The Jakarta Post - Students up with int'l issues for mock UN nuclear debate

 

Students up with int'l issues for mock UN nuclear debate

Arghea Desafti Hapsari, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

While many high school students prefer comics and other light reading materials, delegates at a mock UN conference keep up to date with the latest international issues.

Greta Aprilia Ali from Sekolah Pelita Harapan Cikarang said her team as U.S. delegates researched recent issues in other countries in the lead-up to the UN General Assembly simulation.

"Not only did we search the Internet to gather facts to support our argument, but we also consulted teachers and listened to their opinion on the U.S. and other countries," the twelfth grader told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

As a result, she and her team were one of the most vocal groups at the conference held at the Bina Nusantara (Binus) school in Simprug, South Jakarta, earning them third place.

The UN General Assembly simulation is part of the Blue Feather Interschool Competition held by the Binus School Simprug. The one-day conference took on the theme, "To Create a Better and Peaceful World through Responsible Use of Nuclear Weapons".

Eight schools around Jakarta sent a total of 12 teams of three. Each team represented one country: China, Indonesia, Pakistan, North Korea, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Republic of Iran, Libya, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

These countries were selected by the Foreign Ministry because they had the most interest in the nuclear issue.

Tatu Hutami, a twelfth grader from SMU 78, said her team of Iran delegates had another strategy to win the competition. They researched the international laws on nuclear programs and based their arguments on these laws.

"We think international affairs have a lot to do with international laws. When a country wants to do something (that affects other countries), it must abide by these laws. Only when they fail to comply with these laws, then they can be prosecuted," Tatu said.

She and her team argued that Iran's nuclear program did not contravene any international laws.

Her argument won the favor of the judges and earned them first place. Tatu herself won best speaker.

Greta said the event taught her how to build precise and strong arguments.

"I've always been weak at debating, so I learned a great deal from this event," she said.

Franz from SMU 78 acting as German delegates said he could now imagine what it feels like to be an ambassador.

"I also know why other countries have interests of their own, and to get what we want we have to use diplomacy."

Students learn leadership, negotiation and problem solving sills through activities like the UN simulation, Carolina Tinangon from the Foreign Ministry said.

"An event like this is very beneficial for students. They learn marketing, public speaking and to how to influence people."

She said she hoped similar events would be held more often in the future.

"UN simulations are not new to Indonesia, but most of them are held for college students. I hope to see this kind of event for younger students."

The Jakarta Post - Students up with int'l issues for mock UN nuclear debate

Friedman: Sleepless in Tehran - International Herald Tribune

 

Friedman: Sleepless in Tehran

By Thomas L. Friedman

Published: October 29, 2008

I've always been dubious about Barack Obama's offer to negotiate with Iran - not because I didn't believe that it was the right strategy, but because I didn't believe we Americans had enough leverage to succeed. And negotiating in the Middle East without leverage is like playing baseball without a bat.

Well, if Obama does win the presidency, my gut tells me that he's going to get a chance to negotiate with the Iranians - with a bat in his hand.

Have you seen the reports that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It's probably because he is not sleeping at night. I know why. Watching oil prices fall from $147 a barrel to $57 is not like counting sheep. It's the kind of thing that gives an Iranian autocrat bad dreams.

After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me.

As Vladimir Mau, president of Russia's Academy of National Economy, pointed out to me, it was the long period of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. The spike in oil prices in the 1970s deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home and invading Afghanistan abroad - and then the collapse in prices in the '80s helped bring down that overextended empire.

Today in Opinion

Still time for some environmental mischief

Playing a numbers game with America's students

Loans? Did we say we'd do loans?

(Incidentally, this was exactly what happened to the shah of Iran: 1) Sudden surge in oil prices. 2) Delusions of grandeur. 3) Sudden contraction of oil prices. 4) Dramatic downfall. 5) You're toast.)

Under Ahmadinejad, Iran's mullahs have gone on a domestic subsidy binge - using oil money to cushion the prices of food, gasoline, mortgages and to create jobs - to buy off the Iranian people. But the one thing Ahmadinejad couldn't buy was real economic growth. Iran today has 30 percent inflation, 11 percent unemployment and huge underemployment with thousands of young college grads, engineers and architects selling pizzas and driving taxis. And now with oil prices falling, Iran - just like the Soviet Union - is going to have to pull back spending across the board. Fasten your seat belts.

The UN has imposed three rounds of sanctions against Iran since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005 because of Iran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment. But high oil prices minimized those sanctions; collapsing oil prices will now magnify those sanctions. If prices stay low, there is a good chance Iran will be open to negotiating over its nuclear program with the next U.S. president.

That is a good thing because Iran also funds Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and the anti-U.S. Shiites in Iraq. If America wants to get out of Iraq and leave behind a decent outcome, plus break the deadlocks in Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, it needs to end the Cold War with Iran. Possible? I don't know, but the collapse of oil prices should give America a shot.

But let's use U.S. leverage smartly and not exaggerate Iran's strength. Just as I believe that America should drop the reward for the capture of Osama bin Laden - from $50 million to one penny, plus an autographed picture of Dick Cheney - we need to deflate the Iranian mullahs as well. Let them chase us.

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, compares it to bargaining for a Persian carpet in Tehran. "When you go inside the carpet shop, the first thing you are supposed to do is feign disinterest," he explains. "The last thing you want to suggest is 'We are not leaving without that carpet.' 'Well,' the dealer will say, 'if you feel so strongly about it ..."'

The other lesson from the carpet bazaar, says Sadjadpour, "is that there is never a price tag on any carpet. The dealer is not looking for a fixed price, but the highest price he can get - and the Iran price is constantly fluctuating depending on the price of oil." Let's now use that to our advantage.

Barack Hussein Obama would present another challenge for Iran's mullahs. Their whole rationale for being is that they are resisting a hegemonic American power that wants to keep everyone down. Suddenly, next week, Iranians may look up and see that the country their leaders call "The Great Satan" has just elected "a guy whose middle name is the central figure in Shiite Islam - Hussein - and whose last name - Obama - when transliterated into Farsi, means 'He is with us,"' said Sadjadpour.

Iran is ripe for deflating. Its power was inflated by the price of oil and the popularity of its leader, who was cheered simply because he was willing to poke America with a stick. But as a real nation-building enterprise, the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been an abject failure.

"When you ask young Arabs which leaders in the region they most admire," said Sadjadpour, they will usually answer the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. "When you ask them where in the Middle East would you most like to live," he added, "the answer is usually socially open places like Dubai or Beirut. The Islamic Republic of Iran is never in the top 10."

Friedman: Sleepless in Tehran - International Herald Tribune

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

 

IAEA misses the mark on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In his latest report to the United Nations, Mohamad ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) , has cited "substantial progress" in clarifying questions about Iran's nuclear program, stating unequivocally that the agency "has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran".
This admission by the UN's atomic agency naturally raises serious questions about the legitimacy of coercive UN sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt nuclear activities that are completely legal from the standpoint of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The legal and transparent nature of Iran's uranium-enrichment program in effect renders moot the UN's demand, and the sooner the UN backtracks on its unjustified demands the less the harm to its image.

