Reply With Quote
It's just that the US previously enjoyed relatively high ratings, so the drop seems worse than it is actually. But with your "strategy", it could easily become irreversible.
Quickly irreversible.
Destroy everything and leave.
As they build it back, go back, destroy everything and leave.
Interesting experiment, nobody has ever tried.
Maybe because it is costly and it has preciously little sense.
It's just that the US previously enjoyed relatively high ratings, so the drop seems worse than it is actually. But with your "strategy", it could easily become irreversible.
Quickly irreversible.
Here's Friedman's take. Of course, dubya and head would never try diplomacy or anything truly radical or creative or showing true leadership and statesmanship. They just bomb the out of them and then not think about tomorrow until tomorrow
======================
January 31, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Not-So-Strange Bedfellow
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Here’s a little foreign policy test. I am going to describe two countries — “Country A” and “Country B” — and you tell me which one is America’s ally and which one is not.
Let’s start: Country A actively helped the U.S. defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and replace it with a pro-U.S. elected alliance of moderate Muslims. Country A regularly holds sort-of-free elections. Country A’s women vote, hold office, are the majority of its university students and are fully integrated into the work force.
On 9/11, residents of Country A were among the very few in the Muslim world to hold spontaneous pro-U.S. demonstrations. Country A’s radical president recently held a conference about why the Holocaust never happened — to try to gain popularity. A month later, Country A held nationwide elections for local councils, and that same president saw his candidates get wiped out by voters who preferred more moderate conservatives. Country A has a strategic interest in the success of the pro-U.S., Shiite-led, elected Iraqi government. Although it’s a Muslim country right next to Iraq, Country A has never sent any suicide bombers to Iraq, and has long protected its Christians and Jews. Country A has more bloggers per capita than any country in the Muslim Middle East.
The brand of Islam practiced by Country A respects women, is open to reinterpretation in light of modernity and rejects Al Qaeda’s nihilism.
Now Country B: Country B gave us 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11. Country B does not allow its women to drive, vote or run for office. It is illegal in Country B to build a church, synagogue or Hindu temple. Country B helped finance the Taliban.
Country B’s private charities help sustain Al Qaeda. Young men from Country B’s mosques have been regularly recruited to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq. Mosques and charities in Country B raise funds to support the insurgency in Iraq. Country B does not want the elected, Shiite-led government in Iraq to succeed. While Country B’s leaders are pro-U.S., polls show many of its people are hostile to America — some of them celebrated on 9/11. The brand of Islam supported by Country B and exported by it to mosques around the world is the most hostile to modernity and other faiths.
Question: Which country is America’s natural ally: A or B?
Country A is, of course. Country A is Iran. Country B is Saudi Arabia.
Don’t worry. I know that Iran has also engaged in terrorism against the U.S. and that the Saudis have supported America at key times in some areas. The point I’m trying to make, though, is that the hostility between Iran and the U.S. since the overthrow of the shah in 1979 is not organic. By dint of culture, history and geography, we actually have a lot of interests in common with Iran’s people. And I am not the only one to notice that.
Because the U.S. has destroyed Iran’s two biggest enemies — the Taliban and Saddam — “there is now a debate in Iran as to whether we should continue to act so harshly against the Americans,” Mohammad Hossein Adeli, Iran’s former ambassador to London, told me at Davos. “There is now more readiness for dialogue with the United States.”
More important, when people say, “The most important thing America could do today to stabilize the Middle East is solve the Israel-Palestine conflict,” they are wrong. It’s second. The most important thing would be to resolve the Iran-U.S. conflict.
That would change the whole Middle East and open up the way to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict, because Iran is the key backer of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Syria. Iran’s active help could also be critical for stabilizing Iraq.
This is why I oppose war with Iran. I favor negotiations. Isolating Iran like Castro’s Cuba has produced only the same result as in Cuba: strengthening Iran’s Castros. But for talks with Iran to bear fruit, we have to negotiate with Iran with leverage.
How do we get leverage? Make it clear that Iran can’t push us out of the gulf militarily; bring down the price of oil, which is key to the iness of Iran’s hard-line leadership; squeeze the hard-liners financially. But all this has to be accompanied with a clear declaration that the U.S. is not seeking regime change in Iran, but a change of behavior, that the U.S. wants to immediately restore its embassy in Tehran and that the first thing it will do is grant 50,000 student visas for young Iranians to study at U.S. universities.
Just do that — and then sit back and watch the most amazing debate explode inside Iran. You can bet the farm on it.
=================
There is some rumbling of dissent within Iran. dubya did make a little move a while back to address himself "in peace" and directly "to the people of Iraq", but we haven't heard any serious follow-up or repe ion.
In general, excellent ideas. Anybody should rationally acknowledge that Iran should be the US best "friend" in the ME.
Too bad it just won't happen.
I thought most were Saudis.
Fat, greasy, oily cats.
Pakistanis are leaner, skinnier.
Pakistan, then.
He already decided long ago to attack Iran. Ships are moving in and more troops will be there soon.
One wonders just how much more of his wife's money Tom Friedman will waste on his pretensions toward being a public intellectual.
IIRC, I think Dowd's and Krugman's salaries are about $300K.
Friedman may not be that high but why do you say he's wasting his wife's money?
And why do care what their financial arrangement are in the first place?
And of course, you have no response to his call for diplomatic moves,
just the automatic ad hominem.
To quote our so eloquont AHF "You're so ing stupid"
Because Friedman is a semimoronic dilettante who's built a career as a hack journalist on name recognition and connections resulting from the billions of dollars his wife inherited.
I agree with his argument in this case that it serves the interests of the United States for it to negotiate more freely with Iran. I don't agree with your implicit name-checking of a two-bit liberal interventionist (i.e., neoconservative) who would be overjoyed to join in Mr. DarkReign's fetishism of American air power and hop on the Bomb Iran Express if he hadn't been so thoroughly embarrassed himself during his tenure as a cheerleader for the Iraq invasion.
I just dont care about the middle east or the people in it anymore. Maybe at one point I did, but the damn people are so ing helpless, it makes me sick. I would pity them if they werent prone to so much extremism. And its not like its only a small minority are supportive of terrorism as a form of warfare, its commonplace.
Whole religious sects with an increasing number of members who actually believe blowing yourself up in public is a service to your God and it will be rewarded. You dont re-educate a people like that, you exterminate them. They hang gays and family members perform honor-killings because their daughter was raped. You have judges saying what I would deem prepostorous things like "Well, looking like she did, can you blame the men involved? If you leave meat out in the street, the dogs will eat it." WTF is that? And we're supposed to treat these savages as equals?!
that and them. Pick a fight, keep talking . Youll get yours soon enough. I just dont care about their welfare anymore, at all. Sorry if that offends you.
You seem to care enough to spend billions of your fellow citizens' tax dollars on a bombing campaign.
It was a pretty rant, though. Somewhat lacking in coherence, informed by some laughable bigotry, and with perhaps a limited correspondence to reality, but pretty nonetheless.
What, pray tell, do you think those billions of dollars were going to spent on otherwise?
Laughable bigotry? Honor killings? Hanging sexuals? Rape victims becoming the perpetrator? Point out where I am wrong, please.
All cultures should examine their failures before acting on the failures of others.
Perfect.
Iran Clock Is Ticking
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Wednesday 31 January 2007
While congressional Democrats test how far they should go in challenging George W. Bush's war powers, the time may be running out to stop Bush from ordering a major escalation of the Middle East conflict by attacking Iran.
Military and intelligence sources continue to tell me that preparations are advancing for a war with Iran starting possibly as early as mid-to-late February. The sources offer some differences of opinion over whether Bush might cite a provocation from Iran or whether Israel will take the lead in launching air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.
But there is growing alarm among military and intelligence experts that Bush already has decided to attack and simply is waiting for a second aircraft carrier strike force to arrive in the region - and for a propaganda blitz to stir up some pro-war sentiment at home.
One well-informed U.S. military source called me in a fury after consulting with Pentagon associates and discovering how far along the war preparations are. He said the plans call for extensive aerial attacks on Iran, including use of powerful bunker-busting ordnance.
Another source with a pipeline into Israeli thinking said the Iran war plan has expanded over the past several weeks. Earlier thinking had been that Israeli warplanes would hit Iranian nuclear targets with U.S. forces in reserve in case of Iranian retaliation, but now the strategy anticipates a major U.S. military follow-up to an Israeli attack, the source said.
Both sources used the same word "crazy" in describing the plan to expand the war to Iran. The two sources, like others I have interviewed, said that attacking Iran could touch off a regional - and possibly global - conflagration.
"It will be like the TV show '24'," the American military source said, citing the likelihood of Islamic retaliation reaching directly into the United States.
Though Bush insists that no decision has been made on attacking Iran, he offered similar assurances of his commitment to peace in the months before invading Iraq in 2003. Yet leaked do ents from London made clear that he had set a course for war nine months to a year before the Iraq invasion.
In other words, Bush's statements that he has no plans to "invade" Iran and that he's still committed to settle differences with Iran over its nuclear program diplomatically should be taken with a grain of salt.
There is, of course, the possibility that the war preparations are a game of chicken to pressure Iran to accept outside controls on its nuclear program and to trim back its regional ambitions. But sometimes such high-stakes gambles lead to miscalculations or set in motion dynamics that can't be controlled.
============
"You Will Die"
The rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq is seen as another factor pressing on Bush to act quickly against Iran.
Other sources with first-hand knowledge of conditions in Iraq have told me that the U.S. position is even more precarious than generally understood. Westerners can't even move around Baghdad and many other Iraqi cities except in armed convoys.
"In some countries, if you want to get out of the car and go to the market, they'll tell you that it might be dangerous," one experienced American cameraman told me. "In Iraq, you will be killed. Not that you might be killed, but you will be killed. The first Iraqi with a gun will shoot you, and if no one has a gun, they'll stone you."
While U.S. war correspondents in most countries travel around in taxis with "TV" taped to their windows, Western journalists in Iraq move only in armed convoys to and from specific destinations. They operate from heavily guarded Baghdad hotels sometimes with single families responsible for security since outsiders can't be trusted.
The American cameraman said one European journalist rebelled at the confinement, took off on her own in a cab - and was never seen again.
Depression also is spreading among U.S. intelligence officials who monitor covert operations in Iraq from listening stations sometimes thousands of miles away. The results of these Special Forces operations have been so horrendous that morale in the intelligence community has suffered.
The futility of the Iraq War also is contributing to professional cynicism. Some intelligence support personnel are volunteering for Iraq duty not because they think they can help win the war but because the hazard pay is high and life in the protected Green Zone is relatively safe and easy.
Once getting past the risks of the Baghdad airport and the dangerous road into the city, U.S. civilian government personnel ensconce themselves in the Green Zone, which amounts to a bubble of U.S. creature comforts - from hamburgers to lounging by the pool - separate from the world of average Iraqis who are mostly barred.
Cooks are brought in from other countries out of the unstated concern that Iraqis might poison the food.
That American officials have come to view a posting in Iraq as a pleasant career enhancer - rather than a vital national security mission for the United States - is another sign that the war is almost certainly beyond recovery.
Another experienced observer of conflicts around the world told me that Bush's new idea of putting small numbers of U.S. troops among Iraqi government forces inside police stations represents an act of idiocy that is sure to get Americans killed.
Conditions in Iraq have so deteriorated - and animosity toward Americans has so metastasized - that traditional counterinsurgency strategies are hard to envision, too.
Normally, winning the hearts and minds of a target population requires a commitment to move among the people and work on public action projects, from building roads to improving the judicial system. But all that requires some measure of political goodwill and personal trust.
Given the nearly four years of U.S. occupation and the devastation that Iraq has suffered, not even the most talented American counterinsurgency specialists can expect to overcome the hatred swelling among large segments of Iraqi society.
Bush's "surge" strategy of conducting more military sweeps through more Iraqi neighborhoods - knocking down doors, gunning down hostile Iraqis and dragging off others to detention camps - is not likely to assuage hard feelings.
Wider War
So, facing slim odds in Iraq, Bush is tempted by the allure of escalation, a chance to blame the Iranians for his Iraq failure and to punish them with air strikes. He might see that as a way to buy time, a chance to rally his pro-war supporters and a strategy for enhancing his presidential legacy.
But the consequences both internationally and domestically - from possible disruption of oil supplies to potential retaliation from Islamic terrorists - could be devastating.
Yet, there is a sense of futility among many in Washington who doubt they can do anything to stop Bush. So far, the Democratic-controlled Congress has lagged behind the curve, debating how to phrase a non-binding resolution of disapproval about Bush's "surge" of 21,500 troops in Iraq, while Bush may be opening an entirely new front in Iran.
According to intelligence sources, Bush's Iran strategy is expected to let the Israelis take a lead role in attacking Iran's nuclear facilities in order to defuse Democratic opposition and let the U.S. intervention be sold as defensive, a case of a vulnerable ally protecting itself from a future nuclear threat.
Once American air and naval forces are committed to a new conflict, the Democrats will find it politically difficult to interfere at least in the near future, the thinking goes. A violent reaction from the Islamic world would further polarize the American population and let Bush paint war critics as cowardly, disloyal or pro-terrorist.
( we can bet on that paint from the Exec and from all the hard right knee-jerk nutter in this forum)
As risky as a wider war might be, Bush's end game would dominate the final two years of his presidency as he forces both Republican and Democratic candidates to address issues of war and peace on his terms.
On Jan. 10, the night of Bush's national address on the Iraq War, NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert made a striking observation about a pre-speech briefing that Bush and other senior administration officials gave to news executives.
"There's a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue in the country and the world in a very acute way - and a prediction that in 2008 candidates of both parties will have as a fundamental campaign promise or premise a policy to deal with Iran and not let it go nuclear," Russert said. "That's how significant Iran was today."
