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AIPAC to sic Obama on Iran

Press TV – February 11, 2012

The most powerful Zionist lobbying group in the US, AIPAC, is increasing pressure on the administration of Barack Obama to launch a military strike against Iran, a political writer says.

“It is clear that Israel and its neoconservative camp followers here in the United States are increasing pressure on President Obama to either attack Iran or let Israel do it,” M.J. Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg, who was director of policy at the Israel Policy Forum, made the suggestion in an article about a military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The author said the main reason behind his prediction is that “this is an election year and no one will say no to [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu in an election year.”

He was referring to the 2012 presidential election in the United States that will be held in November.

Rosenberg also pointed out to an upcoming meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“War enthusiasm will rise to a fever pitch by March, when AIPAC holds its annual policy conference,” he wrote.

AIPAC, which has an influential and undeniable role in US policies, advocates pro-Israel policies to the Congress and Executive Branch of the United States.

The group urges all members of Congress to support Israel through foreign aid.

The US and Israel have repeatedly threatened Tehran with the “option” of a military strike, based on their allegation that Iran’s nuclear program may include a covert military aspect, a claim strongly rejected by Tehran.

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February 11, 2012 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

‘Seoul trade with Iran will continue despite sanctions’

Press TV – February 9, 2012

A top official at Korea’s banking sector says Seoul’s trade flow with Iran will not be constricted by western sanctions despite causing a halt in cooperation with Iran’s Bank Tejarat.

“We halted wire transfers of cash to accounts of Bank Tejarat, but this doesn’t hurt exporters at all. Most of exporters take payments from the Central Bank of Iran anyway,” Korea Herald reported Jeon Gwang wook head of the foreign exchange desk at the Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) as saying.

Jeon added that the extended sanctions are unlikely to slow trade flows with Iran as most Korean exporters can still make settlements with Iran’s Central Bank using accounts based on the won (Korea’s national currency).

On December 31, 2011, US President Barack Obama signed into law new sanctions against Iran, which seek to penalize foreign institutions that do business with Iran’s central bank and oil sector.

Under pressure by US-led sanctions against Tehran, two state-run South Korean banks, Woori Bank and the Industrial Bank of Korea, halted transactions with Iran’s Bank Tejarat as of January 23.

The US demands that Seoul halt trade activities with Iran which would reportedly jeopardize over $7 billion in South Korea’s annual exports and about 10 percent of its crude imports.

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February 9, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Did the Ayatollah Really Say: Kill all Jews, Annihilate Israel?

By Keith Johnson | Revolt of the Plebs | February 8, 2012

The short answer: Absolutely not!

Part of the long answer comes from Muhammad Sahimi, who recently told Antiwar Radio host Scott Horton that the inflammatory article published by World Net Daily (WND), entitled Ayatollah: Kill all Jews, Annihilate Israel is “totally bogus.”

Muhammad Sahimi is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He also frequently writes on Iranian politics for Payvand, the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com and several mainstream news outlets. He has a regular column for the Tehran Bureau of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and is fluent in Farsi.

According to Sahimi, the WND piece by Reza Kahlili is based entirely on an article by Alireza Forghani, who is described by Kahlili as “an analyst and a strategy specialist in [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei’s camp.”

However, Kahlili provides no proof of this and expects the reader to take his word for it. In response, Sahimi says that Alireza Forghani is nothing more than an “Iranian blogger” who has “no ties to the Iranian government…no official post anywhere…doesn’t even have a job.”

Forghani’s article first appeared on the website Alef, which Sahimi says is indirectly linked to an Iranian Member of Parliament but has no connection whatsoever to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to WND’s Kahlili, the fact that Forghani’s article “now is being run on most state-owned sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency,” shows that the regime endorses Forghani’s doctrine.

And what is Forghani’s “doctrine,” pray tell? According to Sahimi, Forghani does talk about a pre-emptive strike on Israel, but only because Israel is threatening to attack Iran. Sahimi compares this to the “Bush Doctrine”—“…take the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us again here at home.”

Sahimi goes on to say that Forghani talks about different population densities in various parts of Israel and postulates that if Iran were to attack Israel, these are some of the places Iran’s Shahab-3 missles can reach. “Then [Forghani] talks about—if Iran is to attack Israel—places like railroads, airports, nuclear facilities and so on can also be attacked by Iranian missles,” says Sahimi. “That is what he is saying.”

When Horton asks Sahimi, “Does he say kill all the Jews in Israel?”

“No,” he replies. “I don’t see anything that says that.”

As for Kahlili’s assertion that Forghani’s article contains quotes from Ali Khamenei that calls for the killing of all Jews, and the annihilation of Israel, Sahimi says, “There are no quotes from Khamenei—the current Supreme Leader—but there are two quotes from Khomeini, the leader of the [Iranian] Revolution.”

The first quote, according to Sahimi, basically states that most problems that Muslims are suffering in the Middle East are because of Zionism and U.S. support for Israel. “This is well known,” adds Sahimi. “Khomeini has said this many times. Then there is a second quote: ‘If the enemy attacks the lands of the Muslims or their borders, it is the duty of all Muslims to defend them by any means possible, including the sacrifice of one’s life and expenditure of one’s wealth.’”

