Though the words Conservative and Capitalist are in the title, the booklet is non-political in nature.
If you find my Memo efforts of interest and maybe even challenging , whether you agree or not with what I write and/or post, then consider this a personal appeal to support my effort to raise money for The Wounded Warrior project. Buy my book expressing my thoughts on raising children.
Please make your check for $10.99/copy to Paul laFlamme for a soft cover version and deduct half the cost as a donation to The Wounded Warrior Project. (Add $2.50 for postage and handling.)
If you want a pdf version you can download the cost is $5.99.
Click on WWW.Brokerberko.com
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Will the nightmare end this Tuesday? Let's hops so. (See 1 below)
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Papers are pulling away from Obama that supported him previously. (See 2 below.)
No doubt you have heard about the dust up where Obama tells his supporters voting is a way of revenge and Romney tells voters it is for love of country.
Just one more piece of evidence from the mouth of the messiah of just how screwed up he is.His mind must be one big paranoid torture chamber.
Carter and Nixon had similar darkness always over hanging them (See 2a below.)
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Sowell returns to Libya and finds Obama thou dost protests too much!. (See 3 below.)
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Israeli War Games and their conclusion and then the rebuttal! (See 4 below.)
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In the second and third debate did Obama wear an ear phone? You decide if you can.(See 5 below.)
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Dick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Our Long Obama Nightmare Is Almost Over
By Stella Paul
If you're reading this, you've almost made it through the Obama years. God knows it hasn't been easy holding on this long. If you're like me, there were days you felt as if you'd aged ten years, just trying to bitterly cling to your leaky life raft.
Maybe you're one of the 23 million Americans who are unemployed, under-employed, or who have given up looking for work. Who can blame you for despairing, when two-thirds of the jobs in the last four years have gone to new immigrants, many of them illegals? But don't worry if, like one out of six Americans, you're sinking into poverty -- after all, Obamaassures us that "the private sector is doing fine."
Maybe you or someone you love is serving in our military. Your lives have been endangered by Obama's disastrous rules of engagement, with 70% of the fatalities in Afghanistan occurring during his term. Every day, you wake up to a commander-in-chief so indifferent to your needs that he let four American heroes die, unaided, in a seven-hour terror attack in Benghazi. Making matters unbearably worse, he watched the assault live. But, rest assured, Obama thinks you make "a pretty goodphoto op," even if your slaughter is "not optimal."
Or perhaps you lost the business you started with your blood, sweat, and tears, or that your family had nurtured for generations. Like Bill's Barbecue, an 82-year-old local institution in Richmond, Virginia, you had to fire all your hardworking employees, disappoint your loyal customers, and shut the doors for good. If you owned one of 200,000 small businesses that vanished between 2008 and 2010, wiping out more than three million jobs, Obama won't be sending you a sympathy card anytime soon. After all, the ex-community organizer preaches, "... you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."
Are you a doctor who worries about losing your medical practice when ObamaCare roars into full effect? You spent your youth studying and taking on massive debt for medical school so you could dedicate your life to helping others. Now, facing 2,700 pages of ObamaCare regulations, you're one of 360,000 physicians who plan on "leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if ObamaCare stands. That's 45% of working doctors! Of course, Obama won't be sorry to see you go. This is the guy who claims that "... doctors would rather take out tonsils than treat a sore throat because it pays better" and "... doctors would rather cut off legs for $50,000 than take care of a diabetic before it got to this point."
The casualties, the miseries, the torments add up. One and a half million senior citizens losing their homes to foreclosure...half of college graduates can't find full-time jobs...net worth of families plunging 40%...the ratio of new food stamp recipients to new net jobs skyrocketing to 75 to 1...violent crime up by 18%...America's credit rating downgraded for the first time in history.
And at the center of our nightmare lurks the peculiar character now residing in the people's house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We can see him only through his media-induced saintly glow -- yet we have come to know him all too well. He shimmers before our disbelieving eyes, a self-described piece of "eye candy" with dead fish hands, framed by Greek columns.
The grieving father of slain Benghazi hero Tyrone Woods described meeting Obama at Andrews Air Force Base, when his son's casket arrived from Libya. "Shaking hands with him, quite frankly, was like shaking hands with a dead fish. His face was pointed towards me but he would not look me in the eye, his eyes were over my shoulder...I could tell that he was not sorry. He had no remorse."
Several days after the casket ceremony, Obama materialized on The View to modestly proclaim he was there just as "eye candy." The ladies on The View swooned, but the American people turned away in disgust. Their dream of hope and change had morphed into a nightmare. And now, their passionate new dream was to stampede to the voting booth on November 6 and vote the nightmare over.
Predictably, now that Obama is fated to vaporize like a bad dream, the ugliness behind his persona is swarming to the forefront. His followers threaten us with violence in expensive campaign commercials that degrade anyone who sees them. Their images are explicitly nightmarish: zombies who will eat our flesh, old people who will castrate us for eternity. Bill Maher, who donated one million dollars to Obama's campaign, just warned us, "If you're thinking about voting for Mitt Romney, I would like to make this one plea: black people know who you are, and they will come after you."
I find it so fitting that Obama is ending his reign by exhorting his followers to get "revenge." Right from the start, the smiling messiah was always surrounded by a pulsating aura of violence. "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he said. And "my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And "we're going to punish our enemies and reward our friends."
And so, as the date of Obama's electoral humiliation nears, the Twitter-verse is exploding with riot threats. Many of these illiterate curses are echoing the debased language of "Special Adviser to the President" Kareem Dale. Ordinary Americans now worry, with good reason, that violence will be unleashed against us as punishment for waking up from our Hopium illusions.
Whatever happens, be strong and of good courage. The man who set out to "fundamentally transform" the country, accompanied by a wife who had never been proud of America, can no longer hypnotize us into doing his will.
Our long Obama nightmare is almost over. The restoration of the American dream is about to begin.
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The New York Daily News, the country’s fifth largest newspaper, endorsed Mitt Romney on Sunday, joining the ranks of more than a dozen papers that have turned away from Barack Obama after endorsing his candidacy in 2008.
The paper's endorsement came as a surprise: the News has a staunchly Democratic editorial viewpoint. The Daily News is also owned by one of the country's most respected and influential Democrats, Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire real estate mogul.
But the New York daily staked its arguments against Obama not on politics but the economy, charging that President Obama’s promises went unfulfilled.
“Revival of the U.S. as a land of opportunity and upward mobility is the central challenge facing the next president,” the paper wrote. “The question for Americans: Who is more likely to accomplish the mission — Barack Obama or Mitt Romney?”
“Four years ago, the Daily News endorsed Obama, seeing a historic figure whose intelligence, political skills and empathy with common folk positioned him to build on the small practical experience he would bring to the world’s toughest job. We valued Obama’s pledge to govern with bold pragmatism and bipartisanship. The hopes of those days went unfulfilled.”
The Daily News argued that Obama inherited a difficult economic situation but did not provide the right guidance to lead an economic revival.
“The trend over the Obama years: Goodbye to middle- and high-income jobs in New York City; hello to positions that pay less than $45,000 a year,” the paper wrote.
“Recovery from the disaster that Obama inherited was going to take time. But four years is a long, long slog. Had the president guided a typical upswing, America would by now have regained essentially all its lost jobs. At his present pace, Obama would reach that milestone in the third year of a second term. The regrettable truth is that Obama built a record of miscalculations and missed opportunities,” the Daily News editorial said.
The paper, which is considered the publication of working class New Yorkers, even took Obama to task for Obamacare.
“After originally projecting that the program would produce 4 million more jobs than the country now has, along with a 5 percent jobless rate, Obama pleads that he saved Americans from more dire straits,” it wrote.
“Next came Obamacare. While the country bled jobs, the president battled to establish universal health insurance — without first restraining soaring medical bills. Then he pushed one of the largest social programs in U.S. history through a Democratic-controlled Congress without a single Republican vote. R.I.P. and never to be resurrected — Obama’s promised bipartisanship.”
The Daily News said Romney’s approach to fix the economy would be “stronger”
“Critically, he has tailored his policies to create jobs, jobs, jobs,” the Daily News wrote.
