Iranian FM on Israel: "There is no such country"

Being fairly busy with moving I am not watching things closely here, however some may appreciate these little comics I keep finding. Iran-Relevant!:

http://www.deviantart.com/view/34070875/

Stay safe, everyone.

Mottaki has got to be a high scrule drop out! Israel has been around for thousands of years. It was just reclaimed a nation in 1947. Mr. Mottaki seems to think that Israel needs the United States to fight for them. They don't! Israel did beat back the Egyptian forces in the Three Day War. Iran would be no different.
And Mr. Mottaki is also mistaken if he thinks that the United States can't manage a campaign into Iran as well as maintain a presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. He may need to research the lessons of World War Two. The United States took on the Nazis in Europe while at the same time fought the Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater. The one thing about the United States military is that the impossible is made probable. And miracles just take a second longer. Mr. Mottaki is making a grave mistake in assuming that the U.S. military is incapable of rising to the occasion.

To the Red, White & Blue,
The colors that never run.
Here's to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines,
And the many wars they have won!

What the Iranian Foreign Minister, and the entire leadership of the former land of the Persians all blithely overlook is that the U.S. Navy and Air Force (both as well-armed as the Marines and Army, who concentrate on land-based fighting) are relatively-uninvolved in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and either one of them could send Iran's ayatollahs to the dustbin of history, along with other dictatorial nightmare figures.

One sub, in fact, could take out Mahmoud and the mad mullahs and have them visiting the Hidden Imam by this time tomorrow, if need be.

Or four B-2's, properly armed.

This myth of "the U.S. being tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan" may soothe the nerves of these maniacs, but they need to understand that the skies and seas are not neutral.

Japan made the same mistake.

The Rising Sun attracted a "the light of a thousand suns".

The Iranian people, if they don't want their leaders inviting a free national gamma-radiation bath, need to keep their theocratic lunatics under control.

Then when Israel takes out their nuclear reactor facilities, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

ah'm a mighty nut job means business. Think he has something up his sleeve. Think he has a bomb or two. He is too confident, too sure of himself.

"...declaring that the United States was too tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan..."
-- from the article above

The harm that would result from the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic of Iran far outweighs any conceivable good that could come from the construction or re-construction of a country called "Iraq" from American efforts to keep the Sunni and Shi'a forces apart, or, still more fantastic, keeping them somehow together, fighting side by side, against the same perceived enemies of the new nation-state of "Iraq."

Those who would prefer that United States avoid, if possible, the use of planes and missiles to stop the Iranian nuclear project should naturally wish that the American government do whatever it can to impress upon the Iranian regime, or individual Iranians who work on that project and might sabotage or give more detailed reports on it, that the threats to use force are serious.

The best way to ensure this is to withdraw, within the year, from Iraq. The Iraqi government's hopeless dithering -- hopeless not because everyone is incapable, but because the situation is hopeless, for the Sunnis will not reconcile themselves to the loss of power which became inevitable when Saddam Hussein was overthrown -- provides the excuse for that withdrawl, for those who think some excuse is necessary. Why the American government believes it needs such an excuse is another matter. In any case, such withdrawal would concentrate the minds of Iranian rulers, and also of those described as "Iranian nationalists" who are making a mistake in parroting the line about how "Iran has a right to have nuclear power (i.e., weapons." No it doesn't, and it doesn't because Iranians are Muslims, and Infidels cannot, any longer, tolerate -- and most understand why they cannot -- any Muslim people or polity acquiring dangerous weaponry. It is not merely a question of the present regime, but of the regime that might follow, or the regime after that. Nor is it a question even of a regime, but possibly of a group within that regime that can acquire, or hand off, such weaonry. To the anti-regime Iranian "patriot" who is offended by this view of things, the correct answer from Infidels is -- too bad. That's the problem of Islam, and what it inculcates, and what a sufficient number of its Believers either believe, or can so easily be made to believe when they, for whatever reason, become more deeply faithful in their Faith.

The American presence in Iraq is taken in Tehran not as threatening, as some loyal boosters of the Iraq the Model business appear to believe, but as a sure sign that the Americans will not use military force. The Iraq tarbaby to which the American military is being forced to cling by obstinate civilian leaders, and by some (not all) generals who are unused to questioning the entire strategy (not least because they do not know enough about Islam and Jihad to be sure of themselves in questioning that policy for the right reasons), is doing all kinds of damage. Young officers resign their commissions. Standards for new recruits are lowered. The numbers of those signing up for the Reserves and National Guard (whose own equipment often ends up being left in Iraq) declines. The morale of those who actually compare their own experiences in Iraq, and with Iraqis, with what the officlal line of the generals, merely parroting what the civilians in Washington tell them to say and think, goes steadiy down. How could it not? The more aware one is, the more one thinks about the whole thing (usually when one has left Iraq, and had the leisure and distance to make sense of things), the more likely one is to be appalled by the squandering of resources based on a false notion: the notion of a widespread consciousness of being "Iraqi" that transcends such ideas as being "Arab" or "Kurd," and if Arab, than Sunni Arab or Shi'a Arab.

