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Iran Has/Wants Nuclear Weapons? To date, no concrete evidence has been presented about the existence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Each and every inspect report by the IAEA and the National Intelligence Estimate has confirmed that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Leader of Islamic Revolution has denounced nuclear weapons as un-Islamic and stated unequivocally that Islam forbids the “production and stock piling of nuclear weapons.” The Iranian fatwa against nuclear weapons is a registered document with the UN. Iran has been the only country to lobby for a nuclear-free Middle East. In contrast, Israel has yet to agree to a single IAEA inspection, and its nuclear weapons plant in Dimona is an open secret used to intimidate the Palestinians and neighboring countries. Iran Threatened to Wipe Israel off the Map? The world hears incessantly how Iranian president Ahmedinjad threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” yet, not a single translation of this speech has been made to clearly prove he made this statement. In 2005, the newly-elected Ahmedinjad was giving a speech at a conference in Tehran about Zionism. He quoted the founder of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini, and said, “Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.” A direct translation of this is: “The Imam [Khomeini] said [the] regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” The words “wiped off the map” are not to be found in that sentence, and any amateur translator will tell you nagsheh, the Persian term for map, is not found in that sentence. In the speech, Ahmedinjad further stated that just as the Soviet regime had fallen, the Zionist one would too. He did not say Israel was going to be wiped off any map. Obviously when the Soviet regime collapsed, was Russia wiped off the map? In the same infamous speech, Ahmedinjad called for a Middle East where Muslims, Jews, and Christians would live in a real democracy and in liberty. For the record, Iran has not launched an attack on any nation in the past 300 years, but it has defended itself against assaults by other countries. Compare this track record to that of the biggest war monger in the Middle East, the same one that uses cluster bombs to take out innocent children. The Iranians are Eagerly Awaiting the Arrival of “US Democracy”? American-style democracy has taken over the Middle East; just ask the Iraqis and Afghans how happy they are post-American liberation of their countries. Operation Iraqi Freedom has only cost 1.3 million Iraqi lives to date. In the last Iranian elections, an overwhelming 85 percent of voters turned out to pick the next president, and practically every pre-election poll showed President Ahmedinjad with a significant lead over his opponents. However, the West continues to claim Iran is not a democratic country despite it being the only Middle Eastern country with transparent elections and a fully functional parliament. Western hypocrisy of this magnitude must be respected, and the West has yet to call its allies (Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia) for throwing political opponents in jail and never holding elections. By all instances, Iran is a democratic society, but to the United States and its allies, the very existence of a democracy in Iran is a threat. They removed this threat in 1953 when they overthrew the democratically-elected government and put in the totalitarian Shah. Speaking of democracy and sovereignty, the US would know a thing or two about those terms, considering for the past 30 years we have tried to overthrow the Iranian government and laid siege upon siege on the Iranian people. More recently, Congress voted to allocate 120 million dollars for anti-regime media broadcasts into Iran. It doesn’t end there. The US also generously donated 60-75 million dollars to fund and support violent underground extremist groups MKO, one of the largest anti-Iran terrorist organizations. Democracy in the Middle East is synonymous with murderous and catastrophic regime change. Iran Is Five Years Away from a Nuclear Bomb? Every few months, the United States and Britain try to scare us out of sleeping at night by saying Iran is five years away from a nuclear bomb. Here’s the problem: Iran has been “five years away from a nuclear bomb” for the past four decades. Obama was asked by a Washington Post reporter if he would “call on Israel to declare its nuclear program and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.” The usually eloquent Obama stuttered his way through a response once he finally regained his composure and stated, “And, as far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their program.” Maybe he should leave Iran’s peaceful program alone and worry about the nuclear warheads Israel and India have. http://shervinandpol...-few-questions/

Aug. 23, 2011, 4:32 AM “Business Insider” – Ron Paul doesn’t just think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a mistake. He’s an isolationist: he thinks America shouldn’t be the world’s policeman. He thinks America shouldn’t have troops abroad and shouldn’t use its military except in cases of self-defense. Here’s the problem: this would wreck the US economy, and the world economy. And isolationists in general, and Ron Paul in particular, don’t seem to grasp that. Here’s the thing: when isolationists talk about America being the “world’s policeman”, they think about foreign wars like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. That’s what mobilizes people’s imagination for very obvious reasons: it’s where people die. But foreign wars are by far the least important part of America’s duty as the world’s policeman. What matters about America being the world’s policeman, and America’s troops abroad, is all the troops that don’t do any fighting. From bases in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the US military protects the world’s shipping lanes, making sure the clockwork of the global economy runs smoothly and goods and oil can be shipped to and back. This is the part of the global American military footprint that actually matters, not the wars. These wars may be very bad ideas, but Ron Paul and his ilk don’t just want to end those wars. They want to end America’s global military hegemony. And it should be obvious by now that this would be like taking a wrecking ball to the American economy. Everyone takes it as a granted that you can load a ship full of oil in Saudi Arabia and take it to China and not have anyone steal it. And that you can load a ship full of toys and iPhones in China and take it to the US and not have anyone steal it. And so on. But even a cursory look at world history shows that this is exceptional in the history of the world. The reason why this happens is because there is a benign, global military hegemon which ensures the security of the world’s shipping lanes, on which the globalized world economy, and therefore the US economy, depends. Every era of successful globalization, from Pericles to Queen Victoria, has involved a naval hegemon to ensure the security of shipping, and therefore commerce. The hegemon provides this public good that lets other, smaller actors free-ride not because it’s in the thrall of neocons, but because it directly benefits from strong, safe international trade. And it’s everything libertarians abbhor: basically everyone except the US is getting a free lunch. Saudi kings and Greek shipping magnates don’t pay for the security that the US provides. And the US is paying for everyone else’s security. But actually, the US gets a lot more out of it than it spends, because it gets to be at the center of safe, global free trade. There’s no way around it: without this trade subsidy that the US provides the world, which costs $700 billion per year in military budget but probably brings back trillions in value to the US economy, and trillions more to the world, the cost of everything would automatically rise, especially the cost of oil and the cost of anything that’s on store shelves. It’s not hard to see the effect this would have on the global, and US economy. It would make the Smoot-Hawley Act look like the Doha Round. It would have exactly the effect of something libertarians claim to detest: a giant global tarriff. Now, Ron Paul fans sometimes answer with something like, well, once everyone else stops getting a free lunch, they’ll take charge of their own security. Except that’s not plausible. Who else could do it? No one, that’s who. This is Europe right now. Image: Twitpic Europe would be the likeliest candidate, except that its defense capabilities have shrunk to an extent where it’s impossible. The United States has eleven carrier groups, and “Europe” (because “Europe” is a geographical construct, not a political one) has four. Europe’s carriers are all much smaller than the smallest US carrier. Europe has only one nuclear carrier, meaning a carrier that can stay at sea for a long period of time. Europe doesn’t have military and naval bases across all the global shipping lanes, mostly just in its former colonies in Africa. Even if Europe a- got a unified political executive and b- took up its defense spending to the level of the US, it would take decades for it to actually build the ships and the infrastructure it would take. And meanwhile the world economy burns. (Not to mention that given its current fiscal position, it would have to do it at the price of terrible austerity, which would also wreck the global economy.) China is an even more risible alternative. For all the talk of China’s rising clout, it doesn’t have anything near a “blue-water” navy that can project power globally. Its first and only aircraft carrier, recently launched with much hype and fretting, is a 20-year-old Soviet diesel-powered hand-me-down. So even leaving aside the obvious problems with just handing over responsibility for the global economy to a Communist dictatorship, it’s just not possible. The same applies to India: for all their sheer size, which makes them important political and economic actors, they remain very poor countries that just don’t have the technological and economic capacities to build a military with global-reach. Well, maybe no one country can replace the United States, but maybe everyone could chip in: Europe and the US would ensure the security of the Atlantic, India of South Asia, China of East Asia (which will certainly go down well in Taiwan and Japan) and so forth. Except that history teaches us that these “multipolar” zones of influences lead to one thing: war. In the 17th century, Britain, France and Spain fought endlessly for naval superiority. Only when Britain became most powerful did peace arrive and global trade begin in earnest. Same thing with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. And so on. But let’s imagine an ideal libertarian scenario. Let’s imagine that instead of a specific country, or even set of countries, global security is provided by private actors through some combination of mercenaries and insurance. By definition this would still raise the cost of global trade dramatically. Those mercenaries and insurance would still have to be paid, and those costs would still be reflected in the price of shipping. So it would still amount to a huge global tarriff. All but the most hardcore libertarians realize that government has a role in providing public goods–things that benefit everyone but that it doesn’t make sense for any individual actor to pay for. Like it or not, global American military hegemony is a public good. The fact that the US military is so much more powerful than anyone else (indeed, everyone else combined) means that global trade is safer, and thereby cheaper, than it’s ever been before, which benefits the global economy and the US directly and tremendously. Image: IMDb When libertarians and isolationists talk about the US being “the world’s policeman”, they talk in terms of a- politics and b- foreign wars. But the parts that matter are about a- economics and b- preventing wars. What matters in policing a city isn’t the SWAT team, it’s the cops who walk the beat and take care of the riff-raff so that the SWAT team only has to come out once in a while. And when the SWAT team raids the wrong house, that’s terrible and we should do something about that, but it doesn’t mean we need to disband the police force. We’re all for blasting illegal, unwinnable, endless foreign wars of choice. We’re all for smashing the national security state that treats grandma like a terrorist if she wants to board a flight. We’re all for howling at the insidious and wasteful military-industrial complex, and cutting the unsustainable Pentagon budget. That’s what gets Ron Paul attention, but that’s not what he wants. What he and other isolationists want is to end American global military hegemony. And facts are stubborn: like it or not, doing that would wreck the global and US economy. Ron Paul and his fans should come to terms with that. Commentary. What a complete load of nonsense. Business Insider admits it; But I have a question: Minding your own business is being “isolationist”? So that means that pretty much every other country in the world is isolationist?; So all these presence of the US military all over the world is only for securing the shipment of oiltankers? lol how much really are the people stupid to believe that? The economy-damaging US wars are thought to continue as long as giant American corporations supporting Washington politicians profit from them. The US economy will fail because Americans pay through debt; and by 2021 the US’s debt will equal its GDP. Obama’s solution for debts crisis? 2+2×2=8!! I say thank God Germany stopped being isolationist when they invaded Poland! Americans are going homeless, have no health care, pay $100,000 for college tuition….but they got troops all over the world so they secure oiltankers! LOL The US economy is dependent on wars and the US is being illegally world’s policeman to save its economy, very informative article by BI. http://shervinandpolitics.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/ronpaul/