So, Bush and his top advisers not only signaled their expectation of a "very acute" development with Iran but that the Iranian issue would come to dominate Campaign 2008 with candidates forced to spell out plans for containing this enemy state.
What to Do?
The immediate question, however, is what, if anything, can Congress and the American people do to head off Bush's expanded war strategy.
Some in Congress have called on Bush to seek prior congressional approval before entering a war with Iran. Others, such as Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, have asked Bush to spell out how expansive he thinks his war powers are.
"I would suggest respectfully to the President that he is not the sole decider," Specter said during a Senate hearing on war powers on Jan. 30. "The decider is a shared and joint responsibility."
But Bush and his neoconservative legal advisers have made clear that they see virtually no limits to Bush's "plenary" powers as Commander in Chief at a time of war. In their view, Bush is free to take military actions abroad and to waive legal and cons utional constraints at home because the United States has been deemed part of the "battlefield."
Nothing short of a direct congressional prohibition on war with Iran and a serious threat of impeachment would seem likely to give Bush more than a moment's pause. But congressional Republicans would surely obstruct such measures and Bush might well veto any law that was passed.
Still, unless Congress escalates the confrontation with the President - and does so quickly - it may be too late to stop what could become a very dangerous escalation.
---------
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Logic of a Wider Mideast War."]
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/013107.html
===============
wow, some pretty wild stuff in there.
Y'all will surely attack Parry for writing it and attack me for posting it, but can y'all refute it?
I get the impression that the insane, blood thirsty, hate/war-mongering hard right nutters would love to bomb the out of Iran, just as long as they and their families are untouched by violence or any incovenience whatsoever.
Even some of the talking-head, chicken-hawks are having trouble swallowing some of the Iran War group's media accusations against Iran...
Take your quarrels elsewhere, Bush told
Bob Deans in Washington
February 2, 2007
SMHTHE Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has told the United States and Iran to take their quarrels elsewhere, saying he will not permit his country to be caught in the crossfire.
"Solve your problems outside of Iraq. We do not want the American forces to take Iraq as a field to attack Iran or Syria, and we will not accept Iran to use Iraq to attack the American forces," Mr Maliki told CNN.
The US Under Secretary of State, Nicholas Burns, sent another warning to Iran against interfering in Iraq, saying US officials had "picked up individuals who we believe are giving very sophisticated explosives technology to Shia insurgent groups who then use that technology to target and kill American soldiers".
However, the Bush Administration has postponed plans to publish a "dossier" of Iranian interference in Iraq, with some officials divided over the strength of the US evidence.
Pretty wild stuff, indeed. That would be diabolical. His interviews have a mirror image to that of Iraq, already. You must be this tall to take this ride.
Can anyone even imagine how easy it would be to cut and run if we did not have to depend on foreign oil? To get the out of there and let these peices of kill themselves for another 3000 years?
I can't. But man it would be awesome to know americans weren't dying for this.
ing muslims.
The article is a little too biased, but there are certainly signs that Bushy is cranking up the war machine the same way he did before invading Iraq.
This country is seriously going to end up "Staying the course" just long enough to force us to "cut and run" at the worst possible moment in the history of this war.
A political bombs from Zbigniew Brzezinski
Ex-national security adviser warns that Bush is seeking a pretext to attack Iran
By Barry Grey in Washington DC
2 February 2007
WSWSTestifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the Bush administration’s policy was leading inevitably to a war with Iran, with incalculable consequences for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally.
Brzezinski, who opposed the March 2003 invasion and has publicly denounced the war as a colossal foreign policy blunder, began his remarks on what he called the “war of choice” in Iraq by characterizing it as “a historic, strategic and moral calamity.”
“Undertaken under false assumptions,” he continued, “it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean principles and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.”
Brzezinski derided Bush’s talk of a “decisive ideological struggle” against radical Islam as “simplistic and demagogic,” and called it a “mythical historical narrative” employed to justify a “protracted and potentially expanding war.”
“To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.
Most stunning and disturbing was his description of a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
10 out of 10 for Zbigniew Brzezinski.
"undermining America’s global legitimacy"
WTF is "America’s global legitimacy"?
head is certifiably insane, straight out of Dr. Strangelove
...
Impressive.
Absolutely impressive and unprecedented in mankind history.
You loose a war to country A?
Try another one with its neighbour country B.
IF America's worst possible enemy had to imagine, configurate, design, engineer and finally construct a robot with human-like resemblance taking on the most influential position world-wide, to end America's dominance of world affairs,
well,
this fellow couln't possibly DREAM of anyone better than this Bush chap.
Or whoever is actually calling the shots in Washington.
Bushy has a pathological need to act in ways he considers bold. I have no doubt he is doubling-down on his mideast gamble and will be attacking before his term is up.
Suicide.
Collective suicide.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
