"Iran could be the first non-deterable [sic] nuclear power."

but the united states nuked japan.

Well Jojo, my first interaction with you ...

It did not believe my eyes when I saw it. Because "Global Research" tells a story, it means this story does not exist ? Look in the mirror if you want to find the king of crackpots.

By the way, here is the complete speech of ZBig on the Washington note.

The first "JoJo" criticsm ("I see that NO ONE"..) also seems to be about avoiding the subject matter.  Given the blog post's modest and clear subject matter (see my last comment), the basic point seems to be the following: "I am angry at Iran about x and y and z and do not want to see people talking about U.S. imperial designs in the region." Presumably "JoJo's" loyalties in the region are such that he or she wouldn't mind U.S. machinations and provocatioins leading to a major U.S. and/or Israeli assault on Iran...though this judgement  is not made explicit.

Like most people viewing the Middle East from a left angle of vision (or at least the left angle that prevails at Z), I see the U.S. and its Israeil client inciting and otherwise fueling Islamic fundamenetalist extremism on multiple levels - some quite openly provocative/murderous and others more covert and  socioeconomic/neoliberal.

But that would be the topic for an entire book and was frankly not the subject matter of this very modest post. Some excellent book-length efforts from the left include Gilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms, Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and Stephen Shalom, Achcar, and Chomsky (with the first writer interviewing the second two), Perilous Power (Paradigm, 2006).

I don't always have the time (less and less these days) to respond to diversionary comments but this seemed short and thus doable. 

 

The second (I think) "JoJo" criticism (titled "You are Conveniently" [I corrected the spelling error on last word]) is off base. I said nothing about Iran "helping out its Iraqi neighbors"...I just favorably quoted a letter-writer (to the NYT) saying the following: "it is not surprising that Iran is working to achieve its own ends in Iraq" (emphasis added).That's the truth of what I said in last comment.  The actual subject matter of the post is U.S. foreign policy. The "3,000 year animosity" referred to here would change nothing in what I said (or in what the letter-writer said). 

One thing I notice with the criticism that this blog has always gotten from the right is an amazingly recurrent tendency to take discussion away from the actual subject matter and especially to divert away from critical matters relating to imperial U.S. policy.

JoJo, you don't even come under the wonderful phrase "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" (attributed to Ambrose Bierce). Mesopotamia is defined as the valley of the Tigris/Euphrates. Persia is the mountainous region to the East. There are tributaries to the Tigris flowing down from the Zagros Mountains in Persia, but there is no river separating the two regions. I'm wondering, if you don't know this, maybe Bush and Cheney don't either! T

You are conviently disregarding the 3,000 year anomosity between Persia and Mesopotamia.  There have been battles by kings and tribal leaders across their natural river border for centuries.  To think Iran is helping out its Iraqi neighbors shows no awareness of the history between the two peoples.  Sorry, but that's the truth.

I see that NO ONE has yet to address Iran's funding of Hezbollah or Hamas or presence in Lebanon or bombing of the JUF in Argentina (which Argentina recently indicted Iranian officials for).  I also see that conviently the focus was deflected off of Iran an on to Israel. The past 30 years of Iranian rhetoric of destroying the Zionist enemy apparently is not "proof" of Iranian intent or aggression. 

Finally, you can't cite Global Research and be expected to be taken seriously.  That site is the the crackpotiest of the crackpots.   

 

I've pasted in (below) a nice letter to the editor in today's NYT (it's interesting to note that the letters are generally much better than the paper's editorials).  Note that the writer does the table-turning exercise to encourage U.S. readers to try to think outside the Orwellian-imperial box and get some sense of how supposedly evil others' feel about incredibly provocative U.S. actions:

To the Editor:

It is not surprising that Iran is working to achieve its own ends in Iraq, potentially by supplying Shiite militias with weapons. If a Middle Eastern country invaded Mexico or Canada, does anyone believe that the United States would sit by passively and watch events unfold?

Every country, including the United States, acts to protect its perceived interests, so we should not be shocked to discover that Iran could be trying to shape the outcome of the turmoil in neighboring Iraq.

What we should be shocked by is the Bush administration's attempts to create yet another pretext for an unnecessary war, this time possibly with Iran.

Amanda J.
Madison, Wis., Feb. 10, 2007

That's a great link DMX - I think Victor may have also put up something on this a blog or two back. 

I actually think the story (more than three years later) of Bush's insane idea ("Shoot, he's sompth'n for you British boys to put in your Shepherds Pie and chew on:  let's maybe paint a U.S plane up in UN colors and just dare them crazy Saddamite Irackees to take a shot at the ol' inter-nasha-null  community") tends to work against conspiracy theorizing insofar as it suggests that such plans would tend to get out...stopping leaks would be pretty damn hard.

In any event the current effort to provoke Iran seems to be a fairly open policy, fully evident to the above letter writer, yours truly and millions more of us marginally relevant citizens of "the world's greatest democracy."  

 

 

Z. Brzezinski made a statement 2 weeks ago before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee :

"A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."

They are not only "looking" for a pretext : this administration may as well fabricate one. Just as they have done it nearly five and a half year ago. When will you wake up ?

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001916.php

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=GRE20070204&articleId=4670

Noam Chomsky has some interesting reflections on Iranian nuclear issues in his fook Failed States (2006): "Washington has gone out of its way to instruct Iran on the need for a powerful deterrent, not only by invading Iraq, but also by strengthening the offensive forces of its Israeli client, which already has hundreds of nuclear weapons as well as air and armored forces larger and more advanced than any NATO power other than the United States. Since early 2004, the United states has sent Israel the biggest shipment of advanced jet bombers in its history. The planes, very publicly advertised as capable of bombing Iran, are equipped with unspecified 'special weaponry' and deep-penetration bombs" (pp. 73-74). Chomsky also talks about reasonable proposals for peaceful international control of the "production and processing of weapon-usable" nuclear material - proposals the U.S. has undermined for imperial reasons (see for example Mohamed ElBaradei's plan discussed on p. 71...when ElBaradei was head of IAEA).  The entire region needs to be significantly de-militarized. Increased threats to Iran only "entitle" it to develop a nuclear weapons program, something "sane person[s]" wish to avoid (p.74). Iran and others are looking of course at the interesting comparison between North Korea and Iraq.

The CIA believes that Iran will have nuclear weapons in 5-10, not 2-3 years. Both Hamas and Hizballah are willing to negotiate with Israel, and neither is in a position to destroy Israel---they can defend their homes, like all guerillas, but that's a far cry from being able to invade and occupy someone else's territory. That requires a superior military force, which neither Hamas nor Hizballah can field. To claim that some future Iran which has one nuclear weapon is a regional hegemon when Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons is laughable on it's face. Iran wants nuclear weapons to primarily to deter the Israelis and the U.S. from following through on the "Axis of Evil" threats. -- James Cape @ http://blog.ignore-your.tv

No one seems to want to address that Iran is itself acting imperialistic through its support of Hezbollah and Hamas and their rhetoric of wanting to destroy Israel with zero provocation not to mention that intelligence reports state Iran will have nuclear weapons in 2-3 years and then poses a real threat to its neighbors.  Why doesn't anyone want to address those issues?  Is it wrong to try and prevent a future more wide spread war will a smaller more contained one?  This is real politik - not an academic pipe dream.  Talking about the U.S. - Indian wars is all fine and good, but what does that do for preventing Iran from gaining a hegmony?  If it is ok for Iran to become a hegmony, why the dislike the U.S. hegmony?   I realize the goal is to have no hegmonic states - but let's be realistic when addressing what is going on.   

Don't forget the Tomahawk missile.

Walt, Ahmadinejad is not a member of a "hate filled ideology, a satanic apocalyptic cult" just because Netanyahu says so. Netanyahu (emphasis firmly on the last two sylables of that particular war monger's name, could easily be said to be a subscriber to a "hate filled ideology" himself. I don't like Ahmadinejad, and I don't like nukes, but none of this propoganda bullshit has anything to do with either. Paul is absolutely right that this is some scary shit. This has everything to do with wilfully incinerating Iranian men, women, and children, now that the imperial masses are slowly and reluctantly beginning to grumble about the tediousness of doing it to Iraqi men, women, and children. Our hands are already blood-soaked in this adventure. We have to stop this shit now. Another thing has been on my mind: I share Paul's opinion that the US did not "lose" in Vietnam, and I don't think the US is "losing" in Iraq -- regardless of when US forces leave, the mission to degrade, dehumanize, and destroy yet another country has certainly been accomplished. But I do think the war planners are out of their f-ing gourds to be talking about bringing all this to Iran. I don't take any pleasure in the nagging feeling that bloodthirsty US war planners and their allies will not "win" -- not even in the perverse sense that they are "winning" now -- if they escalate their criminal operation in the region. As Chomsky has continuously noted regarding the consequences of all this shit, we are talking, or should be, about the survival of the species. Keir The Hague

Good of terence to suggest the primordial Indian-killing origins. Can go back well before 1775 (Mystic River and more). I just finished a really well-done book that captures the intimate relationship between settler fear and the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from Illinois (1831-1833): Kerry Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America.  This study deserves wide readership. How darkly perfect it is that the Evil Empire assaults Iraqis and others with helicopters named after the defeated Sauk warrior Black Hawk, made by The Boeing Corporation, which is headquartered in Chicago, whose specactular 19th century expansion followed in the wake of savage forced Indian removal (first the Sauk but then also in short order the Fox and the Pottawatami and Winnebagos) from the richest, most fertile soil on earth --- great black earth that I have seen paved for ecocidal malls, subdivisions, and highways (a great victory for capitalism's obscene and perverted subordination of use value to exchange value...a subordination that understandably disgusted indigenous North Americans) at an accelerating pace in recent years.  Anyway, read Trask's book and you see terrible, undeniable provocation of the Sauk by settlers, militia, and federal troops...leading to some bloody reprisals by increasingly desperate Sauk (and Fox) nations, which then become easy pretexts for serious war resulting in total defeat. 

We are dealing with very different imperialisms and times of course when we compare the Black Hawk War with the occupation of Iraq (with Black Hawk and perhaps [for all I know] Apache and Comanche helicopters!) but I suspect the particuarly vicious nature of U.S. imperialism (ask the Vietnamese about that) has some interesting origins in the "wilderness" meeting with --- and elimenation --- of Native Americans. 

Funny, Walt, that Netanyahu talk sounds exactly like a Bush gang member... or dozen of American "statesmen" all the way back to James K.Polk and beyond! Just plug in "communists," "Mexicans", "japs," "terrorists," etc. for "Iran." The "culture of fear" is a good name for the phenomenon. It rules America--always has, since the bad redskin picked up the little blue-eyed girl somewhere along the Mohawk about 1775 and tried to dash her to the ground but (luckily!) Henry Fonda killed him in time. (This isn't really for you, Walt, although of course you're welcome to read it; it's to help others who read this blog to put your worldview in context.) T

I'm certain you're not a Ben Jetanyahu fan, but that aside, please read what he says below: (from   http://www.onejerusalem.org/blog/index.asp)

Netanyahu: "Iran could be the first non-deterable nuclear power. Fueled and motivated by a hate filled ideology, a satanic apocalyptic cult that is willing to sacrifice millions of its own people for the bad, twisted vision of a reconstituted Islamic empire under Iranian rule."

For this purpose they want to get nuclear weapons that will help them complete what they are already doing which is seeking to topple Lebanon and turn it into a shite republic. They've already taken control of the Palestinian regime with their Hamas proxies. They are seeking to throw out the United States out of Iraq and make it part of the Shite crescent.

But if they get nuclear weapons they would get control of the oil supplies and the Arabian Peninsula and topple many other regimes and then be armed in such a way that they could foster terror on an unimaginable scale.

But equally what they seek to do as they openly say is to destroy my country  while denying one holocaust  as they are preparing another....If they start with Israel they'll only start with Israel. Because Just like the [unintelligible] apocalyptic creed, it's starts with Jew hatred then it spreads like wildfire to the rest of humanity. Stopping Iran is in the interest of civilization. 

With that in mind, focusing ONLY on Iran and not the U.S. or Israel or anyone else, is it wise to let Iran continue the pursuit of their Imperial struggle via Hezbollah, Hamas, and nuclear weapons?

 

(no insults, no personal attacks, just a straight forward question) 

 

Worth mentioning also that the Times seems to be pushing for war again. It's important to report the Iranian-Iraqi Shia links, and they've been known for a long time, but something smells of '03.