|
Banned
|
...and this is the manipulated message....courtesy of the US government and the "Lincoln Group", that you've apparently bought into. It's as contrived and irrational, IMO, as Bush's description of how Saddam could have "avoided war".
Quote:
http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/di...9BPuH0.5717432
27 May 2004
U.S. Will Retain Command of Its Forces in Iraq, Powell Says
........SECRETARY POWELL: When I was Chairman at the end of the Cold War and I was testifying one day, I said, well, you know, the Soviet Union is gone, the Warsaw Pact is gone, you know, I'm running out of enemies. .........
|
You're "at war" with an "islamic fascist" "caliphate" bogeyman, that was created and produced by your own president and his government. <b>I am not !</b>
Quote:
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2005/..._the_prez.html
<b>More Fatwas from the Prez</b>
........Now, how exactly could Saddam have avoided war? <b>By ridding himself of weapons that he didn’t have?</b> Iraq delivered a massive volume, tens of thousands of pages of documents, detailing everything about its nonexistent WMD program to the UN in December, 2002. He allowed UN inspectors access to every nook and cranny of the country. I think we know which party chose war.
Or this:
It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq -- and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that.
Well, that’s easy. To find out what went wrong, Mr. Bush, ask your vice president, who pressured the CIA to find what couldn’t be found, namely, Iraq’s WMD. Again and again, Cheney insisted that the CIA go back and sift the same data. Or ask Rummy, whose Feith-based intelligence shop cherry-picked tidbits to support the obsessive desire to go to war.
Or this nonsense:
[The terrorists’] stated objective is to drive the United States and coalition forces out of the Middle East so they can gain control of Iraq and use that country as a base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East, and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia.
That may be their stated objective. But the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Patty Hearst believed it could create a new Symbionese state on the ruins of America, too. <b>Does Bush actually think he can scare America with the specter of some imaginary Evil Caliphate? Oh, right. He does.</b>
|
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0051214-1.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 14, 2005
<b>President Discusses Iraqi Elections, Victory in the War on Terror</b>
....The stakes in Iraq are high, and we will not leave until victory has been achieved. (Applause.) Today there's an intense debate about the importance of Iraq to the war on terror. The constant headlines about car bombings and killings have led some to ask whether our presence in Iraq has made America less secure. This view presumes that if we were not in Iraq, the terrorists would be leaving us alone. The reality is that the terrorists have been targeting America for years, long before we ever set foot in Iraq.
We were not in Iraq in 1993, when the terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York. We were not in Iraq in 1998, when the terrorists bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. We were not in Iraq in 2000, when the terrorists killed 17 American sailors aboard the USS Cole. There wasn't a single American soldier in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001, when the terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people in the worst attack on our home since Pearl Harbor.
These acts are part of a grand strategy by the terrorists. Their stated objective is to drive the United States and coalition forces out of the Middle East so they can gain control of Iraq and use that country as a base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East, <h3>and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia.</h3> Hear the words of the terrorists. In a letter to the terrorist leader Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader Zawahiri has outlined plans that will unfold in several stages. These are his words: "... Expel the Americans from Iraq. ... Establish an Islamic authority over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq... Extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq." End quote. ....
|
Quote:
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2005/...caliphate.html
Posted by Robert Dreyfuss on December 2, 2005 01:15 PM
<b>Bush V. the Evil Caliphate</b>
Eric Edelman is still lying for the Vice President. Edelman, from 2001, served as Dick Cheney's chief adviser on matters related to national security and Iraq. Since then Edelman has succeeded Douglas Feith, the man who ran the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, as undersecretary of defense for policy. And he is still lying on Cheney's behalf. I caught up with him yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations. More on that, in a second. First, some background.
Three years ago, the Bush-Cheney team told us over and over that it was necessary to attack Iraq because Iraq was a central front in the war on terrorism. Right after 9/11, we now know, Bush personally insisted that Iraq was the chief culprit in that attack, even though the CIA demonstrated decisively that Al Qaeda was responsible for it and that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq. Vice President Cheney was the lead Liar-in-Chief about alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, insisting for example that Iraqi spies met with AQ operatives in Prague and repeatedly linking Baghdad to bin Laden. None of these ties existed. But we went to war anyway.
