Woohoo!! My DVD arrived today!

Persepolis is the animated film by Marjane Satrapi, relating her coming of age in Iran, starting before the fall of the Shah regime to today.

The film is divided into several segments:  Read more 

Like it or not, our next president will have to deal with conflicts all over the world. The nature of warfare has been changing (a lot of ink has been spent on this already) but obviously, this administration did not read the memo.  Read more 

In today’s WaPo, an article on Page 12 discusses Admiral Fallon’s firing expulsion forced exit resignation from CentCom. Not to worry, the article says, and surely with a placement on Page 12 there must not be anything in it to cause concern. If there were, WaPo’s editors would have made sure it was right up front and not down in the body – wouldn’t they?  Read more 

The New York Times is reporting that Admiral William Fallon, the top commander in the Middle East, is retiring early.

As you probably already know Admiral Fallon has been at the center of recent controversy for opposing any war with Iran. So, naturally, having said something so sane and sensible, he must be driven out of his job.

See the NYT article.

Fascinating article by Thomas Barnett in the April Esquire on Admiral Fallon, who sits as apparently the only remaining obstacle between the Bush-Cheney criminal regime and war with Iran. Every time Bush rattles his saber, Fallon makes the regional diplomatic rounds to calm fears of an expanded, uncontrollable conflict and makes public announcements that he thinks going to war would be a mistake.

According to Barnett, Bush/Cheney are tired of Fallon’s unwillingness to get with the program and are planning to move him out of the way.  Read more 

AL gets letters:

A friend writes from Tehran:

Here the political weather is terrible. You might know that the parliamentary election is near and the reformist nearly are not allowed to be involved. About 80 per cent of reformist candidates has been labeled as unqualified by the Government. Mr Khatami and Rafsanjani had a meeting with the Supreme Leader but it had no fruit. We are waiting for much worse days.

The Iranian film festival has been just finished with no movie by great directors of the country. All movies were about Islam, religious rites and Imams. Good for Ahmadinejad!

I love my country but i really hate it. That’s iranian life. Always dealing with dilemmas.

To which I’d like to respond:  Read more 

DOE: Sees 125,000 B/D SPR Fill Rate May-Sep

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. will add 125,000 barrels a day of crude oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve between May and September 2008 through direct market purchases and transfers of royalty oil, a Department of Energy spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Fifth cable cut to Mid-East, Iran has only limited access to the Internet

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told  Read more 

And the Jackass Texan.

From Navy Times:

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”

Now you tell us. Not that anyone is really covering it in the major media.  Read more 

Everything that comes from Chimpy’s administration and his SCLM sternographers, that is. Via Uruknet, comes this Times report which should tell you a thing or two about the Iranian “threat:”

Marie Colvin
THE HEAD of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps slipped into the green zone of Baghdad last month to press Tehran’s hardline position over the terms of the current talks with American officials, it was claimed last week.

Iraqi government sources say that Major-General Mohammed Ali Jafari, 50, travelled secretly from Tehran. Jafari appears to have passed through checkpoints on his way into the fortified enclave that contains the American embassy and Iraqi ministries, even though he is on Washington’s “most wanted” list.  Read more 

Nobody seems to be mentioning that speedboat tactics are remarkably similar to the tactics employed by General Paul Van Riper when he whipped the Pentagon using lo-tech tactics during the Operation Millennium Challenge war game for the Gulf. Shystee wrote:

Van Riper was the commander of a fictional middle eastern state (Iraq, or possibly Iran) attempting to repel a US attack.

The games were designed to test experimental new tactics and doctrines advocated by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and were referred to in Pentagon-speak as “military transformation”.
…
[Van Riper] sent orders with motorcycle couriers to evade sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. When the US fleet sailed into the Gulf, he instructed his small boats and planes to move around in apparently aimless circles before launching a surprise attack which sank a substantial part of the US navy. The war game had to be stopped and the American ships “refloated” so that the US forces stood a chance.

More from the Guardian. The beauty part is that Rummy’s Pentagon didn’t like the outcome, so they rewrote the war game rules so Van Riper would lose and then ran the game again. Mission Accomplished!  Read more 

But never fear, 90% of the agenda was “accomplished.”

Heroes in the Beltway:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, despite their pledges to continue pushing to end the war in Iraq, face growing pressure from their rank-and-file Democrats to focus more attention on domestic, “pocketbook” issues in the upcoming election year.

Junior Democrats describe an “Iraq fatigue” setting in among some members after dozens of successful withdrawal votes failed to drive a wedge between Republicans and President Bush on the war strategy….

[Baird:] “The entire policy has been dictated by the ’Out of Iraq
Caucus’ … What are we going to do, have another 40 withdrawal votes?”

Folks enjoying Christmas in Iraq:

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis.

Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.  Read more 

Bush calls on Iran to “come clean”.

Leaving aside the obvious bad jokes, didn’t I just read something in the news about an NIE?  Read more 

Times, three minutes ago:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.

Gee.