There is still the residual issue of "alleged studies" in the past and in the same report cited above ElBaradei expressed confidence that an "arrangement can be developed which would enable the agency to clarify the remaining issues". Clearly, this does not sound like an alarm bell, heard ever so loudly in the US and Israel, about Iran's imminent leap to the nuclear weapons club.
However, the biggest hurdle on the path of normalization of Iran's nuclear file is the IAEA's demand that Iran should somehow prove "the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities". Historically, the only other country subjected to such a demand by the IAEA was Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and one would think that the agency would have drawn an appropriate lesson from that major fiasco.
"I regret that we are still not in a position to achieve full clarity regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran," ElBaradei stated before the UN General Assembly last week, thus warranting the legitimate question: isn't this beyond the purview of the IAEA's standards and, more specifically, the IAEA's inspection and verification agreement with Iran, to demand that Iran proves a negative?
What the IAEA needs to do is to stick to its own rules, instead of devising ad hoc new regulations or, for that matter, lavishing expanded new responsibilities on itself not embedded in the agency's technical mandate.
ElBaradei also calls for a new IAEA-supervised nuclear fuel bank, saying that "ultimately all existing enrichment facilities should be converted from national to multinational control". He then adds that "this is not going to happen overnight".
The fact is that it is a 90% sure bet that it will never happen and the big powers - the US, China and Russia in particular - will never consent to ceding authority over their nuclear fuel cycles to "multinational" hands.
Nor is Iran going to reveal its conventional military secrets by allowing the IAEA to pry into its missile technology, simply because someone in Washington or Tel Aviv came up with the idea that by concocting some evidence about Iran's missiles the Iranians would be checkmated at nuclear chess, since their refusal to let IAEA inspectors inside their missile systems would be interpreted as a sign they are hiding nuclear secrets.
ElBaradei insists that his intention is pure and is not meant to "pry" into Iran's conventional military secrets and, again, assures the Iranians that there is a way to examine Iran's missile system without risking the confidentiality of its military secrets. That is patently absurd. There is no such possibility, as if the US and Israeli intelligence would not be clamoring to get their hands on the vital information gained by the IAEA inspectors once they poked their noses into Iran's conventional missile program.
Again, history is relevant. The IAEA has a failed report card with respect to Iraq, when in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq the world learned that the US used the IAEA's data to justify its illegal invasion. Is ElBaradei, who is stepping down next year, in a position to fully guarantee that none of his inspectors will cooperate with Iran's adversaries and pass on information deemed vital for those currently planning military action against Iran?
He cannot, and he should stop embarrassing himself and his agency by imposing on Iran an unreasonable demand that could well backfire against the IAEA, and indeed the entire non-proliferation regime, in the event the Iraq fiasco is repeated with respect to Iran.
Already, there are reports of internal fissures within the agency with respect to Iran, reflected in the fact that some agency inspectors boycotted the last presentation by ElBaradei's deputy, Olli Heinonen, regarding the evidence on Iran's "alleged studies". Heinonen has displayed an uncanny propensity to adopt at face value any tidbit of disinformation on Iran and, as a result, it would be nothing short of a national security risk for Iran to comply with the IAEA's unreasonable demand cited above.
Lest we forget, when the IAEA approached Iran in the spring of 2007 and proposed a comprehensive work plan to tackle all outstanding issues, the agency did not list the "alleged studies" as one of its "outstanding issues". (The "alleged studies" relate to information allegedly obtained from a laptop computer that was taken out of Iran and handed to US intelligence in 2004.)
Those six issues have now been effectively dealt with and the IAEA has closed the book on them, that is, considers them "no longer outstanding" per the IAEA's February 2008 report. In terms of that agreement, Iran's nuclear file should have been placed out of the current exceptional or emergency status and treated as "routine", but that has not happened because of the "alleged studies".
Yet ElBaradei has admitted, in his August 2008 report, that the agency has not detected any diversion of nuclear material toward those "alleged studies".
The longer ElBaradei insists on his extra-legal demands from Iran the more the world community loses confidence in his fairness, objectivity and the ability of the atomic agency to remain insulated from big-power manipulation.

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

The Associated Press: UN nuclear chief says Iran blocking progress

Watchdog agency says Iran is blocking it from verifying whether the nation has any ambitions for nuclear weaponry.

Since when IAEA is supposed to investigates ambitions?

UN nuclear chief says Iran blocking progress

By JOHN HEILPRIN – 47 minutes ago

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. nuclear chief said Monday that Iran is blocking his watchdog agency from verifying whether the nation has any ambitions for nuclear weaponry.

"I regret that we are still not in a position to achieve full clarity regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran," Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. General Assembly.

He urged Iran to do more to ensure "transparency," but emphasized the Vienna-based IAEA "does not in any way seek to pry into Iran's conventional or missile-related military activities."

Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee countered that the U.N. Security Council's demand that his nation suspend uranium enrichment is "illegal."

Iran's nuclear program, he said, is only for peaceful purposes and designed to produce nuclear energy and the nation "will never accept illegal demands."

Khazaee also said that the five permanent members of the Security Council — the U.S., Britain, China, Russia and France — plus Germany never responded to Tehran's proposal that they negotiate without preconditions. The six powers have offered economic and political incentives if Iran suspends its enrichment work.

"The policy of few powers in insisting on suspension as a precondition for negotiations bears zero relation to realities and is an irrational and failed policy," he said.

ElBaradei also told the General Assembly in his annual report that he hoped North Korea, which tested a nuclear device two years ago, would return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty from which it withdrew in 2003 after expelling all IAEA inspectors from the country.

IAEA inspectors were allowed to use some monitoring equipment at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex earlier this month, based on a U.S. deal that revived disarmament negotiations.

"I naturally still hope that conditions can be created for the DPRK (North Korea) to return to the NPT soon and for the resumption by the agency of comprehensive safeguards," ElBaradei said.

On Friday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world's nuclear powers to start negotiations on eliminating nuclear weapons and begin talks to assure other nations they will not be attacked. ElBaradei also said it was time to move from resolution to action.

Last month, the Security Council unanimously approved a new resolution reaffirming previous sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt its uranium enrichment program and offering Tehran incentives to do so.

It resulted from a compromise between the United States and Russia to lead a new council effort to condemn Iran's nuclear program, without introducing any new sanctions.

The brief resolution reaffirmed the three earlier Security Council sanctions resolutions, which imposed progressively tougher sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt its uranium enrichment program.

Existing sanctions include an asset freeze on 65 companies and individuals linked to Iran's nuclear program, and a travel ban on five people associated with Tehran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The sanctions also include bans on Iranian arms exports, supplying Iran with materials and technology that could contribute to its nuclear and missile programs, and on trade in goods that have both civilian and military uses.

Enrichment can turn uranium into fissile material used in nuclear warheads, but it can also be used to generate power and is allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Associated Press: UN nuclear chief says Iran blocking progress

We Should Talk to Our Enemies | Print Article | Newsweek.com

 

We Should Talk to Our Enemies

Nicholas Burns

Newsweek Web Exclusive

One of the sharpest and most telling differences on foreign policy between Barack Obama and John McCain is whether the United States should talk to difficult and disreputable leaders like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. In each of the three presidential debates, McCain belittled Obama as naive for arguing that America should be willing to negotiate with such adversaries. In the vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin went even further, accusing Obama of "bad judgment … that is dangerous," an ironic charge given her own very modest foreign-policy credentials.

Are McCain and Palin correct that America should stonewall its foes? I lived this issue for 27 years as a career diplomat, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe that's why I've been struggling to find the real wisdom and logic in this Republican assault against Obama. I'll bet that a poll of senior diplomats who have served presidents from Carter to Bush would reveal an overwhelming majority who agree with the following position: of course we should talk to difficult adversaries—when it is in our interest and at a time of our choosing.

The more challenging and pertinent question, especially for the McCain-Palin ticket, is the reverse: Is it really smart to declare we will never talk to such leaders? Is it really in our long-term national interest to shut ourselves off from one of the most important and powerful states in the Middle East—Iran—or one of our major suppliers of oil, Venezuela?

During the five decades of the cold war, when Americans had a more Manichaean view of the world, we did, from time to time, cut off relations with particularly odious leaders such as North Korea's Kim Il Sung or Albania's bloodthirsty and maniacal strongman, Enver Hoxha. But for the most part even our most ardent cold-war presidents—Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, none of whom was often accused of being weak or naive—decided that sitting down with our adversaries made good sense for America. They all talked to Soviet leaders—men vastly more threatening to America's survival than Ahmadinejad or Chávez are now. JFK negotiated a nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with his mortal adversary, Nikita Khrushchev, just one year after the two narrowly avoided a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis. Perhaps more dramatically, Nixon, the greatest anticommunist crusader of his time, went to China in 1972 to repair a more than 20-year rupture with Mao Zedong that he believed no longer worked for America.

All of these cold-war presidents embraced a foreign-policy maxim memorialized by one of the toughest and most experienced leaders of our time, Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, who defended his discussions with Yasir Arafat by declaring, "You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with very unsavory enemies." Why should the United States approach the world any differently now? Especially now? As Americans learned all too dramatically on 9/11 and again during the financial crisis this autumn, we inhabit a rapidly integrating planet where dangers can strike at any time and from great distances. And when others—China, India, Brazil—are rising to share power in the world with us, America needs to spend more time, not less, talking and listening to friends and foes alike.

The real truth Americans need to embrace is that nearly all of the most urgent global challenges—the quaking financial markets, climate change, terrorism—cannot be resolved by America's acting alone in the world. Rather than retreat into isolationism, as we have often done in our history, or go it alone as the unilateralists advocated disastrously in the past decade, we need to commit ourselves to a national strategy of smart engagement with the rest of the world. Simply put, we need all the friends we can get. And we need to think more creatively about how to blunt the power of opponents through smart diplomacy, not just the force of arms.

Talking to our adversaries is no one's idea of fun, and it is not a sure prescription for success in every crisis. But it is crude, simplistic and wrong to charge that negotiations reflect weakness or appeasement. More often than not, they are evidence of a strong and self-confident country. One of America's greatest but often neglected strengths is, in fact, our diplomatic power. Condoleezza Rice's visit to Libya in September—the first by a U.S. secretary of state in five decades—was the culmination of years of careful, deliberate diplomacy to maneuver the Libyan leadership to give up its weapons of mass destruction and renounce terrorism. She would not have achieved that victory had she refused to talk to the Libyans.

For sure, a successful diplomacy needs to be backed up by strong military and intelligence services to fight our wars and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. We should constantly remind our adversaries that we have other options, including the possible use of force, if talks fail. But we have put too many of the world's problems on the shoulders of our generals and intelligence officers when diplomacy—our ability to persuade, cajole or threaten an opponent—is sometimes the better and more effective way to proceed. We need to trust our ability to outmaneuver dangerous regimes at the negotiating table and in the high court of international public opinion.

Iran is a case in point. Its hard-line, theocratic government poses the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East today. It is funding and arming most of the region's terrorist groups shooting at us, Israel and our moderate Arab friends. It has complicated our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most alarming, Iran is seeking a nuclear-weapons capability that would change the balance of power in the Middle East.

Rather than default to the idea of using U.S. military force against Iran, wouldn't it make more sense for the next American president to offer to negotiate with the Iranian leadership? Here's the logic. If the talks end up succeeding, we will have prevented a third, and potentially catastrophic, war for the United States in the volatile area linking the Middle East and South Asia. If the talks fail, we will have a far better chance of persuading Russia and China to sign on to tougher sanctions against Iran. I think war with Iran would be unconscionable if we refuse even to try diplomacy first.

I'm not saying the next president should sit down immediately with Ahmadinejad. We should initiate contact at a lower level to investigate whether it's worth putting the president's prestige on the line. We should leave the threat of military action on the table to give us greater leverage as we talk to the Iranian government. And ultimately we'd want other countries with influence—like Russia and China—to sit on our side of the table in order to bring maximum pressure to bear against Tehran. But the United States hasn't had a meaningful set of talks with Iran on all the critical issues that separate us in 30 years, since the Khomeini revolution. To illustrate how far we have isolated ourselves, think about this: I served as the Bush administration's point person on Iran for three years but was never permitted to meet an Iranian. To her immense credit, Secretary Rice arranged for my successor to participate in a multilateral meeting with Iranian officials this past summer. That is a good first step, but the next American president should initiate a more sustained discussion with senior Iranians.

If we aren't willing to talk to Iran, we may leave ourselves with only one option—military action. The next U.S. president will have little chance of securing peace in the Middle East if he doesn't determine Iran's bottom line on the nuclear issue through talks. Similarly, there will be no peace treaty between Syria and Israel if we don't support the talks underway between those countries.

In Afghanistan, the new president will face a very difficult set of choices roughly similar to those in Iraq before the surge. The brilliance of Gen. David Petraeus's strategy in Iraq was, in part, to build bridges to formerly bitter foes in the Sunni militias and to cajole and entice them to switch sides. Some are now suggesting that we should deploy a similar strategy with the Taliban rank and file.

While we should have absolutely no interest in sitting down with Qaeda fanatics or the Taliban leadership, does it make sense to try to persuade lower-ranking Taliban supporters to give up the armed struggle and commit to a democratic Afghanistan? While that's a seemingly logical goal, it would be highly problematic in the short term. We would be better served if we first built up a position of much greater military and political strength, and increased security for Afghan villagers. Talking to our adversaries is not always the answer to all our problems, especially in a highly complex environment such as Afghanistan. We have a long way to go before it might be part of a long-term solution there.

America faces a complex and difficult geopolitical landscape. The next president needs to act more creatively and boldly to defend our interests by revalidating diplomacy as a key weapon in our national arsenal and rebuilding our understaffed and underfunded diplomatic corps. Of course he will need to reserve the right to use force against the most vicious and implacable of our foes. More often than not, however, he will find that dialogue and discussion, talking and listening, are the smarter ways to defend our country, end crises and sometimes even sow the seeds of an ultimate peace.

Burns was under secretary of state for political affairs, the highest-ranking American career diplomat, until his retirement in April. He is now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

We Should Talk to Our Enemies | Print Article | Newsweek.com

IRAN: Noam Chomsky says Americans support Iran's right to nuclear energy | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times

 

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IRAN: Noam Chomsky says Americans support Iran's right to nuclear energy

The scholar and leftist political activist Noam Chomsky says his fellow countrymen support Iran's nuclear enrichment program and oppose any kind of military confrontation with the Islamic Republic.

Chomsky, a noted linguistics professor who is among the most outspoken American critics of U.S. foreign policy, spoke in an interview with Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency. The 80-year-old scholar and Massachussets resident was in Berlin:

"Now nobody thinks they have the right to develop nuclear weapons, however that's a different issue. But the majority of the [American] population agrees [on Iran's right to enrich uranium]. ... Public opinion here overwhelmingly holds that Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy."

Mastering the enrichment of uranium is a key step toward building either a peaceful nuclear energy program or creating a homegrown atomic-bomb industry. The U.S., Israel and Europe accuse Iran of exploiting loopholes in international arms-control regulations to build nuclear-weapons capability. Iran has strongly denied the charge.

Chomsky is enormously popular in the Middle East, where his books are widely sold and translated. His critiques of U.S. Middle East policy are a huge hit with Iranians and Arabs.

In the interview published today, he said the U.S. had flubbed chances to improve relations and understanding between Tehran and Washington:

"With regard to Iran, a substantial segment of pretty mainstream opinion has been harshly critical of the confrontational approach and has called for negotiations and diplomacy. ... It did not happen because the extremism of the Bush administration was simply directed at making relations harsher, more bitter, militarizing them, and that's why the Bush administration even antagonized allies."

He criticized Western media for characterizing Iran's continued insistence on enriching uranium as a matter of concern for the entire world. "That's a funny definition of the 'world,' " he told the Islamic Republic News Agency. "The Non-Aligned Movement, for example, which is the majority of countries, endorses Iran's right to enrich uranium."

Iran policy has been a relatively major campaign issue in the presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama. Recently, a committee of mostly neoconservative scholars and politicians published a 117-page paper called "Meeting the Challenge," which argues for stronger sanctions or military confrontation as a way of ending Iran's enrichment program.

But Chomsky voiced optimism that the confrontation between Iran and the U.S. would be solved peacefully. "There is a strong establishment pressure ... moving toward a diplomatic and developmental approach rather than a military approach," he said. "The American popular opinion is strongly in support of it."

-- Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Photo: Noam Chomsky. Credit: First Run Features

 

IRAN: Noam Chomsky says Americans support Iran's right to nuclear energy | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times

Bipartisanship and Threats of War Toward Iran | CommonDreams.org

 

Published on Thursday, October 23, 2008 by Salon.com

Bipartisanship and Threats of War Toward Iran

by Glenn Greenwald

Two former Senators -- conservative Democrat Chuck Robb and conservative Republican Dan Coats (that's what "bipartisan" means) -- have a jointly authored Op-Ed in The Washington Post today decreeing what the U.S. must do towards Iran.  The essence:  Iran must be prevented, using any means necessary, from not only obtaining nuclear weapons, but also denied even "the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon," which means "the complete cessation of enrichment activities inside Iran," even for civilian purposes. 

To achieve that, the Patriot Act should be used to block all Iranian banks from any involvement in the U.S. economy and "our European allies [must] sever commercial relations with Tehran."  And this is what we should immediately prepare for:

The U.S. military is capable of launching a devastating strike on Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure -- probably with more decisive results than the Iranian leadership realizes.

An initial air campaign would probably last up to several weeks and would require vigilance for years to come. Military action would incur significant risks, including the possibility of U.S. and allied losses, wide-scale terrorist reprisals against Israel and other nations, and heightened unrest in the region.

Both to increase our leverage over Iran and to prepare for a military strike, if one were required, the next president will need to begin building up military assets in the region from day one.

They conclude with this grave warning:  "Time may be shorter than many imagine, and failure could carry a catastrophic cost to the national interest."

So here we have, yet again, our glorious Foreign Policy Community threatening another country -- one which hasn't attacked us and can't attack us -- with war, threatening to bomb them with "devastating strikes" that "would probably last up to several weeks and would require vigilance for years to come."  And they want the next President, beginning this January, to "build up military assets in the region" in order to threaten and prepare for those attacks.

It's just objectively true that there is no country in the world -- anywhere -- that threatens to attack and bomb other countries as routinely and blithely as the U.S. does.  What rational leader wouldn't want to obtain nuclear weapons in a world where the "superpower" is run by people like Dan Coates and Chuck Robb who threaten to attack and bomb whatever countries they want?  Even the Coats/Robb Op-Ed argues that Iranian proliferation would be so threatening to the U.S. because "the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon would effectively give Iran a nuclear deterrent" -- in other words, they'd have the ability to deter a U.S. attack on their country, and we can't have that.

And then there is the supreme irony that Coats, Robb and their war-threatening comrades justify an attack on Iran by referencing U.N. Resolutions which Iran is putatively violating, even though Article 2 of the U.N. Charter explicitly provides that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." Yet Supremely Serious Bipartisan Leaders like Coats and Robb who shape U.S. foreign policy -- along with the rest of our political establishment -- routinely violate that provision more than any other country in the world, by constantly threatening to invade and bomb a whole roster of other nations.

Not only does this war advocacy reflect the reckless militarism of our Foreign Policy Community, it also illustrates how deceptive is the Beltway concept of "bipartisanship."  In their Op-Ed, Coats and Robb are summarizing the "findings" of a new report (.pdf)  from what they call a "high-level task force, a politically diverse task force," and which The Post calls "the Bipartisan Policy Center's national security task force on Iran."  That task force was convened by the "Bipartisan Policy Center" -- an organization founded in 2007 by former Senator Majority Leaders George Mitchell, Howard Baker, Tom Daschele and Bob Dole which "seeks to develop policy solutions that make sense for the nation and can be embraced by both parties." 

The Center is basically a trite Broderian dream.  You see, as they piously trumpet, these Serious Leaders rise above the "partisanship [that] poisons our national dialogue" and instead engage in "respectful discourse across party lines"  in order to "develop policy solutions that make sense for the nation and can be embraced by both parties" -- such as bombing Iran for weeks (at least) and, if necessary, unilaterally starting a war that requires "years of vigilance."  Their Serious, pretty logo of a converging blue and red arc demonstrates how civil and harmonious they are.  Let's look at what this elevated "bipartisanship" really means in the case of the Iran report:

The Serious bipartisan task force that produced this war-threatening report employed two "consultants" which it described as "two leading Iran experts: Dr. Michael Rubin, and Mr. Ken Katzman."  "Dr. Michael Rubin" is the supremely crazed neocon of National Review and the American Enterprise Institute, a former Giuliani advisor who has a single-minded obsession with urging American war on Iran. Katzman is a less ideological D.C. bureaucrat who covers Iran for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service -- a competent expert by all appearances but hardly a counterweight to the extremist Rubin. 

So those are the two "experts" -- a raving neocon and a neutral technocrat -- on whom they relied.  And the conservative co-Chairmen -- Coats and Robb -- were joined on the 11-member panel by such disinterested beacons of bipartisan objectivity as:

• AIPAC loyalist Dennis Ross, current Chairman of The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute that includes scores of Israeli government officials;

• Steve Rademaker, a former Bush official and chief of staff to Bill Frist, current BGR lobbyist and Iran extremist (Iran "could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days");

• Kenneth R. Weinstein, a Weekly Standard contributor and chairman of the neoconservative Hudson Institute, which " frequently champions aggressive and Israel-centric U.S. foreign policies''; and,

• Henry Sokolski, former top aide to Paul Wolfowitz and Dan Quayle, and resident at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Hoover Institution.

The rest of the panel was composed of several retired military officials, such as McCain supporter Ret. Admiral Gregory "Grog" Johnson, and former Clinton administration Pentagon official Ashton Carter.  In other words, it was the very embodiment of Glorious Beltway "bipartisan" foreign policy tribunals -- numerous hard-core, right-wing ideologues sprinkled with a couple of like-minded right-wing Democrats and a neutral establishment technocrat or two, all endorsing a pre-ordained, flagrantly extremist, war-loving policy which is then deemed "the harmonious mainstream Center" which no Serious Person opposes.

Much is made of the vague and distorted "threats" issued by a rogue Iranian official, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  But here you have -- yet again -- the predominant, bipartisan faction inside the U.S. composed of leading political and military figures, announcing, in one of the country's most mainstream and influential media outlets, very specific plans to threaten, attack and bomb Iran, and to do so quickly and decisively, regardless of whether there is U.N. approval and regardless of whether Iran intends to attack the U.S.

Meanwhile, both presidential candidates, at least rhetorically, affirm the central premise (one must "do everything" to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including the use of force), and leading right-wing journals publish plans for bombing and invading Iran and seizing its oil assets until they agree to change its governnment to one that we approve.  There is a prevailing perception that the bipartisan Foreign Policy Community has learned its lesson from the Iraq debacle, but threats of war and endless war itself are their primary, indiscriminately used weapon and that has not changed.

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

Bipartisanship and Threats of War Toward Iran | CommonDreams.org

Daniel R. Coats and Charles S. Robb - Stopping A Nuclear Tehran - washingtonpost.com

 

By Daniel R. Coats and Charles S. Robb

Thursday, October 23, 2008; Page A19

It is likely that the first and most pressing national security issue the next president will face is the growing prospect of a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran. After co-chairing a recently concluded, high-level task force on Iranian nuclear development, we have come to believe that five principles must serve as the foundation of any reasonable, bipartisan and comprehensive Iranian policy.

First, an Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons capability would be strategically untenable. It would threaten U.S. national security, regional peace and stability, energy security, the efficacy of multilateralism, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. While a nuclear attack is the worst-case scenario, Iran would not need to employ a nuclear arsenal to threaten U.S. interests.

Simply obtaining the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon would effectively give Iran a nuclear deterrent and drastically multiply its influence in Iraq and the region. While we would welcome cooperation from a democratic Iran, allowing the Middle East to fall under the dominance of a radical clerical regime that supports terrorism should not be considered a viable option.

Second, we believe the only acceptable end state is the complete cessation of enrichment activities inside Iran. We foresee no combination of international inspections or co-ownership of enrichment facilities that would provide sufficient assurances that Iran is not producing weapons-grade fissile material.

Indeed, the enrichment facility at Natanz is already technically capable -- once Iran has a sufficient stockpile of low-enriched uranium -- of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear device in four weeks. That is more than fast enough to elude detection by international inspectors.

Furthermore, the U.N. Security Council on three occasions has called for the cessation of enrichment in Iran, and the International Atomic Energy Agency found Iran to be noncompliant with the NPT. The failure to enforce these mandates could be a fatal blow to the fragile international regime.

Third, while a diplomatic resolution is still possible, it can succeed only if we negotiate from a position of strength. This will require better coordination with our international partners and much stricter sanctions. Negotiations with Iran would probably be ineffective unless our European allies sever commercial relations with Tehran.

In addition to constructing alliances, it will be important to build leverage. Much could be done to strengthen U.S. financial sanctions -- whether by closing loopholes or using more powerful instruments, such as Section 311 of the Patriot Act, to deny Iranian banks access to the U.S. financial system.

If such a strategy succeeds in bringing Iran to the table, it is important that the United States and its allies set a timetable for negotiations. Otherwise, the Iranians may seek to delay until they achieve a nuclear weapons capability.

Fourth, so that Israel does not feel compelled to take unilateral action, the next president must credibly convince Jerusalem that the United States will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capability.

Fifth, while military action against Iran is feasible, it must remain an option of last resort. If all other approaches fail, the new president would have to weigh the risks of a failure to impede Iran's nuclear program sufficiently against the risks of a military strike. The U.S. military is capable of launching a devastating strike on Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure -- probably with more decisive results than the Iranian leadership realizes.

An initial air campaign would probably last up to several weeks and would require vigilance for years to come. Military action would incur significant risks, including the possibility of U.S. and allied losses, wide-scale terrorist reprisals against Israel and other nations, and heightened unrest in the region.

Both to increase our leverage over Iran and to prepare for a military strike, if one were required, the next president will need to begin building up military assets in the region from day one.

These principles are all supported unanimously by a politically diverse task force that was assembled by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The group, which includes former senior Democratic and Republican officials, retired four-star generals and admirals, and experts in nuclear proliferation and energy markets, offers a clear path for constructing an enduring, bipartisan consensus behind an effective U.S. policy on Iran.

It is crucial that, immediately after Election Day, Congress and the president-elect begin to work on the exceedingly difficult policy measures that will be required if the United States is to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability. Time may be shorter than many imagine, and failure could carry a catastrophic cost to the national interest.

Daniel R. Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, and Charles S. Robb, a former Democratic senator from Virginia, are co-chairmen of the Bipartisan Policy Center's national security task force on Iran.

Daniel R. Coats and Charles S. Robb - Stopping A Nuclear Tehran - washingtonpost.com

Obama Is Right About Talking to Iran - WSJ.com

 

These days in Washington and on the campaign trail Russia and Iran compete for the title of the greatest foreign policy challenge facing America.

Many have assumed that Russia can help solve the Iran problem, but few have considered that the reverse is also true. Iran is important to Russia's game plan and how Moscow weighs its options going forward. That makes talking to Iran an essential part of America's plans for containing Russia.

For Russia, an isolated Iran in conflict with the West is a boon. With Iran's rich gas reserves off limits, Russia can hold Europe hostage and divide NATO while also creating linkage between its support for international pressure on Iran and Western response to its aggression in the Caucasus.

Washington cannot resist a Russian sphere of influence stretching from the Black Sea to Aral Mountains unless it plays the Iran card to its advantage. That means dropping its objection to the flow of Iranian gas to Europe, and engaging Iran in talks on security and stability of the Caucasus.

During a recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Richard Cheney supported building Western-backed pipelines to supply Europe with natural gas. Without tapping into Russian or Iranian reserves, there is not enough gas in the region to make these pipelines viable.

Until Russia attacked Georgia this summer, Washington was concerned only with excluding Iran from the pipeline deals. Now that Washington is getting serious about confronting Russia, it has to put freeing Europe of Russia's clutches above punishing Iran for its nuclear program. America will have to accept building the new pipelines on the back of Iranian gas.

That will be a game-changer and Russia knows it. When Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went to Iran a year ago, Western capitals expected him to deliver a tough message to his hosts on the nuclear issue. But Mr. Putin was in Tehran for a different purpose. He offered support against American pressure in exchange for Iran staying away from the two Western-backed pipelines.

Not long after Mr. Putin's visit, the Russian energy giant Gazprom pledged $200 million for building a new Iran-Armenia pipeline as the Iranian press hinted that Tehran was considering taking shelter under a Russian security umbrella by putting Russian bases on Iranian soil.

But since Russia overturned the apple cart in Georgia, the Iranian calculation has changed. Tehran has much to worry about an expansionist Russia stirring ethnic conflict and settling territorial disputes by force. Iran has been resisting Russian claims to a greater share of the Caspian Sea and, furthermore, fears ethnic troubles spilling over its border with the Caucasus.

For many Iranians, separation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia is also a troubling reminder of how Joseph Stalin tried to do the same with two Iranian provinces in 1946.

This provides the United States with an opportunity. Washington has already understood Iran's importance to achieving American goals in Afghanistan and Iraq. It engaged Tehran over Afghanistan's future in 2001 and over Iraq's security in 2007. The high-stakes game in the Caucasus similarly justifies talking to Iran.

During his recent visit to New York, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran was not happy with the carving up of Georgia and that the independence and territorial integrity of Georgia can be a principle that the U.S. and Iran could agree on. America can start talks with Iran as part of a regional dialogue on common security interests and the promise of energy exports. Only by engaging Iran will America draw a wedge between Moscow and Tehran and weaken Russia's hand.

Talking to Iran is good Russia policy. Barack Obama has been right all along. American foreign policy will successfully deal with the world's complex tangle of challenges when it takes diplomacy seriously. And nowhere will the far-reaching impact of diplomacy be more evident than in sorting out the twin challenges of Russia and Iran.

Mr. Nasr, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Obama Is Right About Talking to Iran - WSJ.com

Warning signs of an Israeli strike on Iran | David Owen - Times Online

 

David Owen

Some key decision makers in Israel fear that unless they attack Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities in the next few months, while George W Bush is still president, there will not be another period when they can rely on the United States as being anywhere near as supportive in the aftermath of a unilateral attack.

In the past 40 years there have been few occasions when I have been more concerned about a specific conflict escalating to involve, economically, the whole world. We are watching a disinformation exercise involving a number of intelligence services. Reality is becoming ever harder to disentangle.

Last month a story in The Guardian claimed that on May 14 Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, in a meeting with Bush, had asked for a green light to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. We were told that Bush refused. He believed Iran would see the United States as being behind any such assault and Americans would come under renewed attack in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shipping in the Gulf would be vulnerable. We were told that the source of the story was a European head of government and “his” officials – as if to exclude Angela Merkel and Germany. It is, however, improbable that Israel abandoned its option to take unilateral action.

Three weeks later the Israeli military conducted an exercise over the Mediterranean to demonstrate to the United States as well as Iran that it could attack. More recently there have been a number of stories raising concern about what is happening in Iran. One said Iran’s first nuclear electricity generating plant would go critical in December and thereafter any air attack would become impossible since it would trigger a nuclear explosion. Then we were told that a US radar system had been deployed in Israel with US personnel to strengthen Israel’s defence against Iranian airstrikes. There was also an interview with Olmert where he dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel should attack Iran. He appeared to be trying to disrupt the Israeli coalition negotiations.

Finally, on Friday, The New York Times revealed that in February an IAEA inspector had talked of experiments in Iran that were “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon”. Iran denied the claim.

Before the Israeli negotiations got under way, Ehud Barak, the Labour leader, spoke first to Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud opposition party, rather than to Tzipi Livni, the newly elected leader of Kadima. This indicated that Barak was interested in an all-party coalition, presumably believing that a Palestinian settlement is not yet achievable and that Israel needs maximum unity to deal with a world transfixed by the economic crisis and resigned to Iran becoming a nuclear weapon state.

If Israel were to attack Iran, one Iranian response would be to block the Strait of Hormuz. On September 16 Iran said its Revolutionary Guards would defend the Gulf waters. In the narrow strait just one oil tanker sunk would halt shipping for months. Insurance cover would be refused and owners would fear the risks of sailing even if the US navy cleared mines.

The Revolutionary Guards are committed to a war against Israel and prepared, in the process, to take on the rest of the world. They have good equipment and operate from the land, sea and air. They will be suicide soldiers, seamen and airmen. If Iran is attacked, Russia and China will supply it with arms.

The circumstances surrounding Georgia’s decision to attack South Ossetia are worth remembering. The Georgian president was advised by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, not to attack but there were powerful voices in Washington that, by a nod and a wink, were encouraging action, so the Georgian government felt confident in going ahead.

Following an Israeli attack and Iranian countermeasures, the American military would be bound to follow Bush’s orders. The president-designate or, if before the election, the two candidates, would be wary of criticising him. It is imperative that voices are raised in America and Europe to warn Israel off unilateral action against Iran. The experience of Georgia has given an amber, if not a green, light to Israel and only Bush can switch that to red.

Bush’s legacy would be best served by taking dramatic diplomatic action to prevent a war with Iran. He should publicly warn Israel that the United States will use its air power to prevent it bombing Iran, while announcing that he is sending Rice to Tehran to start negotiating a grand bargain whereby all sanctions would be lifted if Iran forgoes the nuclear weapons option. He could indicate that the negotiations would not continue indefinitely, but they would give his successor, as president, time to consider all the options, military and economic. It would also allow time for Israel either to negotiate a coalition to last until 2010 or to hold elections. It would replace the present multilateral negotiations, which are stalled with Russia and China unwilling to move on strong economic sanctions. Above all, it would be a last act of real statesmanship from Bush who is otherwise destined to end his term a miserable failure.

David Owen was foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979

Warning signs of an Israeli strike on Iran | David Owen - Times Online

The New York Times: Making Nuclear Extermination Respectable

 

On July 18, 2008 The New York Times published an

article by Israeli-Jewish historian, Professor Benny Morris, advocating an Israeli nuclear-genocidal attack on Iran with the likelihood of killing 70 million Iranians – 12 times the number of Jewish victims in the Nazi holocaust:

“ Iran ’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Barring this, the best they could hope for is that Israel ’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.”

Morris is a frequent lecturer and consultant to the Israeli political and military establishment and has unique access to Israeli strategic military planners. Morris’ advocacy and public support of the massive, brutal expulsion of all Palestinians is on public record. Yet his genocidal views have not precluded his receiving numerous academic awards. His writings and views are published in Israel ’s leading newspapers and journals. Morris’ views are not the idle ranting of a marginal psychopath, as witnessed by the recent publication of his latest op-ed article in the New York Times.

