Bad media! BAD! NO COOKIE!

The Doughy Pantload Jonah Goldberg waxed lyrical yesterday on the failures inolved in the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

The failures, of course, being primarily of the news media:

This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage. Keep in mind that the most horrifying tales of woe that captivated the press and prompted news anchors to scream—quite literally—at federal officials occurred within the safe zone around the Superdome where the press was operating. Shame on local officials for fomenting fear and passing along newly minted urban legends, but double shame on the press for recycling this stuff uncritically.

Well, of course, at the time Jonah wasn't doing a great job either, making "humorous" comments like this:

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg]
I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours.

Which of course then said was just a joke and how could we be so insensitive as to take him seriously and he was kidding and the liberals are the REAL hateful ones and yadda yadda ack gag spew. The typical Repug routine, in other words, so well honed lately by the insectoid Ann Coulter.

Back to yesterday's column. Jonah thinks that sure, the government isn't blameless in this, heck, but

if we’re looking for poster children for arrogant incompetence in response to Katrina, there are better candidates than George W. Bush.

"Arrogant incompetence"?

Oh, you mean like this?


George Bush on August 30th, as martial law was being imposed in New Orleans and the levees were starting to give way

No, Jonah, you're right. It's ALL THE FAULT OF THE MEDIA, damn them.

(Oh - and the Pantload has this wisdom to impart as well:

In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500. Blacks did not die disproportionately, nor did the poor. The only group truly singled out in terms of mortality was the elderly. According to a Knight-Ridder study, while only 15 percent of the population of New Orleans was over the age of 60, some 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older, and almost half were older than 75. Blacks were, if anything, slightly underrepresented among the dead given their share of the population.

Well, that's a f*cking relief there, Mr. Pantload. "Only 1500"! Hell, that's only half the number that died in NYC on 9/11, and the racial makeup was pretty even there as well. No, Mr. Jonah, you're a damned idiot, as is your f*cking incompetent Preznit.)

The "moral clarity" folks

In researching the previous post I found this lil' nugget of wisdom with respect to the Iran story from a commenter named "Caipirabob":

Don't really care if it's true or not. The real truth is that the sooner we drop this sick freak and his pals in a blender and hit "Frappe" the better for all humanity.

"Sick freak", I guess, refers to Ahmadinejad.

Mind you, back on May 15, 2004 the same commenter had this to say:

We have freed 25 million people in Iraq from a brutal fascist dictator who believed the way to get people to see his side of the argument was to drop them in a shredder or bomb their village with WMD's.

So... umm... Saddam pureeing his enemies=bad, Us pureeing our enemies=good. That's some mighty fine moral clarity you got there, sunshine.

Thank god they got those barn doors closed

The National Post of Canada issued an apology today for their false story about the Iranian garment laws:

But the National Post, a longtime supporter of Israel and critic of Tehran, admitted Wednesday it had not checked the piece thoroughly enough before running it.

Oops. Sorry 'bout that, folks.

"It is now clear the story is not true," Douglas Kelly, the National Post's editor in chief, wrote in a long editorial on Page 2. "We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story."

But, as I pointed out in the previous post, the mere fact that it's been proven false won't be any kind of deterrent to its use in "proving" the threat from Iran, at least as far as the wingnuts are concerned.

This is doubly true for the fact that the Reuter's story I've gotten the quotes above from also includes the following:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also has sparked fears in the international community by denying the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, and by calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Denying the Holocaust or not, the "wipe Israel off the map" comment has also been proved to be incorrect. But I guess the National Post aren't the only ones to be doing a poor job of checking facts these days.

(ADDENDUM:
While searching for retractions of the story on the right-wing blogs (most of whom seem to have the attitude of "if it's not true it might as well be") I found this story on TownHall.com, claiming that the TALIBAN was doing the "yellow ribbons" thing back in 2001:

Unless you have the Yale Taliban, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, spinning for you. In June 2001, he told UPI's Arnaud De Borchgrave how wonderful it was that the Taliban assigned yellow identity badges to their religious minorities (in this case Hindus).

Oh, look, it's our old buddy Arnaud again. Gee, he gets around, don't he? And it's about badges being required for Hindus, not Jews... but details, details, why spoil perfectly good agitprop?)

The plot thickens

The story from the other day about the supposed Iranian garment law that required non-Muslims to identify themselves gets more and more interesting.

According to Taylor Marsh's site, the article was written by one Amir Taheri, and the trail seems to dead-end there. Interestingly enough, Taheri is a member of a group named Benador Associates, whose membership also includes neo-con notables such as David Gelernter, Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, Michael A. Ledeen, Laurie Mylroie, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, and Natan Sharansky, but the one name that especially jumped out at me was Arnaud de Borchgrave.

De Borchgrave, interestingly enough, was the one who evidently started the story that was so popular back in 2003 or so, the one about Iraqi "people shredders" related by one "Kenneth Joseph", who evidently doesn't exist.

On March 21, veteran right-wing journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, Paris Bureau Chief for Newsweek for 23 years, and now United Press International (UPI) Editor at Large, wrote from the International Desk in Amman Jordan that "a group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video", and that Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality'".

[snip]

"[Rev. Joseph] said that his talks with Iraqis convinced him that Saddam is "a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. . . Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so [the torture masters] could hear the screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

Well, pro-war British Labor MP Ann Clwyd got ahold of the story, and from there it just kept going:

This is one of the many witness statements that were taken by researchers from Indict — the organisation I chair — to provide evidence for legal cases against specific Iraqi individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. This account was taken in the past two weeks.

Web sites such as LGF and Free Republic picked up on the story and ran with it - and it became one of the many justifications on the Right for the invasion & "liberation" of Iraq.

This is but the tip of the iceberg. Yet too many don't want to know about it because it isn't happening to them. It's just like the number of people who have forgotten about 9/11/01 or pretend it never happened and that Saddam wasn't directly or indirectly involved. (from "Free" Republic - no link, they don't deserve one)(And BTW - pretend 9/11 NEVER HAPPENED? WTF?)

I was following this story myself for quite a while as it just seemed to convienently over-the-top to me; kind of a Grand Guignol attempt to paint everyone who wasn't supportive of the war as a defender of such atrocities.

One invasion & occupation later, and the "people shredders" are nowhere to be seen. An article in 2004 by Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator in Britain indictated just how content-free the horror story actually was:

What was done to corroborate the Iraqi’s claims? Apparently nothing. Indict refuses to tell me the names of the researchers who were in Iraq with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told, Mahon, who no longer works at Indict, ‘does not want to speak to journalists about his work with us’. But Clwyd tells me: ‘We heard it from a victim; we heard it and we believed it.’ So nothing was done to check the truth of what the victim said, against other witness statements or other evidence for a shredding machine? ‘Well, no,’ says Clwyd. ‘[Indict researchers] didn’t have to do that; they were just taking witness statements.’

But surely, before going public with so shocking a story, facts ought to have been checked and double-checked? Clwyd clearly doesn’t think so. ‘We heard it from someone who had been released from the Abu Ghraib prison....I heard his account of what went on in the prison. I was there when [Indict’s] cross-examination of the witness took place, and I am satisfied from what I heard that shredding was a method of execution. We knew he wasn’t making it up.’

Note where the shredders were supposedly located - Abu Ghraib. Gosh, I seem to have heard that name... somewhere before...

