Israel tries to cut off Tehran from world markets

I've been arguing for a while now that Bush and Co. are preparing for an attack on Iran. It's not any one thing that they are doing as much as the cumulative effect of lots of things that leads me to believe that they will strike, despite Tony Snow issuing non-denial denials.

Now, Israel have launched a campaign to isolate Iran economically and it is said, "to soften up world opinion for the option of a military strike aimed at crippling or delaying Tehran's uranium enrichment programme".

Pressure will be applied to major US pension funds to stop investment in about 70 companies that trade directly with Iran, and to international banks that trade with its oil sector, cutting off the country's access to hard currency. The aim is to isolate Tehran from the world markets in a campaign similar to that against South Africa at the height of apartheid.

The campaign is being led by Benjamin Netanyahu who also wants Ahmadinejad prosecuted for calling the Holocaust a myth, and saying Israel should be wiped off the map.

The case will be launched under the 1948 UN convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which outlaws "direct and public incitement to genocide".

I have read many translations of Ahmadinejad's remarks and not all of them agree with the reading that Netanyahu is making, but this hardly matters as the reason Netanyahu is proposing prosecuting Ahmadinejad is to encourage some kind of strike against Iran. He's simply using this supposed outrage to fuel fires against Tehran.

Before flying to London to spearhead the mission to sell the sanctions, the Likud party leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, said: "A campaign to divest commercial investment from Iran, beginning with the large pension funds in the west ... either stops Iran's nuclear programme or it will pave the way for tougher actions. So it's no-lose for us."

Of course, there is no mention here of Israel's nuclear weaponry or the fact that Israel, with American backing, has refused to sign the very Nuclear non-Proliferation treaty that she is demanding that Iran comply with.

But such hypocrisies do not bother Netanyahu or his American counterparts.

They will continue to insist that they operate on some mythical moral high ground, whilst Israel retains nuclear weapons that she will not admit to possessing and Bush plans a new range of bunker busting nuclear weapons in clear defiance of the same Treaty that we are demanding Ahmadinejad complies with.

The world would find us much more credible if we took our own commitments as seriously as we demand the Iranians do.

But this is simply another small step in the direction of either the US or Israel launching some kind of attack on Iran, with all the chaos that this is guaranteed to produce throughout the entire Middle East.

Nor will any missile attack even be guaranteed to prove effective at removing the threat of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Preemptive military attack is not a strategy for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons anymore; the changes in technology have made it obsolete.” That’s the current assessment from Larry Derfner, who often writes about Israeli politics for the Jerusalem Post. “Concealing a nuclear start-up is so much easier now than it was in 1981 and it’s only going to get easier yet. Throwing fighter jets, commandos and whatnot at Iran is more than risky; it’s almost certainly futile if not altogether impossible.

So lets be clear what Netanyahu is proposing. He's wanting to launch an attack on Iran that is "almost certainly futile" when it comes to destroying Iran's nuclear facilities. He's actually going to inflame the entire region and almost certainly NOT succeed in ridding Iran of it's nuclear capability.

And this is being proposed AFTER Cheney has refused an offer from Iran that promised the Americans all of the things that the US are now demanding.

It's not their love of violence that I find appalling. It's the fact that they will propose violent acts even when they are guaranteed not to work and when they have already been offered a peaceful solution.

Oh, and Ahmadinejad's the lunatic in case you had forgotten.

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tag: Ahmadinejad, Iran, Netanyahu, Israel, nuclear proliferation