As Iran’s nuclear program stands in shambles, US continues its military agenda
Kurt Nimmo | 28.01.2007 21:39 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | Terror War | World
“Iran’s efforts to produce highly enriched uranium … are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology,” according to Guardian.
Of course, the revelations will not stop the neocons and the Israelis from attacking the Muslim nation, as the reason for the attack has nothing to do with nukes or any possible threat Iran may or may not pose to Israel.
Of course, the revelations will not stop the neocons and the Israelis from attacking the Muslim nation, as the reason for the attack has nothing to do with nukes or any possible threat Iran may or may not pose to Israel.
As it turns out, it does not matter if Iran “stands-down” from its attempt to enrich uranium, a suggestion made by Mohamed El Baradei, head of the IAEA, while in attendance at the elitist confab in Davos, Switzerland.
It doesn’t matter because “Iran’s uranium enrichment program has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved,” writes Peter Beaumont, citing “a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian program.”
Of course, the revelations will not stop the neocons and the Israelis from attacking the Muslim nation, as the reason for the attack has nothing to do with nukes or any possible threat Iran may or may not pose to Israel. It’s all about taking out the next “rogue nation” on the “axis of evil” roster, a laundry list of mass destruction plotted out years ago, well before Bush stumbled into office, thanks to Supreme Court appointment.
Naturally, the Guardian revelations will find their way to memory hole in short order and the Iran demonization effort, gleefully pimped by the corporate media, will continue in earnest, just as it did in 2002, as the neocons prepared to kill 650,000 Iraqis.
Iraq, after more than a decade of debilitating sanctions, claiming the lives of more than a million Iraqis, 500,000 of them children, was no more a threat to the United States than Guinea-Bissau. Saddam Hussein’s stab at Arab nationalism, and the moderate successes of Ba’ath socialism in regard to health care and education, was considered a threat to Israel, however, as Israel likes its Arab neighbors enfeebled, poverty-stricken, ruled by greedy despots, and wracked by sectarian divisions, this would not be allowed to stand.
Ditto Iran. According to Israel and the neocons, Iran is simply too proud—the primary reason it will not admit its problems with uranium enrichment—and although the country has many a problem, not least of all the alienation of young people from an austere Islamic leadership, it irks Israel that Iran’s influence is growing in the neighborhood among traditionally downtrodden Shia Muslims, kicked around once too often by arrogant Sunni Muslims, from the Gulf emirates to Lebanon and beyond. Israel hankers to knock Iran down a few notches, even by way of “tactical” nukes, if need be.
“Iran has never once moved beyond its borders in an act of aggression since the organization of the UN and widespread acceptance of the UN Charter as fundamental international law,” write Edward S. Herman and David Peterson.
This, of course, has not prevented Henry Kissinger from describing the “Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology” as a threat to the “region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend,” a threat for which the counterweight of “American forces are indispensable.” Nor has Iran’s non-aggressive history prevented a wide array of commentators from repeating the views expressed by the Director of National Intelligence in testimony before the Senate on January 11, when he warned of the “shadow” that Iran now casts across the Middle East; by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who warned of an “emboldened and strengthened Iran;” or by George Bush, who, in his two major speeches in January, warned of an Iran “emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons” (January 10), a new axis emerging “out of chaos in Iraq,…an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America” (January 23).
Indeed, Iran experienced aggression directly from the United States and Britain—and its client at the time, Iraq under Saddam Hussein—historical facts ignored by the United Nations, even though the 1953 CIA sponsored coup and Iraq’s invasion were blatant violations of the United Nations charter, essentially a worthless bit of paper to be used when and if the United States deems it necessary.
“The United States and Israel have both engaged in numerous cross-border invasions and occupations in violation of the UN Charter, most recently the United States (and Britain) attacking and occupying Iraq, and Israel bombing and invading Lebanon. The UN Security Council not only failed to do anything punitive in the face of these open violations of the UN Charter, it actually ratified the U.S. occupation,” Herman and Peterson note.
Like any well-trained domestic pet, the United Nations barks only upon command.
“Iran has not threatened to attack the United States—which it couldn’t do anyway, any more than Iraq could have attacked this country in 2003—and it has not threatened to attack Israel, although Iran has promised to retaliate for an attack against its territory, and President Ahmadinejad has made hostile remarks about Israel and expressed the wish that Israel would disappear as an apartheid state,” Herman and Peterson continue. “As noted, his statement was misrepresented by the Western media as part of the demonization process, the media also failing across the board to note the limits of Ahmadinejad’s power in Iran, and the reasons why any offensive effort by Iran against Israel would be suicidal.”
