THE AMERICANS ARE COMING..... TO IRAN

THE SANCTIONS ARE ANNOUNCED, THE BOMBS CANNOT BE FAR BEHIND


We live in odious times. Just yesterday it seems, a gang of criminals in the American leadership were able to carry out an illegal invasion of Iraq on fraudulent premises, against the wishes of the world community, except the bribed, the bullied and the British. The propaganda in support of that invasion included claims that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 911 attacks, possessed weapons of mass destruction for use against America, and had actively been seeking nuclear weapons for the same purpose.

ALL of those claims were false, should have been known to be such – given the devastated state of Iraq since 1991 – and should have been treated with skepticism if not outright contempt by the international media and political leadership. Instead, partly (but only partly) because of the way in which the Bush administration bullied anyone who questioned its actions (accusing them of treason) those lies were swallowed whole, and the nation of Iraq was destroyed again, with some 650,000 casualties to date.

For the last year or so, similar deceitful propaganda has been broadcast about Iran and its leader Ahmadinejad.....whose principal problems seems to be his rejection of official Western narrative and the 'free' expression of alternative viewpoints. But the West does not wish to accord Ahmadinejad the right of free speech and has chosen to misrepresent his statements and intentions. Leading historians such as Niall Ferguson have published articles warning of 'Armageddon', because Iran wants to acquire nuclear energy, conveniently omitting to mention Israel's ownership of hundreds of nuclear weapons.

The same lies are being broadcast about Ahmadinejad and Iran, that had been spread about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Another calamitous attack is in the wings.....Iran is due to be destroyed (by bombs if not an invasion) just as Iraq has been.

Is there no one who will speak out against this obscenity?

ARE YOU GAY, IBBITSON?

TELL ME IBBITSON, ARE YOU GAY?


Hey John, or is it Roger? Tell me, are you gay? I gotta know. Because your love for the gays in Iran has touched my heart.

But I need to know if this was true brotherly love, or just gay love – you know the concern of a gay for his fellow gays in another country – which would seem to be a little tainted for my taste...

The sanctions against Iran have been announced. The bombs cannot be far behind......

Where will you be, John (or is it Roger)? Where will other loving souls like you, tortured by the persecution of gays in Iran, be, when the bombs fall?

Will you be in Teheran – organizing bomb shelters for the gays? Will you act as human shields protecting gay communities so the American bombs don't destroy them?

Will you be asking the Americans to use specially-smart-bombs which don't explode if they hit gays?

You should........ actually that would be a good plan – organize a group of Western journalists like yourself, deeply concerned about the rights of gays in Iran, organize them in bomb shelters, and make sure the Americans know where those gay shelters are......

As for the rest of the Iranian population who will be blown to bits by the tens of thousands of bombs falling from the sky, from those thousands of B-52 bombers safely ensconced at 50,000 feet, they don't matter, do they? After all, they're not gay.......and they're not Christian, either, eh..?

So get on with it, John, or is it Roger.......save the gays in Iran – they need your help – or the Americans will kill them all...!

DON'T PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON'T

Don't play it again, Sam.

You already made a huge mess in Iraq – poetic justice given the lies and fabrications that you engaged in to invade that country, not to mention the bribing and the bullying you did of small and weak countries to create the illusion of a 'Coalition' to mask your criminal intent.

Now you want to do the same thing to Iran, using similar devices. Don't do it. Already you are the most hated country in the world, but more importantly (because this is dear to your capitalist heart) your almighty dollar has taken a huge beating. That's what happens when you spend hundreds of billions of dollars (I know you don't care about the hundreds of thousands of lives you take) for ill-conceived invasions, but even more so when you rape your own citizens by giving hundreds of billions of $ in tax-cuts to your wealthy cronies (you know, like the ones who benefit personally from the sale of weapons abroad, and the commission of war-criminal invasions and other such interventions...) by taking money away from much needed social programs (like universal health-care, education, social-security...) for the average citizen..

