'Referral of Iran to the security council is a trap set by the US knowing full well that China and probably Russia will veto any military action and the way will be paved for the US to take preventative action in order to defend itself and its allies from any threat to international stability'

discuss

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

I can't see why all the fuss myself. Does Iran have the right to develop its nuclear capabilities? i haven't heard a reason why not. Its a cheap and efficient source of power. As for its military uses, they are along way off from having any sort of weapons capability. Moreover, its not like they are operating outside the non-proleferation treaty by enriching uranium. After all they only stopped that process whilst in negotiations with the EU 3. It seems to me that there is one rule for some states and a different rule for others.

Referral to the security council seems like a huge over-reaction and likely to entrench and increase support for extremists like Ahmadinejihad, or whatever his name is. I just watched an interview with Bill Clinton there and although he supports referral to the UN, he believes that the situation should be handled very delicately as it is the one issue in Iranian politics that unites the pro-western reformist types and hard-line Islamists.

Whatever happens, I hope our leaders act rationally and with intelligence. Antagonism, political posturing and stand-offs lead people down roads they wish they hadn't went down. After previous disasters that are all too fresh in the mind, I for one don't want to see history repeating itself.

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

Dealing With Iran a Conundrum for West

By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer

VIENNA, Austria - A growing number of countries are backing moves to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions. But with military action all but ruled out and the difficulty of imposing effective sanctions, their tools appear few and flawed.

The main threat for now is referral to the Security Council. But Iran was defiant Friday, vowing to further limit international monitoring of its nuclear activities if hauled before the United Nations.

It was left to some of Tehran's main critics to tone down the confrontation, with officials from France and Germany saying it was too early to speak of sanctions.

That stance appeared to be a recognition of the lack of unity among the Security Council's five veto-carrying members, as well as doubts about the effectiveness of economic sanctions, given the world's thirst for oil.

The United States — the key backer of harsh sanctions against Iran, which it says wants to make nuclear arms — can count on Britain's backing in the Security Council. France, too, may go along out of frustration with two years of trying — and failing — to persuade Tehran to give up uranium enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear arms.

But Russia and China, who also have veto power, could prove hard to persuade.

Iran buys most of its weapons from Moscow and Beijing. Russia has nearly completed work on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor and is the key contractor for Tehran's plans to build more. China is making energy deals with Iran — it owns a 50 percent stake in its Yadavaran oil fields and has contracted for 250 million tons of Iranian liquefied natural gas worth some $70 billion.

Moscow has toughened its tone since Iran resumed uranium conversion on Tuesday. Still, Alexei Malashenko, a researcher with the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow office, dismissed the new stance as a gesture to its Western allies.

"Russia will never give up its cooperation with Tehran," he told the daily Vremya Novostei.

China is considered likely to oppose tough sanctions. On Friday, its U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, questioned the wisdom of referral, saying that "might complicate the issue."

But even if all five agree on the need for sanctions, the question of how to punish Iran is difficult.

"Full economic sanctions almost work too well," said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector in Iraq who runs the Institute for Science and International Security. "They kill a lot of civilians, and nobody wants that."

The tough sanctions on Iraq resulted in civilian suffering and led to the U.N. oil for food program — essentially an anti-sanction measure approved by the same powers that set the punishments in the first place.

Most experts say Iran would be hurt if its energy exports are targeted, since oil and gas sales amount to 69 percent of the country's annual budget.

But in an energy-hungry world, prohibiting OPEC's second-largest producer from doing international business would be a double-edged sword — even a one-day disruption in natural gas deliveries from Russia this month sent the European Union into emergency mode.

"Even for nations that don't directly import from Iran, any disruption in imports affects prices," said Valerie Marcel, energy specialist at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. "And Asia, with its dependence on Iranian energy, would be directly hurt."

Friedemann Mueller of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin warned that pulling the daily 2.7 million barrels of Iranian oil off the market "would set off an enormous price movement."

And energy expert Ken Stern, managing director of the New York office of FTI Consulting, questioned how effective such sanctions would be if the goal is replacing the present leadership with one more willing to listen to international concerns.

"History has show us that political considerations can trump economic conditions," he said, alluding to the lack of effect the Iraq embargo had in unseating Saddam Hussein.

British politician Michael Ancram suggested Iran be expelled from soccer's World Cup over its nuclear program.

But Andreas Herren, a spokesman for FIFA, soccer's governing body, said any such move would have to be initiated by governments or international political organizations. "FIFA is a sporting organization and not a political organization," he said from its Zurich, Switzerland.

Military action remains as a last-resort means of "regime change."

Israel and the United States, the two nations Iran considers its most implacable enemies and the most likely to resort to such means, have refused to categorically rule out such action. But they say it's not in the cards anytime soon. And their reluctance is understandable.

Iran's nuclear installations are scattered and hidden, and intelligence on them is weak. That would rule out the success of a single devastating airstrike of the kind Israel carried out against Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981.

Only the United States would be capable of carrying out the other combat scenario — a full scale invasion to topple the regime. But it has its hands full in Iraq.

And U.S. military strategists recognize that invading Iran — large, rugged, and with forces led by battle-hardened veterans of the 1980-1988 war against Iraq — could backfire.

"I think the people would unite behind their leadership — even those critical of the leadership now," said Albright. "They would be willing to live under all kinds of hardship to battle an invader."

Depends how you view success. That strike by Israel whilst successful in halting Iraqs then current nuclear capabilities, was widely acknowledged to have made Saddam's regime even more determined to continue with their nuclear ambitions.

1. No US invasion of Iran in all of 2006 
2. The UN will continue to prove that it's worthless and that some individual countries will contniue to support Iran due to economic reasons making the Council as useless as it was with IRaq.
3. Israel will decide that it needs to do something as a result, while the US quietly assists Israel since we now can assist in Iraq and in the Persian Gulf since we are there.
4. Israel will bomb a few times, angering the Muslim world and suddenly any of those peace initiatives in Israel will be gone and we'll be back where we were a few years ago.

Jordan .

Jordan .

STRATFOR
Israel: Scenarios of a Strike Against Iran
December 15, 2005 22 57  GM

Summary

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's latest inflammatory statements, in which he called the Holocaust a "myth" and suggested that Israel's Jews be relocated to Europe or even Alaska, are part of a series of provocations that have severely escalated political tensions between Iran and Israel. Furthermore, Israeli military officials have said that Iran is within months of being able to produce nuclear weapons. Because of its extreme vulnerability to a nuclear attack, Israel's threshold for using the military option to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capability is lower than the United States'. Should Israel decide to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, the operation would be risky, difficult and politically delicate -- but not impossible.

Analysis

In a Dec. 14 live televised speech, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied that the Holocaust happened, saying the Jewish nation had "invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religion, and prophets." Ahmadinejad's comments, which drew immediate responses from both the European Union and Israel, only inflamed political tensions between Israel and Iran.

The Israeli government is moving swiftly into a position where it will be forced to decide at what point Iran will move beyond Israel's national security interests, referred to as a "red line." Iran could begin enriching uranium as soon as March 2006 and start producing nuclear weapons in three years, according to a Dec. 13 Israeli army assessment given to the Israeli Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz also warned the committee that Iran will reach the "point of no return" regarding its nuclear capability by the end of March 2006. Halutz's comments echoed those made by U.N. nuclear watchdog head Mohamed ElBaradei.

Though Israel certainly commands the weaponry to effectively take out Iranian nuclear facilities, the strike route is more problematic. Israel could attack via Iraq, a path that would require U.S. cooperation (which Israel certainly could secure) but that might not be the most practical option. Israel could ask Saudi Arabia for cooperation, but the Saudis would not be likely to acquiesce. The third -- and pragmatically best, though not trouble-free -- option would be to ask Turkey to use its airspace to launch attacks against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Israel striking Iran via Iraq with U.S. collusion is a moot point. If Washington finds itself ready to use force against Tehran, it would be more politically expedient for the United States to attack Iran alone and avoid the political blowback of attacking a Muslim country jointly with Israel. However, with more to lose if Iran becomes nuclear, Israel would have more incentive to strike than the United States would. In that case, the Israelis would be prepared to act unilaterally, without Washington's assistance -- meaning without using Iraqi airspace -- or perhaps even publicly admitted knowledge. However, if Washington or Israel should launch a strike against Iran, the two allies will coordinate with each other -- probably behind the scenes.  (as I mentioned earlier, I believe this will be covert.)

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Iran is nowhere near nuclear weapons capability and again stated today they have no intention to develop any.

Jordan, you seem like an intelligent and well informed guy, but the above statements are highly questionable. Powell himself was very uncomfortable giving that presentation to the UN, thats why he insisted on George Tenet siting right behind him. The UK's foreign minister said at the time, Powells presentation was 'long on repetition and short on fact.' Even the liars aren't peddling the lies anymore. Do we still hear Bush, Blair and co. using the presence of WMD's as justification for invading Iraq? No. The truth is that there weren't any and they have finally stopped insulting our intelligence.  

Regime change is the last pillar on which the justification for war rests, and even that is on very shaky ground given the incompetence of the reconstruction efforts and the general state of the place. Before the gulf war 1 million iraqi dinar was worth $3.2 m, now its worth $1,300 . Iraq should be one of the richest countries in the world.

Anyway, back to Iran. So what if countries have an interest in keeping the status quo in Iran? The US has a major stakeholding in Saudi Arabia, one of the most autocratic oppressive regimes in the world. At least Iran allows debate on societal reform! Iran has huge reserves of oil and is allowed to profit from that, just as Saudi Arabia does. We all have stakeholdings in some form or another, thats a core function of democracy and capitalism. Lets not kid ourselves.

Jordan, you seem like an intelligent and well informed guy, but the above statements are highly questionable. Powell himself was very uncomfortable giving that presentation to the UN, thats why he insisted on George Tenet siting right behind him. The UK's foreign minister said at the time, Powells presentation was 'long on repetition and short on fact.' Even the liars aren't peddling the lies anymore. Do we still hear Bush, Blair and co. using the presence of WMD's as justification for invading Iraq? No. The truth is that there weren't any and they have finally stopped insulting our intelligence.

Let me try again... but this time I will spell it all out.

Today, we have the beauty of 20/20 hindsight. Three years ago we did not. In three years we will again have the beauty of 20/20 hindsight with Iran. The majority of the world all thought that Iraq had WMDs - I'm not talking about present day peddling of anything. I'm talking about what we knew then or thought we knew. Again, let's forget what we know and remember what we thought we knew.

My point is simple - there are a number of parallels between today's issue with Iran and yesterday's issues with Iraq. I'll give you they are not identical, but there are some scary similarities in how Iran is being viewed and it's interesting how once again, we are back to where we were a few years ago with Iraq. But ita's also funny to see how some people who have been so opposed to the Iraq War from the beginning suddenly think Iran is a threat as I've seen from politicians and in the media (not talking about anyone here) even though the "intelligence" is about as "correct" as the intelligence with Iraq.

At the time, no one knew that Powell was uncomfortable, and it's funny, no one has been able to answer some fairly hard proof that Powell delievered at that time - I guess it's easier to forget the audio tapes he played and the satellite pictures of trucks large trucks around installations and then suddenly disappearing just in time for inspectors. Does anyone remember the Iraqi soldier talking to his commander about cleaning some location before the inspectors arrived and ensuring that the items were removed, and the commander kept telling him to not be so specific because they were not on a secure line? I don't think Im making this up but I seem to remember a conversation like that. In fact no one has ever refuted some of these hard facts or explained them away (oh except for the easy one which was the mobile WMD trucks). I'm not saying that Iraq had WMDs I just am saying that Powell did have some fairly "concrete facts" at the time that convinced many (myself included) that Iraq had WMDs.

So with the beauty of 20/20 hindsight, I think we often forget about what things were like a few years ago with Iraq with everything that has gone on.

So my point is simple - why is suddenly Iran (or N Korea) a threat when in fact, we are using teh same type of intelligence systems to determine their threat level that failed us a few years ago with Iraq?

It's a simple question - why do we think Iran is now a threat? Because they "say" they are doing things nuclear?? We learned from Iraq that we can't rely on what govts and "spies" say. Because they are refusing the UN and inspectors? Because they have threatened neighbors? Why do we now think that Iran is a threat?

Oh and I'm not the only one who is finding similarities here - from the Indepdent.

Jordan .

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

This is a possible scenario we might want to mull over. I find it compelling and chilling. Let me know why Niall Ferguson is dead wrong, please, if you will. All of what he describes follows the step-by-step progression that I've been thinking about these many months. Were I given to such histrionics, I would like to scream at the top of my lungs, that there are some real earthshaking civilizational details to pay attention to these days and they do not include global warming and gay marriage.

Susan

The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been prevented
By Niall Ferguson
(Filed: 15/01/2006)

Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next phase of events in the Middle East:

With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.

The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.

A second precondition of war was demographic. While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than the European figure.

This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where the social conservatism of the 1979 Revolution - which had lowered the age of marriage and prohibited contraception - combined with the high mortality of the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent baby boom to produce, by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995 had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007.

This not only gave Islamic societies a youthful energy that contrasted markedly with the slothful senescence of Europe. It also signified a profound shift in the balance of world population. In 1950, there had three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995, the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain and was forecast to be 50 per cent higher by 2050.

Yet people in the West struggled to grasp the implications of this shift. Subliminally, they still thought of the Middle East as a region they could lord it over, as they had in the mid-20th century.

The third and perhaps most important precondition for war was cultural. Since 1979, not just Iran but the greater part of the Muslim world had been swept by a wave of religious fervour, the very opposite of the process of secularisation that was emptying Europe's churches.

Although few countries followed Iran down the road to full-blown theocracy, there was a transformation in politics everywhere. From Morocco to Pakistan, the feudal dynasties or military strongmen who had dominated Islamic politics since the 1950s came under intense pressure from religious radicals.

The ideological cocktail that produced 'Islamism' was as potent as either of the extreme ideologies the West had produced in the previous century, communism and fascism. Islamism was anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic. A seminal moment was the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's intemperate attack on Israel in December 2005, when he called the Holocaust a 'myth'. The state of Israel was a 'disgraceful blot', he had previously declared, to be wiped 'off the map'.

Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America's closest regional ally.

Under different circumstances, it would not have been difficult to thwart Ahmadinejad's ambitions. The Israelis had shown themselves capable of pre-emptive air strikes against Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981. Similar strikes against Iran's were urged on President Bush by neo-conservative commentators throughout 2006. The United States, they argued, was perfectly placed to carry out such strikes. It had the bases in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. It had the intelligence proving Iran's contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy. Not just European opinion but American opinion was strongly opposed to an attack on Iran. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been discredited by the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had supposedly possessed and by the failure of the US-led coalition to quell a bloody insurgency.

Americans did not want to increase their military commitments overseas; they wanted to reduce them. Europeans did not want to hear that Iran was about to build its own WMD. Even if Ahmad-inejad had broadcast a nuclear test live on CNN, liberals would have said it was a CIA con-trick.

So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country's treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist, the West appealed to international agencies - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to China's veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006 World Cup finals.

Only one man might have stiffened President Bush's resolve in the crisis: not Tony Blair, he had wrecked his domestic credibility over Iraq and was in any case on the point of retirement - Ariel Sharon. Yet he had been struck down by a stroke as the Iranian crisis came to a head. With Israel leaderless, Ahmadinejad had a free hand.

As in the 1930s, too, the West fell back on wishful thinking. Perhaps, some said, Ahmadinejad was only sabre-rattling because his domestic position was so weak. Perhaps his political rivals in the Iranian clergy were on the point of getting rid of him. In that case, the last thing the West should do was to take a tough line; that would only bolster Ahmadinejad by inflaming Iranian popular feeling. So in Washington and in London people crossed their fingers, hoping for the deus ex machina of a home-grown regime change in Teheran.

This gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India, was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Teheran.

The optimists argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis would replay itself in the Middle East. Both sides would threaten war - and then both sides would blink. That was Secretary Rice's hope - indeed, her prayer - as she shuttled between the capitals. But it was not to be.

The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.

Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.

• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University

www.niallferguson.org

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Thats an interesting piece, tho when fact is mixed with fiction some credilbility is foregone, a la the da vinci code  

Thank you for your welcome nuart, I am kinda new to the board. I lurk from time to time, but I have my accountancy finals at the moment and engaging in political debate is helping to break up the tedium of revision!

When you get some time, check out Niall Ferguson's bona fides, Let's Roque. He's no Da Vinci Code writer but a Harvard via Oxford professor of economics and history. There's scarcely any fiction within that piece. Only a speculation of how the facts might all piece together and how, with the perspective of time gone by, it MIGHT be assessed in the future.

Just do a little Googling of him and read some of his writing. And if you have a really long time, there's a 3-hour In Depth interview from CSPAN where he deals with a broad array of topics from history, economics and literature. Terrific really!

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

I was willing to go along for the ride until here, at which point it became evident he was masturbating.

Damn, Jamie, you libs are so hyper-sensitive! It's amazing how you can toss the whole lot of the good stuff into the dumpster over one cute masturbatory line. Are you always so judgmental over self-fulfillment? Everyone will disappoint in some small way over the long term. Why not cut Niall a widdle break? He's a worthy contributor to the international scene and I think you'd apprreciate his views if you read him for a while. I, for one, am proud to have him on board at an American university where his thoughtfulness is sorely needed.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Oh, I read the whole thing, and I agree it made some interesting points. But either he believes that line to be more-or-less accurate, or he stepped far out of his way to toss a wacky witticism into the middle of an article which, in its entire remainder, strives for the tone of an actual synopsis of our time as viewed from the near-future. In which case he just makes an inexplicably poor aesthetic decision, given the quality of the rest of his writing.

I try not to be a baby-with-the-bathwater kinda guy, and I've certainly more than once made the error of mistaking crafted writing for accurate analysis. To me, though, a cheap-shot like that projects a bias that undercuts the relatively plausible hypothesis he'd been setting out -- it bursts the bubble of "I, the writer, consider you, the reader to be my intellectual equal", and there's no reason at all that it needed to. It says "I'm speaking from this specific region of the political map" and so necessarily communicates to me the message that I am not in an appropriate ideological bracket to appreciate what it is that he's saying. It's not that I find it insulting, it's just that it forces me to take him less seriously; he's obviously intelligent enough to understand what I've just noted, which means it was more important to him to establish his writing as "not-liberal" than it was to produce an article that could otherwise speak to everyone. That makes no sense to me, but I don't write well-received articles for major international publications, so perhaps he has motivating concerns I wouldn't imagine.

My conclusion: like our friend Mark Steyn, he's a bit overimpressed with his own ideas, and a touch overfond of the sound of his own voice.

(I plead 100% guilty on the "takes one to know one" charge, for the record. )

Well put, Jamie! And just one of the sixteen reasons that I loooooooove you! Honest, well-expressed, well-reasoned, thoughtful.

{Snap out of it, Susan! -- don't fall for his Canadian trickery!}

Uh, I mean, like, that's just, uh, your opinion!

Did Voltaire ever write anything longer than a sentence? So quotable but don't think I've ever read any more than the quotes and Candide which was okay.  But it is with his one-liners where he really shines. Kind of the Henny Youngman of the Enlightenment.

Just caught this little known Voltaire quote from Wikipedia:

"You know that these two nations are at war over a few acres of snow near Canada, and that they are spending on this little war more than all of Canada is worth."

A good one but I'm sticking with HAL!

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

There were a number of stories a few years ago that suggested that Saddam thought he had WMDs or convinced his generals he had (maybe knowing he didn't have them), etc they had WMDs. Here's a Sunday Times story from 2004 confirming this bit of info - a little more research and I bet we could find more articles like this.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2763-1302737,00.html

When the inspectors would find something that Iraq said they didn't have throughout the 90s, it's pretty hard to believe Saddam, esp if his actions are one of someone trying to hide something which he did quite well because he wanted to protect the privacy of his palaces(?) or if we caught him in a direct lie.

the public statement was they had no WMDs, but the behind closed doors (based on intelligence from those who were behind the doors) suggested Saddam had something up his sleeve (like the above story suggests).

So I can't think fo a time that Saddam specifically said "We have WMDs" but the inteligence suggested he could not be believed.

Is it enough to beleive someone is or is not a threat if they say they do or do not have something?

Jordan .