The Iran Thread

[Paradoxium]

I always figured they go for plutonium since it is less expensive and more powerful.

 

[Marx]

Ok.

The UN just voted to sanction them and the Iranians have chosen to further defy that order. It's kind of a big deal Darth.

 

[Darthphere]

The UN just voted to sanction them and the Iranians have chosen to further defy that order. It's kind of a big deal Darth.

The UN should never have sanctioned them. I get the arguments against them having this technology but I've always been in the camp of "If we have it, why shouldn't they have it too?" Sort of like that scene in Transformers where the Military guy tells the Australian chick to explain why the Koreans are mobilizing their forces and her response was Probably because we're doing the same thing.

 

[Hobgoblin]

BREAKING NEWS!

THE IRANIAN CABINET HAS VOTED TO APPROVE THE CONSTRUCTION OF 10 MORE URANIUM ENRICHMENT PLANTS.

This is getting better all the time.

 

[Marx]

WHITE HOUSE REACTS TO IRANIAN REPORT
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/11/29/white-house-reacts-to-iranian-nuclear-report/

 

[Kurosawa]

Yea sanction them, you might as well start a war. It's gonna unite the people in Iran. Kind of like all the death squads and drone bombing in Pakistan is pissing the **** out of them, and anti-American sentiment is really high there.

This is why we need to have as little as possible to do with the rest of the world. Everyone outside of England, Canada and Israel hates us and always will. We just need to cut ties as much as possible, tell the joke that is the UN to f off, close our borders, and if all these idiots want to kill each other, so be it. **** the world. There's nothing in the constitution that requires us to police the world.

 

[Venom'sDad]

Three of the four countries you name are in cahoots with each other in controlling the whole world. This is why the rest of the world hates the big three.

 

[Midnyte_Sun]

How ironic that the US thinks Iran isn't ready for nuclear power, yet 30 years ago they were supporting a multi-billion dollar nuclear power industry in Iran.

Kissinger once said, "..introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals"

 

[Kurosawa]

Three of the four countries you name are in cahoots with each other in controlling the whole world. This is why the rest of the world hates the big three.

And that's why the US should eliminate themselves and their money from those nations. Why we foot the bill for a world that will always hate us is beyond me.

 

[hippie_hunter]

And that's why the US should eliminate themselves and their money from those nations. Why we foot the bill for a world that will always hate us is beyond me.

It's not that they hate the United States, it's just that they hate the unnecessarily aggressive foreign policies of our government. I've met plenty of foreigners who like the United States but disagree with our government's policy.

With your logic Israel hates us as well because Obama has a 4% approval rating there. I would say that the only people who actually outright hate the United States, it's government, and culture are Islamic extremists.

 

[Kurosawa]

It's not that they hate the United States, it's just that they hate the unnecessarily aggressive foreign policies of our government. I've met plenty of foreigners who like the United States but disagree with our government's policy.

With your logic Israel hates us as well because Obama has a 4% approval rating there. I would say that the only people who actually outright hate the United States, it's government, and culture are Islamic extremists.

I feel almost everyone hates us to a degree.

 

[hippie_hunter]

I feel almost everyone hates us to a degree.

But it's not hatred of the United States really. They like our ideals of equality, justice, peace, etc. and our culture. It's just that they don't like our government being the ******* of the world.

 

[Marx]

BRITISH YACHT CREW HELD BY IRAN
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/11/30/iran.yacht.britons/index.html

 

[Paradoxium]

Iran is pretty good at making friends.

 

[omid17]

are they on a suicide mission? Just like those 3 hikers caught when all the ****ing protesting was going on there, i feel like some people are just asking for it

 

[Hobgoblin]

Sailing fail.

 

[Fresh Prince]

I feel almost everyone hates us to a degree.

Maybe cause the U.S. acts like they better then everybody.

 

[Midnyte_Sun]

And that's why the US should eliminate themselves and their money from those nations. Why we foot the bill for a world that will always hate us is beyond me.

Common wisdom persists in this situation. We don't have friends, only interests.

Just like someone would buy a cheeseburger from Mcdonalds prepared by a teenager who probably didn't wash his/her hands after leaving the restroom. We know teenagers don't have any place in preparing food for masses, yet we choose to ignore that because they're making us a cheap cheeseburger.

Look at Saudi Arabia, we knew that countries like Saudi Arabia were creating terrorists that helped destroy the towers on 9/11, yet we still did business with them because they could give us cheap oil.

As for Israel, (the main reason why we even would consider bombing or invading Iran) there is no economic interest, only geopolitical:

"From a strategic standpoint, Israel is vital to western interests because it impedes what the scholar Fouad Ajami calls the "Dream Palace of the Arabs." In essence, it stops both pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism espoused by individuals like Nasser, Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Bin-Laden. Israel is a literal and figurative bulwark against a cross continental Arab-Muslim empire. It inhibits pan-totalitarianism in the forms of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism." Bret Stephens (MEF)

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan showed signs of this exact Pan-Islamic empire, even citing old dubious religious texts that claimed a "Mahdi" or savior of Muslims would come from Transoxiana (Central Asia-Afghanistan) carrying a Black Banner (Taliban carried Black flags) and unite the Islamic world and help defeat the Anti-Christ, or Dajjal to Muslims.

