Here's how Israel would destroy Iran's nuclear program

[almaty 19]

i have no doubt that Israel will take out any threat from iran, in this area....

[Nagishkaw 510]

Not a doubt in my mind, either.

[scandal 951]

i have no doubt that Israel will take out any threat from iran, in this area....

Not a doubt in my mind, either.

Gee, really guys?

Based upon the first article I posted in this thread, I really hope not.

Much as I don't want to see a nuclear Iran, I don't think the military options to remove that capability are very promising.

[almaty 19]

i agree..but i doubt if Israel will remain passive if they feel the current adminsitration in Iran is close to a nuke...and self-perservation comes before world opinion or other nations

[Danno 1,228]

These situations makes one thankful we have a ocean to our left and right.

Saw this piece freshly posted today.

Yeah, I know a number of peps Don't like Pat but I find he is right a lot more than he is wrong and he usually has an interesting take on an issue.

I'm not a student of the Middle East so on this topic, I don't have any strong opinions.

-----------------------

Did Bibi Box Obama In?

Updated 05/22/2009 ET

On Sept. 20, 2002, as the War Party was beating the drum for preventive war on Iraq, lest we wake up to “a mushroom cloud over an American city,” The Wall Street Journal introduced an eminent voice to confirm that, yes, Saddam was driving straight for an atomic bomb.

“This is a dictator who is … feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons,” wrote Bibi Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel.

“Saddam’s nuclear program has changed. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country — and Iraq is a very big country. Even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of mass death. …

“(I)f action is not taken now, we will all be threatened by a much greater peril … (for) no gas mask and no vaccine can protect against nuclear weapons.”

This was horse manure of a high grade, as high as that which Richard Perle deposited on the podium of the Foreign Policy Research Institute a year earlier, when he informed a stunned audience that Saddam “is busily at work on a nuclear weapon.”

Perle had it straight from Saddam’s “Bomb Maker,” “a man named Kadir Hamza.” Hamza, said Perle, told him that after the Osirak reactor was destroyed by Israel in 1981, Saddam “began to build uranium enrichment facilities, many facilities, and we built 400 of them, and they’re all over the country. Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them. They don’t turn out much, but every day they turn out a little bit of nuclear materials.”

“So,” Perle warned his riveted audience, “it’s simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.”

Washing-machine centrifuges in uranium enrichment facilities disguised as barns and chicken coops! And Americans believed it. And so we were stampeded into war against a nation that did not threaten or attack us, to strip it of weapons it did not even have.

That war has cost 4,500 American dead and 35,000 wounded. It has brought death to perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis. Four million people have been driven from their homes, 2 million, including half the Christians, into exile. Hundreds of thousands of fatherless Iraqi children are being raised by women widowed by that war.

Undaunted, the War Party has a new war planned for us.

Target: Tehran. And Obama may just have boxed himself in.

In return for Bibi’s willingness to talk to the Palestinians, Obama agreed to a December deadline for progress in talks with Iran. If the talks are not fruitful by then, America will step on the escalator.

“I’ve been very clear that I don’t take any options off the table with respect to Iran,” said the president.

Bibi got what he came for.

By setting a six-month deadline, Obama has given an incentive to Israel, AIPAC, the neocons and even al-Qaida, which wants Shia Iran bombed back to the stone age, to provoke collisions with Iran, until December, then demand that Obama keep his word, suspend talks, impose severe sanctions and start us on the escalator to war.

And, already, the incidents are multiplying.

Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, has charged the United States with complicity in cross-border attacks from Kurdistan. Israel threatens Iran almost daily and practices bombing runs to Greece and Gibraltar. Iran says it can destroy Israel and tests a missile that can hit that nation.

Israel claims Iran is trucking weapons into Gaza via Sudan. But how the trucks get through Egypt, cross the Red Sea and Sinai, then pass through Israeli and Egyptian checkpoints is unexplained.

Hillary Clinton yesterday called an Iranian nuclear capability an “extraordinary threat” and said the U.S. goal is “to persuade the Iranian regime that they will actually be less secure if they proceed with their nuclear weapons program.”

Query: What nuclear weapons program?

According to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, Iran halted its weapons program in 2003. Nor are there any reports of the diversion of Iran’s industrial-grade uranium from Natanz or evidence of any secret centrifuge cascade to enrich it to weapons grade.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the EastWest Institute of Russian and U.S. scientists says Tehran is “at least six years away from building a deliverable nuclear weapon,” and a Rand Corp. study says that Iran’s “ability to wreak havoc in the Middle East through surrogates is exaggerated.”

Iran represents no threat to the United States to justify a war.

And as Korea finished Harry Truman, Vietnam finished LBJ, and Iraq finished the Bush Republicans, war with Iran would make Barack — with the situations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq all deteriorating — a one-term president.

Barack had best understand. The crowd manipulating him into war with Iran has in mind, first, obliterating Iran; second, getting rid of him.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

The US won't go to war with Iran - it would be political suicide for the Obama administration to pursue a course that is so obvious against the prevailing public sentiment - to say nothing of how economically ruinous it would be to open up a new theatre of war in the ME.

The only conceivable way that would happen is if there were a direct act of war committed against this country (or Israel) by Iran - but for all their sabre rattling those guys aren't stupid. Plus it would very likely trigger a wider conflict as Iran's backers in Russia and China would not stay on the sidelines as they did with Iraq.

[AlHayatZween 2]

Then WWIII,

everyone can blow each other up, and when all the ####### is over, then the rest of us can get back to work...

i'm having a cynical Friday.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Its really very unlikely to happen. Everyone in the game knows the risks if it does. The US will not be allowed to annex the entire middle-east - it would cause a bigger (world) war.

Nor is Iran exactly likely to nuke Israel - given that they'd be downwind of the fallout. My view is that they only want nukes for the purposes of saber-rattling and as a means of shoring up their own position against US opposition.

Iran tends to see-saw between the moderate and the hardline factions in its government. Unsurprisingly when we get involved in their affairs we tend to strengthen the hard line side (which isn't hard to understand - people generally get more conservative and nationalistic if they feel that their country is being meddled with or otherwise threatened by outside powers - it happened here after 9/11).

Edited May 22, 2009 by Private Pike

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Then WWIII,

everyone can blow each other up, and when all the ####### is over, then the rest of us can get back to work...

i'm having a cynical Friday.

Welcome to the wasteland!

[AlHayatZween 2]

Ain't that the truth...

At least when you hit bottom, you can start to crawl back up again!

[almaty 19]

true.the area has always been on the cusp of wars and world changing dynamics

[Danno 1,228]

Its really very unlikely to happen. Everyone in the game knows the risks if it does. The US will not be allowed to annex the entire middle-east - it would cause a bigger (world) war.

Nor is Iran exactly likely to nuke Israel - given that they'd be downwind of the fallout. My view is that they only want nukes for the purposes of saber-rattling and as a means of shoring up their own position against US opposition.

Iran tends to see-saw between the moderate and the hardline factions in its government. Unsurprisingly when we get involved in their affairs we tend to strengthen the hard line side (which isn't hard to understand - people generally get more conservative and nationalistic if they feel that their country is being meddled with or otherwise threatened by outside powers - it happened here after 9/11).

While I tend to agree, there is no urgent threat from Iran, I think the worry is (at least two part).

1. Who knows what politically may develop in Iran, even in ten years, ... now whatever group takes control has a nuclear arsenal at their disposal.

2. If Iran goes Nuke, it will set off a race between other countries in the region to compete, do you have confidence in all of them?

Once the cat is out of the bag, there is no getting it back in.

* the cat getting out of the bag was always just a matter time.

[AlHayatZween 2]

While I tend to agree, there is no urgent threat from Iran, I think the worry is (at least two part).

1. Who knows what politically may develop in Iran, even in ten years, ... now whatever group takes control has a nuclear arsenal at their disposal.

2. If Iran goes Nuke, it will set off a race between other countries in the region to compete, do you have confidence in all of them?

Once the cat is out of the bag, there is no getting it back in.

* the cat getting out of the bag was always just a matter time.

True... it is disconcerting...

But then, i feel like where will any of us be in 10 years? Nukes in Iran, nukes in Israel, Pakistan at civil war, the global economy in the toilet, our economy in the toilet...

Jeez, i am just a downer today... don't read anything i write today.

[almaty 19]

While I tend to agree, there is no urgent threat from Iran, I think the worry is (at least two part).

1. Who knows what politically may develop in Iran, even in ten years, ... now whatever group takes control has a nuclear arsenal at their disposal.

2. If Iran goes Nuke, it will set off a race between other countries in the region to compete, do you have confidence in all of them?

Once the cat is out of the bag, there is no getting it back in.

* the cat getting out of the bag was always just a matter time.

True... it is disconcerting...

But then, i feel like where will any of us be in 10 years? Nukes in Iran, nukes in Israel, Pakistan at civil war, the global economy in the toilet, our economy in the toilet...

Jeez, i am just a downer today... don't read anything i write today.

damn little sister, i am and drinking myers 151 rum straight from the bottle..

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

While I tend to agree, there is no urgent threat from Iran, I think the worry is (at least two part).

1. Who knows what politically may develop in Iran, even in ten years, ... now whatever group takes control has a nuclear arsenal at their disposal.

2. If Iran goes Nuke, it will set off a race between other countries in the region to compete, do you have confidence in all of them?

Once the cat is out of the bag, there is no getting it back in.

* the cat getting out of the bag was always just a matter time.

True... it is disconcerting...

But then, i feel like where will any of us be in 10 years? Nukes in Iran, nukes in Israel, Pakistan at civil war, the global economy in the toilet, our economy in the toilet...

Jeez, i am just a downer today... don't read anything i write today.

damn little sister, i am and drinking myers 151 rum straight from the bottle..

Careful - you might go all ranty like Marc