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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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 Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2015 12:46 pm Post subject: |
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| W.T.Carl wrote: |
| Neither did North Korea................... |
Neither did Iraq............oh wait a minute. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2015 8:39 pm Post subject: |
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| W.T.Carl wrote: |
| Neither did North Korea................... |
Actually it was pretty open about it. North Korea is also strong evidence that the NPT has some teeth. The country did not pull out of the NPT until 2003, more than 10 years after we were worried about them developing nukes. 2 years later North Korea finally had nukes.
If you want to use North Korea as an example, I'd say it is even more reason to view Iran as an overhyped threat to the United States.
History of the DRPK's nuke program |
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W.T.Carl
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2015 10:38 am Post subject: |
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| Iraq DID have a program. The Israelis took care of it. We should just get out of the way. |
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northway
Joined: 05 Jul 2010
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| Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2015 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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| W.T.Carl wrote: |
| Iraq DID have a program. The Israelis took care of it. We should just get out of the way. |
You conveniently decline to mention that Iraq's nuclear weapons program simply went underground after the Israeli's bombed Osirak:
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| Israel—actually, what Israel [did] is that it got out the immediate danger out of the way. But it created a much larger danger in the longer range. What happened is that Saddam ordered us—we were 400 ... scientists and technologists running the program. And when they bombed that reactor out, we had also invested $400 million. And the French reactor and the associated plans were from Italy. When they bombed it out we became 7,000 with a $10 billion investment for a secret, much larger underground program to make bomb material by enriching uranium. We dropped the reactor out totally, which was the plutonium for making nuclear weapons, and went directly into enriching uranium. ... They [Israel] estimated we'd make 7 kg [15 lb] of plutonium a year, which is enough for one bomb. And they get scared and bombed it out. Actually it was much less than this, and it would have taken a much longer time. But the program we built later in secret would make six bombs a year. |
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| Israeli intelligence were convinced that their strike in 1981 on the Osirak nuclear reactor about 10 miles outside Baghdad had ended Saddam's program. Instead [it initiated] covert funding for a nuclear program code-named 'PC3' involving 5.000 people testing and building ingredients for a nuclear bomb. |
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| The destruction of the Osiraq reactor did not delay the development of a nuclear weapons option because it [the reactor] was never intended to be part of such an effort. The French-supplied facility was subject to rigorous safeguards and designed to ensure that Iraq would not be able to produce weapons-grade plutonium. An examination of the reactor by Harvard physicist Richard Wilson after the attack concluded that the facility was not suited for production of weapons-grade plutonium. As a result, the attack did not reduce the risk that Iraq would develop nuclear weapons. On the contrary, it brought about a far more determined and focused effort to acquire nuclear weapons. |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera#Aftermath |
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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2015 7:55 pm Post subject: |
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| W.T.Carl wrote: |
| Iraq DID have a program. The Israelis took care of it. We should just get out of the way. |
How is America in Israel's way?
Israel can bomb Iran if it wants too. The problem is that it wants America to do its dirty work for it. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2015 10:39 am Post subject: |
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| W.T.Carl wrote: |
| Iraq DID have a program. The Israelis took care of it. We should just get out of the way. |
Ah, the Iraq model. Let the Israelis bomb it, and then invade, place sanctions, invade again at cost of $3 trillion, set up a democracy, and then more troops and airstrikes when democracy fails for sectarian reasons.
Why not attempt negotiations? If an agreement is reached, the worst case scenario is that Iran achieves nuclear weapons. If an agreement is not reached, the worst case scenario is that Iran achieves nuclear weapons. An agreement is more advantageous because:
(a) it decreases the likelihood that Iran achieves nuclear weapons;
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(b) it creates legal legitimacy for enforcement against Iran for violations of the agreement, the NPT, and international efforts at mediation and conciliation; and so any military action against Iran would more likely include a worldwide coalition (i.e. would be more like the Gulf War than the Iraq War). |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2015 9:53 am Post subject: |
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| Friedman wrote: |
| So before you make up your mind on the Iran deal, ask how it affects Israel, the country most threatened by Iran. But also ask how it fits into a wider U.S. strategy aimed at quelling tensions in the Middle East with the least U.S. involvement necessary and the lowest oil prices possible. |
I'm not Israeli, so Friedman has this backwards, and so too do too many of our elites.