“The centerpieces of Romney’s plan call for spending restraint and rewriting the Internal Revenue code to lower rates by 20 percent. He would make up much of the lost revenue by eliminating deductions and loopholes that have made the tax system a thicket of strangling complexities. On its own, paring the personal and corporate rules to the basics would catalyze business and consumer spending.”
In the end, the paper’s endorsement came down to who could better get the country back on sound economic footing. It concluded its editorial with:
“The presidential imperative of the times is to energize the economy and get deficits under control to empower the working and middle classes to again enjoy the fruits of an ascendant America.
“So the News is compelled to stand with Romney.”
2a) Romney closes big: ‘Love of country’ vs. ‘Revenge’
By Byron York
WEST CHESTER, Ohio
About midway through Mitt Romney’s speech to a crowd of as many as 30,000 who had gathered for a chilly, outdoor, red-white-and-blue Friday night rally in this suburb of Cincinnati, close Romney aide Stuart Stevens wandered through the throng by himself, getting a feel for how the audience was reacting to Romney’s words. Stevens does that sometimes, listening to the thoughts of people who have no idea they’re talking to someone who has Romney’s ear and probably wrote the very phrases they’re hearing. On Friday, he stepped into the largest gathering that Romney has drawn in the entire campaign.
I ran into Stevens in one corner of the crowd, and we chatted a little. Romney, he said, was using his last campaign days “to remind people of the basic choice — it’s a status quo versus change election, always has been.” Then Stevens grew quiet as Romney reached a critical part of the speech.
“Now, throughout this campaign President Obama has tried to convince you that these last four years have been a success,” Romney said.
“There it is — that’s it,” Stevens whispered.
“He wants to take all the things he did in his first term — the stimulus, the borrowing, ‘Obamacare,’ all the rest — and then try them all over again,” Romney said.
The crowd booed.
“But our big dreams will not be satisfied with the small agenda that’s already failed us,” Romney continued. “And today — did you see what President Obama said today? He asked his supporters to vote for revenge — for revenge.”
The audience seemed genuinely stunned, taking in its collective breath.
“Instead, I ask the American people to vote for love of country,” Romney said, drawing the longest and loudest applause of the night.
Stevens seemed enormously satisfied with Romney’s performance. A few hours later, that portion of Romney’s speech would become a 30-second commercial for the closing days of the campaign. It began with Romney asking if the crowd had heard what Obama said, then cutting to the president, at a rally earlier in the day in Springfield, Ohio, saying, “Don’t boo, vote. Vote. Voting’s the best revenge.” Then it cut back to Romney asking people to vote for love of country, ending on a black slide with a simple question: “What is your reason for voting?”
Obama said “revenge” about 1:30 Friday afternoon. Team Romney saw it on the candidate’s bus after a rally in Wisconsin. Romney himself wanted it in that night’s speech, and it came out of his mouth at the West Chester rally about 8:30, with a campaign camera mounted on a big boom to catch it all. By Saturday morning it was one of the most striking ads of the campaign.
Obama’s “revenge” remark was valuable to Romney not because it could be turned into an attack ad. “Revenge” was valuable because it underscored, a thousand times, Romney’s new emphasis on the bigness of his own campaign versus the smallness of Obama’s. Romney’s closing argument is filled with words and phrases that convey a largeness of vision: destiny, renewal, purpose, better life, better days, better future, fresh start, new beginning, a bigger, better country. In the campaign’s final days, Romney is pushing hard on the idea that things really can improve with new leadership; in his West Chester speech, Romney used the word “better” a total of 15 times.
A critical part of the theme is that Romney is now asking people to join him in a larger cause. In the past, especially after sustaining serious damage from the “47 percent” video, Romney made clunky references to wanting to represent 100 percent of Americans. Now, as he finishes, Romney has settled on a more graceful way to make the “bigger, better country” argument fully inclusive. The key moment came at the end of the West Chester speech.
“We’ve journeyed far and wide in this great campaign for America’s future…” Romney said. “The door to a brighter future is there. It’s open. It’s waiting for us. I need your vote. I need your help. Walk with me. Walk together…”
The crowd erupted in cheers of ROMNEY! ROMNEY! ROMNEY! and then WE WANT MITT! WE WANT MITT! WE WANT MITT! It was a bigger, better moment.
