Bolton seems to believe that everything in the world can be fixed by nuking Iran .... economy, environment, jobs, acne, .....
Really, why on earth did we develop the A bomb if we weren't going to use it and show the world we're total badasses?
Because that was their intent all along... Iraq was supposed to be easy. They were going to pop out Hussein and pop in Chalabi and then be sitting pretty to start a real war with Iran.
And they're making sure the next crop of neocons gets the message:
And even some non-neocons seem to think nuking Iran would fix everything.
They're already planning to blame Obama for everything that goes wrong because he DIDN'T nuke Iran when he had the chance.
Talking about nuclear weapons, watching them being used in movies, reading about them breaks the strong taboo of actually using them. The PNAC supports this view.
The U.S. is closer than it has been since Nagasaki to using nuclear weapons again. This year, for the first time in its history, the American Physical Society, representing 40,000 members of the profession that created nuclear weapons, issued a statement of deep concern on this matter: "The American Physical Society is deeply concerned about the possible use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states and for preemptive counter-proliferation purposes."
In the case of Iraq, our adversary was so weak that there was no way the use of nuclear weapons could have been justified in the eyes of the world. Iran is different: it possesses missiles that could strike U.S. forces in Iraq and the Persian Gulf, as well as Israeli cities. Iran also has a large conventional army. The 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq will be at great risk if there is a war with Iran, and Americans will support a nuclear strike on Iran once the administration creates a situation where it can argue that such action will save a large number of American lives.
Rumsfeld is gone and I've heard the drum beat to attack Iran fade from the news, but it doesn't mean the Bush/Cheney threat has gone.
May we survive these next five months without Bush and Cheney starting WWIII until the swearing in of President Obama.
Update 8/28: Lukery at Against All Enemies reports that Judith Miller is helping keep the war drums going by reporting only on the dangers of nukes in Iran, cherry-picking facts and ignoring every other country involved in trying to get a nuclear bomb.
Isn't it interesting that we haven't heard this term being used recently? The actual reason why the Cold War didn't devolve into a real World War? The fact that it actually worked?
Besides discussing the horrific and mind-boggling numbers of how many people would actually die if Israel and Iran had a nuclear war, Julian Delasantellis at Asia Times reminds us: (my bold)
The success of deterrence is intimately related to the nature of politics and politicians. From their days in short pants, the world's leaders have dreamt of possessing power and dominion over millions of their fellow citizens; whether they do so through democratic or other means is only a question related to the random chance of what nation they were born in.
After they assume ultimate national power, after a lifetime of political striving and ambition, those who say that deterrence does not work are, in essence, saying that these leaders will put some abstract hatred or ideology above the lives and interests of their fellow citizens who put them into power. The countering argument to this is that you can't rule a country if there's no country to rule.
Reading the article, it is clear that Iran and especially Tehran would suffer the worst from any kind of nuclear attack on Israel or any other neighbor.
And as Bush has shown these last horrible eight years, he ignores, insults, maligns those countries he calls allies; he threatens, strong-arms, smears those countries he calls evil; and ... he negotiates with those who are armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.
So any tinpot dictator has quickly put two and two together, and has proceeded to move heaven and earth and a few centrifuges to develop nuclear weapons.
Iran has been in the cross-hairs of the Bush cabal (and it makes me wonder if they had been aiming for Iran all along if the Iraq War had taken Rumsfeld's projected six weeks...) So it's natural that Iran would do the logical thing and get nukes. Especially after being called one of the axis of evil. Especially because of the ever louder saber-rattling that this White House has been doing.
It's also interesting to note Cheney and Wolfowitz were involved in an earlier deal:
President Gerald R. Ford signs a presidential directive giving the Iranian government the opportunity to purchase a US-built nuclear reprocessing facility...
[snip] (my bold)
The shah has argued that Iran needs a nuclear energy program in order to meet Iran’s growing energy demand. Iran is known to have massive oil and gas reserves, but the shah considers these finite reserves too valuable to be spent satisfying daily energy needs. In a 1975 strategy paper, the Ford administration supported this view saying that “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.” Top officials in the Ford administration—including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, who is responsible for nonproliferation issues at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency—are strong supporters of Iran’s ambitions.
Interesting that the very people involved in the control of nonproliferation then are the ones now so very anxious to break the taboo and actually use nukes.
And somehow the magic wand will have fixed Iraq and its multiple civil wars, caught Osama, stomped on al-Qaeda, and spread the sparkily happy dust of democracy on everybody:
Republican presidential nominee John McCain today predicted that most US forces would withdraw from Iraq by 2013, after having helped shape the country into a "functioning democracy".
McCain's remarks, given in a speech in Columbus, Ohio, represent a turnaround from his widely publicised statement that US troops could be in that country for one hundred years, and could blunt Democrats' efforts to portray him as favouring long-term US engagement there.
"By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom," the Arizona senator said.
He described his hopes for the scenario in the country by the end of his first term in office: "The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering form the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension."
Amazing! Sounds cool!
But ... just HOW are you going to achieve this happy state of affairs, Senator McCain? With our broken military? With the Taliban ascendant in Afghanistan and Pakistan? With Saudi Arabia funding the Sunnis and al-Qaeda? With Iran funding and supporting the Shiites? With the fighting factions within each of these militias? Just how will you do this?
Are you going to attack Iran?
Just how many wars are you planning to start?
Or are you planning to stay in Iraq because of Vietnam?:
But the truth is that it's always about Vietnam for John McCain. He has invoked avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam with a sort of religious fervor in every important debate about dispatching U.S. troops since he first entered Congress in 1983. As he put it in an Aug. 18, 1999, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he studies "every prospective conflict for the shadow of Vietnam." In fact, a look at his record shows that he subjects every major foreign-policy decision to a Vietnam-derived test similar to the famed Powell doctrine, a test summed up by the McCain quote, "We're in it, now we must win it."
So entrenched are those lessons that McCain sounds, at times, like he wishes they could be applied retroactively. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said at a speech on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 5, 2003. And for that reason, it might be advisable to take him at his word when he says he'll stay in Iraq for 100 years. Whether Vietnam is the prism through which he judges national security decisions, or the rationale he uses to explain whatever position he decides to take -- and even if the lessons he says he's learned from Vietnam often seem contradictory -- he has applied his Vietnam test to Iraq and come up with the decision to stay.
If we never leave, we will never have to admit defeat, right?
Earlier this week, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said God told him who will win the 2008 presidential election. “He told me some things about the election, but I’m not going to say,” he said.
Last night, Robertson appeared on Hannity and Colmes. When asked by Alan Colmes whether God had spoken to him about the election outcome, Robertson said he was “a little shaky on it” and was “not sure.” But Robertson then implied God told him a Democrat would win the White House:
COLMES: You said that you convene with God on a regular basis. You go into deep prayer and mediation, and you just recently say to you was revealed who would be the winner in November. Is that correct?
ROBERTSON: I felt so. But I’m a little shaky on it and I didn’t want to say anything about it publicly. I’m not sure I heard from the Lord. And if I did, I hope I heard wrong.
A 'little shaky', Mr. Robertson? What about that scary prediction about a nuclear attack in 2007? You're a little more than shaky... maybe you should cut back on those Jesus protein drinks....
But try and calculate this: What if your house, your county, your country is destroyed by weather, water, war, terrorist acts, nukes? What rights do you have?
What if the rest of the world did not want you? Where would you go? You are the new 'climate refugees'.
Introducing the Tuvalu islands:
International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists. Shuuichi Endou is photographing every single citizen in a country. It may sound ludicrous but it is entirely plausible. After all, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu only has about 11,000 inhabitants, and the 41-year-old Japanese photographer has already captured the images of the 340 people who live on the Nukulaelae atoll. By the time next year's G-8 Summit in Japan rolls around, the other 10,500 portraits should be finished. Endou wants to use them to give the rich and powerful a jolt, so that they finally understand the need to reduce emissions and stop global warming.
The photographs of the Tuvaluans are meant to give climate change a human face. They are a people whose country is doomed to disappear. The group of islands lies just 10 centimeters (roughly four inches) above sea level; if the average sea level continues to rise, in just 50 years there will be nothing here but waves.
Some of the islands are already uninhabitable; the ocean nibbles at the narrow landmass from all sides. Nine islands totaling just 26 square kilometers (10 square miles) in area make up the fourth-smallest country in the world. There's hardly any industry, no military, few cars and just eight kilometers of paved roads.
The majority of the people make their living from fishing and agriculture. The country is so small that there is only a rough division of labor, with people acting as cooks and captains, ice cream salesmen and politicians.
Environmentalists have long worried about the fate of this tiny Pacific state. Now, however, international legal experts have also taken up the topic of its imminent demise. A nation's "territorial integrity" is one of the paramount legal principles. It's unprecedented, however, for a country to completely lose its territory without the use of military force.
If we realized that all of us are on this planet together, that working together benefits all of us rather than killing each other for resources and space, it truly would be a wonderful world:
I have made fun of Osama bin Laden but his intent and his threats are real. Pygalgia has done a translation of Osama's last video and offers a sobering assessment:
Now to the threat. In this tape, bin Laden urges America to convert to Islam and also refers to Hiroshima. This is the third time he has done so (he did so in the 2003 and 2004 tapes). Under Islamic law, you must offer your enemy three chances to convert prior to attacking them. Bin Laden did the same in 1996, 1998, and 2000 prior to the attacks of 9/11, so there is a consistent pattern. Bin Laden has said that nuclear war is a different form of war, so this third offer to convert in conjunction with mentioning nuclear warfare means that he has declared that a nuclear attack is now on the table. Most of the "experts" are quick to dismiss bin Laden's statements as "fanatical ravings" and "propaganda", which they most certainly are. But he's been very consistent in patterning his rhetoric in a way to justify his war as being in compliance with Islamic law (at least in his mind. I'll leave to Islamic scholars to debate the truth of his justification). I have conveyed my analysis to the FBI, and while I'm sure they think I'm a crackpot, they said they will "look into it". I'm not reassured.
