Obama: Afghan pullout plan on track
Does this mean the United States will have enough armed private contractors in place when uniformed Americans withdraw? Or is it simply time to declare victory and get out while we still can?
Archive | The Regime
A train rolling downhill without brakes
The seeming inevitability of the military-industrial complex’s push for war with Iran.
Fig leaf from Israel
I don’t know about you, but I sure feel a lot better now. Because there’s simply no way an attack on Iran (a country our government still insists is not building nuclear weapons) would ever bite the U.S. in the ass, right?
WASHINGTON — Israeli officials say they won’t warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.
Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel’s potential attack. The U.S. has been working with the Israelis for months to persuade them that an attack would be only a temporary setback to Iran’s nuclear program.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak delivered the message to a series of top-level U.S. visitors to the country, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House national security adviser and the director of national intelligence, and top U.S. lawmakers, all trying to close the trust gap between Israel and the U.S. over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Netanyahu delivered the same message to all the Americans who have traveled to Israel for talks, the U.S. official said.
Piggie of the Week: The GOP makes a Boo-Boo. Again.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Humor Media News You Can Use Politics As Usual Scary Crazy Wingnuts The Regime Wing Nuts
Ben Franklin is believed to have said “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.”
If he had been alive today, he would have added “and Republican’s complete lack of foresight.” The Iraq War, for instance, was going to be over in weeks. OOOPS. Holding the debt ceiling hostage would make them look strong. OOOPS. Scott Walker was going to dominate Wisconsin. OOOOPS. The Tea Party was going to be their personal conservative army. OOOPS. Sarah Palin would rally the GOP. OOOPS. Impeaching a sitting president would work out swell. OOOOOPS.
In today’s Piggie of the Week, AP Ticker considers how the Citizens United decision backfired on the Republicans.
‘I saw a baby die today’
BBC journalist Marie Colvin reports from Homs, Syria shortly before she dies.
A moving tribute from a colleague here.
The reason
Juan Cole explains it all for you:
Iran has 150 billion barrels in petroleum reserves, among the largest reserves in the world, but they cannot be exploited by US corporations because of Israel lobby-inspired US congressional sanctions on Iran. US elites, especially Big Oil, dream of doing regime change in Iran so as to get access to those vast reserves. Likely the most important US objection to the Iranian civilian nuclear enrichment program is that it could give Iran “nuclear latency,” the ability to construct a bomb quickly if it seemed to Tehran that the US planned to attack. That is, the real objection in Washington to Iranian nuclear know-how is that it makes Iraq-style regime change impossible and so puts Iranian petroleum out of reach of Houston for the foreseeable future. This consideration is likely the real reason that Washington does not, so to speak, go ballistic about North Korea and Pakistan having actual nuclear warheads, but like to has a fainting spell at the very idea of Iran enriching uranium to 3.5 percent (a bomb takes 95%). North Korea and Pakistan don’t have oil.
NATO: We found dead kids after bombing
Being an American requires a strong stomach and a knack for cognitive dissonance:
Last Wednesday, a NATO air strike against the Kapisa Province ended with eight children dead and the Afghan government deploying a team including a number of MPs to try to figure out how it happened.
NATO, incredibly, is just getting around to officially comment on the killings, and would insist only that its officials “found” the dead children at the site of the attack, and that they can’t “confirm nor deny” that the air strike is what killed them.
NATO’s denials are usually a bit behind the game, but in this case it seems doubly absurd, as the Afghan government had already confirmed that an informant in the area had told French occupation forces that the children were “terrorists” planning to attack the village, which led to the strike on them.
Lying with pictures
The U.S. builds a fake case for intervention in Syria, via b. at Moon Over Alabama.
Syria
An independent report finds that Western stories of government violence are greatly exaggerated.
Syria
What could possibly go wrong with our interference in the internal affairs of a Middle East country?
My empire, right or wrong
It was hard not to cringe while listening to Obama speak like the stereotypically insecure Democrat, seemingly desperate to convince right-wingers that he’s the fiercest hawk in the room:
Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader railed against President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address during an appearance Wednesday on Democracy Now.
“I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing,” he said. “I mean, he was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms.”
“He should be ashamed of himself that he tries to drape our soldiers, who were sent on lawless military missions to kill and die in those countries, unconstitutional wars that violate Geneva conventions and international law and federal statutes, and drape them as if they’ve come back from Iwo Jima or Normandy.”
Nader, who has run for president five times, had tried to organize a primary challenge against Obama to “bring the best out of him.” But the effort never materialized.
It was the threats against Iran, it was the overall belligerent tone of Obama’s foreign policy remarks. This is the same man who promised, in the same speech, to streamline the military.
Adviser to warlords
I take it back: The NYT is interested in at least part of this story.
Does this surprise me? Of course not. Neither does the fact that the media is not all that interested in this story:
Walid Phares, the recently announced co-chair of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Middle East advisory group, has a long résumé. College professor. Author. Political pundit. Counterterrorism expert. But there’s one chapter of his life that you won’t find on his CV: He was a high ranking political official in a sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon’s brutal, 15-year civil war.
During the 1980s, Phares, a Maronite Christian, trained Lebanese militants in ideological beliefs justifying the war against Lebanon’s Muslim and Druze factions, according to former colleagues. Phares, they say, advocated the hard-line view that Lebanon’s Christians should work toward creating a separate, independent Christian enclave. A photo obtained by Mother Jones shows him conducting a press conference in 1986 for the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of Christian militias that has been accused of committing atrocities. He was also a close adviser to Samir Geagea, a Lebanese warlord who rose from leading hit squads to running the Lebanese Forces.
Since fleeing to the United States in 1990, when the Syrians took over Lebanon, Phares has reinvented himself as a counterterrorism and national security expert, traveling comfortably between official circles and the GOP’s anti-Muslim wing. In a little over two decades, he’s gone from training Lebanese militants to teaching American law enforcement and intelligence officials about the Middle East, and from advising Lebanese warlords to counseling a man who could be the next president of the United States.
“I can’t think of any earlier instance of a [possible presidential] adviser having held a comparable formal position with a foreign organization,” says Paul Pillar, a 20-year veteran of the CIA and a professor at Georgetown’s Center for Peace and Security Studies. “It should raise eyebrows any time someone in a position to exert behind-the-scenes influence on a US leader has ties to a foreign entity that are strong enough for foreign interests, and not just US interests, to determine the advice being given.”
Phares has long faced questions about his background with the Lebanese Forces. As sketchy details have trickled out, he’s tried to downplay his involvement, claiming that he was “politically in the center” of Lebanese Christian politics and that he “was never a military official.” But a Mother Jones investigation has found that he was a key player within the Lebanese Forces when it was involved in a bloody sectarian conflict.
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