Important post from Eli Clifton on the neoconservative echo chamber pushing for war with Iran. Why isn’t Chris Matthews or Rachel Maddow putting Clifton on air? Do we really want another disastrous American war in the Middle East? Excerpts:
No sooner did I write about the growth industry in astroturf groups promoting a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran than a new one sprung up on CNN. ..
The new group, The Emergency Committee for Israel, appears to have made its public debut on July 6 when Campbell Brown—who ironically is married to Dan Senor, who serves on the four-man board of the neoconservative The Foreign Policy Initiative—hosted Noah Pollak, its “executive director,” to discuss Obama’s recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the threat allegedly posed by Iran’s nuclear program. A transcript of their discussion can be found here.
…Pollak, who writes for Commentary Magazine and has served as the assistant editor of the Jerusalem-based, Shalem Center’s Azure magazine,…repeated the talking points that the recent meeting between Obama and Netanyahu represented the end of the White House’s “tough love” toward Israel and suggested that the Palestinian leadership’s “fractiousness and powerlessness [!]” made progress toward any kind of peace process unlikely.
On Iran, Pollak went straight for the recent money quote delivered last week by the UAE ambassador to the US:
BROWN: Noah, Netanyahu did seem pleased with the administration’s efforts to go after Iran’s nuclear program. In his words, he said these efforts have teeth, they bite. But are the U.S. and Israel really, in your view, on the same page when it comes to Iran?
POLLAK: I would suspect not, although this is one of those issues where there is a huge amount of private discussion that goes on, although it was very interesting to see today in a story that just came out the ambassador of to [sic] the UAE came out and openly advocated for military attacks on the Iranian nuclear program.
So, I think there is a developing consensus that something needs to be done and that it would be very, very bad if the Iranians went nuclear.
The UAE foreign minister has said that the ambassador’s comments were taken out of context and didn’t represent the views of his government, but that hasn’t stopped various foreign policy hawks from jumping on the remarks as a green light from the Arab world for a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
It’s pretty clear that Pollak and Hoover, along with the people behind Keep Israel Safe and Stop Iran Now, are part of the extensive neoconservative echo chamber which seeks to create the appearance of a diverse coalition of grassroots groups calling on the US to prevent Iran from going nuclear by any means necessary.
