Guardian in Denial About Iranian Nuclear Program
Other key examples of reluctance at the Guardian to take Iranian actions at face value include the absence of an editorial response to the discovery in December 2009 by the Times of evidence that Iran was working on a trigger device only applicable to a nuclear weapon. The scoop has never since been referenced in a Guardian editorial on the Iranian nuclear issue and certainly not because it was un-newsworthy. The Obama administration launched an investigation in the wake of the Times’ expose.
Two months later, on February 11, 2010, when President Ahmadinejad claimed to have advanced the stages of uranium enrichment to the key threshold level of 20 percent, another weak response was elicited from the Guardian. The Iranian president addressed a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Tehran, saying, “I want to announce with a loud voice here that the first package of 20 percent fuel was produced and provided to the scientists.” “Trials of strength,” published the following day, once more diminished the Iranian nuclear threat by instead focusing on technical difficulties:
“In reality, there are fewer working centrifuges this year than there were last, because the original Pakistani design is inherently faulty and machines regularly break down. Nor is Iran closer to weaponizing its enriched uranium and putting it on a missile, although the IAEA’s key questions to Iran on this issue remain unanswered.”
The Guardian’s dismissive tone runs counter to the scientific consensus that 20 percent uranium enrichment is a major milestone in nuclear proliferation; from this level, obtaining weapons-grade 90 percent enrichment is relatively easy.
It is not only the refusal of the Guardian to acknowledge Iran’s nuclear intentions that is questionable. It is also not clear that the newspaper regards the prospect of a nuclear Iran as something to worry about in any case. Despite a recurring editorial theme of instability and violence inside Iran, not once does the publication vocalize concerns about the danger of this unstable theocratic government becoming a nuclear power. The connection is simply never made.
On one occasion the anxiety felt in the region about the Iranian nuclear program was alluded to, but the newspaper stopped short of setting out the reasons why. Upon the discovery of the secret enrichment site in Qom, the Guardian noted: “This adds further weight to the fear of every Arab state in the region: that Iran’s nuclear program is run by the military.” Given that the newspaper applies terms such as “appalling” to describe the prospect of a military strike on Iran, it is extremely noteworthy that the prospect of Iran gaining a nuclear capability itself invites no such bluster and for the most part attracts only silence.
Incredibly, the harsh criticism is reserved for Israel, which the Guardian depicts as desperate for a fight with Iran. The same editorial which cites Arab concerns about a nuclear Iran depicts Israel as merely the cynical beneficiary of the Qom facility discovery rather than an additional party with legitimate concerns: “Iran’s cat-and-mouse game with nuclear inspectors hands a propaganda victory on a plate to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier who has made little secret of his air force’s preparations for a long-range air strike.” Needless to say, none of the editorials mention Iran’s regular and public threats against Israel, most notably to “wipe [it] off the map.”
The Guardian’s response to Iran’s blanket rejection in December 2009 of the West’s proposal to enrich uranium abroad for explicitly civilian purposes betrays an almost reflexive denial about causality in the publication. After hailing the proposal in an editorial on October 23, the newspaper reverted to criticizing the West — the U.S. in particular — when Iran failed to accept the deal in December. “On collision course, again” (Dec. 15, 2009) cited “giving diplomacy no more than three months to work” and “limiting the talks to the enrichment process alone” as reasons for the failure to secure a deal. Nowhere in the leading article did the Guardian implicate Iran itself for refusing to compromise.
On the practical issue of how to proceed, the Guardian remains vehemently against military action, arguing that such a strike would “be the start of a conflagration that would spread rapidly from the Strait of Hormuz to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza and Lebanon.” It also strongly opposes sanctions: “Would tougher sanctions work? In a word, no.” This position persists in spite of Iran’s rejection of the West’s offer to enrich uranium abroad and its provocative announcement that it has reached 20% enrichment at home. It is not at all clear what, if anything, would alter this entrenched stance.
What is missing from the Guardian’s editorial narrative on Iran is any real sense that the country is responsible for its own actions. When Iran takes obvious steps towards becoming a nuclear state, its intentions are portrayed as by no means clear. When Iran rejects a perfectly good offer for uranium enrichment abroad, it is the West’s fault for making the length and scope of the talks too limited. It is all very well to continue to favor perpetual talks over diplomatic or military sanctions, but surely the Guardian ought to expect Iran to play a constructive role in this process or at least hold Iran to account if it chooses not to. Otherwise, one is invited to think that the liberal broadsheet views a nuclear Iran as an acceptable inevitability.
According to the liberal elitist framework there is NOTHING which the Muslim world is responsible for-even nuclear terror. HOWEVER, all the world’s ills are dropped at Israel’s doorstep. In other words, the Jewish devils made them do it.
Regardless of their hallucinations, and their silence in the face of another Holocaust, Israel does NOT intend to fall on its sword.
By the way, those who wish Israel ill should understand one salient truth – IF Israel goes down, so too will many other nations. The Samson Option rests on this premise. Count on it.
” This warning, along with an announcement that Iran would join the world’s nuclear club within a month, raised the pitch of Iranian anti-US rhetoric to a new high Tuesday, April 13, as 47 world leaders gathered in Washington for President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit. The statement published by Kayhan said: “If the US strikes Iran with nuclear weapons, there are elements which will respond with nuclear blasts in the centers of America’s main cities.” For the first time, DEBKAfile’s military sources report, Tehran indicated the possibility of passing nuclear devices to terrorists capable of striking inside the United States.
Without specifying whether those elements would be Iranian or others, Tehran aimed at the heart of the Nuclear Security Summit by threatening US cities with nuclear terror. “
WELL YOUR RIGHT DINA. I SIMPLEY CA’NT BELEIVE THAT THE LIB’S HAVE BEEN BLAMING ISREAL FOR SO MANY OF THE WROLDS’ PROBLEM’S, NOT ONLY FOR ALL THE EARTH-QUACKES THAT HAVE BEEN HAPPENING THIS YEAR, BUT ALL SO, THEY BLAMEMING ISREAL FOR SO MUCH CORN SYRUP IN AMERICAN’S FOOD PRODUCTS.
Adina, don’t depend on the USA. The people are with Israel, but Obama is not. I personally think he is a Muslim practicing Taqiyya. Keep your own consul and aim carefully.
The people are not as much with Israel as you think. Just as during the 6 day war the US was not with Israel so much as against Egypt. After all, Egypt was in league with the Soviet Union.
Don’t depend on the US, mostly because if an attack occurs it’s far more likely to be Israel attacking Iran than the other way around.
Though they clearly would like us to attack Iran for them.
nice threats there sparky!
typical zionist trouble maker!
you can blow up dimona and take out yourselves with it, be my guest, just let the arabs leave the area first
Iran will get nuclear weapons. It’s as simple as that. The Chinese and the Russians know that economic sanctions are a joke and they are certainly not willing to help the United States on anything, much less adopt economic sanctions against a country they know is a thorn in our side.
The Russians, especially, still see themselves as a world power instead of what they are, a declining Third-World power armed with First-World nuclear weapons. The Russians will, therefore, do anything they can to hinder American influence in the Middle East. But what always puzzled me is why the Russians, who have their own major problems with Islamic terrorists (two of them blew themselves up a few weeks ago in a Russian subway), are so willing to allow an Islamic regime known for terrorism to acquire nuclear weapons? After all, Iran could just as easily give a small nuclear device to Russian Islamic terrorists as they can to Hezbollah, which would be a deadly threat to Israel. What the Russians fail to see is that the mullahs in Iran see no difference between the United States OR Russia. They see us both as infidels and as a threat to Iran’s domination of the Persian Gulf. The Iranians simply are not saying anything about the Russians because they need them to acquire their nuclear technology. But to the Iranians, an infidel is an infidel, so after they get their nuclear weapons it will be interesting to see how fast they will turn on the Russians.
As for China, Iran desperately needs them as a trading partner. Oil is the only thing Iran has to keep its economy going, and since it does not want to trade with the Americans, that only really leaves China or some other Asian country for trading and obtaining hard currency. As long as Iran can keep supplying cheap oil to China, it will have a friend in Beijing.
So what to do? Well, with Obama in office, not much. I have always believed that we could overthrow the fragile authoritarian government in Iran by using extremely aggressive covert actions. We should have immediately supported the Iranian protesters last summer in hopes of overthrowing the regime. Unfortunately, we failed to do that and now have lost our best chance to influence events inside Iran without having to attack it. All of the protest leaders from last summer are probably dead or in jail by now, so don’t expect much to happen inside Iran.
So we either live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we bomb it. That’s one hell of a choice. My bet is they will get their nuclear weapons, just like North Korea did, and we will make a lot of noise but not do much. After that, not much reason to ge upset about those new Israeli settlements. A couple of years from now it will all be a nuclear wasteland anyway, so nobody is going to want to build on any real estate there.
Carmel, on the one hand thank you for exposing the Guardian. But on the other hand you are taking them too seriously. They know perfectly well what the score is, they just don’t believe they will be the target of Iran’s wrath. They think Israel will be the first target and so they play their game of feigned naivety eagerly awaiting the coming act.
The Guardian is more likely convinced Iran will never attack Israel, for the simple reason that one Nuke aimed at Israel means Iran disappears from the face of the earth.
They are not that fanatical. Most likely only fanatical about their own power and riches.
If I had to hazard a guess I’d say that The Guardian might find the prospect of a nuclear Iran somewhat attractive. It would diminish Israel’s regional nuclear supremacy and stand as an example of defiance against the United States. Maybe Bob From District 9 is right that they are betting on Iran not actually using any nuclear weapons it acquires.
khamenei is NOT going to fire the first they may or may not build at the zionists. EVERYONE KNOWS what cold-blooded murderers zionists are, so they will respond by “going wild and this is a good thing” as tipsi lipsy said about the gaza revenge rampage..
only a fool would suggest otherwise..
btw i’m no supporter of iran, but if you know about operation ajax you will know that BRITAIN and AMERICA created the mess that is iran today..all because mossadegh wanted a bit more than 10% of iran OWN oil revenues from b.p.!
>As each day passes the Islamic Republic inches ever closer to achieving a nuclear capability which no serious observer doubts is intended for military purposes.”
A very great many serious observers doubt Iran is trying very hard to develop a nuclear weapon. A very great many believe Iran is jerking us around, and the right is fool enough to allow themselves to be jerked around.
Remember, the govt of Iran is not very popular, so they are diverting the population in the traditional manner, drumming up a hostile outsider to focus the people’s attention on. And at that Hillary and Obama are playing along too much by expressing way too much hostility.
Thanks to Bush’s stupidity we don’t have enough of an army left to invade with, and there is little else that would provide assurance Iran is not building a bomb.
OTOH, I do support universal military service, so those of you who never served might get your chance. Hint: It’s not all fun and games.
“However, this reality is not reflected in some sections of the world media. A recent UK study by Just Journalism of the Guardian’s editorial position on the Iranian nuclear program reveals a very different picture — one that continues to doubt that Iran intends to obtain the bomb, one that does not necessarily view a nuclear Iran as posing a threat, and one that blames the West for Iran’s intransigence in negotiations.”
Iran is no real threat to the US, or anyone else. Why the right goes on screaming mimi fits over the possibility that Iran might get one or two bombs, while Israel is generally acknowledged to have somewhere around 100, is hard to understand.
If Iran dropped even one nuke on Israel there would be no Iran the next day.
Just before the 6 day war the CIA sent LBJ a briefing in which they stated that, in that tense period, Israel was going to be the one to attack, not the Arabs, Israel was going to win quickly, and there was no imaginable Arab force Israel could not defeat. See the CIA website for that.
It’s true today. Israel is the Middle Eastern powerhouse, not the helpless threatened child. Time to start behaving in a manner consistent with that fact.
‘Iran is no real threat to the US, or anyone else.’ Most of the Arab world would disagree with this. It’s not just the western right that’s concerned with the prospect of a nuclear Iran, it’s those who would have to live in its shadow.
‘Israel is the Middle Eastern powerhouse, not the helpless threatened child. Time to start behaving in a manner consistent with that fact.’ I think Israel is a bit of a paradox when it comes to strength and weakness. Yes, it has a strong conventional army but unlike in 1967, Israel faces both conventional and unconventional threats. Also, in fairness, Iran consistently and publicly threatens to attack/destroy Israel. You don’t have to be a helpless threatened child for this to be disconcerting.
To understand The Guardian, one has to understand liberalism and most Americans do not understand liberalism, they just use it as a sort of ” bogeyman ” catchall description of things which they believe to be unpleasant and they associate as being connected with the left. Liberalism does have serious and legitimate values and perspectives and neoconservatism is in many aspects, a result of what one ends up with, when one takes the core values of liberalism from the nineteenth century till the nineteen fifties and tries to adapt the methodology needed to act in support of those core values for the quite different challenges of the twenty first century. Whilst there are no doubt many people in The Guardian who would be liberals, the ethos of that paper is not liberal, it is based on the theory that the West is a pervasive force for bad in the World and within that theory,the Iranian regime immediately falls in to the ” good guys ” category, so from the The Guardian’s perspective, Iranian nuclear weapons do not present a threat.
the guardian is a left wing paper..”socialist” if you like..but good!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/03/comment
the independent is liberal…but good also!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/this-is-like-apartheid-anc-veterans-visit-west-bank-865063.html
don’t get too comfortable in palestine, it’s somebody else land..you will have to leave one day..you can go back to europe and america, or even birobidjan, what a jewish paradise!!!
“Today one can enjoy the benefits of the Yiddish culture and not be afraid to return to their Jewish traditions. It’s safe without any anti-Semitism, and we plan to open the first Jewish day school here.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan
“don’t get too comfortable in palestine, it’s somebody else land..you will have to leave one day..you can go back to europe and america, or even birobidjan, what a jewish paradise!!!”
Helen Thomas, is that you?