Refuse to choose
Sign in the crowd at the Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia:
“We refuse to choose between Islamic fundamentalism and American imperialism.”
Yep, we’ll just sit here until all of you go home. Have your war. Bomb Israel. Kill all the Jews. Execute the gays and the adulterers. Immolate the world waiting for the twelfth Imam. Go ahead. And you, U.S. warmongers, go ahead and bomb them back. Use your cruise missiles and your Stealth Bombers. Obliterate Tehran. Send in your troops and just occupy the whole frickin Middle East.
Go ahead. But we will not be a part of it. We refused to choose.
Israel, incoming!
We’ve found the WMDs … in Syria … surrounded by Iranian engineers, many of whom are now dead. Iran wasn’t kidding the other day when it said that its escalating investments in Syria were “strategic.”
Jane’s Defense Weekly said the July 26 explosion took place at the site of a joint Iranian- Syrian project to fit short-range ballistic missiles with chemical warheads. It cited Syrian defense sources as saying that fuel caught fire during a test to fit a Scud C missile with a mustard-gas warhead.
“The blast dispersed chemical agents across the storage facility and outside,” the publication quoted the sources as saying. The chemicals included VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent.
On the day of the explosion, Sana, Syria’s state news agency, said [lied, claimed, alleged, asserted?] the blast struck a military complex outside the city of Aleppo, killing at least 15 soldiers and wounding 50. The agency said the blast was caused by “the combustion of sensitive, highly explosive material caused by extremely high temperatures” at a military weapons depot.
Jane’s said that in addition to the 15 Syrian troops killed, “dozens” of Iranian weapons engineers died. It said the chemical weapons program was part of a strategic cooperation accord between Syria and Iran that was signed in November 2005.
But then, as the Left keeps telling us, Iran is not fomenting violence in Iraq and Syria does not present an immediate threat to Israel. I suppose it’s time to get Nancy Pelosi back out to Damascus in her hijab to see if she can leverage her botox smile and talk the off the ledge. Because it never hurts to talk …
[Note above that when the rogue Syrian regime announces what Janes Defense Weekly exposes as a lie –about chemical weapons, no less — the Syrian statement is “said.” But when a U.S. official announces that violence is down in Iraq, and no one offers any data to counter it, the U.S. statement is “claimed.”]
Germans compromised on Iran
Germany is a huge economic partner of Iran, and is struggling to respond to pressure to clamp down that relationship in sanctions against the Mullahs. Some are incredulous that a country with Germany’s past wouldn’t be more sensitive to the ethics of dealing with one that has Iran’s announced ambitions:
“Germans either can’t, or won’t, see the kinds of people with whom they are doing business,” said Nasrin Amirsedghi, an Iranian writer and critic of the Tehran regime, who distributed protest leaflets outside the meeting. “How can this country, with its history, ignore such things?”
Chancellor Angela Merkel has condemned Ahmadinejad, saying in a speech in February 2006, “A president that questions Israel’s right to exist, a president that denies the Holocaust, cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany. We have learned our history.”
But the human mind is almost infinitely malleable when self-interest is at stake. As long as there is a shred of shadow of ambiguity for German business men to hide behind, expect them to drag their feet.
Meanwhile, of course, China and Russia will flout the civilized world with glee.
Don’t worry; be happy
Carter: Iran not yet a realistic threat to Israel
Can you be disciplined for practicing statesmanship without a license? Surely this man had his revoked years ago.
“Iran is quite distant from Israel,” said Carter, 83. “I think it would be almost inconceivable that Iran would commit suicide by launching one or two missiles of any kind against the nation of Israel.”
Surely it is not lost on him that Syria — now engaged in ruthlessly clearing out all opposition to Syrian domination of Lebanon — is an Iranian proxy, and that Hezbollah is a Syrian proxy and that Hezbollah and Lebanon are not “quite distant” from Israel, and that Hezbollah would welcome the immolation that would come from Israeli reprisal, while Iran would maintain (im)plausible deniability.
Or did he miss that the pre-emptive Israeli strike occurred on Syrian soil?
The man is a blithering idiot.
Russia: Iran’s enabler
The Russian foreign minister is not amused by efforts to ratchet up sanctions on Iran nor by speculation by the French foreign minister that military action may eventually be necessary.
“As for sanctions, the United States and the European Union have taken their own decisions,” said a stony-faced Lavrov. “If we decided to act collectively on the basis of consensual decisions in the UN Security Council, what good does it do to take unilateral decisions?”
Two days after Kouchner made waves by musing about the prospect of “war” against Iran - a comment he was repeatedly asked about during his trip to Russia - Lavrov stressed that Moscow was “very worried about the growing number of voices considering military action.”
It seems quite clear that the Russians would be perfectly happy to have the US and the the EU tied down for decades trying to resolve crises in the middle east. Neutralize the superpower, free your own hands.
How can you ask one brutal rogue regime to help you contain another?
Yeah, right
The naiveté expressed here is almost charming:
According to the Italian human rights organisation, Hands Off Cain, at least 190 people have been hanged in Iran since the beginning of the year, while last year the total was estimated to be at least 215.
In its annual report released at the end of August, Hands Off Cain, said 27 countries employed capital punishment and Iran, China and Pakistan had the highest rates in the world.
It said the picture was chilling and called for the European Union to press the United Nations to call for a moratorium on capital punishment.
Let’s just consider this for a moment: a regime of homicidal lunatics is frantically scrambling to build a nuclear bomb, while expressing the hope and intent to wipe Israel off the map, funding terror throughout the middle east, and looking forward to the coming the twelfth imam. The entire international community is scrambling to figure out how to deal with them. The French foreign minister warns that war may be inevitable.
And you think a UN moratorium on capital punishment will have an effect there?
You don’t say?
Iran is going to invest heavily in Syria. They consider it a strategic relationship. Duh.
Teheran, 17 Sept. (AKI) - The Iranian authorities are to pump 10 billion dollars of fresh investments into Syria over the next five years, acting industry and mines minister Ali Akbar Mehrabian announced on his return from a three-day visit to the country.
“Our relations with Syria are strategic, and our economic presence there will be too,” Mehrabian said.
Iran > Syria > Lebanon > Gaza > Israel
Anyone for leapfrog?
Come again?
Prepare for war with Iran, France warns
France has caused anger in Iran and delight in Israel today with a hawkish statement saying that the world should be ready to go to war to stop Tehran getting nuclear weapons.Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said in a radio interview last night that if Iran got the bomb, the world would be in real danger, and that the current stand-off with the country’s Islamist regime was the greatest crisis of the time.
Negotiations should carry on until the last possible moment, said Mr Kouchner, in an interview with RTL radio.
But he went on: “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.”
It’s a big duh to anyone without their head in the sand, but remarkable coming from France. Makes it all the more puzzling why Mitt should even have to bother about advocating the South Africa isolation treatment for Iran. Did anyone ever say “prepare for war with South Africa”?
Romney vs. Ahmadinejad
Mitt not only talks the talk. He walks the walk. As governor, he ordered state agencies, including police, not to provide any services to the former president of Iran when he visited as a “dignitary” at Harvard. Again, he’s getting tough on the creeps:
“If President Ahmadinejad sets foot in the United States, he should be handed an indictment under the Genocide Convention,” Romney added, reiterating his point. He also urged the U.N. to revoke any speaking invitation.
Romney routinely talks about the threat the United States faced from “radical jihadists,” and he has staked out a hard-line position against Iran in particular.
In January, he called for economic sanctions against the Central Asian nation “at least as severe” as those imposed on South Africa during its apartheid era, aiming to isolate the country and convince it to give up its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
What’s remarkable about what Romney is saying here is how unremarkable it ought to be. Here we have a country that fuels terror throughout the region. Indeed, it is the engine of terror, with it’s fingerprints all over Lebanon, Iraq and Gaza. It’s governing regime has publicly declared it’s intention to destroy the state of Israel, and is pursuing nuclear weapons with glee and abandon.
Yet it remains worthy of note when a presidential candidate suggests they should get the South Africa treatment from the civilized world?
