The Beast Of The Sea Opens His Boastful Mouth (Rev 13:10)

  
George W. Bush Bashes Obama on Middle East

By Josh Rogin

In a closed-door meeting with Jewish donors on Saturday night, former President George W. Bush delivered his harshest public criticisms to date against his successor on foreign policy, saying that President Barack Obama is being naïve about Iran and the pending nuclear deal and losing the war against the Islamic State.

One attendee at the Republican Jewish Coalition session, held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas with owner Sheldon Adelson in attendance, transcribed large portions of Bush’s remarks. The former president, who rarely ever criticizes Obama in public, at first remarked that the idea of re-entering the political arena was something he didn’t want to do. He then proceeded to explain why Obama, in his view, was placing the U.S. in “retreat” around the world. He also said Obama was misreading Iran’s intentions while relaxing sanctions on Tehran too easily. 

According to the attendee’s transcription, Bush noted that Iran has a new president, Hassan Rouhani. “He’s smooth,” Bush said. “And you’ve got to ask yourself, is there a new policy or did they just change the spokesman?”

Bush said that Obama’s plan to lift sanctions on Iran with a promise that they could snap back in place at any time was not plausible. He also said the deal would be bad for American national security in the long term: “You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That’s how Americans should view the deal.”  

Bush then went into a detailed criticism of Obama’s policies in fighting the Islamic State and dealing with the chaos in Iraq. On Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011, he quoted Senator Lindsey Graham calling it a “strategic blunder.” Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw those troops, but the idea had been to negotiate a new status of forces agreement to keep U.S. forces there past 2011. The Obama administration tried and failed to negotiate such an agreement.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State as al-Qaeda’s “second act” and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic. He defended his own administration’s handling of terrorism, noting that the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was captured on his watch: “Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl’s throat is in Gitmo, and now they’re doing it on TV.”

Obama promised to degrade and destroy Islamic State’s forces but then didn’t develop a strategy to complete the mission, Bush said. He said that if you have a military goal and you mean it, “you call in your military and say ‘What’s your plan?’ ” He indirectly touted his own decision to surge troops to Iraq in 2007, by saying, “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”

“In order to be an effective president … when you say something you have to mean it,” he said. “You gotta kill em.”

Bush told several anecdotes about his old friend and rival Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bush recalled that Putin met his dog Barney at the White House and then later, when Bush went to Moscow, Putin showed him his dog and remarked that he was “bigger stronger and faster than Barney.” For Bush, that behavior showed him that Putin didn’t think in “win-win” terms.

Bush also remarked that Putin was rich, divorced his wife and loves power. Putin’s domestic popularity comes from his control of Russian media, according to Bush. “Hell, I’d be popular, too, if I owned NBC news,” he said.

Regarding his brother Jeb’s potential run for the presidency, Bush acknowledged that he was a political liability for Jeb, that the Bush name can be used against him, and that Americans don’t like dynasties. He also said that foreign policy is going to be especially important in the presidential campaign and that the test for Republicans running will be who has got the “courage” to resist isolationist tendencies.

Regarding Hillary Clinton, Bush said it will be crucial how she plays her relationship with the president. She will eventually have to choose between running on the Obama administration’s policies or running against them. If she defends them, she’s admitting failure, he said, but if she doesn’t she’s blaming the president.

For George W. Bush, the remarks in Vegas showed he has little respect for how the current president is running the world. He also revealed that he takes little responsibility for the policies that he put in place that contributed to the current state of affairs.

To contact the author on this story:
Josh Rogin at joshrogin@bloomberg.net

The Nuclear Threat & Holocaust Precedes God’s Peace (Revelation 21)

Nuclear threat to world peace

Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina.
Published time: December 15, 2014 09:28

For more than a decade, Western nations and their powerful global media have been sounding loud alarms, warning that Iran is “building the bomb,” and they must be stopped immediately, otherwise world “peace” will be in danger.

They have been fanning the winds of war against Iran on behalf of the “international community” of course, where as usual Israel shrieks the loudest.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an eloquent example of this on December 8 when he boasted his country played a key role last month in stopping a deal from going ahead between the six world powers and Iran on limiting its nuclear program.

“Such an agreement would have effectively left Iran as a threshold nuclear power,” he said, adding that “even though Israel isn’t part of the P5+1 our voice and our concerns played a critical role in preventing a bad deal.”

No doubt nuclear weapons are bad news irrespective of who develops and keeps them ready in their arsenals. In the hands of hawkish warmongers, however, nukes are especially bad news as the martyred cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki learned.

Today, nine countries have nuclear weapons: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan, India and…. “Little” Israel. The first eight have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel has not and will not, a fact the UN has just reminded them of.

Why do nations maintain nukes?

For two basic reasons:

– either for defensive purposes, as weapons of deterrence, dissuasion and protection, or
– for offensive purposes as weapons of conquest, attack and aggression.

Except for the US which was the first to build nuclear bombs and the only country to ever use them in warfare, the other nuclear powers have so far only kept them in readiness “just in case.” So far…

Which country will be the first to press the red button?

Geopolitical and military planners take into account extreme scenarios under which global crises may turn really nasty for their countries. That’s when nervous fingers start fiddling around with the red “first strike” launch button.

Today, India and Pakistan are aiming their nuclear bombs at each other; the on-going conflict over Kashmir could conceivably lead to a direct nuclear confrontation between them, a fact reflected in the “run-for-cover” nuclear attack drills held in that region.

Russia and China show no signs of toying with demented first-strike ideas. The US and UK, in turn, have jointly become very aggressive militarily since 9/11 as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and Syria have so tragically learned, and through NATO, they have dragged nuclear power France into successive brawls. However, they jointly focus on their on-going unconventional so-called “Global War on Terror.”

AFP Photo/US Air Force

In this scheme of things, NATO acts as the West’s military expansion platform: whether it’s about taking out Iraq and Libya, bringing Poland and Central Europe under the Western fold, cornering Syria, or driving a beachhead against Russia in the Ukraine.

That leaves Israel… Here we have a “special” country with a very special relationship with the US and major Western powers. Israel’s leadership seems to run the country’s foreign policy based on one key extreme scenario: What if someday the formidable array of Israel’s Muslim enemies in the Middle East were to corner Israel into a dead-end leaving it no way out?

If that happens, Tel-Aviv’s military and political planners appear to hold one last wild-card up their sleeves, aptly called the “The Samson Option” alluding to the immensely strong Biblical hero Samson who pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple bringing its roof crashing down and killing thousands of the enemy and himself in the process (Judges, 16:30).

In modern Israeli, “to-be-or-not-to-be” defense parlance, if ever that country were confronted with annihilation by its foes, surrender would never be an option – suicide would.

Enter Israel’s nuclear arsenal into this Dr Strangelove scenario: faced with annihilation, would Israel nuke the entire Middle East?

Worse still, nasty rumors seem to indicate that Israeli leaders’ paranoid far-right “trust-nobody” policies have also led them to aim their (America’s, actually) nuclear warheads at certain key European cities too. That means that if ever Samson were to attack, he would hit very hard indeed!

Would Israel’s leaders ever do such a thing?

Who knows, but if the biblical “by their fruits shall ye know them” is any guide then Israel’s behavior over the past two decades of ultra-right-wing Likud and Kadima leadership seems to hold the answer.

If PM Ariel Sharon of Sabra and Shatilla fame purposefully unleashed the second intifada in September 2000 by “reclaiming” the Temple Mount… if successive prime ministers regularly bomb, maim and humiliate the Palestinians building huge 20 foot high prison walls around them and bulldoze their homes… if Benjamin Netanyahu regularly carpet bombs Gaza whilst congresswoman Ayelet Shaked calls on Israelis to “have the blood of Palestinian mothers on their hands,” and Knesset Vice-President Moshe Feiglin calls for the immediate expulsion of 1.5 million Gaza Palestinians, then – 2 plus 2 equals 4 - we can only conclude that, yes: if pushed into a corner Israel would very likely unleash a nuclear holocaust on the world.

Worse still: America would support and do everything in its power to help and justify that. It seems Samson is in need of an urgent haircut!

We may conclude that Israel is the danger to world peace. However, that’s wrong. Iran is the danger! At least that’s what the US, UK, EU and the West’s global press scream all day long.

The “Iranian Danger”

Let’s look at some of the facts: Iran has a legitimate nuclear program for peaceful purposes closely tied to Russia’s technological support. However, with all the anti-Iran uproar raised by the West threatening Iran every other day with a “pre-emptive” military strike, it would not come as a surprise if Iran were to feel cornered into militarizing its nuclear program. Even if only to dissuade Israeli and the Western powers’ constant threats and bullying.

In fact, for over a century, the West has systematically attacked Iran. In 1953, US and British intelligence orchestrated a military coup that ousted Prime Minister Mossadeq as he was in the process of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, including one private oil monster called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, better known today as British Petroleum (“BP”) whose top brass, then and now, are Rothschild/Rockefeller/Bilderberg/Trilateral power insiders.

For the next 26 years, the US and UK placed Mohammed Reza Pahlevi in power as “Shah”. Not exactly a prime example of “democracy” but very much in line with the typical Muslim ally the US/UK demand: authoritarian, undemocratic and retrograde, the same as the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and UAE.

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran by the Revolutionary Guard (not cool: embassies are sacrosanct, but then again no American was hurt), in 1980 America used their proxy in the region – Saddam Hussein of Iraq – to attack Iran.

Bushehr nuclear reactor, 1,200 km (746 miles) south of Tehran (Reuters)

By 1982 however, the Iranians had pushed Saddam out, but in the ensuing six years of war his forces killed more than one million Iranian civilians and military, including tens of thousands who were gassed to death when Iraq used US-supplied chemical WMD’s against them. From the perspective of the US and its allies at the time, Saddam was a “good guy” fighting against the Iranian “bad guys…”

On July 3, 1988, an American warship patrolling the Persian Gulf – the ‘USS Vincennes’ – shot down an Iran Air commercial jetliner killing all 290 people on board, mostly pilgrims on their way to The Mecca. The US stated that the Airbus A300 had been mistaken for an Iranian fighter.

America’s response? The usual: “Oops, sorry! Collateral Damage!”

In January 2002, George W. Bush declared Iran was part of an “Axis of Evil” together with Iraq and North Korea.

Further back, during World War I, Iran was occupied by British, Ottoman and Russian forces. In September 1941, its then “Shah” was forced to abdicate by the Anglo-Soviet invasion. (“Sorry, guys… we need to grab your oil to fight those ghastly undemocratic Germans, Italians and Japanese!”)

Today, Iran is under constant threat from Israel and its global and regional allies. Even “surprising ISIS” has targeted Iran for destruction!

And how many times has Iran invaded, attacked or orchestrated coups against Britain, the US, Israel and other Western nations, or its Arab neighbors? Never!

In fact, Iran has not attacked another single country, neighbor or otherwise, for 200 years. Can the US, France, Britain, Israel and others say the same?

So, talking about nukes and peace, who should “the international community” really be afraid of?

And yet, Western governments, its subservient press and, above all, “Little Israel” just keep on yelling exactly the opposite, and, misquoting Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “They are all, all very honorable countries…” Right?

Right!

What If It Weren’t For George W Bush, the Beast of the Sea? (Rev 13:1)

The Way It Weren’t

Where’s Saddam when we need him?
by Bill Cope | September 24, 2014

Late at night, when you’re struggling to get to sleep but you can’t because you’re too worried about the Middle East–about guys who dress like ninjas beheading guys in orange scrubs; about the entire region disintegrating back to stone-age values, only with nuclear-age weapons–do you ever wonder what things would be like if Saddam Hussein were still in power?

Alternative timelines have long been a staple of sci-fi writers, historical revisionists and chronic day-dreamers. Who can forget Captain Kirk’s adventures on planets where the Roman Empire had never fallen, where Hitler won and the society was a fascist nightmare, or where Capone-ish gangsters with tommy guns were living like their world was all a rum-running racket? And did you know there are novels out that give those nostalgic for the Confederacy a pretend history in which the South was triumphant and the whole U.S. of A. now lives as it did in antebellum Dixie?
So, as useless as it is in any real sense, it’s not unusual for someone to wonder “What if?” For instance…

…what if George W. Bush had been born with even enough intelligence to learn something useful from his father, who was born with enough intelligence to know… yes, Saddam Hussein was a triple-A asshole, and no doubt murdered a great many of his own people… but that this particular area of the Earth’s surface was known for producing triple-A assholes, and that there were plenty more of them lurking around in the shadow of Saddam, just itching for a chance to come out from under their rocks and demonstrate their leadership style–which, in that neck of the desert, often amounts to murdering a great many of their own people?

And what if Bush, rather than invading a place where the perpetrators of 9/11 weren’t, had instead focused his meager attentions on where the perpetrators of 9/11 were; and rather than destroying one of the few regimes in the Middle East that was even more adamant than America about denying Jihadist savages a place to set up shop, he would have directed America’s awesome vengeance exclusively at those countries where Jihadist savages had been allowed to set up shop?

And what if Bush had not unleashed hell on the wrong country, leaving as many innocent civilians dead as Saddam could only dream about; that he and his neo-con cohorts had not turned the Iraqi military into a shambles that we’ve spent the past 10 years trying to rehabilitate; that the infrastructure and administrative capabilities of Iraq had not been smart-bombed into dust; and that there was still a functioning government in Iraq, no matter that it didn’t quite live up to American standards–standards that America itself is struggling to live up to?

And what if Saddam Hussein was still there, still the strong man in Iraq–(this is a particularly iffy “what if,” since he would now be 77 years old, which is pretty over-the-hill-ish for a “strong man”)–and either he or his asshole sons (Uday and Ixnay?) were still managing to keep asshole Jihadists savages from setting up shop anywhere in that country?

And what if there had never been a unilateral invasion, a surge, a sectarian civil war and 30,000-plus American soldiers dead or severely damaged?

And what if we’d never heard of WMDs, which didn’t exist, or IEDs, which did? Or billions of dollars being delivered on pallets into the unaccountability of corrupt contractors and Dick Cheney’s old pals at Halliburton? Or the purple finger sign that Iraqis were voting, as it has turned out, for the majority power of the Shia to screw the Sunni like the minority Sunni had screwed the Shia for all those years? Or the Iraqi treasury, armories and museums being looted like a convenience store during a hurricane. Or Fallujah? Or the Green Zone? Or the Ba’ath Party or Nouri al-Maliki or Muqtada al-Sadr?

What if we’d never had to withdraw our troops because they were never there in the first place? And what if we’d kept it like we had it before March 2003, when a no-fly zone was keeping Saddam from dropping any more poison gas on the Kurds? When Saddam was always bitching about us and we were always bitching about him, only a lot more people–ours and his–were still alive? When the cities and roads and power grid were still in one piece? When Saddam’s army, as feeble as it proved to be when it went up against ours, would have been plenty strong enough to squash ISIS like a baby camel spider, assuming those asshole Jihadist savages even had the nerve to show up when the asshole Saddam was in power? When we hadn’t thrown only-god-knows-how-many-zillions of dollars into the ancient winds that have blown through those sands since the beginning of time and swept away greater empires and greater armies and greater monuments to assholes of the past than Saddam could even dream of, all without any help from Hellfire missiles and bunker-buster bombs?
And what if George W. Bush had developed a strategy which thoughtfully and deeply considered the ramifications of what he was about to do before he did it, rather than recklessly casting America’s fate to those ancient winds, hoping “It’ll work out in the end… somehow?”

And finally, what if Bush’s strategy had succeeded, rather than so miserably failed, leaving the
following president, and most likely the president after him, and the president after her, etc. etc. etc. to be haunted by the eternal curse of George W. asshole Bush’s legacy?

Ah, what if… what if…
Now, back to what is.