Coming War With Iran - All Iran News Here

[Godfather77]

Looks like they are gearing up to hit Iran later this year.

Ehud Barak warns Iran of possible Israeli strike on nuclear facilities
July 27, 2009
Full article:- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6729276.ece

With the US Defence Secretary standing at his side, Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, today warned Iran that a military strike on its nuclear facilities was still an option.

“We clearly believe that no option should be removed from the table. This is our policy. We mean it. We recommend to others to take the same position but we cannot dictate it to anyone,” Mr Barak said at a press conference with Robert Gates in Jerusalem.

The renewed threat of military action came a day after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, told Iran that its pursuit of nuclear ambitions was “futile”.

Israel recently sent warships and a submarine through the Suez Canal in what was widely interpreted as a flexing of muscles toward the Iranian regime, still struggling to handle the fallout from disputed elections last month.

Mr Barak, a seasoned army general, said that diplomatic initiatives, including tough sanctions, should be tried before a military option. Israeli officials sense that the US willingness to engage Iran in dialogue, which had so worried the new right-wing government before the elections, has waned since Tehran’s crackdown on reformist demonstrations.

Mrs Clinton’s comments that the US would protect Israel should Tehran achieve a nuclear arsenal, while meant to smooth worries, only served to aggravate tensions.

“I heard, unenthusiastically, the Americans’ statement that they will defend their allies in the event that Iran arms itself with an atomic bomb, as if they have already reconciled with this possibility, and this is a mistake,” said Dan Meridor, the minister for secret services. “Now, we don’t need to deal with the assumption that Iran will attain nuclear weapons, but to prevent this.”

Mr Gates said today that the clock was ticking for Iran to decide whether it wanted to engage with the West over its nuclear programme. “I think that the president is certainly anticipating or hoping for some kind of response this fall, perhaps by the time of the UN General Assembly [in September]."

There are some concerns in Israel that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the hardline Iranian President who has been shaken by the scale of protests against his re-election, could try to deflect domestic criticism by stirring up trouble against Israel among its regional proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Such fears were heightened today when the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened that his Shia militia’s rockets could for the first time hit Tel Aviv, Israel’s main coastal city, if a new war erupted.

[bigron]

Russia and Iran Join Hands

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23146.htm

July 28, 2009 "Asia Times" -- The United States may think of Russia as a strategic partner when it comes to Iran. In reality, the geostrategic tensions between Washington and Moscow are still powerful enough to warrant a common approach by Russia and its eastern neighbor Iran with respect to a deterrent strategy towards the intrusive Western superpower.

This week, a small but significant clue is on full display with joint Russia-Iran military exercises in the Caspian Sea involving some 30 vessels. This is partially disguised by a benign environmental cause.

The maneuver, dubbed "Regional Collaboration for a Secure and Clean Caspian", combines security and maritime objectives in the Caspian Sea, the world's largest lake and also a main energy hub that is now the scene of competing alternatives for energy transfer. It signals a new trend in Iran-Russia military cooperation that will most likely increase in the near and intermediate future in light of Iran's observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The continuing standoff over Iran's nuclear program should affect this warming of relations.

Iran's willingness to join this exercise represents a complete about-face from seven years ago. In May 2002, Tehran reacted sharply to a Russian military exercise in the Caspian - held in the aftermath of a failed summit on the issue - by refusing to even send a military observer to the maneuver.

Despite all the ups and downs of Iran-Russia relations since then, the weight of geopolitical and geo-economic considerations on both countries has increasingly switched towards greater cooperation, much to the chagrin of Washington, which is keen on isolating "nuclearizing Iran".

At a time when Russia feels undermined by US-backed pipeline projects in the region, as well as dismayed by the absence of any compromise by the Barack Obama administration on its planned installation of an anti-missile shield in Eastern Europe, Moscow's intention to upgrade its military connections with Tehran is calculated. The signal to Washington is that Russia does not tolerate any direct or indirect "regime change" scenario with respect to Iran, a major pillar of anti-US sentiment in the region.

The two-day military exercises are being closely watched by the region's other littoral states - Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan - as well as neighboring states in the Caucasus and Central Asia, some of which are aligned with the West and are wary of a new level of Russia-Iran military ties.

Should Russia make good on its promise to put into operation the much-delayed Bushehr power plant that it is building in Iran, a good deal of present Iranian misgivings about Russia will disappear. After all, Russia is Iran's sole nuclear partner and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev openly rebuffed Obama's attempt, in his recent Moscow visit, to link a new arms limitation treaty with the issue of new sanctions on Iran.

Not surprisingly, on the eve of the Russia-Iran military exercise, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed the US's toughening approach toward Iran, by stating categorically that the US was opposed to Iran's possession of a "full enrichment" program, even though this is allowed under the articles of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory. Clinton's statement on Sunday is in sharp contrast with Obama's statement during his tour of Prague, when he hinted that the US was willing to accept Iran's enrichment program as long as it was fully monitored by the United Nations' atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A widening gap between Moscow and Washington over Iran is indisputable and will likely impact the Obama administration's plans for tough new sanctions later this year. Tehran has already been slapped with several rounds of UN sanctions, as well as those imposed unilaterally by the US over its nuclear program.

United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting Israel this week, told his hosts that he would remain "hopeful" about the administration's engagement with Iran for the next few months, hinting about an emerging deadline for the "engagement" that has unnerved Israel and some moderate Arab states as well.

Compared with the hypothetical US-Iran engagement, relations between Russia and Iran are progressing toward a honeymoon born of geostrategic considerations. The joint maneuver in the Caspian may prove a starting point for more comprehensive military collaboration between the Russian and Iranian navies, particularly if Moscow sets aside its previous refusal to allow new Iranian naval vessels to enter the Caspian through the Volga channel.

Russia's Caspian neighbors - above all Azerbaijan - may not like it, given the dispute between Tehran and Baku over a Caspian oil field. Still, the imperative of closer Russia-Iran cooperation to fend off Western influence dictates the need to beef up Iran's naval presence in the Caspian.

An important question deals with the possible ramifications of closer Russia-Iran military cooperation on the stalemate over the ownership of the Caspian Sea. Most of the Caspian is already portioned out by bilateral and trilateral agreements, involving Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Iran remains unhappy over Russia's lack of cooperation on this matter. This has been somewhat compensated by both countries agreeing on the common use of Caspian surface water, going back to the 1921 Iran-Russia friendship agreement. The earlier pact is the legal foundation for today's naval cooperation between the two countries.

Meanwhile, the predominant sentiment in Iran is that Moscow must make some concessions to Iran on the thorny issue of the Caspian's legal authority in order to gain Tehran's full confidence. Even Iranian officials in charge of Caspian affairs are unclear about what exactly Russia can do about a situation that is partially controlled by the other Caspian littoral states.

Blaming Russia for the stalemate over Caspian legal rights is a favorite pastime of some of Iran's reformists, who despise Moscow's early embrace of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad after the June 12 presidential elections. Such criticisms must be tempered by a cold calculation of Russia's limits of influence on the other Caspian states which have carved up the inland sea among themselves.

Another question raised by the maneuvers pertains to the Persian Gulf, considered a de facto "American lake", where France has entered the scene via a deal with the United Arab Emirates for a permanent military base. Iran's weak response to France's arrival, inexcusable by Iran's foreign policy standards, may be balanced by similar Iran-Russia military exercise in the Persian Gulf.

As such, the Caspian joint maneuver may well turn out to be the harbinger of a broader agenda that includes the concept of a gas cartel.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. His latest book, Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) is now available.

Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online

[bigron]

Russia-Iran Naval Maneuvers Begin in Caspian Sea
 
by Hana Levi Julian
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132634



(IsraelNN.com) Russia is joining up with Iran for joint naval exercises for the first time ever, according to the Iranian Mehr News Agency.

The joint Russian-Iranian naval maneuvers, which were announced Wednesday, are taking place this week in the Caspian Sea.

The report, which could not be independently confirmed, quoted a senior Iranian ports authority official who said the drill was aimed at preventing pollution and improving search and rescue operations coordination between the two nations.

However, the maneuver, involving some 30 vessels, is seen by some analysts as a way to join forces against the U.S., which the Asia Times referred to as "the intrusive Western superpower."

Entitled "Regional Collaboration for a Secure and Clean Caspian," the two-day drill quietly combines military objectives with environmental goals. A 1921 Iran-Russia friendship agreement was the legal foundation for the present naval cooperation between the two countries, according to political analyst Kaveh L. Afrasiabi.

Russia has been instrumental in protecting Iran from further sanctions by the United Nations Security Council due to its defiance of a U.N. mandate to end its nuclear development program.

Iran has continued to add uranium enrichment centrifuges and improve its ability to produce nuclear weapons-grade uranium, to the dismay of those hoping to persuade the Islamic Republic through diplomacy to abandon the effort.

Russia has been behind the construction of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, although Russian banks several months ago balked at funding any more of the project. Nevertheless, Russia has sent at least two shipments of nuclear fuel supplies to the facility, which is expected to come on line by the end of the year.

Israel has warned repeatedly that it will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has often threatened to annihilate the Jewish State.

[bigron]

Khiaban No. 32: Pressure from below ... and then what?

Khiaban # 32, via> Revolutionary Flowerpot Society

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m56508&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 30, 2009

Translation of the lead article from the Iranian newspaper Khiaban, #32. Thanks to the sender!

Pressure from Below, Haggling Above; or Pressure from Below, People's Power from Below?
Khiaban # 32 / Wednesday, July 29, 2009

People are not leaving the streets. Tomorrow, the city's streets will belong to the people again. Different groups of people and countless dissenting citizens are preparing memorials for the martyrs and the dead of the current Iranian revolution. Until now, names and details of 78 martyrs have been published. Many families, due to pressure from the regime's security and intelligence forces, have stayed silent and have not shared their immense grief with other people.

These killings started with the direct and unambiguous order of Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, in his June 19th Friday prayers speech. He said that from the next day anybody who took to the streets to protest would be held responsible for the loss of their own life. People, however, took up this responsibility and, in the face of the supreme jurist's bullets, machetes and knives, took to the streets to demand their rights from this regime of injustice. The brutality and ruthlessness of the supreme jurist's death squads was beyond compare. The order was to employ the maximum violence in order to impose an atmosphere of terror on the people and bring a graveyard-like silence to the society. That mediocre clown, Ahmadinejad, took up the directive of the supreme leader, using the dissent-killing machineries of the Sepah [Revolutionary Guards] and the Basij. The gangs of ruthlessness and brutality had their eyes on the 1980s experience and were imagining the absolute success of the state terror. What fools' dreams!

This time, there was not merely a small, vanguard group at the forefront [of the fight], whose shedding of their lives even could not save the barricades of street resistance from falling. This time the entire society had risen and they had erected their street barricades against a criminal minority.

In this bloody struggle -- in which the people, armed with their solidarity, hope, desire for freedom and a collective love, were on one side, and a governance equipped with the most horrific instruments for murdering its own citizens on the other -- countless of the purest of this land's children have fallen. Countless martyrs have become witness to the naked violence of a system of deceit and criminality, which has put its claws into society's lifeline, sucking its blood, growing corpulent. Countless youths gave their lives to bring to society freedom and a new world. [...]

Their martyrdom was the result of an organized mass killing by a regime, which, after taking away people's right of free speech, right to dignified work, right of assembly, right of self-determination, right of clothing, and all their other rights in a most merciless fashion, is now taking away from them even the right to life. The resistance of the people and the youth does not fit within the framework of the rulers' calculations, and the continuation of this resistance and people's solidarity against the coup regime is shaking the rulers' palace of religious despotism.

The fortieth day memorial of the martyrdom of Neda and all those who were killed the same day by the bullets of the regime, so that freedom and resolve would not fall, is a new day in the fight to bury the dark night of this land forever. People have stood up, and each day with their protests and innovations, they enrich and deepen their movement.

Some, with their thinking and beliefs rooted in the circumstances prior to June 12, are still following the "pressure from below, haggling up above" solution. In this view, people's movement in the streets, in their workplaces and places of living will give a section of the rulers -- who, in this view are thought to be more with the people, and work for the good of all -- a more powerful backing, and in the lobbies of power in the halls of the parliament and the cabinets, cause them to be able to extract more concessions from the other group of rulers, who are openly and unambiguously the enemies of the people. In this view, people, by enduring the costs of building pressure on a despotic and merciless power from below, will enable the more moderates within this closed circle of rulers to impose petty reforms on the other faction, which is reliant on oppressive military forces.

In previous years and in smaller and weaker movements, this logic may have had some buyers, but in the days after June 12, any tendency that takes up this viewpoint will isolate itself and lose people's support.

Today, people have concluded that they shall not give any blank checks to any layer of the ruling politicians, any reformists and seekers of change [from above]. They want their own control over all [social] matters. The rule of a religious group such as the supreme leader, the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, which are backed by military and economic institutions that have no accountability to the people, stands in direct opposition to the governance of the people over their own fate.

The only thing that can lead to an improvement of the people's real life conditions is a pressure from below leading to the taking of power from below and by the people. People want to determine their society's public laws themselves, and want to do so freely. They want all social institutions to be elected by the society and be accountable to them and under their oversight.

The existence of military institutions such as the Sepah and the Basij, which, in the hands of power thirsty groups, easily turn into instruments of killing people, are of no use for the people. The society wants to determine by itself which institutions are needed for its security and how those institutions work. A university president who has not been elected by the students, the professor and the university staff, but selected by powers beyond the society, easily and as it has happened, become collaborator with death squads killing the students.

Parliamentary representatives elected in a system other than one under people's control can come to reveal themselves, as they have these days, not as representing the people, but as functionaries and paid, rudderless hoodlums at the service of a coup regime of terror.

People want to create a new social system, in which in their places of work, in their places of living and in their cities, the methods of management and responsibilities are determined by the people and in realistic fashion, and in which the source of legitimacy and lawfulness is the people, not a group believing themselves to be religious scientists claiming to be god's replacement on earth. It is for these demands and with such outlook that the society has entered the arena of struggle with all they have, with all that the regime has left them with: their lives. If you take a good look at their determination, you will realize that they will achieve their goal.

 

[ConcordeWarrior]

France finds no evidence against Iran N program

What's the deal with  IsraHell  still beating the war drums to plunge the world into yet another costly war?


Quote:
The Foreign Affairs Committee of France Senate has affirmed in its latest report that there is no decisive evidence on the military nature of Iran nuclear program.

Quote:
Israel is the sole nuclear-armed regime in region which has so far refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and scoffed regional and international concerns over the a Middle East free from nuclear weapons.

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=102364&sectionid=351020104

 

[bigron]

The Israeli conundrum: ‘How to deal with Iran’ 


04/08/2009 10:00:00 AM GMT
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/The_Israeli_conundrum_How_to_deal_with_Iran.html
 
 If Israel strikes Iran, there are no guarantees that such an act will in any way destroy, or even slow down the Iranian nuclear program.


(Reuters) Netanyahu is now maneuvering to entice a tougher U.S. position towards Iran.

By Ramzy Baroud

Israeli officials face a conundrum that may take more than military muscle-flexing to resolve: how to deal with Iran? The solution to this dilemma will require no less than sheer political genius.


It must be frustrating for Israeli policymakers and their friends and backers elsewhere to stand idle as Iran openly carries on with its nuclear-enrichment program, facing nothing but United States and European chest-thumping and a mere threat of more sanctions, which will unlikely bend Iranian resolve.


It's doubly frustrating considering the relative ease that led the U.S., its timid coalition and Israeli cheerleaders to unleash a war against Iraq. Alas, those days are long gone. Now, the U.S. is anxiously cloaking its failure in Iraq by pressing the need to tend to more urgent battles elsewhere, namely Afghanistan.


Regardless of why the U.S. targeted Iraq, and why its objectives were not met, Israel's own calculations were a surprising success, as the Iraqi menace (manufactured or real) has been eliminated, and the ghost of chaos will likely haunt that unfortunate country for years to come.


Now, it's Iran's turn. In fact, it has been Iran's turn for years, but nothing seems to be moving on that front. If the Iraq experiment were successful, the U.S. would have definitely jumped at the opportunity to trample Iran, an oil-rich country with crucially strategic positioning. Controlling Iran would have been the missing piece of the puzzle that would push the borders of U.S. control and influence to lock horns, if necessary with the emerging Asian giants, and of course, Russia.


But a U.S. military move against Iran, under the current circumstances, is no less than military suicide. Iraq has established the limits of U.S. military capabilities, inspiring the Taliban to ascertain their own. July 2009 has gone down in history as the month with the highest causalities among U.S. forces. Deadly July is promising many repeats as daring Taliban and all sorts of tribal militias in Afghanistan emerge stronger and savvier than before.


A large-scale U.S. military attack, and needless to say, invasion and subsequent occupation, of Iran is simply not feasible. If such imprudence ever actualized, all hell would break loose in Iraq as well, considering the solid political and sectarian ties that unite both countries, which also share an infinite border.


This is precisely the source of frustration among Israeli officials, who have counted on U.S.military generosity to bully Israel's enemies, or, as was the case in Iraq, to take them down.


Israeli frustration must have also turned into sheer rage when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once more brought up the subject of a "defense umbrella" over the Middle East to shield it from a future nuclear Iran.


"If the United States extends a defense umbrella over the region, if we do even more to develop the military capacity of those in the Gulf, it is unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer because they won't be able to intimidate and dominate as they apparently believe they can once they have a nuclear weapon," she was quoted as saying in a Thai television interview.


Clinton's reinvention of the defense umbrella idea - introduced in a March 4 report by a pro-Israeli think-tank, Washington Institute on Near East Policy (WINEP) - stands at odds with her enthusiastic promise to "totally obliterate" Iran should it attack Israel, while trying to lure in supporters during her last year's run for presidential nomination. It seems that the U.S.- despite the use of threatening language - is edging towards living with and "containing" a nuclear Iran, but, expectedly, Israel is not.


The right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now maneuvering to entice a tougher U.S. position towards Iran, especially as the recent internal destabilization of the Islamic Republic failed to deliver. Israeli maneuvers are both political and military. The Times reported on a quid pro quo deal where Israeli “concessions” regarding its illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territories are to be reciprocated with a Western nod for an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. "Israel has chosen to place the Iranian threat over its settlements," a senior European Union diplomat told The Times on July 16.


That political scheme was supplemented by a show of force, as two Israeli missile-class warships and a submarine capable of launching a nuclear missile strike were reportedly permitted to sail through the Egyptian Suez Canal for the first time. The unprecedented deployment into the Red Sea was meant as a signal that Iran is within Israeli range. The message, however, carried perhaps a deeper political meaning - that Israel is capable of striking Iran with the help of regional allies. In other words, Israel is hardly the isolated party in this conflict. More, considering serious U.S. attempts aimed at weakening the Syria-Iran alliance, the Suez Canal message was even more politically loaded, although its military value is yet to be determined.


Militarily, things are not very promising, as the highly touted Israeli military exercise - conducted recently in the United States - registered little success. Israel called off tests of its Arrow anti-missile system due to technical problems. The Arrow program, which is half-funded by the United States, is meant to intercept and destroy such Iranian missiles as the Shehab-3.


As the U.S. military option against Iran largely dissipates, Israel's frustration and worries grow. If Iran is not neutralized militarily - as the U.S. did Iraq - then a nuclear Iran is a matter of time. If Israel strikes Iran, there are no guarantees that such an act - which will certainly harm U.S. strategic interests - will in any way destroy, or even slow down the Iranian nuclear program.


The U.S. and its European allies seem out of ideas regarding how to deal with Iran, leaving Israel with a major conundrum: either living in the potential shadow of a nuclear Iran, as a long-term regional power, or striking the Islamic Republic with the hope that its erroneously perceived "shaky" regime will quickly crumble, leaving the U.S. to pick up the pieces, and the whole region to deal with the chaos that will surely follow.


-- Ramzy Baroud is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London), and his forthcoming book is, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza The Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).



-- Middle East Online

 

[bigron]

Thursday, August 06, 2009
11:14 Mecca time, 08:14 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/08/200985121520362470.html

 
FOCUS: OPINION 
 
Iran in arms race with Israel 
 
 By Paul Beaver

 
Israel developed the Arrow II in response to what it says is an Iranian missile threat [GETTY]

 
Iran is one of the world's most significant nations in terms of history, culture and intellectual capacity, and is matched in the Middle East perhaps only by Israel.

It is a small wonder, then, that when Iran's hard-line and irascible president talks of building military capability and destroying Israel, Tel Aviv feels its survival is menaced and that Tehran's regime is its nemesis.

For all of its 61 years in existence, Israel has considered itself in a permanent war of survival. It has developed a national system which places great emphasis on its military and intelligence capabilities.

Starting from scratch, Israel has developed technologies which are truly world-leading, especially in the delivery of shock and awe on any potential enemy.

For the early part of its statehood, Israel had shared the support of the United States, as its protector and military hardware supplier, with the Shah's Iran.

When a belligerent Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq, both the Shah and Israel were uneasy and often co-operated in exploiting technology, both US and home-grown in Israel.

There is documented evidence that Israel supplied Iran with communications equipment and the supporting paraphernalia needed to allow both countries (and probably the US Central Intelligence Agency) to eavesdrop on Iraq.

The great divide

The Iranian Revolution changed all that and since 1980, Israel and Iran have grown apart. So far apart, in fact, that there is a real risk of armed conflict between the two states.

What makes the world sit up and take note is that Israel is a nuclear power with delivery systems which can reach Iran – and Iran is, according to US experts, just two years away from creating a nuclear strike capability of its own.

US experts believe Iran will be able to produce nuclear weapons material in the next few months.

For Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia – and even the Gulf states - this is particularly worrying as any nuclear-tipped missiles would fly overhead no matter who launches them.

In addition, Israel has a sophisticated - and tested - anti-missile system called Arrow, which could knock out a potential Iranian first strike. The problem for Israel's neighbours is not the technology but where the debris might fall if the Arrow were ever to be used.

Israel has watched with growing horror as the rhetoric from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, stokes tensions and as Tehran appears to be determined to create a full nuclear weapon capability.

Israel has taken steps to improve its nation's defences and its long-range strike capability. There is no doubt that the Israeli military could mount a successful air strike against targets in Iran and certainly that the Jericho series of ballistic missiles could hit targets with great accuracy.


