Iran, Nukes and Sanctions

Space War ^ | December 10 , 2007 | Martin Walker

[america4vr]

The rhetoric of U.S. and Arab officials over their divergent policies toward Iran has become curiously more heated since the release last week of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear ambitions.

This is odd. The NIE claim that Iran's nuclear weapons program was suspended four years ago should have been, in Arab eyes, a signal that the prospect of a U.S. airstrike against Iran was off the table, and business That has not been the way the Americans see it. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has been attending a security conference in Bahrain, the Gulf headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, has been sounding even tougher than usual about Iran's regional role.

"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing," Gates said. "The United States and the international community must continue -- and intensify -- our economic, financial and diplomatic pressures in Iran."

This will not be an easy sell, but Gates has been warning Gulf state rulers and other Bush administration officials have warned U.S. allies in Europe that a sharp new crackdown is coming on Iran's commercial and financial links. To understand why this should be, look no further than the latest issue of Computer World Magazine, which produces blowups of the shipping documents that suggest Iran's new supercomputer came through the United Arab Emirates.

The Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center, located at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, boasts on its Web site that it has produced a Linux-based system that can process 1 billion floating-point operations per second. This is pretty fast, and the computer

[america4vr]

"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing," Gates said. "The United States and the international community must continue -- and intensify -- our economic, financial and diplomatic pressures in Iran."

Just about the most convincing argument as to why the Three M's of the Apocalypse,The Mad Mullahs of Mayhem must meet Allah via a giant mushroom cloud of radioactive fallout before they get the chance to do it to us.

[familyop]

...so that everyone will know that it's more than intelligence offices and the State Dept.

Iran Assessment Creates an Israeli Headache
On News/Activism 12/09/2007 3:19:19 AM PST · 8 replies
Time ^ | 06DEC07 | TIM MCGIRK
Excerpt:
"At the Annapolis peace talks last month, the Israeli team — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak — didn't have high expectations for making headway on the Palestinian issue, but they were confident of pressing their case on Iran to a receptive White House. Instead, Barak was taken aside by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and told that new intelligence persuaded the Americans that Iran wasn't such a big threat after all."