Odds on a war with Iran before 2013?

[LMNO]

I sometimes forget that not all countrys' appeal to religion is 110% hypocrisy.

[Cain]

Well, it probably is in some sense, but it's also a fairly costly signal, if the regimes top religious authority says "nuclear weapons are sinful" and then goes around and makes a nuclear weapon.

Of course, the regime may go ahead and do that, but keep it secret and hope the public never find out.  It's a hard one to call.  But I think nuclear capability would technically not violate that position, while allowing them to have a latent capacity and thus threat, which makes it perfect for their purposes.

[minuspace]

Without knowing fully their actual intentions, or how many milestones past proof of principle they went, is it now valid to claim "latent" nuclear (weapon) threat.  Meaning, has it already become the kind of knowledge one can claim to posses without practical demonstration? (not that I'm asking for it)

[hirley0]

3:33&1/3 2OF3 ? Read 2607 / 4 IX
3:33&1/3 2OF3 ? Read 2574 / 2 EB

of course they did (80-81}
the ERA i refer to as I.con E_ron v Iran/contra
in the latter 80's OR earily 90's there was a shelve of books
say 15 feet of an encyclopedic ||||||||->15ft|||||| volume
written & displayed with the I/c title. every book was the same
size and thickness as the one to its left | not being a book Junky
i never bothered to look inside of  1. My guess would be 300 pages
and the books were not large{8x10) More like 4x6x1.1 | at the
time they were visable i would just say to myself  Icon/Iran 80/81
Whereas the tail has now taken on Prime time TV time May as well
type the following. There are plenty on Nukes around for Sail or rent
& no point in i/i Even? bothering to make A new 1. To me it seams
as thought They/con can "with impunity" take hostages  at will &
have, HAVE those taken organized & ready | probably D'Ployed
the real Question to consider was why was B.O. paid to serve
and to what end. I ask U that. to what end of the Me v Thee or T/M
5:20

One sign of hope is that the P5+1 talks are restarting.

And with the Supreme Ayatollah apparently taking charge, there might even be progress:

"The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous."

Good to know, Cain; I appreciate you keeping us updated on this stuff.

One sign of hope is that the P5+1 talks are restarting.

And with the Supreme Ayatollah apparently taking charge, there might even be progress:

"The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous."

With a minimum amount of snark on my part, I must ask to what degree or amount do you think what they are saying is true.

(You, on the other hand, can answer with as much snark as you'd like.)

This question also occurred to me.

[hirley0]

6 CIB ? 5:3o-5:38 Read 2626 / MAN_38 |Afgan : Water is ?
5:39 the children ? Women : fled Hom ? Seria (in v out} 41 Gaza ? France etc
5:41 clock stop 

[Don Coyote]

The general feeling of things in my reserve unit is that it is a strong possibility that will be going to war, or that Israel will nuke them (hopefully(ya right)).

[hirley0]

5:49 PDt / 4:49:49board

[Junkenstein]

In regards to the idea that covert action has been in the work for some time...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17365416

Nothing particularly new and exciting. I was more taken by the change of tack. No mention at all about nukes, much more emphasis on   the "cyber army" and claims regarding VPN's are no longer secure.

Guessing there's more to this than the obvious: "Control information within your borders as far as possible"

When will Iran learn from the west? You need to deny and condemn these things if you want to carry on doing them.

[Cain]

Whoops.  A supposedly leaked Iranian document claims the sanctions have strengthened their economy and are hurting European economies

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/juancole/ymbn/~3/oNam8O7LjAw/western-intelligence-analysts-worry-that-iran-sanctions-are-hurting-west-irgc.html

Iran: Report Describes Western Intelligence Services' Perspectives on Iran
Report entitled: "Behind the Scenes Look at Five Intelligence Services' Meeting on Iran"
Javan online
Thursday, March 22, 2012 ...
Document Type: OSC Translated Text...

Javan online

20 March 2012

Report Describes Western Intelligence Services Perspectives on Iran

Javan online: Informed sources say the wave of intelligence reports in the West that say the oil sanctions have ended to Iran's great advantage have caused much confusion among the men of government in Europe and America.

An informed source who works in the area of the economy and tracks intelligence reports about Iran reported that in the last month more than three intelligence reports produced by European and American intelligence services classified confidential and above, have all concluded that for numerous reasons Iran has been the big winner in the oil sanctions and that in a completely smart way these sanctions have increased Iran's revenues while the average revenues of the nations of the world are decreasing because of the economic crisis.

Nuclear Iran writes that an informed source said: "In Stockholm, teams from the CIA (America), Mossad (Israel), MI6 (England), BND (Germany) and DGSE (France) are now discussing one of the main areas of focus in these reports, which is that instead of reducing Iran's revenue, in the last three months the oil sanctions have increased Iran's revenues by more than $3 billion."

This source added: "Western services who want to express views about the content of their findings believe by cleverly intensifying the verbal clashes with America and Israel Iran has caused constant shocks to the price of oil without any oil sanctions being effectively applied against it."

According to this informed official the Western services and especially the German service believe Iran has made good use of the existing crisis in the world economy and has presented the West with a choice between weakening its economy by intensifying the sanctions against Iran or sharply reducing the sanctions.

This source continued: "The Stockholm meeting has effectively become a trial of America and Israel. The European nations believe Iran in coordination with Russia and China has used the main weakness of the Western nations, meaning the extreme sensitivity of public opinion in these nations to fuel price increases, and it has created conditions where the chance of the political survival of the people currently governing these nations has been greatly reduced, especially since almost all of these nations including America and France are about to hold elections. Accordingly the probability exists that insisting on putting restrictions on Iran's oil sector will lead to internal crisis in the Western nations."

This source, who emphasized the many limitations on providing intelligence about this, also added that the Western services believe the 12 Esfand (2 March) elections showed that the government of Iran has succeeded in stopping the project of "transferring pressure to the people" and has effectively not allowed foreign pressures to have an impact on ordinary life in Iran.

According to this source the intelligence evaluation of the five Western sources is that the people of Iran believe existing inflation is due to a domestic process and that there is no relationship between this inflation and the pressures of the West.

On this basis those at the meeting have decided the BBC Persian Service under MI6 oversight must produce a new propaganda package about the relationship between sanctions and inflation.

The existing intelligence shows that this meeting was a preliminary for a more essential meeting to be held in the month of May and at that meeting the European nations will examine the possibility or impossibility of applying oil sanctions against Iran in June 2012.

Existing intelligence shows that these services have still warned that insisting on oil sanctions against Iran will further damage relations with Russia, China and India.

This intelligence source said: "There is the sense that the European and American intelligence community regard the sanctions option, like the war option, as being ineffective in influencing Iran's calculations."

(Description of Source: Tehran Javan online in Persian Website of hardline conservative daily affiliated with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC); ) '

[Deepthroat Chopra]

So, is this drum-beating for war? I'm assuming they won't try divestment.

[Cain]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy's Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It's a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site's security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.'s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration's fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

If the Bush admin did train MEK, then that is clearly illegal.

It also raises questions as to who the MEK are taking their marching orders from right now.  A lot of the evidence I had seen suggested Israel as the main culprit.  But this puts the spotlight back on the US role.

The White House should have been briefed on this.  But that doesn't mean it was either.  Lots of unsettling implications.  Is the White House aware of this?  Are MEK still being run by JSOC?  Were they cut loose, only to turn to Israel?

[Cain]

P5+1 talks starting up again today.

America has a chance to make good with Iran here, as it has backed away recently from more militaristic rhetoric, prompting some rare praise from the Supreme Ayatollah.

However, European and Israeli and Saudi interests do not necessarily align with American ones.  Russia can be bought off, but China want continued access to Iranian oil.  That's a fair bit of potential for cross-purposes to screw something up. Israel and Saudi Arabia can pressure both America and China with varying degrees of effectiveness, for example, though not without consequence.

[Cain]

I sometimes forget that not all countrys' appeal to religion is 110% hypocrisy.

This may be of interest

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ND20Ak01.html

- The Barack Obama administration's new interest in the 2004 religious verdict, or fatwa, by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banning the possession of nuclear weapons, long dismissed by national security officials, has prompted the New York Times to review the significance of the fatwa for the first time in several years.

Senior Obama administration officials have decided to cite the fatwa as an Iranian claim to be tested in negotiations, posing a new challenge to the news media to report accurately on the background to the issue. But the April 13 New York Times article by James Risen rehashed old arguments by Iran's adversaries and even added some new ones.

Former Obama White House Iran policy coordinator Dennis B Ross, known for his close ties with Israel and hardline views on Iran, was quoted as suggesting that Khamenei may not be committed to nuclear weapons after all. But Ross implies that the reason is United States sanctions and perhaps the threat of war rather than that the 2004 fatwa was a genuine expression of policy.

The Times report repeated a familiar allegation, attributed to unnamed "analysts", that the fatwa is merely a conscious deception justified by the traditional Shi'ite legal principle called taqiyyah. But a quick fact check would have shown that taqiyyah is specifically limited to hiding one's Shi'ite faith to avoid being killed or otherwise seriously harmed if it were acknowledged.

Risen also cited unnamed "analysts" who argued that Khamenei's recent statements that Iran had not and would not develop nuclear weapons were contradicted by remarks he had made last year "that it was a mistake for Colonel Muammar el-Gaddafi of Libya to give up his nuclear weapons program".

But the quote from Khamenei complained that "this gentleman wrapped up all his nuclear facilities, packed them on a ship and delivered them to the West and said, 'Take them'!" Khamenei then added, "Look where we are, and in what position they are now."

Missing from the Times article was any reference to Iran's refusal to retaliate with chemical weapons for Iraq's repeated chemical weapons attacks on Iranian cities, based on US intelligence on Iranian troop concentrations, killing 7,000 immediately and severely injuring at least 100,000.

Although US military officers disseminated reports during the war alleging Iranian use of chemical weapons against Iraq, the most authoritative study of the issue, Joost Hilterman's 2007 book A Poisonous Affair, shows those reports represented US disinformation. Hilterman concludes that no reliable evidence ever surfaced that Iran used such weapons during the war.

In a dispatch from Qom on October 31, 2003, Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle, quoted Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, one of the highest ranking clerics in Iran, as saying in an interview that Iran never retaliated against Iraqi chemical attacks with its own chemical weapons because of the strong opposition of Iranian clerical authorities to the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

"You cannot deliberately kill innocent people," Saanei said.

The only reference in the Times report to Khamenei's role in the 2003 nuclear policy turning point was the statement that Khamenei "ordered a suspension of Iran's nuclear weapons program."

In fact, however, Khamenei did far more than "suspend" nuclear weapons work. He invoked the illicit nature of such weapons in Islam in order to enforce a policy decision to ban nuclear weapons work.

There is evidence that there was a long-simmering debate within the Islamic Republic behind the scenes over whether Iran should leave the door open to a nuclear weapons program or not. Both Khamenei and president Hashemi Rafsanjani had publicly opposed the idea of possessing nuclear weapons in the mid-1990s, but pressure for reconsideration of the issue had risen, especially after the aggressive posture of the George W Bush administration toward Iran.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Jesus Christ. For years I've operated a strict policy of assuming that whatever our rulers tell us is wrong and that, conversely, the opposite of what they say is probably nearer the truth. I realised all along that this was a naive way of looking at things but it helped me develop a kneejerk mistrust of anything that came out a politician's mouth or via the media outlets which they pollute with their bullshit.

However, this revelation has caused me to rethink this shit. Is it possible that, in the case of Iran I actually got it right and our lying cocksuckers glorious leaders are actually about to declare war on the last place on earth where the management have real, honest to fuck principles?

Say it aint so 

[Cain]

http://prestowitz.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/04/19/japans_greatest_threat_comes_from_the_persian_gulf_not_north_korea

As a result of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactors were knocked out and largely destroyed. Then safety checks and scheduled maintenance stops halted the remaining active reactors. Today, only one of Japan's reactors is operating and it is scheduled to go down for maintenance soon. Once the reactors are turned off, it is proving extremely difficult to overcome public opposition to turning them back on. Those living near the reactors are afraid of a repeat of the Fukushima experience and don't want to hear about the power being turned back on. While understandable, this means that over a third of Japan's electric generation capacity is out of action. With Japan's hot, humid summer approaching, there is fear of serious power shortages despite draconian conservation measures.

Now here's where the Persian Gulf comes in. To replace the lost nuclear power, Japan has been importing large quantities of oil from the Gulf to power its remaining conventional generators. This has driven up the price of oil, but at least it has relieved to some extent the electricity shortage.

However, any kind of strike on Iran or military action in the Gulf is virtually guaranteed to close, at least temporarily, the Straits of Hormuz and thereby to shut off the oil shipments to Japan. Thus, in a very real sense, a strike on Iran is also likely to be a strike on Japan.

At the German Marshall Fund meeting that I attended earlier in the week in Tokyo, there was much discussion of the North Korean missile failure and its implications. In the midst of this discussion, a senior Japanese official almost screamed at the audience not to become preoccupied with North Korea and missiles. Said this person, "the North Korean missile is not a real threat to Japan. The much greater threat is a closure of the Persian Gulf. We must prevent that by all means."