Archive for October 30th, 2009
U.S. Lawmakers Push for Harder Line on Iran
The Israel lobby in the US wins yet another round on the way to its long desired war with Iran:
From: The Israel Project [mailto:press@theisraelproject.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 6:52 PM
Subject: U.S. Lawmakers Push for Harder Line on Iran
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Ron Paul: Sanctions on Iran are an Act of War! (Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing)
Prof. John Mearsheimer on AIPAC and Congress (Part 1 of 2)
Top Democratic & Republican foreign affairs leaders in the US Congress are calling on the Obama administration to quash the Goldstone Report (Mearsheimer/Walt book validated yet again!):
Top Democratic & Republican foreign affairs leaders in the US Congress are calling on the Obama administration to quash the Goldstone Report
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1256150047889&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
U.S. Middle East policy motivated by pro-Israel lobby
Additional at following URL:
Gorilla in the Room is US support for Israel:
So the Goldstone Report does not get buried at the Security Council
So the Goldstone Report does not get buried at the Security Council
http://www.raghidadergham.com/4rdcolumn.html
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DEBORCHGRAVE Commentary: Bridges too far (in Afghan quagmire)
Commentary: Bridges too far
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) — Not one of the 42 nations involved on the ground in Afghanistan wants to stay the course until the birth of a new nation, cleansed of Taliban insurgents, and a reasonable facsimile of democratic rule. To begin with, no one believes this would be possible short of another 10-year commitment. And untold billions more in economic aid when donor nations are already awash in red ink.
A wise veteran Arab intelligence hand said Afghanistan is now tailor-made for deals with the principal tribal chiefs designed to detach them from the Taliban they fear more than U.S. and NATO troops. Tribal maps are more important than provincial demarcations under a despised central government. This would cost several hundreds of millions of dollars, he said, not the tens of billions that are now being wasted on an unwinnable war.
With much experience dealing with Afghanistan when the mujahedin guerrillas were fighting Soviet occupation troops in the 1980s and again with the Taliban regime when it seized power in 1996 and before it got kicked out by the U.S. invasion in 2001, the former Arab intelligence chief says it may still be possible to suborn lukewarm Taliban supporters into a compromise coalition.
The 1893 (Mortimer) Durand line, named after the foreign secretary of British India, cosigned by the Emir of Afghanistan, drew an imaginary 1,610-mile border that artificially divides the same tribes. It was part of the “Great Game” of nations designed, by the British Empire , to contain Russian expansionism. The 100-year agreement expired in 1993. A more realistic division would keep the same tribes together in a renegotiation that is long overdue.
This is more important than redoing the Afghan presidential election at a time when President Hamid Karzai is not only known to have stolen it, but, more seriously, has a drug-dealing brother tarred and feathered by a CIA connection brush.
U.S. President Barack Obama presumably has studied the history of the Vietnam negotiations. They began shortly after the February 1968 Tet offensive, hailed as a Communist victory by the Western media but seen as a defeat by the post-war memoirs of North Vietnamese generals. Vietcong troops attacked 27 cities and towns simultaneously but, in each case, were repulsed with huge losses (45,000). Hopefully, Obama has talked with John Negroponte, a Vietnamese-speaking young diplomat who pioneered the secret negotiating track as a Kissinger scout. Negroponte was also the first director of national intelligence, in charge of 16 intelligence agencies and 100,000 people with a budget of $50 billion.
On-and-off talks took place over the next four years interspersed with military action, e.g., the incursions into Cambodia to disrupt North Vietnam ‘s supply lines and a major South Vietnamese offensive without U.S. involvement. Finally, Henry Kissinger announced Oct. 26, 1972, “Peace is at hand.”
In an interview this reporter conducted with Ho Chi Minh’s successor, Pham Van Dong, it soon became clear North Vietnam and the United States read the peace accords differently. This led to the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi , which, in turn, produced the revised agreements that were signed Jan. 23, 1973, in Paris .
Two more months saw the last U.S. soldier out of Vietnam . And South Vietnam held its own for two more years — until the U.S. Congress yanked the rug from under our allies and cut off any further military assistance.
Nor is there a fast track to peace in Afghanistan . As President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz said this week, “Initial military successes by the U.S. and the coalition forces were compromised by an attempt to create an Afghanistan that has never previously existed — one with a centralized government and a strong national army. Any future approach must recognize the fact that Afghanistan is a bottom-up, rather than top-down, country, and thus change must be instituted on a local rather than a national level.”
With a majority of the American people against any widening of the war with more blood and treasure, the best card Obama has in hand at this time is to make deals with some of the major tribal leaders who don’t approve of the way the Taliban enforces its feudal religious writ by cowering the rest of the population. Anyone suspected of cooperating with U.S. and NATO forces is dragged out and beheaded or shot in front of villagers.
The CIA and U.S. Special Forces — together 410 men — with a helping hand from Russian intelligence liberated Afghanistan in October 2001. The Taliban regrouped in Pakistan ‘s tribal areas. Bankrolled by the opium poppy trade, they rearmed and went back into Afghanistan . The Pakistani army, under U.S. prodding, tried to dislodge the Taliban from their safe havens but failed. Now, stung by the Taliban’s brazen attacks close to Islamabad , the army has launched a major offensive and met with initial successes.
