reed writes

from Lord Anthony

In the aftermath of Iran’s electoral re-endorsement of Ahmadinejad, President Obama and USA did nothing to restore its disintegrated world image.
Sure, it seems there were some counting-concerns over there, but nothing the electoral-observer community could really make a stink about.

It seems Ahmadinejad won, kind of fair and fairly square.

Besides, the election was an internal matter for Iranians. Can you imagine a Canadian election being subjected to this level of uninvited scrutiny, criticism and suspicion?
No wonder Iranian leaders tell the Obamas of this world to mind their own business, especially when it comes to elections.

Incidentally there is more than a passing similarity between the real and the cardboard leaders involved in USA and Iran……

Stern-faced Obama’s pretty words are to USA what Nero’s fiddling was to Rome.
USA is leading the world on a scale of problems which beggar the imagination. But with their media-stranglehold, you have to dig for real information… or spend a few witnessing days and nights driving through the midwest as I did recently, not pretty.
Incidentally, one of those problems is unchecked militarisation, according to Thomas Homer- Dixon.
History points out that there can be no armies without significant food-surpluses.It’s no accident that the obscene growth of the MIC in the last fifty years has coincided with unprecedented agricultural change, allowing millions of well-fed uniforms to run around the world smashing things and killing people without ever having to worry about what’s in the pot for supper.
Although this supply-dynamic is rapidly changing, militaries don’t care because they’ve gained huge self-serving momentum over the needs of ordinary people, who unfortunately won’t wake up until they’re starving and their tattered armies are meeting their Waterloos.

I believe USA, notwithstanding its epidemic of obesity, is already on this path.

I wish I could source this quote: “…it is well and good for us to reach the best we can into the torrents of human misery to pluck unfortunates from their fate but we must also take a walk upstream to see who is throwing them in….”

Obama and his country know who those throwing-in people are.

To re-invigorate the squandered moral leadership of USA, President Obama cannot continue to avert his eyes from the monsters who did the damage.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are easing themselves into after-office respectability having devastated their country and squandered the international respect it once enjoyed, but nobody has the guts to call them to account.
If President Obama continues to duck this crucial responsibility he will be gone next election, to be replaced by President Hillary Clinton.

She’d love that.

For a man who likes to exert total control over his cabinet as well as the federal bureaucracy, Stephen Harper, who is called “Doughboy” by some staffers, can’t seem to co-ordinate his own brain with his own mouth. (The Doughboy handle comes from Harper’s pasty complexion). (more…)

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon says he’s troubled by reports of intimidation of opposition candidates offices by Iran’s security forces.

Cannon claims that he has ordered Canadian embassy officials in Tehran to be vigilant. He has called on Iranian authorities to conduct fair and transparent counting of all ballots.

Incumbent President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the winner. Was there fraud? Possibly. Does it matter? No.

Mr. Cannon is allowed to criticize other countries when Canada, the U.S. and other western nations have reached a level of democracy that is without flaws. Until then, it is appropriate for him to keep his nose out of other peoples’ business.

Let’s not forget that in the year 2,000 it was the U.S. Supreme Court that decided the outcome of the presidential elections in the context of reports of widespread electoral fraud and manipulation.

If I remember correctly, in that election Al Gore polled a majority of the popular vote, but lost the election.

Enough said.

Mr. Cannon ought to keep his mouth shut.

The Toronto Star has launched a new feature called “The War at Home”. Well worth taking a look at.

Israel’s Prime Minister Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is running as fast as he can to keep up with Barack Obama. He has said he’ll make a major policy speech soon, mapping out his government’s “principles for achieving peace and security.”

Mr. Netanyahu said, “We want to achieve peace with the Palestinians and with the countries of the Arab world, while attempting to reach maximum understanding with the United States and our friends around the world.”

Netanyahu claims he has been reformulating Israeli peace policy. But some are skeptical. Ben Caspit, a columnist, wrote in the newspaper Maariv, that Mr. Netanyahu, “is now going to have to be particularly creative if he wants to renew trust between the United States and Israel.”

Israeli officials say they expect the Obama administration “to respect understandings” they say were reached — some written and some oral — with the Bush administration on building within existing settlements. The Obama administration, however, denies that any binding agreements on settlements were ever reached by anyone. And Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has been talking tough; she has pointed out that “there is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements. If they did occur, which, of course, people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

In any case, the governments of the Arab world will not accept anything less than an Israeli withdrawal to the borders that existed after Israel’s pre-emptive war against the Arabs 41 years ago.

Unless Israel is willing to abide by its legal obligations, including U.N. resolution 242, there will be no lasting peace.

And that really is the bottom line.