.. all but extinguished?
- or obliterated, thanks Hillary.
«Obama to set timetable for Baghdad
From correspondents in Washington April 28, 2008
DEMOCRATIC Senator Barack Obama warned overnight that if he is elected president he will set a performance timetable for the Iraqi government and not sit aside "while they dither".
...
"What I will not do is to continue to let the Iraqi government off the hook and allow them to put our foreign policy on ice, while they dither about making decisions about how they're going to cooperate with each other".»
[theAus/Breaking News]
My decode: "set a performance timetable" refers to exercising a conqueror's (assumed = by murdering force) right to kick their quisling puppet around, "dither about making decisions about how they're going to cooperate" means that the kick is aimed at the Iraqis passing the 'the oil-law,' which (ostensibly) has to do with revenue sharing on the way to (futilely hoped-for?) reconciliation, but in reality has to do with parcelling out PSAs (so-called 'production sharing agreements'), which are the actual 'nuts and bolts' by which the oil-theft intention (Obama's "our foreign policy") is to be enabled.
In summary, the US expects the Iraqis to 'voluntarily' (with US guns at Iraqi heads) kiss their 'patrimony' goodbye.
-=*=-
Long story short: Obama wants the oil too; i.e. he wants to be a murdering oil-thief.
I reckon that's 3 out'a 3 now, and 'game over' - as they say in despised Ameri-speak (spit!) No surprise, perhaps; but riddle me this, Q: why does the rest of the world roll over for the Yanks? A: Most probably, because the US threatens to nuke anyone who doesn't. Including us in Aus, perhaps, but we 'escape' because we're already giving 'em all they want, specifically land for bases and the great bulk of our resources. We the sheople® are 'allowed' only wages plus 30% after (disgustingly generous?) pre-tax concessions from our vast resources boom; the rest is swallowed up by the insatiably ravenous gaping maw of neoliberal, mainly US rip-off capitalism.
Oh, well; look on the bright side: at least the Yanks aren't killing us Aussies (directly, but wha'da 'bout the greedastrophe®, eh?).
Addendum: the penny drops!
Of course, Obama has to say that, otherwise he'd be unelectable. But not because the sheople wouldn't vote for him, Oh, no - rather, the US M/I/C-plex would ensure Obama's unelectability. Neat, eh? - And so much for the much vaunted US 'democracy.' Boo! Hiss!
11 comments:
G'day Phil, if you want to play, you have to play by the rules so it is difficult to imagine anyone becoming president who would really do it differently.
Whenever someone spouts the type of guff as Obama did, the setting of timetables etc approach, I have a good "more front than Mark Foy's laugh. Another in that line is the demand the Iraqis pay for the damage that has been done, from the Gulf War on - and including criminal US targeting of civilian infrastructure. That they an get away with this type of stuff speaks of the influence they have. When you're the biggest bully on the block, who's going to stop you?
A view of the occupation.
Tom Engelhardt on the great PR general.
Remember, this man is now head of CENTCOM.
G'day Bob,
...thanks for the TomD link.
Interesting is some'a the detail, i.e. how Petraeus is ballsing stuff up.
I get the feeling, "So what?"
What it reminds me most of, is managers I once had 'the pleasure' of working with. A lot'a those 'guys' (spit!) had just the one big worry: how to make a slide-show look attractive. (No Power-Point 'back then' (spit!) - it was all 'Foiler;' Letter-sized transparencies.)
My point: it's the *mass* of US ForPol, not the personalities. Further, if the work is as criminal as you'n I think it is, you're just not gunna get 'the very best' available. (Although yeah, a lot'a people do big crimes for big $s. See USrael. Looping.)
And one other thing, the MSM doesn't need any wooing, it *voluntarily* jumped into the M/I/C-plex illegal-affair bed looong ago - also as you probably already know.
A final point: in this case, it's not *how* you play the game; it's the game itself that's wrong, aka *criminal*. (Add the usual qualifiers: dishonourable, filthy, lying, cheating, thieving, murdering etc.)
