3043
04-25-2006, 01:02 PM
Yesterday morning I was watching a live feed stream of an English broadcast of a Russian news channel. (http://www.russiatoday.ru/onair.html)The story that really caught my eye was the press conference of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the main points hit by the Russia Today correspondent were Ahmadinejad's renouncing nuclear weapons as contrary to Islam and his reiteration of Iran's 30-year commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, though Iran reserved the right to revisit its commitment if adherence to the treaty imperiled its sovereignty. It was an unexpectedly optimistic piece. Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak at length and appeared relaxed and informed while fielding questions. He appeared quite different than the ranting fanatic that has been presented to me by the western media. If the excerpts were representative and the translation accurate, he appeared to be credibly attempting to defuse the crisis.
Naturally we need to compensate for spin whatever the source, and Russian news tailored for a foreign audience has a spin no less than Wolf Blitzer's Panic Room, for sure.
But there's a Central Casting-like, almost disney-ish and certainly melodramatic quality to Ahmadinejad's villainy. If he didn't exist the Pentagon would have had to create him to justify moving the goalpost to Tehren. The shocker (or maybe not so shocking to the more jaded among us) was just how taken aback by the absolute unfamiliarity of the same press conference I was when soon after I started reading accounts of it in the Western media.
Get ready for more carpet bombing (please see Regime Change Part II (http://www.thegng.org/forums/showthread.php?t=2864&page=7)):
The accent was almost entirely upon provocation, not concilation:
"the UN lacks guts (http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1883441&page=1)to impose sanctions"
""Defiant Iran in threat (http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=17&art_id=17303&sid=7643322&con_type=1)to quit nuclear treaty"
"Iranian President insists 'Israel (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article359954.ece)can not continue to live.'"
So the question is Did he really spout such shit?
Without a good grasp of Persian I'm forced to look elsewhere - so I started with english, my native and best tongue.
Did he insist that Israel must die? The headline is drawn from this quote, provided without context: "We say that this fake regime cannot logically continue to live." To arrive at the headline, the government has to be conflated with the nation. Likewise I could say about the Bush administration, and with considerable accuracy, that "this fake regime cannot logically continue to survive." And is that the same as saying America must die?
Ahmadinejad says the darnedest things, but perhaps, when translated, his rhetoric is subject to overinflation (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12790.htm) by parties interested in conflict.
But maybe all this doesn't matter. The go-between media appears only to egg Bush and Ahmadinejad on like a pack of jumpy kids itching for the stimulus of a good after-school fight.
I have changed my stance, however, and am turning towards cautious optimism in this matter. Or maybe cautious neutrality is better. A chorus of just one wise word, something like "Enough," should be sufficient now to deter the Bush regime which, judging by the politics alone, ought to be the most vulnerable since Nixon's circa 1974. The question is, then, are there enough true patriots to raise such a chorus? And if so, will the "liberal" media smack them around hard enough (Cindy Sheehan (http://www.truthout.org/cindy.shtml)) to raise the ire of Pro-War america against reason yet again?
If all things were equal I guess I might be cautiously sliding towards optimism but 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4 in the US government; American politics is putting on an ever-more piss-poor pantomime of representative government. So I guess I am wondering just how loud that chorus would need to be...
Naturally we need to compensate for spin whatever the source, and Russian news tailored for a foreign audience has a spin no less than Wolf Blitzer's Panic Room, for sure.
But there's a Central Casting-like, almost disney-ish and certainly melodramatic quality to Ahmadinejad's villainy. If he didn't exist the Pentagon would have had to create him to justify moving the goalpost to Tehren. The shocker (or maybe not so shocking to the more jaded among us) was just how taken aback by the absolute unfamiliarity of the same press conference I was when soon after I started reading accounts of it in the Western media.
Get ready for more carpet bombing (please see Regime Change Part II (http://www.thegng.org/forums/showthread.php?t=2864&page=7)):
The accent was almost entirely upon provocation, not concilation:
"the UN lacks guts (http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1883441&page=1)to impose sanctions"
""Defiant Iran in threat (http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=17&art_id=17303&sid=7643322&con_type=1)to quit nuclear treaty"
"Iranian President insists 'Israel (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article359954.ece)can not continue to live.'"
So the question is Did he really spout such shit?
Without a good grasp of Persian I'm forced to look elsewhere - so I started with english, my native and best tongue.
Did he insist that Israel must die? The headline is drawn from this quote, provided without context: "We say that this fake regime cannot logically continue to live." To arrive at the headline, the government has to be conflated with the nation. Likewise I could say about the Bush administration, and with considerable accuracy, that "this fake regime cannot logically continue to survive." And is that the same as saying America must die?
Ahmadinejad says the darnedest things, but perhaps, when translated, his rhetoric is subject to overinflation (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12790.htm) by parties interested in conflict.
But maybe all this doesn't matter. The go-between media appears only to egg Bush and Ahmadinejad on like a pack of jumpy kids itching for the stimulus of a good after-school fight.
I have changed my stance, however, and am turning towards cautious optimism in this matter. Or maybe cautious neutrality is better. A chorus of just one wise word, something like "Enough," should be sufficient now to deter the Bush regime which, judging by the politics alone, ought to be the most vulnerable since Nixon's circa 1974. The question is, then, are there enough true patriots to raise such a chorus? And if so, will the "liberal" media smack them around hard enough (Cindy Sheehan (http://www.truthout.org/cindy.shtml)) to raise the ire of Pro-War america against reason yet again?
If all things were equal I guess I might be cautiously sliding towards optimism but 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4 in the US government; American politics is putting on an ever-more piss-poor pantomime of representative government. So I guess I am wondering just how loud that chorus would need to be...