed by Washington on the plea of serious concern about Iran’s nuclear program and run counter to international law.”

Zakharova called US efforts to punish countries that do business with Tehran “blackmail.”

“We refute methods of undisguised blackmail,” she said, “which is used by the US towards banks and companies of other countries.”

Earlier, the US passed legislation that targets any party doing business with Iran’s central bank.

Russia has cooperated with Iran in economic projects in the past, including in the Bushehr nuclear plant, which started adding energy to Iran’s electricity grid in September, 2011.

The United States is one of several countries, including Israel, that is concerned that Iran may be trying to develop a nuclear weapon under the cover of a civilian energy program.

Tehran has strongly rejected the accusations, saying it is pursuing nuclear energy for civilian purposes only.

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August 13, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

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