Iran Super Thread- Merged

[Xiang]

Very true, but it is not the only form of Jewish nationalism.  There are other, more moderate forms.  Torah Jews come to mind.

 

[George Wallace]

The point is; do all Zionists and/or Torah Jews reside in Israel?  No.  They are spread around the globe.  This is a major concern.  This is in essence Terrorism, where selected personalities are attacked in nations around the world. 

 

[Xiang]

Regardless, the quote was interpreted incorrectly.  Zionism is more on the extreme side than its more moderate ideological counterparts.  The fact still remains, for someone to advocate eliminating Zionism in no way means they want to commit genocide any more than someone saying they want to eliminate radical Islam.

The ideology does not equal the population.

 

[OldSolduer]

Lets' get one thing staright:

There were at least 6 million people of the Jewish faith put to death during WW2 at the hands of a madman that was allowed to do what he wanted. Do you really think that we should let that happen...again?
Do you blame the Jewish people for being paranoid? It's kept Israel alive since 1948.

I don't know if the President of Iran was misquoted or not, but what he said pretty much pi$$ed off the rest of the world.

 

[Xiang]

Well, to be fair, it pissed off the rest of the world BECAUSE he was misquoted. 

 

[OldSolduer]

Well, to be fair, it pissed off the rest of the world BECAUSE he was misquoted. 

Oh really? Funny, I never heard the world up in arms because he was misquoted.

What would happen if PM Harper or President Obama were to say radical Islam must be eliminated?

I'll tell you. The press would have a field day with that, as would all of Islam.
So this the President of Iran is misquoted...and is taken to task for his anti-Semetic views. Is there something wrong with that? Do you really think this man can be trusted with a nuclear arsenal, if that ever comes to pass?

 

[Xiang]

Oh really? Funny, I never heard the world up in arms because he was misquoted.

Point in hand.  He WAS misquoted and you said it yourself, "I don't know if the President of Iran was misquoted or not".  Now, how can you be up in arms about something you (and most of the world) don't know happened?  Like I mentioned in a previous post... Persian linguists were down right ignored.  As we all know, sensationalism will take precedence over the truth, whether that sensationalism is true or not.

If the world doesn't know, how do you think they will react?

What would happen if PM Harper or President Obama were to say radical Islam must be eliminated?

Considering the fact that we are fighting on the side we are on, the West would have no qualms with such a comment.  Your point?

I'll tell you. The press would have a field day with that, as would all of Islam.

I doubt it.  Radical Islam is predominately associated with terrorism (and rightfully so).  I doubt the press, or the Western world would have much to say about that.  Even I advocate the elimination of radical Islam.  It is not true Islam so it has no right to bear it's name.

So this the President of Iran is misquoted...and is taken to task for his anti-Semetic views. Is there something wrong with that

Well, a Catholic Bishop denied the holocaust took place as well.  He is but one man that represents the most powerful religion in the world.... Should Christianity be attacked because of one man's distorted views?

Do you really think this man can be trusted with a nuclear arsenal, if that ever comes to pass?

No.  And I would like to mention that there is absolutely no proof that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon.  Everything you heard has come from bias sources and is nothing more than fear mongering and here say.

I would like you to provide one single link representing a non partisan international organization that can say with absolute certainty Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.

Going to war based on paranoia would make you no better than the lunatic at the helm of North Korea.

 

[OldSolduer]

SO Iran can buy nuke fuel from Russia, am I correct?
So why do you need centrifuges to produce more?
As fore getting up in arms, I'm passionate...not up in arms. I do not think that this fellow or Kim Jong Il can be trusted with something bigger than a firecracker.

I've been around a while, and I remember very well the 444 days that several US citizens were held hostage by the Iranians.

If he was misquoted so be it. That Catholic bishop was taken to task, and so should the President of Iran for his comments about destroying Israel?
And who said I was willing to go to war with Iran over this? Maybe George W. Bush was, but I think cooler heads are prevailing.

 

[Xiang]

SO Iran can buy nuke fuel from Russia, am I correct?
So why do you need centrifuges to produce more?

Interesting you should say that.  Do you have a link concerning these purchases?  The last I heard, the IAEA confirmed Iran could not build a nuclear weapon with the grade of plutonium they were producing.

If what you say is true (and comes from an un-bias international body) then there is clearly cause for worry.

If he was misquoted so be it. That Catholic bishop was taken to task, and so should the President of Iran for his comments about destroying Israel?

But he never said he wants to wipe Israel off the map.  I'm not sure how many times I need to say this.

And who said I was willing to go to war with Iran over this? Maybe George W. Bush was, but I think cooler heads are prevailing.

I'm glad we agree.

 

[Xiang]

Here is a link for the centrifuges:

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSBLA05041920070710

Centrifuges are used to make fuel for power plants, which is what Iran insists is its goal. But they can also be used to enrich uranium to a far higher level to make bomb material.

The grade of plutonium the Iranians are producing cannot be used for a nuclear weapon, so that only leaves one possible use for them right?  Nuclear power.

I'm sorry, but the production of Centrifuges does not equal building a nuclear bomb.  There are many other components to it (most of which Iran is not, or cannot produce)

After reading (if you bothered to read) my posts concerning Iran's need for nuclear energy, why is it still so hard to believe they are pursuing such a means of power for their nation?  Especially considering the absolute lack of evidence required to prove they are actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

Come on, Im sure we can both agree another war is in neither of our best interests.  Especially when such a war would be based on opinion and here say.

 

[a_majoor]

Unlike Uranium, Plutonium is fissile in all is isotopic forms, and is therefore available to make a nuclear weapon (ither a fission bomb or as the radioactive coating of a "dirty" bomb).

Iran has demonstrated both by word and deed that it is hostile to Isreal and the Liberal Democratic "West"; the capture of Iranian operatives in Iraq the recovery of Iranian equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, the capture of Iranian equipment going to Hamas and Hezbollah (both intercepted as in recent examples by Egypt and Cyprus, as well as equipment recovered by the IDF during the operations in Lebanon and Gaza), as well as repeated forays into the Persian gulf to challenge the resolve of USN and British ships patrolling in international waters (to the detriment of the UK, I might add). Vast sums of money have also been tracked from Iran to various terrorist groups as well.

When you take all these activities into account, then add the complete lack of cooperation between Iran and international agencies on issues of nuclear fuel and fuel enrichment, and also add their determined drive to develop long range delivery systems (and any satellite launcher is an ICBM), then the pronouncements of their leadership take on a whole new cast.

Attempts to parse the phraseology of the Iranian leadership in order to gloss over or ignore the other factual actions of the same leadership only make people come off as delusional. While the Iranian people may be restive, and could be induced back into the arms of their government by a strike against their nuclear establishment, this is really only an example of looking for the "least bad" choice.

 

[OldSolduer]

"But he never said he wants to wipe Israel off the map." OK, what did he say? Because the world equates "Zionism" with "International Jewry" and Jewish people in general, therefore meaning Israel.

This man cannot be trusted with an arsenal any larger than the average armory.


As for centrifuges, how do we really know what grade of plutonium the Iranians are producing? Because they say they aren't? Sorry, that doesn' make me feel any better.

 

[a_majoor]

Depending on how long we can hang tough, the Iran problem may solve itself. OTOH, with the United States displaying it's new "Clueless" diplomacy, the problem may take turns for the worse:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KB24Ak02.html

Sex, drugs and Islam
By Spengler

Political Islam returned to the world stage with Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Iran, which became the most aggressive patron of Muslim radicals outside its borders, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and abroad. How, then, should we explain an eruption of social pathologies in Iran such as drug addiction and prostitution, on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it appears that Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay.

Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran's birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran's population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.

But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the "decadent" West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed.

"Iran is dying for a fight," I wrote in 2007 (Please see Why Iran is dying for a fight, November 13, 2007.) in the literal sense that its decline is so visible that some of its leaders think that they have nothing to lose.

Their efforts to isolate Iran from the cultural degradation of the American "great Satan" have produced social pathologies worse than those in any Western country. With oil at barely one-fifth of its 2008 peak price, they will run out of money some time in late 2009 or early 2010. Game theory would predict that Iran's leaders will gamble on a strategic long shot. That is not a comforting thought for Iran's neighbors.

Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.

