Joe Lieberman: 'Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!'

Technorati Tags: Joe Lieberman, Iran

I'm in a state of white heat right now over the right's collective chorus of approval in response to Joe Lieberman's call today for the bombing of Iran.

Cernig is as angry as I am:

Joe Lieberman thinks we should attack Iran because there are terrorist training camps in the wilderness that no-one has ever produced definite evidence (you know - co-ordinates, pictures) actually exist. Meanwhile, the US is warning Turkey to back-off from threats that it will attack the known and well-documented locations of PKK terrorist training camps in Kurdish Iraq - camps which the US has done not word one about. It's a screaming double standard and even a pet goat could see that.

But it's a good enough bit of warmongering to cause Michael Ledeen to opine today in The National Review Online that Lieberman would make a far better Secretary of State than the current "appeaser" (his word). Remember IAEA chief Mohammed el-Baradei recently warned about "the crazies" in and around the White House? This is they, in full Cheney-chanelling flow.

Proving what a wonderful idea bombing these location-less camps would be, Michael Smith at the London Times, who is the preferred mouthpiece of the British intelligence community's mandarins, has a report on what would happen next (a massive missile attack against U.S. military bases, oil refineries, power stations, and other strategic targets throughout the Gulf region).

Cernig draws our attention to a Gideon Levy op-ed in Haaretz:

I was reading a compelling op-ed from Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz earlier today, and as I read about all of these warmongering plans for strike and counter-strike, fuelled by barbaric lovers of bloodshed on both sides, I was forcibly drawn back to it. I want to share some of it with you but it's worth clicking through for the whole thing.

Satan is no longer to be found only in Tehran --- he is alive and kicking here in our midst. Israel is being inundated by a murky stream of little blue-and-white Ahmadinejads: If the president of Iran proposes to destroy Israel, they, who are smaller than he, are proposing only to "eradicate" villages, "flatten" them, starve entire populations and in fact to kill them.

...There is no difference, in principle or morally, between the Iranian original and his Israeli imitators. The racist and bullying philosophy of Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman and his ilk has unleashed its malignant tentacles into the heart of society.

..."If not the roof beams, destroy the foundations ... Attack Lebanon and also Gaza with plows and with salt, destroy them so no inhabitant remains. Transform them into barren desert, piles of rubble ... kill them, spill their blood, frighten the living," wrote poet Ilan Scheinfeld, who has recently published a novel whose boycott no one has called for.

...[Avigdor] Lieberman has proposed a hit on the quarter where Gaza City's well-off reside for every hit on Sderot; Major General (Res.) Amiram Levin has called for dividing the Gaza Strip into squares, and after every Qassam destroying one; former justice minister Yosef Lapid supported this proposal; former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, the progenitor of the theory of "consciousness-searing," has proposed "cleansing the territory;" Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal has said that he prefers "a dead child in Gaza to a dead child in Sderot," and a bereaved father from the Second Lebanon War, Ami Schreier, has called for the wiping out of a neighborhood in Gaza, with advance warning of three hours, for every Qassam. Not one of them has been castigated for his words, not one of them shunned.

This is what we look like. This is our moral portrait.

To the "little blue-and-white Ahmadinejads" Gideon Levy is appalled by, we should remember to add the little red-white-and blue Ahmadinejads of the American neocon lobby. They are as much a part of the problem as the mirror-image zealots they are so keen to use as an excuse for frightening and devastatingly widespread destruction.