Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

Iran Paid Insurgents to Kill British Soldiers

If I can fault the Bush administration for anything vis a vis Iraq, it has been on two things. 1) They didn't clamp down on Iranian influence early enough. 2) They did not make it clear to the public Iran's role. We're basically fighting a proxy war against Iran like the Soviets were fighting a proxy war against us in Afghanistan.

So the question is, what is anyone going to do about what is essentially an act of war. My guess is that the "stop before I say stop again" type of diplomacy.

Labels: diplomacy, iran

Obama the Naive

Obama has some problems. First, he freaks out when President Bush comes out against appeasers. "Hey, stop talking about me!" So he admits he's an appeaser. Not good.

Then he tries to say that Kennedy talked to the Russians, what's the big deal with talking to the Iranians? Kennedy's first meeting with Kruschev made him think that Kennedy was a light-weight. Kennedy then brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Does anyone seriously think that the Iranians are going to take Obama seriously if he threatens them?

I have no problem with talking with our enemies. But this "stop before I say 'stop' again" stuff has to go.

Labels: barack obama, iran

Iran's Proxy War Against the U.S. and the Iraqi Government (PDF)

Bookmark and read later.

Labels: iran, iraq

Lieberman Opponent Doesn't Like Lieberman's Tough Talk About Iran

Lieberman wants us to "be prepared to take aggressive military action." And for that he should resign from the Senate, say his critic.

Yeah we shouldn't be prepared. We should be completely unprepared. Seriously, this guy is overreacting.

Labels: iran

Wanted: Two Nuclear Reactors.

Good to see the world media is on top of everything.

Another instance of what "stop before I say 'stop' again" gets you.

Among the surreal events becoming ever more frequent in the nuclear showdown with Iran was the appearance of an ad last week in the International Herald Tribune, inviting bids to build "Two Large Scale Nuclear Power Plants in Iran."

The ad ran in all editions of the paper, which is owned by the New York Times, and reaches more than 240,000 readers in more than 180 countries. Somehow this outrageous solicitation escaped the notice of major world media. That's remarkable, at a time when Iran has been flagrantly defying United Nations Security Council resolutions calling on Tehran to halt its nuclear bomb program - with both the U.N. and U.S. Treasury calling for a freeze on the assets worldwide of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on behalf of which the ad was placed.

The ad did get noticed in Israel, a country that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said he would like to see wiped off the map. Bloggers picked up the story, and a scanned version of the ad began circulating, with commentary, on the Internet. It smacked of Iranian nose-thumbing so extreme one had to wonder if it was a spoof.

It's no joke. The ad, which reads like something out of a Graham Greene novel, includes an e-mail address for a "Mr. Esmaeili," the address of Iran's Permanent Mission to the U.N. in Vienna, and a bank-account number at Austria Bank-Creditanstalt, complete with SWIFT code, for interested bidders to pay a nonrefundable fee for a set of bidding specifications.

Labels: iran