Wars 4 Status Quo

Público: "Vitória esmagadora do partido de base islamista no poder na Turquia"

PS: Agora só falta o Paquistão (e o Egipto)

Most Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Saudi
Cheney Pushes Bush to Act on Iran
Drug Czar Says US Pot Growers Are 'Dangerous Terrorists'
British Afghan Casualty Rate at Level of WWII
William Kristol : "Why Bush Will Be A Winner - If Gen. Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president. I like the odds."

The White House line that Iraq’s extremists are all backed by Iran is a myth, writes robert fox

Even the Bush administration will now admit, under its collective breath of course, that Iraq is in the throes of a full-blown civil war between armed groups of its Sunni and Shia Arab communities, triggered a year ago by the destruction of the al-Laskar mosque in Samara, a revered Shia shrine. (...) What the American authorities are reluctant to admit, however, is that there are signs that the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and their allies - including Jordan - have been equipping and training Sunni extremists in Iraq for some time now. Critically, not all the weaponry and munitions have been used against the militants' Shia and Kurdish Iraqi enemies. Some of them - including lethal roadside bombs - have been aimed at US forces. "The growth of the official and unofficial Saudi and Jordanian support for the militants is one of the most worrying developments," a senior British officer has told me privately after a visit to Iraq."

"This weekend the Washington Post ran a story about Richard Barlow, a Pentagon whistle-blower in the late 1980s who tracked Pakistan and A.Q. Khan's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S. government wanted to sell F-16s to Pakistan to help the mujaheddin fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But Congress had prevented the sale of any equipment that could deliver nuclear weapons. Barlow pointed out that selling the jets to Pakistan would violate non-proliferation laws and complained that the Pentagon was misleading Congress on the issue.

From the Post:

"Barlow wrote an analysis for then-Secretary Dick Cheney that concluded the planned F-16 sale violated this law. Drawing on detailed, classified studies, Barlow wrote about Pakistan's ability, intentions and activities to deliver nuclear bombs using F-16s it had acquired before the law was passed.

Barlow discovered later that someone rewrote his analysis so that it endorsed the sale of the F-16s. Arthur Hughes, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, testified to Congress that using the F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons 'far exceeded the state of art in Pakistan' -- something Barlow knew to be untrue."

Twisting the truth to support policy in the Middle East? Never! When Barlow complained, he was instantly fired and stripped of his security clearance. His intelligence career was ruined. He now lives in a trailer in Montana and, even though Congress' investigative arm backed up his position, is still fighting for a government pension that he feels is due. And what happened to Dick Cheney and Barlow's other higher-ups -- Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, among others? We don't think they're worrying about pensions.

Full story here."

Comentários: Good post, Luke. I'm a real conservative (unlike Bush & his cronies) and am really disgusted by these so-called neo-cons. Neo-con is just another term for opportunist. It seems they'll do just about anything in the name of political expediency."

Murray N. Rothbard "For the same myth is now based on the same old fallacies. And this is seen by the increasing use that the Cold Warriors have been making of the "Munich myth": the continually repeated charge that it was the "appeasement" of the "aggressor" at Munich that "fed" his "aggression" (again, the Fu Manchu, or Wild Beast, comparison), and that caused the "aggressor," drunk with his conquests, to launch World War II. This Munich myth has been used as one of the leading arguments against any sort of rational negotiations with the Communist nations, and the stigmatizing of even the most harmless search for agreement as "appeasement."

It is for this reason that A.J.P. Taylor's magnificent Origins of the Second World War received probably its most distorted and frenetic review in the pages of National Review.
It is about time that Americans learn: that Bad Guys (Nazis or Communists) may not necessarily want or desire war, or be out to "conquer" the world (their hope for "conquest" may be strictly ideological and not military at all); that Bad Guys may also fear the possibility of our use of our enormous military might and aggressive posture to attack them; that both the Bad Guys and Good Guys may have common interests which make negotiation possible (e.g., that neither wants to be annihilated by nuclear weapons); that no organization is a "monolith," and that "agents" are often simply ideological allies who can and do split with their supposed "masters"; and that, finally, we may learn the most profound lesson of all: that the domestic policy of a government is often no index whatever to its foreign policy.

We are still, in the last analysis, suffering from the delusion of Woodrow Wilson: that "democracies" ipso facto will never embark on war, and that "dictatorships" are always prone to engage in war. Much as we may and do abhor the domestic programs of most dictators (and certainly of the Nazis and Communists), this has no necessary relation to their foreign policies: indeed, many dictatorships have been passive and static in history, and, contrariwise, many democracies have led in promoting and waging war. Revisionism may, once and for all, be able to destroy this Wilsonian myth.

There is only one real difference between the capacity of a democracy and a dictatorship to wage war: democracies invariably engage much more widely in deceptive war propaganda, to whip up and persuade the public. Democracies that wage war need to produce much more propaganda to whip up their citizens, and at the same time to camouflage their policies much more intensely in hypocritical moral cant to fool the voters. The lack of need for this on the part of dictatorships often makes their policies seem superficially to be more warlike, and this is one of the reasons why they have had a "bad press" in this century."

A de um cientista israelita (judeu convertido ao cristianismo) na prisão há 18 anos.

"Vanunu gets 6-month jail term for foreign contacts

OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS: An Israeli court on Monday sentenced Mordechai Vanunu, who in 2004 completed an 18-year prison term for spilling nuclear secrets, to six more months behind bars after he violated a ban on speaking to foreigners. Israel has barred Vanunu from travelling abroad and monitored his movements since he left jail, alleging that he has more details on the Dimona atomic reactor to divulge. Vanunu denies that but says he will pursue anti-nuclear activities. “I don’t want to live here. I have the right to be free,’’ Vanunu, 52, said after the sentencing at Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. “I want to be free and I want to leave.” The court, which also handed Vanunu a six-month suspended sentence, held off on jailing him to allow for appeals. Vanunu’s lawyer, Michael Sfard, said he had until September 9 to decide on a course of action but hinted he might not fight the prison time. “This is a cruel sentence in a case that has nothing to do with national security or social values. It’s a measure of the vindictiveness of the state of Israel,’’ Sfard told Reuters. “While Vanunu has perfect grounds for an appeal, we will have to give thought to whether that is what is wanted.’’

Vanunu was jailed on treason charges in 1986 after giving an unauthorised interview to a British newspaper about his work as a mid-level Dimona technician. The disclosures all but blew away the secrecy around an assumed Israeli atomic arsenal. Since his release Vanunu has campaigned for the Jewish state to be disarmed. "