AHMADINEJAHD WINS AGAIN!!!!

We'll see.



Of course we can never be sure that Biden is speaking for himself or the Administration, but in either case this isn't a particularly forceful comment.

Our Secretary of State's reaction was even more sapless



Across the Atlantic, however, they are in an uproar



To be fair, in the lexicon of international diplomacy, these statements are somewhat spirited.

I think it's pretty clear that the Iranian regime will remain unfazed by such rhetoric. If, as is almost certain, the election was rigged, some tut-tuts from the West are not about to force the Mullahs to reverse their scheme.

The audience our government's comments should be directed towards, is whatever amounts to The Opposition in Iran. I don't know they will hear these words, but should the protests continue and the reaction of the Iranian regime be, as expected, hard-line, my guess is that protesters will want and need to hear something a lot more encouraging.

You may consider that the US has neither the inherent right, nor, ultimately, the ability to influence the internal affairs of Iran, but it's interests are certainly impacted by Iranian internal affairs, and that is particularly so when those affairs include the intent to secure nuclear arms.

No one can predict with certainty what will happen if and when Iran is armed with nukes, but it's a safe bet US interests will not be served, and a possibility that military involvement will be required. This makes it US business to persuade or coerce Iran into abandoning their nuclear ambitions.

I don't think there are many who believe that additional nuclear players on the world's stage is a thing to be desired

"The spread of nuclear weapons or the theft of nuclear material could lead to the extermination of any city on the planet..."
-Barack Obama-

"(Nuclear terrorism is) the most immediate and extreme threat to global security."
-Barack Obama-

"Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran's neighbors and our allies."
-Barack Obama-

Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -- that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
-Barack Obama-

"(Iran could have "peaceful" nuclear power) but not a military nuclear capability and they have to accept this."
-Nicolas Sarkozy-

“We cannot allow them to have a hundred nuclear weapons. We cannot allow a country to, in effect, become the bomb-seller of the world because they're in a snit, and because they can't grow a crop.”
-Bill Clinton-

"Every time I get a chance to talk to them (leaders of Third World nations who may be seeking nuclear weapons), I try to dissuade them of that. And I make the point that I think that it's a wasted investment in a military capability that is limited in political or military utility, and that we have ways of responding and punishing conventionally that you would not wish to see us use." (emphasis added)
-Colin Powell-

"We can't allow the world's worst leaders to blackmail, threaten, hold freedom-loving nations hostage with the world's worst weapons."
-George Bush-

"For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
-Madeleine Albright -

“The international community must continue to act uncompromisingly to prevent a nuclear Iran and end its activities that assist terror organisations and destabilise the Middle East.”
-Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman-

"They (Iran) are very aggressive in their pursuit of nuclear weapons, in their interference with other countries’ internal affairs, with their funding and deployment of terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah to further Iranian aim. Most of the people in the region who have to live with Iran every day are extremely worried by Iranian actions. We share those worries. Europe and NATO are also with us on that. "
-Hillary Clinton-

"I know that there’s an ongoing debate about what the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons production capacity is, but I don’t think there is a credible debate about their intention. Our task is to dissuade them, deter them, prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon, which given the range of the missiles they currently have access to threatens Europe and Arab neighbors in the Gulf..."
-Hillary Clinton-

“That strategy will... seek to end Iran's ambition to acquire an illicit nuclear capability and its support for terrorism.”
-US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice-

"...that their attacks or -- or their -- their financing of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, the bellicose language that they've used towards Israel, their development of a nuclear weapon or their pursuit of a nuclear weapon -- that all of those things create the possibility of destabilizing the region and are not only contrary to our interests, but I think are contrary to the interests of international peace.”
-Barack Obama-

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
-Bhagavad Gita-

Has Jimmy Carter verified another win for his side?

"...we simply can't prevent other nations from getting the bomb."

Between the Israeli's destruction of the Osirak installation and the US invasion in 2003, Iraq has been prevented from getting the bomb, and it is highly unlikely that it will reanimate it's pursuit of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.

Similarly, Israel's bombing of the covert Syrian nuclear installation has prevented them from reaching the stage in development where the rest of the world dithers and issues hollow warnings and the weapons are produced.

Ayatollah Khameini has said nuclear weapons and the use of them is against Islam. In spite of what the armchair hawks keep saying, the head Iranian clerygy have condemned their use.

The Iranians say they are developing nuclear power, not nuclear weapons, and there is no evidence that's not true. If you do some checking, you will see that most of the Middle East oil states are devloping nuclear power, several with the actual aid of the US, in large part because domestic demand for oil in those countries, including Iran, is rising so fast that in a decade or less it would consume all the oil that they produce, which they rely on for export dollars. So why the hell aren't we on Qatar's case too, instead of helping them, if we're so concerned?

And as long as Israel has nukes and intimidates other countries with their possession, the Mideast will be destabilized. And we don't do a damned thing about that.

It remains highly unlikely that the United States can influence policies in Iran. Especially not with a hectoring tone, nor with bullying through the threat of military intervention. About the only reasonable case which can be made that American interests are affected (impact is a noun, not a verb) by a Persian nuclear program would be if it were used to threaten Iraq or Saudi Arabia--after all, no other middle eastern states (except, perhaps, Kuwait) have anything we want as badly as we want petroleum from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. To assume that the Persians are so stupid that they don't know what the probable consequence of the use of tactical nukes in an attempt to invade Iraq, or the use of nuclear weapons in any form against Saudi Arabia would be, is, in the most charitable construction, naive. The only threat the Persians wish to be perceived from a possible nuclear arsenal (and there is no reliable intelligence that they are attempting to create one, let alone that they possess one) is toward Israel. Believe it or not, absolutely nothing about Israel contributes to our national interest. They are not a major trading partner, they are not a supplier of petroleum, they are not a supplier of strategic minerals and they offer us nothing in the way of military support. They are become such a pariah nation that we wouldn't want military assistance from them (although i suspect Central Intelligence is pathetically grateful for whatever crumbs Mossad throws their way).

A claim that American military involvement would be "required" is also hopelessly naive. For someone who is almost completely militarily ignorant, it probably seems a reasonable thing to talk about American military involvement in Iran. But you would only have two places from which to stage an invasion of Iran. To invade by ground, you would either come out of Iraq, across ground of which every square inch is intimately familiar to the Persians, as they fought over for nearly a decade. It is a narrow corridor, which makes the Fulda gap look spacious, and would be a death trap for hundreds, if not actually thousands of Americans. Having passed the barrier of the Zagros Mountains from Iraq, one is still hundreds of miles from Teheran, with the intervening terrain semi-arid, or desert, and mountainous--a far cry from rushing over flat desert sands in (local) winter as was the case in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Persians have an experienced cadre of officers and NCOs, veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, and about a quarter of a million active duty troops, with millions more of reservists. They have the best weapons systems money can buy, and they've got a lot of money to spend.

Invading from Afghanistan would be even loonier. The terrain of Beluchistan is arid and mountainous, and the portion of Alexander's army which marched across Beluchistan after he returned from Indian saw half their numbers die in that desert, and there was no armed opposition to them. An attempt to invade from Afghanistan would be a logistic nightmare, never mind the issue of the deteriorating relations with Pakistan. (For those whose geographic knowledge is slim, Afghanistan is land-locked, and at least a shadow of good will from Pakistan would be necessary to accomplish a build-up of the size necessary to cross Beluchistan, and deal with an army of a half-million or more when you got to the other side).

The final possibility would be an air assualt, using paratroops and helicopter-borne troops. The cost of such an invasion would unacceptably high--unacceptably high in the terms of the military planners who would be asked to plan such an operation, and unacceptably high to the public even if it were accomplished.

Once again, there are some things which we just cannot accomplish, no matter how bitter a pill it is for some people to swallow. If we were the Roman Empire, and had all of France to draw on for heavy infantry, no regard for public opinion, and no serious external enemies, it's something we might reasonably contemplate. But we're not, and it is not reasonable. It doesn't mean squat that we or anyone else don't think there should be no more nuclear players in the world (and we weren't so damned concerned when Pakistan built nukes). There are some things about which we simply cannot do anything. Suck it up.

