THE SILICON SPEAR – SUN-TZU,CYBERWAR AND THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
If you have the stomach to do a little more reading than the typical blog link the ” Silicon Spear “ is a conceptually-rich, fast-moving paper on the future of strategic military power and the implications for American foreign policy. The use of jargon is limited and the writing is accessible to most well-informed readers even if they are not military specialists.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The multitude is wiser and more constant than a Prince “
– Machiavelli
IRAN AND THEIR QUEST FOR NUKES
From the Associated Press: If after you read the article below and you still feel sanguine, like this might be mere exaggeration, scroll back up and click the link to an article to the Iran Press Service and see what Teheran’s second highest ranking theocratic nut has to say on the topic
Iran Admits Not Reporting Uranium to U.N.
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran admitted Sunday it failed to inform U.N. authorities that it imported a small quantity of uranium 12 years ago but said that failure did not violate the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Gholamreza Aghazadeh, Iran’s nuclear energy chief, also urged the International Atomic Energy Agency to widely publish the report it released to member nations last week on Iran’s nuclear program.
The Bush administration accuses Iran of wanting to build a nuclear bomb and wants the U.N. agency to declare Iran in breach of the treaty. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
Aghazadeh said the IAEA report did not back up U.S. claims that Iran was violating international atomic protocols.
“There is no mention of the word ‘violation,'” he told state-run television. “The report only mentions ‘failure,’ which is still a legal debate between us. And these are normal differences.”
On Friday, a diplomat from an IAEA member state said the report indicated Iran had imported some nuclear material and processed it without declaring it to the Vienna, Austria-based agency.
Aghazadeh said the report notes that in 1991 Iran imported a small quantity of uranium hexofluoride, the chemical form of uranium used for the enrichment process.
IAEA regulations at the time did not require Tehran to inform the agency of the acquisition, he said.
Aghazadeh did not say why Iran imported the uranium but acknowledged that the report says Iran “should have informed” it of the acquisition.
Iran has since identified the materials to the IAEA, which now has them under “safeguard,” he said.
The report will be discussed publicly when the agency’s board meets June 16.
Three IAEA inspectors arrived in Iran on Saturday to assess the country’s nuclear activities. The visit is widely seen as a chance for Iran to counter U.S. accusations of a nuclear weapons program and show it is eager to cooperate with the agency.
In February, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, visited the incomplete Natanz nuclear plant about 200 miles south of Tehran. Diplomats accompanying him said he was taken aback by the advanced stage of a project there using hundreds of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
Also Sunday, Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Washington’s outcry over Iran’s nuclear capabilities is an attempt to block Iran’s economic progress.
“By making accusation against Iran, the United States wants to play down the social progress the Iranian nation has achieved in the past 24 years,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted him as saying.
Secretary of State Colin Powell told CNN’s “Late Edition” Sunday that Washington was not seeking regime change in Iran but said many young Iranians were dissatisfied with Tehran’s political leadership.
“What we have to do is keep showing to the Iranian people that there is a better world out there waiting for you, and you can become a more responsible member of the international community if you stop supporting terrorist activity and if you stop trying to develop weapons of mass destruction,” Powell said.
Washington accuses Iran of sponsoring terrorist groups and recently claimed Tehran was harboring members of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network. Iran rejects the claims, but admits to holding unidentified al-Qaida members in custody and says it will deport them to their home countries once their identities are confirmed ”
GO READ CAERDROIA
On the Medal of Honor winners at Normandy
QUOTE OF THE DAY
” A DECLINE IN COURAGE
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party and of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society….And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional bursts of boldness and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and countries that lack support…But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. ”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Written as part of his Harvard commencement address in 1978, Solzhenitsyn described what today could rightly be termed the ” spirit of the elites ” that still exists today in the EU, the Social Democratic parties, France as a whole, in the State Department, among the transnational NGO’s, the Georgetown sophisticates and other intellectuals who excoriate Bush for daring to fight back against Islamo-fascism, terrorism and rogue state dictatorships. These experts urged appeasement of the Soviets when they were strong and tried to rescue the evil empire when it was weak ( and now try to rewrite history with self-congratulatory articles in liberal newsmagazines to argue that Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet collapse). In the U.S. they inhabit both major political parties but read the same journals, graduate from the same schools and offer the same self-referential opinions that prescribe, for any foreign policy crisis, little better than a world-weary muddling through where ultimate solutions are impossible.
These folks are out of power now and they are hopping mad about it. The vitriol hurled by the Paul Krugmans and the Robert Scheer’s at Bush and Tony Blair is a measure of their desperation to regain the reins of power to resume their declinist, transnationalist and anti-democratic agenda.
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