Iran Affairs

Shirin Shafaei interview

UPDATE: Read the corrections noted in the comment below

I recommend reading this devastating interview with Shirin Shafaei which originally appeared in Iranicum and was translated by Iran Review - especially for the large collection of links.

To use a court case analogy, this is what has happened: Iran has been accused of having an intention to develop nuclear weapons (guilty until proven innocent), the Agency (prosecutor and the jury) cannot guarantee that Iran does not have a military nuclear agenda (double negative case), the enemy of Iran, Israel, itself very much guilty of having actually committed the same crime (nuclear weaponisation) provides the jury with the so-called evidence. Important documents and information were withheld from the jury (former IAEA head, ElBaradei) and the defendant (Iran). Meanwhile the new head of the jury (current IAEA head, Amano) is himself under the influence of another arch enemy of Iran and best friends of Israel, namely the US. The US is itself guilty of not only having the largest number of nuclear arsenal in the world throughout the history, but also guilty of being the only country which has actually used nuclear bombs against civilian population, not once but twice. When the jury-prosecutor receives these readymade allegations and fabricated evidence supporting those allegations, it sends Iran’s nuclear file to the Supreme Court which is the Security Council here. There again you find the US sitting comfortably along with its European allies and opportunist powers to decide if Iran should be punished for a crime it has not committed. It won’t be hard to guess what such a verdict would be, without even having seen or verified the evidence.

Is the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" true?

Provocative title, eh? I am reproducing below a snippet of a conversation I had recently with a friend who is a PhD candidate, about his proposed thesis on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional, fraudulent book published in Tsarist Russia which purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.

Me: What happened when you proposed that as a thesis topic?

Friend: It was rejected, pretty fast. They warned me that publishing such a thesis would kill my academic career before it started; that I would never find someone to act as my thesis advisor; that the department would not accept it. In fact I was told - in so many words - that only Jews can write about the Protocols.

Me: Is it because they thought you would claim the Protocols were true?

Friend: Yeah, in part. There's still so much effort to "prove" that it fabricated and fictional--as if that's still an open question--but my point was that even as a work of fiction, it deserves some attention beyond simply proving it to be fabricated and false. Of course it is fictional, but so what? Orwell's 1984 was also fiction, and no one argues whether it is "true" or not - yet we still study it and analyze it and write about it as a piece of literature and political metaphor.

Me: So what were you going to write about the Protocols?

Friend: I was going to analyze it not as a historical document or a piece of journalism, but as metaphorical writing, just as 1984 is a political metaphor. But that wasn't allowed.

Me: Why?

Friend: Well, I think part of it is sensitivity to charges of promoting anti-semitism, because it is in fact an anti-semitic tract, even if you treat the work purely as a fabrication and fiction. But just because it is fiction doesn't mean it can't also be treated as a piece of literature. There is an undercurrent of Jewish exceptionalism and a sense of Jewish superiority in some corners - this isn't new and occasionally you hear about it in the news when some Rabbi issues some weird ruling for example. That sort of thing is true in Judaism as well as Islam and Christianity; this belief that your religion is not only destined to take over the world but also entitled to do so because it is superior. And recognition of the fact that such thought exists in Judaism makes a lot of people uncomfortable - so much so that even purely academic studies of the subject are entirely taboo, particularly by non-Jews.

Me: What interested you in this topic?

Friend: Well, ironically, initially I wanted to write about the prevalence and basis of Islamophobia in Western societies - something that has already attracted a lot of academic attention and controversy. But in studying the issue, I was struck by the similarity between today's expressions of Islamophobia, and the classic expressions of European anti-Semitism. If you substitute the word "Jew" for "Muslim" in classic anti-semitic literature, in most cases you'll end up with the exact same thing we hear today about Muslims: those swarthy, dirty, deceitful people are multiplying, lust for our blood, are intent on taking over the world, are secretly conspiring to subjugate the enlightened West to their backward religion, etc. These are classic expressions of anti-semitism, which are now applied to Islam. And ironically, some supporters of Israel have promoted this - this is why the pro-Israel Right has started to make common cause with the anti-Semitic Right in Europe like the BNP and EDL, and CUFI in the US, against the "Muslim threat."

Me: And pointing this out makes you anti-Semitic?