Soldiers and officers in the end discover that only a handful in Iraq think that way. This has obvious consequences. One cannot train an "Iraqi" army or "police" unit that will have a force of Sunni and Shi'a Arabs and of Kurds, and find that the recruits will trust each other, or could together mount an attack on targets that were 1) Sunni Arabs 2) Shi'a Arabs 3) Kurds and expect that all the officers and men could be trusted to carry out, rather than undermine, the mission. The Americans cannot distinguish which few Iraqis can be trusted, and which cannot. Nor, of course, can they trust the Sunni Arab officer to tell them the truth about Sunni recruits or for that matter about the Shi'a recuirts, nor the Shi'a Arab officer about the Shi'a and Sunnis, or either about the Kurds, or the Kurds about the Arabs. It is a hopeless entanglement, of a kind that the Americans simply cannot unentangle.

And those who think that the mere existence of that Yankee-can-do attitude will see everyone through, and that somehow good will triumph, and it will all come right in the end, and history will absolve George Bush (he certainly thinks so -- the amount of time he spends alluding to this "history-will-absolve-me" theme reminds one of Fidel Castro, who has taken the same line), are not to be trusted. These are True Believers, not rational calculators of likelihoods, of possibilities, of the finiteness of resources that need to be husbanded, not squandered.

The existence of the odd Chalabi or Allawi or Kanan Makiya (to use his alias) means nothing. These are unrepresentative men, the very best that came out of Iraq, and who furthermore spent decades in the West and there became to a great degree, Western, rational, entirley secular men (even if some of them still become defensive -- as Kanan Makiya does in invoking memories of his pious, and kind grandmother -- when sensing that Islma itself is under attack). Policy cannot be made on the basis of this handful, any more than policies for other Muslim countries can be made on the basis of those clever and appealing people (from Egypt, from Iran) who have their own fish to fry, their own aims in inveigling the Americans to help them -- aims which do not correspond to those that should be ours, as Infidels, which is not to improve matters for the camp of Islam, but everywhere to force the camp of Islam to be divided and demoralized, to be kept constantly on edge, and to be made aware that Infidels everywhere are being immunized, through knowledge, to the siren-songs of Da'wa, and the mountebank's patter of the apologists with their careful handful of Qur'anic quotes, their reliance on taqiyya and tu-quoque and above all, on the continued ignorance and wilful naivete of the Infidel audiences they encounter.

What are the "Iraqis"? The Kurds may be genuinely grateful, but that reflects not only the American aircover from 1991 to 2003, but also the understanding that only the United States can be a midwife to an indepednent Kurdistan. The Arabs are essentially irredeemably hostile. This does not mean that the Shi'a do not, for now, want the Americans to stay so as to keep doing the dangerous work of suppressing both kinds of Sunni rebels -- the Iraqi kind, who simply do not want to lose power to the Shi'a or to the Kurds, and are prepared to fight, and the outside-Iraqi kind, who under Zarqawi are fighting the Infidel Americans and the Infidel Shi'a, those "Rafidite dogs." But if the impulses are different, the end result is the same.

It might be that tomorrow it will be the Sunnis of Iraq wanting the Americans to stay to protect them, and the Shi'a who will now want them to go, if they get in the way of the death-dealing Shi'a militia. It hardly matters. And it hardly matters that some Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'a, would like the Americans not to leave quite yet because they are hopeful of obtaining still more American money, rebuilding, and of course, hope as well that if the Americans have to leave in a hurry, they will leave behind all kinds of highly desirable military equipment. There is no end to this.

And there is no end, apparently, to the belief of many at the top of this Administration that somehow in this ill-named, dangerously-named "war on terror," a "victory" can be achieved in Iraq by creating this permanently on-edge nation-state, with the Americans staying another year, or two, or four, or whatever Bush appears to hallucinate is still possible. That time frame is nonsense, of course, because the candidate elected in 2008 will be the one who promises a 1952-style I-will-end-the-war-in-Korea which helped elect Eisenhower, and all hell will break lose if that new President fails to honor that commitment). But why should we wait until then? Why should hundreds of billions more, that might be spent on nuclear plants (starting now), solar and wind energy, on subsidies for mass transit, on all the things that could be done to diminish one of the key weapons of the world-wide Jihad -- the money, the damned oil money?