All the quotes of all the pundits and leaders of all the world, and all the references to the destroyer of worlds don't change a bit of this. If the Persians want a nuclear arsenal, there is nothing we can do about it short of invasion and occupation for generations, and that is a cost the American public will be unwilling to pay. Invading Iran would make the invasion of Iraq look like a walk in the park.

Once again, you are militarily naive. Osirak was out in plain sight. The Israelis didn't destroy it, the Persians didn't destroy it, and it wasn't finally destroyed until the RAF and the USAF bombed during the Gulf War. Observers both inside and outside Iraq are convinced, and have repeatedly said so, that the Ba'athists and Hussein were spurred to attempt to create a nuclear arsenal by the Israeli attack, and it provided ammunition for Hussein to silence his critics in the Ba'ath party. The situation in Syria was the same--a stupid and clumsy attempt to create a nuclear program and hide it from what is arguably the best intelligence service in the world (at least in its own backyard).

The situation with Iran is entirely different. They have room enough to hide hundreds of reactors and research facilities, and they can hide them under mountains (and they do). They have the examples of Iraq and Syria to teach them these lesson if they were that stupid (and they are not). The only way we could assure the destruction of any such program on their part would be nuke it until it is fit only to be paved for a parking lot, or invade and spend the next 20 or 30 years hunting down every vestige of their program and attempting to convince the Persians that we really are nice guys and that this is all in their best interest (which we won't).

Dream on, mighty armchair warrior, dream on.

a very effective post finn....seems the Dems are just as determined to thwart Iran's nuclear weapons program as previous administrations....they're just gonna go about it in a different way.

I feel certain that Ahmadinejad is quite able to wield a measure of power that is essentially independent from Khamenei, however your statement is accurate. Nevertheless, whether Ahmadinejad or Mousavi present the public face of the Iranian government is not without importance.

While Mousavi's credentials as a reformist are undercut by his performance as Prime Minister from 1981 to 1989, his candidacy has carried the reform banner in this election, and certainly the majority of those who voted for him hoped for the reforms he spoke of while campaigning.

If he had won, the face of the Iranian government would have been a good bit softer than the rigid features of Ahmadinejad. What this would have meant in practical terms is questionable. The "reformist" president Mohamed Khatami certainly didn't live up to the expectations of Iranians who swept him into power in 1997, and it's probably less likely that Mousavi would have delivered, but if he had been allowed to win it would have signaled a pull back from the antagonistic, hard-line approach of Ahmadinejad. Again, what the actual results of such a makeover might have been are debatable.

In any case, Mousavi was not allowed to win and by confirming, if not engineering, Ahmadinejad's election, the Guardian Council would seem to have also confirmed defiant belligerence as the face it wants the rest of the world to see.

Well there you have it. We can all stopy worrying.

I take it you include Barack Obama among the armchair hawks.



Possibly because there is far less reason to believe that Qatar has any intention of developing nuclear weapons.

Qatar has no plans on developing nuclear power capabilities on its own and in secrecy, and there is virtually no expectation that they would refuse to allow IAEA inspections.

Setanta

In your two responsive posts you wrote:









I acknowledge that in many of our prior exchanges in this forum, comments like those above have been written by me about you. I could argue that mine have always been in response to yours, but I'm sure you believe the opposite. It really doesn't matter though. For whatever reason, I have no intention of trading insults with you. You are certainly not compelled to follow suit, but I'm passing.

What does not make sense to me is if Iran wants nuclear power for peaceful purposes, why make the inflammatory rhetoric about wiping Israel off of the map? That statement sounds counter-productive to the goal of developing nuclear power with no sanctions. My thinking is that the goading statement about wiping Israel off of the map is part of the real reason we want to keep Iran non-nuclear. Not to protect Israel, but because such statements belie perhaps that Iran is looking to take on a new role of hegemony in the region.

In effect, what is good for Iran is now bad for U.S. interests. So, based on Iran's desire to be the big kid on the block, they have in effect chosen to be our adversary.

If we, and some other nations, do intervene, it will not be for Israel, but for those Sunni Muslim oil producers, in my opinion.

I think that Finn's list needs to be replicated. All of these worthies against Setanta---But Setanta has not the slightestdoubt that he knows more than they do.

Intellectual arrogance or just being dumb?

Note:


I don't think there are many who believe that additional nuclear players on the world's stage is a thing to be desired

"The spread of nuclear weapons or the theft of nuclear material could lead to the extermination of any city on the planet..."
-Barack Obama-

"(Nuclear terrorism is) the most immediate and extreme threat to global security."
-Barack Obama-

"Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran's neighbors and our allies."
-Barack Obama-

Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -- that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
-Barack Obama-

"(Iran could have "peaceful" nuclear power) but not a military nuclear capability and they have to accept this."
-Nicolas Sarkozy-

“We cannot allow them to have a hundred nuclear weapons. We cannot allow a country to, in effect, become the bomb-seller of the world because they're in a snit, and because they can't grow a crop.”
-Bill Clinton-

"Every time I get a chance to talk to them (leaders of Third World nations who may be seeking nuclear weapons), I try to dissuade them of that. And I make the point that I think that it's a wasted investment in a military capability that is limited in political or military utility, and that we have ways of responding and punishing conventionally that you would not wish to see us use." (emphasis added)
-Colin Powell-

"We can't allow the world's worst leaders to blackmail, threaten, hold freedom-loving nations hostage with the world's worst weapons."
-George Bush-

"For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
-Madeleine Albright -

“The international community must continue to act uncompromisingly to prevent a nuclear Iran and end its activities that assist terror organisations and destabilise the Middle East.”
-Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman-

"They (Iran) are very aggressive in their pursuit of nuclear weapons, in their interference with other countries’ internal affairs, with their funding and deployment of terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah to further Iranian aim. Most of the people in the region who have to live with Iran every day are extremely worried by Iranian actions. We share those worries. Europe and NATO are also with us on that. "
-Hillary Clinton-

"I know that there’s an ongoing debate about what the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons production capacity is, but I don’t think there is a credible debate about their intention. Our task is to dissuade them, deter them, prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon, which given the range of the missiles they currently have access to threatens Europe and Arab neighbors in the Gulf..."
-Hillary Clinton-

“That strategy will... seek to end Iran's ambition to acquire an illicit nuclear capability and its support for terrorism.”
-US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice-

"...that their attacks or -- or their -- their financing of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, the bellicose language that they've used towards Israel, their development of a nuclear weapon or their pursuit of a nuclear weapon -- that all of those things create the possibility of destabilizing the region and are not only contrary to our interests, but I think are contrary to the interests of international peace.”
-Barack Obama-

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
-Bhagavad Gita-

My responses addressed, in detail, the idiocy of advocating military action to deal with a situation which offends our sense of our mastery of world affairs. If we had an emperor on the Roman model rather than a President, we undoubtedly would already have invaded and occupied every oil-bearing nation of the region. But we don't and we haven't. Under the circumstances it is militarily naive rhetoric and offensive saber rattling, particularly by someone who wouldn't be obliged to go in harm's way, to advocate a policy which is so unrealistic. If you want to claim that this was insulting, then i can only observe that you are easily wounded in your self-love.

Iran has twice the population of Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion. It has not suffered under more than a decade of international sanctions, and therefore the population is reasonably healthy and well-fed, while the resources of the government of Iran are enormous in proportion to the nation's population. They have a professional army which is larger than the entire "coalition" force which invaded Iraq (which was essentially the United States and the United Kingdom, for however many desperate cosmetic inclusions of other nation's forces were engineered after the serious fighting had ended). For an invasion of Iran to have a reasonable chance of success, with as few American casualties as possible, we would be obliged to abandon Iraq and Afghanistan, or abandon nearly every other military commitment we currently maintain in the world. In addition of the regular army of Iran, their reserve system could serve up an additional force which would bring their total to a figure at least as great as if not greater than the sum of all of our armed forces. They certainly have the money to equip them, and i strongly suspect that they already have the resources in storage to equip and support them. People who rant about bombing Iran, as though that would solve the problem are militarily naive. People who rant about invading Iran, as though that would be either easy or cheap in terms of money and American lives are militarily naive. Worse yet are those who are not in fact ranting, but who write in a vein which suggest that these things are militarily given realities, and that it were no problem to contemplate their attainment. Those are the kinds of things which can be reasonably attributed to armchair generals who are either ignorant of or have taken no consideration of the military realities on the ground. And they are particular disgusting to hear from those whose personal safety will not be at risk.

Iran has not demonstrated that they possess intercontinental ballistic missiles. If they did, they might be considered a threat to the United States, but so long as they don't, medium range ballistic missiles only make them a threat, outside of the immediate neighborhood of the middle east, to Turkey, eastern Europe and Russia, unless they got some goofy notion that they wanted to attack Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the largely Muslim nations of the former Soviet Union. Were NATO to demand such an operation, and put up the forces and resources to support such an operation, and commit to the many, many years of occupation which would be necessary to once again stabilize the region after the enormously destabilizing effect of such an invasion, such saber rattling might be justified. But for Americans to sit comfortably at home and call for young men and women to be sent in harm's way to gratify their vanity of a superpower capable of any policy which idly occurs to the bellicose is disgusting, and illustrative of military ignorance.

If you are insulted by being told things which are demonstrable reality, then help yourself. Take your phony self-righteous position and console yourself with it. I remain unimpressed with either your military knowledge (something you don't seem to possess), and certainly unimpressed with your phony appeal to an injured nobility and humility.

My remarks about the size of the Persian armed forces have been based on information which i found at Global Security-dot-org a few years ago. I went there this morning to attempt to find that information again, but i am apparently not searching properly to find what i found in the past. A general search for Iran+army yeilded this article at Wikipedia, which describes an armed forces far in excess of the figures which i recall from Global Security a few years ago. According to this article, the regular armed forces of Iran number in excess of 800,000 troops, and while they justifiably describe Iran's claims about their reserve force as unreliable, they claim that up to 3,000,000 members of their reserves are "combat capable." To put this in perspective, we invaded Iraq with 185,000 troops. If you are unwilling to do the math, that means that the regular armed forces of Iran are five times greater than the entire force which we employed to invade Iraq. If the 3,000,000 reservists were armed and joined to the regular professional forces of Iran, that would exceed the entire total of our active-duty professional military. Wikipedia is citing the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Global Security.

So, in fact, the situation might be even worse, in terms of the feasibility of a proposed invasion, than i have been insisting upon. The Wikipedia article on the military of the United States, citing a government printing office document, describes our armed forces thus:



Our two and one quarter million active duty and reserve military personnel are spread out all over the globe. Iran's more than 900,000 active duty, and up to 3,000,000 combat capable reservists are right there in the cockpit of war if we were to attempt to invade.

Would one of the military geniuses of the right explain to me how they propose we could pull this off?

Meanwhile, Khamenei has ordered the Guardian Council to examine the allegations by Mousavi, who still claims widespread vote rigging in the election ...

Thanks Walter, i know the digressions to address rightwingnut saber rattling are tedious, and not to the point of the actual subject of the thread.

cI see that Mousavi is going to have a march to Azadi Tower and square today. I wonder how that will be recieved by the Council of Expediency?

That's cancelled due to not allowed ...

I have an Iranian co-worker who has been following the election all weekend. He and his wife have been translating all the Farsi Internet postings to follow the election. (He says 80% of what is out there is in Farsi.) Of course, I can't verify his stories, but he says everything clearly points to fraud and that Ahmadinejahd and the military seem to be pulling a coup over the religious leadership of the country (that includes a fair number of moderates.)

He also mentioned several statements by the other hard-liner in the election saying he is protesting the results. This other guy apparently released a screen shot showing that he had 400,000 votes in the morning, but later in the day he was down to 300,000.