In September, when the campaign was going through a rocky time in the wake of “47 percent” and other missteps, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote a much-discussed Wall Street Journal column entitled “Time for an Intervention” in which she blasted the Romney campaign’s strategy, and especially the attitude betrayed by “47 percent” video. “That’s too small and pinched and narrow,” Noonan wrote. “You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: ‘Come too, come walk with me.’ Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.”
The Romney campaign and Noonan have had a difficult relationship, certainly so after the column. Many insiders were irritated by Noonan’s critique; some thought she was simply trying to draw attention to herself. Others quietly passed word to Noonan that they thought she was right. But the bottom line is that in West Chester, as well as in an earlier speech near Milwaukee, Romney invited everyone to walk with him to a bigger, better future. At the end of this long campaign, and with Romney’s opponent telling supporters that voting is the best revenge, Romney’s words sounded just right. And they got an enormously positive response. Romney had found just the note to end a long, long campaign.
——————–
Romney pulled out every stop, and a few more, West Chester. The list of speakers and guests was long: Marco Rubio, Rudy Giuliani, John Boehner, John McCain, John Kasich, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte, Artur Davis, Bobby Jindal, and many others. (Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to appear, but didn’t.) Kid Rock, Romney’s Bruce Springsteen, made a concert-length appearance beforehand. The idea was to make the event like a full-scale Republican National Convention, all in one night. “This is just like the RNC,” said one man in the crowd who got the idea without being told.
The campaign had obviously done a huge amount of preparing. The rally was held on a huge site in West Chester, an outer suburb of Cincinnati that will be key to Romney’s fortunes in Ohio. Enormous bleachers were constructed. Huge cranes soared into the sky; one of them displayed an enormous white flag with the Romney campaign logo on it — not a feature of previous rallies. There was a marching band to play before Kid Rock. Lots of hot dogs and ice cream. That big boom with the video camera making sure to capture beautiful pictures for last-minute commercials.
Still, one thing the Romney team has not mastered — and at this late date probably won’t — is how to pace one of these extravaganzas. After Kid Rock, the program went on and on and on. Speakers included Rosario Marin, who was Treasurer of the United States from 2001 to 2003. Nobody knew who she was, and Marin’s remarks consisted mostly of saying, “Viva Romney!” Other speakers included Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida, and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who were fine but left the more politically aware in the crowd wondering why they weren’t home working for Romney in their own hotly-contested swing states.
Meanwhile, as darkness fell — many people had arrived by 5:00 or 5:30 for a Romney speech that wouldn’t begin for three hours — the temperature fell, too. Forty degrees, 38 degrees, 36 degrees — the night chill began to wear on many in the crowd as the list of speakers dragged on. “Make it short!” one man snapped as House Speaker John Boehner took the stage. (The rally was held in Boehner’s home district.) “Wrap it up, I’m freezing!” said another just before vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan appeared. Portman told the crowd that “we’re freezin’ for a reason,” but it’s not clear that everyone agreed with him. Still, the people who stuck it out heard an extraordinary speech from Romney, perhaps the best of the campaign when it came to delineating the differences between himself and Barack Obama.
——————–
The backdrop to Friday night in West Chester remains a race that no one fully understands. In the last ten Ohio polls listed in the RealClearPolitics average, nine show Obama leading Romney, while one shows a tie. Ohio Republicans, at least the ones who come to Romney rallies, are quite knowledgeable about the polls. They can discuss weighting and party identification and models. But many don’t trust the same polls they study. Some blame the situation on media bias, but others simply think pollsters are predicating their findings too much on the Democratic blowout year of 2008. Things just won’t be that way this time around, they say.
But as the campaign’s last days arrive, it’s clear that everyone is suffering from poll overload. They’ve seen too many numbers and have come to rely instead on their own instincts about the race. “It’s a feeling,” said Teresa Frerking, a volunteer who came from Goshen, Kentucky to attend. “It’s not statistics. It’s a feeling.”
“There have been a lot of polls,” Gov. John Kasich told the crowd. “A lot of polls, a lot of people talking about what’s going to happen…but look around you. Look at this crowd, look at this enthusiasm.”
That’s the feeling Romney needs his supporters to have. If the polls are wrong, if there is an invisible wave of Romney support out there, then that wave is focused in this part of the state. If Romney can run up a big margin here, he could upend the conventional wisdom about Ohio.
