WWIII – praag.org

Washington is destroying the world

The aggressive and mindless stance that Washington’s warmongers have taken toward Russia and China have shattered the accomplishment of Reagan and Gorbachev.

Reagan and Gorbachev ended the cold war and removed the threat of nuclear armageddon. Now the neocons, the US budget-dependent (taxpayer dependent) US military/security complex, and the US politicians dependent on campaign funds from the military/security complex have resurrected the nuclear threat.

The corrupt and duplicitous Clinton regime broke the agreement that the George H.W. Bush administration gave Moscow in 1990. In exchange for Moscow permitting a reunified Germany to be a NATO member, Washington agreed that there would be no expansion of NATO to the east. Gorbachev, US Secretary of State James Baker, US ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, and declassified documents all testify to the fact that Moscow was assured that there would be no expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe.

In 1999 President Bill Clinton made a liar of the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The corrupt Clinton brought Poland, Hungary, and the newly formed Czech Republic into NATO.

President George W. Bush also made a liar out of his father, George H.W. Bush, and his father’s trusted Secretary of State, James Baker. “Dubya,” as the fool and drunkard is known, brought Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania into NATO in 2004. The corrupt and hopeless Obama regime added Albania and Croatia in 2009.

In other words, over the past 21 years three two-term US presidents have taught Moscow that the word of the US government is worthless.

Today Russia is surrounded by US and NATO military bases, with more to come in Ukraine (part of Russia for centuries), Georgia (part of Russia for centuries and the birthplace of Joseph Stalin), Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and perhaps also Azerbaijan.

A large land expanse that was formerly part of the Soviet Empire is now part of Washington’s Empire. The “coming of democracy” simply meant the changing of masters.

Washington always picks the puppet who serves as Secretary General of NATO. The latest is a former Norwegian politician and prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg. On Washington’s orders, the puppet quickly antagonized Moscow with the statement that NATO has a powerful army that has a global policing role and can be deployed wherever Washington wishes. This claim is a total contradiction of NATO’s purpose and charter.

Igor Korochenko, a member of the Russian Defense Ministry Public Council replied to Washington’s puppet Stoltenberg: “Such statements run counter to the system of international security, as the NATO alliance poses a threat to Russia. Therefore, it will cause responsive measures.”

The responsive measures are what you would expect: enough nuclear capability to wipe out the United States and Europe many times over.

The arrogant fools in Washington, wallowing in their hubris as “the indispensable nation,” have provoked Moscow to the point that Russia now has more deployed nuclear weapons than the US. As a result of Washington breaking its word and putting ABM missile bases on Russia’s border, Russia has developed supersonic ICBMs that can rapidly change their trajectory and cannot be shot down by any missile defense system. Of course, the US corporations making billions of dollars selling Washington a useless ABM system will deny this.

Moreover, those countries, such as Poland, whose governments are sufficiently stupid to accept US ABM bases, would be obliterated before the bases could function. The utter stupidity of Eastern Europe’s bought-and-paid-for governments to put trust in Washington is likely to be the main cause of WW III.

The happy participant in the new Armageddon is the American military/security complex. These greedy bastards–”private corporations” whose revenues are entirely public funds– are guaranteed more money regardless of the potential cost in human life. Their US Senate spokesperson, Jim Inhofe, a member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, has resurrected the argument from 60 years ago that America is falling behind in the arms race. Restarting the arms race is essential to the profits of the US military/security complex and to the campaign contributions of senators.

It is not only Russia’s strategic nuclear forces that the fools in Washington have revived and activated, but China’s as well. Last year China released a pictorial description of how China’s nuclear forces could destroy the US. This was China’s response to Washington’s insane plan of building new air and naval bases from the Philippines to Vietnam in order to control the flow of resources in the South China Sea. What kind of idiotic government does America have that thinks China is going to put up with this kind of interference in China’s sphere of influence?

China has now added to its nuclear arsenal a new variant of one of its mobile ICBMs. Washington does not know much about this new missile, because the CIA is too busy arranging protests in Hong Kong.

Both Russia and China were content to be part of the world economy and to improve the economic situation of their citizens by developing their economies. But along comes the neocon Unipower, a collection of arrogant psychopaths who declare that Washington will not permit any other country, not even Russia and China, to rise to a capability of exercising a foreign policy independent of Washington’s purposes.

Nuclear war is back into the picture. First Washington threatens those it perceives as rivals. When the perceived rivals don’t submit, Washington demonizes them.

In the histories written by Washington’s court historians, the greatest demons of modern times are the WW II governments of Japan and Germany along with the post-WW II Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. These American court historians ignore the facts.

Japan was forced into war by Washington, which cut off Japan’s access to resources. Japan was then nuked twice while the Japanese government was trying to surrender.

