The U.S. considers Iran to be a threat...?

izzat so... let's go to the visuals...

first, a comparison of military spending, iran vs. the u.s...



now, let's look at a map of the u.s. military bases that literally surround iran...



glenn comments...

Indeed: imagine if the blue in that map were the U.S. (rather than Iran), and the large red areas were Mexico and Canada (rather than Iran’s neighbors), and the stars represented Iranian military bases. Then further imagine that Iranian political leaders and media figures routinely told their population that it was the U.S. that was an aggressive, threatening power that had to be stopped: the mocking condemnations of that level of propaganda would be endless. Yet American political officials and commentators feel free to insist, with a straight face, that Iran is an aggressor nation posing a serious threat to the U.S.: such a serious threat, in fact, that war may be necessary to stop it. And there is, tragically, little doubt that if there is an attack on Iran by Israel — with direct U.S. involvement or, more likely, U.S. support and approval — there will be little opposition in either American political party, and even less challenge to the ludicrous claims about the Grave Iranian Threat that will be invoked to justify it.

yesterday, in response to the incessant sabre-rattling, people took to the streets...

Hundreds of protesters demonstrated Saturday in New York and pacifist groups took to the streets in dozens of other US and Canadian cities in a "Day of Mass Action" against a possible war with Iran.

About 500 protesters gathered in Manhattan's Times Square and marched to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthe headquarters of the US mission to the United Nations and to the Israeli consulate.

"No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations," read a banner leading the march.

The demonstrations came as Europe and the United States slapped tough new sanctions on Iran, and Israel this week launched new threats of military intervention if the Islamic republic fails to rein in its suspected nuclear development program.

There is heightened speculation that Israel is contemplating air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, fueled in part by US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's comments to the Washington Post in which he said he believes there is a "strong possibility" that Israel will launch such air strikes this spring.

our super-rich elites know how effective war is as a tool to keep the u.s. population in line... so far, that strategy has bought them almost ten and a half years counting from the time of the start of the afghanistan war through the iraq war and right on to the present day... now, with iraq "finished" and afghanistan slated to "wind down" soon, i'm sure they're just itching to get another one going... my prediction...? this time it's not going to happen...

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The United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy

chalmers johnson passed away last november... here's an excerpt from his post to tom dispatch that appeared in july 2009...

(note: there's a lot more and it's well worth reading...)

The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.

[...]

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them... He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

reasonably prophetic, eh...?

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Hey... If we can't go to war with Iran, how about Venezuela...?

if the u.s. can't manage to get a war with iran going, there's always venezuela, and ecuador too if they don't mind their p's and q's...

Venezuela's president has warned Colombia against building a US military base on the countries shared border, saying he would consider such a move an act of "aggression".

Hugo Chávez said on Thursday that he would not allow a US military base to be established in La Guajira, a region spanning northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela.

"We will not allow the Colombian government to give La Guajira to the empire," Chávez said, referring to the US during a speech to a packed auditorium of uniformed soldiers.

"Colombia is launching a threat of war at us."

The Venezuelan leader said that if Colombia built the base, his government would revive a decades-old territorial conflict and stake a claim to the entire region.

The US maintains a military base at the Pacific port of Manta in Ecuador, but Rafael Correa, Ecuador's president and an ally of Chávez, has repeatedly said he will not renew the 10-year leases when it runs out next year.

Chávez said that William Brownfield, the US Ambassador to Colombia, had suggested that the Ecuador base could be moved to La Guajira.

and, of course, the u.s. is still banging the same drum that it's been banging on since the illegal attack by colombia on ecuadorean soil of a couple of months ago...

Diplomatic relations between Caracas and Bogota have come under increasing strain in recent months after Colombia unveiled documents allegedly showing that Chávez sought to arm and finance Farc, an armed anti-government group in Colombia.

Last week the US claimed the documents, contained on a laptop, were "authentic" and showed ties between Chávez and Farc.

Chávez, whose sympathies for Farc are well known, said the files had been faked by the Colombian government.

The computer files were found after Colombian forces mounted a raid inside Ecuador to kill a Farc commander at his camp across the border.

The raid sparked a regional crisis when briefly raised fears of war when Chávez threatened to send troops to the border with Colombia.

"authentic" like the syrian nuclear reactor was "authentic," like the iranian weapons in iraq are "authentic," like saddam's wmd's were "authentic"... horse hockey...

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