Moderators: LawBeefaroni, $iljanus
I like how normally the GOP would be fine with his involvement while Democrats would be annoyed with a religious figure inserting himself into politics.
Is something I would expect a Democrat to say."The fact is that his infallibility is on religious matters, not on political ones."
Paywalled.Defiant wrote:Instrumental?El Guapo wrote:we played an instrumental role in toppling the nascent democracy in Iran in the 1950s.
Isgrimnur wrote:Paywalled.Defiant wrote:Instrumental?El Guapo wrote:we played an instrumental role in toppling the nascent democracy in Iran in the 1950s.
had already alienated his own coalition partners. The intelligentsia and Iran’s professional syndicates began chafing under the prime minister’s growing authoritarianism. Mosaddeq’s base of support within the middle classes, alarmed at the economy’s continued decline, began looking for an alternative and drifted toward the royalist opposition, as did the officer corps, which had suffered numerous purges.
The shah planned a trip out of the country to show his displeasure.Watching Iran’s economy collapse and fearing, like Washington, that the crisis could lead to a communist takeover, religious leaders such as Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Kashani began to subtly shift their allegiances. (Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran’s theocratic rulers have attempted to obscure the inconvenient fact that, at a critical juncture, the mullahs sided with the shah.)
Protests engulfed Tehran and many provincial cities, and crowds even attempted to ransack Mosaddeq’s residence. Sensing the public mood, the shah canceled his trip.
This episode is particularly important, because it demonstrated the depth of authentic Iranian opposition to Mosaddeq; there is no evidence that the protests were engineered by the CIA. The demonstrations also helped the anti-Mosaddeq coalition solidify.
It was at this point that the US started considering the British plan of a propaganda campaign and organizing demonstrations and trying to convince the Shah to act by dismissing Mosaddeq and appointing Zahedi by royal decree, but by this point, Mosasseq had been tipped off and had arrested the messenger causing the Shah to leave the country and Zahedi to go into hiding. At that point, the US and the British had thought the plan had failed. And at that point, the Iranians largely took the ball and ran with it with some assistance from the local CIA station in terms of distributing the message the Shah's decree dismissing Mosaddeq.After the protests, the Majlis became the main seat of anti-Mosaddeq agitation. Since Mosaddeq’s ascension to the premiership, his seemingly arbitrary decision-making, his inability to end the oil crisis, and the narrowing of his circle to a few trusted aides had gradually alienated many parliamentarians. In response, the prime minister decided to eliminate the threat by simply dissolving the Majlis. Doing so required executing a ploy of dubious legality, however: on July 14, all the National Front deputies loyal to Mosaddeq resigned their posts at once, depriving the chamber of the necessary quorum to function. Mosaddeq then called for a national referendum to decide the fate of the paralyzed legislature. But this was hardly a good-faith, democratic gesture; the plebiscite was marred by boycotts, voting irregularities, and mob violence, and the results surprised no one: Mosaddeq’s proposal to dissolve parliament was approved by 99 percent of the voters. Mosaddeq won his rigged election, but the move cost him what remained of his tattered legitimacy.
Meanwhile, Mosaddeq seemed determined to do everything he could to confirm Washington’s worst fears about him. The prime minister thought that he could use U.S. concerns about the potential for increased Soviet influence in Iran to secure greater assistance from Washington.
The efforts to publicize the shah’s decree and Mosaddeq’s studied silence are instructive. Many accounts of the coup, including Roosevelt’s, cast the shah as an unpopular and illegitimate ruler who maintained the throne only with the connivance of foreigners. But if that were the case, then Zahedi and his allies would not have worked so hard to try to publicize the shah’s preferences. The fact that they did suggests that the shah still enjoyed a great deal of public and institutional support, at least in the immediate aftermath of Mosaddeq’s countercoup; indeed, the news of the shah’s departure provoked uprisings throughout the country.
Theres a lot more there, but this gives you the sense.Unlike some of the demonstrations that had taken place earlier in the summer, these protests were not the work of the CIA’s and MI6’s clients. A surprised official at the U.S. embassy reported that the crowds “appeared to be led and directed by civilians rather than military. Participants not of hoodlum type, customarily predominant in recent demonstrations in Tehran. They seemed to come from all classes of people including workers, clerks, shopkeepers, students, et cetera.” A CIA assessment noted that “the flight of [the] Shah brought home to the populace in a dramatic way how far Mosaddeq had gone, and galvanized the people into an irate pro-Shah force.”
El Guapo wrote:And of course we also played a role in the eventual rise of the Mullah regime, since we played an instrumental role in toppling the nascent democracy in Iran in the 1950s.
So, good job on Iran, Eisenhower.
Hindsight is 20/20. But frankly, the role described above does not something that should be refrained from use in our arsenal of foreign policy tools.El Guapo wrote: However, I do not think it is in dispute that the U.S. and British efforts played a role in the overthrow of Mosaddeq. Subsequent events indicate that playing such a role was ill-advised.
I know that hindsight is 20/20, and given that the Iranian revolution was over 20 years past the fall of Mossadeq it's not like you can draw a clear causal line between the two (nor would it be reasonable to expect Eisenhower's team to anticipate the long line of events that followed).Defiant wrote:Hindsight is 20/20. But frankly, the role described above does not something that should be refrained from use in our arsenal of foreign policy tools.El Guapo wrote: However, I do not think it is in dispute that the U.S. and British efforts played a role in the overthrow of Mosaddeq. Subsequent events indicate that playing such a role was ill-advised.
Yes, it may have played a role in the revolution decades later, but my guess is that the Shah's actions in the 70s were a far more... instrumental... role in that.
Our actions have consequences, and so do our lack of action. But trying to predict all the potential consequences decades down the line is a fools errand.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh told The Times that when he first sought the Clinton White House’s help to gain access to the Saudi suspects, he was repeatedly thwarted. When he succeeded by going around Mr. Clinton and returned with the evidence, it was dismissed as “hearsay,” and he was asked not to spread it around because the administration had made a policy decision to warm relations with Tehran and didn’t want to rock the boat, he said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... nce-of-ir/Mr. Freeh made similar allegations a decade ago when he wrote a book about his time in the FBI. He was slammed by Clinton supporters, who accused him of being a partisan, claimed the evidence against Iran was inconclusive and that the White House did not try to thwart the probe.
But since that time, substantial new information has emerged in declassified memos, oral history interviews with retired government officials and other venues that corroborate Mr. Freeh’s account, including that the White House tried to cut off the flow of evidence about Iran’s involvement to certain elements of the intelligence community.
Chief among the new evidence is a top-secret cable from summer 1999 showing that Mr. Clinton told Iran’s new and more moderate president at the time, Mohammad Khatami, that the U.S. believed Iran had participated in the Khobar Towers truck bombing.
“Message to President Khatami from President Clinton: The United States Government has received credible evidence that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. (IRGC) along with members of Lebanese and Saudi Hizballah were directly involved in the planning and execution of the terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia of the Khobar Towers military resident complex,” reads a declassified version of the cable obtained by the National Security Archives group.
“The United States views this in the gravest terms,” the cable added. “We acknowledge that the bombing occurred prior to your election. Those responsible, however, have yet to face justice for this crime. And the IRGC may be involved in planning for further terrorist attacks against American citizens. The involvement of the IRGC in terrorist activity and planning aboard remains a cause of deep concern to us.”
But Tehran responded with a harsh denial, backed by its more radical theocratic ruling elite, and it even threatened to make public the cable Mr. Clinton had sent the Iranian leader. At the same time, the Iranians also made clear in their response that they did not harbor ill will or intention against the United States at the present time.
The threat of going public alarmed top U.S. advisers, who feared the disclosure would lead to public pressure inside the United States to retaliate against Iran militarily or diplomatically, contemporaneous memos show.
“If the Iranians make good on their threats to release the text of our letter, we are going to face intense pressure to take action,” top aide Kenneth Pollack wrote in a Sept. 15, 1999, memo routed through White House aide Bruce Riedel to then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger.
Mr. Riedel, who was instrumental in facilitating the top-secret cable to Iran, and Mr. Pollack are now both scholars at the Brookings Institution. They did not return calls and emails Monday seeking comment. But in his 2014 book, Mr. Pollack unequivocally linked the Khobar attack to Iran.
“The 1996 Khobar Towers blast was an Iranian response to an $18 million increase in the U.S. covert action budget against Iran in 1995,” Mr. Pollack wrote. “The Iranians apparently saw it as a declaration of covert war and may have destroyed the Khobar Towers complex as a way of warning the United States of the consequences of such a campaign.”
Wow, just wow....Whatever the case, the White House opted to downplay the concerns, suggesting in public that the evidence linking Iran was “fragmentary” or uncertain. Behind the scenes, steps were also taken to restrict the flow of any further evidence that Iran assisted the Khobar attack, according to interviews with law enforcement and intelligence officials.
At the time, the FBI and the State Department’s intelligence arm were gathering significant new cooperation from Saudi authorities that pointed toward Iranian involvement. But suddenly the flow of information was stopped, officials told The Times.
“We were seeing a line of traffic that led us toward Iranian involvement, and suddenly that traffic was cut off,” recalled Wayne White, a career intelligence officer inside the State Department from 1979 to 2005 who served as deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia.
What can be said with certainty is that had Israel given up the Golan, the situation today would have been much more complex. In response to the Syrian civil war and the rise of Islamic State, Israel would have faced a hot front confronting Hezbollah, Iran, and a range of Islamist jihadis. Given the Golan’s strategic importance, Israel would have had to reoccupy it and would have found itself in the middle of Syria’s civil war. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Israel’s actions would have been a unifying factor and might have actually bucked up the Assad regime as it tried to rally Syrians against the “Zionist enemy.”
linkWhite House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday that there are "strong indications" that Iran's test of a new precision-guided ballistic missile on Sunday violated a UN Security Council resolution.
Defiant wrote:linkWhite House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday that there are "strong indications" that Iran's test of a new precision-guided ballistic missile on Sunday violated a UN Security Council resolution.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12 ... tions.htmlIran has carried out a new medium range ballistic missile test in breach of two United Nations Security Council resolutions, a senior U.S. official told Fox News on Monday.
Western intelligence says the test was held Nov. 21 near Chabahar, a port city in southeast Iran’s Balochistan province near the border with Pakistan. The launch took place from a known missile test site along the Gulf of Oman.
The missile, known as a Ghadr-110, has a range of 1,800 – 2000 km, or 1200 miles, and is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The missile fired in November is an improved version of the Shahab 3, and is similar to the precision guided missile tested by Iran on Oct. 10, which elicited strong condemnation from members of the U.N. Security Council.
“The United States is deeply concerned about Iran's recent ballistic missile launch," Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., said in a statement after the last Iranian ballistic missile test in October.
President Obama mentioned the Iranian missile test during a press conference on Oct. 16 and said the United States was preparing to brief the U.N. sanctions committee. He added that it would not derail the nuclear deal.
Don't say that! With a little luck the rocket scientists Trump or Cruz will solve all your problems. Statesmen, each of them.Rip wrote: We as a nation are such morons.
The medium-range Emad rocket that Iran tested in October was a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, which makes it a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution, a team of sanctions monitors said in a confidential new report. The conclusion of the council's Panel of Experts on Iran will likely lead to calls for expanding sanctions against Tehran in Washington and some other Western capitals. The White House said on Tuesday that it would not rule out additional steps against Tehran over the missile test.
"On the basis of its analysis and findings the Panel concludes that Emad launch is a violation by Iran of paragraph 9 of Security Council resolution 1929," the panel said in its report. Reuters on Tuesday reviewed the 10-page report, which was dated Dec. 11 and went to members of the United Nations Security Council's Iran sanctions committee in recent days. The report is expected to come up later on Tuesday when the 15-nation council discusses the Iran sanctions regime.
The report said the panel considers ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to be those that can deliver at least a 500 kg payload within a range of at least 300 km. "The Panel assesses that the launch of the Emad has a range of not less than 1,000 km with a payload of at least 1,000 kg and that Emad was also a launch 'using ballistic missile technology'," the report said.
The launch took place on Oct. 10, according to the report. The panel noted that Iranian rocket launches from 2012 and 2013 also violated the U.N. ban on ballistic missile tests.
he U.N. nuclear agency closed the books Tuesday on its decade-long probe of allegations that Iran worked on atomic arms, and Tehran proclaimed that it would implement commitments within weeks to cut back on present nuclear programs that could be used to make such weapons.
The probe had to be formally ended as part of a deal between Iran and six nations that involves the removal of economic sanctions. A resolution was approved by consensus of the 35-nation board of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
The move means that some questions about Iran's alleged weapons work may never be resolved. Before the resolution's adoption, agency head Yukiya Amano told the board that his investigation couldn't “reconstruct all the details of activities conducted by Iran in the past.”
At the same time, he repeated an assessment he made last month that Iran worked on “a range of activities relevant” to making nuclear weapons, with coordinated efforts up to 2003 tapering off into scattered activities up to 2009.
The US has imposed fresh sanctions on Iranian companies and individuals over a recent ballistic missile test.
The new sanctions prevent 11 entities and individuals linked to the missile programme from using the US banking system.
The move came after international nuclear sanctions on Iran were lifted as part of a deal hailed by President Barack Obama on Sunday as "smart".
Four American-Iranians were also freed in a prisoner swap as part of the deal.
Even by Trump standards, the egomania embedded in this remark is staggering. But it also reflects something more dangerous about not just Trump but most of the leading GOP candidates: a view that “hitting them hard” is the only way to get people to do things, and that patient diplomacy is for suckers and weaklings. As we now know, the prisoner-release came as the result of 14 months of negotiations between U.S. and Iranian diplomats—who, by the way, would have had no way of even speaking with one another, had it not been for the ties built up during the three years of talks on Iran’s nuclear program.
...
But the centuries-long history of international relations shows that it’s possible for adversaries—even, during the Soviet-American Cold War, bitter foes who have the ability to incinerate each other in a matter of minutes—to negotiate deals that benefit the security interests of both sides, and to do so in ways that might open up avenues of accord in other realms worth exploring.
This is what Obama’s approach to foreign policy—which isn’t so different from the approach of many past presidents—has wrought this week. It’s an approach and an outcome that most of the Republican candidates not only couldn’t pull off but explicitly, if bizarrely, condemn.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... clear.htmlSaudi political analyst Dahham Al-‘Anzi spoke on Russia Today Arabic TV channel on February 15 and claimed that Saudi Arabia has obtained a nuclear bomb. Al-‘Anzi said that the Saudis have acquired the bomb two years ago and that a nuclear test is expected soon. “The superpowers know about this,” he added.
Western intelligence agencies believe that the Saudi monarchy paid for up to 60 per cent of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, in return for the ability to buy warheads for itself at short notice. Any failure by Iran to provide the necessary safeguards by the end of this month could see Riyadh activate that deal, thereby enabling Saudi Arabia to become the Arab world’s first nuclear power. And if that were to happen, then many other regional powers, such as Egypt and Turkey, would also attempt to follow suit – a nuclear arms race in the world’s most unstable region.
Key restrictions on Iran's nuclear program imposed under an internationally negotiated deal will start to ease years before the 15-year accord expires, advancing Tehran's ability to build a bomb even before the end the pact, according to a document obtained Monday by The Associated Press.
The document is the only text linked to last year's deal between Iran and six foreign powers that hasn't been made public, although U.S. officials say members of Congress have been able to see it. It was given to the AP by a diplomat whose work has focused on Iran's nuclear program for more than a decade, and its authenticity was confirmed by another diplomat who possesses the same document.
It's not clear to me what Trump's approach/position is, both because he's often vague and nebulous and inconsistent, and because it's not clear they've developed an approach yet. To the extent they have, though, it looks like the administration is pushing for a freeze on isolated settlements, which is a major change from Obama's administration, that wanted a complete freeze everywhere and condemned any development anywhere, including inside the settlement blocs. And while some on the far right (eg, Bennett) will take issue with it, others might not.Pyperkub wrote:Trump taking the Obama approach?
But Obama, the senior official and other administration representatives weren’t telling the whole story on Jan. 17, 2016, in their highly choreographed rollout of the prisoner swap and simultaneous implementation of the six-party nuclear deal, according to a POLITICO investigation.
In his Sunday morning address to the American people, Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as “civilians.” The senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere “sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.”
In reality, some of them were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware. As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.
And in a series of unpublicized court filings, the Justice Department dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives. The administration didn’t disclose their names or what they were accused of doing, noting only in an unattributed, 152-word statement about the swap that the U.S. “also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians for whom it was assessed that extradition requests were unlikely to be successful.”
| Running__ | __2014: 1300.55 miles__ | __2015: 2036.13 miles__ | __2016: 1012.75 miles__ | __2017: 1105.82 miles__ | __2018: 1318.91 miles | __2019: 2000.00 miles |
Make it illegal. Better in a US prison than a North Korea prisonstessier wrote:How would that work, exactly? It's not like we have direct flights from LA to Pyongyang as a tip off where someone is headed.
| Running__ | __2014: 1300.55 miles__ | __2015: 2036.13 miles__ | __2016: 1012.75 miles__ | __2017: 1105.82 miles__ | __2018: 1318.91 miles | __2019: 2000.00 miles |
I would also add that prohibiting ordinary fellows from going to Iran would make it essentially impossible for CIA operatives to work in Iran.Kraken wrote:I agree with Grif's sentiment -- when I hear about an American being detained in NK, my gut reaction is "well, what did you THINK was going to happen?"
To stessier's point: American citizenship should ideally confer a sort of invincibility, within reason. The Romans understood this; Roman citizenship was valued throughout the ancient world. Subject peoples who behaved as good citizens of the Empire were rewarded with degrees of Roman citizenship. American citizenship, too, should be aspirational and backed by the power of the Empire.
Now, if this was an ordinary fellow detained as a political pawn, that's different than if he was a secret CIA operative. You gotta pick your spots.
Define "plenty". And it was not totally illegal to go there. There were exceptions.stessier wrote:It was illegal to go to Cuba. Plenty of people still went.
As noted, travel to Cuba was largely illegal. So it's not as if this has never happened before.El Guapo wrote:A law flat banning U.S. citizens from traveling at all to a country for any reason would seem to be of dubious constitutionality. Plus, do you really want to open the door to that kind of law during the Trump administration?
Technically it wasn't illegal to travel to Cuba - it was illegal to engage in commercial transactions with Cuba's military-owned tourism monopolies.Grifman wrote:As noted, travel to Cuba was largely illegal. So it's not as if this has never happened before.El Guapo wrote:A law flat banning U.S. citizens from traveling at all to a country for any reason would seem to be of dubious constitutionality. Plus, do you really want to open the door to that kind of law during the Trump administration?
Would it matter if we did? People would still hold the government responsible for not bailing them out.Grifman wrote:Just a general question - can we just not ban travel between the US and countries that kidnap and imprison Americans such as Iran and North Korea? I really get tired of us having to bail out people for this. Just don't let them do in the first place. Or make them sign and acknowledge that they are undertaking a risk in such travel, and that the US will not be responsible for bailing them out if imprisoned.