Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

[Mega]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-Cold-War.html

I remember EJ talking about the possablity of a new Cold war, but this seems differnet. I sense the British (West) has blinked...."They" are NOT going to attack Iran, they might hassle Syria but i think that might cool as well.....

Mike

[c1ue]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

Hague frankly is an idiot - I had not previously ever heard anything coming out of his mouth which was worth the time to hear it, and this interview was even worse.

Comparing Iran to the USSR is idiotic in so many ways, let's explore a couple:

1) Iran can barely scrape together an atomic bomb. The USSR exploded a hydrogen bomb before the US did. The USSR demonstrated low earth orbit launch capabilities, thus demonstrating they could loft their fission and fusion bombs a long, long way.

Iran's ability to reach Israel is even problematic.

2) The USSR/West confrontation was a contest between roughly equal powers. How exactly is Iran trying to enrich uranium - to be capable of making a bomb much like Japan and numerous other nations are capable of making atomic bombs - a similar confrontation? Iran vs. EU+US+UN+Israel? Seriously?

[Mega]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

I sense (may be wrong) that "They" woken up & smelt the coffee.........If they attack Iran its WW3 & they lose.
I think they just chip away at Syria & hope to get round to Iran one day..
Mike

[don]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

a more grounded evaluation . . .

[metalman]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

At right is the result of a simple Google search: Brian Becker Answer. It is an example of the vast resources available to PostWatch, but evidently denied to the Washington Post.In the Post's main story about the antiwar march, 4 years After Start of War, Anger Reigns,reporters Steve Vogel and Michael Alison Chandler vaguely refer to "organizers" a few times before one quick direct identification: More than 60 bus loads of protesters who had been scheduled to come from the region canceled their trips Friday night, according to Brian Becker, national coordinator for the Answer Coalition, the event's main sponsor. Becker and Answer are never heard from again.But they ought to be. The fifth story in that Google search may be the key one for newbies, in an arguing-against-interest kind of way; it's an expose of the extremely extreme far-left antiwar associations of ANSWER and related organizations, written in October, 2002 for LA Weekly by The Nation's David Corn:

If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action. This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool, yet the demo was not intended to persuade doubters. Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don’t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism.This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s “socialist system,” which, according to the party’s newspaper, has kept North Korea “from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.” The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, “Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.”

Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.

If you do your own searches, you'll learn plenty about Becker and his passionate defense of the last great Stalinist enterprise, North Korea. Current websites for ANSWER and the Workers World Party don't reveal many links between the two, and I don't know whether that's a tactical decision on their part after stories like Corn's, or whether this story written by a disgruntled lefty that references rifts in left-wing circles has anything to do with it (Socialism and Liberation, another march supporter, may be part of the answer if you'll pardon the expression).But absent a story about Becker changing his stripes into a classical liberal, I'll assume he still stands for the hodgepodge of "anti-imperialist" ravings that he is widely known for outside the willfully ignorant mainstream media, which has never fully grappled with ANSWER and its allies. That definitely includes the Post.There's more to say about the march coverage, but that will do for now.Update: The New York Times--of all things--explains what the Post did not, and clears up what Becker's been up to since we last tuned in. ViaPowerline:

This New York Times account is interesting, once you get past the clearly low-ball assertion that "several hundred" pro-war demonstrators turned out. The Times acknowledges with unusual frankness the far-left sponsorship of the antiwar rally:

Saturday’s march was organized by the Answer Coalition — named for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism — an organization that was initially associated with the Workers World Party and now affiliated with a breakaway faction of that party called the Party for Socialism and Liberation.*** Judging by the speeches and placards, the marchers on Saturday set their sights on sweeping goals, including not only ending the war but also impeaching President Bush and ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Many carried Answer Coalition signs bearing the image of the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.Brian Becker, the national coordinator of the Answer Coalition and a member of the Party of Socialism and Liberation, said the group held out little hope of influencing either the president or Congress. “It is about radicalizing people,” Mr. Becker said in an interview. “You hook into a movement that exists — in this case the antiwar movement — and channel people who care about that movement and bring them into political life, the life of political activism.”


http://www.postwatchblog.com/2007/03...becker_in.html

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

Itulip is a filter. After you stick around, you sort of know what you're getting, who to half trust.

Don posts an interview that seems reasonable. Metalman bounces back with the above post.

I had never heard of Brian Becker.

After googling him for thirty minutes, I was not one bit closer to figuring what to believe.

To me, that is really scary.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

And while we're at it, who is Bill Keller?

