[Obama's] exchange with Mr. Menendez occurred near the end of a question-and-answer session after Senator Angus King of Maine — an independent who caucuses with the Democrats — asked for an update to the nuclear talks.
According to one of the senators and another person who was present, the president urged lawmakers to stop pursuing sanctions, saying such a move would undermine his authority and could derail the talks. Mr. Obama also said that such a provocative action could lead international observers to blame the Americans, rather than the Iranians, if the talks collapsed before the June 30 deadline.
The president said he understood the pressures that senators face from donors and others, but he urged the lawmakers to take the long view rather than make a move for short-term political gain, according to the senator. Mr. Menendez, who was seated at a table in front of the podium, stood up and said he took “personal offense.”
Mr. Menendez told the president that he had worked for more than 20 years to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and had always been focused on the long-term implications. Mr. Menendez also warned the president that sanctions could not be imposed quickly if Congress waited to act and the talks failed, according to two people who were present.There you have it, assuming the account is accurate: POTUS acknowledging that Iranian sanctions are donor driven, and in response, Bob Menendez, a prime recipient of AIPAC largesse and a co-sponsor of legislation calling for additional sanctions against Iran, bolts upright and claims his integrity has been impugned.
For a helpful summary of U.S. perfidy in regards to Iran's nuclear program take a moment to read Gareth Porter's "Four Ways the West Got the Iran Nuclear Issue Wrong." From the outset the idea that Iran has been secretly pursuing nuclear weapons has been a canard:
The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.
The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.
Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired.
But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it.Porter goes on to list several obvious and egregious U.S. intelligence blunders. But the principal argument for the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program is the Grand Ayatollah's fatwa:
The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.
That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.
The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has landed some unwelcome attention over its flogging of a blogger, Raif Badawi. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, yesterday called for a halt. Nicholas Kristof devoted a column, "An Islamic Reformer, Lashed," to it the other day, placing Badawi's flogging in the proper context of KSA's support for Islamic fundamentalism, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and Free Speech. It is hard for the United States to make a stink over human rights and press freedom in nations it regards as adversaries (Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela et al.) when a principal ally, if not the principal ally, is caning a blogger 50 lashes every Friday until 1000 lashes have been meted out (19 more Fridays, the end of May).
Fariborz Saremi has a piece, "Iran’s Changing Role," about the Islamic Republic's improved status among Gulf Cooperation Council member states relative to KSA and Bahrain:
Political and economic relations between the smaller Gulf states and Iran are rather diverse: Kuwait and Iran, for example have had positive relations since 1991 and are currently expanding their economic ties. Oman and Qatar have a long history of fairly good relations towards Iran. While the UAE has had a troublesome relation with Iran in the past, in particular due to the three island dispute, their relationship is currently improving. All this indicates that Saudi Arabia might not be able to hold its own house together when it comes to confrontation with a regional power like Iran. Many GCC states welcomed the election of President Rouhani but remain skeptical about the depth of change in Tehran especially the overall influence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).Before signing off, let's quote at length from Carl Zimmer's "Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says" about a big, new study published yesterday in Science, "Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean":
There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.
Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide, partly as a result of climate-change-driven warming.
Some fish are migrating to cooler waters already. Black sea bass, once most common off the coast of Virginia, have moved up to New Jersey. Less fortunate species may not be able to find new ranges. At the same time, carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic.
“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Dr. Pinsky said. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”
Fragile ecosystems like mangroves are being replaced by fish farms, which are projected to provide most of the fish we consume within 20 years. Bottom trawlers scraping large nets across the sea floor have already affected 20 million square miles of ocean, turning parts of the continental shelf to rubble. Whales may no longer be widely hunted, the analysis noted, but they are now colliding more often as the number of container ships rises.
Mining operations, too, are poised to transform the ocean. Contracts for seabed mining now cover 460,000 square miles underwater, the researchers found, up from zero in 2000. Seabed mining has the potential to tear up unique ecosystems and introduce pollution into the deep sea.
The oceans are so vast that their ecosystems may seem impervious to change. But Dr. McClenachan warned that the fossil record shows that global disasters have wrecked the seas before. “Marine species are not immune to extinction on a large scale,” she said.
Until now, the seas largely have been spared the carnage visited on terrestrial species, the new analysis also found.
The fossil record indicates that a number of large animal species became extinct as humans arrived on continents and islands. For example, the moa, a giant bird that once lived on New Zealand, was wiped out by arriving Polynesians in the 1300s, probably within a century.
But it was only after 1800, with the Industrial Revolution, that extinctions on land really accelerated.
Humans began to alter the habitat that wildlife depended on, wiping out forests for timber, plowing under prairie for farmland, and laying down roads and railroads across continents.
Species began going extinct at a much faster pace. Over the past five centuries, researchers have recorded 514 animal extinctions on land. But the authors of the new study found that documented extinctions are far rarer in the ocean.
Before 1500, a few species of seabirds are known to have vanished. Since then, scientists have documented only 15 ocean extinctions, including animals such as the Caribbean monk seal and the Steller’s sea cow.
While these figures are likely underestimates, Dr. McCauley said that the difference was nonetheless revealing.
“Fundamentally, we’re a terrestrial predator,” he said. “It’s hard for an ape to drive something in the ocean extinct.”
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