You’ve entered that gray area between day and night:
WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 — In open defiance of the United Nations, Iran is steadily expanding — rather than freezing — its efforts to enrich uranium, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported today. The findings have prompted the Bush Administration to press for more severe sanctions against Iran, at a moment of greatly increased tensions between Washington and Tehran.
In a mild surprise to outside experts, the nuclear agency reported that Iran is now operating, or is about to switch on, roughly 1,000 centrifuges, the high-speed devices that enrich uranium, at its main nuclear facility at Natanz.
A dim, featureless plain where the past and present blur with the future:
Before the report was issued, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. and its allies would use the Security Council and other “available channels” to bring Tehran back to negotiations over its nuclear program.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply concerned … that the Iranian government did not meet the (Wednesday) deadline set by the Security Council.”
“I urge again that the Iranian government should fully comply with the Security Council” as soon as possible, he told reporters in Vienna, saying Iran’s nuclear activities had “great implications for peace and security, as well as nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
You’ve entered the Twilight Zone.
I guess this means they don’t really want to be friends.
I blame Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. It’s been all downhill since then.
I blame Kermit as well. For years the CIA coup in Iran that overthrew a popular democratic ruler and installed a despot and his brutal secret police was held up as a model at the CIA. It inspired much of our more covert foreign policy. It also later brought about a new term – Blowback: a term coined by the CIA to denote the unintended consequences of covert actions and policies that were kept secret from the American public.
The rise of leftist governments in Latin America, the creation of an Islamic militant state in Iran, and Al-Qaeda itself our examples of blowbacks from earlier American secret policies in their regions.
In could also be argued that blowback is a natural consequence of developing an extremely powerful military-industrial-intelligence complex after WW2 to fight the Cold War or even a natural consequence of the world Empire creation we embarked upon in 1898.
I put greater than 50/50 odds we attack Iran by the end of April, despite their being years away from a single nuclear weapon. Blowback will be too mild a term to describe the consequences.