Persicus Maximus

The New York Times ran a front page article on Saturday reiterating the consensus view of the U.S. military and intelligence community regarding Iran’s nuclear program, splitting from usual mainstream media coverage which has hyped fear that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons. The U.S. assessments that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and has demonstrated no intention of doing so has been reported often on independent sites and many other alternative news sources, but only now, after successive pronouncements by high level officials going against the grain of the hawkish rhetoric on an impending Iranian bomb has the Times given the issue substantial space. “Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier,” the report said. “The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it r...

The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons. But the history of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA on carrying out inspections at the Parchin military testing center, as well as a previous IAEA-Iran work program agreement, suggests that Iran is keeping permission for such a visit as bargaining leverage to negotiate a better deal with the agency. The IAEA statement Wednesday emphasized the fact that the mission to Tehran had been denied permission to visit the site at Parchin. That prompted Associated Press correspondent in Vienna George Jahn to call Iran’s refusal to agree to an IAEA visit to Parchin “stonewalling” and evidence of “hard-line resistance” to international pressure on its nuclear program. International Herald Tribune blogger Harv...

In the kabuki theater of British parliamentary politics, great crimes do not happen and criminals go free. It is theater after all; the pirouettes matter, not actions taken at remove in distance and culture from their consequences. It is a secure arrangement guarded by cast and critics alike. The farewell speech of one of the most artful, Tony Blair, had "a sense of moral conviction running through it," effused the television presenter Jon Snow, as if Blair’s appeal to kabuki devotees was mystical. That he was a war criminal was irrelevant. The suppression of Blair’s criminality and that of his administrations is described in Gareth Peirce’s Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice, published in paperback this month by Verso. Peirce is Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyer; her pursuit of infamous miscarriages of justice and justice for the victims of state crimes, such as torture and rendition, is unsurpassed. What is unusual about this a...

Michael S. Lofgren wrote: "For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; U.S. elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence which had guided U.S. policy during the cold war, and which the U.S. government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran. It is curious that the world already has over 100 Islamic b...

There has been altogether too much stuff in the media lately about how Iran is not really a threat to anyone and how even some prominent Israelis don’t really believe that they have to go to war (or have Washington go to war on their behalf). It was perhaps inevitable that there would be some pushback to again stoke the fires and make the case that Iran is indeed evil incarnate and on the verge of obtaining an apocalyptic weapon. Not surprisingly, some of the latest pushback comes from the redoubtable Ethan Bronner of The New York Times in his article “Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation,” which appeared on the paper’s front page on Jan. 26. Bronner, whose son has served in the Israeli Defense Forces, is the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief and covers much of the Middle East. He lives in Israel, and his objectivity has often been questioned, but the self-proclaimed newspaper of record has refused to consider replacing him with someone less openly tied to Israel and its...