Israel's followers in the media are tailing along to Israel's conception of the "Iranian threat", and accepting Israel's word as the last word on the subject. Any reasonable discussion on Iran-Israel requires sanity, and human courage, two qualities that the Western mainstream media does not have.
Goldberg's article runs thousands of words, and the picture it paints is muddy. Very few people actually agree that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. The absurd claim is pure propaganda, meant to put people in a state of panic so that they turn off their rational judgment, and simply follow the loudest, and most determined voices in the room.
Starting another criminal war in the Middle East won't be easy for America's corrupt leaders. Unlike Afghanistan, an Iran war can't be sold to the American people as a "revenge" war, and U.S. political leaders can't claim that U.S. military action will cause the rebirth of Iranian democracy, as in the case of the Iraq war. The American people have largely caught on to the lie about "securing the world for democracy." So U.S. leaders have a major problem on their hands. How do you sell an unsellable war to a country that is already mired in two bankrupting wars? Cheney, and his team in the White House wanted to take the "false flag" route, and that option still remains on the table in America, but if you listen to Israel's extremist leadership, you don't even need a casus belli to start a war with Iran, the claim of "existential threat" is more than sufficient in their eyes, despite the lack of evidence to support their unwarranted fears.
But not everyone in the Pentagon is on board with this Iran lie, unlike the 9/11 lie, or the WMDs lie. The Pentagon was against the war in 2007, and things have gotten worse in America's wars since then, so what chances are there that the Pentagon will support an Iran war this time around? The only way America could win is if it declared itself Lord of the Nukes, and dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on Iran, making them surrender, and cease to inflict harm on America. By conservative estimates, you're looking at 5 million dead on Iran's side. And the American people won't stand for that, especially if more of them begin to understand the false origins of the War on Terrorism, and the overblown claims about the nature of the Iranian nuclear program.
If America goes into this war, whether it decides on its own, or it gets dragged in by Israel, then it will mark the end of the American empire, the National Security State, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the war industry in America.
From the Zionist point of view, if the American empire suffers a major defeat in the service of Israel, then that is an honorable sacrifice. And although they are plagued with delusions, Israeli leaders have none about the fundamental role that America has to play in any future attack on Iran. Sure they're crazy, but they're not crazy enough to attack Iran all on their own. But America can't get sucked, or suckered into a war that it does not want to fight. If there is going to be a war with Iran, it's because the globalist forces that control America want it to happen. So if world war three dawns, the blame will fall on America's crippled and crooked leaders, not anything that Israel might do to provoke it.
Will America ever decide to pull the plug on its "till death do us part" relationship with Israel? This is one of the least asked, but politically most important questions of our time. America's first president warned against foreign entanglements, and that advice should be listened to now. Israel is a strategic burden for America. It is bearing a terrible cost by acting as the shield for Israel's crimes, and aggression in the Palestinian territories.
And what is it all for? What does Israel consider an Israeli victory, and an Israeli loss? Let's leave aside the propaganda about Iran building Auschwitz, and tackle this question rationally. An Israeli victory does not mean what most people are being led to believe. For Zionists, and also, the American empire, Israel's hegemony in the Middle East is the most important thing. It must be the top dog. And in a region where madness seems to rule, the top dog must be the craziest. Making crazy claims like Iran is the new Nazi Germany, or that a nuclear-armed Iran will signal the end of Israel is part of the "madness" strategy of Israel.
It's hard to know how all of this madness will play out. What's so criminal is that it is concocted madness. Israeli and U.S. leaders are not really insane, they're shrewd war criminals, and cold bastards. A war with Iran may seem like fate, especially with magazine titles like, "The Point of No Return," but war with Iran is not fate, its plain, old politics. German philosopher Theodor Adorno said;"The concept of fate, which subjects men to blind domination, reflects the domination exercised by men," (Prisms, pg. 70). We must keep this truth in mind. Forget prophecy, and all the end times rhetoric. War is never justified because it's declared "inevitable." It's only inevitable because war criminals behind the scenes like Cheney, and war propagandists on the front lines like Goldberg are working hard to make it inevitable by dialing up public enthusiasm, and generating public fear.
