I'd actually find it amusing that Miz Palin would accuse Obama/Biden of naivete if the consequences were not so tragic. At one point in the VP debate she mentioned that even the pursuit of civilian nuclear power plants was taboo for the Iranians. Biden was right to point out that Pakistan is more worrisome than Iran on the nuclear issue, I did think Biden stretched the truth a little with the assertion that Pakistan has the delivery system to hit Israel. But, Pakistan does have weaponized nukes and an unstable democracy with many extremists lurking...

McSame further expounds on the failed Shrub Iranian policy... In that, he wants to cut all ties with Iran...

Let’s cut off all kinds of credit to ‘em, all kinds — diplomatic, trade, you name it. Basically isolate them. Because they are in violation of solemn agreements that they entered into, concerning nuclear weapons. And so I really believe that we could have an effect on Iranian behavior.

Now, let's dispense with the immediate falsehood that Iran is in violation of 'solemn agreements.' Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Pakistan and India are not! Both have Nukes and just recently we enabled India to pursue nuclear power plants. On the other hand, in Iran, El Baradei has repeatedly stated that they have positively acted in accordance with the extensive IAEA inspection regime and answered all questions asked until the US, once again, coerced El Baradei into having the Iranians prove a negative... Iraqi redux all over again...!

The Asia Times has an excellent article...

Iran and the IAEA signed an agreement last year to resolve the outstanding issues. The agency posed eight questions, which Tehran answered and ElBaradei said "the answers support the IAEA documentation" verifying non-diversion of Iran's nuclear program to military use.

Soon after this, the US came up with "lap-top" allegations or "alleged studies" that pointed to a weapons program. Iran dismissed these charges, saying they did not come under the earlier agreement with the IAEA on outstanding issues.

And by ElBaradei's own admission, in his latest report, there is no evidence of diversion of any nuclear material toward those alleged studies, nor has the agency detected any discrepancy in Iran's nuclear declarations. Add to this the fact that only a fraction of the IAEA's 145 member states have so far received a complete clean bill of health, and many of them have yet to adopt the intrusive Additional Protocol inspection regime of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[...]

Absent any "smoking gun", the West is forced to rely on hypothetical conjectures that Iran's nuclear activities pose a threat because maybe Iran is harboring the ill intentions of going after nuclear weapon at some point in the future. This is defective logic and underscores the necessity of hard evidence to implicate Iran in any military application of its nuclear program, instead of mere projections and guesswork. And it is precisely here that ElBaradei is now playing a critical function, by raising the scenario of a yet-to-be discovered clandestine nuclear program.

Again, this is beyond the parameters of the IAEA and its safeguard agreement with Iran, or for that matter with any other IAEA member state, and the agency would be better off not speculating and keeping its eyes focused on its technical responsibility. That is, to ensure the peaceful nature of Iran's declared activities.

As the unhappy experience of Iraq reminds us, the IAEA treads a dangerous path when it ventures beyond its responsibilities and tries to prowl in the wilderness of "proving an absence".

As I've pointed out in prior posts, and, in particular, this post, our credibility is pretty much shot...

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.[...]

"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,"... In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran's nuclear program, Krieger said.

The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were "thwarted by CIA employees," according to court papers. Later he was told to "remove himself from any further handling" of the informant, the documents say.

On the laptop computer, Scott Ritter opined...

“We have a situation where the IAEA has published several technical reports all of which state there is no evidence Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. None. Zero,” Ritter said.

Ritter explained how the IAEA report was drafted.

“Information has been provided to the IAEA by member nations, intelligence information. Now the IAEA has to be very circumspect when it says this but we all know that it’s basically intelligence provided to the agency by the United States of America, a nation openly hostile to Iran, a nation that has a track record of fabricating, exaggerating, and misrepresenting intelligence data. The data that’s been provided to the IAEA has derived from a laptop computer which even the IAEA claims is of questionable providence,” he said.

Ritter said that because the United States has such a dominating role in the United Nations Security Council and in the Board of Governors the IAEA couldn’t ignore the information it receives from the United States about Iran.

One can only hope that McInsane is not elected and Obama will recognize the fallacy of our WMD assertions against Iran and that cooler heads will prevail... We certainly can not afford to bomb Iran on false pretenses...

I apologize for my unanticipated absence...

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Mahalo Nui Loa!