New roll-out (propaganda campaign) for war with Iran?

One of the "poor dears" was so overcome with emotion that he was inspired to crack this fine joke-



It might be of interest that the Daily Mail has something of a reputation for existing on the opposite political wing to that where I had presumed Bernie sits. (A sitting duck joke). Or at least it caters to the prejudices of the armchair Ghengis Khan types who are, of course, a key component in the British electorate.

It is surprising that he grants the newspaper credit for integrity on this one particular item thus helping to increase its standing in the minds of liberals.

george said

This ought to be simple.

I did NOT "insist you offer an assertion that one cannot prove a future event certainly will not happen". Obviously, one cannot 'prove' a future event's occurence.

What I actually did was ask you a question to demonstrate our uncertainty about the future.

How did we get here?

1) I said that I did not think this administration would actually launch an attack on Iran but that I might have that wrong and they may do it.

2) Then you accused me of trying to "have it both ways".



As regards likelihoods/probabilities, there is nothing wrong with endeavoring to figure those out. Your discussions on global warming, for example, are marked by just such best-guess estimations. We do this all the time. It's a valid enterprise, given one takes time to try and get educated about the matters. Conversely, it seems entirely foolish to refuse to engage estimations of the sort.

As regards administrations and who might more or less likely launch an attack on Iran, I was not making a claim or an argument about Dem versus Republican, I was pointing to the track record of the Bush administration and to the sort of foreign policy notions and people who surround this administration.

Francis wrote-



We can't have that.

Weasels are of the genus Mustela and they have something of a similarity with stoats, ermines ( a posh word), mink, famous for fur coats, polecats, of which the less said the better, and ferrets, all of whom I love dearly having stroked, fed and carried in my inside pockets, and lectured on the inanity of impatience, on many occasions when rabbits were needed to provide a good stew for the staff. I have strewn freshly cut sawdust upon the floor of their houses when it has become too intolerable to civilised sensitivities. Nay- I have built their houses with my own bare hands.

They have long slender bodies which, it is said, are capable of getting through a wedding ring in emergencies, Sophie Tucker's maybe but hey- they can't be blamed for putting the best possible spin on it. I'd bet there's a lot of blokes who wished they could manage a feat of that order.

They have tails almost as long as their bodies which any self-publicist would be proud to own.

And they have a well merited reputation for cleverness and guile which anybody who admires Flaubert's fabulous creation, Spendius, is hardly going to take exception to.

Folklore has it that they perform mesmerizing war dances when full of themselves.

Collectively they are known as a boogle, or a gang, or a pack, or a confusion of weasels. Caveat Emptor applies.

They are also very caring of their young which is a characteristic sufficient in itself, whatever their other faults, to endear them to all but the stoniest of heart. And I have been told, though I've never seen it myself, that they are faster off the blocks that Roadrunner himself.

Bernie-

When you use the literary form "NOT" instead of "not" you obviously are assuming that we cannot read properly and need your guidance to interpret what you have written.

Like when a lady stamps her foot.

But I'm not convinced you two can read properly.

There you go then. Contemptuous insolence, although I recognise that forebearing to add " for one moment" after the "NOT" is a bit of a Brownie point.

One cannot be 'insolent' to one's inferiors.

Somehow I interpreted this as a request that I deny the categorical certainty of the proposition that the Bush Administration would not attack Iran. I of course, later did - as Blatham requested - deny the certainty of this proposition, though his reasons seem odd in that I had never made it.

Instead I said it was very unlikely; that the Administration has repeatedly said it preferred to see this worked out through the UN; and that the objective factors as I understand them strongly suggest that the Administration itself believes that such an action is undesirable. They steadfastly refuse to categorically deny that they will do such a thing under any circumstances - however that is merely prudent.

It seems very odd to me to castigate the Administration for something it hasn't done, particularly when one also admits that they aren't likely to take the action in question. There is indeed something suggestive of "having it both ways" in this.

It must be the fog.....

george, the romantic, said
As if the saying, or the multiple repetitions of what is said, is to be depended upon. My god, man. Have you learned nothing over the last six years?

