From the AP:
Iran’s hard-line government said Wednesday it was removing 40 ambassadors and senior diplomats, including supporters of warmer ties with the West, from their posts in a shake-up that comes as the Islamic republic takes a more confrontational international stance.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced the changes to parliament, saying “the missions of more than 40 ambassadors and heads of Iranian diplomatic missions abroad will expire by the end of the year,” which is March 20 under the Iranian calendar.
Mottaki, quoted by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, did not specify which ambassadors were among those being removed.
But IRNA said they included the ambassador to London, Mohammad Hossein Adeli, one of Iran’s top diplomats and a leading member of the pragmatic foreign policy wing that supports contacts with Europe.
The moves give the new government of ultraconservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the chance to purge pro-reform figures brought in by his predecessor, moderate Mohammad Khatami, and install its own supporters.
Ahmadinejad has taken a tougher line on a number of issues, particularly negotiations with Britain, France and Germany over Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Hard-liners have criticized Khatami’s government for agreeing to freeze much of the country’s atomic activities during the talks, and Ahmadinejad already has replaced much of the negotiating team with hard-liners.
The new president, elected in June, also generated a storm of international criticism last week when he called for Israel’s eradication, saying it should be “wiped off the map.”
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related: From Michael Ledeen. See also.
They keep inching closer to having Isreal taking matters in to their own hands.
Please, can’t we move a little faster against Iran? Before they destroy Israel? Before they get nukes? It is even okay if we lie a little about intelligence* to do it, but can’t we just do it and get it done, so we don’t have to stand around a smoking hole that used to be Israel wondering if we could have done something to prevent a second Holocaust? Gosh, I’d even go for pissing off Kofi Annan and Jimmeh Carter to do it! Please? FASTER PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*Or, we could just take ten years’ worth of statements about how dangerous Iran’s nuclearly-ambitious revolutionary Islamofascists are, made by Democrat presidents, senators and congresspeople, and articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, reports from the UN, CIA, FBI, U.S. Military Intelligence, British, French, German, Israeli, Pakistani, Indian, Russian, and Chinese Intelligence, published statements of Iranian diplomats/policy makers translated by MEMRI.org, and pronouncements from Iranian terrorist websites, and base our decision on all that, couldn’t we? Then it wouldn’t be a lie, right?
Hmmmm.
You know I keep on wondering if Nostradamus really had something on this. After the fall of the USSR I couldn’t possibly imagine a scenario where Russia supported Iran. Now Russia is dealing with a vanishing population, an terrorism in Chechnya and selling weapons to Iran.
Now I’m rather wondering when the guy with the “blue turban” is going to show up.
Also, don’t miss “Death to America” day on November 4 for all the schoolkids, as noted by Professor Geras.
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/11/educational_cha.html
My comments on it here.
http://www.colossusblog.com/mt/archives/001211.html
Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. I keep repeating that to myself. Otherwise I’d be inclined to just nuke the whole damned place.
Unfortunately, these evil fucks are a minority. In control, but a minority.
But if the majority of Iranians don’t get a grip on the whackos before they go nuclear, all bets are off – along with the kid gloves.
A few hundred thousand innocent dead in Iran are better than millions dead worldwide. At least, that’s my take. YMMV
SB: degree
it’s a matter of
Canadian Tory pundit David Warren:
Turing = schools, as in Experience and hard knocks make for hard schools, but fools, multi-culties, and “world citizens” will learn in no other.
Unfortunately in the US there is very vocal group who are doing everything they can to prevent any sort of prescription for the Iran/radical Islamist problem. With active help from a like-minded media, enough have been brainwashed that support for preemptive action is likely now impossible. The US can be only reactive and not proactive, in other words. And the leftists have already won that battle, I’m afraid.
So we’ll have to lose Israel, some portion of Europe, or an American city, before we can again muster the will to take action against an incipient and growing evil. Currently the left sees the US itself as the primary evil in the world and has persuaded a significant percentage of the world to their cause. So I’m resigned to the fact that it’ll take the blood of millions [more] before we’ll again remember the lessons that history has taught so painfully and so many times in the past: those that would give up freedom to have peace will have neither.
Well. I know a few neocon warmongers who won’t be getting invitations to James Wolcott’s next cocktail party.
That’ll teach you!
“the missions of more than 40 ambassadors and heads of Iranian diplomatic missions abroad will expire by the end of the year,†which is March 20 under the Iranian calendar.
I wonder if “expire” has the same context in government service in the middle east that it does elsewhere.
We may have 40 Iranians applying for a green card early next spring.
[url=”http://www.angelfire.com/ky/kentuckydan/CommitteesofCorrespondence/index.blog?from=20051102″ target=”_blank”]One Year Today, Lest We Forget
Theo van Gogh (July 23, 1957 – November 2, 2004) [/url]
The tighter you squeeze, Lord Mahmoud, the more Iranians will slip from your grasp.
Revolution seems inevitable.
Sticky,
They’ve issued a corrected version:
“the lives of more than 40 ambassadors and severed heads of Iranian diplomatic missions abroad will expire by the end of the year,†which is March 20 under the Iranian calendar.
Iran can’t take out Israel because Israel is every terrorist’s excuse for what they do.
I live about two blocks from the Iranian embassy. I often walk my dog past it, with my blonde hair uncovered and bare arms and blue jeans. It is my own personal protest. Last year, a few women in full cover told me they liked my outfit. I figured that was their personal protest.
I’ll let you know if/when I see any severed heads on the sidewalk.
It sounds like (translated from Farsi, of course) these idiots are saying: “please, Israel, won’t you put a bomb in our glorious rectums?”
I would like to personnally thank Ted “The Swimmer” Kennedy, John Kerry, Babs Boxer, et al. for making it impossible for the US to deal proactively with these madmen. Unfortunately, I think BLT is right. Because of power mad assholes on the left, we won’t be able to make a move until there is a smoking radioactive crater in Israel or the US.
If that happens, I think Kennedy, et al. should be tried for homicidal stupidity. It’s just so hard to get my mind around the fact that a man who would be a drunken gutter bum if his name was not Kennedy has put our whole future at risk so that he can keep fucking waitresses (and anything else that has hair and moves).
I think about 40 guys are burning up the faxes asking for asylum in Anywhere-But-Iran.
MayBee, did you break any embassy windows with your hair rays?
I sure hope work has been done, secretly or not, to equip Israel with an effective ABM system. The Patriot system failed in the first Gulf war, because it was designed to be an anti-aircraft weapon, not an ABM shield. I hope it or something else is in place now.
But you wanna bet that NPR, Indymedia, and the rest would still condemn Israel even if the IDF managed to intercept a blinker-blankin’ nuclear warhead in supersonic re-entry right over Tel Aviv? Sure you do. If Israel found a cure for HIV, these people would blame the Joooos for ruining the AIDS hospices business.
Turing = felt, as in You don’t know how good it felt to say that…
Patricia! That made me laugh so hard I coughed up some of Major John’s tawny port.
The Israelis have had an “Arrow” ABM system up for years. Improved Patriots for backup.
ABM systems are a sucker’s bet. Even if you intercept a nuke-tipped bird, you scatter the warhead to hell and gone, most likely.
And when I say “go nuclear”, I mean just that – not mere posession, but premeditated use against a reachable target.
And don’t let that crap Annette’s peddling rot your brain, the US IS in reach. I note, for instance, that the Mullahs recently put up a sat to “track shipping containers at sea”. Wanna bet that it can also send commands to the containers?
The best ABM system in the world—which I’m sure the Israelis have—still can’t stop them if the delivery method is the back of a pickup truck.
Preemption may well be the only option left. You can bet that Ariel Sharon won’t be deterred by what a few Western liberals think.
If our choice in a few months is regime change by means of the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division, or Israeli preemption by means of making Tehran a smoking crater, do you think we will have the political courage for the more humane solution?
If not, then I think the Left will have a lot of blood on its hands when we fail to act and Israel is forced to.
We all know the answer to that question. The U.S. will not be acting again any time soon without severe provocation, and maybe not even then. The message that most people hear is that Iraq is a dismal failure. It’s almost impossible to act again with that belief so firmly entrenched in people’s minds.
John Fogerty had something to say about this. This line seems apt: “I hope you’re quite prepared to die.”