Hat-tip to ThinkProgress.com,
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/19/friedman-keep-cheney-on-for-another-term/
and Mathew Yglasias,
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/worst_oped_day_ever.php
for capturing and pointing out the sheer INSANE WAR LUST of Thomas Freidman and his employer, the "we LOVE TRASHING NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, while THREATENING NUCLEAR ANHILATION to those we declare to be enemies" NEW YORK TIMES.
NO article or editorial ever published by the NEW YORK whore TIMES has ever quite captured the sheer insanity of the TIMES' devotion to the neo-con, Neo-Confederate, AIPAC war-lust, and designs for imperial hegemony and nuclear-backed intimidations -- and there have been many hundreds if not thousands of such NYT articles over the past decade urging, demanding, and white-washing wars, invasions, occuptaions, torture, spyng, and retributon (including WILLIAM SAFIRE's NYT "RETRIBUTION AGAINST FALLUJAH!" op-ed that advocated a massive reprisal against Fallujah that was indistinguisable from German treatment of GUERNICA, the embattled city in Spain bombed to rubble by Luftwaffe bombers during the Spanish Civil War) - as much as this insane THOMAS FRIEDMAN article, calling for DICK CHENEY - of HALLIBURTON STOCK OPTIONS/DEALING WITH IRAQ behind back of US/UN EMBARGO on Iraq infamy! - to be the choice of DEMOCRATS for their VP nominee in the 2008 elections!
Mr. Friedman, Mr. Safire, Mr. Sulzberger, and the entire top echelons of the New York Times have simply GONE BATTY with POWER, GREED, uncheked influence over the US news industry, and neo-con war-lust: it is THEY (and other AIPAC NEO-CON Straussian imperialists) over the past decade who have sought to LEGITIMIZE the Republican Right-Wing agenda to TRASH INTERNATIONAL TREATIES - including prohibition of TORTURE and restraints on NUCLEAR PROLIFERATIO - and who now seek to grind every nation on the earth under the bombs-and-bullets BOOT HEEL of US military "enforcement", aka threats or outright "war on terra" aggression.
THE NEO-CON WAR LUST AGENDA to CONQUER IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA, and CASPIAN OIL NATIONS is INDISTINGUISHABLE from the German desire to CONQUER POLAND, Western Europe, and Russia, except that the Nazis did not have the massive NUCLEAR ARSENAL that Israel and America have today.
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Channeling Dick Cheney
[i.e., "Dick Cheney for DEMOCRATIC Vice President nominee" !!]
By Thomas Friedman
New York Times columnist
Published: November 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18friedman.html
I have no idea who is going to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but lately I’ve been wondering whether, if it is Barack Obama, he might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president.
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Go to Columnist Page » No, I personally am not a Dick Cheney fan, and I know it is absurd to even suggest, but now that I have your attention, here’s what’s on my mind: After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issue that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran. There is a cold war in the Middle East today between America and Iran, and until and unless it gets resolved, I see Iran using its proxies, its chess pieces — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and the Shiite militias in Iraq — to stymie America and its allies across the region.
And that brings me back to the Obama-Cheney ticket: When it comes to how best to deal with Iran, each has half a policy — but if you actually put them together, they’d add up to an ideal U.S. strategy for Iran. Dare I say, they complete each other.
Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously. But Mr. Cheney’s Dr. Strangelove imitation is totally wasted with President Bush and Secretary of State Condi Rice. Because the president and secretary of state have never been able to make up their minds as to what U.S. policy toward Iran should be — to bring about regime change or a change of behavior — it’s impossible to have any effective diplomacy.
If she were taking advantage of Mr. Cheney’s madness, Secretary Rice would be going to Tehran and saying to the Iranians: “Look, I’m ready to cut a deal with you guys, but I have to tell you, back home, I’ve got Cheney on my back and he is truly craaaaazzzzy. You guys don’t know the half of it. He thinks waterboarding is what you do with your grandchildren at the pool on Sunday. I’m not sure how much longer I can restrain him. So maybe we should have a serious nuke talk, and, if it goes well, we’ll back off regime change.”
Instead, we just have Mr. Cheney being Mr. Cheney, but the Bush team neither carrying out his threats nor leveraging them to drive meaningful diplomacy with Tehran. There’s no good cop, it’s just a bad cop/bad cop routine — a big reason our Iran policy has been a failure. It has not stopped the Iranian nuclear program or changed the regime.
“For coercive diplomacy to work you need to be able to threaten what the regime values most — its own survival,” said the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Robert Litwak, author of the book “Regime Change.” “But for coercive diplomacy to work, you also need to be ready to take yes for an answer.”
Mr. Obama, by contrast, has “yes” down pat. As he said on “Meet the Press” last week: “I would meet directly with the leadership in Iran. I believe that we have not exhausted the diplomatic efforts that could be required to resolve some of these problems — them developing nuclear weapons, them supporting terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.”
I think a President Obama offering to go to Tehran would have a huge impact on that country and create lots of internal debate, especially if we made clear that America would be satisfied with a verifiable change of Iranian behavior.
But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient. Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work. When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.
Mr. Obama would also be more effective if he not only stressed how much further he was ready to go than the Bush team to engage Iran, but also how much further he would be ready to go in bringing meaningful leverage on Iran — by, say, opting for a gasoline tax that would help bring down the price of oil, or by abandoning the anti-Russia policies of the Bush team and trying to enlist Vladimir Putin, or China and India, on our side to bring real pressure on Tehran.
In sum, Mr. Obama’s instinct is right — but he needs to dial down his inner Jimmy Carter a bit when it comes to talking to Iran, and dial up a bit more inner Dick Cheney. If Democrats want to win this election, they have to get these two in balance — they have to learn how to criticize the Bush record from the right and the left, to show they can be better at engagement and coercion. Successful diplomacy requires both. Americans will want to know that Democrats can do both. My guess is that many still aren’t sure.
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