Seymour Hersch's piece is now up on the New Yorker site... http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh

George won't read it. Spendi might, though it's not likely. And if spendi does read it, he'll write here about Hersch's elbow patches.

Bush Sought ?'Way' To Invade Iraq?
Jan. 11, 2004(CBS) A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.

Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run.

Entitled "The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. [Simon and Schuster, the book's publisher, and CBSNews.com, are both units of Viacom.]

But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports. Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.

Will this be seen as a "kiss-and-tell" book?

"I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure somebody will say all of that and more," says O'Neill, who was George Bush's top economic policy official.

In the book, O'Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."

This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: "I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening … As I recall, it was mostly a monologue."

He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.

O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind - and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.

Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book - including several cabinet members.

O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration - Donald Rumsfeld - warned O'Neill not to do this book.

Was it a warning, or a threat?

"I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned," says Suskind. "Understandably, because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president. They said, ?'This could really be the one moment where things are revealed.'"Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.

"Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank you" notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive," says Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings. "You don't get higher than that."

And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

"From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime," says Suskind. "Day one, these things were laid and sealed."

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ?'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."

And that came up at this first meeting, says O'Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.

He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. "There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ?'Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,'" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001. Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.

He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.

"It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions," says Suskind. "On oil in Iraq."

During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."

"The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ?'X' during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ?'Y,'" says Suskind. "Not just saying ?'Y,' but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election."

The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

"Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand," says Suskind. "He says, ?'You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.' … O'Neill is speechless."

"It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society," says O'Neill. "And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."

Did he think it was irresponsible? "Well, it's for sure not what I would have done," says O'Neill.

The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O'Neill. Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. He was becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major damage control.

Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with the Irish rock star Bono.

"Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show," says Suskind. "He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, ?'You know, you're getting quite a cult following.' And it clearly was not a joke. And it was not said in jest."

Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.

The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team.

"It's a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there," says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.

He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged.

"He asks, ?'Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again,'" says Suskind.

"He says, ?'Didn't we already, why are we doing it again?' Now, his advisers, they say, ?'Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.' And the president kind of goes, ?'OK.' That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again. ?'Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to say, ?'You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?'"

But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.

"Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ?'Stick to principle. Stick to principle.' He says it over and over again," says Suskind. "Don't waver."

In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.

With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he was in the right.

But look at the economy today.

"Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was terrific," says O'Neill. "I think the tax cut made a difference. But without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors for, against more tax cuts." While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering.

"Hmmm, you really think so," asks O'Neill, who says he isn't joking. "Well, I'll be darned."

"You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book," says Stahl to O'Neill. "And they're going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because he was fired."
"I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be hard put to," says O'Neill.

Is he prepared for it?

"Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth," says O'Neill. "Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?"

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

Bush Began to Plan War Three Months After 9/11
Book Says President Called Secrecy Vital

By William Hamilton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 17, 2004; Page A01

Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

Blatham,

I did read Hersh's article. Interesting, gossipy report of the often disjoint impressions of the author's sources, all set in the context of a postulated insane U.S. regime bent on yet another mindless attack regardless of the consequences. The problem, of course, is that, even though this assumption is taken as revealed truth by Hersh, you and many of the chattering class, it is not necessarily true, and indeed not even likely. There are other equally coherent explanations that appear (at least to me) far more likely.

A second issue I have with the piece is that, while it makes no attempt whatever to present (or even to refer to) an alternative solution to an admittedly complex strategic problem, it is suffused with the certainty that the administration's actual actions, contemplated ones, and subjective intentions are all necessarily wrong.

I was bemused by the cited opinions of Zbigniew Brzezinski - now a sage elder much in favor with the liberal establishment. He was Jimmy Carter's NSC Director during the Iranian Revolution. Given the abject failure of that unlamented Administration's policy with respect to the outrageous events surrounding that revolution, and their shameless betrayal of a dying former ally (who as history has subsequently shown ran a more progressive government in Iran than the present one) , Brzezinski is in no position to be taken seriously by thinking people today.

Criticism is itself often valuable. However people with an experience of responsibility and accountability know it is no substitute for a coherent alternative strategy, and that in the real world it is often guided by unseen motives and assumptions.

Thanks for the New Yorker article Bernie.

What struck me was the European assessment that Gordon Brown is most supportive of an American strike.

He's a clever cookie. The Labour party are surging ahead in the polls in large measure because Brown is not Blair and seen as standing up to Bush (a bit). But its a false image. Brown is every bit as keen to support the US as Blair was. Given this fundamental understanding, Brown can allow one or two critical voices of US policy to surface, knowing Bush wont be too worried, whilst giving every appearance of putting distance between London and Washington for UK domestic consumption.

Also whats not talked about here much is the humilliating defeat of the Royal Navy by a few Revolutionary Guards in rubber boats. The Marine equivalent of the SAS is now officially the SASSS. (Surrender Apologise Sell Story to Sun)

Bernie wrote-



I did read it and I'm a bit fed up with having been pointed at such banal, simplistic and obvious drivel and can only think that the editor needed something quick to go on the reverse side of an ad for a gas-guzzler and he asked an expert at such things to get one up over lunch. (That'll be 500 droolars chief!)

Report: Russia Evacuates Entire Bushehr Staff
Iranian news outlet claims nuclear experts packed their bags Friday, increasing speculation of imminent U.S., Israeli attack
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, October 1, 2007


Iranian and Israeli news outlets are reporting that Russia has evacuated its entire staff of nuclear engineers and experts who were working at the Bushehr nuclear reactor, increasing speculation that the United States is preparing an imminent military attack on Iran.

According to the Khorramshar News Agency, which represents ethnic Arabs in opposition to Ahmadinejad's regime who live near the reactor, the Russians packed their bags and left on Friday.

DEBKAfile offers three different scenarios to explain the sudden withdrawal of the experts.

a) Russian-Iranian negotiations about how work will proceed on Bushehr have again hit a roadblock. This is highly unlikely because Vladimir Putin is set to visit Iran later in the month to sign a set of nuclear accords.

b) The Russians have learned that an Iranian attack against American interests in the Persian Gulf or Israel is imminent. This is extremely doubtful because any preemptive Iranian attack would give Israel and the U.S. the pretext they are desperately searching for to launch a devastating bombing campaign.

c) Moscow or Tehran have been tipped off that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities is imminent and the Russians are getting their people out of harm's way. This seems to be the most plausible scenario, especially since reports emerged Friday from numerous "unnamed" worldwide intelligence sources that military action is just around the corner.

With every passing week, war rhetoric and maneuvering escalates as an assault on Iran seems all but inevitable.

This past weekend, Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said there was no alternative to a military option and that plans should be enacted for a "limited strike against their nuclear facilities."

Veteran newsman Seymour Hersh reports that the Bush administration has switched targets from Iran's nuclear facilities to instead target the Revolutionary Guard in a series of planned "surgical" air strikes.

"During a video conference over the summer, Bush allegedly told Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, that he was considering striking Iranian targets across the border and that the British "were on board," reports AFP.
link

Blue, you are scaring me. Is it time to get out of the market. Any such attack is going to bring on, at least, a recession.

US, Israel Poised to Repeat Saddam's Error by Uri Avnery
A respected American paper posted a scoop this week: Vice President Dick Cheney, the King of Hawks, has thought up a Machiavellian scheme for an attack on Iran. Its main point: Israel will start by bombing an Iranian nuclear installation, Iran will respond by launching missiles at Israel, and this will serve as a pretext for an American attack on Iran.
http://www.antiwar.com/avnery/?articleid=11694

Advocate, I've already moved most of our year-to-date gains into a federal money market fund, because this market is too bullish for a response to the half point drop in interest rates that doesn't even help consumers.

The housing market is getting worse every month, and that will also depress consumer spending, because there's no more equity to be refinanced.

All the warning signs are there, but it seems most investors are continuing to transfer their bond funds into equity; the exact reverse of what I'm doing.

Bob Brinker, a great, great, market timer, will issue his advice in a couple of days.