So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now?

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/comment/0,,1700146,00.html

So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now? President Jacques Chirac of
France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its
nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an
Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear. So now it seems
that it's the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus.
What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.

Yes, President Bush had some stern words for Iran in his state of the union
address this week. But the tone was very different from his state of the union
in 2002, soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he arbitrarily
hitched together Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an "axis of evil". Now he says
"the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons". The
world, note, not the United States. But how will the world prevent it? At the
moment the only serious answer coming from Washington is multilateral diplomacy,
preferably through the UN. Welcome to the Euroweenies club, Mr President!

To be sure, the White House insists that the president can never take the
military option off the table. But senior administration officials make it
entirely clear that Iran is not another Iraq, and military analysts agree that
there are no good options for strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, only bad or
worse ones. I had the chance last weekend, at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
to talk through those options with one of the leading American experts on the
military side of the relationship with Iran, Kenneth Pollack. Many people
suggest that the US might leave it to Israel to do the dirty work of setting
back Iran's nuclear programme with bombing raids. Pollack argues convincingly
that this would be extraordinarily difficult for Israel to do, even if it was
ready to.

Israel has few planes capable of operating effectively at that distance. There
are so many possible sites where the mullahs might be hiding their nuclear kit.
After the first few strikes you would have lost any element of surprise.
Thereafter you would have to take out Iranian air defences before continuing the
bombing - a major undertaking. And Iran could retaliate, not least by
encouraging Hizbullah to carry out terrorist reprisals against Israel. Since
Israeli commanders say what they really fear most from Iran is not the Tehran
government possessing a nuclear bomb (they have their own to deter it with) but
the unleashing of Hizbullah, these strikes could produce precisely the effect
they were intended to avoid.

None of this is to say that Israel wouldn't, in the end, do the deed if it felt
its own vital security was threatened. But militarily, only the US could do it
with any probability of a technical success (by which I mean setting back the
programme to produce nuclear weapons for a number of years). However, that
technical success would come at a huge price. Given the wide distribution of
potential nuclear sites, far beyond the well-known ones at Isfahan and Natanz,
it's almost certain there would be collateral damage: in plain English, the
killing of innocent civilians. This would produce a wave of patriotic solidarity
with the theocratic regime in Iran, even among those young Iranians who are
fiercely critical of the mullahs, and another tidal wave of reaction around the
world, especially among Muslims. Small wonder that Washington is not keen on it.

Four years ago the run-up to Iraq was like a game of American football - swift
and explosive. Over Iran we shall see a long, drawn-out game of chess. The board
meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that begins today will
be followed by another in early March, which will almost certainly agree to
report Iran to the UN security council. That is what was agreed in a useful
meeting between Britain, France, Germany, the US, Russia and China in London
earlier this week. Russian and Chinese officials have gone to Tehran to bring
home the message to the Iranian government. Jack Straw did the same in a meeting
with the Iranian foreign minister yesterday.

Even if it goes to the UN, there will probably be more elaborate moves before
sanctions are imposed. It's very unclear what sanctions China and Russia would
agree to. This Persian chess game is multidimensional and exemplifies the
reality of a multipolar world. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
denounces the assaults of "false superpowers", but the real point is that they
are multiple great powers, with diverse interests. Even if they agree sanctions,
those may not stop the Iranian regime going ahead, overtly or covertly, with its
nuclear programme. Fortunately, nuclear experts reckon that it will take from
three to eight years for Iran to reach the point at which it can decide whether
to go hell for leather towards the weaponisation of its nuclear capacity.

That timetable has a particular significance for US politics. If you wonder why
the Bush administration is being so mild and moderate, so
more-European-than-the-French, on this issue, a cynic would observe that they
know the crunch won't come on their watch. If you ask why both John McCain and
Hillary Clinton, two frontrunners to become the next president of the United
States, are being so hawkish on this issue, a cynic would observe that they know
the crunch probably will come on their watch, after 2009.

Meanwhile, we should avoid seeing Iran only through the prism of our attitudes
to the United States, as so many Europeans did with Iraq. The truth is that,
whatever Washington does or does not do, the world faces a serious problem of
nuclear proliferation, and Iran has become a leading test case. The head of the
IAEA, the Nobel peace-prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Davos: "The
present system for preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is at an end,
is bankrupt." The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is not adequate to the task
and is often honoured only in the breach. The most telling charge against
established nuclear powers such as the US and Britain is that of double
standards: why is there one rule for you and another for the rest? More acutely
still: why is there one rule for Iran but quite another for Israel and India? To
say "Oh, that's because they are responsible democracies" raises the question,
"Who decides which states are responsible democracies?" And anyway, Pakistan
isn't.

So whatever we do about Iran, what we need is a new international system for the
supervision and inspection of nuclear capacities in every country in the world.
It should be explicit, consistent and administered by the nearest thing we have
to a world arbiter, the United Nations. In order for it to be credible,
established nuclear powers such as Britain and the US will have to submit
themselves to the same regime of supervision and inspection as everyone else.
"The US will never agree to that!" you exclaim. Well, not under the present
leadership and in its current mood. But the American approach to Iran and this
week's state of the union address show how much even the Bush administration has
changed. In 2009 Washington could change some more. If you want a message of
hope in this dark scene, remember Churchill's remark that you can usually rely
on the United States to do the right thing - once it has exhausted all the
alternatives.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/comment/0,,1700146,00.html

Hey, come on you right-ard fuckwits, answer the man's question, who are the
cheese-eating surrender monkeys now?



Alan

"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."

Nemesis Peace Centre

http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/protector.html

Abuse of Women and Children

http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/

Nemesis News

http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/

Absolute Anarchy

http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/

.

Quantcast