Irananian important Articles

10/08/07 "Boston Globe" ---- - AN IMPASSIONED DEBATE over the tight alliance between America and Israel is roiling political circles, sparked by a new book that accuses a powerful "Israel lobby" of distorting American policy and endangering our national security.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18523.htm

Where Did AIPAC Come From?

2007-10-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

AIPAC was founded by Isaiah L. "Si" Kenen, springing from the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs Kenen registered twice with the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) as a foreign agent for Israel. www.antiwar.com/orig/gsmith.php?articleid=11727

2007-08-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

GEOPOLITICALINTERESTS & PETROLEUM DIPLOMACY
The Bernard Lewis Project
http://www.rozanehmagazine.com/NoveDec05/AZPartVI.html

The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew brzezinski

2007-08-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard
Judicial Inc
http://www.judicial-inc.biz/1_master_supreme.htm#linko

Whither the "Global Democratic Revolution"?

2007-08-03T17:14:00.000-07:00

One of the neoconservatives' lasting achievements was the construction of a new pillar of foreign policy—namely, democracy promotion. Today, the neoconservative camp is associated primarily with the Iraq War and the Bush administration's over-reliance on hard military power. But the neoconservatives have, since the Reagan administration, played a central role in elevating "democracy-building" as a core goal of U.S. foreign policy.
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/4436

US lawmakers unite to demonize Iran

2007-07-24T18:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IG25Ak01.html

Idiots on the March

2007-07-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese377.html

War Drums

2007-07-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese368.html

THE ILLUMINATI & THE NEW WORLD ORDER

2007-07-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.nogw.com/illuminati.html

Zionist Influence On The US War Machine

2007-07-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.rense.com/general36/zinf.htm

Neo-Conservative International Targets Iran

2007-06-09T23:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=27
« Kristol Disses Bush Big TimeA Neo-Conservative International Targets Iran
Before the week is out, it’s worth noting the “Democracy & Security” conference in Prague last Monday and Tuesday where Bush, on his way to the G-8 Summit in Heiligendamm, confirmed once more — just in case his tightening embrace over the past year of Sunni-led authoritarian regimes around the Middle East had provoked any doubts — his commitment to spreading freedom and defeating tyranny throughout the world, particularly in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan. Held under the auspices of the Czech Foreign Ministry and Prague’s municipal government, the meeting was organized by the Prague Security Studies Institute (PSSI), the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Likudist Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and Spain’s Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis (FAES) headed by former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

The conference’s official website can be found here and is certainly worth a visit as are the program, and the list of participants, several of whom, notably Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) president Clifford May, European Foundation for Democracy (EFD) executive director Roberta Bonazzi, The Wall Street Journal’s foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, and PSSI’s Jiri Schneider, must have sported suntans earned at the previous week’s off-the-record Iran conference that FDD convened in the Bahamas and about which I wrote in two previous posts here and here.

Heralded last month by the Weekly Standard (whose editor, Bill Kristol, serves on the Shalem Foundation’s board of directors) in an article entitled “Dissidents Unite!,” the conference was convened by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Aznar, and the former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel.

Sharansky, chairman of both the Adelson Institute and of One Jerusalem, a group created to oppose any move under the Oslo peace process to to recognise Palestinian sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem, is a former Soviet refusenik whose 2004 book, ‘The Case for Democracy,’ helped inspire Bush’s ringing 2005 Inaugural Address (even if Sharansky’s own democratic credentials ring a little hollow. Aznar and Havel are co-chairs of the “international” section of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which was launched by FDD in June 2004 and whose website is www.fightingterror.org. Sen. Joe Lieberman, an honorary co-chairman of CPD, keynoted the opening session. In other words, the conference constituted a kind of “Neo-Conservative International” designed to rally support for “dissidents,” primarily from the Islamic world, and give them hope that “regime change” in their countries is possible much as it was in the former Soviet bloc almost 20 years ago.

Indeed, besides FDD’s May, Sharansky and Lieberman, a familiar clutch of U.S. hawks took part in the proceedings, including an all-star contingent from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) consisting of Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Michael Novak, Joshua Muravchik, and Reuel Marc Gerecht; Herb London, John O’Sullivan, and Anne Bayefsky from the Hudson Institute; Bruce Jackson a former director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC); Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution; the FDD’s Walid Phares; and Devon Cross, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB), director of the London-based Policy Forum on International Security, and sister of Frank Gaffney, the president of the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy (CSP). A close Gaffney associate and co-founder of PSSI, Roger W. Robinson, Jr., who is also a leading figure in the Iran divestment campaign here, was also in attendance, along with some major funders of pro-Likud, neo-conservative groups, such as Nina Rosenwald, Ronald Lauder, as well as Miriam and Sheldon Adelson.

In addition to Bush himself, other U.S. government officials who participated in the conference included Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes; the new president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and AEI alumnus, Jeffrey Gedmin; Harold Rhode, a Pentagon official and close associate of AEI’s Michael Ledeen who was involved in back-channel talks with Manucher Ghorbanifar about encouraging “regime change” in Iran in 2003; and Joe Wood, identified in the participants’ list as the deputy assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs in the Office of the Vice President at the White House.

The assumptions underlying the Conference were set out in a background paper by Marc Plattner, the editor of the ‘Journal of Democracy’, which is published by the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy (NED). “Increasingly, the world is divided between liberal democracies (or regimes that are striving or pretending to be liberal democracies) and regimes that are tyrannical or are tending in that direction,” he wrote. And it is states in the latter category that are the source of the growing security threats that confront us. Though these regimes differ greatly in many respects, their leaders seem to be drawn together more and more by their common fear and hatred of liberal democracy – think of the unholy trinity of Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and Lukashenka. It is the tyrannical regimes that support terrorism and threaten not merely to acquire but to use nuclear weapons.”

That analysis not only entirely dismisses the threat posed by Al Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups, but it also, of course, makes Iran Public Enemy Number One. Indeed, Bayefsky, writing in the National Review Online on Friday, wrote (): “(T)here was an elephant in the room that dominated conversations in the coffee breaks and the halls – Iran, its genocidal ambitions, its mad dash towards acquiring nuclear weapons, and its familial relationships with terrorists prepared to use them while screaming the suicide bombers closing argument of choice: Allah Akbar.”

Bayefsky, in fact, was quite frustrated with Bush’s speech and its high-sounding, but too inspecific, injunction that “[F]ree nations must do what it takes to prevail.”

“Which begged the very unpresidential question,” she asked, “so what the hell are we waiting for?” “…Mr. President, the truth is that one of the most evil regimes in the world as we know it is on the verge of acquiring the most powerful weapon in the world as we know it. And the future is in your hands. The clear message from Prague was that you have friends around the world, even if not in your administration. You have the power to protect our nation and freedom for all people everywhere. You lead your nation now. And without exercising that leadership, with no further pretense that the U.N. has the authority to deny the necessities of America’s national defense, the triumph of hate over hope will be laid at your door.”

While a number of the attendees, Muravchik most explicitly, are on record as urging an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities before Bush leaves office if, as they are certain, the diplomatic track doesn’t bear fruit, Sharansky clearly favors, at least for now, an effort to achieve regime change via the East European model. He told the Standard that Iran represents “almost a classic example of how in one generation a country of true believers could turn into a country of doublethinkers” and that opposition to the mullahs is “so massive that it could be compared with Solidarity in Poland.”

That perhaps explains another interesting facet of the conference: All of the one-time dissidents in attendance who, like Havel, eventually took power as a result of regime change in their countries came from countries in the former Soviet bloc; not a single one hailed from Latin America or Africa where a number of countries have made relatively successful – if incomplete — transitions from dictatorships to democracies over the past 20 years. That oversight is particularly remarkable given the co-sponsorship of Aznar, who, one would think, would be particularly conscious of Latin America’s political evolution and its possible relevance to the Islamic world. For whatever reason, neo-conservatives still appear to believe – despite the strong and accumulating evidence to the contrary – that Eastern Europe is the appropriate model for transforming the Middle East despite the latter’s legacy of European colonialism which it shares far more with Latin America and Africa.

A number of genuine dissidents who have suffered for their advocacy did show up, including Mudawi Ibrahim Adam from Sudan; Mamoun Homsy, a former parliamentarian from Syria; Bassem Eid, the founder and director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group); Saad Eddin Ibrahim from Egypt; Cheol Hwan Kang, a former political prisoner from North Korea; and Mohsen Sazegara who was imprisoned for leading a drive to reform the Iranian constitution and subsequently released into exile. He is currently based at Harvard Law School. That some of these have been championed by neo-conservatives does not detract from the importance of their human-rights work.

Other participating dissidents may not have suffered for their beliefs quite as much. Besides Sazegara, who was profiled by Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer in The American Prospect two years ago, the two Iranian representatives were Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son and heir, and Amir Abbas Fakhravar, a Perle favourite whose bona fides was questioned in an important article, also by Laura, in Mother Jones last year. On the Syrian front, Homsy was joined by Farid Ghadry, the Washington-based businessman who emigrated from Syria with his family to Lebanon at the age of eight. Long promoted by neo-conservatives, Ghadry is the founder-president of the Reform Party of Syria, and a member of both CPD and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

2007-05-18T21:58:00.001-07:00

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2006-11-30T23:25:00.000-08:00

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2006-11-30T18:42:00.000-08:00

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How to Aviod been arrested

2006-10-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

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Behind the plan to bomb Iran

2006-08-31T16:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14771.htm

By Ismael Hossein-zadeh

08/31/06 "Asia Times" -- --It is no longer a secret that the administration of US President George W Bush has been methodically paving the way toward a bombing strike against Iran. The administration's plans of an aerial military attack against that country have recently been exposed by a number of reliable sources. [1]

There is strong evidence that the US administration's recent public statements that it is now willing to negotiate with Iran are highly disingenuous: they are designed not to reach a diplomatic solution to the so-called "Iran crisis", but to remove diplomatic hurdles toward a military "solution".

The administration's public gestures of a willingness to negotiate with Iran are rendered utterly meaningless because such alleged negotiations are premised on the condition that Iran suspends its uranium-enrichment program.

Considering the fact that suspension of uranium enrichment, which is altogether within Iran's legitimate rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is supposed to be the main point of negotiations, Iran is asked, in effect, "to concede the main point of the negotiations before they started". [2]

The Bush administration's case against Iran is eerily reminiscent of its case against Iraq in the run-up to the invasion of that country. Accordingly, the case against Iran is based not on any hard evidence provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but on dubious allegations that are based on even more dubious sources of intelligence. Iran is asked, in effect, to prove a negative, which is of course mission impossible - hence grounds for "non-compliance" and the rationale for "punishment".

The US administration's case against Iran is so weak, its objectives of a military strike against that country are so fuzzy, and the odds against achieving any kind of meaningful victory are so strong that even professional military experts are speaking up against the plans of a bombing campaign against Iran. [3] Furthermore, predominant expert views of such a bombing campaign maintain that it would more likely hurt than help the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States.

So if the Bush administration's "national interests" argument as grounds for a military strike against Iran is suspect, why then is it so adamantly pushing for such a potentially calamitous confrontation? What are the driving forces behind a military confrontation with Iran?

Critics would almost unanimously point to neo-conservative militarists in and around the Bush administration. While this is obviously not false, as it is the neo-conservative forces that are beating the drums of war with Iran, it falls short of showing the whole picture. In a real sense, it raises the question: Who are the neo-conservatives to begin with? And what or whom do they represent?

The neo-conservative ideologues often claim that their aggressive foreign policy is inspired primarily by democratic ideals and a desire to spread democracy and freedom worldwide - a claim that is far too readily accepted as genuine by corporate media and many foreign-policy circles. This is obviously little more than a masquerade designed to hide some real powerful special interests that lie behind the facade of neo-conservative figures and their ideological rhetoric.

The driving force behind the neo-conservatives' war juggernaut must be sought not in the alleged defense of democracy or of national interests but in the nefarious special interests that are carefully camouflaged behind the front of national interests. These special interests derive lucrative business gains and high dividends from war and militarism. They include both economic interests (famously known as the military-industrial complex) and geopolitical interests (associated largely with Zionist proponents of "Greater Israel" in the Middle East, or the Israeli lobby).

There is an unspoken, de facto alliance between these two extremely powerful interests - an alliance that might be called the military-industrial-Zionist alliance. More than anything else, the alliance is based on a conjunctural convergence of interests on war and international convulsion in the Middle East. Let me elaborate on this point.

The fact that the military-industrial complex, or merchants of arms and wars, flourishes on war and militarism is largely self-evident. Arms industries and powerful beneficiaries of war dividends need an atmosphere of war and international convulsion to maintain continued increases in the Pentagon budget and justify their lion's share of the public money. Viewed in this light, unilateral or "preemptive" wars abroad can easily been seen as reflections of domestic fights over national resources and tax dollars.

In the debate over allocation of public resources between the proverbial guns and butter, or between military and non-military public spending, powerful beneficiaries of war dividends have proved very resourceful in outmaneuvering proponents of limits on military spending.

During the bipolar world of the Cold War era, that was not a difficult act to perform as the rationale - the "communist threat" - readily lay at hand. Justification of increased military spending in the post-Cold War period has prompted these beneficiaries to be even more creative in manufacturing "new sources of danger to US interests" to justify unilateral wars of aggression. It is not surprising, then, that a wide range of "new sources of threat to US national interests" has emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union: "rogue states", "axis of evil", global terrorism, Islamic radicalism, "enemies of democracy", and more.

Just as the powerful beneficiaries of war dividends view international peace and stability as inimical to their business interests, so too the hardline Zionist proponents of "Greater Israel" perceive peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors perilous to their goal of gaining control over the "Promised Land" of Israel. The reason for this fear of peace is that, according to a number of United Nations resolutions, peace would mean Israel's return to its pre-1967 borders; that is, withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But because proponents of "Greater Israel" are unwilling to withdraw from these territories, they are fearful of peace and genuine dialogue with Palestinians - hence their continued disregard of UN resolutions and their systematic efforts at sabotaging peace negotiations. By the same token, these proponents view war and convulsion (or, as David Ben-Gurion, one of the key founders of the State of Israel, put it, "revolutionary atmosphere") as opportunities that are conducive to the expulsion of Palestinians, to the territorial recasting of the region, and to the expansion of Israel's territory. [4]

The military-industrial-Zionist alliance is represented largely by the cabal of neo-conservative forces in and around the Bush administration. The institutional framework of the alliance consists of a web of closely knit think-tanks that are founded and financed primarily by the armaments lobby and the Israeli lobby. These corporate-backed militaristic think-tanks include the American Enterprise Institute, Center for Security Policy, Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, National Institute for Public Policy and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

These think-tanks, which might appropriately be called institutes of war and militarism, are staffed and directed mainly by the neo-conservative champions of the military-industrial-Zionist alliance, that is, by the proponents of unilateral wars of aggression. There is strong evidence that the major plans of the Bush administration's foreign policy have been drawn up largely by these think-tanks, often in collaboration, directly or indirectly, with the Pentagon, the arms lobby, and the Israeli lobby. These warmongering think-tanks and their neo-conservative champions serve as direct links, or conveyer belts, between the armaments and Israeli lobbies on the one hand, and the Bush administration and its congressional allies on the other.

Take the Center for Security Policy (CSP), for example. It boasts that "no fewer than 22 former advisory board members are close associates in the Bush administration ... A sixth of the center's revenue comes directly from defense corporations." The center's alumni in key posts in the Bush administration include its former chair of the board, Douglas Feith, who served for more than four years as under secretary of defense for policy, Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, former Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle, and longtime friend and financial supporter Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In its 1998 annual report, the center "listed virtually every weapons-maker that had supported it from its founding, from Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Northrop, Grumman and Boeing, to the later 'merged' incarnations of same - Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and so forth". [5]

Likewise, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a major lobbying think-tank for the military-industrial-Zionist alliance, can boast of being the metaphorical alma mater of a number of powerful members of the Bush administration. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney, State Department arms-control official John Bolton (now US ambassador to the UN), and the former chair of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, all have had long-standing ties with the institute.

The AEI played a key role in promoting Ahmad Chalabi's group of Iraqi exiles as a major opposition force "that would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as an alternative to the regime of Saddam Hussein". The group, working closely with the AEI, played an important role in the justification of the invasion of Iraq. It served, for example, as a major source of (largely fabricated) intelligence for the militaristic chicken hawks whenever they found the intelligence gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department at odds with their plans of invading Iraq. [6]

Another example of the interlocking network of neo-conservative forces in the Bush administration and the militaristic think-tanks that are dedicated to the advancement of the military-industrial-Zionist agenda is reflected in the affiliation of a number of influential members of the administration with the Jewish Institute for the National Security Affairs (JINSA).

These include, for example, Douglas Feith, assistant secretary of defense during the first term of the Bush administration; General Jay Garner, the initial head of the US occupation authority in Iraq; and Michael Ladeen, who unofficially advises the Bush administration on Middle Eastern issues.

JINSA "is on record in its support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and against the Oslo Accord ... In its fervent support for the hardline, pro-settlement, anti-Palestinian Likud-style policies in Israel, JINSA has essentially recommended that 'regime change' in Iraq should be just the beginning of a cascade of toppling dominoes in the Middle East." [7]

The fact that neo-conservative militarists of the Bush administration are organically rooted in the military-industrial-Zionist alliance is even more clearly reflected in their incestuous relationship with the warmongering think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Like most of its lobbying counterparts within the extensive network of neo-conservative think-tanks, PNAC was founded by a circle of powerful political figures, a number of whom later ascended to key positions in the Bush administration.

The list of signatories of PNAC's founding statement of principles include Elliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, Elliot Cohen, Frank Gaffney, Zalmay Khalilzad, I Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Add the signature of Cheney to the list of PNAC founders, "and you have the bulwarks of the neo-con network that is currently in the driver's seat of the Bush administration's war-without-end policies all represented in PNAC's founding document". [8]

A closer look at the professional records of the neo-conservative players in the Bush administration indicates that "32 major administration appointees ... are former executives with, consultants for, or significant shareholders of, top defense contractors".

For example, Rumsfeld is an ex-director of a General Dynamics subsidiary, and his deputy during the first term of the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz, acted as a paid consultant to Northrop Grumman. Today the armaments lobby "is exerting more influence over policymaking than at any time since president Dwight D Eisenhower first warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex over 40 years ago". [9]

This sample evidence indicates that the view that the neo-conservative militarists' tendency to war and aggression is inspired by an ideological passion to spread American ideals of democracy is clearly false. Their successful militarization of US foreign policy stems largely from the fact that they in essence operate on behalf of two immensely powerful special interests, the military-industrial complex and the influential Israeli lobby. Neo-conservative architects of war and militarism derive their political clout and policy effectiveness primarily from the political machine and institutional infrastructure of the military-industrial-Zionist alliance.

It is necessary to note at this point that despite its immense political influence, the Zionist lobby is ultimately a junior, not equal, partner in this unspoken, de de facto alliance. Without discounting the extremely important role of the Zionist lobby in the configuration of US foreign policy in the Middle East, I would caution against simplifications and exaggerations of its power and influence over the US policy in the region.

It is true that most of the neo-conservative militarists who have been behind the recent US military aggressions in the Middle East have long been active supporters of Israel's right-wing politicians and/or leaders. It is also no secret that there is a close collaboration over issues of war and militarism among militant Zionism, neo-conservative forces in and around the Bush administration, and jingoistic think-tanks such as AEI, PNAC, CSP and JINSA.

It does not follow, however, that, as some critics argue, the US-Israeli relationship represents a case of "tail wagging the dog", that is, US foreign policy in the Middle East is shaped by the Israeli/Zionist leaders. While no doubt the powerful Zionist lobby exerts considerable influence over US foreign policy in the Middle East, the efficacy and the extent of that influence depend, ultimately, on the real economic and geopolitical interests of US foreign-policy makers.

In other words, US policymakers on the Middle East would go along with the desires and demands of the radical Zionist lobby only if such demands also tended to serve the special interests that those policymakers represented or served, that is, if there were a convergence of interests over those demands. [10]

Aggressive existential tendencies of the US military-industrial empire to war and militarism are shaped by its own internal or intrinsic dynamics: continued need for arms production as a lucrative business whose fortunes depend on permanent war and international convulsion.

Conjunctural or reinforcing factors such as the horrors of the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001, or the Zionist lobby, or the party in power, or the resident of the White House will, no doubt, exert significant influences. But such supporting influences remain in essence contributory, not defining or determining. The decisive or central role is played, ultimately, by the military-industrial complex itself - that is, by the merchants of arms or wars.

Notes
1. See, for example, Seymour M Hersh, The military's problem with the president's Iran policy, The New Yorker (July 10, 2006); Evan Eland, Military action against Iran? Antiwar.com (January 24, 2006).
2. Hersh, "The military's problem with the president's Iran policy".
3. Ibid; see also Ismael Hossein-zadeh, US Iran policy irks senior commanders: The military vs militaristic civilian leadership, OpEdNews.com (July 24, 2006).
4. A detailed discussion of this issue, and of the de facto alliance between militant Zionism and the powerful beneficiaries of war dividends, can be found, among other places, in Chapter 6 of my recently released book, The Political Economy of US Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2006).
5. William D Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? (New York: Nation Books, 2003), page 101; William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, The military-industrial-think tank complex, Multinational Monitor 24, No 1 and 2 (January/February 2003).
6. Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? pp 103-106. 7. Ibid pp 109-11.
8. Ibid p 113.
9. William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, "The military-industrial-think tank complex".
10. I have provided a longer discussion of the role of the Zionist lobby in the configuration of the US policy in the Middle East in Chapter 6 of The Political Economy of US Militarism.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is an economics professor at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. This article draws upon his newly released book, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan Publishers).

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online

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Israeli Agent spying in US

2006-07-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

Jewish Stars Over Hollywood

2006-07-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

Who Rules Hollywood And TV Today?