For the average person, all of this should really be a no-brainer—the idea Iran would nuke Israel, thus inviting an overwhelming response, effectively translating into suicide, makes absolutely no sense—but then, of course, Fox News, CNN, the entire corporate alphabet news media, do not deal in sanity or logic, and have apparently brainwashed millions of people, spectators and navel-gazers, who respond to complex issues with guttural simplicity, grunting in unison that Iran and the “Islamics” should be nuked, demanding their country and civilization, going back to at least 3200 BCE, be reduced to a glass parking lot, a response predicated on a series of neocon lies so transparent as to be ludicrous.
Thus Caspar Willard Weinberger, Jr., son of the late Caspar Weinberger, the Iran-Contra criminal responsible for selling weapons to Iran, indicted but pardoned by Bush Senior, tells us the “United States finally seems to be getting serious about Iran’s increasingly hostile and aggressive tendencies regarding its nuclear program and its apparent wish to dominate the whole Mideast theater.”
According to the junior Weinberger, diplomacy is for wimps and, thankfully, “we now finally seem to be responding to Ahmadinejad’s Iran in the only language he and his cronies really understand: brute strength,” that is to say the United States will brutally shock and awe Iranian grandmothers and infants, and that’ll teach ‘em to mess with us, that is to say Israel.
Never mind Iran is unable to manufacture nukes and its “hostile and aggressive tendencies” are, by and large, the manufacture of hateful neocons.
Ahmadinejad never declared Israel must be “wiped off the map,” as I have insisted here for months, and Paul Joseph Watson most recently documented.
“According to numerous different translations, Ahmadinejad never used the word ‘map,’ instead his statement was in the context of time and applied to the Zionist regime occupying Jerusalem. Ahmadinejad was expressing his future hope that the Zionist regime in Israel would fall, not that Iran was going to physically annex the country and its population,” writes Watson.
But never mind.
Bush’s neocons will get their attack, probably before June and the onset of summer, and the rest of us will get to endure World War Four, a cataclysmic event so far undefined but guaranteed to be touch each of us personally.
If the American people allow the neocons to get away with it, as they more or less allowed them to get away with invading Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of people, then, indeed, this is a nation that will ultimately deserve its fate, as the German people, after Hitler and his minions checked out, deserved their fate for not standing up and saying enough is enough and we’re not going to take anymore.
It doesn’t matter because “Iran’s uranium enrichment program has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved,” writes Peter Beaumont, citing “a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian program.”
Of course, the revelations will not stop the neocons and the Israelis from attacking the Muslim nation, as the reason for the attack has nothing to do with nukes or any possible threat Iran may or may not pose to Israel. It’s all about taking out the next “rogue nation” on the “axis of evil” roster, a laundry list of mass destruction plotted out years ago, well before Bush stumbled into office, thanks to Supreme Court appointment.
Naturally, the Guardian revelations will find their way to memory hole in short order and the Iran demonization effort, gleefully pimped by the corporate media, will continue in earnest, just as it did in 2002, as the neocons prepared to kill 650,000 Iraqis.
Iraq, after more than a decade of debilitating sanctions, claiming the lives of more than a million Iraqis, 500,000 of them children, was no more a threat to the United States than Guinea-Bissau. Saddam Hussein’s stab at Arab nationalism, and the moderate successes of Ba’ath socialism in regard to health care and education, was considered a threat to Israel, however, as Israel likes its Arab neighbors enfeebled, poverty-stricken, ruled by greedy despots, and wracked by sectarian divisions, this would not be allowed to stand.
Ditto Iran. According to Israel and the neocons, Iran is simply too proud—the primary reason it will not admit its problems with uranium enrichment—and although the country has many a problem, not least of all the alienation of young people from an austere Islamic leadership, it irks Israel that Iran’s influence is growing in the neighborhood among traditionally downtrodden Shia Muslims, kicked around once too often by arrogant Sunni Muslims, from the Gulf emirates to Lebanon and beyond. Israel hankers to knock Iran down a few notches, even by way of “tactical” nukes, if need be.
“Iran has never once moved beyond its borders in an act of aggression since the organization of the UN and widespread acceptance of the UN Charter as fundamental international law,” write Edward S. Herman and David Peterson.
This, of course, has not prevented Henry Kissinger from describing the “Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology” as a threat to the “region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend,” a threat for which the counterweight of “American forces are indispensable.” Nor has Iran’s non-aggressive history prevented a wide array of commentators from repeating the views expressed by the Director of National Intelligence in testimony before the Senate on January 11, when he warned of the “shadow” that Iran now casts across the Middle East; by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who warned of an “emboldened and strengthened Iran;” or by George Bush, who, in his two major speeches in January, warned of an Iran “emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons” (January 10), a new axis emerging “out of chaos in Iraq,…an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America” (January 23).
Indeed, Iran experienced aggression directly from the United States and Britain—and its client at the time, Iraq under Saddam Hussein—historical facts ignored by the United Nations, even though the 1953 CIA sponsored coup and Iraq’s invasion were blatant violations of the United Nations charter, essentially a worthless bit of paper to be used when and if the United States deems it necessary.
“The United States and Israel have both engaged in numerous cross-border invasions and occupations in violation of the UN Charter, most recently the United States (and Britain) attacking and occupying Iraq, and Israel bombing and invading Lebanon. The UN Security Council not only failed to do anything punitive in the face of these open violations of the UN Charter, it actually ratified the U.S. occupation,” Herman and Peterson note.
Like any well-trained domestic pet, the United Nations barks only upon command.
“Iran has not threatened to attack the United States—which it couldn’t do anyway, any more than Iraq could have attacked this country in 2003—and it has not threatened to attack Israel, although Iran has promised to retaliate for an attack against its territory, and President Ahmadinejad has made hostile remarks about Israel and expressed the wish that Israel would disappear as an apartheid state,” Herman and Peterson continue. “As noted, his statement was misrepresented by the Western media as part of the demonization process, the media also failing across the board to note the limits of Ahmadinejad’s power in Iran, and the reasons why any offensive effort by Iran against Israel would be suicidal.”
For the average person, all of this should really be a no-brainer—the idea Iran would nuke Israel, thus inviting an overwhelming response, effectively translating into suicide, makes absolutely no sense—but then, of course, Fox News, CNN, the entire corporate alphabet news media, do not deal in sanity or logic, and have apparently brainwashed millions of people, spectators and navel-gazers, who respond to complex issues with guttural simplicity, grunting in unison that Iran and the “Islamics” should be nuked, demanding their country and civilization, going back to at least 3200 BCE, be reduced to a glass parking lot, a response predicated on a series of neocon lies so transparent as to be ludicrous.
Thus Caspar Willard Weinberger, Jr., son of the late Caspar Weinberger, the Iran-Contra criminal responsible for selling weapons to Iran, indicted but pardoned by Bush Senior, tells us the “United States finally seems to be getting serious about Iran’s increasingly hostile and aggressive tendencies regarding its nuclear program and its apparent wish to dominate the whole Mideast theater.”
According to the junior Weinberger, diplomacy is for wimps and, thankfully, “we now finally seem to be responding to Ahmadinejad’s Iran in the only language he and his cronies really understand: brute strength,” that is to say the United States will brutally shock and awe Iranian grandmothers and infants, and that’ll teach ‘em to mess with us, that is to say Israel.
Never mind Iran is unable to manufacture nukes and its “hostile and aggressive tendencies” are, by and large, the manufacture of hateful neocons.
Ahmadinejad never declared Israel must be “wiped off the map,” as I have insisted here for months, and Paul Joseph Watson most recently documented.
“According to numerous different translations, Ahmadinejad never used the word ‘map,’ instead his statement was in the context of time and applied to the Zionist regime occupying Jerusalem. Ahmadinejad was expressing his future hope that the Zionist regime in Israel would fall, not that Iran was going to physically annex the country and its population,” writes Watson.
But never mind.
Bush’s neocons will get their attack, probably before June and the onset of summer, and the rest of us will get to endure World War Four, a cataclysmic event so far undefined but guaranteed to be touch each of us personally.
If the American people allow the neocons to get away with it, as they more or less allowed them to get away with invading Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of people, then, indeed, this is a nation that will ultimately deserve its fate, as the German people, after Hitler and his minions checked out, deserved their fate for not standing up and saying enough is enough and we’re not going to take anymore.
Kurt Nimmo
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http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=733
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The Article In Question
28.01.2007 22:45
Boasts of a nuclear programme are just propaganda, say insiders, but the PR could be enough to provoke Israel into war
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday January 28, 2007
The Observer
Iran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, the material used to make nuclear bombs, are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology.
Iran's uranium enrichment programme has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved. The country denies developing weapons, saying its pursuit of uranium enrichment is for energy purposes.
Despite Iran being presented as an urgent threat to nuclear non-proliferation and regional and world peace - in particular by an increasingly bellicose Israel and its closest ally, the US - a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian programme have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production.
The disclosures come as Iran has told the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], that it plans to install a new 'cascade' of 3,000 high-speed centrifuges at its controversial underground facility at Natanz in central Iran next month.
The centrifuges were supposed to have been installed almost a year ago and many experts are extremely doubtful that Iran has yet mastered the skills to install and run it. Instead, they argue, the 'installation' will more probably be about propaganda than reality.
The detailed descriptions of Iran's problems in enriching more than a few grams of uranium using high-speed centrifuges - 50kg is required for two nuclear devices - comes in stark contrast to the apocalyptic picture being painted of Iran's imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon with which to attack Israel. Instead, say experts, the break-up of the nuclear smuggling organisation of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadheer Khan has massively set back an Iran heavily dependent on his network.
A key case in point is that Tehran originally procured the extremely high-quality bearings required for the centrifuges' carbon-fibre 'top rotors' - spinning dishes within the machines - from foreign companies in Malaysia.
With that source closed down two years ago, Iran is making the bearings itself with only limited success. It is the repeated failure of these crucial bearings, say some sources, that has been one of the programme's biggest setbacks.
Iran is also believed to be critically short of key materials for producing a centrifuge production line to highly enrich uranium - in particular the so-called maraging steel, able to be used at high temperatures and under high stress without deforming - and specialist carbon fibre products. In this light, say some experts, its insistence that it will install 3,000 new centrifuges at the underground Natanz facility in the coming months is as much about domestic PR as reality.
The growing recognition, in expert circles at least, of how far Iran is from mastering centrifuge technology was underlined on Friday by comments by the head of the IAEA, whose inspectors have been attempting to monitor the Iranian nuclear programme.
Talking to the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Mohamed El Baradei appealed for all sides to take a 'time out' under which Iranian enrichment and UN sanctions would be suspended simultaneously, adding that the point at which Iran is able to produce a nuclear weapon is at least half a decade away. In pointed comments aimed at the US and Israel, the Nobel Peace prize winner warned that an attack on Iran would have 'catastrophic consequences'.
Yet some involved in the increasingly aggressive standoff over Iran fear tensions will reach snapping point between March and June this year, with a likely scenario being Israeli air strikes on symbolic Iranian nuclear plants.
The sense of imminent crisis has been driven by statements from Israel, not least from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has insisted that 2007 is make-or-break time over Iran's nuclear programme.
Recent months have seen leaks and background briefings reminiscent of the softening up of public opinion for the war against Iraq which have presented a series of allegations regarding Iran's meddling in Iraq and Lebanon, the 'genocidal' intentions of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and its 'connections' with North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.
It also emerged last week in the Israeli media that the country's private diplomatic efforts to convince the world of the need for tough action on Iran were being co-ordinated by Meir Dagan, the head of Israel's foreign intelligence service, Mossad.
The escalating sense of crisis is being driven by two imminent events, the 'installation' of 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz and the scheduled delivery of fuel from Russia for Iran's Busheyr civil nuclear reactor, due to start up this autumn. Both are regarded as potential trigger points for an Israeli attack.
'The reality is that they have got to the stage where they can run a small experimental centrifuge cascade intermittently,' said one Western source familiar with the Iranian programme. 'They simply have not got to the stage where they can run 3,000 centrifuges There is no evidence either that they have been stockpiling low-enriched uranium which could be highly enriched quickly and which would give an idea of a malevolent intent.'
Another source with familiarity with the Iranian programme said: 'Iran has put all this money into this huge hole in the ground at Natanz; it has put a huge amount of money in these P-1 centrifuges, the model rejected by Urenco. It is like the Model T Ford compared to a Prius. That is not to say they will not master the technology eventually, but they are trying to master very challenging technology without access to everything that they require.'
The Observer