NEW YORK — Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

Just days after Iran abandoned a high-profile bid for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, it began a covert campaign to claim a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women, which is “dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women,” according to its website.

Buried 2,000 words deep in a U.N. press release distributed Wednesday on the filling of “vacancies in subsidiary bodies,” was the stark announcement: Iran, along with representatives from 10 other nations, was “elected by acclamation,” meaning that no open vote was requested or required by any member states — including the United States.

Just lovely.

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Apparently the latest threat to the Islamic Republic can be found in women who have tans:

Iran has warned suntanned women and girls who looked like “walking mannequins” will be arrested as part of a new drive to enforce the Islamic dress code.

Brig Hossien Sajedinia, Tehran’s police chief, said a national crackdown on opposition sympathisers would be extended to women who have been deemed to be violating the spirit of Islamic laws. He said: “The public expects us to act firmly and swiftly if we see any social misbehaviour by women, and men, who defy our Islamic values. In some areas of north Tehran we can see many suntanned women and young girls who look like walking mannequins.

“We are not going to tolerate this situation and will first warn those found in this manner and then arrest and imprison them.”

I think it’s time for another protest !

On that note, here’s Reason’s report on the Boobquake protest in D.C.:

H/T Troglopundit

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Thirty years ago today, the only rescue mission mounted by President Jimmy Carter to end the Iranian Hostage Crisis ended in disaster and embarrassment:

The dramatic attempt to free the hostages began yesterday when six Hercules C130 transport planes set off to rendezvous with a group of nine helicopters at a remote desert airstrip, south-east of Tehran.

But the mission ran into trouble almost as soon as it had started

Two helicopters went down with engine trouble, and a third was diverted to help.

Then another helicopter was damaged as it landed on the airstrip, leaving only five workable helicopters. The mission had become impossible.

President Carter ordered the operation to abort. It was then that the farce became a tragedy.

As the aircraft took off again, another helicopter crashed into one of the C130 aircraft and burst into flames. Eight soldiers died, and another four men suffered burns.

At that point, the 52 hostages has been held for 174 days. It would be another 270 days before they would finally leave Iran.

The full story of that mission, and just how badly planned and executed it was, can be found here.

That morning, President Carter took to the airwaves:

It was the final event that marked the end of Carter’s Presidency.

H/T: ThirdWaveDave

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KRAUTHAMMER: Do we have enough intelligence? Do we know where their stuff is hidden? They have spoken about a second uranium enrichment place. Do they have others? And, also, how deeply buried and how hardened are the targets? Because unless we know if we have access with our equipment, our bombs, they may be ineffective. I think they have got to make assessment on the current intelligence which appears to us, at least on the outside, rather weak.

Weak to say the least, and often contradictory.

Just look at what we’ve been told over the last three years:

The United States’ National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 stated that Iran had halted it’s nuclear weapons program in 2003. In February 2009, though, both the United Nations and the United States issued reports saying that the program was further along than previously believed. Less than a month later, though, the Director of National Intelligence seemed to debunk those February reports. But then, last August, we were told that Iran was on the verge of becoming a nuclear power. Then, last month, the CIA came out with yet another report saying that “Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.”

So, what exactly are we supposed to believe ?

Beyond that, though, there’s the fact that an attack on Iran may prove unsuccessful in having any real impact on their nuclear program:

Last September, when Iran’s uranium enrichment plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum was revealed, the episode cast light on a wider pattern: Over the past decade, Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers across the country.

In doing so, American government and private experts say, Iran has achieved a double purpose. Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort. The discovery of the Qum plant only heightened fears about other undeclared sites.

Now, with the passing of President Obama’s year-end deadline for diplomatic progress, that cloak of invisibility has emerged as something of a stealth weapon, complicating the West’s military and geopolitical calculus.

The Obama administration says it is hoping to take advantage of domestic political unrest and disarray in Iran’s nuclear program to press for a regimen of strong and immediate new sanctions. But a crucial factor behind that push for nonmilitary solutions, some analysts say, is Iran’s tunneling — what Tehran calls its strategy of “passive defense.”

Indeed, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has repeatedly discounted the possibility of a military strike, saying that it would only slow Iran’s nuclear ambitions by one to three years while driving the program further underground.

Some analysts say that Israel, which has taken the hardest line on Iran, may be especially hampered, given its less formidable military and intelligence abilities.

“It complicates your targeting,” said Richard L. Russell, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National Defense University. “We’re used to facilities being above ground. Underground, it becomes literally a black hole. You can’t be sure what’s taking place.”

A military attack on Iran would have unintended consequences even if it was successful.

