CIA analysis finds no Iranian nuclear weapons drive: report

A classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter said on Saturday.

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  thanks to The Agonist

THE NEXT ACT
Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?
by Seymour M. Hersh

A month before the November elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How would that affect policy toward Iran, which is believed to be on the verge of becoming a nuclear power? At that point, according to someone familiar with the discussion, Cheney began reminiscing about his job as a lineman, in the early nineteen-sixties, for a power company in Wyoming. Copper wire was expensive, and the linemen were instructed to return all unused pieces three feet or longer. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that resulted, Cheney said, so he and his colleagues found a solution: putting “shorteners” on the wire—that is, cutting it into short pieces and tossing the leftovers at the end of the workday. If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran. The White House would put “shorteners” on any legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting in its way.

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  thanks to War and Piece

Israel’s Domestic Politics Raises the Danger of a U.S.-Iran War

Even if the Democrats could be relied on to hold the line against insane military adventurism against Iran — and, frankly, listening to their leading lights I have my doubts — that’s unlikely to make any difference to the question of whether or not Iran is attacked. That’s because nobody even among the hawks is talking about a full-blown ground invasion; they’re talking about a series of air strikes that will supposedly destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. And you only have to go back to President Clinton’s 1998 cruise missile strikes on an aspirin factory in Sudan and a patch of dust Afghanistan to remember that the first Americans hear about such attacks will be after the fact. By then, of course, it will be too late. U.S. intel and even the Israelis know that the best such strikes can hope to achieve would be to delay Iran’s nuclear program by a year or two. But it will also prompt a chain of events throughout the Middle East that will plunge the region into a war that leaves U.S. influence — and Israel’s prospects of survival — diminished. The Iranians will hit back, of course, in Iraq, and elsewhere. And the U.S. will be compelled to hit back, creating the pattern for a long war of bloody attrition. One reason it won’t be debated publicly because it’s based on a fallacy promoted by a calculated campaign of hysteria by Israel’s leadership. Iran, right now, has no nuclear weapons program that anyone knows of — the Israelis however have opted to paint the very idea of uranium enrichment in Iran, quite legal under the NPT, into the first stanza of a new Holocaust. Israel’s demand that Iran be stopped, by force if necessary, from establishing the nuclear fuel cycle allowed under the NPT is untenable, I’ve argued elsewhere — the idea that any nation in the Middle East that creates the infrastructural capability to challenge Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region (creates the infrastructure that would allow this choice rather than actually pursue weapons) must face military sanctions is absurd and unsustainable. The only way to resolve this problem is to normalize relations in the region to create a basis for stability. But that’s not the way the Israeli or U.S. leadership sees it, which is why we’re heading for confrontation despite the U.S. election results.

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Revolutionary Guards Head: 'US Forces in Middle East 'Extremely' Vulnerable
by Juan Cole

The commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has said: If America attacks Iran, its 200,000 troops and 33 bases in the region will be extremely vulnerable, and both American politicians and military commanders are aware of it.

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