Now that the war is underway, and going badly, President Bush and his minions are still insisting, against all evidence, that Iraq is still at the heart of the war on terrorism. In his recent Annapolis speech, in the hefty Victory in Iraq document, and in other statements from administration officials, the Bush team is still misrepresenting the enemy. In fact, our real opponents in Iraq are not Al Qaeda, but the Iraqi resistance led by secular Baathists, former Iraqi military and intelligence officials, and a vast underground army of unhappy Sunnis, what U.S. intelligence calls POI's ("pissed off Iraqis"). But just as Bush lied about the terrorist threat from Iraq in 2003, he is doing it again: he is claiming that the real enemy in Iraq are Al Qeda-linked jihadists -- even though virtually all analysts of the war in Iraq say that the jihadists are only about 4 per cent of the fighters that U.S. forces face.
<h3>Which brings us to Edelman. Speaking at CFR yesterday, Edelman cited a long list of jihadist web site ravings, including one in which he quoted bin Laden claiming that the jihadists' goal in Iraq was to turn that country into the base for a new, worldwide Caliphate, a political-religious empire that Edelman warned would take over first the Middle East, then Europe, then the world.</h3> He ignored the reality that whatever outlandish claims bin Laden makes (and bin Laden is not in Iraq and has little leverage even over the small band of jihadists there), there is no chance that bin Laden's wild fantasies could come true. Certainly they do not represent an existential threat to world security, except in the sense that Al Qaeda can blow up things in London or Madrid. But Edelman presented the war in Iraq as the only way to prevent bin Laden from creating his worldwide Evil Calipjhate. (In the press corps, sitting in the back, there were audible titters at the stupidity of Edelman's claims.)....
|
Quote:
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/...ate_again.html
Posted by Robert Dreyfuss on February 21, 2006 10:09 AM
The Evil Caliphate, Again
The latest (official) incarnation of the Evil Caliphate is contained in a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing, which posits that the U.S. enemy in the Long War is made up of at least 12 million Muslims who want to establish an empire to battle the United States. The briefing was reported by the Washington Times. An excerpt:
The briefing was prepared for Rear Adm. William D. Sullivan, vice director for strategic plans and policy within the Joint Staff, which is under Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman. Adm. Sullivan used it to deliver a lecture in January to a national security study group at Mississippi State University.
Bin Laden, the Joint Staff paper says, wants to "expand the Muslim empire to historical significance." And Iraq "has become the focus of the enemy's effort. If they win in Iraq, they have a base from which to expand their terror. ... Extremists now have an Emirate in Iraq that serves as a base of operations <b>from which they can revive the Caliphate [Islamic rule]. ... Baghdad becomes the capital of the Caliphate. The revived Caliphate</b> now turns its attention to the destruction of Israel."
Adm. Sullivan's briefing contains a map that shows the bin Laden-style caliphate conquering North and East Africa, the entire Middle East and Central and South Asia.
To me it sounds like the Protocols of the Elders of Islam. It’s nonsense, of course. As I’ve been writing for years now, the people we are fighting in Iraq are Baathists and former military officials and Sunni tribal and clan leaders, not Caliphate-mongers and bin Laden’s cronies. Is Adm. Sullivan’s intelligence that bad?
|
Quote:
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/...otherhood.html
January 03, 2006
The Neocon Brotherhood
The decision today by the Iraqi Islamic Party to take part in the gestating Iraqi government is important news, but not good news. There’s at least an outside chance that the IIP’s decision was partly the result of a U.S. covert operation by the Pentagon.
First of all, the news. The Iraqi Islamic Party is a branch of the international Muslim Brotherhood, the same fraternity that runs Hamas and the organization in Egypt that just won a big bloc of seats in the new Egyptian national assembly. It’s a Wahhabi-inspired, back-to-basics fundamentalist party that does, indeed, want to create the worldwide Muslim caliphate that President Bush is constantly warning us about. It is Sunni, and in the recent elections, the IIP was the mainstay for the Iraqi Accordance Front, one of the main Sunni parties in the Dec. 15 elections. the IIP-led Accordance Front represented the religious Sunnis, while another bloc represented the secular (and neo-Baathist) Sunnis. It is at least the third time that the IIP broke ranks with the opposition: when it joined the earlier Iraqi interim government, when it decided in October to support the constitution draft, and now its decision to join the Shiite-led coalition.
The IIP decision angered its erstwhile allies, as expected. <a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002717034_webiraq02.html">Reported the AP</a>:
"We were shocked today when we heard that our brothers, who signed agreements with us yesterday to discuss just the fraudulent elections with the Kurdish leaders, instead were discussing forming a national unity government," Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the Sunni Arab National Dialogue Front, told The Associated Press.
What’s interesting here is an apparently covert relationship that has been developing between the IIP and the Pentagon, in part through the secretive Lincoln Group, the PR firm that planted paid propaganda in Iraqi media for the DOD. The New York Times <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/02/MNGKAGG5H61.DTL">revealed yesterday</a> that the Lincoln Group also had Sunni Iraqi clerics on its covert payroll:
<h3>Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm, was told early in 2005 by the Pentagon to identify religious leaders who could help craft messages that would persuade Sunnis in violence-ridden Anbar province to participate in national elections and reject the insurgency, according to a former employee.</h3>
Since then, the company has retained three or four Sunni religious scholars to offer advice and write reports for military commanders on the content of propaganda campaigns, the former employee said. But documents and Lincoln executives say the firm's ties to religious leaders and dozens of other prominent Iraqis are aimed also at enabling it to exercise influence in Iraqi communities on behalf of clients, including the military.
"We do reach out to clerics. We meet with local government officials and with local businessmen," Paige Craig, a Lincoln executive vice president, said in an interview. "We need to have relationships that are broad enough and deep enough that we can touch all the various aspects of society."
It isn’t clear if the Lincoln Group was dealing exclusively, or even primarily, with Muslim Brotherhood-linked clerics. But it ought be noted that one of Lincoln’s paid consultants, according to the Times, was Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. And Rubin is a co-thinker of AEI’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who is on record (in his book, The Islamic Paradox) saying that the Muslim Brotherhood ought to be a main partner of the United States in the region.
|
Quote:
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/...ate_again.html
Bush on the Caliphate, Again
Four times yesterday Bush talked about the evil “caliphate” that radicals want to create. Unlike in the past, though, he spoke about it as if it already existed, accusing his imagined enemy of trying to “extend the caliphate” and “spread their caliphate.” <h3>I wish some reporter had the guts to ask the president to explain what he means, to explain what he thinks a caliphate is, and how a rag-tag band of Al Qaeda types hiding in Pakistan can conquer the land from Spain to Indonesia, which is what Bush keeps warning about.</h3>
Here are the relevant excerpts (you can read the whole transcript here):
The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate.
The stakes couldn't be any higher, as I said earlier, in the world in which we live. There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives. And they want us to leave. And they want to topple government. They want to extend an ideological caliphate that has no concept of liberty inherent in their beliefs.
And they have objectives. They want to -- they want to drive us out of parts of the world to establish a caliphate. It's what they have told us.
It would give these people a chance to plot and plan and attack. It would give them resources from which to continue their efforts to spread their caliphate.
|
<b>...again with the blood (of American troops) for oil "line", and the "caliphate" bullshit:</b>
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...101100922.html
Transcript
News Conference
CQ Transcripts Wire
Wednesday, October 11, 2006; 1:05 PM
OCTOBER 11, 2006
SPEAKER: GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
...BUSH: The enemy's doing everything within its power to destroy the government and to drive us out of the Middle East, starting with driving us out of Iraq before the mission is done....
<h3>....We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves</h3> that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West......
...QUESTION: Senator Warner says Iraq appears to be drifting sideways. And James Baker says a change in strategy may be needed.
Are you willing to acknowledge that a change may be needed?
BUSH: We're constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal. Our strategic goal is a country which can defend itself, sustain itself and govern itself.
The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate.
The stakes couldn't be any higher, as I said earlier, in the world in which we live. <b>There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives.</b> And they want us to leave. And they want to topple government. They want to extend an <b>ideological caliphate</b> that has no concept of liberty inherent in their beliefs.
<b>BUSH: They want to control oil resources</b> and they want to plot and plan and attack us again. That's their objectives.