An unsuccessful attack would serve no purpose other than to embolden the Iranian regime even further.

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One Iranian cleric has discovered the key to the geological instability the world seems to be experiencing:

An Iranian cleric has proclaimed that inappropriately dress women leading to extramarital affairs are the resons behind the devastating earthquakes that frequently rattle the country.

Speaking to worshipped at the Friday prayers here on Apr 16, senior cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said, “Many women who dress inappropriately … cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes.”

“Calamities are the result of people’s deeds…We have no way but conform to Islam to ward off dangers,” the teligious leader is quoted as saying in newspaper reports.

Does that go for volcanic eruptions too ?

H/T: Gateway Pundit

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WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

(…)

Pressed on the administration’s ambiguous phrases until now about how close the United States was willing to allow Iran’s program to proceed, a senior administration official described last week in somewhat clearer terms that there was a line Iran would not be permitted to cross.

The official said that the United States would ensure that Iran would not “acquire a nuclear capability,” a step Tehran could get to well before it developed a sophisticated weapon. “That includes the ability to have a breakout,” he said, using the term nuclear specialists apply to a country that suddenly renounces the nonproliferation treaty and uses its technology to build a small arsenal.

(…)

Mr. Gates’s memo appears to reflect concerns in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the military that the White House did not have a well-prepared series of alternatives in place in case all the diplomatic steps finally failed.

Well, that’s comforting to know, especially considering the fact that there’s never been any indication that diplomacy is going to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and sanctions aren’t going to have an impact unless all the major world powers are behind them. As the Times story indicates, though, Obama’s charm offensive hasn’t done anything to sway reluctant world opinion:

Administration officials had hoped that the revelation by Mr. Obama in September that Iran was building a new uranium enrichment plant inside a mountain near Qum would galvanize other nations against Iran, but the reaction was muted. The next three months were spent in what proved to be fruitless diplomatic talks with Iran over a plan to swap much of its low-enriched uranium for fuel for a medical reactor in Tehran. By the time Mr. Gates wrote his memo, those negotiations had collapsed.

As Allahpundit, notes, though, this isn’t all Barack Obama’s fault:

Bush knew what it would mean to hand this issue off to a Democratic president and he went ahead and did it anyway. Invading Iraq necessarily left him with fewer military options against other threats; now the bill is coming due.

Translation — by bogging the United States down in a pointless war in Iraq, George Bush left us with few military options to deal with a nuclear, or near-nuclear, Iran.

So what does this all mean ?

Basically, it means that Iran is going to become a nuclear power whether we want them to or not. They may not take the formal step of assembling and testing a nuclear weapon right away, but they will soon be at the point where they will have all the components necessary to do so, and it wouldn’t take long for them to take those final steps.

Justin Gardner is among those who don’t seem to think this is such a bad thing:

[M]y question to all of you who think Iran will use their nuclear program to try and destroy Israel…do you really think they would risk the lives of everybody in their country?

Because, if they decide to bomb Israel, I think we all realize that Iran, as a nation, will not exist anymore. Every nuclear nation will bomb them back to the stone age…and then some.

Except, of course, there are a myriad number of ways that a nuclear Iran could be a problem without ever having to actually use it’s weapons. Just as a nuclear Pakistan and India transformed the conflict between those nations into something far more serious than it had been before (not to mention the legitimate concerns about the stability of the Pakistani government and the ties between elements of Pakistan’s intelligence services and the Taliban and al Qaeda), and that’s exactly what a nuclear Iran could mean for the Middle East.

Israel and Iran would stare at each other across the miles, missiles and bombers at the ready, but it’s the nations in between, and most especially Iran’s immediate neighbors, that would feel the most impact of a nuclear Iran. Quite possibly, we’d see signs from nations like Saudi Arabia that they want to pursue their own nuclear program. And, the idea of a Middle East where everybody has nukes isn’t one the world should look forward to.

But there is another danger that a nuclear Iran poses, and it can be found in the history of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. It was the father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who, with the possible cooperation of others in the Pakistani military, transferred nuclear weapons technology to nations ranging from Iran to North Korea to Libya in exchange for missile technology and material that Pakistan needed to continue it’s nuclear weapons development. Going further back, it’s fairly clear that China provided Pakistan with technology and information necessary to the development of nuclear weapons.

Who might Iran share nuclear technology with ?

Well, we’re going to find out, because it’s long past time where we can do anything about it militarily, and the Obama Administration has proven itself incapable of mustering the necessary diplomatic cooperation to do the things that could choke the Iranian economy to the point where it would have no choice but to cooperate.

