During my morning workout I was watching stories on Iran on both Good Morning America and CNN. GMA had an exclusive interview with the President of Iran and interviewed some of the citizens in a move which made it seem like "the Iranian people" love America and it is their leaders that hate the United States. My favorite quote was one of the burkha clad ladies being quoted as saying "I'd like to go Las Vegas" [sic]. CNN on the other hand was all about the recent "news" that Iraqi insurgents are being armed and trained by elite Iranian troops. I'm now going through a serious case of déjà vu, it's like 2003 all over again.

Dave Winer does a good job of calling bullshit on this snow job in his post Iranian weapons? BFD where he writes

The NY Times ran this story on Saturday, today there's a mysterious US press briefing announcing that they had discovered that weapons imported from Iran to Iraq are killing American soldiers. So what exactly are we supposed to conclude from this? They don't say.

On the Sunday talk shows, the politicos don't say what's obvious to this voter.

1. If you don't want Americans blown up by Iranian weapons, get them out of Iraq.

2. It's a big surprise? We're calling them names, threatening them, moving our aircraft carriers into their ports, and we're supposed to be shocked that they're helping people who are fighting with us in Iraq? I would be surprised if it were otherwise, if they weren't helping them.

3. Who's providing more weapons to our enemies, Iran or the U.S.? I don't have the slightest doubt that the American taxpayer is the largest single source of support for people killing Americans in Iraq. We're pumping billions of dollars into Iraq every month, a lot of that must be in the form of weapons. Our supposed allies in Iraq are actually Sunni or Shi'ite militia. There are virtually no non-partisans in Iraq, everyone is on some side, and aside from the Americans and British, they're all trying to blow our guys up.

4. We'll leave behind a power vacuum in Iraq if we leave now? Seems doubtful to me. The place is already in chaos. We have 150,000 troops in Iraq (or thereabouts) in a country of 27 million people.

I agree with a lot of what Dave Winer has to say although I disagree that pulling out is the right course of action since the country is likely to devolve further into a state of civil war which the United States is directly responsible for. Unfortunately, it seems that while the congress is endlessly debating whether to issue the equivalent of a press release that expresses mild indignation at the president's troop surge in Iraq, he has already moved on and is planning how he'll expand his invasion and occupation of the Middle East into Iran.

The phrase to hell in a handbasket never seemed so accurate.


 

Monday, February 12, 2007 9:00:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Why are you suprised that an offensive against iran requires "marketing". Its been this way forever. Mom and Dad don't send their boys to war without "marketing".

And more obvious is that this "marketing" is at work the other direction. Our enemies use the same communication techniques (it used to be called propaganda) to influence us in the other direction.

If the U.S. using "marketing" offends you... it think it time to grow up and realize the world for what it is. We are all consumers, being pitched "marketing" messages all day.

For the record, I think we should do whatever is necessary to neutralize Iran's involvement. They are not peace-makers, which is what the whole area (Middle East) needs in the next few decades, when America withdraws.
steve
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 4:55:12 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
It's time for the Obligatory "Little Black Bag" Comment.

Kornbluth, Cyril M.
The Little Black Bag
http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/web docs/webdescrips/kornbluth1578-des-.html

Angie blithely slitting her throat in order to set a patient's mind at rest as to the harmlessness of the doctors' instruments she proposes to use ... with a smile that horrifies even the most hardened morgue attendants ...

The US entering into another war in the Persian Gulf against Iran, a large nation that has nothing like the problems Iraq faced in 2003, a great power in its own right. With a blithe assurance as to its right to do so, an assurance that shocks even the most hardened morgue attendants ...

It's a truism that US citizens are not very clued up on history. The analogy that keeps recurring is the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918-20. Nothing ahppened as expected, the Allied invention forces got their noses bloodied, and the White forces got discredited because they were working hand-in-hand (or foot-in-mouth) with forces intervening in a purely Russian struggle.

Don't let Uncle Sam give you a shave.
Wesley Parish
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