Baradei: Attack on Iran Would Create Fireball in ME;
The American interpretation of a recent Israeli air force exercise as a warning to Iran that it could be bombed caused oil futures prices to rise and the US stock market to drop. In other words, if you're an American with a pension fund, this stuff cost you money yesterday.
International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed Elbaradei said Friday that Iran's nuclear research program was not such as to raise grave concerns at the moment, and that any attack on the research facilities would turn the Middle East into a fireball and force his own resignation. Quotes from the Al-Arabiya interview via Reuters:
"I don't believe that what I see in Iran today is a current, grave and urgent danger. If a military strike is carried out against Iran at this time ... it would make me unable to continue my work . . ." "A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible. It would turn the region into a fireball . . ." "If you do a military strike, it will mean that Iran, if it is not already making nuclear weapons, will launch a crash course to build nuclear weapons with the blessing of all Iranians, even those in the West."
Meanwhile, acting Friday Prayers leader in Tehran, hard liner Ahmad Khatami threatened a "strong blow" in retaliation if Iran were attacked. The AFP article misquotes him, since he did not say that Iran's mentality is to attack foreigners. He said its mentality is to reject foreign rule.
See also Helena Cobban.
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/21/2008 07:05:00 AM
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Yesterday (Friday 20 June 2008) Mark Tran ran a NewsBlog on The Guardian, with the title "Will Israel bomb Iran?", whose contents, as well as the corresponding Comments by the readership, might be of interest to the readership of Informed Comment. The pertinent address is:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/06/will_israel_bomb_iran_1.html
BF
Here are the facts:
1-Israel has atomic bombs.
2- Israel wants to expand.
3- Israel's neighbors don't like it so they make weapons too.
4-Israel don't like it so Israel tell the USA to bombard its neighbors.
5-The USA military bras is mutiny (finally.)
6-Israel sends a warning sign to (Commander-In-Chief)G.W.B.
PS: never mind the pension money, the holocaust may be around the corner.
The El Baradei comments from the Al Arabiya interview strike me as very important. Yet the U.S. press is not giving it any importance. I could not find the story on the NYTimes, LATimes, Chicago Tribune, or Washington Post sites. AP had a story from the same interview that cited his comments on Syria. Although your link to Reuters worked, I could not find the story by navigating through Reuters. Google shows about ten citations in the international press.
In other words, if you're an American with a pension fund, this stuff cost you money yesterday.
This is only true if one sold stocks after their price went down yesterday. If one doesn't sell the stock, then there is no lost money.
The broader point that oil prices rose and stocks fell because of speculators acting on Israel's bellicose actions is taken.
Helen Cobban raised some wonderful points re: Michael Gordon's story in NYT about the Israeli exercise: http://justworldnews.org/archives/002964.html
This analysis is right on the money in my opinion.
Israel's Iran bombing test run "political theater"
Sat, 21 Jun 2008
....As McClatchy reported earlier this month, Israel appears to be taking part in a concerted psy-ops campaign to rattle Iran and generate support in the US. And some military analysts who are following the issue closely see The New York Times story as part of this ongoing psy-ops campaign.
"This might have been a useful exercise, but it was not a convincing rehearsal of an attack on Iran, perhaps someplace in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Egypt," wrote John McCreary, a retired and respected former Defense Department intelligence analyst who writes the widely read NightWatch. "Nevertheless, it was a great use of an Israeli armed forces exercise as political theater.'
The analysts over at Stratfor, the Texas-based private intelligence analysis company, also had a similar take.
"A country that is planning an attack is not going to prepare in such a public manner," Stratfor concluded. "It follows, then, that these exercises and the subsequent reports are designed to rattle the Iranians. Tehran knows these are psychological operations, but it cannot be 100 percent certain; after all, Israel is highly militarily competent."
While Stratfor thought the story was meant to rattle Iran, McCreary says Israel's target is the American public and the media, which it needs in order to convince the Bush administration to take the lead on a possible military strike.
Both Stratfor and McCreary noted that Israel faces daunting hurdles in carrying out a military strike on Iran.
Full piece Here.
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Re nuclear proliferation and the demonization of Iran in the US press.
Pakistan, whose 'still president Musharaf' funded the Taliban and ran Mullah Omar's Afghanistan as a client state, whose bearded ISI spy agency launched Al Qeda-trained suicide assassins against India, has not yet opened the books on Dr. Kahn's foreign sales of nuke tech. Recent reports have us getting our hard intel on Pakistan-Kahn's compact missile/suitcase bomb design from computers seized in Switzerland.