But whatever happens, Romney is ending his run for the presidency on a high-minded and generous note. Yes, he is pointing out the smallness of Obama’s campaign. But more importantly, he is stressing a big and inclusive vision for a Romney presidency and asking all to join him. He sounds like a winner.
“There’s so much more than just this being our moment,” Romney told the crowd. “It’s America’s moment of renewal and purpose and optimism….We’re almost home. One final push will get us there. We’ve known many long days and short nights, and we are so very, very close.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)Why could thinking American vote for Obama?
Libya and Lies
By Thomas Sowell
It was a little much when President Barack Obama said that he was "offended" by the suggestion that his administration would try to deceive the public about what happened in Benghazi. When has this man not deceived the public?
Remember his pledge to cut the deficit in half in his first term in office? This was followed by the first trillion dollar deficit ever, under any President of the United States -- followed by trillion dollar deficits in every year of the Obama administration.
Remember his pledge to have a "transparent" government that would post its legislative proposals on the Internet several days before Congress was to vote on them, so that everybody would know what was happening? This was followed by an ObamaCare bill so huge and passed so fast that even members of Congress did not have time to read it.
Remember his claims that previous administrations had arrogantly interfered in the internal affairs of other nations -- and then his demands that Israel stop building settlements and give away land outside its 1967 borders, as a precondition to peace talks with the Palestinians, on whom there were no preconditions?
As for what happened in Libya, the Obama administration says that there is an "investigation" under way. An "on-going investigation" sounds so much better than "stonewalling" to get past election day. But you can bet the rent money that this "investigation" will not be completed before election day. And whatever the investigation says after the election will be irrelevant.
The events unfolding in Benghazi on the tragic night of September 11th
were being relayed to the State Department as the attacks were going on, "in real time," as they say. So the idea that the Obama administration now has to carry out a time-consuming "investigation" to find out what those events were, when the information was immediately available at the time, is a little much.
The full story of what happened in Libya, down to the last detail, may never be known. But, as someone once said, you don't need to eat a whole egg to know that it is rotten. And you don't need to know every detail of the events before, during and after the attacks to know that the story put out by the Obama administration was a fraud.
The administration's initial story that what happened in Benghazi began as a protest against an anti-Islamic video in America was a very convenient theory. The most obvious alternative explanation would have been devastating to Barack Obama's much heralded attempts to mollify and pacify Islamic nations in the Middle East.
To have helped overthrow pro-Western governments in Egypt and Libya, only to bring anti-Western Islamic extremists to power would have been revealed as a foreign policy disaster of the first magnitude. To have been celebrating President Obama's supposedly heroic role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, with the implication that Al Qaeda was crippled, would have been revealed as a farce.
Osama bin Laden was by no means the first man to plan a surprise attack on America and later be killed. Japan's Admiral Yamamoto planned the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II, and he was later tracked down and shot down in a plane that was carrying him.
Nobody tried to depict President Franklin D. Roosevelt as some kind of hero for having simply authorized the killing of Yamamoto. In that case, the only hero who was publicized was the man who shot down the plane that Yamamoto was in.
Yet the killing of Osama bin Laden has been depicted as some kind of act of courage by President Obama. After bin Laden was located, why would any President not give the go-ahead to get him?
That took no courage at all. It would have been far more dangerous politically for Obama not to have given the go-ahead. Moreover, Obama hedged his bets by authorizing the admiral in charge of the operation to proceed only under various conditions.
This meant that success would be credited to Obama and failure could be blamed on the admiral -- who would join George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and other scapegoats for Obama's failures
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)Inside Israel's nuclear war games
Israeli military leaders have conducted a war game simulating a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, five days after the US Presidential elections. They concluded such an operation could be pulled off without plunging the whole region into war. Iranian experts disagree.
By David Patrikarakos
On the 24 September at Israel’s National Institute of Security Studies, an obdurately dull building off a main road in Tel Aviv, three dozen men and women drawn from the top echelons of Israel’s political and military elite met to play a war-game, the outcome of which could help decide whether Israel goes to war with Iran.