How can CBS-TV be totally controlled by the Jew Larry Tisch when it has 24 million shares of common stock-outstanding worth $4.66 billion? The answer is that Tisch and his Loew's Inc. bought 25% of the CBS stock. Often a 10% to 20% stock holding in a large company gives one total control. Tisch has turned CBS into an all-Jewish run firm! He named the Jew Howard Stringer president and Jeff Sagansky entertainment head - he determines what you will view each night on CBS. ABC-TV is headed by Leonard Goldenson with Stu Bloomberg in charge of "entertainment".
NBC-TV president is Leonard Grossman with Irvin Segelstein as vice-president. In 1980 they named the 31year-old Jew Brandon Tartikoff as president of entertainment.
The Jewish Post And Opinion of December 6, 1974 states:
"Jews dominate Hollywood today as they did in its infancy, The Jewish presence in Hollywood is a historic fact, A majority of the producers and directors are Jewish while the Writers Guild is practically 70% to 100% Jewish!"
What happens when non-Jews buy a film company? The Jews maintain control because it is "The Deal" in Hollywood which brings in the BIG MONEY! Buying the film story, signing stars to contracts, (who are under Jewish agents) and the distribution of the film to Jewish owned theater chains like Odeon. You had better be in solid with the Jews if you want to make money.
November 16, 1989, the Japanese Sony Corp. bought Columbia Pictures and Tri-Star films. They immediately agreed to pay the all-time record sum of half-a-billion to two young Jews to run the studios. They are Jon Peters and Peter Guber to whom Sony paid $200 million for their production company and each received $50 million as a signing bonus plus $2.75 million each for five years!
Universal Pictures is 100% Jew controlled with Lew Wasserman as chairman of MCA (the parent company). Universal president is Sidney Sheinberg with Thomas Pollack as film head.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is run by the half-Jew Alan Ladd, Jr. (his mother being the Jewess Sue Carroll). Paramount Pictures president is the Jew Mel Harris with Martin Davis chairman and Deborah Rosen as communications director.
Fox TV is owned by the Jew Barry Diller.
The Name Changers
The Jewish Hollywood moguls long ago decided that it would help them make more money if the general public viewed films as being "Christian." In fact, they personally wanted to blend in with the Gentile community. Thus Samuel Goldfish changed his name to Goldwyn and Cecil B. de Mille insisted that he was a Gentile until his death when a Rabbi officiated at his funeral. Every single one of the original Jewish developers of the movie industry divorced their Jewish wives and married beautiful Christian starlets.
This includes Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner, David O. Selznick and Harry Cohen. They gave orders to the numerous Jews they made "stars" to change their Jewish names to Christian sounding ones. This has also included a lot of "nosejobs" for both Jewish male and female stars. Here are but a few who followed this road to stardom.
Adopted Christian Name ..............Real Jewish Name
Joey Adams ....................................... Joseph Abramowitz
Eddie Albert ........................................Eddie Heimberger
Woody Allen....................................... Allen Konigsberg
Lauren Bacall .................................... Betty Joan Perske
Jack Benny ........................................ Benny Kubelsky
Milton Berle ...................................... Milton Berlinger
Ernest Borgnine ..................................Effron Borgnine
George Burns .................................... Nathan Birnbaum
Joan Blondell...................................... Rosebud Blustein
Joyce Brothers ...................................Joyce Bauer
Mel Brooks ....................................... Melvin Kaminsky
Joey Bishop ....................................... Joey Gottlieb
Charles Bronson ................................ Charles Buchinsky
Rona Barrett .......................................Rona Burnstein
Cyd Chrisse .......................................Tula Finklea
Tony Curtis (daughter is Jamie Lee Curtis).......... Bernhard Schwartz
Joan Crawford ................................... Lucille Le Sueur
Dyan Cannon ..................................... Samile Diane Friesen
Kirk Douglas (son is Michael Douglas) ............. Issur Danilovich Demsky
Bob Dylan ...........................................Robert Zimmerman
Rodney Dangerfield ............................Jacob Cohen
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. ........................ Douglas Ullman
Joel Grey (father of Jennifer Grey)................... Joel Katz
Zsa Zsa Gabor ....................................Sara Gabor
John Garfield ...................................... Julius Garfinkle
Judy Garland ....................................... Frances Gumm
Paulette Goddard ................................ Pauline Levee
Eydie Gorme........................................ Edith Gormezano
Elliott Gould ........................................Elliott Goldstein
Cary Grant ......................................... Larry Leach
Lorne Green ........................................Chaim Leibowiz
Judy Holliday ....................................... Judith Tuvim
Leslie Howard ...................................... Leslie Stainer
Buddy Hackett ..................................... Leonard Hacker
Jill St. John ........................................... Jill Oppenheim
Danny Kaye........................................... David Kaminsky
Alan King .............................................. Irwin Kniberg
Larry King...............................................Larry Zeiger
Tina Louise.............................................Tina Blacker
Ann Landers (Abigail Van Buren is her sister) ............Esther Friedman 1. Dorothy Lamour .................................... Dorothy Kaumeyer Miehael Landon .................................... Mike Orowitz
Steve Lawrence ..................................... Sidney Leibowitz
Hal Linden.............................................. Hal Lipshitz
Jerry Lewis ........................................... Joseph Levitch
Karl Maiden ..........................................Maiden Sekulovitch
Paul Muni ..............................................Muni Weisenfreund
Ethel Merman ....................................... Ethel Zimmerman
Jan Murray ........................................... Murray Janofsky
Walter Matthau .................................... Walter Matasschanskayasky
Lilly Palmer ........................................... Maria Peiser
Jan Peerce............................................. Jacob Pincus Perelmuth
Roberta Peters....................................... Roberta Peterman
Eleanor Parker...................................... Ellen Friedlob
Joan Rivers ...........................................Joan Molinsky
Tony Randall ....................................... Leonard Rosenberg
Edward G. Robinson ........................... Emmanuel Goldberg
Dinah Shore ......................................... Francis Rose Shore
Shelly Winters ..................................... Shirley Schrift
Gene Wilder......................................... Eugene Silverstein
Winona Ryder....................................... Laura Horowitz

More Jewish Stars Over Hollywood
There are hundreds of other Jews in Hollywood "stardom" - far too numerous to list them all here. However the following are Jews whom many think are Gentiles: Ed Asner, Bea Arthur, Gene Barry, Richard Benjamin, Kevin Costner, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Dreyfus, Ted Danson, Peter Falk (Columbo), Eddie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Betty Grable, Sharon Gless, Jennifer Grey, David Duchowny, Alicia Silverstone, Natalie Portman, Mandy Patinkin Steven Segall, Dustin Hoffman, Monty Hall, Amy Irving, Jack Klugman, Leonard Nimoy, Ken Olin, Ron Perlman, George Segel, William Shatner, Peter Strauss, Rod Steiger, Jane Seymour, Barbara Walters, Debra Winger, and Bruce Willis. < /FONT>
The following are half-Jewish; Joan Collins, Goldie Hawn, Paul Newman, Robert DeNiro and Geraldo Rivera.
Jews in the music field include, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, Tony Martin, Bette Midler, Barbara Streisand and Ringo Starr.
Here are but a few in the field of "comedy" which is 90% Jewish dominated! Roseanne Barr, David Brenner, Jerry Seinfeld, Sid Caesar, Richard Dawson, Don Adams, Norm Crosby, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Fran "The Nanny" Drescher, Adam Sandler, Jason Alexander, George Jessel, Alan King, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Martha Reye, Garry Shandling, and Henry Winkler.
Propaganda Goals Outlined Our Film Folk, a column by Herbert Luft, appears only in Jewish publications. His description of the 1982 Academy Awards applies to all such events: "Jews award Jews for Jewish theme movies! Reds glorified the Soviet Revolution, Chariots of Fire instilled a guilt feeling in Gentiles for discrimination against Jews. Genocide was best documentary on the German Holocaust of Jews. " In the film "Holocaust" both Poles and Ukranians are described as "worse than Nazies." In "The Eye" the French betray the Jews during World War II.
In the famous Playboy Magazine interview of Jan. 1979, actor Marlon Brando explains this phenomenon: " You've seen every single race besmirched, but you never saw an unfavorable image of the Kike because the Jews were ever so watchful for that. They never allowed it to be shown on screen!"
No film maker dares to be critical of Jews, Israel or Zionism. A Jewish male must be referred to as "a nice Jewish boy", a young girl is an "American Jewish Princess". Jew musicians are always "talented", writers "gifted", painters "sensitive", doctors "brilliant". Jew millionares "philanthropic and visionary".
Hollywood Molds Minds. Millions of innocent non-Jews have been victimized by pro-Zionist film propaganda. They do not realize the Jew "name changers" have used subtle and very sophisticated stories to manipulate the minds of our people. No nation can long remain free while such a powerful medium is totally controlled by Jews whose loyalty is to Zionism first.

and more on that Subject,

http://www.jewwatch.com/index.html

Neocon Redux: Blame Iran,

2006-07-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

Neocon Redux: Blame Iran, Back Israel
Jim Lobe July 18, 2006
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/3371

IRC Right Web
rightweb.irc-online.org
Israel's military offensives in Gaza and Lebanon have reenergized the neoconservatives, who see an opportunity to regain influence lost as a result of setbacks in Iraq. While insisting on unconditional U.S. support for Israel, the neoconservatives are also pushing for possible U.S. attacks on Tehran's nuclear facilities in retaliation for its support of Hezbollah.
In a recent Weekly Standard column entitled “Our War,” editor William Kristol called Iran “the prime mover behind the terrorist groups who have started this war, ” which, he argued, should be considered part of “the global struggle against radical Islamism” (July 24, 2006 issue).
He complained that Washington recently has done a “poor job of standing up and weakening Syria and Iran” and called on President George W. Bush to fly directly from the “silly [Group of Eight] summit in St. Petersburg ... to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies.”
“This is our war, too,” declared Kristol, who is also a founder and co-chairman of the recently lapsed Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
“All of us in the free world owe Israel an enormous thank-you for defending freedom, democracy, and security against the Iranian cat's-paw wholly-owned terrorist subsidiaries Hezbollah and Hamas,” echoed Larry Kudlow, a neoconservative commentator at the National Review, the Standard's right-wing competitor (“Israel's Moment: The Free World's Gain,” July 17, 2006).
“They are defending their own homeland and very existence, but they are also defending America's homeland as our frontline democratic ally in the Middle East,” said Kudlow about Israel. Like Kristol and other polemicists, Kudlow also named Syria (“which is also directed by Iran”) as a promising future target as the conflict expands.
The two columns are the latest examples of a slew of commentaries appearing in U.S. print and broadcast media since Israel began bombing targets in Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah's fatal cross-border attack on July 12, 2006. The opinions appear to be part of a deliberate campaign by neoconservatives and some of their right-wing supporters to depict the current conflict as part of global struggle pitting Israel, billed as the forward base of Western civilization, against Islamist extremism, purportedly organized and directed by Iran and its junior partner, Syria.
This view was perhaps most melodramatically expressed by former speaker of the House, Republican Newt Gingrich, in an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press when he described the conflict as “the early stages of ... the third World War” (July 16, 2006).
The effort to frame the current round of violence as part of a much larger struggle—and the highlighting of Israel's recurring role as Washington's most loyal frontline ally—recalls the neoconservatives' early reaction to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Just nine days after 9/11, Kristol and PNAC—whose charter members included Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and half a dozen other senior Bush administration officials—released an open letter to Bush that called for the United States to retaliate not only against al-Qaida and Afghanistan, but also against Israel's main regional foes, beginning with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat.
In addition, the letter advised, “Any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah. We believe that the administration should demand that Iran and Syria immediately cease all military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah and its operations. Should Iran and Syria refuse to comply, the administration should consider appropriate measures of retaliation against these state sponsors of terrorism.”
“Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism, especially in the Middle East,” the letter asserted. “The United States should fully support our fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism.”
While the Iraqi and Palestinian components of PNAC's agenda were soon adopted as policy and essentially achieved, neoconservative hopes that Bush would move on Hezbollah—as well as Syria and Iran—eventually stalled as U.S. military forces became bogged down in an increasingly bloody and costly counterinsurgency war in Iraq.
As the situation in Iraq worsened, neoconservative influence in and on the administration also declined, to the benefit of “realists” based primarily in the State Department. These “realists” favored a less aggressive policy designed to secure Damascus and Tehran's cooperation in stabilizing Iraq and to strengthen the elected Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah is part.
In that context, the current conflict represents a golden opportunity for the neoconservatives to reassert their influence and to reactivate their Israel-centered agenda against Hezbollah and its two state sponsors.
The cover of the July 24, 2006 Standard blazes “Iran's Proxy War,” and the issue featured no fewer than four articles stressing Iran's sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas and the belief that the United States must stand with Israel, if not take independent action against Tehran and/or Damascus, as Kristol recommended.
The new campaign's prime targets are the more conciliatory “realist” policies toward Syria and Iran pursued by the State Department, which the neoconservatives argue have backfired by making Washington look weak.
“They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago,” wrote Kristol. “Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak,” he went on, adding that, “The right response is renewed strength,” notably “in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran [and] consider[ing] countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.”
The notion that U.S. Middle East policy has become far too flaccid and accommodating is echoed by a number of other neoconservatives, particularly Michael Rubin, a prolific analyst at the hardline American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Richard Perle, a Cheney protégé and former Defense Policy Board chairman. In another July 24 Standard article, Rubin qualified recent State Department policy as “all talk and no strategy” that had emboldened enemies, especially Iran, to challenge Washington and its allies.
In another article for the National Review, bluntly titled “Eradication First,” Rubin elaborated on that theme, arguing diplomacy in the current crisis will only be successful “if it commences both after the eradication of Hezbollah and Hamas, and after their paymasters pay a terrible cost for their support” (July 17, 2006).
“If ... peace is the aim, it is imperative to punish the Syrian and Iranian leadership,” he wrote.
Above all, according to the neoconservatives, the U.S. position in the region is now inextricably tied to the success or failure of Israel's military campaign.

In another Standard article, titled “The Rogues Strike Back: Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah vs. Israel,” Robert Satloff, executive director of the hawkish, pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued that “defeat for Israel—either on the battlefield or via coerced compromises to achieve flawed ceasefires—is a defeat for U.S. interests; it will inspire radicals of every stripe, release Iran and Syria to spread more mayhem inside Iraq, and make more likely our own eventual confrontation with this emboldened alliance of extremists” (July 24, 2006).
Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief of the Inter Press Service and a Right Web contributing writer.

The Middle East Agenda: Oil, Dollar Hegemony & Islam

2006-07-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13864.htm
The Middle East Agenda: Oil, Dollar Hegemony & Islam
Transcript - Public Lecture - Perdana Global Peace Forum 2006
By Prof. Francis A Boyle

06/22/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Kuala Lumpur - Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America's manifest destiny to rule the world. Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the twentieth century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain - in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against the Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal conditions from which they still suffer today- all in the name of securing America's so-called place in the sun. And today at the dawn of the twenty first century, the world witnesses the effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Moslem states and peoples, surrounding central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy which is total nonsense. For the past two hundred and sixteen years, the imperialist foreign policy of the United States of America since its foundation, has been predicated upon racism, aggression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third millennium of humankind's parlous existence, nothing has changed about the operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack upon Iran. Now the topic today is the Middle East Agenda : Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam. So, I'm only going to limit my comments to that subject. We have to begin the story with the Arab oil embargo in nineteen seventy-three. As you know in nineteen sixty-seven, Israel launched an illegal and preventive war against the surrounding Arab states, stole the land and ethnically cleansed the people. But eventually Egypt offered a Peace Treaty to Israel which Israel rejected and the Egyptians and the Arab states decided then to use force to recover their lands. Israel almost collapsed, the United States and Europe came to their support by providing weapons and in reaction the Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States and Europe, and brought their economies to their knees. Whereupon, the then U.S Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger threatened them and said, this will never happen again, and if you do, we will prevent it. And it was not just a threat. The United States government then at that time, planned, prepared and conspired, to steal the oil of the Persian Gulf. They did not have the military capability to do this at that time, to carry out the Kissinger threat, which was also then repeated by the Ford administration, and the Carter administration under Harold Brown and Brzezinski. So they put into planning an interventionary force, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing Arab oil fields, and that was called the rapid deployment force. And it took ten years of training, planning, positioning, and supply to build that interventionary force of that capability and eventually it was called the U.S. Central Command. The purpose of the U.S. Central Command is to steal and control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. And that's exactly what the U.S. Central Command proceeded to do in the Bush Sr. war against Iraq, their first military expedition. And as we know, that war exterminated probably two hundred thousand Iraqis. Half of them innocent civilians. Simply wiped out in a bombing campaign and a military expedition of unprecedented dimensions. But remember, it took fifteen years for the Pentagon and three different administrations both Republicans and Democrats to get the capability to do this. And then, when that genocide or conflict was over, what happened? The United States carved Iraq up into three pieces with their air force, the so-called no-fly zones, a zone for the Kurds in the North, a zone for the Shi'ah in the South, and the Sunni in the middle. Why? To destroy Iraq as an effectively viable state. In his book, Clash of Civilizations, Huntington from Harvard who advised the Pentagon and advised the state department pointed out that the only Arab state with the capability to lead the Arab world and challenge the United States and Israel was Iraq. And so Iraq had to be destroyed, to maintain the domination of the United States and its proxy, Israel. And remember after nineteen seventy-three, whatever it was before then, Israel is nothing more than a catspaw of the United States. They do what America tells them to do. Otherwise Israel is nothing more than a failed state. In addition then, to destroying Iraq as a state, carving it up into three pieces, was the decision to debilitate and destroy the Iraqi people. And so they continued the genocidal economic sanctions on the people of Iraq, that my colleagues, Denis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, so courageously resisted and finally resigned as a matter of principle, calling them by what they really were, genocide. The United States and Britain maliciously and criminally imposed genocidal sanctions on the people of Iraq, that killed approximately 1.5 million Iraqis, all of whom were innocent civilians. And when U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the five hundred thousand dead children, she said that she thought the price was worth it. Now, I could have taken that statement to the International Court of Justice, and filed it against the United States as evidence of genocidal intent against the people of Iraq in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. And indeed I offered to do so to the then President of Iraq, but for whatever reasons he decided not to take these claims to the International Court of Justice. And now, as you see, he is on trial in a total kangaroo court proceeding in Baghdad that is completely controlled and dominated by the United States government. So, 1.5 million Iraqis died as the result of these genocidal sanctions. And then came September 11. And we know for a fact that the Bush Jr. administration knew that a major terrorist attack was going to be launched on the United States. And they let it happen anyway deliberately and on purpose. Why? They wanted a pretext for war. And not just one war but for a long war which they are talking about today. Indeed, from my research the war plans drawn up by the Pentagon for the war against Afghanistan were formulated as early as 1997. Enormous military forces fielded by that same U.S. Central Command, were already in and around and surrounding the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean before September 11. This war had been planned against Afghanistan. And armed, equipped, supplied, trained and war-gamed and ready to go. They just needed the pretext and that was September 11. Why? The United States wanted access to the oil and natural gas of Central Asia. That had been a Pentagon objective since at least before the collapse of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety-one. And the Nine Eleven attack gave them the pretext to make this major grab for the oil and gas of Central Asia. And they are there today with their bases, with their troops, in the surrounding countries in Central Asia. And of course in the process, obliterated, we don 't even have an estimate of the Muslims in Afghanistan who were killed in the air bombardment, twenty, twenty five thousand, maybe more, and tens of thousands of others starved to death and still suffering today. But that, as we know from all the records was only the first step in the process. They wanted to finish the job in Iraq. And so immediately after September 11, Bush ordered Rumsfeld to update and operationalize the plans for attacking and invading Iraq. It had nothing at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. We in the peace movement in America had been saying that all along. The United Nations had determined there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These were lies designed to scaremonger the American people and Congress into supporting an illegal war of aggression, a Nuremberg crime against peace, against Iraq. And they told whatever lies and broke what international laws they had to break in order to attack Iraq. And today the estimate, again we don't know. Perhaps two hundred thousand people in Iraq had been killed outright by the United States, Britain, its allies, Australia in Iraq. And again, most of them civilians. Clearly if you add up what United States government has done to Iraq from August of 1990, when it imposed the genocidal economic embargo until today. The United States and Britain have inflicted outright genocide on the Muslim and Christian people of Iraq and they are predominately Muslim as we know. Now comes the third step in the Pentagon's pre-existing plan, to control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It' s sounds a bit like the plan that Hitler and the Nazis had in the 1930"s. Does it not? First go into Austria, then go into Czechoslovakia, then go into Poland. So first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Iran. And so now Iran is going to be the next victim of these outright criminals unless you and I can stop them. Right now there are three aircraft carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf. And whenever they had put three aircraft carrier task forces over there, it' s always to prepare for an attack. And according to Seymour Hersch, the award winning journalist, it will probably be an aerial bombardment, along the lines of what they did to Yugoslavia in 1999. As you remember there, seventy eight days of aerial bombardment by the United States and NATO with no authorization from the Security Council. Clearly illegal. Killing again, we don't know the exact number outright, four to five thousand innocent civilians. And targeting civilian infrastructure, all up and down, from which the people still suffer today. The use of depleted uranium ammunitions, outbreaks of cancer are documented today. So this is what, is being planned right now as we speak; an attack upon Iran. Using jet fighter aircraft, fighter bombers, on these three aircraft carrier task forces, using cruise missiles on submarines and of course Israel will be involved and have a role to play, doing exactly what the Americans tell them to do. In addition, it appears that if they attack Iran, they will also attack Syria. Yesterday, if you heard President Bush's press conference in Vienna, he threatened Syria, right? There's no other word for it. He threatened Syria. These Neo-Conservatives want to take out Syria as a favour to Israel. Remember, many of these Neo-Conservatives are affiliated personally and professionally with the Likhud Party in Israel and Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, the man who exterminated twenty thousand Arabs in Lebanon, most of them, not all of them were Muslims. And in addition, slaughtered two thousand completely innocent Palestinian women, children and old men at Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon, the man who went to Haram Al-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam, where Muhammad, (Peace Be Upon Him) ascended into heaven, and desecrated the Haram on September 28th, 2000, and deliberately provoked the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and has inflicted death and destruction on the Palestinian people since then. Close to thirty seven hundred Palestinians since then alone have been killed..most of them shot down like dogs in the street, and what has the Muslim world done about this? My Palestinian friends tell me that they are worried that the government of Malaysia might recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations with Israel. I certainly hope this is not true. We must treat the criminal apartheid regime in Israel, the same way the world treated the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa. If the United States attacks Iran, they will probably attack Syria with the Israeli air force and they will attack Lebanon to take out the Islamic resistance movement in southern Lebanon - Hezbollah that defended the legitimate rights of Lebanon and the Lebanese people and expelled the invading longstanding occupying Israeli army that had the full support of the United States government for over twenty years. So they could attack Iran, Syria, Southern Lebanon and inflict yet another round of ethnic cleansing on the suffering Palestinian people. Remember Sharon and Likhud believe that Jordan is Palestine. And they want to drive as many Palestinians as possible out of their homes and into Jordan. So if the United States as reported by Hersh and other reliable sources, goes ahead and attacks Iran, we could see warfare erupt all the way from Egypt to the border with India. This whole area convulsed in warfare. And who will be the primary victims of this war? Muslims. The United States could not care less about Muslim life. Look at the demonisation and victimisation of Muslims that we have seen inflicted by the United States and its surrogate, Israel. Look at Guantanamo, where six hundred Muslim men have been treated like dogs in a kennel. Pretty much the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Look at Abu Ghraib and the sadism and sexual exploitation and perversion of Muslims by their American captors. And the same thing has been done in Baghram in Afghanistan. And when Professor Sharif Bassiouni, the UN special rapporteur filed the report with the Security Council against US practices in Afghanistan, the Americans had Kofi Annan fire him. Just as they had Kofi Annan fire Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for human rights, when she protested what was going on down in Guantanamo. The United States could not care less about Muslim life. And the same is true for the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel. They would be happy to use nuclear weapons against Iran. They would be happy to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against Muslims in Iran. It would create no problem at all for them. Indeed, I went to school with these Neo-Conservatives at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz was there, Chalabi, Khalilzad, Shulsky, all the rest of them. I went through the exact same programme. Their mentor, Professor Leo Strauss. And who was his teacher in Germany and his sponsor? Professor Carl Schmitt who went on to become the most notorious Nazi law Professor of his day, justifying every atrocity that the Nazis inflicted on everyone. We must understand that these Neo-Conservatives are in fact Neo-Nazis. They have espoused the Nazi doctrine of Schmitt and Strauss and Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the 'superman'. They are the supermen, and the Muslims are the scum of the earth. Now, I do not believe the United States will initially start bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. But if things get out of control they are fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons. And here in our materials, you have the Pentagon's Joint Publication 3-12, which you can get on the internet.. just do a Google search and read it. And you will see there dated fifteenth March 2005; nuclear, tactical nuclear weapons have been fully integrated into United States conventional forces. So if Iran were to defend itself, human wave attacks, whatever, they will be happy to use nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Remember, these Neo-Nazis, Neo-Cons want to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They want to use tactical nuclear weapons, to be able to say to the rest of the world, you do what we tell you to do or else look what we did to the Iranians. It's a very serious situation. And this could even get further out of control. Remember that before Bush invaded Iraq, President Putin of Russia said that if he invades Iraq he could set off World War Three. Well, I interpreted that as an implicit threat. Even the famous American news broadcaster Walter Cronkite said that if Bush invaded Iraq he could set off World War Three. Two weeks ago we had the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; China, Russia and Iran. So again, if Bush were to attack Iran, he very well could set off a Third World War, a nuclear war. And that is where you come in. Dr. Mahathir has had the vision to call for this conference to alert the entire world to the existential dangers presented by a US attack on Iran that could readily become nuclear, regional and global. And I am calling upon you to do whatever you can in cooperation with Dr. Mahathir and the Perdana Global Peace Foundation to head this off. Allah has given each and everyone of you skills that can be used in this endeavour. I can't tell you what they are, but you yourself know what they are. And you must go to Dr. Mahathir. You must go to the Perdana Peace Foundation and say, "This is what I can do. These are my talents. These are my professional qualifications. These are my skills. This is my cheque book. Let me help. Let me prevent, let me help prevent a nuclear war, a possible final, cataclysmic Third World War."
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If the Truth be Told...

