Iranian Alert -- May 10, 2004 [EST]-- IRAN LIVE THREAD -- "Americans for Regime Change in Iran"

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House Calls For Stopping Iran's Nukes By All Means

May 10, 2004
Middle East Newsline
MENL

WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives has called on the United States and the rest of the international community to stop Iran's nuclear weapons programs by any means.

House members said the resolution was meant to pave the way for a more aggressive U.S. stance toward Iran's secret development of nuclear weapons. They said this could include additional sanctions on nuclear suppliers to Iran as well as military options.

The nonbinding House resolution, passed 376-3, was said to have endorsed the Bush administration's doctrine of preventive war in the case of Iran's nuclear weapons. The resolution called on the United States and other members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to "use all appropriate means to deter, dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, said similar wording was used by the Bush administration to justify its decision to launch war against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Kucinich voted against the resolution.

http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/may/05_10_2.html

Expressing the concern of Congress over Iran's development of the means to produce nuclear weapons. (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c108:1:./temp/~c108okPEbr::

Be sure to read the declarations made at the end of the resolution! It calls on European Governments and other governments to cease all development activity with regard to Oil Industry and other investment areas..

108th CONGRESS

2d Session

H. CON. RES. 398

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Expressing the concern of Congress over Iran's development of the means to produce nuclear weapons.

HCON 398 EH

108th CONGRESS

2d Session

H. CON. RES. 398

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Whereas the United States has for years attempted to alert the international community to Iran's covert nuclear activities in support of an intention to develop a nuclear weapon, contrary to its obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT);

Whereas Iran's covert activities to develop the means to produce nuclear weapons are finally beginning to be revealed to the international community;

Whereas Iran did not declare to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the existence of the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant and the production-scale Fuel Enrichment Facility under construction at Natanz until February 2003, after the existence of the plant and facility was revealed by an opposition group;

Whereas it is estimated that the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon every year-and-a-half to two years;

Whereas it is estimated that the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Facility could, when completed, produce enough highly enriched uranium for as many as 25-30 nuclear weapons per year;

Whereas in his report of June 6, 2003, the Director-General of the IAEA stated that Iran had failed to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA to report all nuclear material imported into Iran --specifically, the importation of uranium hexafluoride from China in 1991--the processing and use of that material, and the facilities involved in the use and processing of the material;

Whereas the IAEA Board of Governors urged Iran in June 2003 to promptly rectify its failures to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement, not to introduce nuclear material into the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, and to cooperate fully with the Agency in resolving questions about its nuclear activities;

Whereas the IAEA Director General reported to the Board of Governors in August 2003 that, after further investigation, Iran failed to disclose additional nuclear activities as required by its Safeguards Agreement and continued to fail to resolve questions about its undeclared uranium enrichment activities;

Whereas the IAEA Board of Governors on September 12, 2003, called on Iran to suspend all further uranium enrichment and any plutonium reprocessing activities, disclose all its nuclear activities, and cooperate fully with the Agency, and to sign, ratify, and fully implement the Additional Protocol between Iran and the IAEA for the application of safeguards to strengthen investigation of all nuclear activities within Iran , and requested all third countries to cooperate closely and fully with the Agency in resolving questions about Iran's nuclear program;

Whereas IAEA inspectors and officials continued to confront Iran with discrepancies in its explanations of its nuclear activities;

Whereas on October 9, 2003, in a letter to the Director General of the IAEA, Iran finally confirmed that it had conducted research on uranium conversion processes at the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Centre and the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre, despite its earlier denials of such activities;

Whereas on October 21, 2003, Iran and the Foreign Ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement in which Iran indicated that it had decided to suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as defined by the IAEA;

Whereas this statement also foresaw the provision of unspecified nuclear technical cooperation once Iran had satisfied international concerns about its nuclear development program;

Whereas in a subsequent letter on October 23, 2003, Iran further admitted that it had tested uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Kalaye Electric Company between 1998 and 2002 using its previously undeclared imported uranium hexafluoride from China;

Whereas in that same letter, Iran admitted that it had a laser uranium enrichment program, in which it used 30 kg of uranium not previously declared to the IAEA, another violation of its Safeguards Agreement;

Whereas in that same letter, Iran also admitted that it had irradiated 7 kg of uranium dioxide targets and reprocessed them to extract plutonium, another violation of its legal obligation to disclose such activities under its Safeguards Agreement;

Whereas Iran told the IAEA on November 10, 2003, that it would sign and ratify the Additional Protocol agreement for further safeguards, and would act in accordance with the Additional Protocol pending its full entry-into-force;

Whereas on November 10, 2003, Iran further informed the IAEA Director General that it had decided to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities in Iran , not to produce feed material for enrichment processes, and not to import enrichment related items;

Whereas the IAEA, through its investigative and forensic activities in Iran and elsewhere, has uncovered and confronted Iran in numerous lies about its nuclear activities;

Whereas the Director General of the IAEA reported to the IAEA Board of Governors on November 10, 2003, that Iran has concealed many aspects of its nuclear activities from the IAEA, which constituted breaches of its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement;

Whereas despite Iran's subsequent pledge to, once again, fully disclose all of its nuclear activities to the IAEA, the Director General of the IAEA, in his report of February 24, 2004, found that Iran continued to engage in deception regarding its nuclear activities, including failing to disclose a more sophisticated enrichment program using more advanced enrichment centrifuge technology imported from foreign sources, and noncredible explanations involving experiments to create a highly toxic isotope of polonium that is useful as a neutron initiator in nuclear weapons and a firm indicator of a nuclear weapons development program;

Whereas these deceptions by Iran were continuing violations of Iran's Safeguards Agreement and of Iran's previous assurances to the IAEA and the international community for full transparency;

Whereas despite Iran's commitment to the IAEA and to France, Germany, and the United Kingdom that it would suspend uranium enrichment activities, it has repeatedly emphasized that this suspension is temporary and continued to import and manufacture uranium enrichment centrifuge parts and equipment, allowing it to resume and expand its uranium enrichment activities whenever it chooses;

Whereas the statements on February 25, 2004, of Hassan Rowhani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran , that Iran was not required to reveal to the IAEA its research into more sophisticated `P2' uranium enrichment centrifuges, and that Iran has other projects which it has no intention of declaring to the IAEA, are contrary to--

(1) Iran's commitment to the IAEA in a letter on October 16, 2003, by the Vice President of Iran and President of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization that Iran would present a `full picture of its nuclear activities' and `full transparency';

(2) its commitment to the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany of October 21, 2003, to full transparency and to resolve all outstanding issues; and

(3) its statement to the IAEA's Board of Governors of September 12, 2003, of its commitment to full transparency and to `leave no stone unturned' to assure the IAEA of its peaceful objectives;

Whereas it is abundantly clear that Iran remains committed to a nuclear weapons program;

Whereas Libya received enrichment equipment and technology, and a nuclear weapons design, from the same nuclear black market that Iran has used, raising the question of whether Iran , as well, received a nuclear weapon design that it has refused to reveal to international inspectors;

Whereas the Ministry of the Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation has recently announced that it will soon conclude an agreement to supply Iran with enriched nuclear fuel for the Bushehr nuclear power reactor, ignoring the need to sanction Iran to persuade it to cease its nuclear weapons development program;

Whereas the IAEA Board of Governors' resolution of March 13, 2004, which was adopted unanimously, noted with `serious concern that the declarations made by Iran in October 2003 did not amount to the complete and final picture of Iran's past and present nuclear programme considered essential by the Board's November 2003 resolution', and also noted that the Agency has discovered that Iran had hidden more advanced centrifuge associated research, manufacturing, and testing activities; two mass spectrometers used in the laser enrichment program; and designs for hot cells to handle highly radioactive materials;

Whereas the same resolution also noted `with equal concern that Iran has not resolved all questions regarding the development of its enrichment technology to its current extent, and that a number of other questions remain unresolved, including the sources of all HEU contamination in Iran ; the location, extent and nature of work undertaken on the basis of the advanced centrifuge design; the nature, extent, and purpose of activities involving the planned heavy-water reactor; and evidence to support claims regarding the purpose of polonium-210 experiments';

Whereas Hassan Rowhani on March 13, 2004, declared that IAEA inspections would be indefinitely suspended as a protest against the IAEA Board of Governors' resolution of March 13, 2004, and while Iran subsequently agreed to readmit inspectors by March 27, 2004, this suspension calls into serious question Iran's commitment to full transparency about its nuclear activities; and

Whereas Iran's pattern of deception and concealment in dealing with the IAEA, the Foreign Ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and the international community, its receipt from other countries of the means to enrich uranium, and its repeated breaches of its IAEA Safeguards Agreement, indicate that Iran has also violated its legal obligation under article II of the NPT not to acquire or seek assistance in acquiring nuclear weapons: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That the Congress--
(1) condemns in the strongest possible terms Iran's continuing deceptions and falsehoods to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the international community about its nuclear programs and activities;

