Whorestralia is cursed until Sunday this week by the presence of arch-neocon Cheney. We are wondering what shennanigans the torturer has up his sleeve prior to the next US election.
It is understood he said Democrats in the US were riding public opposition to the war that could end up prejudicing their leadership credentials. He said the mood could easily shift if there was another terrorist attack.
Bin Laden would benefit immensely from the gungho Repubes winning the next US elections, as unlike the more sophisticated diplomatic Dems, the militaristic Repubes fall into his traps so easily. Thus, whether there’s to be a false flag op (and at this point because of Doodoo’s inveterate deceit, there would be a lot of people suspecting another attack would be just that) or the genuine article, the United Stupid of Vice well knows the lovely game of fear which he has played with his swooning public so successfully in the past.
Torquemada also alludes to his dark desires for future Iranian misadventures, endorsing
… U.S. Republican Senator John McCain’s view that the only thing worse than a military confrontation with Iran would be a nuclear-armed Iran.
“They appear to be pursuing the development of nuclear weapons.”
In his interview with the Australian, the ghoul hinted at possible timing for aggression by the United Stupids.
“You get various estimates of where the point of no return is,” Mr Cheney said, identifying nuclear terrorism as the greatest threat to the world. “Is it when they possess weapons or does it come sooner, when they have mastered the technology but perhaps not yet produced fissile material for weapons?”
Using Whorestralia as a sounding board, Cheney ‘appears’ to be geeing the world up to expect a military response to Iran’s supposed but in fact non-evident plans, ostensibly to further long held evil ambitions for US world hegemony.
Howard conflates Iraq with Iran, jumping on the torturer’s coat tails to paint by numbers the picture of the next imperial ‘enemy’.
“I don’t think there would be a country whose influence and potential clout would be more enhanced in that part of the world than Iran’s would be if the coalition was defeated in Iraq,” Mr Howard said.
“I don’t think you can separate the two.”
“Iran would be emboldened if the coalition was defeated in Iraq.”
“And that would be seen to have occurred if there was a significant coalition withdrawal.”
Yet Doodoo has burned his political capital and credibility in Iraq – its highly unlikely at this juncture that the Dems will permit him to whack Iran without some very convincing (non-manufactured) evidence of real intent by Iran to produce nukes, especially when they are currently attempting to remove Doodoo’s authorisation for the war against Iraq. Neither Russia nor China are keen on military ‘solutions’ so the US would need to ignore the UN Security Council unilaterally.
However, if the torturer and his fellow deluded neoziocons do get their way for more perks and profits for good mates Helliburton etc., the already stretched US would be fighting on three fronts which conceivably would swiftly become several more. US prestige, its economy and hegemony would decline more rapidly, and other economies, including ours, would follow. Al Qaeda would rejoice again as another trap yielded fruit – it would be bolstered with a flood of newly inspired fresh recruits. If Whorestralia supported the US militarily in its brand new adventures, naturally our own security would be further endangered. As our dollar dropped, foreign companies would have a field day buying up our mineral and other resources. Our wages and purchasing power would plummet as inflation and interest rates took off whilst our economy and wealth distribution statistics would lurch toward parity with our third world neighbours.
Gold, silver, oil and other fuels, essential goods and services would do comparatively well.
Little Johnny channels his gruesome hero by taking his usual vicious hard line against 85 Sri Lankan refugee boat people, who are accused of sabotaging their boat motor to avoid being turned back home on the high seas to probable death. Sri Lanka is the country where suicide bombing was invented, with a tripartite conflict going back years between the government, which disappears dissidents, thus provoking hatred and retaliation amongst the locals, insurgents in the south and guerillas in the north.
Read Michael Ondaatje’s “Anil’s Ghost” for sensational insight into the plight of the impoverished locals of Sri Lanka.
“The 85 men – 83 Sri Lankans and two Indonesians – were rescued by an Australian navy ship in international waters near Christmas Island this week after sabotaging their fishing boat.
It had been expected that many would apply for asylum in Australia and be taken to Nauru or Christmas Island for processing.
It has been reported that the government had struck a secret deal with Jakarta and Colombo to send the asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka via Indonesia.
The policy would be an even more hardline approach than the Howard government’s Pacific solution, introduced amid the Tampa episode in 2001, whereby asylum seekers are sent to offshore detention centres to have their claims determined.
Jakarta is not a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention, meaning the Sri Lankans may not be able to claim asylum if they are sent to Indonesia.
Project SafeCom, a West Australian refugee advocacy group, today said the deal would see Prime Minister John Howard ride roughshod over Australia’s international obligations.
“(It) could well make John Howard into the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) most wanted criminal, if breaches against the United Nations Refugee Convention had criminal charges attached to them,” spokesman Jack Smit (Smit) said.”
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/outcry-over-sri-lankan-plan/2007/02/2
Firstly, we are as yet unsure whether the refugees did in fact disable their boat. After the Tampa incident, one is not inspired to trust either our government or military in these matters.
Secondly, if the refugees did disable their boat, it’s perfectly understandable, because otherwise they would have been turned back on the high seas toward possible death.
If we don’t want more refugees coming here in desperation in boats, we most stop participating in wars and supporting tyrannies which create them and increase the amount of foreign aid we give toward alleviation of poverty and better education in such countries. Turning desperate people away is not acceptable in terms of international human rights treaties to which Australia are signatory. Neither is it Christian.
As it is
“Sri Lanka’s ambassador in Indonesia has told Fairfax newspapers that Australian and Indonesian officials plan to return the men to Jakarta and then send them home.”
If these men are perceived enemies of the Sri Lankan government, it is highly likely they will be disappeared on their return.
“There are fears that a pattern of “disappearances” by state agents is re-emerging in Sri Lanka following the introduction of new Emergency Regulations in August 2005 that granted sweeping powers to the security forces. Sixty-two cases of “disappearance” in the north of the country have been registered by the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka over the past year. The Commission is also investigating the status of 183 other individuals who are still missing under unknown circumstances.”
http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/apro/aproweb.nsf/pages/appeals_sriLanka_ua23006
“In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest.
Unlike Israel and the US, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations — until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to “go anywhere and see anythingâ€. They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on January 10 and 12 and in early February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, says an attack on Iran will have “catastrophic consequences†and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power. The current United Nations Security Council resolution is the result of Washington coercion, as a leading Bush official all but admitted in India recently.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world’s fifth military power with thermo-nuclear weapons aimed at Middle-East targets, an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions and the enforcer of the world’s longest illegal occupation, Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.
The “threat†from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran’s “nuclear ambitionsâ€, just as the vocabulary of Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “has done yeoman service in facilitating thisâ€; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals its distortion.
According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern middle history, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be “wiped off the mapâ€. He said:“The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.†This, says Cole, “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.†Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Jerusalem regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.”
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=299943&area=/insight/insight__inter
The Hon Paul Keating on the despicable rodent’s Tampa lies:
“The Government lied its way through an election campaign about a matter of central consequence and then sought to stonewall their way out of it. And when Admiral Barrie finally fessed up, the Prime Minister, brazen as brass, said Admiral Barrie enjoyed his full confidence even though Barrie’s admission destroyed the integrity of a central factor in the Prime Minister’s election campaign. The Howard Government reserves the right to make a hero of a general when it suits them and a fool of an admiral when it suits them. And pawns of the whole Defence Force whenever it fits their convenience.”
“John Howard does not understand that the moral basis of our politics has to be protected and nurtured.. The moral gutting in the way our affairs have been recently run will exact costs down through history. Governments have to be wise enough and decent enough to know that such fraying is hard to stabilise once started and that such opportunism must be desisted with.”
The Third Annual Manning Clark Lecture
A Time for Reflection: Political Values in the Age of Distraction,
delivered by the Hon Paul Keating at the National Library
of Australia on Sunday 3 March 2002
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigidea/stories/s501762.htm
Phillip Adams:
“….before the President of the US declared his “war against terrorism”, the Prime Minister of Australia declared war upon asylum-seekers. Upon refugees fleeing the wars, the horrors, the terrors of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Howard’s war has been waged ceaselessly, pitilessly, dishonourably, in our name, against some of the most vulnerable people on earth.”
http://www.worldzone.net/art/kezviola/protestweakly.html