Great news: Saudi Arabia has nukes 'on order' from Pakistan
'Our friends, the Saudis,' have
nuclear weapons on order from Pakistan as a response to a nuclear Iran.
While the kingdom's quest has often been set in the context of
countering Iran's atomic programme, it is now possible that the Saudis
might be able to deploy such devices more quickly than the Islamic
republic.
Earlier this year, a senior Nato decision maker told me that
he had seen intelligence reporting that nuclear weapons made in Pakistan
on behalf of Saudi Arabia are now sitting ready for delivery.
Last month Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military
intelligence, told a conference in Sweden that if Iran got the bomb,
"the Saudis will not wait one month. They already paid for the bomb,
they will go to Pakistan and bring what they need to bring."
Since 2009, when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia warned
visiting US special envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross that if Iran
crossed the threshold, "we will get nuclear weapons", the kingdom has
sent the Americans numerous signals of its intentions.
...
Talking to many serving and former officials about this over the past
few months, the only real debate I have found is about how exactly the
Saudi Arabians would redeem the bargain with Pakistan.
Some think it is a cash-and-carry deal for warheads, the
first of those options sketched out by the Saudis back in 2003; others
that it is the second, an arrangement under which Pakistani nuclear
forces could be deployed in the kingdom.
Gary Samore, considering these questions at the centre of the
US intelligence and policy web, at the White House until earlier this
year, thinks that what he calls, "the Nato model", is more likely.
However ,"I think just giving Saudi Arabia a handful of nuclear weapons would be a very provocative action", says Gary Samore.
He adds: "I've always thought it was much more likely - the
most likely option if Pakistan were to honour any agreement would be for
be for Pakistan to send its own forces, its own troops armed with
nuclear weapons and with delivery systems to be deployed in Saudi
Arabia".
This would give a big political advantage to Pakistan since
it would allow them to deny that they had simply handed over the
weapons, but implies a dual key system in which they would need to agree
in order for 'Saudi Arabian' "nukes" to be launched.
Others I have spoken to think this is not credible, since
Saudi Arabia, which regards itself as the leader of the broader Sunni
Islamic 'ummah' or community, would want complete control of its nuclear
deterrent, particularly at this time of worsening sectarian
confrontation with Shia Iran.
...
And it is Israeli information - that Saudi Arabia is now ready to
take delivery of finished warheads for its long-range missiles - that
informs some recent US and Nato intelligence reporting. Israel of course
shares Saudi Arabia's motive in wanting to worry the US into containing
Iran.
Amos Yadlin declined to be interviewed for our BBC Newsnight
report, but told me by email that "unlike other potential regional
threats, the Saudi one is very credible and imminent."
Even if this view is accurate there are many good reasons for
Saudi Arabia to leave its nuclear warheads in Pakistan for the time
being.
Doing so allows the kingdom to deny there are any on its
soil. It avoids challenging Iran to cross the nuclear threshold in
response, and it insulates Pakistan from the international opprobrium of
being seen to operate an atomic cash-and-carry.
These assumptions though may not be safe for much longer. The
US diplomatic thaw with Iran has touched deep insecurities in Riyadh,
which fears that any deal to constrain the Islamic republic's nuclear
program would be ineffective.
Read the whole thing.
President Nuclear Disarmament has been such a tuches-licking wimp with respect to Iran that he's going to succeed in having more countries go nuclear under his watch than any previous US President.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat, Israel, nuclear disarmament, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia
The UN does it again: Iran elected as rapporteur to the UN disarmament commission
Just when you thought that the United Nations could not get any crazier, it has
named Iran as the rapporteur of its disarmament commission.
The election of a member of the Iranian delegation to the sensitive
position in the UN took place despite months-long efforts by
representative of the Zionist regime to prevent Iran’s election.
The Zionist regime representative issued a protest letter urging
members not to let Iran be elected as a member of the commission’s
presiding board.
The election took place in the site of the General Assembly just one
hour after the Zionist regime prime minister vigorously criticized the
attitude of the Iranian government during his remarks.
The remarks were countered by a powerful and well-reasoned response
of the Iranian representative at the UN Khodadad Seifi who stressed the
peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.
I hope there's a world left about which history can be written....
Labels: Iran, Iranian nuclear threat, nuclear disarmament, United Nations General Assembly
From the UN's theater of the absurd: Iran to chair UN nuclear disarmament conference
What will the UN think of next? Iran is going to
chair a UN-sponsored nuclear disarmament conference.
The UN conference addresses not only nuclear proliferation but policies
concerning the race to weaponize space, the production of radiological
weapons and the stockpiling or use of other weapons of mass destruction.
In a statement issued Monday afternoon, the United States said it
would withdraw ambassadorial representation at the conference in protest
so long as Iran retained its chair. Calling Iran's chairmanship "highly
inappropriate," the statement from the US mission to the UN noted that
the Islamic Republic was under UN Chapter VII sanctions for weapons
proliferation and human-rights abuses.
"While the presidency of
the CD is largely ceremonial and involves no substantive
responsibilities, allowing Iran--a country that is in flagrant violation
of its obligations under multiple UN Security Council Resolutions and
to the IAEA Board of Governors--to hold such a position runs counter to
the goals and objectives of the Conference on Disarmament itself," the
statement read.
“Any member state that is the subject of UN
Security Council sanctions for proliferation – and found guilty of
massive human rights violations – should be ineligible to hold a
leadership position in a UN body,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director
of UN Watch, which first noticed the chairmanship.
“We urge world
leaders to declare that allowing Iran to chair a UN disarmament body is
simply unacceptable, given the fundamentalist regime’s illicit
activities in precisely the opposite direction,” said Neuer.
Notice that the Obama administration is withdrawing 'ambassadorial representation' from the conference. That means that UN ambassador 'Lazy Susan' Rice won't go. It doesn't mean that the US won't be there. Hussein Obama can't bring himself to withdraw from anything sponsored by the UN....
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iran, Iranian nuclear threat, nuclear disarmament, Susan Rice, United Nations
Hagel on board of Soros' Ploughshares fund
Here's your daily discomforting fact about the Chuckster, Chuck Hagel, President Hussein Obama's nominee to be US Secretary of Defense. Hagel is a member of the board of the
Ploughshares fund, a George Soros-funded group that advocates for nuclear disarmament, massive cuts in defense spending, communism and a whole slew of radical Leftist (and 'Palestinian,' of course) groups.
The Ploughshares Fund has a long history of anti-war advocacy and is a
partner of the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies, which has
urged the defunding of the Pentagon and massive decreases in U.S.
defense capabilities, including slashing the American nuclear arsenal to
292 deployed weapons.
The Poughshares Fund has also partnered with a who’s who of the
radical left, including Code Pink, the pro-Palestinian J Street, United
for Peace & Justice, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
and the Demos progressive group, where Obama’s former green jobs czar,
Van Jones, serves on the board.
Ploughshares Fund identifies itself as a “publicly supported
foundation that funds, organizes and innovates projects to realize a
world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.”
The fund calls itself “the largest grant-making foundation in the U.S. focusing exclusively on peace and security issues.”
Since its founding in 1981 by San Francisco philanthropist and
activist Sally Lilienthal, Ploughshares says it has awarded many
hundreds of grants “whose aggregate value exceeded $60 million.”
The fund is in turn financed by a small number of foundations,
including Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation, the
Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Read the whole thing.
Shabbat Shalom everyone.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Chuck Hagel, defense spending, George Soros, nuclear disarmament
It's come to this: Obama to demand that Israel give up its nuclear arsenal
David Goldman makes a pretty convincing case that President Hussein Obama is likely to try to
disarm Israel from its alleged nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.
Middle East nuclear disarmament is America’s stated policy. The only
question is how to make it happen. A former senior Israeli intelligence
official told me that the Obama administration expects Iran to acquire
nuclear weapons in the near future. At that point, the official
predicted, Obama will propose that both Israel and Iran give up their
nuclear arsenal.
After his re-election Obama has more “flexibility,” as he told Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev over an accidentally open microphone last March. Since the presidential election, the Obama administration has turned decisively against Israel:
1) Sat on its hands while the Palestine Authority obtained “observer
status” at the United Nations, a setback that could not have occurred
(as former UN ambassador John Bolton explained) if the US had used its diplomatic muscle to avert it, as in the past, and advised at least one country to vote for the UN resolution;
2) Tacitly encouraged five European countries to deliver a strong diplomatic rebuke to Israel, according to Israeli diplomats;
3) Denounced Israel
for a “pattern of provocation action” that “puts peace further at risk”
on Dec. 18–for planning additional homes in an area that every proposed
peace agreement in the past twenty years has assigned to Israel, and
after the Palestine Authority broke the cardinal rule of the Oslo
Process by going to the UN rather than engaging in bilateral
negotiations;
4) Proposed Sen. Chuck Hagel (R.-Nebraska) for Secretary of Defense,
after “the sentiments he’s expressed about the Jewish lobby border on
anti-Semitism,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Obama is a radical utopian who identifies deeply with so-called colonial peoples, as I argued back in February 2008 (and
Dinesh D’Souza documented vividly in his 2012 film). The more his
utopian policies fail–in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and of course Iran–the
harder he will push them. Political constraints made him scrap the idea
of Israeli nuclear disarmament in May 2010.. Now those constraints are
gone. Israel’s friends in Congress will have to draw the line somewhere.
The best place and time to draw the line is here and now, on the Hagel
nomination.
There's only one sentence with which I don't entirely agree here and that's the last one. As you all have figured out, I am all in favor of the Chuckster going down to ignominious defeat. But I believe that Obama will attempt to disarm Israel regardless of whether Hagel or someone else is running the Pentagon. The difference is that Hagel runs a think tank, the Atlantic Council that has gone so far as to suggest that
the US should seek an alliance with Iran.
In December, the Atlantic Council issued the major position paper — part advice to Mr. Obama in his second term, part vision for the world in the next 17 years.
Mr. Hagel did not write “Envisioning 2030: U.S. Strategy for a Post-Western World,” but it corresponds with his and the Atlantic Council’s efforts to seek global cooperation, not confrontation.
The paper predicts that Iranian hard-liners will be unable to insulate the population from democratic movements in Egypt, Tunisia and other neighboring states.
“It
is difficult to envision an already globalized Iranian public not being
inspired by regional examples of popular democratic governance,” the Atlantic Council says. “For U.S. strategy, Iran
should be viewed as a potential natural partner in the region. … A
post-mullah dominated government shedding Shia [Muslim] ideology could
easily return to being a net contributor to stability by 2030.”
...
“The
U.S. will need to persuade its Israeli ally to recognize that the
changing strategic calculus in the region will require Tel Aviv to make
peace with its Arab neighbors to have a secure future as a democratic,
Jewish state,” the document states. “However, the United States would be
wise to also develop a contingency strategy that takes into account a
possible scenario where the
Israel-Palestinian issue remains unresolved to 2030 and the impact of such a reality on the U.S. role in the region.”
Part of the problem here is that even our friends don't understand that Fatah and the 'Palestinian Authority' share Hamas' goals. That's due in part to utopians like Shimon Peres who believe that
peace must be made with one's eyes closed.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Chuck Hagel, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli nuclear capability, nuclear disarmament, nuclear-free Middle East
History abhors a vacuum
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, President Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and whoever else happened to be listening to his open mic, that he would be
much more flexible about arms control if he is reelected. Jackson Diehl has a whole list of issues that Obama is similarly attempting to put off until after the election. These include North Korea, Iran, Syria and the 'Palestinians.' Diehl argues that if Obama tries to put issues off so as not to harm his reelection chances,
others will step into the vacuum (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
That brings us to the weakness with Obama’s strategy: It hands control over events to the likes of 28-year-old Kim Jong Eun. Sure enough, the reprieve Obama thought he had purchased in north Asia expired after only 16 days, when North Korea announced the long-range rocket launch that took place early Friday. The agreement turned out to be a trap. Now that the Obama administration has withdrawn the promised food aid, the regime will have a cue to carry out the nuclear weapons test that many experts are now expecting.
