Iran Affairs

"The terrorists made me do it!"

A couple of prosecutors are charged with hiding exculpatory evidence in a terrorism trial - what a shock!

The panel of seven men and five women will decide if former assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino and former State Department agent Ray Smith hid evidence and lied in the trial of four men arrested in Detroit less than a week after 9/11 and accused of being a sleeper terrorist cell.

Under the US system of criminal trials, prosecutors are obligated to disclose exculpatory evidence that they may have found to the defense (the defense is not similarly obligated to disclose incriminatory evidence to the prosecution.)

Apparently these two prosecutors are accused of violating that legal duty by hiding photographs of a military hospital in Jordan that was the supposed target of the terrorist plot.

I know these two chuckleheads haven't actually been convicted, and we should maintain the "innocent-until-proven-guilty" standard until the jury decides their fate . . . but their own defense attorney doesn't deny that the prosecutors failed to turn over the evidence that could have cleared the "terrorists" - instead, they're using the old "the terrorists made me do it" argument by claiming that the prosecutors were just "trying to save lives" . . . by convicting innocent people of terrorism, apparently.

Bush's apocalypse complex

So Bush has invoked - yet again - the spectre of "World War III" to justify a proposed aggression against another country. Despite all the rhetoric about how Iran's president is supposedly apocalypse-obsessed, it seems that Bush is quite insane, and very much under the influence of far-right dispensationalist Christian ideas about the "end times" scenarios.

A French newspaper recently reported that a few weeks prior tothe invasion of Iraq, Bush had told Jacque Chirac, the French president, that the Biblical prophecy of "Gog and Magog" was unfolding in the Mideast:

Prophétie apocalyptique Bush aurait déclaré à Chirac que Gog et Magog étaient à l'œuvre au Proche-Orient, et que les prophéties bibliques étaient en train de s'accomplir. C'était quelques semaines avant l'intervention en Irak. Stupéfaction du président français, à qui les noms de Gog et Magog ne disent rien. (English translation here)

A "stupified" Chirac then had his office contact a theology professor at the University of Lausanne to explain the story of Gog and Magog to them. (I would have given a million dollars to see the expression on the face of Chirac when he heard the explanation.)

But Bush would not be alone in having an apocalypse complex: there are reports that US troops are being "force fed" Christian religious indoctrination, and Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who gave speeches at churches while in uniform that disparaged Islam and defined the war on terror in fundamentalist, "end times" terms, was not fired but promoted.

Senior religious leaders in Israel are predicting a "Great, Miraculous war" on Iran. Even the pro-Israeli lobby has embraced this nuttiness: The apocalypse-spewing Reverend Hagee, Bush-confidant and head of "Christians United For Israel" was a star speaker at a recent AIPAC convention, where he shared a podium with current & former US officials as well as presidential candidates including John McCain. Hagee has led an intense lobbying effort on Capitol Hill to present government officials with his message of Armageddon, and his efforts have been praised by President Bush and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. In his book entitled "Jerusalem Countdown", Hagee has presented his apocalyptic visions of a nuclear showdown with Iran:

"The end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching.... Rejoice and be exceeding glad -- the best is yet to be."

Despite all the talk about how Iran presents a nuclear threat, the potential dangers of this sort religious armageddon obsession by Bush should be obvious when one considers the fact that President Bush has already explicitly threatened Iran with nuclear first-strikes.

"Why Iran cannot present a nuclear threat."

An Iranian analyst, writing in an Iranian newspaper website, asks whether Iran can really be characterized as a nuclear threat:

"Even in the unlikely event that Iran did have a military nuclear programme...what danger could be threatening the present world order?"

I am providing the partial text of the article here because I think it is particularly relevant - and it touches on several points that ironically, the supposedly "free press" in the West tends to ignore as it marches lockstep with the Bush administration in chanting about "Iran's nuclear threat".

In his "Note" published by the Iranian "Siyasat-e Ruz" newspaper website (often characterized as a "hardline" paper) on 11 May 2006, Dr Seyyed Rasul Musavi writes:

"So it is necessary to try a different approach and use the reverse reasoning method to prove that Iran doesn't need nuclear weapons.

In this method, we assume the worst-case scenario that the West imagines about Iran. Suppose that Iran were in fact in possession of nuclear weapons. In this case, which we call the nuclear Iran case, the question is, basically what threat would a nuclear Iran pose to the world and which country would be in danger?

The world's strategists can't deny that even with nuclear weapons, Iran couldn't be a threat to America and its allies, because the extent of America's nuclear resources is so much that even a single nuclear threat against America and its allies would mean complete destruction of the source of the threat.

How could something that even the Soviet Union with all of its nuclear power never managed to do, possibly be accomplished by other countries that are weaker than the Soviet Union was? Therefore, the assumption that a nuclear Iran could be any threat to America and its allies is impossible.

The issue of posing a threat against the Zionist regime could be viewed in the same light although it could also be discussed separately. The slogan of "death to Israel" is similar to that of "death to the Soviet Union" and the destruction of the racist South African regime. As of today, there is neither a Soviet Union nor any trace left of the racist South African regime. In addition to this matter, it is also important to note that the Islamic Republic of Iran considers the liberation of Quds (Jerusalem) as its ideal, and knows that the use of weapons of mass destruction not only wouldn't liberate Quds, but also would pose a threat to it. And the liberation of Quds is a real goal that will be achieved by means of globally accepted democratic standards.

Aside from the issue of posing a threat to America and its allies, which is an unlikely case, one could think of three possible scenarios where Iran with nuclear weapons could be a global danger. These are:

1) A nuclear Iran would lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

2) Iran's nuclear weapons might end up in the hands of terrorist groups.

3) A nuclear Iran would have an aggressive foreign policy.

As for the first scenario, which means the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, we should say that among Iran's neighbours, Russia and Pakistan already have nuclear weapons. And in the Middle East, the Israeli regime has at least 200 nuclear bombs and warheads. So apart from them, the other countries that would probably move towards developing nuclear weapons would be Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. And under the present circumstances, as far as one could predict, Iraq and the other regional countries have no tendency towards nuclear weapons, because they lack the required capacities.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has this capacity because it has the financial means to get nuclear weapons or the required equipment for arms production on the black market. But the fact of the matter is that ever since Libya's case, buying nuclear equipment on the black market has become very difficult. And Saudi Arabia's own domestic capacities (including its technical forces and its geographical situation) are not such that would allow this country to run special arms production facilities by itself.

Moreover, from a strategic standpoint, Saudi Arabia's reliance on the security umbrella of America and the West provides this country with more security than it could possibly provide on its own by pursuing an independent nuclear programme.

The problems that Egypt would face in order to have a military nuclear programme are much more than those of Saudi Arabia. The present equations in the Middle East are such that if Egypt were to move towards development of nuclear weapons, it would endanger this country's national security. Besides, Egypt is a country that receives aid from the West, and investment in any nuclear activity for military purposes with foreign aid is just impossible.

In the end, Turkey is the only country in this region that has an enormous national capacity to develop nuclear weapons. But as a NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] member and a as country that resisted the Soviet Union during the cold war era by relying on the security umbrella of America and NATO and eventually built the largest conventional army among all NATO countries, Turkey is well aware that its national security depends on preserving this extensive army.

Because of its geopolitical situation, population and national security threats, Turkey needs to have a large and powerful conventional army. And nuclear arms development would be no help to Turkey's national security policy, and would only cause a lot of internal and international problems for this country. Therefore, one could say that the theory of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a result of Iran's possession of nuclear weapons is also refutable.

As for the next scenario - the danger that Iran's nuclear weapons might end up in the hands of terrorist groups (as they are called by America), the Western and American intelligence services know very well that many of the terrorist groups on their blacklist are groups that Iran had been fighting and confronting long before they were called terrorist by America. Those politicians who are not so familiar with intelligence issues probably might say things that are not true. But those who have access to the right information clearly understand the significance of this matter.

Among all the groups that America considers to be terrorist, there are only two that Iran doesn't: first, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and second, the Palestinian fighters who are struggling for the liberation of their occupied lands.

During the entire period of its fight against occupation, the Lebanese Hezbollah never carried out any military operations against non-military targets or any outside Lebanon. All they did was resistance for the liberation of Lebanon from the occupation troops. And today, the entire Lebanese people appreciate this matter and recognize the Hezbollah as a legal parliamentary party and as part of the administration.

The Palestinian fighters, who are also fighting for the liberation of their occupied lands, showed in the recent Palestinian elections that they enjoy extensive popular support. The strategy of the Palestinian fighters is to liberate their country from occupation, not to destroy it. And they know what method and what weapon they should use to achieve that goal. Therefore, with a rational evaluation, one can refute this theory as well. In other words, it is impossible for the Hezbollah or the Palestinian fighters to come into possession of nuclear weapons.

Iran Press: The reasons why Iran cannot present a nuclear threat.
Source: Siyasat-e Ruz website, Tehran, in Persian 11 May 06
(BBC Monitoring International Reports, May 16, 2006)

Iran Polls - do 52% of Americans REALLY support bombing Iran?

There are several news items which claim that "Majority of American support bombing Iran"...

There's an old saying:

There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Pundits like poll results like this because they can claim that their position has popular support - and therefore must be correct. The old "bandwagon" appeal at work.

Actually - and the headlines don't tell you this - way the poll question was phrased was “support a US attack on Iran to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.” Bit of a wrinkle there that goes unreported, no?

Ironically - and most of the US news sources didn't tell you about this - a recent Zogby poll found that 39% of the American public "agree" or "somewhat agree" that "the work of the Israel lobby on Congress and the Bush administration has been a key factor for going to war in Iraq and now confronting Iran.

And oh, while we're at it, remember that 33% of American still think that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9-11 attacks.

Which all brings me back to the psychology of polling. A famous study showed how easy it was to influence the outcome of polls simply by changing the language of the questions ever so slightly:

If witnesses to an accident were asked if they say A broken headlight, some would say yes. If they were aksed instead if they say THE broken headlight, a majority would say yes.

So, if you want to claim that a majority of Americans are in favor of bombing Iran, ask them if they would supporting bombing "to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons" (nevermind if there is any evidence of that) and you can pretty much rest assured that the answer will be yes.