2006-06-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.payvand.com/news/06/jun/1261.html

6/28/06
If the Truth be Told...
By: Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

The Western media, led by Israel, is hard at work presenting Iran as a global threat. Even the brilliant and daring Stephan Walt and John Mearsheimer who argue that the Israeli lobby has too much power are not immune to the damaging sound waves of the controlled media, or the feign-written pages of the newspapers.

Ironic, given that they write at some length about AIPAC’s role in the media, yet they themselves fall in the same trap as the rest of us, believing Israel’s propaganda that Ahmadinejad has declared he is going to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth”, and that Iran is on its way to build nuclear weapons; [i] an allegation that thousands of inspection hours by the nuclear agency watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has refuted. As for Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric – he can never speak above the hateful, truth-aversion media controlled by AIPAC, for even an Iranian-Jew parliamentary who challenged Ahmadinejad to explain his ‘statement’ is not heard in the American media.[ii]

What is disquieting is for the world to lend ears to these incredulous stories and believe that Iran is a threat. Recent headlines read that the Bush overture to Iran splits Israel and the neo-cons. While wisdom would dictate that Iran’s enemies maintain a low profile, (http://www.forward.com/main/printer-friendly.php?id=7937) other more aggressive steps are being suggested to counter the malaise among the Israelis and the neo-cons.

On June 24, 2006, Jonathan Ariel[1] of Israeli News Agency, in a shocking article entitled “Israel Needs a Preemptive Nuclear Strike Against Iran”[iii], suggested a pre-emptive NUCLEAR strike against Iran. My initial shock was why is the world not outraged? After all, the Israelis have the capability. Terminology such as ‘Islamo-Nazi’ is alien to us, referring, I assume, to genocide. But it is not new to them; this will not be their first time.

“Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who had come to America in order to escape Hitler’s clutches, having lost his whole family to Hitler’s systematic killing of Jews, gypsies, communists, and other undesirables, was determined to wake up the world’s consciousness and pass a law to stop genocide. He was looking for a word to coin the term - An all encompassing word that would describe the assaults on all aspects of nationhood – physical, biological, political, social, cultural, economic and religious. He wanted to connote not only full-scale extermination but also Hitler’s other means of destruction: mass deportation, the lowering of birthrate by separating men from women, economic exploitation, progressive starvation, and the suppression of the intelligentsia who served as national leaders.”[iv] Thus he combined the Greek derivative geno, meaning “race”, or “tribe”, and the Latin derivative cide meaning “killing”.

Iran is blameless. A past free of committing acts of genocide and no intentions of ever wanting to embark on one. Nor does it have atomic weapons. Can Israel declare the same?

- On April 9, 1948, more than 250 villagers at Deir Yassin were massacred by a Jewish underground group known as Lohamei Herut Yisraeil led by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. The intention was to strike terror into the Palestinian population and frighten the people into leaving (in effect, deportation). Following the massacre, Zionist forces drove into Arab villages with loudspeaker trucks shouting “run with your lives unless you want another Deir Yassin”. Virtually the entire population of two major Palestinian towns, Lydda and Ramle, which were numbered some 50,000-70,000 were stampeded by the Yishuv’s army.[v]

- The illegal barrier which prevents the Palestinians to go to work and deprives them of their livelihood.
- Withholding funds and encouraging the international community to do likewise creating one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the Gaza and West Bank.
- More than 100,000 Palestinians worked in Israel in the late 1980s, mainly in menial and poorly paid jobs. In the first 20 years of occupation, $1 billion was deducted from wages of Palestinians employed in Israel for employment benefits for which they were ineligible.[vi]
- Women and children being held in prison – especially children. Lowering birthrate.

Under Lemkin’s description of genocide, its treatment of Palestinians, and its constant threat to Iran with its arsenal of some 200-300 nuclear warheads, is a threat to humanity, Iran is not. The media’s attention has been focused on Iran with ramblings about religious fanaticism. In truth, if state and religion are not kept apart, then there will be wars. However, it would a mistake to think that Israel is a secular democracy and different from Iran.

Israel’s electoral system is based on proportional representation which awards seats in the Knesset (parliament) to parties in exact proportion to their share of the total vote. Even the Mapai, Israel’s major labor party, could not obtain a majority vote. As such, it had to incorporate religious parties in order to form government. While the Mapai had a free hand at defense, the religious faction took over education and introduced religion in public schools. All Israelis are subjected to religious law in their personal lives, which among them means that there is no secular marriage or divorce, hence women cannot initiate divorce![vii] I wonder if women’s rights’ group has ventured into Israel?

While Israel wishes to see Iran destroyed so that they realize what Max Nordau said (a close friend of Herzl’s): “[W]e are going to Palestine to extend the moral boundaries of Europe as far as the Euphrates.”[viii], a genocide of this magnitude, will not go unnoticed. Taking on the world, is not an easy task.

[1] Jonathan Ariel, was an advisor to the South African government (advised with Apartheid’s nuclear weaponry?) and is a former editor-in-chief of the Israel on-line Maariv International. He has filled numerous positions with well known Israel and international media organizations such as Maariv, Makor Rishon, Jerusalem Post, Ha'aretz, The International Herald Tribune, Israel Radio, SABC and the Independent Foreign Service. These include Managing-Editor of Makor Rishon and Editor-in-Chief of Maariv International. He has been interviewed and quoted by leading media organizations such as the LA Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Sun, Times of India, The Australian, Sunday Times and the BBC. His articles have been translated into over a dozen major languages, including German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. He has degrees in Political Science and Journalism. He speaks English and Hebrew at mother tongue level, French, Dutch (Afrikaans) fluently.
[i] (Foreign Policy – July/August pp58-66 foreign policy.com).

[ii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1807160,00.html?gusrc=rss

[iii] http://www.israelnewsagency.com/iranisraelnuclearariel3890624.html
[iv] Samantha Power “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”. Perennial NY 2002
[v] James A Bill and Robert Springborg. “Politics in the Middle East”. Addison Wesley Longman, NY, 2000 5th edition p231-2
[vi] Raja Shehadeh. “Occupiers: Law and the Uprising” Journal of Palestine Studies 67 (Spring 1988) :33

[vii] James A Bill and Robert Springborg. “Politics in the Middle East”. Addison Wesley Longman, NY, 2000 5th edition p242-3
[viii] Cited by Kenneth Brown, “Iron and a King: The Likud and Oriental Jews”, Merip Reports 114 (May 1983):7.

Neocons Still Run the Show in Washington

2006-06-28T22:12:00.001-07:00

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=16831
2006-06-27

Neocons Still Run the Show in Washington
With the media detailing the Bush administration's domestic and international banking and financing manoeuvres as weapons in "the war on terror," Patrick Seale introduces the neocons managing this aspect of US foreign policy.
There was a time when it looked as if Washington's neocons were in full retreat, discredited by the catastrophe in Iraq. The cabal of pro-Israeli foreign policy hawks at the heart of the Bush Administration were beginning to face sharp criticism. They were blamed for having carried the United States into war on false, and even fraudulent, premises.
As the huge costs of the war mounted, the notion of reshaping the Middle East's political order by armed force - to suit US and Israeli interests under the cover of promoting 'democracy' - had, for many observers, come to seem a grotesque confidence trick.
At the same time, an acrimonious debate started in the United States about the role of Israel's legion of American lobbyists in influencing American Middle East policy in an anti-Arab and pro-Israeli direction. A trigger for this debate was a lengthy paper, highly-critical of the Israel lobby, which two prominent American academics, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, published last March. Their work aroused a storm of protest from Israeli sympathisers, and continues to be the subject of fierce controversy.
In the meantime, however, several Washington's warmongers had moved - or been moved - to other jobs. Paul Wolfowitz, the main architect of the Iraq war, had left the Pentagon for the presidency of the World Bank. His side-kick, Douglas Feith - whose Office of Special Plans had hyped false intelligence about Saddam's WMD - had also left the Pentagon. Richard Perle - a leading advocate of the idea that American military power should be used to destroy Israel's enemies - had been stripped of his chairmanship of the Defence Policy Board.
The fiery John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, who had been the scourge of "rogue regimes" and Arab radicals, was appointed US ambassador to the United Nations, where his many critics hoped he would do less harm.
It was even thought that the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State in the second Bush administration would serve to moderate the aggressive nationalism and war-like instincts of Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and even those of President George W. Bush himself.
Some pundits were even beginning to predict a change in American foreign policy as Washington woke up to the great hostility its policies had aroused around the world.
Optimists even suggested that the notions which had so far underpinned Bush's foreign policy would now be reassessed and, in some cases, discarded - notions, for example, of American empire, of US world domination through armed force, of the right to resort to pre-emptive war, of contempt for international treaties and international institutions, of reshaping and imposing democracy on the Middle East.
It was even thought that the neocons' central belief - that American and Israeli security interests were identical - would now be re-examined, and that America might adopt a more balanced posture in the Middle East.
Some wishful thinkers even dared to hope that America, chastened by the Iraq war, would rediscover the liberal, generous, internationalist values that had guaranteed American popularity and American leadership after the Second World War.
These hopes, dreams and utopian predictions have all proved vain and without substance for one important reason: Pro-Israeli foreign policy hawks remain strongly entrenched inside the Bush Administration where, in conjunction with an array of supportive right-wing think-tanks, they continue to shape US policy, especially on the Middle East.
Men like Eliott Abrams, director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council; David Wurmser, Vice-President Cheney's Middle East adviser, and John Hannah, Cheney's chief-of-staff, remain active and influential.
In addition, two other senior American officials - closely allied to the neocon camp - now play a central role in America's self-proclaimed Global War on Terror and its bitter contest with Arab and Muslim opponents.
Stuart Levey, Under Secretary at the US Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and Robert Joseph, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs at the State Department (John Bolton's old job) are spearheading America's campaign against Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas.
In the run up to the Iraq war, Robert Joseph was the US government official responsible for inserting into President Bush's 2003 state of the union speech the fraudulent allegation that Iraq had bought uranium from Niger. This charge played a key role in convincing Congress and the public that war against Saddam Hussein was necessary.
Joseph is well known for his association with pro-Israeli think tanks in Washington, such as Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy. He is an advocate of pre-emptive first strikes - including the use of nuclear weapons - against hostile states that might be seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
His often repeated argument is that America's "new adversaries [Iran?] seek only enough destructive power to blackmail us so that we will not come to the help of our friends [Israel?] who then become victims of aggression."
Judging from their speeches, activities and testimonies to Congressional committees, both Levey and Joseph are Israel-centric hard-liners, determined to shatter the Iranian and Syrian economies and cut off the flow of funds to all Islamic movements, organisations and charities - and in particular, of course, to Hamas, the democratically-elected Palestinian government.
On a recent visit to Britain and France, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made no secret of his wish to see the end of the Hamas government. "I want this terrorist government to collapse," he told the French daily, Le Figaro, on 13 June, "so that civilised people may take control and reconstruct the Palestinian Authority."
Stuart Levey is doing his very best to satisfy Olmert's wishes. As he told a House of Representatives sub-committee, his Office remains "fully committed to combating terrorist financing in all its forms and wherever it may occur."
"We do not measure success," he said, "by the number of laws put on the books but by changes made on the ground. Real progress will come in the form of border stops, cash seizures, account blockings, and arrests."
Levey has not commented on the recent Hamas success in bringing $22m in cash across the border from Egypt into Gaza in a dozen suitcases.
Parroting Israeli leaders, Robert Joseph has warned that Iran's nuclear program is approaching a "point of no-return" and that a nuclear-armed Iran "cannot be tolerated." Together with Levey, he has been blackmailing and threatening foreign banks with fines and lost business if they continue dealing with Iran.
"I think there is a real and growing sense," Joseph said recently, "that there's a risk associated with doing business with Iran, with lending Iran more money, or providing it with a line of credit."
Fearing American reprisals, several major international banks - like UBS, Credit Suisse, ABN AMRO and HSBC - have already ended their operations in Iran. At the same time, a US campaign is underway to destroy the Commercial Bank of Syria by preventing any international financial dealings with it, directly or indirectly, in either dollars or euros.
One of the greatest scandals of the present situation is that Arab banks - fearful of being boycotted and punished by the United States as supporters of terrorism - have refused to transfer money to the starving Palestinians. Even the proposed European aid package has first to be approved by Israel. In the words of an Israeli spokesman, Mark Regev, it must give Hamas "neither legitimacy nor recognition."
These then are among the reasons for thinking that the United States is still a very long way from rethinking its foreign policy. In Washington, the neocons still reign supreme.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Neocons Still Run the Show in Washington

2006-06-28T22:12:00.000-07:00

Bush Overture To Iran Splits Israel, Neocons

2006-06-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.forward.com/main/printer-friendly.php?id=7937

Bush Overture To Iran Splits Israel, Neocons
By Ori NirJune 9, 2006
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's offer to open direct talks with Iran and reward Tehran if it stops enriching uranium is exposing a policy rift between neoconservatives on one hand, and the Israeli government and Jewish organizations on the other.
Neoconservative analysts are blasting the administration, saying that holding talks with the Islamic regime would serve only to embolden it and undermine the anti-fundamentalist opposition in Iran. They argue that America's ultimate goal should be to change Tehran's theocratic regime.
"The administration can't have it both ways. They can't embrace the regime and still talk about liberty for the Iranian people," said Iran analyst Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank widely associated with the push for regime change in Iraq. A former Pentagon official, Rubin added that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "can spout whatever platitudes she wants to spout, but at this point, when it comes to liberty and freedom, she has no credibility."
Israeli officials and several influential Jewish groups, meanwhile, have refrained from criticizing the new American approach — which some experts are depicting as the most dramatic foreign policy shift of the Bush presidency — saying that they support more pragmatic ways to block Iran's apparent dash toward a nuclear weapon. For Israel and Jewish groups — despite Iranian calls for Israel's destruction — the fundamental goal is not regime change, but to block Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The split appears to fly in the face of recent high-profile efforts to paint the pro-Israel lobby as a seamless network dominated by Jewish organizations and neoconservatives coordinating their activities with the Israeli government. Most notably, such a view was advanced by two highly respected academics — John Mearsheimer, a top international relations theorist based at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, former academic dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government — in a research paper released in March. The Walt-Mearsheimer paper has triggered an escalating debate on the influence of Israel and Jewish organizations that has spilled over onto the opinion pages of major publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Recently, with such scrutiny mounting, Israeli leaders asked American Jewish organizations to lower their profile on the Iran issue, the Forward has learned.
In one notable example, a delegation of leaders from the American Jewish Congress met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert shortly before returning to the United States. When asked how he thinks Jewish groups should pursue the Iran issue, Olmert reportedly implied that he would prefer a low profile, according to one source familiar with the proceedings.
"We don't want it to be about Israel," Olmert is said to have replied, explaining that although Iran's president focuses his belligerent rhetoric on Israel, both Jerusalem and Washington have an interest in convincing the international community that a nuclear armed Iran would be a menace to the region and to the entire world.
President Bush updated Olmert shortly before Rice announced the new American policy at a May 31 press conference, Israeli and American sources said. Rice announced that Washington would be willing to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran if Tehran "fully and verifiably suspends its enrichment and reprocessing activities." Rice made clear that America would not attempt to hinder an Iranian civilian nuclear program.
Immediately following Rice's comments, her Israeli counterpart, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, issued a statement, saying, "Israel appreciates the steps and measures by the United States in continuing to lead the international coalition and in taking all necessary steps to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability."
One Israeli official told the Forward that Jerusalem is satisfied with the apparent international recognition that "this is the critical time to clarify whether Iran is really pursuing a peaceful nuclear program or a belligerent one." The official dismissed the argument made by some opponents of Rice's move that all the overture by the United States would do is allow Iran to buy time while pursuing nuclear weapons and fending off international sanctions. America's move, the Israeli official said, only would hasten and embolden the international community as it approaches a likely showdown with Iran in the United Nations.
Israel's support for Rice and Olmert's request for Jewish groups to take a lower profile are being well received by many Jewish groups. Already, some Jewish groups had been asking the White House to stop suggesting that American efforts to block Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons are motivated primarily by a desire to protect Israel.
Jewish organizations have no interest in becoming "the lobby for war with Iran," one communal official said.
In the past, when the administration chose to pursue diplomatic options instead of an immediate push for international sanctions, it drew public criticism from some Jewish organizations. This time around, while some Jewish groups are uncomfortable with the administration's shift on direct talks with Iran, only the right-of-center Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs openly criticized the move.
Last year, when the Bush administration agreed to give Russia a chance to negotiate a plan that would allow Iran to enrich uranium under international supervision, the main pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, issued a rare public rebuke of the White House. But this week, in response to the recent American announcement, Aipac issued a measured statement to the Forward, saying that if the administration blocks Iran's production of enriched uranium by offering talks, that would be a "positive development." The statement, however, cautioned against losing sight of Iran's habit of deceiving America and its allies.
Aipac sources said this week that they don't expect the administration's policy shift to hinder their efforts to pass the Iran Freedom Support Act, a bill aimed at tightening U.S. sanctions on Iran, which has overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives but must still be voted on in the Senate. This week Aipac sent a fund-raising letter to thousands of its supporters saying "we need your help to stop Iran." A spokesman for Aipac said that the letter is part of the organization's routine fund-raising efforts and not connected to the administration's new strategy.
Some officials with Jewish groups share the concern expressed by many neoconservative critics of the new American approach, that any negotiations simply would buy Iran time to advance its nuclear weapons program.
"For the Iranians, diplomacy is a form of delay, so it is dangerous," said David Twersky, director of international affairs for the American Jewish Congress. However, he added, "it will also be dangerous to act precipitously, prematurely. The United States cannot go by itself and say, we are imposing sanctions."
Most Jewish groups accept the administration's argument that the overture would make it easier for Washington to put together the international coalition necessary for effective sanctions against Iran.
"Looking down the abyss at the choices, which, in their starkest terms, are either accepting Iran as a nuclear power or attacking militarily, I think people are looking to see whether or not a third way can be found to achieve the same purpose," said Jess Hordes, the Anti-Defamation League's Washington affairs director.
This sentiment was being echoed among some friends of Israel on Capitol Hill. "In the abstract, who wants to talk to the Iranian regime and who wants to give it legitimacy and to prolong the game they are playing?" said Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee. "But that's the price we might have to pay in order to get the world community to take a tougher stand on Iran down the line."
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Iran Nuclear and other releted websites

2006-06-02T22:31:00.000-07:00

http://iranaffairs.typepad.com/

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1083/irans-march-2003-offer

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=917053

Iranian peace overtures in 2003 and mysterious non-reaction
http://www.mideastweb.org/iranian_letter_of_2003.htm

Iranian peace overtures in 2003 and mysterious non-reaction
http://www.mideastweb.org/log/archives/00000467.htm

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1085/dudes-with-lightsabers-redux

Good Site for News

2006-05-31T20:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

Israeli Lobby Anti-Iran in USA

2006-05-24T19:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateI03.php?SID=6&newActiveSubNav=Iran&activeSubNavLink=templateI03.php%3FSID%3D6&newActiveNav=researchAreas

Anti Iran- Israeli's Lobby in USA

2006-05-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.fightingterror.org/

Israeli Anti Iran in USA

2006-05-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.defenddemocracy.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=374034
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/

Israel Anti Iran operations in US

2006-05-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

Neo-cons and the Israel Lobby on Iran,
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/3277

U.S. Moves to weaken Iran

2006-05-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13111.htm
U.S. Moves to Weaken IranA campaign to promote democracy and fund dissidents prompts speculation that the administration's goal is to change the regime.By Laura RozenSpecial to The Times05/19/06 "Los Angeles Times" -- -- WASHINGTON —
The Bush administration, shunning pressure from allies for direct dialogue with Iran, is shifting toward a more confrontational stance and intensifying efforts to undercut the country's ruling clerics.U.S. officials have taken a series of steps to increase pressure on Iran, most recently creating new offices in the State Department and Pentagon specifically to bolster opposition to the Tehran government. In February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Congress for $75 million to supplement $10 million in funds to promote democracy, aid Iranian dissidents and expand the Voice of America's Persian-language broadcasts beamed across the Persian Gulf from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates."We are more out of sync now with Iran than at any time since 1979," said a State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I don't think the time is right now for a dialogue. We seem to be moving closer toward a confrontational stance, versus a compromise stance."Although some observers note similarities in the Iran policy to the stance on Iraq in the lead-up to the war in that nation, officials emphasize that this time around, State Department diplomats rather than Pentagon war planners are in charge. Still, the campaign illustrates the administration's hostility toward Iran's rulers and raises the question of whether its ultimate goal is to curb Iran's nuclear program or change the regime."The administration is trying to make regime change through democratization the policy, instead of making confrontation by military means the policy," said Trita Parsi, a Middle East specialist at Johns Hopkins University who advocates direct U.S. talks with Tehran.The administration's efforts are taking shape on the second floor of the State Department, where a new Office of Iranian Affairs has been charged with leading the push to back Iranian dissidents more aggressively, boost support to democracy broadcasters and strengthen ties with exiles.Nearby at the Pentagon, an Iranian directorate will work with the State Department office to undercut the government in Tehran.Rice and other officials have publicly advocated steps to pressure the Iranian government. But by setting up the new offices, staffs and programs, the administration is institutionalizing its long-held antipathy toward Iran's government.The new offices are modest in size — the Pentagon's directorate began with six full-time staff members. But they can draw on expertise throughout the government, providing access to potentially hundreds of specialists.The State Department's new Iranian Affairs office is headed by David Denehy, a longtime democracy specialist at the International Republican Institute, who will work under Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the vice president.Recently, Denehy and other officials went to Los Angeles for meetings with Iranian exiles and the Persian-language media. The purpose was to inform them of the government's plans, get feedback and — perhaps not a secondary consideration — create a buzz within the Iranian American diaspora and its satellite media outlets, which are beamed into Tehran.Afterward, some Iranian Americans were left disappointed by their first look at the new campaign and by the fact that officials had not begun distributing money to exile groups."They came here — we didn't know why they came — asking: 'What do you think about Iran? Do you have any connections to people inside?' " recounted Zia Atabay, the founder of Los Angeles-based NITV, a Persian-language broadcaster. "We said, 'The reason you are here is you know we have a connection.' "Assistance to dissidents in Iran is complicated by the Iranian regime's demonstrated brutality toward its critics — writers, bloggers, trade union members and human rights activists — much less anyone perceived to be receiving U.S. aid. For that reason, the State Department does not publicly disclose whom it funds.Even private U.S. groups receiving money to support democracy efforts in Iran are reluctant to discuss their programs for fear they will put their Iranian partners in harm's way.As much as $50 million of the funds requested will go to the Voice of America for Persian-language broadcasts. The State Department also is planning to send 15 foreign service officers to countries neighboring Iran and to capitals with large Iranian exile populations to serve as "Iran watchers."At the Pentagon, the new Iranian directorate has been set up inside its policy shop, which previously housed the Office of Special Plans. The controversial intelligence analysis unit, established before the Iraq war, championed some of the claims of Ahmad Chalabi. A number of assertions made by the former Iraqi exile and onetime Pentagon favorite were later discredited.Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable declined to name the acting director of the new Iran office and would say only that the appointee was a "career civil servant." Among those staffing or advising the Iranian directorate are three veterans of the Office of Special Plans: Abram N. Shulsky, its former director; John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst; and Ladan Archin, an Iran specialist.Even if the chief U.S. goal is arresting Iran's nuclear program — and not overthrowing the government — the democratization effort could be a useful part of the strategy, some experts said."The State Department policy of isolating the regime diplomatically is the main policy so far," said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a former CIA analyst who also worked for the Sept. 11 commission."But there are all these different ways you could game this. Supporting opposition groups could also be a way of raising the stakes, in effect saying, 'Here's what we are going to do if you won't comply,' " he said.The new focus also may be contradictory, Richard N. Haass, a State Department official during President Bush's first term and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said at a conference in Washington this month. ."We are telling Iran, 'We want regime change, but while you're still here, we'd like to negotiate with you to stop your nuclear program,' " Haass said.

A letter to Bush to not use Atomic Bomb on Iran

2006-04-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

www.mardomtv.com

2006-03-24T16:26:00.000-08:00

To See Live Program click here:
www.mardomtv.com
Or the Google Links at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4740512582325780578

www.mardomtv.com

2006-03-24T15:56:00.000-08:00

Fishing for a pretext to Squeeze Iran

2006-03-21T15:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060313_fishing_for_a_pretext_in_iran/
Posted on Mar. 13, 2006
By Juan Cole
Editor’s Note: Truthdig’s Middle Eastern affairs expert argues that the Iranian nuclear issue “has not reached the point of crisis, and therefore other motivations must be sought for the Bush administration’s breathless rhetoric."
UPDATE: On March 13, President Bush told an audience at George Washington University: “Coalition forces have seized IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran.... Such actions--along with Iran’s support for terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons--are increasingly isolating Iran, and America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats.” Bush’s allegations about the Iranians providing improvised explosive devices to the Iraqi guerrilla insurgency are bizarre. The British military looked into charges of improvised explosive devices coming from Iran, and this past January actually apologized to Tehran when no evidence pointed to Iranian government involvement. The guerrillas in Iraq are militant Sunnis who hate Shiites, and it is wholly implausible that the Iranian regime would supply bombs to the enemies of its Iraqi allies. Although Bush charges Iran with “support for terrorism,” he seems unable to name any international terrorist incident of the past six years that can unambiguously be attributed to Iran. His baldfaced accusation that Iran is in “pursuit of nuclear weapons” is, as we will see below, not proved either. Bush’s vendetta against Iran is all the more invidious in light of the sweetheart deal he recently offered India, which never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A recent United Nations report says that India has been less than forthright about its enrichment programs, and that its procedures are inadequate to deter further proliferation. India dismisses the report. The Bush administration nevertheless has proposed changing U.S. law to permit the sale of nuclear technology to India.
Start of Original Essay:
Iran threatened last week to use the oil weapon if the United Nations Security Council imposes sanctions on the country because of its nuclear research program, promising “harm and pain” to the United States. In addition to consumer anxieties about oil prices, rumors of a planned U.S. or Israeli airstrike on Iran keep flying, and neighboring Iraqi Shiites have threatened reprisals if that is done to their brethren. What is driving the crisis between the Bush administration and Iran and ratcheting up the rhetoric? Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi said on Friday, “If sanctions are imposed, we will definitely use the oil tool and other tools and we will stop at nothing.” The regime is clearly fearful of an international economic boycott, but feels it has its own advantages in the struggle. With increasing demand from India and China and instability in Nigeria and Iraq, Iran’s crude oil exports are important in maintaining an affordable price, especially in the winters. In some ways, by invading Iraq and destabilizing it, as well as fostering the rise of Shiite religious parties in Baghdad, the Bush administration has inadvertently strengthened Shiite Iran’s hand. Although the doubling of petroleum prices in the past two years has so far been absorbed by the world economy, many analysts are convinced that if the price went up to $75 a barrel and stayed there for two years, it would add significantly to the underlying rate of inflation and begin subtracting 2.5% a year from world growth. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chimed in with regard to the American threats: “They know that they are not capable of causing the least harm to Iranian people. They will suffer more.”
From cbc.ca
Related Links
“Bush Ties Iran to Roadside Bombs in Iraq" (March 13, 2006) The president asserts that many of the improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have proved so deadly to U.S. forces in Iraq, originate in Iran.(March 13, 2006) Washington Post article about Bush’s attempt to build opposition to theocracy in Iran.“New ‘Cold War’ Looms with Iran" (March 13, 2006) BBC article on how the U.S. relationship with Tehran is starting to resemble its pre-1989 relationship with the U.S.S.R.“Britain Wants to Leave the Door Open to Negotiate With Iran" (March 13, 2006) Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, says that any U.N. pressure on Iran should be “incremental” and “reversible."“Russia Accuses Iran of Blocking Nuclear Diplomacy" (March 13, 2006) Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, says “Iran is absolutely no help to those who want to find peaceful ways to solve this problem."Iran is a mid-size country of some 70 million, with a per capita income of only about $2,000 a year. It has no weapons of mass destruction, and its conventional military forms no threat to the United States. From an Iranian point of view, the Americans are simply being unreasonably aggressive. Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei has given a fatwa or formal religious ruling against nuclear weapons, and President Ahmadinejad at his inauguration denounced such arms and committed Iran to remaining a nonnuclear weapons state.
In fact, the Iranian regime has gone further, calling for the Middle East to be a nuclear-weapons-free zone. On Feb. 26, Ahmadinejad said: “We too demand that the Middle East be free of nuclear weapons; not only the Middle East, but the whole world should be free of nuclear weapons.” Only Israel among the states of the Middle East has the bomb, and its stockpile provoked the arms race with Iraq that in some ways led to the U.S. invasion of 2003. The U.S. has also moved nukes into the Middle East at some points, either on bases in Turkey or on submarines. Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect and monitor its nuclear energy research program, as required by the treaty. It raised profound suspicions, however, with its one infraction against the treaty--which was to conduct some secret civilian research that it should have reported and did not, and which was discovered by inspectors. Tehran denies having military labs aiming for a bomb, and in November of 2003 the IAEA formally announced that it could find no proof of such a weapons program. The U.S. reaction was a blustery incredulity, which is not actually an argument or proof in its own right, however good U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is at bunching his eyebrows and glaring. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows Iran to develop civilian nuclear energy, and the United States itself urged Iran to build reactors in the 1970s. Iran does not have a heavy-water breeder reactor, which is the easy way to get a bomb. It does have light-water reactors for energy production, but these cannot be used to get enough fissionable material to make a bomb. Although Vice President Dick Cheney has made light of an oil state seeking nuclear energy, it would be a rational economic policy to use nuclear energy for domestic needs and sell petroleum on the world market. Certainly, the NPT permits such a policy. The difficulty for those concerned with proliferation is that for Iran to independently run its light-water reactors, it needs to complete the fuel cycle of uranium enrichment. The ability to produce nuclear fuel is only one step away from the ability to refine uranium further, to weapons-grade quality. Still, it is a step away and could not easily be done in secret with inspectors making visits. Iran is experimenting with refrigerator-size centrifuges as a means of enriching uranium, but would need 16,000, hooked up in a special way, to produce a bomb. It has 164, and one of its proposals to defuse the crisis with the U.S. is to limit itself to no more than 3,000. Otherwise, it says it ideally would have 50,000 centrifuges. No signatory of the NPT that allows regular IAEA inspections has ever moved to the stage of bomb production. Inspections have been extremely effective tools. United Nations weapons inspectors discovered and dismantled Saddam Hussein’s weapons program after the Gulf War in the early 1990s. The IAEA was even able to detect trace plutonium on Iranian equipment that came from Pakistan, which manufactures bombs. Those who remain suspicious of Iran’s ultimate intentions are not completely without a case. But there is good reason to believe that Iran’s nuclear program could have been monitored successfully. The Bush administration has arbitrarily taken the position that Iran may not have a nuclear research program at all, even a civilian one. This stance actually contradicts the guarantees of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Washington officials continually intimate to the press that Tehran has an active weapons program, which is speculation. And, of course, the United States itself is egregiously in violation of several articles of the NPT, keeping enough nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert to destroy the world several times over and actively pursuing new and deadly weapons, even dreaming of “tactical” nukes. Its ally in the region, Israel, never signed the NPT and was helped by the British to get a bomb in the 1960s. The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released in summer 2005 estimates that if Iran did have an active nuclear weapons program, and if the international atmosphere were favorable to it being able to get hold of the requisite equipment, it would still be a good 10 years away from a bomb. But the international atmosphere is actively hostile to such a development, and anyway it has not been proved that there is such a weapons program. If the Supreme Jurisprudent of theocratic Iran has given a fatwa against nukes, if the president of the country has renounced them and called for others to do so, if the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence of a military nuclear weapons program, and if Iran is at least 10 years from having a bomb even if it is trying to get one, then why is there a diplomatic crisis around this issue between the United States and Iran in 2006? The answer is that the Iranian nuclear issue is déjà vu all over again. As it did with regard to the Baath regime in Iraq, the militarily aggressive Bush administration wants to overthrow the government in Tehran. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, now in a coma, urged the U.S. to hit Iran as soon as it had taken care of Saddam Hussein. The Israelis have a grudge against it because it helped end their military occupation and land grab in southern Lebanon by giving aid to the Shiite Hezbollah organization, the only Arab force ever to succeed in regaining occupied land from Israel by military means. But Iran does not form a conventional military threat to Israel. Overthrowing the theocratic regime in Iran, Washington hopes, would reduce Hezbollah pressure on Israel over its continued occupation of the Shebaa Farms area (and, implicitly, the Golan Heights). It would make Syria more complaisant toward Israel and Washington. It would open up Iran to investment and exploration on the part of the American petroleum majors, which are at the moment excluded because the U.S. slapped an economic boycott on Iran. It might remove support for the more hard-line elements among Shiite political parties in Iraq, making that country easier for the U.S. to shape and dominate. In short, a U.S.-installed regime in Iran would hold out the promise of returning to the halcyon 1960s, when the shah was an American puppet in the region. The nuclear issue is for the most part a pretext for the Americans to exert pressure on the regime in Tehran. This is not to say that proliferation is not a worrisome issue, or that it can be ruled out that Iran wants a bomb. It is to say that the situation simply has not reached the point of crisis, and therefore other motivations must be sought for the Bush administration’s breathless rhetoric. President Ahmadinejad, it should be freely admitted, has, through his lack of diplomatic skills and his maladroitness, given his enemies important propaganda tools. Unlike his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier. He went to an anti-Zionist conference and quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, saying that the “Occupation regime” must “vanish.” This statement about Israel does not necessarily imply violence. After all, Ariel Sharon made the occupation regime in the Gaza Strip vanish. The quote was translated in the international press, however, as a wish that “Israel be wiped off the map,” and this inaccurate translation has now become a tag line for all newspaper articles written about Iran in Western newspapers. In another speech, Ahmadinejad argued that Germans rather than Palestinians should have suffered a loss of territory for the establishment of a Jewish state, if the Germans perpetrated the Holocaust. This argument is an old one in the Middle East, but it was immediately alleged that Ahmadinejad was advocating the shipping of Israelis to Europe. That was not what he said. It is often alleged that since Iran harbors the desire to “destroy” Israel, it must not be allowed to have the bomb. Ahmadinejad has gone blue in the face denouncing the immorality of any mass extermination of innocent civilians, but has been unable to get a hearing in the English-language press. Moreover, the presidency is a very weak post in Iran, and the president is not commander of the armed forces and has no control over nuclear policy. Ahmadinejad’s election is not relevant to the nuclear issue, and neither is the question of whether he is, as Liz Cheney is reported to have said, “a madman.” Iran has not behaved in a militarily aggressive way since its 1979 revolution, having invaded no other countries, unlike Iraq, Israel or the U.S. Washington has nevertheless succeeded in depicting Iran as a rogue state. A final issue between Iran and the United States that might explain the escalating rhetoric over nonexistent nukes is Iraq. The U.S. is bogged down in a quagmire there, fighting militant Sunni Arabs. But it has also seen its political plans for Iraq checked on several occasions by the rise of powerful Iraqi Shiite parties, such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Dawa Party, and the Sadr Movement. Iran hosted SCIRI and Dawa in exile in the Saddam years, and has close relations with them. There are allegations that it gives them money. To any extent that Iran has helped these parties win elections and maintain their paramilitary forces, it has undermined the American hope of installing a relatively secular figure as a Karzai-like ruler. The U.S. would very much like to limit Iranian influence in Iraq, and aggressiveness on the nuclear issue is a way for the Bush administration to enlist European and other countries in the effort to put pressure on Iran and make it cautious about intervening too forcefully in Iraqi affairs. In fact, the Shiite parties in southern Iraq are homegrown and would almost certainly have done well in elections without any Iranian support. The Americans are in some ways scapegoating Iran for their own failures of analysis. They appear to have been unaware of how popular the Shiite religious leaders had become in the late Saddam period, and so were unprepared for their strong showing in the U.S.-sponsored elections. The United States has succeeded in bringing Iran before the United Nations Security Council, though it is unclear if that body will slap economic sanctions on Tehran. Such a move could be vetoed by Russia or China, both of which have high hopes of sharing in the Iranian oil bonanza. If an international boycott is imposed, it will mainly harm the civilians and children of Iran. The crisis has been fueled by Ahmadinejad’s alarming and foolish rhetoric, and by the clever aggressiveness of the Bush administration, which is better at framing its enemies than any other U.S. administration in history. Washington no longer has much leverage on Iran. Its military is bogged down in Iraq, and its diplomats are forbidden to speak to Tehran under most circumstances. Its attempt to prevent even a civilian Iranian nuclear energy program may convince the clerical hard-liners to pull their country out of the NPT and to end international inspections. If the Iranians really did want a bomb, they could not have asked for a better pretext to leave the NPT. President Bush’s policies toward Iran have already failed, and could fail even more miserably in the months to come.
Karen Spector

2005-05-22T20:17:00.000-07:00

Iran Policy Committee: Pentagon Mouthpiece, Israeli Ally, MEK Supporter by John Stantonwww.dissidentvoice.orgMay 19, 2005
The Iran Policy Committee (IPC) has a website up and running at iranpolicycommittee.org. [1] The IPC made the news in February of 2005 when it released a report titled “US Options for Iran.” In that report, the IPC recommended that a terrorist group known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK) be removed from the US government’s hit list. The authors of the IPC report equate the terrorist MEK with the African National Congress that fought long and hard against the despicable all-white South African regime and its US supporters so many years ago. Of course, the implication here is that the MEK will somehow produce a Nelson Mandela, or at least is on the same playing field as Mandela’s group was.
Those two wacky thoughts should be enough to dismiss the eleven IPC principals, their mission and their clumsy report as nonsense. But here inside the Washington, DC Beltway, it’s never wise to dismiss ignorance until performing background checks on the individuals and their affiliations. The record shows that the IPC operates in very close proximity to the US intelligence community, has the support of 150 members in the US Congress, and is linked to individuals/groups who successfully lied and led the US into another Vietnam-like war, and whose primary purpose is the creation of a US empire that controls the world’s resources and protects a greater Israel. Crazy is selling these days and the loonies are in charge.
The IPC is supported by the neocon all-stars that we’ve come to know and love such as Doug Feith, Frank Gaffney, Mike Ledeen, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, et al. But these first benchers are running out of political muscle as their war in Iraq continues to drain the resources of the American people on all political, economic and military fronts. What’s worse, perhaps, is their “with us or against us” mentality that has caused new political and economic alliances to form (example: South America-China-Iran) and that has accelerated both conventional and nuclear arms races. Having failed on so many fronts, they recognize that to get the US into Iran, some new faces are needed and that’s where the IPC back benchers are critical to the forthcoming anti-Iranian/Persian propaganda operations.
The IPC is linked through its purpose and people to the Coalition for a Democratic Iran and the MEK, the Washington PAC, JINSA, AIPAC, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the DOD, the Center for Security Policy, and all the major US intelligence agencies. IPC members are primarily defense & security contractors/consultants and would benefit financially from a war with Iran.
FOX This!
Anyone who can tolerate FOX News -- the electronic equivalent of Reverend Moon’s Washington Times--on a regular basis will recognize these IPC members: LTG Tom McInerney, USAF (Ret.) formerly of the Business Executives for National Security and member of the Center for Security Policy; MG Paul Vallely, USA (Ret.); CAPT Chuck Nash, USN (Ret.); and LTC Bill Cowan, USMC (Ret.). These four folks are frequently seen and heard discussing military matters on FOX. Other IPC heavy hitters include Raymond Tanter, a former staffer at the National Security Council and current member of the Committee for the Present Danger and the Washington Center for Near East Policy; Clare Lopez a former CIA analyst; and Jim Atkins, former US President Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who is known in some circles as “the westerner who knows the most about the Middle East...”
The military heavyweight of the IPC is McInerney. One of the highlights of McInerney’s military career, besides being a top-notch pilot in Vietnam, was assisting Alaska in the clean up of the oil spill caused by the Exxon Valdez when it ran aground in March of 1989. From April to September of that year, McInerney admirably headed the Joint Task Force Alaska Oil Spill while commander of the Alaskan Air Command (then SECDEF Cheney argued for a minimalist DOD/federal government role). These days, though, McInerney is busy promoting the neocon cause and dabbling in a host of money-making and influence peddling activities.
You can find him -- and fellow IPC cohorts Vallely, Cowan and Lopez -- at conferences like Intelcon 2005 [2] as speakers and members of the Intelcon’s Program Advisory Group (Mike Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes are among them). Former directors of the NSA, CIA and DIA are featured panelists, along with more, yes more, FOX News commentators no doubt opining in conference as on the network with all the volume of an announcer at a Monster Truck bash. Yehoshuah Mizrachi of Operation Shiloh apparently spoke at Intelcon about handling terror like an Israeli (he equates the Battle of Shiloh from the US Civil War with 9-11). Finally, the conference program shows that the standard mix of defense contractors and US government bureaucrats round out Intelcon’s conferees, along with a few token liberals thrown in for what appears to be some sort of balance.
Do You Hear What I Hear?
So what are all these IPC characters doing at Intelcon? Well it’s a good place to drum up business and get nod-and-wink-intel about what’s really going on “over there and with that contract award.” At the Intelcon blast held this past February, McInerney chaired a panel on Securing Intelligence Networks. As a director of NetStar Systems, that subject matter is an important part of his job. According to NetStar’s website, it is “a fast-growing Virginia corporation with headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. It was founded in 1998 and most of our employees are cleared at the Top Secret or higher levels. NetStar is growing rapidly in the Intel and DOD sectors and has provided numerous solutions and staff to many of the Intelligence agencies in the DC metro area.” Clients include the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, DHS and the Office of Naval Intelligence. NetStar is a member of the National Military Intelligence Association (NMIA). Most of NetStar’s clients were at Intelcon 2005 including General Jim Williams, USA (Ret.), former director of DIA, and NMIA’s current director.
With the IPC plugged into US global and domestic intelligence operations, and connected with neocon/Israeli lobbying activities here in the USA, it’s important to listen to them—no matter how maniacally they articulate their position. So when McInerney was quoted by the Washington Times Rowan Scarborough in February of 2005 about the likelihood of an attack on Iran, one has to wonder how and where he is getting his information as he states it with an air of complete certainty.
What are we to make of his almost 30 year old assessment of Iranian anti-aircraft defenses? Is it likely that Iran has done nothing about its defenses since the 1970’s or does personnel experience mean something else given his contacts in the neocon pipeline, and US/foreign intelligence communities?
“He [Bush] doesn't have any choice [but to attack Iran because] he understands [the Iranians] are the king of terror right now. They are striving for nuclear weapons that can get into the hands of terrorists and then it's too late. B-2 stealth bombers, armed with the huge penetrating bombs commonly called bunker busters, would be able to pierce Iran's aging air defenses and hit 20 or more sites. They have not updated that very, very old air defense system. McInerney said that as a colonel in 1977 he went to Iran and conducted a war exercise against various Iranian targets during the rule of the United States' ally, the Shah of Iran. They were not very good then, and they have clearly just gotten worse…I can tell you from my personal experience we would have no problem there."
McInerney’s buddy, Vallely, is of the same mind. According to FOX News, Vallely believes that “while the United States has the ability to launch a major ground invasion, it wouldn’t have to…we can take a country down with just our air assets…we don't have to put boots on the ground all the time if we're after specific targets.”
Did they forget about how difficult Iran could make it for US troops on the ground in Iraq? What about the impact on the US and world economy?
It is vacuum packed thinking like this that prompted the following Amazon Books review of McInerney and Vallely’s book Endgame: Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror. Robert Steele of the noted Open Source Solutions had this to say:
I finally figured it out. This is a puff piece of, by, and for FOX Cable News viewers. There are no footnotes in this book. It is a rambling opinion piece. Let us not confuse rank with brains, or opinions with thought. This is a double-spaced book that could probably be distilled to 30 pages of core reading, all summed up as 'we're always right, no matter the cost. This book also adopts the Richard Perle neoconservative game plan of using terrorism as a pretext to invade Syria and Iran. The authors -- who demonstrate how far one could get in the Cold War military without reading or thinking, call this a military assessment. It is not. . . It avoids discussing Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Central Asia, Muslim Africa, and Muslim Pacifica. This is not analysis, this is flim-flam. . .This book is a blueprint for a nuclear winter in which America self-immolates.
We Know Terrorism?
IPC notable Cowan runs a company called wvc3. Among other things, Cowan’s group states “Talking about terrorists is one thing. Having conducted successful operations against them in their midst is another. We know terrorism. It’s not something we’ve learned since 9/11. We can speak with absolute authority about how they organize, think, act, and operate. Programs and operations designed to neutralize them will only be as successful as the thinking behind them. We provide the bedrock around which sound counterterrorism initiatives and efforts are based.”
Uh, if that’s so, where were they on 911? What about the MEK?
Anyway, Cowan’s group links to companies like Aegis whose claim is that, “Our management staff consists of prior U.S. military, police and government personnel. Their many years of dedicated service provides Aegis MEP with a network of international contacts that enable us to act anywhere in the world. Our linguists are rigorously tested to ensure their proficiency in English and their specialty language(s). Our consultants and operational personnel have extensive international experience and are accustomed to acting professionally in politically sensitive environments…The projects we complete for our clients are generally sensitive in nature.”
In sum, they are either guarding people and things, killing/destroying people and things, or watching and listening to someone on something. Which makes one wonder why resort to all the self-inflating crypto military/intelligence speak?
MEK: Terrorists Working for America
On April 6, 2005, a number of IPC principals met with elected officials in the US government. The IPC has the complete account on its website from US Newswire. Here are some of the highlights:
“The IPC convened on Capitol Hill at the invitation of the Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives. At issue were US policy options for Iran. In attendance were over 80 members of the Congress and their aides, foreign diplomats, experts from other think tanks...Co-chairs of the caucus, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO.) and Congressman Bob Filner (D-CA), chaired the briefing. Tancredo raised the issue of the terrorist designation of Iran’s main opposition group, the Mujahedeen e-Khalq organization and IPC panelists concurred on the need to remove it from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations List. Tancredo stated that the MEK was designated not because it was involved in terrorist activities, but because the Clinton administration sought to curry favor with the Iranian regime.”
In fact, the MEK did a lot of Saddam Hussein’s dirty work inside Iraq, according to globalsecurity.org. The MEK assisted Saddam Hussein’s suppression of the 1991 Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish uprisings and in the 1970s MEK members killed a number of US soldiers and contractors. Its membership has been steadily falling. “The MEK was allied with the Iraqi regime and received most of its support from it. MEK members supported the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
The MEK assisted the Hussein regime in suppressing opposition within Iraq, and performed internal security for the Iraqi regime. MEK was founded in the 1960s by a group of college-educated Iranian leftists opposed to the country’s pro-Western ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Although the group took part in the 1979 Islamic revolution that replaced the Shah with a Shiite Islamist regime, MEK’s ideology, a blend of Marxism and Islamism, put it at odds with the post-revolutionary government. MEK activities have dropped off in recent years as its membership has dwindled.”
But the future is bright. The MEK has the IPC and its supporters working on its behalf.
John Stanton is a Virginia Based writer specializing in political & national security matters. He is the author of America 2004: A Power But Not Super. Reach him at: cioran123@yahoo.com. REFERENCES1) All biographies for the IPC members and the referenced report can be found on the IPC website.2) There are far too many websites to reference in the body of the article. You can find the links to IPC member companies on their website. Intelcon is at www.fbcinc.com/intelcon/organizers.asp. Operation Shiloh is www.opshiloh.com. NetStar is www.netstarsys.com. NMIA is at www.nmia.org. Go to the NMIA Awards Citations and you’ll get an idea of some of the intelligence ops being run in the USA and elsewhere.
Other Articles by John Stanton
* Rumsfeld’s Mystery Contingency Operations CACI Gets Bigger * Overview: The Great Energy War* Sibel Edmonds’ 2005 Spring Offensive* US Association Helps Create New EuroAsia/New World Order* Interview With God* Iraq Survey Group: Donald Rumsfeld's Al Qaeda* Turkey, Drugs, Faustian Alliances & Sibel Edmonds * United Kingdom, United States and Israel: Kings of Pain* Don’t Live the Lie, Boycott It* Which Way John Kerry?* The End of Freedom* Landmine Mania: America’s Love Affair with Anti-Personnel Mines* The Ghost of Adolph Hitler: Nazi Influence in America
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2005-05-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