Ballistic arsenals:
Iran vs Israel
 Short range ballistic missiles <1000km
Israel:
Jericho I - 500 km
Iran:
Mushak 120- 130km
Mushak 160- 160km
Mushak 200- 200km
Shahab 1- 300km
Shahab 2- 500km


 Medium range ballistic missiles 1000 - 3000km
Israel:
Jericho  II: 1500km
Iran:
Shahab3: 1300km
Shahab4: 3000km
Ghadr 101: 2500km
Ghadr 110: 3000km
IRIS: 3000km
KH-55: 2900-3000km

 Intermediate-range Ballistic missiles 3000-5500km
Iran:
Shahab: 5500km

 Intercontinental-range ballistic missiles > 5500km
Israel:
Jericho III: 4800-6500km
Iran:
Shahab 6: 10,000km

Source: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Unwanted scenarios
 
But it is also clear that any such first strike would provoke clear and rapid hostile reactions around the world, especially from moderate Arab nations with whom Israel seeks accord and co-operation against Iran, as well as by the European Union and others opposed to first strike operations – in favour of a self-defence option.

The Middle East peace process would be indirectly destroyed and Iran's proxies in Lebanon and Gaza would probably enter the fray against Israel.

Israeli interests worldwide could also be threatened.

Iran is not yet in a position to launch a first strike against Israel. This is perhaps a key concern because Israel has a reputation for not allowing a first strike capability to develop.

It has a record of destroying the Egyptian ballistic missile industry under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late Egyptian president; destroying French-built Iraqi nuclear reactors outside Baghdad at Osirak in 1981, and interdicting the supply of arms moving through Sudan as recently as January this year.

Nevertheless, Iran has had a series of short-range ballistic missiles for three decades, having developed them for the 'War of the Cities' during the war with Iraq. Much of the technology was originally bought from Pakistan and later North Korea.

There is Russian and Chinese technology extant as well – even technology bought commercially in electronics supermarkets in Japan as a report in Jane's Defence Weekly revealed 15 years ago.

But creating a weapon in sufficient numbers and capability to destroy key targets in Israel is a different matter.

Even if Iran had a nuclear device now, it would take some time to 'weaponise' it to create a first strike capability. North Korea is struggling with same problems which leads many to believe there is a union of need between the two otherwise unlikely bedfellows.

Black market technologies


An Israeli strike against Iran could drag in proxies into a wider Middle East conflict [EPA]
 
Iran's defence industries have created good technologies of their own since the US-inspired arms embargo which followed the cessation of hostilities with Iraq in 1988. Battlefield weapon systems were developed from black market Russian missiles and by some clever adaptations of US technology.

For example, Iran's military took medium-range air-to-air missiles (originally exported to Iran in the time of the Shah for the F-14 Tomcat and F-4 Phantom fleets) and reconfigured the guidance systems from air-to-air to air-to-ground.

Israel has also seen Iran, under Ahmadinejad, support both Hezbollah and Hamas. Recent military operations in South Lebanon in 2006 and against Hamas in Gaza in 2009 have witnessed a haul of Iranian-supplied systems.

Israel has put extreme diplomatic pressure on Russia about the extent of weapons sales to Iran. The unlikely alliance between Iran and Syria has also contributed to Israel's unease and feeling that it is - like in the early 1960s - surrounded by potential aggressors.

Washington's anti-Iran stance under George Bush, the former US president, led to speculation that the US would provide the technology for Israel to launch a conventional bombing raid – or rather series of raids – against Iranian nuclear facilities in known locations near Shiraz and Isfahan.

What to bomb?

The problem for Israel in mounting such operations would not be the technology of reaching the target areas, nor destroying those seen, or even the opposition of neighbours, but actually detecting the right facilities.

Iran, using North Korean advisers, has managed to bury and hide its main facilities. This makes a first strike difficult in military terms while the risk of collateral damage makes it impossible in political terms.

Israel has been trying a charm offensive with some moderate Arab states. It has highlighted that the physical and political fallout stemming from Ahmadinejad's more aggressive posture would be damaging for all.

Israel's case has not been helped by Operation Cast Lead, the name it gave its offensive against Hamas in Gaza last January.

Ahmadinejad's inauguration for a second term after the disputed elections is another factor. Traditionally, leaders under pressure in hard-line states have used military adventures to divert public opinion.

One only has to remember the actions of the Argentine Junta in 1982 when it invaded the Falkland Islands or actions in Northeast Africa over several decades.

Military and intelligence organisations look at a nation's potential threat by examining key attributes.

These are 'military capability' – could a nation actually carry out a military strike; "political will" – does a nation actually want to expend that much treasure and 'blood'; "an understanding of the consequence" – does the nation's leadership understand where the ripple caused by its casting of a stone into the pool of peace would stop?

Hard-line versus unpredictable


Hard-line and unpredictable stances in Iran and Israel could lead to war, analyst says [EPA] 

Taking each nation in turn – Israel has the military capability of a nuclear or non-nuclear strike against Iran and hence the war experience of 1967, 1973 and 1982 to fall back upon.

The current government in Tel Aviv is hard-line enough to both take the action and to ride out the political storm.

But it is also pragmatic and - despite its inability to understand the West's clear opposition to its housing policies in Jerusalem and the West Bank - guarded in its use of military force on a regional scale.

US posture is also a determining factor in any decision to strike. The fate of three US tourists apparently being held by Iran could further bolster the position of US hawks on Iran in the Obama administration.

Iran, on the other hand, is completely unpredictable, especially given the competing power structures within the country.

It has a recent history of meddling in the affairs of its neighbours, like the fledgling Iraq, and launched a million men and young boys in human waves against Saddam Hussein's armies dug in along the border in the 1980s.

The religious leaders of the time seemed quite happy to allow this wholesale slaughter without any sign of remorse. So the question remains, would Iran's leadership launch a nuclear strike against Israel?

Today, it cannot because the technology is not there. Will it at some time in the future if Iran were to ever develop such means?

The rest of the world can only hope that sense prevails in Tehran and the internal situation is resolved in a way that does not 'force' Ahmadinejad to take the 'nuclear option' – not literally, but by creating the conditions for war in order to reinforce his own embattled and increasingly fragile position as leader.

Paul Beaver is an independent defence and security analyst based in London. In his 30 years of commenting on strategic matters he has held senior positions in several organisations, including Jane's Information Group.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
 
 
 Source: Al Jazeera 
 
 
 
 
 

[bigron]

Published on Saturday, September 12, 2009 by Inter Press Service


Iran War Drums Begin Beating in Washington


by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - As nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West continue to move slowly, U.S. President Barack Obama is coming under growing pressure from what appears to be a concerted lobbying and media campaign urging him to act more aggressively to stop Iran's nuclear program.

Obama has given Tehran an end-of-September deadline to respond substantively to his offer of diplomatic engagement. But already hawks in the U.S. – backed by hardline pro-Israel organizations – have pressed him to quickly impose "crippling" economic sanctions against Tehran, and some are arguing that he should make preparations for a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The pressure campaign kicked off in earnest this week. On Thursday, hundreds of leaders and activists from the U.S. Jewish community descended on Washington to lobby for harsher sanctions, while widely-publicised media reports suggested that Iran is already nearing the verge of a nuclear capability.

Leaders from Jewish groups came for a national "Advocacy Day on Iran", during which they met with key Congressional figures.

Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, suggested that the clock "has almost run out" on Iran's nuclear program, and indicated that he would move ahead next month with a bill imposing sanctions on Iran's refined petroleum imports "absent some compelling evidence why I should do otherwise".

The bill, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), has for months been the top lobbying priority of hawkish pro-Israel lobbying groups led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). To their frustration, Berman has held up consideration of the bill for most of the past year

Not all U.S. Jewish groups are lining up behind the legislation, however.

Americans for Peace Now (APN), for instance, issued a statement arguing that "arbitrary deadlines are a mistake" and that "pursuing sanctions that target the Iranian people, rather than their leaders, is a morally and strategically perilous path that the Obama Administration must reject".

M.J. Rosenberg, a foreign policy analyst at Media Matters Action Network, suggested on the website TPMCafe that the advocacy day "marks the start of the fall push on Iran".

The advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has launched an intensive television advertising campaign this month claiming that the U.S. "must isolate Iran economically to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon".

UANI's two co-founders are now both high-ranking officials in the Obama administration – Dennis Ross, currently overseeing Iran policy at the National Security Council (NSC), and Richard Holbrooke, now the State Department special representative in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Also on Thursday, the New York Times published a front-page story claiming that U.S. intelligence agencies believe "that Iran has created enough nuclear fuel to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon", although the article did not provide an estimate of when Iran could have a nuclear capability.

The same day, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by former Senators Charles Robb and Daniel Coats and retired four-star Air Force General Chuck Wald. Claiming that Iran "will be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 2010", the authors urged Obama "to begin preparations for the use of military options" against Iran.

However, official U.S. intelligence estimates provide a far slower timeline. In February, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair told Congress that Iran would be unable to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU) until at least 2013, and stated that there is "no evidence" that Iran had even made a decision to produce HEU.

Iran insists that its nuclear program is intended solely for civilian purposes. In 2007, the U.S. intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate suggesting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

The campaign comes on the eve of a series of key international meetings in late September, including the annual opening of the U.N. General Assembly in New York and the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh.

Iran and its nuclear program are expected to be a major topic for world leaders who will attend these meetings, and hawks in Washington and Jerusalem hope that Obama will use them to push for the imposition of far-reaching economic sanctions by the U.N. Security Council as soon as possible.

While Obama faces pressure to move quickly to sanctions, the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still struggling at home to overcome challenges to its legitimacy resulting from the disputed presidential election in June. Many analysts suggest that Iran's government is currently in no position to respond coherently to U.S. engagement.

This week, Ahmadinejad's government finally issued a formal reply to proposals by the P5+1 powers - the U.S., China, Russia, Britain, France, and Germany - for talks on its nuclear program and related issues.

But the five-page-reply has been deemed too vague by Washington, with State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley dismissing it Thursday as "not really responsive" to U.S. concerns.

Other analysts suggested that the Iranian proposal was more promising than initial media reports would indicate.

"Iran's uncompromising stance and its cursory references to nuclear matters are most likely an opening bid, and not a red line," wrote National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi in the Huffington Post.

He suggests that the proposal's language "may offer an opening to push strongly for transparency and acceptance of intrusive inspections and verification mechanisms".

The Obama administration, however, continues to hold out hope for the engagement strategy.

"We'll be looking to see how ready Iran is to actually engage, and we will be testing that willingness to engage in the next few weeks," Crowley said.

At the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov all but ruled out his country's cooperation with new sanctions against Tehran at the Security Council, and called instead for renewed negotiations based on Iran's reply.

Lavrov's comments came shortly after a secret and still-mysterious visit to Russia by Israel's right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The latest developments - along with growing amount of attention being paid to U.S. policy in Afghanistan, at the expense of Iran - have only added to the frustration of Iran hawks in Washington. They believe increasingly that economic sanctions alone, even if they are imposed multilaterally, are unlikely to be enough to persuade Tehran to halt what they see as its drive to obtain a nuclear weapon.

For this reason, many suggest that the U.S. should either make preparations to attack Iran militarily itself, or step aside and allow Israel to do so.

"No one should believe that tighter sanctions will, in the foreseeable future, have any impact on Iran's nuclear weapons program," former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a noted hardliner, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month. "Adopting tougher economic sanctions is simply another detour away from hard decisions on whether to accept a nuclear Iran or support using force to prevent it."

Earlier that month, the Journal featured an article by Gen. Wald - who was one of the co-authors of Thursday's op-ed urging preparations for a military strike - entitled "Of Course There's a Military Option on Iran".

But critics suggest that the constant threats of military action against Tehran will only make the regime's leadership more intransigent on the nuclear issue.

"Pointing a gun at their heads merely reinforces their desire for a reliable deterrent, and probably strengthens the hand of any Iranian officials who think they ought to get a bomb as soon as possible," wrote Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, on the website of Foreign Policy magazine.


© 2009 IPS North America

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/12-3

[Brocke]

Nine smugglers, one police killed in Iran shootout

14 Sep 2009 11:17:01 GMT
Source: Reuters
TEHRAN, Sept 14 (Reuters) - Nine armed drug traffickers and one Iranian policeman have been killed in a shootout near the border with Afghanistan, a police commander said on Monday.

Hossein Sajedinia, a regional police commander, said security forces intercepted on Sunday a caravan of smugglers who refused to give themselves up and opened fire on agents, Mehr news agency reported.

"In the course of this exchange of fire nine armed outlaws were killed and one police officer was martyred," Sajedinia said.

Police seized arms and ammunition and 122 kg (268 pounds) of opium, he added.

Iran's eastern border areas are known for frequent clashes between security forces and well-armed drug traffickers. Iran is a key transit route for narcotics smuggled from Afghanistan, which produces more than 90 percent of the world's supply of opium, to the West and elsewhere.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HOS429221.htm

[bigron]

"They're baaaaack...."

Fri, 09/11/2009 - 11:46am
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/10/theyre_baaaaack



When I started blogging back in January, one of my early posts questioned the belief that Obama's election had ended talk of military action against Iran. I though this view was "almost certainly premature," because I didn't think a rapid diplomatic breakthrough was likely and I knew that advocates of a more forceful approach would soon come out of the woodwork and start pushing the new administration to get tough with Tehran. 

Well, I hate to say I told you so, but ... Right on cue, Wednesday's Wall Street Journal had an op-ed from former Senators Dan Coats and Chuck Robb and retired Air Force general Chuck Wald, recommending that Obama "begin preparations for the use of military options" against Iran's nuclear facilities. They argue that keeping the threat of force "on the table" is the only way to achieve a diplomatic solution, but they also make it clear that they favor bombing Iran if diplomacy fails. In their words, "making preparations now will enable the president, should all other measures fail to bring Tehran to the negotiating table, to use military force to retard Iran's nuclear program."

Will we ever learn? As other commentators have noted, many of the most vocal advocates of military action against Iran tend to be the same groups and individuals who saw 9/11 as a good excuse to invade Iraq and start trying to "transform" the Middle East. Plenty of people agree that Iran's nuclear ambitions are a problem, but the loudest voices calling for the threat or use of force tend to be either Israeli hardliners or American neocons. Gee, who woulda thought! It's equally unsurprising that the United Jewish Communities sponsored an "Iran Advocacy Day" in Washington yesterday, featuring appearances by key administration officials and prominent legislators. Its purpose, of course, was to highlight the danger of a nuclear Iran, put pressure on Obama to take a tough line, and to rally support for stiffer sanctions (at a minimum). M.J. Rosenberg called it just right: "it marks the start of the fall push on Iran."

The Coats, Robb and Wald op-ed is based on a new report from the "Bipartisan Policy Center" (a relatively new inside-the-Beltway think tank) which is an updated version of a lengthy report released last summer. The earlier study presented an alarmist view of Iran's capabilities and intentions and advocated a hard-line approach, including the use of "kinetic action" (i.e., military force) as a last resort. The director of the earlier study and its primary author were Michael Makovsky and Michael Rubin, two prominent neo-conservatives who previously worked on Iraq in the Bush Defense Department. Both are also hawkish defenders of Israel (among other things, Makovsky reportedly emigrated to Israel and served in the IDF before returning to the United States, and his brother David works for WINEP, the right-of-center pro-Israel think-tank that AIPAC created back in the early 1990s.)

Second, even though their earlier advocacy of the Iraq war proved disastrous, those who are now contemplating the use of force against Iran are hardly marginalized or discredited outsiders. The earlier BPC study was endorsed by a task force of mainstream figures that included my Kennedy School colleague Ash Carter (now in charge of acquisitions in the Pentagon) and Iraq hawk (and former WINEP official) Dennis Ross. Ross started out as Obama's special envoy on Iran and then moved over to a senior Middle East position at the NSC. Ross has also expressed skepticism about the prospects for a diplomatic breakthrough in the past, but believed that trying diplomacy first would make it easier to sell a more forceful approach later.

The drumbeats for war may still be faint but they are getting louder, even though trying to disarm Iran by bombing its nuclear facilities is still a very bad idea. If you want to reunite Iran's disaffected population behind the current dictatorship and give Ahmadinejad a real jolt of legitimacy, dropping bombs on their country is a good way to start. The Iranian people strongly support the nuclear research program, as does Mir Hussein Mousavi, the opposition candidate who was allegedly "defeated" in the recent election. Equally important, bombing Iran's existing facilities will only delay the program for a few years, because Iran could reconstitute it in more dispersed, hidden, and protected sites. And bombing them now is hardly going to lessen their desire for a deterrent of their own. Wouldn't any country that had been attacked in this fashion try to obtain the means to prevent a repeat in the future? Wouldn't we? Iran's government and population are also going to be hopping mad at us if we do this (or if we give Israel the green light to attack on its own), and they are bound to do whatever they can to pay us back. Again, wouldn't we do the same thing if anyone attacked us?

And please remember: Iran does not have a single nuclear weapon today, and there is still no sign that it has an active weapons program or is enriching uranium to sufficient purity to permit them to build a bomb. (For a rebuttal of Coats et al's claims on this point, see Daniel Luban here.) As of right now, they appear to looking for a "break out" capability that would enable them to get one rapidly if they decided it was necessary. If so, then it may -- repeat, may -- still be possible to persuade them not to weaponize. But the only course of action that stands a chance of doing that is the exact opposite of the one that the hawks are proposing.  Instead of rattling sabers, setting deadlines, and mobilizing for war, as Coats et al suggest, we need to take the threat of force off the table entirely. Pointing a gun at their heads merely reinforces their desire for a reliable deterrent, and probably strengthens the hand of any Iranian officials who think they ought to get a bomb as soon as possible. It may still come to that -- which would force us to fall back on deterrence and containment -- but following the hawks' prescription makes that outcome more likely.

Lastly, what about tougher sanctions? That will probably end up being the default option -- because it lets the United States and its allies appear to be doing something -- but it's not going to work either. Russia doesn't appear to be willing to go along, sanctions are rarely an effective means of coercion, and Iran has been facing them for years now without budging. If he's not careful, Obama's initial efforts to put relations with Iran on a new trajectory will morph back into the same strategy that the Bush administration followed, and will achieve the same results.

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

[bigron]

Was It "Pirates" or Israeli Intelligence That Intercepted a Ship Loaded with Russian Defense Missiles?

Russian and Israeli sources say the cargo ship Arctic Sea was carrying Russia's most sophisticated air-defense system system, which could protect Iranian facilities from attack.


By Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam
Posted on September 15, 2009, Printed on September 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142631/

A few days ago, in a blog post, I translated portions of an Israeli news story about the Arctic Sea affair which, along with a Time magazine report surmised that Israeli intelligence had intercepted or been involved in the interception of the ship, the Arctic Sea, while it was carrying Russian missiles destined for either Iran or Hezbollah.

Several readers, whose opinions I trust, dismissed these theories as improbable for various reasons. But it appears they are quite likely to be wrong, and the original story is likely to be correct.

Read the posted link above for the background on the original, strange, mysterious story about the ship Arctic Sea. What has happened since is that Russian and Israeli sources have contended that the Arctic Sea was carrying not just any Russian missile, but the nation's most sophisticated S-300 system, which could protect Iran's nuclear facilities from Israeli attack:

News reports over the weekend, citing military sources in Israel and Russia, said the Arctic Sea had been loaded with S-300 missiles at the Kaliningrad naval port without the Kremlin's knowledge.

I repeat a question I asked in my earlier post: How could the Russian government not have known a cargo of its most precious military technology was being loaded in its own naval port? I would surmise that elements of the Russian military and shady arms dealers must have been in cahoots to bring this kind of complex caper off:

Earlier this month, Mikhail Voitenko, a Russian journalist who specializes in maritime reporting, fled abroad after he said he received threats for his reporting that [the] ship was likely being used by corrupt officials to carry weapons. Voitenko broke the story of the ship's initial "disappearance" from the Baltic Sea.

Adding flesh to the story is a BBC report that Israeli intelligence confirms its involvement in the Arctic Sea adventure:

Israel was linked to the interception of the missing cargo ship Arctic Sea last month, a senior figure close to Israeli intelligence has told the BBC. The source said Israel had told Moscow it knew the ship was secretly carrying a Russian air-defense system for Iran …

The Israeli source told the BBC that the piracy story was a cover and that Israel told Moscow it was giving officials time to stop the shipment before making the matter public …

Could it be a coincidence that Israeli President Shimon Peres made a hastily scheduled trip to Moscow the day after the ship was freed? That was when Peres made the rather astonishing statement that an Iranian bomb was like a "flying death camp."

When I first wrote about this, I could only speculate about what he went to talk to the Russians about. But now it becomes clearer, as the S-300 is the single most-feared weapons system the Russians could provide the Iranians. Israel has made loud and clear in every way possible that it does not want Russia to sell it to Iran.

The fact that country almost managed to secure the system surreptitiously would have provided Peres quite a bit to talk about. And if indeed the Russian leadership did not know what was happening in Kaliningrad, then it might have been eager to explain to the Israelis how this little caper got as far along as it did.

Another little matter that would have interested the Russians is how the Mossad knew about this shipment, while the Kremlin was asleep at the switch.

Further, Yediot Achronot broke the story of a "secret" trip by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Moscow on Monday.

If Israel does attack Iran (which it clearly wants to do), it doesn't want to lose half its pilots doing so. With this technology, Iran would not only harden its targets, it would inflict serious damage on the Israeli air force. I would contend that if Israel does not seriously contemplate attacking Iran, then these missiles should not be as big a matter for Israel as they appear to be.

One of the more humorous aspects of this story is the Russian foreign minister imploring the world media to keep their powder dry and not jump to any conclusions:

"All will become transparent, and I hope that everyone will be convinced that the rumors you refer to are absolutely groundless," [Sergey] Lavrov told reporters.

Given the Russian aspiration toward the ideal of full transparency and democracy, I'd say the chances of anyone trusting Lavrov's promise are about slim to none.


Richard Silverstein blogs at Tikun Olam, on Israeli-Arab peace.  He also writes for the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog and lives in Seattle.

© 2009 Tikun Olam All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142631/

[bigron]

The axis of evil and the great Satan  


15/09/2009 02:51:00 PM GMT
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/The-axis-of-evil-and-the-great-Satan.html
 
 30 years after the overthrow of Iran’s autocratic ruler and America’s policeman in the oil-rich Gulf, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the legacy continues to haunt both countries.


(AFP) There exists a stalemate over the nuclear issue. And the United States with its allies and Iran remain engaged in a game of brinkmanship.

By Deepak Tripathi

“America is the Great Satan, the wounded snake.” – Ayatollah Khomeini, November 5, 1979.

“States like [Iran, Iraq, North Korea] constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” – President George W Bush, January 29, 2002.