One important thing to note: In the WND piece, Kahlili claims to be quoting from Forghani’s article, and writes in the third paragraph:

It is a “‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

Notice that Kahlili does not put full quotations around part of this sentence: no opening quotation>> to kill all Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”<<only a closing quotation

That’s because Forghani never wrote that, according to Sahimi. He goes on to say, “The Alef website itself says that this is the personal view of the author. The website does not support it, and it is not the policy of the Iranian government. This is one man’s opinion, and we should condemn it.”

Sahimi then points out the hypocrisy of those who are demonizing Iran over Forghani’s piece. “We have this kind of propaganda everyday among Israelis. Remember, for example in the 1980’s, Rafael Eitan, who was Chief of Staff for Israeli Defense Forces said, [“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”] We have had all sorts of racist statements by citizens of Israel against Palestinians, against Muslims, against Iranians. But they don’t represent (at least officially) the view of the Israeli government. It’s the same case here. Some guy…somewhere…wrote a blog and said something…and all of a sudden this has become the official view of the Supreme Leader and the Iranian government? That’s just nonsense.”

As for the author of the WND piece, Sahimi describes Reza Kahlili as an “Iranian charlatan” who has no credibility. In fact, no one knows his true identity. He goes by a pseudonym and wears masks to conceal his identity when he gives talks. Kahlili claims to have been a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the 1980’s, and that he worked as a double agent for the CIA, but decided to leave Iran in 1989. Sahimi points out that that was 23 years ago, and that the Revolutionary Guard of that era (during the Iran/Iraq War) was entirely different than what it is today. “So he has no insight or knowledge of what is going on in the Revolutionary Guard” says Sahimi. “More importantly, since he has arrived in the U.S., he has allied with the most extreme, warmongering factions. These guys look for anybody who may sound intelligent, and may be from Iran, in order to give credibility for the advocacy of war against Iran. Reza Kahlili is one of those.”

According to Sahimi, “In the Iranian community in the U.S., we have people who support sanctions against Iran. But even within that segment, [Kahlili] has no credibility. For instance, there are many Iranian satellite television stations here in L.A. that are constantly engaged in propaganda against the Iranian government. These stations have never interviewed this guy. It is totally amazing and frightening that the public is being this easily fooled by this propaganda.”

In other words, Kahlili is the type of guy that only fools the gullible Americans who have never met an Iranian, and get their daily dose of lies fed to them from the likes of Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and other nut jobs who have interviewed this creep.

In October 2011, Kahlili wrote a piece for The Washington Times, entitled KAHLILI: Iran already has nuclear weapons, where he asserts that “Not only does the Islamic Republic already have nuclear weapons from the old Soviet Union, but it has enough enriched uranium for more. What’s worse, it has a delivery system.”

WND is the bottom of the barrel, and they have now taken center stage as America’s foremost purveyor of yellow journalism.

February 8, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

WARS FOR ISRAEL: A REMINDER OF WHO IS GIVING THE MARCHING ORDERS

By Damian Lataan | February 07, 2012

As the West prepares to march off to yet another war in the Middle East, we should perhaps remind ourselves of who is giving the West their marching orders.

In February 2003, just weeks before the US and their allies launched their attack on Iraq and her peoples, a delegation of US congressmen, together with the US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, a well known pro-Zionist and neoconservative war-hawk, were in Israel at the invitation of the Israeli government then led by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Addressing the congressmen, Sharon told them ‘that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq’. Later, Sharon told John Bolton ‘that Israel was concerned about the security threat posed by Iran, and stressed that it was important to deal with Iran even while American attention was focused on Iraq’.

Things didn’t quite work out as planned in Iraq. The Iraqi populace, instead of greeting the coalition forces as ‘liberating armies’ as they marched up the road to Baghdad, chose instead to resist the invaders. The neocons who had insisted on the war and were hoping to get their man Ahmed Chalabi into the Iraqi presidency before the summer holidays, found instead that their simplistic fantasies about the venture being a ‘cakewalk’ were turning into a nightmare that is still being played out today nine years later.

But all this hasn’t dulled the neoconservative’s enthusiasm to belatedly do as Ariel Sharon has demanded. Libya has been taken care of; Syria looks like it’s going to get the same treatment; and the whole shebang will reach a crescendo when the Final Confrontation against Iran occurs at some time in the future – and, judging by the way things are going at the moment, it could be in the very near future.

The point I really want to make here is that all of the events of the last twelve years or so haven’t been a series of unrelated or spontaneous occurrences but, rather, have been part of a grand plan carefully instigated by Israeli Zionists and their supporters in the US and around the world designed to eliminate all of Israel’s enemies who so far have successfully been able to resist the Zionist dream of creating a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people.

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February 7, 2012 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran honestly cooperating with IAEA: Britain’s former IAEA envoy to Iran

Mehr News Agency | February 4, 2012

Britain’s former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency Peter Jenkins has said that Iran has honestly and sincerely been cooperating with the UN nuclear watchdog.

Jenkins made the remarks in a recent interview with the BBC Persian service in reply to a question about claims that Iran has not provided answers about the alleged weapons studies.

Jenkins, according to a translation of his comments, said that he does not think that is the case and that he believes Iran has been honestly and sincerely cooperating with the IAEA and its inspectors.

On the main bone of contention between Iran and the West, he said that the West maintains that Tehran should halt the uranium enrichment component of its nuclear program, but Iran is opposed to such a view.

And Iran is right according to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because every country has the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes under the NPT, Jenkins stated.

Britain’s former representative to the IAEA also commented on the pressure exerted and the sanctions imposed by the West on Iran, saying that experiences of the past few years have shown that the continuation of this trend cannot help resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.

It would be better if the Western countries learn a lesson from their past mistakes and engage in open negotiations with Iran, he stated, adding that a peaceful solution can be worked out to Iran’s nuclear issue based on the NPT.

Asked about the fact that he used to believe that Iran’s nuclear activities have a military dimension, Jenkins said that he used to think that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but the reports prepared by U.S. intelligence institutions and the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear activities made him change his mind.

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February 6, 2012 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Daily Beast disavows patriotic American’s website; Jeffrey Goldberg smears both as anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | February 5, 2012

On January 30, The Daily Beast published an article entitled “Newt Gingrich’s Deep Neocon Ties Drive His Bellicose Middle East Policy.” In the well-researched piece on the Republican presidential hopeful’s ties to the Israel partisans who devised the influential “Clean Break” plan to destabilize the Middle East, Wayne Barrett warns:

If elected, Gingrich would be the first American president to emerge from the dark think-tank world born in the Reagan era that gave us the Iraq War and lusts now for an Iranian reprise.

Some time after its publication, The Daily Beast appended the following note to Barrett’s article:

Correction: The original version of this story included an embedded link in the text to a blog called the Neocon Zionist Threat. The author did not use this site in the reporting of the piece, and does not support the views expressed. The link has been redirected to the correct source.

The following day, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg commented on the correction to what he described as “a Daily Beast story that might have been entitled ‘The Jews are Coming.’” In a snide post entitled “Correction of the Day, International Jewish Conspiracy Edition,” Goldberg, a former prison guard in the Israeli army, claimed:

The website “Neocon Zionist Threat” argues that a cabal of Jews is trying to drive the U.S. into a war with Iran. The Daily Beast article, on the other hand, argues that a cabal of Jews is trying to drive the U.S. into a war with Iran. (h/t Jamie Kirchick)

Contrary to Goldberg’s smearing of “Neocon Zionist Threat” as an anti-Semitic site, a cursory look at neoconzionistthreat.com shows that its critique is based primarily on the research compiled in three eminently respectable sources: James Bamford’s A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy; and Stephen J. Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel.

Considering that Goldberg’s award-winning March 25, 2002 “exposé” in The New Yorker on the supposed ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda made a significant contribution to the push for war with Iraq, it’s not surprising that he would resort to such disingenuous smear tactics. The same goes for Kirchick who is currently a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose “advocacy of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, its hawkish stance against Iran, and its defense of right-wing Israeli policy,” according to a 2011 Think Progress report, “is consistent with its donors’ interests in ‘pro-Israel’ advocacy.”

What is surprising, however, is that Wayne Barrett felt it necessary to disavow the more extensive efforts of a patriotic American blogger and YouTube video producer to expose the same people he had just written about.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the news-and-commentary website he writes for is part-owned by former Congresswoman Jane Harman, whose service on Capitol Hill allegedly included a promise to an Israeli agent to lobby the Department of Justice to reduce espionage charges against two former officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for trafficking in classified information on Iran — information AIPAC used to push for a war that Barrett’s article professes to oppose. As a patriotic former CIA officer wrote of the Harman case, some might call it treason.

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February 5, 2012 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Eliot Cohen, Mitt Romney’s Man on Iran

By Max Blumenthal | Al Akhbar | February 3, 2012

Should Mitt Romney make it to the White House, his Middle East policy and plan for Iran may be as hawkish as that of Bush Junior, thanks to Eliot Cohen.

In 2005, a group of graduate students at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced and International Studies (SAIS) participated in the school’s annual diplomatic simulation. The high-pressure scenario required the students to negotiate a resolution to a standoff with a nuclear-armed Republic of Pakistan. Mara Karlin, a student known for her hawkish politics on Israel and the Middle East, played President of the United States.

Though most of the participants were confident they could head off a military conflict with diplomatic measures, Karlin jumped the gun. According to a former SAIS student, not only did Karlin order a nuclear strike on Pakistan, she also took the opportunity to nuke Iran. Her classmates were shocked. It was the first time in 45 years that a simulation concluded with the deployment of a nuclear weapon.

That year, Karlin received a plum job in the Bush administration’s Department of Defense where, according to her bio she was “intimately involved in formulating U.S. policy on Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestinian affairs.” Lebanon was a special area of focus for Karlin. She claims to have helped structure the Lebanese Armed Forces and coordinated relations between the US and Lebanese militaries.

According to the former SAIS student, Karlin was a favorite of Eliot Cohen, an ultra-hawkish professor of strategic studies at SAIS, which is regarded in American foreign policy circles as a training ground for the neoconservative movement. Through Cohen’s connections among the neocons occupying key civilian posts in Bush’s Defense Department, the former student claims Cohen was able to arrange an attractive sinecure for Karlin. Besides Karlin, the ex-SAIS student told me Cohen has promoted the career ambitions of many former pupils, including Kelly Magsamen, who worked under Cohen in the Bush administration and now oversees the Iran portfolio in the Obama administration’s State Department.

