Gawd......

Presidential Selectee Hopefuls Do the Bomb Iran Conference
Wednesday January 24th 2007, 9:18 pm

Newt Gingrich once again climbs up on the soapbox, this time at the Herzliya Conference sponsored by the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Israel. Newt tells us that the “terrorist threats are larger and more formidable than the political system in Israel or the US can cope with,” and of course, following the official fairy tale, this threat is nuclear, never mind Israel and the United States combined have more nukes than any other nation on the planet and have expressed their avid desire to use them, explicitly against Iran.

Gingrich believes the “Department of Homeland Security needs to hold two exercises of what would happened if a nuclear weapon is deployed against us, and one exercise with a biological weapon, to be used on an American city like, Dallas or Pittsburg…. This is not paranoia by the Bush administration, but their legitimate worries about how dangerous the world has become, and most Americans believe this,” thanks to unremitting propaganda and Fox News, hyping Iran’s nonexistent nukes, and telling lies about Ahmedinajad, mistranslating his speeches and inventing scary campfire stories about genocide and national suicide.

“In 1930 we thought we could accommodate Hitler,” Gingrich continues, sidestepping the fact the Bush family dealt directly with the Hitler regime, as did no shortage of corporations in the United States, happy as peaches a ruthless dictator was running things. For, as Mussolini told us at the time, fascism is corporatism on steroids. Until the ruling elite of the day decided war against Germany was in their best interest—that is to say, it would make them a lot of money, handsomely on a barrel head—they accommodated Hitler and did business with Germany’s industrialists, who flourished under the strict mandates of fascism, keeping social and political forces under a mailed fist.

“Anyone who proposes that we pull out of Iraq needs to understand the price of defeat,” Gingrich continues. “The last time the United States was seen as weak and defeated, 1979 and 1980, we had a 444 day long hostage crisis in Iran, and an ambassador killed in Afghanistan.”

Only the magnificently ignorant will buy this argument, as history teaches otherwise.

Iran remembers all too well the 1953 plot to overthrow the popular and democratically elected leader Mossadeq and install the hated monarch Reza Pahlavi, who wasted no time setting up the dreaded SAVAK secret police, trained by the Israelis and having the dubious honor of the worst human rights record on the planet in 1976, according to Amnesty International, no small feat considering the gruesome parade of sadists and torturers haunting the 20th century.

For Gingrich, it wasn’t enough Carter kissed the Shah’s hem and proclaimed: “Iran under the leadership of the Shah is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect, admiration and love which your people give to you.” Carter said this as the Shah prepared to kill thousands on a single day, September 8, 1978, known as Black Friday in Iran. For Gingrich, the Shah failed miserably, as he did not kill millions of his own people instead of a mere few thousand. Leave it to the neocons to pick up where the Shah left off some thirty odd years ago.

“In February 1979 the U.S. embassy was seized by militant Muslim students, angered when the Shah was admitted to an American hospital for medical treatment,” writes Mark Zepezauer. “Against President Carter’s better judgement (and the vehement warnings from the U.S. embassy in Tehran), the Shah’s friends, Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, successfully lobbied to bring him to the U.S. Iranians feared a repeat of the 1953 CIA plot that re-installed the monarchy (though in reality Reza Pahlavi was rapidly dying of cancer). Shredded documents from the ‘nest of spies’ were painstakingly reassembled, making public the details of CIA collaboration with the Shah’s secret police.”

According to Gingrich, we need yet another “Kenan (sic) telegram which formed US policy for the duration of the Cold War, and the 68 plan developed by Nitze in 1950.” Here Gingrich makes reference to George F. Kennan, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR from 1944 to 1946, under ambassador W. Averell Harriman (his uncle was E. Roland Harriman, partner and collaborative traitor with Prescott Bush, grandfather of the unitary decider, at the Nazi finance bank, Brown Brothers Harriman). Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” subsequently expanded into the X Article, formally titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, served as the ideological foundation for the Cold War, a several decade long profiteering boondoggle that served the military industrial complex well, as Dwight D. Eisenhower knew and warned us about.

“My grandchildren are in greater danger than I was throughout the Cold War,” Newt tells us with a straight face.

In short, Gingrich and the neocons demand a new Cold War—only in their demented criminal minds it will not be “cold,” but rather hot, as in nuclear fission, as we have been told for some time now the only way to get at Iran’s fictional nuclear labs is through the use of “mini-nukes,” a word tossed around casually, as if “mini” poses no threat to folks downwind, to say nothing of those in the neighborhood.

It would seem the U.S. presidential selectee field is glutted with those chomping at the bit not only to attack Iran, but please warmongering fanatics in Israel.

