Breaking: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran
It's always the apocalypse you're not expecting. Israel plans to nuke Iran's nuclear facilities.
ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons ( Read more... )
ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons ( Read more... )
That whole "softening up public opinion" angle, where they say they'll nuke Iran's nuclear facilities, and instead they just bomb them with the regular old WMD? Sorry, not gonna work. I'm not gonna think they're reasonable and measured in their actions if they don't actually nuke somebody. I'll think they're raving psychopaths for even considering it, and utter bastards for threatening it.
For all the media makes hay out of Ahmadinejad saying Israel should be wiped off the map, exactly one country has actually threatened to nuke the other one. And if Iran gets nukes, all it means is a MAD scenario. I'm anti-proliferation, so that would also suck, but I think it's a little ridiculous the way Israel is running around like someone lit their panties on fire at the very idea that anyone except them have nuclear weapons in the Middle East... and their first response is "nuke 'em!" It makes it seem like they want to be able to nuke their neighbors at will. I know they're our allies, but this doesn't make them look like the sane and reasonable ones.
All that said, I really hope they're bluffing.
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The ultimate irony is that he never said that. Here's an excerpt from the Manchester Guardian about some of lies and distortions about this conflict ~Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off the map".
Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.
He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.
But the propaganda damage was done, and western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews. At the recent annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group, huge screens switched between pictures of Ahmadinejad making the false "wiping off the map" statement and a ranting Hitler.
The US needs to funding Israel and pronto -- Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, receiving about 30% of the total US foreign aid budget. A few months ago, the Bush administration -- which claims to want to eradicate terrorism -- committed another $2.46 billion to Israel.(As part of the same spending bill, Bush had requested $150 million forthe Palestinian Authority, but that was before Hamas won.) Since 1973, Israel has received about $1.6 trillion from the States.
No,that's not a typo. That's trillion with a T, and it's these funds have allowed the Israelis to build up their arsenal to the extent that they have.
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I remember hearing some ridiculous percentage of Israel's workforce is employed by the military in some way - 40%? It makes you think about how the intertia and economic realities of a military-based economy make a country more militaristic.
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The more I learn about Israel and the IDF, the more frightened I am. They're basically training and deploying killers in that country, and there's never going to be peace in the Middle East as long as the US keeps the money coming.
( I posted about much of this a while ago, but can't bring myself to continue updating the entry. The whole situation makes me quite ill.)
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