Obama to threaten Iran with military strike in June, Israeli media reports

The United States of Israel...

Published: February 26, 2013 -- RT

President Barack Obama says the United States could launch an attack on Iran as early as this June, Israeli media reports.

According to a report on Israel’s Channel 10 News that has since been picked up by the Times of Israel, Pres. Obama will use an upcoming meeting overseas to discuss a military strike on Iran. Pres. Obama is scheduled to visit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next month, and during the get-together the two leaders will reportedly work out the details for a possible assault.

Pres. Obama will tell Netanyahu that a “window of opportunity” for a military strike on Iran will open in June, Channel 10 claims.

Israel has long-urged the White House to use its military prowess to intervene in Iran’s rumored nuclear weapon procurement plan, demands which have by-and-large been rejected by the Obama administration. According to the latest reports, though, the United States might finally be willing to use its might to make a stand against Iran’s race for a nuke.

“I have conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu all the time. And I understand and share Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that Iran should not obtain a nuclear weapon, because it would threaten us, it would threaten Israel, and it would threaten the world and kick off a nuclear arms race,” Pres. Obama said during an interview on the television program 60 Minutes last year, but not before adding that he’ll continue to block “noise” from Netanyahu’s camp. "Now I feel an obligation, not pressure but obligation, to make sure that we’re in close consultation with the Israelis — on these issues. Because it affects them deeply. They’re one of our closest allies in the region. And we’ve got an Iranian regime that has said horrible things that directly threaten Israel’s existence,” he said.

But five months after those remarks, Iran is still inclined to become a nuclear power. Only days earlier, The Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu said the details of a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency suggested that that Iran had begun installing advanced centrifuges at its main uranium enrichment facility, sparking “very grave” concerns that Israel could be hit with a nuke.

Right now, five members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany are holding talks with Iranian officials in Kazakhstan, with the goal of reaching a diplomatic answer to the nuclear crisis. However, domestic tensions within Iranian political elite do not make the prospect of a solution any more viable for now. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second and final term in office is set to wrap up this June, and political fights within the country’s top contenders for the position has prompted possible presidents to take harsh stance on the issue and resist outside pressure.

"President Ahmadinejad’s second term in office expires in half a year. The law prohibits him from running for the third term. What is happening could be an intensifying power struggle,” Andrei Baklitsky of the Russian Center for Policy Studies tells the Moscow Times of the latest “5+1 talks” in Kazakhstan. “At first [Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar] Salehi signals the possibility of direct talks with the United States and then the supreme leader rejects it. But as Salehi is Ahmadinejad’s man, the controversy should be viewed through the prism of an internal political standoff rather than as Tehran’s official policy."

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, told reporters in Berlin, "My hope is Iran will make its choice to move down the path to a diplomatic solution."

When Netanyahu critiqued the United States’ reluctance to act first last year, a meeting between the prime minister and Pres. Obama was subsequently cancelled by the White House. Just next month, though, the commander-in-chief will travel to the West Bank and Jordan for the first time during his second term in office. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor has said of the trip that it will mark an “opportunity to reaffirm the deep and enduring bonds between the United States and Israel and to discuss the way forward on a broad range of issues of mutual concern, including Iran and Syria.”

Israel to stay on its own if Iran is attacked, US warns

Published: 01 November, 2012 | RT


A military strike on Iran by way of Israel could still occur at a moment’s notice, but the US is now warning its allies that any action overseas would jeopardize America’s ability to assist in a Middle East war.
Although US President Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney both say the next administration will be aligned with any Israeli efforts to prevent Iran from procuring a nuclear weapon, any unilateral strike on the Islamic Republic could prevent America from offering its service in the event of a war.

The United States currently has military bases across much of the world, including key stations in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Should Israel decide to strike Iran, instability in the region is expected to become rampant and American officials fear they won’t be able to rely on troops stationed overseas to come to their ally’s aid.

“The Gulf states’ one great fear is Iran going nuclear. The other is a regional war that would destabilize them,” a source in the region tells the UK’s Guardian. “They might support a massive war against Iran, but they know they are not going to get that, and they know a limited strike is not worth it, as it will not destroy the program and only make Iran angrier.”

A war overseas is less hypothetical than officials have let on, though, and could be a very likely reality. Earlier this week, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told London's Daily Telegraph that his nation all but launched an assault on Iran only eight months ago when the country was thought to be close to going nuclear. At the last moment, though, Iran apparently diverted part of its enriched uranium to civilian programs, prompting Israel to pull the plug on a planned preemptive aerial assault.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, recently went on the record with the French magazine Paris Match to say he thinks any strike to stop a nuclear Iran would be well received, despite warnings from others that the Middle East would erupt instantly, especially given the rampant disruptions spurred in recent months through the Arab Spring.

"Five minutes after [an attack], contrary to what the skeptics say, I think a feeling of relief would spread across the region," Netanyahu said. "Iran is not popular in the Arab world, far from it, and some governments in the region, as well as their citizens, have understood that a nuclear-armed Iran would be dangerous for them, not just for Israel."

Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow of the International Institute for Strategic Studies office in Bahrain, tells the Guardian, "I don't believe the Gulf states are praying for an Israeli attack.”

"An attack would create difficult problems for them on the political level. They will be called on to denounce Israel, and they will want to stay out of it. The risk of regional war to them is huge," he said.

On their part, Iran has vowed to attack America if Israel decides to strike first — regardless of whether or not there is any military action from the US.

“We will enter a confrontation with both parties and will definitely be at war with American bases should a war break out,” Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said in a statement this past September.

The Precautionary Principle in Action

Netanyahu: "Do I seem crazy to you?"

What is the Difference Between Benjamin Netanyahu & Colin Powell?
by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Who is the more sophisticated bullshitter when it comes to convincing the world of the pressing need to bomb a Muslim country before it attacks anyone — Colin Powell or Benjamin Netanyahu?  The attached visual aid combined with the entymology of the word “sophisticated” and an analysis of the word before should enable you to answer to the question to your own satisfaction.

The charts speak for themselves.  Now consider please the following elaboration of the preceding italicized words:

Sophisticated is a double edged modifier when viewed in the context of its  etymology: the word  sophistication (use or employment of sophistry) comes from the Latin sophisticare (adulterate, cheat, quibble) and from the Latin sophisticus (of sophists), and is a transliteration of the Greek sophistikos (of or pertaining to a sophist), which refers to the Greek sophistis (a wise man, master, teacher).  Judge for yourself how to apply any or all of these roots to the context of the question.

Bombing a country before it attacks anyone (AKA pre-emptive bombing) is justified morally as a application of the precautionary principle.  The quasi-legal formulation of this principle, ironically, came out of the environmental movement.  It is especially popular among those espousing the urgent need to combat future catastrophic global warming, whatever that action may cost today.  However, its rhetorical origins are as old as the principle of exhortation in war.  This can be readily seen when one parses its logic.  While the principle has many specific definitions, they all embody two unquestioned assumptions:

• First, decision makers must anticipate harm and take action to prevent it before it occurs. Beneath the soothing comfort of these words, however, lies an unstated logical time bomb: These words reverse the onus proof  to place it on the accused by forcing him to prove a negative — that he is not guilty as charged. That is to say, it becomes the obligation of the activity’s proponent (in this case Iran’s claim that it is pursing nuclear technology for peaceful means within the established legal constraints of the IAEA) to prove that its activity will not result in egregious harm to others.  The Iranians must prove they are not building a bomb (a proposition the US and Israeli intelligence assessments tend to agree with), which it can not do politically, because proving a negative opens the door to the fallacious but politically potent counter-argument used to dismiss the intelligence findings : ‘the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.’ Neocon warmongers are particularly prone to invoke this kind of rubbish.

• Second, the precautionary principle places decision makers under an obligation, particularly if the level of possible harm is high, to take early pre-emptive action to minimize or prevent that harm from occurring, even when the absence of scientific certainty or statistical confidence makes it difficult or impossible to predict the likelihood of that harm occurring.  Beneath this premise lies yet another logical time bomb: the need for pre-emptive action increases as one perceives the possible harm and/or the degree of uncertainty to increase.

These two time bombs reinforce each other to make the precautionary principle a formula tailor made for exaggeration and boundless hype.  They create the kind of mentality that seduced Japanese decision makers into concluding they had no choice but to launch a pre-emptive surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

It became incumbent on Iraq in 2003 (as it on Iran today) to prove it was not doing something we now know with certainty that Iraq was not doing in 2003.  We now know that the result of this principle’s invocation in 2003 unleashed a tidal wave of human misery, including hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees and a moral stain on the West, especially the United States.

