They’ve done it before. So, no, I got no problem with that.

You mean as a pre-emptive measure? That’s working out just so delightfully elsewhere.

And what happens if Iran decides that “The Great Satan” needs some nuclear encouragement to get out of the Middle East …

buh-blah, blah blah blah..Yeah. In an unimaginable scenario, despite the umpteenth citation of Ahmadinejad’s money quote every wingnut wanks to -since they don’t speak Farsi.

Yeah, it was cool for Iran to have atomic technology under the rule of the Shah but with those scary mooslims; BOOGETY!! BOOGETY!! BOOGETY!! Oh no! Israel can’t defend themselves despite being the fourth-largest recipient of weapons from the U.S.!

Want to support Israel’s right to defend themselves? Go there and enlist, you miserable bedwetting prat.

Then you’ll have no problem when Israel bombs the crap out Iranian nuclear facilities. Got it.

And what happens if Iran decides that “The Great Satan” needs some nuclear encouragement to get out of the Middle East and (more importantly) stop supporting Israel?

I expect this is at or near the top of their “To Do” list.

Then its Israel’s problem.

Bush: *silence*
Iran: Well, America’s not saying anything so let’s go on building this thing!

Obama: “Iran is not being helpful”
Iran: “Well, America’s not saying they’re against us having it, so let’s go on building this thing!”

Wow! Obama’s approach is so much better. I’m sure he will get excellent results.

I understand why they want them. Unlike you, Bruce (and Obama, apparently), I happen to think they shouldn’t be allowed to get them.

As for the reasons you listed, you forgot to include an important one:

Wiping Israel off the map

I expect this is at or near the top of their “To Do” list.

When you absolutely, positively have to find someone to push your bullshit, accept no substitutes.

(Source linked in my name above)

by JUDITH MILLER
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 12:01 A.M. EDT

-Enough said.

I gotta learn to type faster than Duros!

January 26, 9:40 p.m.:

I’ll name a major advancement towards peace in the Middle East that was achieved without “direct adult diplomacy,” then you name one that was. I’ll go first:

The rehabilitation of Libya into a semi-respectable nation and the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program. All done with behind the scenes, indirect, quiet discussions — prompted by the almost-effortless removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

As you now acknowledge, the behind-the-scenes, quiet discussions were anything but indirect and they began four whole years before the removal of Saddam Hussein.

So are you admitting you missed? Or would you like to take a mulligan?

Jesus. Jay Tea, you wrote, above, in this very thread:

I’ll name a major advancement towards peace in the Middle East that was achieved without “direct adult diplomacy,” then you name one that was. I’ll go first:

The rehabilitation of Libya into a semi-respectable nation and the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program. All done with behind the scenes, indirect, quiet discussions — prompted by the almost-effortless removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

According to you, not only did diplomacy play NO role in Libya’s change of heart, but that what diplomacy did occur began only AFTER the invasion as an indirect consequence of the invasion.

You got your facts wrong.

Your thesis was dead wrong.

And now you’re telling us you didn’t say what you said at the top of the thread.

What a clown.

(Source linked in my name above)

While analysts continue to debate his motivation, evidence suggests that a mix of intelligence, diplomacy and the use of force in Iraq helped persuade him that the weapons he had pursued since he came to power, and on which he had secretly spent $300 million ($100 million on nuclear equipment and material alone), made him more, not less, vulnerable. “The administration overstates Iraq, but its critics go too far in saying that force played no role,” says Bruce W. Jentleson, a foreign-policy adviser to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign and professor at Duke University, who has written the most detailed study of why Col. Gadhafi abandoned WMD: “It was force and diplomacy, not force or diplomacy that turned Gadhafi around . . . a combination of steel and a willingness to deal.”

…

Col. Gadhafi was alarmed by the new U.S. agenda, and Libyans say that the 9/11 attacks were a turning point for the Brother Leader, who was among the first to condemn them. Through intelligence channels, he sent the administration a list of suspects. He also called Hosni Mubarak in a panic, convinced that Mr. Bush would attack Libya once the Taliban had been crushed in Afghanistan, according to a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo reported last month by Time. Meanwhile, Washington increased its rhetorical pressure. Though Libya was not included in Mr. Bush’s “axis of evil,” then-Undersecretary of State John Bolton called Libya a “rogue state” determined to acquire WMD.

…

Libyans close to the Gadhafi family told me that after Saddam Hussein’s sons were killed in a shootout with U.S. soldiers in Mosul in July 2003, Safiya, Col. Gadhafi’s wife, angrily demanded that he do more to ensure that Saif and her other sons would not share a similar fate. Then, in early October 2003, the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Italy interdicted the “BBC China,” a German ship destined for Libya that the Americans had been tracking for nearly a year. A U.S. intelligence official informed the Libyans that the five 40-foot containers marked “used machine parts” that were offloaded from the ship contained thousands of centrifuge parts to enrich uranium, manufactured in Malaysia by the A.Q. Khan network. Stunned by the discovery, Libya fast-tracked its long-promised invitation to the British and U.S. experts to tour suspect sites. A 15-person team, headed by Mr. Kappes, then the CIA deputy director of operations, (who declined to be interviewed for this piece) entered Libya on Oct. 19 on a 10-day mission.

While Col. Gadhafi could have claimed, as Iran now does, that the enrichment equipment was for a peaceful energy program, the pretense was shattered in November when U.S. intelligence gave the Libyans a copy of a compact disc that intelligence agencies had intercepted. According to Saif and Libyan officials in Tripoli, the CD contained a recording of a long discussion on Feb. 28, 2002, about Libya’s nuclear weapons program, between Ma’atouq Mohamed Ma’atouq, the head of that clandestine effort, and A.Q. Khan. Denial of military intent was no longer an option.

I never claimed that the toppling of Saddam was the sole reason that Libya gave up its WMD program, but it sure as hell was a hefty factor.

J.

Iran, which has always claimed that its nuclear programme is peaceful, acquired several thousand tonnes of yellow cake from South Africa during the mid-1970s shortly after the Shah initiated the country’s original push for civil nuclear power.

I did not know that Iran’s quest for nuclear power started under the Shah, a staunch ally of the US. That kind of jibes with the current regime’s argument that their nuclear facilities are for civilian purposes. Are we to assume that the Shah, too, wanted nukes, but was using civilian nuclear power as a cover?

Also interesting, here’s the first part of that article, as Dave only linked to page 2:

Western powers believe that Iran is running short of the raw material required to manufacture nuclear weapons, triggering an international race to prevent it from importing more, The Times has learnt.

Diplomatic sources believe that Iran’s stockpile of yellow cake uranium, produced from uranium ore, is close to running out and could be exhausted within months.

What program?

Fail.

Nimrod:

Iran clearly won’t have the bomb for years and years to come, if ever, assmung they even want it in the first place.

See the link above. Turns out, they do want it after all.

While experts continue to debate Qaddafi’s true motivation for abandoning his WMD, security concerns were certainly a factor: abandoning its WMD program actually provided Libya more security than continued pursuit of chemical or nuclear weapons. Another motive was economic. Bruce Jentleson, a Duke University professor and former foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Al Gore, says Libyan leaders are “gaining economic benefits to deliver to their people,” and “a greater chance at domestic stability.”

This is the subject of much debate in the foreign policy community. Some suggest Qaddafi feared the Bush administration would invade Libya under the preemption doctrine pursued after 9/11. In the 2004 vice presidential debate, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said a byproduct of U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan “is that five days after we captured Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya came forward and announced that he was going to surrender all of his nuclear materials.” Others see this more as coincidence than cause and effect.

Martin Indyk, for instance, points to Libya’s willingness to abandon its WMD in 1999 as evidence that social and economic factors were at the root of Qaddafi’s decision. “The economic benefits of being a part of globalization were increasing,” says Jentleson. Indeed, pro-Western elements have sprung up among the upper echelon of Libya’s leadership. Seif Qaddafi, who is known to have influence among his father’s inner circle, has gently urged reform while expressing a desire to lure foreign investment and revitalize the Libyan economy.

“The backdrop of force was a factor, but not nearly the factor Bush and Cheney have portrayed it to be,” Jentleson says. “The real story was the diplomacy.” Another factor was intelligence. In the first installment of her Wall Street Journal article, Judith Miller reports Qaddafi’s decision to abandon his WMD was reinforced after U.S. officials gave Libya a compact disc containing recorded conversations between the chief of the Libyan nuclear program and representatives of the Khan network.

Once again, the picture is far more complicated than you suggest and diplomacy did in fact play a crucial factor in the Libya’s change of policies, as evidence of Libya’s offer in 1999 to dismantle its weapons programs.

The invasion of Iraq, it can be and has been argued, was entirely coincidental.

It’s the bad faith argument of those who want to push a belligerent foreign policy position could argue that diplomacy was irrelevant.

I think most immediately it’s a fact that “the indispensable help of Great Britain” you reduce to a parenthetical actually began 4 years before our invasion of Iraq and took the form of precisely the “direct adult diplomacy” you seem to think so ineffective.

Here’s a good timeline of what happened:

What did Libya do to warrant removal from the state sponsors list?

The process of welcoming Libya “in from the cold” began in the late 1990s. The first significant step came in 1999 when, after prolonged negotiations with UN and UK representatives, Libya turned over two of its citizens to be tried in The Hague for their role in the Pan Am 103 bombing. Subsequently, Clinton administration officials, led by then-Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk, began secret negotiations with Libya. Writing in the Financial Times in 2004, Indyk recounts Libya’s offers to surrender its WMD programs and cut ties to terrorist groups. The U.S. delegation did not accept the offers at the time because of the unresolved investigation into the Pan Am 103 bombing, Indyk says. Though Libya had turned over two Pan Am suspects, it had not accepted responsibility or compensated the families of the victims.

At the same time, Qaddafi increasingly moved to cut Libya’s ties to terrorism. Starting in 1999, Qaddafi expelled the Abu Nidal Organization, closed Libya’s terrorist training camps, cut ties to Palestinian militants, and extradited suspected terrorists to Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan. In the 2002 edition of the state sponsors of terrorism list, the State Department said Qaddafi had “repeatedly denounced terrorism.”

In August 2003, after protracted negotiations with UN, U.S., and UK representatives, Libya finally agreed to pay some $2.7 million in compensation to the victims of the Pan Am 103 bombing. Days later, Libya delivered a letter to the UN Security Council accepting responsibility for the attack.

On December 19, 2003, Tripoli announced it would give up its WMD programs. Backchannel communications with U.S. and UK intelligence agencies had begun in 2002, and secret negotiations continued until just hours before the announcement, as Judith Miller reported in the Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, Libya pledged to allow monitors to verify the destruction of the program.

So what you have are intense back channel diplomatic negotiations that began in 1999 which started producing real changes in Libyan policy well before the invasion of Iraq.

Please also note that discussions about Libya’s WMD program began in earnest in 2002, not in 2003 as you assert.

So once again, you have a basic fact, crucial to your argument, completely wrong.

How relevant would that be, Jay Tea?