[Mb-civic] Important Action + Dealing with Iran: "The Bush Who Cried Wolf"

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Folks--herein are 2 items:
1st, a short important online action alert on stopping electronic election 
fraud, forward thru renowned progressive blogger Gary Rhine, of 
"Rhino's Blog," who very sadly died in a small plane crash a few days 
ago.  In his memory, take a couple of minutes and do this pro-
democracy action...
2nd, a concise and illuminating article about how Bush and Co. have 
sabatoged their ability to deal effectively with Iran...

--mha atma


 Rhino here:
I'm forwarding an important request from Mimi Kennedy 
of PDA (Progressive Democrats of America) asking 
that we take a quick action to stop election fraud. 

I did it. It. It took me 3 minutes. Just go to:

http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hotissue=
4

For more info, check out the Daily Kos entries at:

Say No to Prohibited Software in Voting Machines!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/30/171814/27#9

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dear Friends,

I'm sending this because catching Diebold is the first important step in
stopping the steal of elections '06 and '08 and on into the future. See
below. You can sign some great letters to the Election Assistance
Commission asking the current Diebold machines all over the country to be
DE-CERTIFIED and put OUT OF SERVICE! They currently control a 
whopping
percentage of the vote - something like 40.

Fraud capacity is an equal-opportunity temptation. Today Republicans
cheat. Tomorrow it could be Democrats. Anyone who fixes elections stinks.
It's outrageous that the installation of capacity to let them do it
wholesale got this far. But such are the times we live in.  Installation
of technological fraud capacity, and its use, went under the radar. All
major media, now that the books on the subject of how the technology
created stolen elections are in the book stores, concur that "glitches"
all happening in favor of the same candidate in every instance are a
statistical impossibility. But that was November 2004, so the election was
probably, gulp, decided by technologically added-and-subtracted tallies.
Stolen.

Diebold has been the major culprit in the "glitches"t. People woke up.
They're being stopped. But the EAC - Election Assistance (!) Commission,
created by HAVA --Help America Vote Act, which actually has been the
engine for installing touch-screen computers everywhere ( what? Stealth
from the Bush Administration?)-- needs to know that we've woken up, and
Democrats and Republicans want a real democracy and fair fights in our
elections.

I have learned from two years' activism that nothing disturbs officials
more than an onslaught of e-mails on a subject they thought no-one among
the general public was paying attention to. Have at it. This is one step
in the process that won't work without your participation. Blast widely.

Thanks,
Mimi Kennedy


1) PLEASE SIGN TODAY: As election integrity activists, 
we of all people must be certain to sign this important 
VoteTrustUSA petition, which I'm submitting here in the 
DailyKos diary only because it's easier to keep the links live. 
Please distribute this to ALL your lists. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/30/171814/27#9

---------

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20060112/the_bush_who
_cried_wolf.php

The Bush Who Cried Wolf
Robert Dreyfuss
January 12, 2006

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of  Devil's Game: How the United States 
Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 
2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who 
specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing 
editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior 
correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor 
to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: 
www.robertdreyfuss.com.

The deteriorating international crisis over Iran is a direct result of the 
Bush’s administration’s ham-handed and mendacious Iraq policy.

Under normal circumstances—that is, under any previous U.S. 
administration—the battle over Iran’s pugnacious effort in pursuit of 
nuclear technology would be amenable to a diplomatic solution. But, by 
insisting on a national security strategy of pre-emptive war, by illegally 
and unilaterally invading Iraq on false pretenses, and by hinting that 
the White House would tolerate an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear 
plants, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have made a 
successful diplomatic resolution of the Iran crisis nearly impossible.

Speaking yesterday at the Council for National Policy, Larry 
Wilkerson—the former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell who 
caused a stir last fall when he accused Cheney and Secretary of 
Defense Rumsfeld of operating a “cabal” —said that it is likely that 
Pentagon officials are polishing contingency plans for a strike against 
Iran. Iran, said Wilkerson, is the “principal winner” from the war in Iraq. 
As a result of the power of the Shiite religious forces in Iraq, he said, 
the Iranians “own the south” of Iraq. Wilkerson insisted that the United 
States ought to “talk to the people who really matter in Iran”—i.e., to 
the ayatollahs. But he said that U.S. policy has failed so utterly that the 
door to negotiations with Iran is virtually closed. “When you close the 
door to diplomacy, you have no other option but to rely on military 
power,” he said. “I hope to hell we don’t have to use it.”

