Posted on 01/15/2014 9:08:18 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
As we approach the centennial of World War I, we will read much of the blunders that produced that tragedy of Western civilization.
Among them will be the “blank check” Kaiser Wilhelm II gave to Vienna after the assassination by a Serb terrorist of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
If you decide to punish the Serbs, said the Kaiser, we are with you.
After dithering for weeks, Austria shelled Belgrade. Within a week, Germany and Austria were at war with Russia, France and Great Britain.
Today the Senate is about to vote Israel a virtual blank check—for war on Iran. Reads Senate bill S.1881: If Israel is “compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” the United States “should stand with Israel and provide … diplomatic, military and economic support to the Government of Israel in the defense of its territory, people and existence.”
Inserted in that call for U.S. military action to support an Israeli strike on Iran, S.1881 says that, in doing so, we should follow our laws and constitutional procedures.
Nevertheless, this bill virtually hands over the decision on war to Bibi Netanyahu who is on record saying: “This is 1938. Iran is Germany.”
Is this the man we want deciding whether America fights her fifth war in a generation in the Mideast? Do we really want to outsource the decision on war in the Persian Gulf, the gas station of the world, to a Likud regime whose leaders routinely compare Iran to Nazi Germany?
The bill repeatedly asserts that Iran has a “nuclear weapons program.”
Yet in both 2007 and 2011, U.S. intelligence declared “with high confidence” that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
Where is the Senate’s evidence for its claim? Why has Director of National Intelligence James Clapper not been called to testify as to whether Tehran has made the decision to go for a bomb?
Why are the American people being kept in the dark?
Are we being as misled, deceived, and lied to about Iran’s “weapons of mass destruction,” as we were about Iraq’s? The bill says that in a final deal Iran must give up all enrichment of uranium. However, we have already been put on notice by President Hassan Rouhani that this is an ultimatum Iran cannot accept.
Even the reformers of Iran’s Green Revolution of 2009 back their country’s right to a peaceful nuclear program including enrichment.
Senate bill S.1881 imposes new sanctions if Iran fails to live up to the interim agreement or fails to come to a final agreement in six months.
Yet the Senate knows that Iran has warned that if new sanctions are voted during negotiations, they will walk away from the table.
Why is the Senate risking, or even inviting, a blowup in these talks?
When the interim agreement was reached, it was denounced by neocons as “worse than Munich.” Now the War Party piously contends this Senate bill is simply an “insurance policy” to ensure that the terms of the deal are met and a final deal reached.
It is nothing of the sort. This bill is a project of AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, designed to sabotage and scuttle the Geneva talks by telling Tehran: Either capitulate and dismantle all your enrichment facilities, or face more severe sanctions which will put us on the road to war.
What terrifies AIPAC and Bibi is not an American war on Iran, but an American rapprochement with Iran.
Who are the leaders of the push for S.1881? Sens. Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez, the biggest recipients of AIPAC campaign cash.
Last weekend, the Obama National Security Council finally belled the cat with a blunt statement by spokesperson Bernadette Meehan: ”If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action [against Iran], they should be up front with the American public and say so.”
Exactly. For whether or not all these senators understand what they are doing, this is where their bill points—to a scuttling of the Geneva talks and a return to the sanctions road, at the end of which lies a U.S. war with Iran.
A majority of Democratic senators have thus far bravely bucked AIPAC and declined to co-sponsor S.1881. However, all but two Republican senators have signed on.
If, after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the GOP has once again caught the war fever, the party should be quarantined from the White House for another four years.
Press Secretary Jay Carney says that if S.1881 passes, Obama will veto it. The president should tell Congress that not only will he veto it, but that if Israel decides on its own to attack Iran, Israel will be on its own in the subsequent war.
Obama should order U.S. intelligence to tell us the truth.
Is Iran truly hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear bomb? Does Iran have a nuclear bomb program? If so, when did Tehran make that decision?
Or are we being lied into war again?
yes but when one of those nations screams almost daily that it plans to destroy its Great Satan (USA) and .. when (as now) it is testing long and longer range ICBM’s... (not that they are necessary but they surely could be used to attack USA), and when that country’s leaders are spending billions of dineros building nuclear bombs to put on those ICBM’s (or to just smuggle into USA what with our open borders)
then it is time to pay attention (and eliminate the danger before it causes us tens of millions of unnecessary casualties)
we can AGREE that we should try to avoid getting bogged down in conflicts (and especially with the crazy Islamicists) like in Syria, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Central African Republic, and everywhere else Obama has been sending American troops to overthrow governments and install his Muslim Brother and other terrorist comrades and friends
three days of the USAF could eliminate the Iranian nuke threat to America NOW, before it is ready to strike our large cities
how to get Obama to stop his illegal bombing and overthrowing of foreign governments to install IslamoNazi terrorists into power?
I don’t have a solution to that, sorry
Whatever Buchanan wants or does not want doesn’t change the fact that our nation is being bled and bankrupted by a messianic urge to defend all and remake the world that is closer in philosophy to Woodrow Wilson and FDR than it is to George Washington.
I think people on this thread should be more focused on arguing the issues Pat raises than arguing the person Pat is. We libertarians and conservatives should never shy away from arguing in the forum of ideas, becasue we are usually right and win the argument just about every time.
I appreciate your reasoned response. I just think Iran is not the threat that their bluster sometimes suggests. And I think the big winner from a US attack on Iran would be al-Qaeda who, unlike Iran, has an actual history of terrorist attacks on American soil.
Iran is a major funder of terrorism and the US is going to squat about that while declaring “peace”.
I wonder if Obama could have been elected in the first place if we conservatives had done a better job facing and debating the issues the past twenty years.
Our endless wars in that area will make China the world’s only superpower. Iran war may be existential for Israel but it is also existential for us.
Nobody’s disputing the sins of Iran’s disreputable regime, But sometimes in this vale of tears you have to live with the lesser of evils or else you will be consumed with eternal war and slow national death.
did I ask for war?
Iran wants to nuke us. They will build nukes and ICBM’s and Kerry/Obama will let them. They hate us more than they hate Israel.
Losing a few cities is a lesser evil than enteral war I guess, that much is probably true.
But, as a free people, we should heed the warning that freedom requires eternal vigilance. This may not be comfortable for us, but it is necessary. I fear our comfortable lifestyle has lulled many of us to sleep. True freedom-loving Americans need to wake up and (re)educate themselves (since all government schools do is brain-wash). So I think conservatives and libertarians should exercise educated involvement as they see fit not becasue they love politics but because they love freedom.
Reminds me William Wallace's initial reluctance in "Braveheart" which we saw last night. It also occurred to me while watching that they were ready to fight because their very lives and families were threatened by the English. The threat was obvious at that point, but it required bloodshed. Well, that's the point you raise and I consider here: the sooner Americans recognize and act on the threat to their freedoms, the less pain to fix it.
well, ok. i believe Iran is a super-sized threat to America
(I am not at all prepared, or willing, to ignore or dismiss their constant, repeated, long-term threats to destroy The Great Satan... especially when they are busy building exactly the kind of weapons and delivery systems that would enable them to do just that)
I think they are, frankly, mad men... quite possibly possessed by Satan...
and that they will do just as they say, once they believe they can pull it off
I wish I had your confidence that the above was wrong
Best regards,
fhc
You and Pat are probably in love with Diane Feinstein now.
That's funny . . . I can remember when "palaecons" were all for fighting for Rhodesia, South Africa, Nationalist China, Nicaragua, El Salvador . . . even South Vietnam. It's just when those pesky Israelis are in someone's crosshairs that they suddenly become isolationist and neutralist. Now ain't that a shiner?
I guess unlike Nationalist China, Israel just isn't a "white, chrstian" nation within the pale of "western civilization."
Meanwhile, bleeding America in a messianic crusade during the Cold War was tickety-boo. It's just too bad those nasty old Israelis had to show up on our side.
Of course. They've been nothing but cuddly little bunnies ever since Khomeini (yimach shemo vezikhro!). Why, that whole 444-day humiliation of the US from '79 to '81 was just a big misunderstanding. They were just mad at David Rockefeller and the "international bankers," that's all!
Iran--mankind's last best hope against the "Zionist new world order."
I like 95% of what Pat says but he is oblivious to Muslim imperialism. He rather play ostrich. He can ignore reality but reality will not ignore him
I think most all conservatives, even Buchanan, were in favor of supporting Israel in the era of the Yom Kippur war when the Soviets threatened to tip the balance against the Israelis. Now it is a different era. The Israeli military is much stronger relative to the rest of the region.
Buchanan is right in that Iran has no desire to attack the United States or to wage war against it. Raccoons don't attack mountain lions.
The alleged and non-existent military threat from Iran (or from Iraq, or Syria, etc) seems like an intentional distraction at times. Insofar as there is a Muslim threat to the western world, it doesn't come from aggressive war, but from immigration and demographic trends. And on the issue of Third World immigration, whether it's the Arabization/Africanization of Europe or the transformation the the US into an annex of Mexico, there is no more stalwart spokesman than Pat Buchanan.
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