Iran

Iran relief map








As I've been posting more frequently on the Chronicle blog as mentioned in the previous post, I've started to post political non-personal stuff there. Today, having to be home all day with the flooring crew has given me a chance to be online and browse around the sites I used to frequent.
And Iran is in the news. Bush's stupidity is too but what's new. I will refer you to two blogs written by intelligent and passionate guys. Their posts might be long, but then, when you want/need to know about issues, you need to read more than just the convenient quick blurb you see. You don't learn from headliners. You learn by reading, processing, thinking, and reading some more.

Please visit Kel at The Osterly Times: Podhoretz Vs Zakaria

And Jaime at The Heathlander: Losing the fight on Iran

...even the Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, has privately acknowledged that Iran poses no existential threat to Israel, with or without nuclear weapons. As military historian Martin van Creveld explains,

“Given the balance of forces, it cannot be argued that a nuclear Iran will threaten the United States. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fulminations to the contrary, the Islamic Republic will not even be a threat to Israel. The latter has long had what it needs to deter an Iranian attack.

Should deterrence fail, Jerusalem can quickly turn Tehran into a radioactive desert - a fact of which Iranians are fully aware.”

Ray McGovern on NIE's

Ray McGovern explains a little on NIE's, National Intelligence Estimates. McGovern, an ex-intelligence officer gone activist, has quite a few good insights:

The
NIE, which leaned so far forward to support the White House’s warnings of a
made-in-Iraq “mushroom cloud,” remains the negative example par excellence of
corrupted intelligence. The good news is that Tenet and his lackeys were
replaced by officers who, by all indications, take their job of speaking truth
to power seriously. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, Tom
Fingar, is a State Department professional not given to professionally selling
out. And his boss, John Negroponte, is too smart to end his government career by
following the example of his servile predecessors in conjuring up “intelligence”
to please the president—not even for a Presidential Medal of
Freedom. Unvarnished NIEs sent to the White House by the Negroponte/Fingar
team have not shied away from unwelcome conclusions undercutting administration
claims, and have gone over like proverbial lead balloons. An estimate on Iran
completed in early 2005, for example, concluded that the Iranians will not be
able to produce a nuclear weapon before “early to mid-next decade,” exposing
Cheney’s fanciful claims of more proximate danger. And an NIE produced in April
‘06 on global terrorism concluded that the invasion of Iraq led to a marked
increase in terrorism, belying administration claims that the invasion and
occupation had made us “safer.” Worse still from the administration’s point
of view, patriotic truth-tellers (aka leakers) inside the government apparently
decided that administration rhetoric on both of these key issues had
deliberately misled the American people, who were entitled to know the
truth. The two unwelcome estimates meant two strikes on Negroponte. Then
the White House learned of an impending strike-three—this one an NIE assessing
the future in Iraq and apparently casting doubt on the advisability of U.S.
escalation. In a classic Cheneyesque pre-emptive strike, the estimate was put on
hold; Negroponte was given a pink slip and assigned back to the State
Department. There are rumors that Fingar is clearing out his desk as
well.

Let's cross our collective fingers and hope no idiotic strike on Iran will go through.