Without diplomatic tools, the looming showdown with Iran is potentially 
even more dangerous than the Iraq war. Iran is a far larger and more 
complex country, with the capability of retaliating against a U.S./Israeli 
attack by fomenting civil war in Iraq, by creating regional chaos in the 
Gulf, and by mobilizing its significant international terrorist capability 
against Western targets.

As it did in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration—along 
with Israel—is content to exaggerate the threat from Iran. The 
ayatollahs appear to be at least five years or more away from a serious 
nuclear capacity, according to U.S. intelligence reports. Iran’s recent 
decision to restart one part of its nuclear research is indeed a serious 
threat to diplomatic talks aimed at resolving the matter peacefully. But 
the issue is nowhere near an end-game stage. There is plenty of time, 
years in fact, for a back-and-forth effort to secure Iran's compliance 
with International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.

By crying wolf over Iraq, through claiming that Saddam Hussein’s 
regime had an active nuclear arms program, the United States lacks 
credibility when it now asserts that Iran is trying to develop nuclear 
weapons. And by its illegal, unilateral invasion of Iraq, without allowing 
the U.N. and the IAEA to proceed with inspections there, the United 
States has made other countries extremely wary of taking Iran to the 
U.N. Security Council, out of fear that it might give the United States or 
Israel a pretext to attack Iran unilaterally.

But the international community’s justified fear that the United States is 
controlled by a war party seeking to attack Iran makes other states’ 
diplomacy even harder. Normally, the five U.N. Security Council 
powers would take up the matter with some urgency, adopt a 
resolution demanding Iran compliance, and threaten political and 
economic sanctions against Iran for non-compliance. But Moscow, 
Beijing and Paris remember what happened in Iraq. That matter was 
taken to the UNSC, a resolution passed—and then Washington 
declared unilaterally that Iraq had violated it, and went to war. So the 
world’s capitals may be forgiven for being reluctant to drag Iran into the 
UNSC in 2006.

The fact that John Bolton, the belligerent, war-mongering 
neoconservative who serves as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., takes 
over as president of the Security Council in February doesn’t help.

Bolton, Cheney and their allies are pushing for a showdown in the 
UNSC, even though it is highly unlikely that either Russia or China 
would support anti-Iran sanctions. India, the Arab League and other 
countries would strongly oppose such measures. And even Western 
Europe, furious over Iran for its latest effrontery, doesn’t view 
sanctions on Iran as a happy outcome. Their resistance to anti-Iran 
measures comes despite a string of outrageous provocations from 
Iranian President Ahmadinejad, from demanding that Israel be “wiped 
off the map” to pooh-poohing the Holocaust to haughtily restarting 
Iran's nuclear research.

It is impossible to deny that Iran is a dangerous, out-of-control 
regime—yes, a “rogue” regime. But, had the Bush administration 
maintained a consistent policy of seeking a dialogue with Iran, had the 
neocons refrained from demanding regime change and military action, 
had President Bush not referred to Iran as part of a mythical “axis of 
evil,” and had the United States not immensely strengthened Iran’s 
position by handing it Iraq on a silver platter, diplomacy would stand a 
better chance. A package deal, giving Iran political acceptance and 
economic incentives, combined with a regulated nuclear technology 
regime, in exchange for Iran’s backing down from its hardline stance, 
could likely have been reached over time. It may still, but it seems 
highly unlikely now.

So we are left with persistent reports that both the United States and 
Israel are planning to strike Iran, and soon. Not only would such an 
attack result in a vastly wider conflict in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf, but it 
would also probably push oil prices well over $100 a barrel, making $5-
a-gallon gas a reality. Perhaps, because the international community 
wants to avoid such a catastrophe, and because the United States is 
exerting enormous pressure on Russia, China and other world powers, 
first the IAEA and then the UNSC might vote to sanction Iran. If so, 
Iran will certainly not back down. And as a result, the United States will 
have the pretext it seeks to go to war once again.

Some Democrats—and even a fair number of moderate and libertarian 
Republicans—expect the November 2006 elections to take place 
against the backdrop of a failed occupation of Iraq. Instead, those 
same elections might take place in the midst of yet another crisis 
manufactured by the Bush administration.


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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