Will the Initial Vote in the Houses of Congress Be Meaningless?

 

We have the deal of a lifetime, presumably the perfect and deeply complex agreement which if the Administration spokespeople are to be believed, and who would know better than those who fashioned the deal, such that the complex minutia weaves a web of inspections and requirements which Iran will be incapable of extricating themselves without being betrayed by the particulars combined with snap unannounced immediate access inspections at which time any failure to be within the web that has been tediously structured would result in total snapback of the most severe sanctions bringing Iran to its knees; thus Iran will not progress as a nuclear power for at least a decade. But if one has also paid any attention to the celebrations and excessive elation raging out of control through the halls of power in Iran, one might suspect that either the Iranians have not figured out the brilliance by President Obama and the State Department mediators who once again have made an airtight box just as they had with North Korea, as the very same members of the North Korean negotiations committee were once again put into service to similarly fashion an ironclad nuclear deal with Iran. Imagine the shock and awe that will eventually end one side or the other’s elation when the truth shows its hand and either Iran never becomes a nuclear armed power for at the least a decade and a half or does so far more rapidly. Still, despite the unanimous approval of the P5+1 and Iranian Agreement with a chapter seven enforceable ratification which some are claiming makes any vote by the United States Congress potentially meaningless, but is this true?

 

The ratification by the United Nations Security Council will only become an issue if there can be a vote taken which manages to recognize and demand enforcement of United Nations sanctions being reimposed. It would still require the five permanent members, France, Britain, United States, Mainland China and the Russian Federation not to use their veto power to block enforcement, those very same nations who have millions or billions or conceivably trillions of Euros or Dollars in trade deals to vote to end such deals, even should Iran test a nuclear device in the middle of the waters to their south. That is far beyond reasonable and should not be expected unless the Iranian test was over Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and even then it would be doubtful. The other P5+1 (France, Britain, China, Russian Federation and Germany) have already announced their willing compliance with the deal and are ready for full ratification which is waiting on the United States which has a far more complicated approval system than any Parliamentary system which is found throughout most of the world, so, every eye is on Washington D.C. and while the world waits the media are thrashing every conceivable turn of the cards of fate possible to come out of Washington in the next sixty days Congress has set as the limit before they must present their final verdict. So, what comes next?

 

 

Photo of the Lead Negotiators Taken After Agreement Reached with the Smiles on the far left two Iranian Lead Negotiators and neutral bored look by the man in the middle representing the European Union with the two on the right no more aware that they are posing for the picture which will mark them in history than they were during the negotiations themselves while they either are looking at the real winners or posing as if this was an after frat party picture with the thumbs up, who are they kidding?

 

 

The United States House of Representatives often limits the debate speaking time to each of the State’s Representatives ten minutes each to express their opinions and attempt to persuade their cohorts before the vote is taken. With four-hundred-thirty-five Representatives that results in four-thousand-three-hundred-fifty minutes of debate or seventy-two-hours and thirty-minutes. That means that if we allow for procedural delays and Representatives speaking beyond their allotted time or outbursts which leaving a mere four hours of time per day this results in a minimum of fourteen and a half days or approximately four weeks before every Representative had made their feelings known. Perhaps this mathematics is why the time allotted for Congressional approval or disapproval to be decided and a final vote taken on the proposed Iran nuclear agreement and the results be made known to the White House and an eager media who will waste no time chewing on every piece of gristle fed to them and pretend that they found the finest filet mignon and then pretend their perception is the finest cut of the votes taken in both houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

 

There are some very unusual conditions stipulated in the Congressional approval of this Agreement which is not a treaty and not exactly just a Presidential decree as the Congress insisted and received oversight, but not merely the usual Senate only ratification required by a normal treaty but because President Obama’s successful labeling unusual and break from norm claiming that arms agreements are not normally treated as a treaty but instead simply demand the straight up majority in both houses rather than the two-thirds approval (sixty-seven of the one-hundred) Senators. President Obama suspected, it would be impossible to receive such ratification from a Senate controlled by a majority Republicans even were it to garner one-hundred-percent support from the Democrats, both Independents who caucus with the Democrats and possibly a half dozen Republicans who honestly believe that the President is to be granted leeway on items pertaining to foreign affairs matters. It was likely beyond any conceivable probability that the President could find a full dozen minimum Republican Senators to vote for the deal, thus it was this frightening reality facing President Obama who decided his sole chance was to invent a new class of agreement where because there were six other nations involved and this presumably made the United States an co-equal partner to an agreement, an executive agreement by a President who was but one amongst many in reaching this agreement making it an agreement amongst executives and thus it was a Presidential Agreement requiring only passage by both houses of Congress. This will presumably provide to grant the President a veto over any vote taken which refused the Congressional approval of the Agreement thus then requiring the Congress to then override the Presidential veto now requiring a two-thirds vote in both houses in order to prevent the Agreement taking effect, a complete reversal of fates. Now, it would appear, there will be required that both houses of Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, would be required to attain a two-thirds vote each to override the veto and end the ratification by the United States.

 

Oddly enough there are a number of presumptions which make much of these arguments completely erroneous. Let us look at the realities. The first item that requires investigation is exactly how the wording of the presentation of the Iranian agreement before Congress is read. Any initial investigation one would expect that a ‘Yea’ vote would be in favor of the Agreement and any ‘Nay’ vote would be against the Agreement. So, if the Senate voted fifty-one in favor and forty-nine against while the House of Representatives voted two-hundred-eighteen in favor and one-hundred-seventeen against, then both houses would have approved the Agreement with minimal votes required and the passage would permit President Obama to sign the Agreement placing the United States to be in compliance of the terns, limitations and obligations within the Agreement just as President Obama desires. So, the House and Senate both approve the Agreement even by the narrowest of margins, then there would be no need for any veto and everybody limps away satisfied they had performed their duty as they saw best to be committed.

 

But we all know that what we have been told is that the problems arise should the Congress oppose the will of President Obama and not approve the Agreement. It would make absolutely no difference should the Senate, the House of Representatives or both deny passage to the agreement sent before them by whatever margin, then what comes next. We have been led to believe that President Obama could veto their vote to turn down their initial vote and now place the two Houses of Congress into having to reach a two-thirds vote to override President Obama’s veto by voting by a two thirds vote in both Houses of Congress in order to have the Congressional advice be heard and President Obama be instructed not to sign the Agreement thus removing the United States from any of the particulars of the Agreement and should this occur, then and only then would the Agreement be kept from becoming binding on the United States. There is one grievous mistake in the reasoning here as long as a ‘Yea’ vote means ratification of the Agreement and a ‘Nay’ vote indicates one is opposed to the Agreement. Once either House of Congress votes against the Agreement and thereby not approving it that is the end of the Iran Nuclear Agreement as far as the United States is officially concerned because the President is not empowered to veto a negative vote. He can only veto those items brought before him as passed legislation by both houses of Congress. In order to have his Iran Deal passed, he must present the deal to both houses for an up or down vote and not propose some finagled legislation asking if they oppose the Iran deal, thus turning approval on its head and making support a ‘Nay’ vote and opposition a ‘Yea’ vote thus making turning down the deal available for him to veto as, despite what he believes, that is not presenting the agreement for a vote by Congress, that is perverting everything that is holy and true about the American confirmation process and turning a negative into a positive and vice-a-versa twisting the affirmation process. By this method it would become near impossible to oppose any appointment or treaty made by a president and makes them a virtual dictator for their time in office and as far as that goes, also impossible to make them relinquish their office claiming their declaration that their removal from the Presidency was itself a threat to national security. The vote over the Iran Nuclear Agreement has to proceed as a ‘Yea’ vote as in favor of the agreement and a ‘Nay’ vote a vote against ratification and thus either house refusing to approve the Agreement would spell the end of the Agreement in so far as the United States would be concerned. The President could ignore that and sign the Agreement but his signature would be meaningless as the courts would override any demand then made under that signature void; thus, all of the Iranian sanctions made by the United States would stand and any monies held by United States banks would remain frozen, period, game-set-match.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Is the United States Allied with Shiites Against Sunnis?

 

This must be a question fermenting and fomenting minds across the Middle East and beyond into North Africa and around the world where Muslims reside, meet, mingle and discuss the political intricacies of the hour. The evidences could be actual tactics and planned policy or it could be only innuendo and hyperbole caused by the situational ethics, policies of the moment, sole remaining available alternatives, or the preferences of the man in the White House, President Obama. The truth is that come later January of 2017, a potentially long eighteen months plus a week give or take a few days and the foreign policies of the United States could take as violent a swing as they did when President Obama set out to be the most un-Bush-like President in American history. Will we see a return to the dull and predictable and similar policies as we had with George W. Bush? Not very likely. The one consistency in the Presidency is the lack of consistency in the Presidency. One would be hard pressed to find two consecutive Presidents whose policies and mannerisms in any manner or way resembled their predecessor which often is considered a good thing. Even after a popular President who often served two terms, a full eight years, at some point usually early in the second term the media finally starts to turn and from there it goes directly downhill and by the time inauguration day both the American people and the President themselves are anxious for them to leave Washington far in their wake never to return. With time the opinions of a President begin to average out between their high points and their lowest lows to somewhere which will resemble their standing in history. So, whether President Obama has chosen to support Shiite Islam over Sunni Islam is an intentional policy or the result of situations and a culmination of events leading him without his realizing how his actions may be perceived, in the end it really does not matter. Still, there will be those who will assign great importance, as has already graced many an article and editorial, both supporting and critiquing the President’s actions with both sides and assigned credit or blame all being pretty evenly split such that I have no idea which side of this is brilliance and which should be taken for buffoonery.

 

What we outside the world of Islam think, feel, argue or critique is of far less importance than what is the opinions of the leaders of the Sunni and Shia Islamic worlds; the Imams, the national leaders and the Muslim peoples themselves are where the consequences will be formed and fall. The thing the rest of us should fear is should alliances in the Muslim world start forming either favoring, fearing or targeting the United States become reality and end up forcing future policy alternatives and resulting in a United States firmly stuck on one side of this divide and because of such the rest of the world choosing up sides accordingly and then not only will the Muslim world be split in adversarial camps but the rest of the world also aligning down the very same divides as that is the thing that world wars are made of. It was the alliances which caused the spread of what should have been a quick skirmish and within a few months the scores settled after the assassination of Duke Ferdinand but then the two sides began calling in allies and those nations sympathetic and before one knows what was actually happening the entirety of Europe and Japan and all the respective colonies around the world were at war and World War I was born and before it died it eventually including the United States whose entry will be debated as to whether it was manufactured and if so by whom. World War II might have been far shorter had the British and French honored their commitments with Czechoslovakia and not given Hitler the Sudetenland or even after that foolishness had at least honored their subsequent promises to Czechoslovakia when Hitler marched through the now unprotected passes and gobbled up the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Instead they waited until after Czechoslovakia fell and Hitler had added much of the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire from World War I vintage to his side before finally striking at Poland still feeling sure that surely after all their previous gutlessness that the French and British threats were still as empty as before. For those still wondering, the French and British honored their treaties with Poland not that this was of much use to Poland who was swallowed in halves to Hitler’s Germany from their west and Stalin’s Soviets from their east and a few scant weeks until the two armies met in the center and Poland was divided between the two temporary allies. Eventually Hitler turned on Stalin as well making one of the two largest mistakes of the war with the other contender was not following the British across the Channel immediately after Dunkirk. If this reference troubled you, look up “mosquito armada World War II Dunkirk” and read about one of the strangest and most noble acts by the British people without requiring anything other than a call to arms, or at least to assist.

 

Should the Muslim and also the Arab worlds neither one decide that the United States has taken sides in their centuries old conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites and thus one side have closed off all relations with the United States, then the next President will have the luxury of mending fences and restoring balance in the United States Middle East policy. In President Obama’s defense, he was and still appears to be a strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood which is as Sunni as Islamic organizations get. The President has a couple of suspected Muslim Brotherhood affiliated or at least sympathizers in the administration as well as in high profile positions in the State Department and there are not many accusing him of being a sympathizer and solely allied with the Sunnis because of these facts. Certainly such is an easy match for his lack of bombing Assad while bombing the Islamic State despite Assad having murdered vastly more peoples all of them Sunni or non-Muslims while the Islamic State has murdered far fewer Shiites and non-Muslims. The problem with such reasoning is it takes a sophomoric view that numbers of fatalities and casualties is the sole reason for policy and ignores other influences such as perceived threat that one group or nation may present over the threat of another plus the reactions of the people of the United States who also have influence over decision more often than politicians or media care to admit, though the media goes to great lengths to influence the populace and their political conversations and should anybody likely be behind the apparent Shiite support over Sunni Muslims than anything else could ever hope to possess. Of course you will never hear the media taking the blame for the reactions from the people driven by the mainstream media which in turn influences the elected officials thus potentially changing the policies of the United States including foreign policies and position taken by a President. That is both the blessing and the curse of a free society which has open and supposedly transparent elections despite much of what some conspiracy theorists claim to have proof is untrue to which we should simply tell them to file their evidence with the courts of the FED (Federal Election Commission) and let the world, or at least the rest of the United States, settle these claims and force remedial action and a higher level of scrutiny and enforced compliance with security providing for honest elections.

 

The claims by some are likely part of a concerted effort to pressure the United States to alter its foreign policies in some manner probably more favorable to the Sunni Muslim and potentially the Sunni Arab states. The main reasons being given dance around one major foreign policy currently being pursued by the United States which is hugely obvious by the omission we have read claiming that the United States policies are highly anti-Sunni and pro-Shiite; that omission is the ongoing and ongoing and ongoing negotiations with Iran and the seeming falling all over themselves by the United States negotiating team which appear to be leaving Iran able to breakout and make nuclear weapons on an industrial scale within six to ten months from deciding whether they want to announce before or after they leave the restrictions from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or after as North Korea did before announcing their first nuclear weapon test after breaking their agreement which was negotiated by many of the same team members as are members in these negotiations as well. The main difference is the Secretary of State where one may not have great amounts of faith in Secretary Kerry’s abilities for a multitude of reasons most likely starting with his testimony about his fellow soldiers from his service in Viet Nam where he served with distinction even if not entirely with honor as he managed to receive three Purple Hearts and an immediate trip home with great haste and ease only to give the following testimony before the Senate here in transcript of the complete two hours and forty minute excerpt from his testimony where the below can be heard roughly between 5 minute 45 seconds through 7 minute mark:

“They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

 

By now I believe almost everybody other than those so sold on the theory that President Obama is the smartest and most knowledgeable person to walk the halls of power in the history of the universe have realized that when it comes to foreign policy his expertise is that of the level of a neophyte and that is being generous. President Obama has done damage to the United States that may never be rectified as he has broken promises made by former Presidents whose guarantees were ratified by both houses of Congress with levels which if the letter of intents and promises given a certain leader of Israel where no such treaty was feasible without harming the standing the United States cared to retain with the Arab world thus a “mere letter which is not binding on any who followed President Bush” was really much more, but then again the bust of Winston Churchill was not given to any particular President to be an ornament that he found pleasing but a gift to the people of the United States and a gift he had not the authority no matter what his position to demand the British take away as he found it odious, many Americans including most of the ones I have ever known would have objected loudly and strenuously and offered to proudly house that gift in their own home just to retain it and offer it to a new President when such a gift might be more appreciated. That was also the treatment President Obama showed the Saudi Arabian Royals when he discounted their preferences and warning about Iran and simply gave them what in their culture would be considered a scolding for getting out of place for having the audacity to not only oppose him but to doubt his intentions, his intelligence, or his expertise as President Obama knows.

 

I guess one of the worst of all things one can ever commit would be holding any doubts about any and everything President Obama says or does as he is, in his own words we quote from a September, 2008, New York Times profile of Obama where he reportedly told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker,

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Well, guess that tells us all we need to know, the rest of us are in a second class league in any expertise we may have because there is a man who likely would meet us and in casual conversation at some point tell us we need not try to inform him on any subject as he already knows twice as much as any of us do on everything. It is little wonder that it has been reported that President Obama often has his daily morning intelligence briefing either told to be given to somebody else or simply waved it off completely often for weeks maybe months at a time and often when he does receive it interrupts to do personal affairs and appears to be distracted and not actually paying attention. I bet he really hears it all and has likely absorbed it all out of the ether and finds such reports unnecessary. According to the Washington Post article By Marc A. Thiessen from September 13, 2012, titled Obama alone: This president does not need intel briefers we quote from almost half the way down,

Vietor’s reply is quite revealing. It is apparently a point of pride in the White House that Obama’s PDB is “not briefed to him.” In the eyes of this administration, it is a virtue that the president does not meet every day with senior intelligence officials. This president, you see, does not need briefers. He can forgo his daily intelligence meeting because he is, in Vietor’s words, “among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet.”

 

Though I really should just let this lie as is, I just am unable to resist a little more fun. I am willing to bet that President Obama does not know better than I what I am thinking right about now, nor likely what your reaction has been either. Imagine being the candidate’s political director at the start of the campaign and have the candidate say to your face, “And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” How does one not just get up and silently walk out the door and simply not return, how? I would be incapable of even supporting such a boorish and ignorant person who is so involved with themselves that they are a more narcissistic egomaniacal megalomaniac than I imagine I am in my wildest dreams, which is why I gave up dreaming long ago as I can dream while awake better than my subconscious can dream when I’m asleep, so top that President Obama.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Coming Deal that Iran Wrote

 

The defection of Amir Hossein Mottaghi, Rouhani’s public relations manager during his 2013 election campaign for President, removed any doubts or glimmers of hope that what was being acted out in Lausanne, Switzerland, nestled in the Alps, was an actual deal meant to deny Iran anything they desired and packaged it as an accomplishment. The crux of the problem is that the Iranians have neither desired nor needed any form of a deal as they always were and are going to do exactly that which best serves their purposes, and that is to build as many nuclear warheads and as many missiles on which to place those warheads and do so at whatever speed they desire. The warning signs have been everywhere for all to see. Even the French and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) claim the deal is so pathetic as it does not limit or even begin to prevent the Iranians from proceeding forward to producing nuclear weapons nor does it address the concerns expressed recently by the IAEA, an agency notorious for being unable to prevent or even monitor any nation which has had any desire to attain nuclear weapons. When the IAEA is expressing serious concerns that the Iranians have kept much of their work and engineering work for the supplemental items to weaponized nuclear materials such as the triggering mechanisms, warhead design and other necessities concealed and has been reticent about reporting such activities, then there may be a serious problem. The IAEA reports claim that Iran has refused to come clean in any number of areas and that they suspect Iran has nuclear research and production sites which they have refused to report and may even have some of which the IAEA has no knowledge or information about and may reveal in time that the Iranians are running a parallel program intended solely to produce the required nuclear weapons materials such as highly enriched uranium and all other parts required for the manufacture of nuclear weapons thus allowing for Iran to negotiate a deal while producing nuclear weapons clandestinely.

 

Meanwhile every report out of Lausanne, Switzerland, has been another piece of the puzzle which is beginning to reveal an ugly reality. What is becoming evidenced this week is satisfying the worst fears of those watching the charade being carried out by the United States negotiating team which appears to be cheering and working for the Iranians and simply attempting to drag any unwilling partners along down the primrose path and producing a document replete with the appropriate signatures all signifying nothing. The Iranians have taken measure of President Obama and found him to be lacking in all ways. They have detected an empty suit which envisions himself as a great negotiator whose simple presence, even from behind the scenes, as so inspiring that others will bend to his will and he can win the day with virtually no effort. They have seen the man-child for what he truly represents, a narcissist with delusions of grandeur and of great moral and intellectual prowess unequaled in all fields and so full of himself that he cannot even begin to believe the reality that Iran has simply been going through the motions of negotiating and simply have been baiting the United States team, the same team which negotiated the agreements with North Korea as they became nuclear capable, manipulating their every response leading them to the exact point the Iranians desired with which they would continue their clandestine operations while also using their agreed upon centrifuges working in order to continue the façade of staying within the letter of the agreement. Iran has used the negotiations to their advantage all the while laughing at the ridiculous actions of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry who have taken every word and action to heart and have never actually shown any intelligence or perceptive abilities all the while being largely led around by their noses going wherever the Iranians had wished to move them. As we have pointed to before, the French see the deal as weak and beyond the monitoring force’s ability to enforce. The IAEA will continue to never receive total access to the Iranian nuclear facilities thus never knowing definitively whether or not Iran is producing nuclear weapons behind their backs.

 

The Institute for Science and International Security was quoted in The Tower magazine having stated, “A deal that does not include Iran addressing the IAEA’s concerns about the past and possibly ongoing military dimensions of its nuclear program would undermine the verifiability of the deal, and thus the credibility of a comprehensive deal.” Their spokesperson was further quoted, “Fordo will remain open, and its centrifuges will spin.” As the information attained monitoring the news out of the negotiations revealed that it truly is a part of the deal that Iran may continue to utilize the Fordo facilities and continue to maintain six-thousand centrifuges at any given time by our latest information. Six-thousand centrifuges are a really large number for supplying fuel rods for the few reactors currently in use and thus one must conclude that Iran has measured the spines of the Western powers and found them to be lacking and thus capable of misleading themselves and their public into believing they had negotiated a good deal. The Iranians were likely convinced that they were negotiating with a pack of fools simply by how they reacted to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress by claiming they had Iran cornered and that the deal was as good as was possible all things being considered. Meanwhile, the IAEA had been sounding the warning bells trying to get anybody at the negotiating table in Lausanne, Switzerland to heed their concerns and realize that the deal they are debating is a complete and total lie as the Iranians have been dealing falsely and has no intentions of observing any limitations written into the deal and are making as many of the terms denoted in vague terminology such that there is potentially two manners in which one would be able to interpret the meaning and operate their centrifuges and other materials as freely as they wish. The truth of the matter is that the Iranians often were only capable of running their centrifuges at around forty to forty-five percent of capacity thus agreeing to around one-third of the units in use at any given time, so the six-thousand centrifuges turns out to be the number they use at any given time.

 

The claims by the French that the United States has spent much of the negotiations parroting the Iranian demands trying to make them more readily digestible for the remaining members of the P5+1 were pretty much validated by the defecting Amir Hossein Mottaghi. His relating the weakness displayed by the United States negotiating team also gives credibility to the claims made a couple of weeks ago by some Iranian dissidents that Iran had recently completed and already using a new unreported uranium enrichment site beneath the outskirts of Tehran. They explained the methods used to conceal its construction and how centrifuges were brought into the facility and assembled within the new laboratory and they claimed that the new site was recently completed and the cascades of centrifuges were tested and functioning well producing enriched uranium. The dissidents’ were dismissed as alarmists by the United States and dismissed as unreliable, pretty much as these same dissidents were dismissed when originally claiming that Iran was running secretive enrichment and other nuclear weapons related development which eventually proved valid producing these very talks.

 

But Iranian uranium enrichment is but the tip of the iceberg whose concern should be taken more seriously by the United States and the rest of the appeasing western nations. There is also the question of their rocket and missile research and their near completion of a true ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) capable of carrying a nuclear warhead anywhere in the globe with relative accuracy. The definition of relatively accuracy is simply because with nuclear weapons, like horseshoes, often close is sufficient to score. This is one reason the difference between the super accurate United States missiles which were capable of striking their exact target missing it by no more than a couple of inches and their Soviet counterparts which had an accuracy of striking within twenty to thirty or even fifty yards really made little difference when talking about warheads which would lay waste to most of the targeted city. It has been proven by observing Iranian rocket and then missile tests that they have progressed from the simple rockets, which generally went where you pointed them and would strike more often than not within the country they were aimed at, though this might have proved more difficult when striking Israel due to her narrow profile, to large ballistic missiles which have ranges of up to three-thousand kilometers and striking within fifty kilometers of their intended target. Iran has recently claimed to have developed a cruise missile with a range of close to two-thousand kilometers and an accuracy of less than ten meters, an impressive level of accuracy. So there is this front which makes the Iranian development of nuclear weapons all the more ominous and threatening, especially with their continued chanting of, “Death to America”, and “Death to Israel.” These chants which have been a response to the policies of their government and the promises given to destroy these two main enemies and obstacles to a world dominated and ruled by the Iranian Mullahs.

 

This concept brings us to the last leg of the triad of threats posed by the Iranians, namely their ever more rapid attempts to control areas of the Middle East and their expressed desire to further their conquest across Europe. Additional to the Iranian conquest to becoming the leader of the entire Muslim world and spreading their form of Islam across Europe, they have a particular desire to vanquish the Greek islands in revenge for the Persians defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great. The Iranian eventual goal is perhaps the most difficult to believe and pertains to drenching the entire planet in a conflagration in order to speed up the arrival of the Messiah, the Twelfth Imam, who will climb from his hiding place in a well in Qom and lead the Iranians in the purification and conquest of all mankind. This sounds incredulous when one first contends with this Iranian belief that their savior has been hiding since childhood in a well to avoid being murdered by his enemies, the Sunni Muslims, and upon the world being bathed in fire and chaos will climb out from that very same well to lead in the Shiite conquest of the earth. Those who believe this concept are referred to as Twelvers for obvious reasons though I might have called them as duodenary dunderheads. This is perhaps partly the reason why many who have studied the leadership of Iran have posited the idea that deterrence is impossible as such a threat merely plays into their belief that the Twelfth Imam would then arise and lead them to their destined victory over all odds and adversaries, and that is truly frightening when one realizes that it is more likely that Iran is currently manufacturing nuclear warheads which are merely waiting to be married to their own ICBM and launched to the far corners of the globe and everywhere inbetween in order to bring on the salvation of the true believers. If this is not frightening enough to any sane individual, then I know not what might be.

 

Beyond the Cusp