http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7089/pub_detail.asp
The Iranian Mullahs Want to Talk August 18, 2010 - <http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/authors/id.138/author_detail.asp> Peter Huessy http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/imgLib/20100817_IranianMullahs.jpgThe Iranian Mullahs want to talk. So does the United States. Tehran wants to negotiate because the economic sanctions are hurting. The US wants to negotiate because it wants to be sure Iran is not building nuclear weapons. But can such talks work? The historical record is not promising. The US administration has apparently decided we will deal with the current regime in Tehran, however despicable we find it. So we have to ask ourselves: if Iran agrees to abide by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, and pursue nuclear energy production without any side-show to produce nuclear weapons grade fuel, do we have sufficient confidence that any agreement they sign will do the job? Here the evidence is murky at best. David Kay, one of America's top specialists in assessing whether a country does or does not have an illicit nuclear weapons program masquerading as a nuclear energy effort, say the rules laid down by the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Administration, the IAEA in Vienna, Austria, will not be sufficient to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions. David Kay writes on July 17th in the Wall Street Journal: "The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would need access to all of the infrastructure that could possibly aid in fashioning a nuclear weapon and potential delivery systems. They also would need a full and complete declaration of all Tehran's nuclear components, all of its uranium enrichment, all of its plutonium-related activities, and all missile testing, production and deployment sites." "This is just not plausible when inspectors confront a hostile regime. Tehran has kept hidden its nuclear activities and support networks, domestic and foreign. It has refused repeated IAEA requests for interviews with the scientists and engineers responsible for large areas of its secret atomic work, and it has refused to disclose the details of its involvement with North Korea and with Pakistan's A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network." And then David Kay reminds us of the history of the IAEA with regard to Iraq. And no, it was not the brief Iraqi inspections in late 2002 and early 2003 but nearly two decades earlier. Here again, Kay's warning is deadly: "Individual IAEA inspectors in the 1980s raised serious questions about the extent and direction of Iraq's nuclear program. These suspicions were buried, and the inspectors moved to other jobs.Even after the 1991 Gulf War, the IAEA leadership at first rejected inspection findings that showed massive violations by Iraq." But the problem with the IAEA leadership, particular the "blind" Hans Blix, was not limited to Iraq. As Kay again reminds us: "beginning in the early 1990s, the IAEA leadership gave Iran a public 'clean bill of health' on living up to its safeguard obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty." In the absence of military pressure on the regime in Iran, will sanctions do the trick? In short, will the Mullahs and the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Supreme Leader, choose what I term "the Saddam option" or "the Gaddafi option"? Faced with the prospects of US military action, Saddam chose to fight. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi chose to give it up, especially on seeing Saddam emerge from his spider hole in the custody of America's finest fighting men and women. Iran may decide the US will not use any military force and thus its diplomatic bob and weave can remain intact. On the other hand, will the US and its allies really enforce the sanctions we have at hand to actually change the regime in Tehran? That then is our dilemma. Though we rhetorically see Iran as a state sponsor of terror, and even officially say so in our annual State Department reports on the same subject, our actions to date, and from every administration since 1979, have revealed a general unwillingness to face an ugly reality. Iran is supporting terrorist attacks on our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are the prime sponsors of Hamas and Hezbollah, serving as both the exchequer and armory for both. They blew up the Pam Am flight over Lockerbie and our Marine barracks in Beirut. They are an outlaw regime. They are at war with Lebanon, Israel, and the United States and its allies. But we have generally chosen to deal with them anyway, despite their record. But there is a reason for this. As long as we see "Al Qaeda and its affiliates" as our most serious terrorism threat, we will be in danger of playing once again a long-run diplomatic game of rope-a-dope with the mullahs and their thuggish friends in Iran. We went through this with Iraq from 1991-2003. If we had not liberated Kuwait from Saddam's clutches in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, we would not have discovered Saddam's nuclear weapons program that was some 6 months to one year away from bearing fruit. In short, if we do not see "states" as the "terror masters" they are, why should they be concerned that we will do anything but play along with the fiction that they are just ordinary members of the international community? Our attention thus gets directed not to the puppet masters but to the puppets. It is very true that some number of mosques and madrasses around the world serve as recruiting ground for terrorists, many who are in turn being used to attack US forces and our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. In them Imams preach a particularly virulent form of Islam, most notably Wahhabism and Khomeinism. But the terror masters are not the mosques or the Imams, but the governments of Iran, Syria, elements within the ISI in Pakistan and the government of Saudi Arabia, as well as their accomplices in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, China and Russia. From here come the weapons, the financing, the training grounds, intelligence and sanctuary. For example, recruits travel to Damascus, they are trained in weaponry and explosives, and then sent to both Iraq and Afghanistan. While securing another "deal" with Iran on its nuclear program may appear to be the next right move in US counter-proliferation policy, it neglects to answer the fundamental question our current efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq are central to: to what extent are we willing to take down those regimes that are the terror masters of the 21st century, not unlike their original sponsor and creator the Soviet Union, the very evil empire Presidents Reagan and Bush took down two decades ago. For as the head of the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who played a leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, (earning him the nickname Lion of Panjshir), warned us years ago, "Al Qaeda.was just one element in a poisonous coalition that included Arab intelligence agencies; impoverished young students bussed to their deaths as volunteer fighters from Pakistani religious schools; exiled Central Asian Islamic radicals; and wealthy sheikhs and preachers who jetted in from the Persian Gulf." Iran is part of just such a poisonous coalition. David Dastych, a former Polish intelligence agent, explains: "State-terrorist links are the most dangerous element of the present nuclear threat to the United States, its military forces and institutions abroad, and to Europe and other regions of the world." Iran may indeed develop a nuclear weapon, and America may be able to deter its use. David Sanger of the New York Times warned recently, what is the deterrent to a terror group, created specifically by Iran to receive a nuclear device gift wrapped by the mullahs, detonating the weapon in an American city? <http://www.fsmarchives.org/> FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor <http://www.fsmarchives.org/publications/id.6785/pub_detail.asp> Peter Huessy is on the Board of the Maryland Taxpayers Association and President of Geostrategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland, a national security firm. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [email protected]. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [email protected] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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