There Are Exploding Neocon Heads Everywhere

They sure look like pals to me:

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday tried to allay Iranian fears over a planned U.S.-Iraq security pact, saying his government would not allow Iraq to become a launching pad for an attack on its neighbor.

"Iraq today doesn't present any threat as it used to be in the times of the former regime," al-Maliki told Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a Sunday meeting between two leaders, according to a statement from the prime minister's office.

"Today's Iraq is a constitutional state based on the rule of law, and it seeks to develop its relations with the regional countries based on cooperation and mutual respect," al-Maliki said.

Earlier, Iran's state-run news agency IRNA quoted the Iraqi leader as saying that "Baghdad would not allow its soil to be used as a base to damage the security of the neighboring countries, including Iran."

It never ceases to amaze me that the neocons believe in a world where the mostly irrelevant and powerless Ahmadinejad has his finger, literally and figuratively, on a nuclear weapon [that Iran doesn't have the capability to build or deploy] and the immediate destruction of Israel, and yet he routinely has warm meetings and dealings at all levels with his "counterpart" in Iraq, the same al-Maliki pictured here:



Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's just one degree of separation between McCain and Ahmadinejad now. Anyone for a bowl of hot steaming appeasement?

Al-Maliki and Ahmadinejad met Sunday afternoon, with Ahmadinejad calling on Iraq's neighbors and the United Nations to help restore security and stability to Iraq, IRNA reported. And al-Maliki thanked Ahmadinejad for his call for an end to longstanding U.N. sanctions against Iraq that date back to the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Wait a minute--five years after the fall of the Iraqi regime under Saddam--five years--and the United Nations still has Iraq on its shit list? There are still UN sanctions against Iraq? I did not know that. But it doesn't surprise me--it's not like we've ever sent anyone to the United Nations who could actually get something done during the Bush Administration. Shouldn't someone be writing a letter or something on behalf of our allies in Iraq? As in, yo, this is a different government now. You can end the sanctions--they're the puppet government we're propping up.

News That Would Make a Wingnut Squirm

If this is true, I'm quite certain we'll see someone denounce it as appeasement, right?

Iran and the United States have been engaged in secret "back channel" discussions for the past five years on Iran's nuclear programme [sic] and the broader relationship between the two sworn enemies, The Independent can reveal.

One of the participants, former senior US diplomat Thomas Pickering, explained that a group of former American diplomats and experts had been meeting with Iranian academics and policy advisers "in a lot of different places, although not in the US or Iran".

"Some of the Iranians were connected to official institutions inside Iran," he said in a telephone interview from Washington. The group was organised by the UN Association of the USA, a pro-UN organisation. Its work was facilitated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a government-funded think-tank chaired by the former chief UN weapons inspector for Iraq, Rolf Ekeus.

Could this be one of the reasons why Deputy Secretary of State Negroponte went to Pakistan earlier this year? As a cover story for meeting with Iranian officials? If this ends up being the case, will Negroponte become the poster boy for appeasement and face withering attacks from the neoconservatives like John Bolton:

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.

Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was "pushing out" and "is not receiving adequate push-back" from the west.

"I don't think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don't know what the alternative is.

"Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities."

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the "source of the problem", Mr Ahmadinejad.

Clearly, the choice has been to try to negotiate. This marks a reversal wholesale rejection of neoconservative rhetoric and returns us to the policy advocated early on by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, before he put his common sense, his decency, and his integrity into a blind trust to be opened only after all of the Bush neocons are out of office. Too bad there's so much intellectual dishonesty out there--it would do wonders for the political discourse in this country to acknowledge the wisdom of negotiation and diplomacy as a means of solving problems. It doesn't make you a "pussy" if you don't want to bomb people or torture them, you know.

Ramping up the rhetoric

As the sand slips through the hourglass, the fear that aWol might not get to start another war with Iran is palpable and his rhetoric becomes increasingly shrill and disconnected from reality.

On Wednesday, Bush conducted an interview with the U.S. government run Farsi-language Radio Farda to mark the Iranian New Year. In that interview, Bush asserted that Iran has openly "declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people." He also insisted that the Iranian government might be hiding a secret program (in spite of a total lack of evidence to support the allegation.)

There is just one problem - it's pure unadulterated bullshit. A veritable tour de farce.

Iran has never staked any such claim, or even stated on the record a desire for nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The Iranian government has been quite adamant and insisting that the uranium enrichment program that it currently operates in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads.

Bush repeated his position that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear power, but insists that they should get the low-enrichment fuel from Russian rather than conduct their own refinement, but Tehran has repeatedly rejected that option. "The problem is the (Iranian) government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now. Who knows?" said Bush. "Secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people, some in the Middle East. And that is unacceptable to the United States and it's unacceptable to the world." (emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Iran has denied repeatedly that the country seeks nuclear warheads, and in 2005, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious edict forbidding the "production, stockpiling and use of such weapons."

Shortly after the White House released the transcript of the interview on Thursday, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe was on the hotseat and spinning so furiously that he threatened to generate his own gravitational field, dismissing the presidents remarks as "shorthand" for comments allegedly made by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the "World Without Zionism" conference in 2005, where he supposedly, by one translation of his remarks, stated his desire to see Israel "wiped off the map." People who actually speak Farsi have said unequivocally that the comments that this administration is determined to hang their "bomb Iran" policy from are vague and should not be interpreted as a threat to use force against Israel.

As their grip slips, as they lose control of the message, their desperation grows by leaps and bounds. The thoroughly diseased, discredited and debunked Neocon/PNAC political philosophy and agenda rooted in arrogance and hubris that has brought our country to the brink of disaster is increasingly viewed as an uncomfortable embarrassment to the less stupid among the craven fucks who subscribed to it. The few die-hards remaining are the most dangerous of the lot - all that is left are the cornered animals. And the psychotic desperation - and flat-out, pathological delusions - of the worst president ever grow every day. It's time to put impeachment back on the table.