Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Nuclear face-off (Asia Times)

Aug 11 2005
Nuclear face-off
By Tom Engelhardt
We have now reached another of those recurring tinderbox moments 
relating to Iran. On Tuesday, the Iranians officially relaunched their 
nuclear program, beginning a suspended process of uranium conversion at 
a facility near Isfahan. In this, Iran's emboldened clerical regime 
defies the European troika - France, Germany and Britain - with which 
it has been in negotiations, and perhaps creates a moment for which 
Bush administration officials have longed, but whose challenging 
arrival they may now regret.
The board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 
met Tuesday essentially on an emergency basis and perhaps in the near 
future the matter of the Iranian nuclear program may even go to the UN 
Security Council with possible sanctions on the table. (The passage of 
any sanctions measure there is unlikely indeed, given Russian and 
Chinese backing for the Iranians, not to speak of "the sympathy of 
other non-nuclear states on the 35-nation IAEA board"). And then ...? 
Well, that's the $64 dollar (a barrel) question, isn't it?
The geopolitical fundamentalists of the Bush administration have been 
itching for a down-and-dirty "regime change" fight with the clerical 
fundamentalists of Iran at least since President George W Bush, in his 
2002 state of the union address, linked Iran, Saddam Hussein's hated 
neighboring regime with which it had fought an eight-year war of the 
utmost brutality, and the completely unrelated regime in North Korea 
into an infamous "axis of evil". (Perhaps what the president meant was 
"excess of evil".)
As we now know, Saddam's Iraq, with its non-existent nuclear program, 
was chosen as the administration's first target on its shock-and-awe 
"cakewalk" through the Middle East (and then, assumedly, the rest of 
the world) exactly because it was a military shell of its former self, 
a third-rate pushover compared to either Iran or North Korea. As it 
happened, the second-cousin-twice-removed of all battles turned into - 
as Saddam predicted - the mother of all battles and war against the 
rest of the "axis" fell into abeyance.
Now we're back to a potential face-off with a country that at least has 
an actual nuclear program, if not (unlike the North Koreans) a weapon 
to go with it. The nuclear world as imagined by the Bush administration 
is, in fact, a jaggedly uneven place. On the one hand, you have Iran, 
considered (like Saddam's Iraq) an imminent proliferation threat (even 
while that proliferator-in-chief of a nation Pakistan remains our bosom 
buddy); and yet Iran has, for at least 17 years, had a secret nuclear 
program (as well as an above-board one) aimed (possibly) at creating 
the means to create nuclear weapons.
A new US National Intelligence Estimate (the first on Iran since 2001) 
was just leaked to the press. This is one of those documents brokered 
every now and then among the 15 agencies that make up the official US 
intelligence "community" - there are more than 15 actually, but the 
others are fittingly "in the shadows". It evidently claims that Iran 
may need another 10 years or so to create the means to make nuclear 
weapons (not even to have the weapons in hand). If that's accurate, 
then we have a 27-year-plus-long effort to create one bomb. That - to 
my untutored mind - is not exactly an overwhelming stat when it comes 
to threat deployment.
Just at this moment (shades of Iraq), Iranian exiles are releasing new 
information on supposedly secret and illegal nuclear work being done by 
the Iranians, while Pentagon Donald Rumsfeld is claiming that US forces 
have found new weaponry in the hands of the Iraqi insurgency that came 
"clearly, unambiguously" from Iran and that these will "ultimately [be] 
a problem for Iran". (Forget that it's quite illogical for the Iranians 
to be supporting the largely Sunni Iraqi insurgency against an allied, 
mainly Shi'ite government.)
Exiled Iranian dissident Alireza Jafarzadeh, who runs Strategic Policy 
Consulting, a Washington-based think-tank, on Tuesday told The 
Associated Press that Iran had manufactured about 4,000 centrifuges 
capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade. He said that the 
centrifuges - which he said are unknown to the IAEA - are ready to be 
installed at Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz. In 2002, Jafarzadeh 
helped uncover nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity in Iran. 
Jafarzadeh said the information - which he described as "very recent" - 
came from sources within the Tehran regime who had proven accurate in 
the past.
In the meantime, there's an 800-pound nuclear gorilla sitting starkly 
at the center of the Middle Eastern proliferation living room. That's 
Israel, of course, with its extra-legal, super-secret arsenal of 
nuclear weapons, an estimated 200-300 of them, ranging from 
city-busters to battlefield-sized tactical nukes, and yet no news piece 
on the Iranian nuclear danger would be complete without the absence of 
the Israeli arsenal. Go look yourself. A thousand articles are 
appearing right now in the US press on the Iranian nuclear crisis and 
you would be hard-pressed to find a mention of the Israeli nuclear 
arsenal in any of them.
Israel and India, two nuclear weapons powers that have never signed the 
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), are treated by the Bush 
administration with kid gloves - in the Indian case, Bush actually 
wants to turn over "peaceful" nuclear technology to its government 
(despite a prohibition against doing so in the NPT).
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Bush administration has just gotten a new 
energy bill passed that does everything but dig the foundations for new 
nuclear plants in your backyard (and, should a Chernobyl or two happen, 
also lifts from the nuclear industry just about all responsibility for 
covering the costs of catastrophe). And of course, the administration 
in its shock-and-awe version of a non-proliferation policy simply 
forges ahead with its own plans to create new, more usable generations 
of US nuclear weapons and to implant in its global-strike planning 
various nuclear options, including the option of taking out some of the 
Iranian nuclear program with nuclear weapons.
Don't even try to make sense of it.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of 
Victory Culture.

beginning a suspended process of uranium conversion
Puttanata.
Taglio il resto visto che si basa tutto sulla puttanata di cui sopra.
-Stefano

 -Stefano
Cosa di cui hai le prove ma vuoi nasconderle al mondo? YAWN...
Am.

Cosa di cui hai le prove
Le hanno tutti i giornali di tutto il mondo :)
E gia' da ieri!
*LOL*
-Stefano

 -Stefano
Che cosa avrebbero i giornali di tutto il mondo da ieri  esattamente di 
cui non sei in grado di parlare?
Sentiamo il grande analista...
Am.

di cui non sei in grado di parlare?
...disse il povero *FESSO* ignorante... :)
-Stefano

 -Stefano
E quale sarebbe  la differenza rispetto alle parole dell'articolo:
"On Tuesday, the Iranians officially relaunched their nuclear program, 
beginning a suspended process of uranium conversion at a facility near 
Isfahan"
????
Riprovaci, avrai piu' fortuna la prossima volta...
Am.

 Riprovaci, avrai piu' fortuna la prossima volta...
...disse il bue all'asino...
-Stefano



Al limite e' piu' una questione felina:
La gatta frettolosa fece i gattini ciechi...
Capish?
Am.

 Al limite e' piu' una questione felina:
Certo, certo ... :)
*pat pat*
-Stefano

 -Stefano
Disse chi voleva far finta di non essersi data la zappa sui piedi.
Bello eh scopiazzare in tutta fretta su Google, e non leggere neanche 
quello che si  scopiazza...
Toppasti,  brother...
Am.

Toppasti,  brother...
E se lo dice il *FESSO* che non sa manco leggere....!!! :)
*LOL*
-Stefano

 -Stefano
Vogliamo fare un'analisi lessicale, grammaticale e sintattica per 
paragonare i due brani?
Accompagnata  da una psicologica che  chiarisca perche' tu proietti la 
tua fessitudine sugli altri?
Al posto tuo mi starei zitto,  riflettendo sulla Legge del Menga (che 
tocca dire  ad un Britannico...)
Am.

Al posto tuo mi starei zitto, 
...disse il bue all'asino... :)
-Stefano