May 12, 2018 Countdown To War On Iran

[from Moon of Alabama]  John Bolton is a ruthless man:

In early 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was putting intense pressure on [José] Bustani to quit as director-general of the [Organization for
the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons].
…
Bolton — then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security Affairs — arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a warning to the organization’s chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn’t mince words. “Cheney wants you out,” Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice president of the United States. “We can’t accept your management style.”

Bolton continued, according to Bustani’s recollections: “You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don’t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you.”

There was a pause.

“We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York.”

José Bustani successfully negotiated to get OPCW inspectors back into Iraq. They would have found nothing. That would have contradicted the U.S. propaganda campaign to wage war on Iraq. When Bustani did not leave voluntarily, the U.S. threatened to cut the OPCW’s budget and “convinced” other countries in the executive council to kick him out.

John Bolton was also behind a campaign against the IAEA and its chief Mohamed ElBaradei. ElBaradei’s phone was tapped and rumors were launched against him to oust him from his office.

The U.S. administration, the neoconservatives and the media are running a remake (recommended) of the propaganda campaign they had launched to wage war on Iraq. This time the target is Iran:

As with Iraq, it’s easier for Bolton and Netanyahu to achieve that goal if they discredit the current system of international inspections. Bolton has called the inspection efforts established by the Iran nuclear deal “fatally inadequate” and declared that “the International Atomic Energy Agency” is “likely missing significant Iranian [nuclear] facilities.” In his 2015 speech to Congress attacking the Iran deal, Netanyahu insisted that “Iran not only defies inspectors, it also plays a pretty good game of hide-and-cheat with them.”

Anyone who counters their propaganda must go. Bolton, who demands to bomb Iran, is back in charge. One of his natural targets is the IAEA which certifies that Iran sticks to the nuclear deal. It seems that Bolton succeeds with his machinations:

The chief of inspections at the U.N. nuclear watchdog has resigned suddenly, the agency said on Friday without giving a reason.

The departure of Tero Varjoranta comes at a sensitive time, three days after the United States announced it was quitting world powers’ nuclear accord with Iran, raising questions as to whether Tehran will continue to comply with it.

Varjoranta, a Finn, had been a deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and head of its Department of Safeguards, which verifies countries’ compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, since October 2013.

Another casualty is the State Department bureaucrat who certified Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal:

One of the State Department’s top experts on nuclear proliferation resigned this week after President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, in what officials and analysts say is part of a worrying brain drain from public service generally over the past 18 months.

Richard Johnson, a career civil servant who served as acting assistant coordinator in State’s Office of Iran Nuclear Implementation, had been involved in talks with countries that sought to salvage the deal in recent weeks, including Britain, France, and Germany — an effort that ultimately failed.
…
The office Johnson led has gone from seven full-time staffers to none since Trump’s inauguration.

The man who launched the war on Iraq now gets awards. Netanyahoo is agitating for war on Iran just like he agitated for war on Iraq. Shady groups of nutty “experts” peddle policy papers for ‘regime change’. U.S. “allies” are put under pressure. With their willingness to “compromise” they actually further the prospect of war. When they insist on sticking to international rules malign actors prepare measures to break their resistance. All that is still just a “shaping operation”, a preparation of the battlefield of public opinion. This buildup towards the war will likely take a year or two.

What is still needed is an event that pushes the U.S. public into war fever. The U.S. typically uses false-flag incidents – the Tonkin incident, the sinking of the Maine, the Anthrax murders – to create a psychological pseudo-rationale for war. An Israel lobbyist begs for one to launch war on Iran.

One wonders when and how a new 9/11 like incident, or another Anthrax scare, will take place. It will be the surest sign that the countdown to war on Iran has started.

[[ http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/05/countdown-to-war-on-iran.html#more%5D%5D

Posted by b on May 12, 2018 at 06:35 AM | Permalink

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Every. Single. Thing. These. Muthafuckers. Do. Is. Evil…

from Comrade Misfit’s blog

>>><<<

No Surprise, That

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn opposes tariffs on Canadian newsprint that have driven up printing costs and forced cutbacks at newspapers around the nation.

