War Without End Forum Index

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

JINSA Israel firsters: 'IRAQ DOWN, IRAN LEFT TO GO' - page 4

War Without End Forum Index -> Wake Up America! Your Government is Hijacked by Zionism
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4
Author Message
Alpha
Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 10:03 pm    Post subject: John Pilger: The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon

http://www.truthout.org

The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon
By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 10 February 2006

Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?

Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."

That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response." you sense he means it. Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations." Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbor, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.

However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament ..." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.

Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991. Iran offers no "nuclear threat." There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognize the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.

Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show that it was "above suspicion." Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under the NPT.

Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.

For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.

At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy."

It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real and probably imminent.

Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.

That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.

While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labor MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all."

But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars," as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in June.

http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
Alpha
Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:25 am    Post subject: Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?

http://www.truthout.org

Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 13 February 2006

The question looms large against the backdrop of the hearing on whistleblowing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon by Christopher Shays, chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. Among those testifying are Russell Tice, one of the sources who exposed illegal eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, and Army Sgt. Sam Provance, who told his superiors of the torture he witnessed at Abu Graib, got no satisfaction, and felt it his duty to go public. It will not be your usual hearing.

I had the privilege of being present at the creation of the international Truth-Telling Coalition on September 9, 2004 and of working with Daniel Ellsberg in drafting the coalition's Appeal to Current Government Officials to put loyalty to the Constitution above career and to expose dishonesty leading to misadventures like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Whether or not encouragement from the Coalition played any role in subsequent disclosures, we are grateful for those responsible for the recent hemorrhaging of important information - from the "Downing Street Minutes," showing that by summer 2002 the Bush administration had decided to "fix" intelligence to "justify" war on Iraq, to disclosures regarding CIA kidnappings, secret prisons, and state-sponsored torture.

As former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who leads the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, keeps reminding us, "Information is the oxygen of democracy." And with this administration's fetish for secrecy and our somnolent Fourth Estate, we would likely all suffocate without patriotic truth-tellers (aka whistleblowers).

Whistleblowing and Vietnam

There are several times as many potential whistleblowers as there are actual ones. I regret that I never got out of the former category during the early stages of the Vietnam War, when I had a chance to try to stop it. I used to lunch periodically with my colleague Sam Adams, with whom I trained as a CIA analyst and who was given the task of assessing Vietnamese Communist strength early in the war. Sam proved himself the consummate analyst. Relying largely on captured documents, he concluded that there were twice as many Communists (about 600,000) under arms in the South as the US military there would admit to.

Adams learned from Army analysts that Gen. William Westmoreland had placed an artificial cap on the official Army count rather than risk questions regarding the prospects for "staying the course" (sound familiar?). It was a clash of cultures, with Army intelligence analysts following politically dictated orders, and Sam Adams aghast. In a cable dated August 20, 1967, Westmoreland's deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, set forth the rationale for the deception. The new, higher numbers, he said "were in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 given to the press." Noting that "We have been projecting an image of success over recent months," Abrams cautioned that if the higher figures became public, "all available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion."

When Sam's superiors decided to acquiesce in the Army's figures, Sam was livid. He told me the whole story over lunch, and I remember a long silence as each of us ruminated on what might be done. I recall thinking to myself, someone should take the Abrams cable down to the New York Times (at the time an independent newspaper). The only reason for the cable's "SECRET EYES ONLY" classification was to hide the deception.

I adduced a slew of reasons why I ought not to: a plum overseas assignment for which I was in the final stages of language training; a mortgage; the ethos of secrecy; and, not least, the analytic work (which was important, exciting work, and which Sam and I both thrived on). One can, I suppose, always find reasons for not sticking one's neck out. For the neck, after all, is a convenient connection between head and torso. But if there is nothing for which you would risk your neck, it has become your idol, and necks are not worthy of that. I much regret giving such worship to my own neck.

As for Sam, he chose to go through grievance channels and got the royal run-around, even after the Communist countrywide offensive at Tet in January-February 1968 proved beyond any doubt that his count of Communist forces was correct. When the offensive began, as a way of keeping his sanity, Adams drafted a cable saying, "It is something of an anomaly to be taking so much punishment from Communist soldiers whose existence is not officially acknowledged." But he did not think the situation at all funny.

Dan Ellsberg Steps In

Sam kept playing by the rules, but it happened that - unbeknownst to Sam - Dan Ellsberg gave Sam's figures on enemy strength to the (then independent) New York Times, which published them on March 19, 1968. Dan had learned that President Lyndon Johnson was about to bow to Pentagon pressure to widen the war into Cambodia, Laos, and up to the Chinese border - perhaps even beyond. Later, it became clear that his timely leak - together with another unauthorized disclosure to the Times that the Pentagon had requested 206,000 more troops - prevented a wider war. On March 25, Johnson complained to a small gathering, "The leaks to the New York Times hurt us ... We have no support for the war ... I would have given Westy the 206,000 men."

Ironically, Sam himself played by the rules; that is, until he learned that Dan Ellsberg was on trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers and was being charged with endangering national security by revealing figures on enemy strength. Which figures? The same old faked numbers from 1967! "Imagine," said Adams, "hanging a man for leaking faked numbers," as he hustled off to testify on Dan's behalf.

Ellsberg, who copied and gave the Pentagon Papers - the 7,000-page top secret history of US decision-making on Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post, has had difficulty shaking off the thought that, had he released them in 1964 or 1965, war might have been averted.

Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else - above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong.
And so was I, it now seems, in not asking Sam for that cable from Gen. Abrams. Sam, too, eventually had strong regrets. When the war drew down, he was tormented by the thought that, had he not let himself be diddled by the system, the left half of the Vietnam Memorial wall would not be there, for there would be no names to chisel into such a wall. Sam Adams died prematurely at age 55 with nagging remorse that he had not done enough.

In a letter appearing in the (then independent) New York Times on October 18, 1975, John T. Moore, a CIA analyst who worked in Saigon and the Pentagon from 1965 to 1970, confirmed Adam's story after Sam told it in detail in the May 1975 issue of Harper's magazine:

My only regret is that I did not have Sam's courage ... The record is clear. It speaks of misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, of outright dishonesty and professional cowardice. It reflects an intelligence community captured by an aging bureaucracy, which too often placed institutional self-interest or personal advancement before the national interest. It is a page of shame in the history of American intelligence.
Next Challenge: Iran

Anyone who has been near a TV in recent weeks has heard the drumbeat for war on Iran. The best guess for timing is next month.

Let's see if we cannot do better this time than we did on Iraq. Patriotic truth tellers, we need you! In an interview last year with US News and World Report, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel said that on Iraq, "The White House is completely disconnected from reality ... It's like they're just making it up as they go along."

Ditto for an adventure against Iran. But the juggernaut has begun to roll; the White House/FOX News/Washington Times spin machine is at full tilt. This is where whistleblowers come in. Some of you will have the equivalent of the Gen. Abrams cable, shedding light on what the Bush administration is up to beneath the spin. Those of you clued into Israeli plans and US intelligence support for them might clue us in too. Don't bother this time with the once-independent Congressional oversight committees; you will have no protection, in any case, if you choose that route - CIA Director Porter Goss's recent claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor should you bother with the once-independent New York Times. Find some other way; just be sure you get the truth out - information that will provide the oxygen for democracy.

Better Late Than Never?

Don't wait until it's too late - like Dan Ellsberg and Sam Adams did on Vietnam. Any number of people would have had a good chance of stopping the Iraq war, had they the courage to disclose publicly what they knew BEFORE it was launched.

One of them, Paul Pillar, was national intelligence officer for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, and has just published an article in Foreign Affairs titled "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq." It is an insider's account of his tenure and the "disturbing developments" he witnessed on the job. In substance it tells us little more than what we have long since pieced together ourselves, but it provides welcome confirmation.

Sadly, Pillar speaks of the politicization of intelligence as though it were a bothersome headache rather than the debilitating cancer it is. Interviewed on NPR, he conceded without any evident embarrassment that, with respect to Iraq, "intelligence was not playing into a decision to be made. It was part of the effort to build support for the operation." So, in the vernacular of Watergate, Pillar's article is "modified limited hangout," in which he pulls many punches. Nowhere in Pillar's 4,450 words, for example, appears the name of former CIA director George Tenet, whom he now joins at Georgetown University.

It should qualify as another "disturbing development" that Pillar parrots the administration's default explanation for what drove its decision to topple Saddam: "namely, the desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures in the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region." The word "oil" appears once in Pillar's article: "military bases" and "Israel" not at all. He splits hairs to be overly kind to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. "To be fair," writes Pillar, "Secretary Powell's presentation at the UN never explicitly asserted that there was a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda." Pillar seem to have forgotten how Powell used that speech to play up "the potentially more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder," and spoke of a "Saddam-bin Laden understanding going back to the early and mid-1990s."

Truly Disturbing

Generally absent is any sense of the enormity of what the Bush administration has done and the urgent imperative to prevent a repeat performance. With no perceptible demurral from inside the government, George W. Bush launched a war of aggression, defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as "the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" - like torture, for example.

If this doesn't qualify for whistleblowing, what does? Let us hope that administration officials, or analysts - or both - will find the courage to speak out loudly, and early enough to prevent the "disconnected-from-reality" cabal in the Bush administration from getting us into an unnecessary war with Iran.

--------

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A veteran of 27 years in the analysis division of CIA, he now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Alpha
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 10:36 am    Post subject: Little Progress in Russia, Iran Nuke Talks

Little Progress in Russia, Iran Nuke Talks

By HENRY MEYER, Associated Press Writer
11 minutes ago



Officials from Russia and Iran on Tuesday ended two days of talks on a Russian offer to enrich uranium for Tehran without any signs of progress, though Russia's foreign minister declined to call the negotiations a failure.

The head of Russia's atomic energy agency, Sergei Kiriyenko, visits Iran on Thursday for further talks, which are widely seen as Iran's last chance to stave off international sanctions over suspicions it has a covert nuclear weapons program.

An initial round of consultations between top national security officials from both countries on Monday made no visible progress, and on Tuesday experts from the Russian Foreign Ministry and atomic energy agency held discussions with the Iranian side.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov underscored that the negotiations were continuing.

"I would be cautious about using the term 'failure' or 'setback' while the negotiations continue," he was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.

The Russian offer, which is backed by the United States and the European Union, is widely seen as the last chance for Iran to address the West's concerns before a March 6 International Atomic Energy Agency meeting that could start a process leading to punishment by the U.N Security Council.

Under Moscow's plan, Iran's enrichment activities would take place on Russian soil to ensure no uranium is diverted for nuclear weapons. Enrichment is a process that can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or material for a warhead.

Lavrov said after Monday's talks that Iran should resume the moratorium on uranium enrichment that it broke last month and assuage international concerns about its nuclear activities to avoid Security Council intervention.

"To achieve that, it's important for Iran to resume a moratorium on uranium enrichment on its territory and continue contacts between all interested parties to achieve mutually acceptable agreements," Lavrov said.

He didn't give any details of the negotiations but said there were reasons to be hopeful that the issue could remain in the hands of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog.

The head of the Iranian delegation in Moscow, deputy secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Hosseinitash, took a tough stance before the meeting, rejecting any link between the Russian plan and demands for Iran to restore a freeze on uranium enrichment that it broke last month.

He added that Iran did not intend to renounce its right to produce nuclear fuel domestically.

IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei recently suggested that the international community might have no choice but to accept small-scale enrichment on Iranian soil as a condition for Tehran to agree to move its full program abroad, a diplomat familiar with ElBaradei's thinking said Sunday.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Silence the War Drums

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/02/20/silence-the-war-drums.php
Alpha
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:24 pm    Post subject: Iran spurns Russian demand for enrichment freeze

Iran spurns Russian demand for enrichment freeze

By Oleg Shchedrov


5 minutes ago



Iran showed few signs on Tuesday that it was ready to strike a deal with Russia that could allay fears it wants nuclear arms and avert possible U.N. sanctions.

After two days of talks in Moscow, Russian and Iranian negotiators said they planned more discussions this week on a Russian proposal to enrich uranium for Iran, seen as a way to ensure Tehran cannot divert nuclear fuel into bomb-making.

But the two sides appeared far apart, with Iran's foreign minister ruling out any return to a moratorium on uranium enrichment, which Russia has repeatedly demanded.

"We discussed a joint formula and we will continue talks," said Ali Hosseinitash, deputy secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security, who led his country's delegation in Moscow.

"Our assessment of this offer is positive," he added.

The Russians were more circumspect, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin saying only that Moscow's proposal had been examined in detail and that more talks were planned.

Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia's atomic energy agency Roastom, is due to travel to Iran on Thursday.

Kamynin, quoted by Itar-Tass news agency, said Moscow had again stressed that Iran must restore the enrichment moratorium.

However, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said this was out of the question and Tehran would press ahead with its nuclear work with or without the Russian plan.

"Returning to the suspension of our nuclear activities is not on our agenda," Mottaki said on his return to Tehran after talks on the nuclear issue with EU officials in Brussels.

U.S. officials suggest Iran is discussing the Russian plan merely to gain time, a view shared by many Russian commentators.

"Their aim is to haggle, to put off as long as possible the hour when sanctions from the international community become unavoidable," wrote the daily Izvestia.

Tehran has said it will consider a joint venture with Russia and possibly others to enrich uranium for power stations, but reserves the right to pursue enrichment at home as well. It says it wants nuclear fuel only to produce electricity, not bombs.

POSSIBLE SANCTIONS

Iran may face action by the U.N. Security Council after Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, formally reports on Tehran's nuclear program at a March 6 meeting of the U.N. watchdog's governing board.

He is expected to circulate his report to members of the 35-nation board on February 27 so they can digest its conclusions.

Diplomats say they doubt the Security Council will rush into sanctions, which Russia, China and other countries oppose.

It may first reiterate IAEA demands for Iran to answer questions still outstanding after three years of investigations and then consider expanding the agency's inspection powers.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged Iran to change tack to stave off punitive measures. "We do not rule out the possibility of economic sanctions completely," he said.

Germany and other European countries have hardened their stance on the Iran nuclear issue after repeated calls by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the destruction of Israel.

Russia and China, which could veto any move by the United States and its European allies to impose sanctions on Tehran, share concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions, but do not want to sacrifice their commercial interests in the Islamic Republic.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman again urged Iran to restore a freeze on uranium enrichment activities to create the conditions for a negotiated solution.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said it might be hard for Moscow to resist calls for U.N. sanctions unless Iran resumes the moratorium it abandoned in January.

Analysts and European diplomats in Tehran said Iran's tough line was a ploy to draw Washington into the nuclear talks.

"They know that the only way to address the issues they really want addressed, such as security concerns, is to talk to the Americans," said a European diplomat who said he had been told of the gambit by a senior Iranian official.

Iran's leaders, who want guarantees against any U.S. attack on a country listed by President George W. Bush as part of an "axis of evil," may believe the time to force the issue is now.

"They know that the Americans were not going to give up until they had sent Iran to the Security Council," said an Iranian political analyst, who asked not to be named.

"So they figured it was better to go to the council now, with America still struggling in Iraq and oil prices high, than say in two years when America may be in a stronger position."

(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley in Beijing, Teruaki Ueno in Tokyo, Meg Clothier in Moscow, Parisa Hafezi and Paul Huges in Tehran and Mark Heinrich in Vienna).
 

Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4

War Without End Forum Index -> Wake Up America! Your Government is Hijacked by Zionism
All times are GMT
©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk
Bookmark and Share
Social Links:  Homeowner Association Software  Appliances Reno NV  America Hijacked  Cash System X Review  300 Internet Marketers Review  300 Internet Marketers
www.1st-amendment.net Real Free Speech Web Hosting
This web site is Hosted Free by: www.1st-Amendment.net