[Mb-civic] Important Action + Dealing with Iran: "The Bush Who
Cried Wolf"
ean at sbcglobal.net
ean at sbcglobal.net
Thu Jan 12 19:43:47 PST 2006
Folks--herein are 2 items:
1st, a short important online action alert on stopping electronic election
fraud, forward thru renowned progressive blogger Gary Rhine, of
"Rhino's Blog," who very sadly died in a small plane crash a few days
ago. In his memory, take a couple of minutes and do this pro-
democracy action...
2nd, a concise and illuminating article about how Bush and Co. have
sabatoged their ability to deal effectively with Iran...
--mha atma
Rhino here:
I'm forwarding an important request from Mimi Kennedy
of PDA (Progressive Democrats of America) asking
that we take a quick action to stop election fraud.
I did it. It. It took me 3 minutes. Just go to:
http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hotissue=
4
For more info, check out the Daily Kos entries at:
Say No to Prohibited Software in Voting Machines!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/30/171814/27#9
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dear Friends,
I'm sending this because catching Diebold is the first important step in
stopping the steal of elections '06 and '08 and on into the future. See
below. You can sign some great letters to the Election Assistance
Commission asking the current Diebold machines all over the country to be
DE-CERTIFIED and put OUT OF SERVICE! They currently control a
whopping
percentage of the vote - something like 40.
Fraud capacity is an equal-opportunity temptation. Today Republicans
cheat. Tomorrow it could be Democrats. Anyone who fixes elections stinks.
It's outrageous that the installation of capacity to let them do it
wholesale got this far. But such are the times we live in. Installation
of technological fraud capacity, and its use, went under the radar. All
major media, now that the books on the subject of how the technology
created stolen elections are in the book stores, concur that "glitches"
all happening in favor of the same candidate in every instance are a
statistical impossibility. But that was November 2004, so the election was
probably, gulp, decided by technologically added-and-subtracted tallies.
Stolen.
Diebold has been the major culprit in the "glitches"t. People woke up.
They're being stopped. But the EAC - Election Assistance (!) Commission,
created by HAVA --Help America Vote Act, which actually has been the
engine for installing touch-screen computers everywhere ( what? Stealth
from the Bush Administration?)-- needs to know that we've woken up, and
Democrats and Republicans want a real democracy and fair fights in our
elections.
I have learned from two years' activism that nothing disturbs officials
more than an onslaught of e-mails on a subject they thought no-one among
the general public was paying attention to. Have at it. This is one step
in the process that won't work without your participation. Blast widely.
Thanks,
Mimi Kennedy
1) PLEASE SIGN TODAY: As election integrity activists,
we of all people must be certain to sign this important
VoteTrustUSA petition, which I'm submitting here in the
DailyKos diary only because it's easier to keep the links live.
Please distribute this to ALL your lists.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/30/171814/27#9
---------
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20060112/the_bush_who
_cried_wolf.php
The Bush Who Cried Wolf
Robert Dreyfuss
January 12, 2006
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States
Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books,
2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who
specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing
editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior
correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor
to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website:
www.robertdreyfuss.com.
The deteriorating international crisis over Iran is a direct result of the
Bushs administrations ham-handed and mendacious Iraq policy.
Under normal circumstancesthat is, under any previous U.S.
administrationthe battle over Irans pugnacious effort in pursuit of
nuclear technology would be amenable to a diplomatic solution. But, by
insisting on a national security strategy of pre-emptive war, by illegally
and unilaterally invading Iraq on false pretenses, and by hinting that
the White House would tolerate an Israeli strike on Irans nuclear
plants, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have made a
successful diplomatic resolution of the Iran crisis nearly impossible.
Speaking yesterday at the Council for National Policy, Larry
Wilkersonthe former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell who
caused a stir last fall when he accused Cheney and Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld of operating a cabal said that it is likely that
Pentagon officials are polishing contingency plans for a strike against
Iran. Iran, said Wilkerson, is the principal winner from the war in Iraq.
As a result of the power of the Shiite religious forces in Iraq, he said,
the Iranians own the south of Iraq. Wilkerson insisted that the United
States ought to talk to the people who really matter in Irani.e., to
the ayatollahs. But he said that U.S. policy has failed so utterly that the
door to negotiations with Iran is virtually closed. When you close the
door to diplomacy, you have no other option but to rely on military
power, he said. I hope to hell we dont have to use it.
Without diplomatic tools, the looming showdown with Iran is potentially
even more dangerous than the Iraq war. Iran is a far larger and more
complex country, with the capability of retaliating against a U.S./Israeli
attack by fomenting civil war in Iraq, by creating regional chaos in the
Gulf, and by mobilizing its significant international terrorist capability
against Western targets.
As it did in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administrationalong
with Israelis content to exaggerate the threat from Iran. The
ayatollahs appear to be at least five years or more away from a serious
nuclear capacity, according to U.S. intelligence reports. Irans recent
decision to restart one part of its nuclear research is indeed a serious
threat to diplomatic talks aimed at resolving the matter peacefully. But
the issue is nowhere near an end-game stage. There is plenty of time,
years in fact, for a back-and-forth effort to secure Iran's compliance
with International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
By crying wolf over Iraq, through claiming that Saddam Husseins
regime had an active nuclear arms program, the United States lacks
credibility when it now asserts that Iran is trying to develop nuclear
weapons. And by its illegal, unilateral invasion of Iraq, without allowing
the U.N. and the IAEA to proceed with inspections there, the United
States has made other countries extremely wary of taking Iran to the
U.N. Security Council, out of fear that it might give the United States or
Israel a pretext to attack Iran unilaterally.
But the international communitys justified fear that the United States is
controlled by a war party seeking to attack Iran makes other states
diplomacy even harder. Normally, the five U.N. Security Council
powers would take up the matter with some urgency, adopt a
resolution demanding Iran compliance, and threaten political and
economic sanctions against Iran for non-compliance. But Moscow,
Beijing and Paris remember what happened in Iraq. That matter was
taken to the UNSC, a resolution passedand then Washington
declared unilaterally that Iraq had violated it, and went to war. So the
worlds capitals may be forgiven for being reluctant to drag Iran into the
UNSC in 2006.
The fact that John Bolton, the belligerent, war-mongering
neoconservative who serves as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., takes
over as president of the Security Council in February doesnt help.
Bolton, Cheney and their allies are pushing for a showdown in the
UNSC, even though it is highly unlikely that either Russia or China
would support anti-Iran sanctions. India, the Arab League and other
countries would strongly oppose such measures. And even Western
Europe, furious over Iran for its latest effrontery, doesnt view
sanctions on Iran as a happy outcome. Their resistance to anti-Iran
measures comes despite a string of outrageous provocations from
Iranian President Ahmadinejad, from demanding that Israel be wiped
off the map to pooh-poohing the Holocaust to haughtily restarting
Iran's nuclear research.
It is impossible to deny that Iran is a dangerous, out-of-control
regimeyes, a rogue regime. But, had the Bush administration
maintained a consistent policy of seeking a dialogue with Iran, had the
neocons refrained from demanding regime change and military action,
had President Bush not referred to Iran as part of a mythical axis of
evil, and had the United States not immensely strengthened Irans
position by handing it Iraq on a silver platter, diplomacy would stand a
better chance. A package deal, giving Iran political acceptance and
economic incentives, combined with a regulated nuclear technology
regime, in exchange for Irans backing down from its hardline stance,
could likely have been reached over time. It may still, but it seems
highly unlikely now.
So we are left with persistent reports that both the United States and
Israel are planning to strike Iran, and soon. Not only would such an
attack result in a vastly wider conflict in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf, but it
would also probably push oil prices well over $100 a barrel, making $5-
a-gallon gas a reality. Perhaps, because the international community
wants to avoid such a catastrophe, and because the United States is
exerting enormous pressure on Russia, China and other world powers,
first the IAEA and then the UNSC might vote to sanction Iran. If so,
Iran will certainly not back down. And as a result, the United States will
have the pretext it seeks to go to war once again.
Some Democratsand even a fair number of moderate and libertarian
Republicansexpect the November 2006 elections to take place
against the backdrop of a failed occupation of Iraq. Instead, those
same elections might take place in the midst of yet another crisis
manufactured by the Bush administration.
--
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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor
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