Meanwihle, in Iraq, there is widespread hostility by the "Iraqis" toward the American soldiers who are there, so those soldiers are told, to help the Iraqis, to rebuild Iraq, to make Iraq into a functioning, even thriving nation-state. Theirs not to reason why -- but they are beginnning to reason, and they cannot quite fit the reality they experience into the pseudo-reality of the generals and civilian leaders. And this pains and confuses and inthe end demoralizes them. For too often they have seen civilians waving sweetly at them, civilians whom they realize know exactly when an attack is planned. Too often they have seen those civliians dancing around in celebration after attacks on American soldiers, sometimes even mutilating the corpses of soldiers, or helping to kill downed pilots who were alive when they reached the ground. They have heard stories, too, about Americans "embedded" with Iraqi units who do not trust, for one minute, the soldiers in those units not to attempt to kill them, the Americans. There are even reports that this feared event may already have occurred. But the officers and men are not allowed to speak about this, not allowed to speak or write or question this whole policy, even if it is they who are risking their lives in this futile, dangerous, expensive effort, still underway only because of the crazed stubbornness, the inability to admit that one was wrong, completely wrong both about Islam (for if Islam is the problem, then helping Muslim countries is hardly a quasi-solution; one wishes insteady to contain Islam, in the first place by dividing and demoralizing the camp of Islam), and about Iraq (the inability of Bush, Cheney, Rice, or for that matter outside advsiers, such as Bernard Lewis, to focus on the resentment of Shi'a for Sunnis, and on the fantasy-world of the Sunnis who will not, cannot, give up their claims to political and therefore every other kind of power in Iraq, should be the focus of everyone's attention. It is clear why they cannot discuss or recognize this: it would show that they had made war, made grand plans, without understanding Iraq. Criminal negligence in the study of Iraq, the willingness to be inveigled by assorted chalabis waving away any pre-war worries -- who now wishes to admit that the whole Iraq the LIght Unto the Muslim Nations notion, whereby a state now ruled by Shi'a would somehow become a model for Sunni Arabs, was madness from first to last? Who?

So the best the Americans can hope for is a limping-along Iraq, constantly propped up by more than a hundred thousand American soldires, and $100 billion a year in expenses to American taxpayers, just so that Bush can end his term without having had to "change course" or admit that he got two things wrong: Islam, and Iraq. Meanwhile, the best the soldiers can hope for of their "Iraqi" friends is a kind of greedy (always angling for, snatching at, whatever American dollars or other aid may be available), watching indifferently the American soldiers fight and die, and save for a handful of largely Kurdish troops, being entirely unwilling and incapable of doing much fighting on their own, adopting in military as in reconstruction efforts a "wake-me-when-it's-over" attitude. And of course, the Sunni Arabs and Shi'a Arabs are unlikely to exhibit what no Muslim peoples have ever exhibited -- a spirit of rational compromise that would require something more than the conspiracy theories, inshallah-fatalism, inculcated aggression, and habit of mental submission, all of which are the natural products of an Islamic society. That some who were in exile for decades have managed, at the very top, to exhibit the features of rational, Western man is not enough; a handful do not make a country.

I have over the past year been calling this tarbaby Iraq. But Uncle Remus, and Joel Chandler Harris, I now realize, do not do paint the matter in colors as dark as deserved. For no longer is it merely a tarbaby. No, as the American policymakers move back and forth trying to unstick itself here, and now getting stuck there, that tarbaby now disssolves slowly into something more menacing. As policies toward the world-wide Jihad remain fixed and prematurely fossilized, and the American military, whatever its purely military accomplishments, is being turned into that powerful, but essentially helpless mammoth, twisting to extricate itself, and no longer knowing how, from that tarbaby of Iraq that has now become the La Brea Tar Pits.

And this is something that Iran knows, and takes delight in, and believes will guarantee that it can proceed, without further ado, toward its nightmarish -- for Infidels -- goal.

Iran refuses to recognize Israel.

Islam: the ultimate dog in the manger. The Israelis made the desert bloom, and are hated for it.

I just got my globe down. It's fairly large, but if your eyesight were bad you might have to squint to see Israel. But look just how much land the Dar al-Islam has, in Arab lands and in the "land of the Aryans" in the Middle East: hundreds of square miles. But it is too much for them to let anyone else have any, any at all, even when others have an historical, moral, and legal right to it.

So how about all those Jews expelled from their homes across the Arab world, communities that had been then for hundreds of years? Don't count. Steal the real estate they had to flee from, but don't recognize their right to their own homeland.