Anyway, the story, though disproved, continued to shamble lich-like around the Right-wing blogosphere:

Saddam simply ensured their loyalty through the twin policies of enriching them with land and oil-for-food dollars (Thanks, Kofi!!!!!) while simultaneously making it known that any dissent would be met with a feet-first date with a plastic shredder. --"Countercolumn", July 2004

I look forward to crying my eyes out when I read about how poor ole saddam had his enimies assasinated with a bullet in the back of the head, or the ones he killed that he really didn't like, and he fed feet first into the industrial plastic shredder. --"Free" Republic, May 2005

As far as whether Bush's strategy has paid off for the Iraqi people, at least they don't have to worry about being fed through a plastic shredder (feet first, of course) by one of Saddam's psychotic kids. Some people would count that a plus. --February 2006

There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. --From the INDICT web site, still there even as of today

Simple. From what I've heard, the most gruesome way his sons killed people was shoving them through a plastic shredder. If they liked you, they went head-first. --here, March 2006

Now, in the interest of truth, there is ONE reference on the Internet (using Google) to the discovery of these mythical people shredders, from an article about one "Michael Paterson":

At the ruins of Babylon, Paterson and his unit discovered a similar shredder used for torture and execution in a palace frequented by Uday Hussein.

Funny thing is, this is the ONLY reference I can find to "Navy Reserve" officer "Michael Paterson", and the ONLY reference I can find to such a discovery. Which indicates to me, anyway, there's nothing to this story. (Why it was published - well, who knows?)

In closing, it seems to me the lil' elves of Benador Associates may have well concocted yet another oh-so-convenient falsehood to motivate people into supporting yet another war. Those who remember the false "babies thrown out of incubators" story which helped to justify the attack on Iraq in 1991 will not be suprised that, like Hill & Knowlton in 1991, Benador is yet another PR firm.

Seems we never learn, sometimes.

The God of Irony works overtime

From Der Preznit, today:

Bush said he would remind Western Hemisphere nations such as those that ''respect for property rights and human rights is essential,'' that ''meddling in other elections ... to achieve a short-term objective is not in the interests of the neighborhood,'' and that the United States expects other nations to stand against corruption and for transparent governance.

''Let me just put it bluntly: I'm concerned about the erosion of democracy in'' Venezuela and Bolivia, he said.

Yeah, Mr. Bush, and we're pretty damned worried about the erosion of democracy here, too.

Let's see, -

"Respect for property rights":
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that local governments may force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public, even if the property is not blighted and the new project's success is not guaranteed.

"Respect for human rights":
Reports of inmates attacking guards at Guantánamo Bay are worrying not least because the camp is still effectively sealed off to the outside world - including to human rights groups.

"Meddling in foreign elections":
. . .the Bush Administration decided to override Pelosi’s objections and covertly intervene in the Iraqi election.

"Stand against corruption":
SAN DIEGO - Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham began his first day in prison after being sentenced to eight years and four months for taking $2.4 million in homes, yachts and other bribes in a corruption scheme unmatched in the annals of Congress.

"Transparent governance":
The Bush administration, however, is aggressively working to prevent such public scrutiny in four distinct ways: it has widened the range of classified and otherwise confidential (but non-classified) materials. It has expanded its ability to criminally prosecute government employees who leak such materials. It has signaled a willingness to move against reporters who publish those leaks. And, most significantly, it is using new "material support" statutes to do an end run around the First Amendment and criminalize many forms of political advocacy.

Pot, meet kettle.

The genius of the Right Wing

Well, I found another righty blog that doesn't allow me to comment on the older posts, so I'll have to address it here. He/she/it is commenting on gun ownership (they DO SO love the 2nd Amendment - would that they loved the other 9 as much!):

It doesn't bother me that the female anchor says near the end of the clip that the number of weapons "begs the question 'why do you need that many guns'" and the guy doing the live interview ponder why they owned several examples of the same weapon...frankly I don't expect anybody who isn't a gun collector or shooter to understand why I or anybody would collect the firearms that they do. If the female anchor is a typical female she probably owns ten times the number of pairs of shoes that I do which, to me, is baffling and unnecessary.

Well, jeez, if you can't see the distinction there, I dunno.

Something about SHOES NOT BEING MADE TO KILL PEOPLE.

About the time I hear of a McDonald's full of people being massacred with a pair of strappy sandals I'll accept that as a valid analogy.