First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. [1]

"More than 90% of Tehran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam, according to the results of one study, and more than 30% of them are registered at a university or studying," reports Der Standard. "The study was assigned to the Tehran Police Department and the Ministry of Health, and when the results were tabulated in early January no local newspaper dared to so much as mention them."

The Austrian newspaper added, "Eighty percent of the Tehran sex workers maintained that they pursue this career voluntarily and temporarily. The educated ones are waiting for better jobs. Those with university qualifications intend to study later, and the ones who already are registered at university mention the high tuition [fees] as their motive for prostitution ... they are content with their occupation and do not consider it a sin according to Islamic law."

There is an extensive trade in poor Iranian women who are trafficked to the Gulf states in huge numbers, as well as to Europe and Japan. "A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women," I wrote in a 2006 study of Iranian prostitution, Jihads and whores.

Prostitution as a response to poverty and abuse is one thing, but the results of this new study reflect something quite different. The educated women of Tehran choose prostitution in pursuit of upward mobility, as a way of sharing in the oil-based potlatch that made Tehran the world's hottest real estate market during 2006 and 2007.

A country is beaten when it sells its women, but it is damned when its women sell themselves. The popular image of the Iranian sex trade portrays tearful teenagers abused and cast out by impoverished parents. Such victims doubtless abound, but the majority of Tehran's prostitutes are educated women seeking affluence.

Only in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism in 1990 did educated women choose prostitution on a comparable scale, but under very different circumstances. Russians went hungry during the early 1990s as the Soviet economy dissolved and the currency collapsed. Today's Iranians suffer from shortages, but the data suggest that Tehran's prostitutes are not so much pushed into the trade by poverty as pulled into it by wealth.

A year ago I observed that prices for Tehran luxury apartments exceeded those in Paris, as Iran's kleptocracy distributed the oil windfall to tens of thousands of hangers-on of the revolution. $35 billion went missing from state oil funds, opposition newspapers charged at the time. Corruption evidently has made whores of Tehran's educated women. (Please see Worst of times for Iran, June 24, 2008.)

Second, according to a recent report from the US Council on Foreign Relations, "Iran serves as the major transport hub for opiates produced by [Afghanistan], and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that Iran has as many as 1.7 million opiate addicts." That is, 5% of Iran's adult, non-elderly population of 35 million is addicted to opiates. That is an astonishing number, unseen since the peak of Chinese addiction during the 19th century. The closest American equivalent (from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health) found that 119,000 Americans reported using heroin within the prior month, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the non-elderly adult population.

Nineteenth-century China had comparable rates of opium addiction, after the British won two wars for the right to push the drug down China's throat. Post-communist Russia had comparable rates of prostitution, when people actually went hungry. Iran's startling rates of opium addiction and prostitution reflect popular demoralization, the implosion of an ancient culture in its encounter with the modern world. These pathologies arose not from poverty but wealth, or rather a sudden concentration of wealth in the hands of the political class. No other country in modern history has evinced this kind of demoralization.

For the majority of young Iranians, there is no way up, only a way out; 36% of Iran's youth aged 15 to 29 years want to emigrate, according to yet another unpublicized Iranian study, this time by the country's Education Ministry, Der Standard adds. Only 32% find the existing social norms acceptable, while 63% complain about unemployment, the social order or lack of money.

As I reported in the cited essay, the potlatch for the political class is balanced by widespread shortages for ordinary Iranians. This winter, widespread natural gas shortages left tens of thousands of households without heat.

The declining morale of the Iranian population helps make sense of its galloping demographic decline. Academic demographers have tried to explain collapsing fertility as a function of rising female literacy. The problem is that the Iranian regime lies about literacy data, and has admitted as much recently.

In a recent paper entitled "Education and the World's Most Raid Fertility Decline in Iran [2], American and Iranian demographers observe:

    A first analysis of the Iran 2006 census results shows a sensationally low fertility level of 1.9 for the whole country and only 1.5 for the Tehran area (which has about 8 million people) ... A decline in the TFR [total fertility rate] of more than 5.0 in roughly two decades is a world record in fertility decline. This is even more surprising to many observers when one considers that it happened in one of the most Islamic societies. It forces the analyst to reconsider many of the usual stereotypes about religious fertility differentials.

