IRAN-Deja vu all over again?

by JWdaughter 318 Replies latest social current

  • leavingwt
    leavingwt

    Robert D. Kaplan, writing for The Atlantic. . .

    Indeed, I would argue that because Sunni Arabs from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt perpetrated the attacks of September 11, 2001, and because Sunni hostility to American and Israeli interests remains a conspicuous problem, the United States should theoretically welcome a strengthened Shiite role in the Middle East, were Iran to go through an even partial political transformation. And demographic, cultural, and other indicators all point to a positive ideological and philosophical shift in Iran in the medium to long term. Given this prognosis, and the high cost and poor chances for success of any military effort to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, I believe that containment of a nuclear Iran is the most sensible policy for the United States.

    . . .

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/living-with-a-nuclear-iran/8193

  • leavingwt
    leavingwt

    Our Proxy War in the Middle East

    "Even Israelis didn’t mind this time when we sold F-15s to Saudi Arabia. That’s because they share an enemy, Iran, and know that we’re going to help them fight it."

    http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/13/the-israeli-saudi-american-alliance-against-iran.html

  • llbh
    llbh

    Hi Justita, I think LWT just just got my point in the above post in the explanation given by Kaplan. It is well known that Hezbollah are backed by Iran,and are therefore anathema to Israel, though Israel has won few friends in its neighbours with recent actions; and has alienated friendly nations to boot.

    David

  • freydo
    freydo

    July 1, 2010
    Dispatches From the Edge
    Guns of August in the Middle East?

    By CONN HALLINAN

    Crazy talk about the Middle East seems to be escalating, backed up by some pretty ominous military deployments. First, the department of scary statements:

    First up, Shabtai Shavit, former chief of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, speaking June 21 at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv on why Israel should launch a pre-emptive strike at Iran: “I am of the opinion that, since there is an ongoing war, since the threat is permanent, since the intention of the enemy in this case is to annihilate you, the right doctrine is one of presumption and not retaliation.”

    Second up, Uzi Arad, Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security advisor, speaking before the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem June 22 on his belief that the “international community” would support an Israeli strike at Iran” “I don’t see anyone who questions the legality of this or the legitimacy.”

    Third up......The rhetoric is getting steamy, the weapons are moving into position, and it is beginning to feel like “The Guns of August” in the Middle East......

    http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan07012010.html

    George Will: Israel Poised to Strike Iran

    Monday, 16 Aug 2010 09:43 AM


    By: George Will

    "When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had to use mostly small arms to repel attacks by six Arab armies. Today, however, Israel feels, and is, more menaced than it was then, or has been since. Hence the potentially world-shaking decision that will be made here, probably within two years.

    To understand the man who will make it, begin with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's belief that stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program is integral to stopping the worldwide campaign to reverse 1948. It is, he says, a campaign to "put the Jew back to the status of a being that couldn't defend himself — a perfect victim." Today's Middle East, he says, reflects two developments. One is the rise of Iran and militant Islam since the 1979 revolution, which led to al-Qaida, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The other development is the multiplying threat of missile warfare.

    Now Israel faces a third threat, the campaign to delegitimize it in order to extinguish its capacity for self-defense..............."

    http://www.newsmax.com/GeorgeWill/Will--Iran--nuclear--Netanyahu--Israel--war--strike/2010/08/16/id/367558

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips

    Reports of Israeli planes being stationed in Georgia and Azerbaijan....shorter flight times.

    Saudi Arabia too, there have been reports of Israeli aircraft unloading equipment.

    In the meantime, a US aircraft carrier has moved away from Afghanistan and is now near the straits of Hormuz, in the last few days.

    BTS

  • leavingwt
    leavingwt

    Christopher Hitchens. . .

    Six More Reasons Why We Can't Let Iran Get Nukes

    With Russia's ever-helpful policy of assisting Iran to accelerate its reactor program, allied to the millimetrical progress of sanctions on the Ahmadinejad regime and the increasingly hopeless state of negotiations with the Palestinians, there is likely to be no let-up in the speculation about an Israeli "first strike" on Iran's covert but ever-more-flagrant nuclear weapons installations. I have lost count of the number of essays and columns on the subject that were published this month alone. The most significant and detailed such contribution, though, came from my friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg in a cover story in the Atlantic. From any close reading of this piece, it was possible to be sure of at least one thing: The government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants it to be understood that, in the absence of an American decision to do so, Israel can and will mount such an attack in the not-too-distant future. The keyword of the current anguished argument—the word existential—is thought by a strategic majority of Israel's political and military leadership to apply in its fullest meaning. To them, an Iranian bomb is incompatible with the long-term survival of the Israeli state and even of the Jewish people.

    It would be a real pity if the argument went on being conducted in these relatively narrow terms. A sentence from Goldberg's report will illustrate what I mean:

    Israel, Netanyahu told me, is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would destroy Tel Aviv.

    Why Tel Aviv? It is admittedly the most Jewish of Israel's centers of population, and it was built only in the course of the last century. It is also the most secular and modern and sexually licentious of Israel's cities, which might also qualify it for the apocalyptic wrath of the mullahs. But it is also home to many Arabs and Muslims, as are the coastal towns adjacent to it. And, as I never tire of pointing out, there is no weapon of mass destruction yet devised that can discriminate on the basis of religion or ethnicity.

