I_R_A_N

[metallix]

[crave]

sshheit, you're no fun man.

 

PM with it if you don't want to leave it posted, please.

[Guest BROWNer]

hahaha, i saw it.....nananananaaaaaanaaa.

thanks for posting villain, i'll be reading those

shortly.

[villain]

Alright crave, I PMed it.

 

You're welcome BROWNer....

 

Alotta lotta info there....

 

A note for readibility. The reason that there are more than one set of numbers before a given piece of equipment is that these stats were originally charts... The extra numbers are by year.... The last number being the most recent year. Example:

 

100 50 50 AH-1J Cobra attack

40 20 20 CH-47C Chinook heavy transport

 

The number of cobras and chinooks have been going down because the US is no longer supplying them and parts and supplies are becoming more scarace for maintainence and upkeep....

Though for some reason they have aquired more m109/a1 howitzers from the US recently.... who knows....

 

160 180 180 155-mm M109/A1 self-propelled (U.S.)

[!@#$%]

woah those posts are marathon.

 

the CIA world factbook is a cool thing.

 

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

[fatalist]

If you look at a map, notice what two countries border on Iran that are of special interest? Bingo, Afghanistan and Iraq. I think Bush and his cronies have had their crosshairs on Iran for a lot longer than most people think. Iran has always been a bulwark of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and the Islamic world.

 

And after Iran, who knows? It seems, though, that America has a serious grudge against Islam. So how about Syria?

[villain]

Hmmm... Well yeah... Iran has something like the third or fourth (I think Venezuela is third) largest known reserves of oil.... not to mention a fairly large claim to the caspian sea basin which is highly, highly coveted by oil companies all over the world. Best beleive there has been political and military manuevering throughout that whole region by a variety of the usual geopolitical chess players. That is a REAL hot topic....

[POIESIS]

Demonizing Iran: Another US salvo

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

A response to the State of the Union Address

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GB05Ak02.html

 

TEHRAN – In his State of the Union address, US President George W Bush once again demonized Iran as “the world’s primary state sponsor of terror”, accusing it of pursuing nuclear weapons, abusing human rights and being led by a few unelected leaders. He also had a message for the Iranian people, “As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”

Two cheers for the “great crusader” for America’s new manifest destiny – to spread the fruits of liberty and freedom in all four corners of the world, to topple the world’s tyrants and deliver their subjects from modern political serfdom. Among others heartened by his stern anti-Iran message there must have been many members of US Congress, presently working overtime to pass a new bill titled the “Iran Freedom Support Act”, which puts the US government squarely on the side of the opposition groups contesting the Islamic regime.

The pending bill not only recycles the pre-existing sanctions against Iran, by lumping conventional weapons with weapons of mass destruction, it actually tightens the sanction regime by calling for punishment of any foreign government or company that trades such goods and material with Iran. Also, the bill calls for a substantial increase in US financial support of the TV and radio programs opposed to Iran beamed inside the country.

For a country boasting of democracy, there is ironically not a minimum required debate on this important bill, which, if passed, would pretty much box the Bush administration in a head-on collision course with Tehran. The combined forces of Iran’s dissidents abroad, composed mostly of monarchists and supporters of the armed opposition group, the People’s Mujahideen, and the neo-conservatives and friends and allies of the state of Israel have for all practical purposes shut down the deliberative process on Iran policy in Washington, making it impossible for anyone to dare voice even slight criticism of the unbounded, unreconstructed and ultimately unproductive and even dangerous course of action cooked up in various committees and sub-committees in both chambers of US Congress.

But, hypothetically speaking, we can imagine an opponent of this bill, counseling a vastly different course of action vis-a-vis Iran, presenting the following arguments:

*Iran has proven a valuable ally against the Taliban, and its constructive role in Afghanistan since its liberation deserves recognition in Washington.

*While Iran for all the known national security reasons has meddled in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq to some extent, it is wrong to perceive this as purely a negative influence, given the powerful presence of pro-Iran Shi’ite groups in the interim Iraqi government and Iran’s leaders steering the Shi’ites along the electoral road to power.

