Deadline Comes and Goes for Iran

10 Comments

1. 

   Jeff Huber on August 31, 2006 at 9:32 pm

   …and see how long before we hear “we tried diplomacy and it didn’t work.”

2. 

   VizierVic on August 31, 2006 at 9:41 pm

   Has anyone seen any of the details on the EU offer made to Iran?  All that I’ve been able to find when I search for detailed information is blather about the offer and how it such a good deal for the Iranians.  It’s no wonder that the Iranians have rejected the offer – it’s all a mirage.   Why say yes to nothing?

   • 

     hass on September 1, 2006 at 10:50 am

     Some of the elements of the “offer” to Iran have been disclosed and discussed on this site:

     http://blog.psaonline.org/2006/08/18/preparation-of-the-iranian-battlefield

     But very few commentators are familiar with the actual content of the proposal, which was not released to the public when it was given to Iran. A careful reading of the proposal, now available on the French foreign ministry website (link) reveals that it fails to offer Iran even the potential for the kind of security benefits that might be expected to accompany the demands that the same proposal makes on Iran.

     However, note that this offer appears to be an “a lot of gift wrapping around a pretty empty box” like that last offer to Iran:

     “In general this document is vague on incentives and heavy on demands. It proposes new processes of further dialogue with the potential for cooperation in a number of areas, but few concrete offers. The demands upon Iran in contrast are specific and uncompromising”

     MORE: http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Notes/BN050811-IranEU.htm

     “

3. 

   rba on August 31, 2006 at 9:59 pm

   Bush is only making himself (and minions) into a fool.  All the democrats really have to do is point that out.  Interesting that George Will said the biggest mistake the democrats could make this cycle is to “go positive”.  Take it even he’s not happy with the administration these days.

4. 

   Madman in the Marketplace on September 1, 2006 at 12:24 am

   why should Iran be scared, they are within their legal rights under current international agreements, and they also know that China and Russia are on their side … and they will have even more cover when Venezuela gets a seat on the Security Council.

   I’m truly puzzled. Why are you helping bang these war drums? Can’t you see that if Bush gets his little war in Iran our army in Iraq will be crushed?

   I don’t get it. I know that you’re a little younger than me, and I’m sure that the hostage drama in the 70s had a huge impact on a lot of peoples’ political viewpoints, but the hostage taking didn’t take place in a vacuum, it was an understandable reaction to years of hegemony and intervention.

   I don’t get it. Why are you buying into the fear, buying into the warmongering, buying into the next war crime, why can’t this wonderful community for discussion and debate be a place where we can take a step back from the Hillary/Reid/Schumer-led appeasment of the NEXT Bush war crime?

   Take a step back, look to independent news sources, and quit worshipping at the alter of CIA and Republican blindness.

   • 

     VizierVic on September 1, 2006 at 6:28 am

     Actually, it’s the MSM which has failed in this build-up to Dubya’s next war.  I don’t think I’ve seen once in the general media the comment that Iran is permitted to conduct nuclear enrichment research under the NPT, which they voluntarily joined and to which they seem to be adhering.  Dubya and the posse keep making assertions that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons by conflating Iran’s nuclear enrichment research with only nuclear weapons without offering one shred of evidence that the assertion is grounded in fact.  Never does the MSM point out that the research does indeed have dual uses and that Iran is entitled, by treaty, to one of them.  

     • 

       supersoling on September 1, 2006 at 8:51 am

       The fault lies with those who choose to remain uninformed and ignorant. That appears to be the vast majority of Americans. Saying that the fault lies with the MSM is just another excuse for Americans to remain blind. Why do they need to be taken by their little soft hands and led to information that’s widely available?

     • 

       Madman in the Marketplace on September 1, 2006 at 8:53 am

       I find it profoundly depressing that on multiple “liberal” blogs I see repeated slavish repetitions of the right’s propaganda. 5, 6 years ago it was so wonderful to find a vital series of forums where you could read other perspectives, where you could find links to the information that the MSM ignored or suppressed in favor of happy warmongering, all the better to sell boner pills. Now, especially in places dedicated to electing Democrats, I’m reading more and more of the center-right BS spewed by the Clintons, by Reid and Schumer and Biden.

       Shame on them.

       • 

         Jeffersonian Democrat on September 1, 2006 at 10:58 am

         Strange, Angela Merkel’s party, the CDU here is Germany is the “business” party, Germany’s answer for the Republicans.  AND THEY’RE STILL LEFT OF THE DEMOCRATS.

         • 

           Madman in the Marketplace on September 1, 2006 at 11:23 am

           drives home how badly off track we are. There’s a new Thomas Frank piece up behind the Times pay wall. A friend sent me the text:

           Rendezvous With Oblivion

             THOMAS FRANK

           Published: September 1, 2006

           Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well have been describing the failure of liberalism: the center-left’s inability to comprehend the current political situation or to draw upon what is most vital in its own history.

           What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

           Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these conditions. Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism and you can find everything you need to derail the conservative juggernaut. But don’t expect liberal leaders in Washington to use those things. They are “New Democrats” now, enlightened and entrepreneurial and barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone muster the strength to deliver some Rooseveltian stemwinder against “economic royalists.”

           Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer — that is, when they’re not gushing about the glory of it all at Davos — is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation and to try to understand how we might retrain or re-educate ourselves so we will fit in better next time.

           This last point was a priority for the Clinton administration. But in “The Disposable American,” a disturbing history of job security, Louis Uchitelle points out that the New Democrats’ emphasis on retraining (as opposed to broader solutions that Old Democrats used to favor) is merely a kinder version of the 19th-century view of unemployment, in which economic dislocation always boils down to the fitness of the unemployed person himself.

           [snip]

           Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

           Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won’t on their own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the much-vilified bloggers.

           [snip]

           The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade.

           Of course, this isn’t going to happen, especially if liberals keep falling for the fearmongering “If you don’t vote for our worthless asses the REPUBLICANS will keep doing what we’re gonna end up doing anyway, only in a more nice way”. If people vote for Hillary et al, they’re helping the right. PERIOD.

           The current membership of the Democratic Party is largely beyond hope, beyond reason, beyond decency.

           note: I snipped out a couple of good paragraphs so the copyright nazis wouldn’t go after BMT.