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*Originally posted by irem: *
Iran can never nuke Pak and Pak can never nuke Iran.
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It would be un-Islamic to launch any nuclear missile what-so-ever.
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*Originally posted by skhan: *
You know I think the only reason you post .....
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I post here to show my love and conviction for Pakistan. Brave people of Pakistan have already fought the commie-Hindi cabal for a long time.
It was easy to spot and defend against the two.
Unfortunately it cannot be said about a new and much more sinister enemy "Mullah-AyaTullah" nexus. This particular enemy is striking from within. It shows off with a beard, a jubba, an Amama while hiding poisonous dagger hidden under the dress. This enemy starts every sentence with "BismAllah" and ends with "JazakAllah". It talks about destruction of Pakistan in the name of "anitnationalism". It is swift in quoting Hadis and Quran at the drop of pugri. Modern Mullah-Aya-Tullahs are the followers of Shaddad, the "Hashishins".
I am confident though that majority of Pakistanis will soon realize these snakes and thrown them in the Arabian Sea.
Long live Pakistan, Pak-Army Zindabaad.
Iran Says It May Pre-empt Attack Against Its Nuclear Facilities
Someone should let the dog out, it’s barking again.
…
TEHRAN, Aug. 19 - Iran’s defense minister, Vice Adm. Ali Shamkhani, has warned that Iran may resort to pre-emptive strikes to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.
Admiral Shamkhani made his comments in an interview on Al Jazeera television on Wednesday in response to a question about the possibility of an American or Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear projects.
“We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us,” he said. “Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly. Any nation, if it feels threatened, can resort to that.”
There has been speculation here that Israel may attack Iran’s nuclear sites, as it struck against Iraq’s nuclear facilities at Osirak in 1981.
A commander of Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Guards warned this week that Iran would strike Israel’s reactor at Dimona if Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear sites.
“If Israel fires one missile at Bushehr atomic power plant, it should permanently forget about the Dimona nuclear center, where it produces and keeps its nuclear weapons,” said the commander, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr.
Admiral Shamkhani said Iran was certain that Israel would not carry out such an attack without a green light from the United States. “So you cannot separate the two,” he said.
On Thursday, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi urged the International Atomic Energy Agency to close its file on charges that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, state-run television reported. This month, the United Nations agency affirmed Iran’s claim that the highly enriched uranium found at an Iranian site had been carried in on equipment Iran purchased in the black market.
“If the case is not closed, it intensifies the suspicion about interference of political motives and pressures within the agency,” Mr. Kharazi said.
The nuclear watchdog agency is scheduled to report its findings on Iran’s nuclear activities at a meeting in Vienna starting Sept. 13. The United States has urged the agency to send Iran’s case to the United Nations Security Council, which can impose sanctions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/international/middleeast/20iran.html
Re: Iran Says It May Pre-empt Attack Against Its Nuclear Facilities
this topic has already been discussed under a thread started by minerva. so i will move it there.
Re: Re: Iran Says It May Pre-empt Attack Against Its Nuclear Facilities
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*Originally posted by phoenixdesi: *
this topic has already been discussed under a thread started by minerva. so i will move it there.
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This is about Iran attacking.
Re: Re: Re: Iran Says It May Pre-empt Attack Against Its Nuclear Facilities
here is a post in the same thread which addresses the same topic as yours. that is why i decided to merge both topics. thanks
"watch out sharon & Bush…dont consider iran another iraq…if you dare to attack its nuclear facilities, it can bounce back by launching a misslile attack at israel…in my opinion, if israel dares to attack iran’s nuclear facilities first, and mind you emphasis is on word “first”, iran should retaliate by launching a full misslile attack on israel ( I am assuming that iran has missile technology and that israel wont be able to block those missile attacks)…who has given israel the authority ( who else but uncle sam) to call other’s nuclear program “suspicious” and keep declaring its own nuclear program peaceful and for defence purposes only…
Reuters in Tehran
Monday August 16, 2004
The Guardian
An Iranian military chief said yesterday that Israel and the US would not dare to attack his country since it could strike back anywhere in Israel with its latest missiles, a news agency reported.
“The entire Zionist territory, including its nuclear facilities and atomic arsenal, are currently within range of Iran’s advanced missiles,” the Isna students news agency quoted Yadollah Javani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards political bureau, as saying. “Therefore, neither the Zionist regime nor America will carry out its threats” against Iran, he said.
Officials have highlighted Iran’s military capabilities in recent weeks in response to some media reports that Israel or the US could try to destroy its nuclear facilities.
Last week Iran said it had successfully tested an upgraded version of its Shahab-3 ballistic missile. Military experts said the unmodified Shahab-3 was capable of striking Israel or US bases in the Gulf.
America and Israel have accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons, a charge it denies. Defence experts say air strikes are unlikely to disable Tehran’s nuclear capability.
Is a nuclear Iran, good for Pakistan? Is it a closed discussion? Read this for a Pakistani perspective from today’s
issue of the Friday Times. One needs a login id, hence I am C&Ping the article.
Pakistan needs policy debate on Iran’s nuclear programme
Ejaz Haider
Should Iran have the bomb? Conventional wisdom is opposed to horizontal proliferation. But Pan-Islamism is all for it. Which is right?
Debating policies in and through a multi-layered mechanism is not Islamabad’s forte. This is regardless of who is in power. The current mess in which Pakistan finds itself is, in large measure, owed to the absence of a structured policymaking process. Ironically, this in itself is the result of the structural anomalies that attend power relations in this country.
Even so, one would have thought, given the events of September 11, 2001, the policy turnarounds, the causes of extremism and the allegations of nuclear proliferation, that the present government would learn a lesson and put in place a mechanism for an identifiable policymaking process to avoid getting the country into a box. That has been wishful thinking.
There are many structural reasons for why this government has avoided doing so and I do not intend to go into them here. But a discussion on a lack of sound policy debate is a good starting point to discuss a development that is likely to pose a challenge to Pakistan in the near future.
The challenge relates to Iran’s efforts to clandestinely work towards developing a nuclear-weapon capability. Tehran denies it is doing so. But its subterfuges have become obvious. We also know now that it has been trying to develop a capability for nearly two decades now. This information comes to us not only from the Iranian opposition groups who blew the whistle on the programme but also from investigations carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency which says that Iran has “a practically complete front end of a nuclear fuel cycle” Most experts believe that if the programme is allowed to proceed unfettered, Tehran will have a bomb within two to three years.
What is Pakistan’s response to this development? If there is a policy to deal with the threat, it is not identifiable. That we should be intensely debating the issue should be obvious to everyone. But that we need to agree on the correct framework to debate it is less obvious. I say this because possibly a majority of Pakistanis look at the Iranian capability in sympathetic terms. That may not be bad, but should it be taken for granted? No.
There is also reason to see the commitments Pakistan has given the international community on proliferation since the proliferation charges against Pakistan involved – rightly or wrongly – an effort by some people in the Pakistani establishment to help Iran build such capability. This is true even if we accept the fact that it was a rogue operation and did not involve the state. Setting aside questions raised by this reality regarding policymaking itself, clearly the government needs to encourage a debate on how Pakistan should react to Iran’s efforts to develop a WMD capability.
One can assume that Pakistan does not want further proliferation from the position it has taken. Conventional wisdom says it makes sense to prevent horizontal proliferation since it is in the interest of a nuclear-weapon state (even one that has developed the capability in the teeth of international opposition) to not allow other states to have it. There is also a legal-normative case here. With the exception of three states (originally four if we include Cuba), all other states – including Iran and North Korea – are signatories to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Deviation from that without invoking the withdrawal clause in the treaty constitutes technical violation of the NPT.
A section of opinion in Pakistan thinks it is good to have a nuclear Iran. This includes not just laypersons who are not expected to have much understanding of these issues but also some political parties and leaders who may be as ignorant of nuclear strategy as the common man but whose input is important because they are a part of the political process, if not policymaking itself. This opinion approaches the issue from the viewpoint of the ummah, or pan-Islamism. If there can be more than one western power armed with nuclear weapons why should the Muslim states shy away from it.
This argument is problematic and, interestingly, can be trashed not just within the framework of a nation-state but also within the framework of pan-Islamism on which it ostensibly rests. Consider.
Pan-Islamism is nothing if not a power bloc representing the triad of economic, political and military power. Historically, effective power blocs have consisted of smaller- to medium-sized states revolving around a core state. The core state is supposed to be the most powerful, sometimes singly more powerful than all other states in the bloc put together.
If this formulation is accepted – and empirical evidence supports it – then too it would not make sense for Pakistan to accept the acquisition of such capability by a contiguous state. One, Pakistan is nowhere near the kind of dominance that attends relations of a core state with other smaller or weaker states in a power bloc. But even if it were, it would still make more sense to extend security guarantees (including extended deterrence) to other states in the bloc rather than allowing them – or actually actively supporting them – to develop such a capability.
One of the problems that Samuel Huntington found with the Islamic world in his controversial book on the “clash of civilisations” was the absence of such a core state within the Islamic civilisation. Huntington mentions five or six states that could lay claim to such a status but rejects their suitability for various reasons. No core state, no power bloc. At this point, therefore, pan-Islamism may be a desire but it is not a reality. And policies are formulated on the basis of what-is, not what ought-to-be.
So helping Iran acquire a nuclear-weapon capability is a no-no even in terms of a theory of pan-Islamism, not only because Pakistan is not a core state leading an Islamic bloc but also because even if it were, there were other ways to defend Iran than help it with an indigenous nuclear programme. That someone in Pakistan at some point might have thought along these lines merely proves the point about the non-existence of policy debates in this country on the one hand and the presence among those who matter of people who would fail an IR paper even as undergraduates.
The United States is worried about Iran. So is the European Union. So should we be. But there is no indication that we are. Are we prepared to live with an Iranian bomb? Will it be in our interest to be sandwiched between two nuclear-weapon states? The issue does not relate to whether Iran should or should not have a bomb (though that should be obvious enough from what has been discussed) but the absence of any identifiable policy in Pakistan on the issue.
I do not want to identify here the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran – that can be the topic of another article – but there is very good reason for Islamabad to begin to discuss a possibility that is likely to present itself in the foreseeable future. If Pakistan can live with an Iranian bomb then perhaps this analysis is irrelevant. If it cannot, then there is need to formulate a policy on the issue and pursue it aggressively. But that can only happen if we begin to discuss it.
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*Originally posted by irem: *
Pak and Iran are Muslim countries and our relations may go a bit down sometimes but never THAT sour buddy, Iran can never nuke Pak and Pak can never nuke Iran.
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Irem,
hopefully we will never see a country nuking another.
But muslim-muslim bhai-bhai didn't stop Iraq from attacking Kuwait or the war between Iran and Iraq.
Do we see why Musharaff is in a hurry to construct the Gwadar port, in spite of the bitterness it is creating in Balochistan? Pakistan's and Iran's strategic interests clash?
We are all laymen and our knowledge is limited to information we obtain from the media. When Iran squealed on the nuclear issue and named Pakistan as its abettor, Pakistani defence analysts and the Pak media accused India of helping Iran in its nuclear quests.
If that is true, one never knows what could happen in the future. Let hatred of/ contempt for the West not lead us to believe that any Islamic country that goes nuclear is good for the whole Ummah. Any country should worry if a neighbour goes nuclear.