(2) calls upon all State Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), including the United States, to use all appropriate means to deter, dissuade, and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, including ending all nuclear and other cooperation with Iran (including the provision of dual use items), until Iran fully implements the Additional Protocol between Iran and the IAEA for the application of safeguards;

(3) declares that Iran , through its many breaches for 18 years of its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA, has forfeited the right to be trusted with development of a nuclear fuel cycle, especially with uranium conversion and enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technology, equipment, and facilities;

(4) declares that the recent revelations of Iran's nondisclosure of additional enrichment and nuclear-weapons-applicable research activities, as detailed in the report of February 24, 2004, by the Director General of the IAEA, along with the statement by the Government of Iran that it will not disclose other research programs, constitute ample evidence of Iran's continuing policy of noncompliance with the letter and spirit of its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement and the Additional Protocol;

(5) demands that Iran immediately and permanently cease all efforts to acquire nuclear fuel cycle capabilities and to immediately, unconditionally, and permanently cease all nuclear enrichment activities, including manufacturing and importing related equipment;

(6) demands that Iran honor its stated commitments and legal obligations to grant the IAEA inspectors full unrestricted access and cooperate fully with the investigation of its nuclear activities and demonstrate a new openness and honesty about all its nuclear programs;

(7) contrasts Iran's behavior with Libya's, in which Libya's decision to renounce and dismantle its nuclear weapons program and to provide full, complete, and transparent disclosure of all its nuclear activities has enabled the IAEA to rapidly understand and verify with high confidence the extent and scope of Libya's program;

(8) calls upon the members of the European Union not to resume discussions with Iran on multilateral trade agreements until such time that Iran has verifiably and permanently ceased all nuclear weapons development activity, including a permanent cessation of uranium conversion and enrichment and plutonium reprocessing activities;

(9) further calls upon the European Union to consider what further measures, including sanctions, may be necessary to persuade Iran to fulfill its obligations and commitments to the IAEA;

(10) in light of ongoing revelations of the noncompliance of the Government of Iran regarding its obligations under the NPT and pledges to the IAEA, and in light of the consequent and ongoing questions and concerns of the IAEA, the United States, and the international community regarding Iran's military nuclear activities--

(A) urges Japan to ensure that Japanese commercial entities not proceed with the development of Iran's Azadegan oil field;

(B) urges France and Malaysia to ensure that French and Malaysian commercial entities not proceed with their agreement for further cooperation in expanding Iran's liquid natural gas production field;

(C) calls on all countries to intercede with their commercial entities to ensure that these entities refrain from or cease all investment and investment-related activities that support Iran's energy industry; and

(D) calls on the President to enforce the provisions of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 to discourage foreign commercial entities from investing in Iran's energy industry;

(11) deplores any effort by any country to provide any nuclear power-related assistance whatsoever to Iran , and calls upon Russia to suspend nuclear cooperation with Iran and not conclude a nuclear fuel supply agreement for the Bushehr reactor, until the conditions of paragraph (8) are satisfied;

(12) calls upon the governments of the countries whose nationals and corporations are implicated in assisting Iranian nuclear activities, especially Pakistan, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany, to fully investigate such assistance, to grant the IAEA full access to individuals, sites, and all information related to the investigations, and to immediately review and rectify their export control laws, regulations, and practices in order to prevent further assistance to countries seeking to develop nuclear programs that could support the development of nuclear weapons;

(13) urges the IAEA Board of Governors, at its earliest opportunity, to report to the United Nations Security Council that Iran is in noncompliance with its agreements with the IAEA;

(14) urges the President of the United States to provide whatever financial, material, or intelligence resources are necessary to the IAEA to enable it to fully investigate Iran's nuclear activities;

(15) urges the United Nations Security Council, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Zangger Committee, and other relevant international entities to declare that non-nuclear-weapon states under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), who commit violations of their safeguards agreements regarding uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing, or engage in activities which could support a military nuclear program, thereby forfeit their right under the NPT to engage in nuclear fuel-cycle activities;

(16) further urges the United Nations Security Council to consider measures necessary to support the inspection efforts by the IAEA and to prevent Iran from further engaging in clandestine nuclear activities; and

(17) urges the President to keep the Congress fully and currently informed concerning the matters addressed in this resolution.

Passed the House of Representatives May 6, 2004.

Attest:

Clerk.

House Calls For Stopping Iran's Nukes By All Means

May 10, 2004
Middle East Newsline
MENL

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1132536/posts?page=3#3

Army Keeps Tehran's New Airport Shut

May 09, 2004
AFP
Siavosh Ghazi

TEHRAN -- The Iranian army kept Tehran's new airport shut Sunday in a row over a foreign operator that saw the military take control of Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA) after a maiden commercial flight.

