I am now 100% convinced that we will attack Iran before the fall elections. I’d suspected for quite a while that the Administration wanted this, but I think we now have concrete evidence that it will happen. You may have heard, Admiral Fallon “resigned” yesterday. Galrahn points out some interesting facts at Information Dissemination.
Four star flag officers, particularly Joint Combatant Commanders, do not resign in the middle of war because of a media report. I read the Esquire article from front to back 5 times, I cannot find a single negative quote from Adm. Fallon about President Bush. I see plenty of criticism from Barnett. The implication is Bush can’t read, which is bullshit, or Fallon is being pushed out, which sounds more believable.
I might be mistaken, but I believe we are witness to Bush fire his first General/Admiral of the war. Think long and hard as you contemplate what that means.
He goes on to explain some of the background of the current political state of the military, including the split between “moderates” who desire a “cooperative” approach, and hardliners who want unilateral military action. His conclusion:
If you didn’t read the Esquire piece, or didn’t read my earlier response, you may of just missed what could in fact be a signal of war to Iran. I know one thing, if I was Iran, that is the only way to read this. There was a message for Iran in the Barnett article:
“Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys [Iran] have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.”
Are we assuming the Bush administration can’t read, Barnett is saying that, Barnett makes all the cuts at the Bush administration in the article, not Fallon. Barnett appears to have been dead right though. Reasonable people who do nothing wrong don’t quit because a reporter writes an article bad about a politician, but unreasonable people can make that person quit. I really am stunned, I have never really believed the US was going to strike Iran until today.
It’ll happen. We’ve been beating that drum for quite a while now, and Fallon has only been at his post for a year. Galrahn is right – Fallon was forced out by someone upset about the politics. That’s the only way this makes sense. And it’s a strong signal that the Administration wishes to push forward plans for war with Iran.
It’s a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can drive in broad daylight though this war-ravaged city and spend the night at the presidential palace, but George W. Bush can’t.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was greeted with lavish ceremony yesterday as he became the first Iranian President to visit Baghdad, a trip some said reflected Iran’s great and growing power in Iraq and how severely the U.S. effort to remake Iraq into a Western-friendly democracy has gone awry.
Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the war began in 2003, but Iraq’s U.S.-backed government warmly welcomed Washington’s No. 1 enemy with flowers and a band.
CNN – known as the “Clinton News Network” to wingnuts, because they are so “liberal” – has dropped a “speculative documentary” that was set to air next week because of the new NIE that pointed out that Iran stopped their nuclear weapons program 4 years ago.
The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary “We Were Warned — Iran Goes Nuclear.”
The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the “CNN Presents” banner, was “set partially in the future,” featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials — playing fictional cabinet members — debate how to deal with the Iranian threat.
So, the “liberal media” was preparing to air a bit of speculative fiction about a bellicose nuclear Iran? On a news network? That hardly seems “liberal” to me. Of course, wingnuts will undoubtedly claim that the fact that the program was scrapped (a week before air) is evidence that the media is liberal, ignoring the fact that (a) they were going to air it in the first place, and (b) that the NIE made it completely silly to do so.
Rudy “9/11″ Giuliani’s new advert puts forth a horribly false meme: that the Iranian hostages were released within an hour of Reagan’s inauguration (true) because Reagan was “tough on terror” (false).
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.
In the past 6 years, there have been an average of just 85 terrorism arrests annually, and less than 31% of those cases end up in terrorism prosecutions. In other words, nearly 70% of the terrorism arrests don’t result in prosecutions for terrorism. In fact, just 4 people have been convicted of plotting terror attacks in the United States, and an overwhelming 58 have been convicted of plotting overseas terror attacks.
Now, don’t get me wrong – every terror attack we stop is a “win”. It’s a good thing. But the dearth of valid charges really undermines the flimsy claims that there are oh-so-many pro-terrorism Muslims in public roles here in Ohio. I need a heck of a lot more (and better) evidence than someone holding opinions counter to right-wingers to be convinced.
A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.
Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.
This article by Rick Perlstein perfectly underlines what a bunch of sissies we’ve been over the entire Ahmadinejad visit. I’ve made this comparison elsewhere – why can’t be behave like we did when Nikita “We will bury you” Khrushchev visited during the height of the Cold War in 1959?
Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers’ family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department’s 12,000 acre research station (“If you didn’t give a turkey a passport you couldn’t tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey”), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin’s crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K’s words, “capitalist lackeys”), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It’s not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, “must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm.” Reporters asked him what he’d been doing during Stalin’s blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them.
But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.
…
But—they sputter—Ahmadinejad has has promised to wipe Israel off the map!
Well, Khrushchev had promised to wipe the U.S. off the map. (“We will bury you.”) And, unlike Mr. A, who has but some possible stores of fissile material, Mr. K very much had the means, motive, and opportunity to do it—thousands of nuclear-tipped rockets aimed at every city in the land.
In 2004 I thought this country was full of neocon idiots. Now I realize that we are a bunch of weak-willed sissies. We are collectively terrified of Lite-Brites and tin-pot dictators on the other side of the world who can’t even control their own countries. And we’ve been made that way by the conservative scare-mongering (Perlstein points out that the John Birch Society was doing the same stuff neocons are now back then). I’m actually to the point of revulsion with all this cowardice. Cowardice hidden behind blustery bravado.
Afraid of terrorists. Afraid of people who say bad things. Afraid of homosexuals. Afraid of criminals. Afraid of atheists. Afraid of black people. Afraid of hispanics. Is this what we’ve become? A nation of people who carry concealed weapons out of fear? Who attack other nations because of fear? Who freak out because some kid has a home-made LED display on her chest out of fear it might be a bomb? Who preach hate towards homosexuals or immigrants because of an irrational fear that granting equal rights to others will somehow invalidate the rights of the privileged? Who react in terror when the bigoted President of another country requests to visit Ground Zero?
If this is what we’ve become, I’m disgusted at our national character. We used to be great.
Fred Kagan yesterday went to National Review — home to countless tough guy warriors like him who fight nothing — to argue against Senator Webb’s bill. There is no need to give our troops more time away from the battlefield, Kagan types. Besides, doing that would be too administratively difficult (“this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home”).
Tracking when individual soldiers and units are shipped in and out of theater is too hard? They should already have this data: soldiers are paid extra when deployed.
Some interesting polling data… We’ll start with the fact that more Americans feel attacks on civilians are “completely justified” than Iranians, Lebanese, or even Saudis.
As a starting point, Muslims do not hold a monopoly on extremist views. While 6% of Americans think attacks in which civilians are targets are “completely justified,” in both Lebanon and Iran, this figure is 2%, and in Saudi Arabia, it’s 4%. In Europe, Muslims in Paris and London were no more likely than were their counterparts in the general public to believe attacks on civilians are ever justified and at least as likely to reject violence, even for a “noble cause.”
It gets more interesting.
After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents. Among the 7% of the population that fits in the politically radicalized category — those who saw the 9/11 attacks as completely justifiable and have an unfavorable view of the United States — 94% said religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with 90% among those in the moderate majority. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.
In other words, religiosity has very little to do with it. Islam isn’t the problem. Politics are the problem.
Gallup probed respondents further and actually asked both those who condoned and condemned extremist acts why they said what they did. The responses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world, many of those who condemned terrorism cited humanitarian or religious justifications to support their response. For example, one woman said, “Killing one life is as sinful as killing the whole world,” paraphrasing verse 5:32 in the Quran.
On the other hand, not a single respondent in Indonesia who condoned the attacks of 9/11 cited the Quran for justification. Instead, this group’s responses were markedly secular and worldly. For example, one Indonesian respondent said, “The U.S. government is too controlling toward other countries, seems like colonizing.”
The most radical people feel that relations would improve if – gasp – the West would “respect Islam and stop imposing it’s beliefs and policies”. Moderates want – gasp – economic concerns addressed.
… perceptions of being under siege characterize those who sympathize with extremism.
The “war on islam(ofacism)” rhetoric from wingnuts here just serves to further radicalize Muslims. There is an interesting comparison drawn between the Watts race riots and the demonstrations over the Danish cartoons – the trigger was not the cause. The comparison is compelling, and highlights the fact that the civil rights movement here might be a better model for combating violent extremists than the idiocy the right wing pushes for now.
Which sounds a lot like what I’ve been advocating for 6 years. Addressing the valid concerns and needs of the majority, causing the violent extremist minority to be marginalized by their own community.
They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”
That’s how Ari “Mouth of Sauron” Fleischer’s new organization – Freedom’s Watch – answers their phones. They are encouraging people to call their Congressman – by calling Freedom’s Watch. If you support the war, they connect you thru to Congress, as documented in this video from Americans United for Change.
You can see Freedom’s Watch videos at their site. You can reach Congress directly by calling (202) 224-3121.
This Abukar Arman mess just won’t go away. It seems the Ohio right-wing blogosphere is obsessed with this man, and unwilling to take his writings at face value. Just yesterday, BizzyBlog had this to say:
Abukar Arman has expressed support in his writings for known terrorists, terrorist organizations, and groups that wish to impose Sharia law on their populations.
Arman’s “crime”, apparently, is believing that working to de-radicalize radical Islamic groups that are in charge is a good thing. Arman is hardly alone. Former top official in Barak’s Israeli Government Daniel Levy wrote a few days ago…
My apparent “crime” is to support engagement with Hamas as part of a strategy for enhancing a ceasefire, security in the region, and ultimately, to advance a peace process that can actually deliver the goods. In being “dangerous” — presumably to Israel and perhaps also Anglo-Jewry — I find myself in not bad company. Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, ex-Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, previous West Bank Divisions Commander and Civil Administration head General Ilan Paz, Gaza Brigades Commander Colonel Shaul Arieli and ex-deputy National Security adviser Yisraela Oron are just a few of the “dangerous” types who support this approach.
In fact, the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs had this to say (emphasis added):
We conclude that the decision not to speak to Hamas in 2007 following the Mecca agreement has been counterproductive…We conclude that the decision to boycott Hamas despite the Mecca agreement and the continued suspension of aid to the national unity Government meant that this Government was highly likely to collapse. We further conclude that whilst the international community was not the root cause of the intra-Palestinian violence, it failed to take the necessary steps to reduce the risk of such violence occurring.
Given the failure of the boycott to deliver results, we recommend that the Government should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging it to meet the three Quartet principles. We conclude that any attempts to pursue a ‘West Bank first’ policy would risk further jeopardising the peace process. We recommend that the Government urge President Abbas to come to a negotiated settlement with Hamas with a view to re-establishing a national unity Government across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
So there you have it. The UK House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs has “expressed support in [their] writings for known terrorists, terrorist organizations, and groups that wish to impose Sharia law on their populations.” Presumably “extra-constitutionally”, whatever that means.
I have to agree with Jerid – there seems to be little explanation for this right-wing hysteria other than racism and anti-Muslim fervor. Just as the majority of devout Christians are not Christofascists, the majority of devout Muslims are not Islamofascists. Just because a devout Muslim has opinions different than yours, that doesn’t put him the the “fascist” camp. Just because someone is willing to admit that a flawed group like the ICU is better than the alternatives that doesn’t mean they think the ICU is the end-all-be-all.
You guys need to let it go. You sound like the crowd in the Monty Python “She’s a witch” skit. It’d be funny, if it didn’t involve real people.
A Nation of Bedwetters
by Brian on September 26, 2007 · Comments
This article by Rick Perlstein perfectly underlines what a bunch of sissies we’ve been over the entire Ahmadinejad visit. I’ve made this comparison elsewhere – why can’t be behave like we did when Nikita “We will bury you” Khrushchev visited during the height of the Cold War in 1959?
In 2004 I thought this country was full of neocon idiots. Now I realize that we are a bunch of weak-willed sissies. We are collectively terrified of Lite-Brites and tin-pot dictators on the other side of the world who can’t even control their own countries. And we’ve been made that way by the conservative scare-mongering (Perlstein points out that the John Birch Society was doing the same stuff neocons are now back then). I’m actually to the point of revulsion with all this cowardice. Cowardice hidden behind blustery bravado.
Afraid of terrorists. Afraid of people who say bad things. Afraid of homosexuals. Afraid of criminals. Afraid of atheists. Afraid of black people. Afraid of hispanics. Is this what we’ve become? A nation of people who carry concealed weapons out of fear? Who attack other nations because of fear? Who freak out because some kid has a home-made LED display on her chest out of fear it might be a bomb? Who preach hate towards homosexuals or immigrants because of an irrational fear that granting equal rights to others will somehow invalidate the rights of the privileged? Who react in terror when the bigoted President of another country requests to visit Ground Zero?
If this is what we’ve become, I’m disgusted at our national character. We used to be great.
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