It’s almost like all the sabre-rattling and threats and bullying were designed to get Iran to restart its program, isn’t it?  Read more 

At last, somebody from outside the Village looks at the stories Bush has been telling on Iran. McClatchy:

Despite President Bush’s claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger “World War III,” experts in and out of government say there’s no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Oh my gawd! Say it’s not so! But wait—Maybe the Iranians trucked the weapons across the border to Syria?

Bush’s rhetoric seems hyperbolic compared with the measured statements by his senior aides and outside experts.

You’re kidding!  Read more 

A lot of folks are chattering about a fresh poll from Zogby, in which 52% of the respondents were favorable to an attack on Iran. I’ve seen other numbers in other polls, some with support for an attack in the low 20s. Obviously, an attack is a stupid idea neither the nation nor the military can really afford, and would have all sorts of horrible consequences; there is also no real threat from Iran, unless by threat you mean “brown not-xtians making lots of money selling oil.”  Read more 

They’re the NSC staffers and Iranian experts who censored by the administration when they wrote on Op-Ed for the Times—and the Times went ahead and published it with parts blacked out, as if the country had turned into a fucking Banana Republic.

So, go read.  Read more 

Well, naturally. They’re not Christianists. And they’re not doing God’s work. What’s to like? UK Daily Mail:

British MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss America’s stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bush’s senior women officials: “I hate all Iranians.”

The all-party group of MPs say Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, made the comments this month. [One] said: “She is very forceful and some of my colleagues were intimidated by her muscular style.”

Right, then. Of course, the administration says the Brits are lying:  Read more 

In apparrent response to the Senate’s passing of Senate Amendment 3017, for which 22 Democrats should be ashamed, Iran has responded:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran’s parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as “terrorist organizations,” a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

It would be funny if it were not so scary.  Read more 

As Woody informed us the Iran amendment passed with edits as Sarah pointed out.

But, as former Senator Mike Gravel said, those who voted for the measure should be ashamed.  Read more 

Central Command C-in-C Admiral William Fallon, who is General David Petraeus’ actual commanding officer, understands that his mission involves more than Iraq, and wishes to conduct the United States’ defense of its interests responsibly and effectively.

Fallon worries that Iraq is undermining the military’s ability to confront other threats, such as Iran. “When he took over, the reality hit him that he had to deal with Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and a whole bunch of other stuff besides Iraq,” a top officer said.

Fallon also was derisive of the Iraqi government’s intentions and competence. “He’s been saying from day one, ’This isn’t working,’” a senior administration official said.

Not surprisingly, this wasn’t what Bush wanted to hear, so  Read more 

On Democracy Now today, there’s excerpts from the speech at Columbia today, in which (via a translator) he sounded mostly quite sane.  Read more 

A nice little amendment to H.R. 1585 by Senators Kyl and Lieberman regarding Iran:

Not only is the language familiar, the implications are downright frightening.

The amendment adds Section 1535: SENSE OF SENATE ON IRAN.  Read more 

msnbc.com just had a no-link-yet breaking-news headline about the U.S. arresting an Iranian officer for abetting terrorism in Iraq.

I don’t have the exact wording, because when I refreshed the browser, the new breaking-news headline was “Bush to hold press conference at 10:45 a.m. ET today.”

Is today False Flag Day?

Oh, and a look further down the page says Bin-Laden is declaring war against Pakistan’s president Musharraf, keeper of the world’s most unstable nuclear arsenal (unless you count ours).

It was nice knowing you.

Steve Clemons:

What we should worry about, however, is the continued effort by the neocons to shore up their sagging influence. They now fear that events and arguments could intervene to keep what once seemed like a “nearly inevitable” attack from happening. They know that they must keep up the pressure on Bush and maintain a drumbeat calling for war.

They are doing exactly this during September and October in a series of meetings organized by the American Enterprise Institute on Iran and Iraq designed to reemphasize the case for hawkish, interventionist deployments in Iraq and a military, regime-change-oriented strike against Iran. And through Op-Eds and the serious political media, the “bomb Iran now” crowd believes they must undermine those in and out of government proposing alternatives to bombing and keep the president and his people saturated with pro-war mantras.

We should also worry about the kind of scenario David Wurmser floated, meaning an engineered provocation. An “accidental war” would escalate quickly and “end run,” as Wurmser put it, the president’s diplomatic, intelligence and military decision-making apparatus. It would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict — Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That kind of war is much more probable and very much worth worrying about.

Why do I not find this news re-assuring?  Read more 

[Just to pre-empt the winger headline on this one. Sorry to, er, deflate you, guys.] AP:

Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran, a recently retired commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East said Monday.

John Abizaid, the retired Army general who headed Central Command for nearly four years, said he was confident that if Iran gained nuclear arms, the United States could deter it from using them.

“I believe that we have the power to deter Iran, should it become nuclear,” he said, referring to the theory that Iran would not risk a catastrophic retaliatory strike by using a nuclear weapon against the United States.

“There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran,” Abizaid said in remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. “Let’s face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we’ve lived with a nuclear China, and we’re living with (other) nuclear powers as well.”

Duh. This is so obvious I would think a child could see it; in fact, I wrote as much yesterday).

So, a general is saying, in essence, that the administration’s Iran policy is deeply bogus. What does it all mean?  Read more