The facility will remain closed until the armed forces have "seen the cancellation of the contract with the Turkish company and a new contract (signed) with Iranian firms", said armed forces commander General Alireza Afshar.

He told the Mehr news agency that Saturday's shutdown was enforced for "security reasons" and had the approval of President Mohammad Khatami.

Just hours after an Emirates plane touched down from Dubai, army vehicles were deployed on the tarmac to prevent any further landings, although the aircraft owned by the southern Gulf emirate was allowed to return home.

An Iran Air plane, however, was diverted to Isfahan, some 500 kilometres (300 miles) away. The aircraft was even warned of anti-aircraft fire and two warplanes were scrambled to escort it to Isfahan, according to the reformist daily Shargh.

Soldiers and elite Revolutionary Guard troops sealed off the airport, according to various sources.

Tepe-Akfen-Vie (TAV), an Austrian-Turkish consortium, has been at the centre of problems which delayed the opening of IKIA, which is designed to replace the congested and ageing Mehrabad International closer to Tehran.

The army has launched a campaign in the pages of Iran's conservative newspapers against the awarding of the licence to TAV, which it says has business interests in Israel, arch-foe of the Islamic republic.

"The granting of contracts to Turkish and Emirati companies poses a security problem at the airport," said Afshar.

He said the armed forces had delivered a report to the Supreme National Security Council, which is headed by Hassan Rowhani, who had in turn asked the transport ministry to scrap the contract with TAV.

The civil defence authority, meanwhile, was on the defensive Sunday.

There has never been a contract with the Turkish company. It was simply a memorandum and we have asked the company's agents to leave the airport," civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh told AFP.

"For the time being, the situation is normal at the airport, which is in the hands of civil aviation. But there will be no flight until the problem has been fully sorted out," he said.

IKIA, in the middle of the desert about 45 kilometres (30 miles) south of the capital, was built at a cost of 350 million dollars with a capacity of 2.5 million international and four million domestic passengers a year.

Officials had said the airport -- a project first launched three decades ago -- would eventually be able to handle 40 million passengers a year as a regional transport hub.

Khatami inaugurated the airport's Terminal 1 with much fanfare on February 1 -- the 25th anniversary of the return from exile of the founder of the Islamic republic, the late Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

It was due to start handling international flights at the end of March but has been hit by a series of delays.

Air transport is one of several areas of confrontation between thadvocates of a liberal economy, especially inside Khatami's pro-reform government, and their opponents.

http://www.iranmania.com/news/090504g.asp

Our enemies know the weaknesses of the Western mind.

Our Weird Way of War
Our enemies know us only too well.

By Victor Davis Hanson
May 07, 2004, 8:32 a.m.
National Review Online

The wars since September 11 have once more revealed the superiority of Western arms. Afghanistan may be 7,000 miles away, cold, high, and full of clans, warlords, and assorted folk who have historically enjoyed killing foreign interlopers for blood sport, but somehow a few thousand Americans went over there and took out the invincible Taliban in eight weeks. What followed was not perfect, but Mr. Karzai offers far more hope than a Mullah Omar — and without half of Afghanistan ceded over as a terrorist sanctuary to plan another September 11.

Iraq is a long way away too. And the neighborhood is especially eerie, with the likes of hostile Syria and Iran, and triangulators on the dole like Jordan and Egypt. When we become ecstatic because a megalomaniac like Khaddafi says he's taken a hiatus from nuclear acquisition, you can see that good news over there is rare indeed.

Add in the hysteria over oil, three decades of the Baathist nightmare, and a potpourri of terrorists, and the idea of even getting near Iraq seems crazy. Yet we defeated Saddam in less than three weeks — in far less time than the 125- to 225-day conflict originally predicted by many Pentagon planners. True, the year-long reconstruction has often been depressing and bloody; but here we are a year later with some hope for a government better than Saddam set to take power. Success, remember, need not be defined as perfection, but simply by leaving things far better than they were.

Despite the tragedy of nearly 600 American combat dead, we did not see thousands of American fatalities, millions of refugees, burning oil wells, and the other assorted Dante-esque scenarios that were promised before the war. In other words, distance, climate, weather, the foul nature of the enemy — all those and more challenges were predictably trumped by the U.S. military, which cannot be defeated on the field of battle by any present force in existence.

Yet will we always see political successes follow from our military triumphs? Hardly — and for a variety of reasons. We are confronted with the paradox that our new military's short wars rarely inflict enough damage on the fabric of a country to establish a sense of general defeat — or the humiliation often necessary for a change of heart and acceptance of change. In the messy follow-ups to these brief and militarily precise wars, it is hard to muster patience and commitment from an American public plagued with attention-deficit problems and busy with better things to do than give fist-shaking Iraqis $87 billion.