Iran nuclear program: Debunking Bush Administration Spin

According to the Bush view of the world, the US was always willing to negotiate with Iran, the Iranian nuclear program can only be used for bombs, and its the Iranians who have refused reasonable compromise offers. The lying is intended to close off any chance that the current impasse with Iran can be resolved peacefully through negotiations and the exercise of real diplomacy.

Facing a distinct absence of any actual facts to support its case that Iran is building nuclear weapons, the State Department and White House spokespersons are promoting some amusing spin about Iran's nuclear program. This article published by Agence France-Presse seems to cover their talking points, so lets analyze it a bit, just for fun:

"Capabilities" and "Intentions".
As usual, to make up for the fact that there's no actual evidence of any nuclear weapons program in Iran, the Bush administration is trying to promote speculation and innuendo about Iran's nuclear "intentions" and "capabilities" as a substitute for the non-existent evidence:

At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino said there was no doubt about Iran's plans because "this is a country that is enriching and reprocessing uranium and the reason that one does that is to lead towards a nuclear weapon." . . .

Asked whether any country enriching uranium seeks nuclear weapons, US National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe clarified Perino's remarks.

"I would say that we're concerned about Iran doing this because they could have the capability to have a nuclear weapon. Each country is different, but obviously Dana was asked and was talking about Iran," he said.

For now, we'll leaving aside the fact that Iran's nuclear program started with the encouragement, support and participation of the US (including some of the current Bush administration officials.) The Bush administration would naturally like to limit the discussion to Iran in an attempt to skip over the fact that any country with a nuclear program can indeed be similarly accused of having the "intent" to build nukes at some indefinite point in the future, as even the IAEA conceeds that even today, about 40 other countries have the same theoretical "capability" to make nuclear weapons of they chose to do so.

But what they can't skip over so lightly is the fact that Iran has repeatedly offered to place additional restrictions on its nuclear program specifically to address even the theoretical possibility that Iran's nuclear program could be diverted to secretly make weapons. These Iranian offers go beyond what any other country has agreed to do, and also exceed anything that the NPT or the Additional Protocol requires Iran to implement. For example, Iran has offered to forego plutonium reprocessing, and has also offered to turn their uranium enrichment faclitiy into a multinational enrichment facility, operating jointly with participation of foreign governments - an offer that matched a suggested solution (pdf) to the impasse by an expert committee of the IAEA itself.

In fact, Iran is hardly alone in its unwillingness to give up its right to enrichment. Despite the Bush administration's insistence on framing the issue as conflict between Iran and "the international community", most of the nations of the world and the developing nations in particular have sided with Iran on this matter. An article in the Los Angeles Times explained why:

Some developing nations are skeptical of the intentions of the five original nuclear states and are reluctant to give up the option of enriching uranium. Developing nations say they don’t want to give up their rights to uranium enrichment and don’t trust the United States or other nuclear countries to be consistent suppliers of the nuclear material they would need to run their power plants

The developing countries' lack of trust of the Bush administration is quite rational, as they see the world being divided into nuclear energy haves and have-nots, with Iran as setting a precedent that could be next used to deprive them of their nuclear right to have an independent, reliable nuclear fuel source.

Driving this process, in part, is the perception that all countries will soon be divided into uranium enrichment "haves" (suppliers) and "have-nots" (customers) under various proposals to establish multinational nuclear fuel centers and fuel-supply arrangements.

These proposals include President George W. Bush's call two years ago for the Nuclear Suppliers Group to refuse to sell enrichment technology to any state that did not already possess a full-scale, functioning enrichment plant, and the idea promoted about the same time by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, for a five-year moratorium on new enrichment plants in order to buy time for developing more equitable means to ensure fuel supplies while stemming proliferation.

More recently, the United States and Russia have proposed that a small set of countries would serve as
enrichment providers while all others would forego such technology . . .

These rules appears founded more on political grounds that distinguish between allies and adversaries. Such a policy of exceptionalism is at odds with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It is also a recipe for failure, as the history of U.S.-Iranian nuclear cooperation in the 1970s should make clear, since today's friend could become tomorrow's foe.

The nuclear offer that wasn't..
The article next quotes White House spokeswoman Dana Perino as saying,

"We have put on the table for Iran a path for them to get a civil nuclear program. And all they have to do to get there is to suspend its enrichment of reprocessing of uranium and they can come to the table and we can have a further discussion," said Perino. "It's the Iranians who have decided not to be at that table," she said. "

Too bad Dana Perino is demonstrably lying. The Bush administration has consistently rejected negotiation offers by the Iranians, and so there was never even an opportunity for such an offer to be made. Instead, the US has been secretly planning for a war, while all the time attempting to silence critics of this policy, and also imposing a pre-condition on any talks that Iran first give in to US demands by giving up enrichment - knowing full well that such a precondition would be unacceptable to the Iranians and so there would be no talks. So in short, it was the US that decided not to be at that table and is deliberately attempting to kill any chance of a peaceful, negotiated end to the conflict - and not the Iranians.

Indeed, the only offer that was made to Iran was put forth by the EU-3, during the course of the Paris Agreement negotiations - which the US announced early on that it would not support. And the EU-3 offer to Iran was itself laughed at by independent international analysts and characterized as an "empty box in pretty wrapping" which not only violated the explicit text of the Iran-EU3 negotiation agreement, but was essentially non-binding on the US or EU3 while making Iran's nuclear industry totally dependent on the imports of nuclear fuel which could be cut off at a whim.

Since then, the EU had shown a greater willingness to compromise with Iran - only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration which continues to place ever-increasing demands on Iran, knowing full well that such demands would undermine chances of resolving the matter peaceably.

Ignore the IAEA findings
Facing the fact that the IAEA head, Mohamad ElBaradei, has plainly stated that the IAEA does not have any evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, the US State Deparment has said that the IAEA is "only a technical body" that should butt out of "diplomacy" - in other words, you shouldn't let the inconvenient facts get in the way of the policy.

What's even more funny is the Bush administration's idea of "diplomacy" which consists of repeatedly threatening Iran with military attacks and ignoring any negotiation offers from Iran or imposing "poison pill" preconditions on such talks. Scott Ritter explained how the US approach to Iran is shaped by Neocon Steven Hadley and his "Hadley Rules" of "diplomacy" with Iran:

Hadley is a long-established neoconservative thinker who has for the most part operated "in the shadows" when it comes to the formulation of Iran policy in the Bush administration. In 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Hadley (then the deputy national security adviser) instituted what has been referred to as the "Hadley Rules," a corollary of which is that no move will be made which alters the ideological positioning of Iran as a mortal enemy of the United States. These "rules" shut down every effort undertaken by Iran to seek a moderation of relations between it and the United States, and prohibited American policymakers from responding favorably to Iranian offers to assist with the fight against al-Qaida; they also blocked the grand offer of May 2003 in which Iran outlined a dramatic diplomatic initiative, including a normalization of relations with Israel. The Hadley Rules are at play today, in an even more nefarious manner, with the National Security Council becoming involved in the muzzling of former Bush administration officials who are speaking out on the issue of Iran. Hadley is blocking Flynt Leverett, formerly of the National Security Council, from publishing an Op-Ed piece critical of the Bush administration on the grounds that any insight into the machinations of policymaking (or lack thereof) somehow strengthens Iran's hand. Leverett's article would simply underscore the fact that the Bush administration has spurned every opportunity to improve relations with Iran while deliberately exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Iranian theocracy.

(UPDATE: Cernig notes over at Newshoggers.com:

And that's where the cat leaps out of the bag. You see, Iran's closing of the nuclear fuel cycle is a direct threat to the Bush administration's plan for a very lucrative nuclear fuel cartel - primarily selling enriched uranium to nations

)

Smearing ElBaradei - again.

IAEA Cheif Mohammad ElBaradei, has said that there's no actual evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.

In response, the Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs, resorted to Islam-bashing conspiracy theories and claimed that ElBaradei, who happens to be an Egyptian, "feels some kind of obligation to the Islamic world":

"It seems that the proof ElBaradei wants is a nuclear mushroom cloud that everyone can see in the sky. Short of that, no evidence will suffice for him, apparently," Lieberman told Israel Radio.

Of course, had Elbaradei been, for example, Dutch, then perhaps he would have been accused of "being more concerned about defending Iran than about Auschwitz, etc. Hysteria and holocaust guilt are convenient distractions from the facts.

Just remember how they also smeared Hans Blix, the former IAEA head, who had "failed" to find the much-touted WMDs in Iraq.

Higazy & FBI: How the FBI coerces false confessions, and how the Courts cover it up

The FBI coerced a false 9-11 terrorism confession from an Egyptian national named Higazy by threatening to have his family tortured - and the Court of Appeals tried to cover it up.

You can read here about how the FBI coerced a false confession from an Egyptian national named Higazy who happened to be staying at a hotel nearby when the WTC attacks happened on 9-11 - and how the Court of Appeals tried to cover-up that fact by censoring a portion of their previously released opinion which described the details of how the FBI coerced the false confession from Higazy by threatening to have Egyptian security forces torture his family members back home, and how the Egyptian secret police would then make his family's life "a living hell."

What the article doesn't mention is what had happened at the trial level, but luckily the New York Law Journal does: Before the case got to the Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of Higazy though it covered up the details of the FBI misconduct, the lower level trial court had ruled against Higazy, holding that the FBI agent had "qualified immunity" in the case - in other words, that even though the FBI had coerced the false confession from Higazy, the fact that Higazy's lawyer (now dead) didn't complain about the coercion and because the FBI agent had flatly denied the coercion charge, then there was no reason to hold the FBI agent responsible.

Just consider the totally fortuitous events that helped this poor guy clear his name. For example, had the original owner of the radio found in this guy's hotel room safe not come back to claim it, this innocent fellow could be sitting in jail, convicted as a 9-11 terrorist and his own forced confession.

That's how the system works here. You can't expect the FBI or the courts to really get the terrorists when they can instead frame some innocent guy.

Cheney & Iran: someone throw a net on this guy

Do you suppose that one of his heart attacks or strokes has restricted the oxygen getting to his brain?

TIM RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, welcome to “Meet the Press.”

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Good morning, Tim.

RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?

CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.

RUSSERT: But you squashed Iraq and that didn’t work out so well.

CHENEY: Iraq will be fine, Tim. It just needs a firmer hand. We learned that lesson. We’re not going to get hung up on democracy this time. (Expletive) purple thumbs.

RUSSERT: Isn’t Secretary Rice still pushing carrots for Iran?

CHENEY: The more carrots Condi feeds ’em, the better they’ll be able to see the bombs coming.

RUSSERT: First you threatened to take action if Iran built a nuclear weapon. Now you’re threatening to take action if Iran knows how to build a nuclear weapon. What’s next? You threaten to take action if Ahmadinejad dresses up as a nuclear weapon for Halloween?

CHENEY: Well, the difficulty here is, each time he has rejected what he was called upon to do by the international community. I’m not sure now, no matter what he says, that anyone would believe him. He’s pretending he doesn’t have W.M.D., just like Saddam.

RUSSERT: But Saddam didn’t have W.M.D.

CHENEY: He did, Tim.

RUSSERT: He did?

CHENEY: Ever wonder what happened to them?

RUSSERT: What happened to them?

CHENEY: Think about it, Tim.

Sen. Tom Lantos: Holocaust justifies Gitmo

US Sentator Tom Lantos has resorted to using 'holocaust guilt' to justify the mistreatment and torture of detainees at Guantanamo:

Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.

The lawmakers said that Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay."

Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was responding to arguments that the United States should shut down the prison, located on a U.S. naval base in Cuba, the lawmakers said. Mariko Peter, a member of the Dutch Green Party, who began the exchange with Lantos, said she took notes of the remarks. . .

"You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany," Lantos said, according to the Dutch lawmakers.

"The comments killed the debate," said Harry van Bommel, a member of the Socialist Party. "It was insulting and counterproductive." (Dutch Lawmakers Offended by Rep. Lantos , Associated Press Saturday, October 27, 2007)

In using the holocaust guilt issue, Lantos is simply resorting to more of the usual abuse of the Holocaust to justify the state policy of aggression and murder.

For example, Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who has made a hobby out of smearing and silencing critics of Israel, has written that ethnic cleaning (he calls it "transfer") of the Palestinians from their country is justified since ethnic cleansing really isn't all that bad, and when applied to Palestinians it should be views as a form of "affirmative action" in favor of Jews. He also justifies it by claiming that all Palestinians are responsible for the Holocaust anyway, since "they" supposedly collaborated with Nazis, and so according Dershowitz, many "decent people" believe that the Palestinians as a whole should acquiesce to their own "transfer" and should just go die elsewhere quitely. I kid you not - this is exactly what Dershowitz has written in his book, "The Case for Israel".

Indeed, that Holocaust guilt is used by Israel to justify its treatment of Palestinians and blackmail the support of US/EU is not new and has been long recognized as a fact:

The historian Arnold Toynbee suggested that British Christians had sympathy for Zionist aspirations because of a sense of guilt stemming from subconscious anti-Semitism. Truman apparently favored the creation of Israel in part as a reaction to the guilt factor resulting from the Holocaust.(1) Pro-Israeli lobbyists in the US actively use Holocaust-guilt to promote US support for Israel.(2) The American stateman and diplomat, George Ball(3) and more recently Michael Scheuer have both stated that the Holocaust, and the Holocaust museums in the US, have been used to promote loyalty and support for the state of Israel -- and others share this view and that the memorialization of the Holocaust has been turned into a supplement to loyalty to Israel and a rationalization of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.(4) (and yes, the word genocide is precisely accurate.)

What else is holocaust-guilt useful for? Well for example, holocaust guilt is useful in covering up the dual-loyalty of the pro-Israeli lobbyists and activists. This is what Michael Lind to say in his essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" back in 2002 (before Walt & Mearsheimer's article with the same title came out)

Ethnocentric political Zionism as the basis of Jewish identity is more appealing to many former leftist and liberal Jews in the US than the adoption of a stringent Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. But making political Zionism the basis of Jewishness imposes a stark dual loyalty, as Stephen Steinlight argues in the essay I have quoted. "I'll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months, for ten formative years during my childhood and adolescence, I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colours, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue... Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was meant to reside... That America has tolerated this dual loyalty-we get a free pass, I suspect, largely over Christian guilt about the Holocaust-makes it no less a reality."

==============

Footnotes:
1. Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations after the Cold
War, by Bernard Reich; Praeger Publishers, 1995, p. 9

2. Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups: American and Canadian
Jews Lobby for Israel by David Howard Goldberg; Greenwood Press, 1990, p.
24

3. CSPAN Booknotes Transcript Air date: May 23, 1993, Author: George
Ball (and Douglas Ball) Title: The Passionate Attachment: America's
Involvement with Israel, 1947 to Present.

4. Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York City's
Holocaust Museum, by Rochelle G. Saidel; Holmes & Meier, 1996 pp 29-30.

Tom Casey is a lying scumbag.

According to the VOA, Tom Casey, the US State Dep't spokesman, bleeds in his heart for Iran and is oh-so upset at how the Iranians are "squandering" opportunities . . .

Iran is squandering the opportunity to achieve the benefits it claims it needs from its nuclear program, says U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey:

“If Iran would simply choose to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, then the United States, as well as Russia, as well as the other members of the P-5 plus one [countries], would sit down with the Iranian government and negotiate a solution to these issues – one that would allow the Iranian people to have civilian nuclear power, but that would assure the rest of us that they weren’t, in fact, using that program as a cover for a nuclear weapon.”

Apparently, US State Department spokesman Tom Casey thinks we don't remember that Iran already tried suspending enrichment for 2 years during the course of the Paris Agreement negotiation process with the EU-3, and we ALL saw how they tried to cheat Iran by making a worthless joke of an offer to Iran.

What they're trying to do, under the guise of "nonproliferation" is to steal Iran's capacity to have an independent source of nuclear fuel, and to force the entire developingworld into accepting a new apartheid regime, where they get to have a monopoly of nuclear energy. Is it any wonder then that

Some developing nations are skeptical of the intentions of the five original nuclear states and are reluctant to give up the option of enriching uranium. Developing nations say they don’t want to give up their rights to uranium enrichment and don’t trust the United States or other nuclear countries to be consistent suppliers of the nuclear material they would need to run their power plants (Los Angeles Times)

The duty of the IAEA is to determine whether a country has been building nukes- and the IAEA has explicitly stated repeatedly that it has not found any such evidence. But I guess the State Department should know about squandered opportunities since they rejected Iran's comprehensive peace offer in 2003, and Rice LIED to Congress about the offer, and they have consistently refused to even acknowledge all of Iran's nuclear compromise offers too. Yes Tom, I am certain you're just so concerned about those "squandered opportunities" aren't you?

Sorry Tom, but do try again.

Iran sanctions and the "Strangling of Persia"

In a brief moment of lucidity, Bush once said that the US has sanctioned itself out of having any leverage over Iran. So, new sanctions on Iran have been announced. Great job, Bush! If you're in a hole, dig deeper! Decreasing US leverage over Iran is really a right move. While you're at it, why not shoot yourself in the other foot too.

The title of this post, the "Strangling of Persia
", is a reference to the title of a book by an American named Morgan Shuster who was appointed in 1911 by the newly (and briefly) consititutional government of Iran to help organize its finaces. Shuster was forced out of the country only a year later as a result of "British and Russian diplomatic intrigue" which toppled Iran's constitutional government (the Russians actually shelled Iran's Parliament building and the British landed forces in the Persian Gulf region) and so he wrote an firsthand account of his expereinces that reveals much about how Great Power interference shaped Iran's history in those days. Read" Strangling of Persia.

My point is that in the context of the Iranian's view of history, the US has now started to fill the same historical role as the colonial British and Russian government. To this day, the Iranians revile the British and Russians, and especially the Iranian government officials who gave into the British/Russian demands on Iran - but most Americans are totally ignorant of that historical context and so they don't understand how their sanctions are playing in Iran.

So while the State Department is on a PR roll about its "tough" and "unprecedented" sanctions - which are in fact a sign of US weakness for reasons explained below - there is not a single mention of how these sanctions will appear in the minds of Iranians. That is a significant problem, because - as usual - they're understimating the fact that the Iranians love their country too, and deeply resent this sort of thing. And no, the Iranians are not going to topple their regime because of US sanctions - you'd think that 50 years of sanctions on Cuba would have proven that thesis wrong by now. Oh sure, the people pushing these sanctions also pay lip service to "respecting the people of Iran" and engaging in "public diplomacy" that will show how the US is not opposed to them but only the government of Iran - but lets face it, the US's "public diplomacy" efforts in the Mideast have been an absolute, total, miserable failure all along because they can't get over the fundamental problem of Israel. Despite the fact that Iranians like Americans and do not associate individual Americans with the Bush administration's policies, the "public diplomacy" efforts are made particularly worse in Iran by the US shooting down of Iran Air 655, support for Saddam during the war, creating the mess in Iraq, etc. So in short, no amount of propaganda and flim-flam is going to trick the Iranian people into thinking that the US actually has their best interests in mind by imposing sanctions on Iran, and only silly people would assume so.

Anyway, as to the sanctions themselves: despite the State Department's PR blitz, I'm not particularly impressed by these sanctions for a variety of reasons. These are something like the 10th set of US sanctions announced on Iran - and what good were the other 9? As a simple practical matter, Iran doesn't have any assets in the US to be seized. What few assets Iran did have, were seized long ago (even though pursuant to the Algiers Agreement, they were supposed to be released but the US has failed to abide by that agreement) which is why some pro-Israeli organizations have been trying to seize museum artifacts in the US that once came from ancient Persia - out of pure greed as usual. Nor is there a large trade between the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and American firms (which are all already prohibited by previous sanctions laws.)

