Does this article shock you?

latimes.com

The above is from the L.A. times online.

The opening line is quite an eyecatcher 'WE MUST bomb Iran'
The author Muravchik believes that unless the US immediately wipes out the threat
of a nuclear armed Iran then 'the wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world'.

Isnt this a bit OTT for an LA Times journalist? Considering in recent weeks it was reported that the Whitehouse & the UK government had indicated that Iran had been contacted in relation to the setup of dialogue in relation to the issue of peace in Iraq.


Mod Edit: Link format edited. Please review this post.

[edit on 22-11-2006 by DontTreadOnMe]

So it's not an LA Times journalist.

From your link:

By Joshua Muravchik, JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
November 19, 2006

No LA times journalist would write something like that... They'd lose their bleeding heart liberal lefty membership card.

My bad Mirthful, I'm not familiar with the site but thanks for your reply.
Do you know anything about this author?
What exactly is the American Enterprise Institute?
It's a pretty heavy opinion which he sems to vehemently believe in.

en.wikipedia.org...

www.aei.org...

And a critical view:

www.sourcewatch.org...

Originally posted by Mirthful Me
en.wikipedia.org...

www.aei.org...

And a critical view:

www.sourcewatch.org...

Thanks again

Mirthful,

From your wiki link seems Mr.Muravchik has some interesting AEI peers :

" Scholars and fellows
Lynne Cheney, wife of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, AEI senior fellow. "

The article doesn't shock me. It's just more from the hawks who want to realise the dream of the Project for the New American Century. This is more or less the same group of people who wrote "A Clean Break: Securing the Realm" for the Israeli government in the late nineties, and their ideal is essentially to knock down and completely rebuild the middle East. Knock down a few walls, split this big room (Iraq) into three smaller rooms (with the oil bath behind the door marked PKK)... and so on.

There are people within the Government who realise what a mess Iraq is and was always destined to be. There are also ideologues, blind to the appalling reality, who want to continue knocking over countries in the ME.

Just as in the run up to the Iraq war with its groundless assertions about Weapons of Mass Destruction, the White House is refusing to listen to the intelligence professionals in the CIA who say Iran has no nuclear programme.

Remember, Iran's line is that their programme is for peaceful purposes only. US attempts to show otherwise have been shown to be full of bluster. The only people who agree with the US assessment are, surprise surprise, Israel, who have their own little propaganda war going against Iran. You might have heard that Ahmedinejad wanted Israel "wiped off the map": well, the translation was provided by Israeli think-tank MEMRI, and a more neutral translation finds that what he said was distorted to make it look threatening - the phrase "wiped off the map" doesn't even appear. What he actually said was that he could envisage a day when there was regime change in Israel. This is actually less aggressive than Bush's rhetoric on Iraq or Iran - and Iran certainly doesn't have the muscle to succeed in this aim.

This is only one example of disinformation spread by Israel. Another notable one was about non-Muslims in Iran having to wear badges. Surprise, this turned out to be disinfo, too.

Anyway, on to the article.

WE MUST bomb Iran.

It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere.

Is Iran posing a clear and present (i.e., imminent) danger to the US? If not, then it would be a war crime to bomb Iran. Not that this matters to people who find international law an inconvenience. As for the secret nuclear programme, the CIA has no evidence it exists. Does this seem familiar to someone whose memory stretches back more than four years? It does to me.

First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned.

Actually, the Iranians voluntarily suspended uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes - enrichment they were entitled to perform as long as it was only for making nuclear fuel for a reactor. Weapons-grade uranium requires something like 95% enrichment - but the process Iran was pursuing was producing fuel-rod grade enrichment of less than 10%.

Iran allowed the IAEA to investigate for several months, during which time the US made noises about how Iran was blocking them, with which the IAEA disagreed, as I recall. Eventually, losing patience with consistent bullying and filibustering tactics, Iran unilaterally reinstated enrichment, to predictable furore from the US. They're entitled to do this, because they're a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

I don't recall the US offering any concessions at all. If any poster here can point them out, I shall be glad to add them to my small store of inadequate knowledge on this subject.

It is now clear that neither Moscow nor Beijing will ever agree to tough sanctions.

Well, they each have their own interests in maintaining friendly contacts with a source of oil. Unlike the world's "sole superpower", which just loves to throw its weight around, they seem to prefer to forge trade agreements rather than just invade and take the oil.

And, of course, like the EU, they might have some scruples about imposing sanctions on a country without any real evidence of a secret nuclear programme.

There's then a quote designed to show Ahmedinejad as a zealot. Well... frankly, the guy's been so extensively misquoted it wouldn't surprise me if this were just one more occasion... but even if not, this is just rhetoric for home consumption. I mean, no-one outside the US really believes that the US is bringing democracy to Iraq. Chaos, that's what the US has brought - chaos and violence.

So if sanctions won't work, what's left? The overthrow of the current Iranian regime might offer a silver bullet

Hmm... we can't get other countries to go in on the sanctions bandwagon (mainly for lack of evidence)... how about another coup just like before when we overthrew the democratically elected President Mossadegh (who just happened to want to nationalise the oil and throw out the multinationals) and installed the despotic Shah, for whom we trained and equipped SAVAK, one of the nastiest secret police forces on the planet? Torture, death squads, disappearances?

but with hard-liners firmly in the saddle in Tehran, any such prospect seems even more remote today

...because it seems likely that Iranians would far rather endure their own hard-liners than a US puppet government. They know what that looks like, and they know how to fight it.

Our options therefore are narrowed to two: We can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it.

Where is this nuclear-armed Iran you're talking about? In cloud-cuckoo-land, that's where. Nestling right alongside the mythical EyeRakLand, which as we know, is cram full of WMDs.

Therefore your options also include waking up to reality and acknowledging that this is just propaganda designed to allow you to destabilise a regime you've never forgiven for storming the US Embassy (or, as the locals used to call it, with some justification, "the nest of spies".)

We then get the whole "Liberals are soft on terror and think everyone should have nukular weapons" spiel. Well, we have kind of a false premise in the first place as we just don't have any evidence that Iran is arming itself at all. And of course, the card to play is nuclear terror, "the smoking gun that comes in the form of a mushroom cloud".

Now, according to a report last week in London's Daily Telegraph, Iran is trying to take over Al Qaeda by positioning its own man, Saif Adel, to become the successor to the ailing Osama bin Laden. How could we possibly trust Iran not to slip nuclear material to terrorists?

Well... possibly because if there ever were a nuke going off in the USA, they know their country would be the target of immediate and massive retaliation. Israeli politicians have stated that Ahmedinejad would be prepared to martyr their whole country. I find this simply not credible - except as propaganda from Israel, which, as we have seen, they're prepared to deploy.

As for the Daily Telegraph... it is well-known in the UK that the Torygraph is often used as a mouthpiece for the security services. And one has to admit that MI6 knows a thing or two about Al Qaeda. They did, after all, pay that organisation 100,000 GBP to assassinate Colonel Gaddaffi. Which attempt failed, btw, resulting in the loss of several (in theory at least) innocent lives. And do we really think that OBL is actually still alive? The French don't and I'm inclined to agree.

But would any U.S. president really order a retaliatory nuclear strike based on an assumption?

Of course not. He'd say that there was conclusive proof that Iran was behind the terrorist nuke before bombing the population centres flat. And a supine media would back him up.

I mean, would any US president really order the invasion of a country based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction procured through torture and bribery? Oh, that's right, they already did.

We then get a quote from Rafsanjani talking about an atomic bomb destroying Israel, while one bomb would only "damage" the Islamic world. First of all, I'd really like to see an independent translation of that speech because there have been so many mistranslations and exaggerations that I don't trust these kind of quotes unless I can refer the original Arabic to a friend who speaks it relatively fluently.

Second... any Islamic-world politician knows that Israel has at least 200 nukes, enough to make the entire ME and beyond glow for several decades to come. This kind of rhetoric, if it is even real, is there to comfort the masses only.

But such ethnic-based analysis fails to take into account Iran's charisma as the archenemy of the United States and Israel and the leverage it achieves as the patron of radicals and rejectionists.

If you took the time to actually read any of Ahmedinejad's letters to Bush, they're actually quite conciliatory. What winds people up is that Ahmedinejad doesn't allow the US any room for BS of the kind this guy's spewing. He actually is far more truthful in his speech than Bush.

Another way to read the information contained in the succeeding paragraphs is: by invading Iraq and Afghanistan the US is succeeding in uniting the Arab world against them.

This would thrust us into a new global struggle akin to the one we waged so painfully with the Soviet Union for 40-odd years. It would be the "clash of civilizations" that has been so much talked about but so little defined.

Be afraid of Muslims NOW!

I'm running out of room: I could go on for the rest of the article... but I think you get the picture.





[edit on 22-11-2006 by rich23]

Excellent and well written post Rich.
This just reminds me of the Iraqi wmd media speculation, and basically as you
have stated above,much more eloquently i might add, it stinks.

[edit on 22-11-2006 by pmexplorer]

I thought I'd post Bill Maher's new rules for the Heritage Foundation... starting at the 2.00 mark:

"You can't call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid..."

Originally posted by rich23
I thought I'd post Bill Maher's new rules for the Heritage Foundation... starting at the 2.00 mark:

"You can't call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid..."

Great find Rich

Originally posted by Mirthful Me
So it's not an LA Times journalist.

From your link:

By Joshua Muravchik, JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
November 19, 2006

No LA times journalist would write something like that... They'd lose their bleeding heart liberal lefty membership card.

I'm a liberal and I think we should bomb Iran

I believe the rules have changed, no only the administration results in Iraq has been off and unexpected.

But also the possibility to see the Iraqi new democratically elected government getting engage into a diplomatic union with US and Israel so called axis of evil, Syria and Iran.

This will be too dangerous for the plans that the private interest behind the Iraqi invasion has for the entire rich oil region.

Yes, the way things are developing with Iraq, Iran and Syria is not doubt that sometime in the next two years Bush will decided to attack Iran.

Who cares about the possibility of lost of lives, no only in the civilian sector but our troops, and who cares how the rest of the world will look upon the US, it could not be any worst.

But the money behind our government will have what they are aiming for sometime, control of the entire region.

Yes the article is not far from the truth, Iran most be attack and soon.