Still, we must give proper credit to our enemies for our present problems in Iraq and indeed in the so-called war against terror in general. The fundamentalists and holdover fascists are as adroit off the conventional battlefield as they were incompetent on it. If Middle Eastern fanatics cannot field tens of thousands to meet the United States in battle, they can at least offer up a few hundred spooky assassins, car bombers, and suicide killers seeking to achieve through repulsion what they otherwise could not through arms.

Thus while hundreds of thousands of Saddam's soldiers ran — as Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians did from the Israelis in five wars — hundreds most certainly did not once the rules of war changed to the protocols of peace. Recently we were within hours of smashing the resistance in Fallujah once we accepted war anew. But when the mujahedeen, Gollum-like, decided to slither out in the open, then in terror scampered to safety, then remerged on all fours defiant and barking when we stopped firing, our forbearance and fear of global-televised condemnation handed them a victory they did not earn. In short, we should have listened to Sam and strangled the creep on the spot.

But our problems are not just with the paradoxes of the fourth-dimensional, asymmetric warfare that the United States has dealt with since the fighting in the Philippines and knew so well in Vietnam.

No, the challenge again is that bin Laden, the al Qaedists, the Baathist remnants, and the generic radical Islamicists of the Middle East have mastered the knowledge of the Western mind. Indeed they know us far better than we do ourselves. Three years ago, if one had dared to suggest that a few terrorists could bring down the Spanish government and send their legion scurrying out of Iraq, we would have thought it impossible.

Who would have imagined that Americans could go, in a few weeks, from the terror of seeing two skyscrapers topple to civil discord over the diet and clothing of war in Guantanamo, some of whom were released only to turn up to shoot at us again on the battlefields of Afghanistan? Our grandfathers would have dubbed Arafat a gangster, and al Sadr a psychopathic faker; many of us in our infinite capacity for fairness and non-judgementalism deemed the one a statesman and the other a holy man.

So our enemies realize that the struggle, lost on the battlefield, can yet be won with images and rhetoric offered up to alter the mentality and erode the will of an affluent, leisured and consensual West. They grasp that we are not so much worried about being convicted of being illiberal as having the charge even raised in the first place.

The one caveat they have learned? Do not provoke us too dramatically to bring on an open shooting war, in which the Arab Street hysteria, empty threats on spec, and silly fatwas nos. 1 through 1,000 mean nothing against the U.S. Marines and Cobra gunships. Instead, their modus operandi is to push all the way up to war — now provoking, now backing down, sometimes threatening, sometimes weeping — the key being to see the struggle in the long duration as a war of attrition, if you will, rather than a brief contest of annihilation.

These rules of the strategy of exhaustion are complex, and yet have been nearly mastered by the radicals of the Middle East. First, shock the sensibilities of a Western society into utter despair at facing primordial enemies from the Dark Ages. The decapitation of a Daniel Pearl; the probing of charred bodies with sticks, whether in Iran in 1980 or Fallujah in 2004; the promise of torturing Japanese hostages — all this is designed to make the Western suburbanite change channels and head to the patio, mumbling either, "How can we fight such barbarians" or — better yet — "Why would we wish to?"

If, on occasion, an exasperated and furious West sinks to the same level — renegade prisoner guards gratuitously humiliating or torturing naked Iraqi prisoners on tape — all the better, as proof that the elevated pretensions of Western decency and humanity are but a sham. A single violation of civility, a momentary lapse in humanism and in the new world of Western cultural relativism and moral equivalence, presto, the West loses its carefully carved-out moral high ground as it engages not merely in much needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves to outright cultural cannibalism.

For someone in a coffee-house in Brussels the idea that Bush apologizes for a dozen or so prison guards makes him the same as or worse than Saddam and his sons shooting prisoners for sport — moral equivalence lapped up by the state-controlled and censored Arab media that is largely responsible for the collective Middle East absence of rage over the exploding, decapitating, and incinerating of Western civilians in its midst.

Key here is our own acceptance of such moral asymmetries. Storming the Church of the Nativity is a misdemeanor in the Western press; shelling a minaret full of shooters is a felony. Blowing up Westerners in Saudi Arabia or Jordan is de rigueur; asking Muslims to take off their scarves while in French schools is a casus belli. If Afghanistan has roads, a benevolent man as president, and al Qaedists on the run, call it a failure because Mr. Karzai has not been able, FDR-like, to tour the countryside in a convertible limousine waving to crowds.

