In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

History teaches Jews that threats against their collective existence should be taken seriously, and, if possible, preempted, he suggested. In recent years, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has regularly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, this month called Israel a “cancerous tumor.”

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NEW YORK - Iran has haunted every U.S. administration since the days of President Jimmy Carter. While running for president, Barack Obama proposed opening talks with Tehran and trying to end the long Cold War between the United States and Iran.

Obama’s sensible idea was greeted with the deepest dismay by ardent supporters of Israel and Rambo Republicans who want to see the US go to war with Iran, a nation of 70 million, and destroy its nuclear infrastructure.

Now, as the United States fights for its economic life, the Iran question and its alleged nuclear weapons program have again become an issue of major contention. Officials in the Obama administration and the media issued a blizzard of contradictory claims over Iran’s alleged nuclear threat, leaving us wondering: who is really charge of U.S. foreign policy?

This awkward question was underlined during a visit to Washington by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Britain is supposed to be America’s most important ally and partner in their ’special relationship.’

Brown’s reception was dismal and Obama’s obvious lack of interest in Britain’s leader was quite embarrassing. The British media slammed America’s cold reception as an ‘insult,’ and claimed that Brown had been treated like the leader of a ‘minor African state.’ White House aides excused the huge diplomatic faux pas by claiming President Obama was worn out from dealing with the financial and economic crisis. I’m sure he is worn out, but this still does not bode well for the conduct of US foreign policy.

Much of the uproar over Iran’s so-far non-existent nuclear weapons must be seen as part of efforts by neoconservatives to thwart President Obama’s proposition to open Tehran and to keep up the pressure for an American attack on Iran.

Israel’s government and its American supporters insist Iran has secret nuclear weapons program that the West has not yet detected. We heard the same claims about Iraq before 2003. Israel certainly knows about covert nuclear programs, having run one of the world’s largest and most productive ones.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lived up to her growing reputation for Mideast hawkishness when she named prominent Israel supporter Dennis Ross as her Special Advisor on Iran and the Gulf. This questionable appointment suggests that she may be more interested in building future domestic political support than securing balanced advice on the Mideast.

At least Ross is considered something of a moderate on the Israeli spectrum, having long been regarded as the Labor Party’s ‘man in Washington.’ During the Bush years, Israel’s centrist Laborites were replaced by partisans of the right-wing Likud Party, who quickly came to dominate administration Mideast policy.

In recent weeks, official Washington has been locked in confusion over Iran.

The new Central Intelligence Agency director, Leon Panetta, said in a recent interview, ‘there is no question, they [Iran] are seeking [nuclear weapons] capability.’

Pentagon chief Adm. Mike Mullen claimed that Iran has ‘enough fissile material to build a bomb.’ Fox News claimed Iran already has 50 nuclear weapons.

While the American Rome burns, here we go again with renewed hysteria over MWMD’s - Muslim Weapons of Mass Destruction. The war drums are again beating over Iran.

The czar of all 16 US intelligence agencies, Adm. Dennis Blair, stated Iran could have enough enriched uranium for one atomic weapon by 2010-2015. He reaffirmed the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not have nuclear weapons and is not pursuing them. Defense Secretary Robert Gates backed up Blair. So did the United Nations nuclear agency.

Some of the confusion over Iran comes from misunderstanding nuclear enrichment, from domestic politics, and from recycled lurid scare stories from the days of Saddam Hussein.

Iran is producing low-grade enriched uranium-235 (LEU), enriched to only 2.5%, to generate electricity. Tehran has this absolute right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT). Its centrifuge enrichment process at Nantaz is under 24-hour international inspection. The soon-to-open nuclear plant at Bushehr cannot produce nuclear weapons fuel. All of its spent fuel, which is under international safeguards, will be returned to supplier Russia.

Today, some 15 nations produce low-grade enriched uranium 235 (LEU-235), including Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, and Japan. I visited the Japanese Defense Ministry in Tokyo, and I saw plans for an atomic weapon. Experts believe Japan could produce a nuclear warhead in within three months, if it so decided.

I also believe - though cannot prove - that Switzerland may have produced a few nuclear warheads in the early 1960s and currently keeps them in one of its secret mountain forts as a sort of doomsday device.

Israel, India, and Pakistan are all covert nuclear weapons powers and have refused to submit to international inspection. North Korea abrogated it.