G'day Phil, you mentioned "ballsing up", well, here is a piece about learning the wrong lessons - and it now prize for guessing who the Yanks have been "learning" from.
While I'm here, Justin Raimondo on a further adventure.
On another tack - and related to the greedastrophe and finding solutions- as someone sang, it's all showbiz.
Anyone for a tea party?
G'day Phil, I previously posted a link to a Justin Raimondo piece on the possibility of the US attacking Iran. There has been a surge of conjecture on that matter lately, not unrelated to the surge in US allegations against Iran. So what is going on inside those twisted, criminal minds of the Bush administration? We can only look at material and try to discern the direction the US is heading.
Some reports on Iran and its relations:
India raises a toast to Iran
NEW DELHI - The one-day visit this week of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the first Iranian head of state to visit India in five years, was short in time, but it was high in symbolic content and laid bare some of New Delhi's strategic thinking.
While energy issues remained the main focus of the visit, the attention was as much on perceptions of Washington, which has a major problem with Iran's independent nuclear program and has been urging nations, including India, not to deal with Tehran.
However, Ahmadinejad's visit is perhaps the first time that the Congress-party led New Delhi government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stood up to the United States on Iran, making an effort to emphasize an independent foreign policy not influenced by Washington's ideas.
In the past couple of years, India, as the new US strategic partner in Asia to dilute the growing influence of China, has been sensitive to US urgings, taking a stand against Iran at international forums.
Awash with its new stature as "America's friend", New Delhi has also been accused of deliberately delaying the US$7.6 billion, 2,600-kilometer Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline to keep Washington happy.
Coincidentally, India's changed views emerge even as the India-US civilian nuclear deal is almost dead due to domestic Indian political opposition. Washington, instead, has been keen to push defense purchases from India in the recent past.
In this period, voices have emerged from New Delhi indicating a changed thinking about Iran.
Last week, New Delhi reacted sharply when US State Department spokesman Tom Casey called on India to utilize Ahmadinejad's visit to persuade Iran to stop its uranium-enrichment activities.
In a terse statement, the Foreign Ministry said, "India and Iran are ancient civilizations whose relations span centuries. Both nations are perfectly capable of managing all aspects of their relationship with the appropriate degree of care and attention."
Iran holds key to India's energy insecurity
In the rapidly intensifying international energy game, Iran holds a master key to the most staggering roadblock to India's economic growth - energy insecurity. With the issue of energy cooperation expected to dominate talks on Tuesday between visiting Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and his hosts in New Delhi, a new chapter in India-Iran relations is on the horizon that will likely bring the two countries closer together on a long-term basis.
While not an official state visit, since it is Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's turn to visit Iran, Ahmadinejad's brief yet significant stopover after his trips to Sri Lanka and Pakistan has been widely interpreted by the global media as a landmark development that will usher in a new era of energy cooperation between energy-starving India and energy-rich Iran, which is also a suitable conduit for the third-country supply of energy to India, given Iran's expanding oil and gas connections to landlocked Central Asian nations.
With oil prices skyrocketing, India's thirst for cheaper imported gas has acquired a greater urgency than ever before, considering what the Hindustan Times has termed as the growing "supply-demand mismatch" reflected in the recent news that "as against an overall requirement of 77 million standard cubic meters per day (mmscmd) of gas between April 2007 and January 2008, only 37 mmscmd was supplied".
Sure, India has other prospects besides Iran and, in addition to investing in Yemeni oil fields and negotiating with Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar, questing for a piece of the Iraqi energy market and scouting various African countries (such as Nigeria, Chad, Angola, Cameron and Congo), Indian officials have also been playing catch-up with China in Central Asia lately, seeking deals with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
But with the Turkmenistan's proximity to Iran and Iran's ability to act as an energy corridor for the sub-continent, the salient importance of Iran is indisputable.