    So why did Netanyahu not say Jerusalem, which he and his party regard as Israel's true capital? Surely because this would immediately raise the question of whether the Iranian theocracy seriously intends to immolate the Dome of the Rock and the other Islamic holy places along with the poisonous "Zionist entity." And that's to say nothing of the number of Palestinians who would be slaughtered in any such assault. There is something sectarian, almost racist, in the way this aspect of the issue is always overlooked.

    I tried to raise the same question in print when Menachem Begin ordered the bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981. On that occasion, the worst he could find to say about Saddam Hussein's genocidal ambitions was that they, too, constituted a threat to Jewish survival. Yet every knowledgeable person understands that if Saddam Hussein had come into possession of a bomb, he would have used it in the first instance on what his propaganda always defined as "the Persian racists." (This is why the Iranian air force had tried and failed to hit the very same reactor a short time before.) When speaking of the Zionist foe, incidentally, Saddam's most aggressive public speech promised only that with his chemical and other weapons, he would "burn up half of Israel." The late megalomaniac was not notorious for speaking of half-measures. It's possible that even in some part of his reptilian brain he understood that Palestine is not populated only by Jews.

    The whole emphasis on Israel's salience in this matter, and of the related idea of subcontracting a strike to the Israeli Defense Forces, is an evasion, somewhat ethnically tinged, of what is an international responsibility. If the Iranian dictatorship succeeds in "breaking out" and becoming a nuclear power, the following things will have happened:

    1) International law and the stewardship of the United Nations will have been irretrievably ruined. The mullahs will have broken every solemn undertaking that they ever gave: to the International Atomic Energy Agency; to the European Union, which has been their main negotiating interlocutor up until now; and to the United Nations. (Tehran specifically rejects the right of the U.N. Security Council to have any say in this question.) Those who usually fetishize the role of the United Nations and of the international nuclear inspectors have a special responsibility to notice this appalling outcome.

    2) The "Revolutionary Guards," who last year shot and raped their way to near-absolute power in Iran, are also the guardians of the underground weapons program. A successful consummation of that program would be an immeasurable enhancement of the most aggressive faction of the current dictatorship.

    3) The power of the guards to project violence outside Iran's borders would likewise be increased. Any Hezbollah subversion of Lebanese democracy or missile attack on Israel; any Iranian collusion with the Taliban or with nihilist forces in Iraq would be harder to counter in that it would involve a confrontation with a nuclear godfather.

    4) The same powerful strategic ambiguity would apply in the case of any Iranian move on a neighboring Sunni Arab Gulf state, such as Bahrain. The more extreme of Iran's theocratic newspapers already gloat at such a prospect, which is why so many Arab regimes hope—sometimes publicly—that this "existential" threat to them also be removed.

    5) There will never be a settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute, because the rejectionist Palestinians will be even more a proxy of a regime that calls for Israel's elimination, and the rejectionist Jews will be vindicated in their belief that concessions are a waste of time, if not worse.

    6) The concept of "nonproliferation," so dear to the heart of the right-thinking, will go straight into the history books along with the League of Nations.

    These, then, are some of the prices to be paid for not disarming Iran. Is it not obvious that the international interest in facing this question squarely, and in considering it as "existential" for civilization, is far stronger than any political calculation to be made in Netanyahu's office?

    http://www.slate.com/id/2264064/

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips

    Obama is an internationalist. Iranian nuclear weapons would trash the current international order, and lead to an arms race in the Middle East.

    An attempt was made on Ahmadinejad's life a few days ago with a hand tossed bomb that wounded his entourage, at the very same time, a brand new petrochemicals plant was sabotaged with explosives.

    Things are very unsettled "over there."

    BTS

  • TastingFreedom
  • freydo
    freydo

    Iran inaugurates nation's first unmanned bomber

    By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer – Sun Aug 22, 7:14 pm ET

    TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday inaugurated the country's first domestically built unmanned bomber aircraft, calling it an "ambassador of death" to Iran's enemies.

    The 4-meter-long drone aircraft can carry up to four cruise missiles and will have a range of 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), according to a state TV report — not far enough to reach archenemy Israel. "The jet, as well as being an ambassador of death for the enemies of humanity, has a main message of peace and friendship," said Ahmadinejad at the inauguration ceremony, which fell on the country's national day for its defense industries.

    The goal of the aircraft, named Karrar or striker, is to "keep the enemy paralyzed in its bases," he said, adding that the aircraft is for deterrence and defensive purposes. The president championed the country's military self-sufficiency program, and said it will continue "until the enemies of humanity lose hope of ever attacking the Iranian nation."

    Iran launched an arms development program during its 1980-88 war with Iraq to compensate for a U.S. weapons embargo and now produces its own tanks, armored personnel carries, missiles and even a fighter plane........................."

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_unmanned_bomber

  • llbh
    llbh

    Sorry Freydo The US is way way ahead, as is Israel in UAV's. If they(Iran) attempt to use them they will be shot down immediately.

    David

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