Tom Cotton: Put Iraq out of your mind. Bombing Iran would take just 'several days'

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR): Smarmy smile, thirst for war.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton: losing his grip on reality, or lying shamelessly? It's not clear which conclusion would be more unflattering to Cotton in light of his claim that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would be just like when then-President Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in the late 1990s. It's just silly to think about the Iraq War of the 2000s, according to Cotton—silly, or a lie pushed by President Obama—"the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case." Simply not the case!

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”

In short, Tom Cotton, 2015: "Several days air and naval bombing ... " Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, on the prospect of war with Iraq: "It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
Uh-huh. About that ...READ MORE

Watch This Fox Host Realize Gohmert Is Bonkers As He Unveils His 'Plan' To Bomb Iran

Possible Republican presidential candidate Louie Gohmert shocked Fox News host Arthel Neville with what she said was a "dangerous" and "volatile" plan to bomb Iran's nuclear sites. During an interview on Sunday, Gohmert argued that President Barack Obama negotiations with Iran had already failed because he was "already allowing them to go full-blown nuclear." The Texas Republican said that he had another solution for dealing with Iran: "You step up the sanctions full-blown, and I think that it's time to look at a plan to go in and bomb them." But Neville immediately saw a downside to effectively declaring war on Iran. "If the U.S. bombs Iran's nuclear facilities, do you think Russia is going to stand by and let that happen?" she asked. "I don't think Russia is in a position to do anything," Gohmert opined. "They're bogged down too many places." READ MORE

‘Israel Loves Iran’ Campaign Gains Force March 23, 2012, ABC News

As diplomats and journalists dissect every word spoken by top Israeli, Iranian and American officials for signs of a potential Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, an online campaign to prevent just that has gained steam in Israel.

 On a sunny Friday in Tel Aviv, a few dozen Israelis gathered on tree-lined Rothschild Boulevard to shoot a video to be posted on YouTube. It was the latest effort in the “Israel Loves Iran” campaign that Israeli graphic designer Ronny Edry and his wife, Michal Tamirm, launched last week

“For there to be a war between us, we must first be afraid of one another, we must hate,” Edry says in a fundraising video already on the site.  “I’m not afraid of you. I don’t hate you. I don’t even know you. No Iranian ever did me … harm. I never even met an Iranian, just one in a museum in Paris – nice dude.”
Sitting one by one in front of the camera, the mostly young Israelis took turns holding “Iranians, We Love You” placards and saying a few  words to the camera in the same vein.  READ MORE

Note: To see the inspiring website of this campaign, click here. For the facebook page, click here. For a highly inspiring two-minute video of the campaign, click here. For the beautiful response from Iranians, click here. This is how we transform our world! To understand how the politicians and military leaders manage to manipulate us into war after war, read what a highly decorated general had to say at this link.

Israel's Assassins and Tehran's Killers

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, center, visits
the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Facility.
(Photo: Iranian President's Office via
The New York Times)

Saturday 3 March 2012

by: Richard Sale, Truthout | Report

They are dying one by one.

They are Iran's nuclear scientists, and they are being murdered. Since 2007, five Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in Iranian territory, many victims dying from magnetic bombs that terrorists had attached to the exterior of their cars.

The latest attack took place on January 11, 2012, when Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan, deputy director in the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, died without warning in a blast in Tehran shortly after two assailants on a motorcycle placed a bomb on his car.

According to news reports, confirmed by Truthout, the United States denied that it was to blame for the killing of the 32-year-old Roshan after Tehran said Washington and Israel were responsible for the attack. "I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters when asked about Iranian allegations over the attack.  READ MORE

Another March to War?

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

18 February 12

s a journalist, there's a buzz you can detect once the normal restraints in your business have been loosened, a smell of fresh chum in the waters, urging us down the road to war. Many years removed from the Iraq disaster, that smell is back, this time with Iran.

You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. CNN's house blockhead, the Goldman-trained ex-finance professional Erin Burnett, came out with a doozie of a broadcast yesterday, a Rumsfeldian jeremiad against the Iranian threat would have fit beautifully in the Saddam's-sending-drones-at-New-York halcyon days of late 2002. Here's how the excellent Glenn Greenwald described Burnett's rant:

It's the sort of thing you would produce if you set out to create a mean-spirited parody of mindless, war-hungry, fear-mongering media stars, but you wouldn't dare go this far because you'd want the parody to have a feel of realism to it, and this would be way too extreme to be believable. She really hauled it all out: WMDs! Terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. controlled by Tehran! Iran's long-range nuclear missiles reaching our homeland!!!! She almost made the anti-Muslim war-mongering fanatic she brought on to interview, Rep. Peter King, appear sober and reasonable by comparison.

