Saturday, September 15, 2007

What we are Faced With


First, we have two illustrations. They represent what is posed to us as the solution to what is wrong in the United States today. Below, are some of the problems. I do not think the problems and solutions quite match.

I’d like to start off with the poem that was somehow missed by so many last time, a poem that very succinctly summarizes in general terms the problems:

*LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: *Especially since Khalil Gibran has been

in the news lately, including yesterday or the day before on your

program. “Pity the Nation,” after Khalil Gibran.

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,

and whose shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are

silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice,

except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero

and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own

and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money

and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.

Pity the nation -- oh, pity the people who allow their

rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

That just about sums it up, but let’s look at the past week or so. [For those of you on the mail-list, a sound file of Larry reading it is attached.]

The decider told us back in spring that he needed a “surge” and then, in September, he would wait for a report from Patreaus and then begin withdrawal. Well, it turns out that his program has 130,000 official U.S. soldiers in Iraq when he escapes the White House and the mess is left to whoever.

Much was made of Anbar Province where the Sunni had turned against Al Qeada. The tribal leader, supposedly, was Abu Reesha, or Risha, which mean “Father of the Feather.” Actually, he spent most of his time in a penthouse at the Marriot in Jordan, with occasional visits to Saudi Arabia. However, when The Decider went to Anbar he had to meet the great leader who joined him there. {Bush, depending on how you accent it, means “nothing” in Arabic, and “Shrub” in Spanish.} So, nothing met the father of the feather and pronounced victory. If the father of the feather’s daughter [actually, it’s a neuter noun so could either mean daughter of son, but Abu is usually reserved for the arrival of the first son], well, um, the mother would be Um Risha, or Mother of the feather. Quite a biological breakthrough.]

Anyway, the Decider gave a speech to praise the father of the feather, but he was killed just 6 hours before speech time, so one more draft had to be written {a total of at least 30). He should have stayed in Jordan.

I have noticed a lot of nonsense by Gulliani over the moveon.org commercial that made a pun on the General’s name. It was stupid, I admit, because no one is more of an expert on puns that can be made on their own name than the person himself. In fact, about 70% of people I know have changed their names, just for the variety. Still, I do not think attacking it qualifies someone to tackle the problems discussed below.

Now, it costs about 3 to 5 billion dollars a week to support the occupation in Iraq. I could do quite a lot with just one billion.

Well, below we have essays on Jews getting fed up with Israel, the betrayal of Petraes, and a Peoples report on Iraq.

Tom Dispatch

posted 2007-09-13 15:07:59

Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews

I often think of the letters that come into the Tomdispatch email box as

the university of my later life -- messages from around the world,

offering commentary, criticism, encouragement, but mainly teaching me

about lives (and versions of life) I would otherwise know little or

nothing about. Then again, the Internet has a way of releasing

inhibitions and, from time to time, the Tomdispatch email box is also a

sobering reminder of the mindless hate in our world -- of every sort,

but sometimes of a strikingly anti-Semitic sort, letters that are wildly

angry and eager, above all, to shut down or shut up commentary or debate

of any sort.

It's ironic, then, that the threat of sparking such "anti-Semitism," as

well as charges of being functionally anti-Semitic, have been used for a

long time in this country as a kind of club to enforce, within the

Jewish community, an exceedingly narrow range of correct opinion on

Israel and its behavior in the world. In recent months, such attacks

from within the Jewish establishment seem to have escalated whenever any

professor or critic steps even slightly out of line, and the recent

controversial book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

by

John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt has caused a little storm of

consternation. Tony Karon, who runs the always provocative Rootless

Cosmopolitan website, suggests that these

attacks may not be what they seem, that the need to turn back every

deviation from Jewish orthodoxy may actually reflect a loosening of

control within the political world of American Jews, and a new opening,

a Jewish /glasnost/. /Tom/

Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?

*Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel*

By Tony Karon

First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't

help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant

right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love

it is its D.I.R.T. list

-- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as

the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And

that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks --

Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The

Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen

to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish

traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us

who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to

that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering

somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against

others -- as "self-haters" is not unfamiliar to me.

In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish

service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the

Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's

Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was

"Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply

embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be

something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli

raid on Lebanon.

By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South

Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an

active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an

interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that

Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important

ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo.

Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black

people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation

in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many

other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were

peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of

citizenship.

Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory,

sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called

a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating

Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of

that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from

Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to

warn others off expressing similar views.

