Archive for August 17, 2010
Israel: We Will Stop Iran Nukes (8.15.10)
August 17, 2010Israeli Government silent on Bushehr reactor – Press Blackout!
August 17, 2010None of the Israeli newspaper websites have anything except foreign reports currently online regarding the August 21 loading of fuel by the Russians into the Bushehr reactor in Iran. Given the heavy attention to the story by the world press, it is highly unlikely that Israeli journalists would ignore the issue unless they were under a government blackout order. Not one article written in Israel on the subject has been published for three days.
The “Galant affair” has been the focus of a media frenzy in Israel. Tonight, London and Kirshenbaum on Israeli television made the point that this sort of inside political maneuvering is standard operating procedure for the IDF, and that the press’ reaction has been completely blown out off all proportion.
My read is that this is potentially a disinformation campaign to lull the Iranians into thinking that Israel is too busy dealing with internal problems to take action on Bushehr.
There has also been no official response of the Israeli government to this highly important announcement. This may be the occasion for the Tehran Times story saying that Imminent nuclear plant startup has shocked enemies.
Not a word from the government or the press in Israel? That’s what has happened so far.
John Bolton has been wrong as often as I have been on the issue of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear program. If the silence coming out of Jerusalem is any indication, this time he might be right. I cannot imagine Netanyahu allowing the reactor to go online unless Israel has some way to neutralize it without causing a Chernobyl-like result. The only way to do that would be through the use of EMP.
My opinion is that either Israel will launch an all-out conventional attack on the entire nuclear infrastructure in Iran prior to the 21st, or it will bide its time until the last possible minute before launching an EMP attack.
Joseph Wouk
August 18, 2010
Bushehr blues
August 17, 2010Iranian technicians walk outside the building housing the reactor of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, in the Iranian port town of Bushehr, 1200 kms south of Tehran, on February 25, 2009.
Surprise, surprise: the Russians will fuel the Iranian nuclear reactor which they have built at Bushehr, next Saturday, and it will begin the months-long process of firing up. This despite pleas from the West to stop this project; and what the Obama administration in Washington may or may not believe to have been an undertaking by the Russians to delay it — at least until Iran had come to some plausible inspection agreement on nuclear weapons.
We cannot know the extent of direct Russian collusion in the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and we cannot trust our massively incompetent intelligence agencies to find out. We do know that the technical aid from Russia goes well beyond building the reactor, and into the provision of weapons systems. We know that Iran is not concealing its commitment to build and arm missiles capable of reaching not only Israel, but India, and much of southern and eastern Europe.
And we know, or can know if we are not incurably naive, that both Russia and China consider Iran — and North Korea — to be wild-card allies in their own rivalries with the West.
It is to their advantage to keep these regimes in a state of dependency upon themselves; thus to our advantage that this tends to limit the amount of co-operation.
But the wild behaviour of both Iran and North Korea — which also, obviously, trade nuclear-related goods and services with each other, with or without Russian and Chinese consent — is entirely to the advantage of the other side. Neither of these “crazed” regimes offers, or would be so foolish as to consider, a threat to either of its big power allies. Their threats are directed entirely at democratic, pro-Western states: at South Korea and Japan, in the one case; at Israel in the other.
Now, a regime does not need to use nuclear weapons to get results from them. The mere fact they are so armed can change all the power relations in a region, just as the mere fact that a man has a loaded gun can change all the power relations within a suburban bank branch.
“But why shouldn’t he have a gun? After all, the police have guns, and they’re just people, too.” Or alternatively, “If you don’t want that man carrying a gun, then the police shouldn’t have guns, either. We must negotiate a gun-free banking environment.”
I hope my reader will find the fatuity in the above two statements. And yet the analogous positions are seriously held, even within the U.S. White House and State Department, both of which are committed to negotiating with the Russians and others for a nuke-free world.
The sane ambition is, incidentally: good guys with guns, bad guys without guns. Ditto for nuclear weapons. But this sane ambition is undermined when spokesmen for our own side cannot see the difference between a peace-loving constitutional democracy and, say, Iran and North Korea. (“After all, they’re just countries, too.”)
Indeed, the threat from Iran is slight compared with the threat to us from our own stupidity. For our lethal enemies are only doing what we have permitted them to do.
It was incumbent upon this and previous U.S. and allied administrations not only to declare that we could not abide a nuclear Iran, but also, what we’d be prepared to do about it. Moreover, a counter-threat requires the preparations to be visible: military build-up, not military climb-down.
This did not mean seeking war with the regime of the ayatollahs, let alone war with Russia. Quite the opposite: it meant preventing war, by leaving them with no room to manoeuvre — and specifically, with no opportunity to luff us into a position where we must either fight or swim. It meant, for instance, standing our ground on the anti-missile defences the U.S. was installing in Poland and Czech Republic; and refusing to forget about the Russian rape of Georgia.
Instead, when we have no reason whatever to trust the motives or behaviour of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and plenty of evidence it had acted insincerely on previous agreements, Hillary Clinton went to Moscow with her
ludicrous “reset button,” and Barack Obama followed with a new “START,” that jumbles the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons — again, just what the Russians wanted.
Likewise on Iran: the persistent and ridiculous assumption that the Russians have been acting in good faith, has left us entirely free of leverage. Instead, we are now gaping at a fait accompli.
In the end — and we are approaching the end, when Iran is established as a nuclear power, and the Israelis must make their “existential” decision on whether and how to take that threat out — we have not been rendered powerless by the enemy. We began with insuperable moral and material advantages, and we have rendered ourselves powerless by frittering them away.
This phoney finger-wagging won’t talk Iran out of nukes
August 17, 2010Drop the moral posturing, Hillary – US hypocrisy will be all too clear in Tehran. Only realpolitik can halt their nuclear ambitions.
This weekend Russian specialists will begin loading low-enriched uranium fuel rods into Iran’s Bushehr reactor, the initial step in getting its first nuclear power plant up and running. Though Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has criticised the irreversible startup as “premature”, Bushehr is in fact a long-delayed fiasco predating the Iranian revolution. By contract, the spent fuel rods, containing weapons-grade plutonium, are to be returned to Russia. Uneasy faith that Iran will keep its promise, if only because it still lacks the technology to process the rods at home, is the sole reason that America and its allies are not hysterical. Whether nominally safe or not, Bushehr foreshadows Iran’s more ominous nuclear plans, which the Obama administration’s hectoring and cajoling have signally failed to discourage.
“Iran is entitled to civil nuclear power,” Hillary Clinton sermonised in Moscow in March. “It is a nuclear weapons programme that it is not entitled to.” While arguably no country is “entitled” to possess weaponry capable of ending life on this planet as we know it, for the nation with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world to rebuke others for developing the same technology is bewilderingly hypocritical.
Yet this is hypocrisy to which we’ve grown so accustomed that nobody seems to notice it any more. The nuclear club is meant to be exclusive. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognises the five permanent members of the UN security council as “nuclear weapons states”, committing them to act as bouncers at the club door. The treaty theoretically obliges these members to ditch their own nukes in the fullness of time – an aptly pompous expression, for an otherwise nuke-free world would make a rogue state with even one bomb so powerful that the chances of universal disarmament are zero. Ever since Hiroshima, we’ve been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.
You also cannot retain a device for yourself and then lecture others that they are not “entitled” to it. Iran is, alas, just as entitled to nuclear weapons as the US and Britain. Ditto North Korea. All the Obama administration has the moral and political right to assert is: “We don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons.” To which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would quite sensibly respond: “So what?”
Virtually no government aside from Tehran itself wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, including its Middle Eastern neighbours, just as it’s sickening worldwide that North Korea’s Dear Leader will likely bequeath a couple of nukes to a son who promises to carry on the family tradition of being even crazier than dad. Yet since promotion of nonproliferation by nuclear states has been chronically two-faced for years, the Obama administration needs to be cannier, and more sensitive to how preaching that “You’ve no right to what we’ve got in buckets” sounds to hostile ears.
Such arrogance can only backfire. By conceit, the US is one of a handful of states righteous enough to safeguard the world from the very Armageddon they could themselves unleash. By implication, Iran is an untrustworthy custodian of the means to apocalypse. But this self-serving pose surely elicits “Who do you think you are?” from non-nuclear sovereign nations. Inside Iran “entitlement” rhetoric can only inflame nationalistic indignation, inverting neatly into propaganda for Ahmadinejad. It throws down a gauntlet – and invites defiance.
