Paul Craig Roberts

In my last column, “A Culture of Delusion,” I wrote that “Americans live in a matrix of lies. Lies dominate every policy discussion, every political decision.” This column will use two top news stories, Iranian nukes and Julian Assange, to illustrate how lies become “truth.”

The western Presstitute media uses every lie to demonize the Iranian government. On September 28 in a fit of unmitigated ignorance, the UK rag, Mail Online, called the president of Iran a “dictator.” The Iranian presidency is an office filled by popular election, and the authority of the office is subordinate to the ayatollahs. Assange is demonized alternatively as a rapist and a spy.

The western media and the US Congress comprise the two largest whore houses in human history. One of their favorite lies is that the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, wants to kill all the Jews. Watch this 6 minute, 42 second video of Ahmadinejad’s meeting with Jewish religious leaders. Don’t be put off by the title. Washington Blog is making a joke.

Last week the news was dominated by the non-existent but virtually real Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, blatantly intervened in the US presidential election, demanding that Obama specify the “red line” for attacking Iran.

Netanyahu believes his maximum leverage over Obama, the president of the “world’s only superpower,” is just prior to the election. Israel cannot attack Iran on its own without the risk of Israel’s destruction. But Netanyahu reasons that if he attacks Iran the week before the US election, Obama will have to join in or lose the Jewish vote for not supporting Israel in states such as Florida, which has a large Jewish population and many electoral votes. If the election is close, Netanyahu, a person consumed by arrogance and hubris, might exercise his threat and attack Iran, despite the opposition of former chiefs of Israeli intelligence and military, the opposition party, and a majority of the Israeli people.

In other words, the outcome of the “superpower’s” presidential election might depend upon whether the sitting president of the “superpower” is sufficiently obedient to the crazed Israeli prime minister.

More »

Philip Giraldi

The view into Syria from Turkey's Ulu mosque

Regional powers aren't immune to blowback and other consequences of intervention either.

Over the past eleven years we have become so accustomed to the United States intervening in the affairs of other countries, to include regime change and military invasion, it is sometimes possible to forget that some other nations have also found themselves mired in situations that they cannot extricate themselves from when they pursued similar policies. America’s closest and most important ally in the Middle East Turkey now finds itself in a largely lose-lose situation in its dealings with its neighbor Syria.

Turkey certainly has many detractors who point to the increasing authoritarianism of the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government, its increasing drift from secularism to a mild Islamism, and the de facto limits on civil liberties and rule of law demonstrated in its arrests and prosecutions of journalists and political opponents. But both visitors and longtime foreign residents would also note the country’s dynamic society and vibrant economy at a time when much of the Western world appears to be mired in self-doubt and historical revisionism. Turkey’s economy has been growing, currently at an 8% annual rate, and its centrality as a militarily powerful moderate Muslim regime has led to speculation that they are a possible role model for other developing Islamic states in the Middle East and North Africa.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, was a passionate secularist, believing as he did that it was the Medievalism of Islam that retarded the nation’s development. He was also a nationalist. During and immediately after the First World War Turkey was a polyglot nation with large Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Jewish, and Arab minorities. Turkish ethnics were a majority, but nearly half of the nation was non-Turkish. Pogroms against the Armenians and the war of liberation against an invasion by Greece produced major population shifts, sharply reducing the numbers of Christians in the country. But the other major ethnic groups remained. Ataturk’s solution to the country’s ethnic diversity consisted of declaring that henceforth all citizens of the Republic of Turkey would be Turks, whether they liked it or not and without regard to what language they spoke at home and how they chose to worship. This was referred to as “Turkification” and some languages, including Kurdish, were actually made illegal. Ethnic riots in the 1950s further reduced the number of Greeks, primarily in Istanbul, but the fundamental instability of the Turkish state based on its large, predominantly Kurdish minority remained.

More »

Wayne Madsen

The old Boston Consulting Group team of Republican US presidential nominee Mitt Willard Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was briefly known in Boston as Benjamin Bin Nitai, is telling enough.

Romney’s sycophantic support for Netanyahu and his reliance on neo-conservative retreads from the Bush-Cheney administration has all but erased any standing the Republican nominee has in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Romney’s hitching of his Middle East foreign policy wagon to Netanyahu received a severe blow when Netanyahu delivered a school teacher-like lecture to the UN General Assembly on setting a “red line” representing 90 percent uranium enrichment for Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu displayed a cartoon image of a sizzling bomb that evoked memories of American cartoons that used similar bombs in scenes of the “Road Runner” outwitting his nemesis, “Wile E. Coyote” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” in which Russian agents Boris Badenov and Natasha tried to kill Rocky the Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose.

Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, an adviser to Romney and a stalwart supporter of Netanyahu, said, “Bibi’s use of that chart was one of the most effective, gripping, uses of a chart I’ve ever seen.” Fleischer probably thought that “Rocky and Bullwinkle” was a documentary on US-Soviet relations during the Cold War.

Netanyahu’s and Romney’s supporters said it was wise for the Israeli Prime Minister to keep his message “simple” for the “uneducated.” In fact, the only “simple” and “uneducated” ones appear to be those like Romney and his neocons who believe Netanyahu is intelligent.

More »