Institutionalized cowardice plays a role as well in this weird way of war: Call the few dozen dead in a West Bank town the wages of Jeningrad or the fire-fighting in Fallujah an atrocity, but don't utter a peep about the 80,000 dead in Chechnya or the flattening of Grozny. The Russians are not quite folk like the Israelis or Americans. They really don't care much if you hate them; they are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press them; they don't have too much money to shake down; they don't put you on cable news to yell at their citizenry; and you wouldn't really wish to emigrate there for a teaching fellowship anyway.

The moral of all this? The West can defeat the enemy on the battlefield, but in distant and much-caricatured wars on the dirty ground it can only win when it has leaders who can convince a fickle public into sacrificing, being ridiculed, and putting up with inevitable short-term disappointment that is the price of long-term security and stability — a sacrifice that in turn will never be acknowledged as such by the very people who are its beneficiaries both here and abroad.

How weird is our way of war! When we embrace Clintonian bombing — in Kosovo, Serbia, or in Iraq — and kill thousands, America sleeps: few of our guys killed, so who cares how many of theirs? Out of sight, out of mind. Yet when we take the trouble to sort out the messy moral calculus and go in on the ground shooting and getting shot, then suddenly the Left cries war crimes and worse — so strong is this Western disease of wishing to be perfect rather than merely good. Such is the self-induced burden for all those who would be gods rather than mere mortals.

What then are we to do when choices since September 11 have always been between bad and worse? We at least must have enough sense not to stand down and let Iraq become Lebanonized, Talibanized, or Iranicized, even though when all is said and done Americans will be blamed for bringing something better to the region. And yes, we need more democracy, not less, in Iraq and the surrounding Middle East in general.

We have to return to an audacious and entirely unpredictable combat mode; put on a happy, aw-shucks face while annihilating utterly the Baathist remnants and Sadr's killers; attribute this success to the new Iraqi government and its veneer of an army for its own 'miraculous' courage; ignore the incoming rounds of moral hypocrisy on Iraq from Europe (past French and German oil deals and arms sales), the Arab League (silence over Iraqi holocausts, cheating on sanctions), and the U.N. (Oil-for-Food debacle); explain to an exasperated American people why other people hate us for who we are rather than what we do; and apologize sincerely and forcefully once — not gratuitously and zillions of times — for the rare transgression.

Do all that and we can really complete this weird peace in Iraq.

http://nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200405070832.asp

Date Released: Thursday, May 06, 2004 Source: United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs

United Nations Workshop on the Use of Space Technology For Environmental Security, Disaster Rehabilitation And Sustainable Development

VIENNA, 6 May (UN Information Service) -- The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (OOSA), within the framework of the United Nations Programme on Space Applications, is organizing a five-day Regional Workshop on the Use of Space Technology for Environmental Security, Disaster Rehabilitation and Sustainable Development. The Workshop, which is being jointly organized with the Iranian Space Agency (ISA) on behalf of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, will be held in Tehran from 8 to 12 May 2004. The other co-organizers of the workshop are the Secretariat for the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Earth observation satellites and other space technologies provide significant and unique solutions in all areas of disaster management, including mitigation, preparedness and prevention, disaster relief and also disaster rehabilitation. Similarly, space-based solutions play an important role in environmental security, which is defined as the relative safety from environmental dangers, such as pollution and sea-level change, caused by natural or human processes due to ignorance, accident, mismanagement or design, and originating within or across national borders.

The objectives of this Workshop are to: (a) increase awareness about the potential benefits of using space technologies within the areas of environmental security, disaster management and sustainable development among managers and decision makers who deal with such issues; (b) determine the types of information and communications needed in activities in those areas and the extent to which space technologies could meet those needs; (c) develop a plan of action with recommendations that will guide the incorporation of space technologies in environmental security, disaster management and sustainable development, and; (d) define and establish a regional database for knowledge and data sharing on the environment and disasters, as well as on their sound management and monitoring.

The Workshop will be divided into presentation sessions, discussion panels and discussion sessions. The presentation sessions will demonstrate the successful use of space technologies in areas including environmental security, natural hazards, disaster rehabilitation, post-conflict reconstruction and refugee support. The panels will bring together experts to focus on specific aspects of space technology applied in those areas. During the discussion sessions, the participants will form smaller groups to discuss specific topics that will lead to the development of an action plan with recommendations and guidelines, as well as profiles for possible pilot projects.

The Workshop will be attended by technical personnel and decision makers from the following countries and international organizations: Afghanistan, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cuba, Egypt, France, India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Nepal, Netherlands, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, United States of America, Uzbekistan, Yemen, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and OOSA.

The United Nations Programme on Space Applications is implemented by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and works to improve the use of space science and technology for the economic and social development of all nations, in particular developing countries. Under the Programme, the Office conducts training courses, workshops, seminars and other activities on applications and capacity building in subjects such as remote sensing, communications, satellite meteorology, search and rescue, basic space science, satellite navigation and space law.

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (OOSA) implements the decisions of the General Assembly and of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and its two Subcommittees, the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee and the Legal Subcommittee. The Office is responsible for promoting international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space, and assisting developing countries in using space science technology. Located in Vienna, Austria, OOSA maintains a website at http://www.oosa.unvienna.org.

United Nations Information Service Vienna (UNIS) P.O.Box 500, A-1400 Vienna, Austria Tel.: (+43-1) 26060 4666, FAX: (+43-1) 26060 5899 Email: UNIS@unvienna.org

Visit our home page: www.unis.unvienna

This seems unrelated to the thread topic!

Well Now
Khamenei is just one click away~~~ LoL!

http://www.khamenei.ir/

How to click with Iran's Supreme Leader

May 10, 2004 - 2:07PM

Religious edicts are now only a click away after Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched his own Web site.

The site (www.khamenei.ir) posts religious decrees, speeches and the latest anecdotes from the man who has the last word on all state matters in the Islamic Republic.

Khamenei gives advice on ritual ablution and tells readers they should try to cleanse themselves before touching any official paperwork with letterheads including the name of God.

The site is run by a section of the supreme leader's office dedicated to preserving his writing and sayings.

In the biography section Khamenei tells how he returned home from his seminary studies to tend to his ailing father.

"If I have been successful in life, I believe that it stems from this good deed I did for my father," he said on the Web site which is written in Persian, Arabic and English.

Reuters

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/10/1084041318757.html

They said this could include additional sanctions on nuclear suppliers to Iran as well as military options.

In the WOT, Bush went after the financing of terrorism. Can't some similar arrangement be brokered between nations that do business with Iran?

Perhaps the linkage is the natural disaster that occured in Bam?

United Nations/Islamic Republic of Iran Regional Workshop on the Use of Space Technology for Environmental Security, Disaster Rehabilitation and Sustainable Development", Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran, 8 - 12 May 2004

Information Note (pdf format)
Application form (MSWord format)

Then we will also be organising the final regional workshop on the series of space technology and disaster management.

http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SAP/rs/iraninfoE.pdf

It was posted on a fair number of threads also.

Tehran’s Hidden Hand - Iran’s mounting threats in Iraq

National Review - By Jonathan Schanzer
May 10, 2004

The State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was issued earlier this month, complete with its usual hit parade of terrorist groups, state sponsors and emerging trends. Predictably, Iran was singled out for the "planning of and support for terrorist acts," as well as assistance to "a variety of groups that use terrorism to pursue their goals." The report also fingers Iran for pursuing "a variety of policies in Iraq aimed at securing Tehran's perceived interests there, some of which ran counter to those of the Coalition." A statement castigating Iran for such activities was long overdue. However, Washington must now challenge Iran over this growing list of nefarious activities in Iraq that have been plaguing coalition reconstruction efforts.

Conventional Fighting. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat ran this headline on March 16, 2004: "American and Iranian Forces Exchange Fire on the Border." American officials claimed that one Iranian border guard was killed, and other reports indicated that three Iranians were killed, but Tehran denied that any such incident took place. This was not the first time that open hostilities were reported. Coalition officials indicated in January and February that Abu al-Khasib, the port just below Basra on the Shatt al-Arab, has been the scene of Iranian violence against Iraqis. Iranian Revolutionary Guards have opened fire upon Iraqi water patrols along the estuary separating their two countries. Iranian fighters are also inside Iraq, and they may or may not be sanctioned by Tehran. On February 14, when a number of guerrillas attacked a police station in Fallujah, it was learned that two of the slain guerrillas were Iranian. An insurgency attack the week before, according to U.S. sources, was an attempt to free a number of Iranians who had only recently been arrested in Fallujah.

Hezbollah & IRGC. In February 2004, during a Washington Institute fact-finding mission to Iraq, one Coalition official reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) offices were spotted in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Moreover, officials noted an immense amount of Hezbollah activity in the city of Karbala. Most of the activity was "intimidation and threats of intimidation...Mafia-type stuff." During our delegation's one day in Basra, we spotted a building that openly advertised the offices of Hezbollah. Members of this organization insisted that their Hezbollah was not tied to Tehran, and that the name, which means "Party of God," is a common one. According to one report in the Arabic paper al-Hayat, Iran sent some 90 Hezbollah fighters into Iraq shortly after Saddam's Iraq fell. The group now receives financing, training and weapons from Iran, and has a rapidly growing presence in the Shi'a south. Western intelligence officials also allege that the man who planned the recent suicide attacks in Basra is Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah operative responsible for bombing the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the early 1980s.

Propaganda. Even before the U.S.-led war on Iraq, Iran had begun beaming in Arabic-language television programming in an effort to gain a strategic propaganda foothold in the country — and it has not stopped. Indeed, American labors to win hearts and minds through the television station, al-Iraqiyya, and Radio Sawa have been steadily undermined by these efforts. In April 2003, an Iranian journalist reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guards brought into Iraq radio-transmission equipment, posters, and printed matter for the militia known as the Badr Corps. The Badr Corps is a militia that has not yet challenged the U.S., but it is run by SCIRI (the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), which is known to have close ties to the Iranian regime.

Ansar al-Islam. Not enough attention has been given to the established ties between Iran and Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish al Qaeda affiliate. Before the war, Iran allowed Ansar al-Islam to operate openly along its borders in the extreme northeast mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, just shy of the Iranian border. Kurdish intelligence, with corroboration from imprisoned Ansar fighters, has established that Iran provided logistical support to the group by allowing the flow of goods and weapons. During periods of conflict with Kurdish militia units, the Peshmerga, Iran further provided a safe haven for these Islamist fighters. One Turkish newspaper also notes that Ansar al-Islam militants actually checked cars going into Iran (rather than coming into their stronghold), indicating close security coordination with the Islamic Republic. When the U.S. struck the Ansar al-Islam enclave in March 2003, Iran permitted many Kurdish fighters to flee across the border. They were later assisted back over the border — with the help of Iran's Revolutionary Guards — so that they could fight against American soldiers in the heart of Iraq. Kurdish intelligence has since intercepted between three and ten foreign fighters crossing Iranian border each week.

Moqtada al-Sadr. Iran sent a delegation to Iraq in mid-April to mediate between the rogue cleric and the U.S. administration. However, at the same time, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, an Iranian agent, has been supporting al-Sadr's anti-American efforts. A source from ash-Sharq al-Awsat estimates that Iran may have provided al-Sadr some $80 million in recent months. Further, Sadr's Mahdi army may now be getting training from Hezbollah, according to new intelligence reports. One Iranian source told ash-Sharq al-Awsat that Iran created three training camps along the Iran-Iraq border to train fighters from Sadr's militia.

In sum, Iran may be spending up to $70 million per month in Iraq. This pales in comparison to the billions spent by the U.S. Still, it is enough to undermine U.S. efforts. As such, Washington needs not only to better patrol the Iranian border, but also to confront clandestine Iranian activity within Iraq itself. Failure to do so will only encourage Iran to redouble its efforts to destabilize Iraq.

— Jonathan Schanzer recently took part in a 12-day fact-finding mission to Iraq, sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

http://nationalreview.com/comment/schanzer200405100900.asp

Iran Says Has Evidence of Worse Abuses in Iraq

TEHRAN (BGNES)- Revolutionary Guards spokesman Brigadier Massoud Jazayeri said he would shortly make public the documents, which would show that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was still taking place.

"There are documents obtained via a certain channel which show that this (abuse) has been practiced since long ago and is far worse than what has been leaked," Jazayeri told the ISNA students news agency.

"American officials, particularly the defense secretary (Donald Rumsfeld) have expressed their remorse about the incident. Nevertheless, such tortures are still taking place," he said.

The United States has been rocked in recent days by a series of graphic images showing prisoners being humiliated and mistreated.

Britain, Washington's main ally in the occupation, is also investigating reports its troops have abused Iraqi prisoners.

Jazayeri said it was clear that U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had been fully aware of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

"Bush must be tried as the head of the American torturers in Iraq," he said.

Iran and the United States have been arch enemies since shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution when radical Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 hostages for 444 days. /Reuters
/bnn/

http://www.bgnewsnet.com/story.php?sid=4953

11 out of 18 posts are from you to you. Maybe nobody cares or buys it.

"Most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East."

The LAST thing in the world the left-wing, anti-American media wants is a successful overthrow of the Ayatollahs in Iran by a popular revolution. It might just look as though Bush's intervention in Iraq was a good thing.

Besides, they would rather see the Iranian people suffer under a regime that oppresses its people than witness that regime replaced by one which might look more favorably upon the nation they detest so much, i.e. the United States.