We knew this was coming, but still, I’m struck by the aggressive, threatening posture. The uproar over the NIE has barely cooled off, and here the Bushies go with their alternative reality.
Iran must “confess” to running a past nuclear weapons program or its claims of cooperating with a U.N. investigation will not be credible, the chief U.S. envoy to the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Friday.
Confess, eh? The waterboarding table must be around here somewhere…
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, said in Washington that if Iran wants U.N. sanctions lifted and avoid new ones, it must halt uranium enrichment and related activities that could make the ingredients for an atomic bomb.
If Iran complies, Rice said she was “prepared to meet my (Iranian) counterpart any place and anytime and anywhere, and we can talk about anything.” But “as long as the Iranians are talking and practicing enrichment, we’re not getting anywhere,” she said.
So basically this means that Bush/Cheney will ignore the NIE interpretation favored by peace loving people, that is to say the voice of reason and diplomacy, and instead they will refuse to negotiate unless the Iranians stop their allowed civilian program. Gregory Schulte, the chief US delegate to the IAEA, sounds like a perfect bastard, the kind of person beloved by authoritarians.
Gregory L. Schulte, the chief U.S. delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, said Iran’s refusal to suspend enrichment “violates Security Council resolutions and casts doubt on its leaders’ ultimate intent.”
“Iran is already a danger in the Middle East,” Schulte said. “That danger only increases as Iran’s leaders shorten the timeline to produce nuclear weapons.”
The IAEA has been investigating Iran’s nuclear programs since revelations in 2003 that the country had conducted nearly two decades of secret atomic activities, including developing enrichment and working on experiments that could be linked to a weapons program.
A recently published U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that in the same year, Iran stopped direct work on creating nuclear arms.
Under a plan agreed to earlier this year with the IAEA, Iran committed itself to answering all lingering questions about its past nuclear activities. That, by implication, included programs that could have weapons applications.
“We are looking for an acknowledgment that they had nuclear weapons,” Schulte said. “The end of the year is rapidly approaching (and) we are waiting to see if Iran’s leaders are ready to confess.”
“The end of the year is rapidly approaching (and) we are waiting to see if Iran’s leaders are ready to confess.” That certainly sounds like a deadline for something to happen, doesn’t it? This confess language strikes me as completely ridiculous. Schulte describes an interrogation here, with a powerful figure of authority on one hand and a subjugated detainee on the other. Yet in reality Iran is a sovereign nation. For Schulte to openly use this language as if it’s the most normal thing in the world provides us some window into how deranged is Bush administration thinking. They have clearly chosen to blow right by the NIE and it’s fallout. Just cherry pick the parts you like and move on, same as the buildup to war with Iraq. The trick is how to get away with it this time, and the method chosen looks like setting unreasonable expectations (bill them as perfectly reasonable, however) and then punishing Iran for failing to meet them.
However, the agreement between Iran and the IAEA makes no direct mention of a clandestine Iranian weapons program, and because Iran denies it ever tried to develop one, the U.S. demands are unlikely to be met.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the U.S. intelligence estimate a victory for his country, and officials of other governments have suggested it could relieve pressure on the Islamic republic.
Schulte warned against such interpretations. Iran had been engaged in a “concerted, covert program, conducted by military entities, under the direction of Iran’s government,” he said. “Iran’s leaders could choose to restart that program.”
Still, the revised U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran has stiffened resistance from permanent U.N. Security Council members Russia and China to moving quickly on a third set of sanctions against Iran.
Schulte, faced with reality, warns against it.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said he wants to wrap up the investigation by December. But diplomats accredited to the agency, who demanded anonymity because their information was confidential, told The Associated Press this week that the agency had run into unspecified obstacles, and that Iranian officials were now talking about March as the new deadline — something they said the United States and its allies would be unlikely to accept.
Time is of the essence. Psychologically, Bush/Cheney need to keep the appearance of forward momentum, quiet down their hysterical neocon and Israeli buddies, and basically change the dynamic back to something that works for them. This belligerent posture and looming deadline effectively sets diplomacy up to fail, and they want diplomacy to fail since that allows them to attack Iran. Of course, there’s still the problem of getting the military to fall in line, but one thing we know about B/C & Co, Inc. is that they spend a lot of time arranging elaborate set-ups. This probably explains why the NIE caused such histrionics among the neocons and Israelis. The NIE trashed their previous set-up, which they had laboriously arranged for who knows how long. Their cry of “everything’s ruined” came through loud and clear. But now it seems that they will pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and redouble their efforts. Instead of letting the NIE vanquish them, B/C will use it to plunge the knife in faster and deeper. Their satisfaction will be all the greater if they can accomplish this, and therefore they will be highly motivated to exact revenge on those who tried to thwart their plans. This is the Trojan Horse theory, and we are watching it’s execution unfold.