In fact, that the Bush administration has resorted to these "unilateral" sanctions actually goes to show that the rest of the world isn't following the US's agenda towards Iran and the Bush administration isn't finding it easy to get the UN Security Council to issue new sanctions either. (Other than Israel, of course, which is instigating this conflict between the US and Iran to serve its own interests - which is why the pro-Israeli lobbyists have been frothing at the mouth about Iran so much lately.) Nor is there, in effect, anything "unprecedented" here. The US already imposes sanctions on the entire government of Iran - all they're doing now is that they're imposing sanctions on individual elements within the government, as if that makes some sort of difference.

I suppose Condi Rice needed to burnish her "tough on Iran" credentials to appease the rabid pro-Israeli Right, and so promoting these "tough" sanctions does that for her. And the pro-Israeli Right are smart enough to know that the sanctions won't have any actual impact on Iran - if anything, the sanctions strengthen the hardliners there and ensure that the US has even less leverage over Iran - but short of a war, the Israelis satisfied as long as there's yet another impediment to improved US-Iran relations - which has been their goal all along since any improved US-Iran relations would pose a threat to Israel's strategic value to the US and their ambitions on the Mideast.

"Terrorism Experts" or fake self-promoters?

The Village Voice has a mildly interesting article entitled "Secret Agent Schmuck" by Chris Thomson, about some guy named Juval Aviv who has been posing on Fox News as a "terrorism expert." The article has the usual sordid details you'd expect from this sort of story, which are not relevant to my post.

What caught my attention, however, was how the author of the article made a terrible mistake in quoting Steven Emerson to "debunk" this guy. The article in the Voice identifies Emerson as "a former CNN correspondent who specializes in security and terrorism" and quotes Emerson saying this about Juval Aviv:

It's amazing to see how many times he fooled people...It's so easy to go on the air and pretend you're something you're not...The trick in television is just to full up the time"

Well, Steven Emerson should know what he's talking about since Emerson himself has a rather "questionable" background as a "terrorism expert" too, and the Village Voice should have checked up on Emerson's own background before using his quotes. In fact, while the author of the Village Voice article also quotes Vince Cannistraro about Juval Aviv, the author apparently failed to check to see what Vince Cannistraro had to say about Steve Emerson:

"They're Israeli-funded. How do I know that? Because they tried to recruit me."

Steven Emerson, a self-styled "terrorism expert", has basically made a career pushing questionable stories about "radical muslims" and promoting anti-Arab hysteria in the US, when he's not busy smearing his critics as terrorist-supporters. Among other gaffes, this is the same "terrorism exerpt" who claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing had a "Mideastern trait" and suggested it was the work of "radical Islamic extremists on American soil". According to reports, he tried pass off two forged documents, supposedly from "FBI files" about radical muslims in the US, to unsuspecting reporters of the Associated Press - who noticed that the alleged documents from "FBI files" looked suspiciously like Emerson's own writings. Emerson filed a defamation lawsuit against a newspaper editor who reported this, but later dropped the suit.

Anyway, this bit of poor journalism by the Village Voice should not reflect too poorly on on otherwise well-written article by Chris Thomson. However, my bigger point is this is hardly the first case in which someone has falsely passed themselves off on Fox News and other news programs as an "expert" on the Mideast or terrorism or whatever. There are many others, in addition to Juval Aviv and Steven Emerson (I am personally fond of the "Iran experts" who have never actually been to Iran, don't speak the language, and can't even pronounce the name of the country correctly)

Take for exampe Alirea Jafarzadeh, who regularly shows up on Fox News as their "Foreign Affairs Analyst" to make outrageous claims about the "threat" that Iran poses to the US - and who is the former (current?) spokesman for the bizzare, cultlike MEK, which is listed (along with its various other names such as NCR or NCRI) as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.

So the next time some talking head shows up on your TV set, don't just believe whatever nonsense he's saying - check him out, find out if he has an agenda or an ax to grind. Remember, there's a whole industry of PR professionals whose job is to get certain faces on your TV set in order to communicate a particular message. You can't rely on the editors and reporters at the news stations to check these people out before they get on the air.

Multinational Enrichment in Iran: The Ignored Alternative to War

The Iranian have offered a perfectly reasonable solution to the alleged crisis over their nuclear program - a solution that the Bush administration has consistently ignored.

At a time that the Iranian nuclear "crisis" is being presented as a false dilemma (according to which, either Iran must be sanctions/attacked, or Iran will get the bomb) it is worth noting that Iran's offer to open its nuclear program to foreign participation and to operate it as a joint venture with other countries is a solution that hasn't received as much attention by the media and punditocracy as it deserves, probably because an actual solution like this to the manufactured "crisis" over Iran's nuclear energy program would distract from the Bush-AIPAC agenda of launching a war on Iran and monopolizing nuclear power:

"There is a growing willingness amongst European states to compromise with Iran on its uranium enrichment activities, but the USA continues to maintain a rigid position." - - Nuclear Engineering Int'l Oct 4 2006

The creation of multilateral enrichment facility on Iranian soil been endorsed by numerous sources (see for example: "Iran as a Pioneer Case for Multilateral Nuclear Arrangments" and "Which Way Forward For Multilateral Approaches? An International Expert Group Examines Options" by Bruno Pellaud in the IAEA Bulletin) and the Iranians have repeatedly indicated that they will accept such a solution since it would protect their concerns about having a secure source of nuclear energy. The Non-Aligned Movement, representing the majority of countries of the world, have in fact backed Iran's claim to a right to nuclear power.

But the Bush administration continues to impose a ridiculous demand that there shouldn't even be a single spinning centrifuge in Iran because it would supposedly give the Iranians the theoretical knowledge to build a nuke one day in the indefinite future:

"The Bush administration has said that a condition of any deal must be that 'not a single centrifuge can spin" in Iran'..." - How to Keep the Bomb From Iran by Scott D. Sagan, From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006

And,

"In the words of Robert Joseph, the State Department's top proliferation official, the administration is
determined to ensure that 'not one centrifuge spins' in Iran...Mr. Bush has therefore taken the position that Iran must give up everything. He said Friday, 'The Iranians should not have a nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, or the knowledge as to how to make a nuclear weapon.'" (NY Times, Apr 30
2006)

and Symour Hersch wrote in the New Yorker back in April 2006:

"In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: 'We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us.' "

Nevermind the fact that the knowledge to build a bomb can be found in any decent public library as proven by the Nth Country Experiment, and that more and more nations are already developing the same uranium enrichment technology that Iran has, including Brazil and Argentina; that both Jordan and Saudi Arabia have a nuclear program, and Egypt has recently signed an agreement with China to develop the same technology too. This is only natural, since more and more nations are starting to realize that nuclear power is the energy source of the future, the price of uranium has increase 10-fold in the last decade, and developing countries simply do not trust the US to provide their nuclear power needs:

"Some developing nations are skeptical of the intentions of the five original nuclear states and are reluctant to give up the option of enriching uranium. Developing nations say they don’t want to give up their rights to uranium enrichment and don’t trust the United States or other nuclear countries to be consistent suppliers of the nuclear material they would need to run their power plants" - Los Angeles Times October 15, 2006

As Charles D. Ferguson and William C. Potter have written in the International Herald Tribune about the international rush to obtain nuclear enrichment capability by nations other than Iran, and the US's intentions to monopilize nuclear power:

Driving this process, in part, is the perception that all countries will soon be divided into uranium enrichment "haves" (suppliers) and "have-nots" (customers) under various proposals to establish multinational nuclear fuel centers and fuel-supply arrangements.

These proposals include President George W. Bush's call two years ago for the Nuclear Suppliers Group to refuse to sell enrichment technology to any state that did not already possess a full-scale, functioning enrichment plant, and the idea promoted about the same time by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, for a five-year moratorium on new enrichment plants in order to buy time for developing more equitable means to ensure fuel supplies while stemming proliferation.

More recently, the United States and Russia have proposed that a small set of countries would serve as
enrichment providers while all others would forego such technology . . .

These rules appears founded more on political grounds that distinguish between allies and adversaries. Such a policy of exceptionalism is at odds with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It is also a recipe for failure, as the history of U.S.-Iranian nuclear cooperation in the 1970s should make clear, since today's friend could become tomorrow's foe.

And why does the Bush administration insist on this ridiculous demand that Iran should just remain ignorant of nuclear technology? Precisely because they know that the Iranians won't give in, and so the Bush administration can use it as a justification and pretext for war with Iran that is ultimately intended to benefit Israel and secure Israel's ambitions in the Mideast, as well as helping the US and its allies monopolize the energy source of the future.

Iran nukes: What if Iran suspends enrichment?

The debate about US policy with respect to Iran's nuclear program takes it for granted that the dispute is really about Iran's nuclear program, when in fact the Iranians have quite justifiably concluded that the nuclear issue is a mere pretext, and no amount of compromises by them will divert the Bush administration's ambitions to "get Iran."

As the drumbeat of war on Iran continues, some ask whether it would be worth it for Iran to give in to US demands and suspend uranium enrichment (a precondition on talks with Iran imposed by Sec. of State and International War Criminal Condoleezza Rice) in the vague and vain hope that such a suspension of uranium enrichment by Iran would be a start on more constructive interaction between the two nations. They claim that only if everyone "gives diplomacy a chance" then everything will work out.

This suggestion is based on the laudable yet naive assumption that if only one side backs down, then the other side will reciprocate - and as such, it isn't a plan as much as it is a hope - worse yet, a hope that has already and repeatedly been shown to be plain wrong. In fact, there is good evidence that the US is far from interested in resolving its disputes with Iran - rather, the US is simply interested in creating and promoting conflict with Iran.

Empirically, we've seen a pattern in which each concession by Iran on the nuclear issue is followed up by greater demands by the Bush administration, and where genuine diplomatic solutions or cooperation suggested by Iran were ignored or actively sabotaged by the Bush administration. Iran already "gave diplomacy a chance" when it sent the offer of negotiation in 2003 which included even the issue of support for Palestinians as well as the nuclear issue - only to see the offer spurned by the Bush administration.

Later, the Iranians entered into the Paris Agreement with the EU-3 and suspended enrichment for 2 years. We all remember how that ended: The EU-3, acting under US-Israeli pressure and in blatant contravention of the explicit text of the Paris Agreement, tried to spin Iran's "temporary and non-legally binding" suspension into a permanent obligation; they made a belated offer that was designed to be refused by the Iranians, and then promptly accused the Iranians of "violating" the Paris Agreement when the Iranians returned to enrichment.

As a result, I suspect a good lesson was learned in Iran that the US/EU-3 simply can't be trusted, and that they're not actually interested in resolving conflicts with Iran.

Other Iranian offers of diplomatic compromise have been similarly ignored and short-shrifted and ignored even though they would have addressed any real, legitimate concern that Iran may use its nuclear program to build bombs.

And in fact, several Iranian authorities, including Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei and Iran's former President Rafsanjani, have indeed come to the conclusion that is merely a pretext by the US to pressure Iran, which would continue even if they gave in to US demands on that point:

"The U.S. is using the nuclear issue as a pretext for regime change," a senior Iranian official said this week. "The issue is a diversion. The U.S. wants to weaken Iran. Even if the nuclear issue was solved, they would want another thing and another thing."

In conclusion, the history of this dispute has shown without any question whatsoever that:

1- The US is not interested in any diplomatic solution, and has actively undermined potentially workable diplomatic solutions...

2- Repeated efforts by Iran to resolve this issue diplomatically, including by suspension of enrichment, were rejected off-hand, and will probably continue to be rejected in a similar manner, since...

3- No amount of capitulations by the Iranians will be satisfactory, and will only be followed by greater demands, because...

4- The nuclear enrichment issue is not the true bone of contention; it is merely a convenient pretext for another conflict which ...

5- Ultimately a strategic struggle between Israel and Iran in which Israel sees Iran as a threat to its regional ambitions/hegemony/relationship with the US. That's what the real conflict is about, not nuclear enrichment per se which is just a pretext and form of misdirection.

As Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States has written:

"But it wasn’t Iran that turned the Israeli-Iranian cold war warm – it was Israel...The Israeli reversal on Iran was partially motivated by the fear that its strategic importance would diminish significantly in the post-cold war middle east...Iran was now a potentially powerful regional player who could become a threat. And according to Israel’s military doctrine, potential threats are to be treated as existing threats."

Israel doesn't want to play the role of Taiwan if and when another US president decides to "go to China" by opening relations with Iran. An improved US-Iran relations would undermine Israel's ambitions and strategic value to the US. The fact that Iran and the US have many common interests is anathema to the Israelis, and so they've been pressing so hard for a conflict. That is precisely why pro-Israeli activists are so busy equating any diplomatic approaches to Iran as akin to Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, etc. This is what the conflict is really all about, and frankly all this talk about nuclear enrichment is really missing the bigger point.

Iran: nukes won't help to us.

We hear a lot of pundits claim that Iran "must be" building nukes, at least to deter a US attack - but the Iranians themselves repeatedly say that nukes would NOT help them, and furthermore that the entire nuclear issue is a manufactured crises that hides another agenda. Read what Iran's ambassador to the UN, Javad Zarif, wrote on this issue a few months ago in Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs (.pdf file)

From a strategic point of view, Iranian leaders realize that nuclear weapons do not provide domestic stability or external security. Nuclear might did not prevent the break up of the Soviet empire, nor has it been a factor in recent conflicts in the Middle East. Iran's policy makers believe that development or possession of nuclear weapons undermine Iranian security. Even the perception that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons negatively impacts Iran's power by decreasing its regional influence and increasing its global vulnerabilities.

Iran does not need nuclear weapons to protect its regional interests in the immediate neighborhood. In fact, to augment Iranian influence in the region, it has been necessary for Iran to win the confidence of its neighbors; an effort that will inevitably suffer from such perceptions. Furthermore, with its current state of technological development and military capability, Iran cannot reasonably rely on nuclear deterrence against its adversaries in the international arena or in the wider region. Engaging in a spiraling arms race to establish and maintain nuclear deterrence would also be prohibitively expensive, draining the limited economic resources of the country. . .

In spite of Iran's record, a massive campaign has been underway to portray Iran as a proliferator of nuclear
weapons and a threat to regional stability. The recent flurry of diplomatic activities and divisive public statements--primarily by the United States and the United Kingdom--to frighten the countries of the region and to create an anti-Iran coalition has become the centerpiece of a strategy to rescue the failed policies of the United States in the region. According to the Wall Street Journal, "The threat of Iran's rise has become for the U.S. a sort of diplomatic glue ... to patch together an alliance aimed at helping heal not only Iraq, but also Lebanon and the Palestinian conflict ... [U.S. allies] are ... apprehensive about lining up too publicly alongside the U.S. in a Cold War-style, anti-Iran bloc."

The enemy paradigm is so pervasive that the U.S. administration opted for an escalation against Iran contrary to the advice of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. The surge in blaming Iran for the insecurity and sectarian violence in Iraq is designed to justify the escalation, while such claims cannot be explained by facts on the ground or by any calculation of Iranian interest in Iraq. In fact, U.S. vision has been so blurred by the prevalence of the paradigm, that American policymakers alienate and threaten Iran, while seeking help from those who have magnified--and instigated for their own motives--the sectarian divide in Iraq long before sectarian clashes started. This policy clearly illustrates that no lessons have been learnt from the devastation caused by many decades of the implementation of that policy in the Persian Gulf region.

The manufacturing of the "Iran Nuclear Crisis" has similarly shown that old habits die hard, and the same
tendencies that caused the misery of the last four years continue to prevail in major power circles in Washington and London. The same cabal has orchestrated a massive campaign to portray Iran's peaceful nuclear program as a threat, and in order to give that a semblance of international legitimacy, has resorted to substantial economic and political pressure to compel members of the Security Council to adopt two
unwarranted resolutions within five months.

The campaign has involved attempts to doctor the evidence in order to create a national and global scare. According to a November 2006 article by Seymour Hersh, "The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared." He also added that "the White House was hostile to [the CIA finding]" and may be trying "to prevent the CIA assessment from being incorporated into a forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities" because this finding complicates "the administration's planning for a military attack against Iran."

SOURCE:
Tackling the Iran-U.S. crisis: the need for a paradigm shift.(pdf file)
by Mohammad Javad Zarif, Journal of International Affairs Spring-Summer 2007

Presidential Quotes: Ahmadinejad, Ben-Gurion, George Washington

Quotes from Ahmadinejad are being used to portray Iranians as fundamentally irrational - and to thus discourage attempts at initiating a dialogue between the US and Iran. However, what if other world leaders were also judged by their words?

We hear endlessly how Iranian President Ahamadinejad has supposedly called for Isreal to be "wiped out" - and how this quote (though debunked) is evidence of the "irrationality" of the Iranian government, etc. Here's what else he's said that doesn't get as much attention in the US media.

But lets remember that Iranian politicians don't have a monopoly on saying stupid things. For example, I remember what George Bush I said when the fact that the US Navy had shot down an Iranian civilian airliner inside Iranian territorial waters finally came to light:

I will never apologize for the United States - I don't care what the facts are.... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.

And what did Colin Powell say when confronted with the number of civilian Iraqis killed during Desert Storm?

It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in.

And what did US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright say say when asked about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children as and direct result of US sanctions:

"We Think the Price Is Worth It"

But while we're using quotes, perhaps there are some more usefull quotes that people should remember, particularly regarding the influence-peddling of AIPAC, and the US "Passionate Attachment" to Israel:

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government." - George Washington

And remember how we're told that Iran represents an "existential danger" to Israel because (according to the Israelis) the Iranians want nothing more than to nuke Israel since the Iranian regime is supposedly "irrational"? Well, you have to wonder, who has explicitly threatened whom with nuclear attacks?

During an impromptu April 18 press conference, President George W. Bush was asked if his assertion that "all options are on the table" regarding Iran included the possibility of a nuclear strike. Bush reiterated, "All options are on the table. We want to solve this issue diplomatically, and we're working hard to do so." In no uncertain words, the president of the United States directly threatened Iran with a preemptive nuclear strike. It is hard to read his reply in any other way. - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist

In fact, what do the following what to the following quotes say about the "rationality" of the Israeli government?

"We must expel Arabs and take their places." -- David Ben Gurion, 1937,
Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." -- David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a
single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." -- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99.

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country." -- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist." -- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!" -- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"[The Palestinian terrorists] are beasts walking on two legs." -- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

"The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya (=Jewish immigration), and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country." -- Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.

"(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." -- Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988 "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." -- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... -- Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

So, who is an "irrational, existential threat" to whom?

Pakistani Nukes and the CIA

Despite all the talk about the evils of nuclear proliferation, it seems that the US intentionally turned a blind eye - or even encouraged - Pakistan's nuclear program.

We already know that the CIA preventend the trial of A. Q. Khan, the so-called "rogue" Pakistani nuclear scientist - in the Netherlands, and may have even made his file "disappear" from the Dutch courts.

Richard Barlow, a CIA analyst specializing in Pakistani nukes, is living in a trailer as a result of his exposure of the US connection to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

Suggested reading: Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons - plus America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento:

Over the past three decades, official investigations in the United States and Europe came close on several occasions to pulling the lid off of Pakistan’s nuclear smuggling network. But to protect strategic relationships with Islamabad, those inquiries were scuttled by intervention at the highest levels of government.

Jihadist Terrorism in the US?

CNN reports that the numbers don't support the view that the US is the target of roaming bands of Islamist jihadists, as the scaremongers would like you to think:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Six years of investigations and prosecutions have turned up little evidence of Islamic jihadists at work in the United States, according to a study released Monday. The study, conducted by New York University's Center on Law and Security, tracked 510 cases billed as terrorism-related when arrests were made. But it found only 158 of those people arrested since al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks were prosecuted for terrorism... The study found only four people -- including confessed al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui and "shoe bomber" Richard Reid -- were convicted of planning attacks within the United States...

I would only add that most of the alleged "Islamic terrorism" cases involved groups who had no hope of ever actually carrying out any of their plans, and they usually also involved government informers who were probably acting as provacateurs, and/or forced plea bargains obtained under extreme duress - see for example, the "Liberty City Seven" case. As Scott Hiaasen of the Miami Herald wrote:

In many respects, the Liberty City case resembles other recent terrorism cases from Hollywood to New York to California: An informant infiltrates a group of anti-American zealots and records -- or even encourages -- their violent plans... But the closest the group got to Osama bin Laden was an FBI informant posing as an ``al Qaeda representative.''

Lets all remember the first World Trade Center bombing involved a secret FBI informant named Emad Salem who offered to substitute a harmless power for the explosives used in making the bomb, but his offer was rejected by his FBI handlers, who thereby essentially allowed the bombing to happen.

Iran: Another Iraq in the making? (part 1 of 2)

Can Bush sell us on another Iraq war? Now that we're in a period of post-invasion war disillusionment, and we're discovering the depths of the falsehoods used to sell the war on Iraq, it is a good time to point out a bit of historical context: basically, that we've been here before, and may fall for it again.

(Warning: this was the topic for a doctoral dissertation that I once considered, so it may be long, boring and overly detailed - but you may see interesting parallels to the Iraq war propaganda environment.)

There is a good bit of history and context for how we got to this mess, and it brings up questions that we should be prepared to answer: 1- can the people be manipulated into another war, and 2- is there a fundamental fault or weakness in our democratic system which prevents us from resisting this sort of propaganda manipulation?

The word propaganda is a dirty word today - perhaps suggesting a dark, smoke-filled room in a totalitarian country, where evil military officials secretly plot to promote lies to a gullible and uninformed public. But in fact, as Jacques Ellul and others have written, propaganda is more common in democratic states than in totalitarian ones, because democratic governments can't resort to coersion as easily to get their way with the people, so they have to rely on persuasion. Furthermore, rather than relying on falsehoods, good propaganda is "truthful" in the sense of having "truthiness" (a simply brilliant obervation by Stephen Colbert - but credit should go to Emily Dickenson: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant...") And finally, the educated classes are perhaps easier victims of propaganda than the "gullible uninformed masses" since they are more likely to accept second-hand information from "authoritative" sources. Nor is propaganda limited to war time - propaganda is a common everyday presence in our entire society - which is why it is known more euphimistically as "public relations" - in fact, PR is a multi-billion dollar industry, and the government is no small customer of the major PR agencies.

As we wallow in the post-war disillusionment, it should be remembered that this isn't the first time in US history that we went to war based on a lot propaganda. To understand this we have to go back to the turn of the 20th century and WWI in particular. The political circumstances of WWI are largely forgotten today, as the whole war is treated as just a run-up to WWII, but anyone who wants to learn more about the role of propaganda and "opinion management" in the modern democratic state should carefully study that period.

The British had a significant propaganda operation intended to demonize the Germans, and they were especially active in the US where they hoped to encourage the US to enter into the war on Britain's side (and to counter the perceived influence of pacificists plus the German- and Irish-American communities.) The Brits promoted a great deal of anti-German atrocity propaganda at home and abroad - stories of mass rape and pillage, summary executions, etc. It was only after the war when Arthur Ponsonby published a lovely little book entitled Falsehoods in Wartime (available for free online) in which much of the atrocity propaganda was exposed as mostly lies - including the widespread claim, promoted by British intelligence services, that the Germans usedcorpse factories in which the bodies of dead troops were rendered to make glycerine, oil, and pig fodder. And thus, it was only after WWI that the term propaganda became pejorative term - prior to that, it was considered to be neutral.

(An interesting sidenote: one of my favorite WWI propaganda ploys by the British intended to demonize the Germans was the Lusitania Medal ploy - which shows how convoluted - and yet effective - WWI propaganda could get. The British exploited the Lusitania's sinking to bring the US into the war. Generations later, according to a disgruntled former CIA employee, a similar ploy was used by the US to demonize the North Vietnamese in the eyes of the US public, except using a stamp instead of a medal. According to Philip Liechty, a former CIA operations officer in Indonesia, the CIA and State Department printed large numbers of the fake postage stamps showing a North Vietnamese soldier shooting down a US Army helicopter. The stamps were supposedly printed by the North Vietnamese. They were placed on letters written in Vietnamese, and were then mailed all over the world. The CIA then made sure journalists would get hold of the letters. A copy of the stamp was featured on the cover of Life Magazine's issue of February 26 1965 and identified as a "North Vietnamese stamp". A few days later, the State Department issued a White Paper accusing the North Vietnamese government of being "aggressors". Thus, the public mind was being prepped for an attack on Vietnam. Ironically, a couple of these stamps were found in the possession of Malcolm X's body after he was assassinated. No one knows why or how he got them.)

In the US, President Woodrow Wilson had been elected into office on an platform which opposed US entry in the war. However, once in office he changed his mind, and had to figure out a way to convince the public to support US participation in the war. To do so, he created the Comittee on Public Education (aka Creel Committee or CPI) which was tasked with the goal of "selling" the war to the people. (The similarity of the Creel Committee's mission to the Office of Special Plans is not accidental.)

In trying to sell the war to the people, the Creel Committee had a tough prospect ahead. As Timothy Glander wrote in Origins of Mass Communications Research during the American Cold War:

That there was a need to create consensus, stifle opposition, and generally manufacture enthusiasm for the war when it was declared on April 6, 1917, was obvious to many who sat in the upper echelons of power. They knew that total mobilization for a modern technological war required not only a generation of young men who would willingly risk their lives for the stated war objectives, but also a population on the home front who would staff the industrial war machine and accept great personal and economic hardship. The Wilson administration knew that it was not about to garner such support for its war aims by remaining idle. Indeed, 6 weeks after the declaration of war, only 73,000 men volunteered for military service, although 1 million were needed.

It is often claimed that the Creel Committee was the first formally-created domestic propaganda apparatus in the US. The members of the commitee included top level businessmen, artists, journalists and more importantly, people like Edward Bernays author of Propaganda and one of the founders of what was then a new field - Public Relations. It also included Walter Lippmann, a well-known American journalist and author of Public Opinion - one of the first books on the topic of government role in shaping mass opinion (and highly recommended reading.)

The Creel Committee was more than just an apparatus used to sell a war. It was part of a historical trend, in which Big Government and Big Business had taken an active role, using the newly-developed mass communications technologies such as radio, in shaping public opinion for the supposed benefit of the public, using the latest scientific means to measure - and then manipulate - mass opinion. It wasn't just the Right and Fascists who believed that the people had to be "led" - Progressives like Creel himself were strong proponents of the necessity of "educating" the public. (Indeed, after the war, Big Business adopted many of the tactics and methods of the Creel Committee for its own benefit.) At the same period, the evolving field of psychology had challenged the Enlightenment idea that humans were rational beings, capable of self-rule (Bernays, one of the members of the Creel Committee and one of the founders of the field of public relations was a nephew and proponent of Freud.)

See, starting from the turn of the 20th century, a certain view of the role of the mass public in democracy had been gaining ground - a view that was later to be known as "Democratic Elitism" (see Peter Bachrach's book, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique) Sociologists and political writers had come to believe that that people were fundamentally irrational, and that the rise of the mass society and mass opinion presented a danger to society itself, and so public opinion had to be controlled and directed using effective domestic propaganda and PR techniques. (See Gustav LeBon's The Crowd, Robert Michels's The Iron Law of Oligarchy, and works by Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, and Politics: who gets what, when and how by Harold Dwight Lasswell.)

In summary, the concept of Democratic Elitism states:

1- The "tradition" Madisonian version of democracy - according to which elected representatives carry out the "will of the people", was untrue and not workable since the people were simply a herd that had no "will" and were not qualified to run a country based on their mass sentiment anyway (but it was a useful legitimizing myth and so it was to be maintained as a cover.) Running a country is too complicated and the people are too short-sighted/irrational to rule themselves. If left uncontrolled, public opinion represents a danger to goverment and the people themselves.

2- Democratic systems will inevitably be dominated by elites who will rise up based on their ability to manipulate public opinion in their favor (one of the characteristics of elites is that they're "symbols specialists".) The elites arise through a selective process to ensure that they have the necessary training/background/specialized knowledge to set the country's policies.

3- It is the responsibility of the elites is to formulate policies, and to sell these policies to the people using propadanda techniques, making the people believe that the selected policies actually represented their views. This is known as the process of the "manufacture of consent" (a term associated with Chomsky - but in fact first coined by Walter Lippmann)

4- The role of the people in a democracy is only to elect which elites will dominate them. This system will work as long as there is a "circulation of elites" which ensures that those who are most competent in selling their policies to the public will rise to the top and that corrupted/incompetent elites will fall from power.

Now if this sounds familiar, it is because the intellectual fathers of "Neoconservatism" - people like Leo Strauss and Joseph Schumpeter - subscribed to the same views as the Democratic Elitists. Schumpeter has a oft-quoted passage in his book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:

"[D]emocracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms 'people' and 'rule.' Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them."

Anyway, the Creel Committee was quite succesful in selling the war to the people. Remember "Freedom Fries" If yes, then some of this may sound familiar:

Creel did his job so well that people went a little nuts in their hatred of Germany and things German. German books were burned, the name sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage," hamburgers became "liberty steaks" and frankfurters were replaced by "victory sausages." Stores with German names were sometimes boycotted and broken into, and owners were attacked.

Berlin, Iowa, changed its name to Lincoln, while East Germantown, Ind., became Pershing. Banks, hotels and other businesses with German in their names soon found new identities. Statues of Schiller, Beethoven, Heine and other icons of German culture were defaced. In Texas, the governor tried to fire all aliens on the faculty of the state university, while the College of the City of New York reduced by one point the credit value of each course in the Department of German.

But after the war, there was a period of disillusionment when many of the propaganda lies were finally exposed by the likes of Ponsonby. The disillusionment the the post-WWI period with the preceived influence of propaganda led to the creation of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which claimed a role in educating the public to be identify and resist propaganda. However, the Institute was short-lived, and the last of its members withdrew after it was accused of 'pacificism' in the face of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. With the entry of the US into WWII, war propaganda was back like never before - and this time, not only was Hollywood recruited into the Pentagon's propaganda business (where it remains today) but the government started funding formal research into the pscyhology of propaganda.

I'll end this longish restatement of the history of propaganda in the US here - I recommend reading Origins of Mass Communications Research during the Cold War plus the sources cited in the "additional reading" section below for more information.

