Newshoggers Comments
But what if all that doesn't matter?
Based on Cheney's 1994 interview, I posted a simple question on the Gulf2000 Project discussion list at Columbia University. (I've been a member of the list for about a decade)
My simple question was this: Since Cheney obviously knew exactly what would go wrong if the US invaded Iraq back in 1994, why oh why did the US proceed to invade Iraq in 2003?
I thought the experts and academics on the Gulf200 list would know something I didn't know -- and guess what? Other than a collective shrug of the shoulders and a couple of rough guesses, NO ONE KNOWS WHY WE ARE AT WAR!
That's a completely mind-blowing thought: here we are, in the fourth year of a war, with over 3000 American soldiers and a million Iraqi civilians dead - and no one give a straight answer to why we're at war.
So what's if there doesn't need to be a reason for a war with Iran?
Cyrus, there's a reason, but it's not one the warmongers will admit to. They feel their manhood was permannently challenged by the Tehran hostage crisis of 79. They won't be satisfied until they can walk tall again.
Quick hint for the Iranian Govt. - it would cost you little to issue an apology for the hostages of 79 and utterly derail the warmongers here in the US.
Regards, C
Thanks Cernig,
It is good to have all this arguments (with links) in one place.
Cernig: You've actually got a pretty sophisticated news-flogger's war-denial machine going on over here!
Yet, the tricky problem of subject-verb agreement keeps dragging you back down to grade-school mendacity:
"Administration" is singular, so you should say "the administration is waiting until after Labor Day" to make the push...
But hey, the "research" you tout is impressive! You're almost a scholar (minus the needed-ESL training)!
I've got a post up on the IAEA as well:
http://burkeanreflections.blogsp...ainst-
iran.html
Enjoy your Labor Day!
Donald, your petty attempts at needling me are still amusing rather than annoying. But why don't you go play with yourself somewhere else? I don't know what else to call this insistence that you are the clever one while denigrating others. Its purile and, to be honest, not very manly. If you were actually interested in a dialogue of argument it would be interesting, but all we ever see is this self-serving mental onanism.
Regards, C
C,
Great post. I don't believe the EFP narrative either, and haven't since it first came up a couple of years back via Richard Clarke. (It caused me to decloak for the first time over at Next Hurrah 2 summers back!) This story smells like pretext rather than a real casus belli. You ought to get in touch with Larry Johnson if you can. He doesn't believe the story either but he does say in a comment thread that he has been told by someone he believes that the EFPs all come from one source, implying Iran, though he doesn't say so.
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/200...tarts/
#comments
Anyhow keep up the good work. Not sure if this is a thing that can be stopped but if were possible it would be through articles like this one.
Cernig,
Nice inclusive post.
I thought this might help:
1979 hostage crisis might be one reason, but it really is not that simple. Yes, the manhood of the big brother is challenged by the Iranian govt., but not in one occasion. The very 1979 revolution was, I believe, the biggest one.
Also, it is worth knowing that the Iranian Govt. resigned after the hostage crisis. That was not enough of an apology? or US signed the Algeria agreement and did not abide by it.
And there is a chain that we'd like to forget, simply because it is to painful. e.g., G H Bush, erstwhile vice president, said "we do not apologize for what we do" after they shot down an iranian airbus while USS Vincennes was indeed inside the iran's territorial waters...or to look back a little further you would see 1953 and a lot more. (it is interesting that for us iranians it is like yesterday, and for Americans it is medieval history)
Apology does not solve anything, when it is not extended at the right moment.
I am pretty sure that you've already seen this: http://www.motherjones.com/
mojob..._mind_us_f.html
it only shows they really got nothing.
John,
I respect Larry greatly, but I strongly suspect that he is putting his trust in someone who is...etc... until somewhere you reach an intel analyst putting their trust in what they are being told without looking at the raw evidence themselves.
Unless you track every single bit of the narrative back to first origins, it's way too easy to miss the transition from "guess" to "assess" to "know". Then, someone swallows the repitition as proof. The same thing, you will recall, happened with Iraq's WMD.
Daniel, agreed, it's far more complex than that. I was trying to boil it down to the simple reason as seen by the neocons and their supporters. The complex reality doesn't matter much to them, they prefer simple linear narratives.
Regards, C
Cernig,
Excellent compendium of counter-argument, but really, you cannot possibly believe that agitation against Iran is only, or even mostly, about revenge for a political slight, can you? This is like believing the US invaded Iraq because Saddam threatened Bush's daddy.
Despite yours and others' best efforts, it should be clear at this point that actual facts are hardly relevant, just as they were not in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. There was plenty of strong evidence that Iraq had no WMD, including UN inspections in the months preceding the invasion. Scott Ritter repeatedly said -- on national television -- that Hussein's WMD had been destroyed by the UN by 1991, exactly the conclusion reached by every weapons inspection team after the invasion. He was black-balled and labeled a pedophile, not because he didn't know what he was talking about but precisely because he did.
As far as your friend Doug is concerned, apparently his grammatical zealotry is uniformed by the fact that the British (you know, the originators of English as a language) treat groups nouns as plural. He probably visibly twitches reading British papers, if that ever happens.
Cernig, thanks for this. Several commenters at Larry Johnson's challenged his EFP assertion, and none of the responses have been satisfactory to me.
A commenter at Barnett Rubin's did a nice job detailing how the very carefully hedged statements of Rick Lynch in Baghdad were converted in the Aug. 21 Washington Post editorial into flat assertions of 50 Iranians in Iraq organizing attacks against U.S. troops.
Iran can easily derail any move to attack by BushCo by bringing in Russian "inspectors" and military and economic development advisors. The Russians send in an official delegation of government and military members who take up residence, as it were, at all the 'juicy' targets. They do this to determine for themselves whether Iran's nuke program is fully legal and fine under the NPT AND as a diplomatic move to help Iran develop economically and modernize militarily. They slow walk their visit. Perhaps a few Russian military transport planes and a few example fighters could be a part of this delegation - there for the Iranians to check out for upgrading their military.
Now, there is NO WAY that Bush/Cheney are going to attack Iran if doing so would kill an official Russian government/military delegation. Hell, the Chinese could jump in on this as well and help cover the sites with the Russians with personnel. They could announce, after their inspections, that Iran's nuclear program IS, in fact, peaceful and fully within bounds of the NPT. They could then announce further that they will remain for some months to help develop an economic and military aid package.
Poor Bush/Cheney. All those sites occupied by Russians and Chinese for the vast bulk of the remainder of their failed term in office.
If only the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians would get together pronto on this they could do themselves and the world a solid.
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