Like Greenwald, I was particularly struck by Burnett's freak-out about Iran's nuclear program, about which she said, "No one buys Iran's claim that [it is] for peaceful purposes." She then cited remarks by Director of Intelligence James Clapper, which, she said, "drove that message home." But then she ran a clip with Clapper's quote, which read as follows:   READ MORE

Robert B. Reich: The extra dollars you're paying at the pump are going to Wall Street speculators

American Voices Tribune Media Services 

February 28, 2012

Nothing drives voter sentiment like the price of gas -- already up nearly 30 cents from the start of the year and hitting $4 in many places. The last time gas topped $4 was 2008.

And nothing energizes Republicans like rising energy prices. House Speaker John Boehner is telling Republicans to take advantage of voters' looming anger over rising prices at the pump. House Republicans have passed a bill to expand offshore drilling and pressure the White House into issuing a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The tumult has already prompted the Interior Department to announce expanded oil exploration in the Arctic.

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If prices at the pump continue to rise, expect the gas wars to intensify.

But the current surge in gas prices has almost nothing to do with energy policy. It doesn't even have much to do with global supply and demand. It has most to do with America's continuing failure to adequately regulate Wall Street.

Oil supplies aren't being squeezed. Over 80 percent of America's energy needs are now being satisfied by domestic supplies. In fact, we're starting to become an energy exporter.

Iran is threatening to cut production in retaliation for sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States. But Saudi Arabia's increased production is more than enough to make up the difference.

Demand for oil isn't rising in any event. Oil demand in the U.S. is down compared to last year at this time. The American economy is showing only the faintest signs of recovery. Meanwhile, global demand is still moderate. Europe's debt crisis hasn't gone away. China's growth continues to slow.

But Wall Street is betting on higher oil prices.    READ MORE

What No One Is Saying: The Horrors That Would Be Unleashed By a Strike on Iran

Nobody seems to care about the consequences of a US or Israeli strike on Iran, which could include the release of radioactive materials into the Middle East.

March 1, 2012

A grim joke made the rounds in late 2002 and early 2003, in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq. The version I recall went something like this:

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney go into a Texas bar. Over a couple of beers they plan the invasion of Iraq, taking out Saddam Hussein and taking control of Iraq’s vast oil reserves. The big question, though, is how Americans might react to their starting another war, with victory still elusive in Afghanistan. They decide to do an impromptu sampling of public opinion, and invite an average, all-American looking guy standing at the bar to join them for a friendly drink.

“What would you think of us invading Iraq and taking over their oil fields, if you knew that 30,000 Iraqis and one American bicycle mechanic would be killed if we do it?” Bush asks.

The fellow slowly sips his beer, his brow furrowed. He mulls the question and looks troubled. Finally he asks, “Why should an American bicycle mechanic have to die?”    READ MORE

Many Top Israeli Soldiers Wary of Bombing Iran

Israeli soldiers do not want to bomb Iran.
(photo: Landov/EPA)

By Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast

08 February 12

here’s nothing American Jews love more than Israeli soldiers, except perhaps, Israeli spies. Go to American synagogues - especially Orthodox synagogues - and you’ll find boys wearing green-and-yellow skullcaps bearing the Israel Defense Force’s Hebrew acronym. A central element of the Birthright Israel program, which aims to instill a love of Israel and Judaism in young American Jews, is their mifgash, or encounter - often R-rated - with Israeli soldiers. For my Bar Mitzvah, I was given a tome celebrating the exploits of Israel’s external and internal spy agencies, the Mossad and Shin Bet. My 6-year-old son recently came back from the library of his Jewish school carrying a volume entitled Keeping Israel Safe: Serving the Israel Defense Forces.

Since then, a throng of current and former security officials have issued similar warnings. In December, Dagan’s successor at Mossad, Tamir Pardo, suggested that an Iranian nuclear weapon was not an existential threat. This month, another former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, declared that “it is not in the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel.” Former IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz added that “Iran poses a serious threat but not an existential threat” and that bombing would mean “taking upon ourselves a task that is bigger than us.” It’s remarkable, when you think about it. Almost every week, Israeli security officials say things about Iran’s nuclear program that, if Barack Obama said them, would get him labeled anti-Israel by American Jewish activists and the GOP.

