Antiwar.com Blog

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_09_25_cirincione.mp3]

Joseph Cirincione, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, discusses the true nature of Syria, North Korea and Iran’s nuclear programs, the neoconservatives lies about them, their motives, the Cheney Cabal’s attempted end run around the president, the willingness of the mass media to continually repeat whatever the government says about Iran, the fragility of the UN’s non-proliferation regime and the possibility of a nuclear war against Iran.

MP3 here. (39:31)

Joseph Cirincione is Senior Fellow and Director for Nuclear Policy at CAP and author of the new book, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia University Press, Spring 2007). Prior to joining the Center in May 2006, he served as director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for eight years. He is the co-author of Contain and Engage: A New Strategy for Resolving the Iran Nuclear Crisis (Center for American Progress, March 2007), Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats (Second Edition, 2005), and Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security (March 2005). He teaches at the graduate School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_09_13_gregory.mp3]

The Independent Institute’s Anthony Gregory discusses the long and bloody history of the expansion of the American empire across this continent and various attempts to create a North American Union over the years.

MP3 here. (56:13)

Anthony Gregory is a writer and musician living in Berkeley, California. He is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a policy adviser for the Future of Freedom Foundation, a columnist for LewRockwell.com and a contributor to Antiwar.com. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history at UC Berkeley, where he was president of the Cal Libertarians. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

As we move closer to confronting Iran for all sorts of reasons, including their President’s slight stature, members of Congress from both parties couldn’t wait to pile more sanctions on the people of Iran and anyone who wants to trade with them.

Today the US House overwhelmingly passed H.R. 1400, piling on the sanctions and racheting up the war hysteria. Only 16 members of the House voted against it. Party leaders on both sides of the aisle lined up behind the Bush policy on Iran.

Ezra Klein points to this bizarre grilling of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by CBS’ Scott Pelley:

PELLEY: What trait do you admire in President Bush?

AHMADINEJAD: Again, I have a very frank tone. I think that President Bush needs to correct his ways.

PELLEY: What do you admire about him?

AHMADINEJAD: He should respect the American people.

PELLEY: Is there anything? Any trait?

AHMADINEJAD: As an American citizen, tell me what trait do you admire?

PELLEY: Well, Mr. Bush is, without question, a very religious man, for example, as you are. I wonder if there’s anything that you’ve seen in President Bush that you admire.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, is Mr. Bush a religious man?

PELLEY: Very much so. As you are.

AHMADINEJAD: What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter? Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops to another country, kill men, women, and children? You just can’t wear your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be truthfully religious. Religion tells us all that you should respect the property, the life of different people. Respect human rights. Love your fellow man. And once you hear that a person has been killed, you should be saddened. You shouldn’t sit in a room, a dark room, and hatch plots. And because of your plots, many thousands of people are killed. Having said that, we respect the American people. And because of our respect for the American people, we respectfully talk with President Bush. We have a respectful tone. But having said that, I don’t think that that is a good definition of religion. Religion is love for your fellow man, brotherhood, telling the truth.

PELLEY: I take it you can’t think of anything you like about President Bush.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I’m not familiar with the gentleman’s private life. Maybe in his private life he is very kind or a determined man. I’m not aware of that. I base my judgment on what I see in his public life. Having said that, I think that President Bush can behave much better. There were golden opportunities for President Bush. He should have used them better.

First, as Klein wonders, what most impresses Scott Pelley about Bush is that he’s “very religious”? Really? Is Pelley very religious himself, or did he not anticipate having his stupid query turned back on him, which forced him to spit out the first thing he could think of?

Second, say what you like about the messenger, but what in Ahmadinejad’s message is the least bit unreasonable? George W. Bush once told an interviewer that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ. (Hey, ask a stupid question…) Has Scott Pelley or any other American journalist demanded to know, in light of the events of the last five years, what exactly Bush admires about Jesus’ teachings? Because, as Ahmadinejad indicates, the answer is far from apparent.

And, just as an afterthought, please note that Ahmadinejad implies an ethical unity among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Now perhaps he’s speaking with a forked tongue, but if he were really out to antagonize the West and score points among radical Muslims, what better time and place to rail against Jews and Crusaders? Hell, America’s faux-butch warbloggers lambasted Bush for calling Islam a “religion of peace” back in the day – imagine what the al-Qaeda types must be saying about Ahmadinejad now.

Our dingbat president blathered on painfully at the UN this morning about several things that have nothing to do with the United States. He wants to tighten Myanmar sanctions — because I guess in the Bizarro World he’s been sucked into, sanctions always work. He blathered on about “tyranny and violence,” “persecution,” “poverty,” — you know, all the things the government he runs has worked to promote the last six years and change. From a foreign policy point of view, it’s old news that we should just ignore anything he has to say unless it’s about the next country he plans to invade and destroy. But he’s always good for laughs on the economics front:

Bush also said he would propose a change in the way the United States offers food aid to Africa. Under Bush’s proposal. the U.S. would purchase crops directly from African farmers, rather than ship food directly from the U.S. That action would help African farmers become more self-sufficient, he said.

“I urge the United States Congress to support this initiative,” Bush said.

George, what happens when US food aid slows or shifts or ends after these farmers you claim to be making self-sufficient have become bloated agricultural enterprises built to sell to the big-spendingest corporation on the face of the earth? How will all their production capacity be used — will its “customers” suddenly have enough money to buy their own food, especially at the prices at which you will have been buying it?

Dumb. Chances are, unfortunately, that Congress is even dumber.

Picture this: you’re an Iraqi civilian, perhaps one of the ever growing number of internally displaced persons, roaming the streets of Baghdad. You come upon a piece of seemingly abandoned US military equipment. Desperate for money, you approach the item, intending to sell it to one of the many vendors dealing in lost, abandoned, and stolen military surplus.

Bang

You just fell victim to the newly uncovered US military practice of “baiting”, and are now officially part of the “insurgents killed” count that is being touted as proof of how swimmingly the surge is going.

This practice has apparently been going on for quite some time, and while we may never know for sure how many innocent lives were taken in the name of inflating the military’s kill count to sell the war to the American public, we do know that the practice was so widespread and acceptable that, according to court documents, soldiers were planting “baits” on the bodies of people they’d killed illegally and, like magic, the problem would just go away.

This gruesome new trend of padding body counts with actual bodies almost makes one long for the days when they were just flat out lying to us about their numbers.