'k hoop dat dit niet waar is!

[A'lies Van Hoof]

Tijdens het avondeten wist mijn broer het volgende te zeggen. Hij had de avond ervoor naar Ter Zake gezien en hij was er blijkbaar nog niet goed van...en terecht. Ik hoop alleen dat hij ongelijk heeft:

In de komende vier jaar zouden er nog vreselijk veel oorlogen bijkomen. De Amerikanen hebben al een heel plan klaarliggen om Iran binnen te vallen, enkel de 'Go' van Mr President ontbreekt nog atm. Op het lijstje van Bush als aan te vallen landen staan nog: Wit-Rusland, Korea (en dan heeft hij er nog genoemd, maar die ben ik vergeten.)

Ik wil hier eigenlijk wel meer over weten... want brrr...waar gaat het toch naartoe!!!

[jenskevdb]

Iran

Over Iran gesproken ... Toevallig iemand de reportage omtrent de status van de vrouw in Iran gezien? Een reportage getoond in het programma 'Bewogen Leven'. Afschuwelijke toestanden overheersen daar. Dit zou echter geen reden mogen zijn om deze wantoestanden met geweld te bestrijden ... Wat meer dan waarschijnlijk wel een zekerheid is: Met Bush aan de macht, zal er zeker geen inperking komen van het oorlogsgeweld.
Toegepast op Iran: Er valt daar nog heel wat olie te rapen. En het regime leent zich ertoe om een 'rechtvaardige' oorlog aan te vatten. Bang afwachten dus wat de toekomst zal brengen ...

Jens

[Michai Geyzen]

Als ik het goed heb, dan hoor ik al enkele maanden het gerucht 'onder de mensen' dat Iran de volgende is... Olie, zoals Jens zegt, is tochwel weeral niet een terugkerende 'toevallige' factor zeker.

Ik hoor Bush het al zeggen:

'Yes, we want to free that country from dictatorship'

Ans what about the oil Mister President?

'Oil, what oil... and may god continue to bless America, and its oil-industry... Darn, did I say that last thing out loud?'



of zoiets

[Barst]

Zimbabwe, Cuba en Miyanmar waren de binnenkomers met stip...

Ik had hetzelfde gevoel: heb hier gisteren al het artikel van Hersh gepost waarin de geheime militaire infiltraties in Iran aan het licht werden gebracht, en dan gisteren als apéritif - kreng Rice is nog niet eens officieel geïnstalleerd in het Foreign Office - krijgen we nog eens op ons brood dat er nota bene nog een aantal 'gegadigden' zijn...

Ondertussen is de opiumproductie in Afghanistan nog nooit zo rendabel geweest, en is in Irak de vrede geen stap dichterbij gekomen, het is integendeel heel wervend gebleken als broeihaard voor terrorisme... En de onvoorwaardelijke(!) Amerikaanse steun aan Israël sluit elke rechtvaardige oplossing van het conflict aldaar van op voorhand al uit... Tenzij men bereid is niet langer te aanvaarden dat het woord 'compromis' een geven en nemen impliceert van TWEE strijdende partijen...

[jenskevdb]

En is het juist als ik zeg dat de fundamentalistisch religieuze dictatuur een uitstekend alibi zou zijn om deze oorlog te verantwoorden?

[Barst]

Als alibi? Natuurlijk. En het hoeft zelfs nog niet eens waar te zijn, zie massavernietigingswapens in Irak. Als je je publiek maar kan laten geloven wat je wil...
De uitzending van 'Bewogen Leven' was ten andere zeer zeker waar - heb ze opgenomen omdat ik ze zondag al had gezien op NED3 - en ze zou als toonbeeld kunnen dienen van schijn-heiligheid...
Denk je dat het er anderzijds in een land als Saoedi-Arabië anders aan toegaat? Maar dat land is omwille van de petrodollars een 'natuurlijke' bondgenoot van de U.S., en dus is datzelfde argument daar van geen tel...