The persuasiveness of Powell’s presentation to the UN in 2003 showed how easy it was to use precautionary principle to lay on a legal veneer while hyping the uncertainties with fabricated ‘evidence.’  In slide above, for example, he used a computer generated slide above to illustrate why Iraq’s mobile anthrax factories helped to create the need for pre-emptive action.  This authoritative looking depiction was based on bogus information provided by an informant, appropriately named Curve Ball, the CIA and its German equivalent knew to be unreliable.  In the case of Iran, Netanyahu simply used a red line in a buffoonish cartoon to slyly introduce the absence-of-evidence argument to hype the uncertainties  and menace surrounding a future possibility (really an unsubstantiated hypothesis) to justify pre-emptive action.

Moreover, as noted above, the larger the uncertainty surrounding both the existence and greater the severity of the speculative menace, the more pressing the case for early decisive action, including a preventive (or precautionary) war to truncate the imagined threat before it could materialize — which is what Netanyahu seemed to do with his silly red line, which incidentally, is equivalent logically (in terms of its ominous unstated uncertainties) to what catastrophic global warming alarmist like to call a tipping point.

It should be clear that if one accepts the quasi-legal logic of the precautionary principle in the governing of foreign policy, one also demolishes the legal bar against aggressive war.

It becomes easy and natural to justify perpetual aggressive war — based, for example, on the need to prevent a looming genocide in Kosovo, to prevent terrorist havens in Somalia from spreading, to prevent Iraq from acquiring nucs or chem/bio weapons, to prevent looming massacres in Libya, to prevent Iran from acquiring nucs, to prevent government sponsored massacres in Syria, to use drones and special forces through Islamic Africa to prevent the spread of Al Qaeda or its wannabees, or in terms of its most vague generalities, to prevent future abuses of human rights, however we choose to define them.  So, when viewed in the context of the precautionary principle applied to foreign policy, Iran is merely the target du jour in a perpetual preventative war.

Thus, the precautionary principle is really a marketing device for exploiting fear and uncertainty about the future by putting a legal veneer on warmongering bullshit, which bring us back to the question of who is the better bullshitter in the real world--Powell or Netanyahu?  The proof is in the results: that is, who succeeds more in paving the road to an unjustified preventative war?

My prediction: the urbane Powell will win hands down, because I agree with Ray McGovern’s argument that BiBi blinked and backed down.  Like all bullying thugs, he increased the decibels  to cover a prudent retreat.  Think of it as an exercise in assigning a higher priority to his own personal precautionary principle.  Perhaps BiBi realized his crude meddling the U.S. presidential election was turning off large numbers of Americans, including a majority of American Jews, or that his favorite, the hapless Mitt Romney, has a terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease.

So, like McGovern, I think BiBi’s retreat has reduced the likelihood of bombing Iran, at least in the near term. This back down may be why the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told the Times of Israel that in an interview given immediately after Netanyahu’s speech, effectively patted BiBi on the head by saying the Obama administration is now completely “in sync” with Netanyahu [here].

How The Government’s Lies Become Truth

September 29, 2012 |Paul Craig Roberts

 

 

In my last column, “A Culture of Delusion,” I wrote that “Americans live in a matrix of lies. Lies dominate every policy discussion, every political decision.” This column will use two top news stories, Iranian nukes and Julian Assange, to illustrate how lies become “truth.”

The western Presstitute media uses every lie to demonize the Iranian government. On September 28 in a fit of unmitigated ignorance, the UK rag, Mail Online, called the president of Iran a “dictator.” The Iranian presidency is an office filled by popular election, and the authority of the office is subordinate to the ayatollahs. Assange is demonized alternatively as a rapist and a spy.

The western media and the US Congress comprise the two largest whore houses in human history. One of their favorite lies is that the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, wants to kill all the Jews. Watch this 6 minute, 42 second video of Ahmadinejad’s meeting with Jewish religious leaders. Don’t be put off by the title. Washington Blog is making a joke.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/horrifying-graphic-video-of-iranian-leader-savagely-abusing-jews/
 
Last week the news was dominated by the non-existent but virtually real Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, blatantly intervened in the US presidential election, demanding that Obama specify the “red line” for attacking Iran. 

Netanyahu believes his maximum leverage over Obama, the president of the “world’s only superpower,” just prior to the election. Israel cannot attack Iran on its own without the risk of Israel’s destruction. But Netanyahu reasons that if he attacks Iran the week before the US election, Obama will have to join in or lose the Jewish vote for not supporting Israel in states such as Florida, which has a large Jewish population and many electoral votes. If the election is close, Netanyahu, a person consumed by arrogance and hubris, might exercise his threat and attack Iran, despite the opposition of former chiefs of Israeli intelligence and military, the opposition party, and a majority of the Israeli people.

In other words, the outcome of the “superpower’s” presidential election might depend upon whether the sitting president of the “superpower” is sufficiently obedient to the crazed Israeli prime minister.

That the outcome of the US presidential election could depend upon the agenda of the prime minister of a tiny country that exists only because of US financial, military, and diplomatic support, especially the UN veto, should disturb those Americans who think that they are the “indispensable people.” How indispensable are you when you have to do what the Israeli prime minister wants?

The US media makes certain that this question never enters american minds. Americans have been told that if Iran doesn’t have nukes, it has a nuke weapons program. This is what the politicians of both parties, the media, and the Israel Lobby tell them. Americans are told this despite the facts that the CIA and the National Intelligence Estimate stick to the conclusion that Iran abandoned its flirtation with a nuclear weapon in 2003 and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground in Iran report no evidence of a nuclear weapons program and no evidence of any diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.

Moreover, what could Iran do with a nuclear weapon, other than use it against an aggressor?

Any offensive use would result in Iran’s destruction.

Why do Americans believe Iran has nukes or is making nukes when the CIA says they are not? The answer is that Netanyahu says so, and the elected members of the US government in the House, Senate, and White House are afraid to contradict the Israeli prime minister, as are the American print and TV media. Some “superpower” we are! The “indispensable people” have to grovel in the dirt before Netanyahu. Americans are not even aware of their shame.

Iran, unlike Israel, signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Signatories to the treaty have the right to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy requires a low level of enrichment, 5% or less. The minute Iran announced a nuclear energy program, the Israeli government and its prostitutes in Washington lied that Iran was building a bomb. For exercising its legal rights under the treaty, Iran has been painted as a rogue criminal state and demonized.

A nuclear weapon requires 95% enrichment. To get to 5% from scratch and then to 95% is a long drawn out process. I think I first started hearing Israeli government claims of an Iranian nuke back in he 1990s of last century.

When Iran announced that, in view of the sanctions imposed by the US, sanctions that affect medical supplies, Iran was going to enrich uranium to 20% in order to supply itself with medical isotopes, the Israeli allegations that this would lead to a bomb resulted in Iran saying that the Iranian government was content for France or some other country to supply their medical isotopes and would not pursue enrichment beyond energy requirements. The US and Russia were also mentioned as suppliers.

According to the NY Times on September 29, 2011, “the Iranian president told the Washington Post and later, in basically the same terms, the New York Times: ‘if you [the United States and Europe] give us uranium grade 20 percent now, we will stop production.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/30iht-edvaez30.html?_r=0

On Israel’s orders Washington vetoed the Iranian concession. Solving the problem is not what the Israeli government wants. The problem has to be kept alive so that it can be used to foment an attack on Iran.

The Iranian nuke is one of those grand hoaxes, a lie designed to hide the real agenda.

What is the real agenda?

The real agenda hiding behind the hysterical concern about an Iranian nuke, is the rightwing Israeli government’s design on the water resources of southern Lebanon.

Twice the Israeli government sent the Israeli army into southern Lebanon to occupy and eventually annex the territory. And twice Hizbollah defeated and drove out the vaunted Israeli army.

The few thousand Hizbollah fighters were able to defeat the Israeli army, which is equipped and supplied by US taxpayers’ dollars while Americans are foreclosed out of their homes and left unemployed as Washington applauds the offshoring of their jobs, because Syria and Iran provide Hizbollah with financial support and weapons that destroy Israeli tanks.

Syria, of course, is currently resisting its destruction by Israel and its american puppet state. The overthrow of Syria hasn’t gone well, because the Russians and Chinese didn’t go along with it, like they stupidly did in Libya. But the far rightwing Israeli government has concluded that with american prestige involved in the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, the deed will be done.

That leaves Iran. The Israeli government knows that it cannot be forthright and say that it wants Americans to go to war with Iran so that Israel can steal southern Lebanon. But if fear over nonexistent nukes can muster the Western populations to support an attack on Iran, Iran can be eliminated as Hizbollah’s supplier, and Israel can steal the water from Lebanon.

There is no discussion whatsoever of the real agenda anywhere in the US print and TV media. I doubt there is any discussion anywhere in Europe, which is a collection of american puppet states.

Will we get World War III for Christmas? Possibly, if the US election is close as it approaches. If the election is too close to call, Netanyahu might throw the dice and rely on Obama following his lead. Iran will be attacked, and the consequences are unknowable.