Granted, international leverage with Iran is limited. Yet what’s required is competent manipulation, which means appealing to self-interest. In addition to brandishing sanctions, America needs to drop the posturing and talk turkey: “OK, you want nukes. Given the way we treat the folks who went out and got them even when they were told not to, that’s understandable. We handle Pakistan with kid gloves, and when they went nuclear we did little more than say: ‘Well. That’s a drag.’ Likewise when Pyongyang sank that South Korean warship, we huffed and puffed and grumbled something like ‘That wasn’t very nice’, but nothing happened. Because we’re afraid of these guys. So sure, you want us to be afraid of you, too.
“But have you read the cover story of this August’s Atlantic Monthly? It assembles an unnervingly convincing case that if you gatecrash our gentlemen’s club, Israel will hit you with massive air strikes, just as they took out Saddam’s Osirak reactor in 1981, and a North Korean-built reactor in Syria in 2007. We realise you don’t believe us, but we don’t totally control these people. Think about it: do you want a war in the Middle East? When you reflect back on the Iran-Iraq war, don’t you feel tired? You’ve sky-high inflation and unemployment. Can you afford a war? Wouldn’t you rather spend the money torturing protesters and executing adulterers with something a little more sophisticated than rocks?”
All right, maybe Clinton could contrive a more persuasive line than that. But any pragmatic appeal would beat the kind of phoney finger-wagging that notoriously flops with one’s children: scolding a teenager for smoking, and jabbing a lit cigarette for emphasis.
Tehran Times : Imminent nuclear plant startup has shocked enemies: envoy
August 17, 2010tehran times : Imminent nuclear plant startup has shocked enemies: envoy.
)
Imminent nuclear plant startup has shocked enemies: envoy
Tehran Times Political Desk
TEHRAN — Iran’s ambassador to Moscow has stated that Russia’s announcement that the Bushehr nuclear power plant will be loaded with nuclear fuel next week caught the enemies off guard.
“The news report about the loading of the Bushehr plant with nuclear fuel was so unexpected that it confused the enemies of this project and prompted them to issue irrelevant and illogical statements,” Ambassador Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi told the Fars News Agency on Monday.
He made the remarks in response to John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who told Fox News on Friday that the Bushehr power plant would become “immune” from an Israeli attack after it is loaded with nuclear fuel rods.
“Once the rods are in the reactor, an attack on the reactor risks spreading radiation in the air, and perhaps into the water of the Persian Gulf,” Bolton said.
Earlier, Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom) spokesman Sergei Novikov had announced that the first reactor of the Bushehr plant would be loaded with nuclear fuel on August 21.
Sajjadi dismissed the Western powers’ claim that Iran should halt its uranium enrichment program because Russia has agreed to provide nuclear fuel for the Bushehr plant.
“It’s like telling a renter, ‘Why are you trying to buy your own house,’” Sajjadi said.
He went on to say that Russia’s decision to load the nuclear plant will restore Tehran’s confidence in Moscow.
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Director Ali Akbar Salehi said on Friday that the reactor will reach 50 percent of its capacity one and a half months after it is fed with fuel.
But the reactor will need six or seven months to reach its full capacity, he noted.
The construction of the Bushehr nuclear plant was begun in 1975 by several German construction companies. They pulled out following the imposition of a U.S. embargo on supplying high-technology equipment to Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
In February 1998, Russia signed a contract with Iran to complete the construction of the nuclear plant.
Iran details plans for new nuclear sites – Salon.com
August 17, 2010Iran details plans for new nuclear sites.
Defying international efforts, Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi discusses 10 new uranium enrichment facilities
Enriching uranium creates fuel for nuclear power plants but can also, if taken to higher levels, produce the material for weapons and Iran’s growing capacity in this process is at the center of its dispute with the international community.
The U.N. Security Council has already passed four sets of sanctions against Iran to try and force it to stop enriching uranium.
Last year, Iran flouted international concerns by claiming it would build 10 new enrichment plants and Monday’s announcement revealed that the sites had been chosen and would be inside mountains, without revealing any other details.
“Construction of a new uranium enrichment site will begin by the end of the (Iranian) year (March) or early next year,” Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi said. “The new enrichment facilities will be built inside mountains.”
Revelations a year ago of a previously undisclosed enrichment facility in a secret mountain base near the city of Qom inflamed international suspicions over Iran’s nuclear program and helped spur a fourth set of international sanctions in June.
The U.S. and its allies accuse Iran of using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Iran has denied the accusation, saying its nuclear program is geared merely toward generating electricity.
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman Steve Field said that Salehi’s announcement was a cause for concern. “The reports that we have seen this morning certainly do not give us any comfort that Iran is moving in the right direction,” Field told reporters.
