Iran

From Tomdispatch today, Michael Klare's "The Tripolar Chessboard, Putting Iran in Great Power Context" http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=92161

For months, the American press and policy-making elite have portrayed the nuclear crisis with Iran as a two-sided struggle between Washington and Tehran, with the European powers as well as Russia and China playing only supporting roles. Energy and geopolitical expert Michael Klare suggests in his latest piece for Tomdispatch that our media focus is far too narrow. "An informed reading of recent international diplomacy surrounding the Iranian crisis suggests," he writes, "that another equally fierce -- and undoubtedly more important -- struggle is also taking place: a tripolar contest between the United States, Russia, and China for domination of the greater Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea region and its mammoth energy reserves."

Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy Presents:
Right Against War with Iran

The speakers include:
Chuck Pena (Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy):
"Refocusing the War on Terrorism"

Ivan Eland (Independent Institute)
“The United States Might Have to Accept a Nuclear Iran.”

Phil Giraldi (former CIA officer, contributing editor, The American Conservative):
"Iran: Same Bad Intelligence, Same Catastrophic Results"

By Larisa Alexandrovna, http://www.rawstory.com

Current military and former intelligence officials remain concerned about a US-led strike on Iran, despite the recent appearance of diplomacy on the part of the US State Department and the offer of an incentives package to Iran.

Officials point to new developments, such as a recent meeting in Rome between an Iranian arms dealer and controversial neoconservative Michael Ledeen and the March creation of the Iranian directorate inside the Pentagon, as examples of recent events similar to the lead up with war in Iraq.

By the War and Law League
http://www.warandlaw.org/files/index.html

I. Iran renounces bomb and offers nuclear concessions, but Bush keeps threat of atomic attack ‘on the table’

A representative of Iran’s supreme leader has renounced nuclear weapons and offered extensive concessions in a document ignored by Bush and his subordinates, who seem hellbent to carry out war plans against Iran.

By Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.antiwar.com

John Bolton, a notorious neocon warmonger who could not be confirmed as America's ambassador to the UN by even the compliant and corrupt U.S. Senate, got the job as a recess appointment. He is using the platform to push America into war with Iran.

Bolton told the Financial Times (June 9) that the Bush Regime has no intention of reaching an agreement with Iran. Time is running out for diplomacy, Bolton told the Financial Times. Iran has a short time remaining in which it can give up its right under the nonproliferation treaty to enrich uranium for nuclear energy or be attacked. Bolton said that U.S. security guarantees for Iran "were not on the table."

By Gareth Porter
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=9128

Despite claims that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has
regained the diplomatic initiative from Iran with a conditional offer
to join multilateral talks with Tehran, the real story behind the
policy shift is that the administration has suffered a decisive defeat
of its effort to get international sanctions for possible military

Received from a soldier's mother-in-law:

"My son-in-law has had orders for a 7/27 deployment to Iraq for several months. He's with the 82nd airborne at Ft. Bragg. Today his orders for Iraq are "on hold" for 2 - 12 months and he was advised his Apache helicopter units are being held now for deployment to IRAN....Just wanted to alert you to this startling announcement that won't be seen on any evening news show."

By Associated Press

Vienna, Austria - Western countries at a 35-nation U.N. meeting pushed Tuesday for consensus on the need for Iran to freeze uranium enrichment, but diplomats said that most nonaligned countries were preparing to endorse Tehran's right to continue the work.

The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were divulging confidential information, said the 16 International Atomic Energy Agency board members from the Nonaligned Movement were likely to issue a joint statement at odds with Western efforts on enrichment.

By Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect

At the very heart of U.S. Middle East policy, from the war in Iraq to pressure for regime change in Iran and Syria to the spread of free-market democracy in the region, sits the 39-year-old daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Elizabeth "Liz" Cheney, appointed to her post in February 2005, has a tongue-twisting title: principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives. By all accounts, it is an enormously powerful post, and one for which she is uniquely unqualified.

How to dismantle an atomic crisis
http://www.enoughfear.org

Seymour Hersh writes an article in the New Yorker. President George W. Bush makes a statement to the press in Washington. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issues a letter from Tehran. But there is something missing from this debate: the voices of the people with the most to lose.

This is a campaign to bring the voices of Iranians and Americans into a discussion that is being dominated by extremists on both sides and bringing us closer to the unthinkable: nuclear war. Our leaders continue to rattle their sabers and spread fear, but we're ready to talk, and if they won't take that first step, we will take it for them. We've had enough. Enough posturing. Enough threats. Enough fear.

EMMETT, Idaho --A group of Idahoans who attribute their health problems to radioactive fallout from open-air nuclear tests in Nevada rallied to demand medical compensation and a stop to a massive non-nuclear explosion that is currently on hold.

About 80 Idaho downwinders gathered Sunday, including many who said they had lost family members to cancer caused by exposure to radiation from the fallout and some who said they were fighting cancer themselves.

Reid Presses to Keep Administration Honest on Iran, Unveils Intelligence Oversight Legislation at YearlyKos Convention

LAS VEGAS, June 10 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid today delivered the keynote address at the YearlyKos Convention in Las Vegas, announcing a new initiative to ensure the Bush Administration speaks honestly and accurately to the American people about the challenge Iran poses. With the Bush administration stepping up its public and private diplomacy with Iran, Reid announced that Democrats would take new steps to hold senior Bush administration officials accountable for their statements on Iran, just like they have fought to hold them accountable for their misleading statements about the Iraq war.

New pressures from the Third World are straining non-proliferation efforts.
By Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com

WASHINGTON - The world may be teetering on the edge of a worrisome new phase in the sixty-year-old age of atomic weapons.

North Korea now has the bomb, probably. Iran may seek nuclear devices of its own. India's stockpile of weapons-grade fissile material could soon grow larger - thanks to a controversial new treaty with the US.

Read and discuss.

By Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung, www.tompaine.com

Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung are senior research associates at the World Policy Institute’s Arms Trade Resource Center.

The game of nuclear diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran continues, with the ball squarely in the Iran’s court. Last week, the United States abruptly shifted tactics and began to engage directly with European-led negotiation efforts aimed at convincing Iran to limit or end its nuclear activity. This week U.S. and European officials revealed that the U.S. has even offered Iran nuclear technology. In what is being viewed as an upset for administration hawks, the U.S. promised that Iran will be allowed to continue its enrichment program, as long as it agrees to first suspend all activity, so that it can “prove”—presumably through IAEA inspections—that its intentions are entirely civilian.

Sankichi Toge: Hibakusha (A-bomb survivor)

Sankichi Toge was born in Japan in 1917. He started writing poems at the age of eighteen. He was twenty-four when the A-bomb was dropped. He died at age thirty-six, a victim of leukemia resulting from the A-bomb. His first hand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace and his realistic insight into the event made him the leading Hiroshima poet in Japan.

By U.S. Labor Against the War

In the face of mounting international isolation, eroding popular support and growing discontent even within the U.S. political and corporate elites, the Bush Administration has put the nation and the world on a collision course with Iran. This new diversionary effort to manufacture a crisis could well lead to another act of military aggression that will needlessly sacrifice thousands more innocent civilian lives in Iran, result in hundreds or thousands of additional deaths among U.S. military forces, and raises the risk of escalating into a war that could spread across the Middle East and beyond to a confrontation with Russia, China and other major powers.

By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press

VIENNA, Austria (AP) — In a major concession, the United States is prepared to provide Iran with some nuclear technology if it stops enriching uranium, diplomats said Tuesday.

The offer was part of a package of incentives presented to Tehran Tuesday by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, said the diplomats, who were familiar with the proposals.

UFPJ Talking Points 41
By Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies

** The Bush administration's "offer" to join direct talks with Iran reflects Washington's international isolation on the Iran issue; the offer itself is simultaneously very significant and entirely fake.

** The U.S. is still trying to ratchet up international pressure against Iran - proposing an "antimissile shield" for Europe, still threatening a return to the UN Security Council and calling for a "coalition" to impose economic sanctions - but the split between the U.S. and Europe is rising, and the Bush administration looks increasingly desperate.

It is absurd to demand that Tehran should have made concessions before sitting down with the Americans
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian

It is 50 years since the greatest misquotation of the cold war. At a Kremlin reception for western ambassadors in 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced: "We will bury you." Those four words were seized on by American hawks as proof of aggressive Soviet intent.

By SCOTT SONNER, ASSOCIATED PRESS

RENO, Nev. (AP) - Tribal leaders were among about 50 protesters who rallied Saturday against an experiment at the Nevada Test Site they fear will produce a massive explosion that will spread radioactivity across the West.