*Iran has signed security agreements with its Persian Gulf Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, and has invited Iraq to sign a similar agreement which calls for regional cooperation.

*Iran, through the regional organization, the Economic Cooperation Organization, has been a key promoter of regional cooperation and, as a result, has established cordial relations with, among others, Turkey and Azerbaijan (whose leader visited Iran recently).

*Iran has fully cooperated with the United Nations’ atomic agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose inspectors have spent more than 1,000 days in Iran over the past few years, notwithstanding the last IAEA meeting in November, when Iran’s nuclear dossier was largely “normalized” after Tehran’s suspension of its nuclear fuel cycle, an initiative which Bush himself “welcomed” as a positive step forward.

*Iran has been receptive toward the post-Yasser Arafat leadership and many official and semi-official voices in Iran, including newspaper editorials, evince a rethinking of Iran’s policy toward the Palestinian issue, making it feasible to think that if the current trend continues, Iran can be counted on to pressure Hamas and other Islamist groups to give non-violence a chance.

Now, of course, all of the above is foreign music to the ears of Washington policymakers, who would rather cling to their caricature of Iran as an integral aspect of the “axis of evil” warranting even military action following the “pre-emptive” warfare doctrine of the Bush administration, as if that doctrine has not already caused enough havoc on the international system. In fact, the anti-Iran climate in the US is presently so polluted, so poisoned, by the Manichean imagery of the Islamic republic, as evil pure and simple, that it precludes a rational discourse pertaining to an important Middle East country that has proven unwilling to bow before the mighty “New Rome” and, instead, clinging ever so stubbornly to its notion of independence and political integrity uncontaminated by the American power.

This is not to absolve the Iranian regime of many of its shortcomings, above all the human-rights situation, calling for drastic improvements, but comparatively speaking, Iran’s rights situation is much better than is the case in Saudi Arabia and other pro-US countries in the region. After all, Iranian women constitute more than half the student population and many important positions in society are occupied by women, a fact acknowledged even by Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace recipient.

But, alas, a lone superpower left with a US$4 trillion military-industrial complex and hardly anyone to fight needs functional enemies, and who better than Iran to fulfill the role of evil (sub) empire, notwithstanding the recent remark of a US State Department official that Iranians as a “nation” still think about empire-building. Doubtless, the same official would react negatively if, God forbid, anyone accused the US of illusions of world empire.

This aside, the sad, and one might say even tragic, aspect of this whole situation is that the Bush administration and US Congress are gearing up for a new and more energetic anti-Iran offensive precisely at a time when the pool of shared or parallel interests between Iran and the US has expanded considerably, perhaps more than ever before, calling for a serious reconsideration of the present belligerent approach by Washington in the direction of conciliation and negotiation.

There is still time and opportunity left for a serious breakthrough in the diplomatic deadlock and perhaps even achieve a rapprochement, should both sides reflect deeply on their overall relations and the misperceptions handicapping a sound reciprocal policy. Yet, misperceptions bred and cultivated by deliberate propaganda, culminating in outright demonization, have now become Washington’s new orthodoxy with regard to Iran, and one can only hope that the unhappy lessons of war in Iraq can act as a timely catalyst in casting question marks on this foreign policy orthodoxy.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran’s Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and “Iran’s Foreign Policy Since 9/11”, Brown’s Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at Tehran University.

[POIESIS]

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_serv...service_id=6945

 

Experts from the U.S. Defense Department, the Pentagon and Israel have put final touches to a plan to launch a military strike targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, experts at the European Commission based in Brussels, revealed on Sunday.

[casekonly]

Originally posted by symbols@Jan 21 2005, 01:29 PM

special ops in iran and or syria are bound to happen and terribly likely to fail.

 

seriously kids, wasn't this kind of a no-brainer?

he's had this in his head since the axis of evil speech and that was three fucking years ago.

 

 

bets on starting date for Official Third World War?

Quoted post

 

it started in '91. no doubt in my mind. bush 1 started it. bush 2 wants to 'end' it and make papa proud.

 

i do have to say one thing, do you think the american public would stand for bush invading another country and stretching our military so thin?

 

well, i might take that back, our public did re-elect him....

[villain]

Last time I checked, surgical strikes by special operation forces upon a sovereign nations nuclear facilities is considered an act of war.

[casekonly]

some reporter for the new yorker on the daily show lat night said it would start in spring or early summer.

[Æ°]

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is preparing to sign a deal with Iran this month to start atomic fuel shipments for a Moscow-built nuclear reactor there, a Russian nuclear source said Monday.

 

The move is certain to enrage the United States which says Iran can use Russian fuel to secretly make a nuclear bomb. Washington has long called on Russia to drop the plans.

 

The source in Russia's Atomic Energy Agency said Moscow and Tehran had largely settled all remaining technicalities and were preparing to sign the accord when Alexander Rumyantsev, the agency's head, travels to Iran at the end of February.

 

"This time the deal will be signed. Of course you can't be 100 percent certain about anything but the probability of that is very high," said the source, who is close to the Iran talks.

 

The comments confirmed earlier hints by Moscow-based diplomats that Russia and Tehran had overcome disagreement over the deal's terms and were moving closer to signing it after years of talks.

 

The source said the first containers with fuel would be supplied about two months after signing.

 

The 1,000-megawatt, $1 billion plant will be then launched in late 2005 and reach full capacity in 2006.

 

Spent fuel will be sent back to Siberian storage units after about a decade of use -- a condition Russia thinks will remove U.S. concerns that Iran would use the material to make weapons.

 

TVEL, Russia's state nuclear fuel producer, has for years kept the fuel for Iran's Bushehr plant at a storage facility in Siberia, awaiting Rumyantsev's order to begin shipments.

 

Oil-rich Iran denies it is developing atomic arms and says its nuclear programs are for peaceful power generation needed to meet the energy demands of its growing population.

 

Sunday, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rohani said there was nothing the West could offer Tehran that would persuade it to scrap a nuclear program.

[casekonly]

[Æ°]

LINK HERE

 

 

 

Russia backs Iran in nuclear row

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin says recent moves by Iran have convinced him it is not trying to build nuclear arms.

 

He said Moscow would continue working with Tehran in all fields, including nuclear power, adding that he had accepted an invitation to Iran.

 

His comments came at a meeting in Moscow with chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani.

 

Moscow is helping Iran build a nuclear reactor - a project which has been heavily criticised by the US.

 

The Americans accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons.

 

Iran denies this, saying its nuclear development programme is purely for peaceful, energy-generating purposes.

 

Iran's latest actions convince us that Iran does not intend to produce nuclear weapons.

Vladimir Putin

Russian president

 

Under an agreement announced on Thursday and due to be signed this month, Moscow will supply Tehran with the nuclear fuel it needs.

 

The spent fuel will be returned to Russia. This was the last issue delaying the start of operations at the Russian-built reactor at Bushehr, in southern Iran.

 

The US believes that the Bushehr reactor - when completed - could enable the Iranians to extract weapons grade plutonium.

 

The BBC's Steve Rosenberg in Moscow says Russia has close ties with Iran, dating back to Soviet times, and it is determined to continue co-operation despite US opposition.

 

Suspension

 

After his talks with President Putin on Friday, Mr Rowhani said Russia's role may prove "rather useful" in moving ahead discussions on Iran's nuclear programme with Germany, Britain and France.

 

The three have offered to replace a heavy-water nuclear reactor - which can be used to make weapons-grade nuclear material - with a light-water reactor.

 

Low grades of uranium are used for nuclear reactor fuel, but higher grades can be used in atomic bombs.

 

Tehran suspended uranium enrichment temporarily in November, as part of the dialogue process.