Interestingly, rather than the much pilloried Iran, it is the original nuclear powers who are all in violation of the nuclear arms treaty. These countries are: the United States, USSR/Russia, Britain, France and China. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty called for all nuclear powers to rapidly eliminate their nuclear forces. President Dwight Eisenhower championed this position. Far from eliminating their nuclear forces, all of the nuclear powers have expanded and modernized them.

UN inspectors report that Iran has produced 1,010 kg of 2-3% enriched uranium. Iran insists it is for energy generation. Theoretically that is enough for one atomic bomb. But to make a nuclear weapon, uranium-235 must be enriched to over 90% in an elaborate, costly process. Iran is not doing so, say UN inspectors, though they have raised certain technical questions about Iran’s nuclear process. Some believe Iran may go up to ‘breakout position’ - that is, having the components to assemble a weapon on fairly short notice.

Highly enriched uranium-235 or plutonium must then be milled and shaped into a perfect ball or cylinder. Any surface imperfections will prevent achieving critical mass. Next, high explosive lenses must surround the core, and detonate at precisely the same millisecond. In the gun system, two cores must collide at very high speed. In some cases, a stream of neutrons is pumped into the device as it explodes.

This process is highly complex. Nuclear weapons cannot be deemed reliable unless they are tested. North Korea recently detonated a device that fizzled. Iran has never built or tested a nuclear weapon. Israel and South Africa jointly tested a nuclear weapon in 1979.

Even if Iran had the capability to fashion a complex nuclear weapon, it would be useless without delivery. Iran’s sole medium-range delivery system is an unreliable, inaccurate 1,500 km ranged Shahab-3. Miniaturizing and hardening nuclear warheads capable of flying atop a Shahab missile is another complex technological challenge.

It is inconceivable that Iran or anyone else would launch a single nuclear weapon. What if it didn’t go off? Imagine the embarrassment and the retaliation. Iran would need at least ten warheads and a reliable delivery system to be a credible nuclear power.

Israel, the primary target for any Iranian nuclear strike, has an indestructible triad of air, missile and sea-launched nuclear weapons pointed at Iran. An Israeli submarine with nuclear cruise missiles is on station off Iran’s coast.

Iran would be wiped off the map by even a few of Israel’s estimated 200 plus nuclear weapons. Iran is no likelier to use a nuke against its Gulf neighbors. The explosion would blanket Iran with radioactive dust and sand.

Finally, while Washington keeps invoking the specter of a nuclear armed Iran, India has quietly developed a large nuclear arsenal and will soon test an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to North America.

Compared to America’s titanic economic and financial mess, whatever goes on in Tehran is of pipsqueak magnitude. The real danger to America comes from its Wall Street fraudsters, not from Tehran.

Press TV
March 13, 2009

The US has extended a set of sanctions against Iran for another year over claims that Tehran is still a threat to US national security.

“The actions and policies of the Government of Iran are contrary to the interests of the United States in the region and pose a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and the US economy, President Barack Obama said in a Thursday message to Congress.

In April 1995, a total embargo on dealings with Iran by US companies was imposed by Bill Clinton’s administration. The sanctions also banned American companies from helping Iran to develop its oil industry.

The sanctions would have expired if Obama had not extended them.

Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic relations for nearly three decades. The two countries severed all ties in 1980 in the aftermath of a US embassy takeover by Iranian revolutionary students.

The United States and its Western allies claim that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Tehran denies the charge, saying its nuclear program is solely for electricity-generating purposes.

Obama has vowed to begin direct talks with Iran to thaw relations between the two nations and resolve Iran’s nuclear issue. However, he has made no concrete offer of talks yet and his decision to restore the sanctions seems to undermine the US administrations claim of a new rhetoric towards Iran.

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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
May 7, 2008

Muslim hater, Michael Ledeen, in the National Review Online:

Time to Attack Iranian Terror Camps?

So says John Bolton, and he’s right. As you know, I have been proposing this for years. I always thought it was only a matter of time before we were compelled to take this action, which is a legitimate form of self-defense. And while we’re at it, we should do the same thing to the Syrian camps as well. It isn’t “sending a message,” it’s acting to protect our guys by fighting back in the proxy war the mullahs have been waging since 1979. Faster, please?

Of course, for Ledeen and his fellow neocon partners in crime, the entire Muslim and Arab world is a “terror camp” and they favor bombing it all back to the Stone Age.

It’s almost funny, this mullah “proxy war” argument. Mike likely knows the mullahs were brought to power by Ayatollah Khomeini and Khomeini was brought to power by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Rockefeller factotum. In November 1978, Carter appointed George Ball to head a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommended the U.S. drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini, an idea proposed by Ledeen’s guru, the “Orientalist” Dr. Bernard Lewis, who has long advocated balkanizing the Muslim world. Brzezinski wanted to buddy up with the Khomeini regime, but this came to naught, thanks to the hostage crisis.

In short, the mullahs Ledeen perpetually complains about are the creation of Rockefeller and the bankers.

Maybe Mike should call for bombing the Rockefeller mansion?

Naw, David is not a Muslim.

Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
May 4, 2008

The neocons who run things over at the Pentagon want you to know — the coming attack on Iran has nothing to do with nukes, as they have maintained now for years, but rather Iran’s ability to protect itself.

“The Pentagon is drawing up plans for a ’surgical strike’ against an alleged insurgent training camp in Iran, according to the UK Sunday Times’ Michael Smith,” reports John Byrne for Raw Story. “Attributing the assertion to Western intelligence officials, Smith asserts that US officials have become increasingly frustrated with Iran’s Republican Guard force — an elite corps of the country’s military — which the Bush Administration has designated a terrorist group. Western officials have accused Iran of helping arming rebel militias in Iraq, and have accused Iran of supplying IEDs.”

Never mind over the weekend Iraq admitted they have no evidence Iran is supplying munitions to the “insurgents,” actually a well-organized resistance. Our “hawks,” i.e., neocon psychopaths who hate Iran and love Israel, know most of you cannot remember important events from day to day, especially when key events are buried on the Agence France Presse website.

Everything is going as planned, although the neocons thought they would have flattened Iran and killed untold numbers of toddlers and grandmothers by now.

Back in October of last year, Seymour Hersh, writing for the New Yorker, said the Pentagon neocons had drawn up plans to bomb Iran and shift emphasis from Iran’s illusory nuclear weapon program to the Revolutionary Guard. Earlier, in September, the Senate approved a resolution urging the Bush administration to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. Not surprisingly, Joe Lieberman, the senator from Tel Aviv, sponsored this non-binding resolution along with neocon faithful, Jon Kyl. Now that all the pieces are in order, the attack on the Revolutionary Guard may commence. No doubt the neocons are pleased by the fact the Revolutionary Guard is situated in Tehran, along with a few million civilians.

Smith was the first to reveal the Downing Street Minutes, an account of a secret 2002 meeting between Bush Administration officials and British intelligence surrounding Iraq, in which MI6 director Richard Dearlove remarked that facts around Iraq were being “fixed” around a policy for war.

“US commanders are increasingly concerned by Iranian interference in Iraq and are determined that recent successes by joint Iraqi and US forces in the southern port city of Basra should not be reversed by the Quds Force,” Smith writes.”‘If the situation in Basra goes back to what it was like before, America is likely to blame Iran and carry out a surgical strike on a militant training camp across the border in Khuzestan,’” he quotes a defense official as saying.

Count on the “situation in Basra” (Shi’ites openly challenging U.S. occupiers) to worsen, same as the situation has steadily grown worse across the entire country, never mind all the fluff emanating from the neocons about the wonderful success of the “surge,” actually an excuse to put more occupation troops in Iraq.

American officials are opposed to any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Smith says. They believe, however, that an attack on a militant camp could send a message to the Republican Guard.

Indeed, it will send a message — and an Iranian “surge” all their own into southern Iraq. If there was not an excuse to aid and abet the Shi’a militias in Iraq before, there most certainly will be after the neocons cross over Iran’s border and bomb the Iranian military encamped in downtown Tehran.

CBS News reported last week about a potential strike on Iran.

“Targets would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which directs operations in Iraq,” they wrote.

Targets will also include water treatment plants, sewage facilities, schools, hospitals, mosques — you name it — same target list as was used in Iraq.

If an attack happens it will be on a training camp to send a clear message to Iran not to interfere,” one intelligence officer said.

It will likely also send a “clear message” Iran may commence with slinging Sunburn missiles at U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. Not only warships but oil tankers as well, thus toppling world oil markets into a severe crisis.

But then this is the sort of dastardly scenario the neocons have entertained for some time. Don’t pay too much attention to the arguments that the neocons are cloistered eggheads, consumed by insane hubris, and have little idea of what they are doing. In order to defeat “Islamofascism,” the neocons need to draft millions of bullet stoppers and nothing will work toward that objective better than crippling the world’s petroleum-based economy.