Julie Bishop is absolutely correct to conclude that it is vitally important to bring a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria. Each member of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly can contribute to stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East and beyond. The West and some Arab states like Saudi Arabia can help by stopping its arms supply channels into Syria. Australia can also play a positive role by leading and supporting peace initiatives and programs that will bring an end to weapons of mass destruction which the world does not need.

Unfortunately and not for the first time an article by Ms Bishop reads as though she has gone through the talking points provided by Washington and Tel Aviv and ticked them off one by one. There is, frankly, an appalling lack of insight into what is going on in the Middle East and has been going on for a very long time.

One looks in vain for some condemnation of Saudi Arabia, the GCC, Israel and the US for training, arming and financing mainly foreign sourced insurgents. One similarly looks in vain for some recognition that what is happenening in Syria is an al out assault on a sovereign nation in violation of the UN Charter and international law.

One also looks for an acknowledgment that the massive destabilization in the Middle East owes more than a little to US military adventurism in the area including but not limited to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Where also is an acknowledgment that Israel is the only nuclear armed power in the Middle East, refuses to sign the NPT, ignores international opinion in its treatment of Palestinians, and regularly invades, bombs, attacks through sabotage and assassinations it's neighbors, and now wants military intervention in Syria and Iran.

Then there is the ongoing insinuation that Iran is somehow concealing a nuclear weapons program, despite two unanimous NIE reports that it did not have a nuclear weapons program.

For goodness sake graham, spare us from more of this mindless propaganda. The issues are too important to be treated in this way.

A negotiated settlement Julie? If only that were still possible!
We could have probably avoided this conflict, the blood-letting and the massacre of thousands of innocent non combatant civilians, if just one leader, had the testicular fortitude, to send in a covert special forces unit, to take out evil personified Assard and his considerably more evil younger brother.
The time for talk/talk, yakity yak, blah blah blah, is over!
Too much blood has been spent, and as long as his populace resists him, Assard's murderous operations, rape, torture and plunder, will continue.
We now have no other choice, but to arm and assist the now far better coordinated opposition. If we can't or won't help, we need to simply get out of the way!
Enough already!
These weapons ought to include SAM's and anti armour ordinance!
The resistance will then be able to do the rest.
The mercenaries currently conducting Assard's mass extermination event, are only strong, when they have superior weapons and numbers.
They can be relied on to cut and run, when their operations begin to be represented by body bags, lost advantage and territory!
The Turks already have legitimate cause to provide a no flight zone and attack Assard's armour!
After they are defeated, the Assards deserve no more mercy, than that they have already displayed for their own.
A Quick and Merciful bullet to the back of those mass murder's heads; on sight, would be deserved justice and far less problematic, costly, or time wasting, than the circus that is the International Court?
Rhrosty.

I fully endorse the comment from James. Julie is using this fine forum to push the American line, the Israeli line, and her party's line.

She present articles that bear her name but are probably written by her staffers. She ignores all those who comment as if she is the holder of all knowledge and anyone who disagrees with her is irrelevant, beneath contempt.

Let her argue her position if she really believes it is relevant and truthful. If she is not prepared to debate the issues then she should be ignored!

I think to some extent the Syrians are caught in the cross-fire of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Detaching the Syrian Alawite regime from Iran's orbit would be a major setback for the Iranian mullahs.

It would also be a setback for Hezbollah. It may even trigger another civil war in Lebanon.

My own feeling is that in the end the Americans will destroy Iran's nuclear program in order to avoid the situation where a nuclear Iran squares off against a nuclear Saudi Arabia.

Now there's the real nightmare scenario. Two unstable Jihadi theocracies with nukes.

And another unstable nuclear-armed Muslim country, Pakistan, in the background!

Time to start digging that radiation fallout shelter. Back to the 1950s.

Steven, you forgot to mention that Israel has a large nuclear arsenal already and, given its religious zealotry, is the most likely nation in the Middle East to use it! It also has Greater Israel as one of its raisons de etre.

Was that just an oversight or was it intentional?

David G

How do you win a game of chicken?

In one form of the game two contestants drive cars towards each other at high speed. The first one to swerve is chicken.

So here's one strategy.

You arrive at the game clutching a Smirnoff vodka bottle. You appear to be in an advanced state of inebriation. You are singing hymns on the theme of "Jesus loves me."

You explain to your opponent that earlier you had discovered your wife had been on the point of committing a great sin that would have condemned her and your children to the eternal fires of hell. You just could not let that happen. Now they are all safe in the arms of Jesus and soon you will be joining them.

Taking a final swig of the clear liquid in the bottle, and still singing hymns, you climb shakily into your car.

This works unless the other guy is a genuine nutso.

Steven, you haven't answered David's question. Veering off on obscure metaphors is no substitute for rational analysis.

There have been at least three reputable polls of Arab opinion, I.e. ordinary men and women, not the despotic elites. They are remarkably consistent. By overwhelming margins ordinary Arabs nominate the US and Israel as the greatest threats to peace in their region. By a smaller margin but still a comfortable majority, they would welcome Iran having nuclear weapons as reducing the Israeli threat.

Have a look at post 1948 history. List the countries who have attacked their neighbors in the Middle East. You will not find Iran in that list. On the contrary it has been the victim. The overthrow of the secular-inclined Mossadegh government in 1953 is a good start. Then the US supported attack by Iraq in the 1980s that killed more than a million Iranians. Currently they are under attack by Jinallah fanatics from Pakistan and. MEK fanatics from within Iraq, in both cases financed and armed by the US. That is just a sample.

There is no evidence that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb but given their recent history who would reasonably blame them if they did?

James O'Neill

I answered David G on another thread.

See:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13911

For a country that is not trying to acquire nukes Iran is spending an awful lot on building uranium enrichment facilities that go far beyond what is needed for civilian reactors. There's the direct cost of the facilities, the cost of putting them underground and the indirect cost of suffering sanctions. That says a lot more to me than any so-called NIE.

The only reasonable inference I can draw is that Iran is intent on acquiring nukes. That's certainly the basis on which most of the people concerned are operating. Nothing else makes sense. In fact, given the sheer scale of the Iranian effort, it takes a wilful determination not to connect the dots to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion.

But you raise an interesting point about why's and wherefore's of Iran's nuclear program. Iran exists in a dangerous neighbourhood and the danger does not emanate from Israel.

On one side it has nuclear armed Pakistan, its strategic rival in Afghanistan. And it is ironic that it acquired some of its nuclear technology from Pakistan's AQ Khan network.

On the other it had Saddam's Iraq. As we now know Saddam's nuclear program did not come to an end with the bombing of the Osirak reactor. I think the prospect of nuclear Saddam spooked the Iranians more than anything.

But once the program got going it acquired a momentum of its own as these things do.

There is another factor here.

I don’t think the Americans, the Europeans or even Israel's neighbours feels especially threatened by Israel's nukes. They know Israel will only use them if its very existence is threatened.

But a nuclear arms race between Iran and Saudi Arabia scares the living daylights out of everybody who does not suffer from Israel Obsession Disorder.

And, yes, I think there is an actual psychological disorder that can best be described as Israel Obsession Disorder or IOD.

It has been a litany of lies and hypocracy.Iran has yet to get one nuke but its OK for the Saudis to buy a few as protection.No mention of Israels hundreds of nukes.

See Prof Michel Chossudovsky's article "Globalisation of war. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?contex=va&aid=28254
Rememeber "All the ay with LBJ". We now know that the Gulf of Tonkin incident which gave the US the green light to attack Nth Vietnam ,did not happen.We know that Iraq was invaded on a lie.

Zibigniew Brezezinski 1998,"What we need is a truely massive and widely percived direct external threat."That threat was contrived terrorism. In the shadow of their project for a "New American Century" we are seeing the imperialists pushing for their,"New World Order" in which we will all be slaves to a world Govt owned and controlled by corpoate elites.

When is Australia going to make a decision based on our national interest instead of being a lap dog for corporate imperialism?

New (ish) Syria Blog "The Land Destroyer Report"
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com.au/
How can any person with two brain cells to rub together be taken in by the SAME lies and SAME disinformation from the SAME people who brought you Yugoslavia. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and now Syria.

Steven, I know there is a disorder called Severe Religious Derangement Psychosis (SRDP) and I believe that the most extreme example of it occurs in Israel.

Over there, racist, deluded people actually believe that some mythical God has chosen them as his special people and that they, and they alone, will share in this mythical God's treasure and protection. Can you believe this happening in a world where we have space travel and nuclear bombs?

Driven by SRDP, these fanatics think they have rights that no other race has and can do whatever they want. They care nothing for world opinion or International Laws and have illegally armed themselves with nukes.

SRDP sufferers are a threat to themselves and to the rest of the world! They need urgent psychiatric therapy!

Careful David G, that kind of talk could get you locked up, seriously.
There's one school of thought in the alternate media which holds that Israel and the Jews have been sold out, that there won't be any support from the U.S the next time they get into it with Hezbollah or, god forbid, Iran.
The murmuring suggests that maybe Obama doesn't really work for AIPAC and the Jewish Bankers after all, that he works for Anglo Saxon power brokers who are cooking up one of their periodic grabs at world domination.
These things go in cycles, rise and fall and rise again.

Jay, thanks for your friendly warning. I guess I take the position that if no one speaks out and tells the truth then, as a society, we are lost!

We can no longer rely on the MSM to tell the truth because they serve the corporations and imperial nations like Israel and the U.S.

Cheers.

David, you always have the defence of "truth". I think it was Orwell who said that telling the truth in an age of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.n. in that sense I am happy to be thought a revolutionary.

You are absolutely right to raise the points you do. Our lame stream media has seriously failed in its duty to discuss a whole range of issues. The extraordinary influence of Israel on US foreign policy is only one of many issues. Given how the events of 11 september 2001 are the purported justification for much of present policy, foreign and domestic, including the current extraordinary proposals to further extend the powers of ASIO, a rational discussion on 9/11 is long overdue.

The average European is far better informed by the media than is the case in Australia about what did and did not happen on that day. Yet here it is the proverbial elephant in the room. And OLO is not exempt from that criticism, although one can raise it in the comments section.

Unless and until we are prepared to have that public debate, free of the idiotic posturings of those who label anything that challenges their world view as "conspiracy theory" we are doomed to go on repeating the appalling mistakes so evident now in Iraq, Afghanistan and, I fear, soon to be Syria and Iran.

James, few people can see the truth. All they do is to mouth the indoctrination they've received from birth and the rote learning they received at school and the false messages that pollute our television screens.

They seem incapable of thinking or seeking out facts for themselves. They seem unable to deal with anyone who questions the status quo about religion, Israel, the imperial U.S., democracy so-called, racism, two-party politics, capitalism, the West, etc, etc.

And they hate people who ridicule mob-speak and sheeple. But if we don't start thinking soon and start punishing the Predators and Parasites and deposing them, we'll have no world left!

Cheers.

David G,
If I can sit down with someone for two hours I can de-program them, it's actually easier because of the fact that we have controlled opposition like Infowars and Cutting Through The Matrix. Exposure to their "Conspiracy Theories" has meant that people's minds are now more open than they were 20 years ago.
"Political Correctness" and the current Orthodoxy is a good place to start and you can draw in people from both the Left and the Right.
This podcast is by someone who's nominally a Leftist:
Thoughts On Political Correctness,- Ray Mangum
http://anarchyandculture.podomatic.com/entry/2012-07-01T00_49_15-07_00

LOL David G

>>Steven, I know there is a disorder called Severe Religious Derangement Psychosis (SRDP)>>

You're right. There certainly is such a derangement. At the moment it's strongest in countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and among the Palestinians. One of the symptoms is that many of the inhabitants believe they have a sacred duty to exterminate the Jews and quite a few others. But especially the Jews.

Of course they are not the only ones afflicted with a desire to exterminate the Jews. Jewish Extermination Disorder (JED) has afflicted quite a few countries. It sweeps across Europe periodically.

Now those afflicted with JED will run up against Jewish nukes. Wonder how it will all end.

Probably ka BOOM!

Y'know David G

I never realised just how crazy Pakistan was until I was privileged to attend a lecture by the great Pakistani physicist, Abdus Salaam.

Seems Salaam belonged to a Muslim sect called the Ahmadiyya. In 1974 The Pakistani Parliament passed a bill declaring the Ahmadiyya to be "non-Islamic." Salaam went into self-imposed exile in protest. This was very painful for him. It was apparent that he missed his native country greatly.

Salaam went on to win the physics Nobel Prize along with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow for his work on the weak nuclear force.

I would call Salaam one of Pakistan's greatest sons and very much a victim of what you call SRDP. I only saw him the one time but he came across as a warm, kindly man.

Since then persecution of the Ahmadiyya has intensified and has spread to Indonesia.

C'est la guerre