Here's the new power combo, if the US doesn't get it's debt in order:

In 1993, there was an official exchange of letters between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Arafat, in which Arafat declared that "the PLO affirms that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel's right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter are now inoperative and no longer valid."In 2009 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demanded the Palestinian Authority's acceptance of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, which the Palestinian Authority rejected. The Knesset plenum gave initial approval in May 2009 to a bill criminalising the public denial of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, with a penalty of up to a year in prison.
According to the linguist Noam Chomsky, the term "right to exist" is unique to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "No state has a right to exist, and no one demands such a right....In an effort to prevent negotiations and a diplomatic settlement, the U.S. and Israel insisted on raising the barrier to something that nobody’s going to accept....[ Palestinians are] not going to accept...the legitimacy of their dispossession." John V. Whitbeck argued that Israel's insistence on a right to exist forces Palestinians to provide a moral justification for their own suffering.

Doug to Jeff - F*#k you!

There is another way to win. Bomb any village hosting combatants, in Afghan or Pakistan, kill many combatants, women, children, make life so horrible that they surrender.

I just read that this was done in 1096 during the first Crusade by the Muslims, got the Catholics to retreat.

Very true, the Christians were very ruthless as well. The first massacre of civilians was that of Jews in the city of Worms, Germany.

Three Russian designers of Iran's nuclear plant die in plane crash
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report June 23, 2011, 12:00 PM (GMT+02:00)
Tags: Iran nuclear Russia Bushehr Stuxnet
Three Russian scients who built Bushehr

The three Russian nuclear scientists who planned, designed, built and put into operation Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr this year, died Tuesday night, June 20, when a Rusaero flight from Moscow to Petrozavodsk in northwest Russia crashed.

debkafile's sources reveal that they were among the 44 passengers who were killed.
Their loss is a severe blow to Russia's atomic reactor industry as well as its nuclear program as a whole, since the three, Sergey Ryzhov, Gennady Banuyk and Nikolay Trunov, specialized in running installations in tandem and synchronizing various systems.

The Russian company OKB Gidropress, Moscow, which employed them as chief planners of nuclear plants, is proud of having sold reactors to five countries including Iran.
The authorities have ordered an investigation to find out why all three senior nuclear scientists were aboard the same airliner in violation of Russian security regulations which prohibit more than one high-ranking politician, military figure or executive of a sensitive industry taking the same flight.
The cause of the Tu-134's crash is also being probed - although it has a notoriously high accident rate and should not have been used by the three scientists. The eight passengers who survived, who are in critical condition, are to be quizzed to find out what happened aboard the plane before it crashed.
The first assumption was that the disaster occurred due to human error. The three pilots missed the runway while landing at Petrozavodsk's Nikolay Trunov airport because of heavy fog. It caught fire next to a highway.
This was the worst Russian aviation disaster since April 10, 2010, when a plane carrying the Polish president, his wife and many other Polish dignitaries crashed in similar circumstances near the city of Smolensk killing 97 people.

Our sources report that Iran chose to buy its first reactor from OKB Gidropress because the Russian firm bills itself as designers, builders, planners and operators of nuclear plants, specializing in adapting them to existing nuclear systems. For Tehran this capability was critical because the Bushehr reactor is composed of systems made in different countries, particularly Germany, and experts were needed for synchronizing them into a smoothly functioning plant.

debkafile's intelligence sources quote Iranian and Western intelligence officials as offering the opinion that the Bushehr reactor's mixed components made it vulnerable to the Stuxnet malworm's invasion of its control system two years ago. The three Russian scientists spent February and March 2011 at Bushehr after the Russian Nuclear Energy Commission insisted that the nuclear fuel rods be removed until they were sure the plant would not explode. The rods have since been reloaded and the reactor went online last month.

Wednesday, June 22, the OKB Gidropress Company Web site ran a black-bordered obituary mourning the deaths of Sergey Ryzhov, 52, Director General designer at OKB Gidropress, Gennady Banuyk, 65, Deputy Director and Chief Designer and Nikolay Trunov, 52, Chief Designer-Head of Division.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING

U.S. Air Force advised to conduct simulations
for strike against nuclear Iran
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force has been urged to prepare for war with Iran.


The Rand Corp. asserted that the Air Force must increase exercises and testing of weapons as part of preparations for any order to attack Iran. In a report for the Air Force, Rand warned that the prospect of a U.S. air strike could turn real once Iran was deemed to have assembled a nuclear weapons arsenal.

"Timelines for military tasks will depend on what happens in Iran's nuclear program," the report, titled "Iran's Nuclear Future: Critical U.S. Policy Choices prepared for the U.S. Air Force," said.


The report urged such U.S. preparations as exercises and war simulations. Rand said the Air Force should train to fight under nuclear threat as well as targeting Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for strategic weapons programs.

"Design exercises and war games to support different policy choices," Rand said. "Exercise objectives for bombers could aim not only to demonstrate to Iran that investment in nuclear capabilities could possibly be destroyed but also to influence the internal Iranian debate over nuclear weaponization."

The simulations would be based on the escalation of conflict between Iran and the United States. Rand said the wargames would test the air force's ability to deter Iran with and without U.S. nuclear weapons.

"Provide ways to manage escalation in conflict with Iran," the report said. "Investigate concepts of operations to manage escalation in U.S.-Iran conflict, e.g., reinforce political communication that signals limited U.S. objectives; focus on immediate threat by directly targeting Iran's regime-supporting paramilitary forces; and withhold targeting of Iran's political leadership."

Rand said Iran could be expected to act rationally and would demonstrate caution in any conflict with the United States. The report said Teheran, despite its anti-Israel rhetoric, regards Washington as the chief threat and could resist U.S. military pressure.

"The Iranian government is aware of the United States' overwhelming nuclear capability, including the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles and sea-launched ballistic missiles," the report said. Greater psychological effect on Iranian political and military decisionmakers could possibly be achieved by U.S. movements and exercises of its nuclear-capable bombers and dual-capable fighter aircraft in the region to signal to Iran the potential costs of nuclear weaponization."

The U.S. military was expected to face Iran's conventional forces as well as IRGC. The report envisioned such Iranian responses as massive missile strikes on Gulf Cooperation Council states and Israel as well as blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the passage for 30 percent of crude oil exports.

"In addition, more advanced missiles, such as the Shihab-3 and Sejil, may provide it with the opportunity to target parts of Europe and Russia," the report said.