Well lets hope he can unravel the knot. It seems a rather hopeless task, as it appears the current Iranian regime wants nukes first and foremost. In short, a goal that is not much subject to diplomatic carrots and sticks.

The threat, if there be one, is the undisclosed nuclear stockpile in Israel. That, rather than Iranian plutonium enrichment, is the existential problem.

The massive, secret, nuclear arsenal that is estimated by US authorities to contain up to 400 nuclear warheads - enough to wipe out half the world - and being roughly equivalent to 1 WMD for every 12,500 of its population – is an astonishingly frightening factor which completely dwarfs the comparative figure in America, Russia, China, France, UK, India or even Pakistan.

Such enormously powerful weaponry in the hands of an extreme right-wing, coalition government, is not something that induces peaceful sleep at nights. And, unbelievably, that stockpile is supported with more billions of US dollars, each and every year. For what reason, I know not.

I guess you couldn't make it up as a movie plot, it would seem too ridiculous.

Whenever the subject of 3rd world nuclear weapons proliferation is raised I always wonder why we never hear much about who it was that supplied, and is supplying, the critical technology bits that was, and are, required. Instead, all that we hear about how many centrifuges Iran has acquired, not how and from whom they acquired them. The same goes for the atomic reactors used to produce Plutonium. I don't believe that such 3rd world nuclear wannabe nations created all of the necessary technology from scratch.

Aren't some of the largest industrialized nations guilty here? The Russians, Americans, French, Germans, etc.? Well, maybe, not those nations so much as certain large corporations within them. Kim Jung Il has, and A.Q. Kahn had, become significant sources of technology proliferation, but from where did N. Korea and Pakistan obtain the critical technology for THEIR domestic atomic weapons programs?

This reminds me of how the U.S. hypocritically demonized Sadam's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds while ignoring the fact that we likely sold Sadam those very same weapons. Sadam almost certainly used those weapons against the Iranians in their war. Remember that photo of Rumsfeld shaking Sadam's hand to celebrate the deal?

The fact that they hijacked an election, along the lines of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, and arrested fewer demonstrators than were arrested by the New York City Police Department during the 2004 GOP convention (and possibly by the Minneapolis Police during the 2008 GOP convention), and killed fewer demonstrators than were killed by the Chinese government just this week. does not demonstrate that the mullahs are "capabable of anything."

For one thing, they seem devoted to maintaining themselves in power. If nothing else, an unprovoked attack on Israel would produce a response that would leave them both out of power and dead. So that doesn't seem to be a sensible option.

The mullahs of Iran may be capable of a lot of things, but some don't even think the election was on the level and said so over the weekend. It's a long way from staging a phony election -- routine dictatorial practice -- and putting down large unauthorized protests -- routine practice in both dictatorships and democracies like the United States (see 2004 GOP convention again -- and 2008 GOP convention, 1968 Democratic Convention, etc., etc.) -- to launching suicidal attacks on a country able and willing to retaliate.

Too many people died in the Iranian protests, mostly at the hands of government thugs, but as these things go, it barely qualifies as a bloodbath. If anything, the mullahs seemed loath to go in for full-scale slaughter of their own people. It was bad enough as it was. No useful purpose is served as acting as if it takes a place among the worst crackdowns in history -- or even, as we've seen in China, the last 30 days.

After all, who is worrying that the persecution of Uighurs means that China is soon to launch a nuclear attack on Japan or even Taiwan?