The census points to a continued fall in fertility, even from today's extremely low levels, the paper maintains.

Most remarkable is the collapse of rural fertility in tandem with urban fertility, the paper adds:

    The similarity of the transition in both urban and rural areas is one the main features of the fertility transition in Iran. There was a considerable gap between the fertility in rural and urban areas, but the TFR in both rural and urban areas continued to decline by the mid-1990s, and the gap has narrowed substantially. In 1980, the TFR in rural areas was 8.4 while that of urban areas was 5.6. In other words, there was a gap of 2.8 children between rural and urban areas. In 2006, the TFR in rural and urban areas was 2.1 and 1.8, respectively (a difference of only 0.3 children).

What the professors hoped to demonstrate is that as rural literacy levels in Iran caught up with urban literacy levels, the corresponding urban and rural fertility rates also converged. That is a perfectly reasonable conjecture whose only flaw is that the data on which it is founded were faked by the Iranian regime.

The Iranian government's official data claim literacy percentage levels in the high 90s for urban women and in the high 80s for rural women. That cannot be true, for Iran's Literacy Movement Organization admitted last year (according to an Agence-France Presse report of May 8, 2008) that 9,450,000 Iranians are illiterate of a population of 71 million (or an adult population of about 52 million). This suggests far higher rates of illiteracy than in the official data.

A better explanation of Iran's population implosion is that the country has undergone an existential crisis comparable to encounters of Amazon or Inuit tribes with modernity. Traditional society demands submission to the collective. Once the external constraints are removed, its members can shift from the most extreme forms of modesty to the other extreme of sexual license. Khomeini's revolution attempted to retard the disintegration of Persian society, but it appears to have accelerated the process.

Modernity implies choice, and the efforts of the Iranian mullahs to prolong the strictures of traditional society appear to have backfired. The cause of Iran's collapsing fertility is not literacy as such, but extreme pessimism about the future and an endemic materialism that leads educated Iranian women to turn their own sexuality into a salable commodity.

Theocracy subjects religion to a political test; it is hard for Iranians to repudiate the regime and remain pious, for religious piety and support for political Islam are inseparable, as a recent academic study documented from survey data [3].

As in the decline of communism, what follows on the breakdown of a state ideology is likely to be nihilism. Iran is a dying country, and it is very difficult to have a rational dialogue with a nation all of whose available choices terminate in oblivion.

[1] Der Standard, Die Wahrheit hinter der islamischen Fassade
.

[2] Education and the World's Most Raid Fertility Decline in Iran
.

[3] Religiosity and Islamic Rule in Iran, by Gunes Murat Tezcur and Tagh Azadarmaki.

 

[a_majoor]

A Russian general weighs in:

http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/03/russian-military-expert-warns-of.html

Thursday, March 12, 2009
Russian Military Expert Warns Of Iranian Threat

While the Obama administration considers pulling back on continuing to develop technology to provide a missile shield for Europe and beyond, the Iranians have made important developments in missile technology. This is not coming from Chas Freeman's dreaded Israel lobby, but from a Russian military expert during a March 12, 2009 press conference which has not been widely reported in the European or American press:

Russia and the West would be making a big mistake if they ignored or underestimated the potential missile and nuclear threat coming from Iran, a Russian military expert said on Thursday.

"Iran is actively working on a missile development program. I won't say the Iranians will be able to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles in the near future, but they will most likely be able to threaten the whole of Europe," said [retired] Maj. Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, head of the Moscow-based Center for Strategic Nuclear Forces....

"Iran has long abandoned outdated missile technologies and is capable of producing sophisticated missile systems," Dvorkin said at a news conference in RIA Novosti

Dvorkin also warned that Iran is only 1-2 years away from obtaining nuclear weapons capability:

"One can speak of one or two years," Vladimir Dvorkin, a retired general and veteran participant in US-Soviet disarmament talks in the 1970s and 1980s, told reporters when asked how close Iran was to having a nuclear weapon.

"In the technical sense, what may be holding them back is the lack of enough weapons-grade uranium," said Dvorkin, who today heads a strategic arms research
centre at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

"I consider this a significant threat," said Dvorkin, who stressed that he was voicing his personal views and not those of the Russian government.

Posted by William A. Jacobson at 6:09 PM 

The Russians have been playing a dangerous double game to date. Their desire for hard cash and the ability to tweak America and keep China and "the West" off balance are probably the driving forces behind their sales of nuclear fuel and technology to Iran. They are probably realizing that ballistic missiles that can reach Europe also threaten European Russia from the Gulf of Finland to the Ural Mountains, and that a nuclear Iran is probably not a stable client nation that they can manipulate for their own ends, but will take unpredictable actions that will upset the calculations and plans of Russia as well...

 

[tomahawk6]

CSIS article about a possible Israeli strike on Iran. Alot of information here you could almost plan the attack from home.

http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/090316_israelistrikeiran.pdf

 

[CougarKing]

It seems that the Russian bear is sending mixed signals.

Russia confirms Iran missile contract


POSTED: 12:24 p.m. EDT, Mar 18, 2009

MOSCOW: Russian news agencies cited a top defense official today as confirming that a contract to sell powerful air-defense missiles to Iran was signed two years ago, but saying no such weapons have yet been delivered.

Russian officials have consistently denied claims the country already has provided some of the S-300 missiles to Iran. They have not said whether a contract existed.

The state-run ITAR-Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies and the independent Interfax quoted an unnamed top official in the Federal Military-Technical Cooperation Service as saying the contract was signed two years ago. Service spokesman Andrei Tarabrin told The Associated Press he could not immediately comment.

Supplying S-300s to Iran would change the military balance in the Middle East and the issue has been the subject of intense speculation and diplomatic wrangling for months.

Israel and the U.S. fear that, were Iran to possess S-300 missiles, it would use them to protect its nuclear facilities — including the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz or the country's first atomic power plant, which is now being built by Russian contractors at Bushehr.

That would make a military strike on the Iranian facilities much more difficult.

It was not clear why the missiles have not been delivered, but the reports cited the defense official as saying ''fulfillment of the contract will mainly depend on the current international situation and the decision of the country's leadership.''

That could indicate that Russia intends to use the contract as a bargaining chip before next month's meeting between President Dmitry Medvedev and President Barack Obama.

But the defense official said Russia does not intend to abandon the contract, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, ITAR-Tass said,

A prominent Russian analyst, Ruslan Pukhov of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said the missile contract was seen by the Kremlin as primarily a political rather than commercial matter.

''The S-300 contract, and cooperation with Iran in general, is regarded by Moscow only as an instrument of political bargaining with the West and not as a way of realizing the fundamental defense and commercial interests of Russia,'' he was quoted as saying by RIA-Novosti.

http://www.ohio.com/news/world/41435987.html

Kissinger, Baker Visit Moscow as Obama Resets Ties

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two former U.S. secretaries of state, will fly to Moscow for talks with Russian officials after President Barack Obama pledged to “reset” relations with Russia.

Kissinger, who met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in December, is scheduled to return later this week, according to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Baker, traveling separately, will hold talks with American investors and address a conference on developing Caspian Sea energy resources.

“These guys are building the bridge from the real diplomacy of the Bush Sr. administration to Obama,” said Nina Khrushcheva, an international affairs professor at the New School in New York. “Diplomatically inclined Republicans can make a better opening line because they come from successful relations in the past.”

Obama, a Democrat, is seeking to strengthen ties to Russia and win Kremlin support for his policies on Afghanistan, Iran and nuclear arms reduction. Vice President Joe Biden said in February it was time to “reset” relations after they reached a post-Cold War low under former President George W. Bush.

Kissinger, 85, is among a group of U.S. “wise men,” including former Secretary of State George Shultz, 88, ex-Defense Secretary William Perry, 81, and former Senator Sam Nunn, 70, who will see Medvedev on March 20, the Kommersant newspaper reported today. They will also meet with Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and ex-Chief of General Staff Yury Baluyevsky, Kommersant said.

(....)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aMiQ11h183F4&refer=us

 

[tomahawk6]

Swiss daily says retired Revolutionary Guards general Ali Reza Asghari told US Intelligence Tehran was financing secret nuclear project of Syria and North Korea; 'Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware,' according to report

A top-ranked Iranian defector told the United States that Iran was financing North Korean moves to make Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli air strike that destroyed a secret reactor, a report said Thursday.

