Monday, January 03, 2011

Perpetual war to "save the Jews": the gift that keeps on giving to warmongers and Empire pimps

From:
Goldberg’s next war sure sounds a lot like his last one

(Mondoweiss) -- by Philip Weiss --

Four months back, Jeffrey Goldberg published a long piece in the Atlantic called "The Point of No Return," making the Israeli case for the United States to attack Iran in Never-again terms: Iran is threatening the existence of “the Jewish people,” Israel is bound to act if the U.S. fails to, the U.S. will do a better job. The piece has stirred a lot of discussion. Goldberg has gone on national media and panels at thinktanks to promote these bellicose ideas.

But no one has pointed out that the piece makes the same argument Goldberg marshaled eight years ago for the U.S. to attack Iraq, that time with an article in the New Yorker magazine under the headline, "The Great Terror." Iraq too was bent on the destruction of the Jewish people, and was developing a nuclear weapon to do so.

The language in the pieces is eerily similar. The last time the concentration camp Goldberg invoked was Bergen-Belsen. This time around it’s Auschwitz.

Both times the enemy is "three years" away from going nuclear. Last time:
He [August Hanning of German intelligence agency] does not equivocate. “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years,” he said.
This time:
Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so).
The last time round Goldberg was flat wrong.

"The Great Terror" stated that Saddam had links to Al Qaeda, and the article was cited by both Bush and Cheney as proof of the threat posed by Iraq (Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has told me). As it turned out, Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction and didn’t attack Israel and wasn’t making a nuclear warhead or an aflatoxin/chemical/biological one and wasn't importing canisters of mysterious nerve gases, as Goldberg had affirmed. But meantime, the U.S. was at war with Iraq, in some measure because of the bad ideas that Goldberg proliferated, and we and the Iraqis and its neighbors are still suffering the consequences.

This time around, the question is, Why is anyone listening to Goldberg? Why are prestige news organizations giving him the microphone?...MORE...LINK
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GOLDBERG'S LIST...

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