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#1
July 12th 08, 08:32 PM
posted to soc.veterans,alt.military.retired,alt.war.vietnam,rec.aviation.military.naval,alt.war
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Iran will target US bases if attacked
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?i...onid=351020101
Iran will target US bases if attacked Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:18:18 Iran says its Armed Forces would target the heart of Israel and 32 US bases before the dust settles from an attack on the country. "If the enemy was confident that it would emerge victorious from an attack on Iran, they would not put it off for even another day," an aide to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Mojtaba Zolnoor said on Saturday. Today, through the efforts of Iranian experts, the military capabilities of the country's Armed Forces have reached an advanced level, he added. "If the US or Israel fire one bullet against Iran, the Iranian Armed Forces will not hesitate to target the heart of Israel and 32 US military bases in the region before the dust settles," warned Ayatollah Khamenei's representative in the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Iran has repeatedly warned that its Armed Forces are fully prepared to immediately deliver a crushing response to any offensive on Iranian territory. Iran's words of caution come following escalating speculation that the Israeli maneuver in early June was held in preparation for a war with the Islamic Republic. -------------------------------------------------------------------- New War Brewing: US, Israel Take Dangerous Steps by Eric Margolis GENEVA - The U.S., Israel and Iran are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that soon could result in a new Mideast war. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration and Israel, recently joined by France, are issuing increasingly loud threats of military action to frighten Iran into halting its nuclear enrichment program. Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely for civilian use. Tehran is alternating between conciliatory statements and threats to retaliate against any attack by inflicting economic chaos on the global economy. Europe fears the economic damage a war against Iran would bring far more than Iran¢s nuclear program. Senior Israeli officials are openly threatening to attack Iran¢s nuclear installations before President George W. Bush¢s term expires. Early, this month Israel staged a large, U.S.-approved exercise using F-15s and F-16s to rehearse an attack over 900 miles - precisely the distance to Iran¢s nuclear facilities. The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran ¢s government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel¢s destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran. This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end. Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets. Senior American officers Admiral William Fallon and Air Force Chief Michael Mosley recently were fired for opposing war against Iran. According to Israel¢s media, President Bush even told Israel¢s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he could not trust America¢s intelligence community and preferred to rely on Israeli intelligence. AIR BLITZ Intensifying activity is evident at U.S. bases in Europe and the Gulf, aimed at preparing a massive air blitz that may include repeated attacks on 3,100 targets in Iran. Other sources say Iranian Revolutionary Guard installations will be barraged by cruise missiles. In Washington, Congress, under intense pressure from the Israel lobby, is about to adopt a resolution calling for a naval blockade of Iran, an overt act of war. Pro-Israel groups have been airing TV commercials claiming Iran is attacking American troops in Iraq and threatens the U.S. The Bush administration¢s last desperate act, its Gotterdammerung, could be war with Iran. UN weapons inspectors concur with U.S. intelligence that there is no proof Iran is working on nuclear arms, but the neocon war party in Washington is determined to loosen a final Parthian shaft by striking Iran. Israel asserts the right to maintain its Mideast nuclear monopoly by destroying all fissile-producing reactors in the region. Iran vows to retaliate against Israel with its inaccurate Shahab missiles, shut the Strait of Hormuz and mine the Gulf, producing worldwide financial panic, severe fuel shortages, and $400-$500 per barrel oil. Iran likely will attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and strike Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities. Canadians in Afghanistan could also become targets. GRAVE DAMAGE The embattled Bush administration¢s bunker mentality is leading to war that will gravely damage long-term U.S. Mideast interests. A single Iranian missile hit on Israel¢s reactor would do more damage to the Jewish state than all its previous wars. Besides, Israel cannot destroy Iran¢s nuclear infrastructure. A U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran will guarantee Tehran decides to build nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran have turned their regional rivalry into a confrontation that threatens all. Iran¢s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, not its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls that nation¢s military and insists Iran will not produce nuclear weapons. Israel claims it faces a second holocaust. Iran says Israel¢s nuclear forces threaten its existence. The dogs of war are being unleashed. Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. Published on Sunday, July 6, 2008 by The Toronto Sun http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/06/10160/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! Date: Friday, July 11, 2008, 10:11 AM Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1y47K29J1o ----------------------------------------------------------------- Israel should not be allowed to push US into war with Iran No More Blank Checks for War by Patrick J. Buchanan Friday, July 11, 2008 After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a "blank cheque" to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should war come, Britain would fight on Poland's side. Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed. Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of Joseph Stalin's empire. Lesson: No great power should ever give to a small ally or client state a blank check to drag it into war. This raises the question: Has President Bush given Israel a blank check? A year ago, Israel attacked and smashed an alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria. In April, Israel held a five-day civil defense drill. In June, Israel sent 100 F-15s and F-16s, with refueling tankers, toward Greece in a simulated attack. The planes flew 1,450 kilometers, the distance to Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. On June 6, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, "If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program we will attack it." Ehud Olmert returned from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis, "George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term." Is Israel bluffing, or in dead earnest? For while Israel can do damage to Iran, she cannot defeat Iran without using nuclear weapons. But any attack Israel launched against Iran would require U.S. complicity, and any Israeli war with Iran would almost certainly require the United States to do most of the fighting to win or end it. Thus, if George Bush does not want war with Iran, with two U.S. wars already, he must inform the Israelis in unequivocal terms that the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, and will not assist but denounce any such attack. If Bush believes war with Iran is vital to U.S. security, he should make that case to Congress. To allow Israel to start a war we do not want would be an abdication of his duty as president. Clearly, among the reasons Israel conducted its dress rehearsal for war was to maximize pressure on Iran to halt enriching uranium. Bush may well have welcomed the added pressure. But as the Iranians have insisted, they are entitled, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty they signed and Israel did not, to enrich uranium for fuel in power plants. Tehran has declared it will not be the only nation to surrender its legal rights under the NPT. And in response to the Israeli military exercises, Tehran conducted its own missile-firing exercises this week. If neither side yields, confrontation is inevitable. Perhaps soon. For we are only four months from the election, and Israel is pawing the ground to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Is this Bush's back door to war with Iran? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, in Israel a week ago, returned to say a "third front" in the Middle East, with Iran, would be "extremely stressful" to U.S. forces. He is saying that U.S. ground forces probably cannot now cope with another war, with a nation three times as large as Iraq. Asked about Israel taking unilateral action, Mullen replied, "This is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be more unstable." But Mullen is not the president. What did Bush tell Olmert? Does Israel have a green light, a yellow light or a red light? Should Israel attack Iran and Bush deny complicity, he would no more be believed than were Britain and France in 1956. Then, the Israelis stormed into Sinai, and Britain and France said they were intervening to separate the warring nations and secure the Suez Canal. Outraged, Ike ordered the British, French and Israelis alike to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did. President Bush must step up to the plate. If he believes sanctions are not succeeding and Iran's nuclear program must be halted, he should go to Congress for authority to neutralize the facilities. If he has not so concluded, he should tell Israel it is not to start a war that U.S. airmen, sailors, soldiers and Marines will have to finish. America needs to restore that absolute freedom of action in matters of war and peace she once had, before entering the skein of entangling alliances that now encumber the republic. No ally, no client state, should ever be allowed to drag America into a war she has not chosen, constitutionally, to fight. No more blank checks for any nation. SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/07/pjb...hecks-for-war/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Israel Believes Obama Will 'Deprive' It of Political Support for Iran Attack http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...elieves-obama- will-deprive-it-of-support-to-attack-iran.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5bpvvb --------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- Subject: DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked (see the comments posted at the bottom of the URL for this article as well) Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 5:40 AM DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-plans-spiked/ See Video: Neocons Pushed Us into War with Iraq and Now with Iran! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbxD5...x=0&playnext=1 Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5johhg http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....with-iraq.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5aspp5 Scott McClellan Questioned about Neocon Push for Iraq War: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....ut-neocon.