worth repeating: a nuclear Iran is inevitable. Also, Ahmadinejad would LOVE it if Israel bombed Iran.
Latest Updates: nuclear weapons RSS
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aziz
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aziz
Full text of Secretary Clinton’s remarks at the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha. To be honest I don’t think she was hawkish on Iran at all. But neither do I think that sanctions will make much difference – a nuclear Iran is inevitable.
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johnpi
Elite US troops ready to combat Pakistani nuclear hijacks.
The US army is training a crack unit to seal off and snatch back Pakistani nuclear weapons in the event that militants, possibly from inside the country’s security apparatus, get their hands on a nuclear device or materials that could make one.
The specialised unit would be charged with recovering the nuclear materials and securing them.
The move follows growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan’s military, a series of attacks on sensitive installations over the past two years, several of which housed nuclear facilities, and rising tension that has seen a series of official complaints by US authorities to Islamabad in the past fortnight.
“What you have in Pakistan is nuclear weapons mixed with the highest density of extremists in the world, so we have a right to be concerned,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who used to run the US energy department’s intelligence unit.
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johnpi
Wargame sees US sidelining Israel on Iran.
Israel will find itself diplomatically sidelined and militarily muzzled as the United States pursues a nuclear deal with Iran next year, according to a closed-door wargame at Israel’s top strategic think-tank.
Not even a warning shot by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the simulation featured a commando raid on Iran’s Arak heavy water plant — would shake U.S. President Barack Obama’s insistence on dialogue.
Israel’s arch-foe, meanwhile, will likely keep enriching uranium, perhaps even winning the grudging assent of the West.
I’ve argued that allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons might serve the cause of regional stability by deterring those who are provoked by weakness.
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johnpi
Richard has put together some ideas and analysis from a day of media and public events he organized on the Iranian nuclear crisis. I’m excerpting this part that echoes my own thinking on Iran’s very rational reasons to be considering acquiring an atomic bomb.
If Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons is it to destroy Israel? In a word, no. Aside from the three-sided net the U.S. has sewn around Iran, several Iranian neighbors like Pakistan and Russia have nuclear weapons. Not to mention Israel’s warheads which could strike it as well. And one fact that is insufficiently understood is that Iran is deeply worried about the instability of the former. Within Pakistan, there is deep hatred of Shiism, the dominant form of Iranian Islam. Pakistan is rumored to have funded and founded an anti-Iranian terror group, Jundallah that is active inside Iran along their joint border.
Iranians worry that an unstable Pakistan could fall to the Taliban or other radical Islamist forces who will look to Iran as a mortal enemy and feel free to use its nuclear arsenal as political blackmail. We must recognize that Iran does have legitimate national security concerns to preserve its territorial integrity and social stability. If we address these concerns and treat them as legitimate then we may be able to resolve the impasse.
I suspect the Iranians are worried about worse things than “political blackmail.”
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johnpi
The case for the Iranian bomb.
Iran should be left alone to develop nuclear weapons without any interference from the West.
The Iranians have every bit as much right of self-defense against genicide and religicide as Israel. Iran is bordered by two unstable countries overtaken with violent mass religious movements that have an eliminationist doctrine toward Shiites, groups that operate in geographical close proximity to Pakistani nuclear weapons and therefore – at least theoretically – are at risk of gaining control of nuclear weapons that could be turned on Iran. Leaders among the loosely federated militant groups have stated that one of their goals is to obtain nuclear weapons.
In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, there have been massacres of Shiites. Were nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of these groups, Iran would be at great risk of attack. A Shiite nation defended with nuclear weapons would be an undesirable target because of the risk of retaliation. The doctrine of MAD, or mutual assured destruction, could be a shield.
Salafi, Wahabbi and Deobandi extremists have shown in their sectarian massacres of defenseless and undefended Shiite civilians that they are provoked by vulnerability, and so a non-nuclear Iran would be a much more likely and attractive target than India.
Iran, in its foreign policy history, has always been a rational actor, and despite bombastic comments coming from Amediniejad to score points with his constituencies, I do not believe based on the historical evidence that Iran would commit national suicide by attempting a nuclear attack on Israel, and so this is not a serious threat.
Some of the anti-nuclear Iran proponents in the West believe in oil imperialism, and would like to keep “all options open” for a US invasion of Iran at some point in the future, a position that all well-meaning people of any nationality should find reprehensible.
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johnpi
Saudi Arabia participates in extraordinary rendition during Hajj, ‘hands missing Iran nuclear scientist to US.’ Scientist was kidnapped while going on Mecca pilgrimage.
An Iranian nuclear scientist who went missing in Saudi Arabia has been “handed over by Riyadh to Washington,” Mehr news agency reported on Tuesday, quoting Tehran’s foreign ministry spokesman.
“Shahram Amiri, Iran’s nuclear scientist who had gone to hajj in Saudi Arabia, was handed over by Riyadh to Washington,” Ramin Mehmanparast told Mehr, referring to umra, a lesser pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest sites.
The spokesman said Amiri was one of 11 Iranian detainees currently held in US jails. His statement was the first acknowledgement by Tehran that Amiri was a nuclear scientist.
Iranian officials have previously said Amiri went missing in Saudi Arabia soon after he landed there as a pilgrim earlier this year.
It sounds like anybody who is significantly involved with the Iranian nuclear program should not go on Hajj or Umrah.
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johnpi
Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulitzer prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, writes in The New Yorker that the greatest fear about Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists comes not from the Taliban but from the likelihood of a mutiny in the Pakistani military by Islamic extremist officers.
The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military’s control over nuclear weapons.” Clinton—whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs—added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, “we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state.”
Clinton’s words sounded reassuring, and several current and former officials also said in interviews that the Pakistan Army was in full control of the nuclear arsenal. But the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.
No conversation about such a mutiny is complete without a discussion of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and despite the dismissive approach of some of my fellow TI front-pagers, the US government is worried enough about the group that it has been discussed at top levels of the Obama administration.
A senior Obama Administration official brought up Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a Sunni organization whose goal is to establish the Caliphate. “They’ve penetrated the Pakistani military and now have cells in the Army,” he said. (The Pakistan Army denies this.) In one case, according to the official, Hizb ut-Tahrir had recruited members of a junior officer group, from the most élite Pakistani military academy, who had been sent to England for additional training.
“Where do these guys get socialized and exposed to Islamic evangelism and the fundamentalism narrative?” the Obama Administration official asked. “In services every Friday for Army officers, and at corps and unit meetings where they are addressed by senior commanders and clerics.”
For more about Hizb-ut-Tahrir, check the history of posts on the group here at Talk Islam.
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johnpi
Quilliam’s Maajid Nawaz rather dramatically recounts his journey to Pakistan as a young Hizb-ut-Tahrir activist to set up an indigenous branch there in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.
…it is important to remember that the seeds of this current malaise were sown much earlier than today — I know this because I am living testimony to it.
….The news of this ‘Islamic [nuclear] bomb’ was what drew me from Britain to Lahore in the summer of 1999, not yet 22 years old. Spurred on by revolutionary zeal and dreams of erecting an Islamist caliphate, I arrived as part of a vanguard to set up a Pakistani branch of the global Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir (HT). The plan was to radicalise the country and foment a military coup against the democratically elected ‘client’ ruler Nawaz Sharif, so that our future caliphate could go nuclear. I was determined not to let anything get in my way, and nothing really did.
In the current climate of “hyper-paranoia” about extremist violence in Pakistan, this article is inflammatory in the extreme against HT.
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johnpi
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johnpi
US spy agencies considering rewriting threat assessment of Iran’s nuclear program.
The original report reversed earlier findings that Iran was pursuing a nuclear-weapons program.
It found with “high confidence” that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and with “moderate confidence” that it hadn’t been restarted as of mid-2007.
So far, intelligence officials are not “ready to declare that invalid,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told the Journal, emphasizing the judgment covered the 2003-2007 time frame only. That leaves room for a reassessment of the period since the December 2007 report was completed, the official suggested.
A new assessment might be useful in racheting up the war effort against Iran.
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johnpi
Neocon heavyweight Bolton calls for Israeli nuclear strike against Iran.
The purpose of Bolton’s excretings may be to make mere fanatic proposals to attack Iran look “middle of the road” by comparison. In an example of classic neoconservative cynicism, Bolton’s speech was titled, “Ensuring peace.”
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aziz
How can US policy towards Iranian nuclear power ever have credibility as long as the US gives Israel special treatment?
The “strategic ambiguity” of Israel’s nuclear arsenal is the single biggest obstacle to nonproliferation in the Middle East.
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johnpi
Threat to Pakistani nuclear arsenal is real, claim experts.
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons facilities were attacked three times in 2007 and 2008 by extremists, a recently published report says. The incidents highlight how difficult it is to keep the weapons safe.
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johnpi
Al Qaeda third in command give interview to Al Jazeera. Says that if he got his hands on Pakistani nukes he would use them against America.
Personally, I’ve felt that given the level of massacre violence against Shi’ites on the part of Al Qaeda affiliated extremists in Iraq and Pakistan, Iran is more at risk from such a development – which is why I have a lot of sympathy for the Iranians who may see some scenarios in their future where they might need a nuclear deterrent. in fact, I’ve pretty much come around to the position that the Iranians need nuclear weapons for self-defense, and ought to have them.
Massacres of Shi’ites in Iraq are becoming so common again that nobody even posts about them anymore.
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johnpi
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johnpi
A new line of anti-Iran propaganda just in case Mousavi wins: He’s as much of a political demon as Ahmadinejad, according to this editorial in Investors Business Daily:
Mousavi, of course, whose candidacy (unlike so many others) got the stamp of approval of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, is no moderate at all.he vowed during the campaign to continue Iran’s nuclear program.
Moreover, as Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman note in their newly published history of nuclear proliferation, “The Nuclear Express,” “Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan first began to transfer uranium enrichment technology to Iran in 1987″ — in the midst of Mousavi’s 1981-89 tenure in power.
Any Obama-Mousavi version of the Camp David Accords would have preserved Iran’s widely dispersed, tough-to-monitor nuclear program in some form, through which it can produce fuel for a bomb.
A few things:
1) Notice how the sole criterion for determining whether someone is a moderate or an extremist is his position on nuclear power.
2) Notice the weight of preference is still for Ahmadinejad: “Any Obama-Mousavi version of the Camp David Accords would have preserved…” as though Mousavi has already lost.
The rest of this editorial is a mess and looks like it was written by an inebriate: At one point it claims the Obama administration was “obviously” hoping Mousavi would win, and at another it claims Obama was “obviously hoping that a newly strengthened Ahmadinejad might come to Camp David.”
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aziz
North Korea – the paper tiger.
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johnpi
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johnpi
