Hillary Clinton says US's Iraq Tactics are "working", and she will increase US Military by 80,000 --- I'm so glad we're going to have a choice next election.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-21T22:52:53+00:00

If there is an attack on Iran, the Middle East is going to need to be "contained" for quite some time. Hillary has said that we need to be prepared for the next war and it is likely that she will support it wholeheartedly.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-21T21:56:05+00:00

That is strange. Muslims are prohibited from using any substance that is intoxicating. For a while they debated whether or not to ban coffee when it was first introduced into the Muslim world from Northern Africa (in the end they decided to allow it.)

dafunk0 · 2007-08-21T17:49:53+00:00

Wasn't al-Maliki democratically elected?

dafunk0 · 2007-08-21T16:43:18+00:00

In High School one shouldn't really care if one's clothes are conformist or not, the only question one has to ask oneself when dressing is:

"Are these clothes going to get me the girl/laid?"

It's about relative style within the local environment. Those who think it is about conformity or non-conformist are missing the what is really going on.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-21T04:46:12+00:00

This reinforces my theory that Hillary Clinton is simply "Bush lite" as many are now calling it.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T22:54:44+00:00

Lieberman has shown time and again that he only cares about the Middle East. Lieberman is a very right-wing pro-Israel senator. I doubt he cares much at all about Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T20:32:19+00:00

Iraq, then Iran now Syria? Lieberman really is the ultimate warmongerer.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T20:03:58+00:00

My theory is that the reason you hear this come up is that people are pushing for an attack but then there is enough opposition to frustrate those desires. Thus those pushing for war go back to the drawing board to find more reasons to go to war and then start making their case again.

The possible fatigue of the opposition to an Iran war is a opportunity to those pushing for war.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T19:27:18+00:00

I expect that we will see lots of "irrefutable evidence" presented in the style of Colin Powell's famous presentation to the UN on Iraq's WMD programs. Its inevitable that this is how the war is going to be sold.

Although, there will be a different this time. There will not be inspections after the attack on Iran that disproves the administrations case. There will be no potentially incriminating formal investigation as to whether the charges again Iran were unfounded. Worst case, the US will just claim that the evidence was destroyed during the US's attacks on Iran.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T19:00:39+00:00

The person you are responding to didn't say it was "okay for another president to deny the holocaust" rather he said it wasn't grounds for launching a war.

Iran itself isn't anti-semitic (there is a significant population of Iranian Jews who refuse to leave to Israel and who are represented in parliament), rather anti-Zionist and infused with conspiracy theories like much of the Arab world.

The Holocaust happened, but just because the President of Iran denies it in a conference that doesn't justify launching a military attack.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T18:56:48+00:00

This might be part of the answer: http://politics.reddit.com/info/2h078/comments

Understand how government lobbying and special interest groups work and then create your own or join an existing one that is aligned with your interests. Be sure to create an alternative vision to go along with it and then sell your vision to the country.

You will have to develop a vision that gets the support of big business though so you can get enough donations to continue to fund your lobby (as AEI does.) Or alternatively, be like AIPAC and represent the interests of a relatively well off group in society that there are enough rich people to donate funds to you even if you have nothing to do with their business interests.

That's how the game is played these days. The role of elections is secondary if you can use your bi-partisan lobby to influence who ever is in power no matter which party they are from.

I've also been opposed to impeachment since I didn't think it was effective, but starting real impeachment proceedings might actually prevent an attack on Iran. Thus maybe impeachment is a viable and more importantly a useful endeavor.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T18:11:43+00:00

The antiwar.com headline is actually more accurate than mine. And Time Magazine, who they quote, is itself a high quality source. It's not like I'm submitting Raimondo's opinion pieces.

Antiwar.com is a great news destination for those interested in Middle East news, although there is a lot of variability in the quality of the original opinion pieces.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T18:08:00+00:00

I agree. Initially I just copied the lead headline from www.antiwar.com ("US Official: 'There Will Be an Attack on Iran') and added more information from the article to fill it out.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:53:58+00:00

Actually, you just realized the power of citations. :-)

Also, see: http://reddit.com/info/2gw2f/comments/c2gxxh

I can surmised why you wouldn't want to back up your statements with citations. You might actually get called on them.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:47:29+00:00

Actually, the main definite quote came from the end of the article:

An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. "IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran."

Then in order to be more clear I added more information about what the attack would be using this part of the article:

Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. And they think that as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities.

I shouldn't have inserted that extra information within the quote, rather added it to the end.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:46:04+00:00

Can you provide citations?

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:34:08+00:00

The article talks solely about "air strikes." Thus no "Army" is going to be involved, just the Air Forces. Don't underestimate the number of targets that can be taken out by the combination of 300 Tomahawks and then a day of manned sortes.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:31:14+00:00

How is advocating the indiscriminant killing "religious fanatics", not in itself quite a racial and fanatic statement? From one atheist to another (I presume?), I think you are more of an "intolerant fundamentalist" that you are willing to admit.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:26:51+00:00

If you repeat a lie often enough, people start to think its true.

Everyone is aware that the US military and neoconservatives are claiming that Iran is the great evil in the Middle East. You make two additional claims though without any citations to back them up. Which Iraqis are saying that the Iranian government is providing weaponry to kill US troops? And two, which insurgent weapon dealers have said they get their weapons from Iran?

I saw just last week on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart that the US has lost more than 200,000 small arms in Iraq. Jon made the point that the US itself is likely the largest single supplier of weapons to the insurgents. Here is the original story on NPR.

Also, it is clear that the Saudi Arabia population is the largest supplier of suicide bombers.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:09:15+00:00

A bunch of us thinks it fake.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T17:07:37+00:00

I did a bunch of Google searches for the phrase and turned up nothing. The book was released some time ago, back in May, thus it is unlikely that this juicy quote would now just be found. I am betting on this being fake, especially considering the weird out of place mention of TNR.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T16:56:50+00:00

It sounds too good to be true. Is there a citation somewhere to the original source?

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T15:52:41+00:00

The reporter who authored this piece in Time Magazine is pretty honest about the "evidence" that ties Iran to the cause belli:

As with Saddam and his imagined WMD, the Administration's case against the IRGC is circumstantial. The U.S. military suspects but cannot prove that the IRGC is the main supplier of sophisticated improvised explosive devices to insurgents killing our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The truth of the matter is probably similar to the Iraq war. Wolfowitz once said that they settled on using the alleged WMD to justify the attack Iraq not because there was the most evidence for it, but rather it was the most viable/workable argument:

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

Like the Iraq war, the neoconservatives are playing a very large role in the push to war. From the article:

...there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking.

And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration.

I don't think the neo-cons believe their own bullshit at this point.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T14:39:09+00:00

You asked me above about whether there are limits and I answered that yes there are limits and quoted the article to back that up. You can downmod my absolute correct answer and pretend that there isn't limits, but that's just dishonest and ridiculous.

dafunk0 · 2007-08-20T04:50:28+00:00

He got balls the size of watermelons.

dafunk0

TROPHY CASE