Continued Problems in US Foreign Policy

Continued Problems in US Foreign Policy

Iran and Nuclear Weapons

On Tuesday, November 8, 2011 the “New York Times ran a piece reporting on The long-awaited report, [of the] International Atomic Energy Agency noting it to be the harshest judgment that the agency has ever issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program.” The report from United Nations weapons inspectors inside what the Times calls “a trove of new evidence“  makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device” and that the project may still be under way.

An important element in this report, based in part on “over a thousand pages, presumably leaked out of Iran,” is the clear fact that Iran has moved “beyond the blackboard,” and in 2008 and 2009 constructed necessary implements to test nuclear triggers.  The report states that “research, development and testing activities on a range of technologies that would only be useful in designing a nuclear weapon.”

For some, debate has existed until now whether Iran’s nuclear research was under development for peaceful means, but most, especially in the Western alliance (and in the opinion of this writer reasonable people) assumed that Iranian military purposes were either central or at the very least contemporaneous with whatever research might also have been under way for the sake of providing energy for the country.  It has been pointed out that Iran having vast oil and natural gas reserves, hardly needs nuclear energy.  Iran counters says that its goal in developing a nuclear program is to generate electricity without dipping into the oil supply it prefers to sell abroad.

Predictably President Ahmadinejad is “outraged” by the U.N. findings, seeing in them the cunning designs of the United States, “Why do you exploit the I.A.E.A. dignity in favor of the U.S. administration?” Mr. Ahmadinejad asked rhetorically in a question directed at Yukiya Amano, the director general of the agency, who oversaw the production and content of the report. And herein lies the crux of the matter. In the minds of Ahmedinejad and Iran leaders  the US (and by implication Israel) is the source of all that’s wrong in the world.  These are a presence in the world that are just bad by all measure.  And, it is not merely the US-Israeli bond that fits into and animates President Ahmedinejad’s narrative of enmity, but also that the roots of current political Iran are born in the 1979 expulsion of Reza Shah Pahlavi.  Paragraph one in the Wikipedia article reminds us that “the nuclear program of Iran was launched in the 1950s with the help of the United States as part of the Atoms for Peace program. The support, encouragement and participation of the United States and Western European governments in Iran's nuclear program continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran.”  

The simple fact is that Iran will not countenance lectures about nuclear weapons from two nuclear powers (US and Israel)

The final piece in the puzzle has to do with Russia, which plays an intensely contentious game against US and European interests in the Middle East, and Eastern European borders. The Russian construction of nuclear reactors in Bushehr was built under an agreement between the Russian and Iranian governments for $800-million, and Russian hopes to build many more reactors in Iran, and Japan, hoping to sign a lucrative oil agreement with Iran for developing Iran's huge Azaadegaan oil field (the largest oil field in the Middle East).  

The debate over Iran’s nuclear ambitions (military or peacetime) should be understood by reasonable people as moot.  That Iran holds the US and Israel as enemies is not a matter of doubt, so the obvious assumption must be that if Iran can gain nuclear weapons capacity it will surely do so, whether or not it need declare such intentions while developing nuclear energy for consumption.

The IAEA report, rife with evidence, this time fully compelling that Iran seeks nuclear weapons has drawn as the immediate response of Western powers the plan for further economic sanctions.  These may be a necessary way to proceed in the short term, and may in fact slow down the pace of Iran’s nuclear programs. But ironically these responses simultaneously serve to strengthen Iran’s resolve, and strengthen the operative foreign policy narrative that imagines the development of nuclear arms responsible in the ideal of national self-interest and self-defense.

Recent years of a jittery and more brashly aggressive US (see Iraq, Libya, Pakistan) put the US in a more difficult position to lead in non-proliferation ideals from a moral posture. What is most needed now from creative foreign policy experts is thinking and workable proposals for penetrating and dissolving the position of hostility that defines US-Iran relations.  Until real progress is made in substantially improving these relations, Iran’s nuclear weapons program will continue by hook or by crook.  The first step in this direction will require forging steps that both the US and Israel, on the one hand, and Iran on the other can recognize as beneficial to the national self interests of "both sides," of all involved.

NowPublic

Tags: New York | Iran | United Nations | nuclear weapons | World | IAEA

9/11: 10 Years After

9/11: 10 Years After

Wisdom Thinkers reflect on 9/11: Ten years after

is an international network of peace seekers, many at the top of their fields, committed to world change arising from the common ground of perennial wisdom found in the stories of sacred and secular tradition.

In recent years, good efforts have been made to advance the cause of peace through dialogue, but as time passes, the concept of bound communities talking across lines of separation is an insufficient starting point toward the outcome of a peaceful world. Wisdom in stories has proven to be the way to break the deadlock binding dialogue based peace efforts.

On Thursday, September 8, 2011, Wisdom Thinkers Network will sponsor an important conversation in New York, as part of the 92nd Street Y's decennial commemoration of 9/11, a series entitled: Searching For Answers In A Post-9/11 World.

Here is the program for this upcoming event. Please go to the site and register to attend.

Wisdom Thinkers Roundtable

Clerical pedophilia – The next step

Clerical pedophilia – The next step

These horrors of abuse continue to haunt us with no signs of abating. But is the world of legal settlements sufficient to rescue us from our collective suffering?

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/308210

Clerical pedophilia – The next step

Clerical pedophilia – The next step

The staunch refusal of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

The staunch refusal of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

An article about democracy movements

Strauss-Kahn: Private lives, public responsibility

Strauss-Kahn: Private lives, public responsibility

Nazis and German Catholics and Lutherans

Nazis and German Catholics and Lutherans

An article about Christian martyrs in Nazi Germany, and Catholic-Lutheran relations

Is it possible to live with a clear conscience

Quora is a forum for questions and answers

Here is a response I gave to a member who asked:

Is it possible to live with a clear conscience in a modern industrial society?

Yes it is possible, but extremely difficult.

Attaining this status is done one decision at a time, thousands of times a day, every day, all day. Eventually it will need to be pursued even in sleep.

The continuous and uninterrupted stream of "choice" should not be seen nor felt as a burden, but rather as incessant opportunity.

The key is to know yourself as "author," and most importantly the author of "you." Who you are is what you have created in your relationship with the voice of your conscience.

Your conscience is a friend and a reliable guide. It is patient, forgiving, and faithful. It will never leave you nor abandon you.

Most people give the right of authorship to the random flux of circumstances. This is an error. Circumstances are merely the environment in which authorship unfolds.

Finally, (so as to avoid a major treatise) there is no such thing as a small or insignificant rejection or violation of conscience. Every yes to conscience counts, just as every rejection or violation of the voice of conscience counts.

A clear conscience is the sweetest of all things,and worth the battle. Don't compromise, don't cheat, don't shade, don't mislead. Be courageous. No threat should be seen as sufficiently terrifying, no opportunity should be seen as sufficiently enticing, that you would chose to violate or reject the voice of your conscience, even in the tiniest way.

If you can go this way, you will be as free as God.

Is it possible to live with a clear conscience

Quora is a forum for questions and answers

Here is a response I gave to a member who asked:

Is it possible to live with a clear conscience in a modern industrial society?

Yes it is possible, but extremely difficult.

Attaining this status is done one decision at a time, thousands of times a day, every day, all day. Eventually it will need to be pursued even in sleep.

The continuous and uninterrupted stream of "choice" should not be seen nor felt as a burden, but rather as incessant opportunity.

The key is to know yourself as "author," and most importantly the author of "you." Who you are is what you have created in your relationship with the voice of your conscience.

Your conscience is a friend and a reliable guide. It is patient, forgiving, and faithful. It will never leave you nor abandon you.

Most people give the right of authorship to the random flux of circumstances. This is an error. Circumstances are merely the environment in which authorship unfolds.

Finally, (so as to avoid a major treatise) there is no such thing as a small or insignificant rejection or violation of conscience. Every yes to conscience counts, just as every rejection or violation of the voice of conscience counts.

A clear conscience is the sweetest of all things,and worth the battle. Don't compromise, don't cheat, don't shade, don't mislead. Be courageous. No threat should be seen as sufficiently terrifying, no opportunity should be seen as sufficiently enticing, that you would chose to violate or reject the voice of your conscience, even in the tiniest way.

If you can go this way, you will be as free as God.

Two State Solution

Quora is a forum for questions and answers

Here is my response to a member asking about the "two-state solution."

If the two state solution is dead, what is the future for Palestinians?

The Palestine Papers indicate that the Israeli government refused huge concessions. Does that mean that they believe they can inch the Palestinians out, one settlement at a time?

Answer Summary

The pursuit of two states is misguided to begin with

The problem is not technically that "the two-state solution is dead" so much as that the phrase is an oxymoron. Two states is not a solution.

It both disappoints, and confuses me that intelligent and well meaning people pursue this. The fact is obviously that even a most perfectly and seamlessly crafted and implemented "two-state" arrangement would solve next to nothing.

As best I can see, "a two-state solution" is something of a nickname for "a slightly smaller Israel, with a new hostile neighbor." Presently Israel is size X, and has as its neighbors, Lebanon, Syriah, Jordon, kind of somehow Saudi Arabia (a stone's skip or two across the puddle), and Egypt.

What is called "a two state solution," would make Israel size X minus, add a new "country" (Palestine?) into the geography, while doing flat zero to solve ANY of the deeply tragic difficulties and suffering born by all people trapped in this sad and complicated relationsip.

The solution the region needs is a growing integration; fewer and fewer boundaries, not more and more of them, ever more irremovable, cynically politicized, and grotesquely militarized.

The costly (in all ways) effort to establish "two states" no matter how on earth it could be designed still leaves the horrific reality that each side would continue with madness and zeal to desire and seek by all means treasure held by the other (family property, access to sacred sites and more)

Calcifying division, enmity, and distrust into political structures (that automatically implies military defense of the political) should never be bound in the same sentence with the sweet, liberating world solution.

More bonds, more trust, more rights, more freedoms, more understanding, greater integration, expanding cooperation characterize the essential impulse that should appear in sentences with the word solution.

Bibles released in Malaysia

Bibles released in Malaysia

The government of Malaysia confirmed Saturday that the proposed 10-point solution has paved successfully the way for the release of the 35,100 Bibles in Bahasa Malaysia, which were impounded in Port Klang and Kuching.

While attracting relatively little attention worldwide, Malaysia has been wrestling with a matter of global significance now in its third year. Political tensions arose related to the question of permitting use of the term Allah in Bible translations. The issue is serious, and not easily solved.

Read more here

Religion and the exploitation of religion in Cote D'Ivoire

Religion and the exploitation of religion in Cote D'Ivoire

The horrific violence in Ivory Coast, stemming from Laurent Gbagbo's gross violation of election results, is degenerating into sectarian conflict involving religious identities of Ivorians typically divided north and south.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/305222#ixzz1I9C4rOEB

The problem with attacking Libya

Op-Ed: The problem with attacking Libya

Published today in Digital Journal