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(CBS) The Obama administration’s nuclear posture review may have removed some of the intentional ambiguity from U.S. nuclear policy, but it does not leave the country any less safe, President Obama’s top national security advisers said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

In fact, they said, it gives a clear warning to other state actors that the U.S. will not ignore any growing threats.

“This is putting everybody on notice,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer in an interview conducted Friday at the Pentagon. “We don’t want more countries to go down the path that North Korea and Iran are.”

(…)

“We were concerned about the biological weapons,” Gates said, “and that’s why the president was very clear … if we see states developing biological weapons that we begin to think endanger us or create serious concerns, that he reserves the right to revise this policy.”

Clinton added, “If we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us, then all bets are off.”

Gates also pointed out that the policy dictates that any country that uses chemical or biological weapons against the U.S. will “suffer a devastating conventional retaliation.”

Strong words indeed, but I still have the same reservations about this policy that I expressed last week, and I still don’t see why we had to break 60 years of tradition and make our nuclear strike policies public. This is a situation where ambiguity works to our advantage.

All I can say is that I hope they know what they’re doing.

Video:

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Last night it broke that the President would be announcing what is clearly a major change to American nuclear strategy:

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

And, the specifics:

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the Cold War. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons, or launched a crippling cyberattack…

White House officials said that the new strategy will leave open the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack, if the development of such weapons reaches a level that makes United States vulnerable to a devastating strike.

Mr. Obama’s new strategy is bound to be controversial, both among conservatives who have warned against diluting America’s most potent deterrent, and among liberals who were hoping for a blanket statement that America would never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

And boy has it brought the conservatives out of the woodwork alright. Just take a trip over to JammieWearingFool, Riehl World View, Power Line, or Fausta’s Blog to get a taste of what I mean.

Before getting to the substance of the new policy, my most immediate problem with this is quite simple —- why would we announce to the world when we would and won’t use nuclear weapons if we’re threatened or attacked ? Wouldn’t it be better to keep them guessing, keep them thinking that if they attack the American homeland with chemical, biological, or radiological weapons, or a cyberattack, they they could face the risk of a massive American response, including the possible use of nukes ? That’s what deterrence is supposed to be about isn’t it ?

As for the substance, I see problems with the idea that we would allow a WMD attack (and biological weapons are WMDs) on U.S. soil without leaving open the possibility of a response in kind. That doesn’t mean we would have to use nuclear weapons in such a case. After all, there might be a smaller scale method of retaliation that would have the same impact. However, telegraphing in advance that we might not respond to, say, a small pox attack in Denver, with massive nuclear retaliation on the country that sent it our way strikes me as a mistake simply because of the message it sends to a potential attacker.

But, does this policy really matter when it comes to what would actually happen if we ever got into a situation where using nuclear weapons would be considered necessary ?

Probably not.

I think Allahpundit makes an excellent point here:

The idea here, of course, is deterrence — comply with the NPT and you have nothing to fear — but (a) no one, least of all Iran, thinks Barack Obama’s going to use nuclear weapons against targets inside a non-nuclear state whether it’s following the NPT or not, and (b) everyone, including Iran, understands that a devastating attack on the U.S. by whatever means will create such unbearable pressure on the president to retaliate that these rules will be revisited instantly. It’s the nuclear equivalent of his interrogation protocol, essentially. America does not and will not torture captured terrorists as a matter of national policy — but if the CIA really, truly believed that a bomb was about to go off somewhere, don’t be surprised to see that policy politely ignored, to great public acclaim for Obama afterwards for having done what he needed to do to try to get the information.

Or, as Power Line puts it:

Does anyone doubt that the administration would use nukes in a heartbeat if it considered such measures necessary? I don’t. The problem is that when the time comes to actually use nuclear weapons, it is too late. The danger here is not that the Obama administration has really gone pacifist. On the contrary, the significance of today’s announcement appears to be entirely symbolic–just one more chance to preen. The problem is that our enemies understand symbolism and maybe take it too seriously. To them, today’s announcement is another sign that our government has gone soft, and one more inducement to undertake aggressive action against the United States.

In other words, if an attack happens a President will respond with nuclear weapons if they believe it’s necessary regardless of what’s in this policy paper.

It’s the “if an attack happens” part that is the problem.

My concern with this new policy is that it seems to scale back the deterrent value of nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan of all people knew that the only way nukes “worked” is the extent to which they prevented war. If you ever get in a situation where using them is necessary, you’ve already lost, and if we ever get to the point where there has been a terrorist attack on the United States massive enough for the President to be considering nuclear retaliation, we’ve already lost. The point is to deter the attacks from happening in the first place. And the danger I see is that this policy dilutes the deterrent value of America’s nuclear arsenal.

