Despite Obama’s promise in last week’s State of the Union address that he will veto any bill that heaps additional sanctions on Iran while the interim agreement is still in place, hawks in the House of Representatives are still pushing for it.
Indeed, a mixture of hawkish Republicans and Democrats in Congress are aligned with AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their belief that the interim deal reached with Iran in the P5+1 talks in Geneva is tantamount to appeasement and will inevitably lead to a nuclear-armed Iran.
The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin is criticizing the Obama administration for not wanting to preventively bomb Iran. Richard Grenell at Fox News argues the interim agreement is too favorable to Iran, “allowing the Islamic Republic to forego full and verified suspension before negotiations even begin.”
President Obama and his team caved further to the Iranians by agreeing to a deal that rewarded sanctions relief and other benefits without getting any actions from Iran first.
In trusting the Iranians to stop their secret enrichment activities and come clean to the IAEA inspectors at a later date, Obama shows his naivety.
I suppose I was the naive one, considering I actually believed such obviously false statements couldn’t possibly be published at FoxNews.com.
The argument that Iran got sanctions relief without any curbs on its nuclear program is so baseless as to be laughable. Jessica Tuchman Matthews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains:
Iran agreed to eliminate its existing stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium either by diluting it down to low enrichment or converting it to an oxide form that is not adaptable for further enrichment. Netanyahu had famously held up a cartoon poster of a bomb before the General Assembly with a red line drawn across it at the threshold level of 90 percent enriched uranium. The agreement takes Iran’s less enriched stockpile to zero.
The terms also provide that Iran can build no additional centrifuges except to replace broken ones. While existing centrifuges may continue to spin, the product must be converted to oxide so that Iran’s stock of low-enriched uranium does not grow. The agreement bans the testing or production of fuel and new components for Arak and requires Iran to turn over important design information that will help theIAEA safeguard the reactor there.
To strengthen the assurance that all this will happen, the agreement requires daily access for inspectors as well as downloads from cameras used for surveillance, including at the Fordow underground enrichment plant. To reduce the possibility that Iran could be running covert, hidden fuel cycles, it extends monitoring for the first time to uranium mines and mills and to centrifuge production and assembly facilities. These inspections are unprecedented in both frequency and extent.
And as to the claim that Iran is using negotiations to cheat and dash for a nuke…
To oppose the deal on this ground, one would have to be able to explain why Rouhani, if his intention were to cheat, would sign a deal that focuses the world’s attention on Iran’s nuclear behavior and imposes unprecedented inspections and monitoring. What would be the logic in that? Iran has inched forward successfully for years. Why invite severe retribution by making an explicit deal with the world’s major powers and then violating it?
Some good questions, that hawks at the Post and Fox News can’t seem to answer. Neither can they answer how imposing additional sanctions won’t put the U.S. back on the war path to Tehran. And if it’s war they want, they can’t seem to understand that bombing Iran’s enrichment facilities is the one surefire way to persuade every single Iranian that a nuclear weapon is their only viable deterrent.
Could someone please explain again why it's okay for Israel have nukes but not Iran?
The argument is that Iran is a terror sponsoring state while Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
israel is the one that keeps terrorising others..
iran supports the opressed
israeli is the opresser
Iran sponsors terror no more than we supported the predecessors of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan against the Soviets when they occupied that naiton. As far as Israel being a democracy, that is laughable. They are as democratic as South Africa was during the apartheid nation's rule over their "territories", where they expelled those not like them onto reservations. Oh they have the token good Muslims within their territory, but they are part of the Israeli's lower echelon caste system, reminiscent of India, with unequal rights that is contrary to democracy. How many leaders in the government are reflective of a good Western democracy's commitment to diversity and equal opportunity? None. Oh there are a few token Arab members of the Knesset but no one other than Jews in any of the ruling governments.
At the risk of misinterpreting what Master said, I thought he was saying that that is the "argument." I don't think his comment implied that it was his personal belief. Of course, I could be wrong.
Pfff. Iran has formal democracy, just like Israel. Israel is currently working with the USA and Saudi Arabia, the actual leading terror states of the world, to wage a proxy jihadist terrorist war of aggression against Syria, an Iranian ally, before moving on to Iran.
The white house stated in 2009 that Saudi Arabia is the world's biggest supporter of Sunni terrorism and the Taliban. That means al Qaeda and al Nusra. After saying that, the white house, in 2013 sent Saudi Arabia almost a billion dollars worth of cluster bombs and 60 billion dollars worth of other lethal weapons – the biggest weapons shipment in US history.
The USA is also complicit in killing over a million Iranians.
Iran supports Hezbollah, which formed in reaction to Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 82, to fight the invaders. Iran also supports Hezbollah, which formed to resist Israeli invasion and occupation of Palestine.
But if you side with aggressors, you have to lie and call the victims the aggressors. Lying is the only way to help your case.
meant: *Iran also supports Hamas
Well, it's not okay.