Iran’s meddling in Iraq: substance vs. symbol
The substance, as anyone watching carefully has known for many months, is that Iran is meddling heavily in Iraq, intent on undermining our mission there. General Petraeus confirms that in striking testimony:
“The evidence is very, very clear,” Petraeus said. He cited documents discovered during the capture in March of Qais Khazali, a Shiite Muslim militant with ties to the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the arrest of a deputy commander of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite group supported by Iran. Petraeus said the evidence links Iran to an attack in Karbala in January that resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.
Under interrogation, Khazali was asked if he could have carried out that attack without Iranian support, Petraeus said in the news conference. “He literally throws up his hands and laughs and says, ‘Of course not,’ ” the general said.
The symbol, for the rabid anti-war left, is that Iran cannot be meddling in Iraq, because if they were it would serve as a rationale for U.S. action against Iran and that cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed. So in their tail-wagging-dog logic, they simply stipulate away the uncomfortable and obvious facts.
Nonsense
The headline reads,
Iran ‘reaches nuclear target’
Which is, of course, nonsense. Last I checked the state of Israel had not been blown off the map.
More on Iran’s machinations
The more you see the more you wonder what kind of glue is being sniffed by those who insist that Iran can be part of the solution in Iraq. Max Boot sums up some of the latest, including a report by Kim Kagan that notes that Iran had begun planning its subversion of the new Iraq before the old one had even been attacked. And this:
Coalition sources report that by August 2007, Iranian-backed insurgents accounted for roughly half the attacks on Coalition forces, a dramatic change from previous periods that had seen the overwhelming majority of attacks coming from the Sunni Arab insurgency and al Qaeda.
Give the mullahs some credit
Iran has shut down two dozen decadent barber shops. Look, we like to pick on the Iranians, but give credit where credit is due. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, it’s hard to argue with shutting these buggers down, though how the West gets blamed for this nonsense is beyond me:
Eleven women’s hair-stylists were told to stop trading for offering customers’ tattoos. Tattooed eyebrows - in which the hair is shaved and replaced with elaborate patterns - are popular amongst many young Iranian women.
A further 13 barbers were closed for giving customers excessively eye-catching haircuts and plucking men’s eyebrows. Many young Iranian men wear their hair in a gelled-up bouffant that would look outlandish even in some western countries.
Conjunction junction, what’s your function?
headline of the day:
“A nuclear-armed Iran would not be good”
No Scheiße Sherlock. But the headline is tongue-in-cheek understatement for a no Scheiße analysis from Greg Sheridan at The Australian:
But Iran is a classic demonstration of the limits of realist theory in foreign relations. It is genuinely motivated by ideology, not by a normal calculus of national interest. Washington has been offering Iran some version of this deal - diplomatic and trade normality in exchange for nuclear non-proliferation and regional stability - virtually since the ayatollahs came to power in 1979. It was once Madeleine Albright’s chief goal in life when she was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state.
And this:
… Iran’s ally Hezbollah is slowly trying to take control of the Lebanese Government, in alliance with a pro al-Qa’ida Syrian front group, Fatah al-Islam. One of their techniques is novel: to assassinate the existing Lebanese parliamentary majority one by one.
But in a refrain that is starting to sound like a creepy country song, we still want them to love us even though they keep kicking us in the teeth:
The deeply flawed James Baker-Lee Hamilton report on Iraq contains some sentence along the lines of saying that Iran shares the US’s interest in a stable Iraq. Which Iran are the two esteemed American statesmen talking about? It is an Iran of their imagination, it is certainly not the real, existing Iran.
Does reality suck so bad that denial now passes as realism? Reminds me of an exchange with a colleague who thinks all behavior is rational and was trying to account for the irrational act of another: “Oh,” he said, “I just need to figure out what his utility function is.”
Here’s a clue: when the other guy’s utility function involves a boatload of virgins or a twelfth imam, it’s time to head for the bunkers.
That’ll teach ya to network
[Warning: long, pissed off post]
More kickin’ us in the teeth when all we want is for them to stop sending bombs to kill our soldiers and … let us do their laundry:
So the Iranians finally let out on bail a 67 year old Iranian-American professor after several months held in miserable conditions on Kafkaesque charges.
The adventure began when three thugs, obviously agents of the regime, attacked her on her way to the airport after visiting her mother, for hell’s sake. [For the math challenged, that means her mother is likely 90 or above.]
Esfandiari’s troubles in Iran began when three masked men with knives threatened to kill her on Dec. 30 as she headed to the Tehran airport after visiting her mother, the Wilson Center has said. They took her baggage, including her U.S. and Iranian passports, rendering her unable to leave the country.
Well, the regime was behind the assault, cause they turn around and arrest her. Duh. Then they interrogate her in prison for several months:
For several weeks, she was interrogated by the authorities for up to eight hours a day … Iran confirmed in mid-May that it was holding Esfandiari, and charged her later that month. The only contact her family has had with her since then has consisted of short phone calls to her mother from prison. In the calls, Esfandiari indicated she was under immense stress and was having trouble receiving medications for health conditions, Hamilton said.
What, you may ask, is their beef with her?
The Iranian Intelligence Ministry has accused Esfandiari and her organization of trying to set up networks of Iranians with the ultimate goal of creating a “soft revolution” in Iran, along the lines of the revolutions that ended communist rule in Eastern Europe. Bakhash and the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan institution established by the U.S. Congress in 1968, deny the allegations.
She is one of two Americans similarly held. So the mullahs lose sleep at night over the possibility that someone will “form a network” and begin a “soft revolution,” like Gandhi, ML King, or Vaclav Havel? But this is a state where this is possible:
On Nov. 12, Kaveh Habibi-Nejad, a 14-year-old schoolboy from Sanandaj died after being flogged for “eating in public” during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan. [Allah be praised …] The autopsy revealed that the boy died “as a result of brain hemorrhage, after the back of his skull was fractured by a blow from a hard object”.
For those who just joined us: Iran is a rogue regime run by hateful men. Many of them are downright loopy in their apocalyptic world view and they are hastening toward a nuclear apocalypse as fast as they can waddle.
Negotiate that.
What can I do to make you love me?
Or at least stop kicking me in the teeth?
Michael Ledeen’s piece in WSJ last friday has been widely noted. Orginally under the subscriber veil, it now has been opened to the public.
For anyone who wonders about the history of our efforts to find common ground with the Iranian regime since 1979, here it is. And it’s pretty ugly. But here we are meeting with Iran again, hoping that they will stop exporting explosives to Afghanistan and Iraq.
If this were a romantic relationship, you’d be dealing with one delusional girl (the U.S.) trying to win over a crude and abusive guy who keeps kicking her in the teeth. But she keeps coming back and offering to do his laundry, in the vague hope that something will change.
Bottom line: they don’t mind if we do their laundry, but at the end of every date they are going to kick us in the teeth. They must be bemused at our continued inability to realize it.
Thanks. That’s all I needed to know
Blue Crab flagged this gem of Iranians being bellicose and obtuse. Original article here:
The commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards was quoted on Saturday as threatening to deal heavier blows in future against the United States after Washington said it may label the force a terrorist group. The Iranian daily Kayhan said commander-in-chief Yahya Rahim Safavi made clear the Guards would not bow to U.S. pressure and would use all their leverage against the Americans.
Kayhan did not provide direct quotes from the speech in the central city of Isfahan on Thursday.
U.S. officials said on Wednesday that Washington may soon name the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist group, a move that would enable Washington to target its finances
Just good clean fun
So a Turkish airline full of Turks gets hijacked by two guys who want a free trip to … [Drumroll. Which rogue regime do these lunatics want to visit today?] If you guessed IRAN, you are correct, sir!
Who were they? What did they want? No one seems quite sure.
Turkish Cypriot authorities said the two hijackers were Iranians protesting against the policies of the US, but Turkish media said one of the hijackers was Turkish and the other was a Palestinian.
And this:
“The adventure that started early in the morning finally came to an end,” said Tuncay Doganer, the CEO of Atlas-Jet. “With the two hijackers having surrendered, the incident ended with no bloodshed.”
A good time was had by all.