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/6gzo4o Additional linked via the pics at the following URLs: http://neoconzionistthreat.com http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking Into the Lobby The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference is one of Washington’s most important—and least reported—events. http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article3.html by Philip Weiss For three days in the capital in early June, suspense built over the question of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference would greet Barack Obama. There was a lot of grousing about Obama in the hallways of the Washington Convention Center, and AIPAC officials repeatedly warned the faithful to be respectful. “We are not a debate society or a protest movement. … our goal is to have a friend in the White House,” executive director Howard Kohr said in a strict tone. It wasn’t hard to imagine things going poorly: Obama gets booed on national television. He feels insulted. Conservative Jewish donors and voters turn off to Obama. He becomes president without their support. AIPAC has no friend in the Oval Office. But of course, Obama complied. His speech became the annual example the conference provides of a powerful man truckling. Two years ago, it was Vice President Cheney’s red-meat speech attacking the Palestinians. Last year, it was Pastor John Hagee’s scary speech saying that giving the Arabs any part of Jerusalem was the same as giving it to the Taliban. Obama took a similar line. He suggested that he would use force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, made no mention of Palestinian human rights, and said that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” a statement so disastrous to the peace process that his staff rescinded it the next day. Big deal. The actual meeting had gone swimmingly. This was my first AIPAC conference, and the first surprise was how blatant the business of wielding influence is. The conference makes no bones about this function, the most savage expression of which is the Tuesday dinner at which AIPAC performs its “roll call,” where the names of all the politicians who have come to the conference are read off from the stage by three barkers in near auctioneer fashion. The pols try to outdo one another in I-love-Israel encomia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely won the day when she teared up while dangling the dogtags of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and Hamas two years ago. The second big surprise was that apart from coverage of the headline speakers, the AIPAC conference is a media no man’s land. It would be hard to imagine a more naked exhibition of political power: a convention of 7,000 mostly rich people, with more than half the Congress in attendance, as well as all the major presidential candidates, the prime minister of Israel, the minority leader, the majority leader, and the speaker of the House. Yet there is precious little journalism about the spectacle in full. The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence. They would have to take on an unpleasant informative task that they have instead left to two international relations scholars in their 50s—Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of last year’s book The Israel Lobby. The press is missing a phantasmagorical event. Imagine a basement meeting in the Warsaw Ghetto transplanted to the biggest hall in Vegas, and you have something of the feeling of the thing. The staging is faultless. Little documentaries called “Zionist Stories” play on the Jumbotron, complete with footage of Auschwitz, and then the subject of the documentary comes out on stage to thundering applause. There is breakout session after breakout session on Middle East policy and Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, with star turns by Natan Sharansky, Bill Kristol, and Leon Wieseltier. The press was excluded from “Advanced Lobbying Techniques,” but still this is a feast of the political condition. And posh. The roll call is described by AIPAC as the largest seated dinner in Washington. The wine flows. I went about in a daze of awe and admiration. My awe was for men like Haim Saban, a toymaker and giant donor to the Democratic Party. After his Zionist story, Saban came out on stage wearing a platinum tie and white shirt and silver gray suit. He has wonderful presence and something of an Arab look—black-haired, wide forehead. He was surrounded by 200 college students, veterans of the Saban Leadership Seminars he sponsors at AIPAC. On Middle East policy, Saban is barely distinguishable from his Republican counterparts, who are there in equal force. The main hall of the conference was filled with lavishly-produced banners featuring AIPAC donors, not a few with trophy wives, alongside statements of their mission. There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Times recently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond’s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. “The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it,” Diamond wrote. “It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other.” I was writing that down when an AIPAC spokesman stopped to check my credentials. The audience for this stuff isn’t the public, it’s people in the hall—other rich Jews who might put AIPAC in their wills. At most conventions, people gather out of self-interest. Therein lies my admiration: the AIPAC’ers didn’t come for selfish reasons. They are devoutly concerned with the lives of people they don’t know, very far away. Yes, people with whom they feel tribal kinship. When Israelis came out on the dais to speak, they were almost invariably overwhelmed by the generosity, if not the Vegas schmaltz. “There is a tremendous amount of love in this place,” Meir Nissensohn, an Israeli executive of IBM, said in wonder. “If it was a beaker, it would explode.” Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment. Among the devout there is only one real issue: What is the latest AIPAC line? This is the organization’s function. After consulting closely with the Israeli political leadership (leaning toward the right wing), AIPAC regurgitates a simple version of Israeli policy to its followers, who in turn regurgitate that line to American politicians. AIPAC’ers do this with the conviction that Israel’s life is on the line. “It is we that are the guardians of that relationship,” AIPAC president David Victor said. James Tisch, the Lowes executive and leader in the Jewish community, warned the audience that it might be 1939 all over again were it not for them. AIPAC makes sure the Israeli line is America’s line by cultivating politicians before they reach the national scene. Victor described this process when he warned the audience that 10 percent of Congress will be new next year because so many seats are open: “Do we know them? Do they know us? Have they __________________________________________ Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He blogs at www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/ -------------------------------------------------------- Stop The AIPAC sponsored "Iran War Resolution" http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0...ic.php?t=91563 Additional about AIPAC's push for the coming war with Iran via the following URL (be sure to access the Scott Ritter youtubes linked at the top of the comments section as well): AIPAC Pushing US to War with Iran for Israel: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....with-iran.html Hedges: It's Insane to Attack Iran: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....tack-iran.html Bob Barr: Attacking Iran Highly Irresponsible and Detrimental: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....an-highly.html McCain's loyalty is to Israel first and foremost: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....ubscribe..html Walt & Mearsheimer's Proof That 'Tail Wagged the Dog' Points American Jews to a Universalist Ethos: http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...n-walt-me.html 
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#2
July 12th 08, 11:59 PM
posted to soc.veterans,alt.military.retired,alt.war.vietnam,rec.aviation.military.naval,alt.war
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Iran will target US bases if attacked
On Jul 12, 12:32 pm, NOMOREWARFORISRAEL
wrote: http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?i...onid=351020101 Iran will target US bases if attacked Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:18:18 Iran says its Armed Forces would target the heart of Israel and 32 US bases before the dust settles from an attack on the country. "If the enemy was confident that it would emerge victorious from an attack on Iran, they would not put it off for even another day," an aide to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Mojtaba Zolnoor said on Saturday. Today, through the efforts of Iranian experts, the military capabilities of the country's Armed Forces have reached an advanced level, he added. "If the US or Israel fire one bullet against Iran, the Iranian Armed Forces will not hesitate to target the heart of Israel and 32 US military bases in the region before the dust settles," warned Ayatollah Khamenei's representative in the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Iran has repeatedly warned that its Armed Forces are fully prepared to immediately deliver a crushing response to any offensive on Iranian territory. Iran's words of caution come following escalating speculation that the Israeli maneuver in early June was held in preparation for a war with the Islamic Republic. -------------------------------------------------------------------- New War Brewing: US, Israel Take Dangerous Steps by Eric Margolis GENEVA - The U.S., Israel and Iran are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that soon could result in a new Mideast war. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration and Israel, recently joined by France, are issuing increasingly loud threats of military action to frighten Iran into halting its nuclear enrichment program. Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely for civilian use. Tehran is alternating between conciliatory statements and threats to retaliate against any attack by inflicting economic chaos on the global economy. Europe fears the economic damage a war against Iran would bring far more than Iran¢s nuclear program. Senior Israeli officials are openly threatening to attack Iran¢s nuclear installations before President George W. Bush¢s term expires. Early, this month Israel staged a large, U.S.-approved exercise using F-15s and F-16s to rehearse an attack over 900 miles - precisely the distance to Iran¢s nuclear facilities. The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran ¢s government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel¢s destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran. This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end. Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets. Senior American officers Admiral William Fallon and Air Force Chief Michael Mosley recently were fired for opposing war against Iran. According to Israel¢s media, President Bush even told Israel¢s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he could not trust America¢s intelligence community and preferred to rely on Israeli intelligence. AIR BLITZ Intensifying activity is evident at U.S. bases in Europe and the Gulf, aimed at preparing a massive air blitz that may include repeated attacks on 3,100 targets in Iran. Other sources say Iranian Revolutionary Guard installations will be barraged by cruise missiles. In Washington, Congress, under intense pressure from the Israel lobby, is about to adopt a resolution calling for a naval blockade of Iran, an overt act of war. Pro-Israel groups have been airing TV commercials claiming Iran is attacking American troops in Iraq and threatens the U.S. The Bush administration¢s last desperate act, its Gotterdammerung, could be war with Iran. UN weapons inspectors concur with U.S. intelligence that there is no proof Iran is working on nuclear arms, but the neocon war party in Washington is determined to loosen a final Parthian shaft by striking Iran. Israel asserts the right to maintain its Mideast nuclear monopoly by destroying all fissile-producing reactors in the region. Iran vows to retaliate against Israel with its inaccurate Shahab missiles, shut the Strait of Hormuz and mine the Gulf, producing worldwide financial panic, severe fuel shortages, and $400-$500 per barrel oil. Iran likely will attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and strike Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities. Canadians in Afghanistan could also become targets. GRAVE DAMAGE The embattled Bush administration¢s bunker mentality is leading to war that will gravely damage long-term U.S. Mideast interests. A single Iranian missile hit on Israel¢s reactor would do more damage to the Jewish state than all its previous wars. Besides, Israel cannot destroy Iran¢s nuclear infrastructure. A U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran will guarantee Tehran decides to build nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran have turned their regional rivalry into a confrontation that threatens all. Iran¢s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, not its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls that nation¢s military and insists Iran will not produce nuclear weapons. Israel claims it faces a second holocaust. Iran says Israel¢s nuclear forces threaten its existence. The dogs of war are being unleashed. Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. Published on Sunday, July 6, 2008 by The Toronto Sun http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/06/10160/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! Date: Friday, July 11, 2008, 10:11 AM Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1y47K29J1o ----------------------------------------------------------------- Israel should not be allowed to push US into war with Iran No More Blank Checks for War by Patrick J. Buchanan Friday, July 11, 2008 After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a "blank cheque" to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should war come, Britain would fight on Poland's side. Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed. Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of Joseph Stalin's empire. Lesson: No great power should ever give to a small ally or client state a blank check to drag it into war. This raises the question: Has President Bush given Israel a blank check? A year ago, Israel attacked and smashed an alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria. In April, Israel held a five-day civil defense drill. In June, Israel sent 100 F-15s and F-16s, with refueling tankers, toward Greece in a simulated attack. The planes flew 1,450 kilometers, the distance to Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. On June 6, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, "If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program we will attack it." Ehud Olmert returned from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis, "George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term." Is Israel bluffing, or in dead earnest? For while Israel can do damage to Iran, she cannot defeat Iran without using nuclear weapons. But any attack Israel launched against Iran would require U.S. complicity, and any Israeli war with Iran would almost certainly require the United States to do most of the fighting to win or end it. Thus, if George Bush does not want war with Iran, with two U.S. wars already, he must inform the Israelis in unequivocal terms that the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, and will not assist but denounce any such attack. If Bush believes war with Iran is vital to U.S. security, he should make that case to Congress. To allow Israel to start a war we do not want would be an abdication of his duty as president. Clearly, among the reasons Israel conducted its dress rehearsal for war was to maximize pressure on Iran to halt enriching uranium. Bush may well have welcomed the added pressure. But as the Iranians have insisted, they are entitled, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty they signed and Israel did not, to enrich uranium for fuel in power plants. Tehran has declared it will not be the only nation to surrender its legal rights under the NPT. And in response to the Israeli military exercises, Tehran conducted its own missile-firing exercises this week. If neither side yields, confrontation is inevitable. Perhaps soon. For we are only four months from the election, and Israel is pawing the ground to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Is this Bush's back door to war with Iran? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, in Israel a week ago, returned to say a "third front" in the Middle East, with Iran, would be "extremely stressful" to U.S. forces. He is saying that U.S. ground forces probably cannot now cope with another war, with a nation three times as large as Iraq. Asked about Israel taking unilateral action, Mullen replied, "This is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be more unstable." But Mullen is not the president. What did Bush tell Olmert? Does Israel have a green light, a yellow light or a red light? Should Israel attack Iran and Bush deny complicity, he would no more be believed than were Britain and France in 1956. Then, the Israelis stormed into Sinai, and Britain and France said they were intervening to separate the warring nations and secure the Suez Canal. Outraged, Ike ordered the British, French and Israelis alike to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did. President Bush must step up to the plate. If he believes sanctions are not succeeding and Iran's nuclear program must be halted, he should go to Congress for authority to neutralize the facilities. If he has not so concluded, he should tell Israel it is not to start a war that U.S. airmen, sailors, soldiers and Marines will have to finish. America needs to restore that absolute freedom of action in matters of war and peace she once had, before entering the skein of entangling alliances that now encumber the republic. No ally, no client state, should ever be allowed to drag America into a war she has not chosen, constitutionally, to fight. No more blank checks for any nation. SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/07/pjb...hecks-for-war/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Israel Believes Obama Will 'Deprive' It of Political Support for Iran Attack http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...elieves-obama- will-deprive-it-of-support-to-attack-iran.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5bpvvb --------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- Subject: DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked (see the comments posted at the bottom of the URL for this article as well) Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 5:40 AM DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-plans-spiked/ See Video: Neocons Pushed Us into War with Iraq and Now with Iran! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbxD5...List&p=7131645... Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5johhg http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....-pushed-us-int... Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5aspp5 Scott McClellan Questioned about Neocon Push for Iraq War: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....cclellan-quest... Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/6gzo4o Additional linked via the pics at the following URLs: http://neoconzionistthreat.com http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking Into the Lobby The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference is one of Washington’s most important—and least reported—events. http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article3.html by Philip Weiss For three days in the capital in early June, suspense built over the question of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference would greet Barack Obama. There was a lot of grousing about Obama in the hallways of the Washington Convention Center, and AIPAC officials repeatedly warned the faithful to be respectful. “We are not a debate society or a protest movement. … our goal is to have a friend in the White House,” executive director Howard Kohr said in a strict tone. It wasn’t hard to imagine things going poorly: Obama gets booed on national television. He feels insulted. Conservative Jewish donors and voters turn off to Obama. He becomes president without their support. AIPAC has no friend in the Oval Office. But of course, Obama complied. His speech became the annual example the conference provides of a powerful man truckling. Two years ago, it was Vice President Cheney’s red-meat speech attacking the Palestinians. Last year, it was Pastor John Hagee’s scary speech saying that giving the Arabs any part of Jerusalem was the same as giving it to the Taliban. Obama took a similar line. He suggested that he would use force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, made no mention of Palestinian human rights, and said that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” a statement so disastrous to the peace process that his staff rescinded it the next day. Big deal. The actual meeting had gone swimmingly. This was my first AIPAC conference, and the first surprise was how blatant the business of wielding influence is. The conference makes no bones about this function, the most savage expression of which is the Tuesday dinner at which AIPAC performs its “roll call,” where the names of all the politicians who have come to the conference are read off from the stage by three barkers in near auctioneer fashion. The pols try to outdo one another in I-love-Israel encomia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely won the day when she teared up while dangling the dogtags of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and Hamas two years ago. The second big surprise was that apart from coverage of the headline speakers, the AIPAC conference is a media no man’s land. It would be hard to imagine a more naked exhibition of political power: a convention of 7,000 mostly rich people, with more than half the Congress in attendance, as well as all the major presidential candidates, the prime minister of Israel, the minority leader, the majority leader, and the speaker of the House. Yet there is precious little journalism about the spectacle in full. The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence. They would have to take on an unpleasant informative task that they have instead left to two international relations scholars in their 50s—Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of last year’s book The Israel Lobby. The press is missing a phantasmagorical event. Imagine a basement meeting in the Warsaw Ghetto transplanted to the biggest hall in Vegas, and you have something of the feeling of the thing. The staging is faultless. Little documentaries called “Zionist Stories” play on the Jumbotron, complete with footage of Auschwitz, and then the subject of the documentary comes out on stage to thundering applause. There is breakout session after breakout session on Middle East policy and Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, with star turns by Natan Sharansky, Bill Kristol, and Leon Wieseltier. The press was excluded from “Advanced Lobbying Techniques,” but still this is a feast of the political condition. And posh. The roll call is described by AIPAC as the largest seated dinner in Washington. The wine flows. I went about in a daze of awe and admiration. My awe was for men like Haim Saban, a toymaker and giant donor to the Democratic Party. After his Zionist story, Saban came out on stage wearing a platinum tie and white shirt and silver gray suit. He has wonderful presence and something of an Arab look—black-haired, wide forehead. He was surrounded by 200 college students, veterans of the Saban Leadership Seminars he sponsors at AIPAC. On Middle East policy, Saban is barely distinguishable from his Republican counterparts, who are there in equal force. The main hall of the conference was filled with lavishly-produced banners featuring AIPAC donors, not a few with trophy wives, alongside statements of their mission. There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Times recently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond’s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. “The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it,” Diamond wrote. “It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other.” I was writing that down when an AIPAC spokesman stopped to check my credentials. The audience for this stuff isn’t the public, it’s people in the hall—other rich Jews who might put AIPAC in their wills. At most conventions, people gather out of self-interest. Therein lies my admiration: the AIPAC’ers didn’t come for selfish reasons. They are devoutly concerned with the lives of people they don’t know, very far away. Yes, people with whom they feel tribal kinship. When Israelis came out on the dais to speak, they were almost invariably overwhelmed by the generosity, if not the Vegas schmaltz. “There is a tremendous amount of love in this place,” Meir Nissensohn, an Israeli executive of IBM, said in wonder. “If it was a beaker, it would explode.” Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment. Among the devout there is only one real issue: What is the latest AIPAC line? This is the organization’s function. After consulting closely with the Israeli political leadership (leaning toward the right wing), AIPAC regurgitates a simple version of Israeli policy to its followers, who in turn regurgitate that line to American politicians. AIPAC’ers do this with the conviction that Israel’s life is on the line. “It is we that are the guardians of that relationship,” AIPAC president David Victor said. James Tisch, the Lowes executive and leader in the Jewish community, warned the audience that it might be 1939 all over again were it not for them. AIPAC makes sure the Israeli line is America’s line by cultivating politicians before they reach the national scene. Victor described this process when he warned the audience that 10 percent of Congress will be new next year because so many seats are open: “Do we know them? Do they know us? Have they __________________________________________ Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He blogs at www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/ -------------------------------------------------------- Stop The AIPAC sponsored "Iran War Resolution" http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0...ic.php?t=91563 Additional about AIPAC's push for the coming war with Iran via the following URL (be sure to access the Scott Ritter youtubes linked at the top of the comments section as well): AIPAC Pushing US to War with Iran for Israel: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....c-is-pushing-u... Hedges: It's Insane to Attack Iran: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....its-insane-to-... Bob Barr: Attacking Iran Highly Irresponsible and Detrimental: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....r-attacking-ir... McCain's loyalty is to Israel first and foremost: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....ople-aware-sub... Walt & Mearsheimer's Proof That 'Tail Wagged the Dog' Points American Jews to a Universalist Ethos: http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...n-walt-me.html I just have one question. What is Iran going to use when they counter attack? Rocks and camel dung? You have a large list of pure propaganda with very little real facts.
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#3
July 13th 08, 01:07 AM
posted to soc.veterans,alt.military.retired,alt.war.vietnam,rec.aviation.military.naval,alt.war
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Iran will target US bases if attacked
It won't matter son. There won't be any oil for an army to move for a counter attack. If you had ever been in the military, or had a job where you had to think, you could figure that out. In , on 07/12/2008 at 03:59 PM, "Jack G." said: On Jul 12, 12:32 pm, NOMOREWARFORISRAEL wrote: http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?i...onid=351020101 Iran will target US bases if attacked Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:18:18 Iran says its Armed Forces would target the heart of Israel and 32 US bases before the dust settles from an attack on the country. "If the enemy was confident that it would emerge victorious from an attack on Iran, they would not put it off for even another day," an aide to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Mojtaba Zolnoor said on Saturday. Today, through the efforts of Iranian experts, the military capabilities of the country's Armed Forces have reached an advanced level, he added. "If the US or Israel fire one bullet against Iran, the Iranian Armed Forces will not hesitate to target the heart of Israel and 32 US military bases in the region before the dust settles," warned Ayatollah Khamenei's representative in the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Iran has repeatedly warned that its Armed Forces are fully prepared to immediately deliver a crushing response to any offensive on Iranian territory. Iran's words of caution come following escalating speculation that the Israeli maneuver in early June was held in preparation for a war with the Islamic Republic. -------------------------------------------------------------------- New War Brewing: US, Israel Take Dangerous Steps by Eric Margolis GENEVA - The U.S., Israel and Iran are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that soon could result in a new Mideast war. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration and Israel, recently joined by France, are issuing increasingly loud threats of military action to frighten Iran into halting its nuclear enrichment program. Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely for civilian use. Tehran is alternating between conciliatory statements and threats to retaliate against any attack by inflicting economic chaos on the global economy. Europe fears the economic damage a war against Iran would bring far more than Iran¢s nuclear program. Senior Israeli officials are openly threatening to attack Iran¢s nuclear installations before President George W. Bush¢s term expires. Early, this month Israel staged a large, U.S.-approved exercise using F-15s and F-16s to rehearse an attack over 900 miles - precisely the distance to Iran¢s nuclear facilities. The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran ¢s government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel¢s destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran. This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end. Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets. Senior American officers Admiral William Fallon and Air Force Chief Michael Mosley recently were fired for opposing war against Iran. According to Israel¢s media, President Bush even told Israel¢s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he could not trust America¢s intelligence community and preferred to rely on Israeli intelligence. AIR BLITZ Intensifying activity is evident at U.S. bases in Europe and the Gulf, aimed at preparing a massive air blitz that may include repeated attacks on 3,100 targets in Iran. Other sources say Iranian Revolutionary Guard installations will be barraged by cruise missiles. In Washington, Congress, under intense pressure from the Israel lobby, is about to adopt a resolution calling for a naval blockade of Iran, an overt act of war. Pro-Israel groups have been airing TV commercials claiming Iran is attacking American troops in Iraq and threatens the U.S. The Bush administration¢s last desperate act, its Gotterdammerung, could be war with Iran. UN weapons inspectors concur with U.S. intelligence that there is no proof Iran is working on nuclear arms, but the neocon war party in Washington is determined to loosen a final Parthian shaft by striking Iran. Israel asserts the right to maintain its Mideast nuclear monopoly by destroying all fissile-producing reactors in the region. Iran vows to retaliate against Israel with its inaccurate Shahab missiles, shut the Strait of Hormuz and mine the Gulf, producing worldwide financial panic, severe fuel shortages, and $400-$500 per barrel oil. Iran likely will attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and strike Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities. Canadians in Afghanistan could also become targets. GRAVE DAMAGE The embattled Bush administration¢s bunker mentality is leading to war that will gravely damage long-term U.S. Mideast interests. A single Iranian missile hit on Israel¢s reactor would do more damage to the Jewish state than all its previous wars. Besides, Israel cannot destroy Iran¢s nuclear infrastructure. A U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran will guarantee Tehran decides to build nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran have turned their regional rivalry into a confrontation that threatens all. Iran¢s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, not its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls that nation¢s military and insists Iran will not produce nuclear weapons. Israel claims it faces a second holocaust. Iran says Israel¢s nuclear forces threaten its existence. The dogs of war are being unleashed. Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. Published on Sunday, July 6, 2008 by The Toronto Sun http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/06/10160/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! Date: Friday, July 11, 2008, 10:11 AM Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1y47K29J1o ----------------------------------------------------------------- Israel should not be allowed to push US into war with Iran No More Blank Checks for War by Patrick J. Buchanan Friday, July 11, 2008 After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a "blank cheque" to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should war come, Britain would fight on Poland's side. Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed. Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of Joseph Stalin's empire. Lesson: No great power should ever give to a small ally or client state a blank check to drag it into war. This raises the question: Has President Bush given Israel a blank check? A year ago, Israel attacked and smashed an alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria. In April, Israel held a five-day civil defense drill. In June, Israel sent 100 F-15s and F-16s, with refueling tankers, toward Greece in a simulated attack. The planes flew 1,450 kilometers, the distance to Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. On June 6, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, "If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program we will attack it." Ehud Olmert returned from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis, "George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term." Is Israel bluffing, or in dead earnest? For while Israel can do damage to Iran, she cannot defeat Iran without using nuclear weapons. But any attack Israel launched against Iran would require U.S. complicity, and any Israeli war with Iran would almost certainly require the United States to do most of the fighting to win or end it. Thus, if George Bush does not want war with Iran, with two U.S. wars already, he must inform the Israelis in unequivocal terms that the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, and will not assist but denounce any such attack. If Bush believes war with Iran is vital to U.S. security, he should make that case to Congress. To allow Israel to start a war we do not want would be an abdication of his duty as president. Clearly, among the reasons Israel conducted its dress rehearsal for war was to maximize pressure on Iran to halt enriching uranium. Bush may well have welcomed the added pressure. But as the Iranians have insisted, they are entitled, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty they signed and Israel did not, to enrich uranium for fuel in power plants. Tehran has declared it will not be the only nation to surrender its legal rights under the NPT. And in response to the Israeli military exercises, Tehran conducted its own missile-firing exercises this week. If neither side yields, confrontation is inevitable. Perhaps soon. For we are only four months from the election, and Israel is pawing the ground to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Is this Bush's back door to war with Iran? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, in Israel a week ago, returned to say a "third front" in the Middle East, with Iran, would be "extremely stressful" to U.S. forces. He is saying that U.S. ground forces probably cannot now cope with another war, with a nation three times as large as Iraq. Asked about Israel taking unilateral action, Mullen replied, "This is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be more unstable." But Mullen is not the president. What did Bush tell Olmert? Does Israel have a green light, a yellow light or a red light? Should Israel attack Iran and Bush deny complicity, he would no more be believed than were Britain and France in 1956. Then, the Israelis stormed into Sinai, and Britain and France said they were intervening to separate the warring nations and secure the Suez Canal. Outraged, Ike ordered the British, French and Israelis alike to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did. President Bush must step up to the plate. If he believes sanctions are not succeeding and Iran's nuclear program must be halted, he should go to Congress for authority to neutralize the facilities. If he has not so concluded, he should tell Israel it is not to start a war that U.S. airmen, sailors, soldiers and Marines will have to finish. America needs to restore that absolute freedom of action in matters of war and peace she once had, before entering the skein of entangling alliances that now encumber the republic. No ally, no client state, should ever be allowed to drag America into a war she has not chosen, constitutionally, to fight. No more blank checks for any nation. SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/07/pjb...hecks-for-war/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Israel Believes Obama Will 'Deprive' It of Political Support for Iran Attack http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...elieves-obama- will-deprive-it-of-support-to-attack-iran.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5bpvvb --------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- Subject: DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked (see the comments posted at the bottom of the URL for this article as well) Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 5:40 AM DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-plans-spiked/ See Video: Neocons Pushed Us into War with Iraq and Now with Iran! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbxD5...List&p=7131645... Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5johhg http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....-pushed-us-int... Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5aspp5 Scott McClellan Questioned about Neocon Push for Iraq War: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....cclellan-quest... Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/6gzo4o Additional linked via the pics at the following URLs: http://neoconzionistthreat.com http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking Into the Lobby The American Israel Public Affairs Committee s annual conference is one of Washington s most important and least reported events. http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article3.html by Philip Weiss For three days in the capital in early June, suspense built over the question of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference would greet Barack Obama. There was a lot of grousing about Obama in the hallways of the Washington Convention Center, and AIPAC officials repeatedly warned the faithful to be respectful. We are not a debate society or a protest movement. our goal is to have a friend in the White House, executive director Howard Kohr said in a strict tone. It wasn t hard to imagine things going poorly: Obama gets booed on national television. He feels insulted. Conservative Jewish donors and voters turn off to Obama. He becomes president without their support. AIPAC has no friend in the Oval Office. But of course, Obama complied. His speech became the annual example the conference provides of a powerful man truckling. Two years ago, it was Vice President Cheney s red-meat speech attacking the Palestinians. Last year, it was Pastor John Hagee s scary speech saying that giving the Arabs any part of Jerusalem was the same as giving it to the Taliban. Obama took a similar line. He suggested that he would use force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, made no mention of Palestinian human rights, and said that Jerusalem must remain undivided, a statement so disastrous to the peace process that his staff rescinded it the next day. Big deal. The actual meeting had gone swimmingly. This was my first AIPAC conference, and the first surprise was how blatant the business of wielding influence is. The conference makes no bones about this function, the most savage expression of which is the Tuesday dinner at which AIPAC performs its roll call, where the names of all the politicians who have come to the conference are read off from the stage by three barkers in near auctioneer fashion. The pols try to outdo one another in I-love-Israel encomia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely won the day when she teared up while dangling the dogtags of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and Hamas two years ago. The second big surprise was that apart from coverage of the headline speakers, the AIPAC conference is a media no man s land. It would be hard to imagine a more naked exhibition of political power: a convention of 7,000 mostly rich people, with more than half the Congress in attendance, as well as all the major presidential candidates, the prime minister of Israel, the minority leader, the majority leader, and the speaker of the House. Yet there is precious little journalism about the spectacle in full. The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence. They would have to take on an unpleasant informative task that they have instead left to two international relations scholars in their 50s Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of last year s book The Israel Lobby. The press is missing a phantasmagorical event. Imagine a basement meeting in the Warsaw Ghetto transplanted to the biggest hall in Vegas, and you have something of the feeling of the thing. The staging is faultless. Little documentaries called Zionist Stories play on the Jumbotron, complete with footage of Auschwitz, and then the subject of the documentary comes out on stage to thundering applause. There is breakout session after breakout session on Middle East policy and Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, with star turns by Natan Sharansky, Bill Kristol, and Leon Wieseltier. The press was excluded from Advanced Lobbying Techniques, but still this is a feast of the political condition. And posh. The roll call is described by AIPAC as the largest seated dinner in Washington. The wine flows. I went about in a daze of awe and admiration. My awe was for men like Haim Saban, a toymaker and giant donor to the Democratic Party. After his Zionist story, Saban came out on stage wearing a platinum tie and white shirt and silver gray suit. He has wonderful presence and something of an Arab look black-haired, wide forehead. He was surrounded by 200 college students, veterans of the Saban Leadership Seminars he sponsors at AIPAC. On Middle East policy, Saban is barely distinguishable from his Republican counterparts, who are there in equal force. The main hall of the conference was filled with lavishly-produced banners featuring AIPAC donors, not a few with trophy wives, alongside statements of their mission. There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Times recently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it, Diamond wrote. It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other. I was writing that down when an AIPAC spokesman stopped to check my credentials. The audience for this stuff isn t the public, it s people in the hall other rich Jews who might put AIPAC in their wills. At most conventions, people gather out of self-interest. Therein lies my admiration: the AIPAC ers didn t come for selfish reasons. They are devoutly concerned with the lives of people they don t know, very far away. Yes, people with whom they feel tribal kinship. When Israelis came out on the dais to speak, they were almost invariably overwhelmed by the generosity, if not the Vegas schmaltz. There is a tremendous amount of love in this place, Meir Nissensohn, an Israeli executive of IBM, said in wonder. If it was a beaker, it would explode. Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment. Among the devout there is only one real issue: What is the latest AIPAC line? This is the organization s function. After consulting closely with the Israeli political leadership (leaning toward the right wing), AIPAC regurgitates a simple version of Israeli policy to its followers, who in turn regurgitate that line to American politicians. AIPAC ers do this with the conviction that Israel s life is on the line. It is we that are the guardians of that relationship, AIPAC president David Victor said. James Tisch, the Lowes executive and leader in the Jewish community, warned the audience that it might be 1939 all over again were it not for them. AIPAC makes sure the Israeli line is America s line by cultivating politicians before they reach the national scene. Victor described this process when he warned the audience that 10 percent of Congress will be new next year because so many seats are open: Do we know them? Do they know us? Have they __________________________________________ Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He blogs at www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/ -------------------------------------------------------- Stop The AIPAC sponsored "Iran War Resolution" http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0...ic.php?t=91563 Additional about AIPAC's push for the coming war with Iran via the following URL (be sure to access the Scott Ritter youtubes linked at the top of the comments section as well): AIPAC Pushing US to War with Iran for Israel: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....c-is-pushing-u... Hedges: It's Insane to Attack Iran: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....its-insane-to-... Bob Barr: Attacking Iran Highly Irresponsible and Detrimental: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....r-attacking-ir... McCain's loyalty is to Israel first and foremost: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....ople-aware-sub... Walt & Mearsheimer's Proof That 'Tail Wagged the Dog' Points American Jews to a Universalist Ethos: http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...n-walt-me.html I just have one question. What is Iran going to use when they counter attack? Rocks and camel dung? You have a large list of pure propaganda with very little real facts.
