Promoted to the front page, is Shelby, who has some info that indicates that the story about the Iranian dresscode is bogus. Thank goodness. And no, I was not voting for war, but I will say this, for me personally, the "fear factor" is greater with Iran than with Iraq, and I am particularly concerned that if something erupts there that we have to address, we do not have the resources to do that adequately. Here's the post:
Is it foreboding that Georgia Women are Voting for war? Careful - the minority dress code story is crumbling:"Yesterday, after it emerged that the report had been false, the affair of "the yellow patch that wasn't" left us with one lesson: The world is ready to believe anything when it comes to a country ruled by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/717935.htmlBut I DID hear they tried to buy uranium from Niger to pass on to al Qaeda....
10:45 AM
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Story About Iran Inaccurate?
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1 comment:
Woohoo, I'm a rock star! Okay, maybe not yet, but this is kind of my pet international security issue.
Iran is a crappy place. GWV has plenty reason to have a problem with the way they run their society -- just read "Reading Lolita in Tehran," or settle for the real news story about the new dress code, sans minority badge red herrings: they want to eradicate the evil influence of the West, where you whores are free to expose your hair, face, elbows, knees...God, the slutty ridiculousness of it all! But yeah, you live your daily life in a black potato sack and can be sentenced to hang for defending yourself from rape.
Still, it's not at all clear how dire the Iranian nuclear puzzle is, nor are the technical questions any easier to resolve than the political ones. The only clear thing is that the US has a rather indelicate approach to the "diplomacy" it professes in this situation. As for the current president...who knows. But he's probably not as scary as some of our media make him out to be. A prominent Russian arms control specialist recently told a bunch of us security geeks that the Iranian diplomats in Moscow apologize for being so busy putting out fires and translating what their president "meant to say" that they can't engage in effective policy all the time. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I'm wondering if Ahmadinejad is the "Harriet Miers" they put up to freak us out so we'll fall all over ourselves in ecstasy when the next slightly less wacky guy comes to power and we negotiate with him out of sheer relief. The other good news is that in a rigged government like Iran's, the president's office isn't actually all that high on the list of people with control (or even knowledge) of something as sensitive as a covert nuclear program. An excellent article is at http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2006/1/27/152726/432 Remembering that the Ayatollah is still top dog is comforting in the sense that, when former president Khatami said in 2001 that Iran would respect any settlement the Palestinians reached with Israel (i.e., recognizing Israel's right to exist, for starters), he couldn't have done so without Khamenei's approval -- and that's the continuity that persists behind these ineffective presidents.
But anyway. Be wary of stuff on the internet about Iran; I started a whole research paper this year based on the pure speculation of right-wing propaganda machines thinking it was actual news. If any GWV readers are bored and/or curious, a good link for the technically aggressive is http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/category/iran/
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