With Iraq fading as an election issue in the United States, Iran is moving up to replace it. For much of the past week, the three remaining candidates for the presidency played rhetorical ping-pong on the subject. However, none seemed quite sure what the problem was, let alone what the solution might be.
Only Senator Barack Obama, the likely Democrat nominee, offered something concrete: If elected, he would invite his Iranian counterpart President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for unconditional talks.
This is what Obama said at a press conference: "Preconditions, as it applies to a country like Iran, for example, was a term of art. Because this administration has been very clear that it will not have direct negotiations with Iran until Iran has met preconditions that are essentially what Iran views, and many other observers would view, as the subject of the negotiations; for example, their nuclear program."
Talking without preconditions would require the US to ignore three resolutions passed unanimously by the United Nations' Security Council, making a set of demands from the Islamic Republic.
Before starting his unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad, would Obama present a new resolution at the Security Council to cancel the three that he Islamic Republic president does not like? Or, would Obama act in defiance of the UN, thus further weakening the authority of the Security Council?
The preconditions that Ahmadinejad does not like and Obama promises to ignore were not set by President George W Bush.
They were decided after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported the Islamic Republic to be in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and, acting in accordance with its charter, referred the issue to the Security Council.
Dismissing the preconditions as irrelevant would mean snubbing America's European allies plus Russia and China, all of whom participated in drafting and approving the resolutions that Ahmadinejad does not like.
Such a move would make a mockery of so-called "multilateral diplomacy" which the Bush administration is supposed to have ignored.
It is clear that Obama has not asked British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicola Sarkozy what they think of the US suddenly changing course and granting Ahmadinejad's key demand in advance.
It is quite possible that Obama has not been properly briefed about the "preconditions" he gets so worked up about.
He cites Iran's "nuclear programme" as a precondition. This is not true. No one has asked, or could ask, Iran to stop its nuclear programme-period. On the contrary, Iran's membership of NPT gives it the right to seek help from other signatories, including the US, to access the latest technology in developing its nuclear industry for peaceful purposes.
The Security Council is not asking the Islamic Republic to do something dishonorable, humiliating or illegal.
All it asks Ahmadinejad to do is to stop cheating, something the Islamic Republic itself has admitted it did for 18 years. The Security Council invites the Islamic Republic to "suspend", not even scrap, a programme of uranium enrichment clearly destined for making bombs in violation of the NPT.
Iran does not have a single nuclear power station and thus does not need enriched uranium, except for making bombs. Its sole nuclear power station under construction, is scheduled to be ready by the end of 2009. That station, however, cannot use the type of uranium that Iran is enriching. The enriched uranium it needs is of a different scientific code, one supplied by Russia, which is building the project, for the next 10 years. ( Russia has offered to provide the fuel needed for the entire life of the station, that is to say 37 years.)
Another precondition is for Tehran to explain why it is building a heavy water plant at Arak when it has absolutely no plans for plutonium-based nuclear power stations. The Arak plant's only imaginable use is to produce material for nuclear warheads.
Finally, the IAEA and the Security Council are asking Tehran to allow international inspectors access to all sites related to the nuclear project, in accordance with Iran's obligations under the NPT.
The minimum show of goodwill on the part of Ahmadinejad would be to implement the UN resolutions before he goes to the White House for talks with President Obama on other issues.
Obama's position has helped ease domestic pressure on Ahmadinejad to listen to the UN and the IAEA. The Islamic Republic president is telling his domestic critics to shut up until after the US presidential election. Why should Iran make concessions that a putative President Obama has already dismissed as unnecessary?
Paradoxically, Obama's stance encourages Ahmadinejad to harden his position. And that could make it more difficult for a putative President Obama to deal with what a regime he describes as "an enemy."
After the recent days of highly charged commentary about “appeasement,” we thought that as Iranian-Americans, we would convey to you the feelings of most people in Iran and the Iranian diaspora at large. It is important that a decision to dialogue with the Islamic Republic of Iran not be made in haste, for the purpose of winning the election. Instead, you now have a unique opportunity to make good on your message of change.
On September 24, 2004, while a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Illinois, you suggested that “surgical missile strikes” on Iran may become necessary. “Launching some missile strikes into Iran is not the optimal position for us to be in” given the ongoing war in Iraq, you told the Chicago Tribune. You continued: “On the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse”.
Your change in approach is now stunning for many Iranians. It is not that we want our country to be bombed, but the point is, why did you so suddenly and without explanation go from that extreme to the extreme of “unconditional dialogue”?
Senator, since 1979 the Mullahs of Iran have killed upwards of one million Iranians, not to mention the nearly one million sacrificed to the 8-year-long Iran/Iraq war. And what the Iranian people have withstood in terms of outrageous human rights violations is shocking; public hangings, stoning, flogging, cutting off limbs, tongues and plucking out eyeballs are an everyday occurrence across Iran. All are meant to strike fear of the ruling Mullahs into people’s hearts.
Since you began talking about unconditionally dialoguing with the Islamic regime of Iran, you too have struck absolute fear in the hearts of the Iranian people, both inside and outside Iran. The few Iranian-Americans who support you are well-intentioned individuals who have been swept up in the excitement and fervor of your campaign. But we can wholeheartedly assure you that your comments have landslide opposition within the much greater Iranian heart both inside and outside Iran.
Iranians believe that the only country who has the moral authority and is able to support them is the United States of America, a country whose foundation as a melting pot mirrors the true character of the once great Persian Empire. But the fact is, as John Bolton so aptly puts it: “Negotiation is a tactic, not policy.” Your policy of direct and unconditional negotiation will give the Mullahs of Iran the legitimacy that they need for more oppression. The real losers will be the already weary people of Iran, whose dreams of freedom and democracy will be dashed for a long time to come. If you empower that regime, the mullahs will continue to harm a country that is already totally economically devastated, as well as socially and politically oppressed.
And rest assured that they will have no qualms about exporting the kind of rule they have established inside Iran to the rest of the world; that is an undeniable fact that they themselves have openly admitted. One can see the proof in Syria and Lebanon.
On September 18, 2001, defying the regime’s warnings and pressure, brave Iranians were the only people in the Middle East to hold a candlelight vigil in solidarity with America. The thousands who marched peacefully down one of the main Boulevards of Tehran were brutally attacked by revolutionary guards and paramilitary forces. Many paid a high price for their bravery: they were arrested and hauled off to prison.
Iranians have struggled since the 1850’s for modernity, sovereignty and progress for our nation; Iran had a constitutional revolution in 1906 to separate the government from religion. Iranians are a progressive people and our cultural identity is very different from any of the other nations in the region.
Cyrus the Great wrote the first declaration of human rights in Iran more than 2500 years ago. The actual Cylinder upon which the declaration was carved is housed in the British Museum in London, and its replica is in the second floor lobby of the United Nations.
Senator, Europeans, through Jack Straw of the U.K., Dominique de Villepin of France and Joschka Fischer of Germany, tried negotiations for five years with the so-called moderate reformist, Mullah President Khatami. That effort ended in disaster, with the European Union admitting its failure. President Reagan tried also. He sent a cake and a Qur’an to Khomeini, but Khomeini fed the cake to dogs and willfully ignored president Reagan’s proposal of friendship. President Clinton worked diligently on negotiations for eight years. Two secretaries of State, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, both failed — during the regime of the same Mullah President, Khatami. In fact, it was Warren Christopher who called the regime of Iran evil after over three years of unsuccessful negotiations. Mrs. Albright even publicly apologized to the Mullahs of Iran for America’s sins. She eliminated trade sanctions on three items as a goodwill gesture and offered incentives on Iranian frozen assets, but at every point the Mullahs ungraciously found excuses not to hail the repeated gestures of good will, and refused to take one step forward.
The most important fact to remember is that while the negotiations were going on between the Clinton Administration and the Mullahs of Iran, they were continuing the development of their hidden nuclear program. Do you really think you can trust these people?
We appreciate the fact that you believe this administration has not done a good job in negotiations, but they have tried. They tried directly and indirectly, behind closed doors and in public. If the Mullahs of Iran wanted to negotiate, there was the April 2006 package approved by the European Allies and Russia and offered by the U.S. with good will and many incentives. Yet typically and inexplicably, Iran remained recalcitrant and rejected it.
Now here is a proposal for you:
America led the world in supporting the Eastern European Solidarity Movement, by which ultimately the Eastern bloc was able to free itself from communist domination and dictatorships. The international community weakened the South African regime by supporting and empowering Mr. Mandela against South Africa’s racial apartheid regime, which was eventually forced to step aside peacefully and allow change for the better to begin.
The Iranian government is, by all definitions and international laws and United Nation’s resolutions, a gender apartheid regime. What would happen if you declare Iran a Gender Apartheid country and not the representative of the oppressed women of Iran? Support the millions of laid-off and destitute Iranian workers, students, and teachers, as well as the estimated 23,000 innocent political prisoners who are being tortured in prisons for speaking out against these tyrants. Support the average Iranian and not the Islamic regime. Put America’s power behind what is right — and watch the people of Iran usher out the Mullahs and democratically elect a government that truly represents the people of Iran.
This will be a bold and thoughtful way of managing the foreign policy of America. It is the picture of your message of change, at work not only for America, but the world at large, Senator. Appeasement of dictators and oppressors is just as unwise as war. A nation is made up of people, not its leaders. The only people in this case who are worth negotiating with are the people of Iran, who are the only friends America should want in Iran — not the tyrants who have hijacked that great nation.
America is in no position to lose more friends.
In closing, Senator, even if you manage to dialogue with the ruling clergy in Iran, they will never keep their word. They are masters of deception, manipulation, rhetoric and spin. They are incapable of even honoring their own signatures, and refuse to abide by the terms and conditions of treaties that they themselves have agreed upon time and time again, as we have witnessed in their reactions to U.N. resolutions.
We were born and raised in Iran, and we do know Iran’s Mullahs.
Respectfully,
Manda Zand-Ervin & Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi
Manda Zand-Ervin & Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, mother and daughter, are human rights activists and president & co-founder of the Alliance of Iranian Women
David Miliband has raised questions over Barack Obama’s policy on Iran, which officials in Washington and Europe fear threatens to undermine the tough stance adopted by the West towards Tehran over recent years.
The Foreign Secretary, on his visit to the US this week, has held talks with all three presidential campaigns, including those of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
But when he met Mr Obama’s team of foreign policy advisers on Wednesday, Mr Miliband is understood to have queried the presumptive Democratic nominee’s declared willingness to meet leaders from rogue states such as Iran.
They also discussed trade — with Mr Obama advisers saying that they still intended to renegotiate deals such as Nafta — and how much European support there would be for a US military surge in Afghanistan.
British intelligence chiefs are understood to have identified Iranian nuclear proliferation as the second greatest security threat, behind Islamic terrorism but ahead of renewed aggression from Russia.
There is also deep concern about Iran’s support for Iraqi Shia militias or terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. “The role of Iran as a source of instability in the region is undoubtedly a concern,” Mr Miliband said this week. “No one can watch armed militias coming on to the streets in defiance of UN resolutions with equanimity.”
Exact accounts of the conversation with Mr Obama differ and there is certainly acute anxiety on the part of the British not to be seen as stoking political controversy in America’s presidential elections. In the past week Mr McCain has repeatedly hammered Mr Obama for what he claims is a “naive” commitment to hold direct talks with foreign dictators.
In a televised debate last summer, Mr Obama was asked if he would be willing to meet the leaders of countries such as Iran and Cuba without preconditions during his first year in office. He replied: “I would.” But this week he appeared to pull back, saying he would still be willing to meet Iranian leaders but not before what he described as “preparations” — and not necessarily with President Ahmadinejad.
Nevertheless, Mr Obama says that “tough but engaged diplomacy” — of the type carried out by President Kennedy or President Reagan with the Soviet Union — would represent “a different approach, a different philosophy” to the “failed Iran policy” of the current administration.
Mr Miliband, in a press conference with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, reiterated Britain’s support for the united front on Iran adopted by the US and its European allies, which he believes is beginning to pay dividends. “Our position, jointly, has always been that as long as Iran exercises responsibilities, then it will be able to forge a more productive and positive relationship with the international community,” Mr Miliband said.
An aide later told The Times that the Foreign Secretary was being very careful to avoid direct criticism of any presidential candidate’s positions. But the same source added: “We know Obama wants to engage more, but we don’t know what route he will take or what he means by ‘no pre-conditions’. It has not unravelled yet and, when it does, we will be able to see where it converges or conflicts with what we’re doing.”
A Foreign Office spokesman later said: “I just want to stress that David Miliband is not confused about Obama’s policy. It would be quite wrong to say that.”
Mr McCain’s foreign policy chief, Randy Scheunemann, would not comment on his own meetings with Mr Miliband. But he said: “Obama’s position is obviously different to that of Britain and France. Otherwise Prime Minister Brown and President Sarkozy would have already met the President of Iran without conditions.
Although Britain — unlike the US — maintains diplomatic relations with Iran, the West has been more or less united in seeking to isolate the Iranian leadership. The US, Britain, France and to some extent Germany have pressed for tighter sanctions against Iran, including measures directed against the country’s ruling elite, for failing to comply with UN resolutions calling for a halt to its uranium enrichment programme.
British intelligence chiefs are understood to have identified Iranian nuclear proliferation as the second greatest security threat, behind Islamic terrorism but ahead of renewed aggression from Russia.
There is also deep concern about Iran’s support for Iraqi Shia militias or terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
“The role of Iran as a source of instability in the region is undoubtedly a concern,” Mr Miliband said this week. “No one can watch armed militias coming on to the streets in defiance of UN resolutions with equanimity.”
When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has gone surreal. Another unmistakable sign is when a presidential candidate makes a gaffe, then, realizing it is too egregious to take back without suffering humiliation, decides to make it a centerpiece of his foreign policy.
Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."
After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.
Should the president ever meet with enemies? Sometimes, but only after minimal American objectives -- i.e. preconditions -- have been met. The Shanghai communique was largely written long before Richard Nixon ever touched down in China. Yet Obama thinks Nixon to China confirms the wisdom of his willingness to undertake a worldwide freshman-year tyrants tour.
Most of the time you don't negotiate with enemy leaders because there is nothing to negotiate. Does Obama imagine that North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela are insufficiently informed about American requirements for improved relations?
There are always contacts through back channels or intermediaries. Iran, for example, has engaged in five years of talks with our closest European allies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, to say nothing of the hundreds of official U.S. statements outlining exactly what we would give them in return for suspending uranium enrichment.
Obama pretends that while he is for such "engagement," the cowboy Republicans oppose it. Another absurdity. No one is debating the need for contacts. The debate is over the stupidity of elevating rogue states and their tyrants, easing their isolation and increasing their leverage by granting them unconditional meetings with the president of the world's superpower.
Obama cited Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as presidents who met with enemies. Does he know no history? Neither Roosevelt nor Truman ever met with any of the leaders of the Axis powers. Obama must be referring to the pictures he's seen of Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, and Truman and Stalin at Potsdam. Does he not know that at that time Stalin was a wartime ally?
During the subsequent Cold War, Truman never met with Stalin. Nor Mao. Nor Kim Il Sung. Truman was no fool.
Obama cites John Kennedy meeting Nikita Khrushchev as another example of what he wants to emulate. Really? That Vienna summit of a young, inexperienced, untested American president was disastrous, emboldening Khrushchev to push Kennedy on Berlin -- and then near fatally in Cuba, leading almost directly to the Cuban missile crisis. Is that the precedent Obama aspires to follow?
A meeting with Ahmadinejad would not just strengthen and vindicate him at home, it would instantly and powerfully ease the mullahs' isolation, inviting other world leaders to follow. And with that would come a flood of commercial contracts, oil deals, diplomatic agreements -- undermining precisely the very sanctions and isolation that Obama says he would employ against Iran.
As every seasoned diplomat knows, the danger of a summit is that it creates enormous pressure for results. And results require mutual concessions. That is why conditions and concessions are worked out in advance, not on the scene.
What concessions does Obama imagine Ahmadinejad will make to him on Iran's nuclear program? And what new concessions will Obama offer? To abandon Lebanon? To recognize Hamas? Or perhaps to squeeze Israel?
Having lashed himself to the ridiculous, unprecedented promise of unconditional presidential negotiations -- and then having compounded the problem by elevating it to a principle -- Obama keeps trying to explain. On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that by Soviet standards Iran and others "don't pose a serious threat to us." (On the contrary. Islamic Iran is dangerously apocalyptic. Soviet Russia was not.) The next day in Billings, Mont.: "I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave."
That's the very next day, mind you. Such rhetorical flailing has done more than create an intellectual mess. It has given rise to a new political phenomenon: the metastatic gaffe. The one begets another, begets another, begets ...
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden took to the airwaves this week to "help" the rookie Barack Obama out of a foreign-policy jam. Oh sure, admitted Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee had given the "wrong" answer when he said he'd meet unconditionally with leaders of rogue states. But on the upside, the guy "has learned a hell of a lot."
Somewhere Mr. Obama was muttering an expletive. But give Mr. Biden marks for honesty. As Mr. Obama finishes a week of brutal questioning over his foreign-policy judgments, it's become clear he has learned a lot – and is learning still.
Right now, for instance, he's learning how tough it can be to pivot to a general-election stance on the crucial issue of foreign policy. He's also learning Democrats won't be able to sail through a national-security debate by simply painting John McCain as the second coming of George Bush.
Remember how Mr. Obama got here. In a July debate, the Illinois senator was asked if he'd meet, "without preconditions," the "leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea." It was an unexpected question, and Mr. Obama rolled with his gut: "I would," he said, riffing that the Bush administration's policy of not negotiating with terror-sponsoring states was "ridiculous."
Hillary Clinton, who still had the aura of inevitability, and who was already thinking ahead to a general election, wouldn't bite. At that point, any initial misgivings the Obama campaign had about the boss's answer disappeared. Mr. Obama hadn't got much traction differentiating himself from Mrs. Clinton over Iraq, but this was a chance to get to her left, to cast her to liberal primary voters as a warmonger. Which he did, often, committing himself ever more to a policy of unfettered engagement.
Today's Obama, all-but-nominee, is pitching to a broad American audience less keen to legitimize Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who provides weapons that kill American soldiers. The senator clumsily invited this debate when he took great umbrage to President Bush's recent criticism of appeasers (which, in a wonderfully revealing moment, Democrats instantly assumed meant them). Mr. Obama has since been scrambling to neutralize his former statement.
A week ago, in Oregon, he adopted the "no-big-deal" approach, telling listeners Iran was just a "tiny" country that, unlike the Soviet Union, did not "pose a serious threat to us." But this suggested he'd missed that whole asymmetrical warfare debate – not to mention 9/11 – so by the next day, he'd switched to the "blame-Republicans" line. Iran was in fact "the greatest threat to the United States and Israel and the Middle East for a generation" – but all because of President Bush's Iraq war.
This, however, revived questions of why he'd meet with said greatest-threat leader, so his advisers jumped in, this time to float the "misunderstood" balloon. Obama senior foreign policy adviser Susan Rice, channeling Bill Clinton, said it all depended on what the definition of a "leader" is. "Well, first of all, he said he'd meet with the appropriate Iranian leaders. He hasn't named who that leader will be." (Turns out, Mr. Obama has said he will meet with . . . Mr. Ahmadinejad.)
Former Sen. Tom Daschle, channeling Ms. Rice, explained it also depended on what the definition of a precondition is: "It's important to emphasize again when we talk about preconditions, we're just saying everything needs to be on the table. I would not say that we would meet unconditionally." This is called being against preconditions before you were for them.
And so it goes, as Mr. Obama shifts and shambles, all the while telling audiences that when voting for president they should look beyond "experience" to "judgment." In this case, whatever his particular judgment on Iran is on any particular day.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Democrats entered this race confident national security wouldn't be the drag on the party it has in the past. With an unpopular war and a rival who supports that war, they planned to wrap Mr. McCain around the unpopular Mr. Bush and be done with it. Mr. Obama is still manfully marching down this road, today spending as much time warning about a "third Bush term" as he does reassuring voters about a first Obama one.
Then again, 9/11 and five years of Iraq debate have educated voters. Mr. McCain is certainly betting they can separate the war from the urgent threat of an Iranian dictator who could possess nukes, and whose legitimization would encourage other rogues in their belligerence. This is a debate the Arizonan has been preparing for all his life and, note, Iranian diplomacy is simply the topic du jour.
Mr. McCain has every intention of running his opponent through the complete foreign-policy gamut. Explain again in what circumstances you'd use nuclear weapons? What was that about invading Pakistan? How does a policy of engaging the world include Mr. Ahmadinejad, but not our ally Colombia and its trade pact?
It explains too the strong desire among the McCain camp to get Mr. Obama on stage for debates soon. There's a feeling Mr. Obama is still climbing the foreign-policy learning curve. And they see mileage in his issuing a few more gut reactions.
[Salamantis] Notice that nowhere in Hermit's vapid screed below does he address the concrete specific instances mentioned in the first of the articles I posted in this post, namely: ________________________________________________________________________
The Security Council is not asking the Islamic Republic to do something dishonorable, humiliating or illegal.
All it asks Ahmadinejad to do is to stop cheating, something the Islamic Republic itself has admitted it did for 18 years. The Security Council invites the Islamic Republic to "suspend", not even scrap, a programme of uranium enrichment clearly destined for making bombs in violation of the NPT.
Iran does not have a single nuclear power station and thus does not need enriched uranium, except for making bombs. Its sole nuclear power station under construction, is scheduled to be ready by the end of 2009. That station, however, cannot use the type of uranium that Iran is enriching. The enriched uranium it needs is of a different scientific code, one supplied by Russia, which is building the project, for the next 10 years. ( Russia has offered to provide the fuel needed for the entire life of the station, that is to say 37 years.)
Another precondition is for Tehran to explain why it is building a heavy water plant at Arak when it has absolutely no plans for plutonium-based nuclear power stations. The Arak plant's only imaginable use is to produce material for nuclear warheads.
