dissident wrote:Various western states are closing their embassies in Syria in what looks like a run up to a "coalition of the billing" attack. The planners with global ambitions in the west better think twice about doing as they please. All their plans for Iran may go down the toilet. Military intervention in Syria without a UN fig leaf means that nuclear weapons can be deployed on Iranian soil from certain friendly governments. These sanctimonious western governments will hardly be in any position to complain about international law. As evident from the North Korea case, there is no stomach amongst the wannabe global managers for military intervention in the presence of at most a few nuclear devices.
rangerone314 wrote:A false flag nuclear strike against a country Iran is unfriendly towards, while Iran is in possession of nuclear weapons, could result in a massive nuclear counter-strike reducing Iran to a burning cinder.
What was the parade of European poodles thinking - that Tehran would just roll over and absorb the European Union's oil embargo, scheduled to start on July 1?
No wonder Brussels was caught as a Gucci deer in the headlights when the news started to flow that Tehran would pre-empt the move and immediately slap its own embargo of crude oil exports to six European Union countries - deeply in crisis Club Med members Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain plus recession-hit France and the Netherlands.
It took virtually no time for Iran's Oil Ministry and then the Foreign Ministry to deny it; such a decision, technically, would have to be officially announced by the Supreme National Security Council, which also deals with the nuclear negotiations.
But only the deaf, dumb and blind wouldn't understand the message; blowback for the ridiculously counter-productive European sanctions/oil embargo package will only plunge vast swathes of Europe further into deep economic pain.
Iran supplies 500,000 barrels of oil a day to the EU. The mere threat of an Iranian embargo has already provoked an oil price spike.
Assuming Club Med countries would be able to get oil from other sources - and that's not a given; Saudi Arabia wants high oil prices with a vengeance - they would have to reconfigure their refineries to process it. Inevitably there would be shortages of gasoline; the average Italian, for instance, is already furious with the skyrocketing price of gas at the pump.
Perhaps those tens of thousands of useless Brussels bureaucrats carrying their multicolored files up and down should do something meaningful and send a letter to Washington officially congratulating the Americans for further impoverishing tens of millions of EU citizens.
When in doubt, slap more sanctions
Yet the vultures, jackals and hyenas of regime change/war can never be appeased in their sanction lust. The US is now forcing the EU to cut off Iran from Brussels-based SWIFT - the independent telecom mechanism/clearinghouse used by every bank in the world to exchange financial data (its official name is Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications). Iran's Central Bank itself may become a victim.
In a nutshell, SWIFT is the wheel that moves global financial transactions and trade. So if this is not an extended, remixed declaration of hardcore economic war against one country - nothing else is.
Will it work? Hardly. It will certainly represent more devastation unleashed over "the Iranian people" - the vague entity of choice against which the US has "no quarrel". More than 40 Iranian banks use SWIFT to process financial transactions, and Iranians use it like everybody else in a globalized economy.
It will drag SWIFT's carefully maintained reputation for trust and neutrality through the mud; imagine other member countries' reaction to the fact they can also be totally marginalized according to the US's whims.
Roy wrote:Just who is threatening whom here? What, can't the war hawks here look at a map? This is why Iran is developing nukes. So they won't be invaded.
An objective observer can look at this and instead of feeling afraid, can feel confident that Iran can't do a damn thing without suffering massive and deadly consequences for their regime and their people.
AgentR11 wrote:Roy wrote:Just who is threatening whom here? What, can't the war hawks here look at a map? This is why Iran is developing nukes. So they won't be invaded.
And yet, its probably the one and only action that could cause them to be invaded/attacked. Fear and paranoia make for poor decision motivators.
The late Saddam was also suckered into shutting down his WMD program.AdTheNad wrote:AgentR11 wrote:Without nukes, over time the west would work to destabilise Iran, so when riots begin we have people to arm and start a revolution. Nukes is the only thing that can stop that. If Gaddafi had nukes he might still be alive and Iran knows this.
Roy wrote:
radon wrote:Heck, we used to be taught in the geography lessons at school that Kushka was the southernmost point of the Soviet Union, and now see - this is an American military base. Never seen this before. The world has changed over the course of the century.
radon wrote:Roy wrote:
Heck, we used to be taught in the geography lessons at school that Kushka was the southernmost point of the Soviet Union, and now see - this is an American military base. Never seen this before. The world has changed over the course of the century.
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