The article in the daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung goes into detail about an Iranian connection and fills in gaps about Israel's Sept. 6, 2007, raid that knocked out Syria's nearly completed Al Kabir reactor in the country's eastern desert.

The February 2007 defection to the United States of Ali Reza Asgari, a retired general in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, provided considerable information on Iran's own nuclear program, said the article, written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry.

"The biggest surprise, however, was his assertion that Iran was financing a secret nuclear project of Syria and North Korea," he said. "No one in the American intelligence scene had heard anything of it. And the Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware."

Ruehle, who did not identify the sources of his information, publishes and comments on security and nuclear proliferation in different European newspapers and broadcasts and has held prominent roles in German and NATO institutions.


'Syrians were completely surprised'

US Intelligence had detected North Korean ship deliveries of construction supplies to Syria that started in 2002, and American satellites spotted the construction as early as 2003, but regarded the work as nothing unusual, in part because the Syrians had banned radio and telephones from the site and handled communications solely by messengers - "medieval but effective," Ruehle said.

Intensive investigation followed by US and Israeli intelligence services until Israel sent a 12-man commando unit in two helicopters to the site in August 2007 to take photographs and soil samples, he said. "The analysis was conclusive that it was a North Korean-type reactor," a gas graphite model, Ruehle said.

Other sources have suggested that the reactor might have been large enough to make about one nuclear weapon's worth of plutonium a year.

Just before the Israeli commando raid, a North Korean ship was intercepted en route to Syria with nuclear fuel rods, underscoring the need for fast action, he said. "On the morning of Sept. 6, 2007, seven Israeli F-15 fighter bombers took off to the north. They flew along the Mediterranean coast, brushed past Turkey and pressed on into Syria. Fifty kilometers (30 miles) from their target they fired 22 rockets at the three identified objects inside the Kibar complex.

"The Syrians were completely surprised. By the time their air defense systems were ready, the Israeli planes were well out of range. The mission was successful, the reactor destroyed," Ruehle said.

Israel estimates that Iran had paid North Korea between $1 billion and $2 billion for the project, Ruehle said. Israel has not commented on the strike, but after a delay of several months Washington presented intelligence purporting to show the target was a reactor being built with North Korean help.

Iranian officials were not available for comment because of a national holiday. In general, Iran has been silent about the Syrian facility bombed by Israel. Syrian officials could not be reached for comment. But Syria has denied the facility was a nuclear plant, saying it was an unused military building. It has also denied any nuclear cooperation with North Korea or Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency earlier this year said UN Inspectors had found processed uranium traces in samples taken from the site.

Syria has suggested the traces came from Israel ordnance used to hit the site, but the IAEA said the composition of the uranium made that unlikely. Israel has denied it was the source of the uranium.

Syria has told diplomats that it built a missile facility over the ruins of the site. 

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...689320,00.html
     

 

[CougarKing]

Ouch.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090321/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_obama

Iran's supreme leader dismisses Obama overtures
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 3 mins ago

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's supreme leader rebuffed President Barack Obama's latest outreach on Saturday, saying Tehran was still waiting to see concrete changes in U.S. policy.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was responding to a video message Obama released Friday in which he reached out to Iran on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian new year, and expressed hopes for an improvement in nearly 30 years of strained relations.

Khamenei holds the last word on major policy decisions, and how Iran ultimately responds to any concrete U.S. effort to engage the country will depend largely on his say.

In his most direct assessment of Obama and prospects for better ties, Khamenei said there will be no change between the two countries unless the American president puts an end to U.S. hostility toward Iran and brings "real changes" in foreign policy.

"They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice. We haven't seen any change," Khamenei said in a speech before a crowd of tens of thousands in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad.

In his video message, Obama said the United States wants to engage Iran, but he also warned that a right place for Iran in the international community "cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization."

Khamenei asked how Obama could congratulate Iranians on the new year and accuse the country of supporting terrorism and seeking nuclear weapons in the same message.

Khamenei said there has been no change even in Obama's language compared to that of his predecessor.