The smoking gun is only 45 minutes away

Once again, here we go:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Iran is only months away from joining the club of nations that can make a nuclear weapon, Israel's prime minister said in a recent interview.

"The technological threshold is very close," Ehud Olmert said on CNN's "Late Edition" in an interview taped Thursday and broadcast Sunday.

[snip]

Some observers disagree with Israel's characterization, saying Iran is five to 10 years away from being able to make a nuclear weapon

"Some observers" including our own government's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

And the Democrats are setting their own necks on the chopping block again, in an effort to appear "strong on defense":

Five key Senate Democrats asked President Bush on Friday to order a new national intelligence estimate on Iran to avoid repeating misjudgments with intelligence that were made in the months leading up to the war in Iraq.

Led by Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the senators also asked for an unclassified summary of the estimate's key findings "to facilitate the public debate."

Ignoring the facts that there was no real public debate on Iraq either (millions of people worldwide disagreed with the invasion and Bush dismissed them as "a focus group"), there was an active propaganda effort based on wild lies, and the "misjudgements" on the Iraq intelligence were actually willful ignorance of the truth in favor of cherry-picking "evidence" to support an attack.

And so the weird selective amnesia continues in Washington as we continue to shuffle towards Armageddon.

Shamelessness

Professor Juan Cole has a posting up today on the newest attempt to paint Iran as The New Nazis - a supposed piece of legsilation requiring non-Muslims to wear stripes of cloth, color-coded to their religions. Iran's only Jewish Minister of Parliament denies the story.

The National Post newspaper quoted human rights groups as saying that Iran's parliament passed a law this week setting a public dress code and requiring non-Muslims to wear special insignia.

Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear a yellow, red or blue strip of cloth, respectively, on the front of their clothes, it said.

Mr Motammed said he had been present in parliament when a bill to promote "an Iranian and Islamic style of dress for women" was voted. "In the law, there is no mention of religious minorities," he added.

(And who knew Iran HAD a Jewish MP? Kinda right up there with Iraq's foreign minister under Hussein being a Christian...)

The story in The Australian has this comment from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

"It think it boggles the mind that any regime on the face of the earth would want to do anything that could remind people of Nazi Germany," he added.

Like, um, I dunno - carry out a pre-emptive invasion of another nation? Pass draconian laws giving extraordinary powers to a supposed democratic leader based on a seemingly perpetual "state of emergency"? Or even comparing deporting undocumented Mexicans to the Holocaust? (Well, admittedly, that last isn't from "the regime", but it certainly indicates how far down that bad road the Right has gone)

It's "one of THOSE days" in the news, again

Yesirree, one of those "go back to bed and hide" days in the news, when you have to wonder WHAT THE HELL country we're living in:

Guantanamo "detainees" attack their guards when the guards show up to cut down an attempted self-hanging. This was ON TOP OF THREE MORE attempted suicides, just in the last DAY. WTF is going on down there? Oh, hell, we'll never know - we just have to trust our leaders!

Remember - this is the supposed frickin' OCEAN PARADISE we treated our "guests" to:

Seeking to dispel what may be GITMO’s few remaining negative images, Rep. Hunter assures us there is no real abuse "unless you consider eating chicken three times a week real torture."

Other members of the resort’s new Board of Directors are also weighing in. At a news briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld boasted that "at Guantanamo, the military spends more per meal for detainees" than it does on rations for U.S. troops. Rummie assures us that this level of extravagance will continue. (June 16, 2005)

And didn't we used to arrest people SUSPECTED of a crime instead of going all Judge Dredd on their asses:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents began following the black SUV after somebody reported seeing it pick up suspected illegal immigrants near the U.S. side of the Otay Mesa border crossing, Lt. Kevin Rooney of San Diego Police Department said.

And the border paranoia that drives crap like this continues, as we plan to build a fence along the border & patrol it with high-tech surveillance (not incidentally giving beaucoup megabucks to military contractors), all justified at least in part by keeping terrorists from crossing into the United States.

However, they'll just need to go North and sneak in through Canada, seeing as our security-conscious government plans to do NOTHING on our Northern border. Which is okay, I guess, 'cause people coming over THAT border aren't all brown and stuff. Or something.

And as so many others are pointing out, we seem to have had our "My Lai" moment in Iraq:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A decorated Marine colonel turned anti-war congressman has said Marines killed at least 30 innocent Iraqi civilians "in cold blood" in Haditha in November, suggesting the death toll may be twice as high as originally reported.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, told reporters Wednesday that he got his information from U.S. commanders, who said the investigation will show that the Marines deliberately killed the civilians.

My Lai was not a unique event, just the most publicized of many such incidents during the Vietnam War. If the same holds now (and we have no reason not to think it does), how many more Hadithas have happened in Iraq that we HAVEN'T been told about?

News flash - sun rises in east!

This is news?

(CNN) -- In a new poll comparing President Bush's job performance with that of his predecessor, a strong majority of respondents said President Clinton outperformed Bush on a host of issues.

Um, really? Do tell!

It makes you so frickin' nostalgic for a time when we had an imperfect President who was neverthless a decent leader... and able to string together an coherent sentence.

And didn't manage to get over 6000 Americans killed by sheer incompetence.

We told you so

General Hayden, Bush's nominee for head of the CIA, January 23, 2006:

I'm disappointed I guess that perhaps the default response for some is to assume the worst. I'm trying to communicate to you that the people who are doing this, okay, go shopping in Glen Burnie and their kids play soccer in Laurel, and they know the law. They know American privacy better than the average American, and they're dedicated to it. So I guess the message I'd ask you to take back to your communities is the same one I take back to mine. This is focused. It's targeted. It's very carefully done. You shouldn't worry. {emphasis added]

Well, it looks like you maybe SHOULD worry, after all:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government is secretly collecting records of ordinary Americans' phone calls in an effort to build a database of every call made within the country, it was reported Thursday.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth telephone companies began turning over records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls to the National Security Agency program shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said USA Today, citing anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

[snip]

The program does not involve listening to or taping the calls. Instead it documents who talks to whom in personal and business calls, whether local or long distance, by tracking which numbers are called, the newspaper said.

Oh, now THAT'S reassuring. No, they aren't listening in - yet -,they're just keeping a record of who called who and when. That's SO much less offensive. "No, we don't have a record of what you said, only who you talked to and when." As if guilt by association has no precedent with these people, after all.

And (from the same news story) the Justice Department has had to drop its inquiry into the domestic spying program, due to stonewalling by the NSA:

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the NSA refused to grant its lawyers the necessary security clearance. (Full story)

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-New York, on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.

But that's okay, since the investigation wasn't really an investigation, after all:

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."

Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules.

So as long as you keep a sense of "ethics", I guess it's okay to break the law. Although with "Torturemada" Gonzalez heading Justice, the whole concept of "ethics" seems rather hollow as it is.

History has shown that when . . . leaders stall inspections and impede the progress, it means they have something to hide.
-- Preznit Bush, November 8, 2002

More proof of the artificiality of the Iran "crisis"

Iran threatens to pull out of nuclear treaty

Sounds threatening, right?

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- The Iranian Parliament has threatened in a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to force the government to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if the United States continues pressuring Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.

Pulling out of the NNPT. Well, that's a bad sign, right?

Oh, wait. They're not pulling out of the Treaty entirely:

The letter, read Sunday on state radio, said Annan and the Security Council must resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program "peacefully, (or) there will be no option for the parliament but to ask the government to withdraw its signature" from an addendum to the treaty that calls for signers to allow intrusive, snap inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the treaty monitoring body.

[emphasis added]

The inspections referred to in the CNN story were being done by the IAEA to monitor the possibility of Iran's nuclear research being used for weapons, though as this story in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from Nov. 2005 indicates, no evidence of a hostile nuclear program has been uncovered:

Although Iran has been less than forthcoming about many of its nuclear activities, inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency have not revealed evidence of a nuclear weapons program.

