The following doesn’t even need to be true to enrage Iranians; but if the Regime is importing Arabs to fight off protesters in Iran, then this will only ignite the movement further, from Independent.co.uk:
The Iranian opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi is under 24-hour guard by secret police and no longer able to speak freely to supporters, according to the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Mr Makhmalbaf, 52, an informal spokesman abroad for the protest in Iran, said that Mr Mousavi was not under arrest but “he has security agents, secret police with him all the time. He has to be careful what he says.”
In a telephone interview, Mr Makhmalbaf, the director of the 2001 film Kandaha, denied suggestions that the protests against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were losing steam.
“The regime, arguably, is losing ground, not the protests,” he said. “Ordinary Iranians are openly rejecting the legitimacy and power of Ayatollah Khamanei. That is entirely new, unheard of.”
Mr Makhmalbaf, a friend of Mr Mousavi for 20 years, said that there were reports from Iran that some of the militia deployed to suppress protest were “speaking Arabic”. “That is unconfirmed but it suggests that the regime is unable to trust its own security forces to repress the Iranian people,” he said. “It suggests that people are being used from abroad.”
Iranians have an affinity with Arabs because of their shared religion. But beneath that veneer, lies two major rifts with Arabs:
- even within the religious affinity, Iranians are (like Iraqis, who are Arab) largely Shiite,
- nationalistically speaking, Iranias are Persians, ie. non-Arabs, and many still resent how the Muslims came to their country and imposed Islam onto them.
Any suggestion that the Regime is bringing in Arabs to fight off the Iranians taking to the street will backfire.
None of this is PC per se, but it is real: while an Iranian and an Arab will exchange pleasantries, an uneasy tension will exist between them, as well.
“The Sadrists were saying, ‘We are talking about having immunity for foreign troops here while at the same time an Iraqi is in prison for insulting a foreigner,’” says Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish lawmaker who attended the session. “They’re trying to embarrass Maliki in an election year, to portray him as an American puppet.”
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting excerpt from “A World Of Trouble,” a forthcoming book by Patrick Tyler on the White House and the Middle East:
A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
“They’re setting me up. The bastards are setting me up,” Tenet said, but “I am not going to take the hit.”…
“According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, “the Jews.”
Update: the source of the leak is a hoax, but the fact remains: for the GOP to send up John McCain and Sarah Palin to the batter’s box after George Bush’s disastrous tenure shows how reckless the POW (Party of War) is. I do not see how America’s shifting demographics will allow for the GOP to remain a viable party…
Original post:
Remember: the GOP is the Party of War… so if their second in command does not know the basics, that is a dangerous thing. From Martin Eisenstadt, the leak who told FOX that Palin was clueless on geography, let alone geo-politics:
So yes, to be clear, last week I was the one who leaked those things to a producer at Fox News who works with Cameron. Carl and his producers are good guys, and I don’t want them to have to worry about protecting their sources (and going through the wringer ala Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) on something like this.
As you know, I was one of the foreign policy advisers on the McCain campaign who worked with Randy Scheunemann to help prep Sarah on her debate with Joe Biden. Did we outright give her a geography quiz when we started the prep? No, of course not. But yes, in the context of the prep, it slowly became apparent that her grasp of basic geo-political knowledge had major gaps. Could she have passed a multiple choice test about South Africa or NAFTA. Probably. But it was clear that she simply didn’t have the ease of knowledge that we come to expect from a major party political candidate. Other slights came up, too: Not knowing the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. Or the difference between the Shiites and Suni. Or when it came to international terrorist organizations, knowing that the IRA was in Northern Ireland, and ETA in Spain.
Read more. The point is, we saw that happens when someone runs the country without knowing that Iraq has Sunnis and Shia and they don’t get along. I don’t think we can afford to have more of these types of people in charge… yet both John McCain and Sarah Palin did not seem to know this very basic fact.
How did Iraq turn out, Ehud?
Read more. Had Bush II done what everyone told him, he would have forced Sharon to sit down and make peace with Palestinians… once Palestine would have been established, the ire of the Arab Street would have dissipated, and Iraq would have been forced to focus on getting its standing in the world community back. Iran would have largely been less influential than it is today.
Because of Bush’s incompetence, none of that happened, it is Israel that is now alienated… not even the US can come to her rescue… and Iran’s role is greater than ever, with a Shia block having been propped up in Iran-Iraq-Lebanon.
People like Edward N. Luttwak should not be allowed to talk, let alone morph policy. When talking about the obstacles John McCain faces, he notes:
But the particular Republican president in office happens to be very unpopular. At this point in history, all of George Bush’s achievements have been forgotten or discounted, including the defeat of Jihadism from Morocco to Indonesia and the de-nuclearization of Iraq, Libya and North Korea–while he is blamed for all that has gone wrong. His fiscal policy certainly caused excessive deficits, but it was under Bill Clinton that mortgage lenders were forced to lend to subprime borrowers.
Hmm… someone might want to tell Eddie Douchebag here that Iraq was not nuclear, or nukular, in the first place. What Bush did was essentially a war crime against a country that was not involved in the slightest bit in 9/11, did not have WMD.
In fact, McCain should be kept far away from the White House specifically because he was one of the lynch men who shouted “On to Baghdad” practically as the towers fell. Luttwak’s type hijacked the White House and anything he says should be discredited and loudly condemned.
From The Nation:
Myth 1. It’s a dangerous world. We face an array of serious national security threats that require an experienced Commander in Chief.
Myth 2. The surge has worked. To withdraw from Iraq now would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and embolden Islamic extremists.
Myth 3. We cannot allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists. We therefore must redouble our military efforts there or face another terrorist attack.
Myth 4. Iran is responsible for much of the violence against US forces in Iraq; by using its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, it threatens to dominate the Middle East.
Myth 5. To talk to the leaders of “rogue” states like Iran and Cuba without conditions legitimizes their position and weakens American leverage.
Myth 6. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an authoritarian state pursuing an anti-American agenda aimed at reconstituting the Soviet Union in the form of a new Russian empire.
Myth 7. Because the American military is stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must increase the size of our conventional armed forces.
Myth 8. A League of Democracies would create a global coalition for peace and freedom and would enable the United States and its democratic allies to intervene to solve humanitarian and other crises when the UN Security Council is paralyzed.
Myth 9. Globalization has strengthened the economy, and we cannot avoid it by hiding behind protectionist walls.
Myth 10. The world needs American leadership.
Interesting myths, no? To find out more about why they are myths, click and read The Nation:
Madness I tell you:
Quoting senior diplomatic sources, Britain’s The Guardian said Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert raised the issue with Mr Bush during his visit to Israel for the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state’s founding.
In a one-to-one meeting on May 14, Mr Bush told the Israeli leader he would not support such a strike because of fears of retaliation, possibly on US targets in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concerns that the Israelis would fail to disable Iran’s nuclear facilities anyway, it said.
Mr Bush’s refusal to support an attack, and the strong suggestion he would not change his mind, is likely to end speculation that Washington could be preparing an “October surprise” before the US presidential election.
Some analysts have argued Mr Bush would back an Israeli attack in an effort to help Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign by creating an eve-of-poll security crisis.
The Guardian reported that Mr Bush’s refusal to support such a strike appeared to be based on two factors.
One was US concern over Iran’s likely retaliation, which would probably include a wave of attacks on US military and other personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan and on shipping in the Persian Gulf.
The other was US anxiety that Israel would not succeed in disabling Iran’s nuclear facilities in a single assault, even with the use of dozens of aircraft. It could not mount a series of attacks over several days without risking full-scale war. So the benefits would not outweigh the costs.
Iran has repeatedly warned it would retaliate with force against any attack. Some Western government analysts believe this could include asking Lebanon’s Shia movement Hezbollah to strike at the US.
Wow. Destroying America for Iraq was clearly not enough. Read more.
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