Category Archives: nuclear Iran

9/11, Gulf states, Iran, Iraq, Israel, nuclear Iran, Persian-American Gulf, Saudi Arabia

Remember Joe (Judas) Lieberman? He is Alive and Well and Homesick for Iraq……..

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““I don’t know that the president will order a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities even if the sanctions don’t work, but I know that he’s capable of doing that and I believe he’s prepared to do that,” he said, adding that he doesn’t think Obama would ever send ground troops to Iran. Over the New Year’s break, Lieberman visited Israel, Iraq, Tunisia, and Libya, and he said Iran was the number one concern of leaders in the region. In previous meetings, Israeli officials had focused almost entirely on U.S. red lines and their concern over whether Obama would really attack Iran if push came to shove, emphasizing that Israel would attack if the United States doesn’t. But now the Israeli government seems more willing to let the sanctions strategy run its course, Lieberman said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview this week that Iran is beginning to show signs of cracking under the international sanctions regime……….”

Now WTF rock did Joe (Judas) Lieberman crawl from under? Joe the famous turncoat of 2008. Maybe he is covering his backside for 2913: maybe he hopes Obama will appoint him secretary of state if he wins again. He might as well appoint that other (Avigdor) Lieberman.
Joe and John (McCain) and their friend Goose had wanted to establish permanent bases in Iraq, although they have plenty of bases and warships all over the Persian-American Gulf to hang around, as well as an alleged drone base in Saudi Arabia.
Anyway, Joe who single-handed derailed the original Obama healthcare plan is back and he has a whole year left of his senate term to do damage and push for a project dear and near to his heart: a new war in the Middle East.

These right-wingers like Joe Lieberman seem to have a perverse attachment to our region, to the Middle East. From Bush-Cheney to Hillary Clinton to the pandering Republicans of 2012, they all want to start yet another war or two or three in the Middle East. Oddly they never want to start a war against the only Middle East country whose citizens attacked the American homeland in September 2001. They want to start a war of choice against another country that has not attacked anyone, not yet.

Cheers
mhg


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Iran, Israel, Middle East Nuclear, nuclear Iran, Sanctions, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Disturbing Solo Brainstorming: So What is the Goal in Iran?………

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“The Obama administration has been adamant that regime change per se is not the goal of U.S. sanctions. On Wednesday, a Washington Post article initially quoted an anonymous U.S. official as saying “regime change” was the goal, but then was quickly corrected to say “public ire” was the sanctions’ goal, not regime change. Today, a U.S. official told AFP that the goal of the sanctions was to “close down” the Central Bank of Iran (CBI)……..”

This is confusing. There are conflicting reports about the goal in Iran. The three (red) goals given above do not include the ‘nuclear’ program which the Iranians insist is civilian. The Obama administration and the Israelis and the Saudi princes and their Gulf Salfi and Wahhabi faux-liberal admirers insist is for military purposes. There are two reasons not mentioned here for the sanctions and the possible war that may follow: Reason One is to keep the Israeli extreme right-wing government quiet before the 2012 U.S. elections. If you don’t believe that is one important, possibly the most important reason, then I still have that perfect old lame camel for sale. The Likud and its American lobbyists and worshipers can make Mr. Obama’s life miserable between now and November, and they probably will do so anyway.
Reason Two may be to keep Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from being “disturbed”. Lately she has been describing many news, allegations, and rumors about the Iranian mullahs as “disturbing” or that she is ‘disturbed’ about them. The secretary and her spokespersons have been doing that at a ‘disturbing’ rate.
I am sure my confusion, and yours, has not been clarified by this individual solo brainstorming by yours truly.
Cheers
mhg


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Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Arab Counterrevoltion, Espionage, Finance, Hezbollah, Iraq, Latin America, Lebanon, nuclear Iran, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy, WTF

Mel Brooks and Oliver Stone of Persia: a Taliban-Hezbollah-Colombian-Iranian-alQaeda-Mexican-Texan-African Network………

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“The court action, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks nearly half a billion dollars in penalties from three Lebanese financial organizations — the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank and two Beirut-based money exchange houses — and 30 auto dealers in the United States. The $480 million in penalties is the sum of the drug proceeds that are alleged to have been laundered; the government is also seeking to freeze and seize assets traceable to those companies………… Thursday’s complaint offers fresh details about the workings of what it says was a scheme to launder South American cocaine cash and Hezbollah’s own money, naming the American-based auto dealers and people it says were Hezbollah operatives. For example, the action charges that Oussama Salhab was a Hezbollah operative in Togo who ran a network that transported cash from cars sold in Benin on flights to Beirut. Prosecutors say he worked with Maroun Saade — suspected of being a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Lebanese Christian political party allied with Hezbollah — who has been charged in a separate case with aiding the Taliban………”

I wonder what Mel Brooks is up to these days? Is he teaming up with Oliver Stone? Could those two be working on something like this, this topic of my piece here?
Is it just the holiday season or is the world going crazy around me? At least from my current perspective in the Pacific Northwest it seems like many heretofore otherwise sensible people are going mad. Look at all this:

  • Hezbollah alliance with the Taliban (across fourteen centuries of separation, across five nations of separation)?
  • Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda which is the mortal Wahhabi enemy of the Shi’as (including Iranians and Iraqis and Lebanese and Bahrainis and Pakistanis and all others)?
  • Iranian and al-Qaeda alliance allegedly but ridiculously improbably going way back to the 1990s, mostly via the good offices and miraculous guesswork of Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia?
  • Iranian-Mexican Drug Cartel-Texan Nutcase alliance to blow up a restaurant in Georgetown and its famous clients just because it serves mediocre food to smug bureaucrats and charges too much? This last one allegedly courtesy of the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice, and possibly Mujahideen-e-Khalq, among others.
  • Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian (wtf?)-Lebanese alliance to conquer Bahrain as a prelude to conquering the rest of the world and forcing Rick Santorum and Rick Perry to become Muslims and make the Hajj to Mecca?
  • Lebanese-Columbian-Taliban-Hezbollah-Maronite Christian plot to make money from a new triangular trade but without the rum and the African slaves.
  • Hezbollah-IRGC-Wehrmacht-Goldman Sachs…….. oh zut, sorry. Got carried away.


WTF is going on here? Is everyone going paranoid or are all of these plots real? Should we start looking under our beds each night for Iranian mullahs and Lebanese Shi’as? Are the Wahhabi princes now financing the hated Shi’a militants as well? Or is it just that the ‘plots’ are thickening?
Cheers
mhg


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Humor, Iran, Middle East Nuclear, North Korea, nuclear Iran, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy, War on Iran

The Iran Bomb: Comparing a North Korean Voter to an American Voter………

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What is one difference (or the similarity if you prefer) between a North Korean voter (I know, North Koreans don’t vote, but humor me) and an American voter?

North Koreans are told and believe the following, among other things: that the Americans want to bomb North Korea and obliterate it with nuclear weapons and only the WMD of Kim Jong Il are keeping them at bay. Kim Jong Il and his sons Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Nam and Kim Dim Sum may also believe that.
 
Americans are told by the media and some politicians and ‘may largely’ believe the following, among other things:
The Iranians are building nuclear weapons which they will immediately use to destroy Israel. After that they would love to use their Hiroshima vintage bombs to trigger Armageddon or take over the world and make it a safer place for the awaited Mahdi (their Messiah). One pre-condition of all that is to bomb Europe back to the good old day of May 1945. Hence all the missiles deployed in Turkey and soon in other places near Iran. All that may have been corroborated by Saudi Intelligence, the shaikhs of Abu Dhabi, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, John Bolton, and one Texas screw-up named Mansoor Arbabsiar (I know you expected me to say Rick Perry). Provided that the End of Time and Rapture and the Christian right and the Republican Party do not beat them to it.
Cheers
mhg


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Iran, Iraq, Middle East Nuclear, nuclear Iran, Persian-American Gulf, War on Iran, WMD

The Beatles and Iranian Intentions: Western Fools on the Hill of Nuclear Intelligence……….

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“But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning ’round.
Well on the way,
Head in a cloud,
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him,
or the sound he appears to make,
and he never seems to notice,……” Les Beatles

“It was the Little Interventionist Tony Blair who first began sanctions on Iran. And the build-up of hostilities has unnerving parallels with the case for war conjured by Blair and George Bush against Iraq. We have another dodgy dossier, in the shape of the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which claims Iran is developing nuclear weapons but says so largely on the basis of intelligence which ends in 2003. It relies on documents on a laptop, found in 2004 by the Israelis, whose reliability prompted deep scepticism among Western intelligence at the time. The foreign scientist said to have worked on a bomb with the Iranians turned out to be a nanotechnologist. And a former IAEA chief inspector has said the type of explosion chamber referred to in the report could not be used in a nuclear test. On that, is based hawkish noises and sabre-rattling sanctions. Intelligence chiefs publicly say such things as, the West must use covert operations to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme. Politicians make thinly veiled threats of military attack using weasel words such as “all options are on the table”. Pardon me if it feels like Iraq all over again……… But Iran is a big, politically sophisticated country whose constitution of parliament, president, councils and assemblies of religious experts, creates a system of checks and balances in which change is possible. Reformers have held sway at times in this political pluralism. The Iranian establishment is fragmented into factions; a third of MPs did not vote for the measure to reduce the diplomatic status of Iran’s relations with Britain last Sunday. But it is precisely the wrong reactionary factions which are strengthened by the bellicosity of the West. And make no mistake, the war has begun. …………”

The West gets some of its ‘intelligence’ from certain Iranian exiles, and from the Israelis, not exactly an impartial source. The Israeli Likud would love for the Iran nuclear program to dominate the news so much that people would forget all about the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They would love for the world to focus on any other issue, HIV-AIDS, Global Warming, Tax Cuts, the War on Drugs, Dr Phil, anything but the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israelis get some of their ‘intelligence; from certain Iranian exiles.
Everybody else relies on Tony Blair and the Saudi royal family and Alarabiya (which belongs to the Saudi royal family) for intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program. Some are beginning to rely on the ruling al-Nahayan clan of Abu Dhabi for ‘intelligence’.
 
This does not mean that I have reliable intelligence that the Iranians are NOT working on a nuclear weapon. For all I know they could be in the last stage of making a Doomsday Bomb. I have no idea, but I would never believe what the IAEA or the UN or the US intelligence or British Intelligence or Israeli intelligence or Iranian intelligence or Ahmadinejad say about the Iranian program. That is what I learned from Iraq. And the writer is right, they are pushing the same arguments they used before the invasion of Iraq (which I supported at the time), and it is very likely based on faulty or downright fake information. The true goal is not nuclear weapons, it has to do with a balance of power in the Middle East.
Cheers
mhg


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Iran, Middle East Nuclear, nuclear Iran, Persian-American Gulf

Of Uranium Enrichment and Balance of Power in the Gulf………

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“The significance of this aspect becomes especially clear upon realising how much popular support the nuclear programme enjoys. Even if much of this popularity can be attributed to state propaganda, it can still be concluded with some certainty that Iran’s citizens stand behind the – ostensibly peaceful – nuclear programme. As a matter of fact, it is probably the only project for which the regime enjoys the support of broad segments of society……….. The so-called “right to uranium enrichment”, in other words, the right to utilise the full fuel cycle, has been elevated by Tehran propagandists to a matter of national honour. This right is not in fact documented in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but many nations, primarily those in the developing world, infer this entitlement from the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy. The problem is that uranium enrichment is the key technology that opens the gate to the production of weapons-grade fuel, i.e. to a nuclear weapons programme, and that fact alone can indeed be used by the Islamic Republic to support its claim to leadership in the region, even without producing a single nuclear weapon. A nuclear-arms-capable Iran would have to be accepted in the region as a de facto nuclear power and hence as the dominant regional power. This would have a number of consequences for the region’s nations. First of all, it would deal a severe blow to Saudi Arabia, which would then clearly fall behind in the leadership ranks. Furthermore, the small countries lining the Gulf would be forced to align their foreign and security policy to Iran’s “virtual” nuclear power, which would also prove detrimental to Saudi influence…………”

Interesting piece, but does not make a good case for why having the nuclear technical “know how” makes a country the leader of the region. Israel and Pakistan (and North Korea) have had actual nuclear weapons for years, and they are not regional leaders. Germany has no nuclear weapons There is no reason why shoring up the influence of the Saudi oligarchy should be a goal of the “international community”. Saudi regional influence is not through direct military prowess, but through money and the sway the kingdom holds over the West and its Gulf policies. Besides, there already is a “virtual” Western (mainly American) protective umbrella over the whole Gulf already, which is why I call it the Persian-American Gulf.
Cheers
mhg


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cyber war, Espionage, Iran, Israel, MEK, Mujahideen Khalq, nuclear Iran, Terrorism

Duqu Hits Iran: Virus Du Jour beats a Shooting War……….

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“Iran has developed a software program that can “control” the newly discovered Duqu spyware, the director of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization has announced. “The software, capable of controlling this virus (Duqu), has been provided to organizations and institutions,” IRNA quoted Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali as saying on Sunday. Duqu, discovered on September 1, 2011, is a sophisticated Trojan which acts as a backdoor into a system and facilitates the theft of private intelligence. Security software manufacturer Symantec says parts of the Duqu code base are nearly identical to the infamous Stuxnet worm, “but with a completely different purpose.” The Duqu malware has reportedly infected a number of systems in Iran. “All of the centers and apparatuses suspected of being infected with the virus are under control,” Jalali said, adding that countering and cleansing processes have been carried out at the infected institutions. Stuxnet, first indentified by Iranian officials in June 2010, is a malware designed to infect computers using supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems made by the German company Siemens …………..”

This Duqu in a new one. Duqu, Stuxnet, Stars, WTF, why not? Let them come: that is a clean war, better than the bloody alternative that some regional absolute potentates are hoping to goad the West into. Anything beats a shooting destructive war, or a war of terror street assassinations that kills civilians, or any war on behalf of absolute kleptocratic tribal princes.
Cheers
mhg


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Ali Khamenei, Iran, Middle East Nuclear, nuclear Iran, Sanctions, U.S. Congress, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Game of Chess: Sanctioning Central Bank of Iran, Sanctioning Grocers of Natanz……………..

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“The legislation requires the US president to impose sanctions on Iran’s central bank if he determines it is facilitating terrorism or the development of nuclear weapons, or supporting Iran’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “I believe the central bank of Iran is not only engaging in those activities; I believe it is the ultimate engine of those activities,” said the author of the central bank provision, Representative Howard Berman, a Democrat. The sanctions would effectively block from the US economy any foreign bank involved in significant transactions with Iran’s central bank. The legislation was approved by the House panel …………..”

There are many institutions and individuals in Iran that contribute to their nuclear program:

  • The Central Bank of Iran, by virtue of operating in Iran, supervising banks and the balance of payments and maintaining the exchange rate and monetary policy in general helps the nuclear program.
  • An Iranian doctor, by virtue of working in Iran helps the nuclear program (he may treat some nuclear scientist or a procurer of ‘yellow cake’ from Niger).
  • A street sweeper in Tehran (there are many of them since Iranians like their cities clean) helps the nuclear program by virtue of improving the quality of life of nuclear scientists and procurer of ‘yellow cake’ from Niger.
  • A grocer in any Iranian city almost certainly feeds some workers on some not-so-secret nuclear plants, let’s call him the green grocer of Natanz.
  • A home vintner in North Tehran, by virtue of supplying some secret party that some nuclear scientist or some clerk at a nuclear plant might attend, is helping the nuclear program.
  • A baby sitter or a housemaid in Tehran, by virtue of……..


You get the drift. It could be a virtual declaration of war, to which the Iranians will most likely only respond in kind, with virtual retaliation. That is how the Iranians, including the dogmatic mullahs, operate in the game of chess their ancestors invented. That is why the alleged Saudi ambassador plot sounds so ridiculous, regardless of all the “weighty” Western leaders who endorsed its veracity. It does not fit the pattern of a game of chess.
(one good thing is that the bill leaves it up to POTUS to decide if the Central Bank is engaged in such activities, The bad news is also that it leaves it to POTUS).

Cheers
mhg


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Iran, nuclear Iran, Racism, U.S. Congress, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Iran to Sue American Lawmakers, about Alan Dershowitz, 1968…………

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“Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi says Tehran will definitely take legal action against the US administration over calls for the assassination of Iranian officials. Salehi told IRNA on Sunday that American statesmen are so brazen that they formally discuss assassinating Iranian military figures in the US House of Representatives and the Senate. He stressed that Tehran would pursue the case through all legal and judicial channels. Salehi said that the US administration’s anti-Iran bids comes as Washington has been leveling baseless accusations against the country alleging that Tehran was involvement in a plot to kill the Saudi envoy to Washington. On October 11, the US Justice Department accused Iran of plotting to assassinate Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir with help from a suspected member of a Mexican drug cartel. Tehran says the media hype created by Washington is an attempt to deflect international attention from the anti-corruption and anti-corporatism protests currently rocking the country. ………….”

It is interesting that the Iranian leaders are becoming Americanized in at least one respect: they are becoming trigger happy in matters of lawsuits. For all I know they could also be watching Jersey Shores or Desperate Housewives (I have never watched any episode of either). I wonder if Alan Dershowitz, if he is asked, would refuse to represent the mullahs on principle. Or maybe he would rise to the challenge.
What these Iranian mullahs don’t understand is that violent protests, even strong protests, don’t work in the USA. The 1960s protests (especially the Chicago events which were arguably violence committed by the police) led to the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.  That was no doubt the opposite effect of what the protesters wanted (helped along by the not-so-soft racism of Nixon’s Southern Strategy)
Cheers
mhg


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Iran, Israel, Middle East Nuclear, nuclear Iran, Pakistan, United Nations International Organizations, US Foreign Policy

An Iranian Mystery, a Western Dilemma…….

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“And we keep forgetting the inconvenient fact that, even if the regime changed, the nuclear program — which is popular as an expression of Iranian nationalism and power — will continue. The leaders of the Green movement strongly support that program and have repeatedly criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for making too-generous offers to the West. (All Iranian officials repeat constantly that they would never develop nuclear weapons. And in a recent interview with Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he had never “seen a shred of evidence that Iran has been weaponizing, in terms of building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials.”…………“

This is another dilemma that the West will continue to face from Iran, something I and a few others have written about. What they don’t seem to understand is that no matter who is in power in Tehran, be it the mullahs, the Mujahideen Khalq, the Greens, the Communists, or the American Tea Party, they all want to keep the nuclear program going. They all claim they have no intention of developing nuclear weapons, but they know that an independent nuclear program, of the sort the Israelis and the Pakistanis have, is a matter of national pride. Regime change in Iran is desirable by the West and very likely by many Iranians, but that does not mean an acceptance of the loss of independent decision-making.
Cheers
mhg


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