Given The Track Record, I'd Scorn Them Too.

I think this is more the signs of desperation, rather than confidence.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad scorned U.N Security Council sanctions imposed against Iran, telling a crowd Tuesday that Iran had humiliated the United States in the past and would do so again.

Speaking in the southwestern provincial capital of Ahvaz, Ahmadinejad said the Security Council's resolution last month was invalid and had left the world body's reputation in tatters.

Actually, the UN's reputation has been in tatters for some time. What with the heinous sexual abuse by UN Peacekeepers in the Congo and the Oil-For-Food scam, to name the latest.

Ahmadinejad is facing some serious problems. He has an increasingly restless populace, especially the among the intelligentsia. The latest elections in Iran were a slap in the face with more moderates elected than had been foreseen. This erosion of Ahmadinejad's power base is also troubling to an aging theocratic council that is truly in control of Iran. His domestic influence is dribbling away. Slowly to be sure, but make no mistake, it is going away.

Ahmadinejad is also dealing with an energy issue. They are currently on a course that will basically rob them of their economic engine, oil exports. With rapidly rising internal energy demands, and an infrastructure that has not been updated since the Shah was deposed, Iran has painted itself into a corner. It desperately needs energy if it wants to improve (or even maintain) the standard of living most of it's citizens have come to expect.

On the face of it, nuclear power seems like a reasonable reaction to this crisis (perhaps the resolution of one issue can even help resolve the first). But, their willingness to sell weapons to external states (see Hezbollah and its recent war with Israel), and the concerns of other nations, specifically the US, UK, France (yes, France of all countries!) and Israel, make their statements regarding civilian application seem specious. Even the IAEA, forever reticent about making a stance one way or the other, has expressed "some concern". Everyone is terrified at the thought of some terrorist purchasing weapons-grade nuclear material.

I hope the UN sticks to its guns on this one. This, along with the North Korean issue, is an opportunity for the UN to show that it still has relevance.

I Hate The KKK As Well

That's not too far of a stretch, after all, I've already said I hate Nazis.

David Duke, the ex-Grand Wizard himself, is in Iran spewing hateful garbage from his pie hole.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference questioning the Holocaust came to an end Tuesday, but not before hearing former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke say that gas chambers were not used to kill Jews.

"The Zionists have used the Holocaust as a weapon to deny the rights of the Palestinians and cover up the crimes of Israel," Duke told a gathering of nearly 70 "researchers" in Tehran at Ahmadinejad's invitation.

What the fuck did he think those chambers were used for? Seriously, what else could they be used for? Rooms that seal hermetically. Pipes with fittings and valves for connecting to compresses gas tanks. Pipes that terminated in above hermetically sealed room. Of course, they were just there for... well, for killing millions of Jews!

God, I can't stand these kind of people. They have the same mentality as the cerebrally challenged 9/11 conspiracy kooks. It's really the same kind of paranoia operating here. Rather than imagining the government is this puppet master manipulating events for money and power, it's a world-wide cabal of Zionists (although these two groups of hidden masters seem to overlap at times). Rather than legitimizing the Jewish grievance against a pogrom on a scale never seen before in history, they seek to take it away and thus the primary rationale for Israel existing.

Now, I'm not going to get into the whole "is Israel legitimate" thing, because that's not really the issue. Well, OK, it is for this "conference", but only tangentially. The real issue here is these... meat sacks trying to erase the record of the systematic genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during the course of WWII.

I'm surprised and, at the same time, not surprised at David Duke's appearance at this carnival of ignorance. I am slightly surprised he's in Iran because for all his nauseating personal philosophy, he was a state legislator and I would expect some semblance of patriotism. But it appears his hatred has a stronger appetite. He's been a busy little beaver these last few years. After looking over that list of "tour dates" linked, the fact that he showed up in Iran is really no surprise.

You know, I've said I hate Nazis, and I hate the KKK, but really it's simpler than that.

I hate ignorance.

Color Me Shocked

But... but... he promised!

New traces of plutonium and enriched uranium — potential material for atomic warheads — have been found in a nuclear waste facility in Iran, a revelation that came Tuesday as the Iranian president boasted his country's nuclear fuel program will soon be completed.

The International Atomic Energy Agency report detailing the discovery also faulted Tehran for not cooperating with the U.N. watchdog's attempts to investigate other suspicious aspects of Iran's nuclear program.

I understand. I do. Iran's economy is so bad, Ahmadinejad is doing the Chicago Tapdance more to distract his own people than anything. He's pulling a quasi-Hitler here. Hell, he's even including antisemitism as a bonus. It's funny, while every rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth lefty is calling Bush the modern day equivalent of Hitler, we have one, bold as life, sitting in the Middle East. We can get into the irony of Iran (of the ancient Persian Empire) being the home of Aryans, later.

The only problem here is that Israel is not Czechoslovakia. While the rest of the world may replay history, bemoaning the fact that Iran is about to become a nuclear power, Israel will not sit on its ass and let things happen. They will do the same thing they did to Iraq. Any facility they suspect of weapons development will be pounded into dust. They can afford to do no less. Ahmadinejad has stated before his fervent wish to see Israel "wiped from the map".

Iranian nuclear officials say 54,000 centrifuges would produce enough enriched uranium to fuel a 1,000-megawatt reactor, such as the one being built by Russia that is near completion at the southern city of Bushehr. Experts have estimated Iran would need only 1,500 centrifuges to produce a nuclear weapon.

Tehran insists it is only seeking to generate low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel and not the highly enriched variety needed for weapons. It also denies it is building a heavy water research reactor at Arak in order to obtain plutonium for nuclear arms, asserting it only wants to produce radioactive isotopes for medical research and treatment.

I find it hard to believe that any society that still publicly flogs female fornicators needs, or even wants, cutting edge materials for medical research. They are a beligerant, aggressive culture. They have been mostly passive-aggressive, as evidenced by their clandestine arming of Hezbollah. But now they are on the verge of creating weapons that will allow them to act confidently and in a more overt manner.

I hope the UN has learned its lesson from North Korea. Harsh sanctions are needed to stop any weapons research. But thanks to blocking efforts from Russia and China, they will most likely emerge as watered-down and ineffectual.

Hey! I'm Insane, Too!

Sensing the world's attention focused on North Korea's Kim Jong Il, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has issued a warning to Europe, reminding us that Kim Jong Il is not the only rabidly crazy world leader.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has warned Europe that it may pay a heavy price for its support of Israel.

"You should believe that this regime (Israel) cannot last and has no more benefit to you. What benefit have you got in supporting this regime, except the hatred of the nations?" he said in nationally broadcast speech Friday.

"We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbors of the nations in this region," he said.

Does he really expect us to believe that Israel is the reason for this hatred? Or the hatred of the Middle East?

Please.

I think Steven Den Beste, back when he was writing on USS Clueless, exposed the real reason for the resentment and seemingly white hot fury aimed at the Western World. From his article written on 1 Aug 2002:

The problem is that Americans permit freedom of religion; Islam is tolerated and even celebrated here, along with many other religions. We certainly are making no important attempts to suppress it. But it doesn't seem to be dominating, and there's no sign that their attitudes are affecting us in any significant way. On the other hand, American ideas and attitudes are infiltrating their own societies and eating away at the foundation of Islamic practice. We offer things which are attractive to individuals, and they find them irresistible. Their young people want to wear blue-jeans. They want to listen to loud music. They like the idea of dating one another, just like young people do in the west. To reactionary Islamic zealots, it's not just that they don't seem to be spreading the faith, but that the faith is being eaten alive by a sinful attraction to our heathen ways. Islam is actually in retreat. It can't even be secure in its own nations, let alone try to take over ours.

The Q'uran also tells them that their nations should be powerful and important, and there was a time when it was true. The golden age of the Islamic empire was glorious. It also ended 600 years ago, and these days the reality is that the only reason that Saudi Arabia isn't a terribly impoverished third world nation is that it's sitting on reserves of oil. But among the Islamic nations, the only ones who have managed to succeed at anything other than selling natural resources have been those which have adopted western ways, western technology, western attitudes. The more devoutly Islamic a nation is, the more it seems to be a failure in all other ways. To be devout should mean being strong, but it seems to make them weak. It's almost as if the Q'uran was wrong – but the Q'uran cannot be wrong; it's the word of God.

So we (you and I) are a living, walking, talking heresy. We're not even trying to spread our culture to the Islamic nations; it just happens on its own because, quite frankly, they are not very fun places to live. Irrespective of whether a devout Islamic life might be good for the soul, it's boring and unpleasant for the body and mind. The people there prefer our lifestyle; they eagerly seek it out. We seem to have no interest at all in their culture, however, except as an intellectual curiosity. There's zero chance of American women adopting the abaya, for example.

In summary, we are an affront to their entire world-view. We are infidels, but worse than that we are prosperous and happy infidels with no desire to convert to the correct religion. And our prosperity is contagious. The hard-liners resent and fear this. The corruption, as they see it, of their culture is a deadly threat and they work tirelessly to eliminate its cause.

Us.

So when Iran says that our support of Isreal will cause a backlash, I say how can that be any worse than things stand now? Ahmadinejad's impetus is similar to Kim Jon Il's. He's simply being more subtle about it. His goal is to maneuver the situation so that the fear of the Middle East will soften or reduce the impact of any sanctions imposed by the UN over their nuclear program. North Korea was a wake-up call for the UN. It showed that a hard stance is needed at the outset, with tough sanctions that actually have teeth.

This is the last thing Iran wants or needs. After all this bluster and posturing, he stands to lose enormous face in the Middle East if the Western world manages to effectively castrate his nuclear program.

But this is exactly what we need to do. Ahmadinejad has shown that he is not the most... emotionally stable of world leaders. I truly fear what would happen if he manages to join the club of nuclear powers.

Do I think that Iran would bootstrap their program from energy production to weapons production?

Yes, I do. I also think that these weapons will end up in the hands of extremists. Iran has already shown it's willingness to arm terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah with large scale munitions and weapons.

It's time to make a stand.

They're Laughing.. *With* You...

From the Khaleej Times:

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana spoke on Thursday of “progress” in his talks with Iran’s main negotiator on a way out of the crisis over Teheran’s nuclear programme.

The discussions had begun in a secluded guest house near Berlin the previous day. Iranian envoy Ali Larijani, who spent several hours talking to Solana on Thursday, said all the topics had been discussed and there had been “some positive outcomes.”

Yeah, this time they waited until after Solana left the room before laughing uproariously.