Letting Israel Lead Us Around by the Potty Wand

by Jeff Huber

Mitt Romney and 51 percent
of his constituency.

The best political joke of the election season so far has been Mitt Romney’s assertion that we should let Israel dictate our Middle East Policy.  Jesus at the temple, Mitt; catch up.  Israel has had undue influence on our policies in that part of the world since its inception in 1948.  Since the neocon/Likudnik cabal came into power with the pseudo-election of young Mr. Bush in 2002, Israel has been leading our Middle East policy around the potty wand. 

The latest evidence of our abject obedience to Israel's interests was the latest two-prong offensive against Iran, the most recent operation in a long propaganda campaign aimed at turning the Persian state into a post-modern incarnation of the Evil Soviet Empire. 

Phase one of Operation Persian Poppycock was a Keystone Kop caper cooked up by the DEA and the FBI that took a drug dealer looking to ditch hard jail time and an alcoholic wife-abusing dead beat and framed them as key conspirators in a Iranian Quds Force scheme to blow a big shot Saudi and an Israeli Embassy to smithereens.  Even though the warmonger friendly New York Times and Washington Post did their very best to peddle the pathetic plot to the proletariat, the story was quickly dismissed by the cognizant majority as bunker mentality bunkum. 

The IAEA Report on Iraq

Less probal to thinking was the grand scale deception the Pentarchy's bull feather merchant marines conducted regarding accusations about Iran’s nuclear intentions centered on the release of the recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  This canard too was supported by the warmongery’s select echo chamberlains, most notably the deplorable David E. Sanger of the New York Times and the irredeemable Job Warwick of the Washington Post, both of whom tumbled tokeses over teakettles to cite the most irresponsible and incendiary sources available on the subject of Iran’s nuclear program, including fake nuclear weapons shaman and prominent AIPAC prostitute David Albright. 

Israeli Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu, who French President Nicholas Sarkozy recently had the moral spine to call a liar in front of U.S. President Barack Obama, took advantage of the mainstream bullhorn to criticize the IAEA report because “only things that could be proven were written” in it, but, “in reality there are many other things that we see."  In reality one needs a microscope and a fertile imagination to see anything provable whatsoever in the IAEA report.   

I cannot tell a lie.  Know what
I mean?  Eh?  Know what I mean?
Wink, wink.   Nudge, nudge.
Say no more.

The crux of the report’s allegations that Iran may yet be working toward building a nuclear weapon rest on its claim that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.  But as my colleague Gareth Porter quickly pointed out, the scientist, identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist at all.  Danilenko, as research of open source documents revealed, has specialized for his entire career in the production of detonation nanodiamonds, which are diamond particles used for industrial and medical purposes including the treatment of cancer.  Iran, coincidentally, has been endeavoring to establish a nanodiamond industry.  Maybe that's the next plank in our Iran policy: they can have a nanodiamond industry as long as they buy their nanodiamonds from us.  

The IAEA could easily have researched the materials that Porter researched and arrived at the same conclusions that he reached.  Considering the report’s predictably profound impact on international relations, one might think that the IAEA would have to taken as much trouble as Porter took to get its facts straight.  But one would be sadly mistaken, and one should be furious to find that the IAEA chose instead to use unchallenged information fed to it by an undisclosed “member nation,” much in the same manner that the New York Times and Washington Post repeat pro-war propaganda channeled though it by unnamed “senior officials.”  I can’t say for sure what that member nation’s identity might be, but I’d bet a dollar of my own money that its first initial stands for “Israel.”  You never know, though.  The member nation’s first initial might also stand for “United.”

Not shockingly, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor any of the rest of the mainstream news foppery has bothered to take the trouble to break the news that their breaking news about the IAEA report was pure unadulterated bull roar. 

This monkey business of accusing Iran of everything from killing our soldiers in Iraq to building nukes to getting dairy goats pregnant without providing a scrap of credible evidence to back the accusations up has been going on since at least 2007 when Mr. Bush’s bunch was looking for excuses to extend the War on Evil in Iraq indefinitely with a “surge” escalation.  If a tenth of shenanigans the Pentarchy has charged Iran with being up to were true, there would be no excuse on earth for not having bombed the entire Persian race into the carrier pigeon mode by now.  

Yet Minister of Peace Leon Panetta wasted little time in calling a news conference and cautioning, oh, no, no, we don’t want to bomb Iran, that might bring on “unintended consequences,” yepper, yup, yup, yo!  It must be that Uncle Leo has reached the age where he's worried about the destination of his immortal soul.  

Iran is not a military threat to anyone—except possibly to itself if it ever were to acquire nuclear weapons.  Nukes in the hands of Iran would be the third-world equivalent of a doomsday machine, and as Doctor Strangelove admonished the Soviet Ambassador in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick, a doomsday machine doesn’t serve its purpose unless you tell everyone that you have it.  Once Iran were to announce its possession of a nuclear arsenal, Fork-Tongued Bebe would have his flying circus turn Iran into a parking lot for our permanent occupation forces in Iraq and the Bananastans.

Despite plain evidence that our Iran policy is the epitome of rogue hegemony, we continue to demonize Iran in accordance with the dictates of the Israelis, who could populate the world’s museums with the galleries' worth of U.S. politicians it has purchased over the years.  I have suggested that if we really want to vouchsafe Israel’s security we should make it the 51^st state.  But Israel isn’t likely to go along with that.  As I mentioned a moment ago, they don’t need formal legislative representation here because they already own our Congress, and if they become a state they’ll have to pay our taxes and obey our laws.

Israel has a much better deal the way things are now.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Hey, I Know What. Let's Lie Some More about Iran.

8 Nov 2011

by Jeff Huber

The Pentarchy* continues to blow smoke about Iran despite its long-standing inability to produce a smoking gun. 

In a 3 November piece for the Middle East Research and Information Project titled “Debunking the Iran ‘Terror Plot,’” my colleague Gareth Porter knocked the bottom out of what little credibility was left of assertions that elements of Iran’s QODs force were behind a plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador and commit other tawdry terrorisms.

Hey, Abbott!  

A still image from Abbot and Costello
Meet the FBI.

The FBI’s cock-eyed case was a keystone caper from creation to conclusion.  A narcotics seller turned DEA informant was dope-dealing his way out of a long prison sentence by dangling a hook in front an Iranian-American named Mansour J. “Scarface” Arbabsiar, a middle-aged alcoholic shipwreck best known for his unreliability, his slovenliness, his business and relationship failures and his limited ability to discriminate between perception and reality. 

A brigade of Jack Bauer wannabes in DEA, the FBI and other Justice Department booby hatcheries decided to make their careers by trumping up a fairy tale of evil deeds and the evil doers who do them for their equally career-minded bosses.  The next thing you knew we had a Tailor of Panama/Our Man in Havana scenario where a head of state, in this case young Mr. Obama, made a draconian foreign policy commitment based on the fabrications of subordinates who were blindingly over-ambitious and dazzlingly under-competent. 

The Scarface farce may has dipped back beneath the radar for now, the companion piece of the latest Iran scare stratagem has roared to the forefront.  While Mr. Obama was telling us that he knew for sure the Iranian government was up to infamous infamies because a dope dealer said that an aging drunk said so (and that was good enough for him), he also sprang the news that UN inspectors had new proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, though he didn’t say what that proof was, just like he doesn’t elaborate on the legal arguments he says support his unitary decisions to suspend the Constitution.

Keystone Kondi Klaims the Persians Puke a Peck of Split Pea Soup

Possessed by Dick Cheney or just stoned?

Over the weekend, the usual echo chamberlains launched the second wave of disingenuous accusations regarding Iran’s nuclear intentions.  Ghoulish Condi Rice, one of the most persistent political herpes strains gifted to us by the Bush administration, made an appearance on ABC’s This Week to blab about how Team Obama is undoing all the beautiful wickedness she helped Dark Lord Cheney accomplish during the two-term Bush disaster.  As ever, Condi’s eyes stubbornly focused on a point somewhere above the camera and far, far away, as if somewhere in the sub-language labyrinth of her cognizance she realizes just how full of used horse lunch she is. 

On the subject of Iran, Condi quacked her standard loco litany of invective, stating that, “It’s trying to get a nuclear weapon.”  Condi didn’t offer any proof of her statement, and This Week host Christiane Amanpour, a once credible Middle East correspondent, didn’t push her for any.  It was Amanpour, in fact, who fed Condi her Iran-bash straight line by saying that this week the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is "about to reveal, apparently, more details showing, apparently, that Iran is trying to weaponize.” (My italics).  Christiane had apparently been reading the apparently unrevised anti-Iran propaganda her print colleagues had polluted the information environment with. 

Fredrick Dahl of Reuters filed a Sunday piece that leads with “The U.N. nuclear watchdog is expected this week to issue its most detailed report yet on research in Iran seen as geared to developing atomic bombs.”  Only near the end of the story does Dahl admit that the report "is not believed to contain an explicit assessment that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability” and that a reliable source says the report is unlikely to contain any "smoking guns."   

Dahl notes that although U.S. intelligence agencies stated outright in a 2007 intelligence assessment that Iran had stopped whatever nuclear weapons program it may have had in 2003, “Many conservative experts criticized the 2007 findings as inaccurate and naïve.”  Dahl doesn't mention that those “conservative experts” are the very same ones who cooked the intelligence on Iraq.  Dahl also states that, “U.S. intelligence agencies now believe Iranian leaders have resumed closed-door debates over the last four years about whether to build a nuclear bomb.”  Not until his next paragraph do we learn that “U.S. intelligence agencies” consist of Peter Crail of the Arms Control Association, a subsidiary of the ASAN Institute for Policy Studies, a neoconservative tank thinkery that schmoozes Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent warlords of our Era of Persistent Conflict. 

But the unlimited weight class winner of the Thomas E. Ricks Journalistic Warmongering Award in last Sunday’s round of Iran-related media mendacity was Joby Warwich of the Washington Post.  His headline proclaimed “IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclear capability,”  and his first sentence warned, “Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon.”

Self-designated UN weapons inspector
David Albright. 

You have to actually read the whole story carefully to glean that nobody actually knows what the IAEA report actually says, and that Warwick’s only actual knowledge of the report’s content actually comes from a PowerPoint presentation on it given by David Albright, who Warwick describes as “a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files” but who is actually a posturing AIPAC propaganda peddler who likely had nothing at all to do with the IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities.

R.I.P. Shame  

You hear plenty of talk these days about the decline in American morality, and you mostly hear it from the kind of people who chug the Kool-Aid and snort the glue they get from rabid radio and FOX News.  At blame for the decline of our national virtue, according to the self-appointed keepers of our national ethos, are the standard scapegoats: MTV, web porn, liberal judges, Rachel Maddow and so on.  

What nobody seems willing to own up to is that the most immoral acts committed in the New American Century have been the lies that the hegemon’s leaders told that world that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the abject suffering of untold millions more.  That the lies that support unjust wars keep getting told, and that so many people in our leading institutions continue to help spread them, is the utterly condemning fact of contemporary American culture. 

We haven’t had a firm foothold on the moral high ground since Pearl Harbor.  We started slipping down the slope around the time of the Dresden massacre.  At this point we’re so from being Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” that I doubt we’ll ever gain the wisdom and enlightenment that we should have possessed before we ascended to the role of sole global superpower.

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.”  Sanger and sidekick William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great.  Caesars.  Ghost.  What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery.  That should have been the story’s lead sentence.  It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions.  Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter bottoms when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy and hence put their careers with the Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.  

Quadruple Shame!


By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of. 

More Update: Hooray for Gareth Porter!

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger with his investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran.  The title tells it all: "IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the New York Times and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read the analysis of the cooked IAEA report at Moon of Alabama.

I'll have further choice observations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore.  Susan Rice is even word than Condi Rice was.  

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Keystone Kondi's Kwazy Kwestions

As the End of Bush Days draws near, the desperation and insanity of the administration and its neoconservative policies become more and more apparent. One of the most recent examples is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's address to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on June 3, where she once and for all crossed over to the dark side and swore fealty to Lord Cheney's quest to start a shooting war with Iran.

With Horse's Caboose Condi hitched onto the Cheney train, can Armageddon be far behind?

Smart Girl

Condi was never part of the administration's policy team. She was the smart professor gal from Stanford who Cheney and Don Rumsfeld brought aboard to tutor the Bush kid in things like geography and history that he should have learned before he graduated from Yale and Harvard but didn't. Making her National Security Adviser gave her an excuse to be in meetings where she could whisper answers in Bush's ear (which is how he graduated from Yale and Harvard). Sticking Condi in the job also guaranteed Dick and Don wouldn't have to put up with a pesky NSA who actually wanted to influence foreign policy. When the time came to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State, Condi was the perfect choice. They wouldn't have to cut her out of the decision loop they way they cut Powell out. Condi was never in the loop to begin with.

The Goebbels Brigade tried to make her seem like a real player on the world stage for a time. There was talk at one point of putting Condi up for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Rice 2008 urges John McCain to pick Condi as his running mate. At the "Run Condi Run" web site (moonfruit.com, really) you can donate to the organization and buy McCain/Rice 2008 bumper stickers and even order a Condi bobble head doll.

Rumors surfaced in summer of 2007 that suggested Condi and Cheney were locking horns over Iran policy. By October of that year though, when she told Congress that Iran was America's "single greatest challenge," it was clear that she was still Uncle Dick's good little girl.

Good Girl

In her June 3, 2008 speech to AIPAC, Condi began her verbal assault on Iran with the standard neoconservative misquote of a remark made by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Then she launched into a fabulist speculation on Iran's nuclear intentions.

Now, we hear Iran’s rulers say that they do not seek a nuclear weapon, only peaceful nuclear energy. Well, then why have they rejected the past offers from the international community for incentives, even cooperation on light water reactors? Why has Iran rejected, thus far, Russia’s offer of uranium enrichment in Russia? Why, as the IAEA’s most recent report shows, is Iran continuing to enrich uranium, in violation of UN Security Council resolutions? Why, as the IAEA also suggests, are parts of Iran’s nuclear program under the control of the Iranian military? And why is Iran continuing to deny international experts full access to its nuclear facilities? Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just hard to imagine that there are innocent answers to these questions. (Applause.)

It's even harder to imagine that we could have a Secretary of State who possesses the intellectual sophistication of a slow child, and yet we do. Ms. Rice seems wholly oblivious to the nature of the competition among today's political entities; the struggle for control of the kind of power it takes to run industries and to transport goods and to transform entire regions of the world.

The international maneuvering revolves around who will control how fast the last of the planet's oil gets used, and how much the rest of us have to pay for it, and who gets to direct the world's transition to alternate energy sources. Hence, the real political leverage Iran has to gain from its nuclear program will come from a viable energy industry, not nuclear weapons. Possessing nuclear weapons would amount to little more than painting a bull's eye on its back. Using one would be tantamount to self-genocide; the retaliation would be the virtual end of the Persian race.

The "past offers from the international community for incentives" regarding cooperation on light water reactors or uranium enrichment performed in another country all involve making Iran dependent on other nations—nations the U.S. can control—in order for its energy industry to function. That's like telling the Iranians they can have a farm as long as they grows their crops in Iowa and use John Deere tractors and American labor and let us keep the seeds for next year, and if they're good little sand tics we'll let them buy some of their own food from us.

We don’t need the IAEA report to "suggest" that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium. Iran isn't keeping it a secret; it has flat out told the whole world it's continuing to enrich uranium. As a party to the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has an "inalienable right" to pursue production of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. For the UN Security Council to have passed a resolution denying Iran of an inalienable right makes the Security Council in violation of the NPT and the resolution itself illegal, so someone please explain to me how Iran is "in violation" of an illegal resolution.

The IAEA report does not suggest that "parts of Iran’s nuclear program [are] under the control of the Iranian military." It says that Iran needs to "clarify procurement and R&D activities of military related institutes and companies that could be nuclear related." (Italics mine.) The distance between those two statements you could drive an armored division through. Military related industries are ideal for providing certain precision components for nuclear fuel refinery. Remember how those aluminum tubes Iraq was supposedly using for a uranium centrifuge turned out to be parts for artillery rockets?

The IAEA report states that in early April the Agency recently "requested Iran to provide, as a transparency measure, access to additional locations related, inter alia, to the manufacturing of centrifuges, R&D on uranium enrichment, and uranium mining and milling." That's all pretty innocent stuff related to the kind of uranium enrichment we already know Iran is doing. Less than two months later, when the report was released, Iran hadn't gotten back to the Agency about taking it to those additional locations. That's not surprising; this was hardly a pressing matter.

A first semester political science student at the most obscure community college in America has sufficient imagination to arrive at these "innocent" conclusions. Why doesn’t our Secretary of State?

Doctor Ditz

Condoleezza Rice, Ph.D. is part of a diplomacy machine that's designed not to work. Demanding Iran give up its uranium enrichment program as a precondition to direct diplomatic talks was a head fake. Cheney's neocons made Iran an offer it couldn't accept; that way they could say they tried diplomacy even though they really didn't.

The goal of the Bush regime's foreign policy is to promote conflict, not avoid it. The neoconservatives desire nothing more ardently than to create a second Cold War with our old adversaries Russia and China, whose client state Iran is assuming the role of Eastern Europe. Rounding out the lineup for round two, Venezuela is stepping in for Cuba and Iraq is substituting for West Germany.

The neo-communists won't engage us in an arms race this time around. They'll let us be the ones who pour national treasure down a sand dune on fantastic weapons that can't win the kinds of wars we fight until we're bankrupt. One commonly hears these days that we're playing checkers and the Russians and Chinese are playing chess. A more ironically apt analogy is that they have graduated to duplicate bridge while we continue to play war.

Even more ironic is that we won the first Cold War because our economic model was superior, but in the second Cold War we're likely to find that the neocoms have become better capitalists than we are.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) is on sale now.

...And Keep Lying Some More...

By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Iran and Time

The mainstream media’s coverage of Iran continues to suck. Joe Klein of TIME magazine just posted a short piece that mentioned “the discovery of the nuclear reactor at Qom, a secret facility that seems to have been built for research into weaponization. The Russians were as surprised by this as everyone else was.”

The nuclear facility he’s referring to is not a reactor; it’s a uranium enrichment plant. Perhaps Klein doesn’t understand the difference. Not everybody was surprised by the plants existence. We have known about its existence for years. The Iranians reveled its existence, months before it was required to under the Non-Proliferaton treaty, and it has given the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) full access to inspect it, and the IAEA says there is “nothing to be worried about.” IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei calls the site “a hole in a mountain.”

A story making the rounds of the echo chamber says that Iran’s disclosure of the Qom facility “raises questions about the existence of other such facilities.” What a crock of poppycock. We’d know if there were other sites like the one at Qom the same way we know about the one at Qom. Our spy satellites are rather good at picking up those sorts of things.

President Obama says “we are running out of time” for Iran to agree to the dope deal where they give Russia most of their uranium and Russia gives it to France. Obama and the rest of his witless security team need to take a time out. They intend to sit on the decision of whether or not to re-re-escalate the war in Afghanistan for December. Iran’s decision on what to do about their nuclear energy program is every bit as important to them as our decision about Afghanistan is, arguably even more important. We can probably afford to make a few more mistakes in Afghanistan and still remain the world’s sole superpower. A nuclear energy program is Iran’s only future. If they blow things now by giving up their right to refine their own uranium, they’re a bowl full of Shemps. It only makes sense for them to take their time figuring out their next step.

One hears that Iran is unstable, that its government and institutions are fractioned. One can also make that assessment of the United States. Our right-left, red-blue national debate has become so derisive as to be the laughingstock of the rest of the planet. America has become two countries. It’s as if we never fought the Civil War. Maps of red and blue states look nearly identical to pre-Civil War maps of slave states and territories and free states and territories. (That tells you something about the Rush Limbaugh/FOX News crowd, doesn’t it?)

We’ve heard a lot about how Iran’s latest election was stolen by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad though we really know nothing about that election. We know for sure that our puppet in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, stole two elections in matter of months, and we’re calling him a “legitimate” head of state. Who does Karzai think he is, George W. Bush? The upstart!

Ahmadinejad has said a lot of unfortunate things, probably for consumption in Iran and in the Muslim world, mostly about Israel, most of which has been misinterpreted and misquoted. But he’s hardly a Hitler, and he’s not the real power in Iran anyway. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is. (Khamenei has also had Agmadinijad’s president job, so he knows how power works in Iran.)

Iran has good reason to mistrust the west, especially American and Israel. We’ve been threatening to attack them for a long time. It’s little wonder that they built an enrichment facility in cave to protect it from being bombed, though that probably did them little good. We’re developing a new bunker buster bomb, a non-nuclear, 30,000-pound, precision-guided kahuna that contains more than ten times the explosive power or our present bunker busters, and our present bunker busters can bust the living daylights out of bunkers.

Iran wisely refuses to give up its “inalienable right” to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and it would be insane to give up its prerogative to refine uranium. Iran’s desire to have a nuclear energy industry reflects a desire on its part to emerge as a regional economic power. We need to get used to the idea that emerging nations want to, uh, emerge, and start partnering with them.

Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Our intelligence agencies, despite pressure from the neoconservative cabal, have certified as much, as has the International Atomic Energy Agency. There is serious question as to whether it ever had a nuclear weapons program at all.

Iran is doubtless keep a card up its sleeve, or is at least pretending to be, but none of the accusations made against it—from nuclear weapons ambitions to arming militants in Iraq and Afghanistan—have ever been backed up with genuine evidence.

Yes, we need to hold the Iranians’ feet to the fire, and we need to make them prove they’re not working toward building nuclear weapons, but we don’t need to rant and rave about them.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Has Iran Stopped Nuking Its Wife?

Keystone Kondi is back in the news. This time she's helping her boss make boo noise about what the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) calls Iran's "relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons."

On January 8, speaking at an AIPAC conference, Condi said that the Iranians, "continue to inch closer to a nuclear weapon." This despite the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate finding (.pdf here) that stated, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Condi and AIPAC and the rest of the neoconservative universe have treated the November NIE the way it treats all inconvenient facts; they've ignored it. And once again, the mainstream media, most notably the New York Times, have been their willing partner in crime.

Our Gang

That the NIE even grants Iran ever had a nuclear weapons program at all sounds like the doings of nefarious manipulation. We've seen time and again the consequences of Dick Cheney's influence. When the Cheney Gang goes to work in Washington I can hear fibulas cracking clear down here in Virginia Beach.

I've said this again and again but it demands repeating: The Russians didn't begin building Iran's first reactor until fall of 2002. If Iran halted its weapons program in fall of 2003, it had to have been the kind of weapons program a couple of Revolutionary Guard colonels drew up on a bar napkin at the Fort Farsi officers' club. I can imagine that the program halted when a senior mullah—perhaps Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself—called the colonels in for a private chat and made it clear that they would drop their weapons project like a bad habit or go through life trying to function with hooks at the ends of their arms.

Whatever happened, Iran doesn't have an active nuclear weapons program now, but recognizing that reality doesn't serve the neoconservative agenda. Desperate to create a global villain on whom they can lay fault for the failure of their ideology, the Cheney-centric Bush administration bounces back and forth between blaming Iran for American casualties in Iraq and accusing it of wanting to blast Israel to smithereens and of planning to give terrorists a suitcase bomb that can blow up New York City. When one line of demonizing gets derailed, they switch to the other.

Little Rascals

The latest campaign to convince the world that Iran is directly responsible for killing American G.I.s in Iraq started running out of steam in early May when allegedly Iranian weapons captured in the Iraqi city of Karbala turned out not to have come from Iran, and Iranian weapons supposedly captured in Basra never materialized. Then on June 6, historian and journalist Gareth Porter demonstrated in Salon magazine that the main supplier of weapons to Iraqi militants is none other than General David "Pushups" Petraeus.

It was time for the Bush administration to switch back to the mushroom cloud meme. For ammunition, they reached for the May 26 report on Iran by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and for support they turned to their old propaganda ally from the Nigergate affair, the New York Times.

The NYT's May 27 headline read, "Atomic Monitor Signals Concern Over Iran’s Work," and the article, by Elaine Sciolino, was a compendium of distortions, out-of-context citations and bald faced fabulism. Sciolino's worst piece of dissembling was that the report "accused the Iranians of a willful lack of cooperation." The report said nothing of the kind.

Key statements in the report not cited by Sciolino include "All nuclear material at [Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant], as well as the cascade area, remains under Agency containment and surveillance" and "The results of the environmental samples taken at FEP and PFEP indicate that the plants have been operated as declared" and " The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran."

In addition, the IAEA report bears the distinct style of coerced language we've seen in U.S. intelligence reports since the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. There is little doubt that Cheney sideman John Bolton's main job at the UN was to bully everyone on the Security Council into parroting the neocons' Iran narrative. Bolton's successor Zalmay Khalilzad looks more presentable and has better social skills than Bolton, but who doesn't? Like Bolton, Khalilzad was a charter member of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century and is a Cheney liegeman, and he's up to no good at the UN. From the sound of things, the velvet knuckle diplomacy Khalilzad conducts in New York transmits directly to Vienna, where U.S. ambassador to the IAEA Gregory Schulte consistently dittos the administration's propaganda on Iran's nuclear program.

Thus the IAEA's May 26 report gave the administration's spin merchants just enough wiggle room to exploit its concerns about yet unresolved issues, and Condi once again stepped up and did her part to foment fear and loathing of Iran.

In her June 3 AIPAC speech, she asked, "Why has Iran rejected, thus far, Russia’s offer of uranium enrichment in Russia?" and " Why…is Iran continuing to enrich uranium, in violation of UN Security Council resolutions?"

"It’s just hard to imagine that there are innocent answers to these questions," she said, which gives you a fairly accurate idea of just how atrophied Condi's imagination is.

The UN Non-Proliferation Treaty grants its signatories, who include both Iran and the United States, the "inalienable right" to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful energy purposes. If Iran gives up its inalienable right to enrich uranium it will likely never get it back. If the Iranians accept an offer from Russia or the U.S. or anyone else to refine their nuclear fuel for them, they'll never have a truly independent energy industry. Having a nuclear energy industry in which you can't make your own fuel is like having an automobile industry in which you have to make your cars overseas and use overseas steel and overseas labor. All you can do with an auto industry like that is buy your own cars from somebody else.

And since the UN resolution forbids Iran to pursue an inalienable right, is the resolution itself not illegal?

At the end of the day, all the scare talk about Iran getting nuclear weapons is a red herring. Today's global power struggle today is about who gets to squeeze the last dime out of the last drop of oil in the planet, and who controls how much the rest of us have to pay for whatever replaces oil as the new energy source.

If, when the last oil well coughs up dust, Iran has a viable nuclear industry and is a full partner in an axis of energy that includes Russia and China, then Dick and Dubya's big oil buddies will be riding bicycles to work.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) is on sale now.

The Iran Whisperers

As journalist Robert Dreyfuss recently remarked, “The hawks, neoconservatives, and Israeli hardliners are squealing” over the fact that we’re going to have high-level talks with Iran. Neocon poster-child Bill Kristol calls the arrangement “Obama’s message of weakness.” It’s actually a show of strength on Obama’s part; this marks the first time he’s stood up to the American warmongery. Kristol and crew never saw a war they didn’t like though, so they’ll continue to accuse Obama of “appeasing” Iran.

The notion that talking to Iran constitutes appeasement is among the looniest assertions in the neocon bin. The analogy, of course, is Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s, and as with so much of the war mafia’s thinking, it’s an inapt comparison. Hitler had the best army in the world at the time. Today, American spends as much or more on defense as the rest of the world combined, and Iran’s defense budget is less than one percent of America’s. We don’t appease when we offer to talk to nations weaker than we are; we display enlightened exercise of power, which in the pre-Glen Beck era was considered a virtue.

Despite what the Kristol mob would have you believe, neither U.S. intelligence nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found any evidence that Iran presently has an active nuclear weapons program. Reports to the contrary generally come from sources in the Israeli government who lie like other people blink and who, like Kristol, have entirely too much influence on U.S. foreign policy. Rumors in both the mainstream and right-wing press that Iran already knows how to make a nuclear weapon and is just waiting for go-ahead from Grand Ayatollah Kahmeni to slap one together also originated in Israel and they’re bunk. Accusations that Iran is not cooperating with the IAEA are specious as well.

As I’ve said many times, the Iranians would be foolish to acquire a nuclear weapon. It would be tantamount to painting a bull’s eye on their backs. The Israelis (and we) would have a perfect excuse to blow their entire nuclear industry to smithereens. And as I’ve also said many times, with peak oil either here or just around the corner, it’s the energy, not a weapon, that makes Iran’s nuclear program worth having.

Iran’s army can’t operate more than a few miles beyond its borders, its navy can’t do much outside the Persian Gulf and its air force doesn’t have enough spare parts to launch more than a few aircraft at a time.

The Bush administration never proved a single one of its countless accusations that Iran was arming Shiite militias in Iraq. The person single-handedly responsible for arming both sides of the civil war was “Teflon General” David Petraeus.

And oh, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that "Israel must be wiped off the map."

Militarily, Iran isn’t a threat to anyone, and certainly not to Israel, which is too far away from it. Iran’s naval forces might embarrass us in the Gulf if we strike them preemptively for no good reason, but there’s an easy way to avoid that; we don’t strike them preemptively for no good reason. See how simple it is to get along?

The only thing Iran threatens is the big western oil companies’ control of how the world makes its energy transition when the wells run dry. An Iran that can lead the Muslim nations to a new economic paradigm is the scariest thing Dick Cheney’s buddies at Exxon/Mobil and Shell and BP can imagine. The best way to keep energy transition under control is to woo Iran away from Russia and China and make the good old U.S. of A. its new biggest, best-est energy buddy.

A cozy relationship between the U.S. and Iran, however, was not in the best interests of Cheney’s buddies in Israel and the American neoconservative cabal. That’s why Cheney and his minions like John Bolton practiced “make them an offer they can’t accept” diplomacy with Iran. Insisting that Iran stop refining uranium for use in nuclear power plants as a precondition to talks ensured talks would not take place. The Iranians would be insane to agree to such an arrangement.

Their “inalienable right” to develop nuclear technology is guaranteed by their participation in the UN nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Asking them to waive that right in order to negotiate was like telling a poker player he has to hand over his only chip before he can sit at the table. Telling them they can have a nuclear energy industry without refining their own uranium is like telling them they can have an oil industry as long as they use our oil.

Up to now, the Obama administration has stupidly clung to the “zero option” demand. Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has turned out to be every bit the neoconservative handmaiden that Condi Rice was, poured salt on the sore by threatening to extend our “defense umbrella” to protect our friends in the region if Iran didn’t agree to our outrageous pre-conditions. Now it appears that someone in our foreign policy structure has managed to inject a dose of sanity into our foreign policy.

Unfortunately, we’ll need to keep our talks with Iran at a whisper level lest the tea party right threatens to string up them Persian appeasers.

The talks can only be meaningful if the zero option issue goes the way of bellbottom jeans. The Iranians will never agree to it, and as we have discussed, they never should. The real goal of these talks should be to convince the Iranians that they should allow complete transparency of their nuclear energy program that would involve allowing the IAEA and us gynecological access to their nuclear program and, indeed, their entire country.

That level of intimacy will come at a price. Part of that price will be technical support, an offer to become Iran’s nuclear energy sponsor. That’s actually a good deal for us, as it allows us to elbow Russia and China out of the action and brings business to American industries.

The other part of the tab will be a hard bill to fill. If Iran turns slut puppy for us, it will justifiably want security guarantees. We’ll need to extend our defense umbrella not over the rest of the Middle East, but over Iran, and that means chaining Israel to a fire hydrant.

That’s guaranteed to make the hawks, neoconservatives and Israeli hardliners squeal even louder, but tough. It’s high time we stopped letting the piggies drive our foreign policy.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Hooray for Gareth Porter!

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger with his investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran.  The title tells it all: "IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the New York Times and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read the analysis of the cooked IAEA report at Moon of Alabama.

I'll have further choice observations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore.

Jeff

More Distortion on Iran

Last Friday and over the weekend, we saw a telling example of just how dangerous the global information environment has become.

Friday afternoon, over a cold carbonated beverage at the neighborhood watering hole, my retired Army buddy said, "You heard the latest about Iran?"

"No," I said. I hadn't been plugged into a news source for almost an hour, so I was behind the news cycle. "What about Iran?"

"They found yellow cake in one of their nuclear facilities," he said.

I cut happy hour short, went home, and jumped on Google. Here were the first headlines and lead stories I found.

From Reuters:

UN finds new uranium traces in Iran - diplomats
Fri May 12, 2006 11:16 AM BST

U.N. inspectors have discovered new traces of highly-enriched uranium on nuclear equipment in Iran, deepening suspicions Tehran may still be concealing the full extent of its atomic enrichment programme, diplomats said.

The headline in Calcutta, India's Telegraph read "Fresh Iran uranium traces found."

The second paragraph in the Saturday morning Toronto Sun article read, "This revelation is likely to strengthen U.S. arguments that Tehran wants to develop nuclear arms."

The lead paragraphs in the Saturday New York Times piece said:

Atomic inspectors have found traces of highly enriched uranium on equipment linked to an Iranian military base, raising new questions about whether Iran harbors a clandestine program to make nuclear bombs, diplomats said yesterday.
It is the second such discovery in three years of United Nations inspections in Iran. As the Security Council debates how to handle the atomic impasse with Tehran, the finding is likely to deepen skepticism about Iran's claims that its program is entirely peaceful.

But a deeper analysis of the story shows that the sensational war drum banging found in the headlines and lead paragraphs of the world's major papers is utter bosh.

Buried nose deep in the NYT article is the factoid that, "…the traces of highly enriched uranium could be explained by the inadvertent contamination of machinery that Iran obtained abroad."

"Obtained abroad," in Iran's case, mainly means "bought second, third or fourth hand from Pakistan." Pakistan is the most primitive nation on the planet to possess nuclear technology. Many regions of that country look uncivilized even by medieval standards. Indiana Jones' felt hat, leather jacket, bullwhip, and metal canteen would seem like high tech survival gear to the average Pakistani.

So what does it say about the state of any of Iran's advanced technology programs--nuclear or otherwise--that it's buying high tech industrial equipment from Pakistan?

And what's the surprise that any "dual use" equipment Iran bought from Pakistan is contaminated with traces of enriched uranium?

What do we mean by "traces," and what sort of equipment were the traces found in?

The UN's International Atomic Energy Committee (IAEA) discovered the traces through a microscopic particle analysis of swabs taken from vacuum pumps earlier this year. Vacuum pumps that were purchased from, yes, Pakistan.

The diplomats who leaked information about the "new" discoveries and said they were further evidence that Iran may be pursuing development of weapons grade uranium "demanded anonymity in exchange for divulging the confidential information." If you haven't picked up on the code yet, that's shorthand for "diplomats who wanted to spread propaganda and disinformation in the press without having it blow back in their faces when it turns out to be disinformation and propaganda."

At the end of the day, there was nothing new about this "news." IAEA inspectors have found microscopic traces of highly enriched uranium in dual use equipment that Iran bought from Pakistan before. It doesn't prove or disprove anything regarding Iran's intentions toward acquiring nuclear weapons. It's just another muffled tap on the war drum.

But for the grace of timing, this misleading story could have created a firestorm of misdirected reaction. Fortunately, it appears to have taken a nosedive. It wasn't discussed on any of the Sunday political talking point shows that I watched, and hasn't appeared to grow legs in any of the major U.S. newspapers. That could be because it broke on a Friday and was noise jammed by the more sensational stories about the NSA spying program and General Hayden's nomination to head the CIA. It might also just be that the greater mainstream media took a look at the story and said, "Eh, this looks like we're being manipulated, let's not push it too hard." But that's giving the mainstream media a lot more credit than they deserve, given their track record during the Bush regime.

In any case, don't expect "new" Iraq story to disappear for good. If ugly stuff comes out in the Hayden nomination hearings next week, or if Karl Rove gets indicted in the traitor-gate affair, or some equally spectacular item unfavorable to the Bush administration comes to light, stand by for an all out distraction campaign centering on the "threat" from Iran.

And when the story reemerges, logically impaired Americans like my retired Army friend won't recall the nuance about contaminated equipment bought from Afghanistan. They'll be completely swayed by the hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric of the likes of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who just this morning wrote:

As it races to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran makes clear that if there is any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer…

… When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million.

Keep in mind that Krauthammer is more than simply a right wing bull feather merchant who writes ill-tempered articles for some of America's leading publications. As a member of the Project for the New American Century he was one of the influential neoconservatives who, days after on September 11, 2001, exhorted young Mister Bush to "remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq" even if "evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack."

And he and his cohorts will doubtless continue to urge action against Iran even if evidence of their alleged ambition to obtain nuclear weapons never amounts to more than microscopic traces of enriched uranium discovered in contaminated dual use equipment the Iranians bought from Pakistan.

Open Letter to Gary Trudeau

7 Dec. 2011

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq.  The recent IAEA report was the latest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time in regard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock. 

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels have never been substantiated.  The only verifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training and weapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantly Shiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combat gear. 

Shame on you, Gary, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)  

Dumb, Dumber and Doonesbury

by Jeff Huber

I’ve been mourning the lamentable state of the anti-war movement lately, especially the portion of it populated by the political left, a great percentage of whom appear to be more concerned with the slaughter of baby seals than with the slaughter of baby humans.  And why wouldn’t they be?  We’ve actually seen more images in our warmongering mainstream media of ice floe carnage than we’ve seen of the carnage of armed conflict.  Nobody in the deep-pockets pocket of the Pentarchy really cares if liberals manage to curb baby seal hunting.  There’s not that much money in it. 

Must remember...this is my shoulder,
this is my elbow, this is my shoulder...

To be fair, a considerable number of liberals have enough angst left over for a healthy hand-wringing or two about those pesky old wars after they’re done saving a) wild animals from hunters so they can be killed by other wild animals instead and b) trees that were grown for the specific purpose of being cut down and used in construction.  Lamentably, though, the few progressives who have the staying power to protest the uniquely American brand of man’s inhumanity to man can seldom discriminate between their shoulders and their elbows. 

Doubly disconcerting is that so many of these feckless war protesters are high-profile humorists, comedians, satirists and other makers of malcontent merriness who enjoy the uncritical adoration of The Huffington Post’s circulation, especially of those callow-eyed progressive cadets of Generations X, Y, and now even Z (nine-year olds who can’t stay up to watch Stewart and Colbert can catch them on reruns the next day).  

Case in point is Doonsebury cartoonist Garry Trudeau who, as friend of Pen and Sword J.P. White recently suggested, is living proof that one doesn’t have to be especially funny to be a commercially successful humorist, especially when said humorist attended Yale like Trudeau did.  As our present president and his immediate predecessor have proven, you don’t need talent to succeed in your chosen field if you have Ivy League credentials.    

When it comes to our woebegone Wars on Evil, Trudeau’s heart generally seems to be in the right place, but he has a penchant for letting his head hobble off to some cozy cranny where it’s isolated from the light of day and breathable air, like it appears to have done when Garry penned his 7 December strip in which a junior U.S. Army officer concedes that the omnipresent evildoers in Iraq are still able to bring the fight to us thanks to “a little help from Iran.”

I don’t dig trolling into other people’s web sites, but this couldn’t go unchallenged.  Here’s what I left in Garry’s “Blowback” inbox:

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq.  The recent IAEA report was the latest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time in regard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock. 

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels have never been substantiated.  The only verifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training and weapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantly Shiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combat gear. 

Shame on you, Garry, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains. 

 Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)     

Someone named “Editor” posted my comment, and added the following curious caveat: “This seems a good occasion to remind readers that if GBT shared the beliefs of all of his characters, he would be deeply schizophrenic.”

Holy non-rebuttal.  Knowing it was a waste of effort, I further submitted this:

Satirists, perhaps more so than other literary figures, present a worldview of moral judgments, and owe it to their audience to indicate when their characters’ actions and words reflect their vision of the truth and when they do not.  Mark Twain knew exactly how to do this.  Garry does some of the time.  This time he did nothing to indicate that his character’s “with a little help from Iran” was intended with any degree of sardonicism.

...and dumber...

That submission hasn’t been blessed for live bandwidth at the Doonesbury site.  Maybe they have a one-per-disgruntled-customer policy.  Something that did make the cut, however, was an attempted disproval of my original post by one Dean Mitchell that began: “The evidence of Iranian involvement has been continuous, with lots of reporting.”  If you click on the “lots” and “reporting” links of Mr. Mitchell’s sentence, you’ll discover what kind of “evidence” he considers convincing. 

The “lots” link, as I noted in my second, unpublished Blowback submission, leads to “a story with Iran allegations penned by Michael R. Gordon, one the Pentarchy's very favorite echo chamberlains.  I'm sure [Mr. Mitchell] had no idea that Gordon was one of the journo-cads who helped Dick Cheney's mob pull the Nigergate hoax on us that led to the invasion of Iraq, and has been a go-to war propaganda conduit to this day.” 

...and BlackFive's Uncle Jimbo

The “reporting” link leads to a July 2011 piece from Britain’s right-wing The Telegraph that features the standard laundry list of unsubstantiated charges against Iran straight from the mouth of then Joint Chiefs chairman and Bull Feather Merchant Marine Corps Commandant Mike Mullen. 

It’s downright horrifying to reflect that not only are the likes of Mr. Mitchell gullible enough to guzzle undiluted war propaganda from the likes of Gordon and Mullen but, apparently, the likes of progressive icon Garry Trudeau are too!

Jesus, Mary and Curly Joe DeRita.  With anti-war liberals like these, who needs Pavlov’s Dogs of War like bathetic BlackFive pundit Uncle Jimbo?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.