The insanity of today's Republican Party

[Unreadphilosophy]

An unstable despot who has WMDs is reason enough to go to war. Which is why I endorse Obama's Iranian sanctions, though I'm not quite sure it goes far enough.

Sanctions are the ultimate act of war. Telling another country what it can and can't do with its resources is what provokes attacks on us. One thing that I love about people like Daruina is their hypocrisy. They scream that other countries need to respect our sovereignty, but they have no problem telling other countries how to live.

Iran is not a threat to us. Never have been, and never will be. They have already said countless times that their nuclear energy programs are for civilian purposes. The Pentagon has back this up. In 2003, Iran signed on to the International Atomic Energy Agency treaty. With the signature of this treaty, Iran promised to divert its nuclear energy programs to its civilians. Here is a quote from the Pentagon's report:

"The Pentagon's top intelligence official says there is no evidence that Iran is planning to build nuclear weapons.

The chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, says the key findings of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear energy program are still valid.

"The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true," he told Voice of America.

The NIE report was a consensus judgment of all US intelligence agencies, which concluded that Iran halted all activities which could have allegedly led to the development of nuclear arms in 2003.

Burgess said the Pentagon had seen no indication that Tehran was planning to resume the program allegedly aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

"We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don't know what we don't know," he said.

Burgess said the Pentagon would continue to work on verifying that Iran is pursuing peaceful nuclear activities."

Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=116...=351020104

There's no reason to fear Iran.

Israel, on the other hand, is a completely different story. Not only has Israel refused to sign the treaty stated above, they're sitting on 150+ nuclear weapons. Most of those weapons came from a generous donation from America.

If Iran attacked Israel at this moment, it would be suicide. Iran would be wiped off the face of planet. There's no reason for us to be funding Israel at all.

Here's a great article on Iran:
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/articl...=1#discuss

America has nothing to gain from attacking Iran. It's the government that wants something. The people running the system realize that the people are getting pissed off with this war. They're fed up with the billions and billions of dollars that are being fed to the beast in the Middle-East. The government was successful in scaring the American people into war with Iraq using the WMD fairytale. It wouldn't surprise me if they did the same with Iran. To the system, patriotism is based on how scared you can get the citizens of a country into believing something.

The WMD threat in the Middle East was false. Everything about it was a lie. The leak of the identity of Valerie Plume was done because her husband was planning to go forth with information proving that individuals with the Bush Administration had manipulated data to make is look like the Middle East was buying Yellow Cake Uranium. The "63,000 liters of anthrax and botulism have not been found, nor have any of the mobile germ labs. There are no signs of the one million pounds of sarin, mustard, and VX gasses alleged to exist" (Paul, 2007, pg. 273). All of it based on lies. All of it nothing more than the figments of the imagination of the people that Durian supports.

A few words: be on the look-out for a false flag terror attack. The war drums in Washington are beating. They'll do whatever it takes to get the bombs dropping. Wanna think I'm crazy? Be my guest.

By the way: the reason that the neo cons probably want to go to war is because the Bible states that Israel is the place where the Rapture will begin. People like Huckabee and Palin are crazed fundamentalist Christians. Palin herself said that she believed that her generation would see the return of Jesus Christ. There's a reason politics and religion should be kept separate. Whether people like her amid it or not, the personal beliefs that they hold are getting in their way of making the right judgment.

Before I end this little rant, enjoy these interesting facts on Iran:

Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the U.S.

Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war modern history (unlike the U.S. or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of "no first strike." This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.

Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.

Reality: Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.

Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to "wipe it off the map."

Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of 'no first strike' to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.

Belief: But didn't President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to "wipe Israel off the map?"

Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that "this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.

Belief: But aren't Iranians Holocaust deniers?

Reality: Some are, some aren't. Former president Mohammad Khatami has castigated Ahmadinejad for questioning the full extent of the Holocaust, which he called "the crime of Nazism." Many educated Iranians in the regime are perfectly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. In any case, despite what propagandists imply, neither Holocaust denial (as wicked as that is) nor calling Israel names is the same thing as pledging to attack it militarily.

Belief: Iran is like North Korea in having an active nuclear weapons program, and is the same sort of threat to the world.

Reality: Iran has a nuclear enrichment site at Natanz near Isfahan where it says it is trying to produce fuel for future civilian nuclear reactors to generate electricity. All Iranian leaders deny that this site is for weapons production, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly inspected it and found no weapons program. Iran is not being completely transparent, generating some doubts, but all the evidence the IAEA and the CIA can gather points to there not being a weapons program. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed with fair confidence that Iran has no nuclear weapons research program. This assessment was based on debriefings of defecting nuclear scientists, as well as on the documents they brought out, in addition to U.S. signals intelligence from Iran. While Germany, Israel and recently the U.K. intelligence is more suspicious of Iranian intentions, all of them were badly wrong about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction and Germany in particular was taken in by Curveball, a drunk Iraqi braggart.

Belief: The West recently discovered a secret Iranian nuclear weapons plant in a mountain near Qom.

Reality: Iran announced Monday a week ago to the International Atomic Energy Agency that it had begun work on a second, civilian nuclear enrichment facility near Qom. There are no nuclear materials at the site and it has not gone hot, so technically Iran is not in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it did break its word to the IAEA that it would immediately inform the UN of any work on a new facility. Iran has pledged to allow the site to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, and if it honors the pledge, as it largely has at the Natanz plant, then Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons at the site, since that would be detected by the inspectors. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that Iran could not produce nuclear weapons at Natanz precisely because it is being inspected. Yet American hawks have repeatedly demanded a strike on Natanz.

Belief: The world should sanction Iran not only because of its nuclear enrichment research program but also because the current regime stole June's presidential election and brutally repressed the subsequent demonstrations.

Reality: Iran's reform movement is dead set against increased sanctions on Iran, which likely would not affect the regime, and would harm ordinary Iranians.

Belief: Isn't the Iranian regime irrational and crazed, so that a doctrine of mutally assured destruction just would not work with them?

Reality: Iranian politicians are rational actors. If they were madmen, why haven't they invaded any of their neighbors? Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded both Iran and Kuwait. Israel invaded its neighbors more than once. In contrast, Iran has not started any wars. Demonizing people by calling them unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. The U.S. elite was once unalterably opposed to China having nuclear science because they believed the Chinese are intrinsically irrational. This kind of talk is a form of racism.

Belief: The international community would not have put sanctions on Iran, and would not be so worried, if it were not a gathering nuclear threat.

Reality: The centrifuge technology that Iran is using to enrich uranium is open-ended. In the old days, you could tell which countries might want a nuclear bomb by whether they were building light water reactors (unsuitable for bomb-making) or heavy-water reactors (could be used to make a bomb). But with centrifuges, once you can enrich to 5% to fuel a civilian reactor, you could theoretically feed the material back through many times and enrich to 90% for a bomb. However, as long as centrifuge plants are being actively inspected, they cannot be used to make a bomb. The two danger signals would be if Iran threw out the inspectors or if it found a way to create a secret facility. The latter task would be extremely difficult, however, as demonstrated by the CIA's discovery of the Qom facility construction in 2006 from satellite photos. Nuclear installations, especially centrifuge ones, consume a great deal of water, construction materiel, and so forth, so that constructing one in secret is a tall order. In any case, you can't attack and destroy a country because you have an intuition that they might be doing something illegal. You need some kind of proof. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they refused to sign the NPT and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing at all has been done to any of them by the UNSC.