In the brief interview he gave NBC before the Super Bowl, President Obama declared, “I’ve been very clear that we’re going to do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and creating an arms race, a nuclear arms race, in a volatile region.”

Sounds like a very laudable goal, right? Except for the fact that, as I recently blogged, the nuclear arms race in the Middle East is already under way. It began almost 50 years ago when Israel developed the bomb.

According to a 2007 study by the Federation of American Scientists, “Estimates for Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile range from 70 to 400 warheads. The actual number is probably closer to the lower estimate. Additional weapons could probably be built from inventories of fissile materials.”

In other words, as I previously wrote, “One of the most uncommented on ironies today is that Israel is threatening military action to prevent Iran from continuing the same clandestine route to nuclear weapons that Israel took; just as Israeli planes destroyed nuclear reactors in Syria and Iraq to prevent those countries from following Israel’s lead.”

Indeed, Israel probably has more nuclear weapons today than either India or Pakistan. Speculation is that they could be fired from long-range artillery, dropped as bombs or delivered as warheads from Israeli submarines or via Israel’s Jericho 1 and 2 missiles. There has also been conjecture about nuclear land mines and suitcase bombs.

A parallel irony is the fact that, for the past 50 years, every American president has refused to publicly acknowledge Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Obama kept the tradition intact. Of course, so did NBC News and reporter Matt Lauer who let Obama’s statement go unchallenged. But, hey, that’s what the mainstream media have done for years.

Whatever your views on this crisis, how are we supposed to discuss it—never mind resolve it—with such a political blind spot?

Think about the missing issue yourself as you follow the breathless coverage of the current crisis.

Barry M. Lando spent 25 years as an award-winning investigative producer with “60 Minutes.” He has produced numerous articles, a documentary and a book, “Web of Deceit,” about Iraq. Lando is just finishing a novel, “The Watchman’s File.”

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Some bitter ironies in Afghanistan these days: U.S. and French soldiers gunned down by the very Afghan troops they work with. America and its NATO allies, facing huge budget problems themselves, persist in squandering billions in Afghanistan to defeat Islamic radicals and create a propitious climate for growth and investment. Right now, the largest investments so safeguarded are Chinese.

A lot of people with important-sounding titles pontificate on what lies ahead, but whom are they kidding? It’s like we’re watching kids playing around with vials of highly volatile chemicals.

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Better to let Iraq blow itself apart than inflict the kind of policies that have, as most commentators refuse to acknowledge, plagued the country’s entire, sorry history.

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The downing of a sophisticated U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel drone over Iran is the latest ratcheting of tension among Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem.

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For several years now the Pakistanis have found China a very willing and increasingly powerful counterweight to the Americans and their often strident political demands.

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A few days ago, before the terrifying bloodshed in Norway, I received an email from the U.S. denouncing the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in France: “Will the world say nothing—again—as it did in Hitler’s time?” The author cataloged a list of attacks against Jewish targets in France over the past few months. He called for a boycott of France and French products: “Only the Arab countries are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and hatred.”

I’ve been getting such emails now for years since I moved to France. In my view, the major reason for the attacks on Jewish targets is political rather than racial. The leadership of the Jewish community in France (which does not represent the majority of French Jews) has been outspoken in supporting the right-wing policies of the current Israeli government. 

What has long bothered me about such emails, however, is not just a misreading of the cause, but a tunnel vision on the part of many Jews. There is a total disregard for those other Semites and the rampant growth of anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiment in France and across Europe over the past few years. The number of attacks on Arab targets and new legislation relating to the practice of Islam in several European countries would have the world’s Jewish community in full cry if they’d been directed against Jewish targets.

Simultaneously, we have seen the rapid growth of right-wing parties across much of the continent. Those parties in the past often had a strong, explicitly anti-Jewish message. The principal targets now are immigrants, mainly Arabs and Muslims. Those parties are no longer confined to kooks and misfits. Anti-Arab/Muslim sentiments are everywhere, from polite dinner conversation to exchanges in street markets to supposedly harmless jokes relayed on the Internet, like the one I received the day after I got the alert on anti-Semitism in France:

Three men, a Frenchman, a Tunisian and an Algerian, find themselves together in a raunchy Parisian bar. They down one beer after another. At one point the Tunisian tosses his empty beer bottle into the air, yells “we’ve got so many empty bottles in Tunis,” pulls out a gun and blasts the bottle apart in midair.

The Algerian also throws his bottle into the air, says “we’ve got so much sand in Algeria, there’s no shortage of glass,” pulls out a gun and shatters the bottle.

The French guy takes a disgusted look at the other two, pulls out a pistol and yells, “we’ve got so goddamn many Arabs in France, I never have to drink with you two creeps again,” and he guns both of them down.

I was still thinking about that the next day when news came of the horrific slaughter in Norway and the gradual disclosures that the suspect was not an bearded Arab terrorist, but a clean-cut white, right-wing terrorist convinced that he was a soldier in the War of Civilizations, defending the Christian West against the threat of Islam.

On his site he wrote approvingly of Islamophobic American blogger Pamela Geller, a frequent guest on Fox News, who also raises the banner of the West against Islam. A poster shows a recent event, which she backed, along with Robert Spencer who operates Jihad Watch.

People like Geller and Spencer, and right-wing leaders across Europe, are already attempting to distance themselves from any responsibility for the outrage in Norway. Their excuses ring hollow, in view of their rabid language and incendiary rhetoric. 

But a more basic question is this: To what degree do the growing anti-Islamic views held by tens (if not hundreds) of millions of “decent” Europeans, folks who would never consider themselves right-wing or racist though they might chuckle at the barroom joke above, contribute to what could be even more horrifying acts to come?

For with growing economic turmoil in Europe and huge numbers attempting to flee the bloody uprisings across much of North Africa, this problem is going to get only worse.

Barry M. Lando spent 25 years as an award-winning investigative producer with “60 Minutes.” He has produced numerous articles, a documentary and a book, “Web of Deceit,” about Iraq. Lando is finishing a novel, “The Watchman’s File.”

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After allegations that top-level Pakistani officials have secretly aided al-Qaida and the Taliban, sheltering Osama bin Laden himself, now comes a startling new charge: “FBI Says Pakistan’s Military Plotted to Tilt U.S. Policy.”

Now we wait for the predictable stream of American outrage. But lighten up, folks, the Pakistanis have done nothing more than take a page from the CIA playbook.

According to The New York Times, the FBI investigation, which involved at least eight FBI field offices, concluded that Pakistan’s military and the ISI, its powerful spy agency, have used front groups to funnel campaign donations over the past two decades to members of the U.S. Congress and presidential candidates. This in blatant disregard of the law prohibiting foreign governments from making donations to American political candidates.

The dastardly aim of that operation? To counter the Indian lobby in Washington and persuade the United States government to push India to allow a vote in Kashmir that would let Kashmiris decide on their own future. I mean—can you imagine?

The total amount involved: $4 million over two decades, which works out to $200,000 per year. That included $250 donations to the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns of Al Gore and Barack Obama. The congressmen involved claimed they had no knowledge that the money actually originated with the Pakistani government.

Of course, the Pakistani effort is pocket money compared with what the United States has been up to clandestinely for more than half a century, spending billions not just to “tilt” policy of other countries, but to literally buy elections, legislators, intelligence chiefs, generals, cabinet ministers, and entire governments around the globe—starting with Italy and Greece and Iran post World War II and then continuing across every continent since.

Take for instance last year’s revelations that several of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s top officials—including some of the most corrupt—are on the U.S. intelligence payroll.

As for Pakistan itself, its military has been on the receiving end of billions of dollars in “military aid,” both parties realizing that that horde is little more than a bribe to keep the military at least officially on our side.

Such payoffs are just for starters. Why bother “tilting” a government when you can work to overthrow it or knock off its leader i.e., Mossadegh in Iran (1953); Arbenz in Guatemala (1954); the Congo (1960); Iraq (1963); Cuba (1959 to this day); Chile (1964 to 1973); Brazil (1962-64); Indonesia (1965); Angola (1975); Nicaragua (1981 to 1990); Grenada (1983); Saddam Hussein (2003)? There have been more than 50 instances over the past 50 years.

Who are the headline writers kidding? You don’t need to be an investigative reporter or a congressman privy to secret intelligence briefings. It’s all out there on Google.

The Pakistanis have been tightly linked to (if not allied with) the CIA for decades. It would have been amazing if they had not been up to such games.

God help us if they, the Russians, Chinese or anyone else, ever decide to really follow the American lead—liquidating anyone they consider a mortal enemy with their own global-roaming Predators.

Barry M. Lando spent 25 years as an award-winning investigative producer with “60 Minutes.” He has produced numerous articles, a documentary and a book, “Web of Deceit,” about Iraq. Lando is finishing a novel, “The Watchman’s File.”

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