[jenskevdb]

Dus kan je gaan stellen dat elke 'niet-bondgenoot' van USA met oliedollars een potentieel slachtoffer kan worden van Bush!!
Wat een situatie!!!

[Barst]

Dus kan je gaan stellen dat elke 'niet-bondgenoot' van USA met oliedollars een potentieel slachtoffer kan worden van Bush!!
Wat een situatie!!!

Klopt...

[Barst]

Maar misschien worden de Amerikanen zelf ook ooit nog eens wakker!?

Dat zijn hier toch niet allemaal onnozelaars die dat zeggen, of wel??

How Americans Were Seduced by War

by Paul Craig Roberts

Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders who they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, "you are with us or against us."

What happens when Americans wake up to their betrayal? It is too late to be rescued from catastrophe in Iraq, but perhaps if Americans can understand how such a grand mistake was made they can avoid repeating it. In a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press,

The New American Militarism, Andrew J. Bacevich writes that we can avoid future disasters by understanding how our doctrines went wrong and by returning to the precepts laid down by our Founding Fathers, men of infinitely more wisdom than those currently holding reins of power.

Bacevich, West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, and soldier for 23 years, is a true conservative. He is an expert on US military strategy and a professor at Boston University. He describes how civilian strategists – especially Albert Wohlstetter and Andrew Marshall – not military leaders, transformed a strategy of deterrence that regarded war as a last resort into a strategy of naked aggression. The resulting "marriage of a militaristic cast of mind with utopian ends" has "committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale."

The greatest threat to the US is not terrorists but the neoconservative belief, to which President Bush is firmly committed, that American security and well-being depend on US global hegemony and impressing US values on the rest of the world. This belief resonates with a patriotic public. Bacevich writes, "in the aftermath of a century filled to overflowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying excessively on military power, the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword."

If Americans persist in these misconceptions, America will "share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny. We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize."

Bacevich understands that the problem is not how to deal with terrorism but how to deal with the hubris, laden with catastrophe, that America is God’s instrument for bringing history to its predetermined destination. Being assigned such an exalted role creates the delusion that America’s virtue is unquestionable and its use of preemptive coercion is infallible, delusion that led to the "cakewalk war" that would entrench Democracy in the Middle East and have the troops home in 90 days.

American hubris, which flows so freely from President Bush’s mouth, explains why half the US population yawns over the US slaughter of Iraqi civilians and communist-style torture of Iraqi prisoners. The "cakewalk war" is now almost two years old and has claimed 10 percent of the US occupation force as casualties. Yet, the delusion persists that the US is prevailing in Iraq.

The new American militarism would be inconceivable, Bacevich writes, "were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals." Books written about "militant Islam" could equally describe militant evangelical Christianity. How did a Christian doctrine of love and peace become an apology for war?

Bacevich explains that evangelicals, aghast at Vietnam era protests of America’s war against "godless communism," turned to the military as the repository of traditional American virtues. For evangelicals, endtimes doctrines converged eschatology with national security. Prophecies merged America’s fate with Israel’s. Islam inherited the role of godless communism and became the target of the war against evil. America emerged with the "same immensely elastic permission to use force previously accorded to Israel."

America’s security and the well-being of the world are threatened by America’s unwarranted belief in the efficacy of force. War is ungovernable: "The shattered reputations of generals and statesmen who presumed to bring it under control litter the twentieth century. On those rare occasions when war has yielded a seemingly decisive outcome, as in 1918 or 1945, it has done so only after exacting a staggering price from victor and vanquished alike. Even then, in resolving one set of problems, ‘good’ wars have fostered resentments or created temptations, leading as often as not to further conflict."

The new American militarism has abandoned the Founding Fathers, deserted the Constitution, and unrestrained the executive. War is a first resort. Militarism is inconsistent with globalism and with American ideals. It will end in abject failure.