What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other

than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it --

is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many

of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're

trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to

keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is:

"Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a

cast of thousands..."

*A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent*

The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list

may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more

mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The

Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past

half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters

speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of

making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it

becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in

the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to

criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian

persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in

the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a

sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche

exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very

personification of Jewishness.

So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the

Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president

Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh

criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in

their intent."

Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham

House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with

apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism." Says Shepherd

: "Of course one

can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when

the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and

the Nazis, using terms such as ?bantustans.' None of these people,

of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of

anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the

kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level

as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire

people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."

I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but

offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of

suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South

Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like

apartheid South Africa? What then?

Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label

on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews

with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds --

have chosen /not/ to live.

Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life

simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies

as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and

the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million

Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to

question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish

establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles

Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal

organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman

revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary

findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American

Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would

consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal

tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and

only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of

those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt

comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.

As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote

Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed

dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They

believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be

reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more

integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and

grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen

,

reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what

it means to be a Jew."

Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the

absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to

"defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what

I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of

Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I

arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to

find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive,

cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging

ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then,

it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate

a binational state for

Israelis and Palestinians or for /Washington Post/ columnist Richard

Cohen to write

that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a

well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable,

but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of

Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare

and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was

the angry renunciation

of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.

And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the

online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in

the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun ,

Americans for Peace Now , and the Israel

Policy Forum , among others, to

anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name

and Jewish Voices for Peace

, had not yet taken shape.

Indeed, there was no Haaretz online English edition

in which the reality of Israel was being

candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed

heretical in much of the U.S. media.

Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like

"Birthright Unplugged," which

aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program,"

funded by Zionist groups and the

government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young

Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the

State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S.

to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay

on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli

human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see

another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and

by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)

Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist

establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the

American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others --

to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded.

It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was

originally a /Jewish/ movement -- the majority of European Jews

before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for

a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in

Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe

had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that

was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there

was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of

Zion /before/ the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of

course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).

Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands

of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.

But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited

above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was

reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was

the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist

movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and

ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The

majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with

our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures

,

some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are

now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the

Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.

*The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice*

Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to

Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency --

apparently oblivious to the irony of its own actions -- has

complained to

Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to

Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging

them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the

Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are

beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior.

If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of

"anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's

hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the

same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most

fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among

American Jews in particular.

That much has been clear in the response

to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's

controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

,

which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and

absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange

on the NPR show /Fresh Air/, Walt was at pains to stress

, as

in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish

lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing

political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion,

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued

exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were

effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is

nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American

Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the

American Jewish community you can increasingly hear

open echoes of

Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts

are good for Israel.

But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an

emerging Jewish /glasnost/. Of course, like any break with a

long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent

has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein

-- the noted Holocaust scholar

and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul

University in a campaign of vilification

based precisely on the idea that

fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" --

could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of

the ultranationalists is weakening.

So, too, could Joel Kovel . After all, he

found his important book /Overcoming Zionism/ pulled by his American

distributor ,

the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge.

(This decision was later reversed, but it may have long-term

consequences for the distributor's relationship with Kovel's

publisher, the British imprint Pluto.)

Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a

Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on

Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism

as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks

on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow

has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic

born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet

Union with the actual /glasnost/ moment, this is a process, once

started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.

Last year, a very cranky academic

by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish

advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a

flurry of attention by

warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt

and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental

criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."

"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state

respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable

to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and

genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of

delegitimizing Israel."

In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those

critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic.

Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of

genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former

Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write

, in reference to

Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes

difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval

National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the

here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis

expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of

Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective

realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at

either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli

writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to

"delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.

Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering

Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper /Haaretz/, was slated

to speak to the British Zionist Federation ? and then, at the last

minute, his speech was canceled .

The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an

apartheid state with different status for different communities."

(While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to

accept

the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli

counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank.

Former education minister Shulamit Aloni

,

for example, or journalist Amira Hass

use

the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to

Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth

movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel,

warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government

was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The

population there, they told us, would never be given the right to

vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put

it, "an apartheid situation.")

Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw

the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that

Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has

deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other

contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them

uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the

A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a

visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize

winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu

,

for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and

you know the answer you're going to get.

Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who

place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their

faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.