A Look At The Powerful
Jewish Lobby In Americah

By Mark Weber7-12-2
"It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture." -- Michael Medved, well-known Jewish author and respected film critic.
For decades Israel has violated well established precepts of international law and defied numerous United Nations resolutions in its occupation of conquered lands, in extra-judicial killings, and in its repeated acts of military aggression.
Most of the world regards Israel's policies, and especially its oppression of Palestinians, as outrageous and criminal. This international consensus is reflected, for example, in numerous UN resolutions condemning Israel, which have been approved with overwhelming majorities.
"The whole world," United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan recently said, "is demanding that Israel withdraw [from occupied Palestinian territories]. I don't think the whole world ... can be wrong." [note 1]
Only in the United States do politicians and the media still fervently support Israel and its policies. For decades the US has provided Israel with crucial military, diplomatic and financial backing, including more than $3 billion each year in aid.
Why is the U.S. the only remaining bastion of support for Israel?
Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who was awarded the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, has candidly identified the reason: "The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic," he said. "People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful." [note 2]
Bishop Tutu spoke the truth. Although Jews make up only about three percent of the US population, they wield immense power and influence -- vastly more than any other ethnic or religious group.
As Jewish author and political science professor, Benjamin Ginsberg, has pointed out: [note 3]
"Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations."
Today, though barely two percent of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and the most influential single newspaper, the New York Times ... The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked.
Jews are only two percent of the nation's population yet comprise eleven percent of what this study defines as the nation's elite. However, Jews constitute more than 25 percent of the elite journalists and publishers, more than 17 percent of the leaders of important voluntary and public interest organizations, and more than 15 percent of the top ranking civil servants.
Stephen Steinlight, former Director of National Affairs of the American Jewish Committee, similarly notes the "disproportionate political power" of Jews, which is "pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America." He goes on to explain that "Jewish economic influence and power are disproportionately concentrated in Hollywood, television, and in the news industry." [note 4]
Two well-known Jewish writers, Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, pointed out in their 1995 book, Jews and the New American Scene: [note 5]
"During the last three decades Jews [in the United States] have made up 50 percent of the top two hundred intellectuals ... 20 percent of professors at the leading universities ... 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington ... 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the 50 top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series."
The influence of American Jewry in Washington, notes the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post, is "far disproportionate to the size of the community, Jewish leaders and U.S. official acknowledge. But so is the amount of money they contribute to [election] campaigns." One member of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations "estimated Jews alone had contributed 50 percent of the funds for [President Bill] Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign." [note 6]
"It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture," acknowledges Michael Medved, a well-known Jewish author and film critic. "Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names." [note 7]
One person who has carefully studied this subject is Jonathan J. Goldberg, now editor of the influential Jewish community weekly 'Forward.' In his 1996 book, Jewish Power, he wrote: [note 8]
"In a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood studio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a statistical observation ... Hollywood at the end of the twentieth century is still an industry with a pronounced ethnic tinge. Virtually all the senior executives at the major studios are Jews. Writers, producers, and to a lesser degree directors are disproportionately Jewish -- one recent study showed the figure as high as 59 percent among top-grossing films."
The combined weight of so many Jews in one of America's most lucrative and important industries gives the Jews of Hollywood a great deal of political power. They are a major source of money for Democratic candidates.
Reflecting their role in the American media, Jews are routinely portrayed as high-minded, altruistic, trustworthy, compassionate, and deserving of sympathy and support. While millions of Americans readily accept such stereotyped imagery, not everyone is impressed.
"I am very angry with some of the Jews," complained actor Marlon Brando during a 1996 interview. "They know perfectly well what their responsibilities are ... Hollywood is run by Jews. It's owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering." [note 9]
A Well-Entrenched Factor
The intimidating power of the "Jewish lobby" is not a new phenomenon, but has long been an important factor in American life.
In 1941 Charles Lindbergh spoke about the danger of Jewish power in the media and government. The shy 39-year-old -- known around the world for his epic 1927 New York to Paris flight, the first solo trans-Atlantic crossing -- was addressing 7,000 people in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, about the dangers of US involvement in the war then raging in Europe. The three most important groups pressing America into war, he explained, were the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration.
Of the Jews, he said: "Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." Lindbergh went on:
"For reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, [they] wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."
In 1978, Jewish American scholar Alfred M. Lilienthal wrote in his detailed study, The Zionist Connection: [note 10]
"How has the Zionist will been imposed on the American people?... It is the Jewish connection, the tribal solidarity among themselves and the amazing pull on non-Jews, that has molded this unprecedented power ... In the larger metropolitan areas, the Jewish-Zionist connection thoroughly pervades affluent financial, commercial, social, entertainment, and art circles."
As a result of the Jewish grip on the media, wrote Lilienthal, news coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in American television, newspapers and magazines is relentlessly sympathetic to Israel. This is manifest, for example, in the misleading portrayal of Palestinian "terrorism." As Lilienthal put it: "One-sided reportage on terrorism, in which cause is never related to effect, was assured because the most effective component of the Jewish connection is probably that of media control."
One-Sided 'Holocaust' History
The Jewish hold on cultural and academic life has had a profound impact on how Americans look at the past. Nowhere is the well-entrenched Judeocentric view of history more obvious than in the "Holocaust" media campaign, which focuses on the fate of Jews in Europe during World War II.
Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has remarked: [note 11]
"Whether presented authentically or inauthentically, in accordance with the historical facts or in contradiction to them, with empathy and understanding or as monumental kitsch, the Holocaust has become a ruling symbol of our culture ... Hardly a month goes by without a new TV production, a new film, a new drama, new books, prose or poetry, dealing with the subject, and the flood is increasing rather than abating."
Non-Jewish suffering simply does not merit comparable attention. Overshadowed in the focus on Jewish victimization are, for example, the tens of millions of victims of America's World War II ally, Stalinist Russia, along with the tens of millions of victims of China's Maoist regime, as well as the 12 to 14 million Germans, victims of the flight and expulsion of 1944-1949, of whom some two million lost their lives.
The well-financed Holocaust media and "educational" campaign is crucially important to the interests of Israel. Paula Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, has observed: "With regard to Israel, the Holocaust may be used to forestall political criticism and suppress debate; it reinforces the sense of Jews as an eternally beleaguered people who can rely for their defense only upon themselves. The invocation of the suffering endured by the Jews under the Nazis often takes the place of rational argument, and is expected to convince doubters of the legitimacy of current Israeli government policy." [note 12]
Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who has taught political science at City University of New York (Hunter College), says in his book, 'The Holocaust Industry,' that "invoking The Holocaust" is "a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews."[note 13] "By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure. ... Organized Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own morally indefensible policies." He writes of the brazen "shakedown" of Germany, Switzerland and other countries by Israel and organized Jewry "to extort billions of dollars." "The Holocaust," Finkelstein predicts, "may yet turn out to be the 'greatest robbery in the history of mankind'."
Jews in Israel feel free to act brutally against Arabs, writes Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, "believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own." [note 14]
Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has spoken with blunt exasperation about the Jewish-Israeli hold on the United States: [note 15]
"I've never seen a President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on."
Today, the danger is greater than ever. Israel and Jewish organizations, in collaboration with this country's pro-Zionist Christian fundamentalist "amen corner," are prodding the United States -- the world's foremost military and economic power -- into new wars against Israel's enemies.
As the French ambassador in London recently acknowledged, Israel -- which he called (a quote which shocked millions -ed) "that shitty little country" -- is a threat to world peace. "Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?," he said. [note 16]
In summation:
Jews wield immense power and influence in the United States.
The "Jewish lobby" is a decisive factor in US support for Israel.
Jewish-Zionist interests are not identical to American interests. In fact, they often conflict.
As long as the "very powerful" Jewish lobby remains entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic Jewish-Zionist distortion of current affairs and history, the Jewish-Zionist domination of the U.S. political system, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East, and the Israeli threat to peace.
Notes
1. Quoted in Forward (New York City), April 19, 2002, p. 11. 2. D. Tutu, "Apartheid in the Holy Land," The Guardian (Britain), April 29, 2002. 3. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago, 1993), pp. 1, 103. 4. S. Steinlight, "The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy," Center for Immigration Studies , Nov. 2001. http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/back1301.html 5. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 26-27. 6. Janine Zacharia, "The Unofficial Ambassadors of the Jewish State," The Jerusalem Post (Israel), April 2, 2000. Reprinted in "Other Voices," June 2000, p. OV-4, a supplement to The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 7. M. Medved, "Is Hollywood Too Jewish?," Moment, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1996), p. 37. 8. Jonathan Jeremy Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 280, 287-288. See also pp. 39-40, 290-291. 9. Interview with Larry King, CNN network, April 5, 1996. "Brando Remarks," Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1996, p. F4 (OC). A short time later, Brando was obliged to apologize for his remarks. 10. A. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), pp. 206, 218, 219, 229. 11. From a 1992 lecture, published in: David Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 305, 306. 12. Paula E. Hyman, "New Debate on the Holocaust," The New York Times Magazine , Sept. 14, 1980, p. 79. 13. Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (London, New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 130, 138, 139, 149. 14. The New York Times, May 27, 1996. Shavit is identified as a columnist for Ha'aretz, a Hebrew-language Israeli daily newspaper, "from which this article is adapted." 15. Interview with Moorer, Aug. 24, 1983. Quoted in: Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby (Lawrence Hill, 1984 and 1985), p. 161. 16. D. Davis, "French Envoy to UK: Israel Threatens World Peace," Jerusalem Post, Dec. 20, 2001. The French ambassador is Daniel Bernard.6/02
About the author
Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977). For nine years he served as editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review. www.ihr.org

Sent: 5/20/2005 1:22 PM
Material about Dangers of divided loyalty for American Jews
Articles/Books
#470 Israel: An Insoluble Problem -- A Jewish View of the Jewish Stateby Lucian Heichler in Issues of The American Council For Judaism, Summer 2002
#2000 An Open Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: To My Former Dean and Other "Court Jews"by Joshua Ruebner in CounterPunch, 14 March 2003
#2520 Can We Talk?by Eric Alterman in The Nation, 21 April 2003
#3562 Epiphany at Beit Jalaby Donald Neff in The Link, November 1995
#3901 Some of Israel's best friends won't forgive a spyby Nathan Guttman in Ha'aretz, 18 August 2003
#4042 Pollard recruiter resurfaces in U.S.by Richard Sale in Washington Times, 11 July 2003
#4043 Israeli Outlaws in America: The Case of Rafi Eitanby Kurt Nimmo in CounterPunch, 25 August 2003
#4190 The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policyby Stephen Steinlight, October 2001
#4325 Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies, and Con-Artistsby Francis Boyle in Media Monitors Network, September 20, 2003
#4642 My ‘04 Vote Will Hinge On Israelby Gary Rosenblatt in The Jewish Week, 7 November 2003
Maps/Atlases/Cartoons/PicturesGo to start of articlesNo maps on this topic.
Audio-visual material

Neocon 101

2005-04-14T16:46:00.000-07:00

Neocon 101
Some basic questions answered.What do neoconservatives believe?
"Neocons" believe that the United States should not be ashamed to use its unrivaled power – forcefully if necessary – to promote its values around the world. Some even speak of the need to cultivate a US empire. Neoconservatives believe modern threats facing the US can no longer be reliably contained and therefore must be prevented, sometimes through preemptive military action.
Most neocons believe that the US has allowed dangers to gather by not spending enough on defense and not confronting threats aggressively enough. One such threat, they contend, was Saddam Hussein and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Since the 1991 Gulf War, neocons relentlessly advocated Mr. Hussein's ouster.
Most neocons share unwavering support for Israel, which they see as crucial to US military sufficiency in a volatile region. They also see Israel as a key outpost of democracy in a region ruled by despots. Believing that authoritarianism and theocracy have allowed anti-Americanism to flourish in the Middle East, neocons advocate the democratic transformation of the region, starting with Iraq. They also believe the US is unnecessarily hampered by multilateral institutions, which they do not trust to effectively neutralize threats to global security. What are the roots of neoconservative beliefs?
The original neocons were a small group of mostly Jewish liberal intellectuals who, in the 1960s and 70s, grew disenchanted with what they saw as the American left's social excesses and reluctance to spend adequately on defense. Many of these neocons worked in the 1970s for Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a staunch anti-communist. By the 1980s, most neocons had become Republicans, finding in President Ronald Reagan an avenue for their aggressive approach of confronting the Soviet Union with bold rhetoric and steep hikes in military spending. After the Soviet Union's fall, the neocons decried what they saw as American complacency. In the 1990s, they warned of the dangers of reducing both America's defense spending and its role in the world.
Unlike their predecessors, most younger neocons never experienced being left of center. They've always been "Reagan" Republicans.
What is the difference between a neoconservative and a conservative?
Liberals first applied the "neo" prefix to their comrades who broke ranks to become more conservative in the 1960s and 70s. The defectors remained more liberal on some domestic policy issues. But foreign policy stands have always defined neoconservatism. Where other conservatives favored détente and containment of the Soviet Union, neocons pushed direct confrontation, which became their raison d'etre during the 1970s and 80s.
Today, both conservatives and neocons favor a robust US military. But most conservatives express greater reservations about military intervention and so-called nation building. Neocons share no such reluctance. The post 9/11-campaigns against regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that the neocons are not afraid to force regime change and reshape hostile states in the American image. Neocons believe the US must do to whatever it takes to end state-supported terrorism. For most, this means an aggressive push for democracy in the Middle East. Even after 9/11, many other conservatives, particularly in the isolationist wing, view this as an overzealous dream with nightmarish consequences.
How have neoconservatives influenced US foreign policy?
Finding a kindred spirit in President Reagan, neocons greatly influenced US foreign policy in the 1980s.
But in the 1990s, neocon cries failed to spur much action. Outside of Reaganite think tanks and Israel's right-wing Likud Party, their calls for regime change in Iraq were deemed provocative and extremist by the political mainstream. With a few notable exceptions, such as President Bill Clinton's decision to launch isolated strikes at suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, their talk of preemptive military action was largely dismissed as overkill.
Despite being muted by a president who called for restraint and humility in foreign affairs, neocons used the 1990s to hone their message and craft their blueprint for American power. Their forward thinking and long-time ties to Republican circles helped many neocons win key posts in the Bush administration.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 moved much of the Bush administration closer than ever to neoconservative foreign policy. Only days after 9/11, one of the top neoconservative think tanks in Washington, the Project for a New American Century, wrote an open letter to President Bush calling for regime change in Iraq. Before long, Bush, who campaigned in 2000 against nation building and excessive military intervention overseas, also began calling for regime change in Iraq. In a highly significant nod to neocon influence, Bush chose the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as the venue for a key February 2003 speech in which he declared that a US victory in Iraq "could begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace." AEI – the de facto headquarters for neconservative policy – had been calling for democratization of the Arab world for more than a decade.
What does a neoconservative dream world look like?
Neocons envision a world in which the United States is the unchallenged superpower, immune to threats. They believe that the US has a responsibility to act as a "benevolent global hegemon." In this capacity, the US would maintain an empire of sorts by helping to create democratic, economically liberal governments in place of "failed states" or oppressive regimes they deem threatening to the US or its interests. In the neocon dream world the entire Middle East would be democratized in the belief that this would eliminate a prime breeding ground for terrorists. This approach, they claim, is not only best for the US; it is best for the world. In their view, the world can only achieve peace through strong US leadership backed with credible force, not weak treaties to be disrespected by tyrants.
Any regime that is outwardly hostile to the US and could pose a threat would be confronted aggressively, not "appeased" or merely contained. The US military would be reconfigured around the world to allow for greater flexibility and quicker deployment to hot spots in the Middle East, as well as Central and Southeast Asia. The US would spend more on defense, particularly for high-tech, precision weaponry that could be used in preemptive strikes. It would work through multilateral institutions such as the United Nations when possible, but must never be constrained from acting in its best interests whenever necessary.
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Don't know much about neoconservatism?Learn basic concepts.
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The neo-consevative factor

2004-12-30T17:39:00.000-08:00

From AxisofLogic.com
Iran/Persia"The neo-conservative factor" By Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
Dec 19, 2004, 23:16
What makes things easier for the neo-conservative-Likudnik coterie is that it is operating within a pre-existent "anti-Iranian" context."
In the absence of official inter-state relations between Iran and Israel on the one side and Iran and the United States on the other, there is no avoiding the fact that much of what is happening between the countries is influenced by the activities of "sub-state" institutional actors who have filled the political vacuum left behind by the governments. One side effect of this constellation is that the American foreign policy-making process vis-a-vis Iran is heavily penetrated by neo-conservative functionaries and activists with close links to Jewish lobbying organizations and the Likud party in Israel. Let me frame the review of the evidence for this statement with two concrete questions: How pervasive is the neo-conservative-Likudnik nexus? How much leverage does it have on the power elites in Washington?
One newly established link in the chain of neo-conservative think tanks tied to Jewish lobbying organizations is the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI). Founded in 2002 by Michael Ledeen and Morris Amitay, who used to be executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the organization aims to foster political support for regime change in Iran. Members include Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), itself an invention of AIPAC, Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and Rob Sohani who has close personal and political links to the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. Ledeen, Amitay and Sobhani joined forces at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in a seminar entitled "The Future of Iran", co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. All three have connections with the media agency Benador Associates that manages both their op-ed placem! ents and television appearances. Eleana Benador represents Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Kramer and other neo-conservatives tied to the Bush administration.
Influence on the levers of power in Washington is not only secured through lobbying efforts. There is also persuasive evidence for covert activity. In August 2004, it was revealed that classified documents including a draft National Security Presidential Directive devised in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was shared with AIPAC and Israeli officials. The document set out a rather more aggressive US policy toward Iran and was leaked by Lawrence Franklin, an "expert" on Iran who was recruited to Feith's office from the Defense Intelligence Agency. An FBI counterintelligence operation revealed that the same Franklin met repeatedly with Naor Gilon, the head of the political department at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and other officials and activists tied to the Israeli state and Jewish lobbying organizations, primarily AIPAC.
Feith himself has longstanding links to Zionist pressure groups. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), for example, honored him and his father for their service to Israel and the Jewish people in 1997. He is also cofounder of "One Jerusalem", a Jerusalem-based organization whose ultimate goal is securing "a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel." A second cofounder of this organization is David Steinmann who is chairman of another neo-conservative institution with close ties to Israel's Likud party, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). He is also a board member of the CSP and chairman of the executive committee of the Middle East Forum. Two other cofounders of "One Jerusalem" are directly tied to the Likud party: Dore Gold is a top advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Natan Sharansky is Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs.
What makes things easier for the neo-conservative-Likudnik coterie is that it is operating within a pre-existent "anti-Iranian" context. Most analysts would agree that the image of Iran as a country in the grip of endemic revolutionary hysteria has been produced, reified and internalized by large segments of the American and Israeli public for quite some time now. That perspective has it that post-revolutionary Iran is monolithic, ruled by sword-swinging mullahs who are not to be trusted. It is a view openly articulated by many. Richard Perle, Harold Rhode, Michael Ledeen, David Frum and other activists and decision-makers tied to the neoconservative-Likudnik nexus are among them. For Iran, it is typically argued, there can be no reprieve. "When it is in our power and interest," pontificate Perle and Frum in their latest book An End to Evil, "we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker".
Given that the neo-conservative-Likudnik consensus has acquired all the qualities of a strategic, transnational alliance, it would be naive to assume that its mobile architects have not the means and determination to channel their campaigns into the power centers of Washington's foreign policy elite. Both the US and Israel are receptive to this kind of manipulation, because producing the image of Iran as a rogue actor serves the important function to legitimate their policies in West Asia (demonizing Israel and the United States is equally expedient for the Iranian state, of course). Yet, there is no escaping the fact that all three actors share a "common fate," that regional stability cannot be secured without a pragmatic consensus among them. This inevitable independence demands opening up communication channels for future dialogue. Reaching that stage is dependent on a) the willingness of the United States to engage Iran diplomatically and b) the ability of the Islamic Re! public to legitimate detente with both Israel and the United States on the level of ideological theorizing.-
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/12064/

Evildoers, here we come

2004-12-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

The road to Damascus is the key node in the Bush/neo-con roadmap for a newMiddle East.
by Pepe Escobar

Washington is faced with two options. It could restore the draft - provoking aminor social earthquake in the US. Or it could develop - and deploy - tacticalnuclear weapons, mini-nukes. Fallujah - flattened by "conventional" means - wasjust a test. On the road to Damascus, the road to Tehran, the road to Riyadh,the neo-cons would be much more tempted to go nuclear. http://207.44.245.159/article7493.htm===

Iranian manchurian

2004-12-16T18:11:00.000-08:00

Iranian Manchurian
December 16, 2004
So now the Iraqi defense minister is the latest to say that Abdel Aziz Hakim and Ayatollah Sistani’s Shiite fascist party is a Trojan Horse for Iran.
The statement from Defense Minister Hazim Shalaan is a stunner, and the fact that he is a chief actor in the puppet U.S. interim government doesn’t take away from the fundamental truth of what he had to say.
Most of today’s papers cover Shalaan’s remarks, but without the prominence they deserve.
The Sistani-backed Shiite party, organized by Hussein Shahristani, a Sistani acolyte, is the “Iranian list,” says Shalaan. “Iran is the big link in terrorism in Iraq. … I want to warn you that Iran is the most dangerous enemy to Iraq and to all Arabs. Shahristani went to Iran after 1991 and worked on building an Iranian nuclear reactor. We will not let him come back and become an Iraqi prime minister.” He warned that Iran and Sistani want “turbaned clerics to rule.”
He is exactly right—and the neoconservatives backing the rise of Shiite fascism in Iraq are to blame.
Incredibly, SCIRI—the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdel Aziz Hakim, a semi-ayatollah—is leading the Sistani list, despite its official backing from Iran. And Al Dawa (The Call) is another Shiite fascist party. Its members actually blew up the American embassy in Kuwait in 1983, with Iranian help, and carried out hundreds of assassinations and terrorist acts in Iraq between 1969 and 2003, also backed by Iran. These are the parties that President Bush wants to rule Iraq? Their leaders ought to be arrested for espionage and put on trial for terrorism by the Iraqi authorities. Hopefully, Shalaan will do just that, but Prime Minister Iyad Allawi isn’t there yet.
Unraveling all this is too complicated for a blog entry. But the important thing to understand is that the forces in Iran supporting Sistani, Shahristani, Hakim and Al Dawa are a faction of Iranians amenable to collaboration with the United States, Israel and the neocons. They are still (of course) Islamic revolutionaries, but slightly more moderate than the hardest of hardliners in Iran. They are the faction of illusory moderates that Bill Casey, Ollie North and Michael Ledeen courted during Iran-Contra in the mid-1980s, and I believe that Hashemi Rafsanjani—who is now contemplating a run for the presidency of Iran—is one of them. As I reported in yesterday’s entry (see below), this is a Big Mistake by the neocons, who seem to relish making Big Mistakes.Thursday 11:30 AM

Neocons in Black Turbans
December 15, 2004
Not many neoconservatives are descended from the Prophet Mohammed. But you wouldn’t know it from the way many neocons—and their puppet in the White House—are backing the Iraqi Shiites.
The black turbans, of course, are the Shiites (mostly clergy) who make the spurious claim that they are descended in a direct bloodline from the prophet himself. Now, unless they’ve hired the genealogical whizzes from the Mormons, it’s not likely that they can prove any such thing. But among the credulous faithful, it’s a big deal. One of those who makes that claim is Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Iranian-connected “Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.” You wouldn’t think that anyone whose party calls for “Islamic revolution” would be invited to the White House, but Hakim has cozied up with President Bush himself in the Oval Office. Hakim also loves to snuggle with Iranian ayatollahs, and his paramilitary praetorian guard, the Badr Brigades, were armed and trained since the 1980s by Iran’s Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard.
Lots to say on this today.
The New York Times has a he-said, she-said page one article on Hakim today, raising some concerns about Hakim and then knocking them down. It’s a horrible article, full of contradictions and with little to none investigative content. (Where, oh where, have the investigative reporters gone?) One glaring contradiction, unremarked on, is that it quotes Ghazi Yawar, the president of Iraq, warning that more than a million people from Iran have crossed the border to vote in the election and than Iranian money and agents are being mobilized to tilt the vote. It then reports: “But American and Iraqi officials say that many of the migrants crossing the largely unmonitored border are Iraqi Shiite families that fled Saddam Hussein’s repression.” I would point out that Yawar, the president, is not so sanguine, and he counts as an Iraqi official.
In the Washington Times today, Arnaud de Borchgrave, conservative but no neocon, says that Jordanian intelligence reports that three million Iranians have entered Iraq since 2003.
The New York Times piece goes on to tell readers to relax—that Shiites in Iraq don’t like Iran, that they don’t believe clerics should run the government, and that there are bitter rivalries among them. (Indeed, Hakim’s brother was blown up last year in Iraq.) All true. Yet there is no question that a great Shiite fundamentalist power is arising in Iran, Iraq and surrounding areas, and it’s all happening with American support.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute takes all this on in a piece called: “Will Iran Win the Iraq War?” The heart of Gerecht’s piece is this: That a Shiite power in Iraq will undermine the clergy’s rule in Iran, and is part of a needed Bush administration offensive against the hard-liners in Teheran. Quote: “Such a government supported by Iraq’s Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Teheran’s clerical dictatorship.”
This theory, now official doctrine for the neocons, is at the heart of their Iran strategy. It counts as second Big Mistake of the Iraq war. Big Mistake No. 1 was the neocon belief that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms—instead, they welcomed us with arms. Big Mistake No. 2, now taking shape, is that Iraq’s Shiites are Good Guys who will lead a pro-American Iraq against Iran’s “clerical dictatorship.” I believe that they really believe this. But the reality is that in a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the hard-liners and the people with guns (i.e., the Badr Brigades) will take over, and they will make common cause with some of the clergy in Iran. It will be a dagger all right, but one aimed at Saudi Arabia’s Sunni state. Of course, that too is part of the long-term Israeli-neocon strategy, to overthrow the Saudi king. It’s a regional regime-change strategy (one that includes Syria of course) and it has been central to their whole Middle East policy for a decade. It is also a fantasy, with a thousand possibilities for things to go terribly wrong. Big Mistake No. 1 led to the Iraqi insurgency. Big Mistake No. 2 could lead to a Middle East inflamed by Islamic revolution in spades.Wednesday 10:39 AM

Bolton's War
December 14, 2004
It might be a long way away—I’d guess 2006—but the war-on-Iran hawks in the Bush administration, led by John Bolton of the State Department, are rattling sabers. The Los Angeles Times has a good piece describing the escalating rhetoric around Iran, and it starts with an anecdote about Bolton sabotaging talks with Europe over Iran:
Top diplomats from the United States and its closest allies gathered this fall in Washington to hammer out a common approach to Iran's nuclear ambitions. But the mood quickly soured.Dispensing with the usual diplomatic niceties, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton simply read aloud a U.S. position paper. In it, the administration refused to back European negotiations with Iran and instead insisted that Tehran be dragged before the United Nations Security Council to condemn it for concealing a nuclear weapons program.Irked, the Europeans demanded to know what good it would do to bring Iran before the U.N. when Washington knew it could not muster enough Security Council votes even to slap Tehran's wrist.Bolton referred them to another U.S. position paper."He was not willing to discuss anything," said one stunned participant.
Meanwhile, the neocons are waiting for the “end of the day”:
Other officials said the United States and its allies have many options short of military action with which to isolate and punish a government that they believe persists in trying to develop nuclear weapons."At the end of the day we may have to do it," said another senior official, referring to military action. "We're not at the end of the day yet."Tuesday 10:12 AM

War on Iran
December 13, 2004
Amid all the talk about the supposed crisis in Iran, I haven’t heard anyone say what the legal basis would be for an attack on Iran. Is there any? Is there an international lawyer in the house?
My guess is: No. The invasion of Iraq was the de facto implementation of the Bush administration’s preventive/pre-emptive war policy. But the neocons cooked up a legal justification, based on Iraq’s supposed violations of UN Security Council resolutions. (I personally interviewed the general counsel of the U.S. NSC about this, and listened in amazement as he spun the tale of how spurious Iraqi violations meant that the United States could invade Iraq in defiance of international law.)
Is this why the neocons are so hot to get the Iran nuclear issue to the UN? Usually they attack the UN lustily, but now they are pushing the issue there. Is it because they are seeking some vaguely worded UN resolution that they can use to invade or bomb Iran? As far as I can tell, Iran has every right in the world to develop nuclear weapons, since last time I checked it was a sovereign nation. We can be mad about it, but I don’t there is the slightest legal justification for an attack.
Of course, that doesn’t stop Bush and the denizens of Neocon World. Here’s the entire text of a UPI release today:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Department reportedly held simulations to determine the effectiveness of an attack on Iran, the Middle East Newsline reported SundayThe Atlantic Monthly revealed the Pentagon held simulations of a U.S. military strike on Iranian bases and nuclear facilities. The war games also included a ground invasion.
A silly piece in the New Republic—a cover story no less—by Franklin Foer, purports to be an account of how the neocons are divided about how to deal with Iran. Maybe they haven’t settled on a specific plan yet (though the outlines are pretty clear), but Foer goes on and on about some supposed big division among them. Perhaps Foer ought to interview the neocons that run the New Republic first.
As the Times reported over the weekend, the United States (led by neocon-in-chief at the State Department John Bolton) and Europe are still at loggerheads over Iran, with the United States still trying to undermine the deal that Europe is trying to consolidate with Teheran. The article included this stunner :
U.S. officials say, however, they are suspicious of any partial deals that do not encompass an end to Iran’s support of insurgents in Iran and to groups that carry out attacks on Israeli citizens, including Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and militant factions within the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Huh? So it’s not enough to get Iran’s agreement to slow down its nuclear program, but Washington wants Iran to change its whole foreign policy and to bail out the United States’ bungled war in Iraq? Including a poison pill like this is obviously designed to scuttle an agreement.Monday 10:43 AM
http://www.tompaine.com/archives/the_dreyfuss_report.php

Bolting on Iran

2004-12-16T18:01:00.000-08:00

Bolting on Iran
Thu Dec 16,10:34 AM ET
Ari Berman
A reliance on dubious intelligence and contempt for international diplomacy has marked the Bush Administration's policy (or lack thereof) on Iran to date. And, in certain neoconservative circles, calls for military aggression are slowly surfacing.

"The clock is ticking for Iran," writes Michael Rubin, a former advisor to the Office of Special Plans--the outfit responsible for much of the US's faulty pre-war intelligence on Iraq (news - web sites). "Bush may have no choice but to order a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities." Neocon academics and policy advisors such as Reuel Marc Gerecht, Orde Kittrie and Norman Podhoretz have also called for decisive action.
Washington seems responsive. On a recent visit to the region, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith--Rumsfeld's number three man--told the Jerusalem Post that even the nuclear strike option remains on the table.
The de facto leader of the right's hawkish philosophy on Iran is John Bolton, a longtime hard-liner and current Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms called his protege, "the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, or what the Bible describes as the final battle between good and evil."
Under Bolton's watch, North Korea (news - web sites) rapidly accelerated its nuclear weapons production (building as many as six new nukes), Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan sold nuclear secrets on the black market, and Iran may be closer to developing the bomb than ever before. Apparently, Bolton takes issue with the "Arms Control" part of his job title.
In recent meetings with the Europeans--who have taken the lead in pushing for a negotiated settlement with Iran--Bolton read a US position paper criticizing negotiations and calling on the UN Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the Islamic Republic. When the shocked Europeans inquired as to why Bolton wanted to engage the Security Council when he knew the US lacked votes and popular support, Bolton simply read another prepared US position paper. "He was not willing to discuss anything," one participant told the Los Angeles Times. (Asked about the possibility of military action at a recent conference at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs--a key neocon think tank--Bolton replied, "No options are off the table," before smiling broadly, The New Republic's Franklin Foer reports.)
In addition to becoming the Administration's bullying point-man on Iran, Bolton is frequently named as the possible second-in-command for Condi Rice's State Department. As the LA Times reported, a hawkish #2 at State could prompt a massive purge of moderate dissenters, modeled on Porter Goss's recent strong-arming at the CIA (news - web sites), or even the disastrous "de-Baathification" process in Iraq.
In a week in which Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the likes of Paul Bremer and George Tenet, a Bolton promotion would be the latest example of incompetence rewarded.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/thenation/20041216/cm_thenation/132075_1

Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran

2004-12-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

Jim Lobe WASHINGTON -

When The Washington Post published a list of the people whom Karl Rove, President George W Bush's closest advisor, regularly consults for advice outside the administration, foreign policy veterans were shocked when Michael Ledeen popped up as the only full-time international affairs analyst. "The two met after Bush's election," the Post reported cheerfully, quoting Ledeen about Rove's request that "any time you have a good idea, tell me". "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric," noted the newspaper. "When I saw that, I couldn't believe it," said one retired senior diplomat. "But then again, with this administration, it seemed frighteningly plausible." Michael A Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works closely with the better-known former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has been a fixture of Washington's neo-conservative community for more than 20 years. But he is now out front, in a public campaign for the United States to confront Iran, warning that Tehran will cause Washington problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan and that "the mullahs are determined to obliterate Israel". "We are now engaged in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network," he wrote in Monday's Post. "Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the terrorists." Along with Morris Amitay, a former top lobbyist for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Ledeen has already co-founded a new group, called the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), which is pressing Congress to approve a pending bill that would, among other things, provide some US$50 million in aid to both exile groups and opposition forces in Iran. To Ledeen, whose own contacts with the mullahs in the Iran-Contra affair 15 years ago remain the source of some mystery, Iran is "the mother of modern terrorism". And terrorism has been Ledeen's bread and butter since at least the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence, which in turn enabled him to expose Billy Carter's dealings with the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya to the great satisfaction of Republicans, who were revving up their campaign against Billy's brother, then president Jimmy Carter. Ledeen's right-wing Italian connections - including alleged ties to the P-2 Masonic Lodge that rocked Italy in the early 1980s - have long been a source of speculation and intrigue, but he returned to Washington in 1981 as "anti-terrorism" advisor to the new secretary of state, Al Haig. Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world's key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East. He was a heavy promoter of the thesis that it was the KGB that was behind the 1981 attempted assassination by Turkish right-winger, Mehmet Ali Agca, of Pope John Paul II, a view he continues to expound today and which also helps explain his contempt for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose analysts never accepted the "Bulgarian Connection", as it was called. In the mid-1980s, when Ledeen was working for the National Security Council, he tangled with the CIA again over his efforts with Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of US hostages in Beirut through an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, in the opening stages of what would become the Iran-Contra affair. But Ghorbanifar did not come through. Despite Ledeen's assessment of the middleman as "one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known", he flunked four lie detector tests administered by the CIA, which had long warned that the Iranian "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance". Undaunted and untouched by the Iran-Contra investigation, Ledeen recorded his experience in Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair, one of more than 10 books he has written on US foreign policy, de Tocqueville, Machiavelli and terrorism, the latest of which is titled The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win. Ledeen has been no less prolific in his organizational work, although, besides AEI - where he works with fellow foreign policy neo-cons Perle, former United Nations ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Joshua Muravchik and Reuel Marc Gerecht - his main institutional forum over the past 25 years has been the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA), an activist group that promotes a strategic alliance between the United States and Israel. He has also served on the board of the US Committee for a Free Lebanon and has taken an organizing role in CDI. His co-founder there, Amitay, also works for JINSA. He is also close to key figures in the administration, particularly Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, whose pro-Likud politics he largely shares; Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff, I Lewis Libby; and Elliott Abrams, the director for the Near East on the National Security Council. To that list can now apparently be added Rove, who is as close to Bush as it is possible to get. Throughout his career, Ledeen has insisted that war and violence are integral parts of human nature and derided the notion that peace can be negotiated between two nations. He was a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process. "I don't know of a case in history where peace has been accomplished in any way other than one side winning a war [and] imposing terms on the other side," he said two years ago. He also has expressed little faith in traditional US allies, notably in "Old Europe", which he spent much of the 1980s attacking for being insufficiently anti-Soviet. As Washington moved toward war in Iraq, for example, he even questioned whether France and Germany were in league with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. "The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States," he wrote, suggesting three weeks later, as the US offensive stalled on its way to Baghdad, that France and Germany be treated as "strategic enemies". For Ledeen, Iraq was only the beginning of the broader struggle against the "terror masters". "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he told an interviewer in March. "Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia are the big four, and then there's Libya." "You can't solve all problems I grant that," he told the BBC. "I mean, I wrote a book about Machiavelli, and I know the struggle against evil is going to go forever."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF26Ak03.html

On to Iran

2004-11-23T08:39:00.000-08:00

November 22, 2004
Won't Get Fooled Again?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
It is not yet Bush's second term. All available US troops are tied down in Iraq by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents. Go-it-alone Bush has isolated America from her allies. And the neocons want to spread their war to Iran.
The Bush administration is recycling the lies that it used to invade Iraq: Iran is acquiring nuclear weapons that will be given to terrorists. In a display of loyalty to a ruthless neocon administration calculated to win him appointments to corporate boards, outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that Iran was working on nuclear missiles.
The source for this effort to spread hysteria? One "walk-in" source with unverified documents. Most likely, the source is a member of an Iranian exile group given the assignment by neocons Richard Perle and John Bolton.
One might think that Powell would be suffering shame enough for lying to the UN about Iraq. Apparently not, as his last act against world peace is to spread neocon propaganda that Iran is going nuke.
The US media, now a tamed propaganda organ for the White House, dutifully repeated Powell's unverified claims, thus providing "reports" for Bush to cite as evidence that Iran was rushing ahead with the development of nuclear weapons.
The International Atomic Energy Agency conducts regular inspections in Iran. The IAEA recently issued a report stating that it has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Real evidence, however, is no match for neocon propaganda.
And the propaganda is pouring out of the well-oiled neocon machine. French, German and British agreements that confine Iran to the peaceful use of nuclear energy are in the way of the neoconservatives' intention to spread the war to Iran and must be discredited.
On November 20, Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post hysterically accused Europe of defending "Iran's ability to attain the wherewithal to destroy the Jewish state." Glick "exposes" France's efforts to prevent the outbreak of wider war in the Middle East as a trick: "France wishes only to box in the US to the point that the Americans will not be able to continue to fight the war against terrorism."
The neoconservative Heritage Foundation promptly broadcast Glick's hysterical rants into the Republican noise machine, reviving talk radio calls for nuking France, "America's oldest enemy."
Three years ago Ann Coulter was fired by National Review, a neocon publication, when she declared: "We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Today such violent words are common parlance.
There is no evidence whatsoever in behalf of the claims the Bush administration is making about Iranian nukes. The purpose of these false claims is to create fear that will breech the public's opposition to a draft. The neocons are desperate for troops for their Middle Eastern War.
For a decade or longer, the neocons who control the Bush administration's foreign and military policies have been writing papers advocating a US-Israeli conquest of the Middle East. A moronic president has given them their chance.
Anxious to get their war underway, the neocons launched their invasion before they had the necessary manpower for the task. Bogged down in Iraq, the neocons are desperate to widen the war before the American public has enough of the pointless carnage and forces a withdrawal.
Thus, before the Iraqi war is finished, the neocon propaganda machine is at work creating fear that the US is in danger from Iranian nukes unless America preemptively attacks Iran.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But Americans are perfectly set up to be fooled twice. Right-wing talk radio has conservative patriots absolutely demanding to be fooled. Christian rapture propagandists have conservative congregations waiting to be wafted up to heaven. The corporate media is with President Bush. Military types are determined to avenge the Vietnam loss by winning the war against Islam into which they have been conned.
Critics are dismissed as "enemies" who are "against us". Reason and common sense are not features of the Bush administration. It is all blind emotion, a replay of The Triumph of the Will.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11222004.html
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during 1981-82.

$20 million for a coup in Iran?

2004-11-21T19:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2911185

Bush is bringhing the NeoCons on board

2004-11-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

Powell 'pushed out' by Bush for seeking to rein in Israel

By Charles Laurence in New York and Philip Sherwell11/21/04 "The Telegraph"

-- Colin Powell, the outgoing US secretary of state, was given his marching orders after telling President George W Bush that he wanted greater power to confront Israel over the stalled Middle East peace process.Although Mr Powell's departure was announced on November 15, his letter of resignation was dated November 11, the day he had a meeting with Mr Bush.According to White House officials, at the meeting Mr Powell was not asked to stay on and gave no hints that he would do so. Briefing reporters later, he referred to "fulsome discussions" - diplomatic code for disagreements."The clincher came over the Mid-East peace process," said a recently-retired state department official."Powell thought he could use the credit he had banked as the president's 'good cop' in foreign policy to rein in Ariel Sharon [Israel's prime minister] and get the peace process going. He was wrong."Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington reporter who was granted unprecedented access to the first Bush administration for his books Bush At War and Plan Of Attack, said last week that Mr Powell had been "dreaming" if he thought that he could stay on.Vice-president Dick Cheney and his fellow hardliner, John Bolton, an under-secretary of state to Mr Powell, are both understood to have lobbied Mr Bush to replace him.They wanted to make Iran's alleged nuclear bomb aspirations and support for Islamic terror groups the foreign policy priority for the new administration and believed that Mr Powell would back away from a confrontational approach.The two are frustrated that Britain, France and Germany are still seeking a diplomatic deal with Teheran rather than backing an immediate UN Security Council resolution condemning Iran and threatening sanctions.Mr Powell's final pitch to remain in office for at least another year was made during Tony Blair's visit to Washington nine days ago, The Telegraph has learned. Earlier indications had been that he intended to step down after enduring four years of clashes with the office of Mr Cheney and the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld.Friends of Mr Powell later briefed journalists that he had changed his mind because he saw the chance of progress on the peace process and wanted to see through the Iraqi elections.Mr Powell is to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and close confidante of Mr Bush.Mr Bolton's predicted promotion as her deputy is a further signal that the president wants to conduct foreign policy without the "moderating" influence and popular public face of Mr Powell.Prominent neo-conservatives in Washington make no secret of their desire for regime change in Teheran, although few believe that a full-scale military operation is a viable strategy.Instead, the emphasis is on establishing economic sanctions as a means to squeeze the ruling mullahs. There is also the option that the US may tacitly back Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.The overhaul of the CIA under its new director, Porter Goss, a recent Bush appointee, is also intended to remove critics of America's foreign policy.16 November 2004: Rice 'to take over from Powell' Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. IranSecerte has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is IranSecrete endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Neocons

2004-11-17T14:42:00.000-08:00

You Can't Blame the Neocons on Us!

As I take a look around the train crash that was the Presidential election 2004, I can take solace in the knowledge that the Democrats did not create the Neocons. No, Neocons are a totally Conservative Republican Right creation.
Amanda Roe Lang

11/17/04 "ICH" -- First, a little history. What is the difference between the regular "Conservative Republican Right" and the "Neocon"? The Neocons are the original "Reagan Republicans." Like their conservative counterpart, the Neocon believes in a strong military and never met a member of the "military-industrial complex" that he/she did not like, especially when it comes to spending the taxpayers' dollars on bigger and better war-toys -- even if they do not work (for example: SDI or "Star Wars"). The Neocons and Conservatives part ways on the issues of "nation-building" and "pre-emptive war". The Neocons are for both, period. The Conservative Republican Right is more concerned about gay sex and marriage, and those other 'life-threatening' moral issues.

By finding a kindred spirit in President Reagan, the Neocons greatly influenced US foreign policy in the 1980s. With huge deficits looming from the Reagan "trickle down bullshit" and unprecedented defense spending, America wanted a change. A Clinton victory over Daddy Bush 41 in the 1990s put the Neocons temporarily out of business and without an ear to influence public policy. So what did the conservatives do? They established little "neoconservative think-tanks" to house these "special" new conservatives -- they feed them honey, nightshade, kept them warm...somebody loved them -- the AEI, the American Enterprise Institute and PNAC, the Project for the New American Century to name a few. So despite being muted by President Bill Clinton who largely tried to practice restraint and humility in foreign affairs, the neocons, funded by their Conservative Right brethren, used the 1990s to "hone their message and craft their blueprint for American power." Funded and nurtured by Republican Conservatives, many neocons won key posts in the Bush administration.
September 11, 2001 provided a much needed opportunity for these think-tanks to act and to push the Bush administration closer than ever to Neoconservative foreign policy. On September 20, 2001, PNAC wrote an open letter to President Bush calling for regime change in Iraq -- a letter that in retrospect had been hatching since Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolowitz, and Libbey walked through the White House doors -- propelled the Bush administration and the American people to adopt and execute Neoconservative foreign policy programs that took the U.S first to Afghanistan, then Iraq and threatened to take us to Iran, North Korea, and perhaps China, Europe, and areas of South America.
September 20, 2001
The Honorable George W. BushPresident of the United StatesWashington, DC
Dear Mr. President,
We write to endorse your admirable commitment to “lead the world to victory” in the war against terrorism. We fully support your call for “a broad and sustained campaign” against the “terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them.” We agree with Secretary of State Powell that the United States must find and punish the perpetrators of the horrific attack of September 11, and we must, as he said, “go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world” and “get it by its branch and root.” We agree with the Secretary of State that U.S. policy must aim not only at finding the people responsible for this incident, but must also target those “other groups out there that mean us no good” and “that have conducted attacks previously against U.S. personnel, U.S. interests and our allies.”
In order to carry out this “first war of the 21st century” successfully, and in order, as you have said, to do future “generations a favor by coming together and whipping terrorism,” we believe the following steps are necessary parts of a comprehensive strategy.
Osama bin Laden
We agree that a key goal, but by no means the only goal, of the current war on terrorism should be to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and to destroy his network of associates. To this end, we support the necessary military action in Afghanistan and the provision of substantial financial and military assistance to the anti-Taliban forces in that country.
Iraq
We agree with Secretary of State Powell’s recent statement that Saddam Hussein “is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth….” It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a “safe zone” in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah is one of the leading terrorist organizations in the world. It is suspected of having been involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Africa, and implicated in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Hezbollah clearly falls in the category cited by Secretary Powell of groups “that mean us no good” and “that have conducted attacks previously against U.S. personnel, U.S. interests and our allies.” Therefore, any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah. We believe the administration should demand that Iran and Syria immediately cease all military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah and its operations. Should Iran and Syria refuse to comply, the administration should consider appropriate measures of retaliation against these known state sponsors of terrorism.
Israel and the Palestinian Authority
Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism, especially in the Middle East. The United States should fully support our fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism. We should insist that the Palestinian Authority put a stop to terrorism emanating from territories under its control and imprison those planning terrorist attacks against Israel. Until the Palestinian Authority moves against terror, the United States should provide it no further assistance.
U.S. Defense Budget
A serious and victorious war on terrorism will require a large increase in defense spending. Fighting this war may well require the United States to engage a well-armed foe, and will also require that we remain capable of defending our interests elsewhere in the world. We urge that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.
There is, of course, much more that will have to be done. Diplomatic efforts will be required to enlist other nations’ aid in this war on terrorism. Economic and financial tools at our disposal will have to be used. There are other actions of a military nature that may well be needed. However, in our judgment the steps outlined above constitute the minimum necessary if this war is to be fought effectively and brought to a successful conclusion. Our purpose in writing is to assure you of our support as you do what must be done to lead the nation to victory in this fight.
Sincerely,
Members of PNAC
And before we knew it Bush, who campaigned against nation building and world policing began calling for regime change in Iraq. Thus America began her odyssey -- Democratization of the Middle East.
In February 2003 before we pre-emptively attacked Iraq, Bush chose the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as the venue for a speech to prepare U.S. citizens for the coming war. Here he declared that a US victory in Iraq "could begin a new s tageforMiddleEasternpeace.AEI – the de facto headquarters for neoconservative policy – had been calling for democratization of the Arab world for more than a decade and from day one of George W. Bush's appointment. In George they trusted, and apparently in them did he....
It follows, then, that among those who deserve credit for shaping this stunning triumph of American virtues and values are the much-maligned "neoconservatives" and their friends, who have been responsible for helping Bush design and execute his wartime agenda. Special recognition and thanks are thus accorded, for example, to: Vice President Dick Cheney and key members of his staff (including Lewis "Scooter" Libby, John Hannah, and David Wurmser); the National Security Council's Condoleezza Rice, Robert Joseph, and Elliott Abrams; the Defense Department's Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and William Luti; and the State Department's John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, and Paula DeSutter. These people — and too many others — have helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.
The aid supplied by the Conservative Republicans in the 90s allowed the Neocons to survive, prosper, and ascend to the highest offices of power within the Bush administration so that they could deliver the first 21st century war to the world's doorstep.
So Conservatives -- PLEASE STOP TELLING ME YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THE NEOCONS ARE OR HOW THEY CAME TO CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT!!!
The Conservative Republican Right created the Neocons

You remind me of a guy I had lab with who had a maggot farm for part of his research. Every day in lab he complained about the flies. Finally one day I had to say, "GDI, if you have maggots, you are going to have flies, duh?" He said, (I SWEAR), ..."if I had known flies were going to be involved, I would never had selected the maggots." OK Conservatives, you built it, they came. The maggot farm and the flies belong to you.

Amanda Roe Lang, PhD
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. IranSecerete has no efiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is IranSecrete or sponsored by the originator.)

Neocons Gone Wild

2004-11-12T10:40:00.000-08:00

Neocons Gone Wild
Jim Lobe
November 08, 2004
Perhaps a few of you spotted Richard Perle and David Frum's neocon fantasy piece in bookstores last spring. Well, with Bush re-elected and not calling for anyone to resign, the neocons are preparing their plans for freedom through American domination. Jim Lobe, our steadfast neocon watcher, says that what was fantasy is about to become policy.
Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center.
An influential foreign-policy neoconservative with close and long-standing ties to top hawks in the George W. Bush administration has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''
The list, which begins with the destruction of Falluja in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that the Bush administration should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's giving up ''defensible boundaries.''
While all seven steps Gaffney listed in an article published Friday morning in the National Review Online have long been favoured by prominent neocons, the article itself, entitled 'Worldwide Value', is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday.
It is also sure to be contested—not just by Democrats who, with the election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on Iraq—but by many conservative Republicans in Congress as well. They blame the neoconservatives for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry that their grander ambitions, such as those set forth by Gaffney, will bankrupt the treasury and break an already-overextended military.
Yet its importance as a road map of where neoconservatives—who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon—want U.S. policy to go was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who, in his words, ''helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.''
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified—and controversial—neoconservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby; his top Middle East advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams on the National Security Council; Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; and Feith's top Mideast aide, William Luti in the Pentagon; and Undersecretaries for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and for Global Issues Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq war, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion.
Indeed, in a lengthy interview about the war last May on 60 Minutes, the former head of the U.S. Central Command and Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief Middle East envoy until 2003, ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni called for the resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as well as Rumsfeld, for their roles.
Zinni also cited former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, who has been close to Gaffney since both of them served, with Abrams, in the office of Washington State Sen. Henry M. Jackson in the early 1970s. When Perle became an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, he brought Gaffney along as his deputy. When Perle left in 1987, Gaffney succeeded him before setting up CSP in 1989.
As Perle's long-time protegé and associate, Gaffney sits at the center of a network of interlocking think tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neoconservatives, aggressive nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11.
Included among CSP's board of advisors over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Feith, Joseph, former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Navy Undersecretary John Lehman, and former CIA director James Woolsey, who also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neoconservative-led lobby group that argues that Washington is now engaged in ''World War IV'' against ''Islamo-fascism.''
Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which finance CSP's work, along with contributions from wealthy pro-Likud individuals, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing foundations, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations.
Gaffney, a ubiquitous ''talking head'' on television in the run-up to the war in Iraq, himself sits on the boards of CPD's parent organisations, the Foundation for the Defense Democracies (FDD) and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), and also was a charter associate, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), another prominent neoconservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the ''war on terrorism'' just nine days after the 9/11 attacks.
His article opens by trying to pre-empt an argument that is already being heard on the right against expanding Bush's ''war on terrorism;'' namely that, since a plurality of Bush voters identified ''moral values'' as their chief concern, the president should stick to his social conservative agenda rather than expand the war.
''The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research, and the right to life were central to his vision of U.S. war aims and foreign policy,'' Gaffney wrote. ''Indeed, the president laid claim square to the ultimate moral value—freedom—as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema.''
To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, Gaffney says, beginning with the ''reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq;'' followed by ''(r)egime change—one way or another—in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'Axis of Evil' states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions.''
Third, the administration must provide ''the substantially increased resources need to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing ''protection of our homeland,'' including deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore.''
Fifth, Washington must keep ''faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and...for our shared 'moral values) especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries.''
Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them ''so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution—as well as other international institutions and mechanisms—to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington.''
Finally, Bush must adapt ''appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,''—which Gaffney does not further identify.
''These items do not represent some sort of neocon 'imperialist' game plan,'' Gaffney stressed. ''Rather, they constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term."

Neo-Con Spies IV

2004-11-10T19:13:00.000-08:00

Neo-Con Spies IV
Jihad Al Khazen Al-Hayat 2004/09/25

What is more dangerous than neo-cons spying for Israel is that some officials hijacking the U.S. foreign policy and direct it to serve the Israeli interests. In previous columns, I recorded their stances toward Iraq, Iran and Palestinians that have become U.S. policy. This is what probably led the real conservative Patrick Buchanan to say, "What the U.S. needs in the Middle East is a policy made in the U.S. not in Tel Aviv, AIPAC or the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)."
Would the Lawrence Franklin scandal be a new Iran-Contra? The bad guys of the new scandal are the same infamous ones of two decades ago in the previous one. Franklin and another "specialist" from Douglas Feith's office, Harold Rhode, were among the officials who established contacts with the Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Iranian refugees abroad; exactly like the arms sales scandal under the Reagan administration. It seems that the contacts reflected a competition between the neo-con clique in the administration who want "to change the regime" in Iran and the officials at the Department of State and the CIA who prefer to be cautious.
Around a year ago, News Day exposed the contacts with Ghorbanifar, and Washington Monthly conducted an exclusive interview with him in which he confirmed he met with officials at the Defense Department, and strongly denied the fact that they were 'chance meetings' as the Department claimed. Thus, it became obvious that there is a separatist team in the Defense Department working on changing the regime in Iran, albeit it was not the policy of the State Department or the administration, and probably without the consent of top officials, including the President.
There is an Israeli nest inside the U.S. Defense Department, and it is not supporting Yitzhak Rabin's policies but the radical Likudnik policy that is working against peace and for war in the whole region, at the expense of American souls and interests. The best image from inside of the Israeli gang in the Department is that presented by Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski about her work directly linked to Israel's gang in the Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA). In fact, she wrote a long article in Salon Internet magazine; she talked about how she moved after two years of working in the Defense Secretary's office to the administration that opened her eyes to the "hijacking" of U.S. foreign policy.
Kwiatkowski said that between May 2002 and April 2003, she "observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neo-conservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it."
She added, "I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies."
She wrote: "To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed me into the fold. I knew little about him. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common assumption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years… Co-workers who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite… I soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by debate or experience with the early Bush administration replacement of the civilian head of the Israel, Lebanon and Syria desk office with a young political appointee from the Washington Institute, David Schenker. Word was that the former experienced civilian desk officer tended to be evenhanded toward the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, but there were complaints and he was gone… I learned that there was indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My first day in the office, a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily advised me that if I wanted to be successful here, I'd better remember not to say anything positive about the Palestinians… A politically savvy civilian-clothes-wearing lieutenant colonel named Bill Bruner served as the Iraq desk officer, and he had apparently joined NESA about the time Bill Luti did. I discovered that Bruner, like Luti, had served as a military aide to Speaker Gingrich. Gingrich himself was now conveniently an active member of Bush's Defense Policy Board.
I asked why Bruner wore civilian attire, and was told by others, "He's Chalabi's handler." Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the president of the Iraqi National Congress, who was the favored exile of the neoconservatives and the source of much of their "intelligence." Bruner himself said he had to attend a lot of meetings downtown in hotels and that explained his suits. Soon, in July, he was joined by another Air Force pilot, a colonel with no discernible political connections, Kevin Jones. I thought of it as a military-civilian partnership, although both were commissioned officers.
I spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative worldview and trying to grasp what was happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what could explain this rush to war and disregard for real intelligence. Neoconservatives are fairly easy to study, mainly because they are few in number, and they show up at all the same parties. Examining them as individuals, it became clear that almost all have worked together, in and out of government, on national security issues for several decades. Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith sent Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party campaign in Israel in 1996 a study entitled "A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm," in which they opposed peace with Palestinians.
David Wurmser is the least known of that trio worked in 2001, as the research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute was assigned to the Pentagon, then moved to the Department of State to work as deputy for the hard-line conservative undersecretary John Bolton, then to the National Security Council, and now is lodged in the office of the vice president. His wife, the prolific Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, is also a neoconservative team player. (She is an Israeli who came with Colonel Igal Karmon to found MEMRI and then left him and worked in the same field.)"
Kwiatkowski is an expert in her field and has occupied several positions at the American government and is now preparing a PhD in international affairs. She authored two books on African issues, her first field of specialty. I have never heard anyone refuting her writings or denying them, which gives her credibility of which the sayings of the radical neo-cons lack.
In addition, Wurmser said in an address delivered at front the AEI at the beginning of 2001, eight months before the known terror occurred, that the tendency of the U.S. and Israel is a common strike to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya.
This is what I have on the spies. I hope that what I illustrated has reached those who are able to take care, if they do not care for their peoples.
©2003 Media Communications Group مجموعة الاتصالات

Reza Pahlavi A Puppet of the US and Israel?

2004-11-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

April 22, 2003

Iran's Reza Pahlavi
A Puppet of the US and Israel?

by JOHN STANTON
The omnipresent neo-conservative kingmakers are at it again, this time with the eloquent and dashing Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of the former enigmatic Iranian King of Kings, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 until his exile in 1979. The rest, as the cliche goes, is a history well known to the world. That painful past for Americans, Iranians, and Iraqis includes the Ayatollah Khomeini's authoritarian rule, former President Jimmy Carter's debilitating US Embassy Hostage crisis, former President Ronald Reagan's damaging Iran-Contra Affair, the horribly futile Iran-Iraq War in which the US supported Iraq, and, now, as history continues to weave its ugly tapestry, Iran finds itself a bona-fide member of current President George Bush II's Axis-of-Evil.
Thanks to the flesh and blood versions of Mattel Toy Company's line of pull-string Chatty Cathy dolls--which utter the same statements over and over and over again--the US seems destined to continue that notorious relationship with Iran. The formulaic logic used to justify the destruction of Iraq has now been set in motion for Iran by Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Mike Leeden, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld, affectionately known as "neo-cons". And, as another cliche goes, the world is subjected to their "broken record" comments that are repeated ad nauseum each news cycle.
What journalist hasn't tired of mentioning them?
Pull the string on any of them, let's say the Chatty Cathy Leeden version, and this is what one gets: "There is now a clear recognition that we must defend ourselves against them [Iran and Syria]. They are an integral part of the terror network that produced September 11. Left undisturbed, they will kill us in Iraq and Afghanistan, and mount new attacks on our homelands. We will see the day when not one turban rules these countries."
These ideological cousins of right-wing Israeli strategists such as Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon are prepping the world with more pronouncements of regime change for the double-barreled purposes of American Empire and a Greater Israel. Today it's Iran; tomorrow it's Syria. Smart money is on Iran due to their oil. On the other hand, Syria would be easier to crush given their antiquated military. Then again, both the USA and Israel have got Reza Pahlavi dancing on strings.
Cool Dude
So what's a cool guy like Pahlavi, a USC graduate and US Air Force trained fighter pilot with a wonderful family here in the USA, doing mixing it up with guys like Leeden? Why not take it easy and stay out of the messy and brutal business that being a king involves? The answer, it seems, is the irresistible pull of genetics and, perhaps, the quest to build a stable and "free" society and not end up, or in his case continue, in exile like his father and grandfather before him. A visit to Pahlavi's excellent website features noted "peace" author Gene Sharp's work Dictatorship to Democracy and The Politics of NonViolent Action, plus assorted other works on removing totalitarian regimes through peaceful means. It's a family site too and one is invited to view photo albums of the family and a host of other documentation including speeches and articles.
Based on the message presented on his website, Pahlavi seems the reincarnation of Cyrus the Great whose Freedom Charter, circa 540BCE, stated:
"Now that I put the crown of kingdom of Iran I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them. I will impose my monarchy on no nation. Each is free to accept it, and if any one of them rejects it, I never resolve on war to reign. I will never let anyone oppress any others, and if it occurs, I will take his or her right back and penalize the oppressor. I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of the others by force or without compensation. Until I am alive, I prevent unpaid, forced labor. Today, I announce that everyone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regions and take up a job provided that they never violate other's rights. No one can be penalized for his or her relatives' faults. I prevent slavery and my governors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains. Such a tradition should be exterminated the world over."
What Iranian, or for that matter American, wouldn't want such an idyllic state of affairs?
But some of the statements attributed to Pahlavi suggest that there's a dangerous streak of kingly greed that fuels his motives and that he merely covets the throne for personal reasons and, in order to get it, is willing to sell out the Iranian people in the process. Is Pahlavi the equivalent of the dashing and dynamic character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street? That Gekko who proclaimed that "the point is, ladies and gentleman, greed is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." Or is Pahlavi a modern day Cyrus the Great who truly wants what's best for Iran but finds himself making Faustian bargains with the ruthless Pro-Israeli militarists of the American Empire?
Family Matters
Grandfather Reza Khan was a respected warfighter in the Cossack Brigade in the late 1800's, and ultimately led a coup to rid the country of a government that allowed British, Russian and Ottoman troops to occupy Iran during World War I. Khan became Prime Minister of the new government and four years later in 1925, ascended to the throne replacing the weakly Ahmad Mirza Shah. He took the name Reza Shah Pahlavi (Reza Shah Kabir or Reza Shah the Great) and the dynasty was underway.
According to iranchamber.com, "Reza Shah introduced many great reforms, reorganizing the army, government administration, and finances. He abolished all special rights granted to foreigners, thus gaining real independence for Iran. Under Reza Shah's 16 years of rule, roads and Trans-Iranian Railway were built, modern education was introduced and the University of Tehran was established, and for the first time, a systematic dispatch of Iranian students to Europe was started. Industrialization of the country was stepped-up, and achievements were great. By the mid 1930's Reza Shah's dictatorial style of rule caused dissatisfaction in Iran. In World War II the Allies protested his rapprochement with the Germans, and in 1941 British and Russian forces invaded and occupied Iran. Forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, he died in exile in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1944."
Like father like son, so yet another cliche has it, and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi was also forced to abdicate and subsequently died in 1980, exiled in Egypt. This Shah of Iran was embroiled in the CIA coup that ousted quixotic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and was a pawn of successive American administrations during the Cold War, which pitted the USSR against the USA. His popular legacy is the current theocratic regime in Iran and SAVAK--the brutal intelligence arm of the Shah. For a short time, though, he waived the flag of democratic reform and Iranians had high hopes for democracy. He instituted the White Revolution, according to the above mentioned website, a 1963 program that included land reform, the extension of voting rights to women, and the elimination of illiteracy. But the trappings of power, fear of opposition groups, and insensitivity towards Islam (Arab Muslims conquered Iran in roughly 650 BCE and Islam remians a powerful force)led him, like his father, into an insular dictatorship and all the wretched practices that method entails.
Will the Real Reza Pahlavi Please Stand Up?
During a recent meeting with US Congressional Representatives and staffers on Capitol Hill, Pahlavi--called "Your Majesty" by the representatives and staffers -seemed embittered at the slow pace of non-violent change taking place in Iran so beautifully articulated on his website. According to sources, several times he blasted the Europeans and those who wish to have contact with Iran and said that they should not "throw a rope to a sinking ship."
As if to echo the neo-conservatives, Pahlavi argued for the political and economic boycott of Iran using the Iraqi model, in order to undercut the Iranian regime while seemingly ignoring the dastardly effects that action would have on the people he wants to "liberate". He also indicated that he was in close contact with Iranian students and that they are asking for a political and economic boycott. That claim, according to many insiders, has been refuted by the students who are smart enough to know what pain and suffering it would cause. Oddly, he maintained that Bush II is someone who cares for Iranians and indicated that "Iranians were heartened by the Axis of Evil comment".
He went on to articulate his view that Iran is the key country in the region and that Iran must change before the entire region can rest easy. As if a neo-con Chatty Cathy himself, Pahlavi stated that Iran is a grave threat to world peace, that they harbor and support Al-Qaeda, they threaten US economic interests and, as if to take the words right out of the mouth of Curt "suitcase nuke" Weldon, US representative from Pennsylvania, Pahlavi indicated "the Iranians do not need delivery systems to send nukes to the US, they can send one lone terrorist to blow off a nuclear device in Lake Michigan."
Iran has been working for generations to acquire nuclear energy generation capability (no doubt some of the weapons grade by-products of that capability too). That effort began in 1967 initiated by Pahlavi's father with the purchase of a five-megawatt research reactor from the United States. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran was established in 1974 and the Shah had intended to build nuclear power plants throughout Iran by 1994. The Iranian nuclear program was supported by the United States, France, Germany and, of course, now Russia.
Yet, during the same meeting with Representatives in the US Congress, the younger Pahlavi stated that Iran does not need nuclear technology. That runs contrary to the belief on the ground in Iran, some report, pointing out that the populace feels the country is in need of nuclear technology in order to develop. But Pahlavi categorically said that Iran has enough energy through gas and oil, and has no need for nuclear power. He said that he would like to see a "reversal of Iran's nuclear program," which only will occur if Iran is democratized.
That, of course, is music to the oily ears of Bush II and Cheney.
Pahlavi also cut a backroom deal by garnering political support and funding from the US Congress for private Iranian-American satellite companies in California and US government sponsored external radio programs such as Radio FARDA, geared to reprogramming Iranians under 30 years of age. He was very careful to mention that there should be "one degree of separation"--no royal hand involved so to speak--and that American taxpayer's funds should be given to foundations that in turn can give the money to the satellite broadcasters. Not surprisingly, Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, introduced an amendment on April 8, 2003, that would provide $50 million (US) to an Iran Democracy Foundation, the purpose of which is to broadcast "democracy" into Iran. According to reports, the language in Brownback's amendment has its origins in the Pentagon and is almost the same as that used in the Iraqi Liberation Act that the US Congress approved in 1998.
"Don't appease the dictators. They only understand the language of power." That according to the Pahlavi who would be the next Shah of Iran. Yet if history offers valid insights, and in light of his recent comments, this next King--should the US and Israel install him--seems destined to repeat the mistakes of his ancestors.
It doesn't have to be that way.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. He can be reached at cioran123@yahoo.com

Coalition for Democracy in Iran:

2004-11-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

Whats New at Right Web
Exposing the Architecture of Power that's Changing Our World
http://rightweb.irc-online.org

October 19, 2004
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Introducing new articles from IRCs Right Web initiative

Coalition for Democracy in Iran
By Tom Barry

The Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI) is one of numerous pressure groups created by neoconservatives that focus on changing U.S. foreign policy. These include the U.S. NATO Committee, Committee for Liberation of Iraq, and U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon. In late 2002 Michael Leeden and Morris Amitay spearheaded the creation of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran. Other members include Frank Gaffney, Jack Kemp, Bruce McColm, Joshua Muravhik, Danielle Pletka, Rob Sobhani, Raymond Tanter, and James Woolsey. (1)

CDI represents just one thrust in a phalanx of neoconservative initiatives and organizations that aim to set the U.S. foreign policy agenda for Iran. Other groups include the Middle East Forum, Project for the New American Century, Hudson Institute, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Committee on the Present Danger, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and especially the American Enterprise Institute, which serves as the flagship neocon think tank.

CDI states it was formed to mobilize the efforts of groups and individuals across the United States, including Iranian-Americans, who support the aspirations of the Iranian people for democracy and respect for human rights in Iran. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, there is an even greater urgency to focus the attention of the U.S. public opinion and the policy makers on the real agenda of the Iranian regime. If judged by actions rather than by words, the battle between the reformers and the hardliners appears only to be a myth, albeit one that has resulted in conflicting signals from Washington. On the vital issues of support for terrorism and for development of weapons of mass destruction, the Islamic Republic tolerates no dissention. Nor has the theocracy been able to deliver economic and political reforms for the people of Iran. Promoting democracy in Iran will build a more peaceful and prosperous Iran, advancing the common interests of both Americans and Iranians.

Tom Barry is Policy Director for the Interhemispheric Resource Center (online at http://www.irc-online.org).

See new Right Web analysis at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0410cdi.php

With printer-friendly .pdf version:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/pdf/0410cdi.pdf

Is Iran Next?
The Pentagon Neocons Who Brought You the War in Iraq Have a New Target
By Tom Barry

(Originally printed in the October 25, 2004 edition of In These Times, http://www.inthesetimes.com)

Shortly after 9/11, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith began coordinating Pentagon planning for an invasion of Iraq. The challenge facing Feith, the No. 3 civilian in the Defense Department, was to establish a policy rationale for the attack. At the same time, Feiths ideological cohorts in the Pentagon began planning to take the administrations global war on terrorism, not only to Baghdad, but also to Damascus and Tehran.

