Here's why:
"US racing against time, Congress on Iran nuke deal" by Lara Jakes | Associated Press November 10, 2014
MUSCAT, Oman — Years of negotiations to limit Tehran’s nuclear production entered the final stretch Sunday....
The stakes are high as the Nov. 24 deadline approaches. A deal could quell Mideast fears about Iran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb and could help revive the Islamic Republic’s economy.
It also would deliver a foreign policy triumph for the White House, which is being hammered by prominent Republican senators over its handling of the civil war in Syria and the growth of the Islamic State militancy in Iraq.
Those same critics seek to put the brakes on US-Iranian bartering, if not shut it down completely, once they seize the majority on Jan. 3.
The Obama administration ‘‘needs to understand that this Iranian regime cares more about trying to weaken America and push us out of the Middle East than cooperating with us,’’ Senators John McCain of Arizona, the incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said in a statement last week.
Well, what are we doing there in the first place anyway?
Maybe Obama can apologize for those two cretins.
President Obama told CBS’s ‘‘Face The Nation’’ that his administration’s ‘‘unprecedented sanctions’’ on Iran are what forced Tehran to the negotiating table. ‘‘Our number-one priority with respect to Iran is making sure they don’t get a nuclear weapon,’’ he said.
Good thing they are not building any.
But Obama also cited ‘‘a big gap’’ between Iran and world powers as they try for a final agreement. ‘‘We may not be able to get there,’’ he said in the interview broadcast Sunday.
That's what he has to say he is sorry for. Due to Israel's outsized influence on U.S. foreign policy, he will not be able to do what is in the best interests of the United States.
Over the past year, congressional Republicans have made little secret of their skepticism of Obama’s outreach to Tehran. They say it has alienated Israel and kept the United States from maintaining a hard line on a number of foreign policy fronts, including Iran’s detention of three Americans.
Like I've said, now the Congre$$ is even more rabidly Zionist.
That skepticism is borne mostly of concerns that Iran secretly will enrich enough uranium to build nuclear weapons, even after a deal is reached. For years, Iran hid some of its nuclear facilities and blocked inspectors’ access at others, raising alarms about its intentions.
No alarms when it is Israel or the U.S. that blocks access to their own, of course.
Iran has maintained that its nuclear activities are purely peaceful and necessary to fuel medical and energy demands.
That's the afterthought you are supposed to forget as your attention to this article ends.
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Related: "The U.N. nuclear agency said Friday that its attempts to probe allegations that Tehran worked on nuclear weapons were deadlocked - a finding that all but rules out hopes of full nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran by the Nov. 24 target date. Iran agreed in February to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency, in what was seen as a test of Tehran's professed new willingness to reduce tensions over its nuclear program. "Iran has not provided any explanations," said the confidential report from the IAEA obtained by The Associated Press."
That means AP was given the piece of propaganda.
Not even the Russians can help the Iranians.
"Obama writes rare letter to Iran’s leader" by Matthew Lee and Julie Pace | Associated Press November 07, 2014
WASHINGTON — In a rare outreach to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Obama has written a letter about the fight against Islamic State militants, a common enemy in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, according to diplomatic sources.
The United States and Iran are each engaged in military efforts to degrade the Islamic State group, essentially putting the longtime foes on the same side in the campaign against the extremists.
In theory, yeah, but when you recognize what the plan is, who created ISIS, and what is the goal, this all looks like rank propaganda.
However, the Obama administration has repeatedly insisted it is not coordinating and will not coordinate its military actions with Iran, though officials from both countries have discussed the matter more broadly.
Like anyone would believe them.
Obama’s letter to Iran’s powerful religious leader comes against the backdrop of the looming Nov. 24 deadline in nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran, as well as five other world powers.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported that Obama had sent the letter, said it described a shared interest in fighting Islamic State militants and stressed any cooperation on that would be largely contingent on Iran agreeing to the nuclear deal.
Meant to put the onus on them so Obummer could say Iran said no to peace.
However, without confirming or denying the existence of the letter, administration officials said there were still no plans to cooperate or coordinate with Iran against the militants.
‘‘The United States will not cooperate militarily with Iran in that effort,’’ White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. ‘‘We won’t share intelligence with them.’’
Why would they? Then the Iranians would find out what we already know about the "terrorists."
Diplomatic sources separately confirmed the existence of the letter to the Associated Press. They did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss Obama’s outreach.
I'm sure Israel didn't like seeing this.
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I actually thought Obama was going to apologize for the CIA-insttigated 1953 coup.
