Motley Moose – Archive

I originally wanted to write about the Iran nuclear deal based on the opinions of people whose opinions I respect as knowledgeable and straight-forward; these are people who aren’t generally on television giving their opinions as the media are more interested in the he said/she said back and forth of political operatives or staffers or Congresspeople than in detailing the actual agreement.  And since my mind tends to flow in Class IV rapid type stream of consciousness I decided to go with the flow and let ‘er rip on a variety of largely linked topics.

Let’s start with the Iran deal.  The usual suspects, most of the Right, think the deal stinks; it has been likened to Chamberlain at Munich.  But what is in the deal?  Is it a good deal or a surrender?  I’m sure there are many good sources to turn to but I immediately thought of Ploughshares Fund and Joe Cirincione to whom I was introduced by Rachel Maddow.  I realize it is one opinion but it is an opinion based on some specific expertise in the area and as such I give it a great deal of weight:

Every president since Jimmy Carter has tried to make a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. None have succeeded. President Barack Obama just did. The deal to limit and begin to roll back Iran’s nuclear program may be the most important foreign policy success of his tenure.

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The deal … completely stops the enrichment of uranium to 20 percent. It gets rid of all the uranium Iran had already enriched to this level. As a result, it doubles the time it would take Iran to dash to a bomb, plus it adds tough new daily inspections of the nuclear facilities that could spot any such dash, giving nations ample time to take appropriate actions.

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The first phase of the deal prohibits the manufacture or installation of any new centrifuges. It requires that any new low-enriched uranium produced be converted to an oxide form that cannot be used for a bomb. It halts any major new work on the Arak reactor, a possible source of plutonium that could be used for a bomb. It opens up facilities that had been previously closed to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, the other nations will deliver about $7 billion in sanctions relief, leaving the entire sanctions architecture in place and continuing to freeze over $100 billion in Iranian assets held abroad.

This is just the initial phase. If Iran wants serious sanctions relief and access to those frozen billions, it will have to negotiate over the next six months a final agreement that would permanently cap Iran’s capabilities and permit extensive inspections that can verify these limits and assure that there are no secret nuclear facilities. In short, the final deal will ensure that Iran cannot build a bomb and if it tried to do so, would be quickly caught.

War is easy; diplomacy is hard and requires some trust between the parties.   It’s easy to suggest that the Iranian government cannot be trusted but those doing so most likely are looking through the lens of the embassy hostage taking and the grossly offensive rhetoric of the previous Iranian president.  That is to ignore, however, the US role in Iranian politics as well as the largely positive tone of the new Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani.  That also ignores the fact that the US has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons and is the one country who has actually used them against another country … twice.  I’m no expert on this subject, and maybe my optimism and willingness to give POTUS the benefit of the doubt is clouding the issue but the deal with Iran seems like a big f*cking deal to me and people who should know seem to agree.

I blessedly don’t have cable so I cannot watch cable news so what I do know about how this and other issue play out comes to me largely via Twitter.  Hello, my name is Happy and I’m a Twitter addict.  I usually have it open all day while I’m at work.  The US media is a joke and they either don’t know or don’t care (I suspect the latter as they get paid no matter what).  I think they are often lazy and content to let the pundits, the political spin doctors and elected officials do their work for them instead of doing their own homework and asking serious questions.

I watched the documentary War of Mass Deception last week and was reminded how badly the US media bungled the run-up to the Iraq War, the war itself, and the ongoing conflict.  Way too much deference was given to the government and its spokepeople which actually continues to this day as the media focuses on bullshit ratings/revenue winners versus actual news.  Why, it seems, should a reporter work for the story when it is just as profitable to regurgitate a press release or to loop a sampling of a soundbite?  

Of course, that’s not to excuse the public from being all too willing to accept “facts” at face value instead of verifying which is what we expect the media to do for us.  When Colin Powell went to the UN and said that Iraq had WMD I lost some of my skepticism because Gen. Powell wasn’t among the warmongers of the administration.  I thought Alan Greenspan was someone to pay attention to after all he was Fed Chairman for, like, a hundred years and things seemed to be going well.

I had to learn the hard way and I think a lot of people are in that same position; some just take longer to complete the lesson and others don’t want to be taught.

I guess I’ve rattled on long enough; need to begin the trek to work (up to the spare bedroom/home office with a detour to the bathroom).  🙂  Sure beats the 45-minute slog to work I used to make.

What are other Moose musing about?