The world is a vast place. The US has demonstrated that it cannot impose its will on a tiny part known as Iraq. American realism may yet reassert itself, dispel the fog of delusion, cleanse the body politic of the Jacobin spirit and lead the world by good example. But this happy outcome will require regime change in the US.


Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Copyright © 2005 Creators Syndicate, P.C. Roberts, 18-01-2005

[Barst]

Let's attack Iran!

Let's attack Iran!

By GWYNNE DYER


01/19/05 "Trinidad Express" -- Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article about American forces carrying out reconnaissance missions in Iran to locate hidden Iranian nuclear facilities, presumably in order to be able to destroy them all in a surprise attack, may be "riddled with errors,'' as the White House promptly alleged. It may be entirely true. And either way, it may have been deliberately leaked by the Bush administration to frighten Iran. But what was really revealing was the US media response to it.

There seems to be hardly anyone in the mainstream US media who is willing to question the assumption that Iranian nuclear weapons would be, say, ten times more dangerous than Chinese nuclear weapons. Yet China is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship while Iran is a partially democratic country struggling, so far unsuccessfully, to rid itself of the clique of deeply conservative mullahs who have dominated defence and foreign policy (together with much else) since 1979. Why is Iran seen as such a threat?

There was never an equivalent panic at the prospect of Chinese nuclear weapons. And it's not just that China was too big to think of attacking, whereas Iran is just right: 70 million Iranians in a country three times the size of Iraq is a very big chunk to bite off militarily, especially since the US already has Iraq on its plate.

It's not even as simple as the fact that Iran is Muslim, and that Americans have got really twitchy about Muslims with nuclear weapons since September 11. They have, but there is no public anxiety in the US about Pakistan's nuclear weapons, let alone any agitation for some sort of "pre-emptive attack'' to destroy them-and this despite the fact that a senior Pakistani nuclear scientist was caught selling nuclear weapons technology and knowledge to other Muslim countries, almost certainly with the complicity of some official circles in Islamabad.

Iran is not a "crazy state.'' In the 25 years that the mullahs have been in power, they have not attacked any neighbouring state. When Iraq invaded Iran in the 1980s (with American encouragement and support), they fought a bitter eight-year war to repel the invasion but accepted a negotiated peace that simply restored the status quo.

They backed their fellow Shias in southern Lebanon in their long resistance to the Israeli occupation and continue to help them today- but if that is support for "terrorism,'' it is only in the specific context of Arab resistance to Israeli military occupation. The only incident of international terrorism in which there was ever suspicion of Iranian involvement was the bombing of a American airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988, allegedly in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner in the Gulf by a US warship-but the Lockerbie attack was eventually pinned on Libya instead.

As for the Iranian nuclear weapons programme, which almost certainly does exist in some form or other, its goal is presumably to create a deterrent to Israel's hundreds of nuclear weapons. Since Israel has about a 40-year head-start in nuclear weapons production, Iran cannot realistically hope to achieve a first-strike capability against it, but even a few Iranian nuclear weapons that might survive to strike back would effectively remove a nuclear attack on Iran from Israel's list of options.

Iran's nuclear programme is not about the US, and the notion that the Iranian government would give terrorists nuclear weapons to attack American targets is just paranoid fantasy. Besides, Iran doesn't have any nuclear weapons yet, and if it sticks to the agreement it negotiated with the European contact group (Britain, France and Germany) late last year, it may never have them.

So why this apparent haste in the Bush administration to attack Iran now, and why the seeming enthusiasm for such a hare-brained project in wide sections of the US public (or at least of the media that claim to speak in their name)? Edward Luttwak, the military historian and strategic analyst who is renowned in Washington for his maverick views, recently described US foreign policy post-9/11 almost as an exercise in emotional physics. Never mind all the elaborate strategic plans and projects of the neo-conservatives, he implied; what really drives all this is just push-back.