WikiLeaks, a Postscript
By BILL KELLER

THIS is apparently the revenge of Julian Assange: everyone who runs afoul of the rock-star leaker is condemned to spend eternity discussing the cosmic meaning of WikiLeaks. As the editor of The Times during our publication of many articles based on that treasury of military and diplomatic secrets, and as the lucky man the WikiLeaks founder singled out as his Least Favorite Journalist, I have participated in half a dozen panel discussions, and turned down at least that many. I can’t complain about the one in Madrid, where, after holding forth in a packed auditorium, the American, British, German, French and Spanish editors who broke news based on WikiLeaks commemorated the collaboration with an after-hours prowl through the Prado Museum and a 27-course meal cooked by master chef Ferran Adrià. (If Europe is dying, Spain is where I plan to go for the wake.) Unforgettable in a different way was the retrospective in Berkeley, where Assange himself, then as now awaiting an extradition ruling in England, was Skyped in on a giant screen, like the mighty Oz, to pontificate on Western media’s failure to turn the files into a kind of Nuremberg trial of American imperialism. About half the audience seemed on the verge of tossing their underwear at the screen.

Add to that the three or four documentaries on the WikiLeaks adventure, the dozen books — including, weirdly, Assange’s unauthorized autobiography — and a couple speculative Hollywood projects, in which I have a twofold interest. (1. The very slight possibility that I might make some money for my small piece of the story. 2. The exceedingly remote chance that a director will take up my wife’s brilliant idea that Assange be played by Tilda Swinton.)

It’s amazing they keep inviting me to these things, since I’m a bit of a spoilsport. My consistent answer to the ponderous question of how WikiLeaks transformed our world has been: really, not all that much. It was a hell of a story and a wild collaboration, but it did not herald, as the documentarians yearn to believe, some new digital age of transparency. In fact, if there is a larger point, it is quite the contrary.

With the subject showing no signs of going away — one more documentary melodrama of our WikiLeaks adventure will be featured at next month’s South by Southwest festival — I decided to check up on the lingering fallout from what may be the nation’s all-time greatest cascade of blown secrets.

Assange himself, who gave a handful of journalists early access to the pilfered data, has moved from a supporter’s country mansion to much more modest digs while he fights extradition to Sweden on sexual abuse charges. An American grand jury is believed to still be mulling an indictment for his role in the leaks. He compiled many hours of interviews for an autobiography, then backed out of the project, but his publisher — in the proper anarchist spirit of WikiLeaks — published it over his objections. (Evidently not for profit. It is No. 1,288,313 on the Amazon list of best-selling titles.) Assange’s newest project, announced last month, is a television talk show in which he will interview “iconoclasts, visionaries and power insiders.” So says the proud buyer of this series, RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda arm and keeper of the cult of Putin. No, not kidding.

Kremlin TV aside, Assange has declined from global notoriety to B-list celebrity: he lacks enough star power for a hosting gig on “Saturday Night Live,” but he did have a cameo in Sunday’s episode of “The Simpsons.”

Bart: “How ya doin’, Mr. Assange?”

Julian: “That’s my personal information, and you have no right to know about it.”

Bada-bing.

The Army private accused of divulging three-quarters of a million secret documents to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning — who was at first kept in such inhumane custody that the State Department spokesman quit in protest — is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on charges that could mean life in prison. You don’t have to excuse his alleged crime to think the original sin in the whole drama is that this tormented soul had access to so many secrets in the first place.

What we cannot know for sure is the fate of the many informants, dissidents, activists and bystanders quoted in the American cables. Assange published source names over the strong objections of the journalists who had access to the data (we expunged the names from our reports) and to the horror of human rights groups and some of his WikiLeaks colleagues. I’ve been told that a few exposed sources fled their countries with American help, a few others were detained by authorities, and none are known to have been killed. But would we even know? When I read stories like the Reuters account last week of the three men beheaded in Yemen for giving information to Americans, I worry anew about the many innocent witnesses named in the WikiLeaks cables.

The publication of so many confidences and indiscretions did not bring U.S. foreign policy to a halt. But it did, at least temporarily, complicate the lives of U.S. diplomats. American officials say that foreign counterparts are sometimes more squeamish about speaking candidly, and that it is harder to recruit and retain informants around the world.

As raw material for journalists, the cache of secrets has had a phenomenal afterlife. It’s been 10 months since The Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and the other partners in this project filed their last major extracts from the files. And still, literally every day, stories based on the trove appear somewhere in the world, either because local news organizations are catching up with morsels of scandal that did not attract major newsrooms, or because new events cast the cables in a more interesting light. Notably, State Department dispatches reporting on the dissolute lifestyles of Mideast autocrats provided a little extra kindling for the bonfires of the Arab Spring.

