Neocon Little Ahmadinejads

By Cernig

Joe Lieberman thinks we should attack Iran because there are terrorist training camps in the wilderness that no-one has ever produced definite evidence (you know - co-ordinates, pictures) actually exist. Meanwhile, the US is warning Turkey to back-off from threats that it will attack the known and well-documented locations of PKK terrorist training camps in Kurdish Iraq - camps which the US has done not word one about. It's a screaming double standard and even a pet goat could see that.

But it's a good enough bit of warmongering to cause Michael Ledeen to opine today in The National Review Online that Lieberman would make a far better Secretary of State than the current "appeaser" (his word). Remember IAEA chief Mohammed el-Baradei recently warned about "the crazies" in and around the White House? This is they, in full Cheney-chanelling flow.

Proving what a wonderful idea bombing these location-less camps would be, Michael Smith at the London Times, who is the preferred mouthpiece of the British intelligence community's mandarins, has a report on what would happen next.

Admiral Ali Shamkhani, a senior defence adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned that Gulf states providing the US with military cooperation would be the key targets of a barrage of ballistic missiles.

Shamkhani told the US journal Defense News that missiles would be launched not only at US military bases but also at strategic targets such as oil refineries and power stations.

Qatar, Bahrain and Oman all host important US bases and British forces are based in all three countries. Any Iranian attack would be bound to draw in the other Gulf Cooperation Council states: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.

The attacks on Arab states would be in addition to airstrikes on Israel, which have been threatened repeatedly. An Iranian foreign ministry official said: “The objective would be to overwhelm US missile defence systems with dozens and maybe hundreds of missiles fired simultaneously at specific targets.”

Such retaliation - including action from Syria - would be the response to anything even remotely akin to what DEBKAfile today says is the actual Cheneyite plan:

The regime heads in Tehran are basing their common front with Damascus on intelligence reports whereby the US and Israel have drawn up plans for coordinated military action against Iran, Syria and Hizballah in the summer.

According to this hypothesis, Iranian leaders foresee the next UN Security Council in New York at the end of June or early July ending with an American announcement that the sanctions against Tehran are inadequate because Russia and China has toned them down. Therefore, the military option is the only one left on the table. The ayatollahs have concluded that US president George W. Bush is determined to bow out of office on the high note of a glittering military success against Iran to eclipse his failures in Iraq.

They believe he will not risk the lives of more Americans by mounting a ground operation, but rather unleash a broad missile assault that will wipe out Iran’s nuclear facilities and seriously cripple its economic infrastructure.

According to the Iranian scenario, the timeline for hostilities has already been fixed between Washington and Jerusalem - and so has the plan of action. The US will strike Iran first, after which Israel will use the opportunity to go for Syria, targeting its air force, missile bases and deployments, as well as Hizballah’s missile and weapons stocks which Iran replenished this year.

I was reading a compelling op-ed from Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz earlier today, and as I read about all of these warmongering plans for strike and counter-strike, fuelled by barbaric lovers of bloodshed on both sides, I was foricibly drawn back to it. I want to share some of it with you but it's worth clicking through for the whole thing.

Satan is no longer to be found only in Tehran --- he is alive and kicking here in our midst. Israel is being inundated by a murky stream of little blue-and-white Ahmadinejads: If the president of Iran proposes to destroy Israel, they, who are smaller than he, are proposing only to "eradicate" villages, "flatten" them, starve entire populations and in fact to kill them.

...There is no difference, in principle or morally, between the Iranian original and his Israeli imitators. The racist and bullying philosophy of Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman and his ilk has unleashed its malignant tentacles into the heart of society.

..."If not the roof beams, destroy the foundations ... Attack Lebanon and also Gaza with plows and with salt, destroy them so no inhabitant remains. Transform them into barren desert, piles of rubble ... kill them, spill their blood, frighten the living," wrote poet Ilan Scheinfeld, who has recently published a novel whose boycott no one has called for.

...[Avigdor] Lieberman has proposed a hit on the quarter where Gaza City's well-off reside for every hit on Sderot; Major General (Res.) Amiram Levin has called for dividing the Gaza Strip into squares, and after every Qassam destroying one; former justice minister Yosef Lapid supported this proposal; former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, the progenitor of the theory of "consciousness-searing," has proposed "cleansing the territory;" Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal has said that he prefers "a dead child in Gaza to a dead child in Sderot," and a bereaved father from the Second Lebanon War, Ami Schreier, has called for the wiping out of a neighborhood in Gaza, with advance warning of three hours, for every Qassam. Not one of them has been castigated for his words, not one of them shunned.

This is what we look like. This is our moral portrait.

To the "little blue-and-white Ahmadinejads" Gideon Levy is appalled by, we should remember to add the little red-white-and blue Ahmadinejads of the American neocon lobby. They are as much a part of the problem as the mirror-image zealots they are so keen to use as an excuse for frightening and devastatingly widespread destruction.

Update Mona at Unqualified Offerings wonders if Ledeen is a convert or whether he will try to weasel on the difference between bombings and a ground invasion. Last fall he told an interviewer that he'd "always said invasion of Iran would be a terrible mistake". Yet today here he is, telling the world that Lieberman "just called for military strikes against terrorist training camps inside Iran, echoing, ahem, myself lo these several years." The blog that did the interview last fall found Ledeen to be one of the most “consistently misrepresented public intellectuals.” Yeah, by his own self.