Seven Days in December?

"Just because the facts on which he based his white-hot rhetoric about Iran possibly sparking World War III have been debunked, W. said with his usual twisted logic, why should his policy change?"

Okay, let's see ~

1. A major "re-direction" in the intelligence on Iran.

2. Israel was caught unawares of (a) the recent US sponsored UN resolution on the Mid-East Peace process, which they later objected to and (b) the "new" intelligence on Iran.

Might the differences in the NIEs issued previously on Iraq and Iran, and the more recent one on Iran be because the Israelis and the Zio-cons were kept OUT of the loop this time around?

Bolton Calls For Congressional Witch-Hunt Into Anti-Bush ‘People In The Intelligence Community’

"Yesterday’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, pouring cold water on neoconservative calls for bombing Iran. Like his ideological kin Norman Podhoretz, former U.N. ambassador and Iran war hawk John Bolton has been attempting to slander the U.S. intelligence community’s collective judgments."

Podhoretz’s ‘Dark Suspicion’: Intel Community Trying To Sabotage Bush With NIE

"Yesterday’s NIE proved Podhoretz’s claims were false. Rather than modify his views on Iran, Podhoretz — who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 — aired a nasty conspiracy theory yesterday, attacking the authors of the NIE and accusing the intelligence community of deliberately “leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush.”

You gotta give even the devil his due ~ The Zio-cons, rather than admit that they just may have been wrong about Iran, is suggesting that the entire intelligence community is conspiring against Bush to head off a war with Iran. Now, that takes chutzpa.

Are they suggesting that Bush fire the intelligence community and rely solely on them for information?

Distorting Fascism to Demonize Iran

"In their frantic drive to pave the way for a military strike against Iran, leading figures in the neoconservative pro-Israel lobby have embarked on a vicious campaign of demonizing that country by comparing it with the early years of Nazi Germany and its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with Hitler."

President Rudy's War Council

"GOP presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani recently named Norman Podhoretz, godfather of neoconservatism and former editor of Commentary magazine, and Daniel Pipes, director of the neoconservative Middle East Forum, to his foreign policy team. The following scene imagines a conversation between Podhoretz and Pipes at Giuliani's victory party. Each line of dialogue is a real quote from either Podhoretz or Pipes."

It's not the "Islamofacists" I fear. It's the "ZioNazis." These guys are scary, very scary.

Joe Lieberman's War

by Philip Giraldi - Nov 6, 2007

Neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz has written that "as an American and as a Jew" he prays that President George W. Bush will attack Iran. He rests his case on his belief that 2007 is really 1938, that Iran is Nazi Germany, and that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Hitler. His most recent book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, was described by a reviewer as "a hectoring, often illogical screed based on cherry-picked facts and blustering assertions (often made without any supporting evidence), a book that furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism, and sheer venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine, be they on the right or the left."

Unlike people who subscribe to the view that a war with Iran would be a catastrophe for the United States, Podhoretz reportedly has regular access to the White House to promote his insightful historical analysis. But as Podhoretz is not in government and he controls no carrier groups, he has only a limited capability to bring about his dream of an emasculated Iran to take its place alongside an emasculated Iraq and a presumably soon-to-be emasculated Syria.

But while Podhoretz cannot start a war alone, there are plenty of others in the government, including Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Council's Elliott Abrams, who share his enthusiasm for a preemptive attack on Iran. The leader of Congress' Iran hawks is undoubtedly Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Lieberman, currently an independent, has long been regarded as a "conservative Democrat," but his voting record reveals that his conservatism is largely limited to foreign policy and more specifically to the Middle East, where he is a strong and uncritical defender of Israel. When he successfully ran for reelection as an independent in Connecticut in 2006, he accused his Democratic opponent Ned Lamont of not being a forceful enough advocate for Israel, claiming that Lamont was "surrounded by people who are either naïve or are isolationists or, frankly, some more explicitly against Israel." A former senior official of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC also endorsed that view, stating that "the pro Israel community … will stick with Joe Lieberman."

