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the blind, one-eyed cyclops is rampant .....‘Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and insists (correctly) that the treaty assures signatories the right to pursue nuclear programs for peaceful use. And when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claims, as she did last month, "There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment," she is being, well, disingenuous again.
If Dr. Rice has done her homework, she is aware that in 1975 President Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a nuclear program to meet future energy requirements. This is what Iranian officials are saying today, and they are supported by energy experts who point out that oil extraction in Iran is already at or near peak and that the country will need alternatives to oil in coming decades.
Ironically, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric. The project fell through when the Shah was ousted three years later.’
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a certain madness .....
‘Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his
Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage
to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used
the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane
self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable
now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its
prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition.
In The March of Folly: from Troy
to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B
Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in
Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain
historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she
wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson
was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his
character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity
to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound
aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."’
Iran: The Next
War
consequences .....
‘An attack on Iranian nuclear infrastructure would signal
the start of a protracted military confrontation that would probably grow to
involve Iraq, Israel and Lebanon, as well as the USA and Iran. The report
concludes that a military response to the current crisis in relations with Iran
is a particularly dangerous option and should not be considered further.
Alternative approaches must be sought, however difficult these may be.’
Iran: Consequences Of War