The struggle between Israel’s civilian and military leaders eerily evokes the struggle inside the Bush administration over war with Iraq. Like Dick Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu has only one mode: apocalyptic. His idols are Winston Churchill and Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, both men famed for having foreseen the Nazi menace when others looked away. And throughout his career, Netanyahu has plugged virtually every adversary Israel faces into the Hitler role. In 1993, when then–Foreign Minister Shimon Peres brokered the Oslo Accords, Netanyahu compared him with Neville Chamberlain.  READ MORE

Regime Change in Iran? The Real Motivations Behind Sanctions

Sanctions against Iran's central bank are meant to cripple the country's oil industry.

January 18, 2012

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Let's start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line,straight from the lion’s mouth.  Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.”

How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat.  Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).

What if, however, there is no “red line,” but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.

READ MORE

A Brief History of America's Dumb Policies Towards Iran

In more than 50 years, America’s leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn’t lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback.

January 17, 2012

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These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered. Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry. In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police. He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf -- until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.

While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring. In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things. 1967: Under the U.S. “Atoms for Peace” program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which -- call it irony -- is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program). READ MORE

US Warns Israel on Strike

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes and Jay Solomon, The Wall Street Journal
Intro: "US defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over US objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard US facilities in the region in case of a conflict."
READ MORE

After 10 years, US blames Iran for 9/11

A US judge has signed a judgment that finds Iran, the Taliban and al-Qaeda responsible for 9/11, counter to the FBI's official reports relating to the incident.

Press TV talks with James Fetzer, founder of Scholars for the 9/11 Truth in Madison about why Iran has only now been included in the list ten years after the fact and why Saudi Arabia was excluded from the list even though 15 of the alleged highjackers were from Saudi Arabia according to the FBI list. Mr. Fetzer outlines numerous facts and references that indicate a strong involvement by Israel in 9/11, but Israel is also not listed on the US default judgment. What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: This filing and leveling of charges against Iran in a US court seems to be a habit for the US recently. To begin with - Is it legal to charge another country without representation?

James Fetzer: It's of dubious legality and the finding is quite preposterous on its face. When President Ahmadinejad addressed the UN and called for a new investigation suggesting that the US and Israel were involved in 9/11, the New York Times was besieged with letters claiming that al-Qaeda was responsible. So who was it - Iran or al-Qaeda?

Fifteen of the alleged highjackers were from Saudi Arabia - So why not Saudi Arabia? Well... they're our friends - Let's blame it on Saddam Hussein. Even George W. Bush would eventually admit that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Independent investigations by the Senate and The Pentagon concluded that there was no collusion between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

The FBI would eventually admit that it had no hard evidence tying Osama Bin Laden to 9/11. The 9/11 Commission report is an elaborate fabrication. Elias Davidson has shown there's no proof any of the hijackers were aboard any of those planes. David Ray Griffin has shown that all of the phone calls from the four flights were faked. Colonel George Nelson US air force retired has observed that of the millions of uniquely identifiable component parts from each of those planes, the US is yet to produce even one.

Two of those flights were not even scheduled to fly that day - flights 11 and 77. And I have FAA registration data showing that the planes corresponding to flights 93 and 175 were not deregistered until 28 September 2005. Which raises the question - How can planes that were not in the air have crashed? And, how can planes that have crashed still be in the air four years later? READ MORE - See Video

Keeping a Curious Bush Secret

Exclusive: One of the strange mysteries from the Reagan-Bush era is where did George H.W. Bush go on one Sunday in October 1980 when some witnesses placed him meeting with Iranians in Paris. More than three decades later, Bush’s supposed alibi remains a state secret, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

More than three decades ago, on Oct. 19, 1980, then-Republican vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush supposedly took an afternoon trip to visit a family friend in Washington, an alibi that could prove he could not have traveled secretly to Paris for treacherous meetings with Iranians.

But Bush’s White House in 1992 – and his presidential library now – have refused to release the name of this alibi witness or even the address where Bush allegedly went. The insistence on keeping this secret has just been reaffirmed by Debra Steidel Wall, deputy archivist of the United States.

So, rather than release what theoretically should be a fact the Bush Family would want out – proof that the elder George Bush did not engage in secret talks with Iranians behind President Jimmy Carter’s back regarding 52 Americans then being held hostage in Iran – the U.S. government is saying that only a costly federal court lawsuit can dislodge this historical detail.

Or, perhaps the reason that this secret has been so zealously guarded for so long is that Bush never took the afternoon trip, that it was just part of a cover story to conceal his mission to Paris, and that the host — if questioned — would discredit Bush’s alibi .

Whatever the truth, as long as the Bushes and the government prevent the corroboration of his purported afternoon visit, it remains impossible to disprove contrary evidence that Bush did sneak off for the alleged Paris meeting and simply arranged with friends in the Secret Service to concoct an alibi.
READ MORE