Lieberman has never counted the costs to the United States of pursuing Israeli objectives in the Middle East. He continues to be a vocal supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, frequently mentioning Saddam's alleged links to terrorists and invoking a variation of the White House line that if the U.S. does not fight terrorists in Iraq it will be necessary to fight them in New Haven. In 1998 he co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change in Baghdad official U.S. policy. His regular forays to Baghdad have convinced him that Iraq has been transformed from "primitive, killing tyranny" into "modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood." He saw clear evidence by 2005 of the democratization of Iraq: "Progress is visible … there are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones." More recently, he enthusiastically supported last summer's Israeli invasion of Lebanon and has tried to make Syria the newest member of the axis of evil, claiming without any evidence that it is Syria "through which up to 80 percent of the Iraq-bound extremists transit. Indeed, even terrorists from countries that directly border Iraq travel by land via Syria to Iraq, instead of directly from their home countries, because of the permissive environment for terrorism that the Syrian government has fostered."

Lieberman has also been front and center in taking on the thorny problem of Iran, promoting a military response as the most effective option. In an April 2006 interview in the Jerusalem Post, he freely discussed using military force to disarm Iran, noting that the U.S. had learned a lesson from both Osama bin Laden and Hitler that "sometimes when people say really extreme things … they may actually mean it." In December 2006, Lieberman followed up by explaining that he opposed direct talks with Iran because it would be like going to "your local fire department asking a couple of arsonists to help put out the fire. These people are flaming the fire. They are extremists." On Dec. 29, 2006, Lieberman wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he explained the situation in the Middle East in simple terms: "On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States."

On June 10, 2007, Lieberman told Face the Nation, "I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me that would include a strike into … over the border into Iran … where they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers." He later stated that "By some estimates, they have killed as many as 200 American soldiers," and, for good measure, he added that if Iran is not willing to live "according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them." On the following day, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said "It sure does," after being asked if the Lieberman statement would make it easier for the White House to consider an attack against Iran.

On July 6, 2007, Lieberman wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he claimed, "The Iranian government, by its actions, has all but declared war on us and our allies in the Middle East. American now has a solemn responsibility to utilize the instruments of our national power to convince Tehran to change its behavior," employing "credible force" because Iran is bringing "about the death of American service members in Iraq." He described, without providing any evidence, how the "Iranian government has been using the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to train and organize Iraqi extremists, who are responsible in turn for the murder of American service members." He called Iran's role as "hostile and violent" and complained that Tehran's "fanatical government" demonstrates "expansionistic, extremist behavior." After again referring to Iran's "fanatical regime," he cited "attacks on American soldiers" as a reason why Iran "must be confronted head on."

Lieberman was the co-sponsor of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to the recently passed defense appropriations bill, which passed by a Senate vote of 76 to 22 on Sept. 26, 2007. The amendment stated that "the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act of hostility against the United States."
Lieberman's press release on the subject, dated July 11, 2007, accused Iran of "murdering our troops" and quoted Sen. John Kyl, who blamed Iran for "actively supporting terrorists who are killing our troops in Iraq." When the Kyl-Lieberman amendment was debated in the Senate, James Webb of Virginia said, "At best, it's a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst, it could be read as a backdoor method of gaining congressional validation for military action, without one hearing and without serious debate." Webb also called the amendment "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream" and noted correctly that the attempt to categorize the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary guard as a "foreign terrorist organization" would mandate military action against Iran: "What do we do with terrorist organizations? … We attack them."

There is hardly any point in identifying Lieberman's numerous errors in fact in an attempt to refute his assertions, as he is ideologically driven and not interested in the truth. His sloganeering is more in the nature of propaganda than a careful consideration of policy options or the U.S.' national interests. He twists and embroiders the facts to enable him to rule out speaking to Iran while at the same time blaming it for all of the problems in the region. Lieberman also disregards the reality in Iraq, which is that Iran is deeply embedded there as a result of the United States' invasion, which removed Tehran's traditional rival and empowered the Shia.

Lieberman repeats over and over again that American soldiers are being killed by Iran. Apparently, the neocons have found it too difficult to make the case that Iran is actually seeking a nuclear weapon. That American soldiers are being killed through the active intervention of the Iranian government is in any event debatable, and most of the international media appears to believe that the allegations lack hard evidence. That many Americans do not see the need to attack Iran does not faze Sen. Joseph Isadore Lieberman, a man of self-proclaimed principle who obviously has clearer vision and knows better than his fellow countrymen what is right and what is wrong. If Iran turns into a major catastrophe not only for the U.S. and Iran but also for the entire region, will Lieberman take the blame as a principal enabler of the war so desired by Norman Podhoretz? If Lieberman's lack of contrition over Iraq is anything to go by, almost certainly not.