"Thirty-five years after Iranian hostage crisis, aftershocks remain; The beginning of mistrust" by Stephen Kinzer | November 04, 2014
Jimmy CARTER has called Nov. 4 “a date I will never forget.” Other Americans may not remember the date, but as a nation we are still captive to the humiliating trauma that began unfolding precisely 35 years ago during Carter’s presidency. At 10:30 on the morning of Nov. 4, 1979, several hundred young Iranians climbed the walls of the American embassy in Tehran and stormed inside. By early afternoon, they had captured, blindfolded, and handcuffed dozens of American citizens and diplomats, including 52 who would remain in their hands for 444 days. Thus began a crisis that may now be seen as one of the crucial events in the modern history of both the United States and the Middle East.
Plenty has happened in the intervening decades to give Iran and the United States reason to mistrust each other. Each country has blamed the other for fomenting terror in the Middle East, and each has violently attacked the other’s vital interests. Yet when I recently asked one lifelong Washington insider to explain why the American political class remains so obsessed with isolating and punishing Iran, he immediately replied, “It all goes back to the hostage crisis.” The emotional legacy of that episode has proven astonishingly long-lasting.
Because the invasion of our embassy violated every law of God and man, it naturally outraged Americans.
Embassies are ruled over by the Law of God? Little hyperbolic, no?
The most deplorable aspect of this crime was that it seemed to have been committed for no reason other than nihilistic hatred. This, coupled with searing images of helpless hostages, shaped the image of Iranians that many American politicians still cherish: hateful terrorists permanently outside the rational world order.
Years later, several of the hostage-takers wrote accounts that make clear how completely we misunderstood their motive. It turns out that they did not seize the embassy out of fanatic passion, but for a clear and rational reason. The deposed shah of Iran had just been admitted to the United States for medical treatment, and Iranians feared that this was the beginning of a CIA plot to re-install him on his Peacock Throne. This was hardly far-fetched, since the CIA had done it before. The shah had been forced to flee in 1953, but CIA officers working in the basement of the US embassy organized a coup and brought him back. That consigned Iran to a quarter-century of royal dictatorship.
Yeah, somehow that CIA skullduggery is forgotten over here, while the democratically-elected government that was overthrown is absent from his background paragraph.
Few Americans had any idea that Iranian democracy had been crushed in 1953. Even fewer knew that the United States was mainly responsible for the operation. These truths have dribbled out slowly, and have not penetrated our national consciousness.
I wonder why that is.
Carter decided to admit the shah under heavy pressure from three of the shah’s most powerful American allies: David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and John McCloy. He rejected pleas from American diplomats in Tehran, who sent him a cable warning that admitting the shah “would almost certainly meet with immediate and violent reaction.” When those diplomats were told that their appeal had been ignored, one of them later recalled, “faces literally went white.” Eerily, Carter himself seemed to have some idea of what might lie ahead. At one White House meeting, he rhetorically asked his aides, “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?”
Even Carter was under the control of the New World Order crowd.
One lesson of this crisis is that presidents should listen to their diplomats, not to self-interested outsiders.
Like Israeli lobbyists.
The more important one is that powerful images can hold entire nations captive for long periods. The humiliating theater of hostage-taking, stretched out over more than 14 months, aroused American emotions so intensely that they have still not calmed down. We readily believe that Iranians are devious terrorists eager to wreak havoc in the world because that fits the image of Iran we ignorantly embraced 35 years ago.
The hostage crisis had far-reaching effects. It stirred patriotic sentiment in Iran that allowed the Islamic government to consolidate its power, and drove the United States into the arms of Saddam Hussein, who we supported in the Iran-Iraq war because we were so angry at Iran.
Say that again? We were driven(?) into the arms of who?
"During the bloody Iraq-Iran War, both sides were used to weaken one another. The intention was, quoting Henry Kissinger, to “let them [meaning Iraq and Iran] kill each other.” Thus, the U.S. tried to keep either side from winning and always in a military deadlock."
Even the Globe's alternative guest historian can't get it right.
Perhaps the worst effect was that it created passions in both countries that blind us to the deep interests we share in the Middle East and beyond. No episode in living memory shows so clearly that self-defeating emotion can grotesquely misshape global politics.
It's the price of a Zionist-occupied government.
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I know, I know, I should be happy with my limited hangout on the ops page.
"A lower key as Iran marks US embassy takeover" by Nasser Karimi | Associated Press November 05, 2014
TEHRAN — Thousands of Iranians chanted ‘‘Down with America’’ on Tuesday in rallies marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran. But the annual show of America-bashing by Iran’s hard-liners seemed to bring little public enthusiasm amid the push by moderate President Hassan Rouhani for a nuclear agreement with Washington.
More than 10,000 people joined the anniversary rally outside the former embassy compound in the capital. That was thousands less than last year’s rally, the first since Rouhani’s election, when his hard-line rivals sought to make a resounding show of opposition to any concessions to the United States.
