Reply #57: US-IRAN: New War Rhetoric Undercuts Iraq Talks [View All]

[Octafish]

People should be listening to the crazy warmonkey and his enablers.
With all the hogwash in the information environment, they may not be able to hear.
The message: Bush and his cronies act like they WANT Chimpageddon.

US-IRAN: New War Rhetoric Undercuts Iraq Talks

Analysis by Trita Parsi*

WASHINGTON, Jun 12 (IPS) - U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman's call for cross-border raids into Iran appears to be the culmination of a two-week long campaign by proponents of war to put the military option centre-stage in the U.S. debate over Iran once more.

The immediate effect of reigniting the let's-bomb-Iran discussions is the undercutting of the recently initiated U.S.-Iran talks over Iraq, which in turn will cause the military confrontation with Iran to be viewed in a new light.

Senator Lieberman out-hawked the George W. Bush administration on the television news show "Face the Nation" this past Sunday by calling for "aggressive military action against the Iranians," including "a strike over the border into Iran." Repeating by now all but abandoned accusations by the Bush administration of Iranian complicity in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the Connecticut senator's comments caused a storm in the U.S. media Monday. Suddenly, the military option against Iran was once more at the centre of the U.S.'s Iran debate.

Earlier that week, Israel's hawkish trade minister and former defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, had visited Washington to hold strategic discussions regarding Iran's nuclear programme with Bush administration officials. According to press reports, Mofaz urged the United States to give diplomacy with Iran an expiration date of the end of the year, after which the military option would be exercised.

"Sanctions must be strong enough to bring about change in the Iranians by the end of 2007," Mofaz reportedly told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. According to Channel 2 News in Israel, Mofaz went on to declare to Rice that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities by year's end if diplomacy and sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to suspend its enrichment activities.

A week prior to Mofaz' visit to Washington, Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative editor-at-large of Commentary, published a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "The Case for Bombing Iran." Comparing Iran's fire-brand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler, Podhoretz accused Iran of seeking to "overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism."

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38133

*Dr. Trita Parsi is the author of "Treacherous Alliance -- The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States" (Yale University Press, 2007). He is also president of the National Iranian American Council (http://www.niacouncil.org/).

Maybe we can make like the "Whos" Horton heard.