Friend: Yes, supposedly. The irony is that on one had the idea of Jewish Superiority is pretty well documented - we know the concept exists and is much debated. For example the idea that Jews are intellectually superior or Jewish Exceptionalism in intellectual arenas - which can just as easily be viewed as the Jewish "sneakiness" that anti-semites promote. There is a rich and long debate about Jewish Exceptionalism in the Jewish community. But it is a debate that is restricted to Jews. Non-Jews are not supposed to enter into it. If they do, people get uncomfortable and charges of anti-Semitism go flying.

Me: Do you think this issue has particular relevance nowdays?

Friend: Yes absolutely. I think much of the Right's world view, particularly the NeoCon and Pro-Israel Right, is informed by the sense of Jewish exceptionalism. I don't think there is a big debate about that, actually. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote about it. Philip Weiss writes about it. But they're both Jewish so they can do so.

I have to agree with this view btw - I think that Iran's real threat to Israel's "existence" is not in that Iran might decided to literally destroy Israel with a nuclear weapon, but as a threat to Israel's political and psychological identity, something Haggai Ram wrote about, and which Netanyahu even implicitly acknowledged when he said that a nuclear Iran would cause Jews to emigrate out of Israel, or when Danielle Pletka conceeds that the real "threat" posed by nuclear Iran would be if it becomes an accepted regional competitor

Dennis Ross, disingenuous on Iran's nuclear program

Dennis Ross has published quite a disingenuous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which portrays the typical NeoCon talking points about Iran: portraying Iran as a threat, deliberately confusing a civilian nuclear program with a nuclear weapons program by referring to a nuclear weapons "capability", calling for the continuation of "pressure" , evading the real fact that the nuclear issue is simply a pretext for regime change, and portraying the issue as a false choice between sanctioning Iran versus bombing Iran which deliberately ignores a third option of actualy engaging Iran.

The disingenuousness of Ross comes through clearly in his concluding paragraph, where he asserts:

With the Iranian regime reeling, an increase in pressure can once again put Iran's leaders in a position where they seek a way out. That way out must not leave the Iranians with the capability to produce nuclear weapons at a time of their choosing. They can have civil nuclear power. They cannot have the means to translate that into nuclear weapons.

In fact, having a nuclear weapons "capability" is inherent in having a civilian nuclear program. As the IAEA has noted, more than 40 countries already have the "capability" to make nukes.

And according to Greenpeace

The first point to note is that military and civil nuclear activities share, for the atomic bomb and the atomic trigger of the thermonuclear warhead, the same nuclear processes and materials...The second point is that the processes of manufacture, procuring, refining and enriching these materials are exactly the same for both military and civil needs...The third point is that as civil applications of nuclear power advance there is a wider crossover into the domain which has been until recent years almost exclusive to the military.

There is no way, in short, for Iran to have a nuclear program that does not also make it theoretically "capable" of making nukes. And yet despite this, Iran has already offered to not only ratify the Additional Protocol (which allows more intrusive inspections) but to also place additional restrictions on its nuclear program WELL BEYOND its legal obligations - even including opening the program to joint US operation - in order to address the even hypothetical concerns about weapons proliferation - only to have the offers totally ignored by the US.

So, Ross' argument that Iran should "not be allowed" (I guess Iran's NPT rights don't count!) to have a nuclear "capability" is in fact a bullshit justification for the continuation of the same policies that have thus far accomplished nothing more than to create the groundwork for a justification for war. 

Nor should this come as a surprise because justifying a war has been Dennis Ross' agenda all along. As the Leveretts pointed out:

Dennis Ross had told us, before entering the Obama Administration, that he did not believe a U.S. strategy of “engagement with pressure” toward Iran would actually work to stimulate productive diplomacy, but would be necessary to lay the ground work for further sanctions and, eventually, military strikes against the Islamic Republic.

 

The "nuclear weapons threat" excuse for a war on Iran

The Obama administration has never seriously sought to engage the Iranians, and has deliberately dragged out the nuclear dispute with Iran because it serves merely as a convenient pretext for war and regime change. It is about time to challenge the false media narrative accusing Iran of being "intransigent", and justifying the sanctions as a response to Iran's nuclear program. This is propaganda, which is intended to ultimately justify a war on Iran.

There's a false narrative on Iran promoted by the media, which claims that the US sanctions on Iran have something to do with the nuclear program, and that the US has attempted to resolve the nuclear standoff through "diplomatic" means. That's simply not true and never was, as many Iran observers have noted. 

For example, BusinessWeek today proclaims in a headline that "U.S. Joins EU Push to Embargo Iran Oil Over Nuclear Effort".

Really? The embargo is "over nuclear effort", is it? If that's the case then why has the US consistently ignored many, many Iranian nulcear compromise offers - even ones endorsed by American and international experts? Why not similar sanctions on other countries that are developing similar nuclear technology, and have a record of lying to the IAEA to cover-up weapons-related work?

See, the US policy with respect to Iran has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. It is about regime change. Nuclear weapons are just a pretext, just as WMDs in Iraq were a pretext for war. And the experts are starting to say so too, although for some this realization comes despite themselves, and belatedly.

Example of a late convert: Mark Hibbs at Arms Control Wonk, who in response to comments written on his posting on that site entitled "Who wants diplomacy on Iran", eventually sees the light:

When I re-read my blog post, it occured to me that “regime change” is the elephant in the room in this entire discussion. It would appear that the US administration has shifted its view on Iran to the point where it is not willing to really negotiate an outcome with this Iranian regime on terms that would permit Iran to keep its nuclear assets.

Yes, an elephant in the room that I've been yelling and pointing at for years now. Sheesh! Che Ajab! (trans: about time!)

Gary Sick concluded thus after reviewing the Wikileaks cables on the Obama administration's supposed outreach to Iran which was supposedly rejected by Iran:

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.

Dr Sick later wrote me an email about this:

I particularly appreciate that someone is reading my year-old posts. I do believe you could have dated my reluctant awakening quite a bit earlier if you had wished. I think I pointed out in some detail what Dennis Ross's position was and what that meant to the Obama administration. And of course I never doubted that the Bush admin -- at least until the very end -- had absolutely no interest in real negotiations with Iran. And I was very critical of the Clinton admin for failing to act on Iran's offers. And I have said consistently, for as long as I have been writing on the subject, that our policy has been more interested in sanctions than in progress.

And if you're curious what was "Dennis Ross's position", the Leveretts pointed that out:

Dennis Ross had told us, before entering the Obama Administration, that he did not believe a U.S. strategy of “engagement with pressure” toward Iran would actually work to stimulate productive diplomacy, but would be necessary to lay the ground work for further sanctions and, eventually, military strikes against the Islamic Republic.

Of course, Ross later denied this.

Reza Marashi, a former State Department official, wrote about this too:

 It should now be clear that U.S. policy has never been a true engagement policy. By definition, engagement entails a long-term approach that abandons "sticks" and reassures both sides that their respective fears are unfounded. We realized early on that the administration was unlikely to adopt this approach...

Former IAEA Director Elbaradei - who was labelled a "despicable person" and an "Iranian agent" by the Israelis - also pointed out that Iran was ready to make significant compromise offers that were ignored, leading to his conclusion:

I have seen the Iranians ready to accept putting a cap on their enrichment [program] in terms of tens of centrifuges, and then in terms of hundreds of centrifuges. But nobody even tried to engage them on these offers.

And,

They weren’t interested in a compromise with the government in Tehran, but regime change – by any means necessary.

Paul Pillar, writing in the National Interest in an entry entitled "The Road Not Taken Toward Iran", noted that there are many possible compromise options that could be explored to meet the minimum requirements of both sides regarding the nuclear dispute between Iran and the US, which have never been explored despite all the talk about willingness by the US to resolve the issue peacefully:

The only way in which this approach would not make sense is if talk about peacefully resolving the impasse over the Iranian nuclear issue is preparation for later making a case for launching a war against Iran. Unfortunately, some in the United States (and in Israel) who comment a lot on this matter seem to be doing exactly that. And when those people come to say that war is necessary because peaceful means have been tried and failed, that statement—if the unexplored road stays unexplored—will be false.

And later, in another entry entitled "Sanctions that are designed to fail", Pillar critiqued the NeoCon propaganda line on Iran sanctions:

Their task for now is to prepare the propagandistic groundwork for a big push for a war after, they hope, a different president enters office in 2013. Repeating the canard that diplomatic alternatives have been exhausted is part of that preparation. Another part is making the case the sanctions are not sufficient—supplementing the case as necessary with proposals for sanctions that would have no chance for working even if they were adopted. And each phase of the preparation, based on the unproven assumption that the advent of an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a terrible development, further fosters the impression that—as will be argued vociferously when the time for a big push for war comes—such a development really would indeed be terrible and must be prevented at all costs, even if “all costs” means a disastrous war.

Six former European ambassadors also wrote about how the maximalist demands by the US on Iran have simply led to the continued standoff, despite the fact that Iran's nuclear program is not in breach of international law:

We often hear that Iran's refusal to negotiate seriously left our countries no other choice but to drag it in 2006 to the security council. Here too, things are not quite that clear. In 2005 Iran was ready to discuss an upper limit for the number of its centrifuges and to maintain its rate of enrichment far below the high levels necessary for weapons. Tehran also expressed its readiness to allow intrusive inspections, even in non-declared sites. But at that time Europe and the US wanted to compel Iran to ditch its enrichment programme entirely.

Iranians assume that this is still the European and US goal, and that for this reason the security council insists on suspension of all Iranian enrichment activities. But the goal of "zero centrifuges operating in Iran, permanently or temporarily" is unrealistic, and has contributed greatly to the present standoff.

I could go on and on, pointing out how the standard media narrative - that the US policy with respect to Iran actually has some relationship to the nuclear issue - is known to be quite false.

And what has this policy resulted in? Well, the Iranians have already reached the conclusion that the NeoCons controlling US policy are disingenuously using the nuclear issue as a pretext, and so they have further concluded - quite logically - that they should give up trying to compromise and negotiate with the US on the nuclear issue, as Farideh Farhi notes.

They even suspended enrichment entirely for 3 years and agreed to sign the Additional Protocol (which allows stricter, more intensive IAEA inspections) - though US allies have refused to do so - and yet their compromise offers were met with only greater hostility and raised demands.

In 2006, Simon Tisdall quoted anonymous Iranian officials and diplomats as saying:

“The U.S. is using the nuclear issue as a pretext for regime change,” a senior Iranian official said this week. “The issue is a diversion. The U.S. wants to weaken Iran. Even if the nuclear issue was solved, they would want another thing and another thing.” And, “The Americans are trying to create an environment so the U.S. can hit Iran,” one diplomat said.

Both Rafsanjani, the backer of the so-called "Green Movement," and Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei have also concluded that the nuclear issue is ultimately a pretext for war.

And yet the media in the US insists on promoting the myth that the sanctions on Iran have something to do with Iran's nuclear issue, that Iran has been the "intransigent" party in the dispute which has refused to negotiate over the issue. These are are convenient lies, which are intended to portray the "fault" for the current standoff as laying with Iran, when in reality the US is responsible for the continued standoff.

The bottom line is that the current dispute between Iran and the US has nothing to do with any "nuclear threat" posed by Iran. That's just a pretext for regime change, through war if necessary. The US has no intention of allowing a peaceful resolution to this dispute while leaving the Iranian regime in power. And sanctions are merely intended to serve as stepping-stones towards a war, which at each step simply paints the US into a tighter corner in dealing with Iran.

 

 

 

 

 

Iran sanctions "bought and paid for by Israel"

Philip Weiss:

It's a new world! I get to say bought and paid for by the Israel lobby every other minute now without being accused of being a conspiracist because Tom Friedman said so in the New York Times! Well, here's another bought-and-paid-for group. United Against Nuclear Iran, started by Dennis Ross, the Israel lobbyist who then went into the Obama administration at a high level.

Yes but considering the amount of US aid that goes to Israel, actually it was bought by US money.

Still desperate to deny the drone story

Had a fun time watching CNN. Some idiot from the "Chertoff Group" - maybe this guy? - was just on CNN acting all smarmy and petulant, and he basically expressed doubt about the Christian Science Monitor story on how Iran brought down the drone by alluding to the damage to the undercarriage of the drone -- I guess the moron had not bothered to actually read the CSM article which clearly explains why the carriage was damaged: because there was a slight difference between the altitude of where it was landing versus where it thought it was landing:

The Iranian engineer explains why: "If you look at the location where we made it land and the bird's home base, they both have [almost] the same altitude," says the Iranian engineer. "There was a problem [of a few meters] with the exact altitude so the bird's underbelly was damaged in landing; that's why it was covered in the broadcast footage."