The utterly repulsive Inayat Bunglawala, who has been consulted by Tony Blair on "Islamic extremism" despite a history of anti-Semitic remarks -

Top job fighting extremism for extremist

- has recently claimed that a Death threat sent to LGF that appeared to have some connection with his column in the foul anti-Semitic rag the Guardian and with an IP address that he appears to have used in the past, claimed it had been sent by "Zionists".

Well, who knows who sent the threat? But we do know who is ranting about "Zionists". Zionism was the movement for a national home for the Jews. Is there any reason why the Jews, alone among mankind, should not have one? And what is any of this to do with someone called Bunglawala - who judging by his name comes from South East Asia (Indonesia? Malaysia?)

What better illustration of the complete and utter moral bankruptcy of Islam that a South East Asian, on spinelessly abandoning his own cultural heritage for Islam, should come to abuse the Jews. Why should someone from South East Asia come to wish so much that the Jew should have nowhere to lay his head?

Complete and utter moral bankruptcy. Take up Islam and abandon your moral sense.

WELL

I hope they just keep believing that??

didn't they have some bird flu there??

Iran is a little piss aint or like a fire aint hill destoryed and when or if they pop up again very easy to destroy with the right tools?

Seams that the big boys are more to the problem BUT wait a min they too have had the bird flu and looks like the cure they thought they had turned out NOT??

Silver nightrate is used to kill germs but it doesn't work on cancer and this virus is as hard if not harder to kill. And the Vac. the Chinese thought they had for their birds again NOT all the birds died?

NO this game is a foot and line drying your panties tells everybody the size of your butt

Tar-baby Nah

http://www.beecy.net/frank/

Hugh said

the American military, whatever its purely military accomplishments, is being turned into that powerful, but essentially helpless mammoth, twisting to extricate itself, and no longer knowing how, from that tarbaby of Iraq that has now become the La Brea Tar Pits

G*d forbid. G*d forbid. It takes billions of dollars to support an army on the other side of the world, busy trying to build a new nation, where arguably, based on the definition of "nation", there has never been one. It takes comparatively miniscule amounts of petrodollars to throw assorted monkey-wrenches into that new nation, assassinating a police chief here, kidnapping the daughter of an assembly member there, destroying oil pipe lines and high tension wires. The current situation is far too much to the advantage of the jihadists. Our fabulous military, which can defeat any adversary on the battlefield, is now instead being used as magicians' assistants, creating a phantom "Iraq" behind the curtain. The magician is struggling both to the finish the illusion so the curtain can be raised, and also keep a smile on his face for the audience. It is becoming farcical, although I've never seen a comedy this dark before.

Hugh, reading your analysis and considering your knowledge of history and languages, I was thinking there must be spot for you at Langley, or at least Foggy Bottom, where that other Hughes, Karen, holds sway. Yours is a viewpoint that is not being heard within the Beltway. But then again, how do we know what reports are being produced and sent up to superiors who, finding them too far from the Administration's official policy, are filed in the circular file can? Would it just be a huge exercise in futility? Actually, given their resources, I find it hard to imagine that no-one there has some inkling of what is going on. If there was a loyal JW reader sitting in a cubicle somewhere in Langley seeing, to use your analogy, the mammoth struggling and sinking into the tar pit, what could they do? Could there be another Daniel Ellsberg out there?

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, declaring that the United States was too tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan to be able to mount an attack on Iran, said Tuesday that "there is no such country" as Israel.
+++++++++++++++++

A hundred or two hundred well placed missels would do wonders in iran.

And now the U.S., in the person of Condoleezza Rice, has offered to switch to the Europeans' tactics of negotiating with the Iranians. This is the path taken with North Korea. We're in trouble folks.

Israel? Ya know, Israel. It's that postage stamp sized country in the eastern Mediterranean, hemmed in by salt water and a howling desert, dwarfed in numbers and size by its not-so-nice neighbors.

Doesn't exist? It only outproduces the surrounding states in every endeavor known to mankind, from its nearly universal literacy rate, to its GDP, education level, and economic production.

Oh yeah! It's also that country whose brave people have whipped your asses in every war of extermination you have launched against them since 1948.

they hold us, all of us Christian and Jew in such contempt.

the Iranians are toying with America, teasing Condi and President Bush

Muslim countries should be barred from FIFA world cup football(soccer).

Should be. Instead... Israeli Universities are boycotted for not censuring their own country's civil defences.

Let's make this short and sweet, Israel is real, it is there where God put it so long ago. There is no "Palestine", however.

A hundred or two hundred well placed missels would do wonders in iran.

Posted by: Texican

Texican, two hundred is the number I like. ;)