iran

we're going to war with Iraq

Submitted by antarchi on November 4, 2011 - 18:46

I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you’re too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?" He said, "I don’t know." He said, "I guess they don’t know what else to do." So I said, "Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments." And he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it’s worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir."

— General Wesley Clarke

Interview with Democracy Now

IAEA hampered in Iran

Submitted by antarchi on May 1, 2011 - 10:22

SPIEGEL: Your optimism is admirable. When you were still the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, you even felt confident that you could solve the nuclear conflict between Iran and the international community. But that didn't work out.

ElBaradei: We were in fact on the verge of a solution on several occasions. The Iranians were willing in 2003, but the administration of then US President George W. Bush was not. Then, in 2010, when President Barack Obama extended his hand, the Iranians couldn't take it, because of domestic political power struggles.

SPIEGEL: In your soon-to-be-published memoirs, you describe how you were deceived in your attempts to investigate.

ElBaradei: I adhere strictly to the facts, and part of that is that the Americans and the Europeans withheld important documents and information from us. They weren't interested in a compromise with the government in Tehran, but regime change -- by any means necessary.

SPIEGEL: And the poor Iranians were completely innocent?

ElBaradei: No, they too engaged in trickery. But the West never tried to understand that the most important thing for Iran was getting recognition and being treated as an equal.

— Elbaradei

Interview with Mohamed ElBaradei

strongly committed to hypocrisy

Submitted by antarchi on October 10, 2010 - 22:23

“The United States is strongly committed to the promotion of human rights around the world, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the White House said in an accompanying news release. “As the President noted in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, human rights are a matter of moral and pragmatic necessity for the United States.”

... Yet, President Obama has taken no action against US officials who under the direction of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld imprisoned without charge “war on terror” detainees at secret black sites and at Guantanamo Bay.

These prisoners also were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process. They, too, were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail, and the threatening of family members.

President Obama has excused his failure to exact any accountability on complicit US officials by saying that he preferred “to look forward, not backwards.” It is apparently easier to look backwards in Iran and demand accountability than it is in Washington.

— Jason Leopold

Obama targets Iran...

the bbc is marching

Submitted by antarchi on October 5, 2009 - 07:04

On Saturday, Ahmedinejad made a speech about the western media distorting and fabricating news, and the BBC promptly misreported it (look at Version 1 on that page). Here's the correspondence I've had so far with them.

Dear Steve Hermann

The online story you have at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8288121.stm (Iran visit for UN nuclear chief) includes the following:

The IAEA chief arrived as Iran's president accused Mr Obama of making a "historic mistake" revealing the plant.

"The US president made a big and historic mistake," Iranian state TV quoted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying during a speech on Saturday.

I have looked at the report of the speech on Press TV and what it says is the following:

“[US President Barack Obama] made a huge mistake when he accused Iran of secrecy and gave rise to the recent torrent of false reports,” said President Ahmadinejad.
(http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=107711&sectionid=351020101)

Is this the part of the speech to which you are referring in your report? It is clear that Ahmedinejad is not accusing President Obama of 'making a "historic mistake" revealing the plant, he is accusing Obama of making a mistake when accusing Iran of secrecy. Please could you let me know if there is another section of the speech - not reported on Press TV - which makes the claim you have on the BBC website. It would, incidentally, be a strange claim for Ahmedinejad to make, given that Obama did not reveal the plant (even if he knew about it beforehand): the plant was 'revealed' in a letter to the IAEA by Iran's president himself.

I can also find no record of Ahmedinejad saying, as you quote him, that:

"Later it became clear that [Mr Obama's] information was wrong and that we had no secrecy."

In view of what appears to be a serious case of misquoting Ahmedinejad in the first case, please could you also confirm the context for this second quote, and that this is indeed the claim he was making. As you have presented it, the claim makes little sense, because we are not told which information was wrong. We are simply led to believe that Ahmedinejad makes strange statements. Perhaps that is your intention.

I note that you made no mention of the essence of Ahmedinejad's speech.

Thank you for your attention.

[*]

a tune for the masses

Submitted by antarchi on October 1, 2009 - 18:00

The drums are starting to roll again, louder and louder. The drummers are familiar with the beat, which is easy to pick up. It goes as follows (with room for a little variation and much embellishment):

1. X is mad, bad and very dangerous (the 'evil-doer' theme).

This theme can be backed up with 'x lies', or 'x did this before' refrains.

2. X has or will have very soon weapons of mass destruction (the 'wmd' theme).

These drum rolls can be given backing by 'intelligence agencies' - though why on earth their backing should be taken seriously any more is past a mystery.

3. X hates us and will kill us soon (the 'HELP' theme).

Be careful with this theme: it is the second part which is important in terms of drumming up support, but actually it should be very rarely heard above the general din. If it is played explicitly, it can lead people to wonder how very mad, bad and sick of life you need to be to go out and deliberately pick a fight with bullies 20,000 times your size. For example: 'I'll just throw my only undeveloped nuclear bomb at Israel, I think. Or maybe at America. It will blow some of them up. We can dodge their 20,000 weapon, high-tech nuclear arsenal, should they be so mad and bad and sick-of-life to throw this back at us'.

You don't want people to be thinking that that is what Iran would need to think, in order to pose a threat. You just want the people to think HELP.

4. We can save you from x by killing him (the 'saddam' theme) The only way the tune can be resolved, once you have set out on 1, 2 and 3, is to destroy. No negotiation. No backing down. Be strong, be resolute, ignore the UN Charter. We can take him out with surgical precision, and make the world a safer place. We did it before, didn't we?

La la la la
La la.

defending ahmedinejad (apparently)

Submitted by antarchi on October 1, 2009 - 17:42

Is Ahmedinejad anti-semitic, is he holocaust denying - and does it matter? Should we bother to defend him if we think that he is not?

I think we should. Partly because he deserves, as any human being does, to be considered innocent until he has been found guilty, but mostly because this story about Ahmedinejad is being used to sell another war. Whatever he is, he is not deserving of a war, nor are the people in his country who will suffer it.

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