Thread: Bush accuses Iran of destabilising the Middle East

BBC NEWS | World | Bush speaks to BBC Arabic TV

Yeah, I thought that the interviewer was very, very soft on him - especially for an Arab! Seemed like he was a bit in awe of being in Mr. President's presence.

It's Bush who has limited time! Less than a year and still 100 fuckups to be made.

I was going to say ....how much more trouble around the world will the fuckwad be making before he loses all power?

They were going to intervene in the Iran/Iraq war when it looked like Iraq might lose. Iran has always been more of an enemy for the US than Iraq.

Nice thread title. Monty Python-esque ridiculousness.

Originally Posted by robitusson

They were going to intervene in the Iran/Iraq war when it looked like Iraq might lose. Iran has always been more of an enemy for the US than Iraq.

In fact, the US was supplying Saddam with satellite pictures of the Iranian positions; a great help to Saddam in accurately targeting the Iranian troops with chemical weapons.

Originally Posted by robitusson

Nice thread title. Monty Python-esque ridiculousness.

Believe it or not, it's actually just based on a translation of this morning's headline on the BBC Arabic webpage! Good stuff, eh?!

Originally Posted by Farangrakthai

the U.S. gave Iraq wmd, seriously.

Actually, I think it may have been the Germans. Seriously. But the US certainly didn't try to stop it from happening.

Actually Iran is a stabilizing influence.

Without Iran, we would have the world's pre-eminent terrorist organization, the USA, mucking about in the middle east more often.

Originally Posted by Boonmee

Bush accuses Iran of destabilising the Middle East

should be:

Bush destabilizes the Middle East

US confession: Weapons were not made in Iran after all | Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran

US confession: Weapons were not made in Iran after all


(source: CASMII) Saturday, May 10, 2008

CASMII Press Release
10 May 2008

"US confession: Weapons were not made in Iran after all"

In a sharp reversal of its longstanding accusations against Iran arming militants in Iraq , the US military has made an unprecedented albeit quiet confession: the weapons they had recently found in Iraq were not made in Iran at all.

According to a report by the LA Times correspondent Tina Susman in Baghdad: “A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin. When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.”

The US , which until two weeks ago had never provided any proof for its allegations, finally handed over its “evidence” of the Iranian origin of these weapons to the Iraqi government. Last week, an Iraqi delegation to Iran presented the US “evidence” to Iranian officials. According to Al-Abadi, a parliament member from the ruling United Iraqi Alliance who was on the delegation, the Iranian officials totally refuted “training, financing and arming” militant groups in Iraq.

Consequently the Iraqi government announced that there is no hard evidence against Iran.
In another extraordinary event this week, the US spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, for the first time did not blame Iran for the violence in Iraq and in fact did not make any reference to Iran at all in his introductory remarks to the world media on Wednesday when he described the large arsenal of weapons found by Iraqi forces in Karbala.

In contrast, the Pentagon in August 2007 admitted that it had lost track of a third of the weapons distributed to the Iraqi security forces in 2004/2005. The 190,000 assault rifles and pistols roam free in Iraqi streets today.

In the past year, the US leaders have been relentless in propagating their charges of Iranian meddling and fomenting violence in Iraq and since the release of the key judgments of the US National Intelligence Estimate in December that Iran does not have a nuclear weaponisation programme, these accusations have sharply intensified.

The US charges of Iranian interference in Iraq too have now collapsed. Any threat of military strike against Iran is in violation of the UN charter and the IAEA's continued supervision on Iran's uranium enrichment facilities means there is no justification for sanctions.

CASMII calls on the US to change course and enter into comprehensive and unconditional negotiations with Iran.

For more information or to contact CASMII please visit Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran | Working for International Dialogue and Peace

^^ eso, thanks for that article. Sadly, I'm not even surprised, though. Those fuckwits in the US & UK Governments


The latest headline on the BBC Persian website is : "Iran accuses Britain and America of Involvement in the Shiraz Bombing"

There's so much finger-pointing and posturing going on from every side. It's so bloody childish. It'd be funny if it didn't result in innocent people dying.