By all definitions, Goldberg is a hype man for the hardliners of Israel, and a traitor to his country, the United States of America. Once the American people see the bombs fly, and American soldiers die for another unnecessary and costly war in the Middle East, they'll demand that Golbderg's American citizenship be revoked, along with other prominent neocons, and U.S. war criminals. Perhaps, Goldberg and the rest may meet a harsher fate than social banishment.
Those who peddle war propaganda to the American people should approach these critical years wisely. An angry, informed, and determined America is waiting to be reborn. The high prospect of public rage against the criminal wars in the Middle East across the world, but especially in America, should concern the traitors who control the U.S. government, and war propagandists.
Reactions to Goldberg's article, "The Point of No Return":
Glenn Greenwald - How propagandists function: Exhibit A:
"Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:Ken Silverstein - Goldberg’s Case for War:
Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam's progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.
When it suited him back then, Goldberg made the exact opposite claim, literally, of the one he makes today. Back then, Goldberg wouldn't possibly claim what he claims now -- that the 1981 strike permanently halted Saddam's "nuclear ambitions" -- because, back then, his goal was to scare Americans about The Threat of Saddam. So in 2002, Goldberg warned Americans that Saddam had "redoubled" his efforts to turn Iraq into a nuclear power after the Israeli attack, i.e., that Saddam had a scarier nuclear program than ever before after the 1981 bombing raid. But now, Goldberg has a different goal: to convince Americans of the efficacy of bombing Iran, and thus, without batting an eye, he simply asserts the exact opposite factual premise: that the Israelis successfully and permanently ended Saddam's nuclear ambition back in 1981 by bombing it out of existence (and, therefore, we can do something similar now to Iran).
This is what a propagandist, by definition, does: asserts any claim as fact in service of a concealed agenda without the slightest concern for whether it's true. Will the existence of a vast and menacing Iraqi nuclear program help my cause (getting Americans to attack Iraq)? Fine, then I'll trumpet that. Now, however, it will help my cause (mainstreaming an attack on Iran) to claim that the Israelis permanently ended Iraq's nuclear efforts in 1981, thus showing how well these attacks can work. No problem: I'll go with that. How can anyone take seriously -- as a Middle East expert and especially as a journalist -- someone with this blatant and thorough of an estrangement from any concern for truth? Can anyone reconcile these factual claims?"
"Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic is more balanced than his Iraqi War “reporting,” which ranked with British propaganda from World War I about German soldiers bayoneting babies, but it’s awfully sympathetic to the Israeli point of view. If Israel does attack Iran, its supporters will surely point to Goldberg’s piece as evidence for why such a strike was necessary, just as President Bush cited Goldberg’s work in making the case for war in Iraq."Dr. Trita Parsi - A campaign for war with Iran begins:
"Even an Iran that doesn't have nuclear weapons but that can build them would damage Israel's ability to deter militant Palestinian and Lebanese organizations. It would damage the image of Israel as the sole nuclear-armed state in the region and undercut the myth of its invincibility. Gone would be the days when Israel's military supremacy would enable it to dictate the parameters of peace and pursue unilateral peace plans.Flynt Leverett, and Hillary Mann Leverett - The Weak Case for War with Iran:This could force Israel to accept territorial compromises with its neighbors in order to deprive Iran of points of hostility that it could use against the Jewish state. Israel simply would not be able to afford a nuclear rivalry with Iran and continued territorial disputes with the Arabs at the same time.
However problematic this scenario would be for Israel, it does not constitute an existential threat. Presenting it as such may have the benefit of pressuring the U.S. not to engage with Iran in the first place, or at a minimum create hurdles to ensure that diplomacy doesn’t lead to any U.S.-Iran agreement. But that is not the same as declaring that the Israelis truly believe Iran to be an existential threat, as Goldberg argues.
