..”Don’t let them take us to a new war.”  

Some have observed, “a terrible calamity is just around the corner.” We now see Iran, Israel and the U.S. are at a cross-road. Will they take the road to the right, to the left or double back?

We are being led by broken men, ‘a couple of second-raters’ reads one of the Editorials in The Guardian, UK, (Sunday Edition):

“Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad have lost face at home; now others must forge peaceful settlements in the Middle East.”

And by extension, do include Ehud Olmert, his popularity is barely at double digits. He too has lost face at home and is ratcheting up against Iran – saying just this past week he will move to prevent Iran’s nuclear program.

From The Guardian, UK,

“They’re broken men, so don’t let them take us to a new war.”

“Make no mistake: this a much more dangerous situation than Iraq and it is unfolding on the watch of a couple of second-raters.

It is true that few nations that have been more estranged over the last quarter of a century, but with the stakes so high, it seems extraordinary that America has no representation in Tehran and almost no contact except through the Swiss embassy.

As Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times reminded us last week, in 2003, America rebuffed an advance made by the Iranians through the Swiss, which, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, suggested the two countries work together on the capture of terrorists in Iraq, stabilising the country after invasion and coming to an agreement on uranium enrichment as well as the financing of Hizbollah and Hamas.

The offer, made almost two years before Ahmadinejad was elected, was layered with insincerity and bluff, but professional diplomats are used to this. At least the two sides would have been talking and Tehran could have been held to account for some of the things that have been going on in Iraq.

But the situation is not beyond hope. The West must realise that if a first strike takes place we have lost. Whatever is destroyed in Iran, the Iranians will come back and produce a bomb that they may feel more entitled to use. The clash of civilisations predicted by neocon academics for years will have moved a step closer to dominating the 21st century at the very moment when all civilisation needs to concentrate on the multiple threats presented by climate change.”

Down this road we go – ‘To Teheran by way of Baghdad’ observes a second editorial. From The Independent, UK

The endgame in Iraq that can’t succeed: Half the military establishment believes that an attack on Iran is likely.”

“There was not a chink of light between the British and American positions in Iraq, said a White House spokesman on Wednesday night. No, indeed. What there is is growing darkness. The US President has announced a “new strategy” to send 20,000 more US troops to Iraq.

No one knows whether the Senate will grant the money, what the extra troops are actually for and how long they’ll be there, or whether the British are part of it or embarked on a withdrawal all of our own.

So confused is the discussion that there is now a whole new theory that the additional American forces are not there to bring security to Iraq at all. They’re there to face off Iran for the moment when Washington, or more likely Jerusalem, decides to launch the bombers.
[.]

Iran is the spectre that haunts the Middle East at the moment. Almost every comment from Washington suggests that the White House sees it as the greatest single threat to its policy in the region, and that neither the US nor, even less, Israel will sit by and let Iran continue on its nuclear course, peaceful or otherwise.

Every diplomatic and military action also suggests that the US is looking to face down the regime in Tehran by erecting a coalition of Sunni countries around and suppressing the Shia groups within Iraq which are held to be under Tehran’s control.

It may be pure and fanciful speculation, but it has to be said that half the military and political establishment believes that an attack on Iran is likely.
[.]

Everything is connected?  Really! Everything? The signs are everywhere.

We have the neo-cons banging the drums for a new war. Why not two?

There’s the disinformation, as our own Steven D observed in his front page article today, and there’s the shameless direct ad campaigns. That’s surely something new. Who would’ve thought, an ad campaign to set up a war! Who is behind that?

But, hold on a minute.

We are now hearing from other Israelis, that ‘Israel’s image needs an extreme makeover.’ or ‘A Brand-New Approach’ – not a new policy approach but a re-branding – as in hiring on Madison Avenue advertising consultants.  

There is also another view that “Israel needs to get out of Bush’s Back seat.”  

‘Olmert is seen as outsourcing Israel’s strategic decisions to a bungling Bush.’

the money graphs:

“Olmert appears to be outsourcing Israel’s strategic decision-making to a White House that has repeatedly demonstrated a catastrophic failure to grasp the realities of the region.

Betting Israel’s security on the ability of the Bush crowd to transform the strategic landscape in the Middle East is rather like leaving a party in the backseat of an SUV whose driver is cradling a bottle of tequila and slurring his words as he rebuffs offers by more sober friends to take the wheel.”

Warning signs have been there for months: When Olmert stumbled into Lebanon last summer, he may have been expecting Washington to play the role of the big brother who would drag him, still swinging, off Hassan Nasrallah, having demonstrated his “deterrent” power without getting himself into too much trouble.

Instead, he found Washington impatiently egging him on, demanding that he destroy Nasrallah to prove a point to the Shiite leader’s own big brother, and holding back anyone else who tried to break up the fight. As neocon cheerleaders like Charles Krauthammer made plain, the administration was disappointed at Olmert’s wimpish performance.

Clearly, the game changed when the United States blundered into Iraq, believing it could transform the region through the application of its overwhelming military force. Sober minds in Washington have concluded that Iraq is lost, but Bush is having none of it – as he made clear last week,[.]

Speaking of brands. I thought it was a JD.  But seriously, one can only guess they’ve read Harold Meyerson’s piece:

“Hedgehog Follies”

“Bush, in all matters pertaining to his war, is a one-trick president who keeps doing the same thing over and over, never mind that it hasn’t worked… He’s a delusional hedgehog who knows one thing that isn’t so.”

Setting up the conflagration: Escalation Against Iran before the bombs drop:

The Pieces Are Being Put in Place – Col. Sam Gardiner

On the brink is Lebanon, destabilized by  Bush’s egging on Olmert.

A Peace that money can’t buy

“We ignore at our peril a new and terrible page opening as the world blithely looks on,”-Robert Fisk

Why is the U.S Arming Fatah against Hamas?– Christopher Brauchli – because ‘When in doubt, start another civil war.’

Question of the Day: What is the U.S. role in the region?

This from TAP: “Trapped in an Iron Cage.”– Jo-Ann Mort interviewed Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinians’ decades struggle for statehood, the failure to establish a state in 1948.

In a nutshell:

And the U.S. role in the region?

“Everything is now connected.”

“It’s not just Palestinians and Israelis … it’s much bigger than that now, for good or for ill. It involves the Lebanese crisis, which is in a critical state now … The Syrians don’t just want something in Lebanon or to have influence in the Palestinian arena; they also want to do a deal in Iraq.”

“The Iranians don’t just want to have influence in Iraq; they also want an end to American hostility. …The problem with that is it requires a 180 degree shift on behalf of people whose feet, as far as I can tell, are entrenched in solid concrete. By that I mean the president and vice president. [Deputy National Security Advisor] Elliot Abrams hasn’t gone anywhere. One can go on and on….”

“That to me is the $64,000 question, which is not to say that I think that the U.S. is key to everything. But I really do think that if the U.S. plays a negative role in two or three [situations] — let’s say Lebanon or Iran, or Iraq, let’s say they refuse to talk to the Sunni insurrectionists or they refuse to give Iran what it sees as its due or they refuse to … allow Israel to talk to Syria — it’s a real problem. Because the hip bone is connected to the backbone, etc.”

So is everything connected?  ‘Yes, more than you know’ say some Israelis – bringing to light this most damning charge: that Israel’s ratcheting up on Iran is a campaign that has nothing to do with nukes.

It is  a planned distraction, says Ilan Pappe, (professor at Haifa University), during an interview on his book: ‘Ilan Pappe and the Nakba Deniers’ -“The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:”

A book that shines 10,000 candles:

Excerpt from one review: John Whitbeck, an international lawyer from South Africa.

“For anyone who possesses a strong stomach and an equally strong desire to know the truth, I strongly recommend Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s new book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, which makes painstakingly and painfully clear the extent to which the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homes and homeland between 1947 and 1949 (an expulsion absolutely essential to create a “Jewish state” in a country where, in 1947, the population was still 70% Muslim and Christian and these non-Jews still owned 94% of the land) was meticulously planned, programmed and documented, ruthlessly carried out and, thereafter, efficiently covered up, sanitized, erased from minds and memories and, to the extent necessary, denied.

Pappe also makes clear that the cleansing spirit and cleansing practices have continued ever since, with public discussion in Israel of the “demographic threat” posed by those Palestinians still remaining in Palestinian never more openly conducted and with a recent poll showing 68% of Israeli Jews in favor of expelling all Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Unfortunately, this book, published in England (and available from amazon.com), is highly likely to go unreviewed and largely unnoticed in the United States, a country where objective historical truth is much less popular than “revealed truth” and pure fantasy and where the Israel-First Lobby starts with a distinct home-field advantage in pursuing its successful efforts to convince American public opinion that American interests and values are identical to Israeli interests and values and to make American foreign policy and America’s wars indistinguishable from Israeli foreign policy and Israel’s wars. [.]

In addition, a significant proportion of the American population embraces a perverted interpretation of Christianity which ignores the humane message of Jesus Christ and the Golden Rule and focuses the devotions of its adherents not on God but, rather, on “God’s Chosen People”, through whose success in ethnically cleansing Palestine and provoking cataclysmic warfare these so-called “Christians” hope to achieve their personal, selfish “rapture” and “salvation”.[.]

Unless we are saved by an Impeachment of Bush – book mark this link for a fictional read over the book salon at Firedoglake “The United States v. George W. Bush, et al– we have two more years of bungling Bush, so we look ahead to his successor to clean up this mess.

Not much hope here. Silence is golden. Why should our presidential candidates seek anointment and be vetted by others?

“In a crowded field of presidential hopefuls, one would think the campaign trail begins in…”

New Hampshire? No.
Iowa? No.
Wisconsin? No.
North Carolina? No.

Where then?  

Try Israel

[As] “the cardboard cut-out presidential wannabes trek to Israel for acceptance, bending over backwards to parrot the Likudnik line on Iran, we turn to Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University. Pappe was recently interviewed by Today’s Zaman, a Turkish web site. Going after Iran, Pappe insists, has nothing to do with nukes. Instead, it has everything to do with the Zionist project, i.e., the task of dispossessing Palestinians of their land and inflicting privation upon them.

“Israel has its own plan for imposing its will and this is in Palestine,” Pappe told Ali Cimen. “It wishes unilaterally to annex large parts of the areas it occupied in 1967 and to imprison the Palestinians in small Bantustans and by that destroy the Palestine will and aspirations. Only two movements, Hezbollah and Hamas, and only two states, Syria and Iran, oppose this scheme.
Israel sees the present American administration and mood as providing a rare window of opportunity to use its military might for destroying the only forces willing to resist its policies in Palestine.”

Naturally, come the election next year, with the American election selectees all lined up neatly in a row like rubber ducks with their Likudnik endorsements in hand, we will hear nothing of this long planned ethnic cleansing campaign, although we will assuredly hear about the threat of Iran, determined to cobble together a nuclear bomb or two and take out Israel in one last suicidal gasp.

Of course, come the election, large areas of Iran may be already smoldering under a dreadful radioactive pall cast by “mini-nukes,” as only a blind, deaf, and dumb person–or one tuned in incessantly to Fox News–is unable to hear the alarm bells screaming, drawing closer from the distance, foretelling a terrible calamity right around the corner.”

And in a side bar, former Democratic senator from South Dakota: “The Hidden Cost of Free Congressional Trips to Israel”

“If Congress is serious about ethics reform, it should not protect the Israel lobby from the consequences. A totally taxpayer-funded travel budget for members to take foreign fact-finding trips, with authorization to be made by committee heads, would be an important first step toward a foreign policy that genuinely serves America.”

Having taken sides, the The U.S. has lost the role of honest broker in the Middle East and along with the Palestinians find themselves and Israelis trapped.

It’s time to end a foreign policy that is crafted by the ‘Israel-First’ Lobby.  We’re not so chosen.

Idredit’s Notes:

  1. Those who are inclined to assail me as anti-Semite, take note as you honor the mezuzah on my door, my family roots are Sephardi.
  2. emphasis where applicable are mine