But the idea that this was the opening of a floodgate has proved exactly wrong. In the immediate aftermath of the breach, several news organizations (including this one) considered creating secure online drop-boxes for would-be leakers, imagining that new digital Deep Throats would arise. But it now seems clear that the WikiLeaks breach was one of a kind — and that even lesser leaks are harder than ever to come by.

Steven Aftergood, who monitors secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, said that since WikiLeaks the government has elevated the “insider threat” as a priority, and tightened access to classified material. Nudged by an irate Congress, the intelligence agencies are at work on an electronic auditing program that would make illicit transfer of secrets much more difficult and make tracking the leaker much easier.

“A lot of attention has been focused on WikiLeaks and its colorful proprietors,” Aftergood told me. “But the real action, it turns out, is not at the publisher level; it’s at the source level. And there aren’t a lot of sources as prolific or as reckless as Bradley Manning allegedly was.”

For good reason. The Obama administration has been much more aggressive than its predecessors in pursuing and punishing leakers. The latest case, the arrest last month of John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. terrorist-hunter accused of telling journalists the names of colleagues who participated in the waterboarding of Qaeda suspects, is symptomatic of the crackdown. It is this administration’s sixth criminal case against an official for confiding to the media, more than all previous presidents combined. The message is chilling for those entrusted with keeping legitimate secrets and for whistleblowers or officials who want the public to understand how our national security is or is not protected.

Here’s the paradox the documentaries have overlooked so far: The most palpable legacy of the WikiLeaks campaign for transparency is that the U.S. government is more secretive than ever.

[Shakespear]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

The latest case, the arrest last month of John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. terrorist-hunter accused of telling journalists the names of colleagues who participated in the waterboarding of Qaeda suspects, is symptomatic of the crackdown. It is this administration’s sixth criminal case against an official for confiding to the media, more than all previous presidents combined. The message is chilling for those entrusted with keeping legitimate secrets and for whistleblowers or officials who want the public to understand how our national security is or is not protected.

These people don't speak up for any ol' trivial reason.

I'm beginning to think that those that do serve the United States with the believe in Democratic values, having a good look behind the "curtain" are startled at what is going on behind it and how dangerous it is to the United States. I have no solid proof for this except the constant "hummmm" of event noise.

Here's one such event from the space of "event noise",

http://www.examiner.com/criminal-pro...who-killed-him
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/...ler-iii/68755/
http://bobmccarty.com/2011/01/04/did...know-too-much/

Nehh, its just a coincidence. Someone was upset about a housing issue and simply killed the poor man.

[c1ue]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

Yes, Iran is sure threatening the US.

We can tell because of all the US military bases around Iran...

http://www.juancole.com/2012/02/ring...eatens-us.html

I had grabbed an earlier version of this graphic off a Democratic Underground bulletin board from 2005. It made the point that the United States, which professes itself menaced by Iran, rather has Iran encircled by military bases. I have tried to update the map a bit, though this area is a moving target and the map no doubt isn’t perfect. It is expressive enough, however, of the reality. Iraq and Uzbekistan no longer have American bases, but the US military now has a refueling station in Turkmenistan.

US Bases Encircle Iran


Some critics complained that forward operating bases are not much of a base. But actually, this map vastly understates the case. It shows only a few of the estimated 450 US military bases and outposts in Afghanistan, e.g. And it does not show drone bases, of which the US has 60 around the world.

Iran has 150 billion barrels in petroleum reserves, among the largest reserves in the world, but they cannot be exploited by US corporations because of Israel lobby-inspired US congressional sanctions on Iran. US elites, especially Big Oil, dream of doing regime change in Iran so as to get access to those vast reserves. Likely the most important US objection to the Iranian civilian nuclear enrichment program is that it could give Iran “nuclear latency,” the ability to construct a bomb quickly if it seemed to Tehran that the US planned to attack. That is, the real objection in Washington to Iranian nuclear know-how is that it makes Iraq-style regime change impossible and so puts Iranian petroleum out of reach of Houston for the foreseeable future. This consideration is likely the real reason that Washington does not, so to speak, go ballistic about North Korea and Pakistan having actual nuclear warheads, but like to has a fainting spell at the very idea of Iran enriching uranium to 3.5 percent (a bomb takes 95%). North Korea and Pakistan don’t have oil.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Iran risks a new Cold war (The British just blinked)

First ten minutes are about Iran.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/...252674477.html