The interesting part of this last article is the fact that Iran's nuclear research up to this point, even with the enrichment of uranium done until now, is perfectly legal within the NNPT:

In pursuing a civilian nuclear program, Iran has international law on its side. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty gives signatories "the inalienable right" to peaceful nuclear technologies contingent on not making nuclear explosives.

And, indeed, Article 4 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty does state that signatories have the right to research into peaceful uses of nuclear energy:

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty.

Iran's actions to the present seem pretty much legal, but nonthless the U.S. is trying to make this into another Iraq "crisis". How much longer until we see the return of the warnings that "we must do something now or risk the smoking gun of a mushroom cloud"?

Don't hold your breath there, Mr. Annan

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is looking for direct talks between the U.S. and Iran on this nuclear kerfluffle thing:

"It would also be good if the U.S. were to be at the table with the Europeans, the Iranians, the Russians, to try and work this out," Annan said in an interview Thursday on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS television.

"I think it would be a good idea because the Iranians give you the impression that ... whatever they discuss with the Europeans had to be checked with the U.S. and come back," he added.

And guess what - Lil' Condi's stomping her foot and saying "no":

While pledging to let diplomacy run its course, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she did not see the need for direct talks now between Washington and Tehran, as favored by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, and other lawmakers.

Here we go again - let's look at the last time:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration Thursday will give Congress a proposed resolution that explicitly authorizes the use of military force if President Bush concludes diplomacy will fail to get Iraq to keep its commitments to the United Nations, administration and congressional sources told CNN.
--CNN, September 19, 2002

The President is serious about consultation. The President is serious about diplomacy. He hopes it will work, and he wants to give it time to work.
--Ari Fleischer, January 30, 2003

The President, as I indicated, he appreciates the efforts the United Kingdom is making. Let me put it to you this way; the President is going the last mile for diplomacy. We shall see if the other nations on the Security Council are willing to entertain that last mile. We shall see.
--Ari Fleischer, March 12, 2003

PRESIDENT BUSH: Tomorrow is the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work. And we sat and visited about this issue, about how best to spend our time between now and tomorrow. And as Prime Minister Blair said, we'll be working the phones and talking to our partners and talking to those who may now clearly understand the objective, and we'll see how it goes tomorrow.
--Bush, in the Azores, March 16, 2003

And here is some analysis from the ever-perceptive Norman Solomon on the use of "diplomacy" as a figleaf for warmongering over the last several years.

Still more "fool me once"

I've been talking about the U.N. resolution that the U.S. wants passed with regards to Iran, and specifically the fact that it's intended to be under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which would allow military action to enforce it.

Well, seems the U.S.'s ambassador to the U.N. is trying to downplay the military aspect of the resolution:

In his testimony to Congress, Bolton said it was possible that a Chapter 7 resolution demanding that Iran suspend its nuclear program could clear the Security Council with abstentions by Russia and China.

But he dismissed a suggestion that the Bush administration might use such a resolution as the basis for military action, saying its only purpose would be to demand Iranian compliance.

Ohhhh, oooo-kay! It's just there to put pressure on Iran! Well, that's DIFFERENT.

Oh, wait - the resolution passed with respect to Iraq in 2002 was also a Chapter 7 resolution.

Specifically, Resolution 1441, which the U.S. and U.K. used as justification for the invasion, was passed under Chapter 7:

Resolution 1441 ultimately passed—by a vote of 15-0—because its ambiguous wording was able to placate all parties. Recognizing the continued threat Iraq poses to international peace and security, recalling that Resolution 678 authorized member states to use all necessary means to implement relevant subsequent resolutions, and noting that Resolution 687 imposed conditions on Iraq—with which it has not complied—the council made clear that Iraq "has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions." It is significant that the council explicitly noted that it was acting under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter.

This was the resolution, as you'll recall, which Preznit Bush pretended was Iraq's "last chance":

With the passage of this resolution, the world must not lapse into unproductive debates over whether specific instances of Iraqi noncompliance are serious. Any Iraqi noncompliance is serious, because such bad faith will show that Iraq has no intention of disarming. If we're to avert war, all nations must continue to pressure Saddam Hussein to accept this resolution and to comply with its obligations and his obligations.

[empahasis added]
[snip]

In confronting this threat, America seeks the support of the world. If action becomes necessary, we will act in the interests of the world. And America expects Iraqi compliance with all U.N. resolutions.

...and we all know where that went.

"Traduttore, tradittore"

One of the favorite recent talking points of the new warheads who're just HANKERIN' for attacking Iran has been Pres. Ahmadinejad's comment about "wiping Israel off the map".

Well, Juan Cole actually looked at the original (what a strange concept!) and says no, that's not what it translates to at all:

The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.

[snip]

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

What's even more interesting is that Professor Cole points out that regardless of what Ahmadinejad has to say, his comments are little more than empty rhetoric:

As for the matter at issue, Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives.

All this B.S. about Iran being an imminent threat to the world, or even to the Middle East, is just that - B.S. This "Iran crisis" is totally artificial and totally a creation of the neocon idiots that have us bogged down in Iraq at the moment, having swore to us that it would be a "cakewalk" and the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators. They've failed just as badly as Bush has, and are similarly looking for something, anything to make their legacy a positive one, even if it means the deaths of millions.

"Fool me once" redux

Evidently the "Can't Remember What Happened Beyond Last Tuesday" White House figures that the U.N. Security Council has the same problem:

PARIS, France (CNN) -- A top U.S. diplomat said he expects the United Nations will soon pass a resolution ordering Iran to suspend its nuclear program.

U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns predicts that if Iran does not comply with the resolution, there will be a serious attempt to impose another resolution calling for sanctions.

[snip]

"I think you will see a serious Chapter 7 resolution emerge in the next couple of days at the United Nations," he said.

A resolution under the U.N. Charter's Chapter 7 makes any demands mandatory and paves the way for the use of sanctions and possibly force.

My question is will the Europeans actually be dumb enough to trust Bush again with another U.N. resolution that he can claim validates a military attack on Iran? Will they remember what he did with the similar resolution that they passed with regard to Iraq?

I'm not sure it matters - as I said in the last post, either they get the resolution and can attack, or they lose the resolution, claim it's a sign of the failings of the U.N., and attack.

Constructive Enragement

Condi Rice did the morning shows on Sunday, and CNN reports she's still very, very unhappy with Iran:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran Sunday of "playing games" with the international community over its nuclear program, but she stopped short of saying whether economic sanctions against the Islamic republic are inevitable.

"Every time they get close to a Security Council decision, there is some effort to say, 'Oh no, we really were in fact interested in that proposal that we rejected a few weeks ago.' Or, 'No, now the IAEA can come,' Rice told ABC's "This Week."

"They've had plenty of time to cooperate."

I ask - does that sound like someone who's sincerely interested in a negotiated, diplomatic solution to what's essentially an artifical "crisis" in the first place? They're setting up a direct parallel here with the inspections in Iraq and Saddam's stonewalling - or percieved stonewalling, anyway. And they may be banking on American confusion between Iraq and Iran to help things along.

This is the significant bit of the interview, as far as I'm concerned:

To address Iran's noncompliance, the U.S. will seek a resolution under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which makes any resolution mandatory, as opposed to discretionary, by the member state, Rice said. Such a resolution could be enforceable by sanctions or, ultimately, by military action.

Well, there you go. There's the "U.N. support" Bush will need to justify the bombing campaign against Iran. And if they refuse to pass the resolution - well, it'll just prove, as far as the neocons are concerned, that the U.N. is a "failed insitution" and the need for the U.S. to act on our own.

Heads we win, tails they lose.