More Mything The Point Over Iran

The narrative for war with Iran rolls onwards and sweeps up in it's grasp those who should know better and have the brains to look further than the myth.

David Sanger, New York Times: inspections that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says will now end.

Kevin Drum: we've got the slam dunk intelligence.

Gen Wesley Clark: Iran is discarding its international obligations in the apparent pursuit of nuclear weaponry...Iran's steady march toward nuclear weaponry...No one should be mistaken: there is a military option.

Sanger's line is simply bad or biased reporting. It's taking the myth to a whole new level as many readers will assimilate the "no more inspections" meme and never look further. In fact, what Iran has done is tell the IAEA to remove camaras that Iran had volunteered to have placed and ended voluntary inspections. Routine inspections of the kind any other signatory to the NPT must undergo will continue. In fact, there's a team of inspectors in Iran soon to oversea their enrichment experiments. Hardly the action of a nation determined to clandestinely develop The Bomb.

Drum's phrase is just stupid. We don't have anything approaching "slam dunk intelligence", as he would know if he consulted independent experts instead of his friends in the media and politics who have already rolled over for the myth. Dr. Gordon Prather, one of America's foremost experts on nuclear proliferation and Bomb physics, puts it bluntly:

the IAEA update never mentions "evidence." Rather, it cites "information that had been made available to the Agency" [by the US] that contains "allegations" that the Iranians claim (and can perhaps demonstrate) are "baseless."

In fact, according the to the IAEA report being debated at the emergency meeting:

"Iran has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as requested by the Agency, and to act as if the Additional Protocol is in force, including by providing in a timely manner the requisite declarations and access to locations."

The accepted wisdom already in America is that, as John Negroponte lied to Congress, "Iran conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment program for nearly two decades in violation of its IAEA safeguards agreement." Whereas the truth is that Iran, according to the IAEA after three years of full inspections, has not yet begun initial operations of its planned uranium enrichment program, which will – in any case – be fully safeguarded. Nor has Iran ever been reported to the UN Security Council to be in violation of its IAEA Safeguards Agreement.

Even if it could be shown that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, which it can't, it's going to take at least a decade for them to set up to do so. As another acknowledged expert, Dr Jeffrey Lewis, points out, Iran has yet to set up a full enrichment cascade or even successfully purify the raw materials for enrichment. A decade may be a pessimistic estimate to do that.

"Slam dunk intelligence" my ass.

As for Gen Clark, a supposed frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination, he's just as wrong on the intelligence and Iran's international obligations as can be - as already shown. That leaves the "military option". Sure there is one. It's just that every conceivable way it could play out would be a disaster! We are being asked to back a disaster on the basis of hyped-up intelligence and a narrative for war, just like in Iraq. And just like back then, Democrat leaders and opinionmakers are just as keen to jump on the bandwagon as ever, ignoring the experts and more sensible voices. It's simply stupid.

Gary Younge in the Guardian puts his finger on it:

there is little point in claiming you were tricked unless you address what made you so gullible in the first place. The basic idea that the US has a historic duty to bring progress, democracy and enlightenment at the barrel of a gun seems about as firmly ingrained in the American mindset as its record of doing the opposite in Central and South America and south-east Asia is in American history. Nothing that has happened in Iraq seems to have shifted that perception in the US. A significant minority were against the war from the start. For the rest, the trouble with the war is not that they invaded a sovereign country on a false pretext and killed hundreds of thousands. It's that they're not winning.

...With each exposé of torture, subjugation, blunder and plunder you keep hearing that Americans have lost their innocence. Somehow they always find it again just in time to buy into the next bad idea.