Iran(and others) were on the table immediately after 9/11. This is neo-CON influence(PNAC) pure and simple. PNAC got(manufactured?) it's "new Pearl Harbor" and they wanted to make quick use of it:

Yes, the Pentagon did want to hit Iran
By Gareth Porter
May 7, 2008

WASHINGTON - Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.

Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism".

In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase "some other states" in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon "campaign plan" document, the Taliban and Saddam regimes are listed as "state regimes" against which "plans and operations" might be mounted, but the names of four other states are blacked out "for security reasons".

General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.

Clark writes that the list also included Lebanon. Feith reveals that Rumsfeld's paper called for getting "Syria out of Lebanon" as a major goal of US policy.

When this writer asked Feith after a recent public appearance which countries' names were deleted from the documents, he cited security reasons for the deletion. But when he was asked which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them."

Rumsfeld's paper was given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a US military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld's proposal called explicitly for postponing indefinitely US airstrikes and the use of ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order to try to catch bin Laden.

Instead, the Rumsfeld paper argued that the US should target states that had supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It urged that the United States "[c]apitalize on our strong suit, which is not finding a few hundred terrorists in caves in Afghanistan, but in the vastness of our military and humanitarian resources, which can strengthen the opposition forces in terrorist-supporting states".

Feith describes the policy outlined in the paper as consisting of "military action against some of the state sponsors and pressure - short of war - against others".

The Rumsfeld plan represented a Pentagon consensus that included the uniformed military leadership, according to Feith's account. He writes that the process of drafting the paper involved consultations with the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Shelton, and the incoming chairman, General Richard Myers.

Myers helped revise the initial draft, Feith writes, and General John P Abizaid, who was then director of the Joint Staff, enthusiastically endorsed it in draft form. "This is an exceptionally important memo," wrote Abizaid, "which gives clear strategic vision." In a message quoted by Feith, Abizaid recommended to Myers that "you support this approach".

After the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, Abizaid was promoted to become chief of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), with military responsibility for the entire Middle East.

Neither Myers nor Abizaid, both of whom are now retired from the military, responded to e-mails asking for their comments on Feith's account of their role in the process of producing the Rumsfeld strategy.
Rumsfeld's aides had also drafted a second version of the paper, as instructions to all military commanders in the development of "campaign plans against terrorism".

That instructions document was a joint effort by Feith's office and by the Strategic Plans and Policy directorate of Abizaid's Joint Staff. It followed the broad outlines of the paper for Bush, arguing that the enemy was a "network" that included states that support terrorism and that the Defense Department should seek to "convince or compel" those states to cut their ties to terrorism.

The Pentagon guidance document called for military commanders to assist other government agencies "as directed" to "encourage populations dominated by terrorist organizations or their supporters to overthrow that domination".

That language was adopted because the campaign planning document was issued as "Strategic Guidance for the Defense Department" on October 3, 2001 - just three days after the Rumsfeld strategy paper had gone to the president.

Bush had not approved the explicit aim of regime change in Iran, Syria and four other countries proposed by Rumsfeld. Thus Rumsfeld adopted the aggressive military plan targeting multiple regimes in the Middle East for regime change even though it was not White House policy.

The Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy" their military capacities - not necessarily limited to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The document included as a "strategic objective" a requirement to "prevent further attacks against the US or US interests". That language, which extended the principle of preemption far beyond the issue of WMD, was so broad as to justify plans to use force against virtually any state that was not a client of the United States.

The military leadership's strong preference for focusing on states as enemies rather than on the threat from al-Qaeda after September 11 continued a pattern of behavior going back to the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001).

After the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa by al-Qaeda operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael Sheehan proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime. However, senior US military leaders "refused to consider it", according to a 2004 account by Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at Tufts University.

A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

Iran, Iran, Iran....the big scary threat.

It's all American and Israeli propaganda.

The American newspapers put headlines out that "Iran continues aggression." etc.

When was the last time the Iranians invaded a country? Over 100 years ago.

It's manufactured propaganda by the US and Israel, and the Zionists in the US media.

Originally Posted by Benedict XVI

When was the last time the Iranians invaded a country? Over 100 years ago.

Of course, technically, they did invade Iraq during the 80s, but only because Iraq attacked them without provocation.