The preemption discussion v/v Iraq in the national security strategy should not be our main focus.  We are responsible, in many respects, for the dilemma we now face in Iran. 

The "dilemma" we now face with Iran is about 80% hype.  The other day, for example, Bush gave a speech in which he complained that "components" of some IEDs used in Iraq were produced Iran.  Of course, since IEDs are usually cobbled together out of a hodgepodge of non-military parts, those components could include anything from nails to pieces of cell phones to metal plates to ordinary industrial explosives.  General Pace later threw some cold water on this latest little fire started by the White House propaganda arsonists.

Subtract all of the similar instances of Bush administration BS from the last five years worth of rhetoric about Iran, and how much of a dilemma do we have left I wonder?

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

This not as off topic as it may first appear...

Helena Cobban's done such fine blogging, I'll let her tell you

Major new article on the pro-Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are two of the most important thinkers in the "realist" school of US foreign-policy analysts. Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Walt is the Academic Dean at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he holds the Robert and Renee Belfer Professorship in International Affairs. These two men are not, as you can see, fuzzy-headed liberals who are marginal to the mainstream of policy discourse in the United States.Now, they have a major new article in the upcoming issue of the London Review of Books on the power and detrimental role that the pro-Israel lobby in Washington has played over the years. (The LRB piece has no footnotes. But you can access a fully documented, PDF version of the longer article from which it was excerpted, if you click here. 211 endnotes, many of them very lengthy, to document just 48 pages of text... These guys are empiricists after my own heart!)Here is some of what they argue in the LRB version:

Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides. Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

And this:
Continue reading"Major new article on the pro-Israel Lobby

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Thank You NeoCon Men!
Mark Fiore

Richard, why has the spelling of your last name changed?

People like Hack and McCutcheon deserve to be flayed alive by Iranian Ayatollahs. Thank G-d the Mossad will prevent that from happening even if they don't have anything nice to say about Israelis.

People like Hack and McCutcheon deserve to be flayed alive by Iranian Ayatollahs. Thank G-d the Mossad will prevent that from happening even if they don't have anything nice to say about Israelis.