It’s bomb, bomb, bomb Iran time

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online
October 5, 2009

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The United States and Western “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” crowd – hysteria running at fever pitch ahead of Thursday’s multilateral nuclear talks in Geneva – could do worse than have a word with Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.

Lula actually talked to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad face-to-face for over an hour on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last week. He invited Ahmadinejad to visit Brazil in November. About the meeting, he went straight to the point, “What I wish for Iran is what I always wanted for Brazil – a peaceful, civilian nuclear program.”

Lula is an island of common sense in an ocean of hysteria. French President Nicolas Sarkozy publicly gave a December deadline for Iran not to make a “tragic mistake”, as in provoking Armageddon. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini reiterated the Group of Eight was giving Iran only three more months.

United States President Barack Obama – now running three wars (Iraq and the AfPak combo) – demanded that Iran (which is not at war with anybody) demonstrate “its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu announced to the UN, “the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fundamentalism and the weapons of mass destruction”. Impervious to irony, Netanyahu obviously forgot that Iran – like Iraq in 2003 – has no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel not only has WMDs, but still refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or allow its weapons to be inspected, as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rushed to clarify. As for religious fundamentalism, Zionism is more than a match to Iran’s Shi’itism.

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This article was posted: Monday, October 5, 2009 at 6:45 am

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