Rouhani has made the negotiations the centerpiece of his administration, betting that he can secure a deal that would lift international sanctions and end Iran’s isolation.
That might have been a bad bet given what we saw above.
That has been a major hope among many Iranians, who are looking for a boost to the ailing economy. The United States and its allies say the accord must ensure that Iran cannot use its nuclear program to build a weapon.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are scheduled to hold key talks on the nuclear program next week in Oman’s capital, Muscat, where they will be joined by the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton.
The embassy anniversary this year coincided with Ashoura, a Shi’ite holy day commemorating the seventh century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shi’ites who was killed in a battle with rival Muslims.
The coincidence may have diminished turnout for the embassy rally, since millions around the country were more focused on Ashoura religious rites. Also, schools were out, meaning hard-liner organizers of the embassy protest could not bus in students as they have in past years to fill out numbers.
Odd. That's the same thing the CIA did during the 1953 coup of the democratically-elected government.
Still, hard-liners sought to use both Ashoura and the anniversary to draw a line against any concessions to the United States. In recent days, posters appeared in the streets of Tehran denouncing the US government as the ‘‘Shimr of this age.’’ Shimr was the fighter who killed Imam Hussein in the Battle of Karbala.
Tuesday’s crowd outside the former embassy burned US, Israeli, and British flags as they chanted against the countries.
Those three nations most responsible for messing around in Iran with assassinations and sabotage.
The main speaker at the rally, cleric and university professor Ali Reza Panahian, compared the United States to Hussein’s enemies — the forces of the Ummayad sultan Yazid, which surrounded Hussein and his loyalists and crushed them in Karbala, in present day Iraq.
‘‘Today, the evil arrogant powers have learned that they should encircle believers of the region and behead them in the same way that the enemies of Hussein encircled him,’’ Panahian said. He vowed that the negotiations will never change Iran’s anti-United States stance, saying the Iranian people seek the ‘‘toppling of the global arrogance’’ — the term used by hard-liners for the United States.
Also at the rally, the head of the Basij organization, paramilitary wing of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, said the negotiations are intended only to reveal American intentions to oppress Iran.
‘‘Iran will never go through the path of concessions,’’ Mohammad Reza Naghdi told reporters.
The negotiators have a Nov. 24 deadline to seal the final deal, though they could mutually decide to extend the talks. The West suspects Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at producing atomic weapons, a charge Tehran denies, insisting it’s for peaceful purposes only.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all Iranian state matters, has repeatedly backed the talks even though he has expressed doubts about the intentions of the six-member group — the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany — in the negotiations.
You will see why below.
In contrast to the anti-United States rhetoric in Tuesday’s rallies, an adviser of Zarif said Iran-US relations have changed from being openly hostile to friendly. But ‘‘it’s a friendly relationship not based on trust, not yet,’’ Ali Khorram said in comments reported in newspapers Sunday.
The Iranians really are trying. They don't want a war.
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"Iran president pledges to back Iraq amid attacks" by Nasser Karimi and Sameer N. Yacoub | Associated Press October 22, 2014
TEHRAN — Shi’ite powerhouse Iran has pledged enduring support for the Shi’ite-led government of Iraq in its battle against an ascendant Sunni insurgency spearheaded by the Islamic State group.
President Hassan Rouhani told Iraq’s prime minister, Haidar al-Abadi, on Tuesday that Iran has supported Baghdad ‘‘from the first day and will remain on that path until the last day,’’ according to a report by the official IRNA news agency.
Later, the state news agency reported that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, told Abadi that he considered the security of Iraq and Iran ‘‘inseparable.’’
It was Abadi’s first foreign visit since taking office in September.
That's the first place the U.S.-installed puppet went?
Doesn't anyone listen to the empire anymore?
The Iran-Iraq alliance highlights some of the complex political dynamics spawned by the emergence of the Islamic State group as a major threat earlier this year. The radical Sunni militia has captured and held large swaths of territory in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq, including the major northern Iraqi city of Mosul, and threatens to expand southward toward Baghdad.
Now both Iran and the United States are essentially on the same side in backing Baghdad and opposing the Islamic State group — although neither country acknowledges any sort of direct coordination. Meanwhile Iran continues to support embattled Syrian autocrat Bashar Assad, whom Washington opposes.
Rouhani, in his Tuesday comments, said greater regional cooperation among affected countries was the only solution to confronting the Islamic State group.
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Still not good enough:
"Arab states may form anti militant alliance" by Hamza Hendawi | Associated Press November 04, 2014
CAIRO — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait are discussing the creation of a military pact to coordinate operations against Islamic militants, with the possibility of a joint force to intervene around the Middle East.
