RSS Feed MenuThe mullahs are closing the doors both on President Obama and themselves – it’s hard to see how a U.S. president can do diplomatic outreach in the middle of this.
In Iran, where there is precedent for executions to surge in the wake of a crisis, human rights groups said there was mounting evidence that the trend had emerged in response to the political tumult that followed the June presidential election. This month, a fifth person connected to the protests was sentenced to death.
In at least one instance, a Kurdish activist was hanged after the government added a new charge, raising concerns that cases with political overtones were drawing more serious penalties.
In the short period between the disputed June election and the inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August, 115 people were executed, according to statistics compiled by human rights groups from Iranian news agencies. Though the executions mostly involved violent criminals and drug dealers, the number and pace of the killings appeared to be sending a message to the opposition, said human rights groups and Iran experts.
“The regime never expected to see people demonstrate so openly since the elections,” said Hossein Askari, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “The executions are intended to frighten them. It is absolutely intended for that purpose.”
The executions have taken place amid rising criticism of Iran’s postelection human rights record. Former officials, intellectuals and journalists have received long prison sentences after brief televised trials, and some prisoners have said they were tortured, raped and sodomized by prison authorities.
So the options are steadily being reduced: those “crippling” sanctions the president keeps approaching – yet somehow never reaching – or else the final stark alternative: acquiescence in a nuclear weapon or acceptance of military action.
sinz54 // Nov 23, 2009 at 9:51 am
When (not if) Iran test-fires its first nuclear bomb,
Israel will be forced to respond militarily after that point, or else face annihilation.
This will be a disaster for the entire Western world, as oil prices soar to record levels. It will be a disaster for America.
But as Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
And we conservatives will hang this entire fiasco around Obama’s neck.
MI-GOPer // Nov 23, 2009 at 10:04 am
Iran is a brutal, cut-throat, terrorist state who will murder its people as readily as Democrat will grab a BoTox syringe. It is part of the Axis of Terror as Bush 43 pointed out and the world –especially the BigHugsHeal Democrats– failed to grasp.
In 2004, it took months of lobbying far Left democrat gays groups, for instance, by concerned, compassionate and caring conservative gay groups before the far Left gays would even condemn Iran for particularly rooting out gays for execution. And then they did it only after 4 multiple murder sprees were carried out and the pictures of the gay youths were leaked to the West.
What is it about condemning terrorists and corrupt regimes that is so foreign to Democrats and far Left activists? I know they think it can be fixed by adopting a strategy of BigHugsHeal… but now the slaughter has spread to political opponents as well.
Maybe Obama needs to rethink his strategy of BigHugsHeal. He didn’t get jack from the ChiComs. He didn’t get jack from his SEAsian trip. He didn’t get jack from NATO or our allies for Iraq or Afghanistan. Chavez and Castro are still fomenting revolution around the world… and Putin is unchecked in eastern Europe.
But the real crime here isn’t that America has been reduced to a bow-wow-kot-tow, BigHugsHeal strategy in foreign affairs… it’s that it all started with that legendary Democrat Idiot JimmineyCricketCarter leaving the Shah high and dry and helping to create the world’s biggest, most radical Islamic terrorist country.
That’s a lot JimmineyCricket. Obama’s term is really just the Carter 2nd term in absentia.
chrisdornan // Nov 23, 2009 at 10:42 am
David, would you please explain how this is relevant to the national security of the United States and Israel? For sure I expect these activities to be condemned, but I don’t otherwise see the connection.
teabag // Nov 23, 2009 at 10:52 am
MI-GOPer. Said wrongly as usual.
“It is part of the Axis of Terror”
The name was the Axis of EVIL. Frum actually coined the phrase. How can you be so wrong in so many ways.
,:-),:-)
MI-GOPer // Nov 23, 2009 at 11:16 am
No, TeaBagged, we can’t say another country is Evil. That would be, according to democrats and the BigHugsHeal strategy, wrong.
We had to adjust it to Axis of Terror because your cowardly metrosexual president declared there is no longer a War On Terror. If republicans are going to be able to spin fear like the democrats, we have to adjust the war on terror to the Axis of Terror.
Your distinction and contribution, per usual, has no value TeaBagged. Get with the program, troll.
hormelmeatco // Nov 23, 2009 at 3:39 pm
MI-GOPer: The entire Obama-Jimmy Carter 2.0 narrative doesn’t work. It was the last presidet whose party lost power because of a bad economy and foreign policy blunders. If a tougher stance is more effective, what do Bush, Rice, Cheney and Rumsfeld (and Frum, while we’re at it) have to show for it? The last time they said there was imminent nuclear danger from a middle Eastern country, we got…. Iraq.
Surely you can understand why I’m skeptical when the same group of people beat the same drum again.
Carney // Nov 24, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Overall, the Right has it right on Iran, with one exception – we are too closed-minded about getting off oil.
ALL oil.
Even oil drilled, refined, and sold in America enriches Iran. How? Because oil is fungible and as a practical matter the world oil market operates like a single entity – in effect, all the oil from all sources goes into a single pot, customers buy it, and then the proceeds get split up according to the proportion each contributor put in. The “all American” oil I described above could have been sold overseas but wasn’t, so its removal from availability on the international market makes oil that much more scarce for the world market, enabling Iran to charge that much more for its oil from those who DO do business with it.
Sanctions or no sanctions, every drop of gasoline you buy, wherever you buy it, whomever you buy it from, enriches Iran, funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, buys Explosively Formed Penetrators that are piercing US armor and killing our men, and keeps the machinery of repression, fanaticism, hate, and terror going. This is what the “drill baby drill” chanters need to have drilled into their skulls.