After 9/11, there was an enormous need in the US to do something big, to smash stuff up and punish people for the hurt that had been done to Americans. Afghanistan was a logical and legitimate target of that anger, but it fell practically without a fight and left the national need for vengeance unassuaged. The invasion of Iraq was an emotional necessity if the rage was to be discharged, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the United States.

In this interpretation, all the talk about attacking Iran is the last wave of this emotional binge running feebly up the beach, and it is unlikely to sweep everything away. The talk is still macho, but the performance is not there to back it up. What the US public gets for all the taxes it pays on defence - currently around $2,000 a year for every American man, woman and child- is armed forces that are barely capable of holding down one middle-sized Arab country.

There simply aren't any American troops available to invade Iran, and air strikes will only annoy them. What would really tip the whole area into an acute crisis is a re-radicalised Iran that has concluded that it will never be secure until it has expelled the US from the region.



Copyright 2005 All rights reserved. Gwynne Dyer, Trinidad Express, 19-01-2005

[Davy V.H.]

Ik ga lekker toekijken... en met een zakje popcorn en speciale UV-bril kan je die paddestoelwolk misschien wel zien. Of is de USA echt zo ver?

Bij een bedrijf zouden de andere aandeelhouders al snel de 'slechte' manager ontslagen en vervangen hebben. Maar nee... ze geven hem nog meer kansen om het spel Risk om te zetten in realiteit. Ik denk dat zijn doel van het spel (verover alle Olierijke Moslimlanden en vernietig het Rode leger. Oh ja... dat rode leger is al weg zeker...

Nu heb ik zin in popcorn

[Davy V.H.]

[Barst]

Mooi... ondertekend met 'World Citizen'! If only all people...

[jenskevdb]

Iran

Volgens Prof. Kerremans is de kans klein dat Amerika Iran zal binnenvallen.
Reden: Ze zijn volgens hem militair te bedreigend voor USA. Maw De Amerikanen hebben er schrik van!
Misschien hebben ze wel iets te veel Iranium in stock

[Barst]

Ge moet van niks 'verschieten' met zo'n mannen...

Derde VS-journalist ontmaskerd die betaald werd door overheid


Een Amerikaanse journalist wiens columns in meer dan 50 kranten verschenen, is door het Amerikaanse ministerie van Volksgezondheid betaald om initiatieven van het ministerie in een goed daglicht te plaatsen.

Michael McManus schreef de column "Ethics & Religion" en bereikte daarmee een groot publiek in de VS. Hij kreeg ongeveer 10.000 dollar van het ministerie om het initiatief ter ondersteuning van het huwelijk te promoten. McManus was niet bereikbaar voor commentaar.

Het bericht over McManus komt een dag nadat de Amerikaanse president George W. Bush zijn ministers heeft gevraagd op te houden met het inhuren van journalisten om overheidsinitiatieven te promoten.

Eerder kwam al aan het licht dat Armstrong Williams, een televisie- en radiocommentator, 240.000 dollar van de regering ontving om zich uit te spreken vóór het onderwijshervormingsprogramma "No Child Left Behind", dat drie jaar geleden werd afgekondigd.

Armstrong Williams, een Conservatief en eigenaar van een PR-bureau, heeft al zijn excuses aangeboden. Hij verklaarde voorts dat hij ook daadwerkelijk een voorstander was van Bush' plan voor onderwijshervorming.

Verder kreeg ook columniste Maggie Gallagher 21.500 dollar van het ministerie van Volksgezondheid om het huwelijk te promoten.

De affaire leidde tot grote verontwaardiging bij de Democratische partij. Die beschuldigt Bush ervan belastinggeld te misbruiken voor politieke propaganda. Twee Democratische senatoren hebben aangekondigd een wetsontwerp te zullen indienen, de "Stop Government Propaganda Act" geheten, die zulke praktijken moet verbieden.

Weblog HLN, 28/01/05 17u41