Archive for December, 2007
The outspoken, inept barbarian Ahamdinejad has been at the receiving end of a mouthful of strictures from within Iran. In recent times many economists have slammed his economic policies, which they believe are leading the Iranian economy towards a deep abyss. He has another critic in a former Revolutionary Guard commander, who has condemned his economic policies and the rising inflation in Iran.
The former commander, Mohsen Rezaie, found support from the deputy speaker of the Parliament, a conservative, and a leading lawmaker. He blamed the government’s policy of injecting insane amount of funds into building ornamental infrastructure, which has increased the inflation to the current level of 19.1% - an outrageous level if you are an economic noob.
“Every year, the government injects a huge amount of money into society without supplying goods and services in return for this money,” Rezaie, who led the Guards from 1981-1997, was quoted as saying by the Sarmayeh newspaper. [source]
No Comments Send Article
The Israelis probably have in Ahmadinejad their most perilous enemy, no matter how delusioned. He has openly threatened them time and again and given them every reason to take the Iranian threat seriously. But the recent U.S intelligence report was a bolt from the blue for the Israelis, and the unwaivering U.S-Israel realtionship has been rocked by it. Now the Israelis are trying to sell their own story of the Iranian nuclear program, which is the true story indeed. In this regard an Israeli delegation is in the U.S. It is in the best interest of U.S-Isarael relations that the Israeli story is listened to and believed. It also needs to be believed and then acted upon if we are to avert anything catastrophic. Iran remains dangerous in intent and nuclear weapons are certainly not beyond its reach.
Israel’s Ynet news portal reported on Sunday that a delegation of Israeli intelligence officers is currently in the US in an effort to convince American intelligence agencies that Iran is still seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. [source]
No Comments Send Article
Many might have quailed at the NIE report and its dramatic entrance from the blue. It has given a clean chit to Iran over its nuclear issue by claiming that the country halted its contoversial nuclear program four year ago. It has sparked a huge debate over its credibility. Even if it has just a wee bit of veracity, it still fails to answer some very important questions.
It has very little details of the events or circumstances leading to the freezing of the nuclear program in 2003. The Iranians couldn’t have whimsicaly put that dream in cold storage, which they had been chasing for two decades. It talks about international pressure as one possible reason for the 2003 halt, but fails to specify exactly what sort of pressure. It is important to identify the exact kind of pressure that led Iran into prostration. Iran has come under a lot of international pressure in the last year and has been loathed by many countries but it has managed to be defiant. So what were those pressures par endurance under which a usually pugnacious Iran wilted. The answer remains nakedly absent from the report and derides its credibility.
Even if the nuclear program had been halted in 2003, it doesn’t relegate the threat posed by Iran, for halting and dismantling are two different things altogether. The NIE report also alludes to this difference, though implicitly. This is what it has to say:
Given “Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons,” the NIE concludes, reasonably if tautologically, that “only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons–and such a decision is inherently reversible.” [source]
The phrase “Inherently reversible” makes the 2003 halt seem only a halt, which might have lost effect by now. The intelligence agencies might resort to the tried and tested intelligence-failure excuse, if it is established that the program is going along unabated, or if something catastrophic happens. But what will you do? How will you excuse yourself from your devastating ignorance? How will you face yourself in the mirror, if something goes wrong? Will you remain in the aftermath?
4 Comments Send Article
The NIE is not about intelligence or Iran. It is about the battle that has been waged by the State Department and intelligence world against President Bush ever since 9/11. As the New York Sun went on to observe:
…Iran has been enriching uranium, or nuclear fuel, for nearly two years despite two Security Council resolutions urging them to suspend. To believe the Mullahs have halted their nuclear weapons program, one has to believe that all of those spinning centrifuges in Natanz are to fuel power plants in a country that is the world’s third leading exporter of petroleum and natural gas.
That is precisely how Iran’s diplomats defend their enrichment. They spin their centrifuges in blatant violation of their prior agreements, but they say they are within their rights because they are pursuing alternative energy and not atomic bombs. The reactor in Natanz, they insist, is for peaceful purposes only. The document released yesterday buys into this line, but contains so much hedging that it will take months to sort out what the analysts are implying in the way of policy.
The proper way to read this report is through the lens of the long struggle the professional intelligence community has been waging against the elected civilian administration in Washington. They have opposed President Bush on nearly every major policy decision. They were against the Iraqi National Congress. They were against elections in Iraq. They were against I. Lewis Libby. They are against a tough line on Iran. One could call all this revenge of the bureaucrats… The bureaucrats may even think they are stopping another war.
It’s a dangerous game that may boomerang, making a war with Iran more likely. Our diplomats, after all, hoped to seal this month a deal to pass a third Security Council resolution against Iran. Already on Monday the Chinese delegation at Turtle Bay has started making noises about dropping their tepid support for such a document. Call it the Van Diepen Demarche, since the Chinese camarilla can boast that even America’s intelligence estimate concludes the mullahs shuttered their nuclear weapons program more than four years ago. [source]
As a result of the NIE, the world is now an even more dangerous place. Europe is dismayed. Israel is expressing confusion. Unless the US pulls itself together, this is the way the west loses. I won’t abandon hope, though.
1 Comment Send Article
Many might think that the fresh U.S. intelligence reports concerning the Iranian nuclear program signal its coda, but not the Israelis. They don’t have any reason to think that Iran has shut its nuclear program, or put it in a freezer, as only a nuclear weapons program can afford a state like Iran the temerity to talk of the destruction of a small but callous state like Israel.
The Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, agrees that the Iranians had indeed suspended their nuclear program in 2003 but it is now again out of the cold storage. He said that Iran could not be taken lightly even after the new report.
One reason for Iran to suspend its nuclear program in 2003 could have been the U.S led invasion of Iraq, which might have made Iran apprehensive. But it doesn’t seem to be fearsome when its leader goes on record, time and again, and talks about the wipe-out of an entire country.
“It’s apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then, it has apparently continued that program,” Barak told Israel army radio. [source]
3 Comments Send Article
You might have heard about the public hangings galore in Iran under the hideously savage Mullah regime, now be informed that Ahmadinejad’s henchmen have a huge appetite for public hangings. Three men faced the gallows in the public glare after being convicted of smuggling related offences.
The public hangings have been widely criticized and are primitively savage. They are inhumane as they can dent the spirits of the masses. However Iran has justified the hangings as being in accordance with the Islamic Law or the Sharia.
Iran hanged three convicted drug smugglers in the central city of Qom on Sunday, Iranian media said, in the latest public execution in the Islamic state. [source]
2 Comments Send Article