The above articles illustrate interests and priorities. Of course they do not fit with the US agenda, but, as I said, priorities. And which is a major priority?
From Tomdispatch, Pepe Escobar.
More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker how George W. Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize that country has proceeded in a relentless, Terminator-like way, applying the same techniques and semantic contortions that were so familiar in the period before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.
The campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs" are building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf -- Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state aimed at the heart of the United States. It's idle to expect the American mainstream media to offer any tools that might put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.
Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" when it comes to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations" of an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he has "no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved."
But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam Take-out of 2003 proved: that a "smoking gun" is, in the end, irrelevant. And this week, the U.S. is ominously floating a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.
But what of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges and threats? What to make of it? What does the world look like from Tehran? Here are five ways to think about Iran under the gun and to better decode the Iranian chessboard.
Read on.
Now for Chris Floyd.
Anyone who thinks the Bush Administration does not intend to attack Iran either has rocks in the head or their head in the sand. The warmongers have raised their cacophonous howling of threat and accusation against Iran to entirely new levels. Every day now, some major Administration figure makes fiery charges that Iran is directly, deliberately killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq: a clear casus belli, if it were true, which it almost certainly is not.
(That is, it a clear cause for war in the perverted logic of Establishment discourse, which ignores the fact that U.S. forces have illegally invaded and occupied Iraq, and the fact the Bush Administration itself supports the same violent sectarian Shiite factions that Iran does in Iraq, factions responsible for killing thousands of innocent people. What's more, Bush and his beloved General Petraeus are now directly paying extremist Sunni factions, including members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who are likewise engaged in murder, repression and "ethnic cleansing," like their Bush-supported Shiite counterparts. George W. Bush and his minions and handlers have deliberately, knowingly, purposely created a slaughterhouse in Iraq, and they keep it going 24/7 with the fresh meat of murdered innocents. This is the true context of the Administration's charges against Iran: mass murderers accusing others of malevolent intent.)
Some interesting comments with the above article.
Another reminder of "Mission Accomplished".
Will they? There are pros and cons - and the cons do not necessarily include impracticality or it would be stupid. They are delusional and create their own reality. Unfortunately, others suffer the effects of the reality that is created. The more they continue the wider the effects.
G'day Bob,
good to 'see' you going in so hard against the "Great Satan," the details are really chilling (massive understatement!) I agree that they, i.e. GWBush&Co, as 'lobbied' by neoCons & the I/J/Z-plex, really do make it sound as if they are just busting to 'go play in' Iran - "Shockin' Whore Mk2," so's to say - as the next stage in their 'murder for oil' campaign (which is - sadly, sickeningly, probably more 'when' than 'if.') Even more chilling are the stories about the (ghastly, dishonourable!) Pentagon's war-game results, showing that the US would lose under all 'normal' circumstances - unless and except if they nuke Iran, that is.
As if the excess CO2-caused greedastrophe® 'coming down the pike' (spit!) wasn't bad enough, the crazies may well throw a nuke (or three) at Iran. Talk about "All over!"
We must find some (enough) countervailing 'force;' the pen being mightier than the sword - we better hope.
There're people - bloggers - all over the world, all screeching the same stuff as can be found in this blog; all (metaphorically) tearing their hair, and lots in the US even. Whereas we "Hate the sin" more than we "Hate the sinner," there are some sinners out there that deserve a bit more than casual disregard - and here I mean the lying trolls, apologist/agitators and the (venal!) MSM, incl. big bits'a th'AusBC & SBS. As the Pentagon-primed (how well paid?) talking-heads story proves, we the sheople® are being propagandised. Surely, if better informed (as opposed to 'entertained,' aka TV-somatized), lots more wo/men in the street would screech along with us truth-seekers (we who can see it all clearly), would screech a rising cacophony of "No more war!" from every rooftop - and so help avert what may well turn out to be an effing terminal disaster?
Sometime - soonest, USrael has just gotta be stopped.
G'day Bob (again),
re: your comment of 2/05/08 12:21.
1st I started reading, concluded it looked a bit looong.
So I scanned it, published it, then went back to it. It *is* a bit looong. Read it, then started on the citations.
I 'jumped' straight to your Floyd, and since you mentioned there were some interesting comments, checked them. Sure enough, a good exchange and some stand-alones, concluding with a 'Grandma Jefferson:'
«They think they are still back in the day, when people of nominal sanity ran the Executive Branch. They haven't caught on to the fact that we are now governed by madmen, who love slaughter for profit and spit on all civilized law. Banger doesn't recognize the true face of the most twisted, psychotic evil the species has ever spawned.
The junta would really like to nuke Iran, in a "tactical" sort of way, and I doubt "the world financial elites who have become tighter and more organized..." will be able to effect much of anything in the way of veto, in the aftermath of that catastrophe.»
Then I went back to read the body which concludes:
«But none of this matters. As with Iraq, the reality doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. The horrifying, murderous consequences don't matter. What matters is the militarist, elitist agenda of global domination -- in a word, empire -- that has driven America's "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" for decades. Iraq was not an aberration; it was an embodiment of this agenda. And the attack on Iran will be the same. A whole new slaughterhouse is about to open for business: more meat for the grinder, more sacrifices to the Moloch of greed and ambition.»
Who will rid [the world] of this meddlesome ... empire?
Floyd's got it about right.
It's not 'if', it's 'when'. And time is running out...
G'day Damian,
your "time is running out..." - err, to do what, exactly? I've been saying 'time for talking is gone; it's time for action' for - well, a looong time now.
Seems to me it's up to a few big countries - like Germany, France, say - to tell Bush&Co to pull their heads in.
Sooo, Q: why don't they?
Or do you have some other action in mind?
G'day Phil and Damian, some reports ... and a suggestion on how to deal with Bush (later).
More on Iran's aspirations.
A matter of interests will determine who supports whom.
More under the table work from the US.
Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, "unprecedented in its scope."
Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department's list of terrorist groups.
Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border -- whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother in law's throat.
I can see the complaints now ... "More anti-American ..." Well, to those inclined to that kneejerk, prejudiced reaction, how about proving they don't get up to all kinds of dirty work. Such as this.
02/05/08 "First Post" -- - One of the forgotten battlegrounds of George Bush's 'war on terror' jumped sharply into focus yesterday, with the announcement that a pre-dawn US missile strike had killed the Islamist militia leader Aden Hashi Ayro and at least 10 other people in the town of Dusamareb in Somalia.
The Americans claim Ayro was a key al-Qaeda figure in East Africa. There is no way of objectively assessing these claims, but his assassination is certain to fuel the ongoing conflict in a country that Oxfam recently described as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.
To much of the Western public, violent mayhem has long been synonymous with the failed state depicted in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. But the violence that is currently ripping Somalia apart is a direct consequence of the Bush administration's reckless military adventurism and the Manichean fantasy world of the 21st century's terror wars.
Or is it that we are simply not allowed to mention such behaviour for fear of shattering your delusions?
Now for a suggestion as to what to do about the Crawford Caligula. Within this Chris Floyd piece is a link to this Ted Rall article, in which we find:
If George W. Bush were an ordinary citizen, there can be little doubt that he would face a long prison sentence for the scores of acts of torture he authorized both specifically and generally. Four of the seven white hillbillies charged with the kidnap-torture of a black woman in Logan County, West Virginia are now in jail for at least the next ten years.
If Bush weren’t president, he would face murder charges. The maximum sentence in a federal murder case is death.
If Bush and his co-conspirators are not above the law, if the United States remains a nation where all citizens are equal, they must be arrested and indicted. But by whom?
The Supreme Court has never resolved the question of whether a sitting president can be arrested by civilian authorities. Even if he were charged and convicted, many legal experts say he could issue himself a pardon.
However, leaving the presidency in the hands of an self-admitted torture killer is unacceptable. Congress could ask a U.S. Marshal to arrest Bush as part of impeachment charges. But the ultimate outcome — removing him from office a few months before the end of his term — seems woefully inadequate given the nature of the charges. In any case, Democrats have already said that impeachment is “off the table.”
Bush could be extradited to one of the countries where the torture and murders were committed — such as Afghanistan or Cuba. But he could claim immunity as a head of state.
There is, however, a person who could begin holding Bush and the others accountable for their crimes.
She is Cathy L. Lanier, the 39-year-old chief of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. Chief Lanier, take note: you have probable cause to arrest a self-confessed serial torturer and mass murderer within the borders of the District of Columbia. He resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Go get him.
History is calling, Chief Lanier. Your city, and your country, needs you.
And not forgetting - the world.
G'day Phil, following on the "get Bush" theme, perhaps this chap should get a few of the lads together and take matters in hand.
03/05/08 "Raw Story" -- - In a new memoir set to be published May 6, the former commander of US forces in Iraq provides new intimate details of the goings-on at high levels of the Bush Administration in the first year of the Iraq war.
His sharp tongued conclusion: "Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."
More on Iraq from Tom Engelhardt.
And those contractors.
Allegations of widespread mismanagement and corruption among private contractors in Iraq are nothing new; if anything, tales of cronyism, over-billing, and embezzlement have become so frequent that our national tolerance for them seems only to have increased as the Iraq War has drawn on. Even so, the testimony earlier this week of three whistleblowers before the Senate's Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) stands out for the sheer outrageousness of their accusations—namely that U.S. private contractors looted Iraqi palaces and ministries, stole military equipment, fenced supplies destined for U.S. troops, and even operated a prostitution ring that may have contributed to the death of fellow contractor. Yet despite its focus on such salacious matters as sex and corruption, the session earned little media attention.
Yes, more corruption. From top to bottom.
Iraq says no hard evidence of Iran supporting militias.
But who needs evidence?
And the agenda is ... Chris Floyd on US games re Iran.
A follow up to the Andrew Cockburn piece.
Perhaps on a smaller scale.
The US military is drawing up plans for a “surgical strike” against an insurgent training camp inside Iran if Republican Guards continue with attempts to destabilise Iraq, western intelligence sources said last week. One source said the Americans were growing increasingly angry at the involvement of the Guards’ special-operations Quds force inside Iraq, training Shi’ite militias and smuggling weapons into the country.
Despite a belligerent stance by Vice-President Dick Cheney, the administration has put plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on the back burner since Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as defence secretary in 2006, the sources said.
However, US commanders are increasingly concerned by Iranian interference in Iraq and are determined that recent successes by joint Iraqi and US forces in the southern port city of Basra should not be reversed by the Quds Force.
“If the situation in Basra goes back to what it was like before, America is likely to blame Iran and carry out a surgical strike on a militant training camp across the border in Khuzestan,” said one source, referring to a frontier province.
They acknowledged Iran was unlikely to cease involvement in Iraq and that, however limited a US attack might be, the fighting could escalate.
The Yanks are angry at Iran being involved in Iraq? Lack of a sense of irony, again. A specialty. perhaps they should note op polls of Iraqi views about US involvement in Iraq.
The last paragraph in the extract should be noted. But the people who take most note of it, perhaps won't. They dwell in their own reality.
And a trip to that reality with Dick.
Cue spooky music ...
George W. Bush has made the world a more hopeful place.
This from Vice President Dick Cheney, who spoke to a crowd of Oklahoma Republicans Friday evening.
"When the history is written, it will be said this is a safer country and more hopeful world because George Bush was president," Cheney said, according to Oklahoma's Tulsa World.
Of Iraq, Cheney quipped: "Our strategy is the right strategy. The only way we can lose is to quit."
If the US departs, he said, it would show America "doesn't have the stomach for a fight." Cheney himself received five draft deferments to avoid service in the Vietnam war.
Post a Comment