03/31: "The Winds of War" - If the Iranians Hate us, Let Them Also Fear Us

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03/30: "The Winds of War" - U.N. Calls on Iran to Free Britons
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?t=235618


<center><b>Britian

<font size=+1 color=red>If the Iranians Hate us, Let Them Also Fear Us </font>

March 31, 2007
Telegraph
Opinion
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/03/31/dl3101.xml </center>
It is one thing to be disliked; quite another to be despised. Iran would not have kidnapped our Servicemen without having considered our rules of engagement, our diplomatic isolation and our likely military response, and made a rough calculation of how likely they were to get away with their piracy. </b>

There was a time when British citizenship afforded a degree of protection from foreign harassment. When the half-mad King of Abyssinia interned two of our diplomats in 1868, we sent an expeditionary force of 13,000 British and Indian troops on a nine-month rescue mission. When Gordon was besieged at Khartoum in 1884, public opinion demanded a relief expedition, whose failure to arrive in time contributed in no small part to the downfall of the government.

During the Don Pacifico Affair in 1850, when Britain blockaded Piraeus in order to secure compensation for a Portuguese moneylender who had been born in Gibraltar, Palmerston assured his countrymen that "a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong".

Not any more. Teheran is well aware that we have been taking on additional military responsibilities while running down our capacity. Struggling to meet our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are in little position to pick a new fight. Public opinion, too, has changed. Where our great-great-grandfathers clamoured for the rescue of Gordon, we have reacted to Iran's provocation with a resigned shrug. Americans, in particular, cannot understand why we seem so indifferent to the fate of our own people.

Part of this indifference has to do, disgracefully, with anti-war sentiment: there is a feeling that we have no business being in the Gulf, and that we therefore are in no position to complain when things go wrong. But our sailors were carrying out their task at the behest of the Iraqi government and the United Nations. The rights and wrongs of the original invasion have no bearing on the criminality of their abduction.

There is also, perhaps, a feeling of impotence: if we can't invade Iran, what else can we do? Plenty of things. We can, of course, pull diplomatic and economic levers. This will involve going through Brussels, not so much because we need a favour as because we have no independent trade policy: the only way that Britain can impose sanctions on Iran is if the EU does so. At the same time, we could be seizing Iranian assets. Longer term, we could be putting pressure on the regime by sponsoring its opponents. We could launch tactical strikes at Iranian military installations.

We could even, in extremis, impose the kind of armed siege, complete with no-fly-zone, that paralysed Saddam in the years between the two Iraq wars: we already maintain large coalition garrisons on both Iran's flanks. Limiting ourselves to trivial resolutions will be treated by the ayatollahs as a sign of weakness. If they hate us, let them also fear us.

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<B><font size=+1 color=brown><center>Death Chants in Tehran Voice Resentment of 'The Little Satan'</font>

March 31, 2007
Independent
Angus McDowall in Tehran
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2408011.ece </center>
Ahmad Khatami, Tehran's thickset leader of Friday prayers, gesticulated in the air as he rebuked Britain. The thousands of people sitting before him are regime loyalists, representing the fifth of Iranians who always vote conservative.
</b>
A thundering salavat, an invocation of God, his prophet and the imams, greeted Mr Khatami's more robust statements, followed by chants of "Death to America! Death to England!" As the crowd poured out, the worshippers expressed their defiance and anger at America's smaller ally, nicknamed "the little Satan".

"The British should get it out of their heads to act like they used to," said Hassan Asghari, an angry middle-aged man in a green felt jacket. "They have a very bad record here but must learn the colonial days are over. Now they're so weak all they can do is follow America."

Near the back of the courtyard sat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has so far played a low-key role in this crisis. There is a suggestion that he is still under instruction - reportedly issued two months ago - not to comment too strongly on foreign policy.

Many of the country's moments of national awakening have come in opposition to high-handed imperialism, most often by the British, and there is still a lot of bad blood here.

Britain and Russia occupied Iran in the early part of the 20th century. When Reza Shah refused to toe the Allied line in 1941 they occupied the country again, forcing him to abdicate. Iranians found themselves subject to foreign rule, culminating in the overthrow of a popular prime minister in 1953.

The arrival of British troops in the current conflict was seen by many Iranians in that context. The government has accused Britain of stirring up ethnic unrest, and the plight of Shia Iraqis since the 2003 invasion has not gone unnoticed.

Britain, or the "old fox", as it is often called, can stir up feeling across society. At yesterday's derby game between the city's two biggest football teams, the scoreboard bore anti-British slogans that were enthusiastically taken up by the crowd.

The crisis has escalated to near blanket coverage on state television. "Britain fails to win strong UN support in sailor row" read a rolling news banner on the television last night.

However, in the salons of north Tehran, some accuse their government of provoking confrontation. And one grocer, who did not want to be named, said: "Things can get out of control and end up hurting people."

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<B><font size=+1 color=green><center>Saudis Warned Iran Not to Underestimate US Threat </font>

March 30, 2007
AFP
Yahoo News!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2007033...70330224120;_ylt=Au09vKV3I5z.i7kYULZMz_NSw60A </center>
WASHINGTON -- Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah reportedly warned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he should not underestimate the US military threat on Iran. Ahmadinejad met with King Abdullah on March 4 in Riyadh, and publicly the two leaders agreed to fight growing Sunni-Shiite strife in the region. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal told Newsweek in an interview </b>

that the king meanwhile warned Ahmadinejad to take seriously threats of US military strikes over Iran's refusal to halts its uranium enrichment program.

"On the nuclear issue, we warned him:<b> 'Dont play with fire. Don't think the threat (of an American attack on Iran) is a nonexistent threat; think that it's a real threat, maybe even a palpable threat,'"</b> Faisal said in the interview posted on the Newsweek website Friday.

<font size=+0 color=red>"Why do you want to take a chance on that and harm your country?" the king continued, according to Faisal. "What is the rush? Why do you have to do it (enrich uranium) this year and not next year or the year after? Or five years from now? What is the real rush in it?" </font>

<b>The king "speaks to everybody frankly," Faisal said, adding that his ruler bluntly told Ahmadinejad: "Youre interfering in Arab affairs," a reference to Iran's alleged interference in other Middle East countries. </b>

Ahmadinejad listened, then denied any interference. "But we said, 'Whether you deny it or not, this is creating bad feelings for Iran and we think you should stop,'" Faisal told Newsweek.

"Certainly what Iran is doing is interfering in Iraq," Faisal said. "We told them this will not benefit them but will do more damage to them than (good). But we have never put ourselves in a position of conflict with Iran."

<b>The Saudis also told the Iranians "that their interference in Arab affairs is creating a backlash in the Arab world and in the Muslim world. Other Muslim countries are complaining of (Iranian) interference in internal affairs," Faisal said.</b>

"And we talked to them frankly and honestly on this issue and they see the danger that what is happening is going to lead to strife between Shiites and Sunnis."

<b>The Saudi foreign minister also said it was "a catastrophe" for Iran to be holding 15 British sailors and marines it had captured on March 23.</b> Iran insists the personnel were detained for being in Iranian waters but Britain maintains they were inside Iraqi waters.

"This is just not the time for them to have a problem like that looming. We tell them that," Faisal said.

On Wednesday, the Saudi king criticized the US occupation of Iraq in an opening address to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh -- a move some observers say is an effort to distance himself from the embattled Bush administration.

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<B><font size=+1 color=blue><center>A Deadly U.S.-Iranian Firefight </font>

March 30, 2007
Time Magazine
Mark Kukis/Baqubah
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1605487,00.html </center>
The soldiers who were there still talk about the September 7 firefight on the Iran-Iraq border in whispers. At Forward Operating Base Warhorse, the main U.S. military outpost in Iraq's eastern Diyala Province bordering Iran, U.S. troops recount events reluctantly, offering details only on condition that they remain nameless. Everyone seems to sense the possible consequences of revealing that a clash between U.S. and Iranian forces had turned deadly. And although the Pentagon has acknowledged that a firefight took place, it says it cannot say anything more. "For that level of detail, you're going to have to ask the [U.S.] military in Baghdad," says Army Lieut. Col. Mark Ballesteros. "We don't know anything about it." </b>

A short Army press release issued on the day of the skirmish offered the following information: U.S. soldiers from the 5th Squadron 73rd Cavalry 82nd Airborne were accompanying Iraqi forces on a routine joint patrol along the border with Iran, about 75 miles east of Baghdad, when they spotted two Iranian soldiers retreating from Iraqi territory back into Iran. A moment later, U.S. and Iraqi forces came upon a third Iranian soldier on the Iraqi side of the border, who stood his ground.

As U.S. and Iraqi soldiers approached the Iranian officer and began speaking with him, a platoon of Iranian soldiers appeared and moved to surround the coalition patrol, taking up positions on high ground. At that point, according to the Army's statement, the Iranian captain told the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers that if they tried to leave they would be fired on.

Fearing abduction by the Iranians, U.S. troops moved to go anyway, and fighting broke out. Army officials say the Iranian troops fired first with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops fell further back into Iraqi territory, while four Iraqi army soldiers, one interpreter and one Iraqi border guard remained in the hands of the Iranians.

The official release says there were no casualties among the Americans, and makes no mention of any on the Iranian side. U.S. soldiers present at the firefight, however, tell TIME that American forces killed at least one Iranian soldier who had been aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at their convoy of Humvees.

The revelation comes amid rising tensions over the past week since Iran captured 15 British Navy personnel in waters between Iran and Iraq. Analysts have suggested that some Iranian officials have argued against speedily returning the Brits, preferring to use them as a bargaining chip in Tehran's efforts to free five of its own officials captured by the U.S. in Erbil earlier this year. News that an Iranian soldier had been killed in a clash with American forces would do little to ease those tensions.

In the months after the incident, U.S. forces have kept up joint patrols on the Iran-Iraq border, where their movements are closely monitored by Iranian outposts. Increasingly, however, U.S. troops stationed in Diyala Province are moving to help counter-insurgency efforts in the Baqubah area, leaving a thinner American presence at the border. On some days, says Lt. Col. Ronald Ward, the U.S. commander tasked with helping Iraqi units maintain border security in the area, no U.S. troops appear there at all.

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<B><center>March 31, 2007

<font size=+1 color=purple>An erratic regime spoiling for a fight</font>

The Times
Bronwen Maddox

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/bronwen_maddox/article1593989.ece </center>
The most dangerous implication of the seizure of the 15 British sailors and Royal Marines — other than the direct threat to them — is that Iran is even more unpredictable and confrontational than it had seemed.

The second is that Russia, despite its own now-explicit unease about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, is a serious obstacle to Britain’s efforts to rally support.
</b>
When Iran seized the sailors, it was reasonable to hope that this might be one of the impetuous accidents to which this complicated regime are prone, their factions often disorganised or contradictory. That hope determined Britain’s initially low-key response; it was plausible that an overenterprising group within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps might have decided to seize the sailors, leaving government officials, scrambling into their offices during the New Year holiday, to fit a framework of policy onto some awkward freelancing.

That hope has gone. If officials found the original predicament embarrassing, they have chosen to escalate it, particularly with the letter from the servicewoman Faye Turner calling on Tony Blair to pull out of Iraq.

Why now? The clash over Iran’s nuclear programme is one reason. Britain, along with the US and France, has been pushing in the UN Security Council for tough sanctions against Iran for its failure to reassure the world that its efforts to develop nuclear power do not conceal a weapons programme. The recent imposition of some sanctions had already ratcheted up tension.

British officials have been encouraged that in the nuclear talks, even since the election of the hardliner President Ahmadinejad two years ago, Iran has behaved like a “rational regime” which wants to avoid sanctions and calculates the penalties and rewards of its actions. It appeared shaken by the united front of the Security Council last year, while the US’s own financial sanctions have appeared to have real and rapid effect.

Most of all, Tehran has appeared perturbed by the sudden coolness of Russia, which has withheld shipments of fuel from Iran’s first reactor because of concerns about the ultimate intentions. Yet Russia’s support for the Western position on the nuclear issue has not extended to the hostage sailor crisis — it forced the council to water down the tough condemnation that Britain wanted.

No Western diplomat can have taken comfort from Iran’s escalation of the nuclear conflict. It has threatened to stop cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency; that cooperation is the basis for its claim to be behaving legally under the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, but has also given other countries their only windows onto Iran’s nuclear sites.

Iraq is another probable cause of the seizure of the sailors. Iran has condemned the US “surge” of troops and the US seizure of Iranians claimed to be military agents. Still, the US is not Britain; it cannot have been lost on Tehran that Mr Blair has said he will soon bring back about a third of British forces in Iraq. To hold hostage the troops of a country that says it is heading for the exit counts as picking a fight.

A letter from Tehran, said to be asking for Britain’s commitment never to enter Iranian waters again, might be the first sketch of an exit from the crisis that Tehran would consider face-saving. But now that the stand-off has gone into its second week, one can only conclude that the regime in Iran, in its various conflicts with the West, is behaving in a more systematically confrontational way than those who negotiate with it had hoped.

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<B><font size=+1 color=red><center>Iran Turns Up Volume in Face-Off Over Captured Britons</font>

By ALAN COWELL
Published: March 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/31/world/middleeast/31britain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin </center>
LONDON, March 30 — As the confrontation over British military prisoners in Iran entered a second week, Iran stepped up its propaganda campaign, broadcasting new video on Friday of a captured British marine and releasing a third letter from the only woman in the group of captives.</b>

Iran’s official Arabic-language television station broadcast today a new video of one of the British sailors seized a week ago.