Let’s turn to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Like Iran, Assange has been demonized, not on the basis of facts but on the basis of lies.

Washington, which poses as a purveyor of human rights, has been mistreating if not torturing Bradley Manning since May 2010 without bringing him to trial in an effort to make Manning say that he and Assange constitute a spy team working against the US.

Assange is a celebrity, because Wikileaks publishes the news leaked to the organization that the Presstitute media suppresses. While in Sweden, Assange was picked up by two celebrity-hungry women who took him home to their beds. The women later bragged of their conquests on social media, but apparently when they found out that they were rivals, they turned on the “two-timer” Assange and made charges. One claimed that he had not used a condom as per her request, and the other claimed that she had offered one helping but he had taken two.

Whatever the accusations, the Swedish prosecutorial office investigated and dismissed the case.

Despite this known fact, the Western Presstitute media reports that Assange is a fugitive evading rape charges by hiding in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Even RT, an alternative media voice, has fallen for this disinformation.

After Assange was cleared in Sweden, a female prosecutor has tried to reopen the case. There is no evidence for her to bring charges, so she demanded that England arrest Assange and extradite him to Sweden to be questioned.

Normally, people are not subject to extradition for questioning. Only people who have been formally charged are extradited. But this detail wasn’t of interest to the Presstitute media or to the British courts which ruled as Washington desired.

Opinions vary as to whether the female prosecutor who wants Assange for questioning is an ideological feminist who believes no heterosexual sex is legitimate or whether she is in the pay of Washington. But experts agree that once Assange is in Sweden he is certain to be turned over to Washington, which will demand his extradition on trumped up charges. Extradition on trumped up charges is difficult in England but easy in Sweden.

Assange offered to be questioned in London, but the female prosecutor refused. Now the Ecuadoran Embassy is offering to send Assange to the Ecuadoran Embassy in Sweden to be questioned, but Washington, London, and the Swedish prosecutor have refused. They want Assange without the protection of the asylum that Ecuador has granted him.

Washington has how made this obvious. John Glaser writing in Antiwar.com, September 26, 2012, reports: “Newly declassified documents have revealed that the US military designated WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange an enemy of the state, who can be killed or detained without trial.”

 http://news.antiwar.com/2012/09/26/declassified-documents-reveal-us-military-designated-assange-enemy-of-state/
See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/27/wikileaks-investigation-enemy 

Assange is Washington’s enemy, because he let the truth get out. WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise, not a spy enterprise. It publishes information, some of which is leaked to it by whistleblowers, just as the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times. The information leaked to WikiLeaks has embarrassed Washington, because it shows Washington to be two-faced, a manipulator of other countries’ governments and medias, and overflowing with mendacity.

In other words, Washington is not the light upon the hill, but the gates of Hell or Mordor.

Assange had best be careful. If he again speaks to supportive crowds from a balcony of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, he is likely to be shot down by a CIA sniper.

Approved by Obama, of course. Or his successor.

How the Israel Lobby Gets What It Wants

Red Lines and Presidential Politics
by LAWRENCE DAVIDSON


Much is being made of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s involvement in the on-going American presidential campaign. His public stance has been characterized as an Israeli effort to “openly…topple [President] Obama.” The truth is that the only thing unusual about this meddling is its open and advertised nature. In a more discreet fashion, Zionist pressure bordering on blackmail and bribery goes on every day.

I have written elsewhere about this corrupting process that I call “lobbification.” In brief, this is how it operates:

Step One: A lobbyist, in this case someone from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), approaches Congresspersons or Senators. At some point in time that means every single one of them has been approached: all 435 voting members of Congress and every one of the 100 voting members of the Senate. Party affiliation is not an issue here. 

Step Two: The lobbyist offers to organize financial campaign assistance, positive media coverage, briefings on situations in the Middle East, trips to Israel, etc. 

Step Three: All that is asked in return is that the recipient consistently vote in a pro-Israel way. In other words, AIPAC wants the politician to surrender a part of his or her mind to the lobby — that part that might exercise critical and considered judgment on issues pertaining to Israel. 

Step Four: There are several unspoken, but publicly acknowledged, consequences of turning down this offer, or alternatively, managing to get elected on your own and then voting the wrong way.

1. If you say no, the same offer will be made to your opponent both at the primary and general election levels.

1. If you are elected and vote against Israel, AIPAC will do all it can, sooner or later, to see you defeated. It has a good record of turning such people out of office.

Step Five: If you sign up for this Faustian bargain and are elected, the lobby becomes your permanent partner. It is a constant presence. Its agents are always hovering about, rating your performance, letting you know they are there. Prove yourself reliable and they will underwrite you for life.

The President and Red Lines

President Obama made this bargain as solidly as have most other politicians in Washington. You can witness him affirming and reaffirming this deal in front of AIPAC conventions, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly, on those rare occasions when he addresses the press, and whenever else he feels it is politically necessary. He was even willing to debase his own national party convention to make a point of his loyalty to the Israel lobby.

Yet all this has proven insufficient. The issue over which Obama has fallen short is Iran.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu (the deus ex machina of the Israel lobby) insists that Iran is preparing to build nuclear weapons and, taking that assumption on faith, their nuclear energy program should be stopped or placed under international control. It should be noted that, back in 2002, Netanyahu incorrectly made the same charge against Iraq and that today, just as in 2002, there is no real evidence for his assertion about Iran’s aims. All U.S. intelligence agencies agree that the Iranians are not presently developing nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, Netanyahu, who appears prone to OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) when it comes to other people’s nuclear programs, demands that Washington set “red lines” for Tehran which, if crossed, would trigger U.S. military action. In other words, on the basis of unsupported Zionist fears, the Israeli government is trying to maneuver the United States into yet another Middle East war. To his credit, President Obama has refused to comply with the demand for “red lines.”

The standard retribution practiced by the Israel lobby against a recalcitrant American politician is to try to get him or her kicked out of office. Usually this is done in a low-key way and most Americans don’t even know it is happening. But this time the act of revenge, driven by an egocentric and bellicose Israeli Prime Minister, is being carried out in full public view. Here are some of the ways Netanyahu is doing this:

1. Netanyahu has joined Mitt Romney in accusing Barack Obama of being too easy on Iran and too unresponsive to an ally, Israel.
2. Netanyahu has acquiesced in the use of his image and words in a blatantly false and distorted media campaign that accuses Obama of being “cozy” with the Society of Muslim Brotherhood.
3. Netanyahu has asserted that Obama has “no moral right” to pressure Israel not to attack Iran. What the Prime Minister leaves out is that such an attack would constitute aggression under international law and violate treaties to which both the U.S. and Israel are signatories. Under these circumstances it would be immoral if President Obama did not pressure Israel to hold its fire.
4. When accused of interfering in the presidential elections, Netanyahu has replied, “This is not an electoral issue….I think there is a common interest of all Americans of all persuasions to stop Iran.” The bit about this not being “electoral” is clearly disingenuous. If Netanyahu wants to hold an opinion about alleged common interests that is fine. However, if as the head of a foreign government, he publicly and repeatedly asserts that opinion in ways that aid one candidate for president over another, he has certainly made both himself and his opinion, an “electoral issue.”

There is speculation that, if Mr. Obama is reelected, then Prime Minister Netanyahu’s indiscreet behavior might result in “a sea change in U.S.-Israeli relations.” Unfortunately this is highly unlikely. The system of “lobbification” is solidly in place at the national political level. When it comes to Israel, only two things are likely to change it:

1. Meaningful campaign finance reform that would free politicians from their present reliance on lobby affiliated contributions.
2. The Israel-American connection becomes a voting issue such that continued blind support for Israel hurts a politician’s chance of election.

Neither of these possibilities seem to be on the horizon:

It is the way the U.S. political system is run that makes politicians so vulnerable to lobby power. The fact that there are some lobbies out there that have decent and humane goals is not sufficient to justify a system that otherwise does so much damage. For instance, under the present circumstances it is impossible to define the national interest in an objective way. As it stands, the national interest is replaced by the parochial interests of lobbies that are successful at suborning Congress and the White House–Zionists pushing support for a racist and expansionist foreign power, Cuban-Americans carrying on a 53 year old vendetta against the government in Havana, the NRA striving to protect the right of every American to own a submachine gun, and the like.

In large part it comes down to money and how it is used manipulate leaders and parties. There is something age-old about this situation. It was the Roman Senator and master rhetorician Cicero (108 to 43 BCE) who said “Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecunia possit.” Translated as: “No fortification is such that it cannot be subdued with money.” That is still the rule by which lobbyists live.

'US will strike Iran in early 2013' - former American ambassador to Israel

RT: 17 September, 2012

The former US Ambassador to Israel predicts that war with Iran is likely to occur in early 2013.

Martin Indyk, the former Ambassador, said there may be about six months left to negotiate a solution that would avoid war – but he thinks this is unlikely. Joining a roundtable of foreign policy experts to discuss the latest Middle East protests and Israel’s concern over Iran, Indyk’s predictions were dire.

“There is still time, perhaps six months, even by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own time table to try to see if a negotiated solution can be worked out,” he said on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday. “I’m pessimistic about that. If that doesn’t work out – and we need to make every effort, exhaust every chance that it does work – then I am afraid that 2013 is going to be a year in which we’re going to have a military confrontation with Iran.”

While Indyk said that Iran does not have nuclear weapons at this point, it is only a matter of time before the US will need to take military action.

Israel continues to put pressure on the US to take greater actions against Iran. This past week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly scolded the Obama administration for their refusal to draw a “red line” on Iran’s nuclear program. In his mind, if this red line were to be drawn, Iran would be prohibited from crossing it, or else face a response from the US military. Indyk said Israel’s request for this line is “unreasonable” and something that neither Governor Romney, nor Senator McCain are supporting.

But Indyk said that even though the US would not declare a red line, the US and Israel see eye to eye on most issues regarding Iran.

“While there’s still time, there is not a lot of time, and I don’t think the difference between Netanyahu and Obama on this is that great in terms of the President’s commitment not to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons,” he said.

During the CBS roundtable discussion, Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said tensions with the Middle East are so high that it takes little to start a conflict. The anti-Muslim film that ignited protests throughout the Arab world was not a major factor, but simply a spark that released already-existing tensions.

“This is the equivalent of a forest fire. Anything could set it off, so the film is the wrong place to focus,” he said.

And while the Arab world continues to display anti-American sentiment and Israel continues to pressure the US to increase tensions with Iran, only time will tell if Indyk’s war prediction will come as soon as early 2013.

Senate Votes 90-1 for Pre-Emptive War Against Iran to Halt their Nuclear Program

Rand Paul stands alone against Senate's 'preemptive war' resolution for Iran
RT: 22 September, 2012

The US Senate voted 90-1 early Saturday on a non-binding resolution to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Voting against the resolution was Sen. Rand Paul, arguing that the bill was a de-facto declaration of war.]

The measure, which was introduced several months ago by Senators Lindsey Graham, Bob Casey and Joe Lieberman, supports continuing to pressure Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program. The resolution advocates using methods other than containment to stop Iran, including exerting economic and diplomatic pressure. Senate Joint Resolution 41 “rejects any United States policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran.” Senators expressed their fears regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“We know that Iran would create access for terrorists – access for them – to these nuclear weapons, making the Middle East a nuclear tinbox,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said before the Senate. “We cannot trust this regime. We know that fact beyond any potential doubt.”

The bill states that it should not be misinterpreted as an endorsement for military force or war. But as the only senator to vote against the resolution, Paul argued that the resolution would eventually lead to war with Iran.

“A vote for this resolution is a vote for the concept of preemptive war,” Paul said before the Senate.

Passage of the resolution comes at a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been pressuring the US for an answer as to what would prompt a US-led military strike against Iran.

Currently, the US is already imposing tough sanctions on Iran to limit its oil sales, hurt its economy and make it problematic for Iran to finance its nuclear enrichment program.

Iran has continuously insisted that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful, civilian ends.

YEAs ---90
Akaka (D-HI) Alexander (R-TN) Ayotte (R-NH) Barrasso (R-WY) Baucus (D-MT) Begich (D-AK) Bennet (D-CO) Bingaman (D-NM) Blumenthal (D-CT) Blunt (R-MO) Brown (D-OH) Brown (R-MA) Cantwell (D-WA) Cardin (D-MD) Carper (D-DE) Casey (D-PA) Chambliss (R-GA) Coats (R-IN) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Collins (R-ME) Conrad (D-ND) Coons (D-DE) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Durbin (D-IL) Enzi (R-WY) Feinstein (D-CA)	Franken (D-MN) Gillibrand (D-NY) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Hagan (D-NC) Harkin (D-IA) Hatch (R-UT) Hoeven (R-ND) Hutchison (R-TX) Inouye (D-HI) Isakson (R-GA) Johanns (R-NE) Johnson (D-SD) Johnson (R-WI) Kerry (D-MA) Klobuchar (D-MN) Kohl (D-WI) Kyl (R-AZ) Landrieu (D-LA) Lautenberg (D-NJ) Leahy (D-VT) Lee (R-UT) Levin (D-MI) Lieberman (ID-CT) Lugar (R-IN) Manchin (D-WV) McCain (R-AZ) McCaskill (D-MO) McConnell (R-KY) Menendez (D-NJ)	Merkley (D-OR) Mikulski (D-MD) Moran (R-KS) Murkowski (R-AK) Nelson (D-FL) Nelson (D-NE) Portman (R-OH) Pryor (D-AR) Reed (D-RI) Reid (D-NV) Risch (R-ID) Roberts (R-KS) Rockefeller (D-WV) Sanders (I-VT) Schumer (D-NY) Sessions (R-AL) Shaheen (D-NH) Shelby (R-AL) Snowe (R-ME) Stabenow (D-MI) Tester (D-MT) Thune (R-SD) Toomey (R-PA) Udall (D-CO) Udall (D-NM) Warner (D-VA) Webb (D-VA) Whitehouse (D-RI) Wicker (R-MS) Wyden (D-OR)

NAYs ---1
Paul (R-KY)

Not Voting - 9
Boozman (R-AR) Boxer (D-CA) Burr (R-NC)	Heller (R-NV) Inhofe (R-OK) Kirk (R-IL)	Murray (D-WA) Rubio (R-FL) Vitter (R-LA)

Israel putting US in corner by demanding red lines for Iran: Panetta

"Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner."US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta

PressTV

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says Israel is pushing the US into ‘a corner’ by demanding that Washington draw red lines before Iran over its nuclear energy program.

The president of the US and the prime minister of Israel “don't have, you know, a bunch of little red lines that determine their decisions,” Panetta told Foreign Policy 's National Security channel.

“Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner," the American defense chief added.

Cracks have appeared in the relations between the old allies with the US rejection of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open bellicosity in pressuring Washington to set ‘red lines’ on Iran's nuclear energy activities.

The Israeli premier has hit back at the US for the refusal, saying "Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran, don't have a moral right to place a red light before Israel," to stop it from taking military action against the Islamic Republic unilaterally.

Opposition to the idea of red lines has not been limited to Uncle Sam. Netanyahu’s deputy for intelligence and atomic affairs Dan Meridor, a member of the core of Bibi’s security cabinet, said on Thursday that "I don't want to set red lines or deadlines for myself," and called for the intensification of sanctions against Tehran.

However, the US-Israel rift seemed on Sunday to be widening with Netanyahu’s indifference to White House opposition to his stance on Iran, when he renewed his demand for US red lines for Iran's nuclear energy program, cautioning his ally that by mid-2013 Iran would be "90 percent of the way" toward the capability to weaponize its nuclear technology.

"You have to place that red line before them now, before it's too late," Netanyahu said on NBC's "Meet the Press" program.

The disagreement added fuel to fire sparked recently when White House said Obama will not make time to meet Netanyahu during the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly next month.

Another serious bone of contention between the close allies came several weeks ago with Pentagon’s decision to scale back its participation in a joint military maneuver with the Israeli regime in September.

The US Defense Department said it had slashed the number of American troops slated to take part in the "Austere Challenge 12," drill by 60 percent, reducing the number from 5,000 to 1,500, or even 1,200 servicemen, according to Time Magazine.

Pentagon’s decision was, according to Israeli officials, taken in “response to the dinner party Netanyahu held in (Mitt) Romney's honor.”

Analysts believe Israeli premier’s unrelenting pressure on the Obama administration over the Iranian nuclear energy program is aimed at affecting developments in the US with the presidential elections just around the corner, a claim Netanyahu has rejected.

In unusual snub, Obama to avoid meeting with Netanyahu

 (Probably because Netanyahu is an evil dick. I hate how so many US politicians bow and scrape to Israel, the worst ally a country could ever have. So, way to go on this one thing, Obama. Wish you'd had these balls on every other issue on which you capitulated.--jef)

By Matt Spetalnick and Allyn Fisher-Ilan - Reuters

WASHINGTON/JERUSALEM | Tue Sep 11, 2012

(Reuters) - In a highly unusual rebuff to a close ally, the White House said on Tuesday that President Barack Obama would not meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a U.S. visit later this month, as tensions escalated over how to deal with Iran's nuclear program.

The apparent snub, coupled with Netanyahu's sharpened demands for a tougher U.S. line against Iran, threatened to plunge U.S.-Israeli relations into crisis and add pressure on Obama in the final stretch of a tight presidential election campaign. (crisis? we're better off without Israel.--jef)

An Israeli official, who declined to be identified, said the White House had refused Netanyahu's request to meet Obama when the Israeli leader visits the United States to attend the U.N. General Assembly, telling the Israelis, "The president's schedule will not permit that."

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor denied that Netanyahu's request had been spurned, insisting instead that the two leaders were attending the General Assembly on different days and would not be in New York at the same time.

Netanyahu has had a strained relationship with Obama, but they have met on all but one of his U.S. trips since 2009. The president was on a foreign visit when the prime minister came to the United States in November 2010.

By withholding a meeting, the Democratic president could alienate some Jewish and pro-Israel voters as he seeks a second term in the November 6 election. Republican rival Mitt Romney has already accused Obama of being too tough on Israel and not hard enough on Iran. (Because Romney is a typical Israel ass licker.--jef)

The White House's decision could signal U.S. displeasure with Netanyahu's intensifying pressure for Obama to set specific red lines on Iran. Obama aides say privately they believe Netanyahu favors Romney, a fellow conservative, although the Israeli leader has been cautious to avoid being seen interfering in the election campaign.

Word that the two men would not meet came on the same day that Netanyahu said the United States had forfeited its moral right to stop Israel from taking action against Iran's nuclear program because it had refused to be firm with Tehran itself.

Netanyahu has argued that setting a clear boundary for Iran's uranium enrichment activities and imposing stronger economic sanctions could deter Tehran from developing nuclear weapons and mitigate the need for military action.

In comments that appeared to bring the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran closer, Netanyahu took Washington to task for rebuffing his call to set a "red line" for Iran's nuclear program, which has already prompted four rounds of U.N. sanctions.

"The world tells Israel, 'Wait, there's still time.' And I say, 'Wait for what? Wait until when?'" Netanyahu said.

"Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don't have a moral right to place a red light before Israel," he added, addressing a news conference with Bulgaria's prime minister.

John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Republican senators and critics of Obama's foreign policy, said in a joint statement: "It is puzzling that the president can't make time to see the head of state of one of America's closest allies in the world."

"If these reports are true, the White House's decision sends a troubling signal to our ally Israel about America's commitment at this dangerous and challenging time," they said.

'UNPRECEDENTED ATTACK'

The website of Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz called Netanyahu's words "an unprecedented verbal attack on the U.S. government".

Iran makes no secret of its hostility to Israel, widely assumed to be the region's only nuclear-armed power, but says its nuclear program is purely peaceful.

Netanyahu's relations with Obama have been tense because of Iran and other issues, such as Jewish settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

But he has never framed his differences with Obama - who has pledged he will "always have Israel's back" - in moral terms.

Obama has been seeking to shore up his advantage over Romney with Jewish voters - who could make a difference in election battleground states like Florida and Ohio - by recently stressing his rock-solid support for Israel's security.

He received 78 percent of the Jewish vote in the 2008 election, but a nationwide Gallup poll in June showed him down to 64 percent backing versus Romney's 29 percent.

While seeking to put Netanyahu in his place might not go down well with pro-Israel voters, the White House may also be trying to avoid the prospects of an embarrassing encounter at a difficult time in U.S.-Israeli relations.

When the two men met in the Oval Office in May 2011, Netanyahu lectured Obama on Jewish history and criticized his approach to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.

Netanyahu's office had offered a solution to the leaders' scheduling problems by having him visit Washington before his U.N. speech on September 28, the Israeli official said. The White House did not accept the idea.

Obama, who is keeping up a busy schedule of campaign rallies across the country, is expected to take a break to address the opening session at the United Nations on September 25. A U.S. official said instead of Obama's usual meetings with foreign leaders on the sidelines, he was not expected to have any.

There was no immediate comment from the Romney campaign, which had curtailed its public statements out of respect for the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Netanyahu's harsh comments on Tuesday followed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's remarks on Monday that the United States would not set a deadline in further talks with Iran, and that there was still time for diplomacy to work.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Tuesday that Washington would have little more than a year to act to stop Iran if it decided to produce a nuclear weapon.

Iran has threatened to retaliate against Israel and U.S. interests in the Gulf if it is attacked, and any such conflict could throw Obama's re-election bid off course.

DEADLINE

Netanyahu did not mention Clinton by name, but pointedly parroted her use of the word "deadline," saying: "If Iran knows that there is no 'deadline', what will it do? Exactly what it's doing. It's continuing, without any interference, towards obtaining a nuclear weapons capability and from there, nuclear bombs."

"So far, we can say with certainty that diplomacy and sanctions haven't worked. The sanctions have hurt the Iranian economy, but they haven't stopped the Iranian nuclear program. That's a fact. And the fact is that every day that passes, Iran gets closer and closer to nuclear bombs."

Despite the recent tougher Israeli rhetoric, over the past week, Netanyahu, in calling for a "red line," had appeared to be backing away from military action and preparing the ground for a possible meeting with Obama.

Opinion polls suggest a majority of Israelis do not want their military to strike Iran without U.S. support.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak seemed to criticize Netanyahu's assault on the Jewish state's biggest ally.

"Despite the differences and importance of maintaining Israel's independence of action, we must remember the importance of partnership with the United States and try as much as possible not to hurt that," a statement from his office said.

Stumbling Towards Nuclear War?

Is Washington Deaf As Well as Criminal?

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

The morons who rule the American sheeple are not only dumb and blind, they are deaf as well. The ears of the american “superpower” only work when the Israeli prime minister, the crazed Netanyahu, speaks. Then Washington hears everything and rushes to comply.

Israel is a tiny insignificant state, created by the careless British and the stupid Americans. It has no power except what its American protector provides. Yet, despite Israel’s insignificance, it rules Washington.

When a resolution introduced by the Israel Lobby is delivered to Congress, it passes unanimously. If Israel wants war, Israel gets its wish. When Israel commits war crimes against Palestinians and Lebanon and is damned by the hundred plus UN resolutions passed against Israel’s criminal actions, the US bails Israel out of trouble with its veto.

The power that tiny Israel exercises over the “worlds’s only superpower” is unique in history. Tens of millions of “christians” bow down to this power, reinforcing it, moved by the exhortations of their “christian” ministers.

Netanyahu lusts for war against Iran. He strikes out against all who oppose his war lust. Recently, he called Israel’s top generals “pussies” for warning against a war with Iran. He regards former Israeli prime ministers and former heads of the Israeli intelligence service as traitors for opposing his determination to attack Iran. He has denounced America’s servile president Obama and america’s top military leader for being “soft on Iran.” The latest poll in Israel shows that a solid majority of the Israelis are opposed to an Israeli attack on Iran. But Netanyahu is uninterested in the opinion of Israeli citizens. He has Washington watching his back, so he is war mad. It is a mystery why Israelis put Netanyahu in public office instead of in an insane asylum.

Netanyahu is not alone. He has the american neoconservatives in his corner. The american neoconservatives are as crazed as Netanyahu. They believe in nuclear war and are itching to nuke some Muslim country and then get on to nuking Russia and China. It is amazing that no more than two or three dozen people have the fate of the entire world in their hands.

The Democratic Party is helpless before them.

The Republican Party is their vehicle.

The Russians, watching Netanyahu push Washington toward dangerous confrontations keep raising their voices about the danger of nuclear war.

On May 17 Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned the West against launching “hasty wars,” which could result “although I do not want to scare anyone” in “the use of a nuclear weapon.”

On November 30 of last year the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia warned of nuclear war with NATO. General Nikolai Makarov said that NATO’s eastward expansion meant that the risk of Russia coming into conflict with NATO had “risen sharply.” General Makarov said, “I do not rule out local and regional armed conflicts developing into a large-scale war, including using nuclear weapons.”

Here is Russian president Medvedev (currently the prime minister) describing the steps toward nuclear war that Russia has taken pushed by the crazed warmongers in Washington wallowing in their insane hubris:

With regard to the American missile bases on Russia’s borders, “I have made the following decisions. First, I am instructing the Defense Ministry to immediately put the missile attack early warning radar station in Kaliningrad on combat alert. Second, protective cover of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons will be reinforced as a priority measure under the program to develop our air and space defenses. Third, the new strategic ballistic missiles commissioned by the Strategic Missile Forces and the Navy will be equipped with advanced missile defense penetration systems and new highly-effective warheads. Fourth, I have instructed the Armed Forces to draw up measures for disabling missile defense system data and guidance systems.

These measures will be adequate, effective, and low-cost. Fifth, if the above measures prove insufficient, the Russian Federation will deploy modern offensive weapon systems in the west and south of the country, ensuring our ability to take out any part of the US missile defense system in Europe. One step in this process will be to deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad Region. Other measures to counter the European missile defense system will be drawn up and implemented as necessary. Furthermore, if the situation continues to develop not to Russia’s favor, we reserve the right to discontinue further disarmament and arms control measures.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said, as politely as possible, that the US seeks to enslave the world, that the US seeks vassals, not allies, that the US seeks to rule the world and that the US is a parasite on the world economy. It would be difficult for an informed person to take exception with Putin’s statements.

Putin told the politicians in Washington and Western and Eastern European capitals that surrounding Russia with anti-ballistic missiles “raises the specter of nuclear war in Europe.” Putin said that the Russian response is to point nuclear armed cruise missiles, which cannot be intercepted by anti-ballistic missiles, at the US missile bases and at European capitals. The American move, Putin said, “could trigger nuclear war.”

Putin has been trying to wake up the American puppet states in Europe at least since February 13, 2007. At the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin said that the unipolar world that Washington was striving to achieve under its banner, “is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

That has certainly happened to the US which now has a police state as thorough-going as Nazi Germany. And even better armed: http://rt.com/usa/news/dhs-ammo-rounds-security-560/print/

Putin went on to tell his European audience that in Russia, “we are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves.” Instead, Putin said, “we are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basis principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, Who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

People are not happy, Putin said, because they don’t feel safe. Not to feel safe “is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this–no one feels safe!” The result, Putin said, is “an arms race.”

Putin politely unbraided the Italian defense minister, a person owned by Washington, for suggesting that NATO or the EU could take the place of the UN in justifying the use of force against sovereign countries. Putin took exception to the idea that Washington could use its puppet organization or its puppet states to legitimize an act of US aggression. Putin stated flatly: “The use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN.”

Putin went on to discuss the forked tongue of Washington. Reagan and Gorbachev had firm agreements, but Reagan’s successors put “frontline forces on our borders. . . . The stones and concrete blocks of the Berlin Wall have long been distributed as souvenirs. But we should not forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was possible thanks to a historic choice – one that was also made by our people, the people of Russia – a choice in favor of democracy, freedom, openness and a sincere partnership with all the members of the big European family. And now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us – these walls may be virtual but they are nevertheless dividing ones that cut through our continent. And is it possible that we will once again require many years and decades, as well as several generations of politicians, to dissemble and dismantle these new walls.”

Putin’s speech of more than 6 years ago shows that he has Washington’s number. Washington is The Great Pretender, pretending to respect human rights while Washington slaughters Muslims in seven countries on the basis of lies and fabricated intelligence. The american people, “the indispensable people,” support this murderous policy. Washington uses the status of the dollar as reserve currency to exclude countries that do not do Washington’s bidding from the international clearing system.

Washington, awash in hubris like Napoleon and Hitler before they marched off into Russia, has turned a deaf, dumb, and blind ear to Putin during the entirety of the 21st century. Speaking on May 10, 2006, Putin said: “We are aware of what is gong on in the world. Comrade wolf [the US] knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he’s clearly not going to listen to anyone.”

“Where,” Putin asked, is Washington’s “pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue its own interests?” For Washington, “everything is allowed, there are no restrictions whatsoever.”

China also has caught on. Now the hubris that drives Washington toward world hegemony confronts two massive nuclear powers. Will the criminal gang in Washington drive the world to nuclear extinction?

Washington, thinking that it owns the world, has imposed more unilateral sanctions on Iran without any basis in any recognized law. The imposed sanctions are nothing but Washington’s assertion that its might is right.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that Washington could stick its sanctions up its ass. “We consider efforts to impose internal American legislation on the entire world completely unacceptable.”

Washington will do what it can to assassinate Putin and effect regime change through the Russian “opposition” that Washington funds. Failing that, Washington’s pursuit of world hegemony has run up against a brick wall. If the fools in Washington with their hubris-inflated egos don’t back off, that mushroom cloud they have been warning about will indeed blossom over Washington.

Ex-Israeli spy boss attacks Netanyahu and Barak over Iran

By Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian
Saturday, April 28, 2012


Israel’s former security chief has censured the country’s “messianic” political leadership for talking up the prospects of a military stike on Iran’s nuclear programme.

In unusually candid comments set to ratchet up tensions over Iran at the top of Israel’s political establishment, Yuval Diskin, who retired as head of the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet last year, said he had “no faith” in the abilities of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the defence minister, Ehud Barak, to conduct a war.

The pair, who are the foremost advocates of military action against Iran’s nuclear programme, were “not fit to hold the steering wheel of power”, Diskin told a meeting on Friday night.

“My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” he said.

“I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defence minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings. Believe me, I have observed them from up close … They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off.

“They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won’t have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race.”

There was no immediate comment from the prime minister’s office.

Diskin’s remarks followed a furore over comments made on Wednesday by Israel’s serving military chief, Benny Gantz, which starkly contrasted with Netanyahu’s rhetoric on Iran. Gantz said he did not believe the Iranian leadership was prepared to “go the extra mile” to acquire nuclear weapons because it was “composed of very rational people” who understood the consequences.

In what was seen as a veiled rebuke to the prime minister, Gantz added: “Decisions can and must be made carefully, out of historic responsibility but without hysteria.”

The chief of staff later attempted to gloss over suggestions of a breach between the military and political leaderships, telling reporters there was “really no distance” between his view and the prime minister’s.

Neither Netanyahu nor Barak have moderated their rhetoric. The prime minister recently said that those who downplayed the threat from a nuclear Iran “have learned nothing from the Holocaust”. He added: “The Iranian regime is openly calling for our destruction and working frantically for the development of nuclear weapons as a means to that end.”

On Thursday, Barak said the chances of Iran halting its nuclear programme in response to international sanctions appeared low. Iran, he said, was not “rational in the western sense of the word”.

Diskin’s comments also put him in agreement with the former head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, who has said that attacking Iran was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard” and that the Iranian regime was rational.

How Neocons Sank Iran Nuke Deal

Friday, April 13, 2012 by Consortium Newsby Robert Parry

Two years ago, Washington’s influential neoconservatives – both inside and outside government – shot down a possible resolution to the Iranian nuclear dispute because they wanted a confrontation with Tehran that some hoped would lead to their long-held dream of “regime change.” In the ensuing two years, the cost of that confrontation has been high not just for Iranians, who have faced harsh sanctions, but for the world’s economy. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent escalation of bomb-Iran rhetoric contributed to the spike in gasoline prices that seems to be choking off the U.S. recovery, just as job growth was starting to accelerate.

But the Israelis and their neocon allies have yet to back away from the path toward war. They appear ready to take President Barack Obama to task if he makes any meaningful concessions to Iran in international negotiations that are set to resume in Istanbul, Turkey, on Friday.

A key question in those talks is whether some version of an earlier peace deal can be revived, whether Iran will agree to trade some of its enriched uranium – especially the amounts refined to 20 percent – for nuclear isotopes needed for medical research. That arrangement might let Iran retain its low-enriched uranium for energy production.

Along with verifiable commitments from Iran not to develop a nuclear bomb, such a deal might be enough for President Obama and the West to begin rolling back some of the toughest economic sanctions imposed on Iran, including restrictions on Iran’s banking and oil sales.

However, it’s also clear that any compromise would provoke fury from the neocons as well as war hawks in Congress and Israel. They all may claim they don’t want a new war with Iran but still insist on a confrontational path that leads in that direction.

On Thursday, the neocon-dominated Washington Post editorialized that a deal might be within Obama’s grasp to avert an immediate conflict with Iran, but “the risk is that it would be counterproductive in the medium term, because it would ease what is now mounting economic pressure on Iran and allow the regime breathing space.”

The Post added: 

“It could leave the [Iranian] nuclear program in a stronger position than it was when the Obama administration began negotiations in the fall of 2009 — with more centrifuges and enough low-enriched uranium to make several nuclear bombs with further processing. If the regime refused a more comprehensive deal, or cheated, it might be difficult to restore sanctions that only now finally appear to be biting.

“With the presidential election looming, President Obama might be happy to trade those problems for avoiding a major international crisis in the coming months. For us, the call is closer. But most likely the Iranians themselves will settle the matter. For better or for worse, the chances the regime will meet Mr. Obama’s terms don’t look good.”

Iranian Flexibility
In recent comments, key Iranians have signaled flexibility along the lines of the earlier swap arrangement, but the reason why such a deal might leave Tehran “in a stronger position” than in 2009-2010 is that then the Post’s editors, along with other neocon pundits and allies inside the Obama administration, sank the earlier plan for Iran to surrender much of its low-enriched uranium for isotopes needed by an Iranian medical research reactor.

Iran had yet to overcome the technical obstacles to refine uranium to the 20 percent level to produce those isotopes. Now, Iran’s 20 percent level is only a few steps short of bringing uranium to the 90 percent refinement for a nuclear bomb. So, the earlier deal would have left Iran much further from the threshold of a nuclear-bomb capability.

However, in 2009 – and again in 2010 – Washington’s neocon voices ridiculed the proposed uranium swap on the grounds that Iran would have kept enough low-enriched uranium (at the much lower 3.5 percent level) that it could theoretically, sometime in the future, be able to refine it and build one nuclear bomb.

Today, Iran has much more enriched uranium at a much higher level, enough for at least several theoretical nuclear bombs (though Iran says it doesn’t want any).

So, one could agree with the Post’s assessment that Iran’s nuclear position today is stronger than it was in 2009 and 2010. But whose fault was that? It would seem to rest more with the Post editorialists and other neocons who demanded the heightened confrontation with Iran in place of the uranium swap.

For instance, even before the revived swap deal was unveiled on May 17, 2010, the Washington Post’s editors were mocking the leaders of Brazil and Turkey who had spearheaded the initiative. The Post called the plan “yet another effort to ‘engage’ the extremist clique of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

After the Iran-Brazil-Turkey deal was announced in Tehran, the rhetorical abuse escalated with Washington pundits and administration hardliners, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, treating the leaders of Brazil and Turkey as unwelcome interlopers who were intruding on America’s diplomatic turf in an effort to grandstand.

On May 26, 2010, the influential New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman weighed in, excoriating the leaders of Brazil and Turkey for negotiating an agreement with Iran to ship about half its low-enriched uranium out of the country.

To Friedman, this deal was “as ugly as it gets,” the title of his column, though others might have had different ideas about what could be uglier, like the carnage in Iraq that Friedman and other neocon pundits had advocated seven years earlier.

But Friedman stuck the “ugly as it gets” label on the peace-seeking actions of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil’s then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had persuaded Iran’s President Ahmadinejad to accept an agreement to send 2,640 pounds of Iran’s low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for higher-enriched uranium that could only be put to peaceful medical uses.

That agreement followed one originally brokered by the Obama administration in fall 2009 before Iran’s internal political tensions caused the deal to collapse.

A Perturbed Leader
After the revived deal encountered a hostile reaction in Official Washington in spring 2010, a perturbed Lula da Silva challenged those Americans who insisted that it was “none of Brazil’s business” to act as an intermediary to resolve the crisis with Iran. “Who said it was a matter for the United States?” he asked.

The Brazilian president continued: “The blunt truth is, Iran is being presented as if it were the devil, that it doesn’t want to sit down” to negotiate, despite the fact “Iran decided to sit down at the negotiating table. It wants to see if the others are going to go along with what (it) has done.”

But Friedman’s column delivered a political coup de grace to the swap idea. Instead, he signaled that the neocon bottom line was the ratcheting up of pressures on Iran with the goal of “regime change” or possibly a military assault on Iran’s infrastructure.

Friedman portrayed the leaders of Brazil and Turkey as glory-seeking dupes, writing:

“I confess that when I first saw the May 17 [2010] picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with raised arms — after their signing of a putative deal to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons program — all I could think of was:

“Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table? No, that’s about as ugly as it gets.”

This U.S. hostility toward the Iran-Brazil-Turkey accord caught Brazilian and Turkish officials by surprise, in part because Obama had encouraged the initiative.

After Friedman’s column and other derogatory U.S. comments, Brazil released a three-page letter that Obama sent to Lula da Silva in April in which Obama said the proposed uranium swap “would build confidence and reduce regional tensions by substantially reducing Iran’s” stockpile of low-enriched uranium.

The contrast between Obama’s support and the anger from other voices in Washington caused “some puzzlement,” one senior Brazilian official said. After all, this official noted, the supportive “letter came from the highest authority and was very clear.”

But, in 2010, the neocons were still dreaming about “regime change” in Iran, one of the charter members of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” The neocons – and much of the U.S. press – also had deluded themselves into thinking that Ahmadinejad had “stolen” the June 2009 election from the so-called Green movement and that “regime change” was just around the corner.

“In my view, the ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran is the most important, self-generated, democracy movement to appear in the Middle East in decades,” Friedman wrote. “It has been suppressed, but it is not going away, and, ultimately, its success — not any nuclear deal with the Iranian clerics — is the only sustainable source of security and stability. We have spent far too little time and energy nurturing that democratic trend and far too much chasing a nuclear deal.”

‘Regime Change’ Argument
That argument ran parallel to the neocons’ earlier case for war with Iraq, that “regime change” was the only acceptable outcome to that crisis. Thus, false or dubious claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were justified to get the American public on board for war, just as the exaggerated fears about Iran’s nuclear program became the new excuse for another bid at “regime change.”

However, unlike Iraq which was ruled by dictator Saddam Hussein, the neocon goal of overthrowing Iran’s government faced the unacknowledged reality that Ahmadinejad almost certainly won the June 12, 2009, election and that he thus was a popularly elected leader (at least within the rules of Iran’s Islamic Republic).

Though the U.S. press corps refused to accept that fact – and still routinely describes the election as “fraudulent,” “rigged” or “stolen,” the reality was that no serious evidence has been presented to support those claims.

Indeed, the overwhelming evidence is that Ahmadinejad, with strong support from the poor especially in more conservative rural areas, defeated the “Green Revolution” candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi by roughly the 2-to-1 margin of the official results.

For instance, an analysis by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes concluded that most Iranians voted for Ahmadinejad and viewed his reelection as legitimate, contrary to claims made by much of the U.S. news media.

Not a single Iranian poll analyzed by PIPA – whether before or after the June 2009 election, whether conducted inside or outside Iran – showed Ahmadinejad with less than majority support. None showed Mousavi, a former prime minister, ahead or even close.

“These findings do not prove that there were no irregularities in the election process,” said Steven Kull, director of PIPA. “But they do not support the belief that a majority rejected Ahmadinejad.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It!”]

If these and other scholarly examinations are correct – and there is no counter-evidence that they aren’t – what happened after the election was that Mousavi simply refused to accept the voters’ choice and – with the enthusiastic backing of the U.S. news media – undertook to reverse the results with massive street protests.

During those demonstrations, a few protesters threw Molotov cocktails at police (scenes carried on CNN but quickly forgotten by the U.S. news media) and security forces overreacted with repression and violence.

Though it’s fair to condemn excessive force used by Iran’s police, you can be sure that if the same factors were transplanted to an American ally – or, say, the United States itself – the U.S. news media’s treatment would be completely different. Suddenly, the security forces would be protecting “democracy” from anti-democratic mobs disgruntled over losing.

But Friedman and other neocon pundits took this false conventional wisdom – that Mousavi was the voters’ choice – and transformed it into a new casus belli, a pattern of turning propaganda into political truth that was eerily reminiscent of the black-and-white portrayals of the crisis with Iraq in 2002-2003.

‘Tony Blair Democrat’
In those days, Friedman was enamored of the idea of invading Iraq and was smitten by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s glib oratory about forcibly planting seeds of “democracy.” Friedman even dubbed himself a pro-war “Tony Blair Democrat” and made the witty observation that it was time to “give war a chance” in Iraq.

Today, it might seem obvious that anyone foolish enough to call himself “a Tony Blair Democrat” – after Blair has gone down in history as “Bush’s poodle” – or to twist John Lennon’s advice to “give peace a chance” into its opposite should have the decency to simply vacate the public stage and let some other aspiring pundit try his or her luck.

But that’s not how it works in the world of U.S. punditry. As long as you don’t offend the powerful, you keep your job, and when the carousel circles around, you’re poised to reach for another brass ring – another glorious war, another lucrative book contract.

Friedman also hasn’t heard any anti-Iranian propaganda theme that he won’t repeat, much like he did in hyping threats from Iraq.

Surely, Ahmadinejad, like Saddam Hussein, has contributed to his and his nations’ problems with wrongful actions and stupid rhetoric, making the work of neocon propagandists all the easier. But the truth is that actions of any national leader can be made to appear more outrageous or more reasonable depending on how the media frames these matters.

For example, Ahmadinejad, a little-educated populist from the Tehran’s “street,” has made obnoxious and ill-informed comments questioning the Holocaust. However, to extrapolate Ahmadinejad’s offensive remarks into a readiness to attack Israel, which has hundreds of undeclared nukes, is the kind of illogical overreach that we saw before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Back then, the Bush administration conjured up nightmare scenarios of Iraq flying unmanned planes over the United States to spray poison gases or secretly building a nuclear bomb that it might give to Islamic radicals (though the secular Saddam Hussein was infamous for his brutal repression of those religious fundamentalists).

It’s also should be clearer today that the mercurial Ahmadinejad has been largely sidelined by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a more predictable figure who has renounced any Iranian interest in developing a nuclear bomb, calling possession of such a weapon a “grave sin.”