There is no alternative to getting off oil to de-fund the enemy, and our failure to do so has been a national scandal since 1973 when the Arab oil embargo first devastated our economy.
Yes, the Left, with its Malthusian anti-human anti-American agenda of austerity, controls, limits, and hatred of the American culture of free roaming individualism and powerful robust vehicles, is obnoxious. We are quite right to resist being forced to pay 4 or 5 extra figures for hybrid capability, or being stuffed into humiliating tiny fragile slow weak Euro-toy cars, or herded obediently into mass transit and passively submit to going only when and where bureaucrats decide are best.
However, that does not mean gasoline is the fuel we should use in our big brawny all American vehicles. We have 25% of world oil demand but when it comes to oil reserves we have only 3% and the Mideast has 70%, and that’s not counting Venezuela and Russia.
There are a number of alternatives – some fraudulent, others physically possible but sub-optimal. The one that is the most affordable, practical, and co-compatible with gasoline in the same machinery so as to make the transition easiest, is alcohol fuel.
“Flex fuel” technology allows a car to run as easily on any alcohol fuel as on gasoline, and it costs automakers only $130 per car to add. They haven’t made it a standard feature because there isn’t much consumer demand; there isn’t much consumer demand for the feature because people don’t see alcohol fuel pumps being available; there are few alcohol fuel pumps because there are few alcohol compatible cars on the road. We have to break through this chicken-and-egg dilemma in order to stop funding our enemies. Some recognize this and have tried approaches such as subsidizing ethanol, giving tax breaks to gas stations that install ethanol pumps, and giving automakers a break on mileage requirements if they include some flex fuel capability. But none of that has been effective enough. We need to just make flex fuel capability a standard feature, like seat belts and air bags, and thus it needs to be a mandate.
Yes I know that causes howls from purists but that is a much less intrusive and complex step than what we have been doing so far. Once alcohol fuel capability is a normal part of new cars, the market share of alcohol compatible cars will rise sharply so that in 3-4 years, most gas stations will have at least one alcohol pump, if only to prevent their neighbors from undercutting them with methanol, which is consistently cheap.
See former NASA rocket scientist and nuclear engineer (and dedicated enemy of the jihad) Robert Zubrin’s book “Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil”, or his website at EnergyVictory.net
hormelmeatco // Nov 24, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Ethanol is the worst solution for replacing fossil fuels, no matter what the objective behind the replacement is.
Why? They have to use as much fossil fuels to fertilize the corn, harvest it, transport it, process it and refine the product. The same amount of fossil fuels are still used, but it’s worse because all of the steps mean that some energy is lost in the process. It’s more energy-efficient to just use fossil fuels. Ethanol has less energy per unit of mass than gasoline, and methanol has less than ethanol.
Ethanol only became a big deal because the first presidential primaries are held in Iowa.
Carney // Nov 25, 2009 at 10:27 am
hormelmeatco, the REPEATEDLY PROVEN FALSE claim about ethanol needing more fossil fuel to make it than the fuel it yields is pushed most prominently by a quack named David Pimentel.
Like most cranks, Pimentel is not an actual credentialed expert in the subjects he writes on – think Chomsky on foreign policy. He is merely an entomologist, rather than an authority on agriculture, energy, or engineering. He opposes all modern agriculture, including the Green Revolution that saved billions from starvation. He has made the crazy claim that 40% of all world deaths are caused by pollutants. He is a hardcore Malthusian who wants to reduce the world’s population by two-thirds, and the USA’s standard of living by half. He is even opposed to pet ownership, calling dogs and cats “invasive species” in America.
And yet conservative and free market think tanks, to their shame, repeatedly and uncritically spam his “studies” and their myths into the public debate and the right’s consciousness, long after they have been refuted in the refereed literature! And they have been refuted, about as thoroughly as it is possible for something to be in science.
Pimentel’s “greatest hit” paper claiming more fuel in vs. out for ethanol was published in 2001 (together with his usual collaborator, Patzek, an oil industry man), and it was promptly eviscerated in 2002 by Dr. Dale Bruce of Michigan State. Bruce, naturally, is an actual chemical engineer. Among the many shady tricks in Pimentel’s paper were:
-failing to assign any energy credit for the high-value, high-protein animal feed that is a byproduct of ethanol production from corn (that livestock would have had to have been fed somehow);
-using corn yields from back in 1992 (thus underestimated because they are constantly rising- Iowa now produces more corn than the entire US in the 1940s and per acre crop yields are up 17% since 2002 alone);
-using figures for the energy needed to produce ethanol dating from way back in 1979 (!) and for the energy needed to make fertilizer are from 1990 (even worse, the latter are world figures from the UN’s FAO, not the far more efficient US figure), thus radically overestimating the energy necessary;
-assuming all corn is irrigated when only 16% of corn is and NEARLY NO ETHANOL CORN IS (which alone completely destroys his claim since he assigns a huge energy cost for irrigation);
there’s more but I’ll skip it – think Little League mercy rules.
The most comprehensive study ever done of the fuel-in vs fuel-out issue for ethanol was published in the January 2006 issue of the most prestigious peer-reviewed publication in the world, “Science”. (“Nature” is the other top-tier journal.) That study was a comprehensive and sweeping survey of the entire body of scientific literature in existence on the subject, and the results were conclusive.
Even using Pimentel’s biased and fatally flawed figures and assumptions (see above), the “Science” paper proved that for every gallon of petroleum involved in making ethanol, you get five gallons of ethanol. Using more widely accepted, mainstream assumptions and figures, you get at LEAST ten gallons of ethanol. And that’s with using petroleum-fueled tractors, trucks, trains, and barges – think if those vehicles used alcohol fuel instead.
Finally, you don’t even have to delve into the technical literature or dