1. “If [Israel] ever did go ahead and drop the bomb on Tehran, whatever blowback they had to endure could be written off as the inevitable price of survival – and the price, as I’ve said, isn’t likely to be very high. I doubt whether even this gross act of mass murder would provoke Washington to do very much more than express outrage – without, however, cutting off so much as a dime of the billions in aid we ship to Israel every year. The “special relationship,” you can rest assured, would endure – and, soon enough, we’d be hearing the same sort of rationalization we are now hearing on the anniversary of Truman’s crime against humanity. It was necessary to bring the Iranians to heel, Israel had no choice, it was kill or be killed – failure to act on the Israelis’ part would have amounted to committing national suicide. I can hear it now.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/08/06/the-return-of-the-bomb/
2. “The War We Can’t Win
Afghanistan & the Limits of American Power
As for the putatively existential challenge posed by Islamic radicalism, that project will prove ultimately to be a self-defeating one. What violent Islamists have on offer-a rejection of modernity that aims to restore the caliphate and unify the ummah [community]—doesn’t sell. In this regard, Iran—its nuclear aspirations the subject of much hand-wringing—offers considerable cause for hope. Much like the Castro revolution that once elicited so much angst in Washington, the Islamic revolution launched in 1979 has failed resoundingly. Observers once feared that the revolution inspired and led by the Ayatollah Khomeini would sweep across the Persian Gulf. In fact, it has accomplished precious little. Within Iran itself, the Islamic republic no longer represents the hopes and aspirations of the Iranian people, as the tens of thousands of protesters who recently filled the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities made evident. Here we see foretold the fate awaiting the revolutionary cause that Osama bin Laden purports to promote.
In short, time is on our side, not on the side of those who proclaim their intention of turning back the clock to the fifteenth century. The ethos of consumption and individual autonomy, privileging the here and now over the eternal, will conquer the Muslim world as surely as it is conquering East Asia and as surely as it has already conquered what was once known as Christendom. It’s the wreckage left in the wake of that conquest that demands our attention. If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: “Come home, America.” The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”
Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking—in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.”
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2609
3. “Congress Objects to CIA Lies, Not Torture and Assassination?”
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/111203
Organizers and compliant politicians are revealing plans to make it more difficult to exercise our fundamental constitutional rights to free speech, peaceful assembly and free expression. For months now, police have been knocking on the doors of known activists and tracking them down in their neighbourhoods to “chat” about their Olympic protest plans.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14689
5. “Rush Limbaugh’s Obama/Hitler comparison
I just got off the phone with Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean and Founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He made clear that he has some “serious objections” to some of Obama’s policies — “especially in the foreign policy context” (read: Israel) — but was nonetheless scathing in his condemnation of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh’s comments are “shameful,” ”beyond the pale,” and “unworthy of Americans.” He said that to compare Obama’s health care package to Nazi programs, or to compare Obama to Hitler, is to “demean ourselves”; that efforts to compare Obama’s health care logo to Nazi logos are “preposterous” and “offensive”; and that Limbaugh’s monologue in particular was “really disgraceful” and “shameful.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