In Part II of this post, I will deal with two questions:

1- Can Bush sell us another war?

2- Is there some fundamental flaw in the American legal/political system that allows the government to manipulate the public?

(More reading: The First Casualty by Phillip Knightley, Munitions of the Mind by Philip Taylor, Information War by Nancy Snow,, etc)

Tony Karon agrees with me!

Tony Karon has a blog entry in which he makes several points thatseem to agree with several previous posts of mine - for example, that the range of of choices available to the US in dealing with Iran's nuclear program is being artificially restricted in order to justify a war:

The idea that Iran enriching uranium is a “red line” is not questioned. An irreversible slide to war in the U.S. is being carefully constructed by those who are out to persuade the American public that if Tehran refuses to run up a white flag, military action — unfortunate as it may be — becomes essential.

Yay! Someone more famous than me and with a more popular blog gets what I've been saying all along!
I can go do some fishing now.

Clinton-Obama on Iran

So presidential candidate Obama once said he'd talk to the Iranians without preconditions. Senator Hillary Clinton, another presidential candidate, castigated him for his "lack of experience" . . . but has now said that she too would talk to Iran without preconditions and has supported bill that AIPAC opposes - all leading to the usual charges of flip-flopping.

And, quite predictably, the Israeli Right is complaining about that loudly since they don't want the US and Iran to talk at all and instead would prefer the US to attack Iran on their behalf.

This is all the usual stuff - not really worth blogging about. Except that it reminds me of how the Israelis complained being "stabbed in the back" when a British minister had the audacity to visit Iran and talk to the Iranians about cooperating in the build-up to the invasion of Afghanistan.

Despite what the Israeli Right claims, there are plenty of examples of fruitful cooperation with Iran once talks are held between the countries - such as Iran's cooperation with the US/UK in the invasion of Afghanistan (which the CIA would prefer not be discussed.) But the Israelis weren't happy about that either, and so they manufactured the "Karin-A" incident which put an end to US/UK talks with Iran, and Bush later smearing of Iran as an "Axis of Evil".

So, I suppose any time now, they'll manufacture an incident or find some other way to bring Hillary and Obama back into the "lets bomb Iran yesterday" camp.

Iranians are not that different

Despite the bluster of the hate-mongering Right, there is no fundamental difference between the world's major civilizations, and we all have more in common than any of us may realize.

The insane, hate-blinded Right in Washington insist that "those people" (meaning Muslims/Iranians/Middle Easterners/brown people, etc.) are "fundamentally different" from "us" and pose a threat to "our" civilization akin to Communism and Nazism etc. etc.

They'd be surprised how much "our" civilization shares with "their" civilization. In fact, not only is the English word for paradise originally a Persian word (as are other words such as angel, lemon, julep, and pyjamas) the very concept of the "good" versus "evil" that Bush and his warmongers constantly expound upon originated elsewhere: the Christian doctrines of the dualistic cosmic struggle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light (and the concept of a freedom to choose between the two) as well as resurrection and the Final Judgment, originated with the ancient Iranian religion called Zoroastrianism and was introduced into Christianity through Judaism. In fact, it was probably Zoroastrianism that introduced the concept of a single Supreme God into Christianity - while other religions at the time believed in a single God, they largely thought were multiple gods for different peoples but only their own was the supreme one. Several biblical sites from those days are located in modern Iran - including the graves of Daniel and Ester & Mordechai in Susa - along with the oldest Jewish community in the Mideast.

Reverend Hagee, a fundamentalist Christian right-wing pro-Israeli evangelist who is embraced by AIPAC and the Bush administration and who regularly urges Bush to attack Iran for the sake of Israel, would be surprised that Iranians were there at the birth of what he considers to be the Son of God. Iran is cited several times in the Bible and especially the old Testament since the Persian king, Cyrus, founder of a vast empire which long pre-dated Rome, had freed the Jews from Bablyon. Long before the Pony Express laid the foundation of the American postal sytem, communication in the Persian Empire was maintained through a system of roads used by messengers. According to Herodotus, "Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" . . . the motto of the modern US postal system. The Cyrus Cylinder was also issued at this time - the first universal declaration of human rights, predating the Magna Carta by a thousand years.

In fact, most Americans would be surprised to learn that every year when they celebrate Christmas, they're actually celebrating Persian religious concepts and traditions. The "Three Magi" who visited the infant Christ, for example, are Persian religious priests (historically, the Magi were Zoroastrian priests, and the Three Magi who visited Christ are said to be buried in Iran somewhere.) Mithraism, another ancient Persian religion, is said to be the origin of the other Christian concepts and Christmas traditions: Mithra was also born of a virgin, on December 25th, had twelve followers, was killed and then resurrected etc. - all from Mithras. The Romans adopted their own version of Mithraism, and took it as far away as London, where today you too can visit a temple dedicated to a Persian prophet.

To this day, when Christians around the world - including in Iran at places like the Vank Cathedral (built 1606 AD) - are preparing to celebtrate the birth of Christ, the people of Iran celebrate the Winter Solstice, marking end of the longest nighte and the "birth of light" in a celebration knowns as Shab-e Yalda.

On Shabe Yalda, Iranians eat many foods that would be quite familiar to most Americans - but which originated in Iran. Pistachios and walnuts came from Iran, as does spinach. Wine was perhaps first made in Iran. Whenever you eat apricots, eggplants, melons, lemons, lime, oranges, saffron or tarragon, you're eating foods that were introduced to the West from Iran. And when guests bring you tulips or red roses . . . yes, both came from Iran. But of course, since then the world's cuisines (and cultures) have intermingled quite a bit, and today a visitor to Iran can enjoy a pizza or hamburger in a shopping mall, after a nice ski trip or paintball.

But perhaps the most interesting food item which is said to come from Iran is . . . ice cream. Long before ice cream became the "Great American Dessert" - and long before America was even discovered - the Persians were eating sweet frozen deserts that evolved into modern ice cream. But there's more to it than that - see, the Iranians could have ice in the hot summer times because they invented something else too: refrigeration. The built vast pits in the ground called yakhchals that were used to store winter ice and snow well into the hot summers. The structures were built with special mortar and bricks (bricks were first used in Iran too incidentally) to be waterproof. The Iranians also invented something else that most Americans would be quite familiar with: air conditioning, using a system of windcatchers or "badgirs" that cooled homes - and are still used in the hotter desert cities in Iran such as in Yazd. Badgirs worked by moving air over a cool source of water that was brought into the cities using another Iranian invention - an underground aquaduct system known as qanats. Oh, and while they were at it, they also invented the windmill.

I could keep on going and talk about the mounted knight, pants, chess and algebra - and many more things which appeared in Iran long before the West etc - but I'll leave it here. Note this important disclaimer: Of course many of the things mentioned on this post may have not actually originated in Iran but instead may have come from China or India, and were developed/evolved further as they passed through Iran and came to the West. That's fine with me - the civilizations of China and India have a long, long historical association with Persia, and I'm not one of the nationalist types who proclaim that everything was invented by one particular place/country. Nothing was ever invented totally from scratch anyway - rather, ideas simply evolve over time and the historical accident that a person of a particular ethniciy/nationality came up with an idea does not necessarily credit that person's government or country as the inventor, in my opinion.

My point in this post, however, is that the Rightwing hate-mongers who claim that we are all fundamentally "different" and doomed to have a "clash of civilizations" are simply ignorant, and do not realize just how closely all of our civilizations are entwined with each other.

Soccer & Israel, No to "Democracy Promotion" etc.

According to Iranian sources, what Iranian President Ahmadinejad meant on the topic of gays in Iran when he said during this speech in Columbia that "we don't have this phenomenon as you do" was that there was no large, activists gay culture in Iran - not that Iran was gay-free.

Trita Parsi's article "Iran - the Inflatable Bogey" is highly recommended, especially in light of reports on how
Bibi Netanyahu and shadowy right-wing groups are gaining power in Israel. Netanyahu has made a point of claiming - repeatedly - that Iran represents the same threat as an ascendant Nazi Germany did in 1938 - which is not only a laughable comparison by any standard (Iran's military budget is dwarfed by Saudi Arabia's) but contradict's Netanyahu's own actual views on Iran, according to Trita Parsi. Rightwingers understand how fear and scaremongering can be a source of power.

Iranian human rights groups in the US have banded together and asked the US Congress to get rid of the so-called "Democracy Promotion Fund". As I have written before, several prominent Iranian dissidents have criticized the Bush administration's "Democracy Promotion" scheme because it amounts to a "Kiss of Death" which taints the Iranian opposition activists as agents of a foreign power, and so ultimately harms true democracy promotion in Iran. Instead, the dissidents themselves say democracy promotion can best be served by greater US-Iran engagement. But, the NeoCons and Iran hawks have dismissed the criticism by the Iranian dissidents. Why? Because they don't really care about democracy promotion (note there's no Democracy Promotion Fund for Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Azerbaijan - all US allies.) Rather, what they want is to place precisely such obstacles in any potential US-Iran engagement which could come at the expense of Israel.

An Iranian-born member of a German soccer team has decided to skip a game in Israel - and is being vilified as a racist anti-Semite. The fact that Ashkan Dejagah is a Muslim (or so it is said) and an immigrant has contributed to the vituperation against him, complete with the usual "Love it or leave it" bigotry. Of course, had the same soccer player refused to play in, say, Apartheid-era South Africa, he would have been hailed as a hero and there would be no talk abut how sports & politics shouldn't mix etc.

Background on the "State Secrecy Privilege"

A few news articles are talking about the el-Masri case but they're not telling the full story. Here's the background and context that's missing:

Today the US Supreme Court refused to consider an appeal brought by Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped by US intelligence agents and "renditioned" to Afghanistan where he was tortured. He was finally let go in Albania, and his entire experience was chalked up to a simple case of mistaken identity. Masri filed a lawsuit in the US courts, but the US government demaned that his claimed be dismissed, on the grounds that pursuit of the lawsuit would result in disclosure of national security information. And so it was. Similar fates had befallen other people too - like Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was seized by US government officials on false grounds and tortured in Syria. His case was also simply dismissed by the US courts because the US government invoked the "State Secrecy Privilege". The Bush administration has used the claim of "national security" to dismiss dozens of lawsuits against it.

You see, according the "State Secrets Privilege" principle, the US government can simply refuse to respond to any claims brought against it if, in the sole and unfettered opinion of the government officials, the lawsuit could result in the disclosure of national security information. Once the government invokes that privilege, judges are simply required to dismiss the lawsuit, no matter what. All the government lawyers have to do is utter the words "State Secrets Privilege", and all legal proceedings come to screeching halt. And no, judges do not have any power to independently determine whether there is in fact any substance to the government's secrecy claims.

How did such a principle become accepted in the US legal system?

Most of the news articles on these Arar and Masri cases will tell you that the "State Secrecy Privilege" started during the Cold War, when the Supreme Court ruled (in the case of United States v. Reynolds) that the relatives of civilian airplane engineers who were killed in the crash of an Air Force B-29 bomber in 1948, were not entitled to see the information on the airplane and its mechanical systems since that could risk exposing national security secrets - and so the widows of the engineers could not sue the government for the wrongful death of their spouses.

That much is certainly true - but they don't tell you the rest of the story.

You see, the children of the deceased engineers attempted to obtain the accident report for years, by filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act. These requests were routinely denied by the government, on national security grounds. However, purely by accident, one of the deceased engineers' relatives discovered the "secret" accident report on a website, since it had been declassified in 2000. When, after fifty years, the relatives of the dead engineers finally obtained the hitherto "secret" accident report from the webiste, they discovered that - surprise, surprise! - the accident report did not contain any "state secret" information as the government had claimed. The government had simply tried to hide the report, not because it contained any "secrets" but because the government didn't want to disclose embarrassing information on how and why the airplane crashed.

The relatives of the dead engineers tried to have the case re-opened. And just as in the el-Masri case the US Supreme Court simply refused to reopen the case. And, the Bush administration has used this "secrecy" privilege to dimiss all sorts of other suits too.

In short, today in the United States of America, innocent people are being picked up and tortured, and no one is being held accountable.

People are dying in airplane accidents that are blatantly covered-up by the government - and no one is held accountable.

The government is abusing claims to 'national security' in order to hide and cover-up important matters - and no one is being held accountable.

Sadly, this is just on small indicator the state of affairs in the US today.

Now how much credibility does this administration have when they shake a finger at Iran and accuse the Iranian government of violating human rights?

Useful links of the day

Some interesting reading . . .

Senator Clinton got snippy with a potential voter who dared question her position on the topic of Iran. When will the voters learn not to question their candidates, and instead just leave it to AIPAC to set the policy?

I highly recommend reading Trita Parsi's new book, Treacherous Alliance. If you don't read this, along with Walt & Mearsheimer's book on the Israel Lobby, you just don't know what's going on in US-Iran relations and are not qualified to have an opinion, let along express it - it is that simple.

The Project on Defense Alternatives has a rather thorough set of links on Iran related matters (including a link to my article on the Rhetoric of War which appeared in Global Dialogue, but not a link to my article in Le Monde diplomatique. Nor is Mr Mousavian's article from Global Dialogue included, which I have just recently posted online.

MuzzleWatch keeps track of the pro-Israeli lobby's efforts to silence critics of Israeli policies.

The Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security has a collection of links and documents of the Iran nuclear issue. Of particular note should be the text of the Paris Agreement, which I have discussed in another post.

The Chicago Tribune has an article about new revelations regarding the USS Liberty incident, in which Israe attacked a US naval vessel. This follows on Capt. Ward Boston's allegations that President Lyndon Johnson instructed the Navy to cover up the attack. This wasn't the first time that Israel attacked US assets, of course: see the Lavon Affair.

Remember when Bush wanted to bomb the offices of Al-Jazeera news agency?

And finally a thank you to Newshoggers for blogrolling IranAffairs.com

Iran and Israel - understanding the dynamics

The real threat that Iran poses to Israel is that Iran and the US may start to get along, thus undermining Israel's strategic value to the US and creating an obstacle to Israel's regional ambitions. Promoting emnity between the US and Iran also gives the pro-Israeli lobby a reason to exist, even though it is contrary to broader US interests.

By now you're quite familar with the standard trope in which Iran, the crazed fundamentalist regime, is supposedly seeking nuclear weapons in order to pose an 'existential' threat to Israel.

This is a convenient way to frame the issue, because among other things is perpetuates the mythology of Israel as the underdog victim, facing down a sea of irrationally hostile neighbors. That's why the Israeli propagandists make a particular effort at locating and magnifying any statements from Iranian officials that they can characterize as being threatening to Israel - for example the alleged statement by Ahmadinejad (the New Hitler, we are told) about "wiping out" Israel - now thoroughly debunked but still often repeated. The mythology of Israel as the always-victim was never true of course, as even Israeli historians now acknowledge - nor is it an accurate representation of the Israel-Iran dynamics either.

The real threat to Israel: US-Iran engagement
What is the real nature of the threat that Iran poses to Israel? Is it that Iran is going to drop a nuke on Israel? No. According to Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, Israel has often gotten along and cooperated with Iran when it suited their interests. In fact, when AIPAC was pushing for US sanctions laws on Iran that prohibited American companies from doing business with Iran, Israel was busy doing business with Iran through Turkey. The danger that Iran poses to Israel is not that Iran may one day decide to nuke Israel - the Iranians are not about to get into a sucidal nuclear exchange with anyone - no matter how hard the Israelis try to portray Iranians as crazed fundamentalists. Rather, the real danger posed by Iran to Israel is that Iran and the US may start to get along, leaving Israel out in the cold, threatening Israel's strategic value to the US, and posing an obstacle to Israel's domination of the Middle East. A secure, economically-stable Iran - which has the benefit of nuclear energy to power its economy in the future and is perceived as being technologically advanced - plus Iran's strategic position and relatively well-educated population of 75 million potential consumers of US goods, added to many other factors - all would pose too much of a temptation to the US to start to warm up to Iran - especially now that the Cold War is over and Israel's strategic utility to the US is severely diminished (assuming Israel was ever a strategic asset during the Cold War in the first place.)

As Trita has written,

"[I]t wasn’t Iran that turned the Israeli-Iranian cold war warm – it was Israel . . . The Israeli reversal on Iran was partially motivated by the fear that its strategic importance would diminish significantly in the post-cold war middle east if the then president (1989-97) Hashemi Rafsanjani’s outreach to the Bush Sr
administration was successful."

And so,

Israeli politicians began painting the regime in Tehran as fanatical and irrational. Clearly, they maintained, finding an accommodation with such “mad mullahs” was a non-starter. Instead, they called on the US to classify Iran, along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as a rogue state that needed to be “contained.”

The Iran-Bashing Industry
Israel's characterization of Iran as an irrational threat that has to be contained rather than engaged has had the added benefit of providing a raison d'etre for the hardline pro-Israeli lobby in the US.

By 1993, with the end of the Cold War and the start of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process under Rabin, AIPAC had lost its purpose and was in a tailspin due to a series of scandals. It had essentially broken off from the Labor government in Israel over the peace process, and had alienated Bush I administration too. AIPAC's swing to the hardline Right had also alienated a good chunk of the Jewish community in the US and had raised quite a bit of ire & controversey all around: by its attempts to impose its hawkish views on the Washington Jewish Week; disclosure by the Village Voice in Aug 92 that a unit of AIPAC had investigated and harassed dovish Jewish peace groups; leaked memos of how AIPAC intended to discredit figures such as Jerome Segal of the Jewish Peace Lobby, Jim Zogby and Jesse Jackson; Rabin explicitly telling AIPAC to back off; Shamir's conflict with Bush I over loan guarantees, etc - all made worse by a series of other scandals and in-fighting which led to the resignations of top AIPAC officials like Thomas Dine, David Steiner, and Harvey Friedman... In fact in June 1993, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin explicitly stated that AIPAC was a right-wing lobby that represented neither his government nor the views of the American Jewish public.

But then came the issue of Iran's award of a lucrative oil contract to Conoco as an opening gesture to the US. It was a Godsend to AIPAC, which rallied hard behind sanctions legislation along with Senator Alfonse D'Amato. With the election of Netanyahu and Indyk's "Dual Containment" policy in ascendance, AIPAC got back in business as never before, and they went to town over Iran, pushing harder and harder on primary then secondary sanctions legislation. Now they've gone completely overboard and are overtly embracing the likes of Rev Hagee who explicitly calls for an apocalyptic war on Iran.

In short, with the end of the Cold War and the renewal of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, AIPAC needed a reason to exist & a "threat" to rally around - and they found Iran. As Walt & Mearsheimer have written:

In addition to this tendency for those with more extreme views to back and dominate key organizations in the lobby, there is another reason that many pro-Israeli groups have moved rightward: to keep contributions flowing in. As Waxman notes, "Many American Jewish organizations now need Israel to legitimate their own existence. Although these organizations may have been established for the purpose of enhancing and strengthening Israel, today Israel is vital for their continued viability." Portraying Israel as beleaguered and vulnerable, and issuing dire warnings about continued or growing anti-Semitism helps maintain a high level of concern among political supporters and thus helps ensure these organizations' continued existence.

And what is the natural conclusion of this sort of policy of "no engagement with Iran" ?

Although it makes good strategic sense for the United States and Iran to pursue a grand bargain, and although there is plenty of suport for that policy inside and outside of America, it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Israel and the lobby will almost certainly try to thwart any efforts to seriously engage Iran before they get started, as they have consistently done since 1993...If the United States does launch an attack, it wll be doing so in part on Israel's behalf, and the lobby will bear significant responsibility for having pushed this dangerous policy. And it would not be in America's national interest.

So now you know.

Bush official: "I hate all Iranians . . . and, I'm a vampire!"

Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, has declared:

I hate all Iranians . . . and, I can turn into a blood-sucking bat!.

Has Halloween come early or something? Man, just when you think the Bush administration can't get any kookier, you discover that some Nazi's fantasy of a crinkly old dominatrix with a David Bowie/Nazi/Vampire fetish is influencing US foreign policy. Is that the Iron Cross around her neck? Do you think Gates is hitting that? (*shiver*)

I vant to suck your bllooooooood!