Wednesday - March 22, 2006

Here Comes Your 19th Nervous Breakdown

All of the tiny little kingdoms in the Middle East secretly sat back and laughed as the Barking Mad Mullahs in Iran performed their insane dance, taunting the US, the UN and anyone who offended them in the least. The radical throwbacks in Iran have now elected a President who is secretly waiting the arrival of the 12th Imam, known as the Mahdi, who will restore the Caliphate and make Islam reign supreme over the world. True ... he is proud of that belief.

It must have all seemed to be fun and games watching the Ayatollah Kohmeini tie Jimmy Carter up in knots but now that President Ama-ina-jihad is foaming at the mouth about nukes, the region is getting restless. Sure, they Iranians are madmen. They all know that but the problem with madmen is they are not very good at targeting coordinates, if you know what I mean. They could launch a missile at Israel and hit Mecca by mistake. You never know with madmen like that.

Add to that the fact that Iran sits over one of the most earthquake-prone regions in that area and you have all kinds of really nasty scenarios to worry about. To me though, the most worrisome aspect is that the Mad Mullahs in Iran have designed and implemented a worldwide strategy of suicide bombers. What’s to stop them from doing the same thing with an entire country? The answer is ... nothing, absolutely nothing ...

Iran’s Nukes Concern Some Arab Countries
_{March 22, 2006, 1:00 PM EST}

KUWAIT CITY (AP)

This tiny Gulf country is increasingly nervous—as are some of its neighbors—about Iran’s controversial nuclear program, right across the water. But heading into a key summit, Arab leaders are divided, and publicly squabbling, over how to defuse a crisis that has caused the West to haul Iran before the U.N. Security Council.

Countries close to Iran, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have focused on safety issues, the threat of a possible regional arms race and the possibility that a crisis with the West could spill onto other nations. Iran’s nuclear program “still poses a big worry,” Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nayyan, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, said this month.

But Arab countries farther away from Iran have insisted that the United States and Europe should not pressure Iran over its program unless they also push for an end to Israel’s nuclear program. In January, the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, an Egyptian, quarreled publicly with the Emirates’ foreign minister after Moussa sent a message to the Gulf Cooperation Council summit, urging the leaders of the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar to focus on Israel, not Iran.

Moussa repeated his stance last month, saying at one Arab meeting: “We should avoid double standards.” Israel maintains ambiguity over its nuclear program but is widely believed to have hundreds of nuclear warheads. The United States accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons. But Iran says its nuclear program aims only to generate electricity and has insisted it has a right to carry out uranium enrichment, a process that can develop either fuel for a reactor or material for a nuclear weapon.

As they head into next week’s Arab League meeting in Sudan, both Iran’s program itself—and the fight over it—have many in the Gulf nervous. “Accidents happen in developed countries. What would reassure us that they won’t happen in a Third World country?” asked Kuwaiti strategist Sami al-Faraj. His Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies is advising the Kuwaiti government—as well as the secretariat-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council—on how to prepare for any nuclear accidents in Iran, he said. The country’s first nuclear reactor, expected to go online this year, is in Bushehr in southern Iran, just 150 miles across the Persian Gulf from Kuwait.

Iran is seismically unstable, and an earthquake could cause an accident that would be more disastrous for Gulf countries than for Iran. “A catastrophe that kills 200,000 people could mean wiping out half of Bahrain,” he noted. In addition, any pollution of the Gulf would shut down the six water desalination plants on the Arab shore, he said. But it’s not just safety issues that concern the Gulf states. Leaders also worry about a possible regional arms race, and fear the dispute with the West might prompt U.S. or Israeli airstrikes against Iran—something sure to rile Shiite Muslim communities in the largely Sunni Muslim Gulf countries.

- More on this bad case of nerves here ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 03/22/2006 at 01:31 PM   
Filed Under: • Insanity • RoPMA •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
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4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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