"He (Obama) insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day. If you are right that change has come, where is that change? What is the sign of that change? Make it clear for us what has changed."

Still, Khamenei left the door open to better ties with America, saying "should you change, our behavior will change too."

Diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Iran were cut after the U.S. Embassy hostage-taking after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which toppled the pro-U.S. shah and brought to power a government of Islamic clerics.

The United States cooperated with Iran in late 2001 and 2002 in the Afghanistan conflict, but the promising contacts fizzled — and were extinguished completely when Bush branded Tehran part of the "Axis of Evil."

Khamenei enumerated a long list of Iranian grievances against the United States over the past 30 years and said the U.S. was still interfering in Iranian affairs.

He mentioned U.S. sanctions against Iran, U.S. support for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during his 1980-88 war against Iran and the downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf in 1988.

He also accused the U.S. of provoking ethnic tension in Iran and said Washington's accusations that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons are a sign of U.S. hostility. Iran says its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, like energy production, not for building weapons.

"Have you released Iranian assets? Have you lifted oppressive sanctions? Have you given up mudslinging and making accusations against the great Iranian nation and its officials? Have you given up your unconditional support for the Zionist regime? Even the language remains unchanged," Khamenei said.

Khamenei, wearing a black turban and dark robes, said America was hated around the world for its arrogance, as the crowd chanted "Death to America."

Prominent political analyst Saeed Leilaz said Khamenei's comments did not amount to a rejection of better ties with the Obama administration. Rather, Iran's current hard-line leaders need to publicly maintain some degree of anti-U.S. rhetoric to bolster their own position, especially with their conservative base, he said.

"Iran's ruling Islamic establishment needs to lessen tensions with the U.S. and at the same time maintain a controlled animosity with Washington," he said. "Iran can't praise Obama all of a sudden."

Khamenei will also likely stand his ground as long as he remains concerned about the United States' ability to destabilize Iran, he said.

For its part, the Obama administration must take practical steps such as lifting a ban on selling Iran spare parts for passenger aircraft or considering unfreezing Iranian assets in the U.S., Leilaz said.

Obama has signaled a willingness to speak directly with Iran about its nuclear program and hostility toward Israel, a key U.S. ally. At his inauguration last month, the president said his administration would reach out to rival states, declaring "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

"They say we have stretched a hand toward Iran. ... If a hand is stretched covered with a velvet glove but it is cast iron inside, that makes no sense," Khamenei said.

 

[a_majoor]

Iran reacts to the stressors by removing websites. This could become an exponentially accelerating problem, with the only total solution for the Theocracy being to remove the .ir domain from the Internet root name servers and severing outside ties. (Of course they are attempting to do this already, but half steps only make the problem bigger).:

http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/22323/?nlid=1875&a=f

Iran dismantles unspecified number of Web sites
By Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's official news agency says the country's Revolutionary Guards has dismantled an unspecified number of Web sites that allegedly received financial assistance from foreign governments.

The IRNA agency says the Guards also arrested several of the Web site's owners for allegedly operating anti-Islamic and pornographic sites.

Thursday's report didn't provide further details including the identity of those arrested or names of the dismantled Web sites.

Iran has repeatedly accused the United States and some of its allies of seeking to undermine the country's ruling system. Authorities have arrested -- and later released -- several Iranian-Americans over the past two years on charges of seeking to overthrow the government.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

Copyright Technology Review 2009.

 

 

[CougarKing]

Makes one wonder how long the Israelis will actually wait under this new government before they decide to strike.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/01/petraeus-israel-might-att_n_181867.html

Petraeus: Israel Might Attack Iran
  The top U.S. commander in the Middle East, General David Petraeus, warned today that Israel might attack Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Bloomberg reports.


Army General David Petraeus told Congress that "the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it."


While Iran insists its nuclear program is intended for peaceful power generation, Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, said "Iranian officials have consistently failed to provide the assurances and transparency necessary for international acceptance and verification."

Iran refuses to suspend uranium enrichment, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions, and won't give international inspectors full access to its nuclear facilities.


Petraeus' warning comes a day after Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, threatened to force Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program if the United States did not do so first.


In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons--and quickly--or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran's nuclear facilities itself.