ISRAEL WINS 'NUKE WAR'

 

I like to know who funds these stupid warmongering studies? Are they tax deductible?

COULD DESTROY IRAN: STUDY

By ANDY SOLTIS

December 25, 2007 -- A doomsday war between nuclear-armed adversaries Iran and Israel would kill up to 28 million Iranians and destroy their nation, but the Jewish state might survive, according to a prestigious US think tank.

The nightmare "what if?" scenario concluded that Israel's state-of-the-art missile defense would intercept most of Iran's nuclear-tipped missiles.

That would limit Israel's deaths to as "few" as 200,000 - while its much more numerous and more powerful nukes would obliterate Iran, said the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term, though Israeli recovery is theoretically possible in population and economic terms," analyst Andrew Cordesman wrote.

The findings could cheer Israeli hawks who dispute the recent US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran is not seeking nukes.

But the study also indicates that Iran wouldn't use them even if it got them, because a war would lead to the same kind of "mutually assured destruction" that kept the US-Soviet Cold War from becoming hot.

"The 'War Game' paradox: The only way to win is not to play," the study concluded.

An exchange of nukes would last about 21 days and immediately kill 16 million to 28 million Iranians and 200,000 to 800,000 Israelis.

Long-term deaths, from the effects of radiation and other causes, were not estimated. The greater Iranian death toll is explained by several factors:

* Israeli bombs have a bigger bang. Israel has produced 1-megaton nukes, while Iran would be unable to produce anything more than 100 kilotons, a weapon with one-tenth the impact.

* Iran would have fewer than 50 nuclear weapons, while Israel would have more than 200.

* Israel also has an Arrow-2 missile defense, buttressed by US-made anti-missile weaponry. Iran has a limited missile defense.

* Israel's missiles would be more accurate, due to high-resolution satellite imagery.

If Syria joined its ally Iran in a wider war, it could attack Israel with mustard gas, nerve agents and anthrax in non-nuclear warheads.

That could kill another 800,000 Israelis, but in response, up to 18 million Syrians would die, the study found. With Post Wire Services

ISRAEL WINS 'NUKE WAR'

'Israel will attack Iran on its own' | Jerusalem Post

 'Israel will attack Iran on its own'

"I came back from a trip to Israel in November convinced that Israel would attack Iran," Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and senior adviser to three US presidents, George W. Bush among them, told the American Newsweek magazine in an article published Friday.

An IAF plane.
Photo: AP [file] , AP

Citing conversations he had in Israel with officials in Mossad and the Israeli defense establishment, Riedel concluded that "Israel is not going to allow its nuclear monopoly to be threatened."

While some US experts doubt Israel's ability to tackle Iran alone, David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, was quoted by Newsweek as saying that although information on the exact location of Iran's nuclear facility is incomplete, Israel's air strike on an alleged Syrian nuclear facility on September 6, widely discussed in foreign media outlets, could be seen as a test run for any future strike on Iran's facilities, as well as a direct warning to Teheran.

Riedel told the magazine his impression that Israel would venture a strike on Iran on its own was formed before the publication of the joint US intelligence agencies' report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). "This [the NIE] makes it [a strike on Iran] even more likely," he said.

Since the publication of the NIE, which reversed a previous American assessment by concluding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, leaders worldwide have been adjusting their publicly stated positions on the Iranian nuclear issue.

Even inside the US, President Bush attempted some damage control by stating a day after the report's publication that "Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous."

In Israel, responses to the report ranged from subtle criticism of the report's conclusions to outright slamming of the US intelligence community's capabilities, so much so that on last Sunday's cabinet meeting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert instructed his ministers to refrain from commenting any further on the report.

In the international scene, Russia's decision to renew fuel shipments to Iran main nuclear facility at Bushehr was interpreted by many anlysts as stemming directly from the NIE's publication; another development possibly stemming from the report is Russia and China's hardened position on further sanctions against Teheran.

In Teheran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quick to capitalize on the NIE, calling it an "Iranian victory" and demanding that the United States publicly apologize for its previous bellicose stance.

Uzi Arad, a former Mossad official and adviser to opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, told Newsweek that on a recent trip to Moscow, a Russian general poked fun at the naiveté of the NIE, commenting that if the Iranians had halted weapons development in 2003 it was partly because they were satisfied with progress there and wanted to devote investment to harder parts of the nuclear equation, like enrichment.

"The irony is that the effect of this report may be self-negating - by itself it will accelerate Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons," Arad told the magazine.

'Israel will attack Iran on its own' | Jerusalem Post

Stupid Intelligence on Iran - WSJ.com

Stupid Intelligence on Iran

By JAMES SCHLESINGER
December 19, 2007; Page A21

The reactor building of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, 750 miles south of Tehran, April 2007.

(Schlesinger has a new definition for civilian enrichment, Weapons program)

The NIE's about-face on Iran's nuclear weapons program represents a reversion to an earlier style of intelligence analysis -- featuring a renewed determination not to get beyond the "hard evidence." But as we shall see, this has led to a decision not to consider several crucial elements that lay behind the presumed 2003 decision in Tehran.

Clearly, the key judgments in the NIE were overstated. And that, in turn, may reflect the very late decision to declassify the key judgments, written in a kind of shorthand, and thus incautiously phrased.

The crucial decision, hidden in a footnote, was to define the "nuclear weapons program" which had been halted to mean only "Iran's weapon design and weaponization work and covert . . . uranium enrichment-related work." Thus it excludes Iran's overt enrichment program monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

We have long understood that the production of fissile material, whether overt or covert, remains "the long pole in the tent" in the development of a nuclear capability. Thus the NIE defines away what has been the main element stirring international alarm regarding Iran's nuclear activity.

Yesterday Tehran announced its Bushehr nuclear power plant will be operating at full capacity by the end of next year. Yet even though Russia supplied the nuclear fuel for Bushehr, the Iranians insist on maintaining their "civilian" uranium-enrichment program. Weapon design and weaponization, at least for the simpler weapons, is a far less demanding and less time-consuming task than uranium enrichment.

Let us examine what else has not been considered. The NIE asserts "that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure" and that "indicates that Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach." Now what might have constituted the principal elements in that "international pressure" to induce Tehran, at least temporarily, to halt its covert weaponization program?

• The American invasion of Iraq, resulting in the seizure of Baghdad in 10 days time -- something that had widely been suggested could not be accomplished.
• The earlier destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, another display of American military prowess.
• The decision of Col. Moammar Gadhafi to abandon his nuclear program and to renounce and make amends for terrorism.
• The exposure and partial demolition of the A.Q. Khan nuclear technology network, Khan's confession and his confinement by the Pakistani government to his home.

Does it not seem likely that Tehran took notice of these events, and may have been intimidated by them into more circumspect behavior? The NIE argues that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach." Given those successful American actions, those who guide decisions in Iran may well have decided that the potential costs of being caught with a clandestine program had risen sharply, and that the presumed benefits of early clandestine weaponization efforts could safely be deferred.

In brief, since the "long pole in the tent" remains the production of fissile material, Iran likely decided that the prudent course of action was to pursue an open enrichment program ostensibly to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. It is a course that had been chartered by North Korea -- and arguably was legitimate under the Nonproliferation Treaty. This central path to obtaining fissile material -- the focus of international concern -- has been treated in the NIE as quite distinct from the "nuclear weapons program."

Still, the achievements of American arms and American policy during that period were undoubtedly noted in Tehran. Why not mention them in the NIE as possibly influencing Tehran's decision in 2003?

The answer, in brief, is that it would have been speculative and in violation of the renewed commitment of the intelligence community to stick to the "hard evidence." There was no intercept; there was no agent's report that such calculations were, indeed, the source of Iran's switch. So in order to avoid the kind of speculation that had gotten the intelligence community into trouble in its judgments regarding Iraq, these realities were left up to the imagination of others and the intelligence community stuck to what it had evidence for.

What was obvious about events in and around 2003 should have been obvious at least to the American media. The media, Lord knows, have no inhibitions about engaging in speculation or urging us to "connect the dots," or feeling any obligation to limit themselves to hard evidence. The NIE almost begged for others to follow up on the nature of "international pressure" and the calculations behind Iran's "cost-benefit approach."

But the American media today almost reflexively treat any development as a setback for the administration of George W. Bush. So, the media quite clearly ignored the obvious: that a surprising decision by Tehran in 2003 to halt the covert weaponization effort likely was a tribute to the successes of American policy and arms during that period. Thus, administration policies and actions that likely induced caution in Tehran could be characterized, ironically enough, as an administration defeat.

Little more need be said about the process by which what might have been heralded as a victory was transformed into a defeat and echoed overseas. But a few words do need to be added about the intelligence community's decision to restrict its key judgments to "hard evidence." Many in the intelligence community embrace this as a return to virtue. Yet in itself it has severe drawbacks. As in this case, reading the key judgments may now require something akin to Cliffs Notes listing other relevant events and considerations that may be necessary in interpreting an Estimate limited to the hard evidence.

Exclusive reliance on hard evidence not infrequently results in deliberately blinding oneself to the most obvious explanation of what has occurred. The classic example of this failing occurred during the Vietnam War, when intelligence analysts stubbornly refused to accept that enemy supplies were pouring through Sihanoukville ostensibly on the grounds that there was no hard evidence. (Actually, there was an agent's report that revealed the activity, but it was dismissed as insufficient.) Intelligence based on hard evidence requires supplementation by other forms of intelligence.

"Failures of imagination," to which the 9-11 Commission referred, can come in a variety of modes.

Stupid Intelligence on Iran - WSJ.com

Iran Receives Nuclear Fuel in Blow to U.S. - New York Times

 

WASHINGTON — The United States lost a long battle when Russia, as it announced on Monday, delivered nuclear fuel to an Iranian power plant that is at the center of an international dispute over its nuclear program. Iran, for its part, confirmed on Monday plans to build a second such plant.

 

Pool photo by Ivan Sekretarev

Iran’s atomic chief, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, said a second power plant was being built.

Related

Times Topics: Iran's Nuclear Program

In announcing that it had delivered the first shipment of enriched-uranium fuel rods to the power plant, at Bushehr in southern Iran, on Sunday, Russian officials said that while the fuel was in Iran, it would be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear monitoring agency for the United Nations. Russia also said the Iranian government had guaranteed that the fuel would be used only for the power plant.

The Bush administration took pains not to criticize the Russian move publicly, even expressing support for outside supplies if that led Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program.

“If the Russians are willing to do that, which I support, then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich,” President Bush said Monday. “If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there’s no need for them to learn how to enrich.”

But from the American standpoint, the timing could not have been worse, coming just two weeks after the release of a United States intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The National Intelligence Estimate also concluded that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, undercutting a central tenet of the Bush administration’s basis for maintaining international pressure against Iran.

While administration officials maintain that the intelligence estimate does not mean that the United States and its allies should ease the pressure, the practical consequence of the report has been to embolden Iran. It has also made it more likely that China and Russia, two of the countries with perhaps the smallest appetite for sanctions against Iran, will not agree to a new round of tough sanctions by the United Nations Security Council.

Russia’s decision to deliver fuel to Bushehr further encourages Iran, several administration officials and European diplomats said privately. They did not speak for attribution because they had not been authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The White House took a different tack in its comments. “There is no doubt that Russia and the rest of the world want to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” said a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe. “And today’s announcement provides one more avenue for the Iranians to make a strategic choice to suspend enrichment.”

But privately, administration officials said they had been hoping, with dwindling confidence, that Russia would continue to stall on delivering the fuel, in part to send a message to Iran that the United States and its European, Chinese and Russian allies were hanging tough in their attempts to punish Iran for refusing to suspend enrichment.

“We for many years tried to stop it, and for the last year we’ve known there was no way to stop it, and that it was coming, and we held our breath on the timing,” a senior administration official said.

Indeed, Iran said it had no intention of suspending its uranium enrichment just because it had received the fuel shipment for Bushehr, and it even confirmed that it intended to enrich uranium for another new nuclear power plant in the south of the country, the Fars news agency reported.

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the chief of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, said Iran needed to produce fuel for a second plant under construction. “We are building a 360-megawatt indigenous power plant in Darkhovin,” Mr. Aghazadeh said.

“The fuel for this plant needs to be produced by Natanz enrichment plant,” he added, according to the news agency.

Darkhovin is a city in the southern province of Khuzistan, north of Bushehr, which is better known for its oil fields. Natanz is the site where Iran has been installing centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

Both Bushehr and Darkhovin were projects planned before the 1979 revolution, and then abandoned. It was not clear how much construction had been carried out at Darkhovin.

Construction of Bushehr has been hindered by repeated delays, most of them a symptom of Russia’s uneasiness about Iran’s nuclear intentions, European and American diplomats said. This year, Russia delayed a fuel shipment expected in March, accusing Iran of tardiness in making its monthly payments of $25 million. At the time, Bush administration officials privately expressed satisfaction about the delay and attributed Russia’s move, in part, to its desire to help the West pressure Iran into more openness about its nuclear program.

Last week, Sergei Shmatko, the director of Atomstroyexport, the Russian contractor responsible for the plant, announced that Russia and Iran had ended their financial disputes over the project, although he did not indicate a date for when the long-awaited opening would occur.

Irina F. Esipova, a spokeswoman for Atomstroyexport, said Bushehr would be ready technically to operate no sooner than six months after all the uranium fuel rods needed to power the station were delivered.

Russia alerted Bush administration officials two weeks ago that the fuel shipment was going ahead, administration officials said. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said Russia agreed to put certain safeguards in place to allow for greater international inspections at Bushehr.

The United States had already agreed in principle that it was acceptable for Russia to provide the fuel to Iran, as long as there were safeguards to handle the spent fuel. Administration officials said they decided that the United States had no choice but to concede that it could no longer keep prodding Russia to delay shipping the fuel.

But “when I was under secretary for arms control, we spent a lot of time trying — successfully — to convince the Russians not to ship the fuel,” John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview on Monday.

He said he believed that Russia’s latest actions reflected a change in the people who were dealing with Russia’s nuclear program, a change of heart by President Vladimir V. Putin and the economics of the deal.

Iran Receives Nuclear Fuel in Blow to U.S. - New York Times

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

 

Kissinger's foggy lens on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Henry Kissinger has thrown his shoulder behind the so-called "push-back" strategy being applied to the new US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear program. Specifically, he's even given hawks in the lame-duck George W Bush administration a helping hand in countering the backlash sparked by the NIE's most inconvenient finding - that Iran is not currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
Despite the decades which have passed since he served in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, former US secretary of state Kissinger is still considered one of the most prescient US observers of global affairs. His recent opinion pieces published in The Washington Post go a long way in fanning the flames of a perceived Iranian nuclear threat - at least at the level of American public opinion - now that much of the fear has been extinguished by the NIE's findings.

This is, in fact, so typical of Kissinger. He's long made a virtue out of rehashing old ideas and assumptions as refreshingly new simply through linguistic acrobatics intermixed with calibrated obfuscation. Such rhetoric is swathed in additional, artificial layers of semantic ambiguity and "double talk". Worse, Kissinger's trademark has long been to simultaneously embrace contradictory ideas and yet escape serious scrutiny in a thick fog of semantic wordplay.

As a result, Kissinger can be everything to everyone these days. He's at once an avid advocate of serious disarmament and also a powerful voice for a "strong American military" and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's reliance on its nuclear arsenal. He's an enthusiastic supporter of various arms limitation treaties and also a reasonable voice for their reconsideration. He's a proponent of post-Cold War, post-hegemonic America and, equally, a principal architect of American primacy in the new global milieu (not to overlook his own singular contributions to the thesis of a "new Cold War" in the Middle East in recent publications in the Arab press).

 

It's nothing new: during the 1970s, Kissinger went to Baghdad and promised that the US would do everything possible "to reduce Israel's size", when, in fact, he never even waved a finger in that direction.
Kissinger now writes opinion columns about the perils of nuclear weapons without ever repudiating his earlier views. For example, in 1957, he wrote that "with proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears".

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

Henry A. Kissinger - Misreading the Iran Report - washingtonpost.com

 

The extraordinary spectacle of the president's national security adviser obliged to defend the president's Iran policy against a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) raises two core issues: How are we now to judge the nuclear threat posed by Iran? How are we to judge the intelligence community's relationship with the White House and the rest of the government?

The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.

Henry A. Kissinger - Misreading the Iran Report - washingtonpost.com

The Associated Press: Israel Officials in US to Discuss Iran

 

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli intelligence officials are in the U.S. trying to convince the Bush administration that Iran is still trying to develop nuclear weapons — contrary to the findings of a recent U.S. intelligence report, security officials said.

(and they ask why Ahmadinejad is mad at Israel)

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, however, scolded a Cabinet minister on Sunday for his harsh, public criticism of the U.S. report.

The U.S. assessment, released earlier this month, concludes Iran halted its weapons development program in 2003 and that the program remained frozen at least through the middle of this year. The findings reversed a key conclusion from a 2005 intelligence report that Iran was developing a bomb.

Israeli officials fear the report will weaken international resolve to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions.

It was not clear what type of material the Israeli delegation — for the most part military intelligence officers — presented to U.S. officials during its unscheduled visit. The Israeli delegation hoped to receive additional information from the U.S. report, which for the most part was classified, the Israeli officials said.

The Associated Press: Israel Officials in US to Discuss Iran

Israeli minister says U.S. assessment on Iran could lead to regional war - International Herald Tribune

(This sounds like something out of twilight zone) 

JERUSALEM: In Israel's harshest criticism yet of a U.S. intelligence report that Iran is no longer developing nuclear arms, a senior minister warned on Saturday that the assessment could lead to a regional war that would threaten the Jewish state.

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter also suggested that Israel could no longer trust American intelligence, saying that its agencies could also issue false information about Palestinian security forces' crackdown on militant groups. The Palestinian action is required as part of a U.S.-backed renewal of peace talks with Israel this month.

Dichter cautioned that a refusal to recognize Iran's intentions to build weapons of mass destruction could lead to a regional war. He compared the possibility of such fighting to a surprise attack on Israel in 1973 by its Arab neighbors, which came to be known in Israel for the Yom Kippur Jewish holy day on which it began.

"The American misconception concerning Iran's nuclear weapons is liable to lead to a regional Yom Kippur where Israel will be among the countries that are threatened," Dichter said in a speech in a suburb south of Tel Aviv, according to his spokesman, Mati Gil. "Something went wrong in the American blueprint for analyzing the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat."

Israeli minister says U.S. assessment on Iran could lead to regional war - International Herald Tribune

Egypt and Saudi Arabia make new overtures to Iran | csmonitor.com

 

Cairo - Iran is suddenly enjoying a thaw with its Arab neighbors – all close US allies – in the wake of a US intelligence report that judged Iran probably suspended its work on nuclear weapons four years ago.

Regional actors, in particular, are scrambling to engage Iran diplomatically, and analysts say they have the tacit approval of the Americans.

Egypt, a US ally and the only Arab state not to have full diplomatic relations with Iran, this week sent a high-level delegation to Tehran for the first time since that country's Islamic revolution in 1979. On Thursday, Russia said it would resume work on an Iranian civilian nuclear plant.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was invited by the Qatari emir to speak to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) earlier this month – the first time that has ever happened. On Wednesday, Iran announced that Saudi Arabia had invited Mr. Ahmedinejad to participate in the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, a first for an Iranian leader since the 1979 revolution.

"Qatar could not have invited Ahmedinejad to the GCC without an understanding with the Americans. I don't think Egypt would be sending a diplomat without some sort of green light either," says Emad Gad, an expert on regional politics at the Al Ahram Center, a government-linked think tank in Cairo. "All of this is part of a strategy, and I think it's an American strategy as well, to keep the freeze on the nuclear program while creating a friendlier climate."

The strategy that's now being crafted looks very similar to the one that US hawks felt was discredited before the American decision to invade Iraq: One of sanctions and limited diplomatic outreach, with only muted threats to use force.

Then, proponents of an invasion argued that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction in defiance of UN sanctions and that such measures were insufficient. While it turned out that Mr. Hussein had no such weapons, analysts like Mr. Gad argue that the US invasion of Iraq was decisive in prompting the Iranian's change of course.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia make new overtures to Iran | csmonitor.com

Ron Paul and the War on Islamofacism

 

Ron Paul and the War on Islamofacism

---

Why our current policy will allow the Terrorists to win, and why leaving Iraq isn't "surrender" or "retreat"

---

by John Armstrong
(Libertarian)

There have been questions about Ron Paul's willingness to "fight" the radical "Islamofascists." Many in the Republican Party refuse to support Congressman Paul because they mistakenly believe that he is some sort of "pacifist hippy" since they don't understand why he doesn't support the "war." This is my attempt at explaining that position with some analogies, plain language, and references that anyone interested in actually defeating these "evil-doers" should find interesting.
The War with IslamoFascism. Let's look at that statement because it will help explain Dr. Paul's position. First of all, "war" can only be declared by Congress. America hasn't issued a real declaration of war since WWII and we haven't won a war since then. Because this "war" isn't a declared war, Ron Paul doesn't support it because as a congressman who was sworn to uphold the constitution, he understands that he has no right to do so.
Congress can only constitutionally issue a declaration of war if America is attacked or feels that an issuance of war is needed to protect us. America was attacked on September 11th, 2001. But it was attacked by 19 men who represent a larger network of men who hold similar extreme ideas. Fighting a "War" on "IslamoFascism" because of September 11th, makes about as much sense as fighting a "War" on "Depressed Asian Students" because of what happened at Virginia Tech last spring. Dr. Paul's response would have been to commit resources to catch the people who were actually responsible for and supported the attacks. This is why he voted in favor of going into Afghanistan, but now doesn't support the ongoing actions there since they are no longer designed to catch Bin Laden or others who are actually responsible for the attacks.
He also understands that part of the reason we were attacked was because of an interventionist foreign policy. Most of the Sept. 11th hijackers were Saudis. Non-coincidentally, they were upset because of our military presence in their country and the way we had influenced governments in their region. This is a priniciple the CIA calls "blowback" which is also the name of a book (by Chalmers Johnson) that was written pre-September 11th and warned that we should expect coming acts of reprisal by individuals or states because of our meddling in their affairs over the course of the previous few decades. At the time it was written, it was greeted with smug laughter (as noted in the book's introduction) exactly the same way Dr. Paul's comments were by other Republican candidates during the debate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5avEmnWrtk starting around the 2:19 mark) when he suggested our current policy was a "road to disaster." Killing terrorists by unconstitutionally going into sovereign countries instead of actually removing the major cause of their hate for us is akin to killing flies instead of removing the dead carcass in the middle of the room. Worse yet, we are not only not removing the carcass we are creating more carcasses on which they feed and multiply. Dr. Paul understands that America has a problem with people who hold radical Islamic views, but doesn't think that a "War" on an "Islamo-Fascism" is the way to solve the problem.
"Islamo-Fascism" is a term used to scare people and make an enemy seem more menacing than it really is. I won't give you the history on it, but you can check out Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamofascism. The 1978 Iranian revolution mentioned there as possibly the first time the word was used, was a direct result of our CIA installing the Shah into power in 1953 (again--our interventionist policy). It has been picked up on an popularized by people like David Horowitz who is a leading proponent of "swatting flies" to solve the problem. As an American citizen, you are more likely to drown in a bathtub than to be killed by a terrorist. Since we decided on this pre-emptive first strike doctrine, more American lives have been lost (soldiers are Americans too--and also support Dr. Paul more via donations than they support any other candidate) than in the September 11th attacks. The money we have spent in Iraq (and will continue to spend if we keep with this policy and move on to Iran) makes the money we lost both directly and tangentially due to the September 11th attacks seem paltry by comparison.

Ron Paul and the War on Islamofacism

Bombs: Comment: The New Yorker

Bombs

by Steve Coll December 17, 2007

Keywords

Iran;

National Intelligence Estimate;

Nuclear Weapons;

Bush, George W. (Pres.) (43rd);

Foreign Policy;

Cheney, Dick (Vice-President);

Diplomacy

Last week, the Bush Administration released declassified extracts from a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear program. The passages landed in Washington like a religious scroll; they radiated revelation. The N.I.E. drew upon new intelligence, collected last summer, to report with “high confidence” two facts that were previously unknown, or at least heavily disputed: that Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government had commissioned a secret, military-run atomic-weapons program, in addition to its open nuclear-power program, and that, in 2003, Iran halted this secret program, “primarily in response to international pressure.”

This assessment may yet prove to be no more accurate than past American intelligence evaluations of Iran (the Shah’s rule is stable; the Iranian Revolution has reliable moderates; if the United States invades Iraq, Iran will react passively). But, taken at face value, the findings expose some of the bluff, humbug, and extremism that have often dominated nuclear diplomacy between the Bush Administration and Tehran.

Iran’s ruling clerics are revealed in the estimate as nervous types. As the mullahs watched the United States recklessly invade Iraq, in 2003, to destroy weapons of mass destruction that no longer existed, they harbored the guilty secret that their atomic-bomb program did exist, and might yet be discovered. So they apparently put their bomb work to rest. To a considerable extent, the “international pressure” referred to in the estimate must have been neurotic and self-inflicted: if the mullahs confessed their secret program, they might be goners, but if they did not confess and got caught, they might also be goners. Iran’s government seems to have coped with this conundrum in the manner of deceivers throughout history and literature: it blustered, obfuscated, hinted, delayed, negotiated for some way out, but ultimately found itself imprisoned by its own deceit. More pragmatically, it launched a clandestine campaign against the American forces occupying Iraq, to forestall a possible American invasion.

The estimate’s findings provide equally bracing clarity about the Bush Administration: they show that the Cheney regency persists, and that the Vice-President and his neoconservative protégés in the Administration have continued to exaggerate and misuse intelligence to advance preconceived policies—in this case, a policy of militant confrontation with Iran, salted by public misstatements of what was known or knowable about the Iranian nuclear threat. A year ago, in these pages, Seymour Hersh reported that the C.I.A. had acquired intelligence that Iran’s nuclear program was considerably less advanced than the White House advertised, but that this reporting had been dismissed by Cheney and his aides, who wanted only intelligence that would allow them “to accomplish the mission,” as a senior intelligence official told Hersh. The official’s choice of words resonates still.

Bombs: Comment: The New Yorker

Inside Intel / How Iran was sold a lemon - Haaretz - Israel News

 

Prof. Louis Rene Beres had no doubt that, in spite of the report's arguments, Iran is still trying to obtain nuclear weapons. Therefore, he says Israel must not stop preparing for a military attack in Iran. The report, he says, is "a shameless acknowledgment that Israel has been abandoned yet again by Washington." But in spite of that, "Israel's right of anticipatory self-defense against Iran is now greater than ever."
"Naturally, such a preemptive act of self-defense would be directed exclusively at Iranian hard targets (pertinent industrial and military infrastructures) and would be entirely conventional in nature," he says. "The American NIE notwithstanding, it is incontestable that Iran still seeks nuclear weapons and that its orientation toward Israel remains authentically genocidal."

Inside Intel / How Iran was sold a lemon - Haaretz - Israel News

Olmert says Iran still seeking nuclear bomb and no evidence will convince him otherwise| Reuters

 

JERUSALEM, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Tuesday that Iran was still pursuing a nuclear weapon and called on the international community to pressure the Islamic Republic to suspend its uranium enrichment programme.
It was the first time Olmert commented publicly on a U.S. intelligence report published last week that said Iran's nuclear weapon programme had been on hold since 2003.
"The U.S. report has created exaggerated debate," Olmert said at a security conference. "Nothing has changed. Iran was and still is dangerous, and we need even stronger international pressure to dissuade Iran from its nuclear direction."

Olmert says Iran still seeking nuclear bomb | Reuters

All Iranians with the nuclear weapon knowledge must be killed

However, Bush has latched onto this "knowledge" aspect in an attempt to lower the bar on Iran: "Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," he said at a press conference following the release of the NIE.

Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE - CommonDreams.org

 

WASHINGTON — A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.                                                                   "Bastards Released the report!!"

A former CIA intelligence officer who has asked not to be identified told IPS that an official involved in the NIE process says the Iran estimate was ready to be published a year ago but has been delayed because the director of national intelligence wanted a draft reflecting a consensus on key conclusions — particularly on Iran’s nuclear program.

The NIE coordinates the judgments of 16 intelligence agencies on a specific country or issue.

There is a split in the intelligence community on how much of a threat the Iranian nuclear program poses, according to the intelligence official’s account. Some analysts who are less independent are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the alarmist view coming from Cheney’s office, but others have rejected that view.

The draft NIE first completed a year ago, which had included the dissenting views, was not acceptable to the White House, according to the former intelligence officer. “They refused to come out with a version that had dissenting views in it,” he says.

As recently as early October, the official involved in the process was said to be unclear about whether an NIE would be circulated and, if so, what it would say.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi provided a similar account, based on his own sources in the intelligence community. He told IPS that intelligence analysts have had to review and rewrite their findings three times, because of pressure from the White House.

Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE - CommonDreams.org

The Gulf States and Iran - WSJ.com

 

The Gulf States and Iran

By MAX BOOT
December 5, 2007; Page A25

The release of the new National Intelligence Estimate will provide more fodder for those who claim that "neoconservative ideologues" and the "Israel lobby" are overly alarmed about the rise of Iran. In reality, some of those most worried about the mullahs wear flowing headdresses, not yarmulkes, and they have good cause for concern, notwithstanding the sanguine tilt many news accounts put on the NIE.

Jets from the United Arab Emirates and France fly together on a joint maneuver.

I recently visited the Persian Gulf region as part of a delegation of American policy wonks organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Throughout our meetings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, the top issue was Iran's ambitions to dominate the region.

Evidence of those imperial designs is not hard to find. The Iranians are aiding extremists who are undermining nascent democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon (No mention of Saudis financing all the murderous extremists). The beneficiaries of Tehran's largess include Hamas, Hezbollah and even, the evidence indicates, al Qaeda. (Saudi officials are quietly furious that Tehran has given refuge to some suspects in the 2003 Riyadh attacks.) Iran is building up its military arsenal, and has threatened to shut down the Persian Gulf (or, as Arabs call it, the Arabian Gulf).

The Gulf States and Iran - WSJ.com

The Morning Brief - WSJ.com

Exposing What We
Don't Know About Iran

(in other words figuring out how to discredit the report)

The Morning Brief, a look at the day's biggest news, is emailed to subscribers by 7 a.m. every business day. Sign up for the e-mail here.

The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran casts doubt on the hawkish warnings about Tehran's nuclear ambitions but paints such a Rorschach-like picture of the situation that it's unlikely to quiet debate.

The NIE process, it must first be noted, is now more prone to ambiguity thanks to the legislative and political overhauls of American spy work in the wake of 9/11 and the Bush administration's use of WMD estimates to take the country into Iraq. Changes in the past 18 months mean NIEs come with definitions and notes on the scope of such phrases as "we judge, we assess, and we estimate -- and probabilistic terms such as probably and likely," as well as a breakdown of the differences among high confidence, moderate confidence and low confidence. What this NIE aimed to do was reexamine a 2005 NIE that accused Iran of working toward creation of a nuclear armament and assessing the Iranian government's relatively current intentions and capabilities -- starting without an assumption of guilt, it insists.

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," the U.S. intelligence community (or IC) concludes. "We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran's announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work." The IC has "high confidence" the halt in the Iranian military's nuclear-weapons work lasted several years. But because of intelligence gaps there is only moderate confidence this halt represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear-weapons program. "We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons," the NIE says. Still, the halt suggests Iran is less determined to get one "than we have been judging since 2005."

The Morning Brief - WSJ.com

US: Iran Halted Weapons Program in 2003 - AOL News

 

US: Iran Halted Weapons Program in 2003

By PAMELA HESS,

AP

Posted: 2007-12-03 22:03:30

WASHINGTON (AP) - A new U.S. intelligence report concludes that Iran's nuclear weapons development program has been halted since the fall of 2003 because of international pressure - a stark contrast to the conclusions U.S. spy agencies drew just two years ago.
The finding is part of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that also cautions that Tehran continues to enrich uranium and still could develop a bomb between 2010 and 2015 if it decided to do so.
The conclusion that Iran's weapons program was still frozen, through at least mid-2007, represents a sharp turnaround from the previous intelligence assessment in 2005. Then, U.S. intelligence agencies believed Tehran was determined to develop a nuclear weapons capability and was continuing its weapons development program. The new report concludes that Iran's decisions are rational and pragmatic, and that Tehran is more susceptible to diplomatic and financial pressure than previously thought.
"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," says the unclassified summary of the secret report.

US: Iran Halted Weapons Program in 2003 - AOL News

US my not bomb Iran becasue of sense of guilt!?

Article or Op-Ed: "Leaving aside the relative merits of a strike against the Iranians, why might America's military resist such action? First, consider the fact that the US has at the moment 162,000 troops in Iraq, 30,000 in Kuwait, 4,500 in Bahrain and 3,300 in Qatar -- not to mention the two carrier battle groups in the Gulf or the 8,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. In the event of an American or Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, for example, the troops in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan would be in even greater danger than they already are, vulnerable to an Iranian counterattack or, more likely, an Iranian-sponsored terror campaign.

Second, there exists a tremendous sense of guilt among the US senior officer corps for what is seen as a failure to stand up to the civilian leadership in the rush to go to war against Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Much of the current divide between America's generals and its junior officer corps boils down to a sense on the part of junior officers that their superiors largely acquiesced to whatever Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in the run-up to the Iraq war. The charge of spinelessness is one that hurts America's generals, especially as it comes from lieutenants and captains who have proven themselves on the battlefield of Iraq.

Third, in the wake of the Iraq war, professional military officers are more suspicious than ever of think-tank types with theories on how easy military victories can be achieved. As an active-duty US Army officer recently told me: 'If I hear one more lawyer with no military experience explain to me how air power alone really can do it this time, I'm going to kill him.' "

George Ajjan, the Aleppine Elephant: Iran

George Ajjan, the Aleppine Elephant: Iran: "Open Letter to the Arab-American Community in Behalf of Ron Paul by George Ajjan Following upon the advice of Walter Block, and in the tradition of Laurence Vance and Thomas Woods, I offer the following Open Letter to the Arab-American Community in Behalf of Ron Paul. While the previous Open Letters on LRC were addressed to a particular religious denomination, I offer this one on the basis of ethnicity. Arab-Americans need to hear Ron Paul's message, because serious concerns about the fate of US foreign policy and civil liberties captivate the minds of Arab-American Muslims, as well as Arab-American Christians, who actually comprise more than half of the community. My Open Letter will therefore be inclusive in nature and address all denominations. It is interesting to note that those who advocate this unifying approach have been disparaged by the wedge-driving, divide-and-conquer neocons as 'dhimmis' or 'Islamo-Christians' – or whatever today's new vocabulary is on the Word-a-Day calendar of the American Enterprise Institute (a.k.a. the Supreme Soviet of Neoconservatism) – for not accepting their erroneous worldview, in which Semitic people (and by Semitic, I mean Semitic) are mindless sectarian robots genetically programmed to kill each other and incapable of peaceful co-existence."

Study: U.S., Israel should begin planning Iran strike - Haaretz - Israel News

Study: U.S., Israel should begin planning Iran strike

- Haaretz - Israel News: "Study: U.S., Israel should begin planning Iran strike By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent Tags: Iran, U.S., Israel, nuclear Israel and the United States should begin an intense dialogue on ways to deal with Iran's nuclear plans and should study ways to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, a new study states. The report, by a former deputy head of the National Security Council, Chuck Freilich, says Israel and the U.S. should discuss nuclear-crisis scenarios between Israel and Iran. The report, entitled 'Speaking About the Unspeakable,' was released over the weekend by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "