Iran: A Bridge too Far?

[malvachat]

I thinks I must be physic.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNew...50140120071008

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNew...64885720071008

"reuters"
Credible source??
Not sure?still waiting for the list.

From the same source.

"War on terror seen fuelling al Qaeda"

"the "war on terror" is failing and instead fuelling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements,"

"Going to war with Iran", he said, "will make matters far worse, playing directly into the hands of extreme elements and adding greatly to the violence across the region. Whatever the problems with Iran, war should be avoided at all costs."

"Oxford Research Group"
Credible??


http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldN...37906320071008

[multi]

The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know

Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.

In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what people didn't realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn't wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say.

"The hard-liners are upping the pressure on the State Department," says Leverett. "They're basically saying, 'You've been trying to engage Iran for more than a year now and what do you have to show for it? They keep building more centrifuges, they're sending this IED stuff over into Iraq that's killing American soldiers, the human-rights internal political situation has gotten more repressive -- what the hell do you have to show for this engagement strategy?' "

But the engagement strategy was never serious and was designed to fail, they say. Over the last year, Rice has begun saying she would talk to "anybody, anywhere, anytime," but not to the Iranians unless they stopped enriching uranium first. That's not a serious approach to diplomacy, Mann says. Diplomacy is about talking to your enemies. That's how wars are averted. You work up to the big things. And when U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had his much-publicized meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this spring, he didn't even have permission from the White House to schedule a second meeting.

The most ominous new development is the Bush administration's push to name the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.

"The U.S. has designated any number of states over the years as state sponsors of terrorism," says Leverett. "But here for the first time the U.S. is saying that part of a government is itself a terrorist organization."

This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and China's geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the Democrats take over American foreign policy. "If you get all those elements coming together, say in the first half of '08," says Leverett, "what is this president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider target zone."

This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran's resistance to the Great Satan. "As disastrous as Iraq has been," says Mann, "an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim world."

Mann and Leverett believe that none of this had to be.

Flynt Lawrence Leverett grew up in Fort Worth and went to Texas Christian University. He spent the first nine years of his government career as a CIA analyst specializing in the Middle East. He voted for George Bush in 2000. On the day the assassins of Al Qaeda flew two hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, Colin Powell summoned him to help plan the response. Five months later, Leverett landed a plum post on the National Security Council. When Condoleezza Rice discussed the Middle East with President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, Leverett was the man standing behind her taking notes and whispering in her ear.

Today, he sits on the back deck of a house tucked into the curve of a leafy suburban street in McLean, Virginia, a forty-nine-year-old white American man wearing khakis and a white dress shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. Mann sits next to him, also wearing khakis. She's thirty-nine but looks much younger, with straight brown hair and a tomboy's open face. The polish on her toenails is pink. If you saw her around McLean, you wouldn't hesitate:

Soccer mom. Classic soccer mom.

But with degrees from Brandeis and Harvard Law and stints at Tel Aviv University and the powerful Israeli lobby known as AIPAC, she has even better right-wing credentials than her husband.

As they talk, eating grapes out of a bowl, lawn mowers hum and birds chirp. The floor is littered with toy trucks and rubber animals left behind by the youngest of their four children. But the tranquillity is misleading. When Mann and Leverett went public with the inside story behind the impending disaster with Iran, the White House dismissed them. Then it imposed prior restraint on them, an extraordinary episode of government censorship. Finally, it threatened them.

Now they are afraid of the White House, and watching what they say. But still, they feel they have to speak out.

Like so many things these days, this story began on the morning of September 11, 2001. On Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan, Mann had just been evacuated from the offices of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and was walking home to her apartment on Thirty-eighth Street -- walking south, toward the giant plume of smoke. When her cell phone rang, she picked it up immediately because her sister worked at the World Trade Center and she was frantic for word. But it wasn't her sister, it was a senior Iranian diplomat. To protect him from reprisals from the Iranian government, she doesn't want to name him, but she describes him as a cultured man in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair. Since early spring, they had been meeting secretly in a small conference room at the UN.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

Yes, she said, she was fine.

The attack was a terrible tragedy, he said, doubtless the work of Al Qaeda.

"I hope that we can still work together," he said.
http://www.esquire.com/features/iranbriefing1107

[malvachat]

Been away for the week(nice break in the sun)
I come back and find Albed still can't come up with a list of credible sources for us all to study.
Why is that?
Maybe it's because he's more interested in name calling than debate.Or even a exchange of views based on agreed principles.
Or maybe he's only interested in one point of view his own.
Or maybe a combination of all three.

[multi]

Israeli Foreign Minister Livni changes Israeli position on Iran: "Iran nukes pose little threat to Israel"

Livni behind closed doors: Iran nukes pose little threat to Israel
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

The article also reveals for the first time a document Livni prepared and sent to Olmert a few months after the Second Lebanon War proposing a new division of labor between the two. "Enclosed is a proposal for work procedures between us, with the aim of providing an answer to Israel's strategic needs and facilitating early planning and the formulation of coordinated Israeli positions ... within the framework of cooperative relations, full transparency and continuous mutual updates," wrote Livni. ...more

[multi]

Will Crazy Cheney Get his War with Iran?

Dick Cheney’s craziness used to influence foreign policy.

Now it is foreign policy.

He may have lost his buddy in belligerence, Rummy. He may have tapped out the military in Iraq. He may not be able to persuade Congress so easily anymore — except for Hillary — to issue warlike resolutions. He can’t cow Condi into supporting his bullying as he once did, and Bob Gates is doing his best to instill some common sense.

Besides, Cheney is running out of time to wreak global havoc; he’s working for a president who is spending his waning days on the job trying to prevent children from getting health insurance.

But the vice president may have hit on a devious tactic used by his old boss Richard Nixon.

President Nixon and Henry Kissinger liked to use madness as a method. In 1969, Nixon told Kissinger to caution the Soviet ambassador that Nixon was “out of control” on Indochina, and could do something drastic.

Three months earlier, as Anthony Summers wrote in “The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon,” “Kissinger had sent that very same message by proxy when he instructed Len Garment, about to leave on a trip to Moscow, to give the Soviets ‘the impression that Nixon is somewhat “crazy” — immensely intelligent, well organized and experienced to be sure, but at moments of stress or personal challenge unpredictable and capable of the bloodiest brutality.’ Garment carried out the mission, telling a senior Brezhnev adviser that Nixon was ‘a dramatically disjointed personality ... more than a little paranoid ... when necessary, a cold-hearted butcher.’ ” All of which, his aides later reflected, was kind of true.

Cheney seems to enjoy giving the impression that he is loony enough to pull off an attack on Iran before leaving office — even if he has to do it alone, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in “Dr. Strangelove” to the sentimental tune of “We’ll Meet Again.” He has even begun referring to his nickname, Darth Vader, noting that it “is one of the nicer things I’ve been called recently.” ...more

[albed]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071025/...9wEGClYkys0NUE

The United States announced harsh new penalties on the Iranian military and state-owned banking systems Thursday, raising pressure on the world financial system to cut ties with a regime the West accuses of bankrolling terrorism and seeking a nuclear bomb.

The U.S. sanctions on elements of Iran's vast armed forces and its largest bank are the most sweeping since 1979

Paulson and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the penalties together, a recognition that a year-old effort to levy unilateral Treasury sanctions has had far greater effect than the diplomatic channels Rice has pursued with Iran.

The Bush administration has won two rounds of watered-down U.N. Security Council sanctions but has been frustrated by months of delay in seeking a third, tougher set of penalties.

Iran has ignored the U.N. sanctions and an offer from European nations that do extensive business with Iran would give the oil-rich country economic and other incentives in exchange for dropping nuclear activities that could produce a bomb.

Russia and China, which hold veto power at the U.N. Security Council, are allies or business partners of Iran and are the chief holdup for the new sanctions sought by the United States.

You should try forming your own opinions multi instead of copying and pasting everyone elses, though that would just show everyone how warped and irrational you really are. But your writing skills are so poor you can hardly convey something anyway, though your thoughts are probably a little difficult to convey to rational people. Ah forget it.




One of my opinions is that the U.S. should start fighting terrorism with terrorism. Iran's annual "Death to the U.S." rally would be an excellant target and I bet Iran would drastically improve it's behaviour after a little brutality on it's own people.

[multi]

Spoken like a true (grammar) nazi brown shirt..
fuck you dickhead , I wil express myself in anyway I choose..
you can bitch all you like. It seems to be the only thing you can do on this forum ,
complain ,whinge, complain some more and then,
bait people with personal insults...
rinse
repeat

You go back to defending your hated President and don't you go worring about my little scrapbook of articles on Iran.. but thanks for the contribution !