“Newspapers are beleaguered already, and I don’t think we need to make that any harder than it already is,” Cornyn said during an appearance at the National Rifle Association convention Friday in Dallas.Trump’s tariff on newsprint is aimed neither at the Canadian paper industry or the American paper industry. It is aimed squarely at newspapers.

Trump, like any half-pint authoritarian wannabee, hates a free press. That’s why he’s toying with yanking the press credentials of any publication that publishes articles that don’t laud the Enlightened Reign of Commandante Bone-Spurs. So this tariff should not shock anyone

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Clusterfuck Nation

How many of you were wondering, as I was, what the suddenly former New York Attorney General, Mr. Schneiderman, might have looked like in a leather bondage get-up with a ball-gag stuffed in his pie-hole?

Not the preferred courtroom attire, of course, and a less appetizing image of justice than, say, a blindfolded, half-naked lady holding a sword in one hand and a scale in the other. But that’s how our boy rolled, even while heaping censorious opprobrium (and indictments!) on other big shot alpha dogs for defiling the honor of women.

I sense that with Schneiderman we’ve reached the zenith in this comic phase of American cultural collapse. The same week, Vanity Fair Magazine ran this item about the pop star Rihanna:

“Rihanna’s lingerie collection will drop on Friday [today], and there’s one very special addition that is making people lose their minds: her line, Savage x Fenty, will feature handcuffs. [Fenty is Ms. Rihanna’s surname.] Just days after she reimagined the Pope at the Met Gala, Rihanna is reminding us that this is still her week. She told Vogue that it was only natural that Fenty Beauty, which launched last fall, feature a lingerie line for women who want to express agency over their own looks and bodies…. ‘Women should be wearing lingerie for their damn selves,’ Rihanna [told Vogue]. I want people to wear Savage x Fenty and think, I’m a bad bitch.’”

Well, handcuffs are fashion accessories for entering prison… and the Marquis deSade did pen much of his personal philosophy in prison… and the women’s penitentiaries are full of bad bitches… so therefore let America celebrate incarceration and sadism! And especially women expressing their personal agency by advertising themselves as… evil? Apparently, a fellow such as Mr. Schneiderman, an avatar of justice, would wish to strike a blow against evil. Thus, beset by one bad bitch after another, he laid the blows of righteous judgment upon the women in his life…! Or something like that.

Forgive me here. I’m trying to imagine how the proverbial Man From Mars might interpret doings in America these days from reading our popular press. Frankly, the part I like best is “reimagining the Pope,” as though it was a great feat of innovation, akin to one of the triumphs of Elon Musk, or Innocent III’s rewrite of canon law — when it was just an act of dress-up. The Met Gala, by the way, an annual costume party thrown by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, proclaimed its theme this year as “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” — an invitation, if there ever was one, to mingle the sacred and the profane.

The Martian in me sees America turning into something like a Fellini movie, a panorama of fabulous excess and sinister fantasy, with the more malign forces of commerce propelling the garbage barge to ever darker extremes at the edge of a flat earth. On one part of the edge stands President Trump, all greatness and little goodness; and on the other edge stand characters like Eric Schneiderman and Harvey Weinstein, deposed champions of social justice — now cultural blood-brothers in the Sexual Predators Hall of Infamy. Mr. Schneiderman was all set to drag Mr. Weinstein, figuratively speaking, over several miles of broken glass and old Gillette blue blades in the state courts, and now it looks like the former NY AG himself may submit to a death of a thousand cuts by civil litigation, or maybe even a trip to one of his old criminal courtrooms, if the ever-vengeful Governor Andrew Cuomo has his wicked way.

If America were an X-rated billiard parlor, I’d think it had run the table on political sex stories, with nothing but the eight-ball of doom left on the table, and a wrathful deity — the Pope’s boss, shall we say — standing there chalking up his cue stick. When he sinks that last shot, a new game will get underway. I believe it will have to do with financial markets and currencies, and a lot more will hang on the outcome. The break itself should be a doozy — all those colored balls banging into each

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