Showing posts with label Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Show all posts
May 6, 2012
May 5, 2012
SandBoxBlogs: Durango Herald "Ahmadinejad rivals win seats in Iran runoff"
ALI AKBAR DAREINI
"Partial results for an Iranian parliamentary runoff election announced Saturday show supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reduced to a small fraction of the legislature, hugely outnumbered by the conservatives who once backed him but then turned against him after he was perceived to challenge the authority of top clerics.
Iran has touted the turnout for Friday's vote as a show of support for the country's religious leadership in their confrontation with the West over Tehran's controversial nuclear program.
It also represents another blow against the populist president who, while usually in agreement with the conservatives on foreign policy and many other issues, had tried to change the rules of the political game in the Islamic Republic, where the president and legislature are subordinate to religious figures like Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khanenei.
The new parliament will begin its sessions in late May. It has no direct control over major policy matters like Iran's nuclear program, but it can influence the run-up to the election of Ahmadinejad's successor in 2013.
Of 65 seats for grabs in Friday's runoff election, Ahmadinejad's opponents won 20 while the president's supporters got only 8 seats. Independents won 11, according to the state media early Saturday...."
(Read more? Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."
"Partial results for an Iranian parliamentary runoff election announced Saturday show supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reduced to a small fraction of the legislature, hugely outnumbered by the conservatives who once backed him but then turned against him after he was perceived to challenge the authority of top clerics.
Iran has touted the turnout for Friday's vote as a show of support for the country's religious leadership in their confrontation with the West over Tehran's controversial nuclear program.
It also represents another blow against the populist president who, while usually in agreement with the conservatives on foreign policy and many other issues, had tried to change the rules of the political game in the Islamic Republic, where the president and legislature are subordinate to religious figures like Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khanenei.
The new parliament will begin its sessions in late May. It has no direct control over major policy matters like Iran's nuclear program, but it can influence the run-up to the election of Ahmadinejad's successor in 2013.
Of 65 seats for grabs in Friday's runoff election, Ahmadinejad's opponents won 20 while the president's supporters got only 8 seats. Independents won 11, according to the state media early Saturday...."
(Read more? Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."
March 20, 2012
SandBoxBlogs: Aspen Daily News "Israel’s need to buy time"
Richard Cohen:
"Nations have doctrines. The Soviet Union had the Brezhnev Doctrine and the United States had the Monroe Doctrine, among others. Even little Israel has one. I call it the Maybe the Dog Will Talk Doctrine and it is based on a folk tale of the rabbi who makes a preposterous deal with a tyrant: If the tyrant spares the lives of local Jews, the rabbi will teach the tyrant’s dog to talk. When the rabbi tells his wife what he has done, she calls him a fool. But, he says, “A year is a long time. In a year, the tyrant could die or I could die” — and here he gives her a sly wise rabbi smile — “or maybe the dog will talk.”
All sorts of people — defense intellectuals, military officers and even the president of the United States — either have not heard of the Maybe the Dog Will Talk Doctrine or do not recognize its importance. (It was cited to me by an Israeli official.) Both Barack Obama and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have characterized any Israeli attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program as a short-term affair. An Israeli raid “wouldn’t achieve their long-term objectives,” Dempsey said on CNN — and he is surely right.
But Israel also has a short-term objective — and that is to play for time. Israel notes that its 1981 bombing of a nuclear reactor in Iraq set back Saddam Hussein’s program — and did not result in some sort of massive retaliation. Something similar happened with the 2007 bombing of a Syrian installation. Neither operation was conceived as a long-term solution, but both accomplished short-term goals. In a year or two, much could change in the Middle East. The region’s in turmoil. Dogs are talking all over the place.....
.......Sanctions may cause Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program, if indeed that’s where it is now heading. But critics of Israel’s approach have to understand that Iran’s program looks different from Tel Aviv than it does from Washington. In the long run, an Israeli attack on Iran will accomplish nothing. In the short run, it could accomplish quite a lot...." (Read more? Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."
"Nations have doctrines. The Soviet Union had the Brezhnev Doctrine and the United States had the Monroe Doctrine, among others. Even little Israel has one. I call it the Maybe the Dog Will Talk Doctrine and it is based on a folk tale of the rabbi who makes a preposterous deal with a tyrant: If the tyrant spares the lives of local Jews, the rabbi will teach the tyrant’s dog to talk. When the rabbi tells his wife what he has done, she calls him a fool. But, he says, “A year is a long time. In a year, the tyrant could die or I could die” — and here he gives her a sly wise rabbi smile — “or maybe the dog will talk.”
All sorts of people — defense intellectuals, military officers and even the president of the United States — either have not heard of the Maybe the Dog Will Talk Doctrine or do not recognize its importance. (It was cited to me by an Israeli official.) Both Barack Obama and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have characterized any Israeli attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program as a short-term affair. An Israeli raid “wouldn’t achieve their long-term objectives,” Dempsey said on CNN — and he is surely right.