“Republican US presidential aspirant Mitt Romney summed up the sentiment of four US presidential hopefuls who addressed the Seventh Annual Herzliya Conference run by the Institute for Policy and Strategy of the IDC Herzliya over the last two days by saying, ‘Iran must be stopped, Iran can be stopped, and Iran will be stopped,’” reports the neocon- and Likudnik-infested Jerusalem Post. “The heart of the jihadist threat is Iran… I believe that Iran’s leaders and ambitions represent the greatest threat to the world since the fall of the Soviet Union and before that Nazi Germany,” comments demonstrating these folks are following the script closely as they press the flesh in Herzliya, hometown of Mossad (in keeping with the tenor of the proceedings in Herzliya, it should be noted that the Institute for Policy and Strategy is run by Uzi Arad, a former senior Mossad official).

Romney made sure to add “that a military option remains on the table,” in other words, we can expect an attack sooner before later.

Not to be back-benched, John Edwards, “progressive Democrat,” told the Herzliya Conference at the Interdisciplinary Center that Iran poses “an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel” and said “in order to ensure Iran never gets nuclear weapons, all options must remain on [the] table,” i.e., thousands of Iranians must die for the lies of the neocons.

Apparently unable to contain himself, Edwards opened “his speech with great praise for former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,” the comatose war criminal, according to Israel Insider. Edwards’ speech put to rest the idea, held by the easily flimflammed, that there is any difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Incidentally, for Canadians out there, your country is on the bomb-Iran-bandwagon, as Peter MacKay, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was on hand in Herzliya. “Canada is deeply concerned,” Mr. MacKay told the gathered. “Tehran must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. We need to start talking seriously and creatively about what the international community can do and can do now and what resources we can draw upon.”

“Rallying the international community to isolate Iran should be the ‘main mission’ of Israel, said Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu,” reports the Jewish Week. “Richard Perle, a former administration official now with the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned that time is running out before Iran hits the point of ‘no return’ on its nuclear program (although other speakers estimated it could take a decade before Iran produces a weapon). While he advocated for the creation of conditions for domestic regime change in Iran, Perle also warned that little time remains before the U.S. weighs taking military action.”

Meanwhile, “Islamic expert and historian Bernard Lewis spoke back-to-back with former CIA director James Woolsey,” reports the Arutz Sheva Israel Broadcasting Network.

Lewis, pegged as “the doyen of Middle Eastern studies,” is the neocon’s neocon who, as any racist worth his salt, believes the “real culprit behind the political, economic, and military failures of the Middle East over the past half a millennium” is Islamic culture, as M. Shahid Alam puts it.

James Woolsey is better known as “Mr. World War Four,” a former CIA director, lurker at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Coalition for Democracy in Iran (comparable to the “democracy” now enjoyed by millions of Iraqis), a PNAC signatory (thus he is a demonstrable war criminal of Nuremberg caliber), and Booz Allen Hamilton VP. “This is going to be a long war, very long indeed,” once declared Woolsey, parroting his buddy Eliot Cohen. “I hope not as long as the Cold War, 40 plus years, but certainly longer than either World War I or World War II.”

“There is a very substantial likelihood that if the diplomatic approach failed—and I think it will—and non-violent regime change won’t work (in Iran), there is no alternative except for the U.S. to use force,” Woolsey told the Jerusalem Post, according to United Press International.

As Woolsey sees it, the “Wahhabis, al-Qaida, the Vilayat Faqih in Teheran … are capable of unification,” never mind “al-Qaida” was assigned the role, in part, of widening the schism between the two branches of Islam, as the now largely forgotten al-Zarqawi labored day and night at accomplishing in Iraq, thus helping to facilitate “civil war,” in short engineered chaos.

One must ask what sort of drugs Mr. Woolsey is taking, as the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia are petrified of the Shia in Iran and not too secretly anticipate and welcome any attack designed to take out the mullahs.

Finally, Blake Hounshell, blogger over at Foreign Policy, is spot on when he writes: “Judging by the sound bytes I’m reading, you could call it the Bomb Iran conference. U.S. government officials as high as Gordon England and Nick Burns were in attendance. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was also there, as were his rivals John McCain and Rudy Giuliani…. Expect more of this over-the-top rhetoric from both sides of the aisle. What to do about Iran is going to dominate the American debate from now until 2008, and beyond.”

Of course, as the above comments make painfully obvious, the “debate” (i.e., threats) will not stretch into 2008. More than likely, the Iran attack will come this year, probably before summer, although I am reluctant to drag out the crystal ball and make predictions, as this has failed dismally in the past. However, we can probably bank on the dire prospect of an Iran attack and its ominous reverberations in the Middle East and its economic backlash here in the United States, indeed around the world, well before 2008.