Concerns continue to mount over not just Iran’s stance on its nuclear program, its hard-line, almost dismissive attitude towards attempts to get it to curtail its nuclear development activities and what a nuclear Iran would mean.
Russia’s Novosti news agency reports that these concerns are dominating UN-related talks in Moscow:
The deputy foreign ministers of all five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany voiced concerns Tuesday over the lack of positive Iranian response to a UN demand it end uranium enrichment by late April.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said the concerns had been raised at a Tuesday meeting in Moscow that had broken up without producing any concrete decisions.
“The Iranian government has made no positive steps demanded in the February 4 resolution of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency followed by a statement of the UN Security Council chairman on March 29, including to cease uranium enrichment activity,” Kamynin said.
Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stressed that the world is not split over the subject of Iran’s nuclear program, the BBC reports:
He told the BBC that at every level the international community was “more united in its concern to ensure full compliance by the Iranians”.
He was talking to the Today programme during a visit to Saudi Arabia. Mr Straw rejected claims that the US and Europe were at odds over the issue of military action against Iran.
He acknowledged the position differed on whether force could theoretically be used, but said “in practice both the Americans and Europeans, the Russians and Chinese are committed to finding a diplomatic solution to this issue”.
Mr Straw said the UK did not expect that Iran would comply with demands to halt uranium enrichment within a 30-day deadline set by the United Nations Security Council.
So now the question becomes: what would happen if Iran emerges from this victorious? Iran doesn’t look as if it’s going to back down and, barring some kind of military intervention (already more-than-hinted at in news reports about the Bush administration’s reported work to get contingency plans in place, but warnings from Tel Aviv that it won’t sit back and in-effect risk Israel becoming an Iranian nuclear target), the clock may be running out.
The MUST READ site Watching America has THIS PIECE translated from a newspaper in Kuwait that must be read in full. Here’s the intro:
Assuming that the worst fears about a resurgent Persian Empire are realized, what would the consequences be? According to this analysis from Kuwait’s Arab-language Al-Seyassah, Iran would recover its place as the locus of Muslim fundamentalism, displacing the al-Qaeda interlopers; it would have a near monopoly over the planet’s oil supply; and it would have a nuclear deterrent to boot.
Writer Ali Hussein Bakeer, Researcher of International Relations, provides a context and review of the situation and Iran’s new emerging role. Then he writes:
The rise of al-Qaeda has been the fatal blow to Iran. Iran didn’t welcome the emergence of any state or movement capable of replacing it as the defender of Muslims and opponent of the West.
Specifically, Tehran considers al-Qaeda a consequence of the rivalry between Pakistan and Saudi Wahhabism [RealVideo]. In 2005, Iran worked to secure its western border and penetrate Iraq, in order to weaken al-Qaeda. After that came the next step, which was for Iran to reclaim its place as leader of the Islamic resistance movement. The selection of Ahmadinejad as president of Iran was carried out with great care, after the removal of the reformers and the exclusion of [Hashemi] Rafsanjani, who had previously represented the spirit of the revolution, yet whose name was also tied to the weapons deal with Israel. Ahmadinejad was selected as the candidate whose image was the closest match to Khomeini’s revolution.
Ahmadinejad has done what had been planned for him to do, which was to reclaim Iran’s place as the revolutionary center of the Islamic World, through his speeches targeting Israel and denying the Jewish Holocaust. Through these incendiary statements, he intended to do two things:
1) Lay out a cultural path for himself, persuading others to believe that he is hostile toward Jews and Israelis, and that because of this, he is the greatest, most vehement fundamentalist Muslim leader.
2) Eliminate former President Khatami’s role, and the course Khatami had laid out leading to closer ties to America and the West by focusing Tehran’s efforts initially toward Europe.
For during Khatami’s reign, Iran had won Europe to its side in regard to America, but it lost Muslims, who remembered yet again Iran’s selfish, self-serving policies in the matter of cooperating with Israel, which were based on hypocrisy, and were not based on principle. So Ahmadinejad focused his attacks on Israel and Europe to regain Iran’s share of Muslim support, thus ending Khatami’s game, plan and reign, and turning instead to a new game, which is: Nuclear Manuever.
So it’s partly take-no-prisoners political jockeying:
According to what has been explained above, Iran can, upon its possession of a nuclear weapon, achieve the following goals:
1) Be the only competitor of Israel and America in the region, and to control and overshadow the power of any other Sunni-Islamic States, who would kneel before Iran.
2) That Iran had proven itself capable of enduring risks that no other Muslim actor is capable of bearing, for the sake of achieving its goals.
Most, although not every State, neighboring and not neighboring Iran, refuses to approve of Iran attaining a nuclear weapon. Naturally, Israel is one of them – but the Arabs and Turkey are as well, in addition to America. But who, among all of these, can do anything about it?
Read the piece in its entirety.But another factor in this mix is not just Washington’s response (if there is to be a military one) but the kind of support the Bush administration would have if it acted.
It’s assumed that the country will come together. But the administration’s credibility problems are such that it would likely lack a chunk of the same kind of support it had when it went into Iraq, an operation that even then faced some skeptics.
Taylor Marsh takes a look at the Bush administration, Iran and whether — in light of that President George Bush vowing to stick with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld despite some calls from retired generals for him to resign — she feels it can be trusted this time. Her key question: “Look what has happened in Iraq. Why on earth should we trust George W. Bush in Iran?”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.