Category: Iran

What Israel and the lobby really fear about Iran

by M.J. Rosenberg

The internet has been burning up with responses to Jeffrey Goldberg‘s Atlantic cover story on the likelihood that either Israel or the United States will preempt development of an Iranian nuclear bomb by attacking its atomic sites.

Goldberg does not flat-out endorse bombing Iran. Rather, after numerous conversations and briefings with US and Israeli officials, he concludes that there is at least a 50-50 chance that bombs will fly in a year or so.

Goldberg himself does not take a position on whether bombing is warranted or justified. But, given the way he frames the article and his personal closeness, to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – who speaks in apocalyptic terms of the existential danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel – it is clear that Goldberg sees no alternative to preventing an Iranian nuke, by whatever means necessary. And that includes war.

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“O, God! Have mercy on me! Distracted, I whirl” — Rumi’s Gift

Not frivolously, around the alleys and bazaars, I whirl.
Lover’s temperament, I have — to have one glimpse of my Beloved, I whirl.

After Maulana Rumi (actual poet unknown)

Singing: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Qawwaals

Translated by Huma Dar

Raqs al-Ruhani, al-Qahirah (Huma Dar 2005)
Naa Man Behooda Gird-e Koocha-o-Baazaar Mi Gardam (Huma Dar 2005)

نه من  بيهوده  گرد کوچه  و  بازار  می  گردم
مذاق عاشقی  دارم  پئ  ديدار  ميگردم

خدايا  رحم  کن  بر  من  پريشان وار  می  گردم
خطا کارم  گناھگارم  به  حال زار  می  گردم

شراب شوق  می نوشم  به  گرد يار  می  گردم
سخن مستانه  می گويم  ولے  هوشيار  می  گردم

گھےخندم  گھے گريم گھے افتم  گھے خيزم
مسيحا  در دلم  پيدا  و  من  بيمار  می گردم

بیا جانا  عنایت  کن  تو  مولانای رومی  را
غلام  شمس  تبریزم  قلندروار  می گردم

Continue reading ““O, God! Have mercy on me! Distracted, I whirl” — Rumi’s Gift”

One More War, Please

by David Bromwich

Will the summer of 2010 be remembered as the time when we turned into a nation of sleepwalkers? We have heard reports of the intrusion of the state into everyday life, and of miscarriages of American power abroad. The reports made a stir, but as suddenly as they came they were gone. The last two weeks of July saw two such stories on almost successive days.

First there was “Top Secret America,” the three-part Washington Post report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the hyperextension of private contracts, government buildings, and tax-funded expenditures in the secret surveillance economy. Since 2001, the new industries of data mining and analysis have yielded close to a million top secret clearances for Americans to spy on other Americans. Then at the end of July came the release of 90,000 documents by Wikileaks, as reported and linked by the New York Times, which revealed among other facts the futility of American “building” efforts in Afghanistan. We are making no headway there, in the face of the unending American killing of civilians; meanwhile, American taxes go to support a Pakistani intelligence service that channels the money to terrorists who kill American soldiers: a treadmill of violence. Both findings the mainstream media brought forward as legitimate stories, or advanced as raw materials of a story yet to be told more fully. This was an improvement on the practice of reporting stories spoon-fed to reporters by the government and “checked” by unnamed sources also in government. Yet, as has happened in many cases in the mass media after 2001 — one thinks of David Barstow’s story on the “war experts” coached by the Pentagon and hired by the networks — the stories on secret surveillance and the Afghanistan documents were printed and let go: no follow-up either in the media or in Congress.

We seem to have entered a moral limbo where political judgment is suspended and public opinion cannot catch its breath.

Continue reading “One More War, Please”

Obama Must Bring Back that Magic to the Middle East

Mosaic Intelligence Report: 2010 is far from over, yet the Middle East has witnessed a series of close encounters with major wars. What are Arabs afraid of? And why is Barack Obama’s popularity sinking fast?

Also see Jim Lobe’s analysis of the Brookings/Zogby ‘Arab Public Opinion Poll’.

Not another war for Israel, intelligence professionals warn

Col. (ret.) Ann Wright warns against the United States waging another war for Israel. Reproduced below is a memo Wright co-signed with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) warning Obama against such a war.

by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war.

