Persicus Maximus

For Obama’s advisers, assuming Iran was simply "playing for time" justifies a heavy reliance on "coercive diplomacy", which combines a boycott of the country’s crude oil exports and hints that an Iranian failure to come to agreement would open the way for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. But that conventional wisdom, which the Obama administration inherited from the Bush administration, ignores the accumulated evidence that Iran’s diplomacy strategy is to accumulate centrifuges, not in order to support a weapons programme, but rather to negotiate a larger bargain with the United States. That strategy, gleaned from sources in direct contact with Iranian national security officials and from Iran’s actual diplomatic record, can be summed up in three principles: 1. Iran should negotiate with the United States only when it has achieved sufficient negotiating leverage to achieve substantial concessions. 2. The objective of negotiations with the United States...

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Iranian-American journalist Hooman Majd wrote that sanctions against Iran are “turning into a form of collective punishment” and are unlikely to bring about the change western governments are after. Western nations have increased bilateral sanctions in recent years as Iran forges ahead with its nuclear energy programme, which some outside the Islamic Republic say is really a programme to create an atomic bomb. Recently, calls for a military attack against Iranian nuclear sites have become more frequent in the Israeli government and US media. Both Israel and the US are nuclear-armed countries.Majd, who’s been described as "100 per cent Iranian and 100 per cent American," has written two books on Iran and spent most of 2011 in Iran working on a third book due out later this year. Majd has often written about his friendship to former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and his support for opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the contested ...

By Guenter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. Why have I kept silent, held back so long, on something openly practiced in war games, at the end of which those of us who survive will at best be footnotes? It's the alleged right to a first strike that could destroy an Iranian people subjugated by a loudmouth and gathered in organized rallies, because an atom bomb may be being developed within his arc of power. Yet why do I hesitate to name that other land in which for years—although kept secret— a growing nuclear power has existed beyond supervision or verification, subject to no inspection of any kind? This general silence on the facts, before which my own silence has bowed, seems to me a troubling lie, and compels me toward a likely punishment the moment it's flouted: the verdict "antisemitism" falls easily. But now that my own country, br...

Major oil companies like Exxon Mobil and Shell are playing politics in Iraq, juggling the autonomous Kurdish north with the central government in Baghdad in fuzzy legal limbo in an attempt to capitalize on their contracts made possible by Washington’s war of aggression. Exxon Mobil has signed up to explore for oil in the north while their competitors at Shell have waited on the sidelines to see if such a move angers the increasingly dictatorial government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Iraq’s huge southern oilfields – potentially the one of the world’s biggest sources of new oil – are set to be opened up to bidding in the next few years. Oil corporations like Shell don’t want to risk being left out of such a bonanza by pissing off Baghdad. In January, Ben Van Heuvelen wrote a piece at Foreign Policy describing how Iraq is on track to become a “swing producer” within five years. A “swing producer” refers to “the ability to drastically increase production on short notice” (Saudi ...

Recently Benjamin Natanyaho, the Israeli Prime minster visited President Obama of the US. He took with him as a present, “The Book Of Esther” (A part of the Hebrew Bible). This was to motivate the US President to preemptively attack and kill all what is Iranian and as many Iranians he possibly can, furthermore he (Obama) should consider it biblically blessed and certified, because it has happened before. The feast of “Purim” bears witness to it and for those of you who simply pass and neglect such sick gestures,here is some background info on this move, and why this State terrorist (Natanyahoo) wants a holocaust on the Iranians. The story of “Purim” is about Esther who lied her way (hiding her identity) into the Persian Kings (Khashayar) bed….to convince the Persian King to act against his own Prime Minister “Haman”. Asking the King to Kill the Prime Minister and all the soldiers under command (75 000 of them). In the Book of Esther is claimed that Jews grabbed Haman and Hanged...