ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

Saturday, November 17, 2007
Farhi: IAEA Finds Iran did not Divert Material to Weapons

Some Saturday reading:

At our Global Affairs group blog, Farideh Farhi takes a closer look at the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran. This issue may be the most important one in world politics today, on which war and peace hang. Farhi shows that the IAEA is saying that Iran has satisfactorily answered questions about its past nuclear energy research, and that the international body can certify that Iran has not diverted nuclear material to weapons purposes. Farhi points out that the NYT did not report either of these important findings.

The IAEA is clearly frustrated with Iran for a) continuing to enrich uranium (the Iranians say it is for fuel and international law allows them to do this), and for not being 100% transparent about their energy research program. But it finds no evidence that Iran even has a weapons program, and finds a consistency between Iranian statements and IAEA findings.

Farhi doesn't bring this point up, but the Israeli government is trying to get the IAEA head, Mohammed Elbaradei, fired, because he is not producing the reports that the Kadima and Likud parties want him to produce. The Israeli government had also been a big proponent of the theory that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2002, with Efraim Halevy, the head of Mossad [Israeli intelligence], making wild charges that he may have known were not true.

Ironically, Israel is the country that broke the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in the Middle East and introduced nuclear weapons into the region, kicking off an arms race with Iraq that in many ways led to the Iraq War. US and American complaints about Iran's civilian energy research program never acknowledge Israel's own outlaw status with regard to nonproliferation.

Israel had a big axe to grind. Saddam was an implacable enemy. What country would do differently?

in December last year, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, accidentally let slip that Israel, like "America, France and Russia", had nuclear weapons. Opposition politicians were furious. They attacked Olmert for "a lack of caution bordering on irresponsibility". But US aid continues to flow without impediment.

As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was developing a nuclear device (what it didn't know is that the first one had already been built by then). The contrast to the efforts now being made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker.

At first, US diplomats urged Washington to make its sale of 50 F4 Phantom jets conditional on Israel's abandonment of its nuclear programme. As a note sent from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to the secretary of state in October 1968 reveals, the order would make the US "the principal supplier of Israel's military needs" for the first time. In return, it should require "commitments that would make it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go nuclear". Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required: France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.

Twenty days later, on November 4 1968, when the assistant defence secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to Washington), Rabin "did not dispute in any way our information on Israel's nuclear or missile capability". He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin announced that the proposal was "completely unacceptable to us". On November 27, Lyndon Johnson's administration accepted Israel's assurance that "it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons".

As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken even before it was made. A record of a phone conversation between Henry Kissinger and another official in July 1969 reveals that Richard Nixon was "very leery of cutting off the Phantoms", despite Israel's blatant disregard of the agreement. The deal went ahead, and from then on the US administration sought to bamboozle its own officials in order to defend Israel's lie. In August 1969, US officials were sent to "inspect" Israel's Dimona nuclear plant. But a memo from the state department reveals that "the US government is not prepared to support a 'real' inspection effort in which the team members can feel authorised to ask directly pertinent questions and/or insist on being allowed to look at records, logs, materials and the like. The team has in many subtle ways been cautioned to avoid controversy, 'be gentlemen' and not take issue with the obvious will of the hosts".

For a great many humans, the desire to survive is one helluva motivator

ican711nm wrote:

For a great many humans, the desire to survive is one helluva motivator

The Palestinians agree.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

ican711nm wrote:

For a great many humans, the desire to survive is one helluva motivator

The Palestinians agree.

Cycloptichorn

Envy is a pretty good motivator too.

BS, the Pals live for the destruction of Israel. They have rejected peace at every turn.

ican711nm wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

ican711nm wrote:

For a great many humans, the desire to survive is one helluva motivator

The Palestinians agree.

Cycloptichorn

Envy is a pretty good motivator too.

Envy of what, exactly?

I think most Palestinians just want to survive, let alone have nice things...

Cycloptichorn

Advocate wrote:

BS, the Pals live for the destruction of Israel. They have rejected peace at every turn.

Sorry, but I don't buy into your theory that the Palestinians are born as murderous, ravening savages.

Cycloptichorn

Advocate wrote:

BS, the Pals live for the destruction of Israel. They have rejected peace at every turn.

Sorry, but I don't buy into your theory that the Palestinians are born as murderous, ravening savages.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Advocate wrote:

BS, the Pals live for the destruction of Israel. They have rejected peace at every turn.

Sorry, but I don't buy into your theory that the Palestinians are born as murderous, ravening savages.

Cycloptichorn

If you want to be literal about it, not all Pals do. But enough do, which negates any peace efforts.

It would be a tiny percentage of Israelis who oppose a peace settlement, and you know it. This is not the case with the Pals. For instance, Hamas had popular support, and it is unbending in its goal of destroying Israel.

Advocate wrote:

It would be a tiny percentage of Israelis who oppose a peace settlement, and you know it. This is not the case with the Pals. For instance, Hamas had popular support, and it is unbending in its goal of destroying Israel.

After years of getting the crap kicked out of them with no movement towards independence, land rights, water rights, or any sort of voting rights at all, people sometimes result to extreme measures.

I don't know that it is a 'tiny' percentage of Israelis. I don't know that at all.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Advocate wrote:

It would be a tiny percentage of Israelis who oppose a peace settlement, and you know it. This is not the case with the Pals. For instance, Hamas had popular support, and it is unbending in its goal of destroying Israel.

After years of getting the crap kicked out of them with no movement towards independence, land rights, water rights, or any sort of voting rights at all, people sometimes result to extreme measures.

I don't know that it is a 'tiny' percentage of Israelis. I don't know that at all.

Cycloptichorn

You do not know that it is not a "tiny" percentage of Israelis who are opposed to the co-existence of a Palestinian Arab state. But we, if not you, do know that it is a tiny percentage of Israelis who are opposed to the co-existence of a Palestinian Arab state. We, if not you, do know that it is a large percentage of Palestinian Arabs who are opposed to the existence of Israel, and have been opposed to the existence of Israel from the first moment after Israel declared its independence back in 1948. They have thereafter been attempting to end Israel's existence. Until they finally realize that their failure to tolerate Israel's existence is causing a continuation of both the misery of themselves and of those Palestinian Arabs who are not opposed to Israel's existence, they will not be able to end the misery of either.