The protest is aimed at the federal government's proposed "Divine Strake" project, the detonation of 700 tons of explosives in an experiment designed to study ground motion and shock waves set off by bombs.

By Andrew Lichterman via DisarmamentActivist.org

Sunday, I was at the Nevada Test Site, speaking at a demonstration against Divine Strake, a high explosive test that will detonate 700 tons of high explosive to simulate the effects of a low-yield nuclear explosion. One of the main points of my talk there was that mainstream debate about U.S. weapons programs remains largely confined to how best to pursue military dominance in service of what really is a global empire. Whether either empire or the use of overwhelming violence to sustain it are acceptable remains well outside the realm of “reasonable” discussion.

By Ed Kociela, http://www.thespectrum.com

The talking heads on the news channels seemed stunned at the announcement that the United States has agreed to meet, face-to-face, with Iran over its nuclear program if it first agrees to put its development programs on the shelf.

What happened, quite simply, is somebody walked into the Oval Office, tapped the president on the shoulder and offered him the simple math: one plus zero equals a coalition of one.

By Warren Hoge, New York Times

United Nations - Hans Blix, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector, said today that American unwillingness to cooperate in international arms agreements was undermining the effectiveness of efforts to curb nuclear weapons.

Saying it was essential that Washington act to end the stagnation of arms limitation, Mr. Blix said: "If it takes the lead, the world is likely to follow. If it does not take the lead, there could be more nuclear tests and new nuclear arms races."

By Stephen Lendman

It may be a new month, but it's the same old Wall Street Journal trumpeting the latest US gambit designed to hide its real intentions toward Iran. Again it was in a front page feature story on June 1 headlined: "In Shift, U.S. Offers to Talk to Iran, Aiming to Bolster Allies' Cohesion." The WSJ is never up to explaining the real motive behind the latest ploy and instead falsely claims it's "a nod to European allies' desire to offer carrots as well as sticks to steer Iran away from its efforts to produce weapons-grade uranium." So to achieve that supposed end, the US has now said it will join with the European-led "negotiations" currently ongoing and actually talk to the Iranians. One has to be impressed with such professed generosity, which, in fact, is just more barely disguised US audacity with a heavy dose of mendacity.

The Spectrum, UT

When trust has been broken, restoring it can be an astronomical feat as Southern Utah residents and the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency have jointly discovered.

Anti-nuclear activists, Downwinders, the Winnemucca Indian Colony and Utah and Nevada congressional lawmakers diligently pressed the government to address health and safety concerns surrounding the detonation of the non-nuclear, 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb called Divine Strake.

By Dilip Hiro
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk

George Bush described Washington's decision to join the European Union troika - Britain, France and Germany - in its talks with Iran on the nuclear issue provided Tehran suspended its enrichment and reprocessing activities, as "robust diplomacy".

In reality Bush's move is more an example of spin rather than a grand diplomatic gesture.

For over a year the US has been actively involved in the EU Iran talks. It was at Washington's insistence that the EU troika reneged on its promise to include supply of a light water civilian nuclear power plant to Tehran in the package that it offered Iran last August. The Iranians were so angered by the reneging on this issue they concluded that the Europeans were negotiating in bad faith.

The Guardian, Letters

John Pilger notes that Diego Garcia is likely to be involved in any US attack on Iran (Out of Eden, G2, May 29). The point is worth expanding.

The US bases on Diego Garcia and in Fairford, Gloucestershire, are two of only four bases worldwide that possess the specialised servicing equipment needed by the B2 bombers that would play a key role in any such attack. The infamous July 2002 "Downing Street memo" concerning US war plans for Iraq noted that the US "saw basing in Diego Garcia" as "critical". And this March, B2 bombers were spotted at Fairford in what was likely an exercise to familiarise crews with the details of combat operations from a new base.

By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press

VIENNA, Austria - Six world powers agreed Thursday on a "significant" package of incentives to convince Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Becket said.

"I am pleased to say we have agreed (on) a set of far-reaching proposals," she said. "We believe they offer Iran the chance to reach a negotiated agreement based on cooperation."

Cosponsors: Conyers, Baldwin, McGovern, and Payne

HRES 846 IH
109th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. RES. 846
Requesting the President and directing the Secretary of State to provide to the House of Representatives certain documents in their possession relating to strategies and plans either designed to cause regime change in or for the use of military force against Iran.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES