Irans Nukes.Follow

As long as we're not misunderstood.

It's really important to read *all* the findings in an NIE, not just pick and choose a handful of statements that appear to support a given position.

Is it? Read a lot of them have you? They should be required to print "For Dummies" on the title page of all of them. No one was under the impression Iran was actively working towards a working device. Hence the intentional qualifications.


I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,"

That word isn't in there accidentally.


Anyway, it would now seem that Iran isn't pursuing nukes, any more than, say Belgium or, if you would prefer a more 'fundamentally' religeous comparison, Vatican City.

That's patently false. They're not pursuing building one from scratch, at the moment. That's not nearly the same thing. If they could acquire fissionable material from some sort of country in danger of an unstable political situation with a poorly secured stockpile, they might. Some sort of Muslim nation perhaps, that borders India or something.


See. Because during the time that their program has been halted, they've continued to develop and build centrifuges for nuclear enrichment and to obtain nuclear materials that could be enriched and used in nuclear weapons.

It's so painful to watch you make a mockery of perfectly tenable positions by missing the point entirely. Iran has valid reasons to build whatever dual use facilities it wants. Getting the material is all that matters. This is @#%^ing 1940s technology we're talking about here. There's no great secret to assembling a device if you have the material.

Edited, Dec 5th 2007 6:49pm by Smasharoo

If I had the time, and the inclination, I would dedicate the rest of my life to making yours such a misery that you would forever rue the day you dared to compare me to that braindead parrot-chimp-monkey. And that's being mean to braindead parrot-chimp-monkeys!

Fortunately for you, I really can't be ****** and I don't have regular access to Alla so it wouldn't be practical anyway, and really, I'm sure you're a nice guy deep down and didn't mean it.

In case the former is too verbose for that dead raccon-covered overheating brain of yours, here's a quick summary:

Grrr! You suck! Grrr! Amnyway gotta go now!



Here ya go, Mr American Denis The Menace:


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As for the suggestions:

- Stop trying to solve complicated problems using bullet points and ryhming soundbites. "If you plutonium, we'll pandemonium!" should not be state policy.

- Stop voting for people who think the Earth is 6000 years old. Just... stop.

- Write a book explaining why the US has such a strongly individualistic capitalist system, while your sports system of drafts and salary caps is completely communist and equalitarian in nature. I'd buy it. Unless it was ****. In which case I'd probably buy it for a friend.

Which is the point, it's capability is now known to be far behind what Bush et al were spouting. Dude, come on. You're what, 30+ years old? So am I. I know Democrat ******** when I smell it, please open your nostrils to George Bush. He's a goddamn militant softbrain with delusions of a place in history. Ignore him now before you completely lose your mind re: retrospect. You do NOT want to be defending him in five years.

Is this going to be another one of those threads where you berate me for pointing out what I see as an incorrect interpretation of some source data based on an assumption that no-one could possibly misinterpret what that source meant, while ignoring half of the posters in the thread who clearly did? Cause I'm pretty sure we've done this dance a few times.

It's not a dance "we" do. It's solely you imagining subtexts that don't exist. Occasionally I point that out. Most of the time I can't be bothered and just wonder in silence what sort of bizarre dreamworld you live in.

Fact 1. USA Invaded Iraq

Fact 2. Iran then suspended its Nucular Weap0nz0rz program

Fact 3. George W Bush is infallible, and those intelligence guys should go back to inventing Rolexes with trip-wire "Laser Beams"

No. It's not. And nothing in that NIE says it is. That's what's bizarre about this. How does the statement that "Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003" translate into "Iran's nuclear weapons capability is less advanced then it was 10 years ago" (or whatever time frame you're using)? It doesn't. "Halted" does not mean "abandoned". It does not mean reversed. It just means that they haven't increased their capability during the time it was halted.

Um... And that's not technically true either.




See. It "halted" work on actually building a nuclear weapon. But it has continued building all the materials and equipment it'll need to actually build one. In otherwords, the number of years away from building their own nukes is fewer today then it was 10 years ago. Despite having "halted" actual work on building the actual weapons themselves.

It's kind of a semantically meaningless statement (which is of course why everyone puts the greatest weight in it). Actually assembling a nuclear weapon isn't the hard part. It's designing and building all the equipment you need to refine some sort of fissile material into a usable warhead that is. So halting work on the actual weapon isn't that important if the nation has continued designing and actually building centrifuges for refining said material.


Get it yet? It's a red herring. It's a meaningless statement. The important parts are the assessments that Iran has continued to build its capability, and that the number of years it would take them to build a nuclear bomb has decreased. Furthermore, even though they "halted" work on their nuclear weapons in 2003, the NIE places roughly a 50/50 chance that it was resumed in 2005.

It would be like someone saying that they stopped smoking in 2003. That does not mean that they didn't resume smoking since then. Get it? NIE statements are not intended to mean anything more then the single factual thing being said. So "Iran halted it's nuclear weapons program in 2003" does *not* mean it's still halted. It does *not* mean that Iran's nuclear weapons capability is less then it used to be. It doesn't mean *anything* other then just what it says.

And it's not exactly hard to figure this out. If you were right next door to a nation that just got invaded as a result of violations of international agreements involving WMDs, you might just "halt" your weapons programs for a bit as well...

Edited, Dec 6th 2007 4:28pm by gbaji

Whatever response you make is far above the response George Bush makes. Your an apologist, George Bush is a ******* idiot. Why do you continue to parse **** in an attempt to demonstrate his position as valid? Look at what he says. Recognize that he has no ******* clue. I know it's in you, you just have to recover from your conservative doldrums.

My entire issue is that it seems like everyone is reading just that one line in the NIE (I sense a pattern here) and interpreting/expanding it to mean something completely different then what it actually says

You haven't read it. It couldn't be any more obvious.

I'll also point out for the "OMG! Bush wants to do to Iran exactly what he did with Iraq!!!" crowd, that the NIEs for both are completely different. With Iraq, each NIE basically said the same thing: That there was no evidence that Iraq would ever comply with their promises with regards to WMDs as long as Saddam was in charge. That's a huge contrast to this one that states that WMD development is all about cost versus benefit in the case of Iran.

With Iran we simply have to make it worth their while to abandon their nuclear weapons programs and they'll likely do it. That's a totally different situation.

Edited, Dec 6th 2007 6:49pm by gbaji

It would take a significant amount of effort for me to have pulled quotes from the various sections of the NIE without actually reading it. Seriously. Put the crack pipe down again and walk away. The whole thing just isn't that long (about 2 pages maybe and that's including some pretty large amounts of whitespace).

How about you stop with the snide and stupid comments and actually respond to the stuff I've written? Funny how as soon as I started pulling facts from the NIE that refute the typical Liberal board consensus, you magically stopped talking about the facts and quotes and shifted to attacking me.


Hmmm... Wonder why that is? Could it be because *you* didn't read the NIE and now have to face what's actually written there instead of what you dreamed up inside your own head? Yeah. I think so...

Funny how as soon as I started pulling facts from the NIE that refute the typical Liberal board consensus, you magically stopped talking about the facts and quotes and shifted to attacking me.

It's true. I was distracted by the magical purple unicorn that started fellating me as I tried to post.

Oh wait. Neither of those things ever happened.

Again, the point: Your inculcated (if that's a word, I'm drunk) to Bushist propaganda. The question you should ask is: Why should Iran's nuclear "knowledge" or plants or etc. be bombed when Israel's isn't? When Pakistan's isn't? The truth is that the US allowed Pak to gain nukes due to present-day post-cold war dilemmma and democratic wishy-washy sanctions. We whored out to them same as we whored out to China in MNF status. A long-term problem for a momentary gain. No one in the Bush Administration cares about any horrendous nuclear holocaust, they care about a holocaust that would suspend their bottem line. The Cold War was supplanted by the Middle East "don't hate me for ******** you over, but if you do I'll invade you" war.

I hear what I want to hear, right. I object to nuclear propagation as regards the NPT. Isreal has abandoned it and deserves to be ostracized. Pakistan semi-sucked us to weasel their way in. Iran's mistake is to still be party to it. For THAT I agree that any nuke ambitions beyond power is due a reckoning. I do not agree that Iran's status is enough different than Israel's/Pakistan's (non-democratic militant state/military dictatorship) to warrant a OMG WHAT IF THEY GET NUKES response. The treaty should not be the deciding factor--if the US really cares about chaos.

Finally, balance of power was enough for Soviets and the US to arms race; you agree with Bush that we are preeminent in our eliminating a similar ME arms race. For the sake of Israeli's? For the sake of continued revenue and, it pains me to say, siding with a certain sort of Biblical people in opposition to a certain sort of Koran people. Then again I'm drunk so I might be just spouting as much crap as GW.