Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?

Conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

By Fareed Zakaria

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:57 PM ET Oct 20, 2007

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Keep Reading...

punditman says...Ever notice that whenever the US government wants to go to war, their newly designated enemy becomes the "new Hitler"? We saw it with Gaddafi, Hussein, Milosevic....I am so sick of this bogus act!

Thankfully, Fareed Zakaria and the article above represent a voice of sanity within the mainstream media. Unfortunately, it is a rare voice in the wilderness.

Labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guards: Another step toward military confrontation

by Daniel Pourkesali

The unprecedented move by the United States to designate a branch of another sovereign nation's armed forces, in this case Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "terrorist" organization [1], is only the latest episode of a menacing plan that has taken years to implement.

Most commonly accepted definition for "terrorism" is "the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, civilian population, or any segment thereof, in order to achieve specific political, social, or economic objectives".

Note that the only thing causing the above to be characterized as an act of "terror" is the word "unlawful". If the very same act of aggression is given a resemblance of being justified on legal grounds then it is magically transformed to an "operation" and given a code name (i.e. Panama attack was called Operation Just Cause and the current Iraq invasion began as Operation Iraqi Freedom). In fact there is a website dedicated to generating such code names [2]. Just choose the area and type of action from the two drop down menus and you'll instantly have a nice label to put on your operation. An air strike on Iran, for example, returned a very catchy name of "Intense Sword" and the same act on Russia was sanitized as "Silent Angel".

So how does a country like the U.S. go about taking care of that little "unlawful" problem? Simple; first task a few bureaucrats or political pundits who've not served a day in uniform with writing a paper to be used as blueprint for global domination through pre-emption and military intervention and call it the "The National Security Strategy of the United States."[3] Then label all those persons, organizations, or even states not readily submitting to your will as "terrorists" and strong-arm the international community, the U.N. and the Congress into supporting that strategy in violation of both U.S. and international laws.

Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution establishes that ratified treaties, such as the U.N. Charter, are the "supreme law of the land."

Article 1 of the U.N. Charter [4] states that "The purposes of the United Nations are to maintain international peace and sovereignty, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removals of threats to peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace. . . "

Article 2 states that all member states, "shall act in accordance with the following Principles: ...All members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered". "All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations...."

One can see that under such a framework, all acts of aggression are to be suppressed and force can only be used as a last and unavoidable resort. The U.N. Charter was enacted in 1945 in the aftermath of the devastation from World War II in order to bring an end to acts of aggression and "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind."

Branding of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization is a blatantly illegal and deliberate act to prepare the ground for waging a pre-emptive war of aggression against yet another sovereign government and its civilian population in order to achieve specific political, social, or economic objectives.

LINK...

Notes

[1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20269253/

[2] http://www.ubique.ch/codename/

[3] http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

[4] http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/