Chief inspector: Iran may be hiding secret nukes
Is there anyone who seriously believes the current Iranian govt, or ANY mullah dominated govt can by talking be dissuaded from the course they are embarked on?VIENNA, Austria - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Monday that Iran may be hiding secret nuclear activities, comments that appeared to reflect a high level of frustration with stonewalling of his investigators.A senior Iranian envoy accused the United States of trying to use the IAEA as a tool in Washington's confrontation with Tehran. Iran, he said, has demonstrated full cooperation with the agency. Allegations of nuclear weapons work by Tehran is based on forged documents and the issue is closed, the envoy said.
The two men spoke at the start of a 35-nation board IAEA meeting. With time running out before Tehran develops potential nuclear weapons capacity, some worry that Israel or the U.S. might resort to military strikes if they believe all diplomatic options have been exhausted.
And with Tehran showing no signs of giving up uranium enrichment or heeding other international demands, the diplomatic window appears to be closing.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran's stonewalling of his agency was a "serious concern."
Military intelligence: Iran halfway to first nuclear bomb
Sep. 22, 2008
Herb Keinon , THE JERUSALEM POSTIran is halfway to a nuclear bomb, and Hizbullah, Hamas and Syria are using this period of relative calm to significantly rearm, Brig.-Gen. Yossi Baidatz, the Military Intelligence's head of research, told the cabinet Sunday during a particularly gloomy briefing on the threats facing the country.
Baidatz said there was a growing gap between Iran's progress on the nuclear front and the West's determination to stop it. "Iran is concentrating on uranium enrichment, and is making progress," he said, noting that they have improved the function of their 4,000 centrifuges.
According to Baidatz, the Iranian centrifuges have so far produced between one-third to one-half of the enriched material needed to build a bomb.
"The time when they will have crossed the nuclear point-of-no-return is fast approaching," he said, though he stopped short of giving a firm deadline. Last week in the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, however, he put the date at 2011.
Baidatz said that neither the efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency nor the US and European attempts to get a fourth round of sanctions through the UN Security council were slowing down the Iranian nuclear march.
"The Iranians are pleased that the gap is widening," Baidatz said. "Their confidence is growing with the thought that the international community is not strong enough to stop them," he added.
Baidatz said the Iranians were playing for time, and that time was working in their favor since the longer the process dragged on, the wider the rifts appearing among the countries in the West become. "Iran is in control of the technology and is moving with determination toward a nuclear bomb," he said.
In addition to their nuclear efforts, the Iranians were also deepening their influence in the region through cooperation with Syria and the Palestinian terrorist organizations, as well as being the main arms supplier to Hizbullah and a source of constant attacks on American troops in Iraq. All of this, he said, was part of Iran's efforts to stand at the head of the region's extremist front.
The region's moderates, he said, were limiting their opposition to "just rhetoric."
How Do You Deter Those That Are Already Dead?
ReplyDeleteFrom a post I did a while back.
IsraPundit reports on a recent paper by BESA Center for Strategic Studies Bar-Ilan University entitled “Radical Islam: Challenge and Response”
This a very scary paper for those who think we are dealing with a rational enemy – the jihadists – and we can somehow deter them from their actions if we would only try and understand them through rational discussions. The paper is a must-read but I’ll summarize the important points here.
According to the paper, we are not dealing with a rational enemy as we did in the past. The Cold War is a good example of deterring an enemy steeped in a rational belief system. MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – kept the Soviets at bay until their economy imploded and the Cold War ended. Their desire to live was the most important deterrent of all.
But we are not dealing with an enemy who values life – theirs or anyone else’s. Laurent Murawiec, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. who is the author of the paper explains.
“Deterrence works because one is able credibly to threaten the center of gravity of the enemy: the threat of inflicting unacceptable losses upon him, whether in a bar brawl or in nuclear escalation. Deterrence works if the price to be paid by the party to be deterred hugely exceeds his expected earnings. But deterrence only works if the enemy is able and willing to enter the same calculus. If the enemy plays by other rules and calculates by other means, he will not be deterred. If the calculus is: I exchange my worthless earthly life against the triumph of Allah on earth, and an eternity of bliss for me, if the enemy wishes to be dead, if to him the Apocalypse is desirable, he will not be deterred.”
Murawiec goes to make the distinction between those that are religious and the ideological religious. As many have said, myself included, Islam is not just a religion. It is a socio-political ideology. “The difference between the religious and the ideologically religious is this: the religious believer accepts that reality is a given, whereas the fanatic gambles everything on a pseudo-reality of what ought to be. The religious believer accepts reality and works at improving it, the fanatic rejects reality, refuses to pass any compromise with it and tries to destroy it and replace it with his fantasy.”
Or in other words, a fanatic is one who when proven wrong – redoubles his efforts.
Murawiec continues. “Contemporary jihad is not a matter of politics at all (of ‘occupation, of ‘grievances,’ of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and Zionism), but a matter of Gnostic faith. Consequently, attempts at dealing with the problem politically will not even touch it. Aspirin is good, and so is penicillin, but they are of little avail to counter maladies of the mind. I am emphatically not saying here that the jihadis are “crazy.” I am saying that they are possessed of a disease of the mind, and the disease is the political religion of modern Gnosticism in its Islamic version.”
This is what I have been saying for the last two month. Islam is a form of mental illness and the current struggle in Islam is not so much a battle over its soul than a battle over its mind.