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#4
July 13th 08, 01:25 PM
posted to soc.veterans,alt.military.retired,alt.war.vietnam,rec.aviation.military.naval,alt.war
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Iran will target US bases if attacked
Once Iran destroyed the oil fields in the Middle East, sell all stocks
and equity in your retirement accounts because the Dow Jones may go down below 5,000. On Jul 12, 2:32 pm, NOMOREWARFORISRAEL wrote: http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?i...onid=351020101 Iran will target US bases if attacked Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:18:18 Iran says its Armed Forces would target the heart of Israel and 32 US bases before the dust settles from an attack on the country. "If the enemy was confident that it would emerge victorious from an attack on Iran, they would not put it off for even another day," an aide to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Mojtaba Zolnoor said on Saturday. Today, through the efforts of Iranian experts, the military capabilities of the country's Armed Forces have reached an advanced level, he added. "If the US or Israel fire one bullet against Iran, the Iranian Armed Forces will not hesitate to target the heart of Israel and 32 US military bases in the region before the dust settles," warned Ayatollah Khamenei's representative in the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Iran has repeatedly warned that its Armed Forces are fully prepared to immediately deliver a crushing response to any offensive on Iranian territory. Iran's words of caution come following escalating speculation that the Israeli maneuver in early June was held in preparation for a war with the Islamic Republic. -------------------------------------------------------------------- New War Brewing: US, Israel Take Dangerous Steps by Eric Margolis GENEVA - The U.S., Israel and Iran are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that soon could result in a new Mideast war. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration and Israel, recently joined by France, are issuing increasingly loud threats of military action to frighten Iran into halting its nuclear enrichment program. Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely for civilian use. Tehran is alternating between conciliatory statements and threats to retaliate against any attack by inflicting economic chaos on the global economy. Europe fears the economic damage a war against Iran would bring far more than Iran¢s nuclear program. Senior Israeli officials are openly threatening to attack Iran¢s nuclear installations before President George W. Bush¢s term expires. Early, this month Israel staged a large, U.S.-approved exercise using F-15s and F-16s to rehearse an attack over 900 miles - precisely the distance to Iran¢s nuclear facilities. The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran ¢s government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel¢s destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran. This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end. Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets. Senior American officers Admiral William Fallon and Air Force Chief Michael Mosley recently were fired for opposing war against Iran. According to Israel¢s media, President Bush even told Israel¢s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he could not trust America¢s intelligence community and preferred to rely on Israeli intelligence. AIR BLITZ Intensifying activity is evident at U.S. bases in Europe and the Gulf, aimed at preparing a massive air blitz that may include repeated attacks on 3,100 targets in Iran. Other sources say Iranian Revolutionary Guard installations will be barraged by cruise missiles. In Washington, Congress, under intense pressure from the Israel lobby, is about to adopt a resolution calling for a naval blockade of Iran, an overt act of war. Pro-Israel groups have been airing TV commercials claiming Iran is attacking American troops in Iraq and threatens the U.S. The Bush administration¢s last desperate act, its Gotterdammerung, could be war with Iran. UN weapons inspectors concur with U.S. intelligence that there is no proof Iran is working on nuclear arms, but the neocon war party in Washington is determined to loosen a final Parthian shaft by striking Iran. Israel asserts the right to maintain its Mideast nuclear monopoly by destroying all fissile-producing reactors in the region. Iran vows to retaliate against Israel with its inaccurate Shahab missiles, shut the Strait of Hormuz and mine the Gulf, producing worldwide financial panic, severe fuel shortages, and $400-$500 per barrel oil. Iran likely will attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and strike Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities. Canadians in Afghanistan could also become targets. GRAVE DAMAGE The embattled Bush administration¢s bunker mentality is leading to war that will gravely damage long-term U.S. Mideast interests. A single Iranian missile hit on Israel¢s reactor would do more damage to the Jewish state than all its previous wars. Besides, Israel cannot destroy Iran¢s nuclear infrastructure. A U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran will guarantee Tehran decides to build nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran have turned their regional rivalry into a confrontation that threatens all. Iran¢s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, not its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls that nation¢s military and insists Iran will not produce nuclear weapons. Israel claims it faces a second holocaust. Iran says Israel¢s nuclear forces threaten its existence. The dogs of war are being unleashed. Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. Published on Sunday, July 6, 2008 by The Toronto Sun http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/06/10160/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! Date: Friday, July 11, 2008, 10:11 AM Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1y47K29J1o ----------------------------------------------------------------- Israel should not be allowed to push US into war with Iran No More Blank Checks for War by Patrick J. Buchanan Friday, July 11, 2008 After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a "blank cheque" to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should war come, Britain would fight on Poland's side. Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed. Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of Joseph Stalin's empire. Lesson: No great power should ever give to a small ally or client state a blank check to drag it into war. This raises the question: Has President Bush given Israel a blank check? A year ago, Israel attacked and smashed an alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria. In April, Israel held a five-day civil defense drill. In June, Israel sent 100 F-15s and F-16s, with refueling tankers, toward Greece in a simulated attack. The planes flew 1,450 kilometers, the distance to Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. On June 6, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, "If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program we will attack it." Ehud Olmert returned from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis, "George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term." Is Israel bluffing, or in dead earnest? For while Israel can do damage to Iran, she cannot defeat Iran without using nuclear weapons. But any attack Israel launched against Iran would require U.S. complicity, and any Israeli war with Iran would almost certainly require the United States to do most of the fighting to win or end it. Thus, if George Bush does not want war with Iran, with two U.S. wars already, he must inform the Israelis in unequivocal terms that the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, and will not assist but denounce any such attack. If Bush believes war with Iran is vital to U.S. security, he should make that case to Congress. To allow Israel to start a war we do not want would be an abdication of his duty as president. Clearly, among the reasons Israel conducted its dress rehearsal for war was to maximize pressure on Iran to halt enriching uranium. Bush may well have welcomed the added pressure. But as the Iranians have insisted, they are entitled, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty they signed and Israel did not, to enrich uranium for fuel in power plants. Tehran has declared it will not be the only nation to surrender its legal rights under the NPT. And in response to the Israeli military exercises, Tehran conducted its own missile-firing exercises this week. If neither side yields, confrontation is inevitable. Perhaps soon. For we are only four months from the election, and Israel is pawing the ground to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Is this Bush's back door to war with Iran? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, in Israel a week ago, returned to say a "third front" in the Middle East, with Iran, would be "extremely stressful" to U.S. forces. He is saying that U.S. ground forces probably cannot now cope with another war, with a nation three times as large as Iraq. Asked about Israel taking unilateral action, Mullen replied, "This is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be more unstable." But Mullen is not the president. What did Bush tell Olmert? Does Israel have a green light, a yellow light or a red light? Should Israel attack Iran and Bush deny ... read more »
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#5
July 13th 08, 07:58 PM
posted to soc.veterans,alt.military.retired,alt.war.vietnam,rec.aviation.military.naval,alt.war
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Iran will target US bases if attacked
Just a hypothetical question.
Lets just say Mexico, Cuba and Canada all got together and started bullying the good 'ol U S of A. They demanded we stop building "h" and "a" bombs and told us to dismantle Oak Ridge, The Savannah River Site, and Hanford; told us to stop testing our ICBM's and said NASA was using our ICBM's to put weapons into space; accused our government of sponsoring global terrorism simply because we let the CIA overthrow democratically governments in Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador; told us to stop letting our government agencies torture political prisoners; and lastly tried to get the whole world to stop trading with us simply because they thought it was a good idea. Then they started to enforce an economic blockade against us. Lets just say that we got mad and told them to go to hell. Then we started shooting at them. Do you think we could justify shooting at them to the rest of the world? -- meport "NOMOREWARFORISRAEL" wrote in message ... http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?i...onid=351020101 Iran will target US bases if attacked Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:18:18 Iran says its Armed Forces would target the heart of Israel and 32 US bases before the dust settles from an attack on the country. "If the enemy was confident that it would emerge victorious from an attack on Iran, they would not put it off for even another day," an aide to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Mojtaba Zolnoor said on Saturday. Today, through the efforts of Iranian experts, the military capabilities of the country's Armed Forces have reached an advanced level, he added. "If the US or Israel fire one bullet against Iran, the Iranian Armed Forces will not hesitate to target the heart of Israel and 32 US military bases in the region before the dust settles," warned Ayatollah Khamenei's representative in the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Iran has repeatedly warned that its Armed Forces are fully prepared to immediately deliver a crushing response to any offensive on Iranian territory. Iran's words of caution come following escalating speculation that the Israeli maneuver in early June was held in preparation for a war with the Islamic Republic. -------------------------------------------------------------------- New War Brewing: US, Israel Take Dangerous Steps by Eric Margolis GENEVA - The U.S., Israel and Iran are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that soon could result in a new Mideast war. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration and Israel, recently joined by France, are issuing increasingly loud threats of military action to frighten Iran into halting its nuclear enrichment program. Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely for civilian use. Tehran is alternating between conciliatory statements and threats to retaliate against any attack by inflicting economic chaos on the global economy. Europe fears the economic damage a war against Iran would bring far more than Iran¢s nuclear program. Senior Israeli officials are openly threatening to attack Iran¢s nuclear installations before President George W. Bush¢s term expires. Early, this month Israel staged a large, U.S.-approved exercise using F-15s and F-16s to rehearse an attack over 900 miles - precisely the distance to Iran¢s nuclear facilities. The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran ¢s government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel¢s destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran. This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end. Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets. Senior American officers Admiral William Fallon and Air Force Chief Michael Mosley recently were fired for opposing war against Iran. According to Israel¢s media, President Bush even told Israel¢s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he could not trust America¢s intelligence community and preferred to rely on Israeli intelligence. AIR BLITZ Intensifying activity is evident at U.S. bases in Europe and the Gulf, aimed at preparing a massive air blitz that may include repeated attacks on 3,100 targets in Iran. Other sources say Iranian Revolutionary Guard installations will be barraged by cruise missiles. In Washington, Congress, under intense pressure from the Israel lobby, is about to adopt a resolution calling for a naval blockade of Iran, an overt act of war. Pro-Israel groups have been airing TV commercials claiming Iran is attacking American troops in Iraq and threatens the U.S. The Bush administration¢s last desperate act, its Gotterdammerung, could be war with Iran. UN weapons inspectors concur with U.S. intelligence that there is no proof Iran is working on nuclear arms, but the neocon war party in Washington is determined to loosen a final Parthian shaft by striking Iran. Israel asserts the right to maintain its Mideast nuclear monopoly by destroying all fissile-producing reactors in the region. Iran vows to retaliate against Israel with its inaccurate Shahab missiles, shut the Strait of Hormuz and mine the Gulf, producing worldwide financial panic, severe fuel shortages, and $400-$500 per barrel oil. Iran likely will attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and strike Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities. Canadians in Afghanistan could also become targets. GRAVE DAMAGE The embattled Bush administration¢s bunker mentality is leading to war that will gravely damage long-term U.S. Mideast interests. A single Iranian missile hit on Israel¢s reactor would do more damage to the Jewish state than all its previous wars. Besides, Israel cannot destroy Iran¢s nuclear infrastructure. A U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran will guarantee Tehran decides to build nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran have turned their regional rivalry into a confrontation that threatens all. Iran¢s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, not its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls that nation¢s military and insists Iran will not produce nuclear weapons. Israel claims it faces a second holocaust. Iran says Israel¢s nuclear forces threaten its existence. The dogs of war are being unleashed. Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. Published on Sunday, July 6, 2008 by The Toronto Sun http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/06/10160/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! Date: Friday, July 11, 2008, 10:11 AM Ron Paul *Iranians Tested Missiles AFTER Israel had WAR GAMES! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1y47K29J1o ----------------------------------------------------------------- Israel should not be allowed to push US into war with Iran No More Blank Checks for War by Patrick J. Buchanan Friday, July 11, 2008 After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a "blank cheque" to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should war come, Britain would fight on Poland's side. Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed. Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of Joseph Stalin's empire. Lesson: No great power should ever give to a small ally or client state a blank check to drag it into war. This raises the question: Has President Bush given Israel a blank check? A year ago, Israel attacked and smashed an alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria. In April, Israel held a five-day civil defense drill. In June, Israel sent 100 F-15s and F-16s, with refueling tankers, toward Greece in a simulated attack. The planes flew 1,450 kilometers, the distance to Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. On June 6, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, "If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program we will attack it." Ehud Olmert returned from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis, "George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term." Is Israel bluffing, or in dead earnest? For while Israel can do damage to Iran, she cannot defeat Iran without using nuclear weapons. But any attack Israel launched against Iran would require U.S. complicity, and any Israeli war with Iran would almost certainly require the United States to do most of the fighting to win or end it. Thus, if George Bush does not want war with Iran, with two U.S. wars already, he must inform the Israelis in unequivocal terms that the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, and will not assist but denounce any such attack. If Bush believes war with Iran is vital to U.S. security, he should make that case to Congress. To allow Israel to start a war we do not want would be an abdication of his duty as president. Clearly, among the reasons Israel conducted its dress rehearsal for war was to maximize pressure on Iran to halt enriching uranium. Bush may well have welcomed the added pressure. But as the Iranians have insisted, they are entitled, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty they signed and Israel did not, to enrich uranium for fuel in power plants. Tehran has declared it will not be the only nation to surrender its legal rights under the NPT. And in response to the Israeli military exercises, Tehran conducted its own missile-firing exercises this week. If neither side yields, confrontation is inevitable. Perhaps soon. For we are only four months from the election, and Israel is pawing the ground to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Is this Bush's back door to war with Iran? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, in Israel a week ago, returned to say a "third front" in the Middle East, with Iran, would be "extremely stressful" to U.S. forces. He is saying that U.S. ground forces probably cannot now cope with another war, with a nation three times as large as Iraq. Asked about Israel taking unilateral action, Mullen replied, "This is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be more unstable." But Mullen is not the president. What did Bush tell Olmert? Does Israel have a green light, a yellow light or a red light? Should Israel attack Iran and Bush deny complicity, he would no more be believed than were Britain and France in 1956. Then, the Israelis stormed into Sinai, and Britain and France said they were intervening to separate the warring nations and secure the Suez Canal. Outraged, Ike ordered the British, French and Israelis alike to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did. President Bush must step up to the plate. If he believes sanctions are not succeeding and Iran's nuclear program must be halted, he should go to Congress for authority to neutralize the facilities. If he has not so concluded, he should tell Israel it is not to start a war that U.S. airmen, sailors, soldiers and Marines will have to finish. America needs to restore that absolute freedom of action in matters of war and peace she once had, before entering the skein of entangling alliances that now encumber the republic. No ally, no client state, should ever be allowed to drag America into a war she has not chosen, constitutionally, to fight. No more blank checks for any nation. SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/07/pjb...hecks-for-war/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Israel Believes Obama Will 'Deprive' It of Political Support for Iran Attack http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...elieves-obama- will-deprive-it-of-support-to-attack-iran.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5bpvvb --------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- Subject: DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked (see the comments posted at the bottom of the URL for this article as well) Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 5:40 AM DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-plans-spiked/ See Video: Neocons Pushed Us into War with Iraq and Now with Iran! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbxD5...x=0&playnext=1 Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5johhg http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....with-iraq.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/5aspp5 Scott McClellan Questioned about Neocon Push for Iraq War: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....ut-neocon.html Here is a tiny URL for the above one: http://tinyurl.com/6gzo4o Additional linked via the pics at the following URLs: http://neoconzionistthreat.com http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking Into the Lobby The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference is one of Washington’s most important—and least reported—events. http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article3.html by Philip Weiss For three days in the capital in early June, suspense built over the question of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference would greet Barack Obama. There was a lot of grousing about Obama in the hallways of the Washington Convention Center, and AIPAC officials repeatedly warned the faithful to be respectful. “We are not a debate society or a protest movement. … our goal is to have a friend in the White House,” executive director Howard Kohr said in a strict tone. It wasn’t hard to imagine things going poorly: Obama gets booed on national television. He feels insulted. Conservative Jewish donors and voters turn off to Obama. He becomes president without their support. AIPAC has no friend in the Oval Office. But of course, Obama complied. His speech became the annual example the conference provides of a powerful man truckling. Two years ago, it was Vice President Cheney’s red-meat speech attacking the Palestinians. Last year, it was Pastor John Hagee’s scary speech saying that giving the Arabs any part of Jerusalem was the same as giving it to the Taliban. Obama took a similar line. He suggested that he would use force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, made no mention of Palestinian human rights, and said that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” a statement so disastrous to the peace process that his staff rescinded it the next day. Big deal. The actual meeting had gone swimmingly. This was my first AIPAC conference, and the first surprise was how blatant the business of wielding influence is. The conference makes no bones about this function, the most savage expression of which is the Tuesday dinner at which AIPAC performs its “roll call,” where the names of all the politicians who have come to the conference are read off from the stage by three barkers in near auctioneer fashion. The pols try to outdo one another in I-love-Israel encomia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely won the day when she teared up while dangling the dogtags of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and Hamas two years ago. The second big surprise was that apart from coverage of the headline speakers, the AIPAC conference is a media no man’s land. It would be hard to imagine a more naked exhibition of political power: a convention of 7,000 mostly rich people, with more than half the Congress in attendance, as well as all the major presidential candidates, the prime minister of Israel, the minority leader, the majority leader, and the speaker of the House. Yet there is precious little journalism about the spectacle in full. The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence. They would have to take on an unpleasant informative task that they have instead left to two international relations scholars in their 50s—Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of last year’s book The Israel Lobby. The press is missing a phantasmagorical event. Imagine a basement meeting in the Warsaw Ghetto transplanted to the biggest hall in Vegas, and you have something of the feeling of the thing. The staging is faultless. Little documentaries called “Zionist Stories” play on the Jumbotron, complete with footage of Auschwitz, and then the subject of the documentary comes out on stage to thundering applause. There is breakout session after breakout session on Middle East policy and Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, with star turns by Natan Sharansky, Bill Kristol, and Leon Wieseltier. The press was excluded from “Advanced Lobbying Techniques,” but still this is a feast of the political condition. And posh. The roll call is described by AIPAC as the largest seated dinner in Washington. The wine flows. I went about in a daze of awe and admiration. My awe was for men like Haim Saban, a toymaker and giant donor to the Democratic Party. After his Zionist story, Saban came out on stage wearing a platinum tie and white shirt and silver gray suit. He has wonderful presence and something of an Arab look—black-haired, wide forehead. He was surrounded by 200 college students, veterans of the Saban Leadership Seminars he sponsors at AIPAC. On Middle East policy, Saban is barely distinguishable from his Republican counterparts, who are there in equal force. The main hall of the conference was filled with lavishly-produced banners featuring AIPAC donors, not a few with trophy wives, alongside statements of their mission. There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Times recently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond’s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. “The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it,” Diamond wrote. “It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other.” I was writing that down when an AIPAC spokesman stopped to check my credentials. The audience for this stuff isn’t the public, it’s people in the hall—other rich Jews who might put AIPAC in their wills. At most conventions, people gather out of self-interest. Therein lies my admiration: the AIPAC’ers didn’t come for selfish reasons. They are devoutly concerned with the lives of people they don’t know, very far away. Yes, people with whom they feel tribal kinship. When Israelis came out on the dais to speak, they were almost invariably overwhelmed by the generosity, if not the Vegas schmaltz. “There is a tremendous amount of love in this place,” Meir Nissensohn, an Israeli executive of IBM, said in wonder. “If it was a beaker, it would explode.” Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment. Among the devout there is only one real issue: What is the latest AIPAC line? This is the organization’s function. After consulting closely with the Israeli political leadership (leaning toward the right wing), AIPAC regurgitates a simple version of Israeli policy to its followers, who in turn regurgitate that line to American politicians. AIPAC’ers do this with the conviction that Israel’s life is on the line. “It is we that are the guardians of that relationship,” AIPAC president David Victor said. James Tisch, the Lowes executive and leader in the Jewish community, warned the audience that it might be 1939 all over again were it not for them. AIPAC makes sure the Israeli line is America’s line by cultivating politicians before they reach the national scene. Victor described this process when he warned the audience that 10 percent of Congress will be new next year because so many seats are open: “Do we know them? Do they know us? Have they __________________________________________ Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He blogs at www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/ -------------------------------------------------------- Stop The AIPAC sponsored "Iran War Resolution" http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0...ic.php?t=91563 Additional about AIPAC's push for the coming war with Iran via the following URL (be sure to access the Scott Ritter youtubes linked at the top of the comments section as well): AIPAC Pushing US to War with Iran for Israel: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....with-iran.html Hedges: It's Insane to Attack Iran: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....tack-iran.html Bob Barr: Attacking Iran Highly Irresponsible and Detrimental: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....an-highly.html McCain's loyalty is to Israel first and foremost: http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot....subscribe.html Walt & Mearsheimer's Proof That 'Tail Wagged the Dog' Points American Jews to a Universalist Ethos: http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweis...n-walt-me.html
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#6
July 13th 08, 11:46 PM
posted to soc.veterans,alt.military.retired,alt.war.vietnam,rec.aviation.military.naval,alt.war
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Iran will target US bases if attacked
Why don't you simplfy whatever it is you are trying to say! In , on 07/13/2008 at 02:58 PM, "meport2" said: Just a hypothetical question. Lets just say Mexico, Cuba and Canada all got together and started bullying the good 'ol U S of A. They demanded we stop building "h" and "a" bombs and told us to dismantle Oak Ridge, The Savannah River Site, and Hanford; told us to stop testing our ICBM's and said NASA was using our ICBM's to put weapons into space; accused our government of sponsoring global terrorism simply because we let the CIA overthrow democratically governments in Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador; told us to stop letting our government agencies torture political prisoners; and lastly tried to get the whole world to stop trading with us simply because they thought it was a good idea. Then they started to enforce an economic blockade against us. Lets just say that we got mad and told them to go to hell. Then we started shooting at them. Do you think we could justify shooting at them to the rest of the world?
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