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How Hawks Are Using Iraq War Talking Points to Stoke Fear Over Iran Deal

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#1

How Hawks Are Using Iraq War Talking Points to Stoke Fear Over Iran Deal

Sarah Lazare, staff writer

In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's announcement of a deal between world powers and Iran, drivers of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are expressing certainty that Iran's alleged "nuclear weapons program" and "malign activities" pose a grave threat—in warnings that analysts say sound eerily similar to their now-discredited claims about Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" more than a decade ago.

#3

Here we go again, with the seditious previous “vice president,” invoking weapons of mass destruction.
The fact that he is taken seriously, at all, speaks eloquently of mainstream media complicity (not to mention insulting its viewers).

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#6

" A lie spreads half way around the world, before the truth gets it’s pants on. " M. Twain Too bad Mr. Twain didn’t have a long correspondence with H.G. Wells, for the public to read. Nuclear weapons and the truth suddenly becomes stranger than fiction. Remember " Al " Haig and his nightmarish " I’m in charge here " buffoonery. Human greed and megalomaniac politicians like Mr. Cheney are more than mere " chickenhawks ". The fact this guy appears on any TeeVee should be contemplated by those who wonder how deep, The Deep State, really goes. Phyllis Bennis is a jewel. What stamina!

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#8

every once in a while it might be good to revisit propaganda for inoculation purposes

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#9

It was good to read the comments after this article. More people are beginning to push away the "glorious war, war-heroes’ mystique that has historically infected our species. You can go back thousands of years and see how the military have been glorified as the ultimate in manhood, honor, and courage. Never mind that their only function was to impose their master’s will through violence on other peoples. Now we’re examining that meme a little more closely, and labeling it for what it is; a form of insanity, a fulfillment of Hobbe’s worst case scenario, a delusion based upon ancient paradigms of validation through brutality.

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#10

Yeah, if only, I’ve been saying the same thing since before the turn of the century.

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#11

Well, dang, we gotta find those Eye-rainian WMDs :slight_smile:

#12

Those who do not prosecute their war criminals are doomed to see them repeat their crimes.

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#13

The big problem for us internally as a nation is something like “What are we going to do with this sizeable portion of the U.S. population both at the top and out in the populace that think this way?” They aren’t going away and obviously are not going to shut up, ever. We have always had them but the Reagan era cemented this evil into a large percentage of Americans. We really are stuck.

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#14

Ugh. Someone should probably tell them that America has fear fatigue. Much of the country figured out that those monsters lurking around the corner were nothing but shadows. Hopefully, we’ve growing up, getting ready to deal with the critical issues with a measure of maturity and sanity. Of course there are dangers. Any one of us could be dead by morning. That’s reality. But we cannot function in a state of constant fear and expectation of mass destruction.

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#15

Nothing. This generation is so deeply divided that the best we can hope for is that the next generation will do better. It’s popular to frame our current mess in terms of, “The 1% vs. the 99%,” but that’s false. This time, the proverbial masses, the poor and middle class, are deeply divided, pitted against each other. We’re so split apart by class and race that we really are powerless to push back.

#16

It always amazed me that we hear so much about ISIS using social media to recruit.

Guess if you use the same tactics on US Mass Media, it is totally different.

Be all You can Be >>>>>>The sins of our Fathers are born upon the Sons…
And Daughters now…Forgive Us our Sins…

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#17

JonnyJames, I just want you to know that I am personally giving you one hell of a standing ovation over here in my tiny corner of the Internet! Fabulous, brilliant, spot on. A good deal of the trouble that we have with all of this media bullshit is that your, my or anyone’s calling a spade a shovel like this is somehow branded as “rude”. We are drowning in criminality from the likes of cowardly, murderous scum like Cheney, yet apparently some people think it unseemly to call them names. I myself have been blacklisted from Common Dreams in the past for calling a spade a shovel – for instance when you even open your mouth about the neo-Nazi realities of right/wing Netanyahu-led Israel and U.S. partnership in its war crimes and genocide. It would be nice to know that the streak of cowardice running through Common Dreams has changed, but I suppose I’ll have my answer to that when I see whether or not this particular comment, or another I’ve made today on another article, gets me blocked again!
You really do glean all you need to know, don’t you, from that episode a little while back when Code Pink staged a symbolic citizens’ arrest of Kissinger on Capitol Hill and John McCain called them ‘lowlife scum.’ If I’d been Medea Benjamin on that occasion, I would have turned right around and screamed back at him, No, arsehole - you, along with this filthy fascist murderous whore Kissinger are the lowlife scum, and we have the documentary evidence to prove it.’ There are people on the left who have said that the left has been far too well-behaved about all of this for far too long. It’s time to take the gloves off.

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#18

Touché! You are great!

#19

Thomas Jefferson said the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the bood of patriots. Was he a war criminal?

Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay said the Spanish American War was a “splendid little war.” Was he a war criminal? And old Teddy thought that the US needed a war every 20 years or so to keep from going soft. Was he a war criminal?

The Homeric heros Hector and Achilles were great warriors who killed a lot of people in battle. Were they war criminals?

We killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians when we fire-bombed German and Japanese cities and nuclear-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The number of civilians killed in all the wars after WWII is miniscule compared to what happened during WWII. General Curtis LeMay was responsible for burning down most of the Japanese cities. After the war he said that had we lost the war, he would have been tried as war criminal. He also wanted to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age. Fortlunately, LBJ did not listen to that lunatic.

Cheney is wrong if he thinks that because of this deal with Iran we will be closer to nuclear war than at any time since WWII. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet sub with torpedoes with nuclear warheads was being depth-charged by our destroyers that were blockading Cuba. The captain and first officer wanted to use the torpedoes to defend the sub against our destroyers. On a Soviet Sub, 3 people must agree to use nuclear weapons (the captain, the first officer, and the political officer; if you have seen the movie “The Hunt for Red October,” you know this). The political officer refused to allow the use of nuclear weapons and the whole world should be grateful to this fellow because he prevented WWIII (had the Soviets sunk one of our ships, we would have retaliated with nuclear weapons). Today, people don’t understand how close we were to thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Major King Kong famously said in the Stanely Kubrick masterpiece, “Dr. Stangelove”: “Thermonuclear war toe-to-toe with the Russkies.”

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#20

Jonny, you are making good points. I don’t know what your definition of insanity is…maybe “simply” a psychotic break from reality…as in hearing voices and seeing things that don’t exist like spiders crawling all over your walls or thinking that someone is reading your thoughts and inserting his ideas into your brain. By that definition, those guys aren’t insane. But they ARE sociopaths with no conscience, psychopaths with no conscience, or at the very least severe Narcissistc Personality Disordered people who feel no compassion and have no compunctions about manipulating people for their own sick gains.
You are spot on about their money…and connections…saving them.

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#21

I am with you…and I bet many others are, too. BG, how did you know you were locked out? I’m having trouble accessing comments on CD but can read the articles on the PC. I can read both on this ancient iPad, however.

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#22

When we and the Brits started to bomb German cities, FDR stated that US planes would not target civilians. We still killed civiians because, alhough our planes were supposed to be able to drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 10,000 ft., the bomb crews said they were lucky if they could hit France.

The Brits. thought we were stupid because to hit a particular targert, you have to bomb when it is light (so you can see the target). But this means the people you are bombing can also see you and can shoot at you. The Brits bombed at night which meant they bombed indiscriminately. But they thought this was fine because the Nazis had bombed civilians during the Blitz. The goal was to sap the will of the Brits to continue fighting so that they would surrender and Hitler wouldn’t have to invade. Of course the bombing of civilians only heightened their resolve to continue to fight (better dead than under the thumb of the Nazis). Hitler decided against a cross-channel invasion of Great Britain and invaded the Soviet Union like some kind of modern day Napoleon. Adolph suffered the same fate as Napoleon.

Nuclear bombs are used for one purpose: terror. They don’t work to bomb only military targets because the damage is so wide-spread. So their use is solely to cause civilians to give up. Whereas conventional bombing against civilians doesn’t cause them to surrender, nuclear bombing does because the Japanese surrendered immediately after the bombing of Nagasaki.

#23

the next time Cheney appears on Fox , fox should be charged with harbouring an international war criminal.

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#24

Yes, I agree! Bennis seems to be such a voice of reason…I wonder if SHE’D like political office. God know Bernie could benefit from her being VERY close at hand.

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