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http://omardakhaneblog.wordpress.com/

Most honest piece so far about the most recent massacre in Afghanistan

Another civilian massacre and the savagery of our soldiers

by Nima Shirazi on March 13, 2012

Nearly eight years ago, on April 1, 2004, former speech writer and Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, where she was a contributing editor. It began like this (emphasis in original):

The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man’s inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes.

The brutal, inhuman event she was referring to was the killing in the Iraqi city of Fallujah of four American civilian contractors, whose SUV was ambushed by rocket-propelled grenades the day before. The four men, all employees of the infamous mercenary outfit Blackwater, were shot, their bodies burned, mutilated, and dragged through the streets in celebration. The charred corpses of two of those killed that day were strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates River. The news, and accompanying photographs, sent shockwaves of horror and disgust through the United States and prompted endless editorialsfrom coast to coast.

Noonan described “the brutalization of their corpses” as “savage, primitive, unacceptable” and decried that the “terrible glee of the young men in the crowds, and the sadism they evinced, reminds us of the special power of the ignorant to impede the good.” She wrote that the Iraqis responsible for such gruesome actions “take pleasure in evil, and they were not shy to show it. They are arrogant. They think barbarity is their right.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan condemned the killings as “despicable, horrific attacks” and “cowardly, hateful acts,” saying, “it was inexcusable the way those individuals were treated.” He called those responsible for the deaths “terrorists” and “a collection of killers” and vowed that “America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins.”

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/another-civilian-massacre-and-the-savagery-of-our-soldiers.html/comment-page-1#comment-433082

As an addition to Walt's list, the MSM hasn't put the War on Iran drumbeat in context with the War on Iraq drumbeat. The same arguments were made then by the same people with the same assurances. Israel wanted us to do this stupid thing then. They want us to do this stupid thing now.

From The Weekly Standard's "The Blog"
March 13, 2012

Is Iran A Rational Actor?

By Lee Harris

. . . [Their] assessment of Iran as a rational actor has been challenged by those who see Iran as dangerously irrational, fully intent on developing nuclear weapons in the near future. The argument between these two camps have one thing in common. They seem blind to the distinct possibly that (A) Iran is indeed a rational actor and (B) it is precisely because Iran is a rational actor that we can be sure that the Iranians are fully committed to developing nuclear weapons, despite the apparent risks involved. . . .

. . . But why should Iran take even the smallest risk of a military attack from the West? Isn’t that irrational? Not at all. Rational actors often take calculated risks. They buy stock. They open businesses. They go to war. If the downside is deemed acceptable, while the rewards of success are enormous, then it would be inexcusably irrational not to take the gamble. And that is how Iran sees it. They have little to lose, and much to win.

This is why economic sanctions will not work: Iran is willing to trade a short-term economic loss in order to achieve a far more important long-range strategic goal. Its target is to dominate the Middle East and, in consequence of this fact alone, to become a major player on the world scene. The nukes are not an end in themselves, but a means to this end. Iran, in short, is involved in a major status quo challenge.

Major status quo challenges are nothing new to history. Rather, they are the stuff of which history is made. The Germanic barbarians presented a major status quo challenge to the faltering Roman Empire. The Arab conquest was a major status quo challenge to the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. Before WWI, the German Reich was engaged in a status quo challenge to the supremacy of Great Britain, in which Germany sought imperial colonies and to construct a navy on par with the British fleet. A generation later Imperial Japan would mount its own status quo challenge, in an attempt to dominate Asia and the Pacific. Some major status quo challenges succeed, while others fail, but all have a powerfully transformative effect on the direction of history, for better or for worse. . . .

. . . Fully aware that tensions are already dangerously high in the Middle East, the rational camp has concluded, no doubt correctly, that a Western attack on Iran would only make a bad situation very much worse. But the West’s public acknowledgement of this well-grounded fear simply emboldens Iran. Worse, the American position that Iran “has not decided to make a nuclear weapon,” along with the decision to continue sanctions and negotiations, has the unintended effect of permitting Iran to decide under what circumstances the West might possibly attack—namely, whenever Iran is stupid enough to abandon the West’s pet policy of peace through negotiation. So long as Iran is prepared to go through all the motions of seeking a negotiated settlement of the issues, as it is currently doing, then the risk of an attack from the West remains close to zero. What savvy poker player, seeing him before him the enormous stack of chips he is on the verge of winning, would not opt to continue his bluff under these circumstances—in this case, the bluff of pretending to negotiate in good faith?

There remains one serious risk to Iran’s bold status quo challenge. Israel does not share the West’s optimistic view that there still plenty of time to deal with Iran. Hence the alarm in the West over the possibility of a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran, evidenced by the Obama administration’s near desperate efforts to convince Israel to hold back, giving more time for sanctions and negotiations to settle matters.

Whether Israel will strike Iran on its own, despite powerful American pressure, is still an open question. But even here a scenario is being played out that should be reassuring to Iran, though once again this is a consequence that no one in the West intended.

Paradoxically, it is the extraordinary attention that the world has focused on Iran’s nuclear program that offers Tehran the best defense against a preemptive attack by Israel. Israeli jets were able to take out Syrian nuclear sites with dispatch and without fanfare, and, most importantly, without months of international hand-wringing before the event. The fact that the U.S. has gone on record urging Israel to refrain from taking action against Iran makes it all but certain that a surprise Israeli attack would create tension and conflict between Israel and its closest and most powerful ally, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Jewish state. Under such circumstances, Israel cannot possibly deceive itself about the dangers of taking unilateral actions, which appreciably diminishes, though it does not eliminate, the chance that Iran will suffer an effective attack against its nuclear facilities.

If an effective strike against Iran poses serious risks to Israel, an ineffective strike would be far worse—that is, a strike that did little or nothing to set back Iran’s nuclear program. Not only would it leave Iran’s nuclear program relatively unscarred, but it would almost certainly be followed by Iranian retaliation against Israel. Furthermore, there are many in the West who would inevitably view such an attack by Israel not as a serious effort to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, but as a cynical attempt to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran, as well might happen if the Iranians keep to their vow to attack American targets in the wake of any Israeli strike.

Americans have little stomach for another costly war in the Middle East, especially a war with far more ominous consequences than our previous conflicts in that region. If Israel is seen as having acted simply as an agent provocateur in unleashing a war between the USA and Iran, then even the staunchest American friends of Israel would be hard put to defend its actions. If the Israelis cannot be absolutely sure of devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities, their best course is to do nothing. And there is simply no way they could possibly be sure in advance of such an attack—far too much can go wrong.

This is the biggest risk Iran is taking—that Israel might try to take out their nuclear facilities, but at a cost that would almost certainly be far more crippling to Israel than to Iran. This is a pretty safe best, and one that any prudent rational actor would be willing to take, considering the stakes in question—a successful status quo challenge that would leave Iran a major factor in future world affairs.

If Iran achieves its objective, much will change about the world. Perhaps the most important change will come from the very failure of the Western powers to have thwarted Iran’s status quo challenge while it was still possible to do so—a failure of foresight and judgment that will be widely interpreted as the inauguration of a new geopolitical order, but one in which the Western powers no longer play a decisive role, dominating world affairs, but are consigned to being helpless observers of events spiraling beyond their control. There is more than blustering rhetoric to the Iranian claim that the days of Western power dominance are nearing an end.

From this perspective, the argument put forth by the Rationalist Camp that Iran is a rational actor should not reassure us. On the contrary, if Iran is a rational actor, it should now be making an all-out effort to develop nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. After all, during the last decade the Iranians have watched the Western powers invade Iraq and Afghanistan, while giving military assistance to the Libyan rebels. No doubt they noticed that none of these nations possessed nuclear arms and that, for reasons of self-preservation, members of the nuclear club do not make war on one another. Once Iran has successfully joined this club, it will have gained a degree of national security and freedom from foreign intervention than nothing except the possession of nuclear weapons can provide. (Just ask North Korea.) Safe from the threat of regime change, Iran can use its increasing armory of conventional weapons and its oil wealth to throw its weight around in the region. Indeed, Iran is already doing so, most conspicuously of late, by sending its warships to Syria in a show of support for the Assad regime, while simultaneously aligning itself (by no coincidence) with Russia and China, and against the Western powers.

Today, despite the raging debate about what policy the West should take toward Iran, the only realistic policy debate about Iran would involve the question of what policy we should have taken toward it in the past, perhaps as far back at the dawn of the Iranian Revolution, during the hostage crisis under Carter. At the point we have now reached, it is naturally still possible to pretend to have a policy, namely, a policy of kidding ourselves that we have a policy, which is what the leadership of the West, including the U.S., is currently doing. The only reasonable course left to us is to respond with ad hoc measures to actions and initiatives taken by Iran, while fully aware that a wrong step on our part could have devastating consequences for the West and the world. Policy is a luxury of those who call the shots—and today it is Iran and not the West who is calling them. Furthermore, Iran is calling them quite well. Far from pursuing an irrational and suicidal policy, Iran is currently following a strategy of cunning and far-sighted self-aggrandizement. They would be crazy to stop now.

Lee Harris is the author, most recently, of The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite.

© Copyright 2012 The Weekly Standard LLC - A Weekly Conservative Magazine & Blog. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/iran-rational-actor_633497.html

I said:

"While protection was surely a primary consideration, this statement glosses over the fact that the facility was under construction for two years in secret, contrary -- in the IAEA's opinion -- to Iran's obligations. "

You said: "False"

What part of this is false?

You appear to concede that the facility was under construction in secret for two years, and you do not dispute, because you cannot, that the IAEA takes the position that Iran violated its Safeguards Agreement.

You claim that Iran is not bound by the subsidiary arrangements, but this is a different claim altogether. I never said that everyone agrees Iran is so bound, only that the IAEA thinks so, which is true.

Moreover, the subsidiary arrangements in question relate to the Safeguards Agreement ratified by the Iranian Parliament. Contrary to your assertion, they are not part of, and have no connection to, the Additional Protocol. The revised subsidiary arrangements themselves were agreed to by Iran in 2003. This did not require parliamentary ratification in Iran, just as it does not require it in any other country in which these provisions are in force.

Note also that Iran declared that it was no longer abiding by the provisions in question in March 2007 (this unilateral action was not recognized by the IAEA). It is, to say the least, highly plausible that the Iranians were planning the Fordow facility prior to this date, meaning they violated the Safeguards Agreement even by their own standards of applicability. See http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2009/09/25/iran-violated-international-obligations-on-qom-facility/6u2

Above comment in response to
NEOLEFT
7:30 PM ET
March 13, 2012

1. Iran voluntarily and provisionally agreed to abide by the provisions of the Additional Protocol in 2003.
2. They also, separately, agreed with the IAEA to revised subsidiary arrangements that implement the existing, ratified Safeguards Agreement.
3. The subsidiary arrangements that prescribe notification are not part of the Additional Protocol; they are part of the existing ratified safeguards agreement.
4. The IAEA does not take the position that the Additional Protocol is in force in Iran, but they do take the position that the revised subsidiary arrangements are in force, and cannot be modified unilaterally.

Virtually all the disagreement above -- with the exception of the question of whether a hidden facility about which one says nothing is secret, or whether "inconsistent with" is equivalent to "in violation of" -- stems from this single misunderstanding.

Thanks for your article. Why do media keep interviewing war talkers like McCain and Graham? They are stuck in time, dull and predictable. I fast forwarded through the whole first portion of ABC's This Week last Sunday with Graham yammering on. I get it when Fox "News" beats the war drums. Their audience is primarily aging, white, conservative males, many of whom are also stuck, bitter and angry. The war talk appeals to them, but it's a dangerous game media are playing.

I don’t know whether it has been reported in the US media but several senior journalists and admin staff have resigned from Al Jazeera claiming it has become biased to the Qatari/Western view of the Arab picture. I suspected something like this halfway through their Egyptian coverage, was further persuaded with reporting from Libya, and gave up watching their reporting from Syria. One reporter, interviewed on Russian TV, claimed he was not allowed to show pictures of the rebels attacking egime supporters in Syria, another told of atrocity sequences being rehearsed, and one showed amateur footage of a Syrian child being bandaged and rehearsed for the Al Jazeera crew, which actually arrived so late she had forgotten what she was supposed to say and fluffed her lines, another showed an activist reporter setting up a scene and calling for gunfire. Al Jazeera has some 60 million viewers and was given a long denied US media licence not long ago.

Anyone who has not yet recognized that the national media is nothing more than a propaganda organ of the criminal organization known as the Republican and Democrat controlled federal government has not been paying attention. How more obvious do they have to be?

The USSR had their Pravda, we have our mainstream media.

NPR continues soft and hard pedaling an attack on Iran. With Robert Siegels go get Iran war banging with Micheal Oren
Middle East (had put up this alert over at Race for Iran last Wednesday)
Israeli Ambassador Weighs In On Netanyahu Visit
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=2&prgDate=03-07-2012

Scott Simon allowing the piece
Experts: A Strike On Iran Poses Many Challenge
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/10/148320514/experts-a-strike-on-iran-poses-many-challenges
this past Saturday assumption that Iran has a nuclear weapons program….

On Wednesday evening WMD’s in Iraq Wolfowitz and Anne Marie Slaughter were both pushing for an intervention in Syria.
Commentators Consider Solutions In Syria

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=2&prgDate=03-14-2012

In some countries they prosecute war criminals like Wolfowitz. In the US our MSM just recycles them. As if they are unable to get far more accurate experts on the subject on their programs. When was the last time you heard Hillary or Flynt Mann Leverett, Prof Cole, Walt on any of these NPR programs (there has to be a block up against having these experts on)

Today (thursday) on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Dennis Ross will be on focused on the I/P conflict. But you can place your bets that he will take this opportunity to drum up support for an attack on Iran.

Are these outlets really incapable or just refusing to have experts who were right on the invasion of Iraq (the intelligence was highly questionable and stood against an invasion) and who now share their expertise and stand against supporting an attack on Iran based on unsubstantiated claims? Why do they have the Iraq war criminals on?

Anyone else noticing how often we are hearing how many Syrians Assad is allegedly responsible for killing. Keep repeating 8000. But here we are 9 years after the invasion of Iraq, 10 and a half years after the invasion of Afghanistan and we still do not know how many people have been killed in those countries as a direct consequence of our invasions

Sounds like these folks ought to try analyzing the problem a la DMAIC and Lean Six Sigma before acting.

Are there any real men other than Bibi that will speak up and tell the truth . For anyone to believe that Iran has anything other than destroying Israel on their mind
is blind and foolish. Because you do not belive it does not make it any less real . The Media tends to hate the truth and spin it for political reasons, but you can't fool everyone. As Bibi said , Iran belives the U.S> is the great Satan and Israel is the little Satan. Who really belives diplomacy will ever work.

(some segments of this comment are copied and pasted from my previous posts)

In the ‘Manufacturing Consent’ coauthored by Noam Chomsky in the mid 70s one can find something like “...the crime of Media is not confined to how they distort the facts, it is also on how they HIDE major information from the general public”

Here is a fact no reference to it can be found in Western MSM.

Watch (the first half of) this video where Hillary Mann Leverett is interviewed by Amy Goodman. In it Hillary asserts that during Iran-Iraq war where Iranians were subjected to Iraqi Chemical Weapons decided not to retaliate with same WMD:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anQmSq6Kz_U )

Iranians in their long war with Iran were subjected to WMD, they could retaliate with same type of WMD but they decided not to do so? Why? They couldn’t manufacture them? Iranians claim they could. All the compounds were known and they had access to many Iraqi unexploded chemical bombs.

There is a Persian proverb implying “a thief believes everyone is a thief”. Since any intelligent Israeli or Westerner logically concludes that, for a wide range of reasons, if he/she was in place of Iranian rulers he/she would’ve definitely acquired the atomic bomb. These astute individuals assume the Iranian psyche works the same as that of the Westerners .There is one thing they just can’t fathom, that is, a mix of old Persian culture with Shia ideology (which harshly discriminates between the amiable oppressed and the ruthless oppressor) has made the present day Iranian culture slightly different from that of the West.

One has to see the color photos of huge masses of Iranian soldiers and the related close-up photos to sense the gravity of the situation and what a tragic story is the story of chemical weapons in Iran Iraq war. Washington Post has published a piece on how the location of Iranian troops (or the satellite photos?) were given to Iraqis by Americans, Iraqis then flying specially made light airplanes to those locations dropping different types of chemical bombs on Iranians.

I suspect Olaf Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden at the time was impressed by Iranian rejection of the primitive acts of harsh revenge since he arranged treatment of many affected Iranian soldiers in Swedish hospitals and most probably it was Sweden who supplied Iran with modern surface to air missiles to shoot the Iraqi planes down.

A lot of events involving Iran, Palme’s suply of arms to Iran and mysterious suicide of a Swedish official (or executive?) are cloaked in mystery. Some believe Palme’s perplexing assassination in middle of Iran-Iraq war might be related to his sympathy for Iran and his activities for establishing peace between Iran and Iraq..

However why the fact of “Iranian refusal to use chemical WMD” is important? It is since Iranians, while taking severe casualties, could have manufactured and used chemical weapons yet they rejected their use on religious or moral grounds. By extension the claim of Iranians that they’ll never build an atomic bomb becomes more believable.

Watch the following video to see how and why Seymor Hersh too finds such an Iranian claim credible.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/21/seymour_hersh_propaganda_used_ahead_of

In the video Hersh brands the recent IAEA report as a Political (not Professional or Scientific) document. Using Wikileak info he blasts Amano as a stooge of the US accusing him of ‘fabricating’ the evidence and so on. Through a lengthy explanation he shows that US spies, after exhaustive efforts in Iran found nothing, nada, not a single evidence of Iran building the bomb. In Hersh’s view the whole story of ‘Iran is building the atomic bomb’ is a ‘fantasy’ and all kinds of purposeful ‘hysteria’ is built around it.

Over a six week period on CSpans Washington Journal this winter they had a Mr. Singh and Mr. Jain from WINEP blatantly pushing for a military confrontation with Iran and repeating one unsubstantiate claim about Iran after the next. Then they had Yoghi Dreazen, Anne Marie Slaughter and Barbara Slavin on. All repeating the debunked by Prof Cole and others "Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map" and diplomacy has been exhausted. All three Yoghi, Slaughter and Slavin pushed the idea that diplomacy with Iran has been exhausted.

Washington Journal, NPR , MSNBC, Cnn etc sure never have the Leveretts, Walt, Cole, former weapons inspector Robert Kelly etc on their programs.

WMD Wolfowitz was on NPR the other night.

Humanist 2 all of Seymours Iranian pieces are well worth reading. He has been writing about special forces being on the ground in Iran for quite awhile. Former IAEA weapons inspector Scott Ritters' Target Iran" is a must read.

But to keep things simple, just one easy thing: If Ahmedinajad's words were "mis-translated" as you claim, how do you explain this Iranian government produced poster which says in English that the correct way to quote Khomeini is "Israel must be wiped off the map"?
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/an-iranian-woman-walks-past-a-poster-featuring-portraits-of-news-photo/80178431

oopsie.

FP had a column saying there was no nuclear weapons program in Iran:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/19/stop_the_madness?page=full

Timely article. Just what we'd expect from W of M & W, whom history might remember as the profs who saved the world. Just one quibble:

"But the world's nine nuclear powers all obtained these weapons first and foremost for deterrent purposes (i.e., because they faced significant external threats and wanted a way to guarantee their own survival)."

America got 'em first. Russia got 'em because the US had used them, not to defeat a 'significant threat', but to show Russia who's boss. (Japan was surrounded by the USA and the USSR, and the nukes added nothing to the more destructive conventional bombing raids). Britain and France did not get 'em because they faced external threats. Nor China, nor India. Pakistan, yes. North Korea, arguably (it thinks South Korea is an occupied part of itself). Israel, no. The Iranians? Walt says they aren't building nukes. I hope he's wrong.

That's four nations out of nine which obtained nuclear weapons for self-defence.

Wants to bomb Iran they should. By all means. They have a proven inability to associate peacefully with their neighbors and I see no reason why they shouldn't also bomb Iran.
One question I have though is "why can't the US work toward normal relations with Iran?" we need to work to bring them into the fold not isolate them and make them a pariah. Our behavior just feeds their extreme viewpoint toward us and encourages a stronger relationship with China. Israel needs to be exposed as the windbags they are. Hey Bibi put up or shut up.

this article contains more misinformation than nearly any article I have ever read on the issue. it purposefully distorts and changes facts. Does anyone honestly believe Iran is enduring sanctions which are crippling its economy and starving its people just to conduct research on medical isotopes?

First you claim that Iran has "nuclear ambitions" that they should renounce it.

And when we point put that Iran has always
been quoted against nukes you say they're lying.

But since Iran has ALREADY renounced nukes you have no case.

Admit it.

Of course not!Obviously you don't understand foreign policy or security issues that have been with us since 1945.You cannot remember a U.S airforce base in Europe..

"Is rio orange war always forfait b and you inevitable ?"
MaximB