All of US president Woodrow Wilson’s promises made to Germany in order to end WW I, such as no territorial loses and no reparations, were broken. Germany was torn apart and German territory was handed over to Poland, France, and Czechoslovakia. Despite US president Woodrow Wilson’s promise to the contrary, impossible reparations were imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. The prescient John Maynard Keynes declared that the reparations would result in a second world war. If memory serves, portions of Germany were also given to Belgium, Lithuania, and Denmark.

This humiliation of an industrious and powerful people, whose armies occupied foreign territories when WW I ended, demonstrated the mendacity of the so-called “Western powers.” The French, British, and Americans paved the way for Adolph Hitler. By 1935 Hitler was sufficiently ensconced to denounce the Versailles Treaty. If Hitler had not succumbed to hubris and sent the German armies marching off into Russia where they were destroyed, he, or his successors, would still be ruling Europe today.

The true history is so different from what Washington pretends and Americans are taught. The majority of Americans are blind enablers of Washington’s war on the world. If ebola and global warming don’t destroy humanity, the ignorance of the American people and Washington’s war for world hegemony surely will.

WWIII may have begun, Pope warns

A “piecemeal” World War III may have already begun with the current spate of crimes, massacres and destruction, Pope Francis has warned.

“War is madness,” the Pope said at a memorial to 100,000 Italian soldiers at Redipuglia cemetery near Slovenia. The Argentine Pope has often condemned the idea of war in God’s name.

Only last month, Pope Francis said the international community would be justified in using force to stop what he called “unjust aggression” by Islamic State militants, who have killed or displaced thousands of people in Iraq and Syria, including many Christians, the BBC’s David Willey reports.

In Saturday’s homily, standing at the altar beneath Italy’s fascist-era Redipuglia memorial – where 100,000 Italian soldiers killed during WWI are buried, 60,000 of them unnamed, the Pope paid tribute to the victims of all wars.

“Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep,” he said. “Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction,” he said.

Source: BBC

The Failure Of German Leadership – Merkel Whores For Washington

Washington, enabled by its compliant but stupid NATO puppets, is pushing the Ukrainian situation closer to war.

German Chancellor Merkel has failed her country, Europe, and world peace. Germany is the strength of the EU and NATO. Had Merkel said “No” to sanctions on Russia, that would have been the end of the crisis that Washington is brewing, a crisis unlikely to be ended short of war.

But Merkel has signed away the sovereignty of the German nation and assigned the fate of Germany to a province in the American Empire. Thus has Merkel and the weak German leadership consigned the world to war. Already blamed for World War 1 and World War 2, now Germany will be blamed for World War 3.

Washington’s mismanaged Ukrainian coup has cost Washington Crimea, which Washington wanted most of all in order to deprive Russia of its warm water naval base on the Black Sea. In addition, the mismanaged overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine is threatening to also lose the Russian cities of eastern Ukraine. Like Crimea, eastern Ukraine consists of former Russian areas that Khrushchev stuck into Ukraine in the 1950s.

In what is clearly a fruitless and pointless effort to get Crimea back, Washington is demanding that Russia interfere in Crimea and prevent Crimea from seceding from Ukraine. If the Russian government refuses to follow Washington’s orders, Washington has announced that it will inflict “damaging sanctions” on Russia. Initially, EU countries expressed an unwillingness to go along with Washington, but with bribes and threats, Washington has conquered Merkel and has its European puppets lined up following orders.

Washington understands that economic sanctions are a far less threat to Russia than the loss of its Black Sea naval base. Washington also understands that Putin cannot possibly abandon the millions of Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine to the mercy of the anti-Russian and unelected government imposed by Washington in Kiev. As Washington knows that its threat of sanctions is empty, why did Washington make it?

The answer is in order to drive the crisis to war. Washington’s neoconservative nazis have been agitating for war with Russia for a long time. They want to remove one of the three remaining restraints (Russia, China, Iran) on Washington’s world hegemony. Washington wants to break up the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) before these countries form a separate currency bloc and avoid the use of the US dollar.

Russia will respond in kind to Washington’s sanctions. European peoples and Western banks and corporations will suffer losses. It would be at least two or three years before Washington has in place means of delivering US natural gas achieved by fracking and contamination of US water supplies to Europe to take the place of Russia’s cutoff of energy to Europe.

The Western presstitute media will dramatize the Russian response to sanctions and demonize Russia, while ignoring who started the fight, thereby helping Washington prepare Americans for war. As neither side can afford to lose the war, nuclear weapons will be used. There will be no winners.

All of this is perfectly clear, just as was the obvious conclusion of the march of events leading up to World War 1. Now, like then, the people who see the outcome are powerless to stop it. Delusion rules. Arrogance and hubris overflow. Statements and actions become ever more reckless, and then there is hell to pay.