In August it was revealed that one of Feiths Middle East policy wonks, Lawrence Franklin, shared classified documentsincluding a draft National Security Presidential Directive formulated in Feiths office that outlines a more aggressive U.S. national security strategy regarding Iranwith the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Israeli officials. The FBI is investigating the document transfer as a case of espionage.

This spy scandal raises two concerns for U.S. diplomats and foreign policy experts from across the political spectrum. One, that U.S. Middle East policy is being directed by neoconservative ideologues variously employed, coordinated or sanctioned by Feiths Pentagon office. And two, that U.S. Middle East policy is too closely aligned with that of Israeli hardliners close to U.S. neoconservatives.

See new Right Web analysis at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0410isirannext.php

With printer-friendly version at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/pdf/0410isirannext.pdf

Also see:

Douglas Feith: Portrait of a Neoconservative.
See profile online at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/feith/feith.php

Morris J. Amitay
Co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in IranSee profile online at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/amitay/amitay.php

Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)
See profile online at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/jinsa.php

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Larry Franklin spy probe over control of Iran policy

2004-11-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

The Larry Franklin spy probe reveals an escalating fight over control of Iran policy.

By Laura Rozen and Jason VestIssue Date: 11.02.04

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, thiTo Washington’s small and sometimes fractious community of Iran experts, it was becoming obvious: What to do about Iran and its fast-developing nuclear program was set to rival Iraq as the most pressing foreign-policy challenge for the person elected president in 2004. By the spring and early summer of this year, the city was awash in rival Iran task forces and conferences. Some recommended that Washington engage in negotiations with Tehran’s mullahs on the nuclear issue; they drew scorn from the other side, which preached regime change or military strikes.
In late July, as this debate raged, a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin telephoned an acquaintance who worked at a pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The two men knew each other professionally from their long involvement in the Washington Iran and Iraq policy debates. A Brooklyn-born Catholic father of five who put himself through school, earning a doctorate, as an Air Force reservist, Franklin had served as a Soviet intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency until about a decade ago, when he learned Farsi and became an Iran specialist. At their July meeting, Franklin told the AIPAC employee about his frustration that the U.S. government wasn’t responding aggressively enough to intelligence about hostile Iranian activities in Iraq. As Franklin explained it, Iran had sent all of its Arabic-speaking Iranian agents to southern Iraq, was orchestrating attacks on Iraqi state oil facilities, and had sent other agents to northern Iraq to kill Israelis believed to be operating there. Iran had also transferred its top operative for Afghanistan to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad. The move, Franklin implied, signified Tehran’s intention to cause more trouble in Iraq.
A couple of weeks after this meeting, in mid-August, the AIPAC official was visited by two FBI agents, who asked him about Franklin. From the line of questioning, it wasn’t clear to the AIPAC official whether Franklin was being investigated by the FBI for possible wrongdoing or if he was simply the subject of a routine background investigation for renewal of his security clearance.
But on August 27, when CBS broke the story that the FBI was close to arresting an alleged “Israeli mole” in the office of the Pentagon’s No. 3 official, Douglas Feith, it became clear that Franklin was in trouble. News reports said that the FBI had evidence that Franklin had passed a classified draft national-security presidential directive (NSPD) on Iran to AIPAC. What’s more, reports said, the FBI wasn’t just interested in Franklin. For the past two years, it had been conducting a counterintelligence probe into whether AIPAC had served as a conduit for U.S. intelligence to Israel, an investigation about which National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was briefed shortly after the Bush administration came into office.
In the flurry of news reports that followed, the scope of the FBI investigation seemed potentially enormous. Citing senior U.S. officials, The Washington Post reported that “the FBI is examining whether highly classified material from the National Security Agency … was also forwarded to Israel,” and that the investigation of Franklin was “coincidental” to that broader FBI probe. Time magazine reported that Franklin had been enlisted by the FBI to place a series of monitored telephone calls (scripted by the FBI) to get possible evidence on others, including allies of Ahmad Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon neoconservatives. Chalabi was alleged to have told his Iranian intelligence contacts that the United States had broken their communications codes -- a breach that prompted a break in U.S. support for Chalabi last spring -- and the FBI wanted to know who had shared that highly classified information with Chalabi. What’s more, an independent expert on Israeli espionage said he had been interviewed by the FBI in June and in several follow-up calls, and that the scope of the senior FBI investigators’ questioning was broad and extremely detailed.
In the wake of the first news reports, AIPAC strongly denied that any of its employees had ever knowingly received classified U.S. information. Israel also categorically denied that it had conducted intelligence operations against the United States since the case of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987.
At the time the CBS report aired in late August -- incidentally, on the Friday evening before the opening of the Republican national convention -- custody of the Franklin investigation was being transferred from the head of the FBI counterintelligence unit, David Szady, to U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, a Bush appointee, in Alexandria, Virginia, as the case moved to the grand-jury phase.
And then, in mid-September, news of the Franklin investigation went dark.
* * *
The classified document that Franklin allegedly passed to AIPAC concerned a controversial proposal by Pentagon hard-liners to destabilize Iran. The latest iteration of the national-security presidential directive was drafted by a Pentagon civilian and avid neocon, Michael Rubin, who hoped it would be adopted as official policy by the Bush administration. But in mid-June, Bush’s national-security advisers canceled consideration of the draft, partly in response to resistance from some at the State Department and the National Security Council, according to a recent memo written by Rubin and obtained by The American Prospect. No doubt also contributing to the administration’s decision was the swelling insurgency and chaos of postwar Iraq.
Rubin, in his early 30s, is a relative newcomer to the neoconservative circles in which he is playing an increasingly prominent role. Once the Iraq and Iran desk officer in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and later a Coalition Provisional Authority adviser in Iraq, these days the Yale-educated Ph.D. hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and serves as editor for controversial Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes’ magazine, The Middle East Quarterly.
In an article published in the Republican-oriented quarterly Ripon Forum in June, Rubin suggests that the administration resolve its Iran waffling by turning against the current regime. “In 1953 and 1979,” he wrote, “Washington supported an unpopular Iranian government against the will of the people. The United States should not make the same mistake three times.” In other words, President Bush should step up his public condemnation of the Iranian regime and break off all contact with it in hopes of spurring a swelling of the Iranian pro-democracy movement. In short, Rubin, like his fellow Iran hawks, urges the administration to make regime change in Iran its official policy.
This invocation of “moral clarity” has a long intellectual pedigree among neoconservatives. It’s the same argument they made to Ronald Reagan about the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago. “If we could bring down the Soviet empire by inspiring and supporting a small percentage of the people,” Michael Ledeen, a chief neoconservative advocate of regime change in Iran and freedom scholar at AEI, recently wrote in the National Review, “surely the chances of successful revolution in Iran are more likely.”
Was it to this end that Franklin was allegedly observed by the FBI passing the draft NSPD on Iran to AIPAC? Was he trying to inform AIPAC, or Israel, about the contents of the draft NSPD? Or rather, and perhaps more plausibly, was he trying to enlist the powerful Washington lobbying organization in advocating for a Iran-destabilization policy? In other words, is the Franklin case really about espionage, or is it a glimpse into the ugly sausage-making process by which Middle East policy gets decided in Washington and, in particular, in the Bush administration?
* * *
Arguably past the apogee of its power, AIPAC nonetheless remains one of Washington’s most influential organizations. Successor to the Eisenhower-era American Zionist Council of Public Affairs, AIPAC came into its own during the Reagan years, thanks largely to the efforts of former Executive Director Thomas Dine. When Dine assumed his post in 1981, the organization had an annual budget of a little more than $1 million, about two dozen employees, and 8,000 members; when he left in 1993, a budget of $15 million was being administered by a staff of 158, and the committee had 50,000 members.
An assiduous networker and fund-raiser, Dine also quickly became indispensable to the Reagan White House as a promoter of various neoconservative foreign-policy initiatives. He also forged alliances between AIPAC and other interests, including the Christian right. (Another former AIPAC executive director, Morris Amitay, has long been active in neoconservative ventures, as both a business partner to Feith and Richard Perle and co-founder, with Michael Ledeen, of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran.) By the mid-’80s, AIPAC had been a prime mover in the defeat or crippling of initiatives and legislators not to its liking, and the passage of billions in grants to Israel. It had also taken on an increasingly pro-Republican (and pro-Likud) tilt.
While many regarded AIPAC’s power as lessened during the Clinton administration, since 2001 AIPAC has been powerful enough that even the Bush administration couldn’t get the committee and its congressional allies to tone down language in a 2002 resolution in support of Israeli military actions against the Palestinians. AIPAC’s 2002 annual conference included 50 senators, 90 representatives, and more than a dozen senior administration officials; this year’s conclave boasted President Bush himself, plus House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and an array of State and Defense department officials.
But while AIPAC is a powerhouse, it is not clear that it would have been the perfect vehicle for the kind of Iran-destabilization lobbying that some in Washington have been pushing. There are a wide variety of Israeli positions on how to deal with Iran. Many of Washington’s Middle East hands who are pro-Israel believe destabilization will not likely succeed, and they fear it will not deal with what they consider the real threat from Iran: nuclear weapons.
“If you mean trying to promote the peaceful overthrow of the regime in Iran, I think the prospects for success are highly uncertain,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank. Pro-Israel activists in Washington want to make sure that the United States considers Iran’s nuclear program first and foremost an American problem, the response to which could include, if necessary, air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran’s nuclear program, one such activist recently told the Prospect, “has to be seen as Washington’s problem.”
There are other competing positions within the Israel-policy community. One Israeli official in Washington this summer for diplomatic meetings discussed regime change in Iran with a reporter from The American Prospect on the condition that his identity not be disclosed. He believes that Iran is ripe for democratic revolution, that it has one of the most pro-Western populations in the region, and that Iranian opposition forces would be electrified by a vigorous show of U.S. presidential support. But he believes that any sort of military intervention in Iran would set back considerably these promising regime-change forces. Still another group of Israeli policy-makers seem more inclined toward a military option, as evidenced by Israel’s well-publicized purchase of 500 “bunker-buster” bombs from the United States in September and its failed efforts to launch a spy satellite to monitor Iran’s nuclear-program developments.
Yet another policy position became evident in Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker in June, in which Hersh reported that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, sensing that the U.S.–created chaos in Iraq could leave an opening for anti-Israel efforts in Iran, was pursuing a “Plan B” that had Israeli operatives covertly training and equipping Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and Syria for possible future covert action to counter any such measures. As Hersh reported: “Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. … Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities.”
The Israeli government insisted the story wasn’t credible, and that it was sourced by Turkey, which is panicked, as ever, about foreign designs on Kurdistan. But a source told the Prospect that Franklin expressed the conviction that the United States has intelligence that affirms Hersh’s report to be largely accurate. A second former U.S. diplomatic official who recently visited the area told the Prospect that there are Israeli intelligence officials operating in Kurdish Iraq as political advisers, and others under the guise of businessmen.
All of which raises questions, like what exactly was in the draft NSPD that Rubin wrote and Franklin allegedly shared with AIPAC? And does the destabilization plan pushed by neoconservatives in the draft NSPD in fact advocate that the United States or its proxies arm the Iranian opposition, including the Kurds, as part of its efforts to pursue regime change?
The public statements by the neoconservatives emphasize that regime change in Iran would not require U.S. military force. Then again, the neoconservatives’ inspiration for the Iran plan has its roots in Reagan-era NSPDs that, while providing nonmilitary support to Poland’s Solidary Movement, also had the CIA aggressively arming and training the Afghan mujahideen, the Nicaraguan Contras, and other anti-communist rebels. There’s also no denying that some of the chief advocates of the Iran regime plot come out of the Pentagon, America’s military command center. And some of those same Iran hawks have discussed the Iran regime-change issue, for instance, with Parisian-based Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- not exactly the kind of go-to guy for a nonviolent regime change plan, one might think.
* * *
Whatever the nuances, the neocons are facing one of their biggest challenges in Washington today: persuading the administration to adopt their regime-change policy toward Iran even while their regime-change policy in Iraq appears to be crumbling. Since the Iraq invasion, Feith’s office has come under the intense scrutiny of congressional investigators, investigative journalists, and Democratic critics for its two controversial prewar intelligence units, the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group. It was those units that had helped convince the Bush White House of an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda -- a claim since disproved by the independent September 11 commission, among others. Those secretive intelligence units had also been among the administration’s strongest champions of Chalabi, who allegedly told Iranian intelligence agents that the United States had penetrated Iranian communications channels.
An FBI counterintelligence investigation of who had leaked this information to Chalabi was reportedly under way by spring 2004, and many of Chalabi’s neocon allies were incredibly anxious: Misjudgment about Chalabi’s virtues or postwar Iraq planning was one thing; passing secrets to another nation would be an accusation of an altogether graver magnitude.
All of these investigations put Franklin and other neoconservatives associated with Feith at the white-hot center of a raging controversy: What would any second-term Bush foreign policy look like? Would controversial neocon figures like Feith remain in power? Or would it mark the rise of pragmatists and realists? For the neoconservatives, the fight to clear Franklin and themselves has become a fight against their internal administration rivals. And they’re fighting it in classic neocon fashion: dirty and disingenuously.
Among intelligence professionals, it’s hardly a state secret that even nations whose relationships go beyond mere alliance and constitute friendship spy on one another. That’s one reason nations have counterintelligence capabilities as well. As such, investigations of espionage and mishandling of classified documents are not uncommon in Washington; the Bush administration’s Justice Department, for example, has opened investigations to probe allegations of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Saudi espionage, including ones that involve ranking officials at the FBI and State Department. With the investigations into AIPAC and Franklin, the Justice Department has renewed its interest in snooping by our ally, Israel.
Since the Pollard case, U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement sources have revealed to the Prospect that at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals for espionage on Israel’s behalf. It’s a testament to the unique relationship between the United States and Israel that those cases were never prosecuted; according to the same sources, both governments ultimately addressed them through diplomatic and intelligence channels rather than air the dirty laundry. A number of career Justice Department and intelligence officials who have worked on Israeli counterespionage told the Prospect of long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely. This history had led to informed speculation that the FBI -- fearing the Franklin probe was heading toward the same silent end -- leaked the story to CBS to keep it in the public eye and give it a fighting chance.
But the pro-Israel lobby and some neoconservatives, fighting for their political lives, have turned the leak on its head. They claim that the AIPAC and Franklin investigations have nothing to do with the substance of the Iran-related leaks. Rather, they say, investigators are going after Jews. In the current probes of Franklin and AIPAC, Michael Rubin has led the strident charge. On September 4, during the media flap over the investigations, Rubin sent an e-mail memo -- obtained by the Prospect -- to a list of friendly parties targeting two of Washington’s more respected mainstream journalists, calling them key players in an “increasing anti-Semitic witch hunt.” The memo fingered Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as one likely source of the leaks about the investigation, and also urged that, if the accusations had any merit, the White House demand the evidence be made public. “I’m increasingly concerned about the leaks spinning off from the Franklin affair,” Rubin wrote. “It was bad enough when the White House rewarded the June 15, 2003, leak by canceling consideration of the NSPD. It showed the State Department that leaks could supplant real debate. … Bureaucratic rivalries are out of control.” Rubin’s memo showed up in a similar form almost a month later in the op-ed pages of The Washington Times under the byline of National Review staffer Joel Mowbray, and echoes of it can be seen in the pages of the neocon-friendly Jerusalem Post.
Meanwhile, Franklin was involved in some pushback of his own. In late August, the Franklin case was referred from Szady to U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty, a Bush-Ashcroft appointee who heads the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. A grand jury was seated on the case in September and had subpoenaed at least some witnesses to testify about Franklin. Then, on October 1, The New York Sun reported that Franklin had fired his court-appointed attorney (whom he had presumably retained for financial reasons), halting grand-jury proceedings while he found new counsel. On October 6, the Los Angeles Times reported that Franklin had stopped cooperating with the FBI entirely. He had hired a high-profile lawyer, Plato Cacheris (of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen fame), and had rejected a proposed plea agreement whose terms Franklin considers “too onerous,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Who pushed Franklin -- who for months seemed vulnerable -- to stop cooperating? And who is paying for his expensive new lawyer? At this writing, we do not know. Also unknown is the status of the larger FBI counterintelligence probe of alleged Israeli espionage into which Franklin stumbled. But we do know that his recent decisions would seem to immensely help any of the people against whom he could have testified. At least for now, that’s a round won by a clique intent on pushing freelance crypto-diplomacy to its limits.
Laura Rozen reports on foreign-policy and national-security issues from Washington, D.C. Jason Vest is a Prospect senior correspondent.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Laura Rozen and Jason Vest, "Cloak and Swagger", The American Prospect Online, Nov 1, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author
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A Bush pre-election strike on Iran 'imminent'

2004-11-09T17:25:00.000-08:00

A Bush pre-election strike on Iran 'imminent'

White House insider report "October Surprise" imminent

By Wayne Madsen

10/20/04 "Lebanon Wire" -- According to White House and Washington Beltway insiders, the Bush administration, worried that it could lose the presidential election to Senator John F. Kerry, has initiated plans to launch a military strike on Iran's top Islamic leadership, its nuclear reactor at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, and key nuclear targets throughout the country, including the main underground research site at Natanz in central Iran and another in Isfahan. Targets of the planned U.S. attack reportedly include mosques in Tehran, Qom, and Isfahan known by the U.S. to headquarter Iran's top mullahs.
The Iran attack plan was reportedly drawn up after internal polling indicated that if the Bush administration launched a so-called anti-terrorist attack on Iran some two weeks before the election, Bush would be assured of a landslide win against Kerry. Reports of a pre-emptive strike on Iran come amid concerns by a number of political observers that the Bush administration would concoct an "October Surprise" to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
According to White House sources, the USS John F. Kennedy was deployed to the Arabian Sea to coordinate the attack on Iran. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discussed the Kennedy's role in the planned attack on Iran when he visited the ship in the Arabian Sea on October 9. Rumsfeld and defense ministers of U.S. coalition partners, including those of Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Iraq, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, Poland, Qatar, Romania, and Ukraine briefly discussed a very "top level" view of potential dual-track military operations in Iran and Iraq in a special "war room" set up on board the aircraft carrier. America's primary ally in Iraq, the United Kingdom, did not attend the planning session because it reportedly disagrees with a military strike on Iran. London also suspects the U.S. wants to move British troops from Basra in southern Iraq to the Baghdad area to help put down an expected surge in Sh'ia violence in Sadr City and other Sh'ia areas in central Iraq when the U.S. attacks Iran as well as clear the way for a U.S. military strike across the Iraqi-Iranian border aimed at securing the huge Iranian oil installations in Abadan. U.S. allies South Korea, Australia, Kuwait, Jordan, Italy, Netherlands, and Japan were also left out of the USS John F. Kennedy planning discussions because of their reported opposition to any strike on Iran.
In addition, Israel has been supplied by the United States with 500 "bunker buster" bombs. According to White House sources, the Israeli Air Force will attack Iran's nuclear facility at Bushehr with the U.S. bunker busters.The joint U.S.-Israeli pre-emptive military move against Iran reportedly was crafted by the same neo-conservative grouping in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office that engineered the invasion of Iraq.
Morale aboard the USS John F. Kennedy is at an all-time low, something that must be attributable to the knowledge that the ship will be involved in an extension of U.S. military actions in the Persian Gulf region. The Commanding Officer of an F-14 Tomcat squadron was relieved of command for a reported shore leave "indiscretion" in Dubai and two months ago the Kennedy's commanding officer was relieved for cause.
The White House leak about the planned attack on Iran was hastened by concerns that Russian technicians present at Bushehr could be killed in an attack, thus resulting in a wider nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow. International Atomic Energy Agency representatives are also present at the Bushehr facility. In addition, an immediate Iranian Shahab ballistic missile attack against Israel would also further destabilize the Middle East. The White House leaks about the pre-emptive strike may have been prompted by warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency that an attack on Iran will escalate out of control. Intelligence circles report that both intelligence agencies are in open revolt against the Bush White House.
White House sources also claimed they are "terrified" that Bush wants to start a dangerous war with Iran prior to the election and fear that such a move will trigger dire consequences for the entire world.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He served in the National Security Council (NSA) during the Reagan Administration and wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth. He is the co-author, with john Stanton of "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II." His forthcoming book is titled: "jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops, and Brass Plates." Madsen can be reached at Wmadsen777@aol.comCopyright©1999-2004 Lebanonwire®.com http://www.lebanonwire.com/0410/04102002LW.asp
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Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America

2004-11-09T15:56:00.000-08:00

Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ...

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (IPS) - An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with longstanding ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W Bush has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.'' The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' also calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea. The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's giving up ''defensible boundaries.'' While all seven steps listed by Gaffney in an article published Friday morning in the 'National Review Online' have long been favoured by prominent neo-cons, the article itself, 'Worldwide Value', is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday. It is also sure to be contested, not just by Democrats who, with the election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on Iraq, but by many conservative Republicans in Congress. They blame the neo-cons for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry their grander ambitions, like those expounded by Gaffney, will bankrupt the Treasury and break an already-overextended military. Yet its importance as a road map of where neo-conservatives -- who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon -- want U.S. policy to go, was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who he said, ''helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.'' In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified -- and controversial -- neo-conservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby; his top Middle East advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National Security Council (NSC). Also on the roster are: Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide William Luti, in the Pentagon; Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, and for global issues, Paula Dobriansky at the State Department. Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq War, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Indeed, in a lengthy interview about the war on the most-watched public-affairs TV programme, '60 Minutes', last May, the former head of the U.S. Central Command and Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief Middle East envoy until 2003, retired Gen Anthony Zinni, called for the resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as well as Rumsfeld, for their roles in the attack. Zinni also cited former Defence Policy Board (DPB) chairman, Richard Perle, who has been close to Gaffney since both of them served, along with Abrams, in the office of Washington State Senator Henry M Jackson in the early 1970s. When Perle became an assistant secretary of defence under Reagan he brought Gaffney along as his deputy. When Perle left in 1987, Gaffney succeeded him before setting up CSP in 1989. As Perle's long-time protege and associate, Gaffney sits at the centre of a network of interlocking think tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. Included among CSP's board of advisers over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Feith, Joseph, former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Navy Undersecretary John Lehman and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director James Woolsey. Woolsey also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neo-con-led lobby group that argues Washington is now engaged in ''World War IV'' against ''Islamo-fascism.'' Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which -- along with wealthy individuals sympathetic to Israel's governing Likud Party, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing bodies, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations -- finance CSP's work. Gaffney, a ubiquitous ''talking head'' on TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, sits on the boards of CPD's parent organisations, the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD) and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT). He was a charter associate, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), another prominent neo-conservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the ''war on terrorism'' just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. His article opens by trying to pre-empt an argument that is already being heard on the right against expanding Bush's ''war on terrorism'': that since a plurality of Bush voters identified ''moral values'' as their chief concern, the president should stick to his social conservative agenda rather than expand the war. ''The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the right to life were central to his vision of U.S. war aims and foreign policy,'' according to Gaffney. ''Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to the ultimate moral value -- freedom -- as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema.'' To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney, beginning with the ''reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilised by freedom's enemies in Iraq''; followed by ''regime change -- one way or another -- in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'Axis of Evil' states from fully realising their terrorist and nuclear ambitions.'' Third, the administration must provide ''the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing ''protection of our homeland, including deploying effective missile defences at sea and in space, as well as ashore.” Fifth, Washington must keep ''faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and ... for our shared 'moral values) especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries.'' Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them ''so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution -- as well as other international institutions and mechanisms -- to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington.'' Finally, writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt ''appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America'', which he does not identify. ''These items do not represent some sort of neo-con 'imperialist' game plan'', Gaffney stressed. ''Rather, they constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.'' (END/2004) :

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