Tehran Levels New Charges About Seized Britons (March 30, 2007) The marine was shown seeming to apologize “deeply” for entering Iranian waters without permission, and the letter supposedly signed by Faye Turney, a female sailor, complained of being “sacrificed” to British and American policies in the region.

The newest moves by Iran added to a deepening sense of frustration among British officials, underscoring the limits of their ability to end the standoff, and offering no public indication that it might be close to resolution. At the same time, some analysts said, the Iranian campaign may reflect tensions among factions in Tehran over the timing of the Britons’ release.

Iranian television identified the latest Briton to be shown as Nathan Thomas Summers, a Marine rifleman. He was one of 15 British sailors and marines seized on March 23 in the northern Persian Gulf.

Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed “disgust” at British personnel being “paraded” and “manipulated.” But he also urged patience, saying, “There is only one possible conclusion to this and that is that our personnel are released safe and sound.”

Mr. Blair is seeking to mold a triumphant legacy before his retirement as prime minister in a few months, and he is under pressure to ensure the captives’ release. But the crisis underscores for some critics the constraints on British power after military campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere as an ally of the United States, which have been a hallmark of his years in office.

“What is crystal clear is that Iran would never have dared so blatant an act of brinksmanship were it not convinced, quite correctly, that the Iraqi misadventure has rendered Britain too nervous and demoralized, not to mention militarily overstretched, to respond with serious force,” Matthew Norman, a columnist, wrote Friday in The Independent, a British daily newspaper.

“The days when Britain had the stature, self-confidence and facade of moral authority to play sergeant to the U.S. chief inspector on the global stage are over, and the villains know it,” he wrote.

Mr. Summers was shown wearing olive-and-sand-colored camouflage fatigues with the words “Royal Navy” and a small Union Jack badge on the shirt. He was seen sitting next to Seaman Turney and another marine identified by the BBC as Adam Sperry. Their whereabouts in Iran have not been disclosed.

Britain insists that the sailors were “ambushed” while operating under United Nations and Iraqi authority, 1.7 nautical miles within Iraqi waters, while Iran insists that the Britons were captured about 500 yards inside Iranian waters.

In video that seemed to jump between camera angles as if it had been edited, Mr. Summers said that Britain had promised after a similar episode in 2004 that its naval vessels would not trespass in Iranian waters. “Again I deeply apologize for entering your waters,” he said, addressing an unseen interviewer.

In what was said to be Seaman Turney’s third letter, the 26-year-old sailor went further than she had in previous missives addressed to her family and to Parliament.

Addressed “To British People,” the latest letter said: “I am writing to you as a British serviceperson who has been sent to Iraq, sacrificed due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair governments.”

“Whereas we hear and see on the news the way that prisoners were treated in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi jails by the British and American personnel, I have received total respect and faced no harm,” the letter in her name said. “It is now our time to ask our government to make a change to its oppressive behavior towards other people.”

The official Iranian news agency IRNA quoted Mr. Summers as saying: “We entered Iranian waters without permission and we were detained by Iranian coast guards. I would like to apologize for this to the Iranian people.”

Britain has been seeking international backing for its demand that Iran release the service personnel immediately, but failed to win full United Nations Security Council support on Thursday for a statement to this effect. Instead, the Security Council voiced “grave concern.”

On Friday, Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, called the Iranian action a “big mistake.” He was speaking as he arrived at a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Germany, where Britain might press its European partners to support punitive action against Iran by suspending export credit guarantees that are crucial to trade between Iran and Europe.

The British authorities also are weighing a letter sent by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to the British Embassy in Tehran on Thursday, apparently softening Iran’s demand for an apology, but seeking a guarantee that British naval vessels will steer clear of Iranian waters in the future.

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<B><font size=+1 color=brown><center>Without America's might the options are few</font>

By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:53am BST 31/03/2007
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/31/wiran131.xml </center>
The Government has few options if it wants to pressure Iran into releasing the captured Britons.

Military action is unfeasible without American support and so is a military blockade of the Gulf. Unless the United Nations shows more rigour, sanctions are unlikely to hurt Iran in the short term.

There is a feeling that the 15 could be in for a long stay in Iran and face the nightmare prospect for Britain of a show trial.</b>

advertisementWashington has remained largely subdued on the crisis but some commentators have made clear that the situation would have been very different if it had been 15 American sailors. Britain's options are:

Diplomatic: Britain has already suffered a setback at the UN with a fairly feeble rebuke of the Iranians. In the next few days, major players such as Russia and China, who are also friendly towards Teheran, might be persuaded to become more robust. But both have trade links with Iran and would be uncomfortable about major economic sanctions.

Downing Street could order all diplomatic links to be severed, throwing out Iran's ambassador, but this would cut off the one line of communication with the regime, leaving the Navy ratings even more isolated.

Sanctions: This is probably the main area where Iran is vulnerable. While it is a huge exporter of oil it has a chronic shortage of refineries, making it necessary to import 40 per cent of refined products such as petrol and jet fuel.

Sanctions would certainly make the regime sit up but they are only likely to appear as part of the game to force Iran to give up its nuclear programme.

Whitehall might have more luck in persuading the European Union to bring in further sanctions and severing trade links. Britain and America are also hamstrung by the lack of political leverage in the Middle East as a result of the Iraq invasion - which has conversely strengthened Iran's position.

Blockade: The Strait of Hormuz is just 21 miles across, making it a highly strategic chokepoint - and consequently very heavily defended by Teheran. With Iran so reliant on the waterway for its fuel, arms imports and other goods it would be a key area to put pressure on the regime.

<b>The Navy has prepared plans on how to enforce a blockade</b> but it would require almost the entire Fleet at a time when it is facing cuts and many ships have been mothballed. <b>A blockade would also substantially increase the threat of all-out war.</b>

Military: Britain is not a strong enough power to go it alone in a land battle with Iran, especially with so many troops committed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

America is unlikely to back military action until diplomacy and possible sanctions have forced Iran to climb down over its nuclear programme.<b> But the SAS will have already made contingency plans for a rescue mission. It would only be seriously considered if the hostages were considered to be under severe threat of death.</b>

If I was them I'd be very afraid of us. We're crazier than they are. They must be stupid. Idiots.

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<B><font size=+1 color=brown><center>Dangerous test of wills in the Gulf</font>

March 31 2007 03:00
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/8052f074-df...age=063fb9c2-3000-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8.html </center>
Iran's seizure of 15 British sailors and marines in the northern Gulf may have begun as a shot across the bows of western powers as they upped the pressure on Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions and its demands to be recognised as a regional power. But it now has the makings of a crisis - one that could spiral out of the control of both sides unless they damp it down fast.</b>

This is not really about whether the Royal Navy patrols were in Iranian or Iraqi waters when they were seized by Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards. The barrages of grid-references being fired from both sides are absurd given that there is no agreed demarcation of the waters in question (as opposed to the Shatt al-Arab that flows into them).

What this would seem to be is a test of wills. The UK servicemen (and one woman) were picked up the day before the United Nations Security Council voted, unanimously, to tighten sanctions on Iran until it suspends its uranium enrichment programme.

More broadly, the US and its allies have been trying to "push back" against Iranian forces and proxies in Iraq, supposedly prior to negotiating with Tehran from a position of strength. These robust tactics, including the capture and killing of Iranian "agents", may be spreading into Iranian territory. Somebody is stirring up Iran's non-Shia and non-Persian minorities - from the Kurds in the north to the Sunni Arabs in Khuzestan, within sight of where the marines were seized.

The Iranian regime, certainly, believes the Anglo-American coalition in Iraq is operating special forces inside its territory - in the same way it did in western and southern Iraq in 2002-03 prior to launching an invasion.

Under these circumstances, and with both sides flexing their muscles, any provocation is extremely dangerous.

That said, Iran's treatment of their captives, parading them on television and issuing coerced statements, is grotesque and intolerable. It is a reminder of how the mullahs' regime tramples upon the rights of its own people and does nothing to advance Iran's cause.

The British government should not, however, be altogether surprised that its indignation is not registering with quite the force it supposes. The Security Council has not let the UK down by only expressing "grave concern". The last time the Council adopted an unedited account from a member-state into a resolution - after the Madrid bombings three years ago that the then Spanish government insisted were carried out by Basque terrorists - it was made a fool of within hours. This is not a cut and dried situation.

It needs to be defused with a mix of firmness and finesse. Escalation, by either side, with the narrow waters of the Gulf already boiling with warships, carries huge risks. Iran still needs to be confronted with a reasonable menu of rewards and penalties for its behaviour by a united international community. But this is not the battleground.

US rejects concept of prisoner exchange:

Last Updated: Saturday, 31 March 2007, 00:43 GMT 01:43 UK

US rejects Iran captives exchange

Faye Turney said her captors had been 'friendly'
US officials have ruled out a deal to exchange 15 Royal Navy personnel captured in the Gulf for five Iranians seized by American forces in Iraq.
State department spokesman Sean McCormack rejected suggestions that a swap could be made.

The five, believed to be members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, were seized in January in the Iraqi city of Irbil.

Britain denies Iran's claims that the UK crew were in its waters when seized on 23March.

The five Iranians were captured in a raid along with equipment which the Americans say shows clear Iranian links to networks supplying Iraqi insurgents with technology and weapons.

US officials have condemned Iran's actions and publicly supported the UK.

But the BBC's James Coomerasamy said they are otherwise seeking to stay out of the dispute.

A Pentagon spokesman said the stand-off was a "delicate situation at a critical stage".

Earlier, Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned Iran for "parading" the UK crew on television in a way which would only "enhance people's sense of disgust".

In a broadcast on Iranian television, sailor Nathan Thomas Summers said: "I would like to apologise for entering your waters without permission."

He was shown alongside two colleagues, including Leading Seaman Faye Turney, 26, from Shropshire, who was broadcast apologising to Iran earlier in the week.

On Friday a third letter, allegedly from LS Turney, was released on Friday in which she said she had been "sacrificed" to UK and US government policy.

The BBC has been able to confirm the names of six of the 15 captured sailors and marines.

Along with LS Turney and Nathan Summers, who is from Cornwall, they are Paul Barton from Southport, Danny Masterton from Ayrshire, Joe Tindall from south London and Adam Sperry from Leicester.

European Union foreign ministers called for "the immediate and unconditional release" of the sailors and expressed "unconditional support" for Britain's position.

UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett described the latest footage as "quite appalling" and "blatant propaganda".

She also disclosed there was nothing in a formal letter from the Iranians to the UK that suggested they were looking for a solution to "this difficult situation".

The note condemned the navy's "illegal act" and demanded guarantees against "the recurrence of such acts" in the future.

In the latest video, Nathan Summers says: "Since we've been arrested in Iran our treatment has been very friendly.

"We have not been harmed at all. They've looked after us really well.

"The food they've been serving us is good and I am grateful that no harm has come to us.

"I would just like to apologise for entering your waters without permission. And that happened back in 2004, and the government promised that it wouldn't happen again.

Earlier, the UN Security Council voiced "grave concern" at Iran's actions in a statement.

But it stopped short of "deploring" Iran's action, as the UK requested.

The Britons, based on HMS Cornwall, were seized by Revolutionary Guards as they returned from searching a vessel in the northern Gulf.

Click to expand...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6512927.stm

If they hate us, let them also fear us.

The ones we are at war with people who celebrate violent lifetaking death and rejoice in torture, that I fear to trump that numbness of soul would take something as fearful as a nuclear bomb. Yet even then, they are of the mindset that they would welcome such a war, as fearful as that, because they believe it will herald in their Maudi. We have been negotiating and playing chicken for 30 years with Iran while we let them get away with murdering our own and many other peoples through terrorism with little consequence and it continues today, emboldened by our refusal to unmercifully squash it where ever it raises its ugly head. We could be in the days where like Sodom and Gomorah, the only thing such hatred will fear is the direct hand of God's wrath. "Then they will know that I am God." God may be the only one that can face off such evil. He will gather all their evil hearts to one place. Maybe we have reached those days, we will watch and see but I agree, their hatred is so great that before they can experience what it is to celebrate love and life, they will need to fear death. I'm not sure that is possible in a society that celebrates hate and death.

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<B><font size=+1 color=green><center>In Captured Britons' Home Port, Fury With Iran Is Personal</font>

By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 31, 2007; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...0/AR2007033002045.html?nav=rss_print/asection </center>
PLYMOUTH, England, March 30 -- Down at Cap'n Jaspers, a harbor-front burger joint, the anger was raw Friday over Iran's detention of 15 British sailors and marines -- especially Faye Turney, who lives in this military town in southwestern England with her husband and 3-year-old daughter.</b>

"What Iran is doing is immoral," said John Alexander, 63, a retired scallop fisherman. "If I were in charge, the special forces would have been there already, and I would have been the first one in."


"If I were in charge," said John Alexander, a retired fisherman in Plymouth, southwestern England, "the special forces would have been there already."


A week after Iran seized the Britons in the Persian Gulf, military and diplomatic analysts in Britain said early hopes that the incident would be resolved quickly are fading. Whether the British sailors entered Iranian waters or not -- a point upon which officials in London and Tehran sharply disagree -- analysts said that it now appears Iran planned the seizure of the Britons and that what initially seemed like a diplomatic spat now looks more like a hostage crisis.

"I think it was a calculated move, though I don't think it was a smart one," said Michael Williams, a foreign policy analyst at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London. Williams said that many people in the Middle East would applaud Iran for "standing up" to Britain and "sticking a finger in the eye of the West."

But the motives behind Iran's action, which European Union foreign ministers on Friday called a "clear breach of international law," remain unclear. Iran could be retaliating for the U.S. seizure of five Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence operatives in Iraq in January or it could be venting frustration with U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program, analysts said. Others said Iran could simply be playing to public sentiment in the Middle East, where taunting the British is seen as implicitly standing up to the United States.

Laleh Khalili, an Iranian American and lecturer in Middle Eastern politics at the University of London, said she believed the Iranian seizure of the Britons was "premeditated," especially since it has dragged out, with the captives being shown on Iranian state television and used to deliver political statements. Khalili said that because there has been so little communication from Iran, it is difficult to say what point Iranian officials want to make.

Whatever the motive, Iran is faring well in the public relations battle in the Middle East, she said. While many in the West accept the British government's version of events, a great number of people in Arab countries believe Iran is telling the truth. Khalili said many people in the Middle East are "profoundly suspicious" of the British, because of their historical role as a colonial power in the region and because of the "very recent history of false information about the Iraq war."

On Friday, the Tehran government continued to press a propaganda offensive centering on video footage and letters in which the detained British sailors purportedly acknowledge that they illegally trespassed into Iranian waters. Iranian state television showed footage of British marine Nathan Thomas Summers saying he apologized "deeply" for entering Iranian waters. "We trespassed without permission," Summers said on the tape. It was impossible to verify whether Summers had been coerced, but Prime Minister Tony Blair reacted with exasperation, like many people in this city, home to the largest naval base in Western Europe.

"I don't know why the Iranian regime keeps doing this -- all it does is heighten people's sense of disgust," Blair said. "Captured personnel being paraded and manipulated in this way, it doesn't fool anyone."

Iranian officials released a letter they said was written by Turney, the third such letter in three days, in which the 26-year-old sailor allegedly tells "the British people" that she has been "sent to Iraq, sacrificed due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair governments." The letter says she is "deeply sorry" for trespassing and "thankful" for the "caring, compassionate, hospitable and friendly" Iranian people. And it states, "I believe that for our countries to move forward we need to start withdrawing our forces from Iraq and leave the people of Iraq to start re-building their lives."

The letter also mentions prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison: "Whereas we hear and see on the news the way prisoners were treated" there by British and American personnel, "I have received total respect and faced no harm."

On the streets of Plymouth, the home port of the HMS Cornwall, the frigate Turney and the 14 other British naval personnel were returning to when they were captured March 23, people said they believed the letters were coerced and contained awkward language that a young British woman would never use.


You could just tell straight away" that someone else had written Turney's statement, said Rebecca Robinson, 19, a navy sailor drinking tea on the windy wharf at Cap'n Jaspers. Since before the Mayflower sailed for the New World from here in 1620, Plymouth has been a naval town. More than 8,000 sailors and marines are stationed here, as well as many army and air force personnel, some of whom are serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. Friday's headline in the Plymouth Herald was "Fighting for Faye."

"It's personal here," Robinson said. "It's like family."

"If I were in charge," said John Alexander, a retired fisherman in Plymouth, southwestern England, "the special forces would have been there already."

Gary Montgomery, 50, a former marine, said he hoped the British government pursued a strategy of diplomatic and economic isolation of Iran, rather than military action. "They've got to be careful -- if they wind the Iranians up too much, they could hurt the captives," he said. "If we do something crazy, they'll never come back."

Brian Pullen, 45, a retired Royal Navy chief petty officer in Plymouth, said he believed Iran seized the British service members in retaliation for January's seizure by U.S. forces of Iranian Revolutionary Guard operatives in Iraq. There has even been speculation that Iran is seeking a prisoner swap -- a prospect that the U.S. State Department dismissed Friday.

Pullen said he thinks Blair, who is expected to step down by summer, has been overly cautious with Iran for political reasons.

"It's been seven days, and nothing seems to have happened," Pullen said. "If there were 15 Americans in there, I'm sure something would have happened by now."

Jordan reported from London. Special correspondent Karla Adam in London and staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.

I am shockedthat England hasn't done somethign. but I think that theywill. I don't think the ywill let this slide. Nor should they .

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<B><center>GERMANY


<font size=+1 color=red>Evil Americans, Poor Mullahs </font>

March 29, 2007
Spiegel Online
Claus Christian Malzahn
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,474636,00.html </center>
Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent believing the opposite. Germans' fundamental hypocrisy about the US suggests that it's high time for a new bout of re-education. </b>

The Germans have believed in many things in the course of their recent history. They've believed in colonies in Africa and in the Kaiser. They even believed in the Kaiser when he told them that there would be no more political parties, only soldiers on the front.

Not too long afterwards, they believed that Jews should be placed into ghettos and concentration camps because they were the enemies of the people. Then they believed in the autobahn and that the Third Reich would ultimately be victorious. A few years later, they believed in the Deutsche mark. They believed that the Berlin Wall would be there forever and that their pensions were safe. They believed in recycling as well as in cheap jet travel. They even believed in a German victory at the soccer World Cup.

Now they believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran. This was the by-no-means-surprising result of a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular -- 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise -- said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran.

The German political establishment, which will no doubt loudly lament the result of the poll, is largely responsible for this wave of anti-Americanism. For years the country's foreign ministers fed the Germans the fairy tale of what they called a "critical dialogue" between Europe and Iran. It went something like this: If we are nice to the ayatollahs, cuddle up to them a bit and occasionally wag our fingers at them when they've been naughty, they'll stop condemning their women to death for "unchaste behavior" and they'll stop building the atom bomb.

That plan failed at some point -- an outcome, incidentally, that Washington had long anticipated. Iran continues to work away unhindered on its nuclear program, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reacts to UN demands with an ostentatious show of ignorance. The UN gets upset and drafts a resolution.

Another item on the Iranian president's wish list is the annihilation of Israel. But that will take a bit longer. In the meantime, just to make sure it doesn't get out of practice, the regime had 15 British soldiers kidnapped a few days ago. But it's still all the Americans' fault -- that much is obvious.

Inherently evil

We've known just what they're like for a long time. The 19th-century German author Karl May taught us about the American Wild West, and Karl Marx warned us about unbridled capitalism. Besides, we've all been there at least once -- on vacation, of course. Be it in California or Florida (that's where you get the best deals on rental cars, you know), we can see right through the Americans.

For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.

Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course -- from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE's readers steadfastly believe, "is worse than Hitler." Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the Führer on to someone else. In fact, we won't even have to posthumously revoke his German citizenship, as politicians in Lower Saxony recently proposed. No one can hold a candle to our talent for symbolism!

Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you're saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you'll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. And on the practical side, you can be the head of the Social Democratic Party and endear yourself to the party's hardcore with a load of anti-American nonsense, and still get invited back to Washington -- just look at Gerhard Schröder. In fact, you could, like leading German politicians in the debate over the planned American missile shield in Europe, be accused of having "an almost unbelievable lack of knowledge" by a former NATO general, and even that wouldn't matter. It's all about what you believe, not what you know.

Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your evening catching the latest episode of "24" and then complain about Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York the next day. You can lament the average American's supposed lack of culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the Green Card lottery.

Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn't making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there's no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness.

Not so safe

Iran is a different story. The last time someone made a joke on German TV about an Iranian leader, the outcome was not pleasant. Exactly 20 years ago, Dutch entertainer Rudi Carell produced a short TV sketch portraying Ayatollah Khomeini dressed in women's underwear. Carell received death threats. The piece, which lasted all of a few seconds, led to flights being cancelled and German diplomats being expelled from Tehran. Carell apologized. Jokes about fat Americans are just safer.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the American historian who in his 1996 book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" deprived the Germans of the belief that they didn't know what was going on back in the day, is currently studying the history of genocides in the 20th century. One of the things he has noticed is that the politicians or military leaders who planned genocides and had them carried out rarely concealed their intentions in advance. Whether the victims were Hereros, Armenians, kulaks, Jews or later Bosnians, the perpetrators generally believed that they were justified and had no reason to hide their murderous intentions.

Today, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks about a world without Israel while dreaming of an atom bomb, it seems obvious that we -- as Germans of all people -- should be putting two and two together. Why shouldn't Ahmadinejad mean what he says? But we Germans only know what we believe.

The Americans are more dangerous than the ayatollahs? Perhaps the Americans should take the Germans at their word for a change. It's high time for a new round of re-education. The last one obviously didn't do the job.

Claus Christian Malzahn is SPIEGEL ONLINE's Berlin bureau chief.

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<B><font size=+1 color=brown><center>'They will be Scared by Sound of Death Chants' </font>

March 31, 2007
The Times
David Brown and Michael Theodoulou in Cyprus
http://www.iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2007&m=03&d=31&a=6 </center>
The detained sailors and Marines are likely to be kept in good physical conditions but will find their detention by Iranian forces a frightening experience, experts say. The 15 are most probably being held in the military barracks at Jamshidiyeh in the foothills of the Alborz mountains which shelter Tehran. Although the seven Royal Marines are drilled in techniques to cope with capture, the eight sailors have little relevant training. </b>

The number of vehicles entering the barracks has increased significantly since the British were caught, according to Alire-za Nourizadeh, a senior researcher at the Centre for Arab--Iranian Studies in London.

The complex has an iconic role in Iranian revolutionary history and is no stranger to unwilling VIP guests. The Shah of Iran’s former officials, including a Mayor of Tehran, cabinet ministers and the Empress’s bureau chief, were locked up there in the 1970s.

“They are kept in rooms with heating and [air] conditioning,” Dr Nourizadeh said. “They are getting good food and will be allowed to watch the television for a few hours each day and the guards will try to get them newspapers.

“They will be scared. They will feel under pressure because they will hear chants of ‘Death to America, death to the UK’ [from soldiers in the barracks]. They will see men with guns. They will see all sorts of threatening gestures from the guards and the people around them will look at them with hate in their eyes.

“They [the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards] wanted to show to the Iranian people that they are so strong that they can go and take British troops. They wanted to keep these soldiers for some time and see what happens.

“Now they will want to show the Iranian people that they are not going to give in to British demands.”

A Ministry of Defence source said that the sailors being held would have been given little training in how to cope with capture. “The sailors would probably have watched a video followed by a question-and-answer session,” he said.

“The Royal Marines would be better prepared. The key of their training is to keep themselves alive and to deny any intelligence to the enemy. They would be aware of the psychological and intelligence tricks that would be used against them.”

Videos of the captives have shown them eating kebabs and smoking. They have been seen smiling and looking relaxed.

What is happening off-screen is a matter of constant concern in London. Iran’s refusal to grant consular access to the prisoners is alarming. The Revolutionary Guards’ erratic record feeds Britain’s fears.

The Guards, a corps established after the 1979 revolution to protect the fledgeling Islamic republic from “internal and external threats”, is the regime’s most trusted power centre when it comes to national security and has every reason to humiliate “little Satan” Britain.

Iran is expected to make a training film about the Britons’ detention as it did when eight British sailors and Marines were seized briefly in similar circumstances in 2004.

That video, being shown in selected universities to students of the Baseej, a hardline civil defence force, portrays the infidels as powerless in the face of devout Iranian forces. One of the Britons had “wet his pants” when a Revolutionary Guard yelled at him, Soheil Karimi, the film’s director, told students at the film’s premiere in November.

Chris Adams, a navy reservist from the 2004 incident, told the Plymouth Evening Herald how the Iranians had removed the two senior officers from the rest of the men. The Britons were moved around in twos to reduce the likelihood of an attempted escape. The 15 sailors and Marines now being held are believed to include an officer but it is unclear if he is with the rest of the party.

“They took everything from us and blindfolded us,” Mr Adams said. “I was scared. We were blindfolded and had weapons pointing at us. We were not allowed to talk.”

As now, the Iranians insisted that the Britons were in their waters although the captives were convinced of their innocence. The British decided to humour the Revolutionary Guards.

“It was pretty rough and ready. We were pushed about. They kept asking us why we were in Iranian waters,” Mr Adams said.

“When we were briefed we were told that, as we were not at war, we could tell them what we needed to survive.

“We told them we were very sorry for being in Iranian waters — we were prepared to tell them anything they wanted to hear.”

He continued: “We were given an adequate amount of water. We were drinking out of a bucket, eating our food off the floor but you eat. We didn’t question it. It was 55 degrees.”

If Iran decides to try them for illegal entry they will come under the control of the hardline judiciary.

There is virtually no precedent but diplomats say that the legal procedure could take two different courses. In one the Britons could face a judicial administrative procedure rather than a trial in its usual sense with argumentation and barristers. A judge or the prosecutor would record the facts and either then, or after a recess, the judge would give his decision. Britain would not necessarily be informed in advance of the proceedings.

Alternately, the authorities could give notice of a trial, in which case British diplomats would ask to be present and the detained Britons might have a lawyer to speak for them. In either case, the proceedings would be swift, amounting to summary justice.

A long week

Friday, March 23 Iran seizes 15 Royal Navy sailors and marines in Gulf. British and Iranian envoys are each summoned to host foreign ministry

Saturday Iran says sailors have confessed to entering Iranian waters illegally. Britain repeats calls for their immediate release

Sunday Margaret Beckett speaks to Iran counterpart. Tony Blair calls for release of captives. Iran says it may pursue illegal entry charges

Monday Iran tells Britain detainees “fit and well”. Faye Turney, 26, naval boat driver, named as a captive

Tuesday Tony Blair gives warning of “different phase” if sailors not freed; shows Iran data that the 15 were in Iraqi waters. US Navy begins biggest Gulf exercise since 2003 Iraq invasion

Wednesday Britain publishes GPS coordinates of navy team and freezes all other diplomatic business with Iran. TV in Iran shows captives. Letter “from Turney” published saying Britons were in Iranian territory. Britain expresses outrage at video and letter

Thursday UN issues statement, not as strong as Britain sought, expressing “grave concern”

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<B><font size=+1 color=green><center>Left No Longer Anti-US</font>

March 31, 2007
Arab News
Amir Taheri
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=94405&d=31&m=3&y=2007 </center>
While elements of the left in the US and Europe are calling on Western democracies to abandon Afghanistan and Iraq to Taleban and Al-Qaeda, and surrender to the Khomeinists in Iran, new alliances are emerging against the jihadists in the region.

What is interesting is that in much of the Middle East, most notably Afghanistan and Iraq, the left is part of these new alliances. </b>

In Iraq, the two Communist parties, along with the Social Democrats and other center-left groups, supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and continue to play a significant role in shaping the new pluralist system.

In Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) is at the heart of the democratic movement against the Islamic republic’s attempt to dominate the country through Hezbollah. The Lebanese democratic movement includes other parties of the left, notably the Socialist Salvation Movement (Inqadh) and the Movement of the Democratic Left (MDL).

In Iran, virtually the whole of the left rejects President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Americanism, and calls for normalization with the United States. The recently created independent trade union movement is emerging as a vocal challenger to Khomeinism.

However, perhaps the most interesting new anti-jihadist alliance is taking shape in Afghanistan.

After months of discussions the leaders of several parties that had fought each other for two decades have come together to set up a new alliance called Popular Front (Jibheh Melli).

One major figure in the group is Burhaneddin Rabbani, an Islamic scholar who served as Afghanistan’s president after the Communist regime’s collapse in 1992. As founder and leader of Jami’at Islami (Islamic Society), Rabbani was one of the first Afghan leaders who started the resistance movement against Soviet occupation.

And, yet, Rabbani has agreed to enter the Popular Front along with leaders of Afghanistan’s dissolved Communist Party.

Both rival wings of the Communist Party will be present in the new front. One wing, known as Parcham (The Banner) had always been pro-Soviet while the other, known as Shoeleh-Javid (Eternal Flame), had Maoist sentiments.

The new front will also include center-left figures such as Nuralhaq Olumi and Muhammad Gulabzvi along with anti-Soviet Mujahedeen commanders such as Gen. Muhammad Qassim Fahim, a former defense minister.

Before the US-led intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003, much of the left in the Middle East shared the views of its American and European counterparts with regard to the United States.

“We looked to the left in the West and imitated it,” says Awad Nasir, one of Iraq’s best-known poets and a lifelong Communist. “We heard from the US and Western Europe that being left meant being anti-American. So we were anti-American. And then we saw Americans coming from the other side of the world to save us from Saddam Hussein, something that our leftist friends and the Soviet Union would never contemplate.”

Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the new Afghan front expresses similar sentiments. “Our nation is still facing the menace of obscurantism and terror from Taleban and Al-Qaeda,” he says. “Thus, we are surprised when elements of the left in the US and Europe campaign for withdrawal so that our new democracy is left defenseless against its enemies.”

For his part, Jumblatt, the Lebanese leader, says he realized that his lifelong anti-Americanism had been misplaced when he saw “long lines of people, waiting to vote in Iraq, in the first free election in an Arab country.”

Samir Qassir, the Lebanese center-left leader, often spoke of anti-Americanism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel” in the Middle East.

“Politics is always a question of choice,” Qassir said in one of the articles before he was killed in a car bomb in Beirut on June 2, 2005. “Here in the Middle East we face a choice between democracy and alliance with the US on one hand and surrender to religious fanatics and terrorists on the other.”

Iraq’s parties of the left were shocked when the new Socialist government in Spain decided to withdraw from the US-led coalition in 2004.

“We had hoped that with a party of the left in power in Madrid we would get more support against the Islamofascists not a withdrawal,” says Aziz Al-Haj, the veteran Iraqi Communist leader.

Tareq Al-Hashemi, vice president of Iraq, has also gambled his impeccable progressive record on the success of the pluralist experiment in his country.

“Our enemy is Al-Qaeda, not the United Sates,” he says.

Skimming through Middle Eastern press these days could produce unexpected results. It is not rare to see a virulently anti-American article by an American or Western European leftist appearing on the same page of a newspaper alongside a pro-American article from an Arab, Iranian or Afghan progressive figure.

In Iran, for example, Hussein Shariatmadari, the ultra Islamist editor of the daily newspaper Kayhan and a theoretician of the extreme right, often admiringly cites such American leftist figures as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jane Fonda.

Having all but abandoned its traditional opposition to capitalism and the bourgeois democratic system, much of the Western left is forced to cling to anti-Americanism as its backbone.

To be sure, anti-Americanism is not the ailment of the Western left alone. Extreme right parties in both the United States and Europe are also vehemently anti-American. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French neo fascist National Front, is as opposed to the new democratic Iraq as Spain’s Socialist Premier Jose Luis Zapatero.

In the Middle East, however, a good part of the left, while not especially enamored of the United States, sees it as a powerful ally against reactionary Islamist and totalitarian pan-Arab movements.

“Anti-Americanism is a luxury we cannot afford in the Middle East,” says Adnan Hussein, a leftist Iraq writer recently picked by the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential columnists in the world. “Blinded by anti-Americanism, the left in the West ends up on the same side as religious fascists and despots.”

Reza Khosravi, a veteran of Iran’s Communist movement, cites history as justification for the left’s rejection of “banal anti-Americanism.”

“During World War II all movements of the left supported an alliance with the Western democracies led by the United States because the common enemy was Fascism,” he says. “Today, we are in a similar position. Progressive forces in the Middle East are threatened by an Islamist version of Fascism. An alliance with Western democracies is not only desirable but necessary.”

George W. Bush, the bete-noire of liberals and leftists in the West, might be surprised to learn that he has a better image among liberals, leftists, secularists, and even moderate Islamists in the Middle East. While Chomsky and Moore see the US as “an evil power”, many leftists in the Middle East see it as a force for good that ended the tyranny of the Taleban in Afghanistan, dismantled the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and forced the Syrians out of Lebanon after 30 years of occupation.

“In our region, the US has become a force for the good,” says Jumblatt who recently met President Bush at the White House for a surprise meeting.

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<i>Folks; I realize that i have posted this bit of news already; but the subject of the U.S. attacking iran keeps showing up on new news sourses! Perhaps the story has 'gotten a life of it's own?" Or perhaps,the story-line is true! ~ Dutch</i>



<B><font size=+1 color=blue><center>Russian Intelligence: US to Attack Iran in April</font>


31 March 2007, Saturday
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=78680 </center>
Russian intelligence has received information that the US armed forces have nearly completed preparations for a possible military operation against Iran, due in early April, Ria Novosti news agency reported, citing a security official.
</b>
The source said the US has already made a list of targets on the territory of Iran and practiced the operation during recent exercises in the Persian Gulf.

"Russian intelligence has information that the US Armed Forces stationed in the Persian Gulf have nearly completed preparations for a missile strike against Iranian territory," the source said.

American commanders will be ready to carry out the attack in early April, but it will be up to the country's political leadership to decide if and when to attack, the source said.

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<B><font size=+1 color=purple><center>Iran will punish 'guilty' British sailors: diplomat</font>

Nicola Boden
April 1, 2007
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/ir...ailors-diplomat/2007/03/31/1174761823410.html </center>
IRANIAN authorities have started legal proceedings against the British military personnel it has seized and said they would be punished if found guilty, Iran's ambassador to Moscow said last night.

"No kind of apology has been received from the British side and, as a result, the case has taken on a juridical form," Gholamreza Ansari told Vesti television in comments quoted on the channel's internet site.</b>

"If their guilt is really demonstrated, naturally it will result in punishment. I want to underline that legal proceedings have already begun," Mr Ansari said.

Tehran has so far refused to bow to mounting world pressure to release the 15 Britons it says entered Iranian territorial waters illegally. London insists they were on a routine anti-smuggling patrol in Iraqi waters.

Asked to respond to Mr Ansari's comments, a British Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "It doesn't change our position. We want them released immediately.

"We have made clear they were seized in Iraqi waters and have demanded consular access. We have not had it," the spokeswoman said.

The crisis escalated after Iran aired new television footage on Friday of a British sailor "confessing" to trespassing in its waters and apologising. The punishment threat came after the family of one of the Royal Marines expressed relief at seeing him alive and well on video footage and urged him to "hang in there".

After a week of holding the marines captive, the Iranians have released a new video of Royal Marines rifleman Nathan Thomas Summers "apologising" for entering their waters "without permission".

He was shown sitting with another serviceman and sailor Faye Turney, the only woman among the captives.

In the clip, Rifleman Summers said: "I deeply apologise for entering your waters." He added that the treatment of the 15 British sailors by the Iranians had been "very friendly".

His father, Roy Summers, 50, dismissed his son's words as a script written by his captors and said he was just doing what he was told.

Mr Summers told The Sun newspaper: "Nathan's a man of very few words. He was obviously given a script."

He added: "It is wrong to parade the captives on television, but I cannot tell you what a relief it is to see my boy alive and well."

Source: The Sun-Herald

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<B><center>Echo of Moscow Radio:

<font size=+1 color=red> US plans attack against Iran on April 6 at 00:40 a.m.</font>

31 March 2007 | 16:49
FOCUS News Agency
http://www.focus-fen.net/?id=n109122 </center>
Moscow. USA plans to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities on April 6 at 00:40 a.m., the Echo of Moscow Radio reports citing anonymous sources from the Russian military intelligence.</b>

Financial analysts predicted that the exchange rate of the US dollar and the euro would fall. Badri Gobechiya, CEO of Otkritie Financial Corporation said that a rise in the oil prices would first affect the EU and then the USA.

In an interview with the radio, Gobechiya said: “The Americans won’t start a new war, their analysts won’t allow such a folly”.

April 1, 2007
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/ira...761823410.html

IRANIAN authorities have started legal proceedings against the British military personnel it has seized and said they would be punished if found guilty, Iran's ambassador to Moscow said last night.

Click to expand...

April fools?? .....??............

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<B><font size=+1 color=brown><center>Iran 'sabre-rattling,' says British minister </font>

AFP
Published: Saturday, March 31, 2007
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/news/story.html?id=e3622da5-4df5-4840-acf8-a0e29c7ed261 </center>
BREMEN, Germany - British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett accused Iran on Saturday of "sabre-rattling" over its capture of 15 British naval personnel in the Gulf last week.

Beckett told reporters, following an EU foreign ministers' meeting in Germany, that Britain had replied by diplomatic note to Iran over the issue.</b>

Iranian authorities have begun legal proceedings against Britain's seized naval personnel and they will be punished if found guilty, Iran's ambassador to Moscow said in comments distributed earlier Saturday.

"It's not the first person to make sabre-rattling comments," said Beckett.

"I don't think it's helpful," she added.

A diplomatic note from Iran to British authorities released Friday condemned the "illegal act" by British naval staff in the Gulf but did not call for an apology.

Beckett said: "I think everyone regrets that this position has arisen. What we want is a way out of it, we want it peacefully and we want it as soon as possible.

"We would like to be told where our personnel are, we would like to be given access to them, but we want it resolved," Beckett added.

She said however she feared that the current holiday period in Iran might delay the diplomatic proceedings.

Iran has so far refused to bow to mounting international pressure to release the naval personnel, who are being held in a secret location and are occasionally shown on television allegedly confessing to having entered Iranian waters.

Britain insists they were in Iraqi waters when they were seized.

© AFP 2007

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<B><font size=+1 color=green><center>Britain Responds to Iranian Letter on Detained British Personnel </font>

By VOA News
31 March 2007
http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-03-31-voa5.cfm </center>
Iranian state-run Al-Alam television image of detained British sailors, 30 Mar. 2007

Britain has responded to a letter from Iran concerning Tehran's detention of 15 British sailors and marines.

Officials in London Saturday said a written response was issued to the communiqué that Iran sent to Britain on Thursday. The officials did not reveal the contents of the letter, which is believed to be the first written communication between the two nations since the crisis began March 23.</b>

Iran's ambassador to Russia said his government has begun a legal investigation into its assertion that the British naval personnel violated Iranian waters. Gholam-Reza Ansari was quoted on Russian television as saying the 15 could be punished if convicted. Britain's foreign secretary today called on Iran to resolve the crisis peacefully.

Speaking on the sidelines of an EU summit in Germany, Margaret Beckett said London is continuing to express its willingness to engage in dialogue with Iran. Britain says the naval personnel were in Iraqi waters when they were overwhelmed by a larger force from Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

Tehran says they illegally entered Iranian waters when they were picked up in the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair criticized Tehran for releasing video of the detainees, saying the images only add to people's disgust at their treatment and risked further isolating Tehran. He said their safe release is the only solution to the crisis.

The U.N. Security Council has expressed "grave concern" about the detention, and called for an early resolution to the standoff. After a Friday meeting in Germany, European Union foreign ministers warned Iran that the EU will take "appropriate measures" if the 15 are not released immediately. The ministers said all evidence indicates the British service members were in Iraqi waters, and that their detention violates international law.

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<B><center>UPDATE 4

<font size=+1 color=blue>British oil worker abducted off Nigeria</font>

Sat Mar 31, 2007 1:29 PM BST
By Tom Ashby
http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news...1681671_RTRIDST_0_NIGERIA-KIDNAP-UPDATE-4.XML </center>
LAGOS, March 31 (Reuters) - Gunmen in two speedboats abducted a British oil worker in a pre-dawn raid on a drilling rig 40 miles off the coast of Nigeria on Saturday, officials and industry sources said.

The gunmen first targeted a support vessel moored to the Bulford Dolphin rig, overpowered the crew, then climbed on to the rig and seized the Briton, a security expert working for a Western oil major said. </b>


The Foreign Office in London confirmed the abduction.

"We can confirm there was an incident in the early hours of this morning in which a British national was taken hostage," a spokeswoman said. "We are in touch with the Nigerian authorities to try to secure a swift and peaceful resolution."

The security expert said the kidnappers came from a coastal community in the Niger Delta that has had disputes with the operators of the rig in the past.

Such disputes are common in the delta, where villagers neglected by corrupt governments expect oil companies to provide jobs and basic public services such as electricity, roads or clean water.


Kidnappings of foreign workers for ransom or to press political demands are common in the lawless delta, which accounts for all of Nigeria's roughly 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in crude oil production.

Six Britons, one American and a Canadian were kidnapped from Bulford Dolphin on June 2 last year in another night raid by gunmen in speedboats. They were released two days later.

The rig is owned by the Norwegian oilfield services group Fred Olsen Energy ASA (FOE.OL: Quote, Profile , Research) and leased to Nigerian firm Peak Petroleum, which operates it in partnership with Equator Exploration (EEL.L: Quote, Profile , Research).

The latest attack did not affect production as the facility is an exploration rig that will not produce crude for years.


Nigeria is the world's eighth biggest exporter of crude oil but the Niger Delta has been hit by a wave of abductions and attacks on oil facilities since late 2005.

Oil production has been down by 500,000 bpd since February last year because of a series of raids on Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L: Quote, Profile , Research) oilfields that month by a rebel group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). A MEND spokesman said the group was not involved in the latest abduction.

MEND has taken hostages to press its demands for greater local control of oil revenues, but numerous other "freelance" kidnappers have seized foreigners to extract hefty ransoms from companies or local authorities.

Violence in the delta is rooted in poverty and frustration at the lack of benefits for local communities from five decades of oil extraction that has polluted the air and water.

Millions of villagers with no access to clean water, electricity or roads resent the multi-billion dollar oil industry and its web of pipelines criss-crossing their lands. (Additional reporting by Adrian Croft in London)

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<B><font size=+1 color=purple><center>Opposition Group Claims Capture of British Soldiers Was Planned in Retaliation for Sanctions</font>

Saturday, March 31, 2007
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,263024,00.html </center>
LONDON — An Iranian opposition group claimed Saturday that Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines was planned in advance and carried out in retaliation for U.N. sanctions imposed against Tehran.</b>

The National Council of Resistance of Iran — the political wing of the Iranian MEK opposition group which is listed as a terrorist group by Britain, the U.S. and the European Union — said the British crew's capture was planned in advance, but offered no evidence to support the claims.

Hossein Abedini, a member of the council's foreign affairs committee, claimed the group had obtained information from sources within Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and had passed details to the British government. He did not provide any evidence or give further details.

Britain's Foreign Office said it could not comment on Abedini's allegation, or say if it had evidence the operation was pre-planned. A spokeswoman said the MEK was a banned organization under British anti-terrorism laws — meaning the government had no dealings with the group.

Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.

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<B><font size=+1 color=red><center>Britain urged to get tough on Iran</font>

Posted on : Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:04:00 GMT
Author : World News Editor
News Category : World
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/46237.html </center>
WASHINGTON, March 31 Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton wants Britain to take a harder line against Iran in the standoff over 15 British sailors.

Calling Britain's step-like approach "pathetic," Bolton said Prime Minister Tony Blair should be threatening "real pain, real economic sanctions," the Times of London reported Saturday. "Britain has got to be tougher here," the former Bush administration official said. Former Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich went so far as to say Britain should threaten to destroy Iran's petroleum industry, the newspaper said.</b>


Meanwhile, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said there would be no deal to swap the British detainees for five Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq, CNN reported Saturday.

"The international community is not going to stand for the Iranian government trying to use this issue to distract the rest of the world from the situation in which Iran finds itself vis-a-vis its nuclear program," McCormack said. The five Iranians are allegedly members of the Revolutionary Guard who were captured in January and accused of aiding insurgents in Iraq.

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<B><center><font size=+1 color=green>Iran Official: U.K. Sailors May Be Tried</font>

British Foreign Minister Calls For "Peaceful" Resolution To Crisis

TEHRAN, Iran, March 31, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/31/world/main2632107.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_2632107 </center>
Quote:</b>

<i>"The Iranian government has at its disposal proved papers which testify that the British navy sailors had been situated in the Iranian maritime belt. Naturally we trust those papers because they are real."</i>

<b>Iran's Ambassador to Russia Gholam-Reza Ansari


(CBS/AP) Iran's ambassador to Russia renewed a threat Iranian officials made earlier this week, saying 15 British sailors held by Iran could be tried for violating international law, Iran's state news agency IRNA reported Saturday.

Gholam-Reza Ansari told Russian television Vesti-24 on Friday that Iran had launched a legal investigation of the British sailors. "They will be tried if there is enough evidence of guilt," Ansari was quoted by IRNA as saying. </b>

"The Iranian government has at its disposal proved papers which testify that the British navy sailors had been situated in the Iranian maritime belt," Ansari said. "Naturally we trust those papers because they are real. It means that the Iranian side has its own version (of the case) based on real documents."

Britain's Foreign Office said it was checking the claim that the sailors were facing trial, but noted that the ambassador's comments didn't alter their view of what was needed to resolve the standoff.

"This doesn't change our position, we have made it perfectly clear that our personnel were in Iraqi waters and we continue to request immediate consular access to them and their immediate release," said a spokeswoman for Britain's Foreign Office, speaking on customary condition of anonymity in line with government rules.

Ansari's talk of the sailors and marines possibly being tried echoes comments made earlier this week by Ali Larijani, the main negotiator in Iran's foreign dealings.

If Britain continued its current approach to the standoff, Larijani told Iranian state radio, "this case may face a legal path. British leaders have miscalculated this issue."

On Thursday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip that the case had entered a legal investigation phase, state television reported.

Ansari also reiterated Iran's stance that the British government could resolve the crisis by admitting the sailors entered Iranian waters.

"If the U.K. government admits its mistake and apologizes to Iran for its naval personnel's trespassing of Iranian territorial waters, the issue can be easily settled," he said.

The diplomat claimed the British government had escalated the crisis by taking the matter to the U.N. Security Council rather than resolving it on a bilateral basis.

Britain has frozen most contacts with Iran and referred the issue to the U.N. Security Council, which expressed "grave concern" on Thursday over Iran's seizure last week of the Britons.

The British sailors were detained by Iranian naval units March 23 while patrolling for smugglers near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab, a waterway that has long been a disputed dividing line between Iraq and Iran.

Iran appears intent on sending a message of strength as it faces mounting U.N. Nations sanctions over its uranium enrichment program, which the U.S. and other nations suspect the Islamic Republic is using to develop nuclear weapons.

On Friday, a captive Royal Marine was shown in new TV footage apologizing for being in Iranian waters, and Tehran made public a third letter supposedly written by the only woman prisoner among 15 Britons seized by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Faye Turney.

Britain sharply denounced Iran over the treatment of the captives — a clear sign both sides were hardening their stance.

As the crisis entered a ninth day, Iraqi boats continued to patrol the Shatt al-Arab waterway on Saturday.

Fisherman Jabbar Salman said he could fish freely on the Iraqi side, but could not venture over to the Iranian side.

Asked about the dividing line, he said he could "distinguish by the Iranian water points."

"We cannot go there because they will open fire on us," Salman added.

=
<i> I wonder; which is it? Last night the Iranians were saying that they were indeed hiding nuclear papers - because they were afraid of being attacked (if it was known what those papers contained). These "good ole boys - aint good ole boys" and they jest can't seem to git thar stories right! ~ Dutchman




<B><font size=+1 color=blue><center>Iran denies 'secret atomic program'</font>

From correspondents in Tehran
31mar07
http://www.ntnews.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,7034,21483139%5E1702,00.html </center>
IRAN has denied that it planned to keep its controversial atomic program secret, insisting the nuclear work would continue under the supervision of the UN watchdog.

“Inspections and cooperation will go on with no change or halt,” Iran's representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said.</b>

Asked whether Iran would refrain from presenting information to the IAEA, he said: “All Iranian (nuclear) activities including enrichment are under IAEA inspectors' supervision and there is no problem.”

Iran limited cooperation with the atomic watchdog in response to a UN resolution adopted this month imposing more sanctions on Tehran for its continued refusal to halt uranium enrichment.

Mr Soltanieh formally announced the decision in a letter sent to IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Thursday.

In a copy of the letter obtained by AFP, Mr Soltanieh said Iran had to protect its nuclear secrets as the US and Israel “are threatening the use of force and attack against the Islamic Republic and have repeatedly stressed that military action is an option on the table”.

In 2003, Iran agreed to give immediate notification of plans to build nuclear plants or to modify existing facilities.

Now it will only notify the IAEA of new sites six months before they begin to function.

Iran said its nuclear program was aimed at peaceful energy ends, denying allegations that it sought to secretly develop atomic weapons.

=





<B><font size=+1 color=purple><center>Opposition group claims Ayatollah Khamenei ordered capture of seized British sailors</font>

The Associated Press
Published: March 31, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/31/europe/EU-GEN-Britain-Iran-Opposition-Claim.php </center>
LONDON: An Iranian opposition group claimed Saturday that Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines was planned in advance and carried out in retaliation for U.N. sanctions imposed against Tehran.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran — the political wing of the Iranian MEK opposition group which is listed as a terrorist group by Britain, the U.S. and the European Union — said the British crew's capture was planned in advance, but offered no evidence to support the claims.</b>

Hossein Abedini, a member of the council's foreign affairs committee, claimed the group had obtained information from sources within Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and had passed details to the British government. He did not provide any evidence or give further details.

Britain's Foreign Office said it could not comment on Abedini's allegation, or say if it had evidence the operation was pre-planned. A spokeswoman said the MEK was a banned organization under British anti-terrorism laws — meaning the government had no dealings with the group.

Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.


Mohammad Mohaddessin, who handles foreign affairs for the council, said in a statement that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had ordered the detention of the Britons in the hope of pressuring the British government over a threat to toughen U.N. sanctions.

The U.N. Security Council voted to toughen measures against Iran on March. 24, to force Tehran to halt a uranium enrichment program, which the U.S. and allies claim is a cover for the illicit development of nuclear weapons. Tehran insists it is engaged in producing civilian nuclear power.

The security council vote came a day after the British crew were seized in the Persian Gulf following the routine boarding of a merchant ship.

Britain insists the crew were in Iraqi waters when seized. Tehran says they were in Iranian waters.

"You can see that the clerical regime had in a premeditated act arrested British sailors in order to win concessions from the international community and divert attention from its nuclear project," Abedini said. "Claims that the sailors were arrested in Iranian territorial waters are baseless."

=




<B><font size=+1 color=red><center>Al-Aqsa gunners fire missiles in direction of Israeli targets </font>

Military and Secuity
3/31/2007 3:58:00 PM
http://www.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesPublicSite/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=1720443&Language=en </center>
Al-Aqsa gunners fire missiles in direction of Israeli targets GAZA, March 31 (KUNA) -- Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, offshoot of the Palestinian mainstream organization Fatah, said on Saturday its gunners fired four locally-fabricated missiles in the direction of the Israeli towns of Al-Majdal and Sderot.</b>

The faction said in a statement that the missiles, of a deveoped version of the locally-made "Yasser" rockets, accurately hit the selected targets. The gunners that fired them returned safely to base.

The attack was in retaliation for recurring Israeli offensives against the Palestinian population in Gaza Strip.

Palestinian factions have fabricated short-range missiles with locally available materials (end) zt.rk KUNA 311558 Mar 07NNNN

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<B><font size=+1 color=red><brown><center>Palestinians reject Israel''s terms for settling the strife -- Oreikat</font>

Politics 3/31/2007 3:17:00 PM
http://www.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesPublicSite/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=1720434&Language=en </center>
Palestinians reject Israel's terms for settling the strife -- Oreikat GAZA, March 31 (KUNA) -- The head of the negotiations department of the Palestinian authority, Saeb Oreikat, affirmed on Saturday rejection of the Israelis' terms for settling the regional conflict.</b>

Oreikat, in remarks broadcast by "Voice of Palestine" radio station, said, "We the ArabS should take action in accordance with our higher interests .. not in line with the Israelis' wish." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on Friday, said Israel would accept the Arab peace initiative, except for the terms that call for return of the Palestinians in diaspora and withdrawal of Israel from Jerusalem.

Oreikat's call came after Arab eaders called, at their latest summit, on Tel Aviv to accept the 2002 initiative that genuinely calls for establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

"We have proposed the Arab initiative on the basis of our interests and the international legitimacy and our message to the world and Israel that we aspire to peace that is based on full Israeli pullout from Arab territories till the June 1967 border line including Jerusalem and the territories in the Golan of Syria and Lebanon," Oreikat said.

He indicated that Israel was seeking concessions on issues, due to be cross-examinted in later phases of the peace process, as had been previously agreed upon between Tel Avid and the Palestinian leadership, namely the demarcation of the borders, settling the issue of the refugees, determining status of the settlements, water-sharing and status of the holy city of Jerusalem.

These topics, as previously agreed upon, should be debated in the final phase of the negotiations, he said, affirming that the Israelis should refrain from attitudes of dictatation on such issues that must be put on the table of negotiations.

He denounced Israel's continuous siege of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ignoring the Arab summit's call on Tel Aviv to lift the blockade. (end) zt.rk KUNA 311517 Mar 07NNNN

Translation

The Flying Dutchman said:

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<B><font size=+1 color=green><center>Saudis Warned Iran Not to Underestimate US Threat </font>

March 30, 2007
AFP
Yahoo News!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2007033...70330224120;_ylt=Au09vKV3I5z.i7kYULZMz_NSw60A </center>
WASHINGTON -- Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah reportedly warned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he should not underestimate the US military threat on Iran. Ahmadinejad met with King Abdullah on March 4 in Riyadh, and publicly the two leaders agreed to fight growing Sunni-Shiite strife in the region. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal told Newsweek in an interview </b>

that the king meanwhile warned Ahmadinejad to take seriously threats of US military strikes over Iran's refusal to halts its uranium enrichment program.

"On the nuclear issue, we warned him:<b> 'Dont play with fire. Don't think the threat (of an American attack on Iran) is a nonexistent threat; think that it's a real threat, maybe even a palpable threat,'"</b> Faisal said in the interview posted on the Newsweek website Friday.

<font size=+0 color=red>"Why do you want to take a chance on that and harm your country?" the king continued, according to Faisal. "What is the rush? Why do you have to do it (enrich uranium) this year and not next year or the year after? Or five years from now? What is the real rush in it?" </font>

<b>The king "speaks to everybody frankly," Faisal said, adding that his ruler bluntly told Ahmadinejad: "Youre interfering in Arab affairs," a reference to Iran's alleged interference in other Middle East countries. </b>

Ahmadinejad listened, then denied any interference. "But we said, 'Whether you deny it or not, this is creating bad feelings for Iran and we think you should stop,'" Faisal told Newsweek.

"Certainly what Iran is doing is interfering in Iraq," Faisal said. "We told them this will not benefit them but will do more damage to them than (good). But we have never put ourselves in a position of conflict with Iran."

<b>The Saudis also told the Iranians "that their interference in Arab affairs is creating a backlash in the Arab world and in the Muslim world. Other Muslim countries are complaining of (Iranian) interference in internal affairs," Faisal said.</b>

"And we talked to them frankly and honestly on this issue and they see the danger that what is happening is going to lead to strife between Shiites and Sunnis."

<b>The Saudi foreign minister also said it was "a catastrophe" for Iran to be holding 15 British sailors and marines it had captured on March 23.</b> Iran insists the personnel were detained for being in Iranian waters but Britain maintains they were inside Iraqi waters.

"This is just not the time for them to have a problem like that looming. We tell them that," Faisal said.

On Wednesday, the Saudi king criticized the US occupation of Iraq in an opening address to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh -- a move some observers say is an effort to distance himself from the embattled Bush administration.

Click to expand...

Translation: WAIT UNTIL YOU HAVE A DEM AS PRESIDENT. However, the Hitler clone President of Iran & the Mullahs knows that President Bush would be on to that ruse & would demand US on site monitoring, so the Mullahs are going all out now. They figure beat (With Dem Appeaser assistance) Bush, the only western leader who has stood up to them & we WIN ALL THE MARBLES.

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<B><center>A Bubbling Stew in Iraq

<font size=+1 color=green>Why Nouri al-Maliki Is Blocking an International Conference</font>

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, April 1, 2007; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../AR2007033001927.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns </center>
U.S. efforts to bring the world's great powers together with Iraq's quarrelsome neighbors to stabilize the government in Baghdad have predictably run into strong opposition. Didn't President Bush warn Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton that Syria and Iran were not interested in stopping the turmoil in Iraq?

Well, yes, he did. But the source of crippling opposition to a high-profile international conference in Turkey this month turns out not to have been foreseen by the president or by his critics on the Iraq Study Group, chaired by Baker and Hamilton. The gathering being pushed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been blocked for weeks by Nouri al-Maliki, the surprisingly strong-willed prime minister of Iraq.</b>

Maliki has his own reasons, which I'll explain in a moment. But his initial sharp defiance of Washington's wishes -- and of the conventional diplomatic wisdom that meeting is always better than not meeting -- carries larger meanings. It again shows that America's ability to produce desired outcomes in the Middle East -- while not yet exhausted -- is waning rapidly as the Democratic majority in Congress challenges Bush's authority and the American occupation of Iraq enters its fifth draining year.

The policy disarray in Washington convinces many Iraqis that the United States is on its way out sooner rather than later. "The government must now prepare for the day after, rather than simply trying to delay it," says one Iraqi politician.

Maliki and his foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, have insisted for months that Iraq's neighbors should send senior officials to Baghdad if they want to hold a meeting that would help the government. The Iraqi position was repeated, in diplomatic form, at a preparatory meeting of regional ambassadors in Baghdad in early March.

But for political as well as security reasons, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and most other states in the region have stonewalled Iraq's proposal. So have France, Germany, Russia and other members of the U.N. Security Council or the Group of Eight industrial nations, which are also on Rice's invitation list for Turkey.

Washington has focused intense pressure on Maliki, who may yet agree to send Zebari to Istanbul rather than see the conference aborted. The reasons for his resistance were explained in these terms by an Iraqi official who requested anonymity in order to speak frankly:

"Why should we go to a meeting to be ganged up on by European and Arab countries that were against the liberation of Iraq to begin with? Why should it be held on the soil of a country that threatens and slights Iraqis instead of helping them?"

Turkey's military stands prepared to invade northern Iraq to destroy Kurdish guerrilla camps or to take control of the disputed city of Kirkuk, if circumstances warrant. Ankara has also pointedly refused to deal with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd who asserts that his home town of Kirkuk is Kurdish, or with the regional Kurdish government of Massoud Barzani. Ankara's non-dialogue policy has led to interruptions of the movement of petroleum supplies across the Turkish border in recent weeks.

Only Iran has unequivocally said it would attend a ministerial meeting in Baghdad. Iranian officials suggest that Sunni Arab regimes fear that sending their high-level politicians to Baghdad would undercut the support they provide for the Sunni insurgents fighting U.S. troops and trying to destabilize Maliki's unsteady coalition government of Kurdish and sectarian Shiite parties.

Such is the stew of local tensions, grievances and countervailing forces that outsiders frequently overlook in drawing up grand military or diplomatic designs -- or even "benchmarks" and "deadlines" -- for Iraqis to carry out. Baker, Hamilton & Co. seem to have understood such regional tensions and barriers to meaningful dialogue no better than Bush and Rice.

Most Iraqis are still deeply suspicious of the Sunni-ruled countries, international organizations and, for that matter, U.S. administrations that sold them out to placate or neglect Saddam Hussein over three decades. Nor can they or the Arab regimes trust Iran's intentions. Iraqis have earned the right to look skeptically at foreign governments that have suddenly come to "help" them.

For the ironic of mind, Maliki's stubborn stance recalls the dangers of answered prayers. Fed up with his vaporous indecisiveness, U.S. diplomats helped dump Ibrahim al-Jafari, Maliki's predecessor (and ideological ally), and bring the more forceful Maliki to office last year.

Bush praised Maliki as a "strong leader" when the two met in November. Now he deals with the consequences of conjuring up a decision maker who decides in ways that the president may well not like, much less be able to control.

=


<B><center:Iranian Ambassador


<font size=+1 color=blue>British sailors' fate in legal phase: Ambassador</font>

DAVID STRINGER
Associated Press
March 31 2007
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/serv...31.wiranupdate0331/BNStory/International/home </center>
LONDON — An Iranian opposition group claimed Saturday that Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines was planned in advance and carried out in retaliation for the U.N. sanctions imposed against the country, as an Iranian diplomat said the case had entered a legal phase.

Gholam-Reza Ansari, the Iranian ambassador to Russia, made his comments to Russian television Vesti-24 on Friday and was quoted by IRNA on its Web site as saying, “the case of the detention of British sailors has taken on a judicial form.”
</b>
IRNA originally quoted the ambassador Saturday morning as saying the sailors could be “tried if there is enough evidence of guilt.” But the agency published a correction later claiming Mr. Ansari's comments were incorrectly translated by Russian television. The Russian TV station could not immediately be reached for comment.

Asked about Mr. Ansari's remarks earlier Saturday before IRNA reported that he was misquoted, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett urged Iran to resolve the crisis peacefully.


The National Council of Resistance of Iran — the political wing of the Iranian MEK opposition group which is listed as a terrorist group by Britain, the U.S. and the European Union — said the British crew's capture was planned in advance, but offered no evidence to support the claims.

The British sailors were detained by Iranian naval units March 23 while patrolling for smugglers near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab, a waterway that has long been a disputed dividing line between Iraq and Iran. Iran claims the Britons were in its territory; Britain and the Iraqi government say they were taken captive in Iraqi waters.

Iran appears intent on sending a message of strength as it faces mounting U.N. Nations sanctions over its uranium enrichment program, which the U.S. and other nations suspect the Islamic Republic is using to develop nuclear weapons.

Hossein Abedini, a member of the opposition group's foreign affairs committee, claimed the group had obtained information from sources within Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and had passed details to the British government. He did not provide any evidence or give further details.

Britain's Foreign Office said it could not comment on Abedini's allegation, or say if it had evidence the operation was pre-planned. A spokeswoman said the MEK was a banned organization under British anti-terrorism laws — meaning the government had no dealings with the group.

Mr. Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who handles foreign affairs for the council, said in a statement that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had ordered the detention of the Britons in the hope of pressuring the British government over a threat to toughen U.N. sanctions.

“You can see that the clerical regime had in a premeditated act arrested British sailors in order to win concessions from the international community and divert attention from its nuclear project,” Mr. Abedini said. “Claims that the sailors were arrested in Iranian territorial waters are baseless.”

Britain's Foreign Office reiterated that the personnel “were in Iraqi waters and we continue to request immediate consular access to them and their immediate release.”

Britain has frozen most contacts with Iran and referred the issue to the U.N. Security Council, which expressed “grave concern” on Thursday over Iran's seizure last week of the Britons.

Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami told reporters on Saturday that he hopes the current standoff will be resolved peacefully “instead of facing a new disaster not only for Iranian-British relations, but for Iran internationally.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL3167087320070331



BREMEN, Germany (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers hailed an Arab peace initiative for the Middle East on Saturday and agreed to engage with non-Hamas members of the new Palestinian national unity government.

The ministers said they would seek ways of redirecting aid to the Palestinians toward institution-building and economic development in talks with Finance Minister Salam Fayyad. But they warned against expecting an overnight resumption of direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority.

The EU voiced full support for the plan revived at an Arab summit in Riyadh this week offering Israel peace and relations in exchange for complete withdrawal from Arab land occupied in 1967 and a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.

"The Arab peace initiative and also the somewhat positive reaction from (Israeli) Prime Minister (Ehud) Olmert are very good things," European External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told reporters.

"The international community should not lose that opportunity (for peace). We have already lost many opportunities," Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters after the EU ministers discussed the Middle East.

The 27-nation EU boycotted the Hamas-led government formed last year because it refused to recognize Israel, renounce violence of accept past peace accords.

The unity government formed this month between President Mahmoud Abbas' moderate nationalist Fatah party and Hamas agreed to respect past agreements, but Hamas insisted it would not recognize the Jewish state or renounce armed resistance.

"We have a pragmatic position to deal with all interlocutors that are not members of Hamas," Moratinos said, mentioning the Palestinian finance, interior and foreign ministers.

Ferrero-Waldner has invited Fayyad, a respected independent technocrat, to Brussels on April 11 to discuss ways of channeling aid to the Palestinians.

AID TALKS

She and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said a temporary mechanism to distribute aid bypassing the government would have to remain in place for a while longer.

"We will continue to rely on the temporary financing mechanism until we can evaluate the new government and the possibilities of the new finance minister," Steinmeier told a news conference.

Talking about the "profound disorder in the Palestinian finances," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said it would take Fayyad months to be ready to receive aid.

Ferrero-Waldner briefed the ministers on proposals to shift more assistance from monthly subsistence allowances for 150,000 families to rebuilding structures that could help economic recovery and prepare for a Palestinian state.

EU officials said the ministers agreed the bloc would press for cooperation between the Quartet of international mediators grouping the United States, the EU, Russia and the United Nations, and a newly-formed Arab Quartet formed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who left on Saturday on a three-day trip to Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, was downbeat on prospects for early progress.

"Now we must see how much movement we can get from this for the peace process in the Middle East. Although I think there is a very long, hard stretch ahead of us," she said in Berlin.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Ziad Abu Amr, another political independent, will visit Paris next week.

(Additional reporting by Tom Armitage in Berlin and Louis Charbonneau and David Brunnstrom in Bremen)
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Reuters journalists are subject to the Reuters Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/31/MNGSCOVGGM1.DTL


Saturday, March 31, 2007
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (right) will visit Syria, a co... President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Reuters ph...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will visit Syria during her fact-finding trip to the Middle East, defying a White House objection in what experts described as a bid to push U.S. foreign policy in a new direction.

Pelosi arrived in Israel on Friday, along with Democratic Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, Tom Lantos of San Mateo, Louise Slaughter of New York and Nick Rahall of West Virginia and Ohio Republican David Hobson. Ellison is the first Muslim member of Congress.

No specific schedule has been released for the trip. The House is on a two-week spring break.

"We discourage members of Congress to make such visits to Syria," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Friday. "This is a country that is a state sponsor of terror, one that is trying to disrupt the Saniora government in Lebanon and one that is allowing foreign fighters to flow into Iraq from its borders. ... I don't know what she's trying to accomplish."

The Democrats were quick to point out that Perino did not speak out about a Syria trip planned for next week by a Republican-led delegation, the Washington Post reported.

But political experts said it is pretty clear what Pelosi is trying to accomplish: following up on the House's new military plan -- the narrowly approved spending bill setting an August 2008 date to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq -- with a new diplomatic plan of Democratic design.

"Part of the Democratic strategy has been to distinguish itself from Bush in a negative way -- calling for an end to the war. This is more positive: showing what diplomacy would look like and a willingness to engage despite presidential pressure," said Julian Zelizer, a congressional scholar at Boston University. "I would not be surprised if there were hearings (after her return) to talk about a diplomatic solution to the crisis drawing in Iran and Syria," he said.

In so doing, Pelosi can once again point for inspiration and support to the Iraq Study Group report, the much-ballyhooed but largely dismissed bipartisan plan for a new strategy that included a call for a regional conference with U.S. friends and foes alike. Pelosi's office specifically cited the report in a one-paragraph statement announcing the trip.

"As recommended by the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan delegation led by Speaker Pelosi intends to discuss a wide range of security issues affecting the United States and the Middle East with representatives of governments in the region, including Syria," said the statement.

Pelosi can expect a warm welcome in Damascus, said Josh Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.

"Syria is going to be thrilled," he said. "Syria has been in deep isolation. They're embattled. There are many people that wish them ill."

The Syrians may not expect anything concrete to arise from Pelosi's visit, Landis said -- at least, so long as President Bush is in the White House. But they are likely to see her visit as an opportunity to make their case to future U.S. leaders on issues such as the continuing U.N. investigation into Syria's meddling in Lebanon and Syria's perennial struggle with Israel over possession of the Golan Heights.

"They want her to see Syria as a potential positive actor ... they are going to say we are important in the region. We can help you," Landis said.

Pelosi, in return, will need to be tough with the Syrians, pressuring them to stay out of Lebanese affairs, to stop supporting Hamas against Israel, and to promise to stay out of Iraq's civil war, especially if U.S. forces leave. But Pelosi, too, probably expects to leave with little of substance, he said.

"Nothing significant is going to come out of this. She's not going to come back with anything in her hands from the Syrians," Landis said. "But it is significant in that it means things are going to change in the Middle East."

Any agreement Pelosi does get from Damascus -- especially to help stabilize Iraq -- is likely to be placed in a congressional spotlight upon her return, said Wayne White, former senior Middle East analyst at the State Department.

"If she comes back with anything significant, she can use it to argue that the president's more narrowly focused approach to Iraq is outdated, unpopular and likely to fail, thereby casting a more positive light on the upcoming Iraq legislation the president plans to veto," he said.

The trip is not without its political hazards for Pelosi, said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College.

"The White House will resent what it regards as congressional meddling in executive territory. Republicans will see an opportunity to attack her for reckless behavior. They may also use the trip as a way to peel Jewish voters from the Democratic Party," he said. "The attack ad writes itself: 'Neville Chamberlain in an Armani pantsuit.' "

Pelosi has insulation from such attacks, Pitney noted -- such as the presence of Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, and a stop in Israel, where she is expected to speak to parliament Sunday in her first address to a foreign government.

Pelosi also can point to past members of Congress who have visited foreign lands in times of turmoil. Several members went to Iraq on the eve of the war, and Damascus hosted four senators in December, including John Kerry, D-Mass., Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a Jewish Republican who White noted has a long history of visiting Syria.

Specter "even (told) the Jerusalem Post that he would like to sit down with Iran's President (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, but apparently only to give him 'a piece of my mind,' " White said. Pelosi "could point to Sen. Specter's long-standing senior contacts with the (Syrians) from the other side of the aisle as a precedent of sorts."

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that despite White House opposition to the trip, his department had provided Pelosi with a pre-departure briefing and normal travel support. Nobody from the State Department accompanied the congressional delegation, he said.

But McCormack reiterated opposition to high-profile visits to Syria until it changes its behavior in Lebanon and with "Palestinian rejectionist groups."

"A typical Syrian MO on this is to use these visits to tell the rest of the world and say, 'Look, there's nothing wrong. We're having all these visitors come to Syria, coming to Damascus, there's no problem with our behavior,' and they point to the visits as proof that there is no problem with their behavior and that they are not, in fact, isolated," he said. "So that's the simple reason why we have encouraged others as well as Speaker Pelosi not to travel."

Chronicle news services contributed to this report. E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/31/MNGSCOVGGM1.DTL

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http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/187203.php


More evidence that Democrats' real war is with the Bush administration, and that they are not above colluding with terrorist regimes:

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will visit Syria, a country President Bush has shunned as a sponsor of terrorism, despite being asked by the administration not to go.
"In our view, it is not the right time to have these sort of high- profile visitors to Syria," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Friday.

Pelosi arrived in Israel on Friday in what is her second fact-finding trip to the Middle East since taking over leadership in the House in January.

Her repeat trip, an indication she plans to play a role in foreign policy, is also a direct affront to the administration, which says such diplomatic overtures by lawmakers can do more harm than good.

Seeking political help from America's enemies is a tradition with Democrats, going back at least to when Teddy Kennedy conspired with the Soviets against the Reagan administration.


http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33265.pdf

CRS Report for Congress
Received through the CRS Web
Order Code RL33265

Conducting Foreign Relations
Without Authority:
The Logan Act
February 1, 2006

Michael V. Seitzinger
Legislative Attorney
American Law Division

The Logan Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 953, states:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without
authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any
correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or
agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States,
or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his
agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury
which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or
subjects.



Pelosi is almost, or is, daring the Bush Administration to put it's foot down in acting as though she is the Prime Minister instead of the Speaker of the House. This is not the first time this has been done, recall the reference to Ted Kennedy during the Cold War. Maybe it's about time that someone clips these guys wings for a change?

On another front in the World v. Caliphate War...
------------------------------------------
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/4677524.html



MOGADISHU, Somalia — Artillery fire and mortar shells rained down on Somalia's capital today as government troops and their Ethiopian allies continued a major offensive to quash a growing insurgency by Islamic militants.

Residents were sent fleeing some of the heaviest fighting in Mogadishu since the early 1990s.

On Friday, insurgents shot an Ethiopian helicopter gunship out of the sky and mortar shells slammed into a hospital, leaving piles of bodies in the streets and wounding hundreds of civilians.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said dozens of people have been killed since Thursday and more than 220 injured, most of them civilians with bullet, grenade and other shrapnel wounds. The death toll is likely to be far worse, however — the fighting was so severe and widespread that bodies were not being picked up or even tallied.

Ethiopia says its forces have killed more than 200 insurgents since the assault started.

Somali presidential spokesman Hussein Mohamoud Hussein blamed the violence on foreign terrorists, saying al-Qaida has sent fighters here to battle government and allied troops.

"These elements were behind the downing of the helicopter yesterday," he said.

The insurgents are linked to the Council of Islamic Courts, which was driven from power in December by Somali and Ethiopian soldiers, accompanied by U.S. special forces.

Insurgents were firing mortars from residential areas of the city, and Ethiopian troops responded with barrages of heavy artillery. The attacks occurred across the flat seaside capital, and huge plumes of smoke rose into the air.

The U.N.'s refugee agency said 58,000 people have fled violence in the Somali capital since the beginning of February.

Islamic militants — who now dominate the insurgency — stockpiled thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition during the six months they controlled Mogadishu. The insurgency will likely last until that stockpile is depleted, or key leaders are killed.

The militants have long rejected any secular government and have sworn to fight until Somalia becomes an Islamic emirate. Clan elders have tried to negotiate several cease-fires, but cannot control the young insurgents.

On Friday, an Associated Press reporter saw an anti-aircraft missile hit an Ethiopian helicopter that had been bombing insurgent positions.

Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on one another.

A U.N. peacekeeping operation in the 1990s saw clashes between foreign troops and Somali fighters, including the notorious downings of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters in 1993 — which was followed by a firefight that killed some 300 Somalis in 12 hours. The U.S. withdrew from Somalia in 1994, and that was followed a year later by the departure of U.N. peacekeepers.

A national government was established in 2004 but has failed to assert any real control. The administration, with crucial support from Ethiopian troops, toppled the Council of Islamic Courts in December, but insurgents with links to the group have staged attacks nearly every day.

The United States has accused the Islamic courts of having ties to al-Qaida.

———

Associated Press Writer Salad Duhul in Mogadishu contributed to this report.

Iran wants to quit the international community, but the international community won’t let it. No act of warfare against the civilized world, no defiance of the United Nations, no violation of international norms, no brazen lie is ever enough to mark Iran as unworthy of outreach, dialogue and the art of sweet persuasion.

When the Iranians seized 15 British sailors in a blatant hostage-taking, the commander of the British ship purred that it might be a “simple misunderstanding.” If so, Iran is cursed with terrible luck. Another such misunderstanding lasted 444 days back in 1979-81. In the latest incident, the accident-prone Iranians have had the misfortune of showing the captured British sailors on television and of telling provable lies about where they seized them.

Showing the captives and coercing a confession out of one of them (a woman the Iranians have thoughtfully outfitted in a head-covering to protect her virtue) are violations of the laws of war, not to mention holding them in the first place. Where are the human-rights groups expressing their outrage? The liberal filmmakers readying their scathing documentaries? The European opinion-makers condescendingly tut-tutting? Nowhere to be found, because they never want to give up their pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Engagement.

If talking with the Iranians doesn’t work, it is because we aren’t talking to them enough, or the wrong people (i.e., not the U.S.) are talking to them, or when we’re talking to them, we aren’t saying the right things, or we haven’t talked to them long enough, or maybe they don’t realize just how very sincere we are in our talking. But, surely, sometime soon, if we just keep talking and offering to talk, all these “misunderstandings” will fade away.

In deterrence theory, this is called “mirroring,” judging someone else’s intentions by looking at your own. James Baker — the head of the late, great Iraq Study Group — concluded that Iran wants stability in Iraq and is amenable to negotiations, no doubt partially because he himself wants stability in Iraq and is amenable to negotiations. Indeed, there is no dispute that can’t be worked out by haggling with James Baker, but he has never taken any hostages, denied the Holocaust or claimed to have had a halo — all exploits of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The old saw about a liberal being someone who won’t take his own side in a fight applies here. When the Bush administration presented evidence that the Iranians have provided material used to kill American troops in Iraq with roadside bombs, Democrats exploded in outrage — at the Bush administration, for not being convincing enough, for having delayed the release of the intelligence, for being overly belligerent toward Iran, which just wants to talk to us.

To the contrary, Iran wants to destabilize Iraq so we will leave and Shia radicals will inherit the country. It wants to acquire a nuclear weapon to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East. And it wants to humiliate the United States and its allies at every opportunity. It can’t merely be talked out of any of these goals. To the extent we try, we are ensuring the abject failure of diplomacy, which can succeed only after we demonstrate that we aren’t to be trifled with.

The United Nations twice has passed resolutions sanctioning Iran for its illicit nuclear program. The first resolution banned nuclear-related exports to Iran but stopped short of banning travel by key officials. The second blocked Iranian arms exports and froze the assets of some officials and entities. Iran, understandably, is unbowed. After their initial hopeful suggestion that the hostage-taking was an honest mistake, the British got tougher. They banned their basically nonexistent bilateral business with Iran. In a few weeks, maybe the Brits will work themselves all the way up to strong-letter-to-follow.

At least that’s what the Iranians expect. If we think the current course will ever fundamentally change Iranian behavior, the misunderstanding is all ours.

© 2007 by King Features Syndicate
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDEyNWVlMTkxZDkzNjllZjk1MjFkZmJjMjE0OWM3YTM=

‘It’s completely outrageous for any nation to go out and arrest the servicemen of another nation in waters that don’t belong to them.” So spoke Admiral Sir Alan West, former First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, concerning the present Anglo-Iranian crisis over captured British soldiers. But if the attack was “outrageous,” it was apparently not quite outrageous enough for anything to have been done about it yet.

Sir Alan elaborated on British rules of engagement by stressing they are “very much de-escalatory, because we don’t want wars starting ... Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were, in effect, able to be captured and taken away.”

One might suggest, not necessarily “sinking everything in sight,” but at least shooting back at a few of the people trying to kidnap Britain’s uniformed soldiers. But the view, apparently, is that stepping back and allowing some chaps to be “captured and taken away” is to be preferred to “roaring into action and sinking everything in sight.” The latter is more or less what Nelson did at the battle of the Nile, when he nearly destroyed the Napoleonic fleet.

The attack coincides roughly with Iran’s announcement that it will end its cooperation with U.N. non-proliferation efforts. That announcement was in reaction to a unanimous vote to begin embargoing some trade with Teheran of critical nuclear-related substances. With that move, Ahmadinejad is essentially notifying the world that Iran will go ahead and get the bomb — and let no one dare try to stop them.

If a non-nuclear Iran kidnaps foreign nationals in international waters, we can imagine what a nuclear theocracy will do. The Iranian thugocracy rightly understands that NATO will not declare the seizure of a member’s personnel an affront to the entire alliance.

Nor will the European Union send its “rapid” defense forces to insist on a return of the hostages. There is simply too much global worry about the price and availability of oil, too much regional concern over stability after Iraq, and too much national anxiety over the cost in lives and treasure that a possible confrontation would bring. Confrontation can be avoided through capitulation, and no Western nation is willing to insist that Iran adhere to any norms of behavior.

Yet the problem is not so much a postfacto “What to do?” as it is a question of why such events happened in serial fashion in the first place.

The paradox now is that, just as no European nation wishes to be seen in solidarity with the United States, so too no European force wishes to venture beyond its borders without acting in concert with the American military, whether on the ground under American air cover or at seas with a U.S. carrier group.

There are reasons along more existential lines for why Iran acts so boldly. After the end of the Cold War, most Western nations — i.e., Europe and Canada — cut their military forces to such an extent that they were essentially disarmed. The new faith was that, after a horrific twentieth century, Europeans and the West in general had finally evolved beyond the need for war.

With the demise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism, and in the new luxury of peace, the West found itself a collective desire to save money that could be better spent on entitlements, to create some distance from the United States, and to enhance international talking clubs in which mellifluent Europeans might outpoint less sophisticated others. And so three post-Cold War myths arose justify these.

First, that the past carnage had been due to misunderstanding rather than the failure of military preparedness to deter evil.

Second, that the foundations of the new house of European straw would be “soft” power. Economic leverage and political hectoring would deter mixed-up or misunderstood nations or groups from using violence. Multilateral institutions — the World Court or the United Nations — might soon make aircraft carriers and tanks superfluous.

All this was predicated on dealing with logical nations — not those countries so wretched as to have nothing left to lose, or so spiteful as to be willing to lose much in order to hurt others a little, or so crazy as to welcome the “end of days.” This has proved an unwarranted assumption. And with the Middle East flush with petrodollars, non-European militaries have bought better and more plentiful weaponry than that which is possessed by the very Western nations that invented and produced those weapons.

Third, that in the 21st century there would be no serious enemies on the world stage. Any violence that would break out would probably be due instead to either American or Israeli imperial, preemptive aggression — and both nations could be ostracized or humiliated by European shunning and moral censure. The more Europeans could appear to the world as demonizing, even restraining, Washington and Tel Aviv, the more credibility abroad would accrue to their notion of multilateral diplomacy.

But even the European Union could not quite change human nature, and thus could not outlaw the entirely human business of war. There were older laws at play — laws so much more deeply rooted than the latest generation’s faddish notions of conflict resolution. Like Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance, which would work only against the liberal British, and never against a Hitler or a Stalin, so too the Europeans’ moral posturing seemed to affect only the Americans, who singularly valued the respect of such civilized moralists.

Now we are in the seventh year of a new century, and even after the wake-up call on 9/11, Westerners are still relearning each day that the world is a dangerous place. When violence comes to downtown Madrid, the well-meaning Spanish chose to pull out of Iraq — only to uncover more serial terrorist cells intent on killing more Spaniards.

To get their captured journalists freed, Italians paid Islamists bribes — and then found more Italians captured. When Germany, Britain, and France parleyed with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the “direct talks” that we in the states yearn for) to try to get Iran to cease its plans for nuclear proliferation, he politely ignored the “EU3.” The European Union is upset that Russian agents murder troublemakers inside the EU’s borders, and so registers its displeasure with the Cheshire Vladimir Putin.

The latest Iranian kidnapping of British sailors came after British promises to leave Iraq, and after the British humiliation of 2004, when eight hostages were begged back. Apparently the Iranians have figured either that London would do little if they captured more British subjects or that the navy of Lord Nelson and Admiral Jellico couldn’t stop them if it wanted to.

“London,” of course, is a misnomer, since the Blair government is an accurate reflection of attitudes widely held in both Britain and Europe. These attitudes have already been voiced by the public: this is understandable payback for the arrest of Iranian agents inside Iraq; this is what happens when you ally with the United States; this is what happens when the United States ceases talking with Iran.

The rationalizations are limitless, but essential, since no one in Europe — again, understandably — wishes a confrontation that might require a cessation of lucrative trade with Iran, or an embarrassing military engagement without sufficient assets, or any overt allegiance with the United States. Pundits talk of a military option, but there really is none, since neither Britain nor Europe at large possesses a military.

What does the future hold if Europe does not rearm and make it clear that attacks on Europeans and threats to the current globalized order have repercussions?

If Europeans recoil from a few Taliban hoodlums or Iranian jihadists, new mega-powers like nuclear India and China will simply ignore European protestations as the ankle-biting of tired moralists. Indeed, they do so already.

Why put European ships or planes outside of European territorial waters when that will only guarantee a crisis in which Europeans are kidnapped and held as hostages or used as bargaining chips to force political concessions?

Europe is just one major terrorist operation away from a disgrace that will not merely discredit the EU, but will do so to such a degree as to endanger its citizenry and interests worldwide and their very safety at home. Islamists must assume that an attack on a European icon — Big Ben, the Vatican, or the Eiffel Tower — could be pulled off with relative impunity and ipso facto shatter European confidence and influence. Each day that the Iranians renege on their promises to release the hostages, and then proceed to parade their captives, earning another “unacceptable” from embarrassed British officials, a little bit more of the prestige of the United Kingdom is chipped away.

In the future, smaller nations in dangerous neighborhoods must accept that in their crises ahead, their only salvation, even after the acrimonious Democratic furor over Iraq, is help from the United States.

America alone can guarantee the safety of the noble Kurds, should Turkey or Iran choose one day to invade. America alone will be willing or able to supply Israel with necessary help and weapons to ensure its survival.

Other small nations — a Greece, for example — with long records of vehement anti-Americanism should take note that the choice facing them in their rough neighborhoods is essentially solidarity with the United States or the embrace of Jimmy Carter diplomacy or Stanley Baldwin appeasement.

Quite simply, there is now no NATO, no EU, no U.N. that can or will do anything in anyone’s hour of need.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGNmMzdmOGM5OTlmMzMxZDAzYjBiZDc4NjI1NjViYzU=

Our bill calls for the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq so that we can focus more fully on the real war on terror, which is in Afghanistan.

— Speaker Nancy Pelosi, March 8

The Senate and the House have both passed bills for ending the Iraq war, or at least liquidating the American involvement in it. The resolutions, approved by the barest majorities, were underpinned by one unmistakable theme: wrong war, wrong place, distracting us from the real war that is elsewhere.

Where? In Afghanistan. The emphasis on Afghanistan echoed across the Democratic aisle in Congress from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to former admiral and now Rep. Joe Sestak. It is a staple of the three leading Democratic candidates for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. It is the constant refrain of their last presidential candidate, John Kerry, and of their current party leader, Howard Dean, who complains “we don't have enough troops in Afghanistan. That's where the real war on terror is.”

Of all the arguments for pulling out of Iraq, its comparative unimportance vis-a-vis Afghanistan is the least serious.

And not just because this argument assumes that the world's one superpower, which spends more on defense every year than the rest of the world combined, does not have the capacity to fight an insurgency in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. But because it assumes that Afghanistan is strategically more important than Iraq.

Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer — a Martian — and point out to him that the United States is involved in two hot wars against radical Islamic insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources, no industrial and no technological infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure which, though suffering decay in the later Saddam years, could easily be revived if it falls into the right (i.e. wrong) hands. Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait ,and the Gulf states. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question.

Al Qaeda has provided the answer many times. Osama bin Laden, the one whose presence in Afghanistan presumably makes it the central front in the war on terror, has been explicit that “the most serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War that is raging in Iraq.” Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has declared that Iraq “is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era.”

And it's not just what al Qaeda says, it's what al Qaeda does. Where are they funneling the worldwide recruits for jihad? Where do all the deranged suicidists who want to die for Allah gravitate? It's no longer Afghanistan, but Iraq. That's because they recognize the greater prize.

The Democratic insistence on the primacy of Afghanistan makes no strategic sense. Instead, it reflects a sensibility. They would rather support the Afghan war because its origins are cleaner, the casus belli clearer, the moral texture of the enterprise more comfortable. Afghanistan is a war of righteous revenge and restitution, law enforcement on the grandest of scales. As senator and presidential candidate Joe Biden put it, “If there was a totally just war since World War II, it is the war in Afghanistan.”

If our resources are so stretched that we have to choose one front, the Martian would choose Iraq. But that is because, unlike a majority of Democratic senators, he did not vote four years earlier to authorize the war in Iraq, a vote for which many have a guilty conscience to be now soothed retroactively by pulling out and fighting the “totally just war.”

But you do not decide where to fight on the basis of history; you decide on the basis of strategic realities of the ground. You can argue about our role in creating this new front and question whether it was worth taking that risk in order to topple Saddam Hussein. But you cannot reasonably argue that in 2007 Iraq is not the most critical strategic front in the war on terror. There's no escaping its centrality. Nostalgia for the “good war” in Afghanistan is perhaps useful in encouraging antiwar Democrats to increase funding that is really needed there. But it is not an argument for abandoning Iraq.

(c) 2007, The Washington Post Writers Group

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzRlYzU4NGZmNTk0MmJmMGEyZjI1ZjgwNWRjZjRkZmM=

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20070331.aspx


March 31, 2007: Whatever prompted the Iranian seizure of 15 British naval personnel on March 23rd, events since then suggest that there are serious internal rifts in the Iranian leadership. Apparently some elements in the Iranian leadership would like the problem to go away. These are the folks who promised to release Leading Seaman Faye Turney, the only woman in the group, with no strings attached. Then there are those who seem to see the incident as a way of twisting the British lion's tail, and, not incidentally, accruing more power to themselves. These are the folks who reneged on the offer to release LS Turney.



There are a number of hostile factions in Iran's leadership. The senior religious leaders, including the Council of Experts, seems to be less hard-line about a lot of issues, such as the country's nuclear weapons program, than some of the more radical elements of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the national militia, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that's not the only set of rivalries. President Ahmadinejad has taken a strong stand against corruption, which appeals to some of religious extremists, as well as some liberal reformers, while most senior religious leaders are believed to have their hands in the till. Then there is the rivalry between the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the regular Iranian Armed Forces, both of which actually take their orders from the religious leadership, rather than the president. And so on.



Managing this crisis will be tricky. Going in shooting, as some have urged, will certainly inflict serious damage on Iran's military forces and civilian infrastructure. This will likely be emotionally satisfactory to many Brits and Americans. But it will not secure the release of the prisoners. And it will certainly increase the influence of the hard liners, who don't care about the damage anyway. Tony Blair seems to understand this, and has been resisting calls for forceful action. He seems to be pursuing a broad front approach. Britain will bring the matter to the UN, which is already considering increasing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear weapons program. In the meanwhile, those fortuitously scheduled Anglo-American naval "maneuvers" in the area keep open the option of retaliatory action. And there are also likely to be several of back channel approaches to various factions and leaders. In the end, the best resolution to the crisis would be if the Brits can convince the moderates in the Iranian leadership to release the prisoners in exchange for a carefully worded statement in which the UK "apologies" if the naval personnel "inadvertently" strayed into Iranian waters. This may not be possible if the radicals in the Iranian leadership prevail.



In some ways the situation is reminiscent of the 1979-1981 Iran Hostage Crisis. Actions taken by each side often had complex causes and consequences. During the Hostage Crisis Iranian leaders often made totally contradictory public statements on a day-by-day basis. Before that crisis was resolved, more than a year passed, and some of the Iranian "soft liners" ended up at the end of a rope as the "hard liners" got the upper hand. But while the "hard liners" prevailed because the crisis seemed to inflict a humiliating defeat on the United States, in fact Iran was the big loser. The crisis provided Saddam Hussein with an opportunity to invade his neighbor, initiating an eight year war, at a time when the Iranian armed forces were suffering from the severance of all American military assistance for their largely American made weapons and equipment.