French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Christine Fages, meanwhile, said the announcement “only intensifies the deep worries of the international community about the Iranian nuclear program.”
“We want Iran to respect its international obligations by suspending all its activities of uranium enrichment,” she said.
Iran has an industrial-scale, internationally supervised enrichment site in Natanz, in central Iran, with around 8,500 centrifuges and as well as the smaller one under construction near Qom. The Islamic republic said it needs 20 large-scale sites to meet domestic electricity needs of 20,000 megawatts in the next 15 years.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday also officially notified the government of the implementation of a new law banning the government from anything except the most minimum level of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
The law is seen as a retaliation for the sanctions and also includes a provision authorizing the Iranian government to retaliate against any countries that attempt to search its ships or airplanes for dual-use materials with inspections of their own.
The Security Council resolution calls on, but does not require, all countries to cooperate in cargo inspections if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the items could contribute to the Iranian nuclear program.
The Iranian law also requires the government to continue refining uranium up to 20 percent to fuel a small medical research reactor in Tehran.
Enriching uranium to 20 percent, instead of just the low levels required for fuel, puts Iran much closer to the 90 percent level needed to create weapons grade material, further aggravating the Western powers.
A number of swap deals have been proposed in which other countries would handle the enrichment process and give Iran the enriched fuel, but a final agreement has remained elusive.
Will Israel Attack Iran? : NPR
August 17, 2010Will Israel Attack Iran? Writer Explores Possibility : The Two-Way : NPR.
It’s no secret that Israel views the possibility of Iran gaining nuclear weapons as an existential threat. Israel has said as much, as have U.S. policymakers.
It’s also well known that Israel has a policy of pre-empting threats to what it views as its survival. We need look no further than the 1981 precedent of the Israelis’ attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant.
We’ve also long known that U.S. policymakers can exert only so much influence over Israel.
And anyone who’s followed the coverage of U.S.-Israel relations since early 2009 knows that Israelis have more questions about President Barack Obama’s willingness to use force against Iran than they did about his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
Those are all major themes in Jeffrey Goldberg’s much discussed and controversial in the Atlantic, the “Point of No Return,” a piece that has drawn much attention. It’s not because it breaks news as much as it focuses attention on the very real possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran.
Much of the attention has come from Goldberg critics who accuse him of being a “propagandist” trying to make a war more likely.
That has drawn defenders like writer James Fallows to vouch for Goldberg’s journalism and to say, if nothing else, the piece provides useful clarity of the way Israeli and U.S. policymakers think about possible military action against Iran.
Aside from that raging debate, some of the piece’s smaller details were fascinating.
For instance, Goldberg writes that numerous Israeli defense ministry offices contain the same aerial photograph of Israeli jet fighters flying over a historic site in Poland with particular meaning for the modern world — Auschwitz. It’s a graphic reminder of one of the Jewish state’s shibboleths: Never Again.
Then there’s the influence of Ben-Zion Netanyahu, the 100-year old father of Israel’s prime minister, who is a noted historian of the Spanish Inquisition.
Goldberg describes the scene of a birthday party for the Israeli leader’s father at which the centenarian spoke, to demonstrate the pull of the father on the son.
“Our party this evening compels me to speak of recent comments made about the continued existence of the nation of Israel and the new threats by its enemies depicting its upcoming destruction,” Ben-Zion began. “From the Iranian side, we hear pledges that soon—in a matter of days, even—the Zionist movement will be put to an end and there will be no more Zionists in the world. One is supposed to conclude from this that the Jews of the Land of Israel will be annihilated, while the Jews of America, whose leaders refuse to pressure Iran, are being told in a hinted fashion that the annihilation of the Jews will not include them.”
He went on, “The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.”
Many people in Likud Party circles have told me that those who discount Ben-Zion’s influence on his son do so at their peril. “This was the father giving his son history’s marching orders,” one of the attendees told me. “I watched Bibi while his father spoke. He was completely absorbed.”
Small wonder this piece has generated so much buzz in Washington and elsewhere.
Analysts see Iranian nuclear dispute continuing despite sanctions
August 17, 2010Analysts see Iranian nuclear dispute continuing despite sanctions – The National Newspaper.
Michael Theodoulou, Foreign Correspondent
The shelves of a shop in north Tehran are stocked with imported detergent, which is not subject to sanctions. Caren Firouz / Reuters
The new wave of international sanctions against Iran will hurt its economy – already suffering from mismanagement and corruption – but not enough to change Tehran’s nuclear policy, many analysts say.
However, the sanctions should give Barack Obama, the US president, the “political space” at home to attempt engaging with Iran once more, said Sir Richard Dalton, Britain’s former ambassador to Tehran and a fellow at Chatham House, a leading British think tank.
That engagement might have a chance of changing Iran’s calculations and resolving the tangled nuclear dispute – although expectations among many foreign policy experts such as Mr Dalton are not high.
A resumption of long-stalled talks is expected next month or in October between world powers and Tehran on Iran’s nuclear programme. But yesterday, in a further demonstration of Iranian defiance, the country’s vice president and atomic chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced that the construction of a new uranium enrichment site, Iran’s third, would begin next March.
Mr Obama has been under constant pressure to act tough on Iran from hawkish pundits in Washington, among them many who clamoured loudest for invading Iraq.
But having secured tougher sanctions against Iran than his predecessor, George W Bush, ever managed, Mr Obama can now argue that the US will enter any new talks with Iran from a position of strength.
At a briefing with senior US correspondents earlier this month, Mr Obama said there were “rumblings” from Tehran that it was feeling the pain from sanctions. At the same time, he put the issue of talks with Iran back on the table, saying he was leaving the “pathway” open for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue.
Mr Obama’s aides believe that technical problems with Iran’s nuclear programme have bought at least a year for sanctions and diplomacy to work, said a New York Times editorial after the White House briefing.
But his dual-track strategy has failed to silence Washington’s hawks.
“The drumbeat for war from neo-conservative pundits and from Israel has only increased” since the “crippling, indiscriminate” new sanctions were imposed, said Trita Parsi, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
“The war drums may not necessarily be to make Obama bomb Iran, but to portray him as weak to hurt him in the upcoming [congressional] elections [in November],” Mr Parsi added in a telephone interview. “If successful, a new domestic political reality will likely emerge that makes a military campaign more probable.”
Mr Dalton, however, said such pundits could “fulminate as much as they want but my reading of the American military is that war against Iran is the very, very last thing they want”.
Mr Obama’s main military adviser made this clear at the beginning of the month. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, acknowledged the US does have a plan to attack Iran if needed to stop Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons. But in an interview with NBC Television, he left little doubt this was an option of last resort.
Adm Mullen said he would be “extremely concerned” about the prospect of a military engagement that could have unintended and unpredictable consequences in “an incredibly unstable part of the world”.
Mr Dalton said the pressure of sanctions was of less importance to Tehran than the nature of any new offer the international community may make if nuclear talks resume.
The key issue for Iran, which insists its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only, is that it can continue enriching uranium on its own territory under international safeguards.
At his White House briefing, Mr Obama left open the possibility that the US would accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear programme, so long as Tehran provides “confidence-building measures” to verify that it is not building a bomb.
But he has always been careful not to define what he means by such a programme and whether that could entail uranium enrichment on Iranian soil.
As Iran prepares to activate its first nuclear power reactor at Bushehr this week using Russian-supplied fuel, the White House said on Friday this showed Tehran does not need its own enrichment capabilities. That assertion was swiftly rejected by a senior Iranian parliamentarian.
Whether the US eventually agrees to limited uranium enrichment in Iran will be left to any new nuclear talks, analysts say.
Many experts are, however, pessimistic that new negotiations will lead to a breakthrough.
“I have major concerns about the absence of Iranian flexibility on the issues that count – and on a parallel lack of flexibility in Washington,” Mr Dalton said in a telephone interview.
Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University in New York, questioned in his blog whether “Iran is capable under its current leadership to take a sober decision about how to deal with the outside world”.
And there was a “real danger”, he added, that “the Obama administration will be so preoccupied with American domestic politics and its constant demand to look tough when dealing with Iran that it will inadvertently rescue this cruel but hapless [Iranian] regime by providing a convenient scapegoat [with sanctions] for everything that goes wrong in Iran.”
A fourth set of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran in June was followed last month by more onerous unilateral measures imposed by the US and the European Union.
But the impact of the additional US and EU sanctions is likely to be reduced significantly by opposition from Russia, China, India and Turkey. They have said they will honour the UN sanctions but are not obliged to comply with those imposed by the US and EU.
Stuart Levey, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US treasury department, is currently visiting the UAE, Bahrain and Lebanon on a tour aimed at strengthening support for the penalties against the Islamic Republic.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments