The week in the Persian Wars

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]
better over the coming months), and of course ours in November. The rest seems a lot like theater, except when Ayatollah Khamenei says that building nuclear weapons is a sin, or permits the foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, to say it for him, as happened Tuesday in Geneva. It is my firm belief that the Supreme Leader is not kidding, indeed that his faith does not permit him to kid when he has laid down a fatwah on the subject. (Islamophobes claim that the doctrine of taqiyya which allows Muslims to conceal their faith in a hostile environment also allows them to lie with impunity, but then the same kind of people used to say the same kind of thing about the Jesuits and their "mental reservations", and I'm pretty sure the Jesuits never built any nuclear weapons.)

At EmptyWheel, Jim White finds (from an interview on what used to be Russia Today) that the Iranian government did not, or says it did not, bar IAEA inspectors from the Parchin site where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the bomb; it's just that the guys they sent weren't actually inspectors, said ambassador Ali Asqar Soltaniye, but legal, political, and technical experts. Proper inspectors would be an entirely different matter, although they would still have to meet some preconditions. (Though he would, as far as that goes, have let this team visit someplace else...)

In the same post, White threw some cold water on the current Israeli sloganeering about the "zone of immunity", the theory that if Iran is not attacked soon enough its alleged nuclear weapons program will become "immune" to attack altogether (reraised in today's Times in an op-ed by former Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin).

I personally react very childishly to these slogans, the "ticking time bomb" and the "blood on their hands" and the "partner for peace" and so on, which are meant not as argument but as substitutes for argument, kind of the way Olestra is a substitute for fat, giving you the right emotional response and mouth feel but unable to proceed in any normal way through your body.

Anyhow the point is that Iran will never be immune, because if they are really building a nuclear weapon then a crucial part of it will be deep underground at the Fordo facility near Qom, and that's not immune and won't be. Which corroborates my own increasing feeling that the Israeli war talk is largely bluster (Christy1947 at Kos called it "Netanyahu woofing"), and really likely to remain so.

Meanwhile, North Korea has announced its deal on nuclear testing. They are suspending all weapons testing and uranium enrichment activities, and allowing inspectors at the Yongbyon complex, and the US is sending food—20,000 tons of nutritional supplements per month, a process with inspectors of its own to make sure it goes to the deserving hungry. It is not the deal but the setup for serious negotiations, and it is really good news, no mockery.

Except I'd like to note that Kim Jong-un clearly enjoys looking at things, in a way his late father, with an artist's sad awareness that the composition would not come out quite right, at least toward the end, did not; as the Tumblr shows:

Looking at bathwater.

Looking at containers.