Michael Bolton – US ambassador to U.N. – Bomb Iran – Iraq is model for change

October 1, 2007 at 10:21 pm | Posted in iran, iraq war, war | Leave a comment

The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that former U.N. ambassador John Bolton advised Tory delegates in Britain this weekend that they should press for “pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities” in Iran.

“Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force,” Bolton said. He added that any strike “should be followed by an attempt to remove” the “source of the problem,” Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

Fleshing out his hawkish dreams on British television, Bolton suggested that the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was a model for the “policy of regime change” he would like to see done in Iran:

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/10/01/bolton-iraq-iran/

U.S. Diplomats told to look for excuses to go to war with Iran

September 30, 2007 at 10:26 pm | Posted in iran, war | Leave a comment

Members of the US secretariat in the United Nations were asked earlier this month to begin “searching for things that Iran has done wrong”, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Some US diplomats believe the exercise — reminiscent of attempts by vice-president Dick Cheney and the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to build the case against Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war — will boost calls for military action by neo-conservatives inside and outside the administration.

Concern is also growing in the CIA and the Pentagon that the White House exaggerated intelligence used to justify an Israeli air raid on a suspected nuclear facility in Syria earlier this month, which some neo-conservatives hope is a precursor to war with Iran.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/30/wiran230.xml

New Spin on Iran – Kill people rather than Nuclear Facilities

September 30, 2007 at 8:44 pm | Posted in Bush, iran, war | 1 Comment

“They’ve changed their rhetoric, really. The name of the game used to be nuclear threat,” Hersh said on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, adding a moment later, “They’ve come to the realization that it’s not selling, it isn’t working. The American people aren’t worried about Iran as a nuclear threat certainly as they were about Iraq. So they’ve switched, really.”The Bush Administration is all but set to authorize a campaign of limited, surgical airstrikes against Iranian targets, Hersh reports in the New Yorker’s latest edition. In his piece, Hersh writes, “During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British ‘were on board’… Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.”

The sites in Iran being targeted however, reflect the change in the White House selling of armed conflict with Iran.

“Instead of… hitting the various [nuclear] facilities we know that exist, instead they’re going to hit the Iranians as payback for hitting us [in Iraq],” Hersh told Blitzer in the CNN interview.

Such targets, Hersh says, would include Iran’s Revolutionary Guard headquarters and other sites of Iran’s alleged support for the insurgency in Iraq.

http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Seymour_Hersh_War_with_Iran_will_0930.html

Is somebody just itching for a fight or this all internet noise?

Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs – “I hate all Iranians”

September 30, 2007 at 1:32 pm | Posted in asshole, Bush, iran | Leave a comment

Britsh MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss America’s stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bush’s senior women officials: “I hate all Iranians.” And she also accused Britain of “dismantling” the Anglo-US-led coalition in Iraq by pulling troops out of Basra too soon.The all-party group of MPs say Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, made the comments this month.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=484762&in_page_id=1770

Rabbis Say Iran Seeks Peace – Calls for True Dialogue With Ahmadinejad

September 24, 2007 at 8:28 pm | Posted in Ahmadinejad, iran, israel | Leave a comment

NEW YORK, Sept. 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesman of Neturei Karta International, issued the following statement on the eve of the group’s meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”It is always our pleasure to visit with President Ahmadinejad. This will be the third such meeting, in addition to our many visits to Iran in the past. We have each time emphasized to the Iranian leadership that, despite media hysteria and the statements of some misinformed Jews, we have found the Iranian people and their leaders to be friendly and respectful.


http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,183456.shtml

The Jewish Ron Paul? Not very mainstream.

The Spin Zone – Building the case for war against Iran through distortion

September 23, 2007 at 9:01 pm | Posted in iran, war | Leave a comment

“Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian,” remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. “He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse.” Since Iran has not “attacked another country aggressively for over a century,” he said in an e-mail exchange, “I smell the whiff of war propaganda.”Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: “The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’ just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

New York Times article

I hate Ahmadinejad for all the same reasons you do. For one thing, he
said he wants to “wipe Israel off the map.” Scholars tell us the correct
translation is more along the lines of wanting a change in Israel’s
government toward something more democratic, with less gerrymandering.
What an ass-muncher!


http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/a-feeling-im-be.html

Cheney considered asking Israel to bomb Iran

September 23, 2007 at 7:19 pm | Posted in asshole, iran, israel | Leave a comment

Sun Sep 23, 2:34 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Vice President Dick Cheney had at one point considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes at an Iranian nuclear site to provoke a retaliation, Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday….A military response by Iran could give Washington an excuse to then launch airstrikes of its own, Newsweek said.
…
Israel has declined to comment on the reported air strike, while Syria has denied receiving North Korean nuclear aid and said it could retaliate for the September 6 violation of its territory.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070923/pl_nm/usa_iran_cheney_dc_1

Iran confront Israel on nuclear arms

September 23, 2007 at 12:24 am | Posted in iran, nuclear arms | Leave a comment

Last update – 17:00 22/09/2007
For the first time, Iran directly confronts Israel on nuclear arms
By The Associated PressIran demanded that United Nations inspectors visit Israel to investigate its nuclear capability while Israel accused Tehran of lying in a bitter debate at an assembly of the UN atomic watchdog in Vienna on Friday.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/906132.html

A Feeling I’m Being Had

I was happy to hear that NYC didn’t allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.


http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/a-feeling-im-be.html

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