When you write "backfire" you assume USA wants moderates in control in Iran. I think you could argue that from a more cynical perspective it is in US interest to encourage the hardliners.
As long as tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia remains high, USA is in a good position to sell lots of weapons and keep their influence in the region as the smaller countries find their military presence necessary to deter Iran.
As a bonus, should hardliners gain more influence in Iran, the US government can proclaim that they were right not to trust Iran in the first place, and should domestic politics make it desirable, they will find it easier to justify an attack.
Let me write a slightly different ending to this scenario:
With most communications broken or unreliable and intelligence getting more and more sparse the US leadership starts to panic. When reports reach them about Russian ships approaching US waters they assume it is in preparation for a nuclear strike and decide to launch a preemptive strike against both Russia and China. One hour later over one billion people are dead and billions more will die of disease and starvation over the coming years. THE END
Not that anything like the scenario above could happen except in the wet dreams of a Chinese general. Absolutely everything the Chinese do work perfectly and nothing the Americans do work at all. Wars just don't happen that way, plans always go wrong at the first contact with the enemy or sometimes before that.
When you say "the Israeli border"you don't really mean the border to Israel, do you? You mean the border between Syria and the part of Syria that is occupied by Israel. First Israel occupies part of Syria as a "buffer zone" and then they demand that Syrian military stay away from part of the remaining country as a buffer zone to protect their buffer zone.
The accusation that an overenthusiastic prosecutor went ahead on a fairly weak case is reasonable, but that is best handled by trying to get a speedy trial, not by wild accusations of CIA involvement or that he would have been put on a plane to Gitmo.
The Swedish government did cooperate with CIA on one occasion, but then they figured it would go below the radar, that no one would find out. This turned out to be wrong and it became a political scandal in Sweden. A public figure like Assange, forget it, it wasn't going to happen.
Alec, conspiracy theories like yours just don't hold water. There is no indication of any CIA involvement, if the charges had been intended as character assassination they could have been a lot less ambiguous. If the charges were made up, surely something better than "he intentionally put a hole in his condom" could have been used. Say accusing him of using "rape drugs".
I strongly doubt Assange would have ben convicted in any Swedish court, but by refusing to be heard he sure has made himself look guilty, again entirely by his own choice.
Should be "Sweden’s former Prime Minister" .The one who in one wikileaked message from the USA embassy was described as "A Medium-Sized Dog with Big Dog Attitude".
The problem here is that the Republicans don't mind if the government loses all credibility. They want to downsize, privatize and let the rich who can afford take care of themselves. They didn't mind sabotaging for Obama because in their minds that just proved how incompetent the government was to run things. The democrats may not want to go down that road.
In what way is this different from Iran being sentenced to
pay $10.5 billion for the attack against WTC just for finding the process so ludicrous that they didn't bother to show up in court: link to bloomberg.com
Or to pay $813 million for the Beirut bombing: link to yourmiddleeast.com
Or Libya being blackmailed to pay compensation for the Lockerbie bombing despite no evidence the Libyan government was behind it? Or US courts fining foreign companies doing business abroad on the flimsiest of connection to USA?
What about the scenario where Trump acts so erratic that the military step in to remove him as a security threat. They will, of course, hand power over to civilian authorities quickly, but it will set a dangerous precedent to have the military as open "protectors" or democracy.
John, search on "Mountaintop removal mining". There's plenty of information to find if you look, but as you say, mainstream media haven't given it much space so not that many outside, or maybe even inside, USA are aware of the extent.
What makes you think "Congress, the Supreme Court, and the American people can make an example of him or her" this time, when all the torturers so far have gotten away with it?
While those guys are gone away from home, what about some native Americans occupying their ranches pointing out that it was their land? Seems fair enough.
The notable part is that the Swedish police sends two men and they all laugh at it afterwards. What would the American police have done given a similar call?
Esta, Hamas won the latest Palestinian election. While they certainly have their flaws, their rule in Gaza is no occupation. I might also remind you that Israel was just as militant against the Palestinians before Hamas even existed, so Hamas can't be the main problem. Then there are faction within Hamas. After the election the more moderate, non-violent faction seemed to gain strength, but when Israel and the West refused to accept the result of the election that hope was crushed.
Getting rid of Hamas while keeping the Israeli occupation would only give room for even more militant organisations like Islamic Jihad and maybe even ISIS. To defuse the situation it's the Israeli occupation of Palestine that needs to be removed. Israel as the stronger part has a choice, the Palestinians don't.
Annexing the West Bank isn't enough. Israel can't handle that many Palestinian citizens while remaining a Jewish state. To annex the West Bank they have to drive out most of the Palstinians as well and this isn't really politically possible today like it was in 1947.
"The result would not be a surge of support for a peace process, but a poorer, more frightened and parochial Israeli society that inflicts a harsher regime of oppression against ‘fifth column’ Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians."
But that's the point! Not creating a poorer Israel, but convincing the more sensible Israelis that if they continue as they have done this is what is going to happen. That ending the ocupation is the only way to avoid that slope to disaster. At the moment the ockupation can go on because it doesn't really cost Israel much, it's simpler just to let the fanatics continue building settlements than to provoke a conflict with them. One day Israel has to choose anyway, BDS only speeds up the process.
To be a bit cynical, what Laron suggest is that the international community can't do anything to force Israel to back down, because they hold " ‘fifth column’ Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians" as hostages that will be punished.
pabelmont, you may be right that in reality even a nuclear country attacked by USA wouldn't use their nukes, but there is no way the US government can be sure about that in advance. They will have to take the loss of several cities into account as price for the war, and that makes it a lot less attractive.
Assuming USA already have boots on the ground in the hostile country, a nuclear retaliation without killing their own soldiers might be difficult too.
It was a "lease" imposed on Cuba during the US occupation in the Spanish-American war. For all practical purposes it's an occupation even if USA tries to hand over a symbolic amount to keep the charade of a "lease" up. That Cuba has limited means of getting rid of the US forces doesn't change this.
Odd that you don't mention Sweden that has had an almost fossil fuel free electricity production for many years now. It's nuclear, hydro, biofuels and recently expanding wind power.
And that is assuming Iran doesn't manage to get their hands on a nuclear bomb and decide to strike back. Americans are too complacent about the countries they attack never being able to strike back. Sooner or later that assumption will fail.
I understood what Cole meant, but words have meaning. If you think bombing isn't really war then it's a lot easier to start bombing (and act surprised and outraged if the other country strikes back).
"...is that a scenario of regular air strikes on Iran without slipping into war isn’t plausible politically. "
Do you realize how insane that sounds? How is regular bombing of a country not war? Imagine what it would be called if Iran bombed USA in the same way.
Supposedly the Dimona reactor is in pretty bad shape, and an accident there seems like a more likely threat to Israel than the Iranian nuclear program.
The rockets may not be quite as indiscriminate as often described: link to haaretz.com
"The defense establishment is concerned that Hamas has been able to identify when senior officials and IDF officers are visiting Israeli communities in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip.
On several recent occasions, the organization has fired rockets and mortar shells at kibbutzim in the area exactly when they were being visited by high-ranking officials."
It's been interesting following the reactions on the editorials of major Swedish newspapers summarized here: link to omni.se
The reaction is split, with a slight dominance of positive reactions. The most extreme negative response was from Per Gudmundson on the Right wing Svenska Dagbladet who wrote that "To recognize Palestine now would be to reward destructivity. The Palestinians have just conducted a war of aggression against Israel".
Lieberman defends Israel to a Swedish audience in the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter today: link to dn.se
Nothing really new there as far as I can see. I guess people who support Israel are impressed, the rest not so much.
"Grasping, indictive and petty policy always produces tragedies for those who pursue it."
It would be nice if the world worked like that, but unfortunately it isn't fair. Often it only produce tragedies for the victims of the policy. USA is a good example of how ethnic cleansing and genocide can work with only minimal repercussions for the aggressors.
When you talk about Clinton's missile strikes, shouldn't you mention the other target too? That Clinton had Sudan's largest pharmaceutical factory bombed. That's what should have gotten him impeached and thrown in jail, and it also shows that bombs as anti-terrorist weapons is a very blunt tool with lots of collateral damage.
Juan, I understand you referred to the American constitution and the right it gives, or is supposed to give, US citizens, but that doesn't apply to anyone else. Try to look it from the perspective of a foreigner, though. The claim you make that it is more serious for your government to kill or spy on citizens than on foreigners may look good from the inside, but it is downright scary seen from the outside. It is especially scary given US history of war and dirty tricks around the globe.
"That one of the six is a US citizen or resident is especially troubling"
Why? Would you say the same if it had been a Russian agency trying to discredit Americans? To me it seems a lot more natural that a government has the right to act against its own citizens than that it takes the right to act on a global scale.
Climate change is not going to make the world uninhabitable or in itself drive humanity extinct. Earth has survived a lot more than that just fine, with just a minor mass extinction or two. Humans like rats and cockroaches are able to survive in most climates and should, as a species, do just fine even if more specialized species go extinct, although possibly in somewhat smaller numbers. Conflict for who those survivors are going to be may, on the other hand, be quite unpleasant, and if it involves larger uses of nuclear or bacteriological weapons might well kill us off.
Going to other planets isn't impossible, just very complex and time consuming. If our civilization manages to survive long enough it seems quite plausible to me that we will send ships to them with either people in some kind of suspended animation, or, more likely, just fertilized eggs or even DNA-code, and machines that upon arrival raise a population.
Juan is quite right that this is not going to happen unless we learn to take care of our own planet first, though. I do hope we try to build some more self-reliant space colonies, as that will really hammer in how complex it is to create and support an ecosystem when you don't have it for free like on Earth.
I once spoke to a Swedish officer who were supposed to promote the Swedish part of the anti-piracy activity, and I asked him if the Swedish military also did something against the poaching that started the whole thing when they were down there. He just looked at me like he didn't have any idea what I was talking about. Depressing!
Juan Cole, I do know that 19,75% is not (in any practical sense at least) bomb grade, nor did I claim it was. Let me quote wikipedia:
"Under the United States Atoms for Peace program it was equipped with 5-megawatt pool-type nuclear research reactor, named the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), which became operational in 1967 fueled by highly enriched uranium.
After the Iranian Revolution the United States cut off the supply of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel for the TRR, which forced the reactor to be shut down for a number of years. In 1987–88 Iran signed agreements with Argentina's National Atomic Energy Commission to convert the TRR from highly enriched uranium fuel to 19.75% low-enriched uranium, and to supply the low-enriched uranium to Iran."
Cheryl, is that modification really possible? When US delivered the reactor to Iran (during the Shah) it ran on weapons grade uranium. After the revolution Iran got help from Argentina to convert it to use 20% uranium instead. Modifying it again to run on 3,5% uranium seems to be very far from the original design.
" Iran should be willing to let them go anywhere, even military bases. "
Do you think any other country would be that cooperative with military espionage? UN inspections lost their credibility when they were used for espionage in Iraq.
Your analogy to Saddam Hussein is strange. There is no defense when your opponent is willing to lie through their teeth and have the media power to make their version stick, at least for a while. I doubt anything Saddam Hussein said or did could have changed the US war machine.
"But is it equally true that Russian refusal to allow an explicit UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria for using heavy military weapons against civilian non-combatants (which is how the protests were turned into a civil war) poses dangers to the credibility of the United Nations."
Since UN has never had any such credibility it can't be damaged. It was clear from the start that the permanent members could prevent any too hard criticism of themselves or their friends. USA has done the same countless time with respect to Israel.
RD Sultan, promising to do something isn't the same as doing it. I suppose he might hand over some CW and claim it was all, but how can anyone be sure? It's not as if you can send inspection teams all over the country with a civil war raging. Then the next time CW:s are used Assad can blame the rebels since the government side now doesn't have any...
Assange has no reason to fear extradition from Sweden to USA. If Britain didn't extradite him, Sweden certainly won't, Assange is far too well known. The Swedish government might do it, in fact did it once, if it thought it could be done without anyone noticing, but the case of Sweden letting CIA render two people to Egypt caused such a scandal when it became public that's it's unlikely to be repeated.
As for the sexual assault charges, the case doesn't seem very strong, but the prosecutor understandably isn't happy about a celebrity being able to just flee the country without even being heard.
"Ironically, tear gas cannot be used in warfare because of the convention against chemical weapons,"
Say "shouldn't be used". We know USA used it in Laos during the Vietnam war, for example. (Unless it was nerve gas as originally claimed in the infamous Time/CNN story, which was later retracted as it might just have been tear gas). Should anyone think use of tear gas was non-lethal and humanitarian, the goal was to disable the enemy so US forces could go in and shoot everyone in sight, mainly civilians.
Bill, I hope you don't really think "illegal" has anything to do with the outcome. USA has done a lot worse. How legal was it, for example, to invade Panama to get rid of their former employee Manuel Noriega, then imprisoning him after a very shady trial? How legal was it to shoot down an Iranian passenger plane over Iranian territory? How legal was it to bomb the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan?
USA is just a bigger bully, that's all, and based on how USA had acted in Iran before there is no reason to think it would have treated Iran any better without the embassy occupation.
If USA wants Assange so much, and has such good relations with Britain, why didn't they just ask for his extradition from there? Why involve Sweden at all?
The case against Assange in Sweden is kind of weak, but surely the police has a right to at least questing him regarding the allegations? My suspicion is that the case will be dropped at that point, which would surely be ironic given all the furor.
Earlier lots of Iraqis fled from the fighting there into Syria. What has happened to them? Have they returned, moved to other countries, or are they now stuck in another civil war?
Juan Cole, what you see as impressive I, as a non-American, see as downright scary. Obama talks about the cost to USA, in lives and dollars, but he never mentions the consequences for Iran, he never mentions international laws against wars of aggression. This is an empire speaking, an empire that thinks it has the right to attack other countries when convenient, and the only thing stopping it from war against Iran is the cost. Weaker countries find themselves target of US missile strikes.
What about the ideas that Amiri's behavior is erratic, not because he works for CIA or the Iranian government but because he is an erratic person who came up with some ideas of his own?
Releasing al-Megrahi was rather convenient for Britain too, as it got out of an embarrassing appeal giving more publicity to the dirty tricks used by the prosecution. As far as I can tell he was convicted on very shaky grounds. There may be secret evidence that Libya was behind the bombing, but the publically available evidence is weak.
Somehow I associate to that disturbing dancing scene in Reservoir Dogs. This wasn't as explicit, but it's still dancing to show off your power over a helpless victim: link to youtube.com
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When you write "backfire" you assume USA wants moderates in control in Iran. I think you could argue that from a more cynical perspective it is in US interest to encourage the hardliners.
As long as tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia remains high, USA is in a good position to sell lots of weapons and keep their influence in the region as the smaller countries find their military presence necessary to deter Iran.
As a bonus, should hardliners gain more influence in Iran, the US government can proclaim that they were right not to trust Iran in the first place, and should domestic politics make it desirable, they will find it easier to justify an attack.
Let me write a slightly different ending to this scenario:
With most communications broken or unreliable and intelligence getting more and more sparse the US leadership starts to panic. When reports reach them about Russian ships approaching US waters they assume it is in preparation for a nuclear strike and decide to launch a preemptive strike against both Russia and China. One hour later over one billion people are dead and billions more will die of disease and starvation over the coming years. THE END
Not that anything like the scenario above could happen except in the wet dreams of a Chinese general. Absolutely everything the Chinese do work perfectly and nothing the Americans do work at all. Wars just don't happen that way, plans always go wrong at the first contact with the enemy or sometimes before that.
When you say "the Israeli border"you don't really mean the border to Israel, do you? You mean the border between Syria and the part of Syria that is occupied by Israel. First Israel occupies part of Syria as a "buffer zone" and then they demand that Syrian military stay away from part of the remaining country as a buffer zone to protect their buffer zone.
If this goes to nuclear war "long haul" may be the least of our worries.
The partitioning started 1967 with Israel grabbing a large chunk of Syria.
The accusation that an overenthusiastic prosecutor went ahead on a fairly weak case is reasonable, but that is best handled by trying to get a speedy trial, not by wild accusations of CIA involvement or that he would have been put on a plane to Gitmo.
The Swedish government did cooperate with CIA on one occasion, but then they figured it would go below the radar, that no one would find out. This turned out to be wrong and it became a political scandal in Sweden. A public figure like Assange, forget it, it wasn't going to happen.
Alec, conspiracy theories like yours just don't hold water. There is no indication of any CIA involvement, if the charges had been intended as character assassination they could have been a lot less ambiguous. If the charges were made up, surely something better than "he intentionally put a hole in his condom" could have been used. Say accusing him of using "rape drugs".
I strongly doubt Assange would have ben convicted in any Swedish court, but by refusing to be heard he sure has made himself look guilty, again entirely by his own choice.
I wish people would stop saying Assange is being detained. He isn't. It's entirely his own choice to avoid justice by hiding in an embassy.
Should be "Sweden’s former Prime Minister" .The one who in one wikileaked message from the USA embassy was described as "A Medium-Sized Dog with Big Dog Attitude".
Some people might even want to include the cost for the Vietnamese, but that may be too radical...
The problem here is that the Republicans don't mind if the government loses all credibility. They want to downsize, privatize and let the rich who can afford take care of themselves. They didn't mind sabotaging for Obama because in their minds that just proved how incompetent the government was to run things. The democrats may not want to go down that road.
What about only letting native Americans vote? Then you don't have to worry exactly how many generations ago your ancestors moved to USA.
In what way is this different from Iran being sentenced to
pay $10.5 billion for the attack against WTC just for finding the process so ludicrous that they didn't bother to show up in court:
link to bloomberg.com
Or to pay $813 million for the Beirut bombing:
link to yourmiddleeast.com
Or Libya being blackmailed to pay compensation for the Lockerbie bombing despite no evidence the Libyan government was behind it? Or US courts fining foreign companies doing business abroad on the flimsiest of connection to USA?
Peres was also a key player in the Suez crisis, conspiring with Britain and France to attack Egypt. Not exactly a man of peace.
What about the scenario where Trump acts so erratic that the military step in to remove him as a security threat. They will, of course, hand power over to civilian authorities quickly, but it will set a dangerous precedent to have the military as open "protectors" or democracy.
If Britain cared about war crimes it could start by prosecuting Blair and his cronies.
Maybe Erdogan thinks he will need more kids as cannon fodder for an eternal war against the kurds?
The rule seems to be that you should never have any assets in USA for fear of getting them confiscated.
John, search on "Mountaintop removal mining". There's plenty of information to find if you look, but as you say, mainstream media haven't given it much space so not that many outside, or maybe even inside, USA are aware of the extent.
What makes you think "Congress, the Supreme Court, and the American people can make an example of him or her" this time, when all the torturers so far have gotten away with it?
But do they dare threaten to expel USA for exactly the same reason?
While those guys are gone away from home, what about some native Americans occupying their ranches pointing out that it was their land? Seems fair enough.
The notable part is that the Swedish police sends two men and they all laugh at it afterwards. What would the American police have done given a similar call?
Esta, Hamas won the latest Palestinian election. While they certainly have their flaws, their rule in Gaza is no occupation. I might also remind you that Israel was just as militant against the Palestinians before Hamas even existed, so Hamas can't be the main problem. Then there are faction within Hamas. After the election the more moderate, non-violent faction seemed to gain strength, but when Israel and the West refused to accept the result of the election that hope was crushed.
Getting rid of Hamas while keeping the Israeli occupation would only give room for even more militant organisations like Islamic Jihad and maybe even ISIS. To defuse the situation it's the Israeli occupation of Palestine that needs to be removed. Israel as the stronger part has a choice, the Palestinians don't.
Annexing the West Bank isn't enough. Israel can't handle that many Palestinian citizens while remaining a Jewish state. To annex the West Bank they have to drive out most of the Palstinians as well and this isn't really politically possible today like it was in 1947.
"The result would not be a surge of support for a peace process, but a poorer, more frightened and parochial Israeli society that inflicts a harsher regime of oppression against ‘fifth column’ Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians."
But that's the point! Not creating a poorer Israel, but convincing the more sensible Israelis that if they continue as they have done this is what is going to happen. That ending the ocupation is the only way to avoid that slope to disaster. At the moment the ockupation can go on because it doesn't really cost Israel much, it's simpler just to let the fanatics continue building settlements than to provoke a conflict with them. One day Israel has to choose anyway, BDS only speeds up the process.
To be a bit cynical, what Laron suggest is that the international community can't do anything to force Israel to back down, because they hold " ‘fifth column’ Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians" as hostages that will be punished.
pabelmont, you may be right that in reality even a nuclear country attacked by USA wouldn't use their nukes, but there is no way the US government can be sure about that in advance. They will have to take the loss of several cities into account as price for the war, and that makes it a lot less attractive.
Assuming USA already have boots on the ground in the hostile country, a nuclear retaliation without killing their own soldiers might be difficult too.
It was a "lease" imposed on Cuba during the US occupation in the Spanish-American war. For all practical purposes it's an occupation even if USA tries to hand over a symbolic amount to keep the charade of a "lease" up. That Cuba has limited means of getting rid of the US forces doesn't change this.
What about Guantanamo Bat Naval Base, which is for all practical purposes a US occupation of Cuban soil?
Odd that you don't mention Sweden that has had an almost fossil fuel free electricity production for many years now. It's nuclear, hydro, biofuels and recently expanding wind power.
And that is assuming Iran doesn't manage to get their hands on a nuclear bomb and decide to strike back. Americans are too complacent about the countries they attack never being able to strike back. Sooner or later that assumption will fail.
What I don't understand is what is really new. Israeli parties have rejected a Palestinian state for a long time:
link to electronicintifada.net
I understood what Cole meant, but words have meaning. If you think bombing isn't really war then it's a lot easier to start bombing (and act surprised and outraged if the other country strikes back).
"...is that a scenario of regular air strikes on Iran without slipping into war isn’t plausible politically. "
Do you realize how insane that sounds? How is regular bombing of a country not war? Imagine what it would be called if Iran bombed USA in the same way.
Supposedly the Dimona reactor is in pretty bad shape, and an accident there seems like a more likely threat to Israel than the Iranian nuclear program.
The rockets may not be quite as indiscriminate as often described:
link to haaretz.com
"The defense establishment is concerned that Hamas has been able to identify when senior officials and IDF officers are visiting Israeli communities in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip.
On several recent occasions, the organization has fired rockets and mortar shells at kibbutzim in the area exactly when they were being visited by high-ranking officials."
Sounds like the Soviet union to me. They liked converting churches to museums etc too.
So basically the GOP voters are the people who cried when the Death Star was destroyed?
Bill, maybe they misunderstood the term "foreign minister" and expected him to leave the country 🙂
It's been interesting following the reactions on the editorials of major Swedish newspapers summarized here:
link to omni.se
The reaction is split, with a slight dominance of positive reactions. The most extreme negative response was from Per Gudmundson on the Right wing Svenska Dagbladet who wrote that "To recognize Palestine now would be to reward destructivity. The Palestinians have just conducted a war of aggression against Israel".
An English version of the same article was added:
link to dn.se
Lieberman defends Israel to a Swedish audience in the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter today:
link to dn.se
Nothing really new there as far as I can see. I guess people who support Israel are impressed, the rest not so much.
This is a statement of intent by a minority government. To become official it has to pass through parliament, and it's not certain that will happen.
How certain are you really that Gaddafi was behind the bomb over Lockerbie? The publicly available evidence seems pretty weak IMHO.
"Grasping, indictive and petty policy always produces tragedies for those who pursue it."
It would be nice if the world worked like that, but unfortunately it isn't fair. Often it only produce tragedies for the victims of the policy. USA is a good example of how ethnic cleansing and genocide can work with only minimal repercussions for the aggressors.
Kewrry thinks Swowden should "man up" and return to USA for trial. I think Kerry should "“man up" and join the ICC for a possible trial.
When you talk about Clinton's missile strikes, shouldn't you mention the other target too? That Clinton had Sudan's largest pharmaceutical factory bombed. That's what should have gotten him impeached and thrown in jail, and it also shows that bombs as anti-terrorist weapons is a very blunt tool with lots of collateral damage.
Juan, I understand you referred to the American constitution and the right it gives, or is supposed to give, US citizens, but that doesn't apply to anyone else. Try to look it from the perspective of a foreigner, though. The claim you make that it is more serious for your government to kill or spy on citizens than on foreigners may look good from the inside, but it is downright scary seen from the outside. It is especially scary given US history of war and dirty tricks around the globe.
"That one of the six is a US citizen or resident is especially troubling"
Why? Would you say the same if it had been a Russian agency trying to discredit Americans? To me it seems a lot more natural that a government has the right to act against its own citizens than that it takes the right to act on a global scale.
Climate change is not going to make the world uninhabitable or in itself drive humanity extinct. Earth has survived a lot more than that just fine, with just a minor mass extinction or two. Humans like rats and cockroaches are able to survive in most climates and should, as a species, do just fine even if more specialized species go extinct, although possibly in somewhat smaller numbers. Conflict for who those survivors are going to be may, on the other hand, be quite unpleasant, and if it involves larger uses of nuclear or bacteriological weapons might well kill us off.
Going to other planets isn't impossible, just very complex and time consuming. If our civilization manages to survive long enough it seems quite plausible to me that we will send ships to them with either people in some kind of suspended animation, or, more likely, just fertilized eggs or even DNA-code, and machines that upon arrival raise a population.
Juan is quite right that this is not going to happen unless we learn to take care of our own planet first, though. I do hope we try to build some more self-reliant space colonies, as that will really hammer in how complex it is to create and support an ecosystem when you don't have it for free like on Earth.
I once spoke to a Swedish officer who were supposed to promote the Swedish part of the anti-piracy activity, and I asked him if the Swedish military also did something against the poaching that started the whole thing when they were down there. He just looked at me like he didn't have any idea what I was talking about. Depressing!
Juan Cole, I do know that 19,75% is not (in any practical sense at least) bomb grade, nor did I claim it was. Let me quote wikipedia:
"Under the United States Atoms for Peace program it was equipped with 5-megawatt pool-type nuclear research reactor, named the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), which became operational in 1967 fueled by highly enriched uranium.
After the Iranian Revolution the United States cut off the supply of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel for the TRR, which forced the reactor to be shut down for a number of years. In 1987–88 Iran signed agreements with Argentina's National Atomic Energy Commission to convert the TRR from highly enriched uranium fuel to 19.75% low-enriched uranium, and to supply the low-enriched uranium to Iran."
Cheryl, is that modification really possible? When US delivered the reactor to Iran (during the Shah) it ran on weapons grade uranium. After the revolution Iran got help from Argentina to convert it to use 20% uranium instead. Modifying it again to run on 3,5% uranium seems to be very far from the original design.
" Iran should be willing to let them go anywhere, even military bases. "
Do you think any other country would be that cooperative with military espionage? UN inspections lost their credibility when they were used for espionage in Iraq.
Your analogy to Saddam Hussein is strange. There is no defense when your opponent is willing to lie through their teeth and have the media power to make their version stick, at least for a while. I doubt anything Saddam Hussein said or did could have changed the US war machine.
"But is it equally true that Russian refusal to allow an explicit UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria for using heavy military weapons against civilian non-combatants (which is how the protests were turned into a civil war) poses dangers to the credibility of the United Nations."
Since UN has never had any such credibility it can't be damaged. It was clear from the start that the permanent members could prevent any too hard criticism of themselves or their friends. USA has done the same countless time with respect to Israel.
RD Sultan, promising to do something isn't the same as doing it. I suppose he might hand over some CW and claim it was all, but how can anyone be sure? It's not as if you can send inspection teams all over the country with a civil war raging. Then the next time CW:s are used Assad can blame the rebels since the government side now doesn't have any...
" After 2001, the US sent captured al-Qaeda operatives to Syria to be tortured by that country’s secret police."
And at least one totally innocent person, Maher Arar.
Assange has no reason to fear extradition from Sweden to USA. If Britain didn't extradite him, Sweden certainly won't, Assange is far too well known. The Swedish government might do it, in fact did it once, if it thought it could be done without anyone noticing, but the case of Sweden letting CIA render two people to Egypt caused such a scandal when it became public that's it's unlikely to be repeated.
As for the sexual assault charges, the case doesn't seem very strong, but the prosecutor understandably isn't happy about a celebrity being able to just flee the country without even being heard.
"Ironically, tear gas cannot be used in warfare because of the convention against chemical weapons,"
Say "shouldn't be used". We know USA used it in Laos during the Vietnam war, for example. (Unless it was nerve gas as originally claimed in the infamous Time/CNN story, which was later retracted as it might just have been tear gas). Should anyone think use of tear gas was non-lethal and humanitarian, the goal was to disable the enemy so US forces could go in and shoot everyone in sight, mainly civilians.
Bill, I hope you don't really think "illegal" has anything to do with the outcome. USA has done a lot worse. How legal was it, for example, to invade Panama to get rid of their former employee Manuel Noriega, then imprisoning him after a very shady trial? How legal was it to shoot down an Iranian passenger plane over Iranian territory? How legal was it to bomb the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan?
USA is just a bigger bully, that's all, and based on how USA had acted in Iran before there is no reason to think it would have treated Iran any better without the embassy occupation.
If USA wants Assange so much, and has such good relations with Britain, why didn't they just ask for his extradition from there? Why involve Sweden at all?
The case against Assange in Sweden is kind of weak, but surely the police has a right to at least questing him regarding the allegations? My suspicion is that the case will be dropped at that point, which would surely be ironic given all the furor.
Earlier lots of Iraqis fled from the fighting there into Syria. What has happened to them? Have they returned, moved to other countries, or are they now stuck in another civil war?
Juan Cole, what you see as impressive I, as a non-American, see as downright scary. Obama talks about the cost to USA, in lives and dollars, but he never mentions the consequences for Iran, he never mentions international laws against wars of aggression. This is an empire speaking, an empire that thinks it has the right to attack other countries when convenient, and the only thing stopping it from war against Iran is the cost. Weaker countries find themselves target of US missile strikes.
Quentin, oddly enough the resolution establishing Israel, resolution 181, was passed by the General Assembly, not the Security Council.
As for Obama, from his record so far he doesn't have the backbone to go against any significant interest group like AIPAC.
Where do the American soldiers withdraw to when they are, as has happened, killed by fellow American soldiers in America?
As long as the Americans want Israel to bomb Iran and the Israeli want USA to do it we are reasonably safe.
What about the ideas that Amiri's behavior is erratic, not because he works for CIA or the Iranian government but because he is an erratic person who came up with some ideas of his own?
Releasing al-Megrahi was rather convenient for Britain too, as it got out of an embarrassing appeal giving more publicity to the dirty tricks used by the prosecution. As far as I can tell he was convicted on very shaky grounds. There may be secret evidence that Libya was behind the bombing, but the publically available evidence is weak.
Somehow I associate to that disturbing dancing scene in Reservoir Dogs. This wasn't as explicit, but it's still dancing to show off your power over a helpless victim:
link to youtube.com
"And, don’t worry, the template will improve as I move away from this generic look."
There is nothing wrong with a simple, generic look on a blog. It is the content that matters, the rest is just fluff. Don't overdo your design.