Consider what would happen if Iran totally complied with the neocons’ demands. The neocons would immediately find another pretext to attack. This is because the neocons simply will not allow Iran to dispose of its own massive energy assets.
For some reason, they adamantly refuse to reveal their true ambitions. But how else can you explain their march to war, when their underlying rationale is phony? Evidence points to Iran NOT having a nuclear weapons program. (IAEA verifications, NIE) And Iran has little to offer the West beyond its obvious potential as an energy superpower, largely off-limits to Western exploitation today.
The biggest problem is that the neocons have once again taken control of the narrative, creating a fantasy which most Americans believe. And nobody in the foreign policy community (including their megaphones in the corporate media) is about to reveal the neocons’ true goals. They all joined in the jingoistic orgy or cowered silently while America marched into a devastating war in Iraq. And today they are either joining the anti-Iran frenzy or cowering in a corner, as neocons fix the case for another devastating, fruitless adventure. They would rather see America march blythely into another catastrophe than try to explain America’s real ambitions.
I recently confronted a well known foreign affairs blogger on his adamant refusal to discuss America’s real ambitions in Iraq (and Iran)–energy. He responded that he “finds the subject matter predictable, an obvious issue, and boring.” Each of these “experts” has his own favorite rationalization for not confronting the neocon mythology with an alternative, candid narrative. And they will find a way to dissociate themselves from themselves from the consequences of their silence.

Posted by: JohnH | Oct 24 2008 16:08 utc | 4

No war on Iran.
The mutterings about it are purely sops to the Israelis. And scare mongering for US citizens.
The US cannot enter a third theater and has no reason to. Attacking Iran would be dire in many ways. (Discussed for years here.)
Commerce is going on underground all the time.
This is just the ordinary pressure on an oil producer, a secret ally, or major deal breaker, in Iraq, etc. The hysterical media pressure is one arm – very nasty, stupid, un cool- of US agit-prop.
Nobody believes in its reality, the posturing is pathetic. Specially as the US itself set up Iran as the major ME power, by knocking away Saddam, etc.
It is perceived so by other powers, and by the Iranians, who are doing fine so to speak, thank you very much, with deals with Russia, Germany, France, etc. The US has not been able to stop these, probably doesn’t even wish to.

Posted by: Tangerine | Oct 24 2008 17:05 utc | 6

McCain surrogate tells students to prepare for war with Iran in next four years

A Republican charged with representing the views of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain told Dominican University students Thursday that war with Iran in the next four years is inevitable.
The prediction came during a campus event in which teams of Dominican students presented the positions of McCain and his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, on six key issues: the economy, foreign policy, environment, health care, education and ethics.
…
After each presentation, brief comments were added by Republican William Grayson, president of a San Francisco hedge fund company and former general counsel for the San Francisco Republican Central Committee, and Tony West, a
partner at a San Francisco law firm and co-chairman of the Obama campaign’s California finance committee.
“Let me assure you of this,” Grayson said after the student presentation on foreign policy. “The next president, whether it is Senator Obama or John McCain, will go to war, and he will go to war with Iran.
“They are very busy developing nuclear weapons. They will use those nuclear weapons against Israel or any of its allies, and that is a war that we’re going to fight,” Grayson said.
To which West responded, “I guess this is where we start to disagree.”
“I do not believe it is a foregone conclusion that this nation will go to war with anybody in the next four or eight years,” West said.
Students on the foreign policy team said Grayson’s war forecast surprised them.
“It kind of caught everybody off guard,” said Jena Goyner, 21, who is studying history and political science at Dominican. “College students don’t want to hear that. We don’t want to hear that we’ve been trapped in war for six years, and we’re about to go get into another one.”

Posted by: annie | Oct 24 2008 18:06 utc | 8

[Each of these “experts” has his own favorite rationalization for not confronting the neocon mythology with an alternative, candid narrative.]
It’s just peer-pressure. No one wants to sound like a conspiracy theory touting America hating closet muslim.

Posted by: Rabia | Oct 24 2008 19:09 utc | 10

There just isn’t the manpower/cannonfodder for a war with Iran at the moment but the zionists know that, and are just putting a line in the sand.
Landslides won’t prevent Obama’s first move as prez elect being to prepare the ground for ’12 and re-election.
That means he ain’t gonna throw out the zionist loons he was told to take into his tent at the AIPAC summons on the eve of his nomination, he will decide to keep them on and ‘keep an eye on them’.
We already know how that works. Both Bush 1 and Clinton1 tried that and while the damage done by the zionist crazies in both administrations seemed mild in comparison to what has happened since, they beavered away through those years laying the groundwork fior the inevitable arrival of a weakling in the gig. Someone who wouldn’t stand up to the racist pricks, either through his inherent weakness or inherent laziness and ignorance.
In the meantime attitudes which had seemed really ‘out there’ for ordinary amerikans in ’88 had become conventional wisdom. This because the assholes had sat so close to the seat of power for so long accepting the small favours dispensed by the corrupt prez’s who thought they were mollifying the ‘crazy jew vote’. The prez’s didn’t seem to notice the loons were using those favours to win influence and secure the position of nazi zionism at the top of the table in both parties.
Of course Obama could stand up to the pricks and if he did it straight away using his position to strengthen the resolve of those in congress who want out from under he could probably reduce the AIPAC influence to a minor irritation by 2012. Power feeds off power and taking AIPAC off the hind tit would slim the fuckers right down.
He won’t though. It goes against a politicians better judgement to chase away neatly parcelled votes such as those AIPAC reckons it delivers, and he probably lacks the strength of will required to withstand the pressure that would come straight back at him.
The Hussein calls would get really loud really quick, he will rationalise that the fight would take his mind and political capital away from ‘important’ stuff like the economy and of course it would always come back to rule number one. ‘Never do something that can only cost you votes’.
Most of the peeps that want him to do this are gonna vote for him anyway, but about half of those who are strongly opposed and who wouldn’t vote for him because of this, will vote for him in 08.
So the best that is likely to happen is that Obama will keep the zionist pricks in his administration, while not giving in to the worst of their demands but giving in to enough to further solidify the zionist position close to power in any administration.
If amerikans want to change this they are going to have to do it from the ground up. Create a stable bloc of voters opposed to murdering the people of the ME just because some other country has corrupted the process and installed traitors at the heart of the amerikan government.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 24 2008 20:57 utc | 12

mistah charley, ph.d. @13,
Seems like a very good idea. And please let her know that despite her age, she is the future of America.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 24 2008 22:11 utc | 14

On second reading, Mistah Charlie, I really can’t believe your naivete, or what psychologists would call tranference.
But as one of my past favorite blogs used to say, “Do what you want. You will anyway.)
March on, Corporate Waldo, you’ve done well….. We will sleep well the night after the elections, knowing that we have concluded our tiny role as activists, and the empire is now secure. Thanks to Susan “but it seems vaguely possible” Eisenhower.

Posted by: Malooga | Oct 24 2008 22:40 utc | 16

I do not believe Obama will be able to do anything significant in foreign policy even if he wants…or he’ll be dead pretty soon. Full stop.
He’ll make some positive movements inside USA and that would give American voters anesthesia for their pains if only the world today is not that much “globalized”. We are all in this deep shit that greedy few on this planet created and having in mind that next big war will definitely be nuclear there is no fix to this by war. Small wars are not working except for few greedy and temporarily…They’ll try everything in war department but this time it does not seem to work. What after wars when we all find out this? People may really put their heads on sticks …literally.

Posted by: vbo | Oct 25 2008 0:27 utc | 18

In 2020 I doubt Americans will be welcomed anywhere in the world…not even UK…haha

Posted by: vbo | Oct 25 2008 5:01 utc | 20

Susan Eisenhower:
Spokesmodel for Peace and Justice
First of all, I’m kidding about the “and justice” part. My nom de cyber is intended to be slightly ridiculous, even though it is also literally true – I am an American male of European descent with a doctoral degree. You may have recognized the reference to Monty Python with my quote from the Life of Brian, “blessed are the cheesemakers.” As a writer and humorist, I aspire to follow in the tradition of Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Kurt Vonnegut, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Wavy Gravy. I very much like Mr. Gravy’s line, “as I said to the mirror the other morning, ‘It’s all done with people’ “.
And it IS all done with people. Malooga has clearly expressed an opinion of my plan to attempt to have an impact on policy. It may indeed be futile, as I explicitly admitted in my previous post. Or maybe not.
But there are some things which ARE clear. For example, Ms. Eisenhower is NOT “an absolute no one” – she is a hereditary member of what C. Wright Mills called the power elite, she appears at their think-tank events, has had op-eds published in the Washington Post, was nationally televised as she spoke from the stage at Democratic National Convention in August, has been interviewed on CNN, written about in corporate media articles in USA Today, Newsweek, etc. See the Wikipedia article about her for more details.
Will she have influence over Obama, who seems on the verge of being elected President? Maybe. Obama courted her endorsement, and put her on the stage at the convention. She’s been campaigning for him in Republican areas in Florida (although she changed her party registration to Independent this year – and her father changed his registration in 2004).
Would she want to move the worldview of the American elite, and the American people in general, towards a more cooperative, less violent stance in the world? Yes, I think so.
Would a letter from me make a small bit of a difference? As the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior puts it, “Under carefully controlled experimental conditions, the organism does what it damn well pleases.”
The complacency, self-satisfaction, and loyalty to the Empire that are imputed to me (along with the application of what is apparently the equivalent to ‘macaca’ here in the MoA comments column, “Corporate Waldo”) are based on imaginings about me, not knowledge, either of my cyberspace or meat world activities.

Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d. | Oct 25 2008 13:37 utc | 22

mistah charley, i agree she isn’t a nobody. she’s the daughter of the president who first warned us of the looming military industrial complex. then name eisenhower will go down in history for this.

Posted by: annie | Oct 25 2008 16:57 utc | 24

Anyone who wants a regime change in a country other than the one he/she resides in, should go to that country and fight for it there. Asking someone else to do it for you from afar is chickenshit. Especially if your parents were gutless parasites who ran out of the country when the former murdering and torturing regime that existed only for the benefit of a few inside that country, got chucked in the shithouse it belonged in, by angry locals.
That Pahlavi scum and their cronies left with anything and anything they could get their hands, all of which they had stolen from the people of Iran ever since 1951 when USuk staged a coup against the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, because they wanted control of Iran’s oil resources.
The fat assed sons and daughters of those murdering pricks, who have been raised on lies about the wondrous lives every Iranian lived before the Ayotollah are now cranking up corrupt USuk pols to stage another coup to steal the resources back from ordinary Iranians and split the booty up once more.
Why should amerikan lives be spent stealing stuff for the cowardly offspring of some SAVAK torturer?
If the Iranian government was that unpopular the people would rise up, just as they did in 1979. The regime then was far more oppressive than the one now, so one has to recognise that the reason the average Iranian isn’t trying a revolution is that the government enjoys support from the people.
Of course these outsiders don’t want a popular revolution. They want government by a small elite for a small elite.
I cannot think of a single instance where regime change bought about by foreign intervention hasn’t caused more misery and bloodshed than the allegedly despicable regime that the foreigners claimed they were getting rid of.
The reason is simple. No foreign state goes to war unless there is a great deal in it for them. Any regime which is expected to ‘cough up big cash’ to foreign interests after a coup gets pretty old with the locals, pretty quick. So the new government uses tyranny to stay in power.
As for waldo’s silly generalisations about what he imagines the average MoA-ite may be, I would say two things.
Firstly call us what you like, but it won’t change the fact that MoA commentators have been correct about 90% of the major issues since the site was founded. Correct that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Correct that Iraq would be a bloodbath if amerika went in, correct that the corrupt dems in congress wouldn’t try to oppose shrubs illegal invasion of Iraq. Correct that if the dems won Congress in 2004 that they would perpetuate the war, allow, Guantanamo Bay to flourish in all its unconstitutional shame, correct that the dems would regard it as being smart politics to leave the criminals bush and cheney in power, that impeachment may have saved the lives of a few hundred thousand sand-n***ers, and a few thousand amerikan soldiers but that wasn’t ‘smart politics’.
MoA-ites were correct when they wrote that that not only would a post 2006 dem majority in congress not overturn the unconstitutional laws allowing government spying on citizens, it would probably push through some new repressions because “you never know when they may come in handy”.
For me the test of Obama’s prezdency will be if the low level dem hacks who come in here peddling their specious bullshit about being the only legitimate voice of the left, are still using the same nyms next year when the reality of an Obama administration is in plain view.
We’ve seen the names change several times over the years, although the tired and shopworn cliches about the “party of the people” never changes.
The dems who came into MoA before 06 trying to shout down the views expressed here that a dem majority wouldn’t change a thing in Iraq, haven’t been come around under those nyms since just after that election. I expect the same from the current crop of lame party spruikers. Within a few months of the new administration revealing itself in all it’s corrupt and self-serving slime the current crop of apologists for anything goes, will be long gone.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 26 2008 4:11 utc | 26

I will take that bet Waldo. name the sum.

Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 26 2008 7:57 utc | 28

Iran is on record as having proudly spent years lying to the EU while going ahead with its nuclear program.
Bullshit – any proof for that assertion?

Posted by: b | Oct 28 2008 10:46 utc | 30