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  1. #21
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    As expected, the President of the USA has declined to continue certifying the 'Iran Nuclear Deal' and, in effect, withdrawn the USA's support for it. There are multiple issues involved in this decision, so I offer an overview below, but in the most general sense of the word this is an example of the President 'delivering' his campaign promise -even if the promise was based on a false premise- and most important of all, proving that he cannot function as a human being with using every opportunity he has to take revenge on President Obama. That international relations and genuine security issues in the Middle East should pivot on one man's incendiary hatred and obsession with revenge is a testament to his weakness, but also his indifference to the advice given by those who wanted the US to maintain the deal.

    Point 1: does the President have the authority to withdrawn from the deal?
    There are legal arguments that suggest that because the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was endorsed by the Security Council of the UN and contains legally binding clauses it is not an 'informal agreement' but an international treaty in law, and that this therefore means the President can register his desire to withdraw from the JCPOA but only Congress can actually make the decision. As is often the case the language of the JCPOA is sufficient to allow interpretation both ways, but one assumes the President has gone through this with lawyers. Nevertheless, the legal argument can be found here-
    http://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2018...g-nuclear-deal

    Point No 2: will the deal unravel because of the USA's decision?
    Hard to know at this point. France, Germany and the UK are of course dismayed by the decision but the real problem may lie in the US threatening those companies that continue to do business with Iran as the US increases sanctions. France has a major aviation contract with Iran at a time when the national carrier, Air France is in crisis. The Boeing Corporation has a $20 billion contract with Iran which it considers a minor deal, but also has contracts in China threatened by tariffs, so in theory this could undermine Boeing's long term viability but even if the company began to decline it would probably be taken over, but either way withdrawing from the Iran Deal could lead to job losses in Washington State.

    Point no 3: Who benefits from the withdrawal?

    Without doubt this is a major boost to the hardliners in Tehran around Ayatollah Khamenei and a blow for the reformers around democratically elected President Rouhani. The long term strategy, if there is one, will be to weaken Iran internally and hope 'regime change' from within follows public anger at the impact of sanctions. But it is also a major victory for Saudi Arabia which views Iran as its major rival across the Middle East. It has urged the President to withdraw to compensate for is own failures in Syria where by contrast Iran can claim to be more effective. It is supposed to be a victory for Israel but in reality the President preferred to listen to a corrupt politician like Netanyahu rather than the sane voices in Israel's military who take the opposite view to their Prime Minister (who has been threatening Iran with violence since 1994). Thus, on Netanyahu's pantomime stunt the other day it was reported:

    Mr Netanyahu’s claims are contradicted by the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot who has stressed: “Right now the agreement, with all its faults, is working and is putting off realisation of the Iranian nuclear vision by 10 to 15 years.”

    Twenty-six former senior officials from Israel’s military and intelligence services, as well as the head of the country’s Atomic Energy Authority, have sent an urgent message to Washington stating: “The consensus among the military and intelligence services around the world – including Israel’s own defence community – is that the pact is working.”
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8342301.html


    Point No 4: Can the USA be trusted to abide by agreements it has signed?
    Yes, but not if they were made when Obama was President of the USA. In other words, no. Does the President care if the USA is viewed as an unreliable ally? No.

    Point No 5: Does this make it more likely Iran will 'go nuclear'?
    Probably. This is an example of the rubbish the President said yesterday:
    The deal’s sunset provisions are totally unacceptable. If I allowed this deal to stand, there would soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Everyone would want their weapons ready by the time Iran had theirs.
    Why would Iran cheat on the deal if the Sunset Clauses mean it can build nuclear weapons when they end? And does it not now make more sense to build a nuclear weapons capability to 'join the club' and deter mlitary attacks? Why is the US opposed to nuclear weapons in Iran, but not Saudi Arabia?

    Point No 6: Iran and Terrorism

    In his statement yesterday the President said:
    The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror. It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda.

    Though it may simply beggar belief that the President does not know the extent to which Saudi Arabia, formally through its government or informally through its wealthy citizens has sponsored terrorist atrocities -not least 9/11 in the USA- we do know that Saudi Arabia is a major source of money for the President and his family, so we can safely say the President has been bought and paid for by Saudi Arabia and that he will not threaten the flow of money into his pockets which takes precedence over the security of the USA and the Constitution of the USA, a document the President has not read and considers to be an obstacle to Supreme Power.

    Nobody disputes that Iran is involved in conflict zones across the Middle East, and that it has been since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 -or more precisely since the war with Iraq that began in 1980. But how one interprets Iran's activities depends on how one defines terrorism.
    For example, the USA describes Hezbollah as a 'terrorist organization', yet not only has Hezbollah just increased its presence in the Lebanese Parliament following the democratic elections in the last week, it has done so at the expense of the Sunni Prime Minister's party largely because Saad Hariri has failed to manage the economy well and in the last year made a fool of himself in Saudi Arabia exposing the divisions with Lebanon that have been generated not by Iran, but by the USA's ally Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia also played a major role in the destabilization of Syria that has seen over a million take refuge in Lebanon. A fair assessment of Lebanon's election can be found in Israel's paper Ha'aretz here where it points out-
    The unofficial results indicate Sunni voters are losing faith in Hariri's party amid a declining Saudi role in Lebanon, a deteriorating economy and general exasperation over the civil war in neighboring Syria, which has brought more than a million refugees to Lebanon.
    https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-...tion-1.6069714

    That Hezbollah also has military capability has enabled those who want to, to refer to it as a 'terrorist organization' but ignores the fact that the military wing of the party emerged from a time when the Shi'a majority that vote for Hezbollah lived in Southern Lebanon when part of its was under Israeli occupation and the Lebanese army useless in deterring Israel's incursions and defending the citizens -that the last Israeli campaign in 2006 was seen as a 'victory' by Hezbollah has strengthened its case, while there have also been attempts to absorb Hezbollah's military into the Lebanese army. And yes, Iran does provide arms and money to its Shi'a allies in Lebanon -just as the US does with Israel.

    HAMAS again has been described as a 'terrorist' organization even when it won the elections that made it the governing party in Gaza, yet few seem to understand that the majority of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees who fled their homes in what is now Israel in 1948 and thus view themselves as living as refugees in their own country. We can debate to the end of time the attacks from Gaza and Israel's response, but HAMAS, which was created with Israel's blessing during the first Intifada in 1988 has on more than one occasion offered to negotiate a peace deal with Israel, and if it were not for Netanyahu this might still be possible

    Iran and the Taliban is a more complex issue. The President ought to know that the Taliban was born, nurtured and supported -as it still is today, by the USA's ally Pakistan, with funding then and now, from the USA's ally Saudi Arabia. In 1998 the Taliban slaughtered Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif and sought to murder as many Shi'a Hazara as they could find. Yet to some extent it is true that in recent years Iran has formed a 'strategic' or 'tactical' relationship with the Taliban, but not for the reasons the President might assume -thus:
    Tehran is also reportedly offering clandestine support to the Afghan government's most potent enemy, the Taliban. The main reason for Iran's backing is the rise of the Islamic State's Khorasan chapter in Afghanistan. Unlike the Taliban, whose chief aim is to reconquer Kabul, the Khorasan group is part of a transnational jihadist movement that threatens Iran, too.
    https://worldview.stratfor.com/artic...an-afghanistan

    The President could have looked back over 17 years of permanent war in Afghanistan and wondered how the Taliban that governed the country before being bombed out of power is still there, retains some popularity in the country and is still supported by the USA's allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. But this is not a coherent mind at work, and one cannot expect much more from a man with so small an intellect.

    Iran has indeed been involved in acts of terror: the bomb on PanAm flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie in 1988 was a revenge attack following the USS Vincennes missile attack on Iran Air 655, and Iran was in some way involved in the suicide bombing of the barracks that killed over 221 marines and 12 others in Lebanon in 1983. On the other side, the US supported Iraq's illegal invasion of Iran in 1980 and continued to support the government of Saddam Hussein throughout the War, turning a blind eye to Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran and also Kurds in the north of the country. One could thus challenge the concept of 'terrorism' and argue the US has been, in effect, at war with Iran since 1979 and that the JCPOA was in fact one tentative step towards the normalizaton of relations.

    But not any more.


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    Last edited by Stavros; 05-09-2018 at 10:21 AM.

  2. #22
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    Patrick Cockburn in The Independent offers a warning:

    Sanctions are a powerful but blunt instrument, take a long time to work and usually do not produce the political dividends expected by those who impose them. The Iranian rial may fall and hyperinflation return to 40 per cent, but this will most likely not be enough if Iran returns to enriching uranium. It has already said that it is not going to keep abiding by its part of the nuclear agreement if it is not getting any of the economic benefits promised.

    What will the US do then? This is the crucial question for the Middle East and the rest of the world. Trump has just torpedoed any diplomatic solution to what he sees as the threat of Iran developing a nuclear bomb. The only alternative is a military response, but this would have to be more than a few days of intense airstrikes. Anything less than total war would not win for Trump the kind of results he says he wants.
    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a8343361.html

    Hard to know what comes next because so far this President has shown himself to be the man with no deal.
    -Repeal and replace 'Obamacare' -with what? Nobody knows.
    -Withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. How will this shape US trade in the Pacific region? Nobody knows.
    -Scrap NAFTA. How will the US trade with Canada and Mexico? Nobody knows.
    -Withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Agreement. And follow it up with? Nobody knows. No climate change = no policy.
    -Withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal. To be followed by? Nobody knows.



  3. #23
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    Quote Originally Posted by Stavros View Post
    The USA's former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton believes the only response the USA should have to the development of Iran's nuclear energy industry is to bomb it into nothing. Bolton was one of the major obstacles to a rapprochement with Iran when he refused the overtures from Iran's President Khatami in 2001, even though he has been associated with the 'neo-cons' in the Bush presidency whose policy on Iraq has been instrumental in the elevation of Iran's political influence in that country and indeed, across the regoin, which makes a mockery of Bolton's attempt to pin the blame on Obama for the latest developments in Iran, as when he says -

    The Obama administration’s increasingly frantic efforts to reach agreement with Iran have spurred demands for ever-greater concessions from Washington. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, worked hard, with varying success, to forestall or terminate efforts to acquire nuclear weapons by states as diverse as South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa. Even where civilian nuclear reactors were tolerated, access to the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle was typically avoided. Everyone involved understood why.
    This gold standard is now everywhere in jeopardy because the president’s policy is empowering Iran.

    Bolton nowhere refers to any energy component of Iran's programme, being only interested in weapons development, yet also never mentions deterrence as a decisive element in nuclear capability that is said to be the guarantor that states possessing nuclear weapons will not use them. It has not occurred to him that Iran, constantly threatened with military attack by nuclear-armed Israel, may want strategic parity, even if this debate on nuclear weapons is stil hypothetical.

    More to the point, if the USA did bomb Iran, how would Iran respond? Bolton surely knows that Iran would, in some way, much as it paid a Palestinian 'guerilla' group to bring down a US passenger aeroplane in response to the US destruction of an Iranian airbus in 1988. Sounds to me like Bolton believes in permanent war.

    His article in the New York Times is here:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/op...rssnyt&emc=rss
    From three years ago. I have to imagine every country in the World has a gameplan on how to act when Trump is in charge, and how to act when he gets impeached. Fifty million rednecks CAN be wrong.


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  4. #24
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    Quote Originally Posted by buttslinger View Post
    From three years ago. I have to imagine every country in the World has a gameplan on how to act when Trump is in charge, and how to act when he gets impeached. Fifty million rednecks CAN be wrong.
    A pathetic response given the seriousness of the situation. The fact that Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron went to Washington DC in person to persuade the Americans to abide by their international agreements, and were insulted and humiliated by a man who can barely read and write, proves there is no 'gameplan' other than to wait for your prime time idiot who claims to be President to leave the stage. What will he leave behind when he goes?

    Had you given this any thought you would be shaking your head in disbelief that the USA has only one 'gameplan' and that it is the same as the one that went so badly wrong in Iraq: regime change. Your President, who knows absolutely nothing about the Middle East other than the volume of dollars it throws at him, has been persuaded by John Bolton -a draft-dodging coward like his boss- that Iranians yearn to overthrow their Mullahs and 're-join' the modern world, egged on by the opposition Mohahedin-e-Qalq (who?, exactly) much as Bush and Cheney and the US Congress gave millions of $$ and support to the Iraqi group led by Ahmad Chalabi that deliberately violated the USA's agreement with Iraq post-Saddam with catastrophic results. Bolton's view is as simple as it is deadly and doomed to fail: if you don't hit it, it won't fall. For a man whose notorious lawyer told him attack is the best form of defence this is all the justification the President needs.

    The USA has gone from its idealist campaigns for freedom, democracy and human rights to adopting a simple strategy -they even call it 'realism'- that 100 years of Middle Eastern has shown is the one strategy that does not work: violence. The USA is now in the business of killing people, destroying their homes, their schools, their hospitals -basically, anything that stands and in return it gets nothing at all except a reputation for being unreliable, incompetent and now little more than a dancing monkey in a street fair in Idaho with an Organ Grinder called MBS.

    Consider: Netanyahu -the USA's No 1 Ally in the Middle East (or is it now No 2?) was actually in Moscow, (Not Washington, but Moscow -the USA's ally?) when Israeli jets were 'pounding' Iranian targets in Syria having warned the Russians in advance so they could warn the Iranians -we have no idea how effective these air strikes were, but all Iran has to do, presumably with or without the permission of the Syrian government, is just replace what was destroyed as if it had never happened. It doesn't matter to Israel because however much it cost, the USA will pay for it, because that is what the USA has been reduced to: a sap country that takes advice from a man with four indictments that could see him in prison this time next year.

    How about Saudi Arabia, the USA's ally -is it No 1 or No 2? Yes, that will be the same Kingdom being 'reformed' under the wise leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or MBS as he is know. MBS and Otaibi in the UAE have Jared Kushner in their pocket, or so they joked some time ago, and though we don't know if Kushner is still advising the President having had his official security clearance withdrawn (which probably means nothing in the chaos that is the White House), we do know that the President's 'Middle East Expert' has been part of this transformation of US policy that sees an alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia as the key to unlocking the blockages in the region. And yes, this is still the same Saudi Arabia that holds public executions every week where you can watch someone's head being chopped off, or a teenager whipped to within an inch of his life; where the 'education' material printed for use in the thousands of Madrasas around the world promotes the Wahabi heresy and makes claims about the Jews so offensive I won't repeat them here. One only wonders if the Wahabi hate the Shi'a more than they hate the Jews.

    What the Saudi's lack in humanity they replace with money, and lots of it. And what the Saudi Arabians can't do -even after spending billions and billions of $$ on arms from the UK, France and the USA- to defeat their enemies, is get the Americans to do it for them, and guess what? You don't even have to give anything political back to get it done, just give the President $25 million (paid to a bank of your choice in the name of 'John Barron' or 'David Dennison') and hey presto! Americans go into a war in the Yemen that cannot be won on the battlefield; head off to Libya to fight another war that cannot be won, ditto Somalia and Niger, while all the time maintaining a presence in Iraq, and Afghanistan where the USA is fighting the same people being funded by, yep you guessed, it Saudi Arabia. And this from a man who said in his Inaugural Address the US would no longer be fighting other people's wars! But hey, the US might abandon the Kurds in Syria pretty soon, so that will deliver his promise.

    I hear music, and see the USA in a red jacket, dancing along the top of an organ in exchange for laughter, ridiculous laughter, and for peanuts. You should be ashamed of yourself and your country.



  5. #25
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    I would say it's actually uglier than it appears, even without the Middle East.
    Trying to get other people to do what you tell them is tough.
    Fox News has been bombarding it's listeners with propaganda not against Putin, but against the Justice Dept!
    It is much worse than it appears.
    The fact that the Democrats couldn't beat Trump and still have no replacement is troubling. Trump is more afraid of the Media than the Democrats.
    Trump v. World
    Trump might win. (with nukes on his side)
    Every day never-never land gets closer.
    Right before our eyes.


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  6. #26
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    Among the many incoherencies is that Trump and his fans have been crowing about a possible deal with North Korea. Yet the only deal that would appear to be plausible is an agreement similar to the one with Iran - ie North Korea agrees to put its nuclear program on hold and allow international inspections in return for relief from sanctions and other assistance.



  7. #27
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    Quote Originally Posted by filghy2 View Post
    Among the many incoherencies is that Trump and his fans have been crowing about a possible deal with North Korea. Yet the only deal that would appear to be plausible is an agreement similar to the one with Iran - ie North Korea agrees to put its nuclear program on hold and allow international inspections in return for relief from sanctions and other assistance.
    The 'deal' that the Americans have said they want with North Korea is more severe than what they would want from Iran, and takes no account of what the North Koreans have said, thus:

    Mike Pompeo, has defined the US goal at the summit as “permanent verifiable, irreversible dismantling of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction”, something that had to happen “without delay”. A bad deal is “not an option”.
    According to the Japan Times, the US demands also include the North Korean surrender of documents on weapons design and even the exile of the country’s own nuclear weapons engineers, so that the regime is divested of its atomic knowhow.


    Yet at the same time Pompeo was told by
    Kim Yong-chol, the vice-chairman of the Workers’ party central committee... “we have perfected our nuclear capability” while insisting that the achievement was “not the result of sanctions that have been imposed from outside”
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...s-not-his-show

    With Iraq going to the polls in an election this weekend that will probably return Abadi to the head of government, the dilemma for the Americans that now exists concerns the threat by the USA to punish any state that does business with Iran as it moves to re-impose sanctions lifted when the JCPOA was signed. But does this mean that Iraq will be punished for its trading relations with Iran which have grown substantially since 2003? Bahrain, Qatar and the the United Arab Emirates all trade with Iran, does this mean that the UAE is suddenly going to feel the 'wrath' of America?

    So here it is: nuclear armed North Korea, a state the USA does not officially recognize exists, is led by a 'nice man' who is going to give up the one strategic advantage he has against the USA -indeed, everyone- in return for the promise of what on paper sounds like a staggering amount of US taxpayer's money:
    “If North Korea takes bold action to quickly denuclearize, the United States is prepared to work with North Korea to achieve prosperity on the par with our South Korean friends,” Pompeo said.
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...uclear-weapons

    This is the same North Korea that does not recognize that South Korea exists and believes in a unified Korea under the leadership of 'Nice' Kim Jong-un and the 'Eternal Leadership' of Kim il-Sung.

    Would a nuclear armed Iran, led by 'nice' Ayatollah Khamenei be given the same guarantees of American cash in exchange for 'de-nuclearization'? I thought all that cash was going to be spent filling in the pot-holes in American roads, repairing bridges so they don't fall down, hell, maybe even invest in the education for the 21st century American's children so desperately need.

    Incoherent indeed!



  8. #28
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    Default Re: The Middle East and the Nuclear Question

    So, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has listed 12 demands of Iran that it needs to obey to avoid crushing sanctions which the USA intends to extend globally by punishing any and every state that does not comply and obey. Needless to say the 12 demands are intended to be rejected by the Iranian government, and are in the link below, but what has been missed is the simple fact that there are 12 demands, because in Iran they practise the 'Twelver Shi'ism' that has dominated the country since the 16th century, prior to which Iran was mostly Sunna and indeed, the birthplace of many distinguished Sunni thinkers, poets and jurists, as the second link shows.

    I think the 12 demands are a calculated insult to Iran to increase their rejection and maintain a relationship based on confrontation and ignorance.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/...151737787.html

    https://ballandalus.wordpress.com/20...ical-overview/



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