Confronting Iran
John Bolton, in “Israel, Iran and the Bomb,” on what is likely to occur in the U.S. over the next year with respect to Iran’s increasingly public pursuit of nuclear weapons:
. . . the Bush administration's last six months pursuing its limp diplomatic efforts, plus six months of a new president getting his national security team and policies together. In other words, one more year for Tehran to proceed unhindered to “the point of no return.”
We have almost certainly lost the race between giving “strong incentives” for Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its scientific and technological efforts to do just that. . . . More sanctions today (even assuming, heroically, support from Russia and China) will simply be too little, too late. . . .
That is why Israel is now at an urgent decision point: whether to use targeted military force to break Iran's indigenous control over the nuclear fuel cycle at one or more critical points. . . .
Israel sees clearly what the next 12 months will bring, which is why ongoing U.S.-Israeli consultations could be dispositive. Israel told the Bush administration it would destroy North Korea's reactor in Syria in spring, 2007, and said it would not wait past summer's end to take action. And take action it did, seeing a Syrian nuclear capability, for all practical purposes Iran's agent on its northern border, as an existential threat.
When the real source of the threat, not just a surrogate, nears the capacity for nuclear Holocaust, can anyone seriously doubt Israel's propensities, whatever the impact on gasoline prices?
Thus, instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran. We will be blamed for the strike anyway, and certainly feel whatever negative consequences result, so there is compelling logic to make it as successful as possible.
Ironically, if John Bolton were still in government, and if a credible threat of U.S. force were communicated to Iran, there might be a chance that diplomacy could successfully avert a military confrontation that no one wants. But he’s not; it hasn’t been; and as a result, the chances of Iran responding to “diplomacy” are virtually nil.
Indeed the current calls for more of the same may at this point be counterproductive. See Caroline Glick, “When Talking Can Kill” and Matthew Continetti, “Let's Not Be Provocative! Obama's Iran Nonsense” and consider also the discussion of Dan Alexander’s points in the comment thread to “U.S. Policy in Iran.”
What would you do if you were the president of Iran?
What does Iran want?
I think more than anything to be able to defend their country. Iran wants the same things as Israel, security. Who can they trust?
They remember 1979; Arabic nations who supported Iraq against Iran. The integrated financial, technical, and armaments that were provided by many Arab countries to support Arabic Iraq against non-Arab Iranians was responsible for death of about 500,000 Iranians and injury of several millions.
They remember our financial and technical support of Sadam Hossein to use chemical bombs against Iranians.
They remember 1988 unprovoked attack of the United State on a civilian Iranian airliner.
An Airbus A300
Iran civilian airliner Flight 655 was shot down by the US Navy's guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes on Sunday July 3, 1988, killing all 290 passengers, including 66 children, and crewmembers onboard.
The civilian airliner, carrying passengers from Iran, Italy, the UAE, India, Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, was en route from Iran's southern city of Bandar Abbas to Dubai when it was hit by two SM-2MR surface-to-air missiles launched from the warship commanded by Captain William C. Rogers III.
The aircraft was flying within the Iranian airspace and did not have an attack profile. The plane was identified by Vincennes crew as a passenger aircraft. The objective was to teach Iran to capitulate in war with Iraq; otherwise more punishments were to be expected, such as U.S. Attacks on Iranian Oil Platforms in 1987-1988.
The Vincennes crew received combat-action ribbons. Lieutenant Commander Scott Lustig, air-warfare coordinator on the Vincennes, was awarded with the Commendation Medal for 'heroic achievement'.
Iranians remember summer of 1953.
President George Bush often states that Iran is threatening the interests of the Unites States in Persian Gulf! What are the interests of England and the United States in Persian Gulf, the Persian front door to Iran?
A primer for discussion of these issues must start with review of British and the United States policies relative to the Persian Gulf region. Stephen Kinzer, a veteran New York Times correspondent, in his book “All the Shah’s Men, an American coup and the roots of Middle East Terror”, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003, brilliantly reconstructs the events leading to the present dilemma of the United States in the Middle East. The events described in this marvelous book are not fiction; the events actually happened during the summer of 1953 in Tehran, Iran.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency operation Ajax staged coup d’état in 1953 against democratically elected Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh. Democracy was substituted with the despotic regime of Mohammad Reza Shah. The dawn of democracy in Iran, started in late 1880, flickered by democratically elected Mossadegh, was extinguished. This was the beginning of Iranian servitude once more to the interests of England and the United States. During his last years, Shah did not trust Iranian people; his inner palace was guarded by Israel commandos. Since 1979, the United States has been punishing Iranian people for ousting the immature, weak, despotic Mohammad Reza Shah. This punishment, Iranian assert, included Iraq invasion of Iran instigated by President Regan. During this war, the United States and her satellite nations helped materially and logistically Iraqi military forces to invade Iran and use chemical and biological weapons on Iranian population.
In the preface of his book, Kinzer recalls his conversation with an Iranian lady about Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh. He asked her: “What do you remember…about the coup against him?” She responded:
“Why did you Americans do that terrible thing? We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again…”
This un-American act was instigated by Winston Churchill-Anthony Eden of England and two American brothers John Foster Dulles (US Secretary of State) and Allen Dulles (Director of Central Intelligence Agency). The primary reason for this regime change was to subordinate Iranian people and exploit the Iranian natural resources.
Harry Truman once said: "There is nothing new in the world except the histories you do not know.” Have we learned from our past mistakes committed during 1953 not to repeat it once more? This time the price would be much larger for both the Iranian and our American societies!
Please read Persian Paradox
http://www.geocities.com/stmtraveler/PersianPardox.htm
Israel, cool it!
Israel let USA diplomatically talk to Iran.
Posted by: Saint Michael Traveler | July 15, 2008 at 12:37 PM
One would think it incumbent on Bolton to explain why he insists that Iran's nuclear program is a threat when all the evidence points to the contrary - unless he is simply war-mongering.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons on August 9, 2005. The full text of the fatwa was released in an official statement at the meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_fatwas#Fatwa_Against_Production.2C_Stockpiling_and_use_of_Nuclear_Weapons
WASHINGTON, Feb 29 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" -- 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop -- as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.
....Tehran has denounced the documents on which the charges are based as fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded copies of the documents to analyse, but the United States had refused to do so.
The Iranian assertion is supported by statements by German officials. A few days after then Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the laptop documents, Karsten Voight, the coordinator for German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry, was reported by the Wall Street Journal Nov. 22, 2004 as saying that the information had been provided by "an Iranian dissident group".
...However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very sceptical about their authenticity.
The Guardian's Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is "doubt over the provenance of the computer".
A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, "I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt."
Scott Ritter, the former U.S. military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.
The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.
...There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel's Mossad.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41416
Posted by: Spoffmoffat | July 19, 2008 at 05:33 PM