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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Iran stupidity overload

Some things to read and share:

Chris Floyd writes about the push for a UN resolution so we can get our war on quickly, facts be damned:
"The Security Council has no option now but to proceed under Chapter 7," [State Department official Nicholas] Burns said today, referring not to the U.S. bankruptcy laws (wonder what chapter covers moral bankruptcy?), but to the UN article that makes resolutions compulsory and "opens the way to sanctions or even military action," as the NYT reports. So we are practically at DEFCON 1 already, despite the recent assurance from Bush's own intelligence googily-moogily, John Negroponte, that Iran is many years away from developing a nuclear weapon – that is, if they are trying to develop a nuclear weapon in the first place, an assumption for which there is no hard evidence whatsoever, and which would fly in the face of the very public fatwa against developing a nuclear weapon promulgated by Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamanei, who actually controls the nation's nuclear program and its armed forces – not the useful idiot, President Ahmadinejad, whose bellicose comments, bad enough on their own, are wildly distorted and mistranslated in the Western press for maximum scaremongering effect.
Justin Raimondo reminds us of the consequences of war with Iran:
Concerns that Iran's dispute with the West could lead to disruption of its oil output pushed oil prices above $74 a barrel, close to the record of $75.35 touched last month."

If that seems like a dizzying hike, wait until the Iranians blockade the Gulf of Hormuz, through which two-fifths of the world's oil passes. Let's assume that when the supreme commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safa, suggested such a strategy, he wasn't kidding. In that case, good luck driving to work: you may have to mortgage your house in order to afford the gas.


Juan Cole had his private e-mail discussions hacked by Christopher Hitchens, who took issue with Cole's translating the statement of Iran's President Ahmadinejad that has been given the most attention in the media, the one which has been translated as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." Cole points out that Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini, not making a direct statement of his own, and that what he did say was actually more like a call for regime change than a call for genocide or anything like it. Here's what Cole said (emphasis added):
[Ahmadinejad] made an analogy to Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government, which Khomeini had said "must go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.

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.
Who knows, if we continue our alphabetical destruction of the Middle Eastern countries beginning with "I," we may eventually find one with nukes. Like the one we've known about for 40 years.

Unfortunately, lots of Americans will once again believe the BuSh, because lots of Americans are really stupid.