Graham: We're Walking a Road to Armageddon

GOP Senator Says Int'l Community Has 18 Months to Stop Iran From Building a Nuclear Weapon

(CBS)  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he definitively believes that Iran has the intention of building nuclear weapons, evident in their covert uranium enrichment facility announced Friday.

"Absolutely I believe they are," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. "I believe the Holocaust existed. I've got one rule of thumb: If the president of a country denies the Holocaust, you should believe the worst, not the best, about what they're doing.

"They're hiding nuclear programs for a purpose. They're trying to develop a nuclear weapon," he told CBS News' Harry Smith.

"If they are successful, the Sunni-Arab states in a region will want a nuclear weapon. Israel becomes at risk. We're walking down the road to Armageddon. We have about 18 months using the international community to decisively act," he warned.

He argued that the international community can no longer offer "half-measures" to deal with rogue nations. China, he said, needs to join with Russia to enforce further sanctions against Iran.

Graham said he would consider military action as "the last resort when all meaningful sanctions fail."

He also pointed to U.S. and NATO activities in fighting Taliban militants as demonstrative.

"What we do in Afghanistan will affect the ability of Iran to get the message. This regime needs to be delivered a message that the international community is deadly serious about stopping their nuclear program.

"[T]he worst thing that could happen to this country in my view is for Iran to get a nuclear weapon because that changes everything in the Mideast for the worst," he explained.

Smith asked the senator whether President Obama should give General Stanley McChrystal the additional 40,000 troops he has asked for in Afghanistan.

"Yes," Graham replied. "I would give the general the resources he needs to regain lost momentum. ... You can't have a second shot at governance until you get the security situation right. This counterinsurgency strategy of General McChrystal's has been well thought out. I hope the president will give him the troops he says he needs."

After having made several trips to Afghanistan, the senator concluded that the situation there is deteriorating and that more combat power is needed "to take fight back to Taliban. Taliban have reemerged. Sixty-eight thousand troops can’t turn Afghanistan around without some help. Hope they get help they need."

When asked to predict what would be the outcome if President Obama does not give Gen. McChrystal the 40,000 additional troops he requested, Graham said, "We're going to lose. We'll be driven out. The Taliban will come back stronger than they were before, [and] the moderates in Afghanistan will go back in hiding or get killed. NATO will be seen as a failure, and America will go it alone in the future.

"We can't let NATO fail in Afghanistan," he said. "This is NATO's fight, just not America's fight. The Taliban have come back for a reason. But the good news is that Afghan people don't want them back. With additional military power we can defeat them.

"We have to do what Secretary Clinton said [earlier on the program]: Push the Karzai government or the next government to do better. But until you get the military situation right, you'll never get better governance."

He also said failing in Afghanistan would bode ill for fighting militants in neighboring Pakistan.

[myst_man]

Says:
October 9th, 2009 at 9:43 am

Big Brother

The most common sense of Orwellian is that of the all-controlling ?Big Brother? state, used to negatively describe a situation in which a Big Brother authority figure ? in concert with ?thought police? ? constantly monitors the population to detect betrayal via ?improper? thoughts. Orwellian also describes oppressive political ideas and the use of euphemistic political language in public discourse to camouflage morally outrageous ideas and actions. In this latter sense, the term is often used as a means of attacking an opponent in political debate, by branding his or her policies as Orwellian. When used like this in political rhetoric if it is not sincere, it is interesting to note as it can be a case of a hypocritical Orwellian strategist denouncing Orwellian strategies.
Isent how our country acts we must change please or we are what it says above in every way. we must end this war and also the war on drugs it's costed us our freedom and angered The Son of god Allah deity The One true God

[MARYWILMA]

WE NEED TO GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE,, THOSE PEOPLE WERE BORN FIGHTING AND ARE PERFECTLY WILLING TO DIE FIGHTING.. I WAS IN PAKISTAN ALONG TIME AGO ON A MISSION TO GIVE THEM SOME OUTDATED CARGO PLANES.. EVEN THEN WE WERE TOLD
TO STAY AWAY FROM THE BORDER """THOSE PEOPLE WILL KILL YOU FOR YOUR BOOTS"""
WE JUST LOST 8 FINE AMERICAN TROOPS .. FOR WHAT ????? I WOULD NOT TRADE ONE ACRE OF THE USA FOR ALL OF THE MID EAST

[REMNANT0820]

One of the things you have to understand is that christian conservatives only back Israel because they think that the bible tells them too.
THEY WILL REALLY FALL APART IF war breaks out, because their theology is based on a false premise.
God created the Nation of Israel a long time ago and it will always survive ..
IT cannot be destroyed ..
WHY?
Simple ... JESUS became Corporate Israel when HE accepted what the Father ask HIM to do on earth. (Israel My First Born Son)
ISRAEL WILL LIVE FOREVER ...GOD doesn't depend on man to bring HIS plan into fruition. GOD-MAN will take care of it ..
BUT ====
The nation there now, has the right to exist just like we do ..we (america) took land from a people who lived here FIRST, but no one wants us to move and give it back ...All nations are occupiers so to speak, because all have conquered someone.

[Escapee1]

Israel, you are clear to launch full out air assault, I repeat, you are clear to launch full out air assault. Unleash the wrath of Hell on these idiots!

[veteran71]

Until our foreign policy is not written by Israel, the Military Industrial Complex, and Big Oil, we'll never get out of this cycle of never ending wars for fun and profit. We could initiate an energy policy that could remove our dependancy on foreign oil,(and soon after, ALL fossil fuels), to ZERO in 10 years if we wanted to, but until Criminal Corporate Money and the influence it buys is removed from government in it's entireity, nothing will change.
The Ruling Elites not only suffer no ill effects from these policies, they benefit financially in the gross extreme.
The other component to this problem is uneducated stupid people, who believe in invisible, magical friends that look down and judge our every action from somewhere far above. They infest every society on earth, around the Globe, with not ONE safe haven from their idiocy. They will wage war indefinitely to prove THEIR particular magical, invisible friend is the TRUE magical, invisible friend, they'll chop off your head, blow you up, or even shoot you down in church if they get a chance.
Enlightenment for mankind is probably a fantasy, since even as our technologies grow at a fantastic rate, the applications of the best of these end up in the hands of the military and their "war forever" proponents. We need to set aside a small area somewhere for intelligent people, protected by force fields from the rest of the planet's drooling inhabitants, where education and the pursuit of ever greater intelligence is promoted, and nothing resembling religion is allowed by consensus.
(And no Tee-Vee NASCAR or Wrastlin' either)........just sayin'....

[noloyalisti]

Lindsay Graham, the right wing wacko is FOR Armageddon. Talk about bait and switch, the entire religious extremist Republican party, is all about End Times Prophecy. Why else would they have turned into Neo Cons and listen to the conservatives who run the government and the country.

[veteran71]

Lindsay Graham is for whatever serves his $personal interests$, as are all the Wingnuts, now in the political wilderness.....
If intelligent people don't remain engaged and come out en masse to vote again like the last 2 election cycles, we'll find ourselves with Nitwits like him dictating policy again in a very short time.
Voting out EVERY single Wingnut and DINO/Blue Dog should be a goal that could be attained, with their numbers reduced to a few yapping tinfoil-hat wearing dullards in the corner, kept only for their entertainment value and a reminder of what could have been, but for continued vigilance by intelligent people.
(They could also fetch coffee and danish for those actually conducting business).......

[gregbirddizelec]

I long ago gave up on the hope humans would ever stop mass-murdering each other through their governments' armed forces. It is just impossible to successfully ban violence, either by nations or groups or individuals. It now seems impossible to ban even the one weapon that will probably cause the extinction of all humans, the atomic bomb.

But perhaps a second best option, along the lines of the thinking of the National Rifle Association, will help to lesson state authorized killings of the future. If every single nation on the planet has as many a-bombs as they can get or want, the chances of wars of aggression, to steal other nations' oil, for example, would be less likely. The US seemed to be less willing to attack North Korea, because it could have unleashed an atomic bomb response of some sort, and tacitly admitted it was acting to prevent Iraq from gaining a "smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud." Unless a nation is suicidal, it will be deterred from launching a military attack upon any other nation, because that nation will respond in kind.

The US support of dictatorships makes nuclear war more likely, since only one deranged man, like one given a "war powers act" capability, could bring about his own vision of "what God told me to do," starting ****-sapian's last great act of self-immolation.

[noloyalisti]

Man are we a primitive, warlike species. Maybe we should arm everyone including elementary school kids to keep everyone polite. In fact, teach personal deterrence and politeness starting in nursery school. We can also do the Republican dream of having everyone (but them) make a career in the military and have endless war like in Orwell's 1984.

[dragon8me]

Unfortunately, the geni's out of the bottle. Once scientist figured out how to make it, it was just a matter of time before others had them. No matter what, even if Isreal bombed them, it wouldn't change the fact that they have the technology. It might sound laim but the only to deal with it is to sit down and talk. If the nations of the world can't get rogue nations to work with them, theres not much anyone can do except start a war that will consume the whole world. No sane person wants that. But even a leader like North Korea's knows that if he uses his, it would be suicide. It's the religious freeks who think they will go to heaven if they kill themselves in the name of a god that are dangerous.
What the UN is doing to try and get rid of nuke is a noble thing but not realistic. Theres not easy answer. I do know I wouldn't want to be president today.

[freddyfrugag]

I am a leftist. I voted for Obama. I support him 100%.

I feel that Graham is one of the biggest idiot senators we have right now.