But Obama’s policy isn’t aimed at that issue, it’s aimed at fighting the last war:

The problem is that the President is fighting the last war, not the current one. The nuclear arms race was a desperate problem of the 70s and 80s – but the nuclear problems we face today come from rogue states like Iran and North Korea and from terrorist organizations attaining a small nuclear device. The President is wasting time putting diplomatic pressure on Russia and China over a Cold War issue when he should be more worried about putting pressure on Tehran and Pyongyang.

Let’s face it, the Russians aren’t going to attack us and neither are the Chinese. The people we need to worry about are the Iranians, the North Koreans, and any other nation or terrorist group for whom the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction hasn’t quite sunk in just yet. By telegraphing in advance our plans, we’ve lost a strategic advantage, and we’ve sent a message that the world is going to interpret in ways that the President probably doesn’t want them to.

I will leave the last word, for now, to Roger L. Simon:

I detest nuclear weapons as much as the next person, but this approach seems — I hate to repeat myself, but I will — deranged. It also has very little to do with actually reducing nuclear weapons in the world. Again, it seems like the act of an extreme narcissist, someone who wants to parade himself as anti-nuke while ignoring the checks and balances that have, in fact, kept nuclear weapons in their silos for decades.

Deterrence has worked. And now Obama wants to abandon or diminish it at the very moment Russia is modernizing their arsenal. What a strange person. President Weirdo, indeed. As I said in my previous post, “good luck to us.”

Good luck indeed.

None Found

Iran is poised to begin producing nuclear weapons after its uranium program expansion in 2009, even though it has had problems with thousands of its centrifuges, according to a newly released CIA report.

“Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” the annual report to Congress states.

A U.S. official involved in countering weapons proliferation said the Iranians are “keeping the door open to the possibility of building a nuclear weapon.”

“That’s in spite of strong international pressure not to do so, and some difficulties they themselves seem to be having with their nuclear program,” the official said. “There are powerful incentives for them to close the door completely, but they are either purposefully ignoring them or are tone deaf. You almost want to shout, ‘Tune in Tehran.’”

We’ve seen this before, of course. The United States’ National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 stated that Iran had halted it’s nuclear weapons program in 2003. In February 2009, though, both the United Nations and the United States issued reports saying that the program was further along than previously believed. Less than a month later, though, the Director of National Intelligence seemed to debunk those February reports. But then, last August, we were told that Iran was on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.

So, what exactly are we supposed to believe ?

Well, ABC’s Brian Ross reports on an intelligence coup that may help a little bit:

An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials.

The officials were said to have termed the defection of the scientist, Shahram Amiri, “an intelligence coup” in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment. In its declassified annual report to Congress, the CIA said, “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons though we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons.”

Amiri, a nuclear physicist in his early 30s, went missing last June three days after arriving in Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage, according to the Iranian government. He worked at Tehran’s Malek Ashtar University, which is closely connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, according to the Associated Press.

“The significance of the coup will depend on how much the scientist knew in the compartmentalized Iranian nuclear program,” said former White House counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant. “Just taking one scientist out of the program will not really disrupt it.”

(…)

According to the people briefed on the intelligence operation, Amiri’s disappearance was part of a long-planned CIA operation to get him to defect. The CIA reportedly approached the scientist in Iran through an intermediary who made an offer of resettlement on behalf of the United States.

So does this mean the latest CIA report is more reliable ? Maybe, but even if it is, I’m not sure that it means anything or that it deserves the banner headlines that the media are giving it today. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, and it does not say that Iran has, or is close to having nuclear weapons.

In related news, it appears that President Obama may be weeks away from making a major international push for sanctions against Iran:

(Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday he wanted tougher U.N. sanctions in weeks against Iran over its nuclear program, and the world’s leading industrial nations expressed optimism that China will agree on possible next ste

Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy presented a united front on Iran at a joint White House news conference, saying they felt it was time to move ahead with tougher sanctions that their governments have been negotiating with China, Russia, Germany and Britain.

“My hope is that we are going to get this done this spring,” Obama said. “I’m interested in seeing that regime in place in weeks.”

The problem is that it seems incredibly unlikely to me that Obama will be able to get China on board with a tough sanctions regime simply because China is Iran’s second biggest customer for oil after Japan, and China needs oil. Without China on board, sanctions will be meaningless.

At the same time, it’s unclear what other options there are. Neoconservative dreams to the contrary, war with Iran would not be a cakewalk by any means, and it’s unclear if the U.S. military is currently capable of fighting a third war.

There’s no easy answer here.

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