In an earlier commentary

,

perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:

"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a

marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish

minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is

this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive

for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer

security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to

be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns

out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down

to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt

lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their

enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more

Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their

children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are

honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."

Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal

justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition. Growing up in

apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes,

there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of

my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And

if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish

impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not

only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles

in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims,

Hindus, and others.

Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we

live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests

it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to

others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of

Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends

instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical

anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are

in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's

relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its

ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its

citizens, but to those it has hurt.

/Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains his own

website, Rootless Cosmopolitan , where he

comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to Jewish identity

issues. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" was Stalin's euphemistic pejorative

for "Jew" during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but

Karon, who grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in

Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term as a badge of

honor. Karon was a teenage activist in the left-Zionist Habonim

movement before finding his way into the big tent of the

anti-apartheid liberation struggle, an experience that prompted him

to re-imagine what it meant to be a Jew in the world./

Copyright 2007 Tony Karon

*ZNet | Anti War*

*Iraq: The People's Report*

*by United for Peace and Justice -- UFPJ; UFPJ

; September 12,

2007*

*For Immediate Release: *September 10th, 2007

*Contact: *Sue Udry: 301-325-1201; Leslie Cagan: 212-868-5545;

Erik Leaver: 202-787-5240

With General Petraeus claiming significant progress in Iraq,

United for Peace and Justice, the largest national coalition of

peace organizations with some 1,400 member groups, deplores his

misleading and cynical report to Congress. The "surge" of U.S.

forces in Iraq has not led to security, stability or peace. In

fact, this past summer was the deadliest since the war began in

2003. General Petraeus' recommendation to withdraw one Marine

unit this month and a bridge combat team sometime in December

comes nowhere near ending the U.S. military engagement in Iraq.

United for Peace and Justice has produced an assessment of the

situation on the ground in Iraq that contrasts sharply with the

comments from General Petraeus, which barely mention the impact

the U.S. war and occupation has on the lives of the people of Iraq.

Leslie Cagan, National Coordinator of UFPJ, says, "We feel it is

essential to provide a true picture of what the shattered lives

of the 25 million Iraqis look like today. For four years now we

have been hearing the same false claims that the U.S. is making

important gains, but they have never been true. Prepared by

Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver, researchers at the Institute for

Policy Studies, /*Iraq: The People's Report*/, takes an honest

look at what this war has cost the people in Iraq and our

communities here in the U.S."

*/Iraq: The People's Report/* notes that:

* Two million Iraqis have fled the war to seek hard-to-find

refuge in neighboring countries, and an additional two

million Iraqis have been forced by war fueled violence to

flee their homes and remain displaced and homeless inside

Iraq.

* Most Iraqis have electricity for only about five hours a

day, clean water remains scarce for most and unobtainable

for many, and Iraq's oil production remains a fraction of

what it was before war.

* Occupation, war and violence have so decimated the Iraqi

economy that unemployment has reached up to 40% and higher

and underemployment an additional 10% or more.

In spite of the appalling conditions that most Iraqis now find

themselves living in, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker

are trying to convince Congress that the situation is improving.

"We hope that Congress will remember that these small

improvements in a horrific situation have cost U.S. taxpayers

over $480 billion so far, with no end in sight," remarked Sue

Udry, Legislative Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice.

"That is $480 billion that we could not spend here at home to

rebuild the Gulf Coast, improve education or healthcare and more."

The People's Report also notes that:

/The failure of the Iraq War has also meant a huge cost to our

democracy at home. We have paid an enormous price: in the deaths

and shattered minds and bodies of our young soldiers; in the

threats to an economy ravaged by billion-dollar bills to pay for

an illegal war; in the destruction of so much of our

infrastructure, security and social fabric because of human and

financial resources diverted to Iraq; and in the shredding of

our Constitution and civil rights as fear becomes a weapon in

the hands of the Bush administration aimed at Congress, the

courts and the people of this country. /

United for Peace and Justice has been working throughout the

summer to pressure members of Congress to take a firm stand

against the White House. "General Petraeus' testimony today

illustrates once again the urgency of congressional action,"

observed Leslie Cagan, UFPJ's National Coordinator. "Congress

has the constitutional right and moral obligation to use the

power of the purse to force a complete withdrawal from Iraq. The

people of this country are looking to them to take leadership in

this effort."