I was in Israel with film director, Kevin Sim, who was making a documentary on the war game for ‘Dispatches’ on Channel 4.
The notional starting point of the game was 9 November 2012, just after the American presidential elections. Participants were divided into ten groups each representing likely key players in the conflict – Israel, Iran, the US, Russia, Hezbollah, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Russia and the UN. All the teams were made up of Israelis.
The war game is what it says it is – a game. Despite its seriousness, inside the Institute there was an air of make-believe.
The “Netanyahu” who led the Israeli team was an imposter – a former Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel. Two former government ministers took turns to play Obama. Putin was a former Israeli ambassador to Moscow.
The war game was designed to explore the likely outcome of an Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran; it didn't examine the legal or moral arguments for or against any such strike but rather focused on how the Iranians might retaliate and what the wider fallout would be.
The game began when the players were told that just after midnight, in a surprise air raid, Israeli bombers had attacked nuclear installations deep inside Iran. First reports indicated that Israel had acted alone without consent or help from the Americans.
The Iranians responded quickly to the Israeli strike, launching a barrage of Shahab-3 ballistic missiles (based on the North Korean Nodong-1 missile) at Israeli targets, including the country’s largest city, Tel Aviv. Then they discussed their political goals.
The most immediate of these was the desire to rebuild the nuclear programme, preferably to a level “beyond what it was on the eve of the strike.” Given their new found status as victims of an attack, another priority was to have the sanctions on Iran lifted; and to have sanctions placed on Israel for its “unprovoked act.”
They also decided to offer Jordan and Egypt extensive aid packages to cancel their peace treaties with Israel, before debating a key dilemma: whether or not to attack US targets. With Iran’s considerable influence in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention its huge presence in the Gulf, the Iranians could cause huge problems for Washington.
In the end, though, the decision was taken to refrain; Washington was one more complication they didn't need. Russia (which has been building the Bushehr nuclear power plant) was also approached for immediate help to rebuild the devastated facilities, as well as delivery of S-300 surface-to-air missiles and a consignment of Sukhoi 24 aircraft.
Militarily, Iran tried to get its allies – namely, its proxy militia groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza – to enter the conflict on its behalf.
"All our help to you over the years," the Israeli playing Ahmadinejad (a former colonel in military intelligence) declared in a meeting with Hezbollah, "has been for the purpose of this moment."
"There’s no such thing as a free lunch," his assistant added. The Lebanese declared they were only too happy to help - in any way that would not bring massive Israeli retaliation down on Lebanon. There was tension in the room.
The Israelis, meanwhile, had met with the “US President” (the Israelis deliberately made no comment on who had won the 7 November US Presidential election), who, despite being unhappy at the lack of a “timely announcement” about the “premature” strike, reiterated his support for Israel. Washington’s primary concern, it seemed, was to avoid an escalation of hostilities in what it considered to be the world’s most volatile region. It raised the status of alert for its forces across the Middle East.
The Israelis were clear on what they wanted from their US ally. Most important was for Washington to use its ‘good offices’ in Lebanon and Gaza to prevent Hezbollah and Hamas inflaming the situation. The Israelis also wanted US ships in the area, armed with Aegis anti-missile systems, to help intercept the Iranian missiles raining down on them.
Finally, they requested that the US maintain pressure on Iran in the UN Security Council, and to help ensure that Israel was not the victim of ‘one sided resolutions in the United Nations."
Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looks on as Iranian military hardware is displayed march during the National Army Day parade in Tehran, Iran
On the ground, things were tense. As Iran continued shelling Israel, people began to leave Tel Aviv heading to the South. Fearing Israeli retaliation, Hezbollah limited themselves to firing only a few, sporadic Katyusha rockets into northern Israel in an attempt to placate their Iranian patron, and succeeded in pushing the inhabitants of the city of Kiryat Shmona into heading south as well. Israel, in turn, instructed its army not to respond to the firing from Lebanon without the Minister of Defense’s authorization; army reserves were called up.
But the Israelis were also planning – for a second wave of strikes against Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities, which they undertook about 24 hours (in game time) after the first. This second strike seemed to encapsulate the war game for Israel. Its boldness rewarded and Iran simply unable to respond in kind: limited to firing missiles at Israel, many of which were intercepted - largely by itself.
