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01.13 Hawaii, the Unique State
01.24 Can Apple “Rescue” US Education? (Graphics)
01.23 What You (Really) Need to Know
01.22 How to Forecast Weather Infographic w/Simple Explanations
Ref. : Letters to the editor
02.10 LET’S REMAKE THE WAY WE MAKE THINGS
02.09 Cancer rates triple among New York police officers who responded to 9/11
02.08 The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy
02.07 Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering
02.04 Your Day at the Beach Could Soon Lead to a Night at the Hospital
02.03 Obama Won't Touch Climate With a 10-Foot Pole
02.03 Komen reverses decision to cut Planned Parenthood funding
02.03 Reforming EU Deep-Sea Fisheries Management
02.02 By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women
02.02 Ohio Tries to Escape Fate as a Dumping Ground for Fracking Fluid
01.31 Eleanor Smeal dissects Obama vs. Catholic Church controversy over birth control coverage - video
01.30 Scientists Call on Obama Administration to Use Science as Guide for Arctic
01.28 Universal health care proposal stalls in California Senate
01.27 Apple, Electronics and Environmental Ills
01.25 Solar Cheaper Than Diesel Making India’s Mittal Believer: Energy
01.24 Sounding an Alarm on Birds and Mercury
01.24 Why Don’t We Have Abundant Solar Power? Blame Financing, and Industry, not Science
01.22 The Money Traps in U.S. Health Care
01.22 Looking Inside the Twinkie
Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians
Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics
Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators
Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here)
Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries
02.07 Did Obama make the economy worse? Not according to most statistics
02.02 ABC's Iran Propaganda
02.02 The Ongoing “Foxification” of the Wall Street Journal
01.30 While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower
01.29 Fox News psychiatrist: Newt Gingrich's affairs 'mean he might make a strong president'
01.22 ‘Shocking victory’: With SOPA shelved, Markos Moulitsas on a way forward for Internet policy - video
Daily The Daily Howler
02.05 Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
02.04 THE CAGING OF AMERICA
02.03 Senate Votes To Ban Its Members From Insider Trading... Kind Of
01.31 Senate clears way for vote on insider-trading ban
01.25 Why all the robo-signing? Shedding light on the shadow banking system
01.25 In Iraq, Haditha case is reminder of justice denied
01.22 Still Not Clear on SOPA & PIPA? Infographic w/Simple Explanations
02.10 The Cancer in Occupy
02.10 How Opus Dei Influenced Rick Santorum
02.10 People Are Not Leaving the Labor Force
02.09 Obama, Explained
02.09 OPED: The White Underclass
02.09 EDITORIAL: A Terrible Transportation Bill
02.09 THE OBAMA MEMOS
02.06 Are Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals?
02.04 Soaking the Poor, State by State
02.04 Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics
02.03 SUPERBOWL XLVI: Are You Ready for Some Football???
02.03 Buffett rules: Sheldon Whitehouse introduces the Paying a Fair Share Act - video
02.02 Secrecy Shrouds ‘Super PAC’ Funds in Latest Filings
02.01 Rich Patrons Are Major Source of Romney’s Cash
01.31 How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress
01.30 Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable
01.30 Clashes in Oakland: 400 Arrests, Tear Gas, Flash-Bang Grenades
01.30 A European look at the US primaries - video
01.29 Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton
01.25 Inside Romney’s Tax Returns: A Reading Guide
01.24 ILLUSIONS: Being Led Down the Primrose Path...???
01.24 Science Bulletins: Whales Give Dolphins a Lift - video
01.24 THE OBAMA MEMOS
01.22 Three Takeaways From South Carolina
02.10 This is no bailout for Main Street America
02.10 Why the Foreclosure Deal May Not Be So Hot After All
02.10 Matt Taibbi assesses the $26 billion settlement designed to aid victims of foreclosure fraud - video
02.10 Foreclosure Deal to Spur U.S. Home Seizures
02.08 Banks Paying Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures
02.07 App Stores Create 500,000 U.S. Jobs
02.07 The Payroll Tax Fight
02.07 Obama super PAC decision: President blesses fundraising for Priorities USA Action
02.06 How Privatizing Government Shovels Cash to Parasitic Corporations and Undermines Democracy
02.05 We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income
02.03 PRIVATE INEQUITY
02.02 The New American Divide
02.02 American Airlines proposes to end all four pension plans
02.01 Economics 101
01.30 New Strategy, Old Pentagon Budget
01.30 Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph
01.29 The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing
01.29 Made in the World
01.28 Sugar daddy Adelson could save $500 million in taxes if his boy Gingrich wins - video
01.28 How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
01.27 Unemployment in Spain Rises to 22.9%
01.27 Chinese Company Continues Plan To Replace Workforce With 500,000 Robots
01.27 Details Emerge of New Financial Fraud Unit
01.27 Not all jobs are equal
01.27 The Shift from Manufacturing to Service Economy - Graphic
01.25 Billionaires Occupy Davos as 0.01% Bemoan Inequality
01.24 Germany has the economic strengths America once boasted
01.23 State Capitalism: The visible hand
01.22 How Big Money Bought Our Democracy, Corrupted Both Parties, and Set Us Up for Another Financial Crisis - video
01.22 How U.S. lost out on Apple's iPhone work
02.03 What the Occupy movement must learn from Sundance
02.02 US plans to halt Afghan combat role early surprise Kabul
01.31 TABLE TALK
01.30 With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war
01.30 UN panel aims for 'a future worth choosing'
01.26 Iran is ready to return to nuclear talks
01.24 Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide
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BRITISH VIEWPOINT:
World War W
Still unable to bring themselves to exercise diplomacy, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice administration is now preparing to broaden America’s military activities in the Middle East in anticipation of a wider, more engulfing and, perhaps, even global war—World War W.
In anticipation of future pre-emptive wars to uphold the Bush Doctrine in military clashes against North Korea and Iran, Donald Rumsfeld recently ordered the re-tooling of a significant proportion of America’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) so that they could carry “conventional” warheads. Rumsfeld took this inane decision against the shrill warnings of some of America’s leading experts on national security who fear the outcome of such a dangerously unsound policy.
Leading American experts based at Stanford and MIT warn that Donald Rumsfeld’s program to re-tool America’s ICBMs to carry conventional warheads could precipitate a nuclear world war, and the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, agrees with the experts.
In a stark warning aimed directly at Bush’s America, Putin stated that the launch of non-nuclear ICBMs could be misinterpreted, and it might lead to a retaliatory response that could trigger a full-scale nuclear war à la the Doomsday Device of Dr. Strangelove. In the twenty-first century, these Strangelovian fears are no longer far-fetched. In 1995, the launch of an unarmed Norwegian space rocket triggered a nuclear alert that appeared at the time to be an American ICBM attack on Moscow. At that time, former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, activated his nuclear briefcase and took the first steps to retaliate against a broad array of American targets before he discovered the mistake.
Elsewhere, the Bush-Cheney White House and Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon have ordered a broadening of US military operations in the Middle East. Led by the Nimitz class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Eisenhower, a strike force bristling with Tomahawk missiles is headed to the Persian Gulf to take up a position to launch an aerial “shock and awe” campaign against Iran. The Prepare To Deploy Orders (PTDO) issued to the USS Eisenhower led Time magazine to call public attention to American moves in apparent preparation for imminent war with Iran. The USS Eisenhower is scheduled to arrive in the Persian Gulf on the 21st of October, just slightly over two weeks before the ominous midterm elections on the 7th of November.
Over the past two years, America and the global community have been bombarded with reports of the White House and Pentagon’s detailed military planning to wage war against Iran. With the time clock ticking, and Bush’s presidency on the wane, the window of opportunity to launch the next phase of the Project for a New American Century’s (PNAC) schemes of global conquest to deliver ongoing US control of world oil reserves is swiftly drawing to its close.
And, worse. The Democratic Party’s campaign to regain a majority in the US Senate is headed by Senator Charles Schumer. While the majority of his party favour a timely withdrawal and disengagement from Iraq, in what should be regarded as a very curious development, Senator Schumer voted against setting a timetable for strategic deployment from Iraq. Additionally, Senator Schumer has created controversy as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). Earlier this year, Senator Schumer endorsed the deeply unpopular Senator Joe Lieberman in his primary campaign against a very popular anti-war Democratic challenger, Ned Lamont. Schumer and Lieberman are both members of the right-leaning group of Democrats who purport to swing a lot of weight on national security affairs in their party caucus and the DLC—as well as being the Bush-Cheney White House’s favorite “Democrats.”
With the war in Iraq the single most unpopular policy of the entire Bush presidency, it does seem odd that the Democratic Party’s dual campaigns to win majorities in both houses of congress are being headed by two pro-war Democrats, both of whom are warmly regarded by the Republican-leaning DLC.
On the global stage, the increasingly ominous scenario unfolding against a backdrop of the US war in Iraq is dark and getting darker. Not only is America moving much more military hardware into the theatre, a constellation of its allies in NATO are moving heavy hardware into the Eastern Mediterranean, where they will be in position to check any potential retaliation by Syria or Hizbullah against Israel in the wake of a US assault on Iran.
The repercussions of a US attack on Iran could well be dire—especially for Israel and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There have been reports in the international media of tens of thousands of suicide bombers awaiting the order from Iran to launch themselves against targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, America, the United Kingdom and other allied targets—if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld give the orders to launch “pre-emptive” war against Iran.
Some of the world’s leading military experts now believe that a unilateral US strike against Iran could broaden America’s wars in the Middle East to engulf the oil-rich regions of Central Asia. Kazakhstan and Russia are now in possession of massive reserves of untapped oil. The enlargement of NATO that began in the 1990s has led to a new system of counter-balancing alliances in Central Asia involving Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgztan in a new organization called the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Recently, CSTO conducted joint military exercises at the same time that Iran staged the largest war games in her history. These collateral military operations between CSTO and Iran were stage-setting defensive manoeuvres in advance of the anticipated American attack against Iran so stridently threatened by the Bush-Cheney White House and their minions led by Condoleezza Rice in Foggy Bottom and Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.
Last week, Condoleezza Rice visited the Middle East. In advance of her trip, the reports were to the effect that she would experience an icy reception, but there was vanishingly little coverage of the outcome of her mission in the western media. However, in the Middle East, there was ample coverage. We learn from reports from Cairo that Rice was greeted politely, but when she launched into her usual harangue about American fears of nuclear technology in Iran she met with a wall of cold, hard logic. A stream of Middle Eastern diplomats delivered a calm, cool and lucid concatenation of criticism of provocative US policy in the region. Rice learned, perhaps, for the first time in her life—that American policy for the Middle East should not be predicated on bogus fears about Iran and Iraq but on Israel and its persistent historical denial of human rights to the Palestinians, a travesty of justice that is now entering its seventh decade. From the perspective of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, Rice’s latest mission to the Middle East was a total failure. Their warships, missiles and bombers are now in striking position—and they have a very important ace-in-the-hole—a well-financed fifth column of support in Iran.
With a budget estimated in published accounts of circa eighty-five million dollars ($85,000,000) per year, the US State Department funds a covert pro-democracy movement inside Ahmadinejad’s Iran. This US-Iran project has been roundly criticized in the US and in the international media for its financial support of the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq (MEK)—an independent militia that has been labelled a terrorist organization for the past twelve years because of its overt links to Saddam Hussein. That dubious distinction does not prevent the MEK from finding warm support in the Republican-dominated Congress. While the right-wing extremists, Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), are the most vocal supporters of the MEK, at least four more members of Congress have also voiced their support for the terrorist militia. Astonishingly and shamefully, three of them are Democrats. These Republican-leaning Democrats are: Edolphus Towns (D-NY); Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). In addition to these Republicrats, the rabid Republican right-winger Lincoln Diaz Balart of Florida is known to be a supporter of the pro-Saddam faction in Iran.
An arc of darkness is moving swiftly across American history. Not only has America undertaken to: provoke nuclear war with Russia; wage expansionist wars in the Middle East; precipitate the proliferation of nuclear weapons in North Korea; encourage wars between Israel and its neighbouring territories and conduct its foreign policy through the constant and obsessive resort to belligerent military confrontations instead of diplomacy—the Bush-Cheney White House is also attempting to implement a dynastic succession designed to perpetuate its imperialistic wars for generations to come. The bureaucrat in charge of the vast budget for support of the MEK and other insurgents in Iran is none other than Dick Cheney’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth Cheney.
Born in 1966, Elizabeth Cheney is the mother of five children as well as the American bureaucrat responsible for the “democratization” of Iran. As head of the Iran-Syria Operations Group (ISOG), Elizabeth Cheney controls a strategically important unit of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department.
Given the chain of bad, bogus and downright ridiculous decisions flowing from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice administration and speaking entirely for myself, I am not confident in their ability to govern America—much less to design, launch and wage World War W.
The complete illustrated and referenced article "World War W" by Michael Carmichael is online here.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on October 11, 2006.
