« Saturday | Main | Sunday »

January 7, 2007

Confused Americans for Truth - Headline Plans Attack on News Story, Film at 11

by Ferdinand T Cat

The English language is a tricky beast, and a small change can turn a dull proposal into the final apocalypse. A good example is today's top news story from the London Times, which begins with the headline Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran. It's not true, but it may very well be completely accurate.

The payoff is in the first paragraph.

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

See, the point is that when you're dealing with the military, there's a vast difference between drawing up plans and actually intending to do something. It's easy to forget that when you're fighting terrorists. A terrorist can run away and hide under a children's hospital to escape the consequences of an act of war. A nation can't, so a national military is only going to commit an act of war as a last resort. Planning a last resort contingency is not the same as planning a strike.

Israel plans nuclear strike is a much snazzier headline than Israel has plans for a nuclear strike, but it has a very different meaning. If you're planning a nuclear strike, you don't want anybody to know how it's going to be done. On the other hand, if you want to frighten a rogue nation into behaving itself, then leaking a really scary contingency plan and denying it a few hours later gets you a lot of bang for a very low price. I don't know if that's what happened here, but it is nonetheless a useful experiment. Maybe the existence of this plan will shock Iran's government back to reality.

If that works, maybe a similar technique will shock the London Times back to reality.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Wake Up America, Stop the ACLU, Outside the Beltway, Rightwing Guy, Faultline USA, stikNstein... has no mercy, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, Diggers Realm, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, Jo's Cafe, Pursuing Holiness, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

# At Sun 12:53 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags:

Trackback Pings

Comments

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

Post a comment