Today, Cohen is among Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s top campaign advisers. He is the primary author of Romney’s foreign policy white paper, which attacks Obama for “currying favor with [America’s] enemies” and “ostentatiously shunning Jerusalem.”

The paper urges a policy of regime change in Iran including possible coordination with Israel on military strikes to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear weapon. It is an aggressive Republican election season document presenting a concoction of post-9/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism as the antidote to a sitting president Cohen accused of “unilateral disarmament in the diplomatic and moral sphere.” More importantly, it suggests that a Romney administration’s foreign policy might look remarkably similar to – and perhaps more extreme than – that of the Bush administration.

Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s School of Government who has been on the receiving end of aggressive attacks by Cohen, called Cohen “a classic neoconservative.” Walt said, “He is constantly fretting about alleged U.S. vulnerabilities, consistently supportive of increased defense spending, and generally inclined to favor U.S. intervention in other countries. Second, like virtually all neoconservatives, he is also deeply attached to Israel, as well as to the United States. I do not question his patriotism, but I think he tends to see U.S. and Israeli interests as more-or-less identical and doesn’t see a trade-off between support for one and support for the other.”Cohen rose through the ranks of the Republican foreign policy elite as a protégé of Paul Wolfowitz, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense who is credited with playing a central role in the push for invading Iraq. In 1990, Wolfowitz secured a position for Cohen working beside him on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Three years later, when Wolfowitz was appointed dean of SAIS, he began using his influence to propel Cohen’s career. According to a former State Department official who graduated from SAIS, it was through the beneficence of Wolfowitz that Cohen earned an endowed teaching position at SAIS as the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies.

In 1997, Wolfowitz and Cohen joined forces to form the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative umbrella group that served as the key non-governmental vehicle for promoting the case for invading Iraq after 9/11. In the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Cohen took to the media to map out the next phase of a grand global military venture that he coined, “World War IV.”

Describing Iraq as “the big prize,” Cohen urged a unilateral invasion of Iraq that would advance the ambitions of the now-discredited political charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Like so many of his neoconservative peers, Cohen claimed Saddam Hussein’s regime maintained “a connection with the 9/11 terrorists.” With the war deteriorating into a chaotic bloodbath and as his own son was called up for duty, Cohen criticized the Bush administration for “happy talk and denials of error.” However, he refused to admit fault for his role in selling Americans on the invasion.

Despite mildly dissenting from the White House line, Cohen continued his ascent, replacing Philip Zelikow as counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in 2007. According to the former State Department official, Rice had almost no role in Cohen’s appointment. Instead, Cohen was recommended for the position by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz. Cheney’s daughter headed the Iran Syrian Operations Group, a newly created, neoconservative-inspired initiative burrowed within the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. At the time of Cohen’s appointment, Rice was attempting to open diplomatic lines to Iran, North Korea, and Syria – a move Cohen and the Cheneys fiercely opposed.

A few months after Bush left office, the former State Department official said Cohen and Wolfowitz rewarded their neoconservative fellow traveler Eric Edelman – a former Defense Department official during the later Bush years – with a visiting scholarship at SAID. In private, Johns Hopkins alumni expressed outrage at the installment of Edelman, a career diplomat with no academic background, accusing the neoconservatives of exploiting SAIS to create a system of political patronage.

Cohen’s extensive web of foreign policy and military connections forms a seamless line to Tel Aviv. There, on the top floor of one of the office buildings known as “HaKirya,” is the office of one of Cohen’s former pupils, Aviv Kochavi. Kochavi is now the director of Israeli military intelligence, making him one of the most quietly influential figures in the country. In 2006, Kochavi, who also holds a philosophy degree, boasted to the Israeli architect and anti-occupation activist Eyal Weizmann about how he and his troops crushed Palestinian resistance cells in Nablus through the use of “inverse geometry” and “micro-tactical actions” inspired by the theories of post-structuralist philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari. On February 2, Kochavi appearedat the annual Herzliya Conference to issue grave warnings about the rapid progress of Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting that sanctions and diplomacy have failed, and that more aggressive action might be required.Despite Cohen’s deep Israeli ties, he has proven extremely sensitive to critiques of the connection. When Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter a professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago, published their widely debated paper on the Israel lobby in 2006, Cohen authored one of the first attempts to discredit their thesis about a loose coalition of individuals and organizations creating political pressure to move US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Cohen accused the authors of “kooky academic work” and “obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews.”

“Cohen’s rather hysterical reaction to our work was both typical and easy to explain,” Walt remarked. “Given that he and other neoconservatives had played a key role in convincing George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, he was understandably upset when we pointed this out and provided extensive documentation of their role in the run-up to this disastrous war. He could not refute our logic or our evidence, however, so he chose to misrepresent our views and smear us falsely as anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists.”

With the last battalions of US troops preparing to redeploy from Iraq to other conflict zones, Cohen is homing in on Iran. In a September 2009 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he dismissed diplomacy and sanctions as feasible means of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program,” he wrote. “The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.” While not ruling out the necessity of an American strike on Iranian facilities, Cohen advised that the “US actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic…through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.”

As tensions between Israel and Iran rise to unprecedented levels, and Israel’s leadership beseeches the US to join a military strike on Iran, Cohen’s visions of regime change seem closer to realization than ever before. For him and the neoconservative policy elite, a Romney victory in November might deliver the next “big prize.”

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February 4, 2012 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New thinking in India’s Iran policy

By M K Bhadrakumar | Rediff | February 2, 2012

Finally, India is getting its act together in its Iran policy. The ‘breaking news’ that India proposes to robustly explore expanding its trade with Iran signals a new approach to stepping up oil imports from Iran while at the same time rectifying the imbalance in trade, which heavily favours Iran traditionally, and to make this happen within a paradigm that resolves the current problem over the payment mechanism.

The new thinking is an acknowledgement of Iran’s importance as a strategic partner. That is where the rub lies. Delhi has lumped far too long the blackmail tactic by Washington with the malicious intention to erode India’s ties with Iran. Indeed, as result, for no real fault of Tehran, the India-Iran relationship suffered needless setbacks in the recent years.

Delhi should never accept that this is a zero sum game – India’s relationships with the US and Iran respectively. Iran is far too important a regional power in India’s extended neighbourhood to be neglected. There is no need to dilate on this thought.

Other Asian countries like Japan, South Korea or Malaysia have successfully managed to have positive relationships with both Iran and the GCC states. Also, GCC states themselves have maintained highly nuanced relationships with Iran. In a long term perspective, it is far from inevitable that Iran’s rise is an irreconcilable eventuality for the GCC states.

Much of the present-day tensions in the Persian Gulf is also to be attributed to the imperial policy of ‘divide-and-rule’ that the West continues to pursue in the region for the sake of perpetuating their hegemony. Finally, the US-Iran standoff itself is increasingly becoming unsustainable if Washington is to optimally develop a regional strategy. The point is, Iran has already bolted away.

China sees all these trends very clearly and is successfully developing a multi-tiered regional strategy that creates space for pursuing fruitful relations with Iran and GCC –  and even Israel – alike.

Indeed, it is also best for a healthy US-India partnership that it is an equal relationship where neither side takes undue advantage or tries to browbeat or resorts to prescriptive approaches and arm-twisting. In this case, the US policy toward Iran also happens to be vacuous, lacking sincerity of purpose; it is opaque and brittle – and increasingly, US comes to realise that even its European allies are reluctant to follow its lead. Therefore, it is simply appalling that US has chosen to harbour expectations of dictating to Delhi the directions and content of its Iran policy.

Of course, the American side is not to bear the entire blame, either. Somehow, the Indian elites (including bureaucrats) and strategic pundits have come to develop an atavistic fear that US-Indian partnership is highly perishable unless Delhi keeps harmonising its policies with the US global strategies even by sacrificing its interests. This sort of inferiority complex is completely unwarranted.

The heart of the matter is that the US is a highly experienced practitioner of diplomacy. If it began abandoning its historic cussedness toward India sometime during Bill Clinton administration’s second term, it was because Washington saw the growth potential of India and the great possibilities that would arise for a beneficial relationship.

Even today, that consideration is the prime mover of the US polices toward India. It is a well-known fact that after being grumpy for a few weeks after India spurned the US offer for the 10-billion dollar multi-purpose aircraft tender, Washington moved on.

We could also learn from the Americans – how doggedly they keep pursuing their regional strategies through the Afghan endgame, no matter what Delhi thinks of it. Suffice to say, the high probability is that India’s Iran policy may displease Washington for a while and then life will move on. As for the fear complex of the Indian elites or pundits, it is borne more out of their own insecurities vis-a-vis the US establishment and it should remain their private affair.

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February 3, 2012 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

The Warmongering Post: Iran, Israel, Ignatius, and the Intended Consequences of Propaganda

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep In America | February 2, 2012

In the latest example of mainstream media warmongering, in today’s Washington Post David Ignatius writes,

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.

Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.

When reading reports like the one Ignatius has filed here, it should always be remembered that what is being so nonchalantly discussed as a point of perturbation for a beleaguered Leon Panetta is, without doubt, the willful and active commission of a war crime. Not only that, but – in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal – initiating a war of aggression, as Israel would undoubtedly be doing by unilaterally and illegally bombing Iran, is “the supreme international crime.”

Ignatius, despite his clear intent of beating war drums under the guise of disinterested journalism, acknowledges repeatedly that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and has no nuclear weapons program. While the bogus Israeli claim of Iran reaching a “zone of immunity” (the new Barakian term for what until recently was ominously called the “point of no return“) is noted by Ignatius, it’s followed by the claim that this spooky “zone” would enable Iran to “commence building a nuclear bomb.” Which means it’s not currently doing that. Ignatius even reiterates the fact that – per U.S. (and Israeli and IAEA) intelligence – Iran is not building a bomb. Which means this is all speculative. Which means any potential attack would be “preventative” and not based on any immediate threat. Which means it would be totally illegal under any possible reading of international law.

Ignatius writes that “Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the fate of Israel dependent on American action.” There’s that “existential threat” again! Y’know, the one that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, former Mossad chiefs Meir Dagan and Ephraim Halevy, current Mossad chief Tamir Pardo say doesn’t actually exist. Just today, Ynet reported that former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz also repeated the assessment that Iran poses no such threat to Israel. “The use of this terminology is misleading. If it is intended to encourage a strike on Iran, it’s a mistake,” he said.

Nevertheless, Ignatius repeats this absurdity as if it’s an uncontroversial fact. It appears that, for Beltway reportage, “If Netanyahu says it, it must be true!”

Ignatius goes on, “Administration officials caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: The United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israel’s population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.”

Does that refer to an aggressive, first-strike on Israel by Iran? If so, this is a fabricated premise that no one actually considers to be a danger (Iran’s “defensive military doctrine” is well-documented and consistently reaffirmed by U.S. intelligence) and is an action Iran has repeatedly said it would never commit. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s head of state and commander-in-chief, has stated unequivocally that “the Islamic Republic has never threatened and will never threaten any country.” Meanwhile, just the mere threat of military attack by Israel is a clear violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter.

So, essentially, Ignatius is crafting a strawman in order to beat the American warrior chest much like Hillary Clinton did in 2008 when she declared that, if Iran attacked Israel and she were president, she would order the U.S. military to “totally obliterate” Iran. How’s that for a genocidal, “wipe off the map” fantasy?

Ignatius also suggests there are currently only two ways out of the current crisis: Iran could “finally open serious negotiations for a formula to verifiably guarantee that its nuclear program will remain a civilian one; or the United States could step up its covert actions.”

Anyone familiar with the 2007 Work Plan that Iran and the IAEA agreed to, knows that this has already happened and that the IAEA consistently confirms that Iran’s nuclear program is not militarized. The “verifiable guarantee” is the presence of IAEA cameras and inspectors at Iran’s safeguarded facilities. What would make Iran’s program even more “verifiably” civilian in nature would be for the international community – including the U.S. – to accept Iran’s numerous offers to invest in and partner with its program, thereby making it virtually impossible for Iran to weaponize. These overtures have been consistently rebuffed or ignored.

The other option, of course, is more “covert actions” – in other words: drone surveillance and industrial sabotage. Those pesky little murders and explosions that leave widows and orphans and which, in any other context – if any other country’s citizens were the victims of such summary executions – would be unconditionally and unequivocally condemned as terrorism.

Sure, Ignatius ends with the off-hand comment that Netanyahu is vacillating and that “top Israeli intelligence officials remain skeptical of the project” – the “project” of course being shorthand for an act of aggressive war (again, “the supreme international crime”).

Concluding with requisite Beltway fear-mongering, Ignatius warns that “senior Americans doubt that the Israelis are bluffing” and are “worrying about the guns of spring — and the unintended consequences.”

At this point, with three decades of war threats, devastating sanctions that amount to the collective punishment of the Iranian people for the crime of overthrowing the Shah, and propaganda about Iran’s ever-imminent hell-bending drive for atomic weaponry with which to evaporate poor little (nuclear-armed and super-power funded) Israel, how can any of the “consequences” honestly be referred to as “unintended”?

I suppose it would be lovely for Israel (and its many cheerleaders here in Congress and the media) if it were able to bomb whomever they want whenever they want, killing thousands upon thousands, with impunity and without any repercussions – that’s what it’s been doing in Gaza and Lebanon for years. But Iran is not ghettoized and occupied, demilitarized and defenseless, blockaded and besieged. Iran, unlike the usual victims of Israeli and American bullets and bombs, can actually fight back if it’s attacked.

That’s what frustrates warmongers from Foggy Bottom to Herzliya so much.

February 3, 2012 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Get Off the Road to War: Stop the Sanctions on Iran

By Michael S. Rozeff | Lew Rockwell | February 2, 2012

It would be nice if the U.S. kept its word when it signs those international agreements that are in some kind of accord with rights and advance the international maintenance of rights.

The U.S. has not done this with Iran.

The U.S. and Iran signed the Algiers Accords in 1981 to end the hostage crisis. See also here. Point 1 of the accords is titled “Non-Intervention in Iranian Affairs”. It reads (in full):

“The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.”

This is a pragmatically wise policy. Moreover, it is in the direction of respecting the rights of Iranians and also those non-Iranians who have dealings with Iranians. Overall, it is an agreement that settled a potentially explosive situation. It moved toward peace.

It’s too bad that the U.S. didn’t continue the motion toward peace. The U.S. had other ideas.

The U.S. didn’t want to make peace between it and Iran a policy. It wanted to un-do the Iranian Revolution. The U.S. did not follow up the Algiers Accords with further moves toward peace.

It did just the opposite.

The U.S. didn’t keep the bargain. It sided with Iraq after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. It imposed sanctions in 1984, 1987 and in the 1990s. A review of sanctions is here. The U.S. tried to destabilize the Iranian government, isolate it and keep it out of the World Trade organization. See here.

Economic sanctions enacted by Congress are politically-caused interference. The Senate Banking Committee is about to enact more of these sanctions. Their open aim is “to force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions”. This is political interference. This violates the Algiers Accords.

There is a rather long list of measures that the Committee says is “designed to increase pressure on Iran’s government.” The political interference of these sanctions is evident from the latter statement. In addition, the Senate measure directly targets the IRGC (Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps). This is a branch of Iran’s military, with obvious political importance.

The U.S. government is once again violating the Algiers Accords, as it has in the past. However, the U.S. has not officially abrogated the Algiers Accords. It will only do so when it decides it can gain from doing so. It wants to maintain the option, for example, to seize Iranian assets.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is acting hypocritically as explained here by supporting the Accords’ provisions against lawsuits brought by the hostages.

Experiencing the sanctions for decades, observing all this and knowing what happened to Gaddafi, how can Iran trust the word of the U.S.? How can it view the U.S. as anything but a hostile power that is aiming to un-do its revolution? And when Israel, an ally of the U.S., makes strong and plain threats against Iran, what else can Iran think but that the U.S. and Israel are out to get it, not just halt its nuclear program, but overturn it and introduce the regime change that some like Tom Ridge have openly advocated?

The U.S. Banking Committee acknowledges that previous U.S. sanctions haven’t achieved their objective. They say “it is now clear that the steps taken thus far by the international community have not been sufficient to force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.”

It has been argued by Lieutenant Colonel George T. Doran of the United States Air Force that economic sanctions are futile. Others have reached similar conclusions after studying many cases of economic sanctions.

It is not hard to understand why economic sanctions might hurt a country’s economy or hurt companies that deal with a sanctioned country but still not cause the leaders of that country’s state to alter a targeted policy or policies. One reason is that the leaders of a state are only indirectly affected by sanctions. They stand in a rather insulated and remote relation to political pressures from below that arise from sanctions. Any country has many political currents of which sanctions are only one. Another is that people in the country may rally around their government. A third reason is that sanctioned countries find ways around the sanctions, using other markets or trades.

Sanctions have other negative effects such as reducing the likelihood of diplomacy, raising the chance of war, raising the chance of retaliation, reducing trade and human exchanges, and driving a state to become isolated and more self-sufficient.

U.S. sanctions are said by the Senate Banking Committee to have slowed Iran’s nuclear program, a program that is allowable and legal under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (another accord that the U.S. has not lived up to), but where is the evidence that this is the case? How could the senators know this when that program has been interfered with by computer viruses introduced from without and from assassinations of nuclear scientists?

And even if Iran’s peaceful nuclear program has been slowed by sanctions, what does that mean when we consider the objectives of the U.S. government? If Iran appears still to be achieving its objective but on a slower time frame, does that mean that the U.S. or Israel will ratchet up their actions and start a war to force Iran to stop what sanctions have failed to stop? In other words, once the U.S. has set forth on a path to interfere with Iran politically, if only by sanctions and then stiffer sanctions, it appears to have committed itself to continue on that path, even if the eventual outcome is outright war. That was the outcome in Iraq and Libya.

More and stiffer sanctions will not cause Iran to change its tune, not if the following accurately reflects the views of Iran’s most important leader:

“Khamenei has been described as consistent in his opposition to the United States and the Western World in general, reportedly including this theme into his speeches no matter whether the topic is foreign policy, agriculture or education. He has declared that it is ‘clear that conflict and confrontation between’ Islamic Republic of Iran and the U.S. ‘is something natural and unavoidable’ since the United States ‘is trying to establish a global dictatorship and further its own interests by dominating other nations and trampling on their rights.’ However, while ‘cutting ties with America is among our basic policies,’ and ‘any relations would provide the possibility to the Americans to infiltrate Iran and would pave the way for their intelligence and spy agents,’ Khamenei holds the door open to relations with the U.S. at some future date, saying ‘we have never said that the relations will remain severed forever. Undoubtedly, the day the relations with America prove beneficial for the Iranian nation I will be the first one to approve of that.’ However, in a speech to Iranian students on October 29, 2008, which was quoted on Iranian TV (as translated by MEMRI), Khamenei stated that ‘the Iranian people’s hatred for America is profound. The reason for this [hatred] is the various plots that the U.S. government has concocted against Iran and the Iranian people in the past 50 years. The Americans have not only refused to apologize for their actions, but have continued with their arrogant actions.’”

This passage does not depict a man willing to be humiliated. Why should he back off of a peaceful nuclear program? Why should he implicitly acknowledge a kind of guilt or wrong-doing when Iran is blameless?

If sanctions do not have their intended effect, then war with Iran comes closer. Sanctions should be stopped.

Even forgetting sanctions, Israel is a loose cannon unless restrained by the U.S., or so it appears to us who are not privy to the secret communications between these two governments.

The situation is dangerous and getting more dangerous. Stop the sanctions against Iran. Sit on Israel. Shift onto the road to peace. Get off the road to war.

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

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February 2, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran: This Is What Propaganda Looks Like

By Peter Hart | FAIR | February 1, 2012

Alarmist corporate media coverage of the “threat” from Iran is everywhere, thanks to a Senate appearance yesterday by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

But Clapper said very little in his remarks that would justify the propagandistic coverage we’re seeing.  His main point was that Iran could launch attacks if it felt threatened. It is hard to see how this is particularly surprising. Clapper pointed to the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. as evidence that Iran seems more eager to assert itself, perhaps even inside the United States. But there were many people who raised serious questions about that rather implausible scenario (which involved hiring a Mexican drug gang to carry out the assassination).

As the Wall Street Journal reported (one of the few corporate outlets I saw pushing back against the official alarmism):

There is still widespread doubt that an alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was authorized at the highest levels in Tehran, said Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“If that’s the only data point, I think it’s a stretch to conclude that the regime is now looking to commit acts of terror on U.S. soil,” he said.

That kind of caution was in short supply on the network newscasts. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (1/31/12) announced:

Iran’s threat. Not just the nuclear program. Tonight, U.S. intelligence warns Iran may be prepared to strike on American soil.

Williams called Clapper’s testimony  a “chilling new assessment about the scope of the threat from Iran.” As correspondent Andrea Mitchell explained,  “Experts warn that the U.S. is even more vulnerable than Israel if Iran retaliates or launches a pre-emptive bomb plot…. Soft U.S. targets like embassies throughout the Persian Gulf, and 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan, next door to Iran.”

It wasn’t until the end of Mitchell’s report that any notes of caution were sounded:

Still, intelligence officials told the Senate today they don’t think Iran has taken the final step, deciding to build a bomb. But Israel does think Iran has crossed that red line, and U.S. officials say if attacked, Iran would not hesitate to retaliate against both Israel and the U.S.

So Iran is a substantial threat, though then again it might not even be developing the weapons the U.S. and Israel claim are in the works. And really, the “threat” seems mostly that Iran might be ready to respond to an attack on its country–something virtually any country in the world would do.

But for sheer propaganda value, ABC World News‘ January 31 broadcast would be tough to top.

First, start with alarming graphic:

Then Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz announced, “The saber rattling from Iran has been constant.”

Match that with threatening B-roll footage from the enemy country. Weapons  on display at a military parade, for instance:

Iran “may be more ready than ever to launch terror attacks in the United States,” Raddatz explained. Cue footage of apparently menacing soldiers:

Don’t forget to show the enemy county’s leader (or, rather, a close approximation) meeting with other Official Enemies. Like this:

And why not one more, while reminding viewers that such figures “have little love for the U.S.”:

It’s important to remember, amidst all this hoopla, that it is U.S. military officials and the president who have regularly threatened that “no options” are “off the table” in dealing with Iran. That is code for using nuclear weapons–and Barack Obama’s latest repetition of that apocalyptic threat got a standing ovation from Congress.

It is hard to argue honestly that the real escalation  is coming from the Iranian side. But that’s what propaganda is for.

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

WASHINGTON’S IRAN DEBATE AND THE “SOFT SIDE” OF REGIME CHANGE

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | Race for Iran | January 31st, 2012

We have long supported a comprehensive approach to U.S.-Iranian realignment as the only way to put U.S.-Iranian relations on a more productive trajectory.  But we do not understand how anyone can think that the Islamic Republic of Iran—any more than the People’s Republic of China—would negotiate its internal political transformation with the United States.

Yet this is precisely what Trita Parsi argues in his new book, A Single Roll of the Dice:  Obama’s Diplomacy With Iran, blending distorted treatments of both Iranian politics and Obama’s Iran policy into a deeply misleading and agenda-driven account.  In the aftermath of the Islamic Republic’s 2009 presidential election (which Parsi assured us, and continues to assure his readers, was “fraudulent”), Parsi was one of the most publicly prominent voices calling on the Obama Administration to take a “tactical pause” from diplomacy (which had not yet commenced).  He advocated for such a pause because, he told large numbers of television viewers and Op Ed readers, the Islamic Republic was on the verge of collapse.

Well, here we are, almost three years later.  The Islamic Republic is still here.  Parsi, for his part, has returned to advocating U.S. engagement with Iran—but only if the Islamic Republic’s internal politics and “human rights situation” are a central part of the agenda.  And the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the advocacy group headed by Parsi, tells us on its website that the goal of U.S. engagement should be “a world in which the United States and a democratic Iran”—no mention of the Islamic Republic—“enjoy peaceful, cooperative relations.”

Make no mistake:  this is neoconservatism without guns, effectively indistinguishable from the position of Michael Ledeen, who parts from other neoconservatives to side with Parsi and NIAC in opposing military action against Iran, but is ideologically committed to regime change there.

In a war-fevered environment, a book like Parsi’s can make a difference.  Recall, in this regard, the impact just a decade ago of Ken Pollack’s The Threatening Storm:  The Case for Invading Iraq, which helped to legitimate Democratic support for George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq—and which was dead wrong, analytically and empirically, in all of its major arguments.  To be sure, Parsi’s book is not written as a case for war against Iran, something that Parsi says he does not want.  But, like Pollack, Parsi advances baseless evidence and agenda-driven analysis.  And, in the same way that Pollack’s work helped pave the way for invading Iraq, Parsi’s book—by reinforcing conventional wisdom about Iranian politics and Obama’s Iran policy and counseling bad policy, raises the risk of another disastrous war in the Middle East.

Because Pollack, like Parsi, is not considered a neoconservative hawk, his book did not get the critical scrutiny it should have before the U.S. went to war.  Although we like Trita Parsi personally, we are compelled to say what we think is so fundamentally wrong and dangerous about his book.  Therefore, we have just published an extended review of A Single Roll of the Dice in Boston Review.  Our essay, entitled “The Soft Side of Regime Change:  Trita Parsi’s A Single Roll of the Dice”, is available online, by clicking here.  We would encourage those interested in posting comments to also do so directly on the Boston Review site; there is a place to do so at the bottom of our article.

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February 1, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

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