Hey did you see 'Sicko'? Bet it didn't embarrass you, eh? Why should it? Your favoured friends can buy all the health-care they want from the welfare subsidies (oops – tax cuts) they get...so what does it matter if a few poor citizens (911 heroes, to boot!) have to travel to Cuba to get free medical care which you cannot give them, or should I say do not want to give them....as you thrust them into the clutches of mercenary HMO's.

There is a special place being created in hell for the likes of your Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their friends in the CIA (the world-beating terrorist organization) and the industrial-military-politico-bureaucratic complex....... and no amount of spin by your friends in the media will save these guys from that hell. Actually those media friends will be joining your guys in hell – as true friends in places high and low....

But meanwhile, please, please, please – Don't Play It Again, Sam.....leave Iran alone......don't shoot yourself in your second foot now, please...

INVASION OF THE BUSHITES - PART TWO

These guttersnipes have already raped and destroyed Iraq, but their innate evil urges them to now plunder the ancient land of Persia, called Iran. The most despised man on this planet is probably George Bush Jr., if a world-wide poll could be taken. However, in the unreal world of the Bushites which includes the lying media and members of the 'bribed and bullied' (where do they get their research funding?) academia (eg. Niall Ferguson - that Oxford-Harvard historian who defends imperialism as good medicine for the world) - that position belongs to Ahmadinejad.....

Hence their constant attacks on that man simply because he dares to stand up for Iran's rights to acquire nuclear energy, and for the rights of Palestinians to their own country, one that is denied them by the combined might of the United States and an Israel armed to the tooth by the United States - including with hundreds of nuclear weapons that can easily 'vaporize' Iran. But that is not relevant in the minds of the Western media and 'historians' like Ferguson who write of Armageddon if Iran builds a bomb, while breathing not a word about the 200+ BOMBS that Israel already possesses.

American attacks on Iran, whether an invasion (less likely after the rapid decline in the US dollar and international US prestige following the rape of Iraq) or simply waves of bombings (that a Bill Maher would correctly label as cowardly) by B-52's safe at 50,000 feet in the sky......are the next great calamity and war-crime waiting to happen. And it must not be allowed to happen.

These Bushites, these murderers, war-criminals, and looters of the resources of other nations, must be stopped. The lies of their supporters in the media and the academic world must be exposed......the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, including vigilance against the criminals in our own leadership, who plan the rape and murder of other nations in broad daylight, with the mushroom gas of their lies, so that our brains, already sapped by alcohol, sports, sitcoms, the insane world of 30-second propaganda ads, and a contemptible Jerry Springer culture of instant celebrity, narcissism, and notoriety, give in as we slowly and subliminally turn to zombies following the corporate agenda...

A BRILLIANT ARTICLE THAT ONE PRAYS WILL BE PROPHETIC

Sun sets early on the American Century

Even hard-headed realists in the U.S. power elite fear the Iraq war has crippled America's ability to lead
Oct 14, 2007 04:30 AM
Philip S. Golub

The disastrous outcome of the invasion and occupation of Iraq has caused a crisis in the power elite of the United States deeper than that resulting from defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago. Ironically, it is the very coalition of ultranationalists and neo-conservatives that coalesced in the 1970s, seeking to reverse the Vietnam syndrome, restore U.S. power and revive "the will to victory" that has caused the present crisis.

There has been no sustained popular mass protest as there was during the Vietnam War, probably because of the underclass sociology of the volunteer U.S. military and the fact that the war is being funded by foreign financial flows. However, at the elite level the war has fractured the national security establishment that has run the United States for six decades. The unprecedented public critique in 2006 by several retired senior officers over the conduct of the war, plus recurrent signs of dissent in the intelligence agencies and the state department, reflects a much wider trend in elite opinion.

Not all critics are as forthright as retired general William Odom, who tirelessly repeats that the invasion of Iraq was the "greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history"; or Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who denounced a "blunder of historic proportions" and has recently suggested impeaching the president; or former National Security Council head Zbigniew Brzezinski, who called the war and occupation a "historic, strategic and moral calamity."

Most public critiques from within the institutions of state focus on the way the war and occupation have been mismanaged rather than the more fundamental issue of the invasion itself. Yet discord is wide and deep: Government departments are trading blame, accusing each other of the "loss of Iraq." In private, former senior officials express incandescent anger, denounce shadowy cabals and have deep contempt for the White House. A former official of the National Security Council compared the president and his staff to the Corleone mafia family in The Godfather. A senior foreign policy expert said: "Due to an incompetent, arrogant and corrupt clique we are about to lose our hegemonic position in the Middle East and Gulf."

"The White House has broken the army and trampled its honour," added a Republican senator and former Vietnam veteran.

None of these, nor any of the other institutional critics, could be considered doves: Whatever their political affiliations (mostly Republican) or personal beliefs, they were – and some are still – guardians of U.S. power, managers of the national security state, and sometimes central actors in covert and overt imperial interventions in the Third World during the Cold War and post-Cold War.

As a social group, these realists cannot be distinguished from the object of their criticism in terms of their willingness to use force or their historically demonstrated ruthlessness in achieving state aims. Nor can the cause of their dissent be attributed to conflicting convictions over ethics, norms and values (though this may be a motivating factor for some). It lies rather in the rational realization that the war in Iraq has nearly "broken the U.S. Army," weakened the national security state, and severely, if not irreparably, undermined "America's global legitimacy" – its ability to shape world preferences and set the global agenda. The most sophisticated expressions of dissent, such as Brzezinski's, reflect the understanding that power is not reducible to the ability to coerce, and that, once lost, hegemonic legitimacy is hard to restore.

The signs of slippage are apparent everywhere: in Latin America, where U.S. influence is at its lowest in decades; in East Asia, where the United States has been obliged, reluctantly, to negotiate with North Korea and recognize China as an indispensable actor in regional security; in Europe, where U.S. plans to install missile defence capabilities in Poland are being contested by Germany and other European Union states; in the Gulf, where old allies such as Saudi Arabia are pursuing autonomous agendas that coincide only in part with U.S. aims; and in the international institutions, the UN and the World Bank, where the United States is no longer in a position to drive the agenda unaided.

Transnational opinion surveys show a consistent and nearly global pattern of defiance of U.S. foreign policy as well as a more fundamental erosion in the attractiveness of the United States: The narrative of the American dream has been submerged by images of a military leviathan disregarding world opinion and breaking the rules. World public opinion may not stop wars but it does count in subtler ways. Some of this slippage may be repairable under new leaders and with new and less aggressive policies. Yet it is hard to see how internal unity of purpose will be restored: It took decades to rebuild the U.S. military after Vietnam and to define an elite and popular consensus on the uses of power.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq is not the sole cause of the trends sketched. Rather, the war significantly accentuated all of them at a moment when larger centrifugal forces were already at work: the erosion and collapse of the Washington Consensus and the gradual rise of new gravitational centres, notably in Asia, were established trends when President George Bush went to war. Now, as the shift in the world economy towards Asia matures, the United States is stuck in a conflict that is absorbing its total energies. History is moving on and the world is slipping, slowly but inexorably, out of U.S. hands.

For the U.S. power elite this is deeply unsettling. Since the mid-20th century U.S. leaders have thought of themselves as having a unique historic responsibility to lead and govern the globe. Sitting on top of the world since the 1940s, they have assumed that, like Great Britain in the 19th century, they were destined to act as hegemon – a dominant state having the will and the means to establish and maintain international order: peace and an open and expanding liberal world economy. In their reading of history it was Britain's inability to sustain such a role and America's simultaneous unwillingness to take responsibility that created the conditions for the cycle of world wars and depression during the first half of the 20th century.

The corollary of this assumption is the circular argument that since order requires a dominant centre, the maintenance of order (or avoidance of chaos) requires the perpetuation of hegemony. This belief system, theorized in U.S. academia in the 1970s as "hegemonic stability," has underpinned U.S. foreign policy since World War II, when the United States emerged as the core state of the world capitalist system. As early as 1940 U.S. economic and political elites forecast a vast revolution in the balance of power: The United States would become heir to the economic and political assets of the British Empire.

A year later, Time magazine publisher Henry Luce announced the coming American Century: "America's first century as a dominant power in the world" meant that its people would have "to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation and exert upon the world the full impact of our influence as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." By the mid-1940s the contours of the American Century had already emerged: U.S. economic predominance and strategic supremacy upheld by a planetary network of military bases.

The postwar U.S. leaders who presided over the construction of the national security state were filled, in William Appleman Williams's words, with "visions of omnipotence": The United States enjoyed enormous economic advantages, a significant technological edge and briefly held an atomic monopoly. Though the Korean stalemate (1953) and the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons and missile programs dented U.S. self-confidence, it took defeat in Vietnam and the domestic social upheavals that accompanied the war to reveal the limits of power. Henry Kissinger's and Richard Nixon's "realism in an era of decline" was a reluctant acknowledgment that the overarching hegemony of the previous 20 years could not and would not last forever.

But Vietnam and the Nixon era were a turning point in another more paradoxical way: Domestically they ushered in the conservative revolution and the concerted effort of the mid-1980s to restore and renew the national security state and U.S. world power. When the Soviet Union collapsed a few years later, misguided visions of omnipotence resurfaced. Conservative triumphalists dreamed of primacy and sought to lock in long-term unipolarity. Iraq was a strategic experiment designed to begin the Second American Century. That experiment and U.S. foreign policy now lie in ruins.

Historical analogies are never perfect but Great Britain's long exit from empire may shed some light on the present moment. At the end of the 19th century few British leaders could even begin to imagine an end to empire. When Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in 1897, Britain possessed a formal transoceanic empire that encompassed a quarter of the world's territory and 300 million people – twice that if China, a near colony of 430 million people, was included. The city of London was the centre of an even more far-flung trading and financial empire that bound the world. It is unsurprising that, despite apprehensions over U.S. and German industrial competitiveness, significant parts of the British elite believed that they had been given "a gift from the Almighty of a lease of the universe forever."

The Jubilee turned out to be "final sunburst of an unalloyed belief in British fitness to rule." The Second Boer War (1899-1902) fought to preserve the routes to India and secure the weakest link in the imperial chain, wasted British wealth and blood and revealed the atrocities of scorched-earth policies to a restive British public. The world war that broke out in 1914 bankrupted and exhausted all of its European protagonists. The long end of the British era had started. However, the empire not only survived the immediate crisis but hobbled on for decades, through World War II, until its inglorious end at Suez in 1956. Still, a nostalgia for lost grandeur persists. As Tony Blair's Mesopotamian adventures show, the imperial afterglow has faded but is not entirely extinguished.

For the U.S. power elite, being on top of the world has been a habit for 60 years. Hegemony has been a way of life; empire, a state of being and of mind. The institutional realist critics of the Bush administration have no alternative conceptual framework for international relations, based on something other than force, the balance of power or strategic predominance.

The present crisis and the deepening impact of global concerns will perhaps generate new impulses for co-operation and interdependence in future. Yet it is just as likely that U.S. policy will be unpredictable: As all post-colonial experiences show, de-imperialization is likely to be a long and possibly traumatic process.

Philip S. Golub is a journalist and lecturer at the University of Paris VIII.

WHO'S THE F....NG LIAR, HERE, EH?

Much has been made of Iranian president's evasiveness in answering questions about anti-gay laws in Iran, and the treatment of women. Several journalists have used these topics as an excuse to dismiss everything he said as 'mendacious'. There are two serious problems with this approach. First it allows these journalists to behave as if the West has always been friendly to gays- an obvious lie since homosexuals suffered decades of persecution with extreme prejudice including savage beatings in some cases or suicide in others. Secondly, it allows them to ignore the real and valid allegations Ahmadinejad made about the terrorism and war-criminal acts of the West, particularly the US and UK.

There is therefore plenty of mendacity in the way Western journalists have reported Ahmadinejad's speeches. Brobdingnagian mendacity in fact. As an article in the Star recently stated, 2 gays were executed in Iran in 2005 under harsh laws, but the community of gays by and large functions without persecution so long as they stay closeted and don't become activists demanding rights. The principal privation that
Iranian gays seem to suffer then, is they cannot hold Gay Pride marches as in the West. Is that really a big deal? And how long did Western gays have to suffer and fight before they acquired this privilege?

Secondly - women's rights. Yes Iran is an Islamic country and behind the West in this respect. But the West's record once again on this subject is hardly laudatory, as women suffered exploitation and inequality (in some respects they still do) for ages before the Suffragists and Feminists changed the societal dynamic so far that now extreme misandrous (male-hating) feminist ideology is sacrosanct in Western society.

The high and mighty in the West must have an unbelievable amount of feminist 'skeletons' in their closets to have capitulated so cravenly to every extreme feminist demand, even in the face of contradictory evidence and protest from moderate feminists who have argued in vain that male-female relations are too complex to be adjudicated in the 'male aggressor, female victim' mold. And male academics who have tried to publish research contradicting feminist ideology have been ostracized, persecuted and marginalized. No wonder the Western media finds it profitable and safe to pay homage to feminist ideology rather than male-female realities.

Now on to the bigger mendacities of omission by the Western media. Journalists attacking Ahmadinejad's statements (not actions) should note the duplicitous, imperialist and frequently genocidal actions of their own governments, which the Iranian president politely tried to bring to the world's attention. They should mention the long-standing history of imperialist interference in the Middle East and other parts of the third world.

The Sykes-Pikot treaty, the CIA coup to remove Mossadegh and install the brutal Shah in Iran, the deceit and complicity of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in providing massive WMD to Saddam Hussein to wage war against Iran, the denial of Palestinian rights, the US's occupation of Iraq and their killing of 650,000 Iraqi civilians - these are all truths that the Western media doesn't want to mention.

Hence their focus on some things Ahmadinejad allegedly said, instead of what their societies and governments did. Academics who have tried to publish similar views in America, and even former leaders such as Jimmy Carter, have seen themselves ostracized. The West does not want to hear the truth about its own crimes.

Hence the media's refusal to report the fact that Ahmadinejad's views on Israel are supported by many Jewish groups opposed to Zionism and that the leaders of such groups actually met Ahmadinejad during his visit to New York as a gesture of support...... now that simply cannot be reported, can it?

The West and its media are guilty of far greater mendacity than they accuse Ahmadinejad of, and much, much, much else besides.

Harinder Jadwani

AN ANGRY LETTER TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

AN ANGRY LETTER TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

In early 2003, your newspaper was one of many North American media organizations including newspapers and TV channels such as CNN and Fox, which supported the Bush administration's propaganda and lies which led to the American invasion, utterly illegal and based on false premises, of Iraq. That country, which had already been devastated in 1991 (though for more legitimate grounds, which nonetheless included the US's setting up Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait by suggesting
Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait did not concern the US) - 'bombed to the stone age' as some put it, then subjected to incessant economic sanctions which ended up killing a half-million Iraqi children, constant harassment with UN arms inspections until Hussein finally threw the inspectors out, and ad-hoc bombings by the US and the UK, whenever the US President's political ratings needed a boost, was once again destroyed. Since 2003, over 650,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, many through US bombings, although this piece of news is hardly reported in North America, or is otherwise marginalized.

The blood of those 650,000 Iraqis is not only on the hands of the war-criminals in the White House - Bush, Cheney and the erstwhile Rumsfeld - and their friends in the industrial-military-politico-bureaucratic complex, it is also on the hands of news organizations such as the Globe and Mail which supported the invasion by acting as propaganda agencies for the Bush administration and its neo-imperialist agenda. You are complicit in the crimes committed against Iraq.

But that hasn't deterred you from engaging in similar misleading propaganda about Iran. Some months ago - during the mini-brouhaha over 15 British 'hostages' captured by Iran, your editorial fumed about that nation's 'history' of taking hostages. But you didn't mention why Iran took those hostages - the history that led to that action. You neglected to mention that in the 1950s, the 'democracy-loving' US and its imperialist lapdog the UK, illegally and criminally removed Iran's democratically elected leader and installed the Shah - who for the next twenty-plus years ran Iran as a brutal police state, torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. During this period, the US was able to profitably sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to the Shah, crippling Iran's economy and causing massive unemployment and unrest. It was this 'history' which you deliberately failed to mention in your editorial, which led to the overthrow of the Shah, the storming of the US embassy and the taking of 50 American hostages..... A reasonable person would conclude that this action, however unpleasant, was remarkably limited and mild given the catastrophic harm that the US had done to Iran.
And why was Mossadegh removed? Because he wanted to secure a better price for Iranian oil which was being extracted by the British oil company at virtually no cost, and for which Iran got virtually nothing. And what was the US response to this unpleasant but relatively mild Iranian protest? It gave massive support and arms to Saddam Hussein to prosecute an 8-year war against Iran which, as Ahmedinejad said at Columbia University, cost 200,000 Iranian lives, and 600,000 wounded casualties. Twenty years later, the loathsome Bush administration including the odious Rumsfeld who had personally offered the arms to Hussein, turned around and accused Iraq of waging war against its
neighbours!

As PM Stephen Harper euphemistically noted yesterday in New York, the US is hated in 'some circles'. In many circles, actually and for good reason. It has a 'history' of neo-imperialistic intervention in many parts of the world - through the CIA and other means of terror (yes terror - Professor Noam Chomsky of the MIT has published volumes of documented research on this). It has a 'history' of removing democratically elected leaders in third world countries, and replacing them with brutal dictators who serve the US's interests.

It brutally murdered millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians...through some of the most savage and inhuman bombings in history (if bombings can be anything other than inhuman)...

Unfortunately the actions of newspapers such as yours which parrot American propaganda may end up causing Canada also to be hated internationally.

Not content with your complicity in the Iraqi genocide, you now wish to support the Bush administration's posturing and lies against Iran. You deliberately portray Iran as seeking nuclear weapons and publish alarmist articles such as those written by prestigious neo-imperialist apologists like Niall Ferguson. You deliberately fail to mention that it is Israel that has hundreds of nuclear weapons. It is Israel that can easily 'wipe Iran off the map'. You deliberately misrepresent, as do the US media, the Iranian president's statements about Israel, to create the impression that Iran seeks to build nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Your journalist, John Ibbotson, knows very well that what
Ahmedinejad said was that Israel was created by force out of Palestinian land, in the process evicting millions of Palestinian Muslims who have lived for 60 years as refugees in terrible conditions - and that the original nation of Palestine incorporating Jews, Muslims and Christians should be reconstituted as a replacement for Israel.

You seem determined to support the Bush administration's plan to attack Iran on premises as shaky and deceitful as those used against Iraq. You want more blood, it seems on your hands. Well, perhaps you will get your wish, and even evade justice until the hereafter. But perhaps that will signal the end of the US as an 'hyper-power'. Bin Laden once said the US could never be defeated in battle - it could only be drained of its strength by engaging it in 2 or 3 intractable international conflicts. Well - nobody needed
to engage the US in Iraq - it did it all by itself, against the wishes of the international community, excepting the 'bribed and the bullied' and its British lapdog. Perhaps an invasion of Iran, though catastrophic for that nation, will finally bring down the American bully and war-criminal.

If your newspaper has an ounce of journalistic integrity, it will publish this letter.

Harinder Jadwani
Brampton, Ontario