Duct tape and plastic wrap won't help if he pulls this off...
WASHINGTON - Although the Bush administration has warned repeatedly about the threat of a terrorist nuclear attack and spent more than $300 billion to protect the homeland, the government remains ill-prepared to respond to a nuclear catastrophe.
Experts and government documents suggest that, absent a major preparedness push, the U.S. response to a mushroom cloud could be worse than the debacle after Hurricane Katrina, possibly contributing to civil disorder and costing thousands of lives.
"The United States is unprepared to mitigate the consequences of a nuclear attack," Pentagon analyst John Brinkerhoff concluded in a July 31, 2005, draft of a confidential memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We were unable to find any group or office with a coherent approach to this very important aspect of homeland security. ...
"This is a bad situation. The threat of a nuclear attack is real, and action is needed now to learn how to deal with one."
After the article lists what HASN"T been done and what dangers the population faces if there were a nuclear bomb, it finishes:
Brinkerhoff wrote that people could build their own radiation-proof shelters if the government engaged in "large-scale civil defense planning" and gave them meters and dosimeters to monitor the radiation.
Since there hasn't been "any enthusiasm to address this kind of preparedness," Brinkerhoff concluded, the only choice for most people would be to flee.
Bush's Department of Homeland Security's defense plan: Run Away!!!
According to Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov of the Argumenty Nedeli, we’re launching an assault on Iran on April 6th in a massive, 12 hour air strike called Operation Bite. Of course, this story, while it may be fairly new (March 25th), is hardly news. I’ve been saying for months now that we’re going to hit Iran anytime now and Global Research and the Arab Times have been saying the same thing since at least the middle of January. What’s notable is that the April date has remained intact all this time, which indicates a specific timetable and an unshakable, longstanding agenda.
Don't forget Bush's naming of Admiral William "Fox" Fallon to replace Gen. John Abizaid as head honcho at the Central Command early this year. At first it looked to be yet another bizarre, inappropriate appointment by our bizarre preznit until one re-examined Fallon's biography a bit more closely and realized that he was exactly the sort of guy that Bush would need for an air/naval war with Iran.
The news is out there, all indications are there that Bush and Cheney want this to happen. Mark your calendars, call your congressperson, dig your bombshelter, hold on to your ass. This could get very interesting.
Looks like the Iranian laptop found with nuclear program related activities was oddly written all in English. No Farsi anywhere:
Turns out some IAEA officials think the purloined laptop that the US has been shopping as evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program is a fake, at least in part because all the files are in English.
Somewhere deep in some undisclosed secret location a man twirls his moustache in great frustration and exclaims,"Rats! Foiled again!"
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. officers said Monday they had discovered a factory for assembling sophisticated roadside bombs from Iranian-made components - the first such facility uncovered in a religiously mixed province north of Baghdad.
The officers, who displayed weapons for reporters at a U.S. base in the capital, said the find provides more evidence that the Iranians are providing weapons used to kill Americans. They include EFPs - explosively formed projectiles - that fire a slug of molten metal capable of penetrating armored vehicles and have been blamed for killing more than 170 U.S. and coalition soldiers since 2004.
(Picture is from the January find.)
No diplomacy, no talks, no containment of borders, Georgie and Dick just wanna nuke Iran! How many more of these finds do they have to set up before they can do it?
And we are distracted with the state of Anna Nicole Smith's decomposition and the Oscars. Paul Slansky of Huffington Post:
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are our native Manchurian candidates - could anyone from anywhere else have damaged us more? Muslim terrorists are obsessed with the idea of killing as many Americans as possible. They wake up thinking about it, they spend their days thinking about it, they go to bed thinking about it, and then they dream about it. It is what their entire lives are about, and everything Bush and Cheney have done in the Middle East has increased the numbers of such people exponentially. By any laws of logic and reason, this means that they have made us not safer but, rather, enormously less safe.
We had no trouble calling the suicide bombers crazy for believing that seventy-two virgins would be waiting for them in Heaven. Is born-again Bush any less nuts to believe he'll be rising up to Heaven during the Rapture? For all we know, Armageddon has been his intentional goal from the start. It's almost the only explanation that makes sense. America is Flight 93. It's been hijacked and it's about to crash, and every single one of us has to charge the cockpit.
We have been warned. Al Qaeda is still "determined to strike in U.S." Michael Scheuer is the new Richard Clarke, and he says they're going to set off a nuke here. And if we know it, Bush and Cheney know it, every congressman and senator knows it, and everyone in the media knows it. And yet it's not a big story. Hello? Government people? Media people? I live in L.A. and I'm terrified. You live in New York and Washington, the two likeliest targets. Why aren't you shrieking in the streets?
...The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week’s Times, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The system “was blinking red,” as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.
The White House doesn’t want to hear it now, either. That’s why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
“are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States”
(the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”). Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the Pentagon’s last report — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