However, I completely agree with what he said in this article. I can't believe I'm saying it. He's absolutely right about Iran and Afghanistan. We must be quick and decisive, or we will regret it for decades.

[jjreding-2009]

sjc - since you brought up 'Atoms for Peace' were you aware that it was THE US that built the first nuke plants in both Pakistan and, yes, Iran?

And ag - um, it was people who wrote the Bible, not 'god'. And the people that wrote it stole much of their 'information' and many of their stories from a much older source. The Sumerians wrote a lot of what the Bible claims to be the 'word of god' thousands of years before the Bible was ever thought of. Go do some research and you'll see that the Creation story follows the legend of Gilgamesh almost to the letter, and it goes at least through the great flood.

[REMNANT0820]

But ' THE GOD' predates Gilgamesh !(which is a story about a flood)
Moses pre-dates THE story of Gilgamesh.
Moses wrote the first flood account ...included in THE FIRST 5 BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, which moses wrote.
Yes the sumerians wrote things down, but the earliest records were 'oral traditions' handed down by tribes. so if they were sinful men they worshippeed other gods ...instead of THE GOD!
SUMERIANS were decendents of either ADAM AND EVE AND SETH ...
OR CAIN (the banished one).
Mankind has always been trying to ursurp GOD and HIS PLAN ..
Wait until you see how it all unfolds ..YOU and other unbeleivers will be "shock and awed"!

[ag1999]

This is nothing new.... if any of you have read the bible. Its been predicted for years and it will happen. The question we have to ask ourselves is when..... God wrote this play a long time ago and we are just actors in the grand scheme of things. Iran will attack and we will head to Armageddon. We don't need to pray for our Country, we need to pray for ourselves and make sure we are right with God.

[jjreding-2009]

Brilliant article by Gregory Rodriguez of the LA Times today:

One man's rumor is another man's reality

Dispelling conspiracy theories and untruths can be difficult when people only hear what they already believe.

This should be required reading.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rodriguez28-2009sep28,0,7227491.column

[jjreding-2009]

National Socialist party? Hmmm, let's see...

1. Wrong - rose to power after the West rebuilt Germany post-World War I. As for 'trickle down', that was a policy put in place by Republican god-figure Ronald Reagan - NOT a Democratic idea. Hitler's rise to power was caused by HIS promise of a 'return to German prosperity', not the Weimar Republic, which was reduced to nothing during World War I.

2. Democrats do not have a 'list of enemies' - it's the Republicans who have used these things to attack Democrats who are liable to beat them in their respective races.

3. Wrong - the Nazis started the Reichstag fire as part of Kristallnacht and blamed the Jews for it to 'crystallize support for military invasions' and to prove that Jews were insidious and needed to be eliminated.

4. During the entire Bush administration, the idea that 'if you're not with us you're against us' caused so-called 'liberals' and the anti-war movement to be labeled as traitors.

5. There are NO FEMA camps - that is a concoction put forward by people like Saints Sarah and Limbaugh.

6. Bush's cronies (including the war-monger-in-chief Dick Cheney) are the poster boys of corruption. All efforts at energy reform were dashed against the rocks because they would interfere with the profits of Halliburton, Enron, Exxon and all the other energy companies that they were invested in that would have stood to lose billions in profits if new legislation regarding fuel mileage had been passed when it needed to be. Why else would Exxon-Mobil and all the other oil conglomerates have made such obscene profits during the Bush administration and not the preceding Clinton OR the current Obama administrations? And why was Blackwater, a subsidiary company of Halliburton given free-reign in Iraq to kill indiscriminately without any threat of reprisal? And why were there so many non-bid contracts handed out to other subsidiaries of Halliburton, Enron and other related companies?

Yep, so far exactly like the Obama administration, now let us see where it led.

1. It was Bush who overstretched the military by conducting two wars simultaneously and sending more and more troops into harm's way with repeated tours of duty - and, not only that, by sending so many reservists into war that there weren't enough national guard troops left to help in the Katrina debacle. As for the economic collapse - let's see. Clinton left Bush with a multi-trillion dollar SURPLUS in 2000. By 2001 that surplus had already turned into a deficit, which then continued to grow as he gave out unpaid-for tax breaks to the upper 1% of the population, allowing tax deductions to go unchallenged, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on those two aforementioned wars.

2. I really have nothing to say about this ridiculous 'fact'. Where the hell did this come from?

3. It was the Allied Command that defeated Hitler - he lost his attack on Russia when he attempted to invade in the dead of winter.

4. Don't know where this one came from either.

5. The rest of the world didn't start to condemn the US until BUSH got into office and is only now starting to respect us again with Obama's proposed policies - INCLUDING his plan on negotiation with Iran on the nuclear issue. It was also a Republican, NIXON, who initiated contact with the Chinese in 1972 when they were never considered a nation worth negotiating with at any time since the Cultural Revolution and the rise of Mao Tse Tung. China is now a world power, partially as a result of this interaction and its subsequent export of nearly everything we use in this country today.

6. & 7. And *** do the last two items have ANYTHING to do with the current argument?

I think you need to go back to school and relearn your history.

[jjreding-2009]

First of all, Buck, I have NOT said that Bush was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, although there are legitimate questions that need answers. Like, why was nothing done - NOTHING - when he was warned in August that there was an imminent attack? And why were explosive residues found in the building struts - INSIDE THE BUILDING? And why did he not leave that classroom as soon as he was told of the attacks? And why did that OTHER building fall that was not part of the complex that was hit by the planes?

But that's a moot point.

As for 'handing bin Laden on a plate', well, we all know about the Tora Bora debacle. Bin Laden was CORNERED but Bush called off the attack to get ready to invade Iraq for a vendetta he'd held for more than a decade, based on lies and cooked 'intelligence' - THAT has been proven and no matter how much blustering the right wing does, the facts are still there in the reports that Democrats had NOTHING to do with preparing.

As for Iran and North Korea being rogue states - you dare to say Obama has done nothing about them in 9 months when Bush called them the 'Axis of Evil' at the beginning of his presidency and did nothing about it for EIGHT YEARS, opting instead to attack Iraq over cooked intelligence (oh, wait, we've been through THAT already).

And, once again, there is nothing to indicate that Obama 'knew' Iran was producing nuclear weapons any more than there was when Bush was in office, so that is a typical right wing talking point that has already been debunked a dozen times over.

Arguing with people like you is like arguing with a brick wall that it's made out of grass.

[jjreding-2009]

For all you people who are advocating buildups in Afghanistan and wiping Iran off the map - do any of you even know why we are in the situation we're in now anyway?

Here's a little history lesson for you.

The British helped Afghanistan defeat the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, and occupied the area for decades afterward. This was before Pakistan existed. Meanwhile, the British and French, who also occupied almost the entire Middle East at the time, cut a deal to split up the territory, with US complicity after World War I - France and England occupied most of what is now Iraq, giving the people there only a small sliver in what is now the Kurdish area. At the same time, they promised the Saudis (which wasn't a country yet either) a large swath of that land, which TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) tried to stop from happening, to no avail. He had previously made an arrangement with Prince Faisal of what would eventually become Saudi Arabia, to split up the territory between the Arab nations, which the rest of the Western allies reneged on. Iran was still called Persia at that time, and they were also occupied and controlled by the same forces.

Over the ensuing decades, until the end of World War II, when the allies took MORE land from the Arabs and gave it to what is now Israel, the Arabs were under the thumb of the west. 20 years later, Israel invaded and took over what is now called the West Bank and Gaza, occupying even more territory that has historically belonged to the Arab nations.
In the meantime, ALL of these Middle East natives are descendants of King David centuries before Christ, giving them shared heritage in the area.

Since the 1940s, and more so, since the late 1960s, Arabs have been screwed out of their land by the West and its Israeli allies.

Added to the above, is the centuries long history of western cultures (read The Crusades) dominating and killing Arabs for western religious reasons. So, with all of this history behind them, is there really anyone out there who can honestly say that the Arabs have NO reason to hate the West?

Maybe if western schools would teach THIS in their history classes, we might be able to actually start making progress in bringing peace to the region and, even more so, to the rest of the world.

[jjreding-2009]

I just watched a great documentary called 'Nixon: A Presidency Revealed'. You know what? It sounded just like a description of the Bush presidency - it could have been written and produced to describe the past 8 years and, had he not pulled our troops out of Viet Nam in 1973 the situation would have been a carbon copy of what's going on today (or vice versa) - oh, wait, it already is.

[jjreding-2009]

So where was Graham's condemnation of Bush's plan to ignore Afghanistan in favour of an attack on Iraq, AFTER we had the Taleban defeated and on the run in 2001/2002? The return of the Taleban 'belongs' to the Republican party for going along with Bush's vendetta against Saddam Hussein. Adding an additional 40,000 troops at this juncture will not do anything to change things on the ground except to get more of our troops killed.

[RuthCalabria]

THE POLITICS OF MONEY

With the nonsense about it spouted on TV clarified

With the concepts of entropy and information

And with a personal story of judicial conspiracy and contradiction

That makes clear that we live, not in a just democracy,

But in a kingdom of clever liars and thieves

By The Calabria Family, ©, Ruth Calabria, Sept. 27, 2009, Lubbock, Texas, Contact: [e-mail].

[stuart-johns]

The bottom line is I agree with Graham. The republican extremist party is on the road to Armageddon.

[actornaught]

There's Endtimers, and then there's Endtimers that want it to be The Instrument.

And your assignment is to differentiate between the christian and moslem variants...