Israel–that criminal, racist Zionist entity–is the warmonger of the Middle East. Iran isn't.
Israel is a tool for US world domination. Iran is an obstacle to US world domination.
And Iran is not pursuing nukes. Saying they are is just a lie from US politicians like Bush, Obama, and Hillary Clinton, intended to create a pretext for attacking Iran.
As the imperialists of Britain openly stated, controlling Mid East resources is crucial for any country seeking "world domination". The term is from the mouths of the imperialists themselves. They know what they're doing.
I also confess to naivety. I keep thinking that the neocons and warmongers can't get any more delusional in their thinking, or more brazen in their transparent lies, yet somehow they keep surpassing their own achievements on an almost daily basis.
I, too, have been guilty of naivety. I never thought that 16 democrat senators would so blatantly undermine their party's leader by signing on to the Orwellian-named "Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act." It shows who really is in control of this declining empire.
Have to respectfully disagree with the general thrust, here.
An assumption seems to be that the USA's goal is to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. That's not the USA's goal. The USA knows Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons.
The USA's goal is to attack Iran and gain resource and strategic space control, which in turn gives more power to the USA. Period. It's the same goal as in 1953, and in all US interventions in the Middle East, and many elsewhere.
That's Obama's goal, too. This is painfully, painfully obvious.
US machinations are not confusing or stupid. It's people trying to create a pretext to attack Iran, and it's embarrassingly transparent. Both Bush and Obama have had to pretend all 16 US intelligence agencies, the UN, and Israeli intelligence have not repeatedly said that Iran is not pursuing nukes.
Why would Bush and Obama lie? Because their goal is not preventing Iran from achieving nukes that it's not trying to achieve. Their goal is to attack Iran.
Details: http://empireslayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-impe…
http://empireslayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-usa…
I'd suggest you read John Le Carre's book "The Brothers" , (John Foster and Allen Dulles). I knew that though Churchill's pleadings Eisenhower gave the go ahead to unseat Mossadeq in Operation Ajax, but I had no idea that Allen Dulles had connections with the Shah beforehand through a predecessor of Blackwater and Haliburton , the OCI.
We, the US, have a great deal of darkness behind us.
Good suggestion. That stuff is also of course ongoing right now and has been through US history and before the formation of the US, with the colonists.
Today, for example, Hillary Clinton promised US government backing to Chevron on the Afghan pipeline project, then pushed for a huge escalation of troops into Afghanistan: http://empireslayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/us-imper…
Rubin is crazy. She needs meds. I wonder if she ever reads the criticisms in the comments section of her blog posts. They have some interesting nicknames for her like "jenocide" and my favorite one is "harpy." Grenell wraps his warmongering in a predictable partisan cloak in order to get useful idiots to support his position. Does he believe what he writes are does he think his audience is filled with a bunch of morons?
Has anyone ever told Pakistan that nuclear weapons are a deterrent?
"Hawks"? – how about Zionist TRAITORS to America!
The "hawks" know very well that a final agreement hammered out between the 5+1 and Iran making Iran a "normal" NPT state will radically change US policies vs. Iran. No longer can Israel and its ally the House of Saud demand every six month or so that "something must be done to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear arsenal in a few weeks" because the "something" has already been done. The White House can call the President of Israel and the Head-Honcho of the House of Saud and demand proof that Iran has violated the agreement. No proof? Shut up and please no experts named "Spitball" who claim to have proof of Iran's violations in interviews with the German journal "Der Spiegel".
President Obama is doing groundbreaking work for future US presidents by trying to remove this particular blackmail by Israel and the House of Saud. Every US Senator and Representative should be thankful to him. Come to think of it, every US citizen ought to be thankful for what he is attempting to change and support this attempt.
I am and do although I want the President to demand that Mr. Kerry stops stirring the pot with his dumb remarks which are potentially just as destructive as the attempt of the Senators to derail the diplomacy.
Yes, "regime change in Iran" by military threats and economic strangulation from the outside will then be "off the table" but that liberates the people of Iran to do their own "regime change" without a combined Irael-US gun pointed at them all of the time.
If Obama didn't want war with Iran, why would he repeatedly sabotage his own "deals" with Iran, nakedly following a Brookings playbook for how to create a pretext to attack Iran, by trying to make them look uncooperative?
Why would he say Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, when it is not? Why not adamantly spread the truth, as confirmed by US, Israeli, and UN findings, that Iran is not pursuing nukes? Why lie, and repeatedly make terrorist threats against Iran, even in the SOTU?
Because Obama does want to attack Iran. He's just playing good cop to the republican bad cop right now. It's bad theater.
Obama has attacked, bombed, or invaded dozens of countries. He's surrounding Russia and China.
Obama's record in detail: http://empireslayer.blogspot.com/2013/11/obama-su…
If you think Obama is about peace and not imperialism… that's a good testament to the US corporate media bubble.
Other sources: http://empireslayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-impe…
The Zionist control this Government.
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