So this is no time to be accusing the Pakistani intelligence service, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton coyly suggested on a visit to Pakistan last week, of concealing the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
Working with Pakistani intelligence, this would be a propitious time to contact major Afghan tribal chiefs and work out the kind of deals that the former Arab intelligence chief was talking about. They must be made to understand that NATO and U.S. forces are not there to occupy Afghanistan and want to leave as soon as we are reasonably certain that al-Qaida will not be allowed back. What kind of government the Afghans wish to give themselves should be of no concern to Obama and the allies.
Tribal loyalties are much stronger than the shaky Afghan nation-state. There is an urgent need to upgrade knowledge of the dominant Pashtun tribe. It was one of the keys to the Bush administration’s success in 2001. It is still a key, this time for a successful exit for 42 nations that don’t belong there. And to make sure al-Qaida does not return.
Ron Paul was excellent about the Iraq/Afghan quagmires and the coming war with Iran in the following youtube:
Ron Paul vs. Michael Moore on Larry King CNN 10/29/2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hn6ad4_FzM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/27/matthew-hoh-afghanistan-resign-us
First US official resigns in protest at Afghan war
Afghanistan: A War of Lies:
http://america-hijacked.com/2009/10/12/afghanistan-a-war-of-lies/
So one can clearly argue that 9/11 happened because of Israel and that the US invaded Afghanistan because of 9/11 and therefore because of Israel (look up ‘Israel as a terrorist’s motivation’ in Bamford’s ‘A Pretext for War’ book as the paperback version of ‘A Pretext for War’ includes an additional section about the AIPAC espionage case):
http://america-hijacked.com/2009/10/12/afghanistan-a-war-of-lies/comment-page-1/#comment-606
John Hibbs wrote:
Re: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/24696
Tony: Thanks for sending this link to the Bill Moyer’s video. It should be required viewing for every adult American. I have long contended that if the government sent an invoice to every taxpayer in the country, and had enforcement powers to collect, for his/her share of the actual out-of-pocket for the cost to conduct either the Afghan or the Iraq war, we would never have gone —- and sure as hell wouldn’t send more troops to in what many bright people on both sides of the political spectrum consider a hopeless cause (in Afghanistan).
Moyers reminds us about the monetary cost. But his really powerful message comes at the end.
For all those blind copied, please take four minutes to view Bill Moyers, —a fine, well respected journalist if ever there was one. Then, please forward
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/24696
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Israel’s European Lobby
Israel’s European Lobby
By Maidhc Ó Cathail
October 28th, 2009
“Dissident Voice” –
In their 2006 article “The Israel Lobby,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt famously assert, “Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.” Having for decades successfully steered policymaking in Washington in a pro-Israel direction, Israel’s American Lobby has more recently turned its attention to Europe. Despite its brief presence in Brussels, it appears to have already had marked success in influencing the nascent foreign policy of the European Union.
One of the most important of the more than 60 organizations that make up “the Lobby” is the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Jeff Blankfort, an American Jew who is one of the Lobby’s most trenchant critics, described the AJC as “the Lobby’s unofficial foreign office.” Extending its global diplomatic mission, the AJC opened an office in Brussels in 2004. Since then, according to Blankfort, it has held weekly meetings with a high official or the chief of state of EU member states. The meetings seem to be having the desired effect. As Blankfort wrote in 2006, “Over the past year the EU has moved away from relative support for the Palestinians to adopting one position after another reflecting Israeli demands.”
As part of its lobbying efforts in Brussels, the AJC founded the Transatlantic Institute (TAI) in February 2004. According to its mission statement, the institute functions as “an intellectual bridge between the United States and the European Union” with the aim of “strengthening transatlantic ties.” Although it describes itself as “nongovernmental, non-partisan and independent,” TAI’s publications leave little doubt that it intends to shift the EU in a more aggressively pro-Israel direction, as the neoconservatives succeeded in doing with the Bush administration’s Middle Eastern policy.
Like American neocons, the TAI’s executive director, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, has a “special affinity for Israel.” Before moving to Brussels, the Jewish Italian academic taught Israel Studies (a discipline which Mearsheimer and Walt describe as “intended in large part to promote Israel’s image”) at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, after having received his PhD in political science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And like the current Israeli government and pro-Israeli groups worldwide, Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons are Ottolenghi’s overriding concern at the moment – now that the threat of Iraq’s non-existent WMDs has promptly been forgotten. In his 2009 book, Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the Bomb, Ottolenghi urges Europeans to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Despite his concern about the bomb, it’s unlikely that he would support a comprehensive ban on nuclear weapons in the Middle East – since Israel is the only country in the region that currently possesses them.
Israel’s crying wolf is nothing if not predictable though. As for the “mushroom cloud” that’s supposedly looming over Europe, who, bar the mainstream media, could forget Condoleezza Rice’s pre-Iraq invasion soundbite: “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”? It was Michael Gerson, Bush’s pro-Israel speechwriter, who thought up that one. Incidentally, Gerson was so incensed by Mearsheimer and Walt’s criticism of the Lobby that he accused them in his Washington Post column of “sowing the seeds of anti-Semitism.”
Anyone for World War IV?
Before European policymakers give too much credence to the prescriptions of Ottolenghi and his “non-partisan” institute, they should familiarize themselves with the geopolitical outlook of Commentary, the magazine for which Ottolenghi blogs. Like the Transatlantic Institute, which became “the flagship of neoconservatism” in the 1970s, it was also founded by the American Jewish Committee, a relationship that lasted from 1945 to 2006. But above all, Commentary has been dominated by the political views of Norman Podhoretz.
Podhoretz, who has edited Commentary since 1960, claims that September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of World War IV (he considers the Cold War to have been World War III). “We are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war,” declares the doyen of neoconservatism, “and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play.” Whatever about the incalculable cost in blood and treasure to the United States, presumably Israel won’t have any enemies left standing by the end of this bloody drama. Coincidentally or not, in 2007, the same year he published World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Podhoretz was honoured by Bar-Ilan University with its Guardian of Zion Award, bestowed on Jews who have been supportive of the State of Israel.
However, those who question the motives behind Podhoretz’s enthusiasm for World War IV, or believe that his belligerent Zionism poses a far greater threat to world peace than “Islamofascism” – a nebulous concept that lumps together disparate entities such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and Al Qaeda – are invariably smeared as anti-Semites. It’s not surprising, of course, that Zionists like Ottolenghi, in a transparent attempt to discredit their opponents, claim that “anti-Zionism is anti-semitism.” After all, “the charge of anti-semitism,” as Mearsheimer and Walt point out, is one of the Lobby’s “most powerful weapons.”
What is worrying, however, is that the EU now legitimates the deployment of that weapon by pro-Israelis against their critics. According to the definition given by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency, it seems that you’re an anti-semite if you agree with Mearsheimer and Walt that pressure from Israel and the Lobby played a “critical” role in the decision to invade Iraq, or if you suspect that the likes of Podhoretz and Ottolenghi may be more loyal to Israel than they are to their respective countries. Before coming up with their working definition of anti-Semitism in 2004, the EU consulted with Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee. If they were asked about the question of loyalty, the AJC probably forgot to mention the case of Jonathan Pollard.
Pollard, an American Jew, is now serving a life sentence for stealing thousands of documents while employed as an analyst for US naval intelligence during the mid-1980s. In Dangerous Liaison, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn write, “Though he always maintained that he was motivated purely by devotion to Israel, he was well paid for his services.” That money may have come from the US-Israeli Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), according to Claudia Wright, the author of Spy, Steal, and Smuggle: Israel’s Special Relationship with the US. When Jordan Baruch, an adviser to BIRD’s board, was asked for an audit report, he replied, “Even if I did (have one), I couldn’t release it.” Interestingly, it was Baruch and his wife, “long-time AJC leaders,” who funded the Transatlantic Foundation.
In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Benjamin Netanyahu portrayed Israel’s grievance against Iran as a conflict which “pits civilization against barbarism.” It’s tempting to dismiss the Israeli leader’s assertion as the hyperbolic trope of a demagogue, but there may be some truth to what he said. After all, what better word than “barbarism” to describe what Israel has done to the Palestinians for the past six decades? Or the havoc that Israel’s supporters in America have wrought on the people of Iraq? Or the untold devastation they have in mind for the Iranians? The influence the Israel Lobby wields in Washington has ensured that the United States has long been complicit in Israel’s barbarism. And if the Lobby gets it way in Brussels, so too will the European Union.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer living in Japan who writes a monthly political column for Kansai Time Out magazine. He also contributes a monthly column to the Irish language internet magazine Beo! Read other articles by Maidhc, or visit Maidhc’s website.
Ron Paul: Sanctions on Iran are an Act of War! (Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing)
Ron Paul: Sanctions on Iran are an Act of War! (Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYX9xhRi_to
Ron Paul was excellent about the Iraq/Afghan quagmires and the coming war with Iran in the following youtube:
Ron Paul vs. Michael Moore on Larry King CNN 10/29/2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hn6ad4_FzM
The Israel lobby in the US wins yet another round on the way to its long desired war with Iran:
Subject: U.S. Lawmakers Push for Harder Line on Iran
http://america-hijacked.com/2009/10/30/u-s-lawmakers-push-for-harder-line-on-iran/
http://mondoweiss.net/2008/02/portrait-of-a-h.html
More on Berman:
http://www.stopaipac.org/hayden.htm
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/pg-dupe.html
Disinformation about the Iranian “Threat” (by Dr. Stephen Sniegoski):
Civil War(s) in Iraq/Afghanistan: Back Door to War on Iran
http://america-hijacked.com/2009/09/14/civil-wars-in-iraq-afghanistan-back-door-to-war-on-iran/
Israel Ever-Present at US-Iranian Negotiations
http://america-hijacked.com/2009/10/23/israel-ever-present-at-us-iranian-negotiations/
U.S. Middle East policy motivated by pro-Israel lobby
The Gorilla in the Room is US Support for Israel
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