Now if we attack Iran it will drain our economic resources and line the pockets of the thugs in Moscow at the same time. Wow are the Bushies bright ones! Not to mention the missiles will most likely work quite well.
MOSCOW - Russia has struck a deal to sell short-range, surface-to-air missiles to Iran, the defense minister said Monday, confirming reports that have raised concern in the United States and Israel.
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Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov didn't give details. But Russian media have said that Moscow agreed in November to sell $1 billion worth of weapons to Iran, including up to 30 Tor-M1 missile systems over the next two years.
"A contract for the delivery of air defense Tor missiles to Iran has indeed been signed," Ivanov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
"This unequivocally will not change the balance of forces in the region," Ivanov added. Tor M1 missiles are short-range, surface-to-air missiles already used by several other armed forces, including China.
The reports last week prompted expressions of concern from the U.S administration and Israel, which considers Iran to be its biggest threat. Israeli concerns recently were heightened after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged that Israel be "wiped off the map."
Top politicians in Israel have ratcheted up the tough talk against Iran, led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called for a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear installations. Such a strike would be similar to a 1981 attack, ordered by then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, that destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor.
"I will continue the tradition established by Menachem Begin, who did not allow Iraq to develop such a nuclear threat against Israel, and by a daring and courageous act gave us two decades of tranquility," Netanyahu told the daily newspaper Maariv. "I believe that this is what Israel has to do."
Interfax said the Tor-M1 system could identify up to 48 targets and fire at two targets simultaneously at a height of up to 20,000 feet.
On Saturday, an influential Iranian official played down the deal, telling the official Islamic Republic News Agency that Tehran has been trading arms with many countries and would continue to do so.
The Russian Foreign Ministry, without commenting on the reported missile sale, also said Saturday that all Russian weaponry supplied to Iran is purely for defensive purposes.
However, a senior Bush administration official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject, said last week that any arms sale to Iran is a source of concern. The official would not say whether Russia had advised the United States of any negotiations with Iran.
The United States and Russia are supporting efforts by the European Union to persuade Iran to halt development of nuclear weapons in exchange for economic incentives, such as trade opportunities.
Russia, which has a long and lucrative relationship with Iran, has offered to try to resolve a key dispute by offering to enrich uranium for an Iranian civilian nuclear energy program as a safeguard against Iran using enrichment for weapons purposes.
Doing internet digging, how would you rate this as a source? <<Wesley Clark: Hero or Villain? by Gary Sudborough Monday September 22, 2003 at 04:15 AM IconoclastGS@aol.com
The hidden and ignored recent history of Yugoslavia and its relevance to the candidacy of General Wesley Clark for US president.
General Wesley Clark has attempted recently to portray himself as a liberal, deserving of support by progressives in his campaign for president. On the Bill Maher show, he was asked if he would run away from the word "liberal" and he said no and that America was founded as a "liberal democracy." The fact that he was NATO commander during the bombing of Yugoslavia is pointed out with pride by the corporate media as indicating he is a patriotic American willing to defend his country and end human rights abuses in other countries. This is all propaganda and derives from a basic misunderstanding about how and why the breakup of Yugoslavia occurred.
Yugoslavia did not disintegrate because of old ethnic hatreds as the corporate media would like the whole world to believe. It was deliberately broken up by the United States and Germany using methods designed to instigate and foster ethnic hatreds. This is conclusively proven by a law passed by the US Congress a year prior to the start of Yugoslavia's breakup. This law is called Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513. The law cut off all aid, credits and loans from the United States to Yugoslavia. Also, it cut off loans from international institutions heavily influenced by the US like the IMF and the World Bank. This law was very hard on Yugoslavia because it had borrowed heavily from foreign banks to finance the growth of its economy and was deeply in debt. The law further stipulated that for aid and loans to be resumed, separate elections had to be held in each of the six Yugoslavian republics, and the US State Department had to approve the election procedures and results in each republic. Only so-called democratic parties were allowed to participate in these elections. In actuality, this meant that the US financed fascist and nationalist parties in each republic, which would collaborate in the breakup of Yugoslavia. Fascist exiles from the old Ustasha party, which ruled the former Nazi puppet state of Croatia, flowed back into that republic from the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria and other countries. The old fascist symbols and flag returned to prominence. Croatian president Tudjman was a fascist and a Holocaust denier. Thousands of communists, Jews, Roma and Serbs had been killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp run by the Ustashi in Croatia during World War 2. Now, these fascists were returning to power. Muslim fascists returned to Bosnia and seized power. Bosnian president Izetbegovic was a Nazi collaborator in the Second World War.
There are many other indications of the careful planning of Yugoslavia's disintegration. The CIA trained both the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim militaries. There were numerous reports in European newspapers about this fact, but, naturally, the US corporate media kept silent about it. The US provided air support when the Croatian military drove over 200,000 Serbs from their homes in Krajina- a gigantic ethnic cleansing that dwarfed any atrocities the Serbs were alleged to have committed, including Srebrenica and Sarajevo. In fact, the explosion at the market place in Sarajevo, attributed to a Serb mortar or artillery shell, was later found to be a bomb planted by Bosnian Muslims to draw sympathy to their cause and demonize the Serbs. The Croatian and Bosnian governments hired the US public relations firm Ruder Finn to help demonize the Serbs. Ruder Finn was actually proud of its success in demonizing the Serbs, saying that they had overcome the natural sympathy Jews had with Serbs because both had been targeted by the Nazis and turned Jewish public opinion against the Serbs. Finally, the so-called Rambouillet agreement, the rejection of which by Yugoslavia was used as a pretext for the massive and continuous bombing of Serbia and Kosovo for nearly three months, was not an agreement, but an ultimatum. It gave NATO forces the right to occupy Serbia-an effective loss of sovereignty and Serbia had every right to reject it.
Why would the United States deliberately cause the disintegration of Yugoslavia? The Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe, except for Yugoslavia, had been pressured to adopt a capitalist system (shock therapy), and these countries sold many state-owned industries at fire sale prices to foreign investors. Yugoslavia held out against the privatization and deregulation demands of the IMF and World Bank, and therefore, its people had to pay the price of having cluster bombs and depleted uranium dropped on them. Actually, if state-owned industries can't be privatized, the other option is to bomb them out of existence, move in American corporations and utilize very cheap Slavic labor, all the cheaper because of the chaos and destruction of war. Bombing and the spread of American corporate power go hand in hand.
The bombing of Yugoslavia was not a humanitarian intervention to end ethnic cleansing because at the very same time the US was supporting militarily a far greater ethnic cleansing by Turkey against the Kurds. General Wesley Clark is not a war hero. He is a war criminal, who time after time on CNN defended the bombing of Yugoslavia and choice of targets in an immoral, imperialist war designed to further enrich the ruling elites in the United States. He told lie after lie as all apologists for imperialist wars do and was very truculent in justifying the bombing. No leftist who truly understands the meaning of imperialism could possibly vote for this candidate for president. He is a wolf in sheep's clothing. I have the greatest admiration for the work of Michael Moore, but he needs to investigate the recent history of Yugoslavia more closely before endorsing Wesley Clark. I recommend NATO in the Balkans from the International Action Center and To Kill a Nation-The Attack on Yugoslavia by Michael Parenti. Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, also writes many excellent articles about Yugoslavia.
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