Six years ago everybody ignored Scott Ritter when he told the world Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Here’s your chance to ignore him again, as he explains that Iran hasn’t got an a-bomb nor seems to be anywhere near making one either. Key paragraph:
Never forget that sports odds makers were laying 2:1 odds that either Israel or the US would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities by March 2007. Since leaving office, former vice-president Dick Cheney has acknowledged that he was pushing heavily for a military attack against Iran during the time of the Bush administration. And the level of rhetoric coming from Israel concerning its plans to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran have been alarming.
Obama may have been elected with the electorate hoping for a more sane foreign policy and he’s certainly more diplomatic and less likely to pursue stupid policies just to show who’s boss, but that doesn’t mean America’s foreign policy goals have changed. Though there have been some well publicised attempts at reconcillation with Iran, underlying it have been the constant demands for Iran to give up its nuclear programme, to stop working on nuclear weapons, despite the lack of evidence for this. Though of a much lower intensity than the similar propaganda campaign and pressure tactics we saw in 2002/03 in the runup to the War on Iraq. Are we’re seeing the same thing happening to its neighbour?
Well, the news today has been led by Iran. At the Pittsburgh G20 summit, we’ve had Irish-American leader Fionnbarra “Barack†O’Bama, with Brown on one side of him and Sarko on the other, indulging in some serious sabre-rattling. Taken alongside Netanyahu’s apocalyptic tubthumping at the UN, it’s all horribly reminiscent of the runup to the Iraq war, and I’m just waiting for the sexed-up dossier proving that not only has Iran nukes, but it could launch them at Britain in 45 minutes. A few thoughts occur. One is to wonder if the Russians have ratted out the Iranians as a quid pro quo for not having a deployment of US missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. Another is to wonder how this is going down with those two well-known allies of democracy, the pro-Iranian government of Iraq and the pro-Iranian government of Afghanistan. Finally, it strikes me that this is probably not a good time for Ahmadinejad to start winding the Jews up with his hilarious stand-up routine on the Holocaust.
ADDENDUM: on a semi-related topic Ingrid Robeyns on the firing of Tariq Ramadan from the university of Rotterdam for having a shown on the Iranian PressTV.