 

[Midnyte_Sun]

Another good comparison with our double standards for China by Scaruffi.com:

(june 2009)

Why Iran and not China? The difference that money makes: the USA owes mainland China billions of dollars, while it has no relations with Iran. Therefore the USA is outraged when the Iranian regime steals and election and cracks down on protesters, but totally ignores the fact that the regime of mainland China didn't even allow people to vote and has been increasingly cracking down on protesters. Liu Xiaobo, one of China's best known dissidents (one of those who have not "disappeared") was jailed in 2008. He was one of the signers of "Charter 08", a document written by Chinese intellectuals to demand democracy in mainland China. While the protests go on in Tehran against the rigged Iranian elections, the USA media has hardly acknowledged that Liu has been convicted of the very same crimes that the Iranian regime is blaming on the Iranian protesters: "agitation activities, such as spreading of rumors and defaming of the government, aimed at subversion of the state". This is almost a paraphrase of what grand ayatollah Khomenei said in Iran about the protesters. Somehow it's ok if mainland China does it, but not ok if Iran does it.

Note of july 2009: When riots erupted in East Turkestan (a region controlled by mainland China and renamed Xinjiang), in which the Uighur population demanded freedom from the Chinese occupier, the government of mainland China blocked social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook, took down countless websites, shut down the Internet entirely in some cities, and disrupted cell phone service in order to erase any information about the violence (the killed a lot more people than the riots in Iran). However, not a single Western government complained about the repressive actions of the Chinese government.

--

Gotta love the double standards.

 

[Marx]

GIBBS THREATENS 'CONSEQUENCES' IF IRAN DOESN'T COMPLY WITH UN
http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmem...if-not-brought-to-un-requirements.php?ref=fpa

 

[Kelly]

Lmao, that just reads funny...

"Gibbs threatens 'consequences' if Iran doesn't complywith UN"...?????? Gibbs threatens...??????? lol

 

[Marx]

I couldn't figure out a better way to word it.

 

[Marx]

I just read an article from the AP that said Iran has taken over an oil well inside Iraq.

 

[Midnyte_Sun]

I just read an article from the AP that said Iran has taken over an oil well inside Iraq.

The Atlantic Has the Geo-political answer to that recent claim:

How Russia And China Got Those Iraqi Oil Fields

There's been much scratching of heads over how U.S. oil companies managed to win exactly 0% of the Iraqi field contracts recently up for bid. The contracts, based in Iraq's oil-heavy south, are extremely lucrative. The great American liberators were beat out primarily by China and Russia for the contracts. How did we lose the bids? Quite simply, we mistook the Iraqi oil fields as Iraqi. If we wanted them, we should have talked to Iran instead. The southern Iraqi oil fields, after all, belong to Tehran. From Robert Baer's 2008 book on Iran, The Devil We Know:

The city of Basra offers Iraq's only maritime access and its main oil export route. A half-million barrels of oil a day pass through Basra, heading to offshore oil terminals in the Gulf. Iraq's Shia-dominated south produced 1.9 million barrels a day, accounting for the bulk of the country's production. The south also possesses 71 percent of Iraq's proven oil reserves, and accounts for 95 percent of Iraq's government revenues. Basra is the beating heart of Iraq's economy.

Yet Basra and its surrounding area are not really part of Iraq anymore. Quietly, without firing a single shot, the Iranians have effectively annexed the entire south, fully one-third of Iraq. In Basra today, the preferred currency is the Iranian rial. The Iraqi police, the military, and at least one of its intelligence services answers not to Baghdad, but to the Iranian-backed political parties, SCIRI, Da'wa, and other Shia groups under Tehran's control. But it's not just the police; the same Iranian proxies run the universities, the hospitals, and the social welfare organizations. They exert more control over daily life in Basra than the central government does -- and clearly more than Britain or the United States.

Iran supplies Basra with refined fuel and nearly every other raw commodity that keeps the city alive. An Iranian-allied faction is in charge of Iraq's oil exports, siphoning off hundreds of thousands of barrels a day to support the faction and its sponsors in Iran. Iran takes a direct role in reviewing lists of foreign companies bidding on Iraq's mega oil fields in the south. In other words, you can't do business in southern Iraq without a green light from Tehran. And no one even bothers to hide Iran's role.

Iraq's Shia oil minister was quoted in the Iranian press as saying there was an agreement between Iran and Iraq to jointly invest in Iraq's oil fields.
Baer goes on with pages of evidence. For example, Iraqi Da'wa spent 25 years in "exile" in Iran until, in January 2005, it hopped across the border and promptly won 38 of Basra's 41 Parliamentary seats. As it turns out, Iran even recently occupied one of Iraq's fields. Tellingly, they did it with "10 to 11 Iranian troops," which doesn't exactly imply massive resistance from the Iraqis.

But this would be little more than speculation if nor for the fact that Russia and China walked away with the rights to the Iraqi fields. In September, revelations of Iran's accelerated nuclear program brought international rebuke, but the United Nations Security Council has failed to act on the massive multilateral sanctions required to really deter Iran. Why has it failed? Both China and Russia, which have veto power on the Security Council, have consistently signaled that they would block sanctions.

It was less than three months ago that Russia and China defended Iran from sanctions that could have crippled its economy. Now they've both beat out the world's largest private oil companies to secure wildly lucrative deals in the south of Iraq, a region where Iran appears to exercise strict economic and political influence. Unless we can find a way to get along with Iran, we can probably expect for the free market economies of the West to have less and less access to the world's most important resource.

--

http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/12/how_russia_and_china_got_those_iraqi_oil_fields.php


--

I just want to point out that Although Russia and China have been able to make inroads into Iraqi oil, one of Iraq's biggest oil contracts was taken by Western-aligned Shell and Petronas. The details can be read here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/11/iraq-oil-auction-shell

--

 

[Marx]

WHITE HOUSE AGAIN CONDEMNS NEWEST SITUATION IN IRAN
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/27/white-house-condemns-iran-situation/