What does the publication by the New York Times of an article, which calls for the nuclear incineration of 70 million Iranians and the contamination of the better part of a billion people in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, tell us about US politics and culture? For it is the NYT, which informs the ‘educated classes’ in the US, its Sunday supplements, literary and editorial pages and which serves as the ‘moral conscience’ of important sectors of the cultural, economic and political elite.

The New York Times provides a certain respectability to mass murder, which Morris’ views otherwise would not possess if say, they were published in the neo-conservative weeklies or monthlies. The fact that the NYT considers the prospect of an Israeli mass extermination of millions of Iranians part of the policy debate in the Middle East reveals the degree to which Zionofascism has infected the ‘higher’ cultural and journalist circles of the United States. Truth to say, this is the logical outgrowth of the Times public endorsement of Israel ’s economic blockade to starve 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza ; the Times’ cover-up of Israeli-Zionist-AIPAC influence in launching the US invasion of Iraq leading to over one million murdered Iraqi citizens.

The Times sets the tone for the entire New York cultural scene, which privileges Israeli interests, to the point of assimilating into the US political discourse not only its routine violations of international law, but its threats, indeed promises, to scorch vast areas of the earth in pursuit of its regional supremacy. The willingness of the NYT to publish an Israeli genocide-ethnocide advocate tells us about the strength of the ties between a purportedly ‘liberal establishment’ pro-Israel publication and the totalitarian Israeli right: It is as if to say that for the liberal pro-Israel establishment, the nonJewish Nazis are off limits, but the views and policies of Judeo-fascists need careful consideration and possible implementation.

Morris’ New York Times ‘nuclear-extermination’ article did not provoke any opposition from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO) because, in its daily information bulletin, Daily Alert, it has frequently published articles by Israeli and US Zionists advocating an Israeli and/or US nuclear attack on Iran . In other words, Morris’ totalitarian views are part of the cultural matrix deeply embedded in the Zionist organizational networks and its extensive ‘reach’ in US cultural and political circles. What the Times did in publishing Morris’ lunacy has taken genocidal discourse out of the limited circulation of Zionist influentials and into the mainstream of millions of American readers.

Apart from a handful of writers (Gentile and Jewish) publishing in marginal web sites, there was no political or moral condemnation from the entire literary, political and journalistic world of this affront to our humanity. No attempt was made to link Morris’ totalitarian genocidal policies to Israel ’s public official threats and preparations for nuclear war. There is no anti-nuclear campaign led by our most influential public intellectuals to repudiate the state ( Israel ) and its public intellectuals who prepare a nuclear war with the potential to exterminate more than ten times the number of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.

A nuclear incineration of the nation of Iran is the Israeli counterpart of Hitler’s gas chambers and ovens writ large. Extermination is the last stage of Zionism: Informed by the doctrine of rule the Middle East or ruin the air and land of the world. That is the explicit message of Benny Morris (and his official Israeli sponsors), who like Hitler, issues ultimatums to the Iranians, ‘surrender or be destroyed’ and who threatens the US, join us in bombing Iran or face a world ecological and economic catastrophe.

That Morris is utterly, starkly and clinically insane is beyond question. That the New York Times in publishing his genocidal ravings provides new signs of how power and wealth has contributed to the degeneration of Jewish intellectual and cultural life in the US . To comprehend the dimensions of this decay we need only compare the brilliant tragic-romantic German-Jewish writer, Walter Benjamin, desperately fleeing the advance of totalitarian Nazi terror to the Israeli-Jewish writer, Benny Morris’ criminal advocacy of Zionist nuclear terror published in the New York Times.

The question of Zionist power in America is not merely a question of a ‘lobby’ influencing Congressional and White House decisions concerning foreign aid to Israel . What is at stake today are the related questions of the advocacy of a nuclear war in which 70 million Iranians face extermination and the complicity of the US mass media in providing a platform, nay a certain political respectability for mass murder and global contamination. Unlike the Nazi past, we cannot claim, as the good Germans did, that ‘we did not know’ or ‘we weren’t notified’, because it was written by an eminent Israeli academic and was published in the New York Times.

Professor Petras latest book is Zionism, Militarism And the Decline of U.S Power (Clarity Press Atlanta ), August 2008

The New York Times: Making Nuclear Extermination Respectable

Former officials say Iranians helped on al-Qaida - International Herald Tribune

 

WASHINGTON: Iran rounded up hundreds of Arabs to help the United States counter al-Qaida after the Sept. 11 attack after they crossed the border from Afghanistan, a former Bush administration official said Tuesday. Many were expelled, Hillary Mann Leverett said, and the Iranians made copies of almost 300 of their passports.

The copies were sent to Kofi Annan, then the secretary-general of the United Nations, who passed them to the United States, and U.S. interrogators were given a chance by Iran to question some of the detainees, Leverett said in an Associated Press interview.

Leverett, a Middle East expert who was a career U.S. Foreign Service officer, said she negotiated with Iran for the Bush administration in the 2001-3 period, and Iran sought a broader relationship with the United States. "They thought they had been helpful on al-Qaida, and they were," she said.

For one thing, she said, Iran denied sanctuary to suspected al-Qaida operatives.

Some administration officials took the view, however, that Iran had not acknowledged all likely al-Qaida members nor provided access to them, Leverett said.

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Many of the expelled Arabs were deported to Saudi Arabia and other Arab and Muslim countries, even though Iran had poor relations with the Saudi monarchy and some other countries in the region, Leverett said. Iranians are Persian, not Arab, and most belong to the Shiite sect of Islam rather than the Sunni, the majority sect in most Arab countries.

James F. Dobbins, the Bush administration's chief negotiator on Afghanistan in late 2001, said Iran was "comprehensively helpful" in the aftermath of the 9-11 attack in 2001 in working to overthrow the Taliban militias' rule and collaborating with the United States to install the Karzai government in Kabul.

Iranian diplomats made clear at the time they were looking for broader cooperation with the United States, but the Bush administration was not interested, the author of "After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan," said in a separate interview.

The Bush administration has acknowledged contacts with Iran over the years even while denouncing Iran as part of an "axis of evil" and declining to consider resumption of diplomatic relations.

"It isn't something that is talked about," Leverett said in describing Iran's role during a forum at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute.

Leverett and her husband, Flynt Leverett, a former career CIA analyst and a former National Security Council official, jointly proposed that the U.S. president who replaces George W. Bush in January seek a "grand bargain" with Iran to settle all major outstanding differences.

"The next president needs to reorient U.S. policy toward Iran as fundamentally as President Nixon did with China in the 1970s," Flynt Leverett said. Richard Nixon, a political conservative, opened the U.S.-China relationship by among other things visiting the communist country.

Among provisions of the Leveretts' recommended new Iran policy: The United States would clarify that it is not seeking change in the nature of Iran's Islamic government but rather its policies, while Iran would agree to "certain limits" on its nuclear program.

Iran considers most of its neighbors as its enemies. Among incentives for improving U.S. relations, the Leveretts said, is they feel that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia would be less provocative with a friendlier U.S.-Iranian relationship.

Former officials say Iranians helped on al-Qaida - International Herald Tribune

Iran, the IAEA, and the Laptop - by Muhammad Sahimi

 

by Muhammad Sahimi

In August 2002, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an armed Iranian opposition group listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization but supported by the neoconservatives within and without the Pentagon, provided the first concrete evidence of the existence of Iran's uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. In February 2003, Iran formally declared the existence of the facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Since then, Iran's nuclear facilities and program have undergone the most intrusive and time-consuming inspections in the history of the IAEA, including from October 2003-February 2006, when Iran voluntarily implemented the provisions of the Additional Protocol of its Safeguards (SG) Agreement with the IAEA, which it had signed but not ratified.

Despite the intrusive inspections and intense propaganda, which consisted mostly of lies, exaggerations, half-truths, and dire predictions by the neoconservatives, the War Party, and the Israel Lobby, the IAEA could identify only a few breaches of Iran's SG Agreement – none serious – and what ultimately turned out to be non-issues altogether.

According to Iran's SG Agreement, a breach happens when Iran

1. Receives nuclear materials and/or technology without declaring them to the IAEA, and
2. Carries out secret experiments with its declared or undeclared nuclear materials.

Iran has acknowledged breaching its SG Agreement by failing to report to the Agency the following activities:

In February 2003 Iran acknowledged that in 1991 it imported from China 1800 kg of uranium compounds, and that it used some of them in experiments to test its conversion processes.

In October 2003 Iran acknowledged that it had used a small amount of its imported uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in the P1 centrifuges at its centrifuge workshop. Up to 19 centrifuges had been used.Note that the establishment of the centrifuge workshop is not, by itself, a breach of the SG Agreement. In fact, so long as nuclear materials have not been introduced into the centrifuges, even their manufacturing does not concern the IAEA.

Iran acknowledged that from 1989-1993 it carried out experiments that produced polonium-210, a highly radioactive but unstable material with a short half-life. While polonium-210 does have civilian applications (such as radioisotope batteries), it can theoretically be used for initiating the fission chain reactions that result in a nuclear explosion. Due to its instability, however, polonium-210 is not used for this purpose.

Iran acknowledged importing in 1993 50 kg of natural uranium metal and using 30 kg of it for experimenting with atomic vapor laser isotope separation. Note that, it was the U.S. in the 1970s that suggested to Iran the idea of uranium enrichment by lasers, and sold it four laser instruments in 1978, only a few months before the Iranian Revolution.

Between 1988 and 1993 Iran carried out experiments on plutonium separation, using very small amounts of uranium oxide (UO₂).

In addition, there were certain other contentious issues between Iran and the IAEA that turned to be non-issues:

1. The past and current administration of Iran's Gechin uranium mine and mill (near Bandar Abbas in southern Iran). The IAEA was concerned about secret use of uranium from the mine by Iran's military.
2. Procurement of certain equipment, with potential nuclear applications, and their use by researchers at Sharif University of Technology, one of Iran's top universities.
3. The source of nuclear contamination at a physics research laboratory in Lavisan-Shian near Tehran.
4. The procurement activities of the former head of the same physics research laboratory. The IAEA was concerned that he had been used as a cover for clandestine nuclear activities.
5. Iran's possession of a 15-page document that described the procedures for converting UF₆ into uranium metal and casting and machining enriched uranium metal into hemispheres, suitable for a nuclear weapon.

So, though it may seem that Iran was in deep trouble with the IAEA, it certainly was not. The Iranians turned out to be more truthful than George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the neocons. In its Feb. 22, 2008, report to the Board of Governors of the IAEA, the Agency declared satisfactory resolution of all the above issues and non-issues.

For example, Iran had contended that the 15-page document had been provided by A. Q. Khan with the design for the P1 centrifuges in 1987, as a sweetener for future deals, without Iran asking for it. After checking with Pakistan, the IAEA confirmed Iran's contention.

Regarding the contamination issue, which the neocons and the Israel Lobby had declared as the missing "smoking gun," the IAEA environmental sampling and tests confirmed Iran's explanation that they had been brought into the country by the imported centrifuge parts. The IAEA declared that its analysis "tends, on balance, to support Iran's statement."

Documents From the Stolen Laptop

Given the February 2008 report, it would have been reasonable to expect that Iran's case before the Board of Governors, and even the United Nations Security Council, would be closed. Absolutely not! The U.S. and its European allies have no intention of letting Iran off the hook, even when they have nothing to press it with.

It has been a pattern that each time the IAEA declares its satisfaction with Iran's explanations for any issue, new allegations and questions are raised, and Iran's response to them is declared "urgent" and its timing a "defining moment." This time was no exception.

After declaring its satisfaction with all the above issues and non-issues, Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's deputy director general of safeguards – a man who has a reputation inconsistent with impartiality and objectivity – presented a briefing to the Board of Governors in Vienna in which he presented a dark view of Iran's nuclear program under the guise of "Agency Evaluation," as if his employer had not just declared its satisfaction with the resolution of many issues that, up until then, had been considered "crucial" and "critical." In fact, there are persistent rumors about tension between Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA's director-general, and his SG experts.

Heinonen spoke about three supposedly secret projects: Project 5 for converting UO₂ to "green salt" (so named due to its color and smell) or uranium tetrafluoride (UF₄), an intermediate compound in the conversion of uranium ore to gaseous UF₆; Projects 110 and 111 for the design of device and re-entry vehicle for a missile; and Project 3.12 for testing high-power explosives. They were supposedly led by Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a 40-year-old physicist, not a nuclear engineer as has been reported in the West, who received his Ph.D. from Shiraz University in southern Iran and works openly in physics research institutes in Tehran. The same type of accusations was repeated in the IAEA's reports presented to the Board of Governors on May 26, 2008, and Sept. 15, 2008.

What was the source of the new "information" and "data" that Heinonen was talking about? A laptop that had been purportedly stolen in Iran, taken out of the country, and made available to Western intelligence agencies in Turkey. Iran's MEK has been given credit for the theft.

But the existence of the laptop has been known since 2004. The first time there was any indirect reference to it was on Nov. 17, 2004, when, in a conversation with reporters, then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell briefly referred to "new, missile-related" intelligence on Iran.

Shortly thereafter, articles were published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times about the laptop they claimed contained the "smoking gun" for Iran's (nonexistent) nuclear weapon program. Journalist Gareth Porter cited reports that the laptop had been given to the MEK by Israel.

My own information indicates that, because the MEK is completely discredited in Iran, Israel's first preference was for the laptop to be publicized by Iran's monarchist opposition groups (which are supported by Iranian Jews in the U.S. and Europe), but that they had refused to go along (some of the most senior statesmen among the Iranian monarchists actually support Iran's nuclear program).

In July 2005, the Bush administration began exerting pressure on the United Nations to take action against Iran and, as part of its concerted efforts, it briefed Dr. ElBaradei on the contents of the laptop on July 18. But then the U.S. stopped pressing the issue.

Most experts have cast doubt on the authenticity of the laptop's documents. A senior European diplomat was quoted by the New York Times' William J. Broad and David E. Sanger in a Nov. 13, 2005, article as saying, "I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt." Another European official said, "Yeah, so what? How do you know what you're shown on a slide is true, given past experience?"

A senior intelligence official was quoted as saying, "It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that beautiful pictures represent reality, but that may not be the case." Another U.S. official was quoted as saying, "Even with the best intelligence, you always ask yourself, 'was this prepared for my eyes?'" Julian Borger of the Guardian quoted an IAEA official as saying "there is some doubt over the provenance of the computer."

Commenting on the New York Times article, David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington said that "the information [in the laptop's documents] actually describes a reentry vehicle for a missile. This distinction is not minor. The information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead. The 'black box' carried by the reentry vehicle may appear to be a nuclear warhead, but the documents do not state what the warhead is." In other words, even if the documents are authentic, they do not prove anything about the existence of a secret nuclear weapon program in Iran. The New York Times refused to publish Albright's rebuttal of the claims made in the article by Broad and Sanger.

Aside from the above experts' opinions, there are many reasons to believe that the documents are not authentic.

1. Anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of how the Iranian political establishment works knows that often even the most harmless documents are classified as "top secret." Yet none of the documents had been designated as such.
2. As Borger of the Guardian reported, all the documents are in English, without any Persian notes. That is odd for a country where the official language is Persian, and many do not know much English. Why had the documents not been translated?
3. If the documents include exchanges between various officials, then anyone with even elementary knowledge of the workings of the Iranian bureaucracy knows that, once a document is received by some official, he writes (in Persian) in the margins in his own hand "received," and signs and dates it. Do the documents have such notes?
4. Why would the documents name the projects' leader, Dr. Fakhrizadeh? Iran has had experience with the murder of prominent people in its missile program. In July 2001, Col. Ali Mahmoudi Mimand, known as the father of Iran's missile program, was found dead in his office. After the laptop was supposedly smuggled out of Iran, Dr. Ardeshir Hassanpour, a prominent and award-winning figure in Iran's nuclear program, was murdered on Jan. 15, 2007. Stratfor.com reported that Israel's Mossad had murdered Dr. Hassanpour. We also know that a large number of Iraqi nuclear scientists have either disappeared or been killed. Why does a man like Dr. Fakhrizadeh, who supposedly knows so much of Iran's secrets, work and appear in public so freely?
5. Why could Iran not hide such documents? This is a nation that could hide the development of its extensive uranium enrichment program for 18 years. Iran is also a nation with a thousand-year culture of writing in coded language.
6. Why would such sensitive documents be put on a laptop? Even then, why was the laptop not at a secure place with very tight control, given the degree of secrecy that the Iranian government applies to all of its affairs?
7. Iran's Ministry of Intelligence (MI) is known in the Middle East as a ruthless and extremely efficient organization. If the laptop with all the sensitive documents had been stolen, its absence should have been noticed almost immediately. In that case, Iran's MI should have been able to at least trace back the events in order to identify the person who stole the laptop. There has never been a report in Iran about the discovery of such a spy.
8. If the documents were authentic, then, given that some time after the laptop had been stolen, the Iranian officials knew that they would be confronted with the documents, they should have been able to prepare reasonable and plausible explanations for the documents. After all, as noticed above, Iran provided satisfactory answers to all the issues and non-issues listed above. Yet Iran's only response so far has been that the documents are forgeries.
9. Some of the documents describe and discuss issues that can be found in the open literature. Some others have to do with Iran's conventional arms industry, which Iran has readily admitted and talked about. Therefore, it would be easy to copy such documents, or create some based on the available information.
10. Why would Iran have a separate project for the green salt when it has openly, and under the IAEA's Safeguards, established the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan that produces the same uranium compounds?
11. Even if some of the documents are authentic, how do we know that, for example, they are not just indicative of Iran's efforts for its missile program?
12. If the documents contain such devastating information, why did the U.S. and its allies wait four years to confront Iran? After all, the documents seem to provide the long-missing "smoking gun." In fact, at first the U.S. made much noise about the laptop, and asked for and convened an emergency meeting of the Board of Governors of the IAEA in January 2006. But then it stopped crying "wolf."
13. The contention is that the laptop was stolen by a member of the MEK. However, it is practically impossible for the MEK to be able to penetrate the Iranian government at such a sensitive level. After the MEK started its armed opposition to the Islamic Republic in June 1981 and assassinated many top government officials, its member were ruthlessly eliminated from all levels of Iran's bureaucracy.

