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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (75368)	8/25/2007 12:38:24 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Israel and the US Jewish Community may not be a monolith but the Israel lobby is dominated by billionaire and multi-millionaire right-wing war mongering extremists. Remember how Cheney was cheered by AIPAC when he hinted at war with Iran? The lobby was the key force behind the Iraq war and today is the chief force pushing Bush to attack Iran. And with the Democratic Party getting over half its funding from Jews (many of them pro-war) I for one do not expect them to SERIOUSLY oppose Bush if he launches still another war for Israel. More War on the Horizon by Paul Craig Roberts No pullout from Iraq while I’m president, declares George W. Bush. On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney. Israel is a "peace-seeking state" that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers’ money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas Burns. The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no longer is in the way of it. Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime’s build up for initiating war with Iran. The Bush regime says it is going to designate part of Iran’s military – the Revolutionary Guards – a terrorist organization, whose bases and facilities Bush intends to bomb along with Iran’s nuclear energy sites. Three US aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran. B-2 Stealth Bombers are being fitted to carry 30,000 pound "bunker-buster" bombs to use against hardened sites. Politicized US generals assert that Iran is providing arms and aid to the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. The media is feeding the US population the same propaganda about nonexistent Iranian weapons of mass destruction that they fed us about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. A former CIA Middle East field officer, Robert Baer, has written in Time magazine that the Bush regime has decided to attack the Revolutionary Guards within the next 6 months. Remember the "cakewalk war"? Well, this time the neocons think that an attack on the Revolutionary Guards will free Iran from Islamic influence and cause Iranians to back the US against their own government. Lies, unprovoked aggression, and delusional expectations – the same ingredients that produced the Iraq catastrophe – all over again. The entire Bush regime and both political parties are complicit, along with the media and US allies. According to Baer, the Bush regime has given no consideration to whether Iran’s response to a US attack might be different than to welcome it as liberation. What if Iran really were to arm the Iraqi resistance and/or to sink our aircraft carriers? How can any government, even one as incompetent, delusional and unaccountable as the Bush regime, initiate war without any thought to the consequences? The Bush regime’s planned war against Iran casts light on the large increase in military armaments that the US is supplying to Israel. With Iraq in chaos and civil war, an attack on Iran leaves as opposition to Israel only Syria and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel cannot finish off the Palestinians until Hezbollah is destroyed. An Israeli attack on Syria while the US attacks Iran would leave Hezbollah without supplies in the face of a new Israeli attack. The agenda unfolding before our eyes may be the neoconservative/Israeli/Cheney plan to rid the Middle East of any check to Israeli territorial expansion. Nicholas Burns said that the $30 billion in military aid was not conditional on any Israeli concessions or progress toward resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s ghettoizing and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian West Bank proceeds apace. Meanwhile in America, while more money is poured into more war, condemned bridges collapse killing Americans who trusted their government to provide safe infrastructure. Devastated residents of New Orleans remain unaided. Financial difficulties deepen for more Americans as falling home prices and jobs lost to offshoring push more Americans into desperate straits. The US dollar continues to fall as the government’s war debts build up abroad. Except for the armaments industry, where is the gain to America in Bush’s wars? Before Bush invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had stamped out drug production. The US invasion has brought it back. On August 22 Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that US troops are the "greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known." Tell that to the 650,000 dead Iraqis and the 4 million displaced Iraqis, and the tens of thousands of slaughtered Afghans, and the coming civilian deaths in Iran. Tell that to all the bombed civilians from Serbia to Africa who are blown to pieces in order that a US president can make a point. Bush goes far beyond George Orwell’s "Newspeak" in his novel, 1984, when Bush equates US hegemony with liberation. America’s hegemonic hubris is a sickness. A country that tolerates a war criminal while he openly plans to attack yet another country is definitely not a light unto the world.

To: American Spirit who wrote (75368)	8/26/2007 12:18:33 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Brzezinski Embraces Obama Over Clinton for President (Update3) By Janine Zacharia Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most influential foreign-policy experts in the Democratic Party, threw his support behind Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, saying the Illinois senator has a better global grasp than his chief rival, Hillary Clinton. Obama ``recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America's role in the world,'' Brzezinski said in an interview on Bloomberg Television's ``Political Capital with Al Hunt.'' ``Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand,'' Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, said. ``He has a sense of what is historically relevant, and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world.'' Brzezinski, 79, dismissed the notion that Clinton, 59, a New York senator and the wife of former President Bill Clinton, is more seasoned than Obama, 46. ``Being a former first lady doesn't prepare you to be president. President Truman didn't have much experience before he came to office. Neither did John Kennedy,'' Brzezinski said. Clinton's foreign-policy approach is ``very conventional,'' Brzezinski said. ``I don't think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago.'' ``There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs,'' he added. ``And Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America's relationship with the world.'' Negotiating With Foes Brzezinski also sided with Obama, who was criticized by Clinton as being ``irresponsible'' and ``naïve'' for saying he would meet in his first year as president with leaders of adversaries such as Iran and Syria. ``What's the hang-up about negotiating with the Syrians or with the Iranians?'' Brzezinksi said. ``What it in effect means'' is ``that you only talk to people who agree with you.'' Clinton has the backing of her own Democratic foreign- policy heavyweights, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke, both of whom served in her husband's administration. Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, had no comment on Brzezinski's remarks. Iraq Brzezinski, a harsh critic of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, slammed President George W. Bush for claiming progress is being made in Iraq and for asserting in an Aug. 22 speech that an early pullout would lead to the kind of bloodshed Southeast Asia experienced after American forces left Vietnam. The addition of about 30,000 U.S. troops in recent months ``may be making some progress in some suburbs of Baghdad, but I don't think anyone claims that it marks the turning point in what is clearly a failure,'' Brzezinski said. ``And the president's speech itself was an admission of a colossal failure, a colossal failure,'' he said. ``Four and a half years after his invasion of Iraq, he's now saying that if we withdraw, Iraq ends up like Vietnam or even worse.'' A U.S. intelligence report released yesterday said the troop increase has had some success in curbing violence and there have been ``modest improvements in economic output,'' yet ``Iraq's sectarian groups remain un-reconciled'' and al-Qaeda ``retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks.'' Brzezinski said Bush wants to ``bequeath the war to his successor.'' ``As long as that war goes, we're going to be tied, handcuffed in dealing with foreign affairs,'' he said. ``Our relations with China, with Russia are deteriorating, we don't have freedom of action, we're despised worldwide.'' To contact the reporter on this story: Janine Zacharia in Washington at jzacharia@bloomberg.net Last Updated: August 24, 2007 16:23 EDT