Redstate

Posted at 10:42am on May 4, 2008 Iran, Sri Lanka, terrorism, and international organizations

How the international system sometime works

By Soren Dayton

Here are two facts for you about a recent change in the relationship between Sri Lanka and Iran. First, Iran makes some offers to Sri Lanka:

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad of Iran is to visit Sri Lanka for two days from April 28,2008. ... His engagements will include the inauguration of the construction of the Iranian-funded ( US $ 450 million) Uma Oya hydroelectricity project at Wellawaya in the Monaragala district. ... The visit is also expected to result in the finalisation of an agreement for Iranian financial and technical assistance for enabling the Sapugaskanda oil refinery to handle Iran’s light crude. This project is expected to result in a further Iranian investment of US $ one billion.

And:

Iran has also agreed to train the Sri Lankan Army and Intelligence officers in Iran. A team of about 10 officers has already proceeded to Iran for training. Sri Lanka has already shared with Iranian Intelligence the manuals of Israeli equipment purchased by it in the past.

In exchange, the Chinese News Agency reports the following with the headline, "Sri Lanka supports Iran's peaceful use of nuclear energy":

Sri Lanka said Tuesday that it supports the peaceful use of nuclear energy by Iran within the framework of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The lesson? The best indicator of Iranian (and Chinese) influence is investment. Gee. I wonder how Iranian influence grows at the UN.

Posted in 2008 | IAEA | Iran | Sri Lanka | Terorrism — Comments (0)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 6:19pm on Apr. 21, 2008 Obama With Iran

"Realistic Idealism" Vs. "Aggressive Personal Diplomacy."

By California Yankee

I have a slightly different take on the Iranians preference for Obama than does my esteemed colleague Dan McLaughlin.

Time magazine's Scott MacLeod reports that Sergei Barseghian, a columnist for the Iranian reformist newspaper Etemad Meli (National Confidence), notes that in Farsi, the words Oo ba ma would translate as "He's with us."

Iranians are following the American presidential race. In part, because they wish to be rid of President Bush, who branded Iran part of an "Axis of Evil," and because they are taken in by Obama's false hope. According to MacLeod, Iranians favor Obama's hope rhetoric and see a President Obama repairing the U.S.-Iranian relationship:

It's not only the policy expectations that account for Obama's popularity: his Third World ethnic background and the Muslim faith of his father's Kenyan family — even his middle name, Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and a revered figure in the Shi'ite Islam practiced in Iran — offer points of affinity that some analysts believe could give Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the political cover to make a gesture of reconciliation to the country long decried in Tehran as "the Great Satan."

But it's Obama's declared willingness to engage in "aggressive personal diplomacy" with the Iranian leadership that has generated the most interest among senior officials in Tehran, since this would mark a sea-change in Washington's approach. "Obama is a man of engagement, a man of negotiations," one Iranian official told TIME. Amir Mohebbian, an analyst close to Iranian conservative politicians, argues that "the mentality of Iranian decision makers is ready for that." He adds: "I think that the coming of Obama — maybe, maybe — helps to solve this problem, but it needs bravery, from both sides."

MacLeod, fails to mention that the U.S./Iran "30-year Cold War" is the result of Iran's seizure of the U.S. embassy and the subsequent holding of 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days -- the remainder of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Like Carter's failure to free the hostages, Obama's proposed "aggressive personal diplomacy" will also be seen as a sign of weakness that will only encourage this state sponsor of terrorism.

Read on there is more.

Posted in 2008 | 2008 Presidential Campaign | Iran | McCain | Obama — Comments (20)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 5:39pm on Apr. 21, 2008 McCain Dares To Speak The Truth In The Battle of Ideas

Wonder Why Hamas and Iran Prefer Obama?

By Dan McLaughlin

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), "the nation's largest association of Muslim organizations," joined by one of its increasingly natural allies, the left-wing blog ThinkProgress, is pressing John McCain to stop using the term "radical Islamic extremism" to describe terrorist and terror-sympathizing groups that are undeniably radical and extremist and justify that radical extremism with appeals to a radical and extreme reading of Islam.

Or, at least, a reading that I assume is radical and extreme; one would like to believe that groups like ISNA think so. Naturally, the United States wants and needs to convince the Muslim world that this is the case, and that the terrorists aren't right when they invoke Islam to justify violence against non-Muslims and even, very regularly, against fellow Muslims. But it's hard to make that argument if you don't even acknowledge the fact that the enemy is making such use of an ideology that purports to be grounded in Islamic theology. How would you have gone about combatting the KKK without describing them as a racist group, or international Communism without arguing against Communism? ISNA's leader apparently wants to shut down precisely that sort of dialogue:

Read On...

Posted in Hamas | Iran | John McCain | Obamafiles | War — Comments (29)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:34pm on Mar. 20, 2008 "Death to Ahmadenijad"

By Dan McLaughlin

Has a nice ring to it, does it not?

Posted at 9:48am on Mar. 4, 2008 UN Sanctions Iran Again

By California Yankee

The United Nations Security Council has adopted a third resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to cease enriching uranium designed to build nuclear weapons.

The new sanctions add to Council sanctions imposed in 2006 and 2007.

The resolution was adopted by a vote of 14 - 0, with Indonesia abstaining, and calls on "Member States" to inspect cargoes to and from Iran believed to contain goods prohibited by U.N. resolutions, mandates tighter monitoring of financial institutions and imposes additional travel bans and asset freezes.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zamay Khalizad puts Iran's continued nuclear defiance in perspective:

Instead of suspending its proliferation-sensitive activities as the council has required, Iran is dramatically expanding the number of operating centrifuges and developing a new generation of centrifuges, testing one of them with nuclear fuel.

[. . .]

Continued below the fold.

Posted in Foreign Affairs | Iran | Israel | Nuclear Proliferation | Sanctions | UN — Comments (1)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:38pm on Mar. 1, 2008 Re: Obama Walkback

By Neil Stevens

As I read that quote, it sounds like he's implying he wants to meet with Khameini or someone else on the Council of Guardians. Because it is they who truly rule Iran, as I understand it.

It'd be so embarassing for Obama, though, were they to refuse to meet with him and refer him to their selected favorite Ahmadinejad. It'd be embarassing for us, too, so we'd better not let him become President.

Posted at 11:17am on Feb. 23, 2008 Israel In The Crossfire...Again

By haystack

We've heard Iran's President and his diatribe about Israel often enough to get the basic point: "We want Israel to go away, and we want to "own" the Middle East." We know he plans on having nukes, regardless his strained denials and insistences to the contrary. There's really no reason to even attempt to convince ourselves there is anything BUT hostile intentions despite all the Democrats running for President who promise to be open minded (and, in Obama's case actually sit DOWN with these lunatics for a mocha latte and cookies) and look for a peaceful relationship with them.

Now, apparently, Lebanese Lunatic Nasrallah wants a piece of that action as well:

"The disappearance of Israel is an inevitable fact. It is an historical process in the region which will come to an end in several years.

I wonder...does the reference to "several years" fall solely to coincidence in the larger context of Iran's nuke program? We are to believe as much, apparently.

Our Democrat Presidential wannabes refuse to look at the reality of what Iran would do were they to have this capability. Obama has even gone so far as to promise open talks without pre-conditions. How do you think that conversation will go?

BO: Are you going to launch nuclear weapons against Israel and wipe them from the face of the earth?

MA: Of COURSE not. We are a peaceful people.

BO: You PROMISE?

MA: Of COURSE. You can trust us...always...to tell you the truth.

BO: Cool-pass the cream and sugar please? You gonna eat that cookie?

More below the fold...

Posted in Democrat Denials | Iran | Israel | nuclear weapons | War — Comments (40)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:08am on Jan. 15, 2008 It's Time to Stop Scoring 'Slam Dunks' for the Other Team

Senator Ensign, with the help of Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, should pursue a commission to examine the NIE on Iran

By RS Insider

Lost in the furious coverage of the primaries and abetted by the pack mentality of our national press corps, has been last month’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program. Now that Congress is returning to Washington to begin a new year – another year in which it is unlikely that any legislation of import will be passed in its hallowed chambers – some are hoping that Republicans, led by Senator John Ensign (R-NV), will renew their efforts to get at least one important thing done in 2008: To examine the processes, analysis and intelligence that led to the NIE.

The NIE’s contents have been used as a bludgeon by administration critics, the media, and Iranian regime apologists to prevent any further ratcheting up of pressure on Iran. The Bush administration, for its part, has been pushed backed on its heels, and forced to defend the NIE as an “opportunity.”

There has been one, lone voice in the administration who has been having none of it: our inestimable ambassador to the U.N., Zal Khalilzad. Instead of gussying up the NIE’s incontrovertible long-term damage to our efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions, Ambassador Khalilzad has openly called the NIE for what it is: “a goal against ourselves.”

Zal could have also used another sports analogy, one seemingly favored by our intelligence agencies: We scored a “slam dunk” for the other team. The last NIE may well prove to be as inaccurate as the previous conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community, from Soviet missiles on Cuba in the 1960s, to underestimating Iraq’s nuclear capability before the first Persian Gulf War (Saddam, we later learned, was only a few years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon), to the original “slam dunk” estimates on Iraq’s WMD pre-2003.

The litany of failures goes on, yet the clearly broken intelligence system remains free from any culpability.

Read on...

Posted in Foreign Affairs | Iran | NIE — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 6:09pm on Dec. 13, 2007 Clarifying The Iran NIE

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

A valuable and interesting op-ed from Henry Kissinger. The following passage deserves mention and further commentary in response to the questions that it raises:

The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.

The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components: the production of fissile material, the development of missiles and the building of warheads. Heretofore, production of fissile material has been treated as by far the greatest danger, and the pace of Iranian production of fissile material has accelerated since 2006. So has the development of missiles of increasing range. What appears to have been suspended is the engineering aimed at the production of warheads.

The NIE holds that Iran may be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009 and, with increasing confidence, more warheads by the period 2010 to 2015. That is virtually the same timeline as was suggested in the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate. The new estimate does not assess how long it would take to build a warhead, though it treats the availability of fissile material as the principal limiting factor. If there is a significant gap between these two processes, it would be important to be told what it is. Nor are we told how close to developing a warhead Tehran was when it suspended its program or how confident the intelligence community is in its ability to learn when work on warheads has resumed. On the latter point, the new estimate expresses only "moderate" confidence that the suspension has not been lifted already.

It is therefore doubtful that the evidence supports the dramatic language of the summary and, even less so, the broad conclusions drawn in much of the public commentary. For the past three years, the international debate has concentrated on the Iranian effort to enrich uranium by centrifuges, some 3,000 of which are now in operation. The administration has asserted that this represents a decisive step toward Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons and has urged a policy of maximum pressure. Every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council has supported the request that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program; the various countries differ on the urgency with which their recommendations should be pressed and in their willingness to impose penalties.

Posted at 5:19pm on Dec. 13, 2007 Spying and Policymaking Don't Mix

By California Yankee

Required reading: Henry Kissinger on misreading the NIE and the intelligence community's recent tendency to turn itself into a kind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch.

Posted at 11:19am on Dec. 11, 2007 Some Further Thoughts on the Iran NIE

By Dan McLaughlin

A few thoughts on last week's announcement of the National Intelligence Estimate, which estimates that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program in 2003:

1. As Reagan used to say, trust, but verify. U.S. intelligence has historically been lousy regarding other nations' WMD programs, especially police states, going back as far as the USSR and Red China getting The Bomb. The errors haven't even all been in one direction: threats have been underestimated at least as often as overestimated. And if the post-9/11 bureaucratic imperative was to avoid charges of failing to 'connect the dots,' the post-Iraq War imperative is to avoid charges of overestimating WMD threats. So this may well be yet another case of fighting the last war. Taranto's column last Wednesday collected some good analyses, of which there are many more. At a minimum, the NIE should not be taken at face value as holy writ. There's a reason they call these things "estimates."

Posted in Alan Dershowitz | Iran | Iraq | National Security | NIE | WMD — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 12:21pm on Dec. 10, 2007 NR on Huckabee's Foreign Policy Views [OK, now comments *actually* enabled]

By Dan McLaughlin

A blistering editorial:

On Iran, Huckabee is at his most troubling. He accuses the administration of “proceeding down only one track with Iran: armed confrontation.” This is false, and the kind of rhetoric you’d expect from DailyKos bloggers, not a Republican presidential candidate. Huckabee thinks it has been a lack of diplomatic engagement that has soured our relations with Iran: “We haven’t had diplomatic relations with Iran in almost 30 years, my whole adult life and a lot of good it’s done. Putting this in human terms, all of us know that when we stop talking to a parent or a sibling or a friend, it’s impossible to accomplish anything, impossible to resolve differences and move the relationship forward. The same is true for countries.”

This is the kernel of Huckabee’s foreign policy. He wants to anthropomorphize international relations and bring a Christian commitment to the Golden Rule to our affairs with other nations. As he told the Des Moines Register the other day, “You treat others the way you’d like to be treated. That’s to me the fundamental issue that has to be re-established in our dealings with other countries.”

This is deeply naïve. Countries aren’t people, and the world is more dangerous than a Sunday church social. Threats, deception, and — as a last resort — violence must play a role in international relations. Differences cannot always be worked out through sweet persuasion. A U.S. president who doesn’t realize this will repeat the experience of President Jimmy Carter at his most ineffectual.

Read the whole thing. I'm warming to Huckabee's electability; he's a likeable guy and a great speaker. One could make the case that his ardently pro-life convictions matter more than his un-conservative approach to economic issues and the size of government. But any president's Job #1 is being the Commander-in-Chief and "decider" in foreign affairs. And the more I see of Huckabee's views on foreign policy, the more he looks like a guy who has no business doing the most important part of the job.

Posted at 5:28pm on Dec. 6, 2007 "From Hell's Heart, I Stab At Thee/For Hate's Sake, I Spit My Last Breath At Thee"

I Am Laughing At The Superior Intellect

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

It is no secret that blogger Steve Clemons has been a wee bit obsessed when it comes to the subject of former UN Ambassador John Bolton, leading, of course, to the titling of this post and the comparisons with one of the characters in this somewhat well known story. Clemons rarely misses a chance to let his obsessions go unsatisfied and so, today, in response to this editorial by Ambassador Bolton on the issue of the recent NIE on Iran, Clemons has this post comparing Bolton's rhetoric with MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad that so spectacularly backfired. According to Clemons, Bolton is trashing intelligence analysts the same way that MoveOn.org trashed General David Petraeus, even stating that Bolton "essentially accuses the entire national security intelligence establishment of betraying American interests in the 2007 Iran National Intelligence Estimate."

Really? Let's look at the "proof" that Clemons offers for this . . . interesting proposition, proof that is presented in the form of an excerpt from Bolton's editorial.

Read on . . .

Posted in Iran | John Bolton | National Security | NIE | Steve Clemons — Comments (6)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:07am on Dec. 5, 2007 Hewitt, Huckabee, and the NIE

By Neil Stevens

Honestly, I don't know if Hugh Hewitt's criticism of Mike Huckabee here – suggesting that it's a huge deal that Huckabee did not immediately know about the new National Intelligence Estimate of Iran, and further that he didn't immediately have developed an opinion of that estimate and its consequences – can actually be traced by to his devoted support for Mitt Romney. I say this because he shows a mindset that has been known to exist outside of political shillery: namely that being an intelligent, informed person involves being intimately aware of the stories, scandals, and talk currently hot in the mainstream press news cycle.

Specifically, Hewitt says that Huckabee makes an "astonishing admission of cluelessness" when he admits he was not aware of this bit of news. This suggests a certain obsession with novelty, an idea that one must be continuously monitoring events in order to make intelligent, informed decisions. This despite the fact that this bit of "news" discusses a viewpoint of events years old!

Maybe it's because Hewitt has his radio show to do, in which he must be continuously new to a degree in order to maintain an audience, maybe it's a sickness likely to afflict anyone who follows too much the mainstream press and their continuous news cycle, and maybe it comes with territory of having a website in which he himself reacts to news, but I don't think it's necessarily correct to pin this on a bias for Mitt Romney.