McNamara Speaks  

Weirdly enough, the same day I was blogging about him in "The Fog Of War" and how this related to the Iran situation, he was on the ABC talking about exactly that (along with the North Koreans). Ah, synchronicity.

The quesion to ask is - is the Bush administration simply ignoring the risks, or do they want to provoke a war (and you can go to town with dieoff conspiracy theories from there) ?

Former US Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara played a significant role in US nuclear policy as part of the
Kennedy and Johnson White Houses. Robert McNamara says both so-called 'axis of evil' countries are willing to negotiate on nuclear issues, but it's President Bush who's posturing.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: The issue is, what can the US do to meet North Korea's and Iran's objections? In the case of North Korea, they state that if the US will agree not to carry out aggression against North Korea, they will engage in negotiations.

We never had any intention of committing aggression against North Korea. Why in God's name won't we say it? That's the way we ended the Cuban missile crisis. We guaranteed Kruschev not to commit aggression against Cuba. Why can't we do the same with North Korea?

In the case of Iran, they say they want fuel for their civilian reactors. Why can't we, the US, join with the six European powers and guarantee them that fuel. Each of these countries appears willing to negotiate in ways that we, the US, are unwilling to enter.

I think McNamara should remember his own words - they ended the Cuban missile crisis because they put themselves in the Russians shoes (and trading US missiles in Turkey for Russian missiles in Cuba was a fair compromise - although he didn't mention that aspect). They failed to end the Vietnam war for 10 years after it was lost because they never tried to see the war from the point of view of the Vietnamese (well - thats one view of it anyway - Noam Chomsky has a rather different view).

Elsewhere, WorldNutDaily is pushing for a "preemptive" strike on Tehran ("Project Daniel").

Jerusalem: With Tehran announcing it will shortly resume some nuclear activities in spite of ongoing negotiations with European countries, a private report that was issued to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urging an American or Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iran has been gaining some steam here.

Reports continue to stream in that Iran – with the assistance of Russia – has been moving ahead with its nuclear program. Several reactors with advanced production capabilities have been built, and Russia has been contemplating providing Tehran with rods that are able to enrich uranium, a deal that was first reported last September.

Russia also recently trained a group of senior Iranian nuclear scientists and has installed a mobile anti-missile system to protect Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, with similar systems allegedly in the works for other Iranian nuclear facilities, including a facility in central Iran.

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