It’s about how to shoot oneself into the foot.  Greece, Italy and others are going to suffer, Iran won’t. Oil can (and should) be sold to anyone else.

Last update January 26, 2012.

Among the few highlights of living in the far North, northern lights may be the most delicate. Thursday’s  eruption of active sun spot 1401 (click on the picture to see it in detail) has resulted in a huge coronal mass ejection which shall arrive in a couple of hours (22:30 UTC tonight) and may lead  to  spectacular aurorae.

Last update January 21, 2012.

Definitely. Long-awaited. About the drone, the sanctions, the Strait of Hormuz, the assassination of nuclear scientists, sponsoring of terrorism, uranium enrichment, medical isotopes, military dimensions of the nuclear program, regime change. The threats, Israel.

What the hell is going on between the U.S. and Israel, as Daniel Drezner put it? Obama is sending letters to Khamenei? What the hell?

Last update January 15, 2012.

While 2011 draws to a close, New Year’s pledges are hard to formulate. Generally, predictions are unreliable, and what has happened this year hardly anybody had envisaged one year ago. So, there might be some hope for 2012.

The year started promising, millions of North Africans eventually lost patience after realizing that nothing had to be expected in the aftermath of President Obama’s historical speech in Cairo of June 4, 2009, just one week before Iran’s disputed presidential election. Whether WikiLeak’s diplomatic cables ignited what is now known as Arab Spring is not clear, but they certainly contributed to it. The world won’t be the same after the brave publication of the cables. If there had been trust in U.S. foreign policy, it has vanished. If anybody had kept faith with Obama’s integrity his hypocrisy must have come as a shock.

Ongoing perplexity of world leaders on how to deal with the aggravating global financial crisis, or catastrophic effects of global warming; Obama’s need for being re-elected, and Iran’s suffocating encirclement and ruined economy; two lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and beacons of hope Julian Assange and Bradley Manning arrested. Well, the future will tell what the future will be.

We spent Christmas this year again in the Middle East. Oman’s comparably broad-minded and western music loving Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said had made his dream come true and bestowed peaceful and friendly Omanis and everybody else a, well, opera house. It is said that the Royal Opera House Muscat was one of the most expensive opera houses so far (more expensive than Sultan Qaboos’ Grand Mosque with its second largest hand-woven carpet and chandelier). We attended Pjotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake given by the world class Mariinsky Ballet, an unforgettable experience.

To all my readers, Happy New Year 2012!

Last update December 31, 2011.

Both fascinating and alarming is the map of U.S. military bases in the Middle East, which had been posted a couple of days ago by Juan Cole. Essentially unsuccessful in designing several serious allegations, even casus belli, towards America’s arch enemy, Iran (does anyone remember the assassination plot against the Saudi Arabian Ambassador? Does anybody still believe that the notorious “Addendum” to the latest report by IAEA’s Yukiya Amano is anything else than what has been rejected in 2009 by former nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei?), the current Administration in Washington led by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama has unprecedentedly surrounded the country with military bases. Anybody with a clear sense for reality would interpret this as an obvious threat of an upcoming war. The Obama doctrine, only borrowed from his immediate predecessor, of “all options still being on the table” in order to prevent Iran from pursuing its nuclear program (no, there is no smoking gun of a military dimension), is even more terrifying taking into account imminent implementations of more severe sanctions which will inevitably ruin Iran’s economy (with serious consequences for its people) and suffocate the much-hated regime in Tehran.

That Iran has continued today its naval maneuvers in the Persian Gulf with firing several long- or mid-range missiles has most probably only been welcomed inside Washington’s Belt Way and elsewhere. That Iran has threatened a couple of days ago to shut the Strait of Hormuz in case of further sanctions as well.

In order to enter the phase of a hot war, Western powers need to provoke Iran to show its might for self defense. So, Iran’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty would be most welcome. Remember, there has been nothing new recently about Iran’s nuclear program.

Update. Iran has denied test-firing long-range missiles today. The schedule has been changed, as naval drill spokesman Rear Admiral Mahmoud Mousavi indicated today. It is expected that long- and short-range missiles will be fired during the power phase of the drill which has started today.

Update II (Sunday). They did it.

While the last American soldier has left Iraq (only to return, after seasonal holidays, to nearby Kuwait), the Iraq Body Count has certainly to go on. The war isn’t over yet. The arrest warrant for Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi upon allegations of sparking violent tensions after the U.S. troop withdrawal has to be seen as a portent.

Obama’s withdrawal, heavily criticized at home, has obviously something to do with WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, and numerous known and unknown U.S. massacres of Iraqi civilians which have been conducted in the previous 104 months. When McClatchy had acquired the report by Matthew Schofield of Knight Ridder and published this particular log in the Iraqi War Logs on the Balad massacre of March 15, 2006, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s patience had already come to an end. Why should there be diplomatic immunity for American war criminals?

According to the Iraq Body Count, information provided by WikiLeaks suggests up to 15,000 more civilian deaths adding to the 104,156 to 113,804 documented civilian deaths due to violence after the U.S. and allies’ invasion had begun in March 2003.

Last update December 20, 2011.

When President Obama welcomed all American troops from Iraq home the other day one should not forget that the reason for the withdrawal is that the Iraqi Government would not grant immunity for remaining troops. Taking the known and yet unknown war crimes of the Americans in this basically illegal war into account, it would have been too risky to stay there. What this decision means for the Iraqis, well, future will tell.

Yesterday, Private Bradley Manning has been heard for the first time since his detention in May 2010 in military court, at Fort Meade in Maryland. He is the alleged whistleblower who provided WikiLeaks with the infamous Collateral Murder video of July 2007 showing the killing of a dozen civilians including two Reuters employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldin. He is also alleged of having leaked what became the Iraqi and Afghanistan War Logs and, last year, more than 250,000 U.S. Embassy Diplomatic Cables, WikiLeaks’ Cablegate.

If convicted, 24-year-old Manning, person of the year for many, faces up to 50 years in jail and, at least theoretically, even the death sentence.

Last update December 17, 2011.

Update below (December 14, 2011)

With Tawakkul Karman, the Norwegian Nobel Price committee has revised its wrong decision of 2009. At least, she deserves. What a great choice. What a beautiful woman.

Anyway, it’s Norwegian hubris at its best. The real candidates this year, besides Tawakkul,  were Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

Disempower Jagland and his ridiculous committee.

Update December 14, 2011. See her speech during the ceremony, provided by Democracy Now! here.

The recent hype about Iran’s nuclear program culminated last week when originally the London Times reported a loud blast heard all over Esfahan on November 28 which was then widely re-reported and denied by Iranian officials. It wasn’t an accident, Israeli sources immediately claimed. This story and reports of a huge explosion at a military base near Tehran last month which killed at least 17 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards including a high-ranked General, satellite imagery of the devastating blast; now the shooting soft landing of an American drone in eastern Iran and its presentation yesterday; is this in the middle of cold war or has it been stepped-up already?

Washington’s International Institute of Science and Security (ISIS) and its director David Albright have provided us with old (1996, August 2011) and new satellite imagery (December 5, 2011) of a site near Esfahan’s uranium conversion facility (UCF).  In the latest images buildings have been razed, areas bulldozed and “heavy equipment” is seen all over the site.

I have identified the site in Google Earth (October 15, 2010). It lies 2300 meters west to the UCF, at the southeastern foots of a hill or mountain. It measures 300 meters times 200 meters, about 0.06 square kilometers. There had been five buildings on the older images visible, and something what Albright interprets as “a ramp leading to a underground facility” (“It is unclear what Iran stored in this underground facility”). I had reported on the tunnel system of the UCF in a previous post, see here.

The new imagery doesn’t look like an explosion site. The razed buildings are just razed, the bulldozed area seems not be related to a crater. In fact it seems be unrelated to the buildings. The “ramp” is intact. It just looks like a deconstruction site, see here.

What amazes me is the fact that the site is about 6 km distant to the Islamic Azad University in Khorasgan which hosted me a couple of years ago. The blast must have been heard there. The distance to the Esfahan’s city center is 15 km.

Last update December 10, 2011.

The unjust allegations of a ridiculous plot for assassinating the Saudi Arabian Ambassador of the U.S., the continuous allegations of striving to annihilate Israel, assassination plots of nuclear scientists, explosions, support of terrorism, intruding drones, sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.

Who cares about the Iranian soul? Thirst for justice? Young women’s and men’s aspirations, whose future is more uncertain than ever? Who cares?

Last modified December 5, 2011