Archive for October, 2008
Rice for oil
A more consequential story than the US raid into Syria may be the agreement between Thailand and Iran to barter rice for oil. As reported in this week’s economic papers, Bangkok’s commerce ministry said it was sending a delegation to Tehran to discuss the barter deal. Thailand is the world’s largest rice exporter, controlling a [...]
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Now, Syria
The United States has confirmed that it launched a “special operation” Sunday to strike at a suspected insurgent base accross the border from Iraq inside Syria. This would be the first confirmed attack inside Syrian territory staged by US troops from Iraq. The New York Times and other American MSM was slow to report and confirm [...]
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Its about oil
A fascinating article appeared in the latest Middle East Journal, an academic publication, by Anderson Scott Cooper (not the CNN Cooper), on the economic reasons for the 1979 Iranian revolution. Few authors have looked at the relationship between the volatile oil market and the collapse of the Iranian economy in the 1977-1978 period. In his [...]
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Good news
In the midst of a generally miserable October, a ray of sunshine appears. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced Thursday that Iraq and Iran have signed an agreement to trace missing soldiers from the eight-year war fought between them in the 1980s, and repatriate remains.
On 16 October the governments of Iran [...]
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Well, so much for that. Kaveh Afrasiabi finds what most others missed, namely Bush’s decision to renounce a pending opeining of a small US consul office in Tehran.
By announcing that the United States is no longer interested in opening a consular office in Iran, the George W Bush administration has forfeited a golden opportunity for [...]
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The unraveling
The rift between the West and the Arab members of the IAEA is becoming serious. In an organization used to consensus, a resolution intended to urge all Middle Eastern countries to renounce nuclear weapons became controversial when most of the Arab delegations boycotted the vote over amendments to take pressure off of Israel, a nuclear [...]
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India’s backstage pass
With all the fuss over Iran, which is years from having a single bomb (if and when it decides to), the Bush administration has successfully pushed the nuclear deal with India through Congress. On Wednesday the US Senate, by 86-13, ratified the ‘123 Agreement’ which now only requires Bush’s signature:
The White House has strongly [...]
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Thursday’s atomic drivel
Reuters is reporting that Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, indicated that Iran would consider suspending uranium enrichment if there was a legally binding agreement to sell it nuclear fuel. If true, this is a crack – albeit small – in the present deadlock.
Iran would consider stopping sensitive uranium enrichment if guaranteed [...]
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ElBaradei in a blind alley
Kaveh Afrasiabi follows the IAEA’s backflips with respect to Iran, and the problems this poses for any negotiated solution, in today’s Asia Times:
The latest news from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), aside from a gloomy portrayal of an international agency starved of cash and manpower, is that it cannot confirm the absence of a [...]
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The sound of one toilet flushing
If I could figure out how to import .wav files into this blog, I’d include a flushing toilet.
I am not talking about the US economy (at least for now), but rather the IAEA Safeguard Agreement with Iran. There are now plenty of danger signals that both the US and Iran have now “had it” with the [...]
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