Sue Udry, UFPJ's Legislative Coordinator, said, "In the weeks

ahead, the pressure on Congress to rein in the White House will

accelerate. The public knows this policy is a failure and wants

a rapid change of course."

The full report from United for Peace and Justice is available

for download in two formats:

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/peoplesreport.pdf

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/people_s_report_11by17.pdf

Imploding housing and financial mess,fed pumping in liquid to keep fears

at bay,Bush with little time in office left.Con agenda,last page.

Cheney Orders Media To Sell Attack On Iran

Fox News, Wall Street Journal instructed to launch PR blitz for upcoming

military strike

Paul Joseph Watson

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Dick Cheney has ordered top Neo-Con media outlets, including Fox News

and the Wall Street Journal, to unleash a PR blitz to sell a war with

Iran from today, according to Barnett Rubin, the highly respected

Afghanistan expert at New York University.

The New Yorker magazine reports that Rubin had a conversation with a

member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him

that "instructions" had been passed on from the Office of the

Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week

after Labor Day.

"It will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall

Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual

suspects, writes Rubin, "It will be heavy sustained assault on the

airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which

a war can be maintained. Evidently they don?t think they?ll ever get

majority support for this?they want something like 35-40 percent

support, which in their book is ?plenty.?

Rubin subsequently confirmed with a second source that the propaganda

coup had been launched and the individual, another top Neo-Con at a

major think tank, had this to say about it: ?I am a Republican. I am a

conservative. But I?m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.?

(Article continues below)

An organized mass media campaign to propagandize for a military strike

on Iran mirrors exactly what happened in late 2002 in preparation for

the invasion of Iraq and would be seen as par for the course in

anticipation of an attack that presidential candidate Ron Paul amongst

other expert observers fear will take place within 12 months.

President Bush met directly with talk radio idealogues at the White

House last year to push the Neo-Con agenda. Sean Hannity, Laura

Ingraham, Neal Boortz and Michael Medved (pictured below) amongst others

all attended and received their talking points straight from the

President's mouth.

Considering the history of the sordid "fake news" scandal, where

millions of dollars were used to create pre-packaged government press

releases disguised as news, along with the Armstrong Williams farce, it

should surprise no one that such "instructions" are now being handed out

to prepare the public for another military invasion.

The issuance of orders for Neo-Con mass media arms to push for an

assault on Iran also puts the U.S. on red alert for a terror attack,

whether real or manufactured, which Dick Cheney has already promised

will immediately be blamed on Iran no matter who the real culprits are.

On August 1st, 2005 the American Conservative reported that Cheney had

tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a

contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type

terrorist attack on the United States. The plan involved a massive air

strike on Iran which included the use of nuclear weapons.

The publication reported that, "The response is not conditional on Iran

actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the

United States," meaning that any such attack will immediately be blamed

on Iran and any evidence to the contrary will be buried.

The London Times reported on Sunday that the Pentagon had finalized

plans for a 3 day blitz designed to annihilate 1,200 targets in Iran and

destroy the country's military capability.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon

Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for

?pinprick strikes? against Iran?s nuclear facilities. ?They?re about

taking out the entire Iranian military,? he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a

conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the

US military had concluded: ?Whether you go for pinprick strikes or

all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the

same.? It was, he added, a ?very legitimate strategic calculus?.

Rhetoric regarding a potential military attack on Iran has heated again

over the past week, with President Bush having warned of the risk of a

"nuclear holocaust" if the country was allowed to acquire nuclear

capability.

In a speech last Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that a

diplomatic push by the world's powers to rein in Tehran's nuclear

program was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of

Iran."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad subsequently stated that a U.S.

attack on Iran was "impossible" due to U.S. troops being tied down in

Afghanistan and Iraq. Yesterday, he claimed to have proof that the U.S.

were not planning to attack, bizarrely citing his mathematical skills as

an engineer and faith in God.

A January poll by Ipsos found that 40% of Americans thought it likely

that Iran would be attacked by the end of the year. The U.S. has

stationed three aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, the Nimitz, a

nuclear-powered carrier, John C. Stennis Strike Group, and Dwight D.

Eisenhower, a relief carrier.

The U.S. government is openly funding and supporting the activities of

Jundullah, a Sunni Al-Qaeda terrorist group formerly headed by the

alleged mastermind of 9/11, to carry out bombings in Iran and

destabilize Ahmadinejad's power base.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard military was recently declared to be a

terrorist organization by the White House, another ominous sign that an

attack is being readied.

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