But Israel also has a short-term objective — and that is to play for time. Israel notes that its 1981 bombing of a nuclear reactor in Iraq set back Saddam Hussein’s program — and did not result in some sort of massive retaliation. Something similar happened with the 2007 bombing of a Syrian installation. Neither operation was conceived as a long-term solution, but both accomplished short-term goals. In a year or two, much could change in the Middle East. The region’s in turmoil. Dogs are talking all over the place.....
.......Sanctions may cause Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program, if indeed that’s where it is now heading. But critics of Israel’s approach have to understand that Iran’s program looks different from Tel Aviv than it does from Washington. In the long run, an Israeli attack on Iran will accomplish nothing. In the short run, it could accomplish quite a lot...." (Read more? Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."
February 22, 2012
SandBox Comments: Commentary Magazine "Contentions "NYTimes: War, Again?" "
Seth Mandel:
"The New York Times has a “news analysis”–usually code for “front-page, signed editorial”–lamenting the American public’s appetite for countering the Iranian regime’s attempts to build nuclear weapons. The conceit of the story is that this is a rerun of the war in Iraq, where the supposed existence of a nuclear weapons program spurred the West to form a coalition to depose Saddam Hussein.
“Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable,” Scott Shane tells us, “igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb.” And who is debating the veracity of reporters’ accounts? “Both the ombudsman of the Washington Post and the public editor of the New York Times in his online blog have scolded their newspapers since December for overstating the current evidence against Iran in particular headlines and stories.” So it is the New York Times accusing the New York Times of beating the drums of war. Let’s take a look at some of the other parallels.
“The intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, which was one of the Bush administration’s main rationales for the invasion, proved to be devastatingly wrong,” Shane writes. Not just wrong, but devastatingly wrong. I’ll leave it to others to check the Times style guide for the spectrum of wrongness, but “devastatingly wrong” must be among the wrongest you can be, in the Times’s opinion....
....In any event, the intelligence on Iran isn’t all that murky. What the Times is saying is that even when we can all agree on what the intelligence shows, we can’t trust it, because of Iraq. The Times is actually building a case here against military action even if Iran is about to achieve nuclear capability. As the article notes, however, that’s a view shared by some academics from Harvard and Columbia, but opposed by a majority of Americans...."
(Read more? Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."
"The New York Times has a “news analysis”–usually code for “front-page, signed editorial”–lamenting the American public’s appetite for countering the Iranian regime’s attempts to build nuclear weapons. The conceit of the story is that this is a rerun of the war in Iraq, where the supposed existence of a nuclear weapons program spurred the West to form a coalition to depose Saddam Hussein.
“Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable,” Scott Shane tells us, “igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb.” And who is debating the veracity of reporters’ accounts? “Both the ombudsman of the Washington Post and the public editor of the New York Times in his online blog have scolded their newspapers since December for overstating the current evidence against Iran in particular headlines and stories.” So it is the New York Times accusing the New York Times of beating the drums of war. Let’s take a look at some of the other parallels.
“The intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, which was one of the Bush administration’s main rationales for the invasion, proved to be devastatingly wrong,” Shane writes. Not just wrong, but devastatingly wrong. I’ll leave it to others to check the Times style guide for the spectrum of wrongness, but “devastatingly wrong” must be among the wrongest you can be, in the Times’s opinion....
....In any event, the intelligence on Iran isn’t all that murky. What the Times is saying is that even when we can all agree on what the intelligence shows, we can’t trust it, because of Iraq. The Times is actually building a case here against military action even if Iran is about to achieve nuclear capability. As the article notes, however, that’s a view shared by some academics from Harvard and Columbia, but opposed by a majority of Americans...."
(Read more? Click title)
"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."
November 29, 2011
SandBox Comments: Weasel Zippers "Iran: Satellite Images Show Revolutionary Guard Missile Base Completely Destroyed After Mysterious Explosion…"
Our thanks goes out to that "mysterious explosion".
(Incredible photos. Click title. Comment to discuss)
(Incredible photos. Click title. Comment to discuss)
"Truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident."
November 2, 2011
SandBox Comments: Circle of Blue "Plumbing WikiLeaks: Saudi Arabia Fears Iranian Nuclear Meltdown and Potential Terrorism to Desalination "
"Classified cables show that Saudi and U.S. officials believe water supplies along the Persian Gulf are at high-risk for terrorist attacks and possible contamination from nearby nuclear plants. This is the first of a new series that will analyze the water-related U.S. embassy cables published by WikiLeaks."
(Circle of Blue, Brett Walton)
(Learn more about this incredible report? Click title. Comment to start discussion)
(Circle of Blue, Brett Walton)
(Learn more about this incredible report? Click title. Comment to start discussion)
"Truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident."
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