Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘nuclear’

Iran moves a step closer to going nuclear… while the useless UN looks idly on:

Iran began processing uranium more than a week ago to prepare it for enrichment — a process that can be used to make nuclear weapons — in defiance of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, a diplomat said Wednesday.

But Iran’s president said Tehran would not give in to foreign pressure aimed at stopping what he said was a peaceful nuclear energy program, but which Washington says is a covert scheme aimed at building bombs.

A spokeswoman for the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the uranium processing was being closely monitored by the IAEA.

So what will the nice folks at the U.N. do with all the information they’re gleaning through this observation?

If Tehran fails to heed the demands, the board said it would consider possible “further steps” when it meets next month. Diplomats on the board said this included possibly referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which can impose sanctions.

In other words, nothing.

Something tells me that the IDF has training underway for a repeat of the Osarik strike…

The U.N. has continued its uselessness this week by calling for nuclear disarmament and inspections in North Korea.

The predicted North Korean response is: “Oh yeah? And if we don’t agree, what are you gonna do about it?” The predicted U.N. response is, well, silence.

In the meantime, the U.N. couldn’t be seen slouching on its regularly scheduled programming, so it resumed calls for a “nuclear weapons-free zone” in the Middle East – a call clearly aimed at Israel:

Israel has always said that it does not oppose signing the NPT, though only after there is stable peace in the Middle East.

It is an annual ritual at the IAEA annual conference that Arab and Muslim states try to get a resolution on the table that calls on Israel to give up its alleged nuclear weapons arsenal.

The last time they succeeded in getting such a resolution adopted by the IAEA General Conference was in 1991. Since 1987, the IAEA conference and U.N. General Assembly have passed 13 such resolutions. Israel has ignored them all.

Israel, by any normal standards, cannot be considered a threat to world security, and its neither-confirm-nor-deny policy is a necessity in a world that won’t let it defend itself from destruction by any means. Of course, since when are U.N. standards normal standards?

No, U.N. standards are more like these:

“Israel’s unsafeguarded facilities is a real threat to international peace and security,” Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, told the conference.

Excuse me for laughing. Iran, which has openly threatened to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons, claims that Israel, who would never dream of using the nuclear weapons they allegedly posses, is the threat to world security? But Iran knows that the best way to divert attention from itself is to attack Israel, the eternal scapegoat.

Mah nishtana?

I have a feeling that most of the world expects and secretly hopes that Israel will deal with Iran’s nuclear program the same way it dealt with Iraq’s ambitions in 1981. Of course, everyone will condemn Israel for it and bluster and threaten. But none of them want to see a nuclear Iran either, and they know that Israel’s the only country that will actually do something about it.

Hypocrites.

Terrorists publicize a video of the beheading of another hostage in Iraq. The nuclear threat from Iran continues to grow, because the Iranian government believes – probably rightly – that the US is tied up elsewhere and nobody else in the world will do anything about it. And North Korea flaunts its nuclear status. Meanwhile, thousands more are killed in Darfur while the world points fingers and stands idly by.

Just another typical day.

Witnesses saw a mushroom cloud. Little else is known so far.

Update: Both the US and South Korea are saying it’s unlikely to be nuclear. Which, of course, begs the question of what it was.

Update #2: North Korea says it was for a hydroelectric project. But this is North Korea we’re talking about, so the credibility of that statement is somewhat suspect. Just look at their statement:

Paek, who was providing the first North Korean word on the explosion, said it was part of a construction project to build a hydro-electric dam in the remote mountainous region of Ryanggang on the Chinese border.

The BBC said that when Paek was asked why North Korea had not explained earlier about the blasts he told Rammell Pyongyang had not done so because all foreign journalists were liars.

I suppose that’s a good reason… if you subscribe to the North Korean version of logic.

Brace yourself for yet another UN-led Israel-bashing session, as a proposed Arab-Israeli nuclear conference next year is sure to devolve into just that:

The UN nuclear agency will next year host a conference, including Israel and Arab states, to discuss steps to make the Middle East into a zone free of nuclear weapons, the head of the U.N. watchdog said Sunday.

As Israel is the only Middle Eastern country believed to have nuclear weapons, the talks would effectively boil down to what the Israeli government would require to abandon the nuclear option. Israel has never confirmed nor denied having the nuclear bomb.

At a time when the world should be raising the alarm about Iran’s nuclear program – which actually poses a great threat to the entire world – the UN has chosen to revert to type and once again focus its energies on the traditional scapegoat, Israel.

I can’t wait.

The Zahra Kazemi story continues to get media attention, as her son pressures the Canadian government to keep fighting for justice:

The son of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi is “totally unhappy” about the way Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew has responded to his call for a government commitment to get to the bottom of his mother’s murder case.

Stephan Hachemi had been calling on Pettigrew to impose diplomatic sanctions against Iran for failing to find the person responsible for his mother’s murder.

“The Iranian ambassador has nothing to do in Canada right now,” Hachemi told a news conference Tuesday. “He should be expelled. The embassy should be closed.”

It’s understandable that the son of a murdered woman is grieving and lashing out. And the government seems to be paying attention.

But what really bothers me about this whole affair is not so much that Canadians are angry about the lack of justice in this case, but that nobody is nearly angry enough about the lack of justice in every other case in Iran. Canada spends years appeasing a brutal dictatorship that has suppressed virtually every human right we take for granted. Those Iranians don’t count. But when an Iranian who happens to have Canadian citizenship is the victim, she counts. We shrug off thousands of unexplained murders, but when Zahra Kazemi is the victim, suddenly everyone is expecting the kind of fair and transparent justice system that lives up to Canadian standards.

It’s not unusual for countries to react much more strongly when their own citizens are victimized. But the hypocrisy gets to me. Iran is not a democracy. It’s not a very nice place to live, especially if you happen to be, say, female, or non-Muslim. And it’s in danger of acquiring nuclear weapons, in which case it might be too late to curb the threat.

And while Canadians continue to issue a “tsk tsk” about the Zahra Kazemi case, we are simultaneously following the Europeans, not the Americans, in softpedalling this new nuclear threat and refusing to take a hard line. This is but one of a long list of the things that the Canadian government just doesn’t get.

Israel gets it, however:

Iran’s ability for nuclear armament should not worry just us but the entire free world and moderate Arabic countries as well, according to Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen Moshe Ya’alon.

And of course, if and when Israel takes matters into its own hands, and the United Nations issues a routine condemnation of Israel for having the courage to do so, Canada will likely be right there on the General Assembly floor, loudly… abstaining.

The U.N. is reporting that Iran is being less than forthcoming with weapons inspections teams:

Iran is not fully cooperating with U.N. inspectors and must come clean about the full extent of its nuclear program within months, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday.

Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran’s cooperation has been “less than satisfactory” and warned that the process of clarifying unresolved issues — particularly over Iran’s uranium enrichment activities — could not be allowed to drag on for ever.

I’m sure I’m not the only one hit with a sense of deja vu. Though if I were the type to gamble, I’d bet that the situation in Iran will never come to what has transpired in Iraq. The two are vastly different, and while Bush had grouped them under his “Axis of Evil” umbrella, it’s still like comparing apples to oranges.

However, ElBaradei would also do well to remember that his weapons inspections teams lost all credibility when they failed in Iraq. Countries like Iran might feel more comfortable flouting them now, knowing that the U.N. will not do anything beyond shaking a fist at a country’s failure to cooperate.

And of course, the worst-case scenario is that Iran is far ahead of anyone’s expectations in terms of development of nuclear weaponry. That would truly be catastrophic, because if the U.N. allows this lack of cooperation to drag for months, then a militant Islamist regime would have acquired nuclear capability, and does anyone have any doubts as to who the first victims would be?

Far more likely, of course, is that Iran is simply flouting the process to prove a point. In any case, the U.N. and most of the world demonstrated pretty clearly that they won’t do anything to countries who flout the inspections. That leaves us in a dangerous place. Iraq’s WMDs were nowhere to be found, so the United States ended up looking foolish. But remember the story of the boy who cried wolf: what happens when there really is a threat?

The Jerusalem Post reports that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program.

Iran insists it is following international regulations and that all its facilities are open to inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog agency. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday it has been aware for several years of Iran’s plans to mine and process uranium.

[ . . . ]

Washington says those two facilities are part of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.

A disconcerting thought.

Anyone who thinks that passive appeasement will work in Iraq obviously isn’t following the developing situation in North Korea very carefully. Now, North Korea says it will regard any UN Security Council sanctions as an act of war. That’s a threat not to be taken lightly, given North Korea’s nuclear weapons development.

If we wait around for Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, I somehow doubt he’d even give the world a warning. With one push of the button he’ll obliterate Israel, attack the United States, and probably take over many of his neighbours. I mean, we’re talking about Saddam Hussein here.

The world has a responsibility to see to it that Iraq never develops nuclear weapons. If it is allowed to, G-d help us all.

The tensions in North Korea continue to heat up, with the war of words becoming reminiscent of the Cold War era.

But reclusive North Korea remained defiant, denouncing Washington’s missile defense system and threatening the United States with destruction if it launched a nuclear attack over its suspected atomic weapons program.

North Korea said it had “increased its self-defensive military capability” to cope with the “U.S. intensified policy to invade and stifle it with nukes.”

“If the U.S. unleashes a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, it will not escape its destruction,” Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

That’s of course of little comfort to South Korea, which is hoping to avert a crisis through diplomacy. While appeasement of hostile nuclear threats is of course extremely dangerous, it makes sense that South Korea is scared, given the fact that it’s the most likely to suffer if North Korea launches an attack.

With the escalation in North Korea, inevitable comparisons to Iraq are being made on a daily basis. Jonah Goldberg in the Washington Times explains why the two must be treated differently.

Um, yeah. That’s because North Korea has the fifth-largest standing army in the world, huge supplies of weapons of mass-destruction, probably including nukes, and the ability to inflict staggering casualties on South Korea, Japan and our own troops.

[. . .]

Of course, Iraq wants to be treated like North Korea. That’s why Iraq is pursuing weapons of mass destruction. And that’s why the Bush administration wants to keep that from happening. The whole rationale for stopping Saddam now is that the price might be too high to stop him later, like it already is with North Korea.

A heavy dose of reality is needed here. Some oppose all war on principle, not recognizing that you can’t stand in the middle of a battlefield holding up a white ribbon when you’re being shot at, and that the our enemies’ bombs can’t distinguish between activists and pacifists when they fall. Others say that we can’t right one wrong if we’re not going to right all the others at the same time. To them, I say that we’re doing the best we can, one situation at a time, and that if they really wanted to change the world, they should start backing those efforts.