Yeah, Friedman is an elite. Its a description of his power and influence not his quality. |
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northway
Joined: 05 Jul 2010
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| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2015 12:47 pm Post subject: |
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| Funny, usually I try to be on the right side of Friedman (also known as the opposite side). |
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atwood
Joined: 26 Dec 2009
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| Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2015 12:52 am Post subject: |
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You got that right. |
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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 7:31 pm Post subject: |
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Deal isn't official till the language is worked out, but:
basically, Iran scales back on its uranium, it's refinement % and centrifuges big time. They get incremental sanction relief as steps are verified. They won't be able to build a bomb with plutonium or any stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. The only refinement will be at 3.67% which is verified as civilian use refinement levels. They're under int'l inspections even for rumoured violations.
Still have 3 months to go, to get the final wording, but by June-ish, final draft of the deal should be signed by all parties. |
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stilicho25
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
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| Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2015 5:42 am Post subject: |
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| I love the deal but have a bad feeling its going to freak SA and Israel out to the point where they do something rash... I hope not though. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2015 6:51 am Post subject: |
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| Yes, some here have stated Iran is irrational. Well I'd say Saudi Arabia is acting more impulsively these days. Its bombing and involvement in Yemen makes our invasion of Iraq look genius in comparison. Iran has little to no interest in Yemen and I seriously doubt it is giving much if any support to the Houthis. The Saudi government is paranoid about Iran. It will no doubt freak out about this agreement. |
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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2015 2:21 pm Post subject: |
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The Emerging GOP War Platform
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It's fascinating how, in addition to genuflection to the person of Benjamin Netanyahu, breaking off any nuclear agreement with Iran is quickly becoming a litmus test for GOP presidential candidates. If you look around, virtually everyone who doesn't oppose any agreement or has strong ideological commitments that preclude support, is surprised at how tight the restrictions the US negotiated ended up being. (Examples one and two; Dennis Ross struggles to find quibbles.) There are real questions about how much latitude the next president would have to tear up an agreement within the bounds of international law. But Jeb Bush has already signed on: he'll try to ditch it. And now Scott Walker says he will, too.
One way to look at this is that they will simply commit the country to war. But I don't think that's the most likely option. More likely, they will copy the policy most associated with George W. Bush's first term, and 'stand tough' while Iran does whatever it wants.
Even more striking though is just how little grasp Walker has of any of the details about what's involved, and how little his advisors have prepped him.
If elected president, Walker says that he'll pull back on any nuclear agreement on day one. And revealingly, he says he doesn't care if our trading partners aren't willing to go along with us. He'll have America go it alone.
This is a good encapsulation of Walker's seemingly total ignorance of this topic. What brought Iran to the table and forced this agreement was a mix of crippling economic sanctions and a covert war of sabotage by the US and Israel. The sanctions have only worked because Europe, Russia and China have joined us in imposing them. Without them, they would be onerous, but simply not effective on the same scale.
The best argument of those saying we need a better deal is that we should leave the sanctions in place, let them become more painful and wait for the Iranians to offer an even better deal. I don't think that makes sense for a number of reasons. But absent this scale of restrictive sanctions, there's really no reason to think they'd be offering even this deal.
It simply makes no sense. To make this argument, you have to come up with an explanation to how you'd be able to reassemble the world powers to reimpose the sanctions and press for a new deal. If you don't have that, you're just saying, at best, that you'd threaten war so credibly that the Iranians would just give up their nuclear program. Or that you'll actually launch a war that might set the program back a number of years but would make it impossible restrain after that.
All of this stuff is just talking out of a place that is not your mouth. About as dangerous as it is stupid. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Tue May 17, 2016 7:31 am Post subject: |
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David Samuels profiles Ben Rhodes
Some more hornswaggle from the NYTimes.
The Ben Rhodes Furor
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| The profile says, essentially, that Rhodes hornswoggled the public into believing the Iran nuclear deal was a good idea by manipulating the press. |
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What does Samuels get wrong?
Virtually everything. For starters, neither Obama's foreign policy in general nor the Iran deal in particular is especially popular. So if you, like Samuels, believe Obama's approach to these issues has been bad, there is genuinely nothing to explain about his communications strategy.
