Iran's Mr Nuclear Quits
Ali Larijani is the man who for years has been in the forefront of Iran's nuclear negotiations. Now he's resigned, apparently because of policy disagreements with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian politics are always complex and subtle: at first sight, this would seem to be a victory for Tehran's hardlines, because Larijani has always been regarded as someone who was on the more flexible end of the Iranian political spectrum.
But there are already signs that some of Ahmadinejad's political opponents want to know more about what's behind his resignation ... there's an excellent analysis by the respected Hawaii-based Iranian analyst Farideh Farhi. Definitely worth looking at ...
Maybe he doesn't want to be near ground zero when the attack comes. What will "the west" do if he defects and reveals to the world that Iran is not only building an atom bomb but that it is very close to having one operational for testing or even for weaponization? The last such revelation in the region came from Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995, announced it to the world claiming that he was in charge of the program, was lured back to Iraq, and was assassinated for his betrayal. At that time, the coalition didn't even have evidence that such a program existed in Iraq. Small wonder there was no further trust in anything the Iraqis or the UN inspectors said by 2003 after all the games of evasion and obfuscation Iraq played. You have to wonder just how much longer the US and Israel are going to sit around playing chicken, each hoping the other will make the first move sparing it the onus. This can't go on much longer. Why is Russia worried? Because it doesn't want to lose its investment in Iran the way it lost its investment in Iraq. Anyway, I don't see that the analysis sheds any new light on what is happening, just speculation. Any rational analysis based on public knowledge has to conclude that Iran is working on building nuclear weapons and will use them perhaps through its terrorist surrogates like Hezbollah once it acquires them. Even a cynical old fool like Jacques Chirac couldn't avoid coming to this conclusion and that it has to be stopped. He said so publically. You also have to wonder if the US would go through another public charade at the UN Security Council, an utter waste of time and effort. Personally I think the US should play the Lybia gambit, tell Iran's Ayatollah's open everything up and disarm or face the certainty of a massive American military strike that no one can prevent or stop. That worked.
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