It's Started

This was an ominous Sunday morning (4/18/10) with a sinister echo of the events which led to the horrific Iraq War. On the front page of The New York Times was a misleading warmongering article conveniently coordinated with Sunday morning talk shows.

Bill Moyers' excellent PBS DVD "Buying the War" documents over and over the way false front-page New York Times articles were planted by neocon warmongers and then further publicized on Sunday TV talk shows in the push to war.

Anonymous sources continue to predominate. Today's article quotes a "senior official" describing a January memo by Defense Secretary Gates as a "wake-up call" regarding the administration's need for planning a war with Iran. Later today, Secretary Gates called this article a mischaracterization of the memo which was in no way such a "wake-up call."

The Israel Lobby neocons' main message is that "diplomacy has failed," so we must precede to crippling sanctions and/or war. The truth is, however, that diplomacy has barely been given a chance.

For instance, as reported by Iranian expert Hooman Majd on Politico 4/13/10, there has been little notice of Iran's many diplomatic offers "including the most recent, last week, from Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki. Mottaki said Iran would put most of its enriched uranium stockpile under 24-hour IAEA supervision until it was removed from the country simultaneously with the West's delivery of fuel rods with higher-enriched uranium."

Unfortunately, we won't be seeing articles about these Iranian offers on the front pages of our major newspapers, just as we never saw the important pre-Iraq War articles by Knight Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay. Their work refuted the neocons' pro-war propaganda and should have served to save us from the unnecessary Iraq War.