Gyroscope

Rick Steves passes on this link of photos of Iran - amazing photos because they show Tehran as an ordinary, attractive, urban area. If we saw it like that it would be harder to destroy. God forbid the US launch another war to satisfy the ego of the neo-cons.

3/5 update:

A reader wrote the following:

It seems to me that all the leadership courage has been sucked out of the planet (through the ozone layer, perhaps?). I'm not seeing courage anywhere---in my work with organizations, nor certainly on the political horizon.

Yes, where is the courage, the leadership to express our outrage about the attempt to attack Iran?

Posted by John Nordin at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is Bush now sufficiently loose from his moorings that he is about to launch us into Iran?

The must-read Helena Cobban connects some dots and comes to that conclusion

Go check out her argument. What is particularly disheartening is that many Democrats have been ‘crying for blood’ on Iran, so they will probably support an invasion and prove yet again what useless fools they all are.

I’ve written here and here just about how stupid this will be.

But let’s just remind ourselves of a quick fact: Iran four times the size, three times the people, six times the economy of Iraq. Iraq is just smaller than France, Iran is nearly three times the size of France.

Posted by John Nordin at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For a more reasonable and informative take on what Iran is up to, look at the article by David Albrights, “When Could Iran get the Bomb? What we know and what we don’t know about Iran’s nuclear program.”

The first clue that we might learn something is that this is in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July 2006 and our second clue is that the author is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. In other words, an article written by a scientist for scientists.

What does he say? Iran, in his judgment, is doing things that imply it wants at least to preserve the option of making a fast push to build a weapon and that it will take them a minimum of three years to do so, and likely much more.

He also flatly accuses US government sources of flat out lying about what the IAEA actually found to hype the fear of a real danger to the world. Himm, have we heard this before?

He recommends diplomacy, but also sanctions on Iran’s acquisition of duel use items.

Posted by John Nordin at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s hard to keep up with all the countries we’re going to invade. Just when I was getting around to working on why invading Iran was a bad idea, now maybe it is Syria that is next in our sights. But just in case Israel bombing the hell out of Lebanon continues to be blamed neither on Israel nor on Hezbollah but on Iran, here are some pertinent facts from “Iran: Consequences of a War” by Paul Rogers, published by the Oxford Research Group. Facts from the report; interpretations and questions by me.

Israel does have the capability of projecting air power to Iran thanks to us selling them long-range versions of the F-15 and F-16, as well as over 500 large earth penetrating bombs (p.4). Could any of this have motivated Iran and other nations to acquire longer-range weapons of their own? And what does Israel need bunker-buster weapons for if not to go after the sort of hardened underground facilities that the Palestinians do NOT have?

The US routinely keeps one aircraft carrier battle group near the Persian Gulf and sometimes two during rotations. (p.7). This would presumably provide all the air power needed for the US to launch yet another one of those mythical “surgical” attacks that – because all the trouble they cause is weeks and months later – are regarded as easy and painless by civilian leaders.

We’d presumably want to take out the 1000Mw reactor near Bushehr (p.7), but since it goes critical this year an attack that broke the containment structure would spread radiation not only over Arabs and Persians we don’t care about but maybe over US soldiers (whom the Bush administration doesn’t much care about) and over oil production facilities that we do care about.

Continue reading "Just in case it’s Iran we invade next" »

Posted by John Nordin at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Could it be that they are actually thinking of invading or attacking Iran? Using tactical nukes? Or will they have the Israelis do it for us? Could the saber rattling be just to try to scare Iran (which it won’t) and then the Busites will be backed into a corner by their own extreme rhetoric? Or maybe the extreme language is a trick: they will do a “little” raid or some sanctions and – because we’ve been conditioned by the extreme rhetoric we’ll think we convinced Bush to be reasonable.

Whatever, it’s a bad idea all around. Some facts:

Iran
1.6 million sq km – About the size of Alaska
68.8 million people
4.3 million cell phones
GDP: $552 billion (purchasing power parity)
GDP/capita: $8,100

Iraq
437 thousand sq km – twice the size of Idaho
26.7 million people
547 thousand cell phones
GDP: $94 billion (purchasing power parity)
GDP/capita: $3,400

France
547 thousand sq km – twice the size of Colorado
60.8 million people
44.5 million cell phones.
GDP: $1.8 trillion
GDP/capita: $30,000

All data from the CIA fact book. The cell phone number is a proxy for the level of development. France I listed just because we might be invading them after Iran.

So: Iran. Four times the size, three times the people, six times the economy. Oh yea, Iraq went so well, Iran should be just easy.

I think Bush might well do something other than a full invasion – a bombing, sanctions, getting the Iraq army to start incidents on the border. And in a later post, I’ll explain why that won’t work either.

Posted by John Nordin at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)