Tag Archives | Middle East

Gaming An Iran War: How Washington Plans For Aggression

By on July 9, 2012 in News 1

When we hear that the United States government is announcing a new policy, it is usually the result of a detailed process, a calculated weighing of options and scenarios in which planners seek to calculate the likely impact and reaction to policies they are advocating.

The stepped-up anti-Iranian sanctions strategy now underway was not an off the top of the head impulsive decision, but one reached through a process of careful strategizing — as in, if we do this, what are they likely to do?

It’s just one step of an ongoing process with many stages that usually leads to armed conflict even if it is always presented as a way to reduce conflict.

Sometimes strategists seek to provoke the very responses they decry. Sometimes, they calibrate policies with allies; sometimes they undertake initiatives that are suggested or planned by allies, especially Tel-Aviv which has been promoting the crusade, at first loudly,  threatening unilateral action, but then, quietly, maneuvering Washington publicly into the lead.… Read the rest

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Israel Outlaws German Author Gunter Grass For Writing A Poem

By on April 9, 2012 in News 43

Günter GrassOne feels that Herr Grass’s poem must have struck a raw nerve for the Israelis to freak out to this extent. Via Al-Jazeera:

Israel has declared Nobel Prize-winning German author Guenter Grass “persona non grata” over a poem that deeply criticises the Jewish state and suggests it is as much a danger as Iran.

In a poem called “What Must Be Said” published last Wednesday, Grass, 84, criticised what he described as Western hypocrisy over Israel’s nuclear programme and labeled the country a threat to “already fragile world peace” over its belligerent stance on Iran.

On Sunday, Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, announced that Grass would be barred from Israel for his attempt “to fan the flames of hate against the state of Israel and the Israeli people”.

The poem sparked outrage in Israel, with officials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down criticising Grass.

Netanyahu on Thursday called Grass’s poem “shameful”, while his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman accused the author of anti-Semitism.

… Read the rest

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Does The U.S. Have A Team In Iran?

By on April 8, 2012 in News 5

MEK IranMiddle East expert Seymour Hersh reveals the United States’ military’s ties with The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, a/k/a M.E.K., in the New Yorker:

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens.

… Read the rest

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How To Stage War Reporting

By on March 22, 2012 in News 9

Via Russia Today, an interesting look at mainstream media outlets (Al Jazeera, CNN) dramatizing conflict journalism — in this case, in Syria.

The camera is shaken to make the footage seem raw and amateur, a stream of grey smoke in the sky is reported as stemming from a nonexistent “explosion”, and an onscreen personality requests background gunfire for a sound effect for his live shot on Anderson Cooper 360. In short, “The activists who become journalists try to make their shows as ‘hard’ as possible. The more blood and death, the higher the price.”

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A War Tax at the Gas Pump?

By on March 4, 2012 in News 9

Gas PumpInteresting point of view from Jeff Klein on Counterpunch:

It’s hard to miss the higher cost of gas every time we fill up our cars these days, but the News Media doesn’t do a very good job of explaining why. There isn’t any mystery, though, if you read the financial press and oil industry sources: We’re paying extra for gas because of rising tensions in the Middle East and especially the scare over a possible US or Israeli attack on Iran. In effect, we’re paying a “war tax” at the gas pump, and the cost will only get higher unless we put aside the talk of war and get down to serious diplomacy to settle the differences in the region.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say recently, under the headline “Oil Rise Imperils Budding Recovery”:

Rising oil prices are emerging once again as a threat to the U.S.

… Read the rest

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Caught in the Crossfire: Should Musicians Boycott Israel?

By on February 29, 2012 in News 19

Jello-BiafraJello Biafra, musician, speaker, record label director, and Green Party politician, writes for Al Jazeera English:

So now I have been to Israel. I have also been to Palestine. I got a taste of the place, but not in the way I’d originally hoped.In many ways I really wish my band, Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, had played in Tel Aviv. But I also share most of the boycott’s supporters’ feelings about Israel’s government, the occupation and ongoing human rights violations.

I hope people take the time to understand how deeply this has torn at the fabric of our band. The promoter in Tel Aviv lost thousands, and I am eating thousands more in lost and re-booked airfares that I have no idea how I am going to pay, or how I will pay my bills for the rest of the year. Real human beings got hurt here.

This whole controversy has been one of the most intense situations of my life – and I thrive on intense situations. But the rest of the band was not used to this. How fair was it to drag them there in the first place? This is not like fighting Tipper Gore and the Los Angeles Police Department, greedy ex-Dead Kennedys members or more-radical-than-thou thugs who think it’s OK to put someone in the hospital for being a “sellout”…

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5 Reasons Iran is Not a Threat to the U.S.

By on February 27, 2012 in News 72

IranMichael Edwards writes on InfoWars:

The Obama Administration, by Executive Order, has moved another step closer to preemptive war with Iran by declaring a National Emergency to deal with this supposed threat.  A National Emergency, which gives the president extraordinary power to subvert the Constitution, is legally defined as “A situation beyond the ordinary which threatens the health or safety of citizens and which cannot be properly addressed by the use of other law.”

Given the immense power the executive receives during such “emergencies”, one would think the U.S. must face a clear and present danger in order to justify such actions.  Yet, all recent wars fought by America and paid for by U.S. tax dollars were preceded by little more than an Executive Order declaring a national emergency.  And, notably, the president makes these declarations without the need for a vote by the Congress as stipulated by the U.S. Constitution.

So what has changed with Iran that now requires a National Emergency?

… Read the rest

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Israel To Demolish Palestinian Solar Energy Program

By on February 22, 2012 in News 7

West BankVia Common Dreams:

A sustainable energy program in ‘Area C’ of rural West Bank is being threatened by Israeli authorities. The program, which recently installed solar panels and wind turbines in 16 communities, is providing 1,500 Palestinians with electricity — who were formerly without reliable energy.

The foreign aid program, thus far successful, has become a new target for Israel as it threatens to demolish the structures that supposedly lie within Israeli ‘administration’.

Der Spiegel reports:

The best part is when the lights in the tents go on, one by one, says Elad Orian. Electricity here, in the hills south of Hebron, was long unreliable. Either it was not available or it was too expensive, produced for just a few hours each day by a noisy, diesel-guzzling generator. That changed when Elad Orian and Noam Dotan, two Israeli physicians who had tired of conflict, came along three years ago and installed solar panels and erected wind turbines.

… Read the rest

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Is The Past The Future? The News Dissector Reports From And On Iran

By on February 7, 2012 in News 4

Impossible project polaroid type filmThe TV series House of Lies is about business but it could as easily be about government and foreign policy.

In a recent episode, one of the management consultants pitches a company about the need to launch a new product.  She recounts the story of the Polaroid Company known as the Apple of its day, widely admired for the cool design of its instant cameras.

When I lived in Cambridge, Mass., Polaroid was one of the town’s biggest employers, an economic powerhouse.

But soon it was gone. It failed to see new competitive products on the horizon. It only saw the future as its past.

It went bankrupt.

That seems to be the case of our own bankrupt foreign policy that operates with a limited playbook, of negative “options” build around threats, warnings, covert actions and military adventures.

The gap between what we say and what we do has become a chasm, a paper tiger in words first coined by Chairman Mao.… Read the rest

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