In fact, several senior Israeli officials have rejected that claim and pointed out the risks it puts Israel under. For instance, Barak told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in September 2009 that "I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel." A few years earlier, Haaretz revealed that in internal discussions, then-Foreign Minister Livni argued against the idea that a nuclear Iran would constitute an existential threat to Israel. This past summer in Israel, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevi told me the same thing and pointed out that speaking of Iran as an existential threat exaggerates Iran’s power and leaves the false -- and dangerous -- impression that Israel is helpless and vulnerable.
This echoed what Halevi told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius in 2007. "[Iran] is not an existential threat. It is not within the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel -- at best it can cause Israel grievous damage. Israel is indestructible," he said.
Rather than a factual, critical presentation of where Israel currently stands on Iran and why, Goldberg’s article is perhaps better understood as the starting salvo in a long-term campaign to create the necessary conditions for a future war with Iran.
Whether characterizing it as "mainstreaming war with Iran" or "making aggression respectable," Goldberg’s article serves to create a false narrative that claims that the two failed meetings held between the U.S. and Iran last October constitute an exhaustion of diplomacy, that deems the Obama administration’s crippling, indiscriminate sanctions on Iran a failure only weeks after they've been imposed, and that then leaves only one option remaining on the table: an American or Israeli military strike. And on top of that, if President Obama doesn’t green light a bombing campaign, Israel will have no choice but to bomb itself, even though it isn’t well-equipped to do so, according to Goldberg."
"To be sure, Goldberg never explicitly writes that "the United States should bomb Iran." But he argues that, unless Israel is persuaded that Obama will order an attack, "there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July." And Goldberg's Israeli interlocutors readily acknowledge that the United States could mount a far more robust air campaign against Iranian nuclear targets than Israel could. A much more limited Israeli strike "may cause Iran to redouble its efforts-this time with a measure of international sympathy-to create a nuclear arsenal [and] cause chaos for America in the Middle East," he acknowledges. Goldberg believes the Obama administration understands that "perhaps the best way to obviate a military strike on Iran is to make the threat of a strike by the Americans seem real." But there is a clear implication that, if threat alone does not work, better for the United States to pull the trigger than Israel."Gareth Porter - Top Israeli Generals and Intel Officials Oppose Striking Iran:
"Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neoconservative line in his reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with al Qaeda.Ray McGovern - A Neocon Preps US for War with Iran:Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu's thinking as saying, "In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation."
In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead he argues that Hezbollah and Hamas would be able to "fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella".
But Israel relies on conventional forces - not nuclear deterrence - against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.
Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defence minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode Israel's ability to retain its most talented people.
But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that Israeli generals with whom he talked "worry that talk of an 'existential threat' is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people."
A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, doubts "the usefulness of an attack".
Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-defeating."
"This time, Goldberg and the Israelis want us to buy into a syllogism without a valid major premise. Their argument presupposes that Iran has made the decision to develop nuclear weapons and is hard at work on such a program, which is what they want Americans to believe whether there’s evidence or not.The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) and the neocons who brought us the war on Iraq, and occasionally the President himself, speak as though Iran has restarted work on the nuclear weapons part of their nuclear energy program.
This internal government debate (and the external propaganda) is a replay of three years ago, when the FCM succeeded in convincing most Americans that Iran either had nuclear weapons or was on the verge of getting them.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney were out in front hyping the danger, whipping the American people into another war frenzy -- when an honest National Intelligence Estimate stopped them in their tracks.
Two things saved the day: integrity and fear.
Integrity on the part of analysts who, after the corruption before the Iraq War, were able to revert to the tell-it-like-it-is-without-fear-or-favor ethos that obtained during my 27 years as a CIA analyst; and fear on the part of the senior U.S. military that Cheney and Bush were about to order them to commit U.S. forces to war with Iran."
