Iran, Germany, and the five permanent security council members have sent delegations to a a villa outside Geneva to discuss developments in Iran’s nuclear program. Given the weather’s going to be nice, I suppose there’s likely to be worse ways to spend a weekend. What prompted this? Iran’s new hole in the ground near Qom.
This particular hole in the ground is intended to be a duplicate of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Enrichment is the process by which natural uranium – which is mostly uranium-238 – is filtered, and the concentration of uranium-235 is increased. You can either do a little filtering to make fuel for nuclear power plants, a bit more filtering to make fuel for research reactors (like Lucas Heights), or do a lot of filtering and get 80-90% pure HEU. Any idiot with a country engineering shop can build a bomb out of HEU once sufficient quantities are available, which is why it kind of bothers other countries that Iran is developing the capability to make the stuff.
So, given that Iran already has one enrichment plant, why did they build another one, and why has it come to light now?
A cursory inspection of the intertubes today suggests that the right-wing press across the “Anglosphere” is trumpeting the provincial election results in Iraq as variously “the end of the war”, “a model for the Middle East”, “a defeat for Shi’ite Islamism”, “a victory for secularism” and/or “a loss for Iran”. At Obsidian Wings, Eric Martin begs to differ.
It’s hard to think of genuine foreign policy successes of the Bush administration – apparently the right-wing blogosphere in the US is touting “improved relations with Australia” as an achievement… The deals with Libya and North Korea were perhaps success, though the deal with North Korea remains horribly shaky. It seems, however, that the Bush White House did have the sense to not pour petrol on one hotspot. According to today’s New York Times:
WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.
White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.
George W. Bush – or whomever is actually running the shop – is a rather busy lame duck. As well as the credit crunch, there’s there are all manner of foreign policy challenges which at any other time would be making headlines.
Number 1 cab off the rank is North Korea, who seem to be planning to fire up their nuclear infrastructure again. The Arms Control Wonk seems to think it’s because they’re peeved they haven’t been taken off the list of states that sponsor terrorism. Meanwhile, the US-led, NATO-labelled occupation of Afghanistan is sailing into rather interesting times. The pursuit of militants near – and possibly over – the Afghanistan-Pakistan border isn’t exactly thrilling the Pakistani government or the army. So much so, in fact, that they’ve started firing on NATO (which I assume means American) helicopters.
Whomever wins the US Presidency in November is going to have a pretty full slate.
There are moments in the film Persepolis when the animation makes you gasp at its ability to tell you so much in such apparently simple images. Three notable instances of such illustrations are the young Marjane Satrapi morphing into the character we know so well from Munch’s The Scream, two snake-like female “guardians of the revolution” accosting Satrapi because of the way she’s dressed, and a young soldier slowly being blown to bits. According to the movie (and one of the graphic novels it’s based on), such young men were given a plastic key that had been painted gold prior to going into battle as a symbol that soon they’d be entering the kingdom of heaven.
Persepolis is about a precocious girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. It’s also about her travails in exile when her educated and liberal parents decide she needs to get out. It’s an extraordinary achievement that manages to be funny, perceptive, shattering and educative about Iran and the West.
Well, the question was, if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, what would our response be. And I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. And I want them to understand that, because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their society, because at whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program, in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel we would be able to totally obliterate them.
In her attempt to “muscle up” and prove her “experience” compared to Obama’s, she’s strayed very far into the bellicose posture usually found among the further reaches of GOP wingnut-dom or the Neocon thinktank and noise machine empire. Continue reading ‘Hillary to obliterate Iran, if not Obama’
In the wake of a new IAEA report on Iran, the UN Security Council has voted to impose more sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear program, restricting the import of more dual-use technologies, and placing additional travel restrictions on people involved in the program.
If you want to read the IAEA report, it’s available here, though it’s pretty incomprehensible. A more accessible summary is provided by Andy Grotto at Arms Control Wonk: in essence, the Iranians have provided plausible explanations for some of the things they did during the 1990s and early 2000s, but they’ve simply denied the most, um, explosive allegations floating around.
In Deborah Siegel’s book about conflicts within the feminist movement – or at least within the American feminist movement – SisterhoodInterrupted: FromRadicalWomentoGrrls Gone Wild, the author suggests that young feminists are largely conducting their battles on the Internet these days. Thus, blogs like feministing.com provide a forum for debates about whether “the new forms of public sexual expression…represent progress or regression”, among other issues. While discussions on feminist blogs created in democratic nations can get heated and abusive (usually due to comments being made by those who view feminism as a monolithic and totally negative force), it’s worth noting that the Iranian blogger, journalist, and women’s rights activist, Maryam Hosseinkhah, actually spent time in prison for her writings. According to Amnesty International’s website, “She was reportedly accused of “spreading lies” and “propaganda against the system” in connection with articles posted on websites she edits, but she has not yet been formally charged.” Ms Hosseinkhah was released earlier this month, however, the threat of having one’s blog filtered, or of even ending up in prison, remains a constant threat in Iran. According to an item written last year by Omid Mermarian, an Iranian journalist, blogger and women’s rights activist: Continue reading ‘“The last refuge of communication”’
Lately I’ve been having alarming episodes of déjà vu. As the drums of war beat louder for Iran, public utterances regarding the evil doings of Iran become increasingly common. One of the stranger ones is the idea that Iran is arming the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There has been little evidence that Iran is supplying arms to the Taliban. It is possible that Iranian arms are ending up in Taliban hands similar to the way US weapons find their way to insurgent groups. It is a self-evident truths with little critical examination arising from the maxim that the enemy of my enemy if my friend. This thinking ignores the religious and political divides of the region. Which wouldn’t be the first time for US Middle Eastern policy.
Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere, and the United States is rallying friends and allies to isolate Iran’s regime to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late
The Iranian embassy in Baghdad says U.S. troops have freed seven Iranians hours after detaining them at a hotel in the Iraqi capital
An embassy official said the men were handed over to Iraqi authorities early Wednesday morning.
American troops raided Baghdad’s Sheraton hotel late Tuesday and seized the Iranians. Video footage also showed soldiers leaving the hotel with what appeared to be luggage and a laptop computer bag
Of course, crazy president No 2 has already had a go at dangerous provocation.
This is going to end well.
Note: The numerical designations of the crazy presidents is arbitrary. This is not to be taken as an indication of rank presidential craziness as, to be frank, they both seem equally insane.
As Gwynne Dyer argues in The Mess They Made, the Middle East is about to change fundamentally, and everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking-orders within states, even national borders themselves are liable to change without notice. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, a Muslim cold war between Sunnis and Shias, almost anything you care to imagine.
Dyer’s book is important because it’s one of the few books on the topic I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) to really make the effort to place the current conflicts in their long term historical perspective, and to speculate on a future beyond the immediate political and strategic context (although he nevertheless documents the now familiar litany of disasters that has characterised the Iraq War). He does, however, extrapolate from that context to a conclusion which I think is becoming inescapable – much as the Democrats, either through lack of courage or political calculation, might be prepared to maintain US forces in Iraq until the 2008 election, it’s almost certain that the “implosion of public support” for the war will see troops leave when a new President, of either party, is sworn in. Dyer adds his voice to those scholars and analysts who’ve seen the US war in Iraq as a monument to its decline, not a sign of its growing power. Further, he argues that it’s likely that the US will walk away from the Middle East in toto, and he suggests that may not be an undesirable outcome.
I haven’t seen a better encapsulation of the context of the renewed threats against Salman Rushdie than this one from Lisa Appignanesi:
The decision of Iran’s foreign ministry to enter the fray by denouncing both Rushdie (“a hated apostate”) and his award (“an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies”) is a repeat of the mistake which began with Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on 14 February 1989. That killing review chose utterly to misunderstand the place fiction occupies in the west and subjected it to a fundamentalist jurisdiction which essentially recognises only one book and one truth. The journalists, writers and academics who languish in Iran’s prisons – no less than the translators and publishers of Rushdie’s novel who were murdered or attacked, from Norway to Japan – are a mark of the intolerance of any form of dissent which the fatwa represented.
Intimidation and silencing of the free expression of views and the creative freedom of writers is wrong no matter what the motivation. That phenomenon, of course, is much wider than Salman Rushdie, and writers face intimidation, official censure, prison, censorship, exile, violence and even death in many countries across the world. Anyone interested in supporting freedom of expression and informing themselves about the dimensions of the problem, which cuts across civilisations and religions, might consider visiting Pen International.
As is the way of the news and political cycles, hysteria about Iran has died down. Maybe this is an apposite moment to consider some perspectives which are actually informed by what goes on in Iran and what underlies the American and international responses, as opposed to geo-strategic and politically motivated tub thumping. I’ve come across three interesting articles on the intertubes in the past few days which I thought worth a link.
War and Piece blogger and foreign affairs correspondent Laura Rozen sees the American posture in Iran being driven by the same illusions that characterised the neocon Iraq adventure, in conflict with a realist perspective embodied by Condi Rice.
And the pick of the bunch, for me, is this excellent review essay by Marla Braverman in Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation which looks at a couple of recent books on middle class youth cultural resistance to the theocratic regime. But it’s not as straightforward as it might seem.
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