Monday, September 21, 2009

Brzezinski's lips move, truth may or may not emerge

The national security adviser for former President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, gave an interview to The Daily Beast in which he suggested President Obama should make it clear to Israel that if they attempt to attack Iran's nuclear weapons sites the U.S. Air Force will stop them.
"We are not exactly impotent little babies," Brzezinski said. "They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? ... We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a 'Liberty' in reverse."
The USS Liberty was a U.S. Navy technical research ship that the Israeli Air Force mistakenly attacked during the Six Day War in 1967.

The above is from Jake Tapper's "Zbig Brzezinski: Obama Administration Should Tell Israel U.S. Will Attack Israeli Jets if They Try to Attack Iran" (ABC News) and Ynet news adds, "Brzezinski also criticized US President Barack Obama for his foreign policy, and especially his manner of involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He said Obama's actions were uncoordinated with his speeches" while Haaretz notes, "On Sunday Russian President Dimitry Medvedev told CNN that Israeli President Shimon Peres told him that Israel would not launch an attack on Iran." For more on the CNN interview (conducted by Faereed Zakaria for his CNN program), click here. The statements by Brzezinski will be treated as gospel by some. Smarter approach will be to wonder who the liar is trying to manipulate this time? When the current problems in Afghanistan were created during the Carter administration. Brzezinski was seen as 'believable' and trust worthy. This decade, he's repeatedly given interviews (with journals -- usually not the popular press) where he laughs about what was staged there. So people need to grasp Brzezinski has a long history of lying and a lot of people have died from his lies. He may be offering some truth or he may be attempting to the American people for sucker one more time.

As Brzezinski makes an already tense situation even more so, tensions continue between the governments of Iraq and Syria. Alsumaria reports:

Iraqi-Syrian crisis is escalating while the row is debated on the inside between President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki. The last facet of dispute is centered on Iraq representation in the United Nations General Assembly. In this concern, President Talabani announced that he will represent Iraq in the General Assembly thus sapping reports on Al Maliki’s representation to his country.
Iraqi Prime Minister's advisor Ali Al Moussawi affirmed that Al Maliki did not decide about his participation in the United Nations meetings.
The Premiership believes the row with the Presidency is unjustified since according to the Constitution the Prime Minister is concerned by the executive politics and responsible for the decision of forming an international tribunal and for asking Syria to hand wanted, Al Moussawi explained.
Iraqi-Syrian talks under the supervision of Turkey and the Arab League have not brought forth any tangible results, yet they did not fail, and Iraq is still ready to pursue dialogue, Cabinet spokesman Ali Al Dabbagh said.

While those tensions continue, Iran's Press TV reports Iraqi Ayad al-Samarrai, Speaker of Parliament, will be in Iran next week for a visit.

Last week, Mary Travers (Peter, Paul and Mary) passed away. Ruth noted the loss in "Mary Travers" and Kat did so in "It Knows Me By No Other Name, Mary Travers." Kat highlighted a rememberance by Don Rhodes (Augusta Chronicle) which she noted made her cry. An e-mail to the public account notes the Don Rhodes has updated his article by posting the dollar bill Mary Travers had signed for him many years ago. I'm sure Kat will note that at her site tonight but I'm noting it here this morning because I had to put it with Kat or Ruth. (I knew I didn't highlight it Thursday morning and I wasn't sure who the e-mail was too. So having to figure that out, I'll go ahead and note it here as well.) Bonnie reminds that Kat's "Kat's Korner: If you can get ahold of it, We Came To Sing! is amazing" and Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "The Grouch of Wrath" went up last night.

Jonathan Tasini advises:

I'm scheduled to be on CNBC today at about 1:15 p.m. Eastern time to discuss Wal-Mart's labor practices.
And since Wal-Mart and greed are a close match, it's a good time to mention to those of you living in the Denver area: I will be doing a reading/discussion of my new book, "The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves and The Looting of America" on Wednesday evening at the famed Tattered Cover book store (2526 East Colfax Avenue) at 7:30 p.m. The book is available via Powell's or Amazon (and in bookstores). Join the book's Facebook page and be part of the on-going discussion.

Today Amy Goodman 'notes' the death of Irving Kristol. I had no intention of noting it here and avoided it but I'm so damn sick of liars. "Neocon" is tossed around like crazy but we'll never learn from Amy that the "neocons" were Socialist Hawks. That's too much for a political closet case like Goody to touch. So since she's putting her lies out there (to save her own ass -- she's a great deal like a closeted gay in the entertainment industry who will only greenlight 'flamboyant' portrayals of gays in the hopes that Americans will assume all gays are easy to 'spot'), we'll note Justin Rainmondo's "Irving Kristol, RIP" (Antiwar):

Neoconservatism, the successful promotion of which Kristol devoted a good part of his life to, is biography at least as much as ideology. It is the story of the so-called New York intellectuals, who spent their misbegotten youth as Trotskyists, penning furious polemics against U.S. imperialism, but mostly against each other – and some of whom, including the ex-Trotskyist Kristol, wound up in the pay of the CIA, writing for Encounter and its French and Italian equivalents. (For a fascinating account of the neocon-CIA convergence, see Christopher Lasch’s essay on the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a CIA front that nurtured Kristol in the early days of the Cold War.)
In his 1977 essay, "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," Kristol describes the denizens of Alcove No. 1 at New York’s City College – the favorite hangout of the anti-Stalinist leftists on campus, including Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and, indeed, an entire generation of social scientists who later became prominent in academia. Here was the birthplace what we know today as the neoconservative movement, an intellectual tendency in modern American politics that has had an outsized impact on the nation, especially our foreign policy.
The intellectual odyssey of the neoconservatives is too well-known to go into here at length: the story has been told, especially by the participants, time and again. They even made a movie out of it, in which Kristol played a starring role. As a dedicated Trotskyist on the eve of World War II, young Kristol was caught up in the internecine feuds that consumed the movement and ultimately ripped it into two then three factions. The question was how to respond to the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the occupation of Europe by the twin totalitarian powers. The side Kristol chose propelled him on an intellectual journey, along with his friends and cohorts, that would take him to the heights of power in the inner councils of the very capitalist class he was once pledged to overthrow.
The debate that broke out in the Socialist Workers Party, the main Trotskyist group in the U.S. at the time, pitted the "orthodox" Trotskyists, led by Trotsky and James P. Cannon – who considered the Soviet Union a "workers state," because property was collectivized – against the revisionists, led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham, who held that the USSR had morphed into "bureaucratic collectivism," a new form of class society based on collectivized property forms, and was no longer worth defending. The movement split, with the Shachtmanite minority going its own way. Kristol went with them, and this was just the beginning of multiple defections.


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