Secondarily, the core allegation that the American people have been mislead about the timing of Obama's interest in diplomacy with Iran is ridiculous. Obama's desire to do a deal with Iran was a prominent subject of the 2008 political campaign, and the not-very-obscure figure of Hillary Clinton has bragged about her role in laying the groundwork for a deal back in Obama's first term.
Samuels doesn't even understand what Somanader told him about Laura Rozen's Twitter feed, portraying her as saying that Rozen would reliably retweet whatever the White House wanted when in fact she's saying she relied upon Rozen's comprehensive retweeting of deal-related scuttlebutt to stay on top of the news.
The portrayal of Goldberg as a White House cat's paw appears to be grounded in some kind of beef between Goldberg and Samuels's wife.
Last but by no means least, Samuels's disparaging reference to "freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal" is strategically designed to create the impression that there are some major technical flaws with the deal that real, veteran experts would know about. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Arms control experts were so unanimous in support of a deal that the president of a group formed to oppose diplomacy with Iran ended up resigning to support the deal.
There's a cogent case against the deal grounded in regional politics (more on this later), but Rhodes was able to create the impression of a firm consensus in the arms control community because there really was a consensus.
Yet despite its significant flaws, the story is a pretty effective hit on the Obama administration for two big reasons.
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Rhodes is quoted, on the record, as castigating the entire media ("27 year olds … who literally know nothing") and the entire world of foreign policy analysis ("the Blob") in extremely broad-brush terms that alienate all possible allies.
Since the substance of the article is to cast aspersions on White House efforts to mount coordinated media responses to critics, the White House seems to have been shy about mounting a coordinating response to Samuels's criticisms.
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Consequently, while opponents of Obama's foreign policy have cited the article as bolstering their arguments, even critics of Samuels's story have tended to defend the honor of Goldberg or Rozen or the think tank world rather than Rhodes himself. |
The Echo Chamber is right on the Ben Rhodes Piece
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As for his remarks at that panel discussion about why the Iran deal was bad: Samuels explains that he was participating not as a neoconservative pundit, but as a journalist who had done extensive reporting on nuclear weapons. It’s true that, at one point in the discussion, he argued that the deal would unleash a potentially disastrous wave of nuclear proliferation — but he did so while assuming the hypothetical that this deal would undermine “existing nonenrichment standards.”
When it comes to the actual deal that was ultimately negotiated, Samuels says he is a tentative supporter. But he doesn't explain why he believed his alarmist hypothetical to be plausible in April 2015. At that time, Iran had publicly agreed to a framework that required the nation to restrict its uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent for 15 years (bomb-grade uranium requires enrichment of above 90 percent).
After disputing the characterization of his ideological leanings, Samuels only addresses one other critique of his work: that he branded the journalists Jeffrey Goldberg and Laura Rozen as “retailers” of the administration’s talking points, without offering any supporting evidence for that characterization.
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| The reason I chose to cite Rozen and Goldberg as important conduits for the administration’s foreign policy message is based on two kinds of evidence. One: This very idea was suggested to me in taped interviews with White House staff members who dealt with these journalists; in interviews with other journalists; and in interviews with other people who read their work. Two: My own reading of both Rozen and Goldberg for years had suggested to me that this was a fair thing to say about their work. |
Samuels’s case here would be strengthened by presenting specific quotes from these taped interviews, or, better, specific excerpts from Rozen and Goldberg’s reporting that betray an unmerited sympathy with the Obama administration’s narrative on a given subject.
Nonetheless, the great failing of Samuels’s profile was not that it contained a dig at two prominent journalists — though that is what Samuels would like you to believe:
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If I didn’t name any of those journalists, readers might fairly conclude that Rhodes was in fact terrible at his job — or that journalists, especially those who live in Washington, belong to a special category of person who must never be criticized, even gently.
And this is why, I think, my story ignited such a firestorm. It was a portrait of an honest, dedicated person with a great deal of power in Washington who happens to be deeply critical of the press — not out of cynicism or anger, but out of regret over the seemingly vanishing possibilities of free and open discourse. |
Whatever ignited the “firestorm” against Samuels’s piece, said firestorm was well deserved. If you peruse my initial critique of the profile, you’ll find many undisputed flaws in its argument. But since Samuels accuses his critics of failing to deal with his “text itself,” I’d like to examine a short paragraph of Samuels’s initial piece — one particularly dense with unsupported assertions. |
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