Americans and Europeans, if they had any awareness at all, would be in the streets violently protesting the coming war toward which the insane criminals in Washington are driving the world.

Instead, the German chancellor, the French president, the British prime minister and the Western presstitute media continue to lie: It was legitimate for the West to steal Kosovo from Serbia and to steal the Ukrainian government, but it is not legitimate for the Russian population of Crimea to exercise self-determination and return to Russia. Washington and its EU puppets even have the audacity to declare falsely, after overthrowing an elected government in Ukraine and installing an unelected one, that Crimean self-determination violates the Ukrainian constitution, which no longer exists because Washington destroyed it.

The criminally insane government in Washington has pushed the Russian bear into a corner. The bear is not going to surrender.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest books are, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and How America Was Lost.

Economic warfare provoked Pearl Harbor

: Robert Higgs

Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. Its war making took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy conducted “shoot [Germans] on sight” convoys – convoys that might include British ships — in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping route from the United States to Great Britain, even though German U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating attacks on U.S. shipping. The United States and Great Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated with the British military in combat operations against the Germans, for example, by alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines, which the British then attacked. The U.S. government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government also provided military and other supplies and assistance, including warplanes and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with Japan.[1] The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch (government in exile) had embargoed. [2]

Roosevelt had already led the United States into war with Germany in the spring of 1941—into a shooting war on a small scale. From then on, he gradually increased U.S. military participation. Japan’s attack on December 7 enabled him to increase it further and to obtain a war declaration. Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell. . . . In the eyes of Roosevelt and his advisers, the measures taken early in 1941 justified a German declaration of war on the United States—a declaration that did not come, to their disappointment. . . . Roosevelt told his ambassador to France, William Bullitt, that U.S. entry into war against Germany was certain but must wait for an “incident,” which he was “confident that the Germans would give us.” . . . Establishing a record in which the enemy fired the first shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt’s tactics. . . . He seems [eventually] to have concluded—correctly as it turned out—that Japan would be easier to provoke into a major attack on the Unites States than Germany would be. [3]

The claim that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was . . . typical rhetoric. It worked because the public did not know that the administration had expected Japan to respond with war to anti-Japanese measures it had taken in July 1941. . . . Expecting to lose a war with the United States—and lose it disastrously—Japan’s leaders had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has come out that Roosevelt and Hull persistently refused to negotiate. . . . Japan . . . offered compromises and concessions, which the United States countered with increasing demands. . . . It was after learning of Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States if the talks “break down” that Roosevelt decided to break them off. . . . According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt said he hoped for an “incident” in the Pacific to bring the United States into the European war.[4]

These facts and numerous others that point in the same direction are for the most part anything but new; many of them have been available to the public since the 1940s. As early as 1953, anyone might have read a collection of heavily documented essays on various aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, that showed the numerous ways in which the U.S. government bore responsibility for the country’s eventual engagement in World War II—showed, in short, that the Roosevelt administration wanted to get the country into the war and worked craftily along various avenues to ensure that, sooner or later, it would get in, preferably in a way that would unite public opinion behind the war by making the United States appear to have been the victim of an aggressor’s unprovoked attack.[5] As Secretary of War Henry Stimson testified after the war, “we needed the Japanese to commit the first overt act.” [6]

At present, however, seventy years after these events, probably not one American in 1,000—nay, not one in 10,000—has an inkling of any of this history. So effective has been the pro-Roosevelt, pro-American, pro-World War II faction that in this country it has utterly dominated teaching and popular writing about U.S. engagement in the “Good War.”

In the late nineteenth century, Japan’s economy began to grow and to industrialize rapidly. Because Japan has few natural resources, many of its burgeoning industries had to rely on imported raw materials, such as coal, iron ore or steel scrap, tin, copper, bauxite, rubber, and petroleum. Without access to such imports, many of which came from the United States or from European colonies in Southeast Asia, Japan’s industrial economy would have ground to a halt. By engaging in international trade, however, the Japanese had built a moderately advanced industrial economy by 1941.

At the same time, they also built a military-industrial complex to support an increasingly powerful army and navy. These armed forces allowed Japan to project its power into various places in the Pacific and East Asia, including Korea and northern China, much as the United States used its growing industrial might to equip armed forces that projected U.S. power into the Caribbean, Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippine Islands.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the U.S. government fell under the control of a man who disliked the Japanese and harbored a romantic affection for the Chinese because, some writers have speculated, Roosevelt’s ancestors had made money in the China trade. [7] Roosevelt also disliked the Germans in general and Adolf Hitler in particular, and he tended to favor the British in his personal relations and in world affairs. He did not pay much attention to foreign policy, however, until his New Deal began to peter out in 1937. Thereafter he relied heavily on foreign policy to fulfill his political ambitions, including his desire for reelection to an unprecedented third term.

When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the northern Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—a belligerence that the great majority of Americans opposed.

In June 1940, Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war under William Howard Taft and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, became secretary of war again. Stimson was a lion of the Anglophile, northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called Open Door Policy for China, Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied.

The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939, the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” [8] The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in Southeast Asia.

Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the American leaders knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”[9]

Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor.[10] Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the War Cabinet on November 25, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief . . . that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.”[11]

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. Send him mail.

Notes

[1] See “Flying Tigers,” Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers .

[2] Robert Higgs, “How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor,” The Freeman 56 (May 2006): 36-37.

[3] George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007), pp. 179-80, 184, 185, emphasis added.

[4] Ibid ., pp. 15, 202, 240.

[5] See Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes (Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1953).

[6] Stimson as quoted in Victor, Pearl Harbor Myth, p. 105.

[7] Harry Elmer Barnes, “Summary and Conclusions,” in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), 682-83.

[8] All quotations in this paragraph are from George Morgenstern, “The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor,” in Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 322-23, 327-28.

[9] Quoted in Morgenstern, “The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor,” 329.

[10] Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000).

[11] Quoted in Morgenstern, “The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor,” 343, 384.

This talk by Robert Higgs was the Arthur M. Krolman Lecture at the 30th Anniversary Supporters Summit of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Callaway Gardens, Georgia, on October 26, 2012. Originally posted at the Ludwig von Mises Inistitute

Israel, Iran square off at UN

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded Thursday that the international community impose a red line on Iran to prevent it from enriching enough uranium for a nuclear bomb.

“The hour is late, very late,” Netanyahu said, alleging Iran was already 70% of the way through the process of enriching enough uranium to fuel a bomb, and must be prevented from reaching the 90% level.

The Israeli leader even used the world stage at the UN to present a cardboard diagram of a bomb with different levels on it, drawing a thick red line across it with a marker pen for dramatic effect.

“Faced with a clear red line Iran will back down,” he said, insisting in a address to the United Nations General Assembly that imposing an ultimatum on Tehran would not provoke war but help prevent it.

Israel has warned that it could launch military action against Iran in order to prevent it reaching a certain nuclear threshold, and has urged the international community to force Tehran to abandon its atomic quest.

Iran denies it is building a nuclear weapon and has dismissed the Israeli threat.

US President Barack Obama vowed in his address to the United Nations on Tuesday that he would prevent Iran from getting the bomb but his administration has repeatedly rejected imposing a red line on Tehran.

With relations between Netanyahu and Obama already viewed as frosty, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta earlier this month highlighted the policy split further when he rejected Israel’s “red lines” outright.

“The fact is, look, presidents of the United States, prime ministers of Israel or any other country – leaders of these countries don’t have, you know, a bunch of little red lines that determine their decisions,” Panetta said.

“What they have are facts that are presented to them about what a country is up to, and then they weigh what kind of action is needed to be taken in order to deal with that situation,” he told Foreign Policy magazine.

“I mean, that’s the real world. Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner.”

The Iranian government, reacting to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations, demanded that Jerusalem open its own nuclear installations to inspection before telling Tehran do so.

Using the U.N.’s “right of reply,” Iran’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Eshagh al Habib, told the General Assembly the Israeli prime minister “has admitted to the possession of nuclear weapons which has been repeatedly stated by the 120 members of the Non-Aligned Movement ‘poses a serious and continuing threat to the security of states in the region.

“Instead of making baseless allegations,” he said, “this regime has ignored repeated calls by the international community to accede promptly and without any conditions to the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons party and place all its nuclear-related facilities under the International Atomic Energy Agency verification system. … The international community should continue to exert the utmost pressure on this regime.”

The Iranians have long claimed to be sponsoring a movement to free the Middle East of any atomic weapons.

Israel, its conventional forces vastly outnumbered by neighboring Arabs, has long seen its nuclear stockpile as an equalizer should a new war erupt in the region.

Published reports claim Jerusalem has manufactured more than 200 low-yield nuclear warheads that have been stockpiled in a desert facility in the Negev.

The nuclear facility, near the hamlet of Dimona, has had sporadic visits by U.N. inspectors, but nothing unusual has ever been uncovered.

Late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein tried unsuccessfully to rocket bomb the Dimona facility in the 1991 Gulf War.

Today, the Dimona base is protected by the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile system.

A group of Israeli diplomats sat stone-faced throughout the Iranian rebuttal, deciding not to challenge it.

The U.S.-U.N. mission did not attend the late-night General Assembly session. – AFP/WND