Finally, the IAEA and the Security Council are asking Tehran to allow international inspectors access to all sites related to the nuclear project, in accordance with Iran's obligations under the NPT. ________________________________________________________________________
C'mon, Hermit, WHAT ABOUT the fact that the uranium that Iran is enriching cannot be used in their only under-construction nuclear power plant? WHAT ABOUT that heavy water plant whose sole possible purpose could be to assist in plutonium production, when no plutonium power plants are being built in Iran? WHY DOESN'T Iran allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect its facilities, as it is obligated to under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? And since Iran has already admitted to cheating for the past 18 years, what has it not admitted to yet?
Address THESE ISSUES, and cease your irrelevant logorrheic bloviational posturing. Treating Pelosi (or Reid) as some kind of expert on these matters, or El Baradei as objective and impartial, just makes you look even more foolish than you already do. ________________________________________________________________________
And now Blunderov doesn't know why Ahmeedinejad shouldn't be allowed to have his finger on the nuclear trigger.
Ahmedinejad is a member of the Hojetiyyah cult, a sect that is so extreme that even Khomeini banned them during his reign. They believe that they can hasten the Return of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Iman (the Shia version of the Second Coming) by instigating a global thermonuclear conflagration centered around Israel, because they believe that the Mahdi would return in order to win the day and impose his Global Caliphate (Shia Heaven on Earth). They devoutly desire the Mahdi's swift Return above all else. They wouldn't worry about all the Palestinians this would kill, because they would go to Paradise as martyrs for the faith. Obviously, nuclear deterrence does not work on fervent fanatical zealots who desire an apocalyptic nuclear armageddon for religious reasons. Rafsanjani has proposed the rationalizing fiction that, although Israel, being a tiny country, would be eradicated by a nuclear strike, Iran, being much larger, could absorb a retaliatory strike and continue to exist. And Khomeini famously said that it mattered not to him if Iran burned, so long as the cause of Islam was advanced.
But if Iran nuked Israel, they would not passively die, as they did in the Holocaust; instead, they would embrace the Samson option, and strike out at their enemies - all of them - from the grave, with the 200+ nukes they have at Dimona. This would cause skyrocketing global radiation level increases, render Middle Eastern oil untouchable for decades, most likely plunging the globe into a long term economic depression, and could quite possibly breach the tipping point threshhold for nuclear winter.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Sunni countries in the area are also unlikely to allow a Shia nation to be the sole Islamic nuclear power in their region, so one would expect them to obtain their own nuclear arsenals, also. That many nuclear armed Islamist or Islamic majority regimes in the area would be a recipe for nuclear disaster. To simply say let Iran's Hojetiyyist-influenced regime have nukes if they want them is an exceedingly naive, short-sighted and dangerous position.
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #16 on: 2008-05-25 17:01:34 »
[ Hermit : OMG, Our local cretinous troll dumped another of his insanely long, eminently ignorable steaming turds of other's words, without comment or cause and filled with insane and unsustainable assertions in our laps. How fortunate that somebody else, somebody competent and knowledgeable in the field (unlike our troll), should have just contradicted it. Again. Not that I expect the troll to respond, or even read the undoing of the foundation of its delusions about the IAEA, given that it has never shown any comprehension of this issue before. The Iran and the IAEA Reading Primer for Grade I has yet to be released and anything more advanced than that clearly transcends our trolls very limited comprehension, but for the rest of us, another nugget of crunchy goodness from Gordon Prather. ]
An Act of War
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Gordon Prather Dated: 2008-05-25
Just as you thought the chances of the United States going to war with Iran were diminishing (largely because our own Iraqi sock-puppet regime has rejected U.S. accusations that Iran is directly responsible for American soldiers being killed in Iraq and because Director-General ElBaradei continues to report to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency that he can find "no indication" that Iran now has or ever did have a nuclear weapons program) Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, goes to Israel, presumably to help celebrate the 60th anniversary of al-Nakba, but also to discuss "the threat posed by Iran" to Israel.
Do you copy? Iran does not pose a threat to us or our troops in Iraq, but – in Pelosi's view – may somehow pose a threat to Israel?
True, a "breakthrough deal" – reached with the help of Arab mediators – had just been reached in Lebanon between the U.S.-backed government and the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah, ending the country's 18-month political stalemate, giving Hezbollah something of a victory and "veto" power over future government actions.
And, presumably, that is not good news to the Israelis who had already effectively lost the quasi-war fought two years ago with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But, never mind that.
According to Haaretz, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Pelosi that the international community "needed to take more drastic steps to stop Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons."
What efforts to obtain nuclear weapons?
What sections of ElBaradei's (apparently null) reports to the IAEA Board and to the Security Council – the results of years of exhaustive go-almost-anywhere (including some military installations) interview-almost-anyone (including some military officials) inspections – do the Likudniks not understand?
What would it take to convince the paranoids in Israel and elsewhere that Iran's nuclear programs – which have voluntarily been made more transparent to IAEA inspections than any other country's – could never produce a nuclear weapon, so long as those programs are subject to IAEA Safeguards.
Never!
Well, according to Haaretz, Prime Minister Olmert "suggested" that, among other more drastic steps, the US impose a "naval blockade," using U.S. warships, "to limit the movement of Iranian merchant vessels."
Now, Iran is already subject to a third "round" of sanctions, preventing the import into or export from Iran, of goods, many of them commercial items, totally unrelated to Iran's Safeguarded nuclear programs, imposed by the Security Council "in order to strengthen a global response to this serious challenge and threat to international security."
What constitutes a serious challenge and a threat to international security? Why, Iran's IAEA Safeguarded programs, of course.
The threat to international security of Iran's Safeguarded programs in which ElBaradei has repeatedly told the Security Council he can find "no indication" that any materials proscribed by the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons have ever been diverted to a military purpose.
The threat to international security of Iran's Safeguarded uranium-enrichment program the Iranians were forced to undertake, themselves – mining their own ore, converting it to "yellowcake," converting the "yellowcake" to uranium-hexafluoride, developing their own supersonic gas-centrifuge uranium-enrichment devices – all because President Clinton strong-armed Boris Yeltsin into canceling the turn-key Safeguarded uranium-enrichment plant the Russians had agreed to provide Iran, and strong-armed the Chinese into canceling the turn-key Safeguarded uranium-conversion plant they had agreed to provide Iran.
Don't all members of the UN Security Council know all this?
Of course, they do.
[b]In his report last November to the IAEA Board and to the Security Council, ElBaradei included the results of his search through Iran's records, going back decades, said results not in conflict with the justifications the Iranians supplied for the secretive manner in which they were forced – by "some" Members of the Security Council – to pursue the civilian nuclear power fuel-cycle, which both the IAEA Statute and the NPT assure them is their "inalienable right."
In his most recent report ElBaradei was "able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran."
Even for those nuclear "weaponization" studies – alleged to have been done for Iran's military, stored on a laptop computer, allegedly stolen from an Iranian engineer, obtained by Israeli intelligence, given by our intelligence community to the IAEA [ Hermit : Not a confidence inspiring chain of custody to put it mildly! ] – which the IAEA confronted the Iranians with earlier this year, ElBaradei noted that "the Agency has not detected the use of nuclear material in connection with the alleged studies, nor does it have credible information in this regard."
Okay. That should do it. You can study all you want, but you can't make a nuke unless you've got a dozen pounds of weapons-grade plutonium or about ten times that much weapons-grade enriched-uranium. The IAEA bottom line is that the Iranians have not produced, as yet, any of either, nor do they have the capability, as yet, of producing any of either.
The UN's own agency has verified, time and again, that Iranian nuclear programs are entirely "peaceful."
So, ordinarily it would be all right for Presidential candidates, such as Barack Obama, to visit synagogues in this country and declare, as he did last month in Philadelphia and again this week in Florida;
"As president, I will do everything that I can to help (Israel) protect itself ... We will make sure that it can defend itself from any attack, whether it comes from as close as Gaza or as far as Tehran."
But, as Prime Minister Olmert must know, and Speaker Pelosi should have known, a "naval blockade" – which goes beyond the imposition of "sanctions" – involves the interdiction and/or seizure of all civil "merchant vessels" and their cargoes on the high seas. It's an act of war!
Hence, upon Pelosi's return to Washington – perhaps after frantic consultation with State Department officials – Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elsharri denied "there was ever any mention of a US naval blockade of Iranian ports."
Well, someone's lying.
So what the candidates for our presidency must make clear to Americans – most of whom are not paranoid – is actually what they mean when they say will "defend Israel."
Will our next president be willing to blockade Iran, to starve Iranian women and children, to effectively launch a war against Iran because the Likudnik paranoids, here and abroad, consider Iran's Safeguarded nuclear programs a "threat" to Israel?
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #17 on: 2008-05-26 03:01:04 »
[Blunderov] I wasn't too sure whether to post this in this thread but it does seem on topic in the matter of the drum to war. (That rat in the Democratic kitchen, Nancy Pelosi, has also been stirring up trouble in service of her beloved Cretin-in-Chief I see. No surprise there.)
I don't see why Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons. Everybody else seems to have them. Whatever happened to the theory of "Mutually Assured Destruction"? ISTM that a nuclear armed Iran would in fact add stabilty to the region. But perhaps this would not suit certain parties who have their beady little eyes on the hydrocarbons of the region...have to keep these resources out of the the hands of "terrorists" of course. For the good of the world of course.
In one of the most embarrassingly absurd, historically baseless, and astonishingly one-sided speeches any U.S. president has ever given, President Bush compared Iran to Nazi Germany in his speech to Israel's Knesset. In doing so, the president repeated the same diatribes that Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of the neoconservatives, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel's Likud Party, have been making for quite some time.
Said Bush:
"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them [that] they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator [William Borah of Idaho] declared, 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
Bush made his "argument" against "appeasement" only days after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had called for a combination of incentives and pressure to engage Iran. So, as Sen. Barack Obama pointed out, even the president's own defense secretary is apparently an appeaser.
Comparing Iran with the 1939 Nazi Germany is ridiculous. Germany was a powerful, industrialized nation that had been defeated in World War I. It had grievances against the victors who had humiliated it. Germany's culture was such that many Germans blindly followed their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler. Even the eminent physicist and Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg, though no Nazi, worked for the regime. Most importantly, the 1939 Wehrmacht was the most powerful military in the world, backed by Germany's advanced technology, industrial capacity, and a great corps of first-rate scientists. At the point in time Bush was referring to, Germany was invading Poland and had already annexed Austria and devoured Czechoslovakia.
Compare this with Iran, which has neither territorial claims against any nation nor has it attacked its neighbors for 1,000 years, but was the victim of an eight-year war with Iraq, which was encouraged and supported by the U.S. Persian culture is such that few Iranians blindly follow their leaders. In 1905 Iranians set up the first constitutional government in all of Asia and the Middle East. Despite its resources and potential, Iran is only a developing nation, not an advanced industrial power.
Iran's armed forces have been designed to defend the country, without any ability to project power outside the country's borders. The massive presence of U.S. and NATO forces around Iran limits Iran's reach, as do its terrible economy, restless population, and democracy movement. The U.S. and Israel constantly point to Iran's aid to Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah as evidence of its "evil intentions." But with relatively weak armed forces and constant threats from the U.S. and Israel, Iran needs strategic depth to protect its territorial integrity, hence its aid to both Hezbollah and Hamas.
Furthermore, Hamas won the democratic elections of 2006 and is far more popular than Fatah. As Sen. John McCain said then, "They are the government. … It's a new reality in the Middle East.'' And contrary to popular misconceptions, Hezbollah would be just as powerful without Iran's help, because it was formed as a reaction to the invasion of southern Lebanon by Israel in 1978 and 1982, which created hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite refugees and tens of thousands of Shi'ite dead and wounded, while the U.S. and the rest of the West stood by, doing nothing. Hezbollah and Hamas receive aid, not orders, from Iran.
The president brazenly lies when he blames Iran for all the problems that the U.S. and Israel face in the Middle East. Iran did not provoke the U.S. to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, nor did it force the U.S. to support Israeli aggression for decades. These are the main causes of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world. Half of all the foreign fighters in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia, and the rest are from Egypt, Jordan, and other U.S.-supported sunni States, as were the 9/11 terrorists. Almost all the suicide bombers are Sunni, the majority of them Saudis. But instead of confronting Saudi Arabia, President Bush has agreed to supply billions of dollars in advanced weaponry, as well as nuclear technology, to that country.
Surely, Iran has considerable influence in Iraq. It has been supporting the Badr Army and the Mahdi Army of Shi'ite firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr. These groups spent years in Iran when Saddam Hussein was in power. But Iran also supports the government of Nouri al-Maliki. There is a strong rationale behind this. Iran was invaded by Iraq in 1980, so in order to avoid another war with Iraq, Iran wishes to have influence there, regardless of who wins the internal struggle among the various factions. At the same time, though, Iran's influence has its limits because of the historical rivalry between Arabs and Persians.
Worst of all, military attacks on Iran will only consolidate the hardliners' grip on Iran, just when economic problems and political repression are shaking the foundations of their power. President Ahmadinejad is in deep trouble at home, even among his own base. The vast majority of Iran's urban population, and in particular its university students, despise him for his failed economic policies, political repression, and the danger that his hollow rhetoric has created for Iran's national security. In the March elections for the Iranian parliament, he was attacked fiercely not only by the reformists, but also by pragmatic conservatives and former allies. But as Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights advocate and the 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate, said recently in a speech at Barnard College,
"Foreign attacks and threats on the Iranian government will only harm human rights efforts, since the government would act under the guise of 'national security' to suppress those who are seeking more freedom in the country."
In April 2005, when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was still president, Iran made a comprehensive proposal to the U.S., offering to enter serious negotiations and putting all the important issues on the table. The offer was never taken seriously. What is not understood in the U.S. is that, given the deep unpopularity of the hardliners, the absence of an external threat to Iran's national security would make it much easier for democratic groups to push for reforms. Therefore, détente, not war, with the U.S. will make fundamental changes in Iran possible.
President Bush, however, is oblivious to such realities. In his parallel universe, which is completely disconnected from ours, rejecting negotiations with Iran in, of all the places, the Knesset is in America's national interest. In his fantasies, the invasion and destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, his unstinting support for Israel, and a possible war with Iran are all good for the cause of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
How will Iranians react if their nation is attacked by the U.S. and/or Israel? Most Iranians despise the hardliners, but as Ebadi and the author stated in a joint op-ed published by the International Herald Tribune on Jan. 19, 2006,
"A military attack would only inflame nationalist sentiments. Iranians remember the U.S. help to Iraq during its war with Iran. They see the double standards when the United States offers security guarantees and aid to North Korea and advanced nuclear technology to India [and to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain], but nothing but sanctions and threats to Iran.
"Iran is not Iraq: Given the Iranians' fierce nationalism and the Shi'ites' long tradition of martyrdom, any military move on Iran would receive a response that would engulf the entire region in fire."
Thus, the president is playing with fire when he threatens Iran at Israel's behest. In response to a question about how Iran is a threat to the U.S., he once replied, "Its leader wants to destroy Israel." In other words, Bush is willing to order attacks on Iran because of Iran's nonexistent threat to Israel. Shi'ites across the Middle East will not respond kindly.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, in an unusually blunt and detailed report, said Monday that Iran’s suspected research into the development of nuclear weapons remained “a matter of serious concern” and that Iran continued to owe the agency “substantial explanations.”
The nine-page report accused the Iranians of a willful lack of cooperation, particularly in answering allegations that its nuclear program may be intended more for military use than for energy generation.
Part of the agency’s case hinges on 18 documents listed in the report and presented to Iran that, according to Western intelligence agencies, indicate the Iranians have ventured into explosives, uranium processing and a missile warhead design — activities that could be associated with constructing nuclear weapons.
“There are certain parts of their nuclear program where the military seems to have played a role,” said one senior official close to the agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic constraints. He added, “We want to understand why.”
The atomic energy agency’s report highlights the amount of work still to be done before definitive conclusions about the nature of the program can be made, a task that the official associated with the agency said would require months.
Iran’s nuclear program has long been a flashpoint, with critics fearing that suggestions that Iran is developing weapons could embolden factions within the administration who have been pushing for a confrontation with Iran.
Iran has dismissed the documents as “forged” or “fabricated,” claimed that its experiments and projects had nothing to do with a nuclear weapons program and refused to provide documentation and access to its scientists to support its claims.
The report also makes the allegation that Iran is learning to make more powerful centrifuges that are operating faster and more efficiently, the product of robust research and development that have not been fully disclosed to the agency.
That means that the country may be producing enriched uranium — which can be used to make electricity or to produce bombs — faster than expected at the same time as it a replaces its older generation of less reliable centrifuges. Some of the centrifuge components have been produced by Iran’s military, said the report, prepared by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the agency, which is the United Nations nuclear monitor.
The report makes no effort to disguise the agency’s frustration with Iran’s lack of openness. It describes, for example, Iran’s installation of new centrifuges, known as the IR-2 and IR-3 (for Iranian second and third generations) and other modifications at its site at Natanz, as “significant, and as such should have been communicated to the agency.”
The agency also said that during a visit in April, it was denied access to sites where centrifuge components were being manufactured and where research of uranium enrichment was being conducted.
The report does not say how much enriched uranium the Iranians are now producing, but the official connected to the agency said that since December, it was slightly less than 150 kilograms, or 330 pounds, about double the amount they were producing during the same period about 18 months ago.
“The Iranians are certainly being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and they are being petulant and defensive,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now runs the Institute for Science and International Security. “The report lays out what the agency knows, and it is very damning. I’ve never seen it laid out quite like this.”
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the atomic energy agency, however, said that the report vindicated Iran’s nuclear activities. It “is another document that shows Iran’s entire nuclear activities are peaceful,” the semi-official Fars News Agency quoted him as saying.
A National Intelligence Estimate published in December by American intelligence agencies concluded that Iran suspended its work on a weapons design in late 2003, apparently in response to mounting international pressure. That report added that it was uncertain whether the weapons work had resumed. It concluded that work continued on Iran’s missiles and uranium enrichment, the two other steps that would be necessary for Iran either to build and launch a weapon or to announce that it is able to construct one quickly.
The Bush administration, in its waning days, seems powerless to modify Iran’s behavior. The question seems to have been pushed to the future with the forceful disagreements in recent days between the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, and Senator Barack Obama, contending for the Democratic nomination, over whether an American president should negotiate with Iran’s leadership.
Still, Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, announced in Brussels on Monday that he would go to Iran soon — possibly “within the month” — to present a new offer of political, technological, security and trade rewards for Iran if it halts its uranium enrichment program.
Mr. Solana will travel with senior foreign ministry officials from five of the six countries involved in the initiative — Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany — but not the United States, which has refused to hold talks with Iran. The incentives, agreed on by the six countries in London this month but still not made public, repackaged and clarified an incentives package presented to Iran in 2006.
Iran rejected it at the time, saying that relinquishing its uranium enrichment program was non-negotiable. After the London meeting this month, the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said the new package should not cross Iran’s “red line” — shorthand for its uranium-enrichment program.
On May 13, Iran responded with its own package of proposals, calling for new international talks on political, economic and security issues, including its nuclear program and the Arab-Israeli peace process.
The proposal, made in a letter from Mr. Mottaki to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, includes the creation of international fuel production facilities in Iran and other countries — a longstanding goal of Iran — as well as improved supervision of Iran’s nuclear program by the atomic energy agency, which is based in Vienna.
Over the years, the United States and France have led the way in opposing the idea of a fuel-production facility in Iran, contending that it would allow Iranian experts to master the complex process of enriching uranium and to use that knowledge in a secret bomb-making project.
Iran insists its uranium enrichment program is devoted solely to producing fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity.
The report, which was released on Monday to the agency’s 35-country board of directors and the United Nations Security Council, will be formally discussed by the board next week.
A ranking International Atomic Energy Agency official called Tehran's possession of a drawing showing how to make part of an atomic warhead " alarming" Thursday and said the onus is on Iran to prove it had not tried to develop nuclear arms, said diplomats attending a closed briefing.
The U.S. said the evidence detailed by IAEA Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen increased concerns that Tehran had tried to make such weapons.
"Today's briefing showed...strong reasons to suspect that Iran was working covertly and deceitfully at least until recently to build a bomb," Gregory L. Schulte, the chief U.S. delegate to the agency, told reporters.
Rejecting the allegation, Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, Schulte's Iranian counterpart, again dismissed the evidence as "baseless and fabricated documents and papers."
Separately, a senior diplomat suggested the agency wasn't accepting as fact U.S. intelligence estimates that the Islamic Republic stopped active pursuit of nuclear weapons five years ago.
Queried on documents in the agency's possession possibly linked to research in such weapons and bearing dates into early 2004, he told The Associated Press that the IAEA was reserving its judgment on whether they indicated nuclear weapons work past 2003 until it finished its own investigations.
The documents, outlined in an IAEA report forwarded Monday to the U.N. Security Council and agency board members, are part of evidence provided by board member nations to the agency for its investigation into allegations that Iran used the cover of peaceful nuclear activities to conduct research and testing on a nuclear arms program.
One, dated January-February 2004 is linked to high explosives testing of the kind that can be used to detonate a nuclear device. Others, dated into January 2004 - and one as late as March 14 of that year - are part of purported evidence that Iran worked on designs of a missile re-entry vehicle that is normally a part of a nuclear delivery system.
The senior diplomat, who is familiar with agency attempts to investigate the nuclear weapons allegations, said the dates could mean nothing more than a review of activities that ended before 2004 but added the IAEA could make a final judgment only if Iran was forthcoming on requests to explain these and other documents.
A summarized U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, made public late last year, came to the conclusion that Tehran was conducting atomic weapons work but froze such activities in 2003. Other countries, however, believe such activities continued beyond that year, and any Iranian focus on nuclear weapons work in 2004 would at least indicate continued interest past the timeframe outlined in the U.S. intelligence estimate.