And so -- and our strategic objective is to prevent them from doing that. And we're constantly changing tactics to achieve that objective. And I appreciate Senator Warner going over there and taking a look.
I want you to notice what he did say is: If the plan is now not working, the plan that's in place isn't working, America needs to adjust. I completely agree. That's what I talked to General Casey about.
I said: General, the Baghdad security plan is in its early implementation. I support you strongly but, if you come into this office and say we need to do something differently, I support you. If you need more troops, I support you. If you're going to devise a new strategy, we're with you. Because I trust General Casey to make the judgments necessary to put the tactics in place to help us achieve an objective.
And I appreciate Jimmy Baker's willingness to -- he and Lee Hamilton are putting this -- they got a group they put together that -- I think it was Congressman Wolf's suggestion -- or passed into law.
BUSH: We supported the idea. I think it's good to have some of our elder statesmen -- I hate to call Baker an elder statesman -- but to go over there and take a look and to come back and make recommendations.
Somebody said he said, "Well, you know, cut-and-run isn't working." That's not our policy.
Our policy is to help this country succeed, because I understand the stakes. And I'm going to repeat them one more time. As a matter of fact, I'm going to spend a lot of time repeating the stakes about what life is like in the Middle East.
It is conceivable that there will be a world in which radical forms -- <b>extreme forms of religion fight each other for influence in the Middle East; in which they've got the capacity to use oil as an economic weapon....</b>
|
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15239205/site/newsweek/
By Lisa Miller And Matthew Philips
Newsweek
Updated: 4:11 p.m. ET Oct. 12, 2006
Oct. 12, 2006 - When President George W. Bush starts using fifty-cent words in press conferences, one has to wonder why, and on Wednesday, during his Rose Garden appearance, he used the word “caliphate” four times. The enemy, he said—by which he clearly meant the Islamic terrorist enemy—wants to “extend the caliphate,” “establish a caliphate,” and “spread their caliphate.” Caliphate? Really? Many people live long, fruitful lives without once using the word caliphate. Almost no one, with the exception of our president and some of his advisers, uses it as a pejorative.
As NEWSWEEK reported last month, the president and the people who prep him are still clearly casting about for the right phrase to pin on America’s elusive enemy. “Axis of evil” is outdated by now. “Islamist,” the preferred choice of scholars, has been deemed too jargony and academic. “Islamofascist” is a recent favorite, and in a speech last month the president used it as punctuation in a litany of other tags, notably “Islamic radicalism” and “militant jihadism.” The beauty of “caliphate” is that no one but students of Islamic history have much more than a vague idea of what it means. “Bush has been successful in defining terms in his own way,” said Steve Ebbins, a former Democratic speechwriter. “[The Bush administration] has captured the language. If you control the language, you control the message and are able to sway people’s attitude toward your policy. It’s a policy-endorsing mechanism.” Until last January, the president rarely used it, if ever. Since then, he’s used it more than 15 times.
A caliphate, according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, is the “office or dominion of a caliph”; a caliph is “a successor of Muhammad ... [the] spiritual head of Islam.” Simply put, the caliph is Islam’s deputy to the world. After the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 A.D., his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, became the first caliph. (At the heart of the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims, even today, is the question of succession: who has the right to become Islam’s caliph?) From the time of the Prophet’s death until the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, caliphs ruled over Muslims and presided over the Muslim expansion throughout the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe. These were the caliphates; some beneficent, some warmongering, in concept not unlike any other empire or dynasty.
In fairness, Bush isn’t the first person in recent history to appropriate the word caliphate and use it as a weapon. Osama bin Laden did it himself, most notably three years ago, in his statement to the United Sates via Al-Jazeera. “Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate, will not fall to you, God willing,” he said, “and we will fight you as long as we carry our guns.” Bin Laden’s rhetoric evoked, as it often does, an earlier, golden era of Islam, one that exists more in his imagination than in the lawless, crumbling city of Baghdad today. Backers of the war in Iraq—Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, not to mention hawks like Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania—jumped on the word and used it in speeches dozens of times.
Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American Islamic Relations, says bin Laden’s word choices distort Islam for the world, and he wishes the president would take more care. When Ahmed heard “caliphate” Wednesday morning, he thought of the way Bush used the word “crusade” after September 11. “There’s a fundamental misunderstanding with the president and his advisers on core Islamic issues,” Ahmed said. “He’s getting bad advice, they’re misinformed on Islamic terminology.” Either that, or he’s making a strategic rhetorical choice.
|
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011301816.html
Reunified Islam: Unlikely but Not Entirely Radical
Restoration of Caliphate, Attacked by Bush, Resonates With Mainstream Muslims
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 14, 2006; Page A01
ISTANBUL -- The plan was to fly a hijacked plane into a national landmark on live television. The year was 1998, the country was Turkey, and the rented plane ended up grounded by weather. Court records show the Islamic extremist who planned to commandeer the cockpit did not actually know how to fly.
But if the audacious scheme prefigured Sept. 11, 2001, it also highlighted a cause that, seven years later, President Bush has used to define the war against terrorism. What the ill-prepared Turkish plotters told investigators they aimed to do was strike a dramatic blow toward reviving Islam's caliphate, the institution that had nominally governed the world's Muslims for nearly all of the almost 1,400 years since the death of the prophet Muhammad.
The goal of reuniting Muslims under a single flag stands at the heart of the radical Islamic ideology Bush has warned of repeatedly in recent major speeches on terrorism. In language evoking the Cold War, Bush has cast the conflict in Iraq as the pivotal battleground in a larger contest between advocates of freedom and those who seek to establish "a totalitarian Islamic empire reaching from Spain to Indonesia."
The enthusiasm of the extremists for that vision is not disputed. However unlikely its realization, the ambition may help explain terrorist acts that often appear beyond understanding. When Osama bin Laden called the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "a very small thing compared to this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years," the reference was to the aftermath of World War I, when the last caliphate was suspended as European powers divided up the Middle East. Al Qaeda named its Internet newscast, which debuted in September, "The Voice of the Caliphate."
Yet the caliphate is also esteemed by many ordinary Muslims. For most, its revival is not an urgent concern. Public opinion polls show immediate issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and discrimination rank as more pressing. But Muslims regard themselves as members of the umma , or community of believers, that forms the heart of Islam. And as earthly head of that community, the caliph is cherished both as memory and ideal, interviews indicate.
That reservoir of respect represents a risk for the Bush administration as it addresses an issue closely watched by a global Islamic population estimated at 1.2 billion. Already, many surveys show that since the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Muslims almost universally have seen the war against terrorism as a war on Islam.
"Why do you keep invading Muslim countries?" asked Kerem Acar, a tailor in central Istanbul. "I won't live to see it, and my children won't, but one day maybe my children's children will see someone declare himself the caliph, like the pope, and have an impact."
The issue comes into sharp relief in Turkey, which is often held up as a democratic model for other Muslim nations but where empathy with fellow believers runs deep -- as Karen Hughes, a presidential adviser and undersecretary of state, was reminded in September when angry complaints about civilian casualties in Iraq dominated a public appearance in Ankara, the capital.
Here, the last caliph, an urbane scholar, Abdulmecid Efendi, was unseated in March 1924 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the charismatic military officer who conceived modern Turkey as an exemplar of the system that places sovereignty in the nation-state rather than faith. Importing from France the notion that religion had no place in public life, Ataturk decreed that Islamic religious law was second to "the rule of law" by the state.
Ataturk's mausoleum, on a hilltop where Turkish officials had gathered to honor his memory, was ground zero for the 1998 plot. Its ringleader, Metin Kaplan, was imprisoned in Turkey after being extradited from Germany, where he was known as the "Caliph of Cologne." Many Turks found the grandiloquent title less than amusing, said Husnu Tuna, his attorney.
"People called me when I took this case and asked, 'Why are you defending a person who lowers the value of an Islamic concept?' " Tuna said. "I heard that both from individuals and from officials, including police and security."
Caliph, from the Arabic word khalifa , means successor to the prophet Muhammad. Competition for the title caused the schism between Shiite and Sunni lines of the faith, and the Shiites soon stopped selecting caliphs. But in the dominant Sunni tradition, the office embodied the ultimate religious and political authority, enabling Ottoman sultans to hold together an empire across three continents for more than 500 years. Ataturk appealed to Muslim solidarity in the battle to drive European powers off the Anatolian peninsula after World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.........
|
|