Spoken two decades apart, these words sum up the troubled history of the relationship between Iran and the United States. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, once said, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” His observation holds true about the manner in which Tehran and Washington remain preoccupied with each other. No significant event in Iran can go without repercussions for relations with the West. Almost 30 years after the overthrow of Iran’s autocratic ruler and America’s policeman in the oil-rich Gulf, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the legacy continues to haunt both countries.

The presidential election of June 2009 has been no exception. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative incumbent, was seeking reelection after four turbulent years. A range of internal and external peculiarities surrounded the campaign that was both exciting and unique. In a country of 72 million people, two-thirds are under 30 years of age and the rate of literacy exceeds 75 percent. Iran’s economy has suffered a steady decline. Oil revenues have failed to benefit the population. The downturn in the world economy has affected Iranian oil exports particularly hard and its balance of payments difficulties are acute due to low financial reserves.[1]

Inflation was over 30 percent during the summer of 2008, when the Central Bank intervened to limit lending to prevent the resulting expansion of the money supply. In 2009, inflation has come down but has still been around 24 percent. Unemployment is 17 percent, about a third higher than 2005, when Ahmadinejad first became president. The chorus of criticism of Ahmadinejad for economic mismanagement grew as the election drew near, not only from his political opponents but sometimes from his one-time supporters. The Islamic Revolution Devotees Society, a fundamentalist grouping of revolutionary veterans co-founded by the Iranian President himself, accused him for starting huge state-funded projects while Iran’s poor suffered and his stated goal of social justice was undermined.[2]

Ahmadinejad routinely dismisses such complaints. He says they are a product of intervention by hostile media. He blames ‘secret networks’ for rising house prices. He has a doctorate in engineering, but often makes light of complaints about the economy by telling jokes. For instance, he has told Iranian MPs to visit his grocer to find out the truth about the rising price of tomatoes. He suggests that he often takes advice about the economy from his local butcher, who knows about the economic problems of the people. And he says that he prays to God he never learned about economics.

The electoral system of Iran is by no means perfect, but not as bad as in some other countries in the region. In Saudi Arabia, small Gulf emirates and Egypt, elections are either nonexistent or held under extreme restrictions. Rigging is widespread. And these states are ruled by America’s allies. In the June 2009 presidential election, Ahmadinejad, the incumbent, faced three challengers. Mir-Hossein Mousavi was seen as the leading challenger. He was Iran’s last prime minister (1981-1989) before a presidential form of government was introduced. Three others had been rejected by the Council of Guardians, which vets all candidates. Former President, Mohammad Khatami, a liberal in the context of Iran, announced his candidacy but later withdrew and declared his support for Mousavi. Another ex-President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, often described as a centrist-pragmatic conservative, was also known to be unhappy with the state of affairs.

The high percentage of young voters, economic decline and restlessness among influential Iranians encouraged many inside and outside the country to believe that the time was ripe for political change. President Obama’s Cairo speech, seeking ‘a new beginning between the United States and Muslims’, came a few days before polling day in Iran. His words of reconciliation were a source of new hope for moderates and liberals in that country. They enlivened the prospect for improvement in US-Iran relations, perhaps for the first time since the 1979 revolution.

Relations between Washington and Tehran sank to a new low following the events of 9/11 and Bush’s description of Iran as part of the ‘axis of evil’. Two factors in particular came to the fore: Iran’s nuclear program, assisted by America and its allies when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi used to be Washington’s regional policeman; and accusations of its support for international terrorism. In a leaked letter obtained by Associated Press in September 2006, the International Atomic Energy Agency described as ‘outrageous and dishonest’ claims made in a report by the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee that Iran’s nuclear program was geared towards making weapons.[3]

The IAEA letter specifically said the report is ‘false in saying that Iran is making weapons-grade uranium at an experimental enrichment site’. In fact, the agency said, the material produced was only in small quantities far below that can be used in nuclear weapons. The clash between Washington and IAEA experts was reminiscent of the earlier disputes between them over whether President Saddam Hussein was involved in developing weapons of mass destruction. Those claims in Washington and London were given as the principal reason for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The claims were subsequently discredited when no traces of weapons of mass destruction were found. However, it did not prevent the Bush administration from using similar tactics against Iran, with both America and Israel issuing warnings that Iran’s nuclear research facilities might be bombed.

The failure of the US-led invasion forces to produce evidence was one factor that conspired against an attack on Iran. Another was the outbreak of full-scale war following the dissolution of the Iraqi state structure by Paul Bremer, the head of the American-led occupation authority. The conflict in Iraq defied the Bush administration’s calculations and prevented the Americans from using strong-arm tactics against other adversaries. However, diplomatic pressure and threats continue even after the Bush presidency.

On September 7, 2009, the IAEA Director General, Mohamed El-Baradei, delivered his last report to the Board of Governors two months before his retirement. He said that although Iran had ‘cooperated with the agency on some issues’, several critical areas remained ‘unaddressed’.[4] Iran had not suspended its enrichment-related activities or its heavy water-related project, as required by the UN Security Council. Choosing his words carefully, El-Baradei said that these issues needed to be clarified ‘in order to exclude the possibility of there being military dimensions’ to Iran’s nuclear program.

President Ahmadinejad has by now ruled out further concessions by Iran. He recently told journalists in Tehran, “From our point of view, Iran’s nuclear issue is over. We will never negotiate over the obvious rights of the Iranian nation.” Tehran has also accused Washington of faking intelligence reports suggesting that Iran has ‘studied ways to make atomic bombs’. Press TV, Iran’s state-funded channel, quotes officials saying the United States has not ‘shared the original documents’ it claimed to have a year ago and there is no credible evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

The outgoing IAEA Director General, Mohamed El-Baradei, is also highly critical of the West and its allies, France and Israel in particular. Both have accused El-Baradei of ‘suppressing damning evidence’ of Iranian attempts to build nuclear weapons. To them, the IAEA chief said, “I am dismayed by the allegations … which have been fed to the media that information has been withheld from the Board. These allegations are politically motivated and totally baseless.” He bitterly complained that such attempts to influence the work of the IAEA Secretariat and undermine its independence and objectivity are in violation … of the IAEA Statute and should cease forthwith.

As El-Baradei prepares to retire, accusations and counter-accusations continue to fly between all concerned parties. There exists a stalemate over the nuclear issue. And the United States with its allies and Iran remain engaged in a game of brinkmanship.

-- Deepak Tripathi is the author of two forthcoming books – Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan and Afghanistan: The Real Story Behind Terrorism, both to be published by Potomac Books, Inc. His works can be found on http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at: DandATripathi@gmail.com.

Notes

[1] Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, ‘Tough Times Ahead for the Iranian Economy’ (Washington: Brookings Institute, April 6, 2009); also Mahtab Alam Rizvi, ‘An Assessment of Iran’s Presidential Elections 2009’ (New Delhi: The Institute for Defense Studies, June 19, 2009).

[2] Robert Tait, ‘It’s the economy, Mr Ahmadinejad’ (Guardian, September 19, 2007).

[3] Amy S Clark, ‘IAEA: Iran Nuclear Report Outrageous’, CBS News, September 14, 2006.

[4] ‘Director General’s Report to Board’ (IAEA, September 7, 2009).



-- Middle East Online

 

[bigron]

Black Propaganda: Manufacturing Consent For Attack On Iran

Obama Is Pushing Israel Toward War

President Obama can't outsource matters of war and peace to another state.

By BRET STEPHENS

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23499.htm

September 15, 2009 "Wall Street Journal" -- Events are fast pushing Israel toward a pre-emptive military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, probably by next spring. That strike could well fail. Or it could succeed at the price of oil at $300 a barrel, a Middle East war, and American servicemen caught in between. So why is the Obama administration doing everything it can to speed the war process along?

At July's G-8 summit in Italy, Iran was given a September deadline to start negotiations over its nuclear programs. Last week, Iran gave its answer: No.

Instead, what Tehran offered was a five-page document that was the diplomatic equivalent of a giant kiss-off. It begins by lamenting the "ungodly ways of thinking prevailing in global relations" and proceeds to offer comprehensive talks on a variety of subjects: democracy, human rights, disarmament, terrorism, "respect for the rights of nations," and other areas where Iran is a paragon. Conspicuously absent from the document is any mention of Iran's nuclear program, now at the so-called breakout point, which both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his boss Ali Khamenei insist is not up for discussion.

What's an American president to do in the face of this nonstarter of a document? What else, but pretend it isn't a nonstarter. Talks begin Oct. 1.

All this only helps persuade Israel's skittish leadership that when President Obama calls a nuclear-armed Iran "unacceptable," he means it approximately in the same way a parent does when fecklessly reprimanding his misbehaving teenager. That impression is strengthened by Mr. Obama's decision to drop Iran from the agenda when he chairs a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sept. 24; by Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly opposing military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities; and by Russia's announcement that it will not support any further sanctions on Iran.

In sum, the conclusion among Israelis is that the Obama administration won't lift a finger to stop Iran, much less will the "international community." So Israel has pursued a different strategy, in effect seeking to goad the U.S. into stopping, or at least delaying, an Israeli attack by imposing stiff sanctions and perhaps even launching military strikes of its own.

Thus, unlike Israel's air strike against Iraq's reactor in 1981 or Syria's in 2007, both of which were planned in the utmost secrecy, the Israelis have gone out of their way to advertise their fears, purposes and capabilities. They have sent warships through the Suez Canal in broad daylight and conducted widely publicized air-combat exercises at long range. They have also been unusually forthcoming in their briefings with reporters, expressing confidence at every turn that Israel can get the job done.

The problem, however, is that the administration isn't taking the bait, and one has to wonder why. Perhaps it thinks its diplomacy will work, or that it has the luxury of time, or that it can talk the Israelis out of attacking. Alternatively, it might actually want Israel to attack without inviting the perception that it has colluded with it. Or maybe it isn't really paying attention.

But Israel is paying attention. And the longer the U.S. delays playing hardball with Iran, the sooner Israel is likely to strike. A report published today by the Bipartisan Policy Center, and signed by Democrat Chuck Robb, Republican Dan Coats, and retired Gen. Charles Ward, notes that by next year Iran will "be able to produce a weapon's worth of highly enriched uranium . . . in less than two months." No less critical in determining Israel's timetable is the anticipated delivery to Iran of Russian S-300 anti-aircraft batteries: Israel will almost certainly strike before those deliveries are made, no matter whether an Iranian bomb is two months or two years away.

Such a strike may well be in Israel's best interests, though that depends entirely on whether the strike succeeds. It is certainly in America's supreme interest that Iran not acquire a genuine nuclear capability, whether of the actual or break-out variety. That goes also for the Middle East generally, which doesn't need the nuclear arms race an Iranian capability would inevitably provoke.

Then again, it is not in the U.S. interest that Israel be the instrument of Iran's disarmament. For starters, its ability to do so is iffy: Israeli strategists are quietly putting it about that even a successful attack may have to be repeated a few years down the road as Iran reconstitutes its capacity. For another thing, Iran could respond to such a strike not only against Israel itself, but also U.S targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

But most importantly, it is an abdication of a superpower's responsibility to outsource matters of war and peace to another state, however closely allied. President Obama has now ceded the driver's seat on Iran policy to Prime Minister Netanyahu. He would do better to take the wheel again, keeping in mind that Iran is beyond the reach of his eloquence, and keeping in mind, too, that very useful Roman adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com
   

 

[Brocke]

Iranian Judges being eliminated?


Attempt on Iranian judge's life

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:08:49 GMT

Gunmen have carried out an assassination attempt on a judge in the western Iranian city of Sanandaj in the Kordestan province.

Hassan Davtalab was shot in front of his home Wednesday morning, state-run IRNA news agency reported.

The judge was taken to a hospital, but officials of the hospital are tight-lipped about the state of his health.

On September 13, interim Friday prayer leader Mamousta Borhan Ali was shot dead in Sanandaj by three unidentified gunmen who approached his home 'under the pretext of asking religious questions' of the cleric.

The interim Friday prayer leader, who was part of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election campaign in Kordestan, was hit by a hail of bullets.

The incident comes only days after a failed attempt to assassinate a Revolutionary Court judge in Sanandaj.

SF/SC/AKM

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=106333&sectionid=351020101



Gunmen Kill Sanandaj Friday Prayer Leader

Mon, Sep 14, 2009

An interim Friday prayer leader in the western city of Sanandaj in the Iranian province of Kurdestan was shot on Saturday.
Three unidentified gunmen approached the home of Mamousta Borhan Ali in Sanandaj “under the pretext of asking religious questions“.
The cleric who worked for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election campaign in Kurdestan was killed in a hail of bullets, Fars News Agency reported. The incident comes only days after a failed attempt to assassinate a Revolutionary Court judge in the same border city.
Sanandaj governor Mohammad Taghi Heydari said the assassination was part of the enemy plot to portray that the region is insecure and unstable.
“Through such plots, they seek to stoke tensions in the region so that they can achieve their evil objectives,“ he said.

http://www.iran-daily.com/1388/3498/html/national.htm#s403689

[bigron]

Proxy war feared in Yemen
Iran, Saudi Arabia


by Peter Goodspeed, National Post
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m58012&hd=&size=1&l=e

                           

September 16, 2009

Fierce battles between government troops and Shiite rebels in the northern mountains of Yemen are fuelling fears of regional instability and a possible proxy war between Shiite-dominated Iran and Sunniled Saudi Arabia.

A month-old government offensive -- Operation Scorched Earth -- has displaced nearly 50,000 people and created a humanitarian crisis as troops use artillery and fighter aircraft to attack the insurgents near the border with Saudi Arabia.

The latest escalation in a five-year-old civil war has targeted Zaidi Shiite rebels in the predominantly mountainous Saadah province.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's President, accuses the Zaidis, who form a majority in the north of the predominantly Sunni country, of trying to spread Shiite fundamentalism and seeking to reinstate clerical rule. The rebels, followers of Sayyid Abd al-Houthi, claim they are protesting against discrimination and poverty. They also object to the Yemen government's close ties to Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Mr. Saleh accuses Iran and its Iraqi-Shiite ally, Muqtada al-Sadr, and his Mahdi Army of backing the Houthis, while the rebels claim Saudi warplanes have participated in recent air raids on their hideouts.

For weeks now, fighting has raged along the mountains that overlook the main highway linking Yemen and Saudi Arabia, as the Yemeni military focuses on trying to destroy rebel arsenals, supply convoys and fortifications.

Repeated truces have failed and international aid agencies say they fear for 165,000 people who have been displaced by the fighting since 2004.

Yesterday the International Red Cross called for the establishment of a humanitarian aid corridor to rush relief supplies to trapped civilians.

Renewed fighting has only served to push the Arab world's poorest country one step closer toward becoming a failed state, with serious implications for the Middle East.

"Yemen is beset by a host of challenges that endanger both its domestic stability and regional security. The country faces a very bleak future," says Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Among Yemen's problems: violent extremism, international terrorism, religious and tribal conflict, separatism, piracy and international smuggling from the Horn of Africa.

Awash in guns and drugs -- there are about six million weapons for only 11 million adults -- the country has become a transit point for smuggling from East Africa to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

The ancestral home of Osama bin Laden is also a magnet for al-Qaeda terrorists. Many Yemenis fought in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and returned home sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalists.

Counter-terrorism measures in Saudi Arabia and Iraq have also encouraged Islamist terrorists to flee to Yemen.

Now there are signs increasingly successful counter-terrorism efforts in Pakistan may be adding to its appeal as a terrorist refuge.

Two weeks ago, Peter Van Loan, the Public Safety Minister, said Canadian security officials have noted an increased flow of terror suspects to Yemen.

Months earlier, Dennis Blair, the U. S. director of national intelligence, told a congressional hearing in Washington Yemen is "re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base for al-Qaeda to plan internal and external attacks, train terrorists and facilitate the movement of operatives."

The increased lawlessness worries Saudi Arabia, which fears Yemen could provide al-Qaeda with a chance to regroup, organize and train to launch cross-border attacks.

In January, the group's Saudi and Yemeni affiliates merged to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Republic of Yemen was created in 1990 when traditionalist North Yemen and Marxist South Yemen merged after years of border wars. But in 1994 southern separatists staged an unsuccessful civil war and ever since have backed a simmering uprising against the government.

"If the central government's authority and legitimacy continue to deteriorate, Yemen may slowly devolve into semiautonomous regions and cities," Mr. Boucek says. "This trajectory has occurred in other states, such as Somalia and Afghanistan, with disastrous consequences."

In an effort to forestall Yemen's collapse, the United States has equipped and trained local security forces, while Saudi Arabia and Iran are waging proxy ideological battles by backing different elements in Yemen.

"Yemen's window of opportunity to shape its own future is narrowing," warns Ginny Hill, a Middle East analyst with the London-based Chatham House think tank. "Future instability in Yemen could expand a lawless zone stretching from northern Kenya through Somalia and the Gulf of Aden to Saudi Arabia. Piracy, organized crime and violent jihad would escalate, with implications for the security of shipping routes, the transit of oil through the Suez Canal and the internal security of Yemen's neighbours."

- pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com




 

[bigron]

Manipulating Public Perceptions

 

Obama Urged to Ready Tougher Iran Sanctions, Military Strike

By Janine Zacharia

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23507.htm

September 16, 2009 "Bloomberg" -- Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. should begin preparing crippling sanctions on Iran and publicly make clear that a military strike is possible should the Iranian government press ahead with its nuclear effort, a bipartisan policy group said.

“If biting sanctions do not persuade the Islamic Republic to demonstrate sincerity in negotiations and give up its enrichment activities, the White House will have to begin serious consideration of the option of a U.S.-led military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities,” said the study from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

The report was written by Charles Robb, a former Democratic senator from Virginia; Daniel Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana who also served as ambassador to Germany, and retired General Charles Wald, the former deputy commander of U.S. European command. Their assessment comes as the U.S. prepares to participate in preliminary talks with Iran on Oct. 1 designed to gauge its commitment to address concerns about its nuclear aims.

The report echoes the Obama administration’s conclusion that Iran’s atomic work is approaching a destabilizing point at which it may be able to build a bomb.

Coats, Robb and Wald write that Iran will have enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by next year, “leaving little time for the United States to prevent both a nuclear- weapons capable Islamic Republic and an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.”

Gasoline Sanction

The authors back a bill that would sanction foreign companies that export gasoline to Iran, if negotiations fail. They say the administration should have prepared “sufficient financial, political and military pressure” before agreeing to negotiations.

The U.S. will dispatch its undersecretary of state for political affairs, William Burns, to the Oct. 1 meeting with U.S. allies and Iran without conditions. Iran has said its nuclear program is closed for discussion. The State Department said yesterday it will use the meeting to outline the consequences of Iran proceeding with a nuclear program.

The U.S. and its allies on the United Nations Security Council plus Germany have pushed Iran to accept a suspension of sanctions in exchange for Iran’s halt to uranium enrichment.

Iran has expanded its nuclear stockpile to 1,430 kilograms of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride compared to 75 kilograms in December 2007, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. It has also almost doubled its number of centrifuges at its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz since 2007.

Deadline Proposed

The authors say a deadline of 60 days should be set for determining Iran’s seriousness once it commits to negotiations. If those negotiations fail, the administration should toughen sanctions and “prepare overtly for any military option.”

Such preparations could include deploying an additional aircraft carrier battle group to the waters off Iran and conducting joint exercises with U.S. allies.

In the absence of U.S. action, Israel is more likely to strike, the authors argue, saying that an Israeli strike “entails more risks than a U.S. strike.”

Israeli officials say that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a threat to their country’s existence.

To contact the reporter on this story: Janine Zacharia in Washington atjzacharia@bloomberg.net.
   

 

[bigron]

The Iran Whisperers

Posted By Jeff Huber On September 16, 2009 @ 11:00 pm

As journalist Robert Dreyfuss recently remarked, "The hawks, neoconservatives, and Israeli hardliners are squealing" over the fact that we’re going to have high-level talks with Iran. Neocon poster-child Bill Kristol calls the arrangement "Obama’s message of weakness."  It’s actually a show of strength on Obama’s part; this marks the first time he’s stood up to the American warmongery.  Kristol and crew never saw a war they didn’t like though, so they’ll continue to accuse Obama of "appeasing" Iran.   


The notion that talking to Iran constitutes appeasement is among the looniest assertions in the neocon bin.  The analogy, of course, is Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s, and as with so much of the war mafia’s thinking, it’s an inapt comparison. Hitler had the best army in the world at the time.  Today, America spends as much or more on defense as the rest of the world combined, and Iran’s defense budget is less than one percent of America’s. We don’t appease when we offer to talk to nations weaker than we are; we display enlightened exercise of power, which in the pre-Glen Beck era was considered a virtue.   


Despite what the Kristol mob would have you believe, neither U.S. intelligence nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found any evidence that Iran presently has an active nuclear weapons program.  Reports to the contrary generally come from sources in the Israeli government who lie like other people blink and who, like Kristol, have entirely too much influence on U.S. foreign policy.  Rumors in both the mainstream and right-wing press that Iran already knows how to make a nuclear weapon and is just waiting for go-ahead from Grand Ayatollah Kahmeni to slap one together also originated in Israel and they’re bunk.  Accusations that Iran is not cooperating with the IAEA are specious as well.   


As I’ve said many times, the Iranians would be foolish to acquire a nuclear weapon.  It would be tantamount to painting a bull’s eye on their backs.  The Israelis (and we) would have a perfect excuse to blow their entire nuclear industry to smithereens.  And as I’ve also said many times, with peak oil either here or just around the corner, it’s the energy, not a weapon, that makes Iran’s nuclear program worth having. 


Iran’s army can’t operate more than a few miles beyond its borders, its navy can’t do much outside the Persian Gulf and its air force doesn’t have enough spare parts to launch more than a few aircraft at a time.   


The Bush administration never proved a single one of its countless accusations that Iran was arming Shi’ite militias in Iraq.  The person single-handedly responsible for arming both sides of the civil war was "Teflon General" David Petraeus.   


And oh, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that "Israel must be wiped off the map."


Militarily, Iran isn’t a threat to anyone, and certainly not to Israel, which is too far away from it.  Iran’s naval forces might embarrass us in the Gulf if we strike them preemptively for no good reason, but there’s an easy way to avoid that: we don’t strike them preemptively for no good reason. 


The only thing Iran threatens is the big western oil companies’ control of how the world makes its energy transition when the wells run dry.  An Iran that can lead the Muslim nations to a new economic paradigm is the scariest thing Dick Cheney’s buddies at Exxon/Mobil and Shell and BP can imagine.  The best way to keep energy transition under control is to woo Iran away from Russia and China and make the good old U.S. of A. its new biggest, bestest energy buddy.   


A cozy relationship between the U.S. and Iran, however, was not in the best interests of Cheney’s buddies in Israel and the American neoconservative cabal.  That’s why Cheney and his minions like John Bolton practiced "make them an offer they can’t accept" diplomacy with Iran.  Insisting that Iran stop refining uranium for use in nuclear power plants as a precondition to talks ensured talks would not take place.  The Iranians would be insane to agree to such an arrangement.   


The Iranians’ "inalienable right" to develop nuclear technology is guaranteed by their participation in the UN nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  Asking them to waive that right in order to negotiate was like telling a poker player he has to hand over his only chip before he can sit at the table.  Telling them they can have a nuclear energy industry without refining their own uranium is like telling them they can have an oil industry as long as they use our oil. 


Up to now, the Obama administration has stupidly clung to the "zero option" demand.  Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has turned out to be every bit the neoconservative handmaiden that Condi Rice was, poured salt on the sore by threatening to extend our "defense umbrella" to protect our friends in the region if Iran didn’t agree to our outrageous pre-conditions.  Now it appears that someone in our foreign policy structure has managed to inject a dose of sanity into our foreign policy.   


Unfortunately, we’ll need to keep our talks with Iran at a whisper level lest the tea-party right threatens to string up them Persian appeasers. 


The talks can only be meaningful if the zero option issue goes the way of bellbottom jeans.  The Iranians will never agree to it, and as we have discussed, they never should.  The real goal of these talks should be to convince the Iranians that they should allow complete transparency of their nuclear energy program.  That would involve allowing the IAEA and us gynecological access to their nuclear program and, indeed, their entire country.   


That level of intimacy will come at a price.  Part of that price will be technical support, an offer to become Iran’s nuclear energy sponsor.  That’s actually a good deal for us, as it allows us to elbow strike Russia and China out of the action and brings business to American industries.


The other part of the tab will be a hard bill to fill.  If Iran turns slut puppy for us, it will justifiably want security guarantees.  We’ll need to extend our defense umbrella not over the rest of the Middle East, but over Iran, and that means chaining Israel to a fire hydrant.   


That’s guaranteed to make the hawks, neoconservatives and Israeli hardliners squeal even louder, but tough.  It’s high time we stopped letting the piggies drive our foreign policy.

Read more by Jeff Huber
•Death by Bananastan – September 14th, 2009
•Bananas in Bananastan – September 10th, 2009
•The General Who Would Be King – September 8th, 2009
•Another Krock of Krepinevich – September 4th, 2009
•The Next New Plan for Bananastan – September 2nd, 2009

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/09/16/the-iran-whisperers/

[bigron]

Obama, the Gap Band, and Today's Iran's News

by Patrick Barry

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m58295&hd=&size=1&l=e

September 25, 2009

President Obama as the long-lost member of the Gap Band? Definitely seems that way after he lobbed this bombshell revelation of Iran's efforts at constructing a secret enrichment facility, buried under a mountain near the Holy City of Qum.  Here are some key details from the New York Times:



...American officials said that they had been tracking the covert project for years, but that Mr. Obama decided to disclose the American findings after Iran discovered, in recent weeks, that Western intelligence agencies had breached the secrecy surrounding the complex. On Monday, Iran wrote a brief, cryptic letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying that it now had a "pilot plant" under construction, whose existence it had never before revealed...


There are three points to take home here - two on timing, and another on the calls for a military strike that will likely follow this revelation.

First on timing.  Marc Lynch has noted that its no coincidence that this announcement came in advance of the P5 + 1 meeting with Iran in October, and following Russia's verbal commitment to consider sanctions.  I think he's spot on w the first point, but there's something left out of the second. If Mike McFaul's "beaming" is any indication, the decision to shut down missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic was the primary reason for Russia's verbal concession on sanctions. Not to say that the Administration didn't have the Russians in mind when it decided to reveal its intelligence, but I think the very-public announcement has the added benefit of putting additional pressure on the still-reluctant Chinese to join with the rest of their negotiating partners, and present a unified front to Iran.  Whether they will, given the dramatically altered context, is still unknown. 

Something else to note on timing is that the U.S. has reportedly known about this facility for "years," a period which coincides with the development and release of the the 2007 NIE on Iran's nuclear program, a report which found that the Iranians were not actively seeking a nuclear weapon.  If that timing is right, then while its troubling that this facility was kept secret, its existence does not actually prove that Iran is moving past the break-out capability they are suspected to be pursuing. From the public's perspective, Iran is no closer to a nuclear weapon now than they were before this intelligence was released.

The last point about this facility is that its mere existence strongly debunks the notation that a military strike would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.  Though I would emphasize that there's still a lot we don't know about this facility (a whole lot), it does seem clear that A) the Iranians were interested in securing it from sabotage, evidenced by its location underneath a mountain, and B) that they had sought to hide it from international scrutiny. The question therefore becomes, if there is one such facility, might there also be others? While an air-strike could certainly take out the plant at Natanz, and perhaps even this covert facility in Qum, it does nothing to address the possibility of other facilities hidden elsewhere in Iran.  The only thing it would ensure is Iran's refusal to the type of monitoring that could unearth a clandestine program. 

In conclusion, I have to agree with Marc - this revelation ultimately strengthens the U.S.' hand, but it's no cause for alarm and the military option is just as unpalatable as it was before. 

 

[bigron]

The Iran nuclear revelation

by Marc Lynch

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m58294&hd=&size=1&l=e

September 25, 2009



 Last night, President Obama along with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Nikolas Sarkozy announced that the IAEA had been presented with detailed evidence about the existence of a previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear enrichment facility.  While there's always good reason to be skeptical about such intelligence claims, in this case it is significant that the Iranians hastened to pre-emptively declare to the IAEA that a "new pilot fuel-enrichment plant is under construction."  The U.S. has, from what I can tell, been aware of this site for quite some time, and it has not yet gone operational.  So this is not a story of the sudden discovery of an urgent new threat requiring whatever red-blooded solution the hawks will be peddling today.  The interesting question is why Obama chose to go public with this information now, and how it fits into the administration's diplomatic strategy.

 According to the New York Times, the administration went public because the Iranians had discovered that Western intelligence had "breached the secrecy surrounding the project."  Perhaps.  But it seems rather more likely that the administration chose to go public as part of a calculated effort to ratchet up the credibility of the threat of tough sanctions ahead of the October 1 meeting between Iran and the P5+1 in Geneva.   The public disclosure puts Iran on the back foot ahead of those talks, and appears to have encouraged Russia to more seriously consider supporting such sanctions (that, plus the missile defense decision probably).   This has to change Iranian calculations -- indeed, the perception that the sanctions are now more likely is precisely what may lead the Iranians to make more concessions to avoid them.

 It also demonstrates to the Iranians the quality of Western intelligence and the difficulty of deception and denial -- especially in the atmosphere of (quite warranted) mistrust of their intentions.  That may reduce their reasons to oppose the intrusive inspections and monitoring regime which Gary Sick argues is the most likely reasonable negotiated outcome.  Such an outcome would be far more in the interests of the U.S., Iran, and Iran's neighbors than any plausible outcome of a military strike, and has to be the target of the engagement process.

 So despite what I expect to see swarming the media in the next few days -- wanna bet that John Bolton or John Bolton-equivalent oped is already in production over at the Washington Times Washington Post (sorry, it's hard to tell the difference on foreign policy issues sometimes) -- I actually think that this public revelation makes war less rather than more likely.  The timing of the announcement, immediately following the consultations at the UN and the G-20 and just before the Geneva meetings, makes it seem extremely likely that the Obama administration has been waiting for just the right moment to play this card.  Now they have.   It strengthens the P5+1 bargaining position ahead of October 1, changes Iranian calculations, and lays the foundations for a more serious kind of engagement.  So now let's see how it changes the game. 



 

[Letsbereal]

Graphic: Iran’s nuclear program http://bit.ly/1rssHp

[bigron]

Everything You Know About Iran Is A Myth
 

By Lawrence of Cyberia
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23579.htm
 

Photo: modified from an original by TIME Inc.

September 27, 2009 "Lawrence of Cyberia " -- -

There are some terms that people in Islamic and Western countries should never say to each other, because they confuse and inflame more than they clarify. The most obvious ones would be “jihad”, “crusade” and “great satan”. All of them are used in somewhat innocuous ways by the people who utter them, but mean something completely different – and much more inflammatory – to foreign ears.

I would like to propose a topical addition to the list of words that should never be used, and that would be “myth”. Specifically when it is used in the context in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Egyptian Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mehdi Akef have mentioned it in recent months, i.e. to speak of "the myth of the Holocaust" (Egyptian Islamists deny Holocaust; BBC News, 23 Dec 2005) . They know what they mean by the phrase, and I know what they mean, but if they think that most people over here are going to hear it and respond with anything more profound than “Holocaust deniers!” then they are deeply ignorant of how central is the Holocaust in U.S. perceptions of the Middle East, how superficial is the U.S. public discourse on relations with the Muslim world, and how much that discourse is framed by those who are pushing for a “clash of civilizations” and who are currently fixated on finding a justification to bring about regime change in Iran.

Everyone knows what a myth is, right? It’s just a fairytale; an unlikely, invented story featuring toga-clad heroes of the ancient past. So when Ahmadinejad and Akef talk of the “myth of the Holocaust” they are simply – as the BBC suggests in the report I linked to above – saying that the Holocaust never really happened, and can be written off as Holocaust deniers. Except that that’s not what a “myth” is. (And I must be getting old, because I actually remember the days when any reporter employed by the BBC would have known the meaning of the word, and made some effort to render it accurately).

Let me tell you what a “myth” really is.

Humans are complex beings who live in complex societies, and are capable of thoughts, insights and feelings beyond the mere physical needs of everyday life. Some of the intangible things that we feel about ourselves are difficult to articulate, so we express them by telling stories. And that’s what myths are. Myths are stories that groups of people tell to express and justify their most fundamental beliefs about themselves, their origins, their essential nature and their aspirations. The stories themselves can be historical or non-historical, but that is irrelevant to the myth. In the U.S., which for all its religiosity is basically a secular and demythologized society, we tend to think of myths as fairytales because the most common exposure we have to them is via the craptacular Hollywood spectacles of the 1960's like Jason and the Argonauts. But in fact a myth is a myth because it is a story that tells an underlying, existential truth about the people who tell it, and historicity is nothing to do with what makes it a myth.

For example, there are tribes in New Guinea that tell a traditional story about how children are conceived. The story explains that human conception takes place only when an emu passes through the parents’ village by night, and casts its shadow over their hut - all of which was very amusing to the 19th century European anthropologists who first documented the story, and thought it meant that the dumb natives didn’t even know where babies come from. But of course the dumb natives knew perfectly well where babies come from: the story was actually about something else altogether.

In the religious mythology of those New Guinea tribes, the emu was a symbol of divinity, and the story about the emu’s shadow was a creation myth that explained the origins of human beings and expressed what kind of creatures we are. By saying that a human baby can be conceived only when the parents are touched by the presence of the emu (God), the story expresses the conviction that humans are not just physical beings. Although a part of the created order, human beings have “higher” qualities that set them apart from every other created thing; they have the ability to transcend their instincts and passions and to be self-aware, spiritual, creative, empathetic etc, etc. So the conception of a new human being is never just a physical act, but requires an act of divine creation. It needs the mother and father to do their bit, but it doesn’t happen unless the emu makes an appearance too, as the myth puts it. If the people of New Guinea were Jewish, they might express the same fundamental understanding about themselves by telling a story about God breathing the breath of life into a handful of dirt to create the first man, or they might sum it up simply by saying that humanity is made “in the image and likeness of God”.

Another kind of myth: here in the U.S. we have made a myth out of the story of the Mayflower. Very few of us could claim that our families literally arrived here on the Mayflower. A few of us descend from people who were already here when the Pilgrims arrived. Quite a few of us came here on slave ships; an awful lot of us immigrated on steamships in the early 20th century; and some of us came here more recently courtesy of Boeing. But as Americans, we share a common narrative that says we, collectively, came here on the Mayflower. And we do that because we see in the story of the Mayflower a representation in historical form of what we as a nation believe America to be. We take the historical event and make it into a story that describes what we as Americans believe we essentially are: a pioneering people, a city on a hill, a community of faith in search of religious liberty, a free people fleeing tyranny and establishing democracy, etc etc.

That’s a different kind of myth from the emu story: one is a nationalistic myth, based on an historical event; the other is a religious myth, based on a non-historical event (i.e. there isn’t a real flesh and blood emu involved in human conception). But they’re both myths, because they are stories used to tell an underlying, existential truth about the people who tell them, and calling them myths is not in any way a judgement on whether the events in the story are historically true.

So what does it mean when Ahmadinejad and Akef refer to the “myth of the Holocaust”, as they both certainly did:

Speaking to thousands of people in the southeastern city of Zahedan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: "Today, they have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets." -- Holocaust a myth, says Iran president
 

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition force in Egypt's parliament, has echoed Iran's president in describing the Holocaust as a myth. "Western democracy has attacked everyone who does not share the vision of the sons of Zion as far as the myth of the Holocaust is concerned," Mohamed Akef said in a statement on Thursday. --Brotherhood chief: Holocaust a myth
"Some western governments, in particular the US, approve of the sacrilege on the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), while denial of the `Myth of Holocaust', based on which the Zionists have been exerting pressure upon other countries for the past 60 years and kill the innocent Palestinians, is considered as a crime," added the president. -- President: Real holocaust to be sought in Palestine, Iraq
They don't say the Holocaust didn't happen; they are suggesting something more complex than that. That last quote in particular suggests that Ahmadinejad is using the word “myth” in its correct, technical sense. Remember: myths are stories that groups of people tell to express and justify their most fundamental beliefs about themselves, their origins, their essential nature, etc. Ahmadinejad is saying that Zionism tells the story of the Holocaust in exactly this way, i.e. as a vehicle to explain and justify what Zionists believe about themselves. When he “denies” the “myth” of the Holocaust, he is not denying the Holocaust, he’s not even discussing the Holocaust as a historical event at all. He is denying the validity of the use to which the story of the Holocaust is being put. He is saying that instead of being a story that expresses an underlying truth, “the myth of the Holocaust” expresses a “truth” that simply isn’t true, and that denial of that myth is such a big deal in the West because you are not meant to question whether the underlying claim is really true.

So what exactly is the “myth of the Holocaust” that Akef and Ahmadinejad reject? Well, do you remember Wissam Tayem, the Palestinian man forced by Israeli soldiers to play his violin for them at a checkpoint in the Occupied Territories?

The reaction to Wissam Tayem's experience at that checkpoint succinctly summarized what Ahmadinejad means by "the myth of the Holocaust". As Chris McGreal pointed out at the time, the sight of a Palestinian being forced to play the violin for his occupiers caused quite a stir in Israel. But the main reason it made Israelis (specifically Jewish-Israelis) uncomfortable was not because they recognized that it's simply wrong to treat a human being the way Wissam Tayem was treated. Instead, it made them uncomfortable because it challenged their image of the kind of people they are, and the kind of country they have created. In other words, it undermined the Israelis' myth of themselves.

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin...
[A]fter the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs. The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust". "Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote. "If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps." [Emphasis mine]

Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock; The Guardian, 29 Nov 2004.

 

That last line sums up precisely what Ahmadinejad and Akef mean when they say that Zionism has made a “myth of the Holocaust”. They mean that Zionism tells the story of the Holocaust with the purpose of justifying what it has done to Palestine and its inhabitants. The underlying truth that the myth is meant to convey is that Jewish suffering in Europe justified the establishment of a Jewish state in a land whose population was 1. not Jewish, but overwhelmingly Muslim and Christian and 2. not responsible for European anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad and Akef are saying that this myth is a fake; that it is not an explanation of an underlying truth, but an appropriation of the Holocaust in order to further a political agenda. When they deny the “myth of the Holocaust”, they are not talking about whether the historical events of the Holocaust really happened, they are denying that Zionism is entitled to do what it does to the Palestinians because of what Nazism and its collaborators did to European Jewry. In short, "the myth of the Holocaust" says that Shoah justifies Nakba, and Ahmadinejad and Akef are saying, “No, it doesn’t”.

This is not some obscure reading of Akef and Ahmadinejad’s “myth” comments: they have both made it clear that their questions about the Holocaust aren’t about the Jewish genocide in Europeper se, but specifically about why the Palestinians should be the ones to pay for it. If you read the context in which Ahmedinejad said “they have made a myth of the Holocaust”, you find that the subject he is discussing is not whether the Holocaust took place, but rather “why the Palestinian nation should pay for the crimes the Europeans have committed” (which – if you think about it - kind of takes for granted already that those crimes really did happen):

"If the Europeans are telling the truth in their claim that they have killed six million Jews in the Holocaust during the World War II - which seems they are right in their claim because they insist on it and arrest and imprison those who oppose it, why the Palestinian nation should pay for the crime [?]…
 

Stressing that "the same European countries have imposed the illegally-established Zionist regime on the oppressed nation of Palestine", he said, "If you have committed the crimes so give a piece of your land somewhere in Europe or America and Canada or Alaska to them to set up their own state there. Then the Iranian nation will have no objections, will stage no rallies on the Qods Day and will support your decision."

 

Similarly, Muhammad Akef explicitly denied that his comments were anything to do with Holocaust denial:

The leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has said that when he called the Holocaust a myth this week, he did not mean to say it never happened but wanted to highlight the West's attitude towards democracy...
 

In a message on Thursday, Akif said: "Western democracy has attacked everyone who does not share the vision of the sons of Zion as far as the myth of the Holocaust is concerned."… But on Saturday, his office said: "Some media gave this a meaning which he [Akif] did not intend [and read it as] a denial that the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis during World War Two happened. The fact is that he did not deny that it took place."

 

And Akef’s Deputy, Dr. Mohamed El-Sayed Habib, made it clear what "myth of the Holocaust Akef was rejecting:

As to the reported statement describing the holocaust as a myth, it was not intended as a denial of the event but only a rejection of exaggerations put forward by Jews. This does not mean that we are not against the holocaust. Anyway, that event should not have led to the loss of the rights of the Palestinian people, the occupation of their land and the violation and assault of their sacred places and sanctities.
 

 

So, who really cares what a myth is, and what bearded foreigners half a world away have to say about it? Normally, this might just be an interesting academic discussion, but right now it actually matters that we try to understand what Ahmadinejad is really saying, because the Iranian government is currently the target of a disinformation campaign designed to soften up public opinion for regime change in that country. When we hear an inflammatory claim being pushed by our corporate media about Iran and its president - like for example, “Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust!!!” – we would do well to remember the sad performance of our news media in laying the foundation for war in 2003, and to ask ourselves whether each new revelation is real news, or manufactured “news” designed to mobilize public opinion for a new war.

The same people who brought us the spectacular failure that is the Iraq war, would now like to try their luck in Iran. Paul Wolfowitz explained in May 2003 that, in the absence of a clear and present danger from Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration had looked around for a justification for invading Iraq and settled on WMDs as the rationale that everyone could agree on. This time around, the U.S. needs a new excuse for invading a country that clearly is not going to invade us, and it’s really not too hard to see that the new excuse is going to focus in large part on the person of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Just look at the thrust of the stories about him that our news media have been feeding us over the last six months.

1. He’s a Holocaust denier! That’s what we are meant to understand from the reporting of his “myth of the Holocaust” statements that I have just been discussing.
2. He wants to wipe Israel off the map! That’s what we were told in our news media’s hysterical reporting of Ahmadinejad's speech to the “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran on 26 October 2005. Except it turns out that, when correctly translated, he didn’t really say that Israel must be wiped off the map, but that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time", which is not a threat of war or annihilation, but an expression of hope for regime change. Ahmadinejad isn’t a Zionist. He doesn’t believe that the Muslim-majority land of Palestine should be forcibly transformed into a Jewish state, and his speech is an expression of confidence that Zionist rule over Jerusalem will come to an end just as surely as other once-powerful regimes (he cites the examples of the Shah in Iran, the Communists in the Soviet Union, and Saddam’s rule over Iraq) all came to an end. If you look at the Middle East through a Zionist perspective, you might not like to hear that, but it doesn’t give anyone the right to pretend that he’s threatening to launch nukes at Tel Aviv or drive the Jews into the sea, as the “wiped off the map” language would suggest.
3. He's a "psychopath" who "speaks like Hitler"!
4. Iranian Jews are being forced to wear yellow stars! Do you remember that story, peddled first by Canada's National Post and and subsequently reproduced in the New York Post, about the law passed in the Iranian Parliament under which “Jews would be forced to wear yellow cloth strips - like the Star of David that Jews were made to wear in Nazi Germany”? (The National Post has since removed this article from its web site, but screenshots of the original story can be viewed at Lenin’s Tomb, and I have uploaded the text of the original article here). Just look at the photos the National Post used to illustrate that story, to hammer home the point about where laws like this are leading Iran:


Except there is no such Iranian law. This story was a complete hoax (later retracted by the National Post), perpetrated by an Iranian monarchist expatriate journalist named Amir Taheri, who coincidentally happens to be a member of Benador Associates, a public relations firm that lists a large number of leading neo-conservatives, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) associates Richard Perle, David Frum, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, and Joshua Muravchik, among its clients. Major boosters of the war with Iraq, Benador clients, who also include former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky, have also called for the Bush administration to take a hard line against Iran.

The newspapers that so far have run the story are similarly identified with a hard line against Tehran. The National Post, which was bought by CanWest Global Communications from Conrad Black, a close associate of Perle's, is controlled by David and Leonard Asper, who have accused the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of being anti-Israel, according to Marsha Cohen of Florida International University, who has closely followed the badges story.

Similarly, the Sun has consistently taken positions consistent with the right-wing Likud Party in Israel on Middle East issues, while Murdoch owns the strongly pro-Israel Weekly Standard and Fox News, in addition to the New York Post… (source)

 

Are you sensing a theme here? Are you getting the message that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler and Iran is the Fourth Reich and they’re just days away from nuking us and if we don’tShock and Awe them into regime change and install a U.S.-friendly regime that will recognise Israel and sell their oil and gas to us instead of to the Chinese then we’re all a bunch of appeasing Neville J’aime-Berlin’s and WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!…? Because that’s what you’re meant to understand. That’s the new meme, to make you scared enough to support a war you wouldn't otherwise support. Once again, our fears are being manipulated by people who want a war but haven't got a justification for starting one. Last time, they brought public opinion on board with scary stories about Iraq’s nonexistent nuclear weapons and Saddam's fictitious links to al Qaeda; this time around, it's Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons and Ahmadinejad's spurious equivalence to Hitler.

And that’s why unravelling the meaning of Ahmadinejad’s "myth of the Holocaust" is not just an obscure academic exercise. Knowing that a propaganda offensive is underway to demonize Iran's president as the new Hitler so that we can justify an attack on his country, we need to think critically every time our mass media draws these parallels between Nazi Germany and present-day Iran and consider whether this is a legitimate equivalence or more manipulative scare-mongering to lay the foundation for a new war. Despite what Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen et al sound like when they dispassionately discuss rearranging the Middle East, war is not really like a game of Risk or a role-playing exercise in an undergraduate PolSci seminar. It is much more likeyoung soldiers getting their limbs blown off by roadside bombs, or entire families wiped out "collaterally" by our missiles. Knowing that this is what is really at stake, we should at least make the effort to determine whether the “Holocaust denier!” and other hitlerish epithets currently being hurled at Iran are based in fact, or are just the latest work of the same misinformers who – from the safety of their Washington thinktanks - repeatedly pimp for war in the Middle East, safe in the knowledge that it will never be their friends and relatives on the receiving end of the IEDs or the so-called smart bombs.

After more than three years in Iraq, when more than 2500 of our own troops and unknown thousands of Iraqis have been killed, Americans have finally become skeptical about why we invaded Iraq in the first place, and are wondering what exactly we are fighting for there. When it comes to the threatened attack on Iran, maybe this time we could do the critical thinking before we invade and sentence to death tens of thousands of our fellow human beings whose lives are as valuable in every respect as our own. In the immortal words of the President himself: "There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."



Related Links:

Ahmadinejad: Lost in translation; Little Red Email, via Information Clearing House, 5 April 2006.
Does Iran's President Want Israel Wiped Off The Map - Does He Deny The Holocaust? ; Information Clearing House, 14 April 2006.
Iran; The Early Days of a Better Nation, 1 May 2006.
Latest Hitler: How Lies Becomes News; Lenin's Tomb, 20 May 2006.
Another Fraud on Iran: No Legislation on Dress of Religious Minorities; Informed Comment, 20 May 2006.
Yellow stars for Iranian Jews? The disinfo campaign; Just World News, 20 May 2006.
Harper says Iran 'capable' of introducing Nazi-like clothing labels; The Canadian Press, 21 May 2006.
Taheri-ng It Up; Unqualified Offerings, 22 May 2006.
Iran Target of Apparent Disinformation Ploy; Jim Lobe, 22 May 2006.
Fake But Accurate; Antiwar.com, 24 May 2006.
Too Stupid for Citizenship: Will Americans fall for Bush's lies again? ; Antiwar.com, 1 June 2006.   

visit page for above links 

[bigron]

Keeping Iran Honest

Iran's secret nuclear plant will spark a new round of IAEA inspections and lead to a period of even greater transparency

By Scott Ritter
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23580.htm
 
September 27, 209 "The Guardian" --  It was very much a moment of high drama. Barack Obama, fresh from his history-making stint hosting the UN security council, took a break from his duties at the G20 economic summit in Pittsburgh to announce the existence of a secret, undeclared nuclear facility in Iran which was inconsistent with a peaceful nuclear programme, underscoring the president's conclusion that "Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow".
Obama, backed by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, threatened tough sanctions against Iran if it did not fully comply with its obligations concerning the international monitoring of its nuclear programme, which at the present time is being defined by the US, Britain and France as requiring an immediate suspension of all nuclear-enrichment activity.

The facility in question, said to be located on a secret Iranian military installation outside of the holy city of Qom and capable of housing up to 3,000 centrifuges used to enrich uranium, had been monitored by the intelligence services of the US and other nations for some time. But it wasn't until Monday that the IAEA found out about its existence, based not on any intelligence "scoop" provided by the US, but rather Iran's own voluntary declaration. Iran's actions forced the hand of the US, leading to Obama's hurried press conference Friday morning.

Beware politically motivated hype. While on the surface, Obama's dramatic intervention seemed sound, the devil is always in the details. The "rules" Iran is accused of breaking are not vague, but rather spelled out in clear terms. In accordance with Article 42 of Iran's Safeguards Agreement, and Code 3.1 of the General Part of the Subsidiary Arrangements (also known as the "additional protocol") to that agreement, Iran is obliged to inform the IAEA of any decision to construct a facility which would house operational centrifuges, and to provide preliminary design information about that facility, even if nuclear material had not been introduced. This would initiate a process of complementary access and design verification inspections by the IAEA.

This agreement was signed by Iran in December 2004. However, since the "additional protocol" has not been ratified by the Iranian parliament, and as such is not legally binding, Iran had viewed its implementation as being voluntary, and as such agreed to comply with these new measures as a confidence building measure more so than a mandated obligation.

In March 2007, Iran suspended the implementation of the modified text of Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements General Part concerning the early provisions of design information. As such, Iran was reverting back to its legally-binding requirements of the original safeguards agreement, which did not require early declaration of nuclear-capable facilities prior to the introduction of nuclear material.

While this action is understandably vexing for the IAEA and those member states who are desirous of full transparency on the part of Iran, one cannot speak in absolute terms about Iran violating its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. So when Obama announced that "Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow", he is technically and legally wrong.

There are many ways to interpret Iran's decision of March 2007, especially in light of today's revelations. It should be underscored that what the Qom facility Obama is referring to is not a nuclear weapons plant, but simply a nuclear enrichment plant similar to that found at the declared (and inspected) facility in Natanz.

The Qom plant, if current descriptions are accurate, cannot manufacture the basic feed-stock (uranium hexaflouride, or UF6) used in the centrifuge-based enrichment process. It is simply another plant in which the UF6 can be enriched.

Why is this distinction important? Because the IAEA has underscored, again and again, that it has a full accounting of Iran's nuclear material stockpile. There has been no diversion of nuclear material to the Qom plant (since it is under construction). The existence of the alleged enrichment plant at Qom in no way changes the nuclear material balance inside Iran today.

Simply put, Iran is no closer to producing a hypothetical nuclear weapon today than it was prior to Obama's announcement concerning the Qom facility.

One could make the argument that the existence of this new plant provides Iran with a "breakout" capability to produce highly-enriched uranium that could be used in the manufacture of a nuclear bomb at some later date. The size of the Qom facility, alleged to be capable of housing 3,000 centrifuges, is not ideal for large-scale enrichment activity needed to produce the significant quantities of low-enriched uranium Iran would need to power its planned nuclear power reactors. As such, one could claim that its only real purpose is to rapidly cycle low-enriched uranium stocks into highly-enriched uranium usable in a nuclear weapon. The fact that the Qom facility is said to be located on an Iranian military installation only reinforces this type of thinking.

But this interpretation would still require the diversion of significant nuclear material away from the oversight of IAEA inspectors, something that would be almost immediately evident. Any meaningful diversion of nuclear material would be an immediate cause for alarm, and would trigger robust international reaction, most probably inclusive of military action against the totality of Iran's known nuclear infrastructure.

Likewise, the 3,000 centrifuges at the Qom facility, even when starting with 5% enriched uranium stocks, would have to operate for months before being able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a single nuclear device. Frankly speaking, this does not constitute a viable "breakout" capability.

Iran has, in its declaration of the Qom enrichment facility to the IAEA on 21 September, described it as a "pilot plant". Given that Iran already has a "pilot enrichment plant" in operation at its declared facility in Natanz, this obvious duplication of effort points to either a parallel military-run nuclear enrichment programme intended for more nefarious purposes, or more likely, an attempt on the part of Iran to provide for strategic depth and survivability of its nuclear programme in the face of repeated threats on the part of the US and Israel to bomb its nuclear infrastructure.

Never forget that sports odds makers were laying 2:1 odds that either Israel or the US would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities by March 2007. Since leaving office, former vice-president Dick Cheney has acknowledged that he was pushing heavily for a military attack against Iran during the time of the Bush administration. And the level of rhetoric coming from Israel concerning its plans to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran have been alarming.

While Obama may have sent conciliatory signals to Iran concerning the possibility of rapprochement in the aftermath of his election in November 2008, this was not the environment faced by Iran when it made the decision to withdraw from its commitment to declare any new nuclear facility under construction. The need to create a mechanism of economic survival in the face of the real threat of either US or Israeli military action is probably the most likely explanation behind the Qom facility. Iran's declaration of this facility to the IAEA, which predates Obama's announcement by several days, is probably a recognition on the part of Iran that this duplication of effort is no longer representative of sound policy on its part.

In any event, the facility is now out of the shadows, and will soon be subjected to a vast range of IAEA inspections, making any speculation about Iran's nuclear intentions moot. Moreover, Iran, in declaring this facility, has to know that because it has allegedly placed operational centrifuges in the Qom plant (even if no nuclear material has been introduced), there will be a need to provide the IAEA with full access to Iran's centrifuge manufacturing capability, so that a material balance can be acquired for these items as well.

Rather than representing the tip of the iceberg in terms of uncovering a covert nuclear weapons capability, the emergence of the existence of the Qom enrichment facility could very well mark the initiation of a period of even greater transparency on the part of Iran, leading to its full adoption and implementation of the IAEA additional protocol. This, more than anything, should be the desired outcome of the "Qom declaration".

Calls for "crippling" sanctions on Iran by Obama and Brown are certainly not the most productive policy options available to these two world leaders. Both have indicated a desire to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Iran's action, in declaring the existence of the Qom facility, has created a window of opportunity for doing just that, and should be fully exploited within the framework of IAEA negotiations and inspections, and not more bluster and threats form the leaders of the western world.
   

 

[bigron]

Manufacturing Consent For Attack On Iran:


Obama Times Calling Out Iran For Impact

By Jon Ward
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23578.htm

September 26, 2009 "Washington Times" -- PITTSBURGH | President Obama's decision to confront Iran with evidence of a secret nuclear production site Friday was the culmination of a deliberate strategy over the past nine months to gain maximum impact from the disclosure by building up to it with other steps on the world stage.

A high-ranking administration official told The Washington Times that while the White House knew about Iran's construction of a second uranium enrichment plant before Mr. Obama took office in January, it waited to drop the bombshell until U.S. officials had conducted extensive diplomatic advance work.

The preparations go back to Mr. Obama's inaugural promise to engage in meaningful dialogue with Iran to two letters he sent to Iran's supreme leader, which led to Tehran's agreeing to sit down with negotiators from the U.S. and other world powers on Oct. 1. Mr. Obama has lobbied or spoken to key leaders for months, including Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Last week the White House scrapped a missile defense plan that had infuriated Russia, smoothing the way for closer cooperation. That was followed by a progression of moves that played out at the United Nations. Mr. Obama gave a broad speech to the General Assembly that included an appeal to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. He then bolstered the treaty procedurally with the passage of a Security Council resolution at a meeting he chaired, the first U.S. president to do so.

In between the speech and the council vote, Mr. Obama held meetings with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, whose governments are key to further U.N. sanctions against Iran.

"It's important to see what happened today building on what happened in New York," Mr. Obama said at a press conference to close out the week, adding that his overall strategy to keep an open hand toward Iran had succeeded in isolating Tehran on the world stage.

"That means that, when we find that diplomacy does not work, we will be in a much stronger position to, for example, apply sanctions that have bite," he said.

A high-ranking government official in Washington who has been involved in the strategy formulation said that the engagement policy, which has been roundly criticized by many conservatives and foreign policy hawks, had "create* a new landscape, a landscape where the Iranians would look out and realize they really were sitting there alone."

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" that, "The Iranians are in a very bad spot now,"

U.S. officials said they had been developing the intelligence about the uranium plant for some time to have it ready for important meetings this week, but the exact timing was influenced by a Iranian letter to the IAEA on Monday admitting that a second enrichment plant was under construction but providing few details.

At the United Nations, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the plant near the Iranian theological center of Qom as within IAEA rules because Iran has not yet introduced nuclear materials into it.

However, Mr. Obama said Iran had violated U.N. resolutions and IAEA rules by not informing the nuclear watchdog in advance about the project.

"Iran's actions have raised grave doubts" about Iranian claims that they are only pursuing the peaceful use of nuclear energy," he said. "Iran is on notice when we meet with them Oct. 1. ... They're going to have to come clean and they're going to have to make a choice."

It is still unclear whether Iran will bow to international pressure. Some nuclear experts noted that the discovery of a clandestine site suggests that Iran could have many more.

"The Iranians are teaching us the limits of what we are overselling," said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.

Each time they are caught, the Iranians belatedly inform the IAEA and claim they are not breaking the rules, he said, and the IAEA then agrees to monitor the new facility.

"What you're doing is increasing the noise-to-signal ratio and making it much tougher to find the next covert facility," he said.

Mr. Sokolski agreed, however, that the timing of the disclosure was "fortuitous." And he gave credit to the Obama administration "for keeping its powder keg dry."

White House officials acknowledged that the Iranians will determine when IAEA inspectors will be allowed into the site. IAEA spokesperson Marc Vidricaire said that the organization in Vienna "has requested Iran to provide specific information and access to the facility as soon as possible."

Mr. Obama said that the intelligence on the once secret site, tunneled into mountains 18 miles north of Qom, which is about 160 miles southwest of Tehran, was the product of U.S., British and French intelligence, had been "thoroughly scrubbed" and was "solid."

"The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program," he said.

"The facility is located in an underground tunnel complex on the grounds of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base," an official in Washington said. "The site is under the management of the Atomic Energy Organization for Iran, but is unknown to all but the most senior AEOI officials." He spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitivity of the information.

White House officials here explained that the site was configured for 3,000 centrifuges - not enough to produce fuel for a civilian reactor, which Iran claims is the goal of its program, but big enough to make highly enriched uranium for one or two nuclear bombs a year.

In 2002, an Iranian opposition group revealed Iran's first secret enrichment plant, at Natanz. It now has about 8,000 centrifuges under IAEA supervision producing low-enriched uranium.

A 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate said Iran appeared to have stopped work on nuclear warheads but was continuing enrichment, which can produce fuel for civilian reactors or bombs.

"It was evident to everybody, both the United States and our allies, that if the Iranians wanted to pursue a nuclear weapons option, the use of the Natanz facility was a very unattractive approach. ... So the obvious option for Iran would be to build another secret underground enrichment facility," said a senior White House official.

"Our intelligence services, working in very close cooperation with our allies, for the past several years have been looking for such a facility. And not surprisingly we found one. So we have known for some time now," he said.

White House officials told reporters that they briefed Russian, Chinese and German officials about the technical details of their evidence on the sidelines of global economic talks here. They said that Mr. Obama told Mr. Medvedev about the intelligence - shared with the British and French for some time - at their meeting in New York on Wednesday.

That sheds light on why American officials who briefed the press afterward seemed so elated with a statement from the Russian leader that sanctions were sometimes "inevitable."

The Kremlin released a statement Friday saying that "Iran's construction of a uranium enrichment plant violates decisions of the United Nations Security Council" and calling for the IAEA to "investigate this site immediately."

"Iran must cooperate with this investigation. Russia will assist in this investigation by any available means. Russia remains committed to a dialogue with Iran on the nuclear issue, and urges Iran to provide proof of its commitment to a peaceful nuclear program by the Oct. 1 meeting," the Kremlin said.

Mr. Obama did not inform Mr. Hu on Tuesday of plans to go public with the information about the Iranian site, apparently because the White House had not yet decided to do so.

The Chinese on Thursday reiterated their opposition to new sanctions against Iran, but White House officials said Friday that Beijing made those comments before it had been briefed by U.S. intelligence officials.

"China is just now fully absorbing these latest revelations. I think we should stay tuned for the Chinese position in the coming days," an adviser to Mr. Obama said.

A senior White House adviser told reporters here Friday that the development "increases our leverage diplomatically, and we intend to make use of it."

"It was important to us, coming into this critical period in the fall, to be prepared, to be basically in the driver's seat under any contingency," an official in Washington said.

Barbara Slavin and Eli Lake in Washington and Nicholas Kralev in Berlin contributed to this report.

 

[bigron]

US giant bunker-buster bomb project rushed since Iran's Qom site discovered

DEBKAfile Special Report
http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=6288
September 27, 2009, 4:08 PM (GMT+02:00)


 Estimated location of Qom enrichment plant


The Pentagon has brought forward to December 2009 the target-date for producing the first 15-ton super bunker-buster bomb (GBU-57A/B) Massive Ordinance Penetrator, which can reach a depth of 60.09 meters underground before exploding. DEBKAfile's military sources report that top defense agencies and air force units were also working against the clock to adapt the bay of a B2a Stealth bomber for carrying and delivering the bomb.

The Pentagon has ordered the number of bombs rolling off the production line increased from four to ten - a rush job triggered in May by the discovery that Iran was hiding a second uranium enrichment plant under a mountain near Qom - a discovery which prompted this week's international outcry.

Congress has since quietly inserted the necessary funding in the 2009 budget.

All this urgency indicates that the Obama administration has been preparing military muscle to back up the international condemnation of Iran's concealed nuclear bomb program, its sanctions threat and his willingness to join the negotiations with Iran opening on Oct. 1 in Geneva. Tehran may have to take into account a possible one-time surgical strike against its underground enrichment facility as a warning shot should its defiance continue. In particular, the world powers this week demanded that Iran open up all its nuclear facilities and programs to full and immediate international inspection. Failure to do so could bring forth further US military action.

According to our military sources, the earliest date for the accelerated Pentagon program to produce a super bunker buster bomb mounted on a stealth bomber is December 2009 or January 2010. This too is three years ahead of its original schedule.

Pressed into service are two US Air Force research centers for work on adapting the radar-evading stealth bomber to the giant bomb: the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the Munitions Directorate and Air Armament Center, both headquartered at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

Last month, DEBKAfile quoted Air Force Lt. Gen. Mark Shackelford as disclosing that the Pentagon had decided to accelerate the production of 10-12 giant bunker buster bombs in response to intelligence received of Iranian and North Korean underground nuclear plants.

[bigron]

Clinton tries to distort fact about Iran N plant 


28/09/2009 01:11:00 PM GMT
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Clinton-tries-to-distort-fact-about-Iran-N-plant.html
   


In an attempt to distort facts, the US Secretary of State implies that Iran was not the first to make an announcement about its new nuclear plant.

"This latest incident concerning the facility at Qom would have been disclosed were it for peaceful purposes. There would have already been IAEA inspections," Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a Sunday televised interview.

"The facility had only become known through our working with partners to discover it prior to the Iranian announcement" she added.

Ignoring findings of a recent NIE update, Clinton said the Iranians must "present convincing evidence as to the purpose of their nuclear program" in the October 1 meeting with the P5+1 (permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany).

The National Intelligence Estimate update, which was put together by US spy agencies, clarified that there was no evidence to prove Iran's nuclear work was in anyway military.

Clinton claimed that the plant's "discovery" gave a sense of urgency to the upcoming talks in Geneva, adding that Washington did not believe Tehran could prove its peaceful intentions at the meeting.

Clinton made the remarks while Iran had written a letter to the UN nuclear watchdog on September 21 (days before the US publicized the issue), saying that it was constructing a second plant for uranium enrichment.

Tehran sent the letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency 12 months prior to the date set for the plant to enter operational phase.

Document 153 of Agency regulations, obliges member states to inform the body of the existence of enrichment plants only "six" months before the introduction of nuclear materials into the facility.

Clinton did, however, welcome the positive move taken by Iran to ask International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to check the new uranium enrichment plant.

Clinton's comments come as the US and its allies try to portray Tehran's early announcement about the still under-construction nuclear facility, as a sign of "deception". Ironically, the efforts coincide with confessions by top US officials that the White House already knew about the plan.

"The Americans say that they knew of the new plant prior to Iran's announcement and have presented aerial pictures of the location, so why are they claiming that the project was clandestine?" head of Iran's nuclear program, Ali Akbar Salehi asks.

Despite Western attempts to accuse Iran of "secrecy", several days after the publication of Iran's letter, a US counter-proliferation official confirmed that Washington knew about the second Iranian nuclear plant “for several years”.

US officials continue to represent Iran's clear openness as a "hidden agenda", while avoiding a series of questions raised by Tehran about how they conduct their nuclear activities.

In a Sunday Press TV interview, Iran's IAEA ambassador Ali Asghar Soltaniyeh accused the US, Britain, and France of deceiving the international community over their nuclear programs, claims that Clinton failed to address in her comments.

"Those three countries in fact have violated for the last 40 years NPT articles," he said, accusing the UK of deceiving the world and its own people over its covert Trident (a ballistic missile equipped with nuclear-warheads) submarines program.

"This is the real deception… Mr. Brown has to answer to the international community because this is a shocking threat to international peace and security.

"France is also working on the nuclear weapon programs continuously… Americans are working hard on the nuclear weapon posture review. These are all deceptions and concealment."

Western countries have a "long-term strategy" to "destroy and jeopardize the spirit of cooperation between Iran and the IAEA in order to find an excuse and pretext for sanctions and other measures," said Soltaniyeh.


-- Press TV

 

[bigron]

Riyadh 'offers airspace' for Israel attack on Iran

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:13:52 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=107317&sectionid=351020104

   
 
Israeli fighter jets have been allowed to use Saudi airspace to launch go-it-alone air strikes on Iranian nuclear installations, says a recent report.

The issue ahs been discussed in a closed-door meeting in London, where British Intelligence Chief Sir John Scarlett his Israeli counterpart, Meir Dagan, and Saudi official have been present Daily Express.

According to the report Scarlett has been told that Saudi airspace would be at Israel's disposal should Tel Aviv decide to move forward with his military plans against Iran.

The British daily added the likelihood of an Israeli attack against Iran has increased significantly after the country announced plans to launch its second enrichment facility in the central city of Qom.

In line with its policy of nuclear transparency, Iran announced the construction of a second enrichment plant in a letter to the UN nuclear watchdog on September 21. The new plant is due to produce enriched uranium up to 5 percent.

The letter was sent 12 months before the agency's regulations oblige its members states to inform of new developments.

With eyes firmly fixed on Iran's nuclear progressions, the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly threatened to bomb the country's enrichment facilities out of existence.

Tel Aviv accuses Tehran of nuclear weapons development - a charge rejected by both Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog, which has so far made "21 unannounced inspections" of the country's nuclear facilities.

The UN nuclear watchdog in its previous reports has confirmed that Iran only enriches uranium-235 to a level of "less than 5 percent."

Uranium, which fuels a nuclear power plant, can be used for military purposes only if enriched to high levels of above 90 percent.

Details of the controversial Israeli plans to attack Iran emerged after John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, recently told a group of intelligence analysts that “Riyadh certainly approves” of Israel's use of Saudi airspace in the event of war with Iran.

Bolton, had previously said he had discussed the possibility with Saudi officials in closed-door meetings. “None of them would say anything about it publicly but they would certainly acquiesce in an overflight if the Israelis didn't trumpet it as a big success.”

The recent revelations follow a flurry of media reports in July, which suggested the Saudi government had approved the use of its airspace for an attack.

While Saudi officials deny having diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv, an Israeli defense source has confirmed that the Mossad spy agency maintained “working relations” with the kingdom.

According to a study published bythe Center for Strategic and International Studies, a military exchange between Iran and Israel could result in the death of as many as 6 million people.

SBB/DT

[Freeski]

Giant bunker busters? Say, could you exterminate a million or more people with that?

[America2]

BEWARE of listening to John Hagee, Joel Rosenberg, Hal Lindsey, Grant Jeffrey, and these other so-called "end times bible scholars" - these guys are REALLY in overdrive now conditioning their listeners for the next false flag attack.

[bigron]

Iran’s Nuclear Theatre


by Ramzy Baroud

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m58385&hd=&size=1&l=e

28 September 2009

World events have taken an interesting turn recently, with the Goldstone report, which wreaked havoc in the beginning of the week being nearly completely overshadowed by Iran’s revelation of another nuclear facility, according to diplomats in Vienna on September 25.

The Iran nuclear threat — although theatre is a more suitable term — was highlighted repeatedly, first by US President Barack Obama during a UN speech on September 23, then again by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next day. The latter came armed with maps and relentlessly provoked Holocaust memories, following the ever so predictable, albeit insensitive and deceptive pattern.

This charade was meant to distract from the nearly 600-page UN report, prepared by South Africa judge Richard Goldstone and others, dedicated mostly to Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Confirming that Israel wantonly used weapons, including illegal weapons, against a defenseless civilian population in Gaza and going so far to say that Israel did not only commit war crimes, but indeed may have also committed crimes against humanity, the findings of the report were all set by the wayside. The report was utterly rebuked by Netanyahu and his ilk, arrogantly disregarded and shelved.

Concurrently, Israel’s official statement regarding the IAEA’s pressure on Israel to sign on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty was that Israel "deplored" such a notion.

The Israeli conceit may be redundant, but is as ever infuriating.

Many of Israel’s devoted supporters accused the Goldstone mission of fabricating conclusions before the investigations even came to a close.

And so yet again, Israel unhesitatingly established that they it’s above the law, promptly and successfully turning the world’s attention to the greater menace: Iran.

It seems that President Obama is also learning some painful lessons regarding the balance of power between the US and Israel, going into negotiations in Washington this past week – along with Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas — with a strong stance for the complete freeze of all settlement activity, and ending with clear and potent calls for the Palestinians to continue down the road of diplomacy inspite of Israel’s refusal to consider the option of adhering to international law. In the words of Israeli writer, Uri Avnery, "No point denying it: in the first round of the match between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama was beaten."

Learning from past history, one can hardly be optimistic to expect a US victory in the second round, or anytime soon for that matter.

And thereafter, the Israeli cue was emulated, and Obama followed it to the letter. Israel’s recent use of illegal weapons on civilians, its arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons and its refusal to consider disarmament paled in comparison to the potential threat that could arise should Iran seek a nuclear weapon some time in the future.

Obama’s words to Ahmadinejad and the people of Iran at the UN were decisive: "They are going to have to make a choice: Are they willing to go down the path to greater prosperity and security for Iran, giving up the acquisition of nuclear weapons ... or will they continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation."

This is sure to ignite a war of words, to the pleasure of Netanyahu and his extremist government.

But the outcome of this duel will certainly exceed the realm of words.

It seems that Obama’s rebuke and Netanyahu’s declarations could actually lead to the detriment of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and indeed to us all, by encouraging nations who until this point do not possess nuclear weapons to expedite the creation of their own arsenal. After all, what we have learned from this episode is that nations who do not yet possess weapons of mass destruction had better get on the band-wagon and make some, for it seems that without them, they are nothing more than sitting ducks.

How ironic it is, and what a sweet-talker Netanyahu is, to successfully divert the world’s eye, ears and conscience away from what he has indeed done, to the dangerous notion of what another man with up until this point can only be branded for fiery speeches, could do some time in the future.

As for Ahmadinejad’s crusade for Iran, it could be very possible that in the end, the ones who will pay for his bold declarations will be as usual, the Palestinians, who after the scourge of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead nearly one year ago, still await the bare necessities to rebuild, still thirst for clean water and basic sustenance. Netanyahu has been tireless at drawing parallels between Iran and Gaza, presenting them both to the world as dire threats to the existence of the Jewish State. When addressing the UN in New York on September 24, he branded Iran once again, exhorting that. "The struggle against Iran pits civilisation against barbarism. This Iranian regime is fueled by extreme fundamentalism. What starts as attacks on Jews always ends up engulfing others. This regime embodies the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism."

Interesting words from a man whose former administration and current administration could very well face the International Criminal Court for the endorsing the carrying out of crimes against humanity.

Such utterances make one wonder, just who in the world are we to trust, and who in the world are we to fear?

For the time being however, one can only hope that the international community reject all attempts to be blinded by Netanyahu’s fear mongering, and insist on a stern and decisive investigation into the alleged war crimes in Gaza, as presented in the Goldstone report so that the real culprits, not the imagined ones in Tehran, pay for their heinous crimes against the defenseless people of the Strip.

Ramzy Baroud is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com




 

[bigron]

Analysis – Iran Debate Pretty Much Over

Is Iran's Lack of Nuclear Weapons Really Beside the Point?


Posted By Jason Ditz On September 28, 2009 @ 6:31 pm


The Obama Administration was seemingly foiled last week when it was discovered that the “secret” Iranian nuclear facility they were about to reveal to the rest of the UN Security Council had already been reported to the IAEA, by Iran, as legally required.

But no one seemed to notice. The Western media still crowed about the “uncovering” of a secret facility by the Obama Administration and ran several stories questioning the ramifications in the lead-up to this week’s talks.

Today Slashdot, a popular news and current affairs discussion site, has run a discussion entitled “Iran’s nuclear ambitions” which underscores the tenor of the topic. Slashdot’s readership tends to be pretty politically independent and have above average education, so one would think they’d be more skeptical about the case for war than the average voter.

And there is a pretty even split between pro-war and anti-war positions on the discussion. Lots of grousing about empire. Lots of mentioning Israel. But there is one thing you won’t see, and that’s any serious questioning of whether or not Iran is creating nuclear weapons.

Despite the US intelligence community saying they aren’t, despite the IAEA saying they have seen no proof that they are, pretty much everyone takes Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” for granted, and are just split over whether or not its worth going to war over.

It’s not hard to imagine why this is. Both the Bush Administration and Obama Administration have cheerfully ignored their own intelligence communities and trumpeted this myth of the threat posed by Iran. If you’re the average person who doesn’t spend all day paying attention to this stuff you’d probably figure if one was lying about it so overtly the other party would call them on it. Not so.

But while we can take some solace in the fact that so many on Slashdot don’t see this as a good reason to go to war, if everybody believes Iran is making nuclear weapons this argument is pretty much over, and then the pro-war side has won. If facts don’t matter the state can ALWAYS scare the public into war.

It worked in Iraq… and 6+ years after the occupation a non-trivial minority of Americans still think Iraq had WMDs. Now it seems like it’s just a matter of if President Obama really wants to attack Iran or not.

And that’s not so straightforward. The US has 130,000+ troops in Iraq and will likely have over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan very soon. Conquering Iran will be no cakewalk, and even with the international good will the Obama Administration seems to have it is unlikely NATO is going to jump at the chance for another war.

But unless Americans are really willing to revisit the underlying claim of Iran’s mythical nuclear weapons program, the debate is over. Thursday’s talks will be about lining up international forces on Obama’s side for sanctions or worse against Iran, and the media will gleefully report the official line, no matter how little sense it makes.

Related Stories
•September 27, 2009 -- Clinton: Nothing Iran Can Do to Convince US Nuclear Program Is Peaceful
•September 25, 2009 -- Obama: Iran Is on Notice, Won’t Rule Out Military Action
•September 25, 2009 -- Calls for More Harsh Action After Iran Reveals New Construction

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from News From Antiwar.com: http://news.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/09/28/analysis-iran-debate-pretty-much-over/

[bigron]

Obama stuck between wars on Iraq, Afghanistan

 
29/09/2009 03:00:00 PM GMT
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/Obama-stuck-between-wars-on-Iraq-Afghanistan.html
 
For too long now the Middle East has been paying in blood for U.S. experimental and contradictory foreign policies.


By Nicola Nasser

It was extraordinarily questionable why U.S. President Barak Obama chose not to credit the War on Afghanistan with a separate paragraph in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 23, to “note” the war on Iraq with only a four – line paragraph, and instead to escalate his war of words on Iran, as if the expansion of the war on Afghanistan into Pakistan was not enough over-depletion of an already exhausted US human, financial and military resources, and as if a threat of a third war in the Middle East would serve in any way the U.S. vital interests in the region or contribute to US elusive victory in either one of both wars. Downplaying the most pressing items on the U.S. agenda and leaping forward to the nuclear issue and Iran was only a thinly – veiled attempt to divert attention away from the fact that Obama was stuck between the worse and the worst in both countries.


(Reuters) Why Is Obama Still Using Blackwater?


On the second anniversary of Blackwater’s massacre of Iraqis in Baghdad’s Al-Nusur Square, CBS on this September 17 asked in a detailed report: “Why Is Obama Still Using Blackwater?” The answer could obviously be found in exhausting the U.S. “volunteer” military manpower stretched out to the maximum to sustain the two U.S. – led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.


This military manpower debacle leaves Obama with either one of three options: More privatization of both wars and consequently more “blackwaters”, “nationalization” of both wars through “Iraqization” and “Afghanization”, which nonetheless could not disengage the U.S. neither militarily nor financially from both theaters neither in the short term nor in the foreseeable future, or resorting to conscription to sustain a war that has so far proved unwinnable both on Iraq and on Afghanistan after nine years and seven years respectively.


However all three options seem unfeasible. Conscription as the last resort is absolutely an option that would immediately be dismissed because unless it is dictated by a clear-cut threat to national security it will not be accepted as an indispensible measure of self defense, let alone conscribing Americans for a war on Iraq that has been unpopular with them since the U.S. – led invasion in 2003, or for the war on Afghanistan that is increasingly becoming unpopular among them, according to the latest CNN Poll of Polls (58% against), and is gradually eroding Obama’s popularity, which dropped to 50% from 57% in July (Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll on September 23).


The other two options, namely privatization or nationalization of both wars, are evidently contradictory. While Iraqis or Afghanis may swallow a delayed withdrawal of foreign military troops until they can develop their own defense forces, they will in no way accept a mercenary alternative to such troops in the meantime, nor would they perceive collaborators who were brought into both countries by the invading armies themselves as turned “nationalists” overnight.


Obama’s strategy as was announced on the inauguration of his administration was to exit U.S. combatants from Iraq and move these same combating resources to Afghanistan to solve his military manpower problem, but exit from Iraq is proving untenable and the war on Afghanistan is proving unsustainable without immediate commitment of substantially more troops.


Obama has now to choose between two failures, either a failure in Iraq or a failure in Afghanistan, because a “successful outcome” in the latter theater “is going to require a major U.S. reinforcement,” but “fast redeployment in Afghanistan hurts us in Iraq. It comes at a price … at the cost of the risk of failure in another theater (i.e. Iraq),” according to Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for defense policy on March 2.


Obama is now obviously stuck between what he described as the U.S. “war of choice” on Iraq and the U.S. “war of necessity” on Afghanistan, which practically has become His “war of hard choice” – according to Richard Haas, the CFR president in a recent article. Both wars however are still insistently sustained by Obama whose exit strategy from both is still blurred in Iraqi and Afghani eyes as much as in US eyes.


Viewed from the battle grounds of the U.S. global wars on terrorism or otherwise, which ironically are only fought in the Middle East, Obama’s strategies seem indecisive and confused. On Iraq, he pledged in his UN speech to “ending the war” and “to remove all American troops by the end of 2011,” but “responsibly,” until the Iraqis “transition to full responsibility for their future,” which practically translates to a long term strategic commitment.


Meanwhile on Afghanistan he is still wavering and meandering not to rush to a sizeable reinforcement to avoid what Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in country, warned against in a confidential report, recently leaked: “Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it .. The overall effort is deteriorating. We run the risk of strategic defeat.” But Obama will not yet surge troops there until he has “the right strategy” and will not send “young men and women into battle, without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.”


Nine months in office, Obama is still wondering: "Are we doing the right thing?" "Are we pursuing the right strategy?" If Obama has yet to decide on a strategy on Afghanistan, in hindsight, one might ask: why did he send there seventeen thousand additional troops earlier this year!


For too long now the Middle East has been paying in blood for U.S. experimental and contradictory foreign policies, which ostensibly seek peace where war is the only option to make the Israeli occupying power, for instance, succumb to a just and lasting peace in the Palestinian – Israeli conflict, and launch war where peace is only attainable through an end to U.S. – led wars as the cases are in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Obama at the UN on Wednesday seemed poised to promise the Middle East more of the same when he pledged he “will never apologize” for defending the interests “of my nation,” and yet lamented “anti-Americanism,” which is exacerbated by sustaining such counterproductive policies.


-- Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli – occupied Palestinian territories.



-- AJP

 

[bigron]

Another War in the Works

Posted By Paul Craig Roberts On September 28, 2009 @ 11:00 pm

Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by then-president Bush and the "mainstream media" about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that no such weapons existed.

The weapons inspectors did an honest job in Iraq and told the truth, but the mainstream media did not emphasize their findings. Instead, the media served as a Ministry of Propaganda, beating the war drums for the U.S. government.

Now the whole process is repeating itself. This time the target is Iran.

As there is no real case against Iran, Obama took a script from Bush’s playbook and fabricated one.

First the facts: As a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran’s nuclear facilities are open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which carefully monitors Iran’s nuclear energy program to make certain that no material is diverted to nuclear weapons.

The IAEA has monitored Iran’s nuclear energy program and has announced repeatedly that it has found no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program. All 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have affirmed and reaffirmed that Iran abandoned interest in nuclear weapons years ago.

In keeping with the safeguards agreement that the IAEA be informed before an enrichment facility comes online, Iran informed the IAEA on Sept. 21 that it had a new nuclear facility under construction. By informing the IAEA, Iran fulfilled its obligations under the safeguards agreement. The IAEA will inspect the facility and monitor the nuclear material produced to make sure it is not diverted to a weapons program.

Despite these unequivocal facts, Obama announced on Sept. 25 that Iran has been caught with a "secret nuclear facility" with which to produce a bomb that would threaten the world.

The Obama regime’s claim that Iran is not in compliance with the safeguards agreement is disinformation. Between the end of 2004 and early 2007, Iran voluntarily complied with an additional protocol (Code 3.1) that was never ratified and never became a legal part of the safeguards agreement. The additional protocol would have required Iran to notify the IAEA prior to beginning construction of a new facility, whereas the safeguards agreement in force requires notification prior to completion of a new facility. Iran ceased its voluntary compliance with the unratified additional protocol in March 2007, most likely because of the American and Israeli misrepresentations of Iran’s existing facilities and military threats against them.

By accusing Iran of having a secret "nuclear weapons program" and demanding that Iran "come clean" about the nonexistent program, adding that he does not rule out a military attack on Iran, Obama mimics the discredited Bush regime’s use of nonexistent Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" to set up Iraq for invasion.

The U.S. media, even the "liberal" National Public Radio, quickly fell in with the Obama lie machine. Steven Thomma of the McClatchy Newspapers declared the non-operational facility under construction, which Iran reported to the IAEA, to be "a secret nuclear facility."

Thomma, reported incorrectly that the world didn’t learn of Iran’s "secret" facility, the one that Iran reported to the IAEA the previous Monday, until Obama announced it in a joint appearance in Pittsburgh the following Friday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Obviously, Thomma has no command over the facts, a routine inadequacy of "mainstream media" reporters. The new facility was revealed when Iran voluntarily reported the facility to the IAEA on Sept. 21.

Ali Akbar Dareini, an Associated Press writer, reported, incorrectly, over AP: "The presence of a second uranium-enrichment site that could potentially produce material for a nuclear weapon has provided one of the strongest indications yet that Iran has something to hide."

Dareini went on to write that "the existence of the secret site was first revealed by Western intelligence officials and diplomats on Friday." Dareini is mistaken. We learned of the facility when the IAEA announced that Iran had reported the facility the previous Monday in keeping with the safeguards agreement.

Dareini’s untruthful report of "a secret underground uranium enrichment facility whose existence has been hidden from international inspectors for years" helped to heighten the orchestrated alarm.

There you have it. The president of the United States and his European puppets are doing what they do best – lying through their teeth. The U.S. "mainstream media" repeats the lies as if they were facts. The U.S. "media" is again making itself an accomplice to wars based on fabrications. Apparently, the media’s main interest is to please the U.S. government and hopefully obtain a taxpayer bailout of its failing print operations.

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a rare man of principle who has not sold his integrity to the U.S. and Israeli governments, refuted in his report (Sept. 7, 2009) the baseless "accusations that information has been withheld from the Board of Governors about Iran’s nuclear program. I am dismayed by the allegations of some Member states, which have been fed to the media, that information has been withheld from the Board. These allegations are politically motivated and totally baseless. Such attempts to influence the work of the Secretariat and undermine its independence and objectivity are in violation of Article VII.F. of the IAEA Statute and should cease forthwith."

As there is no legal basis for action against Iran, the Obama regime is creating another hoax, like the nonexistent "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction." The hoax is that a facility, reported to the IAEA by Iran, is a secret facility for making nuclear weapons.

Just as the factual reports from the weapons inspectors in Iraq were ignored by the Bush regime, the factual reports from the IAEA are ignored by the Obama regime. Like the Bush regime, the Middle East policy of the Obama regime is based in lies and deception.

Who is the worse enemy of the American people, Iran or the government in Washington and the media whores who serve it?

Read more by Paul Craig Roberts
•US Hypocrisy Astonishes the World – September 6th, 2009
•Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs – August 19th, 2009
•Obama to Muslims: Put Up and Shut Up – June 4th, 2009
•Succumbing to the Dark Side – May 28th, 2009
•Who Will Stand Up to America and Israel? – May 27th, 2009

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/09/28/another-war-in-the-works/

[Brocke]

Iran accuses U.N. chief of parroting West on nukes

Iran's president is accusing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of parroting Western criticism of its new uranium enrichment facility instead of waiting for a report from the U.N. nuclear agency, Iran's U.N. Mission said Tuesday.

By EDITH M. LEDERER

Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS —

Iran's president is accusing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of parroting Western criticism of its new uranium enrichment facility instead of waiting for a report from the U.N. nuclear agency, Iran's U.N. Mission said Tuesday.

The Iranian mission said in a statement that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed "grave concern" during a meeting with Ban on Friday that the U.N. chief had "chosen to repeat the same allegations that (a) few Western powers are making."

Following Friday's disclosure of the new facility, Ban expressed "grave concern" about Iran's continued uranium enrichment, as did the leaders of the United States, Britain and France.

The secretary-general, asked at a news conference Tuesday about the Iranian Mission's statement, said that he responded to Ahmadinejad's criticism by telling the president that the newly disclosed facility violated U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The resolutions call for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and return to negotiations on its nuclear program, which the U.S. and its European allies believe is aimed at producing nuclear weapons. Iran insists its program is purely peaceful and aimed solely at producing nuclear energy, which is allowed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Ban said he also told Ahmadinejad during Friday's meeting that Iran needs to open all its facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, and be completely transparent.

"I made it quite clear that when they argue that their nuclear facilities are genuinely for peaceful purposes the burden of proof is on their side," he said.

Ahmadinejad said Friday his country has complied with requirements to inform the IAEA six months before a new enrichment facility becomes operational, and was giving 18 months notice.

Iran has agreed to allow the IAEA to inspect the new facility. At the news conference Tuesday, Ban was asked why he didn't wait for the U.N. nuclear agency to issue its report, as Ahmadinejad said.

"To be transparent and credible, when you have such an intent to build facilities, they should have informed - notified the IAEA long time before, not just before everything would be completed," Ban replied.

"That's what I'm raising. So there is a question of transparency. That is why the world leaders have expressed their deep concern and that is why I have also expressed my concern," he said.

"I urged him that Iran as (a) historically rich and proud country should take the constructive role in the international community by making very transparent and directly involvement and engagement in negotiations to prove all the pending issues," Ban said.

The secretary-general said he was following up his meeting with Ahmadinejad with a meeting later Tuesday with Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

"I sincerely hope that all these questions pertaining this new facility and other facilities - all the pending issues concerning nuclear development programs of Iran should be resolved through dialogue in a transparent and objective manner with (the) international atomic agency involved," he said.

The Iranian Mission's statement said Ahmadinejad raised other issues including Iran, Afghanistan and the Palestinian question.

Ahmadinejad has come under strong attack for denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel's destruction.

The statement said Ahmadinejad stated that "Iran condemns all the killings of innocent people that have occurred throughout the history including the killing of tens of millions of civilians in World War II."

Ahmadinejad told Ban that Iran "believes that there is no justification for these killings, nor can there be any justification for the attempts made by some, particularly by the Zionist regime, to commit new genocides and crimes and to perpetrate a new holocaust in Palestine by referring to the Holocaust," the mission's statement said.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009964516_apununiran.html

[bigron]

US Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn’t Add Up

Posted By Gareth Porter On September 29, 2009 @ 11:00 pm

The story line that dominated media coverage of the second Iranian uranium enrichment facility last week was the official assertion that U.S. intelligence had caught Iran trying to conceal a "secret" nuclear facility.

But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts, and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.

Iran’s notification to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the second enrichment facility in a letter on Sept. 21 was buried deep in most of the news stories and explained as a response to being detected by U.S. intelligence. In reporting the story in that way, journalists were relying entirely on the testimony of "senior administration officials" who briefed them at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh Friday.

U.S. intelligence had "learned that the Iranians learned that the secrecy of the facility was compromised," one of the officials said, according to the White House transcript. The Iranians had informed the IAEA, he asserted, because "they came to believe that the value of the facility as a secret facility was no longer valid."

Later in the briefing, however, the official said "we believe," rather than "we learned," in referring to that claim, indicating that it is only an inference rather than being based on hard intelligence.

The official refused to explain how U.S. analysts had arrived at that conclusion, but an analysis by the defense intelligence consulting firm IHS Jane’s of a satellite photo of the site taken Saturday said there is a surface-to-air missile system located at the site.

Since surface-to-air missiles protect many Iranian military sites, however, their presence at the Qom site doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran believed that Washington had just discovered the enrichment plant.

The official said the administration had organized an intelligence briefing on the facility for the IAEA during the summer on the assumption that the Iranians might "choose to disclose the facility themselves." But he offered no explanation for the fact that there had been no briefing given to the IAEA or anyone else until Sept. 24 – three days after the Iranians disclosed the existence of the facility.

A major question surrounding the official story is why the Barack Obama administration had not done anything – and apparently had no plans to do anything – with its intelligence on the Iranian facility at Qom prior to the Iranian letter to the IAEA. When asked whether the administration had intended to keep the information in its intelligence briefing secret even after the meeting with the Iranians on Oct. 1, the senior official answered obliquely but revealingly, "I think it’s impossible to turn back the clock and say what might have been otherwise."

In effect, the answer was no, there had been no plan for briefing the IAEA or anyone.

News media played up the statement by the senior administration official that U.S. intelligence had been "aware of this facility for years."

But what was not reported was that he meant only that the U.S. was aware of a possible nuclear site, not one whose function was known.

The official in question acknowledged the analysts had not been able to identify it as an enrichment facility for a long time. In the "very early stage of construction," said the official, "a facility like this could have multiple uses." Intelligence analysts had to "wait until the facility had reached the stage of construction where it was undeniably intended for use as a centrifuge facility," he explained.

The fact that the administration had made no move to brief the IAEA or other governments on the site before Iran revealed its existence suggests that site had not yet reached that stage where the evidence was unambiguous.

A former U.S. official who has seen the summary of the administration’s intelligence used to brief foreign governments told IPS he doubts the intelligence community had hard evidence that the Qom site was an enrichment plant. "I think they didn’t have the goods on them," he said.

Also misleading was the official briefing’s characterization of the intelligence assessment on the purpose of the enrichment plant. The briefing concluded that the Qom facility must be for production of weapons-grade enriched uranium, because it will accommodate only 3,000 centrifuges, which would be too few to provide fuel for a nuclear power plant.

According to the former U.S. official who has read the briefing paper on the intelligence assessment, however, the paper says explicitly that the Qom facility is "a possible military facility." That language indicates that intelligence analysts have suggested that the facility may be for making low-enriched rather than for high-enriched, bomb-grade uranium.

It also implies that the senior administration official briefing the press was deliberately portraying the new enrichment facility in more menacing terms than the actual intelligence assessment.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer the day after the denunciation of the site by U.S., British, and French leaders to allow IAEA monitoring of the plant will make it far more difficult to argue that it was meant to serve military purposes.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that Iran never intended to keep the Qom facility secret from the IAEA but was waiting to make it public at a moment that served its political-diplomatic objectives.

The Iranian government is well aware of U.S. capabilities for monitoring from satellite photographs any site in Iran that exhibits certain characteristics.

Iran obviously wanted to make the existence of the Qom site public before construction on the site would clearly indicate an enrichment purpose. But it gave the IAEA no details in its initial announcement, evidently hoping to find out whether and how much the United States already knew about it.

The specific timing of the Iranian letter, however, appears to be related to the upcoming talks between Iran and the P5+1 – China, France, Britain, Russia, the United States, and Germany – and an emerging Iranian strategy of smaller back-up nuclear facilities that would assure continuity if Natanz were attacked.

The Iranian announcement of that decision on Sept. 14 coincided with a statement by the head of Iran’s atomic energy organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, warning against preemptive strikes against the country’s nuclear facilities.

The day after the United States, Britain, and France denounced the Qom facility as part of a deception, Salehi said, "Considering the threats, our organization decided to do what is necessary to preserve and continue our nuclear activities. So we decided to build new installations which will guarantee the continuation of our nuclear activities which will never stop at any cost."

As satellite photos of the site show, the enrichment facility at Qom is being built into the side of a mountain, making it less vulnerable to destruction, even with the latest bunker-busting U.S. bombs.

The pro-administration newspaper Kayhan quoted an "informed official" as saying that Iran had told the IAEA in 2004 that it had to do something about the threat of attack on its nuclear facilities "repeatedly posed by the Western countries."

The government newspaper called the existence of the second uranium enrichment plan "a winning card" that would increase Iran’s bargaining power in the talks. That presumably referred to neutralizing the ultimate coercive threat against Iran by the United States.

(Inter Press Service)


Read more by Gareth Porter
•Fears of Blame for Defeat Shadow Afghan War Meetings – September 28th, 2009
•US Afghan Campaign Plan Says Key Groups Back Taliban – September 22nd, 2009
•IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Documents Were Forged – September 14th, 2009
•Taliban’s Tank-Killing Bombs Came from US, Not Iran – September 3rd, 2009
•ElBaradei Foes Leaked Stories to Force His Hand on Iran – August 25th, 2009

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2009/09/29/us-story-on-iran-nuke-facility-doesnt-add-up/

[bigron]

September 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/world/middleeast/30intel.html?_r=1&ref=global-home


In Dispute With Iran, Path to Iraq Is in Spotlight

By SCOTT SHANE


Satellite images, from 2000, left, and 2009, of an area near Qum, Iran. Analysts say the image on the right may show a nuclear plant.


WASHINGTON — To many Americans, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations on Iraq’s unconventional weapons was powerfully persuasive. It was a dazzling performance, featuring satellite images and intercepts of Iraqi communications, delivered by one of the most trusted figures in public life.

Then a long and costly war began, and the country discovered that the assertions that Iraq possessed illicit weapons had been completely unfounded.

Now the United States’ confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program is heating up, with the disclosure last week that the Iranian government is building a second uranium enrichment complex it had not previously acknowledged.

The question is inevitable: Is the uproar over the secret plant near Qum another rush to judgment, based on ambiguous evidence, spurred on by a desire to appear tough toward a loathed regime? In other words, is the United States repeating the mistakes of 2002?

Antiwar activists, with a fool-me-once skepticism, watch the dispute over the Qum plant with an alarmed sense of déjà vu. And some specialists on arms control and Iran are asking for more evidence and warning against hasty conclusions.

But while the similarities between 2002, when the faulty intelligence estimates were produced, and 2009 are unmistakable, the differences are profound.

This time, by all accounts, there is no White House-led march toward war. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said that military action would merely delay Iranian nuclear weapons for one to three years, and there is no evidence that President Obama wants to add a third war to his responsibilities.

This time, too, the dispute over facts is narrower. Iran has admitted the existence of nuclear enrichment facilities, and on Tuesday it acknowledged that it was building the plant underground, next to a military base, for its protection. Still, Iran disputes claims that the plant is part of a weapons program.

American intelligence officials say that they learned a traumatic lesson from the Iraqi weapons debacle, and that assessments of Iran’s nuclear program are hedged and not influenced by political or policy considerations.

“We’d let the country down, and we wanted to make sure it would never happen again,” said Thomas Fingar, who before the Iraq war led the State Department’s intelligence bureau, which dissented from the inaccurate claims about Iraq’s nuclear program. Dissent from majority views in intelligence assessments is now encouraged, and assumptions are spelled out, said Mr. Fingar, who is now at Stanford University.

“Now, it’s much more of a transparent tussle of ideas,” he said.

That tussle produced a surprising conclusion in a 2007 national intelligence assessment on Iran’s nuclear program: that Tehran’s work on designing a warhead was halted in 2003. Today, the American view is that the design work has still not resumed, a more conservative stance than that of some close allies, who say they believe the work has resumed or never stopped at all, including Germany, Israel and, according to a report Tuesday by The Financial Times, Britain.

In assessing the construction near Qum, the Central Intelligence Agency “formed its conclusions carefully and patiently over time, weighing and testing each piece of information that came in,” said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. “This was a major intelligence success.”

Not all are persuaded. Glenn Greenwald, an author and a left-leaning blogger for the online magazine Salon, called the parallels with the charges that Iraq had so-called weapons of mass destruction in 2002 “substantial and disturbing.”

“The administration is making inflammatory claims about another country’s W.M.D. program and intentions without providing any evidence,” he said.

Gary Sick, an expert on Iran at Columbia University, said that ever since 1992, American officials had claimed that Iran was just a few years away from a nuclear bomb. Like Saddam Hussein, the clerical government in Iran is “despised,” he said, leading to worst-case assumptions.

“In 2002, it seemed utterly naïve to believe Saddam didn’t have a program,” Mr. Sick said. Now, the notion that Iran is not racing to build a bomb is similarly excluded from serious discussion, he said.

Mr. Sick, like some in the intelligence community, said he believed that Iran might intend to stop short of building a weapon while creating “breakout capability” — the ability to make a bomb in a matter of months in the future. That chain of events might allow room for later intervention.

Without actually constructing a bomb, Iran could gain the influence of being an almost nuclear power, without facing the repercussions that would ensue if it finished the job.

Greg Thielmann, an intelligence analyst in the State Department before the Iraq war, said he believed that the Iran intelligence assessments were far more balanced, in part because there was not the urgent pressure from the White House to reach a particular conclusion, as there was in 2002. But he said he was bothered by what he said was an exaggerated sense of crisis over the Iranian nuclear issue.

“Some people are saying time’s running out and we have to act by the end of the year,” said Mr. Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association. “I’ve been arguing that we have years, not months. The facts argue for a calmer approach.”

David Albright, a former nuclear arms inspector who is now the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said Iran’s “well-documented history of undeclared nuclear programs” lent credibility to American suspicions.

Still, Mr. Albright said, the government must provide more information to back up its charges. On the Qum plant, for example, he asked, do intelligence agencies have evidence that it was intended to produce weapons-grade uranium, or merely that it could accommodate the equipment for such a purpose?

“They have to show their hand,” he said of American intelligence agencies. “Or we don’t have to believe them.”

In many dissections of the blunders before the Iraq war, the news media, including The New York Times, came in for a share of the criticism, for repeating Bush administration claims about Iraq without sufficient scrutiny or skepticism.

Mr. Greenwald, the Salon blogger, said he found in the coverage about the Qum plant little improvement in the performance of the press. “There is virtually no questioning of whether this facility could be used for civilian purposes, or whether Iran’s reporting it more than a year before operability demonstrates its good faith,” he said.

Greg Mitchell, whose 2008 book “So Wrong for So Long” analyzed the media’s failures on Iraq, said he would give the Iran coverage better marks. “I don’t see the same level of blindly accepting what the hawks are saying,” said Mr. Mitchell, editor of the trade publication Editor & Publisher. “I think the press has learned some lessons.”

[bigron]

Middle East
Oct 1, 2009 
 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ01Ak01.html
 
 
THE ROVING EYE

It's bomb, bomb, bomb Iran time


By Pepe Escobar

The United States and Western "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" crowd - hysteria running at fever pitch ahead of Thursday's multilateral nuclear talks in Geneva - could do worse than have a word with Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.

Lula actually talked to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad face-to-face for over an hour on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last week. He invited Ahmadinejad to visit Brazil in November. About the meeting, he went straight to the point, "What I wish for Iran is what I always wanted for Brazil - a peaceful, civilian nuclear program."

Lula is an island of common sense in an ocean of hysteria. French President Nicolas Sarkozy publicly gave a December deadline for Iran not to make a "tragic mistake", as in provoking Armageddon. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini reiterated the Group of Eight was giving Iran only three more months.

United States President Barack Obama - now running three wars (Iraq and the AfPak combo) - demanded that Iran (which is not at war with anybody) demonstrate "its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu announced to the UN, "the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fundamentalism and the weapons of mass destruction". Impervious to irony, Netanyahu obviously forgot that Iran - like Iraq in 2003 - has no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel not only has WMDs, but still refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or allow its weapons to be inspected, as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rushed to clarify. As for religious fundamentalism, Zionism is more than a match to Iran's Shi'itism.

As if this was not hysteria enough, leaks in Britain revealed that the head of M-I6 Sir John Scarlett and the head of Mossad Meir Dagan may have established that Saudi Arabia is ready to allow Israel to bomb Iran. The House of Saud remained mute. But not the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - which de facto controls Iran's missile program. They successfully tested long-range Shahab-3 and Sajjil solid-fuel missiles with a maximum range of 2,000 kilometers. Ergo, even more hysteria.

General Hoseyn Salami, commander of IRGC's air force, told the IRINN TV network that Iran had a firm "no first strike" policy in terms of a missile war with Israel, and defended the tests as linked to the approaching anniversary of the 1980 Iraqi attack on Iran - the beginning of a horrible eight-year war that killed at least 250,000 Iranians. (The US, by the way, supported in that war a character who later personified the "new Hitler", Saddam Hussein.)

Now compare all this to the Western reaction to what's happening this Thursday in Beijing on China's National Day parade for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China; an array of two types of surface-to-surface conventional missiles, a new land-based cruise missile, surface-to-surface intermediate and long-range missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, and nuclear intercontinental missiles will all be shown off in an asphalt catwalk. Not a peep from the West. It's as if this was part of Beijing Fashion Week.

A non-secret secret
The all-out hysteria reaches ludicrous overtones when it comes to the disinformation campaign around the now iconic Iranian back-up nuclear enrichment plant, built at the base of a mountain inside an ultra-protected underground facility controlled by the IRGC some 30 kilometers northeast of the holy city of Qom. The plant was built with heavily reinforced concrete and is about the size of a football field, enough to hold 3,000 uranium-refining centrifuges.

The site was duly reported by Tehran in a letter to the IAEA, according to the rules this is done six months before a site becomes operational. Iranian Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, also the head of Iran's nuclear program, has stressed there was never anything "secret" about the plant; and justified its construction because of "threats" against Iran.

Ahmadinejad - an engineer - for his part stressed the plant would only be operational in 18 months. And it will be open to IAEA inspections according to a timetable already being discussed. This is the bottom line: if the IAEA inspects, there's no way the plant will churn out nuclear weapons.

From Tehran's point of view, this all makes sense; a back-up plant protected by the IRGC near Qom is a given after the George W Bush administration and Israel have repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran. Location is everything; imagine Israel bombing the outskirts of Qom. It's as if the Pentagon bombed the Vatican.

As for Washington, it might have known about this "secret" plant during the George W Bush administration - as those usual suspects, "senior officials", confirmed to US corporate media. But that raises the question: why did Israel and the US not expose it when it was "secret", that is, still not reported to the IAEA?

Anyway, what remains excluded from the hysteria-saturated news cycle is that the new not-so-secret plant will not enrich uranium beyond 5% - the suitable level in a civilian energy program. A nuclear weapon demands 90% enrichment. The plant will not produce uranium hexaflouride, or UF6, which is used for enrichment. The bottom line, once again; the Qom backup plant changes nothing in terms of Iran's nuclear program as recognized by the IAEA.

Talk first, bomb later
And that brings us back to Lula. Brazil, just like Iran, is a signatory of the NPT. Just like Iran, it is enriching uranium. Just like Iran, it does not allow unlimited, invasive IAEA inspections. And just like Iran, it has in the past kept some aspects of its nuclear technology "secret".

Brazil enriches uranium to less than 5%, as part of its $1 billion nuclear industry, which will invest on seven new atomic plants to diversify the country's consumption of oil and hydroelectric power. Brazil plans to start exporting enriched uranium before 2014. Brazilian centrifuges could be used to produce highly enriched uranium. But that's a matter of political will. The letter of the Brazilian constitution effectively forbids the building of nuclear weapons.

In Iran the situation is actually similar. Both the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have made it very clear that nuclear weapons are against Islam.

Obviously, the US State Department will always dismiss any comparisons between Tehran and Brasilia. After all, Brazil is a Western-style democracy and Iran is now, after the last presidential elections, a military dictatorship of the mullahtariat. Brazil may be a natural leader in South America, but it's not threatening anybody; while Iran, a regional leader, threatens Israel's "secret" nuclear hegemony in the Middle East. But in both Iran's and Brazil's case, the heart of the matter is the same: running a successful nuclear program is, above all, a question of national pride.

Sanctions cannot possibly work. And once again the current hysteria glaringly shows how, when it comes to Iran, double standards rule.

Washington was forced to admit sanctions did not work with the dictatorship in Myanmar. Now Washington wants to talk. Sanctions will not work on Iran either. It's ridiculous, for instance, to imagine Iraq joining a Western-enforced gasoline embargo on Iran. Besides, Persians are too proud and loaded with too much history to succumb to threats.

Israel, sundry Sunni Arab puppet rulers and dictators, the pathetic American right and the European right, these all fear Iran's regional clout and want to bring the regime down. The nuclear dossier could not be a more convenient cover story for regime change.

As much as the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat may be distasteful for the world and for a lot of Iranian citizens, the end does not justify the means. And the means won't lead to the desired end, as an attack on Iran will make the whole population rally behind the regime. Something is profoundly rotten in the so-called "international community" kingdom - minus Russia and China, by the way - when it lets global policy be determined by someone like Netanyahu.

Obama and Lula meet this Friday in Copenhagen to see whether Chicago or Rio will win the race to host the 2016 Olympic Summer Games. The chemistry between them is excellent. Obama could do worse than check up on Lula on his face-to-face meeting with Ahmadinejad.

But as it stands, it's more like the "international community" is being led in an Olympic race to bomb Iran.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
 
 
 

[bigron]

The U.S., Iran and nuclear terror  


(AFP) Iran's admission that it is enriching uranium at a second nuclear site was greeted with alarm in the halls of Washington.

30/09/2009 02:34:00 PM GMT
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/The-US-Iran-and-nuclear-terror.html
 
It would not be surprising if the Iranian regime decided at some point that it needed to develop nuclear weapons to protect itself from the threats of the U.S. and Israel.


By Anthony DiMaggio

Iran's admission that it is enriching uranium at a second nuclear site was greeted with alarm in the halls of Washington and in American newsrooms on Friday. Obama has long warned about the "existential threat" that Iran poses to the U.S. and its allies. Concern over a nuclear Iran is understandable for those who are committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons, and for those who worry about the danger that nuclear proliferation poses for human survival.

It should be noted, however, that the Obama administration does not share those concerns. U.S. officials have always been preoccupied with how to prohibit enemy states from developing these weapons, while ensuring maximum U.S. and allied maneuverability in keeping such weapons, and even in using them when deemed necessary.

I consistently stress that U.S. national intelligence and international intelligence provide no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. While I stand by this conclusion, it is worth noting that Iran's declaration this week that it was quietly developing nuclear fuel (fuel that it had not reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency) is troubling for those committed to transparency in the development and use of nuclear fuel. Indeed, it would not be surprising if the Iranian regime decided at some point - perhaps in the near future - that it needed to develop nuclear weapons to protect itself from the belligerent rhetoric and threats of the U.S. and Israel. It is also at least theoretically possible that Iran already decided to proceed with a weapons program, although the uranium disclosed at Iran's two nuclear plants is clearly unfit to be used in developing such weapons. All of the uranium currently used in Iran - at least the uranium that has been reported to or found by the IAEA - is not of a weapons grade quality. The BBC reports that legally, Iran "does not need to inform the IAEA of any new [nuclear] site until 180 days before any nuclear material is placed in the facility." For the record, the second plant reported in the news this week is not yet operational. Hence it is not evidence - contrary to the claims of Obama - of an Iranian violation of the inspection process or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The major point that needs to be understood is that, as of today, there is still no hard evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

There is certainly good reason, however, for Iranians to be concerned with U.S. aggression. Although the Obama administration indicates that it would sit down and negotiate with Iran without preconditions, it also refuses to take the military option off the table. The threat of a U.S. attack (or an attack itself) threatens to throw an already volatile region into complete chaos. A review of the US foreign policy record is also a cause for concern when evaluating US threats against Iran. The review below is illuminating:

The number of major U.S. invasions since World War II: 13

By conservative estimates, the U.S. led over a dozen invasions of sovereign countries in the last 65 years - including attacks on North Korea (1950 and 1951), Cuba (1961), South Vietnam (1962), The Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia (1970), Lebanon (1982-1983), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Haiti (1994), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq again (2003). U.S. covert operations designed to overthrow foreign governments are about three times more common than invasions. As William Blum explains in his classic book Rogue State, "From 1945 to the end of the century, the U.S. attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes." To that list of attempted overthrows in the post-2000 period one could add Venezuela, Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iran - just to name the cases we know about.

The number of nuclear weapons that the US and allies possess, in violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: 22,965

While Iran is a non-nuclear state, the number of nuclear weapons possessed by powers that either support sanctions or an attack on Iran is staggering (this list includes Russia, the U.S., UK, Israel, the UK, and France). The U.S. is the only country to have used nuclear weapons against civilians, despite its claims that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a responsible act intended to reduce American lives lost and force an early end to the war.

The number of times the IAEA has successfully inspected the US and its allies' nuclear arsenals in order to force them to disarm: 0

This point remains absolutely vital. Nuclear states retain their "right" to keep nuclear weapons indefinitely, while forcing other countries into inspections with the threat of sanctions and war. In the case of Iran and Iraq, both countries were forced into inspections by the UN Security Council - a body the U.S. has long used as a weapon against weaker non-nuclear states. Furthermore, the U.S. does not even pretend to secretly reconstitute its nuclear weapons stockpile. U.S. leaders contemptuously flaunt their disregard of the NPT's disarmament requirement by publicly announcing their intent to redevelop nuclear weapons. The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program is a case in point, which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates supported as a means of "modernizing" the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The program's funding was eventually cut off by Congress in 2008, although that has not stopped the US from developing and using other radioactive weapons such as Depleted Uranium shells in the battlefield. While Depleted Uranium is clearly not the same as a nuclear weapon, we would do well to remember that the danger of radioactive weapons is cited as a major reason for detaining alleged terrorists such as Jose Padilla - the infamous Chicago "dirty bomber."

The number of times Iran has threatened another country with nuclear annihilation: 0

Much has been made of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's alleged claim that he will "wipe Israel off the map." Scholarly analysis of this incident reveals that this is likely an inaccurate reading of Ahmadinejad's statement. As Middle East expert Juan Cole explains, the statement was originally drawn from a speech from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which promised that the "[Israeli] regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." As those familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict understand, there is a great difference between demanding that an illegal occupation come to an end and a threat to wipe the state of Israel off the face of the earth. Ahmadinejad is rightly condemned throughout the world as an anti-Semite, but denying the Holocaust is not the equivalent of supporting the nuclear annihilation of Israel. Even if Ahmadinejad does believe that Israel should be destroyed, U.S. pundits and officials are hard pressed to explain how he would accomplish this task without the possession of nuclear weapons, and in light of the fact that Ahmadinejad does not hold the power to make decisions regarding Iranian foreign policy. As the supreme leader in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has final say over foreign policy. Furthermore, the Iranian leadership indicated as recently as 2003 that it was willing to negotiate an easing of tensions with the U.S., in exchange for recognizing Israel within the pre-1967 Israeli-Palestinian borders. This fact rarely makes it into journalistic and political screeds framing Iran as an "existential threat" to Israel.

The number of countries the U.S. has explicitly threatened with nuclear annihilation: 8

I am aware of at least eight instances in which the U.S. threatened countries with nuclear weapons. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2002, the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review included within it "contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries, namely not only Russia and the "axis of evil" - Iraq, Iran, and North Korea - but also China, Libya, and Syria. In addition, the US Defense Department has been told to prepare for the possibility that nuclear weapons may be required in some future Arab-Israeli crisis. And it is to develop plans for using nuclear weapons to retaliate against chemical or biological attacks, as well as ‘surprising military developments' of an unspecified nature." The Bush administration's National Security Presidential Directive 17 reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to using nuclear weapons against any country that might use weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. and its allies. Some might discount these two documents as merely defensive posturing or as simple contingency plans that are not likely to be implemented by the U.S. It is worth reflecting for a moment, however, on how U.S. leaders would react to similar documents threatening nuclear war against the U.S. if they were issued by Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Iran, or any other national enemy.

U.S. plans for nuking other countries go beyond vague hypotheticals. The Nixon administration famously popularized the "madman theory," whereby the U.S. might nuke countries that oppose capitalist interests. As Nixon explained to his Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, "I call it the madman theory. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the [Vietnam] war. We'll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry - and he has his hand on the nuclear button' - and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."

Nixon's contemplation of nuclear blackmail was not an isolated incident. In 1995, the Strategic Command under the Clinton administration released a study speculating over the use of nuclear weapons for strategic purposes. Titled "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence," the document concluded that the goal of U.S. foreign policy should center on creating fear in the heart of adversaries: "Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the U.S. may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out. It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational or cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control' can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts in the minds of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project to all adversaries...nuclear weapons always cast a shadow over any crisis in which the U.S. is engaged. Thus, deterrence through the threat of nuclear weapons will continue to be our top military strategy." While some might again point out that the document states that the U.S. is "not likely to use [nuclear weapons] in less than matters of the greatest national importance," one can imagine how U.S. leaders would react if they read a document from Iraqi or Iranian officials making similar claims about their "responsible" possession and use of nuclear weapons.

American political elites and journalists will predictably cast stones at Iran for the alleged danger the regime poses to world order. Those with a critical knowledge of US history and policy will be more hesitant to accept this hypocritical "defensive" posturing. We should not discount the danger that the spread of nuclear weapons poses to human survival; but at the same time, we should never exaggerate threats when there is little to no evidence of an immediate danger. Anti-proliferation efforts need to be driven by a sincere, even-handed effort to disarm all nuclear and potentially nuclear powers, whether they are big or small, and regardless of whether they're powerful or weak.

-- Anthony DiMaggio teaches American and Global Politics at Illinois State University. He is the author of Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008) and the forthcoming When Media Goes to War (2010). He can be reached at adimagg@ilstu.edu.This article appeared in CounterPunch.org.



-- Middle East Online

 
 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
© aljazeera.com
 

[bigron]

Thursday, October 01, 2009
11:20 Mecca time, 08:20 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/10/200910143944953976.html
   
FOCUS  
 
Iran's difficult talks in Geneva 
 
 By Hamish MacDonald in Geneva
 

The US says Iran broke IAEA rules by not declaring its intent to build a second nuclear facility, shown above in a satellite image, near the city of Qom [EPA]

 
The five permanent veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, and Germany, have gathered in Switzerland for talks with Iran over its disputed nuclear programme. The EU delegation will be led by Javier Solana, the high representative of the EU.

Saeed Jalili, the secretary of the Iranian supreme national security council and chief negotiator for nuclear Issues, will head the Iranian delegation.

Al Jazeera's Hamish MacDonald reports from Geneva where few observers expect a breakthrough.

When the foreign ministers from China, France, Germany, Russia, US, and UK sit down for talks with a high-level Iranian delegation in Geneva, it will be unlike any other meeting in decades.

This is the first time in almost 30 years that the US has met for direct, formal talks with Iran. For those who questioned whether Barack Obama, the US president, would live up to his promise to "engage", this is the evidence of his commitment.

In quiet meeting rooms here in Geneva, senior Iranian and US negotiators are sitting down to talk on Thursday about Iran's nuclear programme and specifically the nuclear plant Iran has built outside the city of Qom.

It has 3,000 centrifuges – too few, scientists say, to be part of civilian use programme to generate electricity, and too many for this to be a "test site".

Iran disclosed the construction of this second plant to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week after Western intelligence agents reportedly discovered its existence.

ElBaradei disagrees

But there has been disagreement over the legality of this site due to the different interpretations of the IAEA statutes and more importantly, which ones Iran has signed up to.

Iran says that it is obliged to notify the IAEA 180 days before introducing materials to a nuclear facility. In this instance it has done so 18 months before the site was completed, therefore exceeding the IAEA requirements.

Speaking in Tehran last week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, said: "Now is this the right thing or the wrong thing to do? It is not a secret facility. If it was, why did we inform the IAEA a year ahead of time?"

Even as he insisted that Iran, as a sovereign state, did not need to report to Washington, Ahmadinejad said that Tehran would allow IAEA inspectors to visit the site.

However, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, disagrees.

An IAEA statute modified in 1992 states that "countries must notify inspectors as soon as a decision is made to build a nuclear plant".

Iran initially accepted these terms, but then withdrew in 2007 in protest at a decision by the UN Security Council to enforce punitive sanctions.

"Iran was supposed to inform us on the day it was decided to construct the facility. They have not done that," ElBaradei said earlier this week.

Defiant

Nevertheless, in the lead-up to these talks, the Iranians have remained steadfast in their defiance, even suggesting they are not prepared to negotiate their "nuclear rights".

http://english.aljazeera.net/mritems/Images//2009/9/24/20099240469884954_3.jpg
 
At the UN, Ahmadinejad reiterated Iran's right to nuclear technology [REUTERS]

On Wednesday, Ahmadinejad said: "Of course we have prepared ourselves for any situation.The Iranian nation, throughout history, particularly over the last 30 years, has learned well how to stand on its feet and turn any situation into its advantage and benefit from that."

Those comments, along with Iran's decision to test fire its missile defence capabilities earlier this week have set the stage for some complex diplomacy. The US is clear about what it wants:

"We will demand that IAEA inspectors have unfettered access to the facility, to personnel, to documents surrounding the facility. There is no doubt this is in violation of their own obligations to which they are a party," said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

Few are expecting a breakthrough here in Geneva. The most hoped for in many quarters will be minor concessions and a promise to continue talks at later dates. And given the fraught history between Iran and the West, such steps may in themselves be solid achievements.
 
 
 Source: Al Jazeera 
 
 
 
 
 

[bigron]

Oct 2, 2009 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ02Ak02.html 
 
 
A MANUFACTURED CRISIS, Part 3
The case for Iran

By Jack A Smith

PART 1: The facts of the matter
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KI30Ak01.html

PART 2: It's sanctions or bust
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ01Ak03.html

There have been a number of reports this year that Iran is not constructing weapons. For example, "Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran" was the headline on a Newsweek article on September 16 that read in part:
The US intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counter-proliferation officials tell Newsweek. US agencies had previously said that Tehran halted the program in 2003.

The officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that US intelligence agencies have informed policymakers at the White House and other agencies that the status of Iranian work on development and production of a nuclear bomb has not changed since the formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's "Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" in November 2007. Public portions of that report stated that US intelligence agencies had "high confidence" that, as of early 2003, Iranian military units were pursuing development of a nuclear bomb, but that in the fall of that year Iran "halted its nuclear weapons program". The document said that while US agencies believed the Iranian government "at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons", US intelligence as of mid-2007 still had "moderate confidence" that it had not restarted weapons-development efforts.

One of the two officials said that the [Barack] Obama administration has now worked out a system in which intelligence agencies provide top policymakers, including the president, with regular updates on intelligence judgments like the conclusions in the 2007 Iran NIE. According to the two officials, the latest update to policymakers has been that as of now - two years after the period covered by the 2007 NIE - US intelligence agencies still believe Iran has not resumed nuclear-weapons development work.
"That's the conclusion, but it's one that - like every other - is constantly checked and reassessed, both to take account of new information and to test old assumptions," one of the officials told Newsweek. In this connection, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair - the insider's insider - testified before Congress in February that there was no evidence Iran is producing the highly enriched uranium required for nuclear weapons.

The September-October issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists contained an interview with Mohamed ElBaradei, the retiring long-time director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in which he declared, "We have not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program ... But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world.

"In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped. Yes, there's concern about Iran's future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community ... But the idea that we'll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn't supported by the facts as we have seen them so far."

The September 21 issue of Newsweek reported that "quarrels concerning the ultimate aim of Iran's secretive nuke program have become so heated that some UN officials are making comparisons to the proliferation of misinformation in the runup to the US invasion of Iraq." The article continued:
In a private e-mail sent last week to nuclear experts and obtained by Newsweek, Tariq Rauf, a senior official with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, wrote that the mainstream media are repeating mistakes from 2003, when they "carried unsubstantiated stories on Iraq and WMD - the same mistakes are being repeated re IAEA and Iran." Rauf added that "the hype is likely originating from certain (known) sources." The message does not specify the sources, but US and European officials have previously accused Israel of exaggerating Iran's nuclear progress.
On February 22, India's mass circulation daily The Hindu reported, "Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency have said. The Austrian Press Agency quoted an IAEA expert as saying that the uranium substances that Iran has produced at its Natanz enrichment facility have been carefully recorded and remote cameras have been installed to supervise part of the stockpile. 'If the Iranians intend to transport these uranium substances to a secret location for further processing, the agency's inspectors will find out,' he said. The expert added that 'so far, Iran has carried out good cooperation with us in relevant verifications'."

The French news agency Agence France-Presse reported on September 20 that "Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei today denied the West's charge that Tehran aims to develop nuclear weapons under a covert program, insisting the Islamic Republic bans such activity. 'They falsely accuse [Iran] of producing nuclear weapons. We fundamentally reject nuclear weapons and prohibit the production and the use of nuclear weapons,' Khamenei said in a speech broadcast by state television. 'They know themselves that it's not true ... but it is part of Iran-phobia policy that controls the behavior of these arrogant governments today'."

In our view, Iran is no danger to Israel, the United States or the Sunni Arab world. It wants to protect its revolution, independence and what it considers its precious Islamic Republic. The Mahmud Ahmadinejad government and Ayatollah Khamenei fully understand that heavy US sanctions are capable of causing extreme agony for the masses of its people and would lead to a weakening of the state. Tehran is also aware that if it produces one nuclear weapon it may be mercilessly attacked.

Iran's leadership is not suicidal, and is well aware that if Tehran not only produced a weapon but actually launched a nuclear missile toward Israel, the massive retaliation from the US and Israel would obliterate most of Iranian society, whether or not its weapon was deflected by the US anti-missile system that the Obama administration is now going to place aboard naval ships in the Mediterranean. (President George W Bush wanted to deploy the system to Poland and the Czech Republic to threaten Russia, not to defend Europe against an Iranian attack. By moving the anti-ballistic missiles south, Obama achieved two objectives: he got Russia off his back, while assuring Israel of yet another layer of US protection.)

For all its fiery international rhetoric, Iran's leadership is essentially cautious, and its military intentions are defensive. The country hasn't started a war in almost 200 years, and the Iranian people have no desire to replicate the horror of the defensive war they waged against the Iraqi aggressor for most of the 1980s.

Developing nuclear weapons in today's world makes a country a recognized power, and is a great defense against imperial aggression, particularly for a country that has long been on Washington's hit list and narrowly avoided an invasion during the Bush years.

But we believe that Iran - even if it knows how to produce a nuclear bomb - will not weaponize because it wishes to demonstrate its adherence to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and because it desires to survive the hostility of America and Israel. At the same time, Iran does not intend to be humiliated and hampered by hugely excessive restrictions and intrusive surveillance that is not applied to other countries in compliance with the NPT. Nor does it intend to turn tail because of threats from those who object to its support of the Palestinian people and its opposition to imperialism.

If the United States genuinely wishes to resolve its dispute with Iran, it is possible to do so rationally and without violence. But this means Obama must treat Iran as an equal, accept the reality that Tehran and Washington see the world differently, and negotiate in good faith.

Most Americans and virtually the rest of the world have high hopes about Obama, especially after the Bush administration. We certainly recognize the improvement but have doubts, not high hopes, when it comes to the direction of American foreign policy. We see little difference, other than the cosmetic, between the Obama administration's international strategy and the strategy of American global domination and hegemony based on military power that has prevailed in Washington in its present incarnation since the end of World War II.

We'd like nothing better than to be proven wrong. But that would take the development of a massive progressive movement in this country, focused in this instance on world peace, the equality of peoples, and justice for all, a not unreasonable goal worth struggling for, in our view. And as far as nuclear proliferation is concerned, the only true solution is total nuclear disarmament, a position, by the way, that Iran appears to be putting forth these days.

Jack A Smith is editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter in New York State and the former editor of the Guardian Newsweekly (US). He may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net

(Copyright 2009 Jack A Smith.) 
 
 

[bigron]

 Oct 1, 2009 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ01Ak03.html 
 
 
A MANUFACTURED CRISIS, Part 2
It's sanctions or bust

By Jack A Smith

PART 1: The facts of the matter
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KI30Ak01.html

There's obviously more than meets the eye to unproven allegations of late September from the United States and its allies that Iran's nuclear program is really intended to result in the clandestine production of nuclear weapons, presumably to attack other countries.

As we proceed with our analysis, here are a few things that should be kept in mind.

So far, there is no evidence Iran is going to "weaponize" its nuclear power program and build atomic bombs. So far, it has been abiding by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has pledged not to produce nuclear weapons, is under very close scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and obviously its program is the target of intensive surveillance by the United States. There is no secret way in which it could construct nuclear weapons under such circumstances.


Israel possesses an arsenal of up to 200 nuclear weapons and thumbs its nose at the IAEA and the NPT, with which it is notoriously non-compliant. If US President Barack Obama must sternly castigate Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons, for "breaking rules that all nations must follow ... and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world", why does he protect Israel from international sanctions and subsidize its military machine? Pakistan and India are also non-compliant, but they, too, are allies of Washington and thus have been granted immunity.


In this connection, it must be noted that the far right-wing Tel Aviv government appears to be on the verge of launching an attack on Iran and has made this well known to the world. But it receives no censure for such threats from the US and its European allies, or for the horror it inflicted on Gaza a few months ago. Imagine the outcry if Iran threatened to attack Israel, or its army entered the territory of a neighboring society and inflicted cruelties largely on its civilian population for not submitting to national oppression.

And yet Tel Aviv calls Iran an "existential" threat, despite Israel's nuclear weapons, its superior military force and its support from the entire American military apparatus, including 2,600 strategic nuclear warheads on hair-trigger readiness. But as we've noted before, the only concrete threat to Israel's existence would be if the US government withdrew its political, military and financial support.


Washington's geopolitical interests are key to America's relationship to Iran and the Middle East in general. The US desires to control - or at minimum to keep out of "unfriendly" hands - the immense oil reserves possessed by Iran and neighboring Iraq. It fears a future alliance between these resource-rich developing countries, which also happen to be the only two nations in the world governed by Shi'ite Muslims. The US invaded to overthrow the "unfriendly", Sunni-backed Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. But it can neither rely totally on its selected successor regime in Baghdad, nor has it yet been able to remove the theocratic government in Tehran, which is conservative domestically but puts forward an anti-imperialist foreign policy that drives the world's remaining superpower to distraction.

Washington's objective at the talks beginning on October 1 in Geneva is to coerce Iran to accept extremely intrusive controls on its nuclear development, combining dire threats for refusal with small rewards for agreement. The Tehran government said it would reject demands that it halt uranium enrichment, a main concern of the five members of the Security Council plus Germany, but indicated without elaboration that "Iran is ready to ... help ease joint international concerns over the nuclear issue." (Enriched uranium is required to power nuclear plants for civilian uses. A much higher level of enriched uranium is required for weapons.)

Washington wants to confine the seven-party discussions to Tehran's nuclear project, but the Iranian government put forward its own proposal in early September for "comprehensive, all-encompassing and constructive negotiations". The US rejected the proposal, but accepted it with seeming reluctance the next day. (We don't know what happened to change things.) The Iranian suggestions include hastening global nuclear disarmament, ending nuclear proliferation and working toward world peace. Theoretically, Washington agrees with these goals, but doesn't really want to discuss them with Iran.

The White House knows that in a broader discussion of non-proliferation issues, Iran would draw attention to the three US allies presently defying the NPT and getting away with it, and also show that the US itself is non-compliant because it was supposed to have made more progress by now in reducing the Pentagon's nuclear arsenal. Further, the US will hardly discuss an Iranian proposal for a comprehensive agreement to achieve "global peace and security based on justice" that includes an inquiry into America's aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel's disproportionate violence against Gaza and Lebanon.

The Obama administration wants at minimum to impose stringent sanctions on Iran if no progress is made to its satisfaction in the next few months, as demanded by US neo-conservatives, the right wing in general and those influenced by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which describes itself as "America's Pro-Israel Lobby".

One reason for harsh sanctions would be to hasten the downfall of the Mahmud Ahmadinejad government, if possible, by creating a serious economic crisis, unemployment and suffering to exacerbate existing social tensions within the Islamic Republic. The last time Washington engaged in deep sanctions was from 1991-2003, when it was been verified that over a million Iraqis, including a huge number of children, died from various deprivations from hunger to unclean drinking water.

If sanctions are the minimum, the maximum response would be unleashing Israel to attack Iran - an action that would backfire as surely as there is water in the Hudson River.

After his Pittsburgh speech, Obama told the press he wasn't "taking any options off the table", a phrase he has used a number of times in relation to Iran. It means war remains an option for the US, even over the relatively petty issue of an empty building still under construction that's probably intended to produce energy, not violence. This same statement was a favorite of George W Bush as well, and he used it repeatedly in relation to Iran. In April 2006, at a time when vice president Dick Cheney, the neo-conservatives and their supporters were pushing hard for war against Iran, the BBC reported, "Bush says all options, including the use of force, are on the table." As they say, the more things change ...

Although some in Washington are hopeful that Ahmadinejad will be weakened in the nuclear talks because of opposition claims that he "stole" the June 12 election in Iran, we don't believe this is a factor. So far, more than three-and-a-half months later, there has not been any concrete evidence to support the opposition allegations of electoral fraud.

While the US mass media depict Ahmadinejad as being under virtual siege from the majority of Iranians, other information shows this is exaggerated. Inter Press Service reported the following in an article by Jim Lobe on September 19 headlined, "New Poll Finds Strong Domestic Support for Iran Regime”:
A new survey of Iranian public opinion released here suggests majority domestic support for both him [Ahmadinejad] and the country's basic governing institutions. Four out of five of the 1,003 Iranian respondents interviewed in the survey released by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project of the highly respected Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland, said they considered Ahmadinejad to be the legitimate president of Iran.

Sixty-two percent of respondents said they had "a lot of confidence" in the declared election results, which gave Ahmadinejad 62.6% of the vote within hours of the polls' closing June 12 and which were swiftly endorsed by the Islamic Republic's Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Three of four respondents said Khamenei had reacted correctly in his endorsement.
No mass demonstrations have taken place from early August until September 18, when thousands of protestors marched in Tehran in an attempt to rival much larger government-sponsored annual rallies in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle on what is called "Jerusalem Day" in Iran. Coming just two weeks before the opening of the nuclear talks, it was obviously intended to convey the impression internationally that Ahmadinejad did not really represent the will of the Iranian people. Police handled the dissenters with kid gloves.

A number of the demonstrators and signs seemed to oppose the Tehran government's support for the Palestinians as well as Ahmadinejad's re-election. The Economist reported chants of "Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I'll only give my life for Iran," although Jerusalem Day observances never suggested Iranians should give their lives for either Gaza or Lebanon, both of which have been targets of Israeli military aggression. There were also chants of "Death to Russia" and "Death to China”, evidently a reference to their refusal to join the US and Israel in denunciations of the Tehran government.

In a speech that day, Ahmadinejad in effect pulled the rug from under his own feet in terms of international opinion by once again charging that the Holocaust was a "lie". Wisely, the Iranian leader did not repeat the preposterous allegation during his 35-minute speech to the UN General Assembly in New York September 23. He mainly discussed building durable world peace and "elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to pave the way for all nations to have access to advanced and peaceful technology".

He criticized the US and Israel, but seemed somewhat subdued. According to Sarah Wheaton in the New York Times blog that evening, he "said the United States was aiding Israel in 'racist ambitions', called Israel's attack on Gaza in December 'barbaric' and said the economic blockade of Palestinians amounts to 'genocide' " - comments that provoked the US and 10 other delegations to walk out. Israel didn't attend in the first place.

Soon after Ahmadinejad's speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the General Assembly, "The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons," and urged the delegates to oppose Iranian "barbarism".

Back in Israel on September 26, according to an Associated Press dispatch from Jerusalem, "Netanyahu spoke with House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a number of unidentified US senators and told them that now is the time to act on Iran. Israel maintains the Islamic Republic is seeking nuclear weapons. 'If not now then when?' the official quoted Netanyahu as saying. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak with the media. He did not disclose what kind of action Netanyahu recommended be taken.

"Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said earlier in the day that the Iranian nuclear facility proves 'without a doubt' the Islamic republic is pursuing nuclear weapons. 'This removes the dispute whether Iran is developing military nuclear power or not and therefore the world powers need to draw conclusions', Lieberman told Israel Radio. 'Without a doubt it is a reactor for military purposes not peaceful purposes'."

NEXT: Part 3 - The case for Iran

Jack A Smith is editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter in New York State and the former editor of the Guardian Newsweekly (US). He may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net

(Copyright 2009 Jack A Smith