At the closed meeting Thursday, Heinonen said about 10 nations had provided intelligence and documentation meant to assist his team in investigating the allegations of hidden nuclear weapons work by Iran, said the diplomats. That marks the first time a precise number of countries was mentioned. The U.S. was the first country to share intelligence with the IAEA to support its allegations, and Tehran has depicted the probe as based on lies fabricated by Washington.
The diplomats quoted Heinonen as saying that Iran's possession of a drawing showing how to mold uranium metal into the shape of a warhead was "alarming" - even though it wasn't the ultimate key to making a nuclear weapon - because it raised questions about why a non-nuclear weapons state would want to have it.
He urged Iran to provide "plausible evidence" to back up its assertions that its high-explosives testing - which fits the pattern used to detonate a nuclear payload - was for non-nuclear purposes.
The briefing followed up on Monday's IAEA report, which said Iran may be withholding information needed to establish whether it tried to make nuclear arms.
The report also said Iran remains defiant of the council's demands that it suspend uranium enrichment and has expanded its operational centrifuges - machines that churn out enriched uranium - by about 500 since the last IAEA report, in February.
The IAEA report noted Iran now had only 3,500 centrifuges and said the few advanced machines actually running were only in a testing phase. Still, a senior U.N. official said Iran's goal of 6,000 machines running by the summer was " pretty much plausible."
Uranium can be used as nuclear reactor fuel or as the core for atomic warheads, depending on the degree of enrichment. Iran says it is interested in enrichment only for its nuclear energy program.
In a report released this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed "serious concern" that the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to conceal details of its nuclear weapons program, even as it defies U.N. demands to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
Meanwhile, presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama – in lieu of a policy for dealing with the growing threat posed by the Islamic Republic – repeats what has become a familiar refrain within his party: Let's talk to Iran.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to talk to an adversary. But Mr. Obama and his supporters should not pretend this is "change" in any real sense. Every U.S. administration in the past 30 years, from Jimmy Carter's to George W. Bush's, has tried to engage in dialogue with Iran's leaders. They've all failed.
Just two years ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proffered an invitation to the Islamic Republic for talks, backed by promises of what one of her advisers described as "juicy carrots" with not a shadow of a stick. At the time, I happened to be in Washington. Early one morning, one of Ms. Rice's assistants read the text of her statement (which was to be issued a few hours later) to me over the phone, asking my opinion. I said the move won't work, but insisted that the statement should mention U.S. concern for human- rights violations in Iran.
"We don't wish to set preconditions," was the answer. "We could raise all issues once they have agreed to talk." I suppose Ms. Rice is still waiting for Iran's mullahs to accept her invitation, even while Mr. Obama castigates her for not wanting to talk.
The Europeans invented the phrase "critical dialogue" to describe their approach to Iran. They negotiated with Tehran for more than two decades, achieving nothing.
The Arabs, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been negotiating with the mullahs for years – the Egyptians over restoring diplomatic ties cut off by Tehran, and the Saudis on measures to stop Shiite-Sunni killings in the Muslim world – with nothing to show for it. Since 1993, the Russians have tried to achieve agreement on the status of the Caspian Sea through talks with Tehran, again without results.
The reason is that Iran is gripped by a typical crisis of identity that afflicts most nations that pass through a revolutionary experience. The Islamic Republic does not know how to behave: as a nation-state, or as the embodiment of a revolution with universal messianic pretensions. Is it a country or a cause?
A nation-state wants concrete things such as demarcated borders, markets, access to natural resources, security, influence, and, of course, stability – all things that could be negotiated with other nation-states. A revolution, on the other hand, doesn't want anything in particular because it wants everything.
In 1802, when Bonaparte embarked on his campaign of world conquest, the threat did not come from France as a nation-state but from the French Revolution in its Napoleonic reincarnation. In 1933, it was Germany as a cause, the Nazi cause, that threatened the world. Under communism, the Soviet Union was a cause and thus a threat. Having ceased to be a cause and re-emerged a nation-state, Russia no longer poses an existential threat to others.
The problem that the world, including the U.S., has today is not with Iran as a nation-state but with the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary cause bent on world conquest under the guidance of the "Hidden Imam." The following statement by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme leader" of the Islamic Republic – who Mr. Obama admits has ultimate power in Iran -- exposes the futility of the very talks Mr. Obama proposes: "You have nothing to say to us. We object. We do not agree to a relationship with you! We are not prepared to establish relations with powerful world devourers like you! The Iranian nation has no need of the United States, nor is the Iranian nation afraid of the United States. We . . . do not accept your behavior, your oppression and intervention in various parts of the world."
So, how should one deal with a regime of this nature? The challenge for the U.S. and the world is finding a way to help Iran absorb its revolutionary experience, stop being a cause, and re-emerge as a nation-state.
Whenever Iran has appeared as a nation-state, others have been able to negotiate with it, occasionally with good results. In Iraq, for example, Iran has successfully negotiated a range of issues with both the Iraqi government and the U.S. Agreement has been reached on conditions under which millions of Iranians visit Iraq each year for pilgrimage. An accord has been worked out to dredge the Shatt al-Arab waterway of three decades of war debris, thus enabling both neighbors to reopen their biggest ports. Again acting as a nation-state, Iran has secured permission for its citizens to invest in Iraq.
When it comes to Iran behaving as the embodiment of a revolutionary cause, however, no agreement is possible. There will be no compromise on Iranian smuggling of weapons into Iraq. Nor will the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps agree to stop training Hezbollah-style terrorists in Shiite parts of Iraq. Iraq and its allies should not allow the mullahs of Tehran to export their sick ideology to the newly liberated country through violence and terror.
As a nation-state, Iran is not concerned with the Palestinian issue and has no reason to be Israel's enemy. As a revolutionary cause, however, Iran must pose as Israel's arch-foe to sell the Khomeinist regime's claim of leadership to the Arabs.
As a nation, Iranians are among the few in the world that still like the U.S. As a revolution, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. Last month, Tehran hosted an international conference titled "A World Without America." Indeed, since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, Iran has returned to a more acute state of revolutionary hysteria. Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to truly believe the "Hidden Imam" is coming to conquer the world for his brand of Islam. He does not appear to be interested in the kind of "carrots" that Secretary Rice was offering two years ago and Mr. Obama is hinting at today.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is talking about changing the destiny of mankind, while Mr. Obama and his foreign policy experts offer spare parts for Boeings or membership in the World Trade Organization. Perhaps Mr. Obama is unaware that one of Mr. Ahmadinejad's first acts was to freeze Tehran's efforts for securing WTO membership because he regards the outfit as "a nest of conspiracies by Zionists and Americans."
Mr. Obama wavers back and forth over whether he will talk directly to Mr. Ahmadinejad or some other representative of the Islamic Republic, including the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Moreover, he does not make it clear which of the two Irans – the nation-state or the revolutionary cause – he wishes to "engage." A misstep could legitimize the Khomeinist system and help it crush Iranians' hope of return as a nation-state.
The Islamic Republic might welcome unconditional talks, but only if the U.S. signals readiness for unconditional surrender. Talk about talking to Iran and engaging Mr. Ahmadinejad cannot hide the fact that, three decades after Khomeinist thugs raided the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, America does not understand what is really happening in Iran.
Mr. Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night: Iran From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad," will be published later this year by Encounter Books.
[Salamantis] Notice that the posts following mine have nothing to do with the rest of the posts, or with the thread topic. It seems that when some folks lose a debate, they do not acknowledge same; they merely change the subject - even if the subject under discussion was one they chose in the first place.
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #19 on: 2008-06-11 17:55:58 »
McBama joins the AIPAC choir, but O'Cain is still far worse
[ Hermit : US support for Israeli Apartheid remains the most disgusting sight in the world - except possibly to watch the wannabe leaders of the US grovelling to AIPAC. ]
The Iran Trap
Source: TruthDig Authors: Chris Hedges Dated: 2008-06-08
The failure by Barack Obama to chart another course in the Middle East, to defy the Israel lobby and to denounce the Bush administration’s inexorable march toward a conflict with Iran is a failure to challenge the collective insanity that has gripped the political leadership in the United States and Israel.
Obama, in a miscalculation that will have grave consequences, has given his blessing to the widening circle of violence and abuse of the Palestinians by Israel and, most dangerously, to those in the Bush White House and Jerusalem now plotting a war against Iran. He illustrates how the lust for power is morally corrosive. And while he may win the White House, by the time he takes power he will be trapped in George Bush’s alternative reality.
We need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to stay the hand of Israel, which is building more settlements - including a new plan to put 800 housing units in occupied East Jerusalem - and imposing draconian measures to physically break the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. We need, most of all, to prevent a war with Iran.
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, in a letter to President Bush on May 8, threatened to open impeachment proceedings if Bush attacked Iran. The letter is a signal that planning for strikes on Iran is under way and pronounced.
“Our concerns in this area have been heightened by more recent events,” Conyers wrote. “The resignation in mid-March of Admiral William J. ‘Fox’ Fallon from the head of U.S. Central Command, which was reportedly linked to a magazine article that portrayed him as the only person who might stop your Administration from waging preemptive war against Iran, has renewed widespread concerns that your Administration is unilaterally planning for military action against that country. This is despite the fact that the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003, a stark reversal of previous Administration assessments.”
The administration, in rhetoric that is eerily similar to that used to build the case for a war against Iraq, asserts that the Iranian Quds Force is arming anti-American groups in Iraq and providing them with high-tech roadside bombs and sophisticated rockets. It dismisses the National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program. The White House has not provided evidence to back up its claims. I suspect it never will. And when Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz tells the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth an attack on Iran is “unavoidable” if Tehran does not halt its alleged nuclear weapons program, what he is really telling us is we should prepare for war.
Conyers’ threat is too little too late, especially if the Bush White House, possibly assisted by Israel, launches airstrikes on some or all of 1,000 selected Iranian targets in the final weeks of the administration. [ Hermit : And a "usually reliable Whitehouse source" has claimed that "if Obama is elected in November, Bush will attack Iran immediately". If McCain is elected, then it will be "left to the next president"] .But it is an effort. Conyers tried.
This is more than we can say for the presumptive Democratic nominee. Obama went before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Wednesday and said he will stand with the right-wing Israeli government, even if this means backing an attack on Iran.
“As president I will use all elements of American power to pressure Iran,” he said. “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything.”
Obama went on to blame the Palestinians for the conflict, although the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed in 2007 was 40 to 1. This is an increase from 30 to 1 in 2006 and 4 to 1 in 2000-2005.
“I will bring to the White House an unshakable commitment to Israel’s security. That starts with ensuring Israel’s qualitative military advantage, ...” Obama told AIPAC. “I will ensure Israel can defend itself from any threat, from Gaza to Tehran. ...”
Obama spoke about Israelis whose houses were damaged by the crude rockets, most made out of old pipes, fired from Gaza on Israeli towns. He never mentioned the Israeli siege of Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, or that Israel was deploying fighter jets and helicopters to attack densely crowded refugee camps with missiles and iron fragmentation bombs or that it had cut off food and fuel. He ignored the steady expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. He called for Jerusalem to become the “undivided capital” of the Jewish state, erasing Arab East Jerusalem from the map in contravention of international law. East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are internationally recognized as occupied Palestinian territories, which Israel took over in 1967. Obama’s stance is the moral equivalent of assuring the Johannesburg government during the apartheid era that one would support their repressive efforts to punish the restive blacks in the townships. [ Hermit : Not really a good parallel here. It might have been more equivalent to giving the South Africans jets, helicopters, bombs and missiles to use against the black population, but only if they had first moved them into concentration camps and starved them into submission. As the Israelis have already done - and the Americans are doing. And then to have blamed the blacks for bringing the violence upon themselves if they had attempted to fight back. As is also happening. ]
The deterioration of the conflict in Israel, which would be accelerated by airstrikes on Iran and an ensuring regional war, will propel us into the Armageddon-type scenario in the Middle East relished by the lunatic fringes of the radical Christian right. And so, with Obama’s enthusiastic endorsement, we barrel toward a Dr. Strangelove self-immolation. No one will be able to say we did not go out with a spectacular show of firepower, gore and death. Our European and Middle Eastern allies, who are numb with consternation over our death spiral, are frantically trying to reach out to Tehran diplomatically.
The instant we attack Iran, oil prices will double, perhaps triple. [ Hermit : This is an underestimate. The cost of oil will almost certainly hit $500/bbl, and the impact will be most severe on Europe, China and India. Their economies will collapse with a "knock-on" effect destroying the value of the dollar. This will probably result in the dismantling of the pretense of constitutional government in the USA ] This price increase will devastate the American economy. The ensuing retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, will leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, will see an attack on Iran as a war against Shiism. They will turn with rage and violence on us and our allies. Hezbollah will renew attacks on northern Israel. And the localized war in Iraq will become a long, messy and protracted regional war that, by the time it is done, will most likely end the American empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins.
The Israeli leadership, like the Bush White House, is increasingly bellicose and threatening. The Israeli prime minister, after a 90-minute meeting with Bush in the White House on Wednesday, said the two leaders were of one mind. “We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat,” Ehud Olmert said. “I left with a lot less questions marks [than] I had entered with regarding the means, the timetable restrictions and American resoluteness to deal with the problem. George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term in the White House.”
This time around, unlike about the war with Iraq, the Washington bureaucracy, loathed by the Bush White House, did not remain silent and complicit. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program released last Dec. 3 distinguished Iran’s enrichment of uranium at Natanz and Arak from its formal nuclear weapons program, which it said had halted in 2003 after the American invasion of Iraq. Adm. Fallon, who put his country and his integrity before his career, spoke out against a war with Iran, tried to stop it and lost his job as the head of CENTCOM. He has been replaced with Gen. David H. Petraeus, whose devotion to his career admits no such moral impediments.
“ ... There is no greater threat to Israel or peace than Iran,” Obama assured AIPAC. “This audience is made up of both Republicans and Democrats. And the enemies of Israel should have no doubt that regardless of party, Americans stand shoulder to shoulder in support of Israel’s security. ... The Iran regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race and ... its president denies the Holocaust and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. ... [M]y goal will be to eliminate this threat.” [ Hermit : As I have repeatedly demonstrated here, this litany of lies is a Zionist invention. It is quite clear to a regular reader of the Israeli press that even Israelis do not accept these ludicrous charges as being true. ]
Barack Obama, when we need sane leadership the most, has proved feckless and weak. He, and the Democratic leadership, is as morally bankrupt as those preparing to ignite our funeral pyre in the Middle East. [ Hermit : Did anyone imagine that anyone electable in the USA could possibly be anything else but "morally bankrupt"? And of course, the funeral pyre was lit many, many years ago. The Middle East is merely a final flourish before the lights are extinguished on the not quite successful transition to empire by the Disunited States.]
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
<snip> [ Hermit : Did anyone imagine that anyone electable in the USA could possibly be anything else but "morally bankrupt"? </snip>
[Blunderov] Sometime back the (former) cricketer Jeffery Boycott went to Australia to commentate on a test series. When he arrived he was asked by the immigration authorities there "whether he had a criminal record?" He replied that he had not realised that this was still a requirement for admission to that country. He was turned away - or so the story goes.
Our favourite and ever helpful General JC Christian (Patriot) brings succour, if that's the word I want, to the much oppressed and sadly abused John McCain (Wingnut). Islamoterrocommypinkists have attacked our hero for his cavalier attitude towards women. This must be stopped - preferably pre-emptively.
Although I applaud your constitutional amendment to deny homosexuals the special right of marrying the people they love, I'm concerned about your failure to address the issue of when heterosexual marriages should end. By omitting any mention of justifiable divorce from this amendment, you seem the be suggesting that marriage should be an irrevocable act. I fear that such a stance may harm Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign.
Opponents to the amendment will certainly ask why you would cite homosexual unions as a threat to marriage while ignoring divorce. They are likely to point to Sen. McCain's marriage history as an example of this.
You can blunt such criticism by adding what I call the "McCain Justification" to the measure. I've drafted some language to help you:
Inasmuch as marriage is a sacred covenant between a man, a woman, and Our Lord Jesus, no divorce shall be granted in the State of California unless the wife is crippled in a car accident.
I like this language because it provides cover for Sen. McCain in two ways. first, it gives him an excuse for leaving his wife because he did not want to deal with her paralysis (it also works metaphorically as a justification for his vote to support torture after it became politically inconvenient for him to oppose it .)
Secondly, it provides him with cover for the way he treats his current wife. His psychological abuse of her--calling her a trollop and a cunt, etc--would not be seen as being an offense so serious it would justify divorce. And perhaps even more importantly, it would send a signal to the women of California that patriarchy is back, just like God intended.
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #21 on: 2008-06-13 10:15:26 »
The General's sensible comments not withstanding, given that the USA's constitution does not refer to marriage, this is one of those areas which is covered by the 9th and 10th amendments. In this case, I suggest that it devolves to "the people." As all of the US laws I have seen relating to marriage can be shown to devolve from Judeo-Christian sources, I suggest that all are de facto unconstitutional under the establishment clause. Proposed amendments can't fix this problem, they can only highlight the fact that the constitution is no longer particularly relevant to the governance of these Disunited States.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #22 on: 2008-06-20 02:49:18 »
Ron Paul Claims Pelosi Spiked Iran Bill
[ Hermit : The lobby strikes again. Democans as vulnerable or more to AIPAC as Republicrats. ]
Source: News Max Authors: Rick Pedraza Dated: 2008-06-18
Representative Ron Paul says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed a section from a bill passed by Congress which would have barred the U.S. from going to war with Iran without a congressional vote, claiming she did so at the behest of the leadership of Israel and AIPAC.
Paul, a former Republican presidential contender who formally removed himself from the party’s nomination race last week, makes the allegation on C-SPAN during a recently held foreign policy conference in Virginia.
Paul says Pelosi’s first act as House Speaker in 2006 was to “deliberately” remove a portion of a legislative spending bill which said the United States “can't go to war with Iran without getting approval from Congress.”
According to Paul, Pelosi and her allies in the chamber's Democratic leadership initially accepted the bill designed to outline an Iraq exit strategy, but during a revision of the legislation excluded the statement regarding the need for congressional approval of any military assault on the neighboring country of Iran.
“She [Pelosi] removed it deliberately,” Paul says. “And then, the astounding thing is, when asked why, she said the leadership in Israel asked her to. That was in the newspaper, that was in 'The Washington Post,' that she was asked by AIPAC and others not to do that."
Paul implies Pelosi, desperate to advance her flawed spending legislation, bargained away the proposal that would have been the House leadership's primary vehicle for challenging the administration's policies in the region.
[color=yellow]According to John Nichols, who covered the story about Pelosi’s capitulation at the time for “The Nation,” Pelosi was "under pressure from some conservative members of her caucus, and from lobbyists associated with neoconservative groups that want war with Iran, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).”
Paul's allegation is corroborated by 'The Asia Times', which in another article published at the time says AIPAC was strongly against attaching "a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would require President Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option 'off the table.' The provision was killed."
The article also cites Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, as saying [Pelosi's] decision was due to AIPAC.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #23 on: 2008-06-20 13:33:42 »
How to silence that Iran war drumbeat War is not inevitable. Bold, transparent diplomacy can work.
Source: The Christian Science Monitor Authors: John K. Cooley (John K. Cooley is a former Monitor correspondent who covered the Middle East for more than 40 years. His latest book is "Currency Wars.") Dated: 2008-06-18 Dateline: Greece, Athens
How Iran would retaliate if it comes to war Military analysts say the Islamic Republic would strike back in unconventional ways – targeting American interests in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Source: The Christian Science Monitor Authors: Scott Peterson (Staff writer, The Christian Science Monitor) Dated: 2008-06-20 Dateline: Turkey, Istanbul
Increasing signs that either Israel or the US might attack Iran before President Bush leaves office have many people in Europe, the Middle East, and around the world on edge.
Whether the rumblings are real or overinflated rumors, it's time to reverse any momentum that could unleash a potentially calamitous Middle East conflict, killing thousands, sending oil prices to $200 a barrel and beyond, and accentuating global recession.
After talks with Mr. Bush on his tour through Europe, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown didn't mention war explicitly, but did say that European states would agree to impose new financial sanctions on Tehran. Bush noted that "all options are on the table," and that the ball was in Tehran's court.
Tehran, meanwhile, seems to continue to ignore the threat of sanctions.
Beyond official statements, the latest clues to war parallel proposed and actual sanctions against Iran. Immediately after a high-profile visit to Washington earlier this month, Israeli cabinet minister Saul Mofaz publicly called an Israeli attack on Iran "unavoidable" unless Iran reined in its nuclear activities.
Members of a Bush delegation in mid-May reportedly assured Israeli officials in secret that a US attack on Iran was planned, according to Israeli Army Radio and in The Jerusalem Post as well as in American blogs and websites.
Also last month, the Asia Times claimed that US Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California and Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana were given classified briefings about a planned US strike – not on Iran's nuclear sites but on headquarters of its Revolutionary Guard Corps. The purpose, the paper claimed, was to "send a message" to halt Iranian support for anti-US militias in Iraq. Offices for both senators vigorously denied the report.
To avoid further inflaming this kind of talk, the West must end Iran's race to nuclear weapons – not by force, but by bold transparent, and imaginative diplomacy.
This should include direct and comprehensive US-Iranian talks on the basic issues that have plagued Washington-Tehran relations since the Islamic Republic overthrew the late Shah in 1979 and the ensuing hostage crisis.
One immediate step the Bush administration could (but most probably won't) take is to make absolutely clear its intensions regarding long term presence in Iraq. Both Iraq – which is worried about its sovereignty– and Iran – worried about military threats – are anxious about the possibility of permanent US bases there.
Washington has forsworn such bases, but further reassurances are needed.
More realistically, the most powerful and technologically advanced nations, including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and China, should join in offering Iran much more cooperation in peaceful nuclear and other energy fields that would finally induce it to abandon uncontrolled enrichment of uranium or plutonium production and any related weapons programs. Though such offers have been periodically on the table for years, they can be effective now if we repeat and improve them, and make them more detailed.
Although nearly unnoticed in Western media, Iran made an official offer to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in May involving a package of "comprehensive negotiations" on everything from the nuclear issue to general disarmament and help toward a Palestinian-Israeli settlement. If this were taken seriously and acted on, the West could stymie Iran's dangerous growing isolation.
To ease tensions, both US presidential candidates should specifically renounce plans for permanent US bases and presence in Iraq. As US historian William Pfaff recently wrote in his column, insisting on a permanent presence in Iraq would "turn Iraq into an American satellite state." This would force Tehran and other neighbors to regard Iraq as a threat and provide incentive to speed nuclear weapons activity.
The veracity of Iran's protestations about its purely peaceful goals has been shadowed by the most recent report from UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Years of US and UN sanctions haven't made Tehran change its policies. Why would it do so now?
In fact, some of the big Western banks have acceded to US demands to curb credits to Iran, hitting imports of products from refrigerators to children's toys. But Iranian importers have now turned to Chinese and smaller Western banks. What Iran is discovering is that it can deal somewhat successfully regardless.
What's more, Iran is a major regional power. By defeating its enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Afghan Taliban, the US – helped by Iran in both cases – has greatly strengthened this power.
By reopening a US diplomatic mission in Tehran, dropping sanctions except those involving military technology, and improving the old offers of Western and Russian IAEA-supervised peaceful nuclear technology, the US could help avert intensified tensions or an actual war.
The wisest path to peace would be to encourage rather than discourage Western investment in Iran's oil – natural gas and other (nonmilitary) industries – and engage immediately in direct, top-level dialogue with Iran's leaders.
We don't have to further back ourselves into a corner, from which neither the West nor Iran is able to come out without a fight.
Pressure is building on Iran. This week Europe agreed to new sanctions and President Bush again suggested something more serious – possible military strikes [ Hermit : Of course this is a breach of International Law and a Constitutional crime, but as the Bush unregime has repeatedly proven, nobody cares ] – if the Islamic Republic doesn't bend to the will of the international community on its nuclear program.
But increasingly military analysts are warning of severe consequences if the US begins a shooting war with Iran. While Iranian forces are no match for American technology on a conventional battlefield, Iran has shown that it can bite back in unconventional ways.
Iranian networks in Iraq and Afghanistan could imperil US interests there; American forces throughout the Gulf region could be targeted by asymmetric methods and lethal rocket barrages; and Iranian partners across the region – such as Hezbollah in Lebanon – could be mobilized to engage in an anti-US fight.
Iran's response could also be global, analysts say, but the scale would depend on the scale of the US attack. "One very important issue from a US intelligence perspective, [the Iranian reaction] is probably more unpredictable than the Al Qaeda threat," says Magnus Ranstorp at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm.
"I doubt very much our ability to manage some of the consequences," says Mr. Ranstorp, noting that Iranian revenge attacks in the past have been marked by "plausible deniability" and have had global reach.
"If you attack Iran you are unleashing a firestorm of reaction internally that will only strengthen revolutionary forces, and externally in the region," says Ranstorp. "It's a nightmare scenario for any contingency planner, and I think you really enter the twilight zone if you strike Iran."
Though the US military has since early 2007 accused [ Hermit : It is important to note that these accusations have been without evidence, and as we have seen, on those occassions when evidence was claimed, the US military occupation of Iraq has been seriously embarrassed. ] Iran's Qods Force – an elite element of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – of providing anti-US militias in Iraq with lethal roadside bombs, and of training and backing "special groups" in actions that the US government alleges have cost "thousands" of lives, US commanders have played down Iran's military capabilities.
Even Admiral William Fallon, who publicly opposed a US strike on Iran before he resigned in April, dismissed Iran as a military threat. "Get serious," Adm. Fallon told Esquire in March. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them." [ Hermit : This ignores the fact that in recent war games, officers managing an Iranian response to an American attack (Ref Team) have repeatedly and highly embarrassingly defeated the American attackers (Blue Team) ] .
But that has not kept Iran from rhetorical chest-beating, with an active military manpower of 540,000 – the largest in the Middle East – dependent on some of the lowest per capita defense spending in the region. Iran "can deal fatal blows to aggressor America by unpredictable and creative tactical moves," the senior commander Brig. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid said in late May. "It is meaningless to back down before an enemy who has targeted the roots of our existence."
Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei also warned of far-reaching revenge in 2006. "The Americans should know that if they assault Iran, their interests will be harmed anywhere in the world that is possible," he said. "The Iranian nation will respond to any blow with double the intensity."
Analysts say Iran has a number of tools to make good on those threats and take pride in taking on a more powerful enemy. "This is not something they are shying away from," says Alex Vatanka, a Middle East security analyst at Jane's Information Group in Washington.
"They say: 'Conventional warfare is not something we can win against the US, but we have other assets in the toolbox,' " says Mr. Vatanka, noting that the IRGC commander appointed last fall has been "marketed as this genius behind asymmetric warfare doctrine."
"What they are really worried about is the idea of massive aerial attacks on literally thousands of targets inside Iran," says Vatanka, also an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute. "Their reading of America's intentions in that scenario would be twofold: One is to obviously dismantle as much as possible the nuclear program; and [the other], indirectly try to weaken the [Islamic] regime."
Any US-Iran conflict would push up oil prices, and though Iran could disrupt shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, its weak economy depends on oil revenues.
But nearby US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf provide a host of targets. Iran claimed last October that it could rain down 11,000 rockets upon "the enemy" within one minute of an attack and that rate "would continue."
Further afield, Israel is within range of Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, and Hezbollah claims its rockets – enhanced and resupplied by Iran since the 2006 war to an estimated 30,000 – can now hit anywhere in the Jewish state, including its nuclear plant at Dimona.
Closer to home, Iran has honed a swarming tactic, in which small and lightly armed speedboats come at far larger warships from different directions. A classified Pentagon war game in 2002 simulated just such an attack and in it the Navy lost 16 major warships, according to a report in The New York Times last January.
"The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack," Lt. Gen. K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who commanded the swarming force, told the Times. "The whole thing was over in five, maybe 10 minutes." [ Hermit : In addition, the US supply lines in Iraq are highly vulnerable to interception, and the US forces and ancillaries positioned in Iraq are likely to become hostages in the event of a strike unless they are first withdrawn. The use of missiles against oil infrastructure throughout the Middle East and possible use of bacteriological agents against oil supplies may also play a significant role in an Iranian response which would probably have a permanent effect on the Western ability to project power. Additional massive vulnerabilities exist throughout the world and the US itself to reprisal actions - particularly actions designed to inflict maximal economic damage. Should this nightmare scenario come to pass, it is possible that other players will act simultaneously, quite likely independently, to take advantage of the US's current inability to respond effectively.]
During the 1990s, Iranian agents were believed to be behind the assassinations of scores of regime opponents in Europe, and German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Iran's intelligence minister.
Iran and Hezbollah are alleged to have collaborated in the May 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in revenge for Israel's killing of a Hezbollah leader months before. Argentine prosecutors charge that they jointly struck again in 1994, bombing a Jewish community center in the Argentine capital that killed 85, one month after Israel attacked a Hezbollah base in Lebanon. [ Hermit : This has previously been examined here and the Argentinian claims do not appear to be credible. ]
With some 30,000 on the payroll by one count, Iranian intelligence "is a superpower in intelligence terms in the region; they have global reach because of their reconnaissance ability and quite sophisticated ways of inflicting pain," says Ranstorp. "They have been expanding their influence.… Who would have predicted that Argentina would be the area that Hezbollah and the Iranians collectively would respond?"
Past examples show that "Tehran recognizes that at times its interest are best served by restraint," says a report on consequences of a strike on Iran published this week by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
But Iran could target the US, too, depending on the magnitude of any US strike. "Iran's capacity for terror and subversion remains one of its most potent levers in the event of a confrontation with the United States," says the report, adding that "success" in delaying Iran's nuclear programs could backfire.
If "US and world opinion were so angered by the strikes that they refused to support further pressure against Iran's nuclear ambitions, then prevention could paradoxically [eventually ensure] Iran's open pursuit of nuclear weapons," concludes the report.
And the long list of unconventional tactics should not be taken for granted in Tehran, says Vatanka, noting that the Islamic system's top priority is survival.
"So the Iranians have to be careful," says Vatanka. "Just because the US doesn't have the will right now, or the ability to produce the kind of stick that they would fear, doesn't mean the way of confrontation is going to pay off for them in the long run." [ Hermit : Of course, energy independence is already a vulnerability and becoming worse. The impact of American pressure on Iran has convinced it that it must own the full fuel cycle or remain forever vulnerable. So in a sense, US tactics have now created the situation where the monitored and safeguarded Iranian nuclear programs are causing immense pressure on Iran. The next likely step will be for Iran to withdraw from the treaties and monitoring programs and by doing so, massively reduce their vulnerability to attack on known locations. ]
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #24 on: 2008-06-21 00:22:50 »
Bomb Iran? What's to Stop Us?
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Ray McGovern Dated: 2008-06-20
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years – from the John F. Kennedy administration to that of George H. W. Bush.
Unlike the attack on Iraq five years ago, to deal with Iran there need be no massing of troops. And, with the propaganda buildup already well under way, there need be little, if any, forewarning before shock and awe and pox – in the form of air and missile attacks – begin.
This time it will be largely the Air Force's show, punctuated by missile and air strikes by the Navy. Israeli-American agreement has now been reached at the highest level; the armed forces planners, plotters and pilots are working out the details.
Emerging from a 90-minute White House meeting with President George W. Bush on June 4, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the two leaders were of one mind:
"We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat. I left with a lot less question marks [than] I had entered with regarding the means, the timetable restrictions, and American resoluteness to deal with the problem. George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House."
Does that sound like a man concerned that Bush is just bluff and bluster?
A member of Olmert's delegation noted that same day that the two countries had agreed to cooperate in case of an attack by Iran, and that "the meetings focused on 'operational matters' pertaining to the Iranian threat." So bring 'em on!
A show of hands please. How many believe Iran is about to attack the U.S. or Israel?
You say you missed Olmert's account of what Bush has undertaken to do? So did I. We are indebted to intrepid journalist Chris Hedges for including the quote in his article of June 8, "The Iran Trap."
We can perhaps be excused for missing Olmert's confident words about "Israel's best friend" that week. Your attention – like mine – may have been riveted on the June 5 release of the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding administration misrepresentations of pre-Iraq-war intelligence – the so-called "Phase II" investigation (also known, irreverently, as the "Waiting-for-Godot Study").
Better late than never, I suppose.
Oversight?
Yet I found myself thinking: It took them five years, and that is what passes for oversight? Yes, the president and vice president and their courtiers lied us into war. And now a bipartisan report could assert that fact formally; and committee chair Jay Rockefeller could sum it up succinctly:
"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."
But as I listened to Senator Rockefeller, I had this sinking feeling that in five or six years time, those of us still around will be listening to a very similar post mortem looking back on an even more disastrous attack on Iran.
My colleagues and I in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) issued repeated warnings, before the invasion of Iraq, about the warping of intelligence. And our memoranda met considerable resonance in foreign media.
We could get no ink or airtime, however, in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) in the U.S. Nor can we now.
In a same-day critique of Colin Powell's unfortunate speech to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003, we warned the president to widen his circle of advisers "beyond those clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
It was a no-brainer for anyone who knew anything about intelligence, the Middle East, and the brown noses leading intelligence analysis at the CIA.
Former U.N. senior weapons inspector and former Marine major, Scott Ritter, and many others were saying the same thing. But none of us could get past the president's praetorian guard to drop a memo into his in-box, so to speak. Nor can we now.
The 'Iranian Threat'
However much the same warnings are called for now with respect to Iran, there is even less prospect that any contrarians could puncture and break through what former White House spokesman Scott McClellan calls the president's "bubble."
By all indications, Vice President Dick Cheney and his huge staff continue to control the flow of information to the president.
But, you say, the president cannot be unaware of the far-reaching disaster an attack on Iran would bring?
Well, this is a president who admits he does not read newspapers, but rather depends on his staff to keep him informed. And the memos Cheney does brief to Bush pooh-pooh the dangers.
This time no one is saying we will be welcomed as liberators, since the planning does not include – officially, at least – any U.S. boots on the ground.
Besides, even on important issues like the price of gasoline, the performance of the president's staff has been spotty.
Think back on the White House press conference of Feb. 28, when Bush was asked what advice he would give to Americans facing the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline.
"Wait, what did you just say?" the president interrupted. "You're predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline?...That's interesting. I hadn't heard that."
A poll in January showed that nearly three-quarters of Americans were expecting $4-a-gallon gas. That forecast was widely reported in late February, and discussed by the White House press secretary at the media briefing the day before the president's press conference.
Here's the alarming thing: Unlike Iraq, which was prostrate after the Gulf War and a dozen years of sanctions, Iran can retaliate in a number of dangerous ways, launching a war for which our forces are ill-prepared.
The lethality, intensity and breadth of ensuing hostilities will make the violence in Iraq look, in comparison, like a volleyball game between St. Helena's High School and Mount St. Ursula.
Cheney's Brainchild
Attacking Iran is Vice President Dick Cheney's brainchild, if that is the correct word.
Cheney proposed launching air strikes last summer on Iranian Revolutionary Guards bases, but was thwarted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff who insisted that would be unwise, according to J. Scott Carpenter, a senior State Department official at the time.
Chastened by the unending debacle in Iraq, this time around Pentagon officials reportedly are insisting on a "policy decision" regarding "what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks," according to Carpenter.
Serious concerns include the vulnerability of the critical U.S. supply line from Kuwait to Baghdad, our inability to reinforce and the eventual possibility that the U.S. might be forced into a choice between ignominious retreat and using, or threatening to use, "mini-nukes."
Pentagon opposition was confirmed in a July 2007 commentary by former Bush adviser Michael Gerson, who noted the "fear of the military leadership" that Iran would have "escalation dominance" in any conflict with the U.S.
Writing in the Washington Post last July, Gerson indicated that "escalation dominance" means, "in a broadened conflict, the Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than we complicate theirs."
The Joint Chiefs also have opposed the option of attacking Iran's nuclear sites, according to former Iran specialist at the National Security Council, Hillary Mann, who has close ties with senior Pentagon officials.
Mann confirmed that Adm. William Fallon joined the Joint Chiefs in strongly opposing such an attack, adding that he made his opposition known to the White House, as well.
The outspoken Fallon was forced to resign in March, and will be replaced as CENTCOM commander by Gen. David Petraeus – apparently in September. Petraeus has already demonstrated his penchant to circumvent the chain of command in order to do Cheney's bidding (by making false claims about Iranian weaponry in Iraq, for example).
In sum, a perfect storm seems to be gathering in late summer or early fall.
Controlled Media
The experience of those of us whose job it was to analyze the controlled media of the Soviet Union and China for insights into Russian and Chinese intentions have been able to put that experience to good use in monitoring our own controlled media as they parrot the party line.
Suffice it to say that the FCM is already well embarked, a la Iraq, on its accustomed mission to provide stenographic services for the White House to indoctrinate Americans on the "threat" from Iran and prepare them for the planned air and missile attacks.[/b]
At least this time we are spared the "mushroom cloud" bugaboo. Neither Bush nor Cheney wish to call attention, even indirectly, to the fact that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded last November that Iran had stopped nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 and had not resumed it as of last year.
In a pre-FCM age, it would have been looked on as inopportune, at the least, to manufacture intelligence to justify another war hard on the heels of a congressional report that on Iraq the administration made significant claims not supported by the intelligence.
But (surprise, surprise!) the very damning Senate Intelligence Committee report got meager exposure in the media.
So far it has been a handful of senior military officers that have kept us from war with Iran. It hardly suffices to give them vocal encouragement, or to warn them that the post WW-II Nuremberg Tribunal ruled explicitly that "just-following-orders" is no defense when war crimes are involved.
And still less when the "supreme international crime" – a war of aggression is involved.
Senior officers trying to slow the juggernaut lumbering along toward an attack on Iran have been scandalized watching what can only be described as unconscionable dereliction of duty in the House of Representatives, which the Constitution charges with the duty of impeaching a president, vice president or other senior official charged with high crimes and misdemeanors.
Where Are You, Conyers?
In 2005, before John Conyers became chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, he introduced a bill to explore impeaching the president and was asked by Lewis Lapham of Harpers why he was for impeachment then. He replied:
"To take away the excuse that we didn't know. So that two, or four, or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, 'Where were you, Conyers, and where was the U.S. Congress?' when the Bush administration declared the Constitution inoperative...none of the company here present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity [or] say that 'somehow it escaped our notice.'"
In the three years since then, the train of abuses and usurpations has gotten longer and Conyers has become chair of the committee. Yet he has dawdled and dawdled, and has shown no appetite for impeachment.
On July 23, 2007, Conyers told Cindy Sheehan, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, and me that he would need 218 votes in the House and they were not there.
A week ago, 251 members of the House voted to refer to Conyers' committee the 35 Articles of Impeachment proposed by Congressman Dennis Kucinich.
Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who sat on Judiciary with Conyers when it voted out three articles of impeachment on President Richard Nixon, spoke out immediately: "The House should commence an impeachment inquiry forthwith."
Much of the work has been done. As Holtzman noted, Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment, together with the Senate report that on Iraq we were led to war based on false pretenses – arguably the most serious charge – go a long way toward jump-starting any additional investigative work Congress needs to do.
And seldom mentioned is the voluminous book published by Conyers himself, "Constitution in Crisis," containing a wealth of relevant detail on the crimes of the current executive.
Conyers' complaint that there is not enough time is a dog that won't hunt, as Lyndon Johnson would say.
How can Conyers say this one day, and on the next say that if Bush attacks Iran, well then, the House may move toward impeachment.
Afraid of the media?
During the meeting last July with Cindy Sheehan, Rev. Yearwood and me, and during an interview in December on "Democracy Now," Conyers was surprisingly candid in expressing his fear of Fox News and how it could paint Democrats as divisive if they pursued impeachment.
Ironically, this time it is Fox and the rest of the FCM that is afraid – witness their virtual silence on Kucinich's very damning 35 Articles of Impeachment.
The only way to encourage constructive media attention would be for Conyers to act. The FCM could be expected to fulminate against that, but they could not afford to ignore impeachment, as they are able to ignore other unpleasant things – like preparations for another "war of choice."
I would argue that perhaps the most effective way to prevent air and missile attacks on Iran and a wider Middle East war is to proceed as Elizabeth Holtzman urges – with impeachment "forthwith."
Does Conyers not owe at least that much encouragement to those courageous officers who have stood up to Cheney in trying to prevent wider war and catastrophe in the Middle East?
Scott McClellan has been quite clear in reminding us that once the president decided to invade Iraq, he was not going to let anything stop him. There is ample evidence that Bush has taken a similar decision with respect to Iran – with Olmert as his chief counsel, no less.
It is getting late, but this is due largely to Conyers' own dithering. Now, to his credit, Dennis Kucinich has forced the issue with 35 well-drafted Articles of Impeachment.
What the country needs is the young John Conyers back. Not the one now surrounded by fancy lawyers and henpecked by the lady of the House.
In October 1974, after he and the even younger Elizabeth Holtzman faced up to their duty on House Judiciary and voted out three Articles of Impeachment on President Richard Nixon, Conyers wrote this:
"This inquiry was forced on us by an accumulation of disclosures which, finally and after unnecessary delays, could no longer be ignored...Impeachment is difficult and it is painful, but the courage to do what must be done is the price of remaining free."
Someone needs to ask John Conyers if he still believes that; and, if he does, he must summon the courage to "do what must be done."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Barack Obama is getting painfully close to tying himself in knots with all his explanations of the conditions under which he would unconditionally talk with America’s foes, like Iran. His latest clarification was that there is a difference between “preparations” and “preconditions” for negotiations with bad guys. Such hair-splitting word games do not inspire confidence, and they play right into the arms of his critics. The last place he wants to look uncertain is on national security.
The fact is, Mr. Obama was right to say that he would talk with any foe, if it would advance U.S. interests. The Bush team negotiated with Libya to give up its nuclear program, even after Libya had accepted responsibility for blowing up Americans on Pan Am Flight 103. Those negotiations succeeded, though, not because Mr. Bush was better “prepared,” but because, at the time, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush had leverage. Iraq had yet to fall apart.
Mr. Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America, so no matter who we have to talk with the advantage will be on our side of the table. That’s what matters.
Mr. Bush was also right: talking with Iran today would be tantamount to appeasement — but that’s because the Bush team has so squandered U.S. power and credibility in the Middle East, and has failed to put in place any effective energy policy, that negotiating with Iran could only end up with us on the short end. We don’t have the leverage — the allies, the alternative energy, the unity at home, the credible threat of force — to advance our interests diplomatically today.
As I have argued before: When you have leverage, talk. When you don’t have leverage, get some. Then talk.
Right now Iran & Friends — Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria — have a strategy that has produced leverage for them, and the next U.S. president is going to have to think afresh how to counter it. The “Iran & Friends” strategy is built on five principles:
Principle No. 1: Always seek “control without responsibility.” In Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, Iran & Friends have veto power over the politics, without being held fully responsible for the electricity. America’s allies, by contrast, tend to have “responsibility without control.”
Principle No. 2: Always insist on being able to both run for political office and bear arms. In Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, America’s opponents are both in the government and have their own militias.
Principle No. 3: Use suicide bombing and targeted assassinations against any opponents who get in your way. In Lebanon, Syria is widely suspected to have been behind the spate of killings of anti-Syrian journalists and parliamentarians. One suicide attack on a major official in Iraq can neutralize superior U.S. power.
Principle No. 4: Use the Internet as a free command and control system for raising money, recruiting and operations.
Principle No. 5: Cast yourself as the “resistance” to Israel and America, so any opposition to you is equal to support for Israel and America and so no matter how badly you are defeated the mere fact that you “resisted” means you didn’t really lose.
Do the pro-American Arab moderates have a counterstrategy with leverage? I just got the new book, “The Arab Center,” by Marwan Muasher, the former foreign minister of Jordan. Retired Arab statesmen don’t often write books about their time in office, but Mr. Muasher has, and his argument is a powerful one: Arab moderates have been on the defensive because they have been “one-dimensional moderates,” focused only on moderate proposals for making peace with Israel, while ignoring other issues important to Arab citizens: good governance, political reform, economic well-being, women’s rights and religious and cultural diversity.
“For the Arab moderates to have credibility, they have to assume more responsibility,” says Muasher. America could help by delivering on the Arab moderates’ main issue — a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal. But, ultimately, he said, if the Arab center is to shape the future and rid “itself of the image its opponents paint of an apologist for the West or a compromiser of Arab rights,” it will have to meet the challenge of building “a robust, diverse, tolerant, democratic, and prosperous Arab society.”
There has been some promising moderate push back against extremists in Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank lately. It’s definitely worth watching, but is still very frail. America’s leverage will be limited as long our key allies do not have a strategy, with weight, to counter the hard-liners. Here’s hoping that once the primary silly season is over, the McCain and Obama camps will stop jousting over whether to talk with our enemies — which we must — and will start focusing instead about how we and our friends get more chips to bargain with — which we lack.
The Middle East has witnessed dramatic changes over the past few years, including the adoption in some countries – Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories – of the democratic system as the means for the transfer of political power. Though all of these countries are still troubled, the huge turnouts in all three electoral processes were clear evidence of the willingness of their peoples to switch to ballots over bullets.
Unfortunately, some Arab intellectuals seem bent on rejecting democracy as a foreign – in particular, Western – concept. I recall before Saddam's fall that many were repeating a slogan that says "No America and No Saddam," which ostensibly aimed at touting a nationalistic project for change. Today the same slogans are reiterated; sometimes out of good will and naïveté, other times to support the totalitarians and the extremists. People keep saying that if both Iran and the U.S. had stayed out of our business we would have been able to solve our problems on our own.
In my opinion this fantasy about change in isolation from foreign influence is ridiculous. The Middle East is not like Eastern Europe – where the countries that underwent a change were surrounded by old and well-established democracies and the Soviet Union was falling apart. Had the latter factor not been the case, democracies in Eastern Europe would've been silenced for God knows how many more decades.
Similarly, it's naïve to expect democracies that emerge from isolated nationalistic initiatives, without backing from outside powers, would ever be welcomed by the neighbors in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Syria. The idea that these states wouldn't interfere if America and the West did not is laughable.
Just look at Syrian and Iranian interference in Lebanon, even though America did not lead the change the way it did in Iraq. And while Gaza and Beirut have fallen to the extremists, Baghdad has not. The reason is the American presence that continues to protect the democratic process.
Change with support from the outside, especially the West, is a necessity. First of all, the neighbors would not let these democracies take a breath and second, democracy is a concept that emerged and evolved in the West. For the Middle East it's like importing a medicine that we didn't manufacture. The usage and dosage instructions are necessary.
Toppling Saddam's regime was half the way to democracy, and now it's become clear that protecting the newborn democracy is just as crucial a job as overthrowing the dictator. There's absolutely no doubt that the American presence in Iraq has been the biggest factor in protecting Iraq from coup attempts by extremists – be it al Qaeda to declare an Islamic state, or the hard-line Shiite movements.
It is obvious that in the Middle East there's a real war raging between the supporters of extremism and totalitarianism and those of democracy and tolerance. The choice before the world is whether it will support one side by doing something, or the other by doing nothing.
An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.
The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.
The computer contents -- among more than 1,000 gigabytes of data seized -- were recently destroyed by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, which is investigating the now-defunct smuggling ring previously led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
But U.N. officials cannot rule out the possibility that the blueprints were shared with others before their discovery, said the report's author, David Albright, a prominent nuclear weapons expert who spent four years researching the smuggling network.
"These advanced nuclear weapons designs may have long ago been sold off to some of the most treacherous regimes in the world," Albright wrote in a draft report about the blueprint's discovery. A copy of the report, expected to be published later this week, was provided to The Washington Post.
The A.Q. Khan smuggling ring was previously known to have provided Libya with design information for a nuclear bomb. But the blueprints found in 2006 are far more troubling, Albright said in his report. While Libya was given plans for an older and relatively unsophisticated weapon that was bulky and difficult to deliver, the newly discovered blueprints offered instructions for building a compact device, the report said. The lethality of such a bomb would be little enhanced, but its smaller size might allow for delivery by ballistic missile.
"To many of these countries, it's all about size and weight," Albright said in an interview. "They need to be able to fit the device on the missiles they have."
The Swiss government acknowledged this month that it destroyed nuclear-related documents, including weapons-design details, under the direction of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency to keep them from falling into terrorists' hands. However, it has not been previously reported that the documents included hundreds of pages of specifications for a second, more advanced nuclear bomb.
"These would have been ideal for two of Khan's other major customers, Iran and North Korea," wrote Albright, now president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "They both faced struggles in building a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop their ballistic missiles, and these designs were for a warhead that would fit."
It is unknown whether the designs were delivered to either country, or to anyone else, Albright said.
The Pakistani government did not rebut the findings in the report but said it had cooperated extensively with U.N. investigators. "The government of Pakistan has adequately investigated allegations of nuclear proliferation by A.Q. Khan and shared the information with IAEA," Nadeem Kiani, a spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said yesterday. "It considers the A.Q. Khan affair to be over."
A CIA official, informed of the essential details of Albright's report, said the agency would not comment because of the extreme diplomatic and security sensitivities of the matter. In his 2007 memoir, former CIA director George Tenet acknowledged the agency's extensive involvement in tracking the Khan network over more than a decade.
Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq, has published detailed analyses of the nuclear programs of numerous states, including Iran and North Korea. His institute was the first to publicly identify the location of an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor that was destroyed by Israeli warplanes last September.
A design for a compact, missile-ready nuclear weapon could help an aspiring nuclear power overcome a major technical hurdle and vastly increase its options for delivery of a nuclear explosive. Such a design could theoretically help North Korea -- which detonated a nuclear device in a 2006 test -- to couple a nuclear warhead with its Nodong missile, which has a proven range of 1,300 kilometers (about 800 miles).
Iran also possesses medium-range ballistic missiles and is believed by U.S. government officials to be seeking the capability to build nuclear weapons in the future, although an assessment late last year by U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Weapons experts have long puzzled over whether Tehran might have previously acquired a weapons design from the Khan network, which sold the Iranian government numerous other nuclear-related items, including designs for uranium-enrichment equipment.
The computers that contained the drawings were owned by three members of the Tinner family -- brothers Marco and Urs and their father, Friedrich -- all Swiss businessmen who have been identified by U.S. and IAEA officials as key participants in Khan's nuclear black market. The smuggling ring operated from the mid-1980s until 2003, when it was exposed after a years-long probe by the U.S. and British intelligence agencies.
Khan, who apologized for his role in the smuggling network in a 2004 speech broadcast in Pakistan, was officially pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf without being formally charged with crimes. The Tinner brothers are in Swiss prisons awaiting trial on charges related to their alleged involvement in the network. They and their father are the focus of an ongoing probe by Swiss authorities, who discovered the blueprints while exploring the heavily encrypted contents of the Tinners' computers, the report said. Several published reports have asserted that Urs Tinner became an informant for U.S. intelligence before the breakup of the smuggling ring, but that has not been officially confirmed.
Switzerland shared the finding with the IAEA as well as the United States, which asked for copies of the blueprints, the report states. The IAEA has acknowledged that it oversaw the destruction of nuclear-design material by Swiss authorities in November 2007. However, IAEA officials would neither confirm nor deny the existence of a second weapons design or comment on Albright's report.
Albright, citing information provided by IAEA investigators, said the designs were similar to that of a nuclear device built by Pakistan. He contends in the report that IAEA officials confronted Pakistan's government shortly after the discovery, adding that the private reaction of government officials was astonishment. The Pakistanis "were genuinely shocked; Khan may have transferred his own country's most secret and dangerous information to foreign smugglers so that they could sell it for a profit," Albright said, relating a description of the encounter given to him by IAEA officials.
Pakistan has previously denied that Khan stole the country's weapons plans. Musharraf has not allowed IAEA experts to interview Khan, an engineer who is regarded as a national hero for his role in establishing Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Khan, in interviews last month with The Post and several other publications, asserted that the allegations of nuclear smuggling were false.
Albright said it remains critical that investigators press Khan and others for details about how the blueprints were obtained and who might have them. Because the plans were stored electronically, they may have been copied many times, he said.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans Monday for new European sanctions against Iranian banking, oil and natural gas interests, signaling a growing willingness by Western allies to join President Bush in punishing Tehran for its nuclear enrichment program.
With Bush by his side at 10 Downing Street, Brown said Britain and the other members of the European Union had agreed to freeze the assets of Bank Melli, Iran's largest bank, and would consider separate sanctions targeting Iran's oil and natural gas industry. E.U. ministers are to take formal action as early as Tuesday, officials said.
Brown's announcement, which followed meetings with Bush, was aimed at ratcheting up pressure on the Islamic republic to curtail its nuclear activities and allow more extensive international inspections.
"We will take any necessary actions so that Iran is aware of the choice it has to make: to start to play its part as a full and respected member of the international community or face further isolation," Brown said.
The endorsement of sanctions was a notable victory for Bush, who is entering his final months in office and, like Brown, is struggling against low approval ratings and sharp political opposition at home. Bush made Iran's uranium enrichment program a key focus of his week-long trip to Europe, which ended Monday here in Britain.
At his first stop last week, the Balkan republic Slovenia, Bush and E.U. leaders issued a joint statement threatening the kind of financial sanctions announced Monday. Over the weekend, the United States and five European nations offered a package of incentives to Iran in exchange for a halt to its nuclear efforts.
Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and has declared repeatedly that it will never give up its uranium enrichment program. But Bush and other Western leaders fear that the enriched uranium could be diverted to nuclear weapons.
European action against Bank Melli would come on top of restrictions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department against Melli and other state-owned Iranian financial institutions this year. From 2002 to 2006, Bank Melli sent $100 million to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other organizations that the United States has designated as terrorist groups, according to Treasury officials.
Treasury has also moved to cut off another major Iranian bank, Bank Saderat, from the international financial system.
The United States has had numerous other measures in force against Iran since shortly after the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.
Stephen J. Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One that the sanctions show close agreement among the United States and its European allies on Iran. "I think there was a lot of questions some of you had about whether we were knit up with the Europeans on Iran policy before we left," Hadley said. "I think it's pretty clear that the answer is yes."
Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London-based public policy group, said Monday he was surprised by the swiftness of the move to impose E.U. financial sanctions against Iran. The action came just two days after the E.U.'s top diplomat offered the incentives package to Tehran, which has not yet formally rejected it.
"It feels like we are moving into a different phase on this issue," Niblett said. "There is a building sense of European hardness on Iran. . . . For Bush it's always good to have the Europeans say they are being serious, because there is always a fear back in America that they are wavering."
But Julianne Smith of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington cast the announcement as merely a continuation of the sanctions policy pursued over the last three years. "Many European leaders are now waiting to see what the next U.S. president will do vis-a-vis Iran," Smith said. " . . . This will continue to be a sticking point in our relationship with Europe as both sides of the Atlantic differ on how best to balance carrots and sticks."
During the trip, Bush enjoyed warm welcomes from the leaders of Slovenia, Germany, Italy and France, as well as Pope Benedict XVI, and did not face the type of massive street protests common in the past.
In London, he received similar hospitality from Brown, who announced the addition of 200 troops to the British contingent in Afghanistan, which now stands at 7,800. Brown also denied British media reports that he planned to set a timetable for removing about 4,000 British troops who remain in Iraq.
Bush also met Monday with Brown's predecessor as prime minister, Tony Blair, who closely supported Bush on Iraq and is now heading up international efforts to broker Middle East peace negotiations.
From London, Bush flew to Belfast, where he visited with the Protestant and Catholic leaders of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government. He said the success of the agreement in the British province could provide lessons for Iraq. Belfast was the final stop of the tour; Bush's plane then took off for the United States.
The signatures of more than two million Iraqi Shi'ites, demanding that Iran cease its interference in Iraq, were presented on Saturday during a convention in Ashraf, northeast of Baghdad, the London-based daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat reported.
Representatives of more than 135 parties and organizations, as well as 1,000 tribal elders from Iraq's southern and central regions, attended the conference, titled "Solidarity with the Iraqi People." Also attending the event were representatives from the Iranian opposition group, Mujahidin Khalq.
"We have gathered over two million signatures from Iraqi Shi'ites, calling on Iran to pull its hands off Iraq and especially the southern districts," said the leader of the Al-Humeidat tribe, Sheikh Ka'sid Najm during the conference.
In an interview with A-Sharq Al-Awsat, Najm explained that Iranian interference in the southern regions had become obvious. He warned that if it did not stop, then Iraq would turn into "an Iranian protectorate."
Shi'ite armed groups in Iraq are supported and trained by Iranian forces, in particular the Al-Quds Force, an elite unit affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.
Meanwhile, Iraq and Iran recently signed a security memorandum of understanding, which focused on clearing mine fields, recovering the remains of soldiers killed in the eight-year war and setting border lines between the two nations.
The document was agreed upon during last week's visit of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to Teheran.
"Don't tell me words don't matter!" Sen. Barack Obama thundered at a Wisconsin Democratic Party dinner in February. He should have remembered that at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference last week.
There, Mr. Obama defended the outrageous promise he made last July to meet, during his first year as president and without precondition, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Mr. Obama's eagerness to undertake a "World Tyrants Tour" is both naive and foolhardy, and how he dealt with those concerns at AIPAC raises the question of whether he's done his homework.
Mr. Obama knew the audience was wondering what could come from such meetings, except propaganda victories for thugs and a loss of prestige for America. He tried to mitigate the damage of his promised meetings. But the man who criticizes George W. Bush for unilateralism ended up denouncing a multilateral approach to Iran, saying it would "outsource the sustained work to our European allies."
Mr. Obama also said he would practice "tough and principled diplomacy." There would be "careful preparation." He would "open up lines of communication, build an agenda, coordinate closely with our allies." And then he brought up Ronald Reagan. He said he'd be "tough" like Reagan, who "understood that diplomacy backed by real leverage was a fundamental tool of statecraft."
But what do Mr. Obama's words mean? What would his preparations be? What would his agenda be? Does he want to coordinate closely with allies or not "outsource the sustained work" to them? And would he really be anything like Reagan?
As early as March 1975, Reagan described the leverage he would require before sitting down with the Soviets. His key insight was that "We need to remove [the Soviets'] incentive to race ahead by making it clear to them that we can and will compete . . . at the same time we tell them that we prefer to halt this competition and reduce the nuclear arsenals by patient negotiation."
There were three elements to Reagan's strategy. First, he argued America must become a reliable ally and respected by our adversaries. As we did, we would "be tested in ways calculated to try our patience, to confound our resolve and to erode our belief in ourselves." But being consistent and credible was important to friend and foe alike.
Second, Reagan said America must rebuild its conventional as well as its nuclear defenses, because "we are number two in a world where it's dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best." The Soviets must "know we are going about the business of restoring our margin of safety."
Third, Reagan knew "peace is made by the fact of strength – economic, military, and strategic. Peace is lost when such strength disappears or – just as bad – is seen by an adversary as disappearing." America's economy had to be restored, so the Soviets would know the U.S. could compete with them.
Reagan's careful preparation for negotiations with the Evil Empire was simple to explain and difficult to achieve: "a consistent foreign policy, a strong America, and a strong economy." If you want an arms race, we'll give you one, Reagan said, and we will win it, so once you're convinced of that, let's negotiate.
Reagan spoke about his strategy repeatedly in speeches, debates and articles in the half-decade before being elected president. His approach was not cloaked in secrecy. It was not abstract promises. And it was not something to be revealed only after the election. Reagan knew a successful strategy doesn't surprise adversaries, it engages them and draws them toward changes in behavior.
When it comes to America's adversaries, Mr. Obama doesn't have a comprehensive strategy to match Reagan's. Mr. Obama believes in talking and in meeting, in the hope that his charm will sweep despots off their feet like college students in Madison, Cambridge and Berkeley.
If Mr. Obama wants to portray himself as Reagan, then let him show it by spelling out his strategy for Iran and the other rogue states he's pledged to spend his first year visiting. What specifically will he say in those meetings that will cause their leaders to change? What will he do to create the conditions that lead them to abandon their aggressive course?
If Mr. Obama keeps dodging these questions, then the American people will have every reason to view him as unprepared for the world stage. America's adversaries are watching too. And one can only imagine the guffaws in Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang, Caracas and Havana as tyrants think about how they'd be able to take advantage of Mr. Obama's arrogance and innocence if he were elected president.
Barack Obama's willingness to meet with the leaders of rogue states such as Iran and North Korea "without preconditions" is a naive and dangerous approach to dealing with the hard men who run pariah states. It will be an important and legitimate issue for policy debate during the remainder of the presidential campaign.
Consider his facile observations about President Kennedy's first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in Vienna in 1961. Obama saw it as a meeting that helped win the Cold War, when in fact it was an embarrassment for the American side. The inexperienced Kennedy performed so poorly that Khrushchev may well have been encouraged to position Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, thus precipitating one of the Cold War's most dangerous crises.
Such realities should cause Obama to become more circumspect, minimizing his off-the-cuff observations about history, grand strategy and diplomacy. In fact, he has done exactly the opposite, exhibiting so many gaps in his knowledge and understanding of world affairs that they have not yet received the attention they deserve. He consistently reveals failings in foreign policy that are far more serious than even his critics had previously imagined.
Consider the following statement, which was lost in the controversy over his comments about negotiations: "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. ... Iran, they spend 1/100th of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance."
Let's dissect this comment. Obama is correct that the rogue states he names do not present the same magnitude of threat as that posed by the Soviet Union through the possibility of nuclear war. Fortunately for us all, general nuclear war never took place. Nonetheless, serious surrogate struggles between the superpowers abounded because the Soviet Union's threat to the West was broader and more complex than simply the risk of nuclear war. Subversion, guerrilla warfare, sabotage and propaganda were several of the means by which this struggle was waged, and the stakes were high, even, or perhaps especially, in "tiny" countries.
In the Western Hemisphere, for example, the Soviets used Fidel Castro's Cuba to assist revolutionary activities in El Salvador and Nicaragua. In Western Europe, vigorous Moscow-directed communist parties challenged the democracies on their home turfs. In Africa, numerous regimes depended on Soviet military assistance to stay in power, threaten their neighbors or resist anti-communist opposition groups.
Both sides in the Cold War were anxious to keep these surrogate struggles from going nuclear, so the stakes were never "civilizational." But to say that these "asymmetric" threats were "tiny" would be news to those who struggled to maintain or extend freedom's reach during the Cold War.
Had Italy, for example, gone communist during the 1950s or 1960s, it would have been an inconvenient defeat for the United States but a catastrophe for the people of Italy. An "asymmetric" threat to the U.S. often is an existential threat to its friends, which was something we never forgot during the Cold War. Obama plainly seems to have entirely missed this crucial point. Ironically, it is he who is advocating a unilateralist policy, ignoring the risks and challenges to U.S. allies when the direct threat to us is, in his view, "tiny."
What is implicit in Obama's reference to "tiny" threats is that they are sufficiently insignificant that negotiations alone can resolve them. Indeed, he has gone even further, arguing that the lack of negotiations with Iran caused the threats: "And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons, funding Hamas, funding Hezbollah."
This is perhaps the most breathtakingly naive statement of all, implying as it does that it is actually U.S. policy that motivates Iran rather than Iran's own perceived ambitions and interests. That would be news to the mullahs in Tehran, not to mention the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.
It is an article of faith for Obama, and many others on the left in the U.S. and abroad, that it is the United States that is mostly responsible for the world's ills. In 1984, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick labeled people with these views the "San Francisco Democrats," after the city where Walter Mondale was nominated for president.
Most famously, Kirkpatrick forever seared the San Francisco Democrats by saying that "they always blame America first" for the world's problems. In so doing, she turned the name of the pre-World War II isolationist America First movement into a stigma the Democratic Party has never shaken.
This is yet another piece of history that Obama has ignored or never learned. There may be one more piece of history worthy of attention: In 1984, Mondale went down to one of the worst electoral defeats in American political history. We will now see whether Obama follows that path as well.
John R. Bolton is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."
Ever since World War II, we have been driven by a passionate desire to understand how mass genocide, terror states and global war came about – and how we can prevent them in the future.
Above all, we have sought answers to several basic questions: Why did the West fail to see the coming of the catastrophe? Why were there so few efforts to thwart the fascist tide, and why did virtually all Western leaders, and so many Western intellectuals, treat the fascists as if they were normal political leaders, instead of the virulent revolutionaries they really were? Why did the main designated victims – the Jews – similarly fail to recognize the magnitude of their impending doom? Why was resistance so rare?
Most eventually accepted a twofold "explanation": the uniqueness of the evil, and the lack of historical precedent for it. Italy and Germany were two of the most civilized and cultured nations in the world. It was difficult to appreciate that a great evil had become paramount in the countries that had produced Kant, Beethoven, Dante and Rossini.
How could Western leaders, let alone the victims, be blamed for failing to see something that was almost totally new – systematic mass murder on a vast scale, and a threat to civilization itself? Never before had there been such an organized campaign to destroy an entire "race," and it was therefore almost impossible to see it coming, or even to recognize it as it got under way.
The failure to understand what was happening took a well-known form: a systematic refusal to view our enemies plain. Hitler's rants, whether in "Mein Kampf" or at Nazi Party rallies, were often downplayed as "politics," a way of maintaining popular support. They were rarely taken seriously as solemn promises he fully intended to fulfill. Mussolini's call for the creation of a new Italian Empire, and his later alliance with Hitler, were often downplayed as mere bluster, or even excused on the grounds that, since other European countries had overseas territories, why not Italy?
