Rubio Calls for War on Iran, Syria– as Israeli Army Rejects Strike
GOP Vice-Presidential hopeful Marco Rubio on Wednesday called for unilateral US military action against Syria and Iran and blamed President Barack Obama for declining to send troops to Syria in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. He also said that in addition to sanctioning Iran, “We should also be preparing our allies, and the world, for the reality that unfortunately, if all else fails, preventing a nuclear Iran may, tragically, require a military solution.”
...
The US now has a two-party system in which one party is systematically pledged to make the US an international outlaw, with all the immense costs that entails. Meanwhile, the chief instigator of war with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has clearly lost the fight inside the Israeli security establishment and even among his own colleagues. First, Israeli deputy premier and minister of intelligence and atomic energy Dan Meridor gave an interview with Aljazeera English in which he admitted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the face of the map.’
I made the same point in 2005 and was raked over the coals by the late Christopher Hitchens and his Neoconservative friends, and by Likudniks (Meridor is a member of the Likud Party!). My dispute with Hitchens was instanced as a reason I shouldn’t be allowed to teach in the History Department at Yale University, and Likud apparatchik-posing-as-historian Michael Oren also attacked me at that time (he was a visitor at Yale and is now Israeli ambassador to Washington). Ethan Bronner at the New York Times did a hatchet piece on my stance, concluding with no evidence that Ahmadinejad had said the words, and he even implied that I don’t know the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb in Persian. I have been grossly insulted many times in the press and cyberspace, but I mind that one most of all. And the Likudniks complained that I was on Aljazeera or cited it.
It seems obvious to me that Meridor and Gantz are attempting to box in PM Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, whom the Israeli officers and intelligence chiefs consider insane or at least ‘absolutely stupid’ on the Iran issue. Meridor completely pulled the rug out from under Netanyahu, who has quoted ‘wipe off the face of the map’ till he was blue in the face.
http://www.juancole.com/2012/04/rubio-calls-for-war-on-iran-syria-as-israeli-army-rejects-it.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