In Syria, too, delay may prove disastrous. As the senior State Department official for the Middle East, Jeffrey Feltman, told Congress on March 1, “it’s important that the tipping point for the regime be reached quickly, because the longer the regime assaults the Syrian people, the greater the chances of all-out war in a failed state.” Yet in the following six weeks Obama has been passive, delegating Syria to the feckless diplomatic hands of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Some 1,000 more Syrians have been killed; last week’s “cease-fire” is crumbling. At this rate, the “all-out war” Feltman predicted will be underway long before November.
As for Iran, if Tehran accepts Obama’s bargain, the momentum the administration has managed to build up behind sanctions, and the resulting pressure on the Iranian economy, will be broken. If the regime then cheats, or refuses to negotiate a more lasting solution to its pursuit of nuclear technology, Obama will end his term with Iran closer to a an atomic bomb than it was in 2009.
And if Iran won’t agree, and the talks collapse? Then Obama’s effort to stop history until November will once again depend on a man who probably would like to see him lose the election: Netanyahu. That’s the problem with asking for “space”: It tends to get filled by others.
Obama would like some of these problems to go away, while he would rather push off others until he is better able to deal with them. In the former category, I would put North Korea, Iran and Syria, where I don't believe that Obama really cares about the outcome so long as it doesn't mess up his reelection chances. And in the latter category, I would put the Russians and the 'Palestinians,' both of whom stand to reap some serious benefits from - God forbid - a second Obama term.
But the place where Prime Minister Netanyahu can most harm Obama's reelection chances is not on the 'Palestinian' front. It's with Iran. So you can add to Netanyahu's
possible motivations to attack Iran between now and November, the possibility that it could harm Obama's reelection chances.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli attack on Iran, North Korea, nuclear disarmament, Russia, Syrian uprising
Good news: If Iran builds nuclear weapons, so will the Saudis
Former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the United States Turki al-Faisal warned NATO that if Iran builds
nuclear weapons, his country will too.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington, warned senior Nato military officials that the existence of such a device "would compel Saudi Arabia … to pursue policies which could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences".
He did not state explicitly what these policies would be, but a senior official in Riyadh who is close to the prince said yesterday his message was clear.
"We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don't. It's as simple as that," the official said. "If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit."
Officials in Riyadh said that Saudi Arabia would reluctantly push ahead with its own civilian nuclear programme. Peaceful use of nuclear power, Turki said, was the right of all nations.
Turki was speaking earlier this month at an unpublicised meeting at RAF Molesworth, the airbase in Cambridgeshire used by Nato as a centre for gathering and collating intelligence on the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
According to a transcript of his speech obtained by the Guardian, Turki told his audience that Iran was a "paper tiger with steel claws" that was "meddling and destabilising" across the region.
Funny how the Saudis seem a lot more concerned about the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon than they are about an Israeli one.
How's that nuclear disarmament going Barack?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat, nuclear disarmament, Saudi Arabia
OMG: North Korea named head of UN nuclear disarmament body
Just when you thought that the United Nations could not get any crazier.... North Korea has been named to
head the organization's nuclear disarmament body.
Nuclear-armed North Korea has assumed the presidency of a key United Nations disarmament body — despite facing UN Security Council sanctions over its weapons programs.
The development comes in the same week the UN defended its decision to support Iran's holding of an international "anti-terrorism" conference — which saw participants declaring that Western powers were the international terrorists.
UN officials point out that North Korean ambassador So Se Pyong takes on the presidency of the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament under rules that say the chair will rotate among all 65 member states in alphabetical order.
But critics said Wednesday the rules should be changed when they allow the body — whose mandate is in part to push for world nuclear disarmament — to be led by a country that the West considers to be an international nuclear renegade.
"No system should tolerate such a fundamental conflict of interests," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, which also led protests against the UN's input at the Iranian "anti-terrorism" conference.
"It's common sense that a disarmament body should not be headed by the world's arch-villain on illegal weapons and nuclear proliferation, notorious for exporting missiles and nuclear know-how to fellow rogue regimes around the globe."
Read the whole thing. You have to love God's sense of humor, eh?
Labels: North Korea, nuclear disarmament, United Nations
Bear, meet Honey
The
bear meets the honey at the IAEA in Vienna.
Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) Ali Asghar Soltanieh assumed Group of 77 (G-77) presidency.
Soltanieh was elected as head of the organization in a ceremony held in the center of Vienna-based international organizations and attended by presidents and representatives of international organizations.
Soltanieh vowed to perform completely impartially during his presidency.
The Iranian ambassador replaced the Algerian ambassador to the IAEA as the outgoing chairman of the G-77.
Iran is to lead the group for one year.
The group was founded on June 15, 1964 by the "Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries," which was issued at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
The group's member states first met in Algiers in 1967, where the Charter of Algiers was adopted.
The organization was initially founded by 77 countries but it now includes 131 member states.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Ali Asghar Soltanieh, IAEA, Iran, nuclear disarmament
Mubarak to Obama: 'If you don't stop Iran, we'll build nukes'
For a guy who's pushing nuclear disarmament, Barack Obama
really doesn't get it.
WikiLeak documents have revealed that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the U.S. administration that if it did not put a stop to the Iranian nuclear program, Egypt would build its own nuclear weapons to counter the threat.
Other Arab states have announced the launching of their own nuclear programs in the past year.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in. But the good guys are still going to have to have nuclear weapons to make sure the bad guys don't get them. If the bad guys get them, everyone else feels they have to get them to protect themselves.
Obama doesn't get that. Instead, he is trying to take nuclear weapons away from the good guys (US and Israel) while refusing to confront a threat that the bad guys will get them (Iran).
Labels: Barack Obama, Hosni Mubarak, Iranian nuclear program, nuclear disarmament
Living in a time warp
I loved the 1980's. It was a decade in which I spent a chunk of time in Israel, got married, had my first three kids, worked in big New York law firms, and enjoyed a ferocious boom market that began in 1982 - just in time for me to finish law school.
But that was 30 years ago. I've grown older. My wife has grown older. Those three kids have grown up (two of them are married and have kids of their own). We've left the New York area.
Someone else from that era has left the New York area. Unfortunately, argues Jackson Diehl, he hasn't grown up yet. He lives in a time warp, and unfortunately, he's the President of the United States.
Barack Obama.
For help understanding the foreign policy headlines of the past week, let's return, briefly, to the spring of 1983, when Barack Obama was a student at Columbia University. What were the burning international issues of that time?
Well, first was the "nuclear freeze" movement, which was prompting mass demonstrations around the world by people worried about the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. Obama published an article about it in a campus magazine in which he invoked the vision of "a nuclear free world."
The Middle East, meanwhile, was still reeling from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon - which was the apotheosis of the Zionist right's dream of creating a "greater Israel" including all of the Palestinian West Bank.
Back to November 2010. The Obama administration is devoting a big share of its diplomatic time and capital to curbing Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank - most recently, offering Israel's right-wing government $3 billion in warplanes in exchange for a 90-day moratorium. Meanwhile, it has committed much of its dwindling domestic political capital to pushing a new nuclear arms control treaty with Russia through a reluctant Senate.
So has nothing changed in the past quarter-century? In fact, almost everything has - especially when it comes to nuclear arms control and Israel's national objectives. What hasn't changed, it seems, is Barack Obama - who has led his administration into a foreign policy time warp that is sapping its strength abroad and at home.
Read the whole thing.
What Diehl's argument is missing (but which is also correct) is Obama's feeling of a fierce moral urgency to resolve these issues. If they haven't been resolved in the last 27 years, they're unlikely to be resolved during Obama's (hopefully) brief term in office.
Labels: Barack Obama, fierce moral urgency, nuclear disarmament, Palestinian state, settlement freeze