The alliance would also serve as a show of strength to counterbalance their traditional rival, Shi’ite-dominated Iran.
Two countries are seen as potential theaters for the alliance to act, senior Egyptian military officials said: Libya, where Islamic militants have taken over several cities, and Yemen, where Shi’ite rebels suspected of links to Iran have seized control of the capital.
Un-flipping-f***ing-believable!
The discussions reflect a new assertiveness among the Middle East’s Sunni powerhouses, whose governments — after three years of post-Arab Spring turmoil in the region — have increasingly come to see Sunni Islamic militants and Islamist political movements as a threat.
Then why did they help to staff and fund them?
The consideration of a joint force by the Arab allies of the United States illustrates a desire to go beyond the international coalition that the United States has put together to wage an air campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have participated in those strikes in Syria.
Then why don't they just join it?
The officials said the alliance under consideration was not intended to intervene in Iraq or Syria but to act separately to address other extremist hot spots.
Three Egyptian military officials discussed details of the talks and a fourth confirmed their comments.
A Gulf country official, who is aware of the discussions, also said the governments were coordinating on how to deal with Libya, and the talks were ‘‘ongoing on wider cooperation on how to deal with extremists in the region.’’ He and the Egyptian officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks remain secret.
Talks on an alliance against extremists are well advanced, the Egyptian officials said. But there are differences among the countries over the size of any joint force, funding, and headquarters, and over whether to seek Arab League or UN political cover for operations, one of the Egyptian officials said. Past attempts at a pan-Arab military force have fallen apart.
Even if no joint force is agreed on, the alliance would coordinate military action, aiming at quick, pinpoint operations against militants rather than longer missions, the officials said.
The countries have already shown an unprecedented willingness to intervene together. Egypt and the UAE cooperated in carrying out airstrikes against Islamic militants in Libya during the summer, according to US and Egyptian officials, and last month Egypt carried out strikes of its own. Egypt’s government has denied both operations.
Egypt’s president, former military chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, has warned repeatedly that Islamic extremists must be dealt with in multiple places, not just in Iraq and Syria. In a September interview, he said ‘‘a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy in the region’’ is needed.
In Washington, asked whether the United States was aware of the discussions, Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said, ‘‘We’re not privy to that. I wouldn’t speak to it.’’
The spokesman for Egypt’s presidency, Alaa Youssef, denied that creating a joint rapid deployment force, complete with a headquarters, was part of the ‘‘routine’’ discussions between Egypt and its Arab allies on a strategy to combat extremism.
The Egyptian military officials said top generals from the countries — including, at times, their chiefs of staff — have held multiple rounds of talks. Two of the Egyptian military officials said they had participated in the discussions, while the other two said they had been briefed on them.
Under consideration, they said, is the establishment of a core force made up of elite troops with aircraft and access to a pool of intelligence gathered by members of the alliance.
To prepare for such a force, bilateral and multilateral war games have been held over the past year among the countries to promote harmony among their troops and weapons systems, the Egyptian officials said. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in particular, have elite counter-terrorism units, and the Gulf countries have sophisticated air forces, largely purchased from the United States.
World War III is near.
The officials said Jordan and Algeria had also been approached to join.
The countries involved intend to get a ‘‘nod’’ of approval from the United States, the officials said.
It sure looked and sounded like a U.S. idea.
However, the idea of a joint force reflects skepticism among the countries that Washington is prepared to pursue militants beyond the anti-Islamic State group operation, they said.
In Libya, Islamic militants have controlled the capital, Tripoli, and the second-largest city, Benghazi, for the past two months. Islamist politicians in Tripoli have set up their own government and revived the previous Parliament, where they held a majority.
I will be getting back to lost Libya soon.
The internationally recognized and most recently elected Parliament and government have been relegated to the small city of Tobrouk near the Egyptian border, while its allied militias and army forces under General Khalifa Hifter battle the militants. Sissi and Saudi Arabia have backed the Tobrouk government.
In Yemen, Al Qaeda has one of its most active branches, fighting the government for years. Also, Shi’ite rebels known as Houthis overran the capital, Sana, in September, threatening the rule of Gulf-backed President Abed Rabo Mansour Hadi.
See: Houthis Leading Yemen
Saudi Arabia intervened to fight the Houthis in 2010, believing that the movement is a proxy for Iran.
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I happened to notice that Qatar has been left out.
Maybe Obummer should apologize for that.
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
Egyptian militant group pledges loyalty to Islamic State
Iran touts successful test of US drone replica
FURTHER UPDATE:
US officials: More work needed on Iran nuke deal
Russia to build 2 nuclear plants in Iran, and possibly 6 more
