Word: frenchness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fact, the only one of Iran's neighbors for whom it may be true, as the French PM suggests, that tensions have reached "an extreme point," is the United States - a neighbor by virtue of its presence in Iraq. Despite offering little evidence to back the claim, the Administration now routinely claims Iran is destabilizing Iraq and waging a proxy war on U.S. forces there. In fact, President Bush proclaims containing Iran as one of the strategic rationales for staying in Iraq. And the hawkish political faction inside and outside of the Administration that campaigned for war in Iraq...
...French statements are warning the world that a clock is ticking on the Iran "crisis," although the countdown is on the remaining 16 months of President Bush's tenure rather than anything happening during that time in Iran's nuclear program, which remains a number of years away from the capability of building a bomb. A mounting tide of reports has suggested that President Bush does not want to leave office without having prevented Iran from attaining the means to build nuclear weapons - and if that outcome cannot be achieved through diplomatic pressure, the reports suggest, then he is prepared...
...Even if the purpose of French alarmism and U.S. media leaks is simply to sweat the Iranians into backing down, it runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Iranians tend to harden their positions in response to threats, and the sense of urgency being engendered by the U.S. and its closest allies is not shared by the international community - the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, has found no evidence of a covert nuclear weapons program in Iran, and has reached an agreement with Tehran to address a number of specific concerns over aspects of Iran's nuclear...
...Clearly, the U.N. process is not going to yield the results desired by the U.S. and its allies any time soon. The latest Iran-IAEA agreement has sharply diminished chances of the U.N. Security Council approving any further sanctions against Iran this fall, and the French call for unilateral European sanctions has been rebuffed by Italy (Iran's largest European trading partner) and sharply criticized by Russia. A deeper problem lies in the fact that the West sees uranium enrichment itself - to which Iran is entitled under the Non-Proliferation Treaty - as unacceptable, because it would give Iran the means...
...Iran's nuclear program by any means necessary before he leaves office, the sense of crisis will have to be sharply escalated in order to convince a war-weary American public to back a second potentially catastrophic war of choice in the Middle East. At least this time, the French are doing their...