Some scholars broadened the analysis to include other evil regimes, such as Stalin's Russia, which also systematically murdered millions of people and whose ambitions similarly threatened the West. Just as with fascism, most contemporaries found it nearly impossible to believe that the Gulag Archipelago was what it was. And just as with fascism, we studied it so that the next time we would see evil early enough to prevent it from threatening us again.
By now, there is very little we do not know about such regimes, and such movements. Some of our greatest scholars have described them, analyzed the reasons for their success, and chronicled the wars we fought to defeat them. Our understanding is considerable, as is the honesty and intensity of our desire that such things must be prevented.
Yet they are with us again, and we are acting as we did in the last century. The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes – from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis – who swear to destroy us and others like us. Like their 20th-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can. Like our own 20th-century predecessors, we rarely take them seriously or act accordingly. More often than not, we downplay the consequences of their words, as if they were some Islamic or Arab version of "politics," intended for internal consumption, and designed to accomplish domestic objectives.
Clearly, the explanations we gave for our failure to act in the last century were wrong. The rise of messianic mass movements is not new, and there is very little we do not know about them. Nor is there any excuse for us to be surprised at the success of evil leaders, even in countries with long histories and great cultural and political accomplishments. We know all about that. So we need to ask the old questions again. Why are we failing to see the mounting power of evil enemies? Why do we treat them as if they were normal political phenomena, as Western leaders do when they embrace negotiations as the best course of action?
No doubt there are many reasons. One is the deep-seated belief that all people are basically the same, and all are basically good. Most human history, above all the history of the last century, points in the opposite direction. But it is unpleasant to accept the fact that many people are evil, and entire cultures, even the finest, can fall prey to evil leaders and march in lockstep to their commands. Much of contemporary Western culture is deeply committed to a belief in the goodness of all mankind; we are reluctant to abandon that reassuring article of faith. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we prefer to pursue the path of reasonableness, even with enemies whose thoroughly unreasonable fanaticism is manifest.
This is not merely a philosophical issue, for to accept the threat to us means – short of a policy of national suicide – acting against it. As it did in the 20th century, it means war. It means that, temporarily at least, we have to make sacrifices on many fronts: in the comforts of our lives, indeed in lives lost, in the domestic focus of our passions – careers derailed and personal freedoms subjected to unpleasant and even dangerous restrictions – and the diversion of wealth from self-satisfaction to the instruments of power. All of this is painful; even the contemplation of it hurts.
Then there is anti-Semitism. Old Jew-hating texts like "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," now in Farsi and Arabic, are proliferating throughout the Middle East. Calls for the destruction of the Jews appear regularly on Iranian, Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian television and are heard in European and American mosques. There is little if any condemnation from the West, and virtually no action against it, suggesting, at a minimum, a familiar Western indifference to the fate of the Jews.
Finally, there is the nature of our political system. None of the democracies adequately prepared for war before it was unleashed on them in the 1940s. None was prepared for the terror assault of the 21st century. The nature of Western politics makes it very difficult for national leaders – even those rare men and women who see what is happening and want to act – to take timely, prudent measures before war is upon them. Leaders like Winston Churchill are relegated to the opposition until the battle is unavoidable. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to fight desperately to win Congressional approval for a national military draft a few months before Pearl Harbor.
Then, as now, the initiative lies with the enemies of the West. Even today, when we are engaged on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little apparent recognition that we are under attack by a familiar sort of enemy, and great reluctance to act accordingly. This time, ignorance cannot be claimed as an excuse. If we are defeated, it will be because of failure of will, not lack of understanding. As, indeed, was almost the case with our near-defeat in the 1940s.
Mr. Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "The Iranian Time Bomb" (St. Martin's Press, 2007).
Iran said on Tuesday uranium enrichment was its "red line" and would continue, despite an enhanced offer of incentives from big powers to stop activity the West fears could yield nuclear bombs.
The EU's top diplomat, Javier Solana, presented Tehran on Saturday with an adjusted package of economic benefits designed to persuade it to curb its nuclear work, and said Iran should stop enrichment during negotiations to implement the offer.
"We have repeatedly said that enrichment is our red line and we should enjoy this technology. The work will be continued," deputy foreign minister Alireza Sheikhattar told reporters, according to the state news agency IRNA.
The incentive package agreed by the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany last month and delivered by Solana is a revised version of one rejected by Iran in 2006.
Western powers have warned Iran it will face more sanctions if it spurns the offer. Iran has shown no sign it will change its position, and suggested it was in no hurry to respond to the incentives proposal, saying it is being reviewed.
"We will give our answer as soon as possible. But we do not know exactly when it will be," the Iranian official said.
The incentives package offers Iran the chance to develop a civilian nuclear program with light water reactors -- seen as harder to divert into bomb-making than the technology Tehran is now developing -- and legally binding fuel supply guarantees.
It also offers trade and other benefits, including the possibility of Iran buying civil aircraft from the West.
A prominent Washington think-tank, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) said the package contained two important new additions.
ISIS noted a passage saying the powers would "support" continued research and development (R&D) in nuclear energy "as confidence is gradually restored" in Iran's intentions. This suggested R&D could go on even during an enrichment halt and set a longer-term timetable for resolving core issues, it said.
ISIS said the offer also alluded to possible security guarantees, a prime Iranian concern, by citing readiness to "reaffirm obligations under the U.N. Charter to refrain ... from the use of force against (Iran's) territorial integrity".
NO STRAIGHT ANSWER
A senior Iranian official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters Iran's response would not be a straight yes-or-no answer. "It will be a discussable response. We might accept some elements of the proposal and reject some others," he said.
"But suspension of enrichment is not on the agenda."
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday Europe would take further sanctions against Iran, speaking of immediate action to freeze the overseas assets of Iran's biggest bank, the Bank Melli.
But after a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Luxembourg on Monday, Solana said the EU had yet to decide on a new round of sanctions. The U.N. Security Council has imposed three rounds of limited sanctions on Iran since 2006.
Iran insists, as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, that it has the right to master the complete nuclear fuel cycle, including enriching uranium, for peaceful purposes. It says it wants nuclear power only for electricity generation.
The process provides fuel for power plants or, if concentrated to heighten the enrichment level, atomic bombs.
Washington says it wants a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear row with the West that has helped push oil prices to record highs, but has not ruled out military action as a last option. Tehran says its response to attack would be "painful".
For the first time since 2003, Iran has stumbled in Iraq. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's decision to confront Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra and Sadr City last month caught Tehran off guard. The Mahdi Army lost more than face: It surrendered large caches of arms, and many of its leaders fled or were killed or captured. Crucially, the militias lost strategic terrain -- Basra and its chokehold on the causeway between Kuwait and Baghdad and Iraq's oil exports; Sadr City and the threat it posed to Baghdad security. Visiting Basra this month, I saw city walls covered with pro-Maliki graffiti. Commerce is returning to the city center. Trouble spots remain in both places, as Tuesday's car bombings show, but the Mahdi Army's unchallenged hold has ended.
Iran wants U.S. forces to leave Iraq and assumes that a friendly Shiite government would then protect Iran's interests. Tehran has looked to Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, to manage its strategy of supporting Shiite unity and resisting American occupation. But these efforts do not go hand in hand. The first means supporting stability and state-building and working with Iraq's government; the second involves building violent militias that undermine government authority.
It was easy for Tehran to do both when a sectarian war united Shiites against a common Sunni enemy. But sectarian violence has largely ceased, and Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda are no longer imminent threats. Throughout 2007, militias challenged the government as they terrorized neighborhoods in southern Iraq, disrupting commerce and assassinating clerics as well as government and provincial officials. The situation came to a head in August when Mahdi Army gunmen killed several pilgrims in Karbala. Tehran intervened; Sadr agreed to a truce with government forces and rival Shiite parties and ordered his militia to stand down.
The Quds Force and its backers in Tehran expected the truce to hold, allowing Iran to continue to build militias while also supporting the Baghdad government. Ali Larijani, then head of Iran's Supreme Council for National Security (now the speaker of parliament), and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Tehran's influential mayor, were among those who argued that Iran should stop seeing Iraq through the lens of its conflict with the United States, stop supporting the Mahdi Army and instead throw its weight behind the Baghdad government. But moderate voices were drowned out by the drumbeat of war in Lebanon and growing tensions with America over the nuclear issue.
Maliki's recent push into Basra showed that Iran's policy was untenable. Not only are its two goals at war, but Iran has alienated the Maliki government and mainstream Shiites. One Shiite politician asked me, "How can the government succeed if Iran undermines its effectiveness?" They recognize that Iranian-backed militias were a threat not to Sunnis but Shiites in the government. It was Iranian-made rockets that rained down on the homes of Shiite leaders in the Green Zone. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who refused to even speak with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his visit to Iraq, condemned militia violence and said that only government forces should carry guns. Criticism of Iran was rife in conversations I had in Iraq this month, even among those usually protective of Iran's role there.
Iran has also managed to bolster the Iraqi army. The dissolution of Iraq's military after the fall of Saddam Hussein was a strategic victory for Tehran. Yet after all the talk of standing up an army that could confront the Sunni insurgency, it was not by fighting al-Qaeda in Mosul but the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army in Basra that the Iraqi army found its footing.
Iran still has considerable influence in Iraq. It may reconstitute the Mahdi Army and pick up the fight against America, using special groups of the type suspected in the Baghdad car bombing Tuesday. It may also try to use nationalist opposition to the U.S.-Iraq "status of forces" agreement to its advantage. But Tehran will find it difficult to regain lost turf in Baghdad or Basra, or to go back to happily supporting Shiites both at the center and in the militias. It will have to choose whether it is with the state or the sub-state actors.
That debate is unfolding in Tehran. In not-too-subtle criticism of the Quds Force's handling of Iraq, even Tehran's conservative press heaped praise on Maliki during the Basra operations. Some calls for expelling Sadr from Iran even made it into the media.
Washington needs to see this as an opportunity not just for Iraq but for U.S. relations with Iran. The U.S. and Iraqi governments should build on recent gains. Stepped-up action against Mahdi Army cells and disrupting the flow of money and weapons are important, but so is quickly improving the economic lot of the poor of Basra, Sadr City and other Mahdi Army strongholds. In the long run, only good government will change the calculus in Iraq.
It is a frequent refrain in Washington that the United States needs leverage before it can talk to Iran. In Iraq, Washington is getting leverage. America has the advantage while Iran is on its heels. Engaging Iran now could even influence who wins the Iraq debate in Tehran.
The writer is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #26 on: 2008-06-26 11:12:03 »
The myth of 'weapons-grade' enrichment
[ Hermit : Again we see media outside the USA enunciating well researched and nuanced articles while our own lazy sycophants propagate the Zionist Military-Industrial line. Perhaps no real surprise considering who owns the media. But given their widely publicized role in leading the US to the illegal attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, one would think that people would be smarter as they repeat the same program against the next target. What is more disgusting is that Asia Times is able to find a competent researcher capable of writing a credible article on this subject, while US Senators and Congressmen appear unable or unwilling to find competent advisors or even people with a high school physics education and so blindly follow the Zionist line leading to "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" even though the claims about Iran's nuclear program requires the suspension of the laws of physics and rejection of rationality. The fact that our leaders probably think that control over Iran's oil would be nice doesn't help. I think that this points strongly to the fact that evil does not really require intent. Banality, laziness, ignorance, stupidity, delusion, greed and cupidity - possessed by many Americans and their leaders in abundance - will do just fine. ]
Source: Asia Times Authors: Kaveh L Afrasiabi Dated: 2008-06-24
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
Talk about the double standards at the United Nations. Whereas UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly condemned Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric against Israel, expressing "shock and dismay", he has remained ominously, and inexcusably, silent about the blatant Israeli threats of military attacks on Iran, thus undermining the world's confidence in his ability to steer the global community clear of yet another major war in the Middle East caldron.
Having turned a blind eye to Iran's formal protest at the UN regarding Israel's explicit threats, Ban may need to revisit his own statement of June 7, 2007, "The secretary general points out that all members have undertaken to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."
In light of new media disclosures about Israel's advanced plans to launch a major air offensive against Iran's nuclear installations, bound to inflict serious civilian casualties and trigger the volatile region into a "fireball", to paraphrase the reaction of the head of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammad ElBaradei, who has stated categorically that he would resign immediately if Iran is attacked, Ban is borderline on the verge of skirting his official obligation by refusing to issue a stern statement on this serious matter of war and peace.
ElBaradei's comments followed confirmation by sources at the Pentagon and other US government agencies that Israel recently carried out a full rehearsal of an air assault on Iran's nuclear sites.
Should Israel deliver on its stated threats and drop its bombs on Iran, thus triggering a major conflict in the Middle East, with dangerous and unanticipated consequences, then the UN will be widely regarded a key casualty of this crisis, and would be blamed for failing in prudent crisis-management.
Unfortunately, compounding the UN's shortcoming above-cited is a related failure of mainstream media in the US and Europe to criticize Ban's flawed approach to the Iran crisis, or to address the systematic disinformation and planned paranoia about Iran's nuclear program put forth by Israel and its allies.
Instead, the US media in particular have allowed themselves to become an unwitting accomplice of Israel's anti-Iran propaganda machine, dutifully recycling the line that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons, has amassed "weapons-grade" enriched uranium, and is thus on the verge of arriving at "the point of no return" with respect to bomb-making.
In a word, the race to dupe public opinion about a "clear and present danger" posed by Iran's nuclear program, to justify Israel's threatened attack (with the US's tacit approval) is in full gear and the US media are by and large about to receive another "F" card, just as they did with the US's 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the "pluralistic" media became a shell of itself by blindly echoing the White House's spin about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, it is remarkable how little the US media have learned, or evolved, since then and how frozen their will is when it comes to their sedimented inability to criticize the state of Israel, recalling the criticisms of US editorials by former president Jimmy Carter in his book, Worse than Apartheid. In fact, the rather uniform, uncritical and conformist behavior of the US media shows that they are worse than Israel's own media, they occasionally display signs of independence from the government on foreign policy matters. [ Hermit : Which is why I generally prefer Ha'Aretz, Y'not and even the unabashedly Zionist Jerusalem Post as news sources over the Washington Post or New York Times ] .
It is not 'unsupervised' or 'weapons-grade'
From the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Boston Globe, the Dallas News and so on, a common thread running through their editorials and opinion pages nowadays is a fundamental distortion of facts about Iran's nuclear program that has gone unnoticed despite the patently obvious and flagrant nature of this distortion.
With leading nuclear experts [ Hermit : This should perhaps have been in quotation marks to indicate extreme skepticism ] , media pundits and members of the US Congress recycling it, this serious distortion has now acquired the status of a truism about Iran, and a dangerous one that lends itself to an unprovoked attack on Iran by Israel and or the US.
But, no matter what the influential position of their signatories, the narratives in the US media that persist in their claim that Iran has manufactured "weapons-grade" enriched uranium simply cannot stand the weight of scrutiny and are refuted by the IAEA's findings to the contrary. These narratives routinely refer to the IAEA's reports on Iran, yet turn a blind eye to those reports' explicit references to Iran's "low-enriched uranium" (up to 4%).
To give a few examples, Graham Allison, a leading US nuclear expert at Harvard University, recently penned an article in the Boston Globe [1] stating: "Iran is operating 3,492 centrifuges in a cascade that has produced 500 pounds of low-enriched uranium. This is one-third of what is required for Iran's first nuclear bomb."
Similarly, in an article in The Wall Street Journal, US Congresswoman Jane Harman, who chairs the powerful Homeland Security Intelligence Committee, cites Iran's steady progress in installing new centrifuges and the dangers posed by "unsupervised, weapons-grade material" in Tehran's hands. [2]
Never mind that IAEA reports clearly confirm that all of Iran's enrichment-related facilities are under the agency's "containment and monitoring", or that IAEA inspectors have had nine "unannounced visits" at the enrichment facility in Natanz since March 2007.
Thus, for instance, in a front-page article in the New York Times, [3] dated June 20, Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt break the sensational news about Israel's extensive maneuvers in preparation for an attack on Iran, indirectly rationalizing Israel's belligerency by omitting any mention of the IAEA's latest report confirming the absence of any evidence of military nuclear diversion and, instead, confining themselves to the following comment: "In late May, the IAEA reported that Iran's suspected work on nuclear matters was a 'matter of serious concern' and that the Iranians owed the agency 'substantial explanation'."
What ought to have been added was that the same IAEA report states unequivocally that it had received "no credible information" regarding the alleged "weaponization studies", nor has the agency detected any nuclear activity connected to those alleged studies. Besides, the same IAEA report more than a dozen times stresses the evidence of peacefulness of Iran's nuclear program.
Yet none of this seem meritorious of attention of even veteran New York Times reporter Michael Gordon, better known for his association with discredited reporter Judith Miller, who loyally dished out Israel's disinformation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to the newspaper's global readership in 2002-2003. Yet Gordon is now emboldened to lend his penmanship to Israel's warmongering against Iran, through narrow, selective attention to IAEA reports and distorting the atomic agency's findings.
To turn to another example of flawed coverage of Iran by the US media, a recent editorial in the Dallas News [4] states categorically that the IAEA "has recently accused Iran of developing its program of enriching uranium". The editors appear unaware that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a signatory, does not prohibit Iran's uranium-enrichment program.
The IAEA has never declared Iran in material breach of its obligations and, certainly, has never "accused" Iran of pursuing a program sanctioned under the NPT. Rather, the governing board of the IAEA has simply requested from Iran to suspend its sensitive nuclear program as a "confidence-building measure", that is, as a time-bound and thus temporary "legally non-binding" step.
Yet, by dispensing with such important nuances and critical distinctions between low-enriched uranium and "weapons-grade" uranium, a growing segment of the US media has now fully integrated itself in Israel's incessant anti-Iran campaign, aimed at exerting maximum pressure, even if that means twisting the facts and standing them on their head.
Israel's 60-year history is replete with examples of its leaders misguiding the public with their threats, such as when they painted Egyptian leader Gemal Abdul Nasser as a "Hitler of the Middle East", when, in retrospect, the historical record has established the carefully-orchestrated media campaign to justify Israel's pre-emptive strike at Egypt (and other Arab states) in June 1967.
History often repeats itself and today Israel is reportedly poised to take on Iran, despite the absence of any "smoking gun" and the fact that neither Israel nor the US has "proved that Iran's nuclear program is military", to paraphrase Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. One would think that after the Iraq fiasco, the bar for instigating warfare in the Middle East would be set relatively higher. Yet the exact opposite seems to be the case now, with the lame-duck President George W Bush, who upped the ante against Iran in his recent European tour, reportedly tilting in favor of the "wild card" in a military scenario with Iran, ie, Israel.
Concerning the latter, although US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has signed a letter from the "Iran Six" countries to Iran, accompanying with an incentive package, pledging to respect Iran's sovereignty, Rice's hawkish colleagues in the Bush administration apparently have a different scenario in mind. (The "Iran Six" includes the United States, France, China, Russia, England and Germany.)
Thus, Mike McConnell, the US national intelligence director, told the right-wing Fox TV last Sunday that Iran was a year or two from developing its first nuclear bombs. McConnell's alarmist estimate on Iran is clearly at odds with the US's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, released late last year, that confirmed that Iran's nuclear program was, and had been since 2003, peaceful.
McConnell's own deputy, Donald M Kerr, has repeatedly defended the NIE report before the US Congress, stating that the US intelligence community does not plan to "revise" it.
Various pundits, such as former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, have criticized the NIE report for failing to refer to Iran's enrichment program as an evidence of weaponization. (See Kissinger's foggy lens on Iran Asia Times Online, December 18, 2007.) Yet, Kissinger and others critical of the NIE report overlook that as long as there is no evidence of Iranian enrichment above the "low-grade" that is qualitatively and technically different from "high-enriched" or "weapons-grade" enrichment, no one can accuse Iran of engaging in proliferation by simply pursuing a legal nuclear activity.
To return to Allison's piece above-mentioned, it is factually incorrect to assume that Iran's low-enriched uranium is "one-third" what is required for a nuclear bomb. First, only through extensive and a painstakingly difficult technological process of re-processing and re-enriching uranium to substantially higher levels (90% or more), can Iran's enriched uranium be utilized for manufacturing bombs.
Second, with the IAEA's robust inspection of Iran's enrichment facilities, any such diversion to "weapons-grade" enrichment would be instantly detected, simply because significant modifications, re-assembling and re-configuration of the cascades of centrifuges would be necessary and that could not possibly evade the IAEA's watchful eyes.
Yet, all of this is ignored, with the tacit suggestion that Iran's program is "unsupervised" when, in fact, it is one of the most exhaustively inspected and supervised nuclear programs in the world, in light of some 3,500 hours of inspection of its facilities since 2003.
In conclusion, misperceptions of Iran's nuclear activities form an important prerequisite for a major military offensive against the country. This is the concern as long as those misperceptions are propagated.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
European officials are increasingly concerned that Sen. Barack Obama's campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.
The U.N. Security Council has passed four resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching uranium, each time highlighting the offer of financial and diplomatic incentives from a European-led coalition if Tehran suspends enrichment, a route to producing fuel for nuclear weapons. But Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said he would make such suspension a topic for discussion with Iran, rather than a precondition for any negotiations to take place.
European officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they are wary of giving up a demand that has been so enshrined in U.N. resolutions, particularly without any corresponding concessions by Iran. Although European officials are eager to welcome a U.S. president promising renewed diplomacy and multilateralism after years of tensions with the Bush administration, they feel strongly about continuing on the current path.
"Dropping a unanimous Security Council condition would simply be interpreted by Iran and America's allies as unconditional surrender, and America's friends would view this as confirmation of America's basic unreliability," said François Heisbourg, a Paris-based military analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "A hell of a way to start a presidential term."
The United States does not have formal diplomatic relations with Tehran, unlike the other countries in the coalition. Obama advisers contend that U.S. willingness to engage directly with Iran would improve a process that they say is not effective in thwarting Iranian ambitions. "People say we can't give something for nothing," said Susan Rice, a key Obama foreign policy aide. "But every day that passes, the Iranians are getting something for nothing -- progress on their nuclear program."
Obama advisers appear to distinguish between full negotiations and preparatory talks with Iran, stressing that the most immediate consequence of their approach is that a U.S. official likely would accompany European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana when he meets with Iranian representatives, a shift European officials said they would welcome.
Still, Philip H. Gordon, a Europe expert at the Brookings Institution who has advised the Obama campaign, acknowledged that European officials "are uncomfortable with giving up the precondition of uranium enrichment right now." Gordon, who emphasized he was not speaking for the campaign, said the dynamic has changed in recent years, so that "after all the lies and dissembling by the Iranians, the European negotiators have become pretty hard-line" on Iran.
European officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen as interfering with U.S. politics, said the demand that Iran first suspend its uranium enrichment is a European concept, not something forced on them by the Bush administration. Three European countries -- Britain, France and Germany -- persuaded Tehran to suspend its enrichment activities in 2003 while the two sides negotiated, until Iran declared in 2006 that the talks were fruitless and restarted their nuclear program.
After the United States, Russia and China joined the European-led effort in 2006, the six nations jointly offered a large package of incentives if Iran would once again suspend enrichment. This month, the six sweetened the terms of the deal -- and European leaders warned that Iran faces even tougher sanctions if it does not stop its nuclear work. But Iran has shrugged off the offers and threats and is building a stockpile now estimated at 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of low-enriched uranium.
European officials say they are not prepared to start negotiations on the package of incentives while Iran continues its enrichment activities. "Formal negotiations can start as soon as Iran's enrichment-related and reprocessing activities are suspended," declared a June 12 letter to Iran's foreign minister, signed by all six foreign ministers in the coalition, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
President Bush, during his farewell tour of Europe last week, pointed to the coalition as one of his foreign policy legacies. "I leave behind a multilateral framework to work this issue," Bush said. "You know, one country can't solve all problems. I fully agree with that. A group of countries can send a clear message to the Iranians."
But in a recent interview on CNN, Susan Rice, Obama's adviser, was blunt in her criticism of the current approach. "Before we will talk to them about their nuclear problem, they have to suspend their nuclear problem. That [is a] counterproductive precondition," she said.
Obama, during a speech this month to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, argued that Iran's growing expertise in uranium enrichment meant there is "no time to waste" and that it is "time for the United States to lead." He dismissed the Bush administration approach as "limited, piecemeal talks while we outsource the sustained work to our European allies." But, he added: "There will be careful preparation. We will open up lines of communication, build an agenda, coordinate closely with our allies and evaluate the potential for progress."
Obama's Republican rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), has lauded the European efforts, saying in April that the coalition "deserves praise for its great efforts to present a positive endgame: an Iran with far-reaching economic incentives, external support for a civilian nuclear energy program and integration into the international community."
"Obama criticizes a multilateral process and disparages the European contribution. What he is proposing is unilateral cowboy summitry," said Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign's national security director. He said McCain "agrees we need to have basic benchmarks, such as suspension, before you go further. And he has called for a significant increase in sanctions, through the U.N. if possible or through like-minded allies if necessary."
Obama campaign officials, however, dismiss the current effort as "weak carrots and weak sticks" and argue that U.S. willingness to engage Iran could be used to prod both Iran and U.S. allies -- such as by seeking an upfront commitment from Europe, Russia and China to support much tougher sanctions if the negotiations fail.
"This will give us stronger carrots and stronger sticks," said Dennis Ross, a Middle East envoy in the Clinton administration who advises the campaign and acknowledged he has heard concerns from Europeans. "This will give us leverage with those who are convinced Iran should be stopped but have not provided tough economic sanctions," such as ending financing of Iran's energy businesses. "This will not take place divorced from the U.N. Security Council. But we have to be mindful we have a process that is not working."
Check out the melodramatics that have followed the introduction in the House of Representatives of a bipartisan, non-binding resolution calling on President Bush to levy stronger sanctions on Iran.
The resolution urges the President to impose sanctions on Iranian banks which are implicated in terrorism and — this is what has set consciences aflame — “demands the president lead an international effort to cut off exports of refined petroleum to Iran.” Shouldn’t sanctions, which occupy a middle ground between diplomacy and war, be the preferred strategy for liberals who wish to defuse the nuclear confrontation without shots fired? Well, maybe sanctions are only preferred in theory.
The non-binding resolution was too much for a group called the National Iranian American Council, which is more or less a contemporary iteration of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. NIAC has posted on its website a silly reaction to the House bill, titled “Is a New Congressional Resolution Declaring War with Iran?” which announces that the bill “effectively requir[es] a naval blockade on Iran.” How, one might ask, does Congress go about “effectively” requiring action of the magnitude of a naval blockade? (NIAC’s larger strategy is something of a reverse image of the Bush Doctrine, in which America preemptively capitulates to everything the Iranian regime wants.)
Okay, so one shouldn’t look to Trita Parsi & co. for serious thinking about Iran. But now comes M.J. Rosenberg, who appears to have been drinking strong spirits rather than cappuccino in the TPM Cafe:
Both the House and Senate are considering legislation that would put us in a state of war with Iran. Right now. . . . The bill’s “action clause” would put us at war with Iran by immediately imposing a blockade.
The Fifth Fleet is encircling the port of Bushehr as we speak! Well, actually it’s not. So, in the hopes that Mr. Rosenberg will take a break from stockpiling bottled water and flashlight batteries in his basement long enough to read this, here’s a basic lesson in logic: Refusing to export a good to a country is not the same thing as militarily blockading the import of that good to a country. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of non-military pressure which responsible liberals uphold as an ideal form of collective international action, which if pursued with confidence and unity can prevent war. But one gets the feeling that some people find it more satisfying to make false accusations of warmongering than to join a genuine effort to prevent war.
An attack on the U.S. 5th Fleet, exploding Saudi oil refineries, and a Hezbollah operation against a soft target in the Americas, Asia, or Europe. These are scenarios America's intelligence analysts are now poring over as Israel signals its preparedness to deal with Iran's race for the A-bomb.
The disclosure Friday in the New York Times of Israel's aerial training mission earlier this month over the Greek Mediterranean prompted America's intelligence chiefs to task analysts with developing contingency plans — or what one called "nightmare scenarios" — if the Israelis were to send their F-15s and F-16s to Iran's known nuclear enrichment facilities. While the training exercise was known at the time to American intelligence, the fact that Israel and America chose to make the mission public escalated the already high tensions between Tehran and Jerusalem.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, speaking on Al-Arabiya television over the weekend, said an Israeli attack on Iran's enrichment facilities would turn the Middle East into a "ball of fire." Interviews with current and former national security officials in America suggest that Washington and its allies in the Middle East are bracing for unconventional and conventional attacks from Iran in response to such an Israeli action.
Possible scenarios include:
A terrorist attack on the Saudi oil port of Ras Tanura, an export point for oil bound for Asia. Saudi and American officials have in the past disrupted Al Qaeda plots on the facility, such as an attack on the Abqaiq oil processing plant near Dammam, Saudi Arabia, that killed two guards. A naval assault on the U.S. 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf. Iran still has warships equipped with Russian-designed Shkval torpedoes that it could fire at American vessels. Another possible attack would be suicide boat sorties similar to the one that bombed the USS Cole. The commencement of a new round in the war between Hezbollah and Israel, with Hezbollah firing its Shihab missiles into Haifa and possibly the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. Hezbollah or Iranian intelligence terrorist operations on soft targets, such as shopping malls and community centers, in third countries and possibly even America. A renewed effort to stir an uprising in Iraq through Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army or the special groups controlled by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. While Europe, America, and other allies increase economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran, Israel is privately making it clear that it seeks to prevent Iran from even testing a nuclear device, as North Korea did in 2006. Most Western intelligence agencies agree that Iran's enrichment tests at Natanz have increased the odds of Iran mastering the technology necessary to create a test explosion.
In February, the director of national intelligence, Admiral John Michael McConnell, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Iran could be between six and 12 months away from mastering the technology needed for a nuclear device but not a warhead or bomb. Later in that hearing, he conceded that weapons analysts differ on the matter, providing a range of dates for nuclear fuel cycle mastery between 2010 and 2015, and adding that America's knowledge of the matter was incomplete.
The former deputy commissioner for counterterrorism for the New York City Police Department, Michael Sheehan, said his office had prepared for an Iranian response in New York the last time "there was a lot of saber-rattling on this," in 2005. He outlines some of his thinking in his new book, "Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves."
In an interview, Mr. Sheehan said: "We very much considered how would the Iranians potentially respond to an American or Israeli attack. My thinking then and now is that Iran, in my view, is very rational. They will react in a very carefully and considered way, and I believe they will react with some sort of direct action by Iranian intelligence services or through a surrogate like Hezbollah."
Mr. Sheehan, who also served as one of President Clinton's ambassadors for counterterrorism, said that both the FBI and the NYPD have expelled Iranian intelligence officials from New York. He said he would not disclose details of possible targets considered in 2005, and he stressed that the faction of Hezbollah that carries out attacks in foreign countries, such as Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia or the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, is controlled by Iranian intelligence and not the political party and militia in Lebanon known as Hezbollah.
Asked whether Iran would attack the U.S. 5th Fleet, Mr. Sheehan suggested that the Iranians would be beaten, noting that the Navy would be on the highest alert should Israel attack Iran. A former chief of the Iran-Hezbollah office at the FBI's counterterrorism division, Kenneth Piernick, yesterday said he would guess that the Iranians would attack targets in the Persian Gulf.
"It seems to me the Iranians would have a greater power thrust closer to their borders. Our folks in Iraq and the Gulf will have their hands full. The Strait of Hormuz would be a target. They have made their demonstrations there in the past," he said. He added: "I would imagine my former colleagues are looking at Hezbollah's capabilities, but I have been away from the bureau for too long to speak on that now."
Mr. Piernick left the FBI in 2002.
In the past, Admiral McConnell has testified that Hezbollah has operatives in America. The network from Hezbollah was first disclosed in a series of federal prosecutions against the group's illicit fund raising. In some cases, individuals who were primarily raising money for the organization were found to have trained with the organization at the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.
A former senior counterterrorism official for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, Roger Cressey, said yesterday that it might not be in Hezbollah's interest to do Iran's retaliatory bidding. "As much as Iran is Hezbollah's state patron, it is unclear whether Hezbollah would take operations at the behest of Iran inside the United States," he said. "That is not necessarily in Hezbollah's state interest right now."
A more likely scenario, Mr. Cressey said, would involve Hezbollah operatives attempting to terrorize softer targets in South America, Europe, or East Asia.
"There are other targets they could hit," he said. "You can't discount those scenarios."
"Iran is the only country that does not interfere in Lebanon." Mahmoud Ahamdinejad [1]
Introduction
Ahmadinejad's absurd statement coincided ironically with the publication in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat of an extensive interview with Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, who has recently completed a total of 14 years as Iran's ambassador to Syria. By his own admission, Akhtari was the most senior Iranian liaison official with Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and the architect of the special relationship between Iran and Syria. Akhtari was also the founder in Damascus of the Palestinian-Iranian Friendship Society.
In the interview, published in two parts on May 14 and May 15, 2008, Akhtari distinguishes between the spiritual father (al-ab al-rouhi) of Hizbullah, the one who initiated the idea, and the "field father" (al-ab al-midani). Akhtari considers himself the latter, while his predecessor in Damascus, Ali Muhtashemi, was the former. [2]
Akhtari's Background and Proselytizing Activity
Akhtari was born in Qom in 1928, and came to diplomacy from his position as Friday preacher at the Samnan mosque, north of Tehran. He studied religious jurisprudence at a hawza (a Shi'ite religious center) in Qom. Concurrently with his role as ambassador to Damascus, Akhtari has served for the last four years as the head of the International Society of aal-al-beit, the Prophet Mohammad's descendents, who are viewed by the Shi'ite branch of Islam as the legitimate rulers of Islam. The Aal-al-beit Society is also engaged in spreading "Shi'ite Islamic consciousness," essentially a proselytizing organization which seeks converts to Shi'ite Islam.
Akhtari served two terms as ambassador to Damascus: the first, longer term from 1986 to 1997, and the second from 2005 to January 2008. But before serving as ambassador, he had accumulated a record as a proselytizer: He spent some time in Homs, Syria in 1969, and from there he went to Lebanon for two and a half years, through 1972, to carry out religious activities and tabligh (spreading of Islam).
Facing the First Crisis
Akhtari arrived in Syria in 1986, at a time of conflict between the Palestinians and the Shi'ite Movement - Amal - that was created by Imam Moussa al-Sadr in the 1960s as a social-service organization intended to improve the living conditions of the Shi'ite community in southern Lebanon, one of the poorest communities in the country. Al-Sadr, born in Iran and educated in Qom, also established the Shi'ite Supreme Islamic Council in 1969. Al-Sadr flew to Tripoli, Libya on August 25, 1978 and there he disappeared. His disappearance, six months prior to the success of the Iranian revolution, was a key factor in the marginalization of the Amal Movement, and the birth of Hizbullah.
The Splintering of Amal and the Creation of Hizbullah
The Islamic regime of Iran after the revolution regarded the Amal Movement with suspicion because it seemed insufficiently religious, and lacking the suitability or will to be an instrument of spreading the Iranian revolution. In addition, it was led by politicians, many of them were secular, rather than by clerics. In fact, the very name Amal (Hope) lacked religious ring. On its part, Amal was disenchanted with Iran because during its conflict with the Palestinians Iran supported the latter.
As a result, Iran encouraged elements from the Amal Movement to splinter and establish a religious party that would be more in tune with the concept of wilayat al-faqih, [the Rule of the Jurisprudent] introduced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic Republic. Once that party, Hizbullah, was established, Khomeini ordered elements of the Revolutionary Guards to go to Lebanon to train its young cadres.
The Iranian ambassador to Damascus from 1982-85, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, was quoted by Al-Sharq Al-Awsat as telling an Iranian newspaper that Hizbullah gained part of its battle experience through its participation in the war against Iraq. According to Mohtashemi, more than 100,000 young Lebanese received military training both in Lebanon and in Iran in groups of 300 fighters. Akhtari has also conceded that elements of Hizbullah fought in the war with Iraq "either within our ranks or by themselves."
Akhtari recalls that five planeloads of Revolutionary Guards and Basij (youth militia) landed in Damascus to stand with Hizbullah during the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, but Khomeini stopped any further dispatch of Iranian forces to Lebanon because of logistical problems. According to Akhtari, supplying a military contingency in Lebanon would have been difficult with the war raging between Iran and Iraq. The only other alternative would have been to go through Turkey, but Turkey was a member of NATO. Hence, the real alternative was to train Hizbullah's cadres in Lebanon itself.
Syria Allowed the Passage of Military Aid to Hizbullah
The arming of Hizbullah could not have been possible without the support of Syria. When Hizbullah was established, Syria was in control of Lebanon, and no one could come and go without the approval of the Syrian regime. In fact, Akhtari admits that throughout his "diplomatic" mission to Syria he coordinated his activities in Lebanon with Ghazi Kan'an, who was chief of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon from 1982-2001, and who became minister of interior in October 2003 and who in 2005 allegedly committed suicide. (Kan'an may have been involved in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri. As the international investigation of the assassination was beginning to implicate the Syrian regime, Kan'an may have been silenced by a staged - unexplainable - suicide.)
In his interview with Al-Asharq Al-Awsat, Ambassador Akhtari stated with evident pride that Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas are the "legitimate children of the Iranian revolution," and that Iran has supported them financially, politically, and morally. There was coordination between Iran and each of these organizations, but Akhtari argues that any final decisions were taken by these groups themselves.
The Establishment of Al-Manar TV
To solidify its control over its supporters and to spread Shi'ite Islamic fervor, Hizbullah needed its own television station, but Lebanon was reluctant to approve an independent station for Hizbullah. According to former Syrian vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam, now living in exile in France, the Iranian president at the time, Hashemi Rafsanjani, called Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad to obtain a license for Al-Manar TV. Assad told then-Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri to grant the permit, and the permit was granted. The establishment of Al-Manar was one of the steps that, Akhtari stresses, "strengthened the independence of Hizbullah on the Lebanese political scene." [3]
Hizbullah's Social Institutions - Identical To Iran's
In addition to Al-Manar TV, Hizbullah was able, with Iran's financing, to establish a wide range of social, financial, and economic institutions that strengthened the loyalty of the Shi'ites in Lebanon to Iran. One of the significant financial arms of Hizbullah is the Shahid Foundation (Martyrs Foundation), an Iran-based organization established in 1982 in Iran to assist victims of the Iran-Iraq war. In 2007, the U.S. Treasury targeted "Iran-based Martyrs Foundation," including its U.S. branch, and the finance firm Al-Qardh al-Hassan (Good Deed Loan) as front organizations for Hizbullah. According to the Treasury, the Martyrs Foundation branches in Lebanon provided financial support to the families of killed or imprisoned Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad members, including suicide bombers in the Palestinian territories. Al-Qardh al-Hassan created the Goodwill Charitable Organization (munathamat al-niyya al-hasana al-khairiya) in Dearborn, Michigan as a fundraising office for the Martyrs Foundation.
According to the U.S. Treasury, Hizbullah used the Al-Qardh al-Hassan's financial arms as cover to manage its financial activity. Al-Qardh al-Hassan is run by Hussein al-Shami, a senior Hizbullah leader who has also served as a member of Hizbullah's Shura Council and as head of several Hizbullah-controlled organizations. [4]
Hussein Raslan, in charge of the social functions in the Martyrs Foundation, told Islamonline on August 13, 2006, that the idea for the Foundation originated with Khomeini, who provided the financing from zakat (alms contributed by Muslims). Raslan said that the first Hizbullah school was established in Beirut in 1988, but that eventually the school was incorporated into the Imam al-Mahdi Foundation in 2002. The flow of funds [from Iran], Raslan said, enabled Hizbullah to establish a series of enterprises including those dealing with food supply, gasoline and printing houses. Hizbullah schools in Lebanon, either under Khomeini or al-Mahdi Foundations, follow the Iranian curriculum.
Hizbullah has also established a network of hospitals (dispensing Iranian-made medicines), banks, and cultural organizations. Finally, there are the Hizbullah police, who are responsible for maintaining "good manners" on the street - meaning, among other things, that women are always veiled in public. Money from Iran keeps this massive apparatus running.
Refusal to Pay for Electricity
One of the least-known facts about the dominance of Hizbullah in parts of Lebanon is the refusal of its members to pay their electric bills. Without the means to force them to do so, the Lebanese government is left with one of its largest budgetary problems - the growing subsidy the government has to pay to the national power company, Electricite du Liban.
The Shi'ization of Syria
The International Aal-Al-Beit Society, which operates under Iran's supreme leader, currently Ali Khamenei, and whose primary function is to spread Shi'ism (tashayu') in the rest of the Muslim world, took advantage of Iran's special relations with Syria in order to establish Shi'ite religious seminaries in Damascus. In fact, Damascus has now at least three hawzas (religious centers,) and is considered the third largest Shi'ite center in the world after Najaf and Qom. While Akhtari minimizes the proselytizing functions of the Aal Al-Beit society in Syria, there are concerns sounded in both Syria and the Arab world about the tashayu' effort - not only in Syria but in other countries, such as Egypt and Sudan.
Conclusion
This paper highlights two significant facts: first, Hizbullah was created and sustained by Iran. Iranian financial support has made it possible for this political organization to build a network of schools, hospitals, social welfare organizations and above all, military prowess. It now serves as an extension of Iran's strategic expansion into the Mediterranean.
Second, it is absolutely evident that Iran's extended arm into Lebanon would not have been possible without the collusion or approval of the Syrian regime. Syria is also the main conduit of arms from Iran to Hizbullah.
[Salamantis] And since Hermit likes the Asia Times, here's a recent article on Iran from them by Spengler, far and away their most intellectually gifted correspondent:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure 19 pounds 19 shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds and six pence, result misery," said Charles Dickens' Wilkins Micawber in the novel David Copperfield.
Households in President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's Iran must suffer on a Dickensian scale, for they spend 10% more than their income, according to the country's central bank. Iran's data are more hilarious than reliable, to be sure, but they illustrate how ordinary Iranians are perishing in a sea of petrodollars.
The price of oil more than doubled since I warned last year (Why Iran will fight, not compromise Asia Times Online, May 30, 2007) that Iran's Islamic kleptocracy had reached the end of its rope. Despite the surge in oil revenues, conditions are worse than they were a year ago, as the price of necessities soars out of ordinary reach. Not only the theft of the oil windfall, but the manner of the heft, puts Adhmadinejad's political future in doubt, as Sami Moubayed reported on this site on June 21 ('President' Larijani: A star is born). Changing the man at the top, however, is no cure for fecklessness of Central African proportions. Underneath Iran's imperial ambitions and messianic pretensions suppurates a pre-modern patronage system that corrupts everyone who comes near it.
The system is rotten, and must either break down, or break out, that is, through military adventures. Western observers who hope for reduced tensions through replacing the feckless Ahmadinejad with Majlis (parliament) speaker Ali Larijani will be disappointed. On that more below.
Iran's economic disaster looms large in the twilight war now in progress in the Middle East. Israel has just conducted the sort of public display of force that a nation does not do if it actually plans a surprise attack. Israel engages Syria, Egypt engages Hamas, and everyone else engages Iran - but to what end? It may be Sitzkrieg (sitting or phony war), but it is war nonetheless. Wars arise not from whim, but from circumstances that the prospective belligerents cannot bear. Iran has shown in the most vivid fashion that it cannot solve its internal problems. It is therefore likely to seek an external solution.
What happened to the US$35 billion of oil revenues that Iran's Shabab News, in a now notorious account, claims disappeared from official accounting during the year through March 2008? Half the country's oil revenues disappeared from the books. A great deal of it left the country for banks in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere; capital flight already was running at a $15 billion annual rate last year, by my estimate.
During the past year, though, conspicuous consumption in the form of a luxury housing boom has absorbed even more of Iran's oil windfall. Luxury apartments in Tehran's better neighborhoods now sell for $15,000 per square meter, Agence France Presse reported May 26, equal to the best neighborhoods in Paris or New York. A 200-square-meter apartment in northern Tehran sells for about $1 million. Real estate prices in outlying suburbs and some provincial cities have doubled over the past year.
Corruption has metastasized, that is to say, for the scale of the property boom implies that tens of thousands of Iranians are taking six-to-seven figure bites out of the oil budget. Rather than a handful of officials siphoning state funds into bank accounts in Dubai, an entire class of hangers-on of the Islamic revolution is spending sums beyond the dreams of the average Iranian, and in brazen public view.
Ahmadinejad's patronage system generates payoffs to the political class that have set in motion uncontrolled inflation - officially 25% per year but certainly much higher - and a rush into real assets. A side effect is that the average Iranian urban household, which spends $316 a month, is gradually being priced out of the rental market.
Not only rents but foodstuffs, fuel and other essentials have registered double- or triple-digit price increases during recent months, according to fragmentary reports trickling out of the country. The government's 25% inflation figure cannot be correct. The German Suddeutsche Zeitung's Tehran correspondent wrote on June 17, "Price increases follow one another in batches. After the prices of rice and detergent suddenly jumped by a multiple, tea prices have their turn. In just a few days different types of tea have become 300% to 700% more expensive." It is too early to speak of hyperinflation, but the the Iranian bazaar already presents with symptoms of incipient hyperinflation. How do households survive?
"Iranian urban households spent an average of 35 million rials (US$$3,700) for current annual living expenses (about 2.9 million rials per month)" in fiscal year 2005-2006, reports the country's central bank, of which just under 30% bought food. But it also reports that "urban households had an annual average gross income of 31,674 thousand rials [US$$3,423], about 2,640 thousand rials per month, out of which 74.6% was the share of money income and 25.4% was the share of non-money income."
These are the most recent data available from the central bank, which does not explain how it is possible for households to spend more than they earn in a country that has no consumer credit (nor for that matter what "non-money income" involves). Part of the explanation seems to be that every poor Iranian has a part-time job, from selling black-market gasoline to prostitution. The latter appears to be the most lucrative source of extra household income. Some 300,000 prostitutes ply the streets of Tehran, or one out of 10 of the city's female population of child-bearing age, [1] according to the most frequently cited sources (see Jihadis and whores Asia Times Online, November 21, 2006.)
In addition, tens of thousands of Iranian women are working as prostitutes abroad, notoriously in the Gulf States, but in Europe and Japan as well. The US State Department recently downgraded Iran to a "Level III" country, that is, one that does nothing to suppress the trade in female flesh.
Prostitution incorporates such a large proportion of Iran's marriageable females as to accelerate the country's demographic decline, which by 2030 will leave Iran with as high a proportion of pensioners as Western Europe, just as its oil reserves run out. Unlike Norway, which entrusted its oil windfalls to a national trust under professional management, Iran has allowed the political class to steal its patrimony.
The Persian pocket empire never had a government or a civil society: it only had a court and a bazaar, which are incapable of managing the affairs of a modern society. There is no political party, no social movement, in fact no form of popular organization of any kind capable of handling $350 million a day of oil revenue at present prices.
"Regime change" is a buzzword among Western strategists, but it is not at all clear what sort of regime might replace the court-and-bazaar combination that has characterized Persian politics for the past 2,600 years. Apart from a thin crust of Western-oriented students in the larger cities, the Iranian population remains sullenly dependent on state subsidies as well as its own cupidity.
Apart from oil, Iran exports mainly fruits and nuts. Its most talented people have emigrated, leaving behind only the leeches of the bazaar who hope to grow fat on state oil money. Its demographic problems are insoluble. It has no employment to offer its last generation of young people, half of whom have no visible employment, and no way to support a rapidly aging population. I am in no position to judge the likelihood that the Twelfth Imam of Shi'ite soteriology will reappear in the near future, but it is a fair assertion that nothing else is likely to steer the Persian pocket empire out of the ditch. Western analysts start with the premise that a solution exists for every problem, and set out to find it. I do not believe there is any way to save Iran from terminal dysfunction; it is only possible to prevent Iran's problems from turning into a disaster for the region.
It is no surprise that Iran's leaders remain obsessed with Shi'ite revolution. Larijani told the Islamic Coalition Party on June 19, "The jihadi forces of the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas are the pioneers of change in today's world," Iran's official press agency reported. Larijani added, "Interpreting the moves made within the Islamic World as terrorism under such conditions that the Islamic society enjoys the pride of having jihadi combatants is a grave mistake, since those groups are the soldiers of Almighty Allah." IRNA continued: Larijani reiterated, "During the course of the 33-day war [in 2006] the global arrogance invaded against an oppressed nation with all its might having assumed that they could in confrontation with the jihadi combatants fighting for Allah's sake crash them fatally."
He reiterated, "The US Secretary of State had at that time directed the March 14 group to disturb the internal situation, assuring them that the Zionists, backed by the US, too, would wrap up the work of Hezbollah, and that was their strategic mistake." The parliament speaker said, "The Lebanese nation, in the framework of Hezbollah, resisted against the United States and Israel so that even their friends confessed to their defeat."
Larijani said, "The sagacious stands adopted by [Hezbollah leader] Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah regarding the recent developments in Lebanon revealed the plots hatched by the arrogance and they begged assistance from the small country Qatar, where they yielded to the presence of Hezbollah in Lebanon."
He considered all such jihadi victories as fruits of the martyrs' pure blood, arguing, "The martyrs were those who changed the conditions and were involved in deciding the fates of nations." (Emphasis added) The fact that Larijani holds a doctorate in European philosophy and has authored books on the philosopher Immanuel Kant impressed political observers in Germany, that is, until he spoke at the annual Munich Conference on Security in February 2007. As Der Spiegel reported, "Larijani was cornered. In his answer he talked about an 'overreaction' to the Holocaust. In any case, he said, 'That's a historical matter,' which has 'nothing to do with us'. He was 'neither for, nor against' the idea that the Holocaust had really occurred, saying it was an 'open question'. He thus delicately danced around a straight denial of the Holocaust, which is illegal in Germany. If Larijani had voiced the well-known opinion of his own president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, he could have been arrested."
Adhmadinejad is a boor from the back streets of Tehran, while Larijani is the polished son and the son-in-law of two ayatollahs. No matter; German universities during the 1930s were crawling with Kant scholars who enthused for Adolf Hitler. Larijani's enthusiasm for the blood of martyrs as the determinant of national destiny is not a philosophical, but an existential view, and Iran is one of the few venues in the world in which existential despair is sadly justified.
Note 1. Assuming that the distribution of female population in Tehran is the same as that in all of Iran. According to United Nations population data, in 2005 half of Iran's women were between 15 and 44 years of age.
The finishing touches on several contingency plans for attacking Iran
By David DeBatto
24/06/08 -- - Global Research Editor's note
We bring to the attention of our readers David DeBatto's scenario as to what might occur if one of the several contingency plans to attack Iran, with the participation of Israel and NATO, were to be carried out. While one may disagree with certain elements of detail of the author's text, the thrust of this analysis must be taken seriously. "Israel has said a strike on Iran will be "unavoidable" if the Islamic regime continues to press ahead with alleged plans for building an atom-bomb." (London Daily Telegraph, 6/11/2008) "Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany joined President Bush on Wednesday in calling for further sanctions against Iran if it does not suspend its uranium enrichment program." Mr. Bush stressed again that "all options are on the table," which would include military force. (New York Times, 6/11/2008)
We are fast approaching the final six months of the Bush administration. The quagmire in Iraq is in its sixth painful year with no real end in sight and the forgotten war in Afghanistan is well into its seventh year. The "dead enders" and other armed factions are still alive and well in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan again controls most of that country. Gas prices have now reached an average of $4.00 a gallon nationally and several analysts predict the price will rise to $5.00-$6.00 dollars per gallon at the pump by Labor Day. This, despite assurances by some major supporters of the decision to invade Iraq that the Iraq war "will pay for itself" (Paul Wolfowitz) or that we will see "$20.00 per barrel" oil prices if we invade Iraq (Rupert Murdoch).
One thing the Pentagon routinely does (and does very well) is conduct war games. Top brass there are constantly developing strategies for conducting any number of theoretical missions based on real or perceived threats to our national security or vital interests. This was also done prior to the invasion of Iraq, but the Bush administration chose not to listen to the dire warnings about that mission given to him by Pentagon leaders, or for that matter, by his own senior intelligence officials. Nevertheless, war gaming is in full swing again right now with the bullseye just to the right of our current mess – Iran.
It’s no secret that the U.S. is currently putting the finishing touches on several contingency plans for attacking Iranian nuclear and military facilities. With our ground forces stretched to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan, none of the most likely scenarios involve a ground invasion. Not that this administration wouldn’t prefer to march into the seat of Shiite Islam behind a solid, moving line of M1 Abrams tanks and proclaim the country for democracy. The fact is that even the President knows we can’t pull that off any more so he and the neo-cons will have to settle for Shock and Awe Lite.
If we invade Iran this year it will be done using hundreds of sorties by carrier based aircraft already stationed in the Persian Gulf and from land based aircraft located in Iraq and Qatar. They will strike the known nuclear facilities located in and around Tehran and the rest of the country as well as bases containing major units of the Iranian military, anti-aircraft installations and units of the Revolutionary Guard (a separate and potent Iranian para-military organization).
Will this military action stop Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons? Probably not. It will probably not even destroy all of their nuclear research facilities, the most sensitive of which are known to be underground, protected by tons of earth and reinforced concrete and steel designed to survive almost all attacks using conventional munitions. The Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard will most likely survive as well, although they will suffer significant casualties and major bases and command centers will undoubtedly be destroyed. However, since Iran has both a functioning Air Force, Navy (including submarines) and modern anti-aircraft capabilities, U.S. fighter-bombers will suffer casualties as well. This will not be a "Cake Walk" as with the U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the Iraqi Army simply melted away and the Iraqi Air Force never even launched a single aircraft.
Not even close.
If the United States attacks Iran either this summer or this fall, the American people had better be prepared for a shock that may perhaps be even greater to the national psyche (and economy) than 9/11. First of all, there will be significant U.S. casualties in the initial invasion. American jets will be shot down and the American pilots who are not killed will be taken prisoner - including female pilots. Iranian Yakhonts 26, Sunburn 22 and Exocet missiles will seek out and strike U.S. naval battle groups bottled up in the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf with very deadly results. American sailors will be killed and U.S. ships will be badly damaged and perhaps sunk. We may even witness the first attack on an American Aircraft carrier since World War II.
That’s just the opening act.
Israel (who had thus far stayed out of the fray by letting the U.S. military do the heavy lifting) is attacked by Hezbollah in a coordinated and large scale effort. Widespread and grisly casualties effectively paralyze the nation, a notion once thought impossible. Iran’s newest ally in the region, Syria, then unleashes a barrage of over 200 Scud B, C and D missiles at Israel, each armed with VX gas. Since all of Israel is within range of these Russian built weapons, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and virtually all major civilian centers and several military bases are struck, often with a result of massive casualties.
The Israeli Air Force orders all three squadrons of their F-16I Sufa fighter/bombers into the air with orders to bomb Tehran and as many military and nuclear bases as they can before they are either shot down or run out of fuel. It is a one way trip for some of these pilots. Their ancient homeland lies in ruins. Many have family that is already dead or dying. They do not wait for permission from Washington, DC or U.S. regional military commanders. The Israeli aircraft are carrying the majority of their country’s nuclear arsenal under their wings.
Just after the first waves of U.S. bombers cross into Iranian airspace, the Iranian Navy, using shore based missiles and small, fast attack craft sinks several oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, sealing off the Persian Gulf and all its oil from the rest of the world. They then mine the area, making it difficult and even deadly for American minesweepers to clear the straits. Whatever is left of the Iranian Navy and Air Force harasses our Navy as it attempts minesweeping operations. More U.S casualties.
The day after the invasion Wall Street (and to a lesser extent, Tokyo, London and Frankfurt) acts as it always does in an international crisis – irrational speculative and spot buying reaches fever pitch and sends the cost of oil skyrocketing. In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iran, the price of oil goes to $200.00 - $300.00 dollars a barrel on the open market. If the war is not resolved in a few weeks, that price could rise even higher. This will send the price of gasoline at the pump in this country to $8.00-$10.00 per gallon immediately and subsequently to even higher unthinkable levels.
If that happens, this country shuts down. Most Americans are not be able to afford gas to go to work. Truckers pull their big rigs to the side of the road and simply walk away. Food, medicine and other critical products are not be brought to stores. Gas and electricity (what is left of the short supply) are too expensive for most people to afford. Children, the sick and elderly die from lack of air-conditioned homes and hospitals in the summer. Children, the sick and elderly die in the winter for lack of heat. There are food riots across the country. A barter system takes the place of currency and credit as the economy dissolves and banks close or limit withdrawals. Civil unrest builds.
The police are unable to contain the violence and are themselves victims of the same crisis as the rest of the population. Civilian rule dissolves and Martial Law is declared under provisions approved under the Patriot Act. Regular U.S. Army and Marine troops patrol the streets. The federal government apparatus is moved to an unknown but secure location. The United States descends into chaos and becomes a third world country. Its time as the lone superpower is over.
It doesn’t get any worse than this.
Then the first Israeli bomber drops its nuclear payload on Tehran.
David DeBatto is a former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, Iraqi war veteran and co-author the "CI" series from Warner Books and the upcoming "Counter to Intelligence" from Praeger Security International.
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #29 on: 2008-06-26 22:30:52 »
Note that Israeli F16s don't have the range to attack Iran without refueling - and I would be very reluctant to be in flight in a refueling tanker - or on an AWACS platform - while an attack against Iran was in progress. Unlike Iraq or even Czechoslovakia, Iran has a very competent multilayered air defense system. Which means that for Israeli F16s an attack on Iran would be a one way trip - and they would still need a refueling on the way in.
The long-range F15s kindly supplied to Israel by the US do have the needed range, but Israel does not have many of them, which will seriously curtail any potential response on Iran outside of submarine launched nuclear missiles. And it should not be forgotten that Iran now has some submarines of its own.
My expectation is that any use of nuclear weapons (already determined by the International Court to be a war crime) against Iran will result in a "justified" response using biochemical weapons on Israel, but that first use of proscribed weapons will be by Israel, the US or both. This might be deliberately stimulated by Iraq tickling the dragon's tails for propaganda purposes.
Strategically speaking, if the USA and, or Israel attack Iran, then Iran would have to respond with a carefully balanced response intended to push either and or both into a process of pricey escalation without inviting the total destruction of Iran - which either could do using nuclear weapons. The huge advantage held by Iran is that Israel cannot "win" any kind of war against it. The demographics are against Israel; five million Jews, no matter how well equipped, couldn't dominate 10 million Palestinians and 80 million Iranians for very long. Especially with Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon exploding into violent insurgencies around her. While the USA might be able to inflict an initial defeat on Iran, the initial cost would also likely destroy the USA and if it didn't, any attempt to manage Iran as a defeated state while continuing to attempt to fend off ongoing attacks by outraged Muslims as the price of energy continues to soar definitely would. And very soon, the huge population of the Middle East is going to need water from nuclear reactors to keep it going until we get space solar working - or vast numbers of people are going to die. Which will cause a collapse of oil supplies anyway - which will utterly demolish the US. I think Iran realizes this. The military in the US recognizes this too, but the politicians are too much enthralled to Israel and in to deep a denial to have grasped it yet.
The primary way for Iran to achieve a US withdrawal, which will be equivalent to a stunning defeat for the US, while still allowing the US to sustain its pride by claiming a victory (necessary to force withdrawal), will be through economic pressure; with a strong element of Iran attempting to prove to the West that we are not immune from nasty consequences for our brutality and simultaneously triggering massive guilt for the way we are fighting. This is far from difficult. Remember that the Iranians, some of the smartest people on earth have been able to inspect our behavior and develop responses for at least 30 years. When the response comes, it will likely not be in easily thwarted forms and might not even be immediately recognizable as being Iran at work. If I read the Iranians correctly, and I think I do, each time we attack, we will discover that the structure has been established such that we are forced to kill large numbers of "innocents" and, or, will make oil more scarce. So each attack will in fact serve to stimulate opposition within our own ranks and in the Islamic sphere. We will effectively be fighting for Iran.
The absolute worst case for Iran is that they might lose some major cities and some leaders and perhaps be occupied for a short while. Should the latter happen, I suspect that they have plans in place to effectively deny access to their oil in the short term or even in the long term. However, they know that they will recover once the US goes home bled to death by a million cuts as is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, only worse. How much worse will depend on the cost of oil and the value - if any - of the dollar. Oil is, according to OPEC, expected to rise to $170/barrel before labor day even without an attack on Iran. So $200/barrel is way below the likely price were the gulf closed. Which a war such as described above would inevitably do. I think my prior estimates of $500/barrel are conservative, as recent history has shown that a 1% increase in demand implies a 20% increase in the per barrel price. The Middle East currently provides some 30% of global oil while South America and Africa provide about 20%. As I consider it likely that Venezuela will respond to an attack on Iran by cutting output and directing it away from the US, while a small amount of intervention in West Africa by Iran and friends could have a massive social impact, dramatically reducing African oil supplies in the short, medium and even long term. The effective result is likely to be a devastating spike in the cost of oil, followed by eventual stabilization at effective prices some three to five times higher than present. The fact that the US reserves have been converted from light oils of the Brent class to heavy Saudi and Venezuelan tars under Bush tells us that the availability of oil in the US will drop even as the price soars and the impact of the increase will be far more severe in the US than in most of the rest of the world.
I think that outside of the article - which strikes me as having been written by somebody a long way outside of current military thinking and not very imaginative, Iran might try:
Ground based assaults against the US supply lines in Iraq, potentially harvesting some 160,000 soldiers and the same again or more in US contractors who would have no choice but to surrender in short order if their supply routes were cut, particularly given a massive increase in local attacks against US personnel and materiel in Iraq by our erstwhile Shiite allies there - potentially teamed up with the Sunni - as with the US being thrown out, the Sunni might well perceive themselves as having a strong chance of improving their share of the pie.
It is important to recognize that large scale thermobaric devices have a PoK and kill radius similar to tactical nuclear devices. In my opinion the use of missile borne thermobaric weapons ("legalized" by US and British use of these weapons) against Israeli facilities, US military camps, green zone targets in Iraq as well as against bases, oil installations and infrastructure in US allies throughout the Middle East - including Egypt, with probable massive loss of tactical assets and personnel, is the main reason why Iran does not regard nuclear weapons as necessary.
Massive "human wave" attacks against Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (as used successfully by Iran against Iraq in the first Gulf War). Whether they succeed militarily - which they well might - or fail, the "heroism" and sheer volume of death required to stop them will inspire uprisings throughout the Middle East.
Some ground based insertion attacks, with the intention of taking hostages, particularly in Israel and the US, would be expected.
Prepositioned smart torpedo clusters or smart mines either of which will operate on signatures harvested due to the US hubris in deploying significant assets in the Persian Gulf and which will independently attack significant assets - e.g. carrier fleets - on detection of the signatures after a cessation of "no attack" commands.
The use of supersonic shore-to-ship missiles and swarm attacks to overwhelm Aegis equipped flotillas and having overwhelmed them, sink them or at least render them valueless. No matter how large they are, not even American carriers are invulnerable to ongoing barrages of high explosives and thermobaric weapons. The US Navy thinks that any ships in littoral waters have only a limited possibility of survival in current generation warfare. The Gulf is effectively not only littoral, but access is controlled by Iran While Iran's well camouflaged and hardened ground based missile batteries dominate it.
Outside of spring, storms will effectively guarantee Iran sufficient manoevering periods free of satellite or RPV observation to neutralize US/Israeli space asset and theater observation dominance.
I suspect that Iran must have developed some strategy against US stealth helicopters, possibly optical detection combined with hand held optical tracking or laser designator missiles with "cable spool" or flechette terminal phases, to neutralize the advantage these provided the US during previous attacks on Iranian assets. Iran would not be nearly as confident as they seem to be were this not the case.
The use of oeliophilic bacteria and archaea to methanate and clot the oil fields of others; the use of sabotage crews to destroy pipelines throughout the Middle East and perhaps even in Europe; the use of chemicals to destroy refineries and electrical generation capacity (legitimized by US use of the same in the Balkans); the use of thermobaric devices and sabotage to destroy above ground infrastructure, all will combine to push the price of oil into the $500/barrel range on a permanent basis, with a "drag on" effect doing horrible things to the cost of coal, gas, fertilizer and food.
Possible use of prepositioned human assets and munitions in the US and Europe to cause chaos beyond that which oil prices will create, likely through attacking infrastructure to cause further economic harm without massive loss of life.
Finally, while the scenarios above play their course, the US' bankers, particularly the Chinese, who also need Mideast oil, are going to go crazy. As, I think, will many other hotspots, if only because it is obvious that if the US becomes embroiled in another Middle East war, it is not going to be able to act in the Republic of China (Taiwan), in Korea, in the Kashmir, in the ex-soviet Central Asian republics (which will likely go the way of Chechnya), in Georgia, in the Baltics, or even in the Levant. This is, after all, not dissimilar from how previous major wars arose. Even if this nightmare scenario does not come to pass, and I put the odds as better than even that some of it will, the pressure applied on us will be immediate and probably irresistible. If you think the dollar is in freefall now, wait till the effects of this sort of insanity become visible.
Meanwhile Iran is sitting on bullion. A lot of bullion. While US allies hold our scrip which is not going to be worth a whole lot no matter how such a scenario ends. If friendship can be bought then Iran is likely to end up with far more friends than the US. And Israel is likely to vanish entirely. Which might be the only positive thing to come out of this disaster. It would still in my opinion be a case of too little too late to justify it.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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