While the government talks tough about joining the currency war that has broken out as a result of the collapsing dollar (see my column at The Daily Maverick: Currency: the race to the bottom), I was thinking about the many other grand but ultimately futile ideas government comes up with to plaster over the cracks of past failures. Then I thought how nice it would be for everyone, including the ANC’s own constituency, if the government tried to do far less, but do it well.

In other news, some guy on the interwebs said I called for genocide, and proceeded to point out how barbaric that would be. I quite agree. Well, I would, if there was even a shred of truth in the words he put in my mouth: The algebra has a devil for a sidekick. Cute headline, though.

I enjoyed this interview by Eric, over at the Tygrrrr Express, with John Podhoretz, the sometimes controversial but usually eloquent incoming editor of the neoconservative Commentary magazine, the publication his father Norman once edited.

In particular, his quip on uniting Americans is funny: “I, for one, have no interest in uniting with Michael Moore. I have no idea how to reduce the acrimony. People enjoy it more than they admit.” His view on Israel taking action against Iran’s nuclear programme also elicited a chuckle: “After Lebanon, I see no reason to have faith that Ehud Olmert knows how to find the men’s room.”

I’m a little perplexed by what the recent US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has to say about Iran.

If Iran stopped its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, why did the NIE of 2005 say it was actively pursuing one? Which was right? Who is the contradictor in chief (to quote Eric over at Classical Values, who has plenty more good questions and links on the subject)?

If Iran is not actively pursuing a weapons programme, why has it been so stubbornly secretive? Why is it acting just about as guilty as Saddam Hussein did about WMDs? And if Bush is so adamant on going to war with Iran, why did this NIE get declassified? Surely the evil genius has learnt to plot a little more elegantly than that? Or is this another example of the intelligence covering its backside after its previous failures? Are they saying, “Next time we’re wrong, we’re damn well going to err on the side of underestimating enemy capabilities”?

Why are the Israelis, who’d be first on the “let’s test our little toys” list, not breathing a sigh of relief?

Why, when the media has surely learnt to distrust everything the intelligence community ever said about Iraq’s weapons, suddenly turn around and splash this across the front pages as vindication of Iran and indictment of the warmonger in chief?

Herbert E. Meyer asks the really pertinent question: how do we know that the 2005 NIE was wrong and this one is right, rather than vice versa?

I, for one, am not so easily convinced. We’ve seen Mahmoud Ahmademocrat’s comedy show at Columbia University, in which he said there were no gays in Iran, and whether the Holocaust was really that bad remains a matter for further historical research. He doesn’t exactly inspire trust.

We’ve heard how he defied the UN’s International Atomic Energy inspectors, breaking seals and barring entry to Natanz. These aren’t the only ways in which Iran is failing to comply with the obligations the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty places on signatories who wish to pursue a peaceful, civilian nuclear power programme.

That same watchdog body, which can hardly be accused of warmongering or a pro-US stance, just last month said Iran is within a year of producing nuclear weapons.

So who’s right? And what’s the prize for being wrong?

Foreign Policy Passport blog has a quotation from George Perkovich, the nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in which he says that “ElBaradei and Iran have won this round.”

The conjunction of the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency with a regime that stands accused of seeking to develop nuclear weapons strikes me as curious, to say the least. Here’s the quotation in full:

ElBaradei and Iran have won this round. In August the IAEA Director General accepted what were essentially Iranian terms for answering the IAEA’s outstanding questions about Iran’s suspicious nuclear activities. This agreement seemed to surrender the IAEA’s rights and responsibilities to conduct follow-up investigations and pursue new leads. The agreement also neglected the U.N. Security Council’s legally binding demands that Iran suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as long as the IAEA is unable to satisfy itself that Iran’s nuclear activities have been entirely peaceful. Yet Iran and Mr. ElBaradei hailed it as a breakthrough. ElBaradei and others who are convinced the U.S. plans to go to war against Iran felt the agreement would spare the world another catastrophe.

The P5+2 statement reveals that the Iran/IAEA deal effectively neutralized the U.S., French, U.K. effort to tighten sanctions on Iran in response to Iran’s ongoing refusal to accede to U.N. Security Council resolutions. The statement basically says the world should wait and hope that Iran gives the IAEA full answers and that somehow all the outstanding issues are indeed resolved. (If this were so easy, why has Iran waited more than four years to provide such answers and suffered U.N. sanctions for failing to cooperate?) Then, in November the P5+2 will reconvene and, if Iran has not satisfied the IAEA, they will huff and puff some more.

When President Ahmadinejad said last week that the Iran case is closed in the Security Council and the matter is with the IAEA where it belongs, he was absolutely wrong from a legal standpoint. The U.N. Security Council Resolutions remain active and binding. But now some members of the Security Council, following the lead of Director General ElBaradei, are showing that President Ahmadinejad is having his way, at least for now.

This puts me in mind of another article, in which the main exiled Iranian opposition group reports that a new underground facility is being built for enriching weapons-grade uranium:

“Information we have from inside the regime indicates the site is destined for military nuclear activity, mainly for the further enrichment of uranium,” Mehdi Abrichamtchi, of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said in Paris.

The new site in central Iran consists of a “vast underground area beneath the Karkass mountains linked to the surface by two tunnels and connecting with a third tunnel” to the Natanz nuclear complex 5km away, Mr Abrichamtchi said.

“The site is protected against aerial attack. If Natanz is bombed, it won’t be touched,” he said. “To maintain secrecy, the area has been declared a military zone, and the regime has bought up all the local land.”

All of which raises a serious question. Let’s assume such a facility did exist, and the regime denies it, and its location is secret, and its connection to the main Natanz facility is disguised, and the few Iranians who can confirm its existence or location are under orders, on pain of death, to keep silent. Let’s assume that ElBaradei’s inspectors were permitted unrestricted access to Iran, and they weren’t on side of the Iranian regime. How could they possibly know that it’s there?

Yesterday, I noted the rhetorical style of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. Here’s another technique: “I officially announce that in our opinion the nuclear issue of Iran is now closed.” Did someone compare him to Hitler?

Now where have I heard the technique of unilaterally declaring victory in a debate before? Oh wait. Here. And here.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s talk at Columbia University was a wonderful comedy show. But while his reception at Columbia is one thing, the respect the United Nations accords him is quite another.

He started with a pathetic complaint about being treated rudely, because Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, introduced him by reading his CV. It includes such items as the imprisonment of journalists, sponsoring terror, executing children, threatening the destruction of a nation-state, fighting a proxy war against the United States and hosting a Holocaust denial conference. A rush transcript of the introduction, the speech, and the Q&A session is here.

Ahmadinejad proceeded with his usual deranged notions about global politics and made an asinine appeal to fellow academics for further research into the veracity of the Holocaust. He points out that, “the key to the understanding of the realities around us rests in the hands of the researchers, those who seek to undiscover (sic) areas that are hidden, the unknown sciences.” Here’s to undiscovery, indeed. Perhaps if we undiscover the Holocaust, or Apartheid, or the Inquisition, or the Crusades, or the present Jihad, they will never have happened. Wouldn’t that be nice?

He tells us, “Nobody should interfere in the affairs of the Palestinian nation. Nobody should sow the seeds of discord. Nobody should spend tens of billions of dollars equipping and arming one group there.” Something about a mote and a splinter comes to mind — I’m sure our Hizbollah-sponsoring friend knows the holy texts well enough to understand.

He used this rhetorical trick of inversion often. If such tactics fooled anyone (and judging by the applause in the audience it did), he finished with an enlightening flourish: there are no homosexuals in Iran. Granted, in a country where homosexuality is punishable by lashes or execution, I guess gay pride marches, burlesque cabaret and rainbow bumper stickers aren’t really all that popular.

Perhaps his Columbia address, as Bollinger said he hoped, brings home to a few naïve listeners the absurd regime over which he presides, and the nature of the enemy that faces those who love freedom and cherish civilisation.

What is less easy to accept is that this man remains — along with dozens of other leaders of unfree countries — a respected member of the United Nations. An excellent editorial at Investor’s Business Daily points this out, and calls for the failed global body to be closed for good.

The World Stage: Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, sponsors terrorism and colludes in the murder of American troops. So why is he given the honor of addressing the United Nations on U.S. soil?

To us, the answer is clear. The U.N. is as corrupt, brutal and morally compromised as Ahmadinejad himself. In its many affronts to civilization and decency, the U.N. has long since outlived its usefulness and reason for being. Time to shut it down.

Sounds harsh, we know. Isn’t it better, you ask, to have a place where people can peaceably gather and talk out their problems?

Sad as it is to say, the answer is no. For the U.N. has been hijacked by a rather diverse group of kleptocrats, dictators and fanatics who have successfully used it to their own rather nefarious ends.

An old proposal, put forward by Sen. John McCain a while back, would scrap the U.N. and replace it with a “league of democracies.” Great idea. Let that be the starting point for reform talks. Given the U.N.’s abysmal record and its epic depravity, there is no choice.

It cites numbers specific reasons, including the perversity that the worst tyrants and kleptocrats in the world get to chair commissions on human rights, nuclear disarmament and sustainable development.

It revives an excellent proposal by McCain, to establish a club of free nations. Membership would be by invitation only, and would be subject to adherence to minimum standards of liberty, democracy and human rights. Member countries would agree a common defence and military support arrangement, much like the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation. As an inducement to non-members, member countries would agree to dismantle all trade barriers among them, but would not be so bound vis-a-vis non-members.

It is a capital solution to a huge and expensive problem the world has created in the U.N. It was created for a different world. Its costs, morally and financially, far outweigh the limited benefits it has brought in that time. It’s time to end the perverse charade.

Russia ‘worried’ by Iran war risk — BBC News, 18 September 2007