And of course the dingbat CNN interviewer didn't bother pressing the issue in the interview. Instead she went on to another angle, about how this drone really isn't the top of the line etc.

They just can't come to terms with the reality!

How Iran "hijacked" the US drone

It doesn't sound very complicated - basically they fed some false GPS coordinates to the drone, using transmitters that over-powered the normal GPS signal coming from GPS satellites, thus telling the drone to go land in a location that the drone THOUGHT was its base.

PS: dontcha love the word "hijacked" in there? If the US had downed an Iranian drone flying in US airspace, the word would have been "comandeered" or "appropriated" or "seized" or even "took over". "Hijacked" implies an illegal act, but there's nothing illegal about Iran seizing a foreign aircraft violating its airspace.

Steel mill blast due to old munitions in scrap metal

So the the blast at the Yazd steel mill was reportedly due to the presence of old munitions in scrap metal. This would not be the first time that munitions have exploded in Iran due to negligence.

Regardless, while the Israeli media have been quite active in promoting totally unsubstantiated theories about this latest explosion (claiming that the facility was somehow "linked" to Iran's nuclear program - while the body of the article says the presence of any such link is "unclear") let me just say that the "foreign workers" who were reportedly killed in this blast were probably not North Korean, but were probably Afghans. There are still many thousands of Afghan refugees who work in Iran. But I guess speculation about North Koreans is much more interesting than such a prosaic explanation.

More international support for Iran's nuclear program

So the head of the Organization for the Islamic Conference (representing 57 Islamic countries around the world) has said that there's no proof of any nuclear weapons program in Iran. This is at least the 2nd time that the OIC has expressed support for Iran's nuclear program.

This comes after the recent criticisms of the latest IAEA reports on Iran by the 180-member Non Aligned Movement, which has historically supported Iran in this dispute.

Some analysts see some significance in the fact the most recent expression of support by the OIC was delivered by a Turkish diplomat who is supposedly going to be the next president of Turkey. However, Turkey has repeatedly supported Iran's nuclear program.

In fact both Brazil and Turkey explicitly endorsed Iran's right to enrich uranium in the May 2010 uranium swap agreement - the same agreement that the US torpedoed at the last moment by yet again moving the goalposts (adding a demand that Iran must entirely suspend enrichment) to ensure there was no breakthrough (because the US doesn't really want to resolve the nuclear issue but instead wants to use it as a pretext for regime change.)

The Russias have said there's no evidence of a nuclear program in Iran. Many times.

And Iraq

And Algeria

And Indonesia

etc etc

Washington Post fixes headlines about Iranian nuclear "weapons" - so what?

So apparently the ombudsman at the Washington Post has agreed that headlines claiming that Iran had a 'nuclear weapons program' were wrong and instead should have just referenced an Iranian 'nuclear program'.

That's all very nice and good but the deliberate conflation of a nuclear energy program with a nuclear weapons program has been going on in the media for so long now that this is hardly any sort of victory. The public has been thoroughly trained to read "weapons" whenever it sees the words "Iran" and "nuclear" close to each other (or even just "Iran".) And, the continued references to Iranian "intentions to obtain capabilities" to make nukes is also a form of this conflation, since any country with a perfectly legitimate civilian nuclear program is automatically also a "potential" nuclear weapons proliferator.

I wrote this a long time ago:

[T]he absence of any actual evidence of an Iranian nuclear-weapons programme is being smoothed over through the use of ambiguities. This is usually done by conflating a nuclear-weapons programme with a nuclear-energy programme....

The intentional conflation of a nuclear-weapons programme with a nuclear-energy programme takes several forms. For example, in addition to overt references to Iran’s “nuclear-weapons programme”, there may be references to Iran’s nuclear “threat”, or vague statements about Iran’s nuclear “ambitions”, or even more tenuously, allusions to Iran’s “intentions” to obtain a nuclear-weapons “capability”. In a paper entitled “Defusing Iran’s Bomb”, one pundit claims: “Iran is now no more than 12 to 48 months from acquiring a nuclear bomb … and seems dead set on securing an option to do so.”⁷ So, what is Iran months from acquiring: the bomb, or merely an “option” to obtain the bomb? What exactly is an “option” to acquire the bomb, anyway? Can’t any country with a nuclear infrastructure be said to have the “option” of using it to build bombs? All these inconvenient issues are covered up by such use of ambiguous language. The ambiguity is useful precisely because such questions don’t have to be answered, provided the implied “threat” is communicated.

 

 

QUIZ

Here’s a quiz:

In which Middle Eastern country will you find:

a) neighbourhoods that require women in public to have all parts of their body covered except for the face and hands;

b) cities with an absence of women’s images from public posters and advertisements;

c) soldiers disobeying orders if they mean listening to women sing;

d) religious groups that traditionally eschewed anything political becoming increasingly powerful from their involvement in elections;

e) shops, even in mixed communities, being told they must display “we-dress-modestly” certificates if they expect any religious customers.

ANSWER

Silly media coverage and US drone in Iran: a follow-up

So to follow-up my previous post about how the PR people in the Pentagon were trying desperately to down-play the importance of the US drone captured in Iran...

CNN has an article entitled "Iran won't return U.S. drone it claims to have"

It "claims to have"??

So, I guess Obama is asking Iran to return a drone that Iran does not have?

 

Cost of nuclear power

Random fact: Average fuel cost for nuclear power in 2007 in the US was US$0.0045 per kilowatt-hour.

Spinning the "US drone captured by Iran" story

So the story of the captured drone started out as "Drone flying in Western Afghanistan went missing" to "Yes, it was captured by Iranians 140 miles inside Iran, where we regularly conduct spying missions over their territory."

But it seems like the PR people in the Pentagon are still madly trying any tactic to downplay the implications of a US drone falling into Iranian hands, tossing out all sorts of spins. In addition to the claim that it was just an old drone that really wasn't all that sophisticated anyway ( "Pfft! That old thing? They can keep it." ) we now see this:

PENTAGON: The US Drone Shown On Iranian TV Was Likely Just A Model

[M]ultiple U.S. officials said that based on inconsistencies with the design of the drone, along with clues from imagery of the actual drone's crash site, the drone shown was not the Sentinel

Versus

U.S. official: Iran does have our drone

A U.S. official tells CBS News that there is "high confidence" that a captured American aircraft shown on Iranian television today is, in fact, one of this country's most sophisticated spy planes.

Improvement of standards of living in post-revolutionary Iran

Is it any wonder that multiple polls show that Iranians generally support the regime there?

From the UNDP's Human Development Report 2011:

Islamic Republic of Iran’s HDI value for 2011 is 0.707—in the high human development category—positioning the country at 88 out of 187 countries and territories. Between 1980 and 2011, Islamic Republic of Iran’s HDI value increased from 0.437 to 0.707, an increase of 62.0 per cent or average annual increase of about 1.6 per cent. The rank of Islamic Republic of Iran’s HDI for 2010 based on data available in 2011 and methods used in 2011 is 87 out of 187 countries....

Between 1980 and 2011, Islamic Republic of Iran’s life expectancy at birth increased by 21.9 years, mean years of schooling increased by 5.2 years and expected years of schooling increased by 4.3 years. Islamic Republic of Iran’s GNI [Gross National Income] per capita increased by about 43.0 per cent between 1980 and 2011.(more)

And here's an interesting chart showing how life has improved in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution:

Of course there are still problems - gender inequality an inequality in income distribution has to be improved.

While Iran dismantles the drone...

I recommend Paul Woordward's post on War in Context:

As soon as Iran proudly announced that they had captured a Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone that had flown from Afghanistan, a stream of reports followed about how this will be of little consequence. An unfortunate mishap. Once in a while the US loses a drone. What to do. Let’s just move on because there’s nothing worth paying attention to here.

 

Attacking diplomatic outposts - the double standard exposed.

You know, I'd be slightly more pertrubed about the Iranian mob attacking the UK embassy in Iran, if the US hadn't attacked the Iranian consulate in Iraq in 2007 and imprisoned accreditted Iranian diplomats in blatant disregard for international law (and over Iraqi objections.)

Germany provides nuclear-weapons subs to Israel

On the point that Germany has provided more submarines to Israel that can carry nuclear weapons, an email from a friend:

Funny how the Germans are sanctioning Iran, when they were primarily responsible for giving chemicals to Saddam for this chemical weapons attacks against Iran that killed more than 100,000 peope [about 60,000 Iranians - c.s.]

The irony is that the Germans were supposedly "shocked" that Saddam's chemical weapons could have been used against Israel. However, they're apparently not nearly as shocked about the fact that the German-provided chemical weapons were used against Iranians.

Apparently Germans still have thing for gassing people, and now nuking people.

Bahrain PR drive to demonize Iran, justify arms deal

 Guess the "Arab Spring" of Bahrain will have to wait . . .

After an independent commission found no evidence of any Iranian role in the uprising in Bahrain, which was put down with the assistance of invading Saudi troops backed by the US and UK, the Bahraini sheikhs are still trying to implicate Iran, and are promoting a PR drive to blame Iran for their unpopularity anyway, and especially so as to justify the recent $53 million pending arms deal with the US. They even get a former US admiral to write that the US should continue supporting the regime in Bahrain for the sake of US security.

Which Republican candidate is "best for Israel"

Which Republican candidate is "best for Israel"?? That's apparently a really hard question to answer, since they're all falling over themselves to adopt the pro-Israeli line.

 Every single candidate, including Ron Paul (with the exception of his opinion on aid) would look to Israeli government positions as the guide to its interests and for use as a barometer by which to gauge support

Yup, this is the American political process at work.

Israel is a third-world country in denial

From Haaretz

There are people who want us to be scared by the Iranian bomb rather than by the home-grown social-welfare bomb; there are people who gladly devote themselves to this act of whitewashing and denial. The dream of bombing Iran's reactors is more exciting than the dream of Petah Tikva's Ron Nagar, who wants to have a bank account. There are people who want us to do precisely that: Fear nuclear weapons, which are not of our doing, and forget about the hunger, which is of our doing. This behavior is typical of undemocratic regimes, and it's typical of Israel democracy too.

Iran oil sanctions - theory v reality

According to BusinessWeek:

Sanctions could achieve their purpose given the right circumstances. If the price of oil slid to about $65 a barrel, Iran’s oil dependence could leave it struggling to meet government budgets. Dubowitz’s idea is to pressure law-abiding companies to sever business ties with Iran, allowing the remaining players to negotiate for deep discounts. So if Europe, Japan, and South Korea abandoned Iranian oil, customers such as China could push for discounts as big as 40 percent, Dubowitz’s group estimates, starving the regime of funds needed for its nuclear and missile programs.

But Iran sanctions underpriced, says JP Morgan :

Oil rose above $109 a barrel on Friday in part due to supported rising tension over Iran... Recently, South Korea indicated that it could ban Iranian oil, but most analysts do not think it is likely, given the impact it would have on Korean economy. Even the EU, which imposed tough sanctions on 180 Iranian companies and individuals stopped short of imposing oil sanctions on the country for fear of harming its weakest members who are all already sinking under debt and poor economic growth.

Nothing like shooting yourself in the foot.

PS: Similar predictions about Iran's regime falling due to low oil prices have been with us for a long, long time. In fact Iran's regime has survived $15/barrel prices.

Iran to attack US bases in Germany? Not so fast

"There is no evidence that any actions against U.S. facilities have been prepared," said on Thursday afternoon, a spokesman for the Attorney General told SPIEGEL ONLINE. In other words, the investigators believe it or not on such a plot.

 

(Translation of original by Google)

Muslim Brotherhood wins Egyptian elections

So, while we're all distracted with the British embassy saga, looks like the "Arab Spring" is springing in all the wrong directions:

Partial results Wednesday showed the Muslim Brotherhood emerging as the biggest winner in Egypt's landmark parliamentary elections, and leaders of the once-banned Islamic group demanded to form the next government, setting the stage for a possible confrontation with the ruling military.

The generals who took power after the February fall of Hosni Mubarak have said they will name the government and the parliament would have no right to dissolve it. They have also sought to wrest from the new parliament the more long-reaching and crucial role of running the process for writing the new constitution.

So will the military back down in the face of the popular Ikhwan? If not, will Egypt fall into a civil war? Who is that 21 tons of American tear gas intended for? Either way, as you can read in the right-wing media in the West, neither Israel nor the US are happy about this, and now there's even talk of an Israeli invasion of the Sinai.