Israel’s leaders would calculate that once the battle is joined, it will be politically untenable for you to give anything less than unstinting support to Israel, no matter how the war started, and that U.S. troops and weaponry would flow freely. Wider war could eventually result in destruction of the state of Israel.

This can be stopped, but only if you move quickly to pre-empt an Israeli attack by publicly condemning such a move before it happens.

We believe that comments by senior American officials, you included, reflect misplaced trust in Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu.

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On Iran, Liberals Are Enabling Another Disastrous War

by Tony Karon

Beinart chats with friends in high places: Liberal “hawks” like him played a major role in enabling the Iraq debacle

In 2003, the United States launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, a country that had neither attacked nor threatened it — and we, and the Iraqis, are still living with the consequences. Going to war in Iraq was made possible — easy, even — for the Bush Administration not only by Republican hawks and neocon extremists (the wannabe Army Corps of Social Engineers) baying for blood, but even more importantly, by supposedly sober and moderate liberal voices — the Peter Beinarts, Ken Pollacks, George Packers and the editors of the New York Times — not only failing to challenge the basic logic of the case for war, but providing their own more elegant (although equally brutal when stripped of their high-minded rhetoric) rationalizations for invading Iraq.

It was the liberal “hawks” and the New York Times, by failing to ask the right questions of the case for war, that did more to make the war a “thinkable” option for America than any neocon. They allowed the question to be posed simply as one of whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or not. And because nobody could give an absolute assurance in the negative, the argument became “better safe than sorry”. The liberals and the New York Times offered no challenge, and asked no questions, of the basic assumption that if Saddam had, in fact, had a couple of warehouses full of VX gas and refrigerator full of anthrax, that necessitated launching a war that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of upward of half a million Iraqis (and thousands of Americans) and left America weaker and more vulnerable.

And the bad news is that they’re doing it again on Iran.

Continue reading “On Iran, Liberals Are Enabling Another Disastrous War”

Why Jeff Goldberg Is Losing It

by M.J. Rosenberg

For two days, the Atlantic’s Jeff Goldberg has been calling Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and other critics of Bibi Netanyahu “anti-Semites.” Nothing new about that. For Goldberg, a major AIPAC neocon, all critics of Israeli policies are anti-Semites by definition. (See this good piece on Goldberg).

But why is he obsessing about Walt so much now?

It is because, in August, Goldberg is coming out with his big Atlantic piece calling on the United States to bomb Iran so that Israel does not have to.

But Goldberg has a problem. As an American who chose to serve in the Israeli army (he was a guard at a Palestinian prison camp), he fears that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer — who accused the Likud lobby of promoting war with Iraq in their groundbreaking bestseller — will point out that Goldberg is just about the least credible advocate for war with Iran.

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US Attack on Iran Air Flight 655

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Iran Air Flight 655 where the US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 passengers and crew aboard. Iran Air Flight 655 was brought down over the Strait of Hormuz by a US Navy guided missile USS Vincennes in 1988. RT Correspondent Jihan Hafiz has joins Alyona with the story.

Also see this Press TV broadcast from July 2009.

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Turkey’s regional popularity soars

AlJazeeraEnglish — 18 June 2010 — Turkey’s popularity in the Middle East has soared following its denunciation of Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla last month. Turkish flags and posters of Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, have been prominent in demonstrations around the world protesting the Israeli attack. In the Gaza Strip, a growing number of newborn babies have been named after Erdogan. Meanwhile Turkey says it will not send its ambassador back to Israel unless it receives a formal apology for the attack, that left nine people, mostly Turks, dead.

Al Jazeera’s Rula Amin reports on Turkey’s rising popularity in the region.

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Nuclear Iran – Is There An Option?

Not for the US but plenty for Iran, says Mosaic Intelligence Report. It says sanctions are futile and the United States only harms its own interests.

linktv — 17 June 2010 — (Mosaic Intelligence Report: June 17, 2010) The US imposes more sanctions on Iran. Iranian President Ahmedinejad remains defiant. Are sanctions enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program? And who will pay the price?