I was watching Gerald Celente today and Iran came up. For some reason, the thought of buying a nuclear weapon on the black market flashed into my head. If Iran were intent on “wiping Israel off the map” - as the imperialists claim - why wouldn’t they just buy nukes off the black market? They have a fully operational intelligence service. Its acronym is, ironically, MISIRI. So, if drug lords can buy these things, surely a nationally funded intelligence service can. Here’s a YouTube video discussing the trek of some freelance journalists to hunt down black market nukes in Bulgaria. It might be a bit of a tall tale but it can’t be far from the truth. These nukes are far from accounted for.
It just goes to show that the saber-rattling from Washington DC & Co. is all a big farce put forward by the war-mongers to justify the war they want.
Actually you bring about a good point. Why would those idiots in Tehran not buy nukes in the black market, if only as an intermediate step until they themselves can make some? It seems to me that they are inviting an invasion.
Maybe black market sellers are reluctant to sell nuclear weaponry to a country that may use it offensively instead of defensively. Maybe black market sellers do not want to see markets destroyed when one country after another launches a nuclear weapon in response to one aggressive nuclear power. Maybe the U.S. is buying any nuclear weaponry on the black market leaving none for Iran.
Come on, Iran will never attack a nuclear–armed nation. Even if it really wanted to erase Israel (it doesn’t’, its just propaganda) and even if it managed to destroy every single Israeli base, it would still get sub-launched nuclear-tipped harpoons to Tehran. And I’m not even assuming the US would join Israel. No, Iran doesn’t want to start any war. It’s just sick and tired of living under the sword of Damocles that are Israeli air strikes (Iraq and Syria know that). Nukes would equalize the field.
As for the US buying all black market nukes, wouldn’t that just drive production higher?
It seems to me that either Iranians leaders are outright dumb, or perhaps this whole thing is a farce, and I mean a coordinated farce.
I agree with you that this whole “bomb Iran before they nuke [insert US ally here]” is a farce. And Iran is most likely playing along.
Israeli and US “experts” guarantee us all it would take to stop Iran is a well aimed air strike campaign: destroy the enrichment facility, kill their researchers… a couple of weeks and we’ve saved mankind from a fate worse than death. My memory is failing because of creeping old age and years of debauchery but I seem to recall these are the same experts who guaranteed us Afghanistan could be turned in a model social-democracy in less than five years and that the US Marines would be welcomed in Baghdad with flower wreaths (most of you are too young to remember but Marines were welcomed with flower wreaths in Vietnam in 1965 in a carefully staged propaganda op).
Iran is playing its part perfectly: its largely powerless president (true power sits elsewhere) has been transformed into something aking to an ogre by the foreign press and is craftly using this situation to improve his image at home by playing the role of the patriot fighting the foreign hordes (a particularly dear concept to Persians, who have been invaded and humiliated by Macedonians, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Mongols etc).
As far as black market nukes are concerned, they seem to be a concept lifted straight from a Tom Clancy novel. The big difference is that Tom Clancy, a fiction writer, fully aknowledged the implications of such a thing: in one of his novel, The Sum of All Fears, the bomb is actually an Israeli device taken from a bomber shot down during the Yom Kippur war. The Islamic terrorists, though obviously the crazed, bad guys, are shown in a sympathetic light: they want revenge (they do not hate the US “for their liberties”), they are incredibly crafty (just like the chaps in Afghanistan) and they fully appreciate the enormous difficulties they face to exact their revenge on the “Great Satan”. Though with its faults (but give Mr Clancy a break… he’s writing fiction, not an academic treatise) this whole operation is much more plausible than the now famous “suitcase bomb” scenario, with Osama bin Laden walking up to Mad Molotov, the crazy Russian arm dealer, giving him a wand of cash and walking away with a nuclear device in a suitcase.
The muslim world population outnumbers and outgrows the caucasian christian social conservative world population. What happens in the near term ultimately makes no difference. Both sides will be Iran more or less at some point in the future.
Nice argument. Very plausible. In fact, I’d say more likely true than not. The Iranian government, as a whole, likely has little desire to actually go to war with Israel, or anyone else. You know how people (we) are, especially when they’re in power—they want to maintain that power and privilege at all costs; going to war threatens this in Iran’s case. On the flip side of this, people in power tend to seek more power and more prestige. Having an operational nuclear weapons program at one’s disposal is about as prestigious as it gets for government power, together with controlling the money supply maybe.
Anyhoo, so much speculation here on my part. I really have no idea, apart from what I believe about the nature of government and government offialdom.
The only thing I can think of which argues for the opposite case is this…
(1) maybe they’ve tried, but can’t procure enough nuclear weapons for their plans
Have a good day, everyone. We should be thinking about dragonflies and moonbeams…unfortunately we must trek through this other stuff.
@bcycl: The State of Israel is consistently self-aggrandizing both in its foreign policy stance and in its official (and unofficial) propaganda. Whether or not it is controlled by Zionists today, its creation and perpetuation was certainly brought about by the Zionists going back to Herzl himself. Its claims that the Arab nations have some special, irrational, homicidal urge to wipe them off the face of the map - more than any government wants to wipe another government off the face of the map, given the chance - is absurd on its face. What do any of the Arab nations stand to gain? The other half of the world’s oldest tourist-trap, Jerusalem? I think not.
If Iran or another nation did, in fact, want to wipe Israel off the map, the most cost-effective way to do it would certainly be a covert dirty-bombing campaign. Essentially, infiltrate hundreds of suitcase dirty-bombs into Israel and then, on a pre-arranged cue, set them off simultaneously in every major business district, port and so on. It would be highly risky and you’d lose quite a few people in the process, but it would accomplish the job with the least expenditure of resources and the lowest risk to oneself. But by every measure, there is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost from a nonsensical policy of “wiping Israel off the map.” Yet we are supposed to believe that is the rationale for the Iranians to want to build nuclear weapons.
It is rarely noted that the Persians (Iran) are not the epicenter of Mohammedanism. Mohammedanism arose among the Bedouin tribes of the Arab peninsula, eventually culminating in the Ottoman empire, which later conquered the Persians (and a lot of other territory). Yet Iran is supposed to be a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s like saying the Native American tribes have become a hotbed of white-supremacist, fundamentalist Christianity.
Man, that nuclear material traffic article made my day. There is indeed hope for the future!
The State of Israel is consistently self-aggrandizing both in its foreign policy stance and in its official (and unofficial) propaganda.
Actually yes! Just take a look at the obverse of a 10 agorot coin. Man, if any other nation was to mint such a thing there would be an outcry!
Mohammedanism arose among the Bedouin tribes of the Arab peninsula, eventually culminating in the Ottoman empire, which later conquered the Persians (and a lot of other territory)
Technical note here. The ottomans had as much to do with Jihads as libertarians with Jesuits.
I think about what the major muslim organizations in Canada and Britain do, which is try to force Shariah Law, censorship and other nonsense on everyone else. Not my problem that you have your head stuck in the sand and believe that a few guys on mises.org represent anything.
And it “just doesn’t make any sense” that Italians should be Catholic and that Pope should reside in Rome when it was the Romans who crucified Jesus and when Rome was home to Pantheon. So I conclude that actually Italians are Pagans and it is really the Jews who are the Christians and so Zionism is trully a crypto-Christian movement re-enacting the crusades in order to make the Holly Land Christian once more. The secretly Pagan Europe is naturally lukewarm about this, but America thank god is supportive of this project thanks to its 6 million Judeo-Christian population.
Not everything is a conspiracy. During the Shah everything was tightly controlled and all kinds of political organising was banned. The mosques however were not since the regime assumed that in the clergy it had a valuable ally against left-wingers. Consequentially the mosques became the only place where Iranians could hear uncensored commentary and to escape government oversight. Naturally this worked to disproportionally strengthen the influence of the mullahs. However it turned out that the clergy was not necessarily any less anti-imperialists and willing to support the status quo than the left-wingers. And so Shah was deposed from his blind spot. But the sentiment that fueled the revolution was not entirely different than a sentiment that may had fueled a left-wing revolution. Khomeinist Iran during its first years of revolutionary fervor was stressing its being a declared anti-imperialist state as much as a religious one. Its media focused heavily not just on the struggles of the Shias (Lebanon, Afghanistan), but of any movement trying to shake of US domination, for example in Nicaragua.
If nukes were so easy to buy in the black market, North Korea would already have a bunch instead of spending years to develop one that has 1/10 of the power of Hiroshima’s and that doesn’t even fit a missile.
The muslim world population outnumbers and outgrows the caucasian christian social conservative world population. What happens in the near term ultimately makes no difference. Both sides will be Iran more or less at some point in the future.
Yet another reason why democracy will cease to exist in the Western world in my lifetime. Enough Sharia law idiots will help westerners see the foolishness of their political beliefs.
I’m just hoping Iran gets it nukes as soon as it can, so the rest will stfu.
I think they have already. I’ll be proven wrong the day the USA attacks Iran.