By the game’s end, Iran’s nuclear facilities had been almost totally destroyed. Hezbollah and Hamas had done nothing more than launch a few token rocket salvos at Israel, while Iranian missiles had been of only limited effect. Iran had also failed in its attempts to have the sanctions on it removed and, thanks to US cover in the UN Security Council, it had also failed to have sanctions placed on Israel. It was the game’s clear loser.
Yehuda Ben-Meir, the former deputy foreign minister of Israel, who had played Netanyahu, summed the situation up. “The principal insight we gained was that following an Israeli attack the entire world was interested in calming the region down.
"Before the attack everyone had something to say on a possible attack but once it became a fait accompli the world wanted to know what would happen next, and everyone’s goal was to contain the situation and to prevent escalation.”
An Israeli missile launching from the Iron Dome missile-defence system
I had seen Israel’s perspective on a possible attack and now wanted an Iranian view, so I caught a flight to Istanbul to put the game’s results to Hossein Mousavian, a former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team. He believed the game was deeply flawed.
Dismissing the limited nature of Iran’s response, Mousavian argued that in reality Iran would respond ‘by all means’, employing the total power of its armed forces to draw Israel into a long-term war. Perhaps, more importantly, Mousavian argued that Iran would see the US as complicit.
Iranians, he said, are convinced that Israel is too small to attack Iran unilaterally Iran. "They see Israeli as just a baby,” he said. “One that would never act without US assistance.”
The attack would also have huge regional consequences, he continued. Most obviously, Iran would use its status as the symbol of resistance against Israel in the Middle East to stoke the high levels of anti-Americanism that already exist there. Even groups like Al Qaeda, he argued, who are Iran’s enemies, would use “inflamed Muslim sentiment to launch attacks at American citizens across the world and on US soldiers on the many American bases in the region.”
At the end of our interview, he leaned forward, took my arm and looked me right in the eyes. He recalled the Israeli strikes on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor in 2007.
“This is the big mistake that people make,” he told me. “To think if Israel attacks Iran, like it attacked Iraq and Syria, the Iranians would not retaliate.
"The nation is one hundred percent different. The whole region would be engulfed.”
David Patrikarakos is the author of Nuclear Iran: the Birth of an Atomic State.
Dispatches: Nuclear War Games, will be broadcast on Monday 5th November, 8pm, Channel 4
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5)Subject: Fwd: Obama Caught with Earpiece in Third Debate!
By Jim Mclwee
It went thru my mind that he might try something like this and when he did so much better in the next debate I wondered if he had and then you say to yourself 'NAH,' he's crooked but he wouldn't do that. 'HA' I guess I was wrong
on that one. Amazing! Such a disappointment!!
WHAT WILL THIS GUY NOT DO TO CHEAT?
THE PRESIDENT JUST CAN'T PLAY ANYTHING STRAIGHT .
EARPHONE DISCOVERED DURING DEBATE.TAKE A LOOK ? YOU DECIDE - As we look close at Obama, we can see he was wearing an earpiece! .Lets take a close-up of this ear
I am a retired Licensed Optician (40 year experience) with a PhD?. I have also fit hearing aids for many years.. I knew he had a device in his ear..( Itold my husband & our friends what to look for) because whenever Mr. Romney was talking, Obama turned his head slightly to pick up on a second person talking in his ear to coach him ;I am sure of this. The last 2 debates he had a Prompter Ear Device for help~~?..
REMEMBER HOW MISERABLY HE DID IN THE FIRST DEBATE WITH NO HELP!!
I wonder how CLOSE BY Bill Clinton or someone FAR more knowledgeable and
SAVVY was available to feed him INFO.. He isn't that SMART because He still didn't do that well even with the
HELP HE SO OBVIOUSLY RECEIVED!..
SAVVY was available to feed him INFO.. He isn't that SMART because He still didn't do that well even with the
HELP HE SO OBVIOUSLY RECEIVED!..
OK,
We have one candidate (Obama) who has proven what he will do for us.
He will lie his head off, cheat even for no reason, turn us into a poverty-stricken anti God country, insert his Chicago thugs anywhere he can, and diss us all over the world. The other candidate has a proven business record and certainly held his own on foreign policy!
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