edmonton sun, 2-4-07 wrote:New contingents of U.S. Air Force personnel and warplanes are arriving at key forward air bases in Bulgaria and Romania that link the U.S. to the Mideast and Central Asia. U.S. bases in Britain, Germany, Diego Garcia, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and Pakistan are reported on heightened alert. Turkey is being pressed to allow U.S. and Israeli strike aircraft to use its air space to attack northern Iran.

clocker bob wrote:

edmonton sun, 2-4-07 wrote:New contingents of U.S. Air Force personnel and warplanes are arriving at key forward air bases in Bulgaria and Romania that link the U.S. to the Mideast and Central Asia. U.S. bases in Britain, Germany, Diego Garcia, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and Pakistan are reported on heightened alert. Turkey is being pressed to allow U.S. and Israeli strike aircraft to use its air space to attack northern Iran.

The next new moon over Iran is February 17. Watch that week, until the 24th.

clocker bob wrote: Check out the percentages of new immigrants in the ground forces of the US Army. The government is recruiting overseas, using citizenship as the prize.

dallas morning news, 11/28/06 wrote:By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News

They come from Mexico, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Colombia, Cambodia and a hundred other countries across the globe to find the promise of America. Increasingly they enlist to fight, and sometimes die, in America's wars.

About 69,300 foreign-born men and women serve in the U.S. armed forces, roughly 5 percent of the total active-duty force, according to the most recent data. Of those, 43 percent – 29,800 – are not U.S. citizens. The Pentagon says more than 100 immigrant soldiers have died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

eephour wrote:

clocker bob wrote: The next new moon over Iran is February 17. Watch that week, until the 24th.

What does the moon have to do with things?

reuters wrote:Israel warns its citizens to avoid Egypt, Jordan
Wed 7 Mar 2007 14:18:31 GMT

JERUSALEM, March 7 (Reuters) - Israel has warned its citizens to immediately leave Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab states with which it has full ties, out of concern they could come under attack, a government official said on Wednesday.

The advisory was issued on the recommendation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Counter-terrorism Unit, which this week placed Egypt and Jordan in its highest threat category, alongside enemy states such as Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

Israeli officials gave no further details.

3/12/07 wrote:Top House Democrats retreated Monday from an attempt to limit President Bush's authority for taking military action against Iran as the leadership concentrated on a looming confrontation with the White House over the Iraq war.

Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran.

Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy.

AP 6-6-07 wrote:WASHINGTON -
Iran has not yet crossed the threshold of being able to make nuclear weapons but may be only two years away, Israeli ambassador Sallai M. Meridor said Wednesday.

"I really think they are on the verge of getting the genie out of the bottle, and leaving our children with a nightmare," the Israeli envoy said at a news conference at the Council on Foreign Relations, a private think tank.

Meridor said that Iran was susceptible to economic pressure because it was dependent on foreign investment, but, apparently referring to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he said "the world continues to fund this madman."

If economic and diplomatic pressure fail, Meridor threatened action by
Israel. "An option is on the table is, they will not be allowed to have nuclear weapons," he said.

Asked to elaborate on what actions Israel might be considering, the ambassador said, "I hope you will forgive me for not sharing that."

antiwar.com wrote:Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national security policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the nonpartisan Committee for the Republic in Washington May 30 that an al-Qaeda terrorist attack in the United States intended to provoke war between the U.S. and Iran was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the Bush administration might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.

Brzezinski's warning came a few weeks after the publication in late April of former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet's memoirs, which revealed that CIA officials had told Iranian officials in a face-to-face meeting that the Bush administration would hold Iran responsible for any al-Qaeda attack on the United States that was planned from Iranian territory.

The Bush administration has made persistent claims over the past five years that Iran has harbored al-Qaeda operatives who had fled from Afghanistan and that they had participated in planning terrorist actions – claims that were not supported by intelligence analysts.

Cheney told Fox News in an interview May 14, "We are confident that there are a number of senior al-Qaeda officials in Iran, that they've been there since the spring of 2003. About the time that we launched operations into Iraq, the Iranians rounded up a number of al-Qaeda individuals and placed them under house arrest."