Council on Foreign Relations: Questions We Dare Not Ask About Iran

[yurbud]

Last edited Thu Mar 15, 2012, 06:37 PM - Edit history (1)

The most surprising thing about this is that it comes from an establishment source like the CFR. They are usually purveyors of inside the Beltway talking points that rarely rise above the level of a Steven Segal movie.

First, if Iran’s regime was anti-Semitic by nature, then why has it not eliminated or “self-deported” the 30,000 Jews who live inside Iran? They are Iranian and Jewish, and proud of being both.

Second, Iran funds Hamas and is a self-declared champion of Palestinian peoples. How, then, can it attack Israel without harming the more than 1.5 million Arabs who live inside Israel? How can an Iranian nuclear warhead “eliminate” Israel without removing the populations of Gaza and the West Bank, too? Iran will destroy Palestine to save it?

Third, Iran’s Green Movement is not the West’s savior. Thanks to relentless threats against Iran, developing nuclear capability has become a symbol of Iranian national pride and defiance of the West. Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi is committed to maintaining the country’s nuclear program, saying “we have to have the technology.”

The ugly fact is that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is unstoppable. The consequences for regional weapons proliferation are severe, but Iran’s mullahs are not always “irrational actors,” as they’ve often been portrayed. Unlike Sunni Islam, Shia Muslims embrace ration and logic as key tenets of their creed, an inheritance from early Mutazalite thinking.

FULL TEXT

[GeorgeGist]

1. link please

I googled :

How can an Iranian nuclear warhead

and came up empty.

[yurbud]

2. done

[yurbud]

3. my comment after the article:

Posted by Professor Smartass
March 15, 2012 at 3:48 pm
I’m glad to see this common sense analysis, which is so sorely lacking in our public discourse on Iran, which is dominated by cartoonish fear-mongering on the level of a Steven Segal movie.

The debate here in the US is so embarrassing, that THE ONION made a more intelligent comment in “Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon” than most of the “experts” who appear on TV and in the press.

With the advent of the internet, and the ability of the public to fact check for themselves, and more importantly, read the press in other countries where they actually do their job and report underlying economic motives for struggles between nations means the days are numbered for the kind of vapid commentary that even the CFR spits out on a regular basis.

For example, most who follow international politics at all don’t believe that the US is primarily worried about Iran’s religious fundamentalism and support for terrorists since we ignore both in our ally Saudi Arabia.

It is more likely that Iran’s independence and negotiating in their own self-interest with international finance and the oil industry are what are aggravating elites in the US and Europe.

And as you correctly pointed out about this nuke issue, overthrowing the government and installing another won’t help if enough of the people in Iran see this as a matter of national pride.

Something similar happened in Iraq: Saddam would not deal with oil companies on the terms they dictated, but when we overthrew him and installed a parliament, they would not vote for a Hydrocarbon Law we tried to force on them that would have given 88% of their oil income to oil companies.

Even corrupt, puppet governments know there is a limit to how much they can screw their own people before they will storm the palace and hang their carcasses from the walls like Mussolini and his mistress.

Our financial elite seem to think that everyone in the world is eager to serve or cower before them because they have been surrounded their whole lives by those paid to do just that.

Those of you in place like CFR who have contact with the very wealthy, but also have jobs and some contact with the real world outside the gated compounds of the rich need to give them a reality check.

Most of the world does not begrudge them their wealth, we just want them to stop using it as a weapon to hunt the rest of us.