Digital Chain of Custody

Although very difficult, if not impossible, one might argue that one can find plausible answers to the above questions. However, one crucial piece of information about the laptop and its contents can shed definitive light on the authenticity of the documents. This is the documents' digital chain of custody, which has not been discussed or mentioned. It is defined as "An account documenting data at a particular place and time." It is a technique by which one can trace back electronically stored documents on a computer to their original source – the electronic source from which they were copied, or when and how the documents were uploaded electronically, etc. If done in a forensically sound manner, it will generate a digital fingerprint. Then, a credible forensic test can reveal when or how different versions of the documents were created.

Therefore, it should not be difficult to analyze the digital chain of custody of the laptop's documents, in order to better understand their original source. That would settle at once the question of the documents' authenticity. Iran has asked to see the laptop in order to analyze it, but the IAEA has responded that its source does not allow that.

Dr. ElBaradei has said repeatedly that the IAEA is bound to "follow due process, which means I need to establish the veracity, consistency, and authenticity of any intelligence, and share it with the country of concern." But once again, in Iran's case this established procedure has not been followed. Iran has not even been presented with an analysis of the digital chain of custody of the documents, indicating their authenticity. Yet it is being pressed to respond to charges of doubtful legitimacy

Iran, the IAEA, and the Laptop - by Muhammad Sahimi

WAR INFO: Bomb-Bomb Iran: To Avert EMP Attack?

 

10/05/2008

Bomb-Bomb Iran: To Avert EMP Attack?

According to the Guardian, a few months ago President Bush put the kibosh on Israel's plan to take out, in a preventative strike, Iran's nuclear facilities, despite all being duly subject to a Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, as required by the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Because Bush deemed such an attack to be immoral? To be contrary to the UN Charter? A violation of UN Security Council Resolution 487? Would further undermine the IAEA-NPT nuke proliferation-prevention regime?
No, No. Bush was reportedly concerned that the Iranians might retaliate for the dastardly Israeli deed and that said retaliation might disrupt oil shipments from the Persian Gulf, causing gasoline prices in America to go sky-high, just before the election.
Now comes a seemingly authoritative report that Russia's crushing retaliation for the Georgian attack on South Ossetia has put the kibosh on Israel's alternative plan; to launch that "preventative strike" from airfields in Southern Georgia.
Perhaps those reports are all true. How else to account for the spectacle of various neo-crazies and Likudniks, running around in circles of diminishing radius, muttering to themselves or shrieking incoherently.
Take Frank Gaffney, for instance, for the last 30 years or so a lickspittle of Likudnik Grand Pooh-Bah Richard Perle.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV, Gaffney essentially warned that "any day" now, Iran could detonate exo-atmospherically, somewhere over Kansas, a specially designed multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon, which could wipe out our entire electricity grid, causing a "catastrophic disaster."
"Such an attack could really cripple our 21st-century society, and I would suggest sort of push us back into preindustrial society in the blink of an eye. It would translate over time – not immediately but over time – into the deaths of perhaps as many as nine out of 10 Americans, because our society simply can't be sustained without electricity and all of the infrastructure that supports our urban settings."
So, Gaffney appears to have gone from Likudnik neo-crazy to just plain crazy. What could conceivably have moved Gaffney to make such charges?
Well, way back in 2004, the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack delivered its final report [.pdf] to Congress.
The Commission had been asked to assess – among other things – "the nature and magnitude of potential high-altitude EMP threats to the United States from all potentially hostile states or non-state actors that have or could acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles enabling them to perform a high-altitude EMP attack against the United States within the next 15 years."
You see, back in Operation Dominic, a series of nuke tests we conducted over the Pacific in 1962, we learned – much to our surprise – then when a multi-megaton-yield anti-ballistic-missile nuke warhead is detonated at the very high altitudes where incoming Soviet nuke warheads would be intercepted, in addition to destroying the incoming Soviet warhead, our ABM nuke's enhanced radiation also produces extreme charge separation in the underlying atmosphere. That is, the atoms in the air are not merely ionized – separated into positively-charged ions and negatively-charged electrons – but gadzillions of those ionization electrons are driven far away from the ions, creating humongous high-frequency dipole radio transmitters.
The resulting multi-frequency electromagnetic pulse – EMP – can interfere catastrophically with the operation of certain kinds of electrical and electronic systems at considerable distances. That first high-altitude megaton-yield nuke test over Johnson Island resulted in power system failures in Hawaii, more than 700 miles away.
Once the EMP effect was discovered, we did two things. One was to spend a zillion dollars EMP-proofing all military electrical and electronic components and weapons systems.
The second was to see if specially designed nukes of much lower yield could produce EMP as the primary "kill mechanism."
According to the Commission, China and Russia have done the same. In fact, in May 1999, during the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, high-ranking members of the Russian Duma, meeting with a U.S. congressional delegation to discuss the Balkans conflict, reportedly raised the specter of a Russian EMP attack that would paralyze the United States.
The Commission concluded that such an attack – non-lethal, in and of, itself – "has the potential to hold our society at risk and might result in defeat of our military forces."
Now the Commission has burped again, this time detailing the grizzly details of what might happen if Russia or China or someone with that EMP-capability did attack us. Whereupon, Gaffney, on behalf of frustrated Likudniks, goes on Newsmax to warn that "any day" now, Iran could detonate exo-atmospherically, somewhere over Kansas, a specially designed multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon, which could wipe out our entire electricity grid, causing a "catastrophic disaster."
Of course, it is one thing for Russia or China to have that capability. It is quite another for a "potentially hostile state or non-state actor" to develop or acquire such a capability.
Is it conceivable that Iran could develop such a capability? Iran – one of the very largest producers of oil and natural gas in the world – can't even construct the refineries it needs to produce enough gasoline for its population.
In any case, if Iran was to somehow acquire a multi-megaton nuke (from the Russians or the Chinese?), why do the Likudniks think you're stupid enough to believe their claim that the Iranians would choose some non-lethal use for it? Like using a magic carpet to haul it up 50 miles or so above Kansas and detonating it? Is that what you'd do? Or would you use eight tiny reindeer?
Do the Likudniks really believe that you're stupid enough to believe that if the Israelis don't launch a "preventative strike" against the Mullahs and the Iranian IAEA-Safeguarded facilities this year or early next year that nine out of ten of us will – if we're the lucky ones – freeze in the dark?
Now, Gaffney apparently told Newsmax TV that he had been "an Assistant Secretary of Defense" – a PAS position, requiring Senate confirmation – "under Ronald Reagan" and if he did, he told them a bald-faced lie. He never was.
In fact, when Assistant Secretary Perle attempted to get the Senate to confirm his lickspittle, Gaffney, as his successor, the reaction of the Senate Armed Services Committee staff was – to put it politely – negative.
You can see why.

WAR INFO: Bomb-Bomb Iran: To Avert EMP Attack?