Arabia, who's state (oil) funded Wahabi cult still exports the mosque-madrassah scaffolding for terrorist recruitment, also funded the Paki bomb/missile program. Do we think covert Arabian intent was for Paki proliferation of 'Allah's Bomb' to be so loose as to allow obsolete centrifuge sales to Iran, without taking measures to provide the nuke trump card to the 'Kingdom'?
2003-4 reports had it that the last big shipment of nuclear tech from Pakistan to Libya went missing... (Much of what Libya re-sold to the US sounded like junk product, left over from the 60's in China.)
And yet, possible future nuclear weapons in Iran obsesses US public diplomacy and defense policy, not the linkage of 9/11 to existing nuclear weapons and large-ish missile delivery systems in the two leading Wahabi states.
Isreal this week publicly rehearsed sending a combat wing strength attack against Iran. Such an attack would have to cross the Arabian Peninsula and US patrolled Gulf oil routes. Hmmm.
Strategic blindness is something we do to ourselves.
tommy times:
I hope you will share this blog entry at Reddit and other such sites (links at the bottom of the post); that is the blogosphere's answer when the corporate media ignore important news. I don't typically have time to do it myself.
cheers Juan
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2008/06/israeli-propagandists-can-leak-anything.html
June 20, 2008
Israeli propagandists can leak anything to the New York Times and they will guarantee to put it on the front page. It must be nice. *
* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/washington/20iran.html
-- Asad AbuKhalil
One thing that I think is poorly understood by the American public in general is how much of the ideological basis of the Iranian Revolution and, therefore, its current government is steeped in the notion of anti-colonialism and a certain element of xenophobia. I suspect there is also a wide ignorance of America's imperial/colonial past in the Middle East, however limited it may have been, and how America's actions are seen in that particular context, however unfair it may be presented.
There are no less than twelve articles and sections of the IRI's Constitution which are primarily concerned with the elimination and prevention of outside influence. Some political scientists believe that the IRI's Constitution is essentially moot with respect to real affairs in Iran, but, given Shirin Ebadi's apparent view, I suspect it is very pertinent.
Sir & Sirius,
You might be interested on the "Sins of the fathers" in the Bush family. Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker were running the slave coal mines that needed Jewish and other camp laborers in Poland. Bush continued his business transactions with Fritz "I Paid Hitler -author" Thyssen even after US had been in war with the Nazi Germany already for a year.
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Bushism_sins_of_the_fathers.htm
I think GW Bush was repenting over the sins of his fathers during his era. But "Thou Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless whosoever uses His name in vain", said the decalog, Ten Commandments to the hypocrite fake believers. G*d's name should not be used to our own ends. I pray for the Republican quasi-royal families, I wish them all good. An analogous process of blood money laundring was going on in the richest family of the "impartial" Sweden, the Wallenberg's. They invested in the Nazi's during the hyperinflation at the 1920's, when money from abroad determined who's gonna get the power. SA was a private and PAID army with its 350,000 x2 arms. They were no boy scouts but demanded money. Four times larger private army than the Wehrmacht field army of Germany!
A longer version in English with Scientific backround of Western race hygiene in general (first few pages scanned from a classic volume of professor Daniel Gasman on antisemitism, then my own 50 page research with 100 references):
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm
Currently, "A new wave of ethnic cleansing is going on in Iraq," Iraqi Christian representative Behiye Hadodo told the gathering. "If these atrocities continue, the Chaldean, Syriac and Assyrian communities there will be wiped out altogether, creating a new catastrophe for humanity." Yet nobody seems to care. Boycotts, divestment and other initiatives are directed only at Israel. Iraq's Assyrians are a non-Arab ethnic minority located mainly in northeastern Iraq, and adherents of Christian denominations including the Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Orthodox churches. A 1987 census recorded 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, but the numbers began to drop after the 1990 Gulf War, reaching around 800,000 before the U.S. invaded in March 2003. Persecution at the hands of Islamic radicals -- killings, church bombings, kidnappings, forced conversions and harassment -- has prompted hundreds of thousands of Christians to flee the country since 2003. Although accurate statistics are unavailable, researchers believe the community may have been halved in the past five years. Within one or two generations, he said, Christians in the Middle East - the birthplace of Christianity - may be reduced to a negligible number, having been forced to flee radical Islam.
Be it either the civilian Obama or the 5-year Viet-Kong suicidal captive admirals son McCain, please mention the forgotten Iraqi Christians...But do not attack Iran and engage yourself in a field battle... This country sacrificed even child soldiers as 'martyrs' to mine fields with plastic keys in their neck.
Recovering from hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of the brain,
Pauli.Ojala@gmail.com, evolutionary critic
Helsinki, Finland
Biochemist (MSci-Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Dinoglyfs.htm
Dr Cole,
I've read that Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa, last year I think, banning the production and use of nuclear weapons. Can you confirm this?
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