Human Paraquats and Progress Both Spring Eternal

by Patrick Grimm - Oct 24, 2007

The human paraquats of Big Jewry have had their way with this country for too long. One of these toxic agents, Norman Podhoretz, a frothing Straussian, told a throng at a Barnes and Noble bookstore to “Shut up!” when the gathered listeners to the dribbling old curmudgeonly neo-convict’s crusty spiel grew tired and disgusted by his calls to murder millions in Iran, all for the partitioned Paraquat of all Paraquat nations, and the terror overclass in both America and the uncomely beast’s Knesset who wants Eretz Israel sweeping from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is very unlikely. “Of course, it’s all to fight the ‘War On Terror’!” the government-media complex will tell all the lemming luckless lackeys, who are more than ready to believe.

Norman Podhoretz and his archfiend Yiddish enfant terribles in the American neo-conservative cartel, those who have the ear and the balls of the President in a kosher jar, are the only people I know who would have the chutzpah to demand that another country fight their wars and dance the jig of death over their enemies. Of course, we know Israel is the problem, organized Jews are the problem and before the colonialism, state terror and spy ring of Irgun, then Mossad, there was nothing that any of these Judases could even point to and say “Thar blow the winds of Islamofascism!” In fact, the very term “Islamofascism” without a doubt had to have been incubated and crafted by Jewish activists, for the egalitarian and antifascist drumbeat heard in the media issues from no other quarters so consistently and reflexively.

Call it neo-conservative or neo-liberal and it makes no difference. Dr. Tom Sunic has so adroitly pinpointed these Americanisms in his own writings and he is correct that this is our Gospel as a Jewish nation. Egalitarianism drips with the honey poured athwart it, day in and day out, from the Jewish engines of regress in the media, while it is a modern truism that nothing is so repugnant and full of ignominy than “fascism” whatever the unpacking of this inflammatory buzz word means at any given and opportune moment. Hence, Muslims resisting Zionist advances are “fascists” and Walt and Mearsheimer who pen the “poison” and crack open Pandora’s Box on the Jewish Lobby are also potentially flirting with fascism and are “anti-Semitic in result if not in intent” to pluck the phraseology of Jewish Harvard President Larry Summers to the bosom of the issue at hand, which is war without end for a state (Israel) that is not worth in its entirety one drop of American blood to pump sustenance into its eternal criminal Ponzi scheme.

There is only one real hurdle for the Jewish paraquatic par redundancies who shape and shift and solder our politics to meet their always needful wills and whims. Like the Podhoretz B & N lecture disaster to promote a book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism by a man who has spent a lifetime recalibrating himself at his own convenience, the cattle are chafing, and actually having the first germinations of a thought process that could actually lead somewhere. They are discovering that the beast is not all-powerful or invincible, that the Goliath of Zionism could yet lose its head literally, as we can plainly surmise that its brain matter (ideological cogency, real or imagined) has begun an atrophy, though this may not make it any more innocuous. For like a rabietic dog, madness does not signify inefficacity, especially when the Other (us) is as wholesale in its otherness as the Jews see Gentiles, both Christians and Muslims, in their pecking order and standing on the uneven plane of Talmudic existence.

Americans at their best, are not battle-fatigued when squared off with the right enemy. The enemies we should be fearing are not Muslims, most of whom live in a subsistence that is Third Worldly in most cases and otherworldly to the average sheltered US citizen nursed on the milk of righteous causes and hyper-moralizing, even when the facts are still out and when they will never bear the brunt of their own Puritan impulses, again as Dr. Tunic has noted, which fit hand-in-glove with the aims of Judaism, now hyper-Zionized and self-crowning in its reign of expansionism.

For all of these reasons, America, more than any other nation-state, is ripe for the picking when the numbers for crusades, either moral or militarily imperialistic, are called. That’s why our support and group hug for Israel seems so natural and our bound-at-the-hipness is so cushy and devil-may-care for the elites. American chosenness and Jewish chosenness makes for inevitable intercourse and I think you can guess who got the real screwing when the rogering thrusts reached their cessation, if they have, as of yet, ceased. The question of who will do the post-romp paying is not an open query either.

Yes, Podhoretz and his coterie have had their way with this country for too long and their bilking ilk have stunted the growth of our garden for much longer than Israel has blemished and pocked the green earth. As he and the Straussian smart boys take the masks off and just say “Oh, the hell with it! Of course this thing was about the Israeli killing machine all along!” it will allow the eyes of the multitudes to open, the horror to spread like margarine across the faces of our everymen and everywomen, who finally see the crimes of Zion, perpetrated and perpetuated as much by our Gentile Self-Chosen Puritans as by the neo-Jacobins, the globalists and the rest. If one should wish to look upon the face of terror, war-like and wanton, then perhaps they will see the smile of the aged and decrepit Trotskyites signing autographs at the book bordello and the black hats with buckles worn weightily by the overseers of the “indispensable nation” worked into a moral frenzy yet again over “democracy” and progress that springs eternal once in a while.

More about Islamofascism

by Paul Gottfried - Sept 25, 2007

Reading reviews in the national press about Norman Podhoretz’s The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (Doubleday), I was struck by how oblivious to certain facts the reviewers of this book seem to be. Haven’t Ian Buruma of the New York Review of Books, Jay Nordlinger of National Review, Amer Tahiri of the New York Post or any of the other establishment reviewers noticed that Podhoretz knows nothing about “fascism?” His references to this particular phenomenon show all the sophistication of an Abe Foxman tirade designed for ADL donors.

Quite conveniently for himself, Podhoretz links all unpleasant Muslims to a European political movement that he identifies with the Holocaust and of course with “anti-democracy”; nonetheless, he never begins to prove that Muslims doctrinally or programmatically resemble interwar European “fascists,” as opposed to being mere terrorist nuisances. Telling us that fascists were “anti-Semitic” is at best a partial truth, and even if real fascists, like fundamentalist Muslims, didn’t care much for democracy or for the free market, that would put them in the same category with 99% of the human race throughout history.

My friend David Gordon, who has actually had the stomach to digest the entire text, (I myself only had the visceral strength to look at it quite selectively), remarked on its references to the “system of Westphalia,” an arrangement that Podhoretz, to his credit, knows no longer exists. But the Westphalia system, contrary to what Norman indicates, began in 1648. It did not, as Podhoretz and his friends may believe, come out of the “sixteenth century,” a period of time that spawned religious and dynastic strife resulting in the later attempt to create a state-system based on different state religions within different sovereign territories. Apparently Podhoretz believes that the recognition of national sovereignty doesn’t work any more, because we face an international “fascist” enemy, and in any case it was never a democratic way of dealing with the world. To this it might be answered that the system of state sovereignty has been ruined at least partly because of global revolutionaries like Norman Podhoretz.

There is a point of reference in Podhoretz’s diatribe that one might have thought his fellow-journalists would be eager to pursue. Podhoretz directs much of his fire against a group that he seeks to combat, namely, “paleoconservatives.” Although motivating him to pen his polemic, this group does not seem to interest his reviewers, or at least not enough to be worthy of mention. From the reviews one might gather that paying attention to those against whom Podhoretz is railing would be an impropriety, comparable to belching at dinner while being seated next to the Queen of England. Moreover, allowing such reactionary types to respond in the national press would be even more upsetting—something on the order of inviting a Holocaust-denier to a meeting of AIPAC.

In one particularly arresting image in the New York Review of Books (September 27, 2007), Times- religious editor Ian Buruma compares Podhoretz and his followers to a “youngish Old Etonian Foreign Office man at a smart London club at the time of the Boer War.” The trouble with this strained analogy is that Buruma is describing not Edwardian gentlemen but grubby arrivistes. And these arrivistes would not have arrived at their present fame, were it not for their establishment liberal contacts, who treat them as first-rate thinkers while excluding from mention the paleo targets of Podhoretz’s invectives. Without forty years of respectful publicity, which have come gratis thanks to Ian and his New York pals, one wonders where Podhoretz and his movement would now be.