Still, the neocons are itching for another conflict, this time with Iran, and they are sure to condemn any concessions that Obama makes in the upcoming negotiations. However, if an eventual deal does end up more favorable to Iran than the one available in 2010, the neocons will have themselves to blame.

US offers Israel advanced arms for not attacking Iran

So, was it all just a great big bluff?--jef

Published: 08 March, 2012 - RT

The US has proposed that Israel withhold from waging an assault on Iran till the next presidential term in America in exchange for advanced weaponry, reports Israeli Maariv newspaper.

The proposal was made during the visit of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington, the newspaper says, citing unnamed diplomats and intelligence sources.

It adds the Americans have offered Tel Aviv the latest versions of bunker-busting bombs and aerial tankers to gain tactical advantage over Iran. This would imply Israel’s shelving of plans to attack Iran, evidently until America gets a new president in 2013.

The US diplomats allegedly believe such step would enlarge the “opportunity window” for Israel to try to solve the issue of controversial Iranian nuclear program diplomatically.

Speaking to the Israeli prime minister in the Oval Office on Monday, President Obama once again reaffirmed his personal "unprecedented commitment" to Israel's security.

The newspaper does not report on whether PM Netanyahu agreed to accept the proposal.

On Wednesday Netanyahu told Fox News Channel he actually does not think a war with Iran is inevitable.

"The paradox is that if they actually believe that they are going to face the military option, then you probably will not need the military option," Netanyahu said.

The sides also discussed new steps to be taken to isolate the Islamic Republic internationally even further.

At a media briefing in the White House Obama told journalists that America will apply more pressure on Iran despite the fact that “we provide a door for the Iranian regime to walk through," Obama said.

Israel has been stressing for years that the real aim of the Iranian nuclear program is not peaceful energy, but the creation of an atomic bomb, and furthermore, the destruction of the Jewish state. Tehran has consistently denied such allegations, allowing the IAEA to inspect its nuclear facilities in an attempt to prove that its nuclear program is solely peaceful.

The Absurdity of US/Israeli Relations

Israel is not a good ally. In fact, they are probably the worst ally a nation could have. USS LIBERTY, anyone?

We are You and You are Us?

by THOMAS H. NAYLOR


“We are you, and you are us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrogantly proclaimed to President Barack Obama in the White House recently.

How is it possible that Israel, a tiny country with only eight million people, can have so much influence over the foreign policy of the most powerful empire of all-time? Yet Israel played a major role in shaping the war on terror against Islam, the war with Afghanistan, two wars with Iraq, and the annihilation of Libya by NATO. And now Israel is aggressively doing everything within its power to provoke a war between the United States and Iran – a war which could quite easily precipitate World War III. That’s a lot!

The $3 billion in annual economic and military aid which the United States officially provides Israel enables it to engage in continuous acts of terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing against its Palestinian neighbors whose land was stolen by Israel at its inception back in 1948. This process of Israeli expansion into Palestinian occupied territory continues unabated. The Obama administration pretends to be opposed to further Israeli encroachment into Palestinian lands, but obviously couldn’t care less.

The moral justification for all of this can be traced to the Holocaust. Because six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War II, Jews are entitled to their own country within what was once the Biblical Holy Land. Never mind the fact that the land happened to be occupied by Palestinians. For similar reasons, Jews are also entitled to revenge against anyone or any government which challenges the moral authority of Israel. According to Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon in his provocative book entitled The Wandering Who?, this way of thinking has given rise to a new Jewish religion grounded in revenge, which he calls the “Holocaust religion.” In the name of Jewish suffering, the Holocaust religion “issues licenses to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to annihilate, to loot, to ethnically cleanse. It has made vengeance into an acceptable Western value.” According to Holocaust theology a nuclear attack against Iran by either Israel or the United States would be morally justifiable, since Iran has challenged Israel’s right to exist. “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

Because Americans were slow to respond to the horrors of the Holocaust, they are expected to do penance. The U.S. government is obliged to provide Israel with unconditional economic and military support. It must veto all U.N. Security Council resolutions deemed to be critical of Israel and boycott all international conferences which might embarrass Israel.

Israel expects the United States to treat it as its only true ally in the Middle East. The so-called Arab-Israeli peace process is a complete sham, since the United States always sides with Israel.

In return for the unconditional support which the United States extends to Israel, Israel is encouraged to destabilize the Middle East so as to justify American intervention in the region enabling it to hegemonize the supply of oil. It’s all a very cozy relationship.

The Israeli military machine is free to invade any country in the Middle East of its choosing and can expect the full support of the Pentagon, no questions asked. Israel is the only country in the Middle East which has the right to possess nuclear weapons. Any other country in the region which aspires to membership in the elite club will be demonized and treated as a terrorist state.

Few Americans are aware of the role Israel played in derailing détente in 1974 and prolonging the Cold War unnecessarily for at least fifteen years by accusing the Soviet Union of discrimination against Soviet Jews who wanted to leave. The charges were a complete fabrication. The vast majority of Soviet citizens allowed to emigrate to the West between 1968 and 1989 were, in fact, Jews. By portraying itself as both a victim of communism and America’s only true non-communist friend in the Middle East, Israel extracted billions of dollars from the United States to finance its never ending war with the Palestinians. This strategy also helped deflect public opinion away from Israel’s own human rights abuses.

All of this is made possible by the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), our nation’s most powerful political lobbying organization. Anyone who has the audacity to challenge America’s foreign policy towards Israel is by definition an anti-Semite and can expect to receive the full wrath of the Israeli Lobby and become the target of a disinformation campaign. Candidates for Congress who are not openly pro-Israel will fall victim to a negative media blitz which virtually assures political defeat.

Nothing better illustrates the power of AIPAC than the invitation by Columbia University to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on the campus on September 24, 2007. Rather than withdrawing the invitation in response to the political firestorm created by the Israeli Lobby, Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger opted personally to introduce Ahmadinejad. His introduction took the form of a highly inflammatory, arrogant, insulting diatribe against the University’s guest – all to appease AIPAC and its constituents. As a graduate of Columbia University, I was overcome by a sense of shame as a result of Bollinger’s demagogic behavior. He reminded me of white racist politicians such as George W. Wallace and Ross Barnett in the South in the 1960s. The rage against Iran expressed by Republican Presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum is more of the same.

Since President Ahmadinejad is one of only a handful of surviving political leaders in the world who has ever stood up against Israel and the United States, he must not only be demonized but eventually taken out. Indeed, there is no more important test of one’s Americanism than one’s stand against Iran and its president.

In the eyes of the United States, Iran has been persona non grata since Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy on November 4, 1979. Few Americans recall that in 1953 when the Eisenhower administration disapproved of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the CIA removed him from office, had him placed under house arrest, and installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as head of state. Most Americans have also forgotten that Ronald Reagan collaborated with his buddy Saddam Hussein to destroy Iran. All the while Reagan had arranged for the Israelis to sell weapons to the Iranians to finance the Contras in Nicaragua whose aim was to overthrow the duly elected Sandinista government. Such financial aid had been specifically banned by the U.S. Congress. Is there any wonder that the Iranian government is not particularly fond of the United States?

Although American politicians like to quote the Founding Fathers, no admonition has ever been more systematically ignored than President George Washington’s warning in his 1796 farewell address, about the inherent dangers of blindly siding with one nation, “a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of ills.”

The U.S.-Israeli relationship gets right to the very essence of what the American Empire is all about. The United States and Israel are the two foremost technofascist nations in the world. That’s why there is such a close symbiotic relationship between the two war mongering nations. The answer to the question, “Who controls whom?” remains in doubt. But as we previously noted, Israel is nevertheless useful to the United States, even though it pulls our string.

About Israel, Human Scale author Kirkpatrick Sale once said, “The original idea of a Jewish state was a mistake, and to establish it in an Islamic Middle East essentially by force and with the immiseration of millions of natives was a tragic mistake. We are reaping the awful results of that error today.” Continuing he said, “It is not so easy to know what to do to undo that mistake, but I would argue that a world that can make a state can unmake it.”

Because the compliant American media marches in lockstep to the beat of the AIPAC drum, no change in the U.S. – Israeli relationship is expected anytime soon.

The only way to stop Israeli terrorism is for the U.S. to discontinue all economic and military aid to Israel. Only then will the fighting cease. But this will never happen so long as the Empire remains intact. So strong are the ties between Israel and the United States that only the dissolution of the Union itself could put an end to the relationship.

If there is any hope for Israel and Palestine, it lies in some form of Swiss federalism. The crux of the Swiss Confederation is a loosely defined three-dimensional matrix consisting of 26 cantons, 4 cultures, and 7 major departments of the federal government. One could envision Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights as Palestinian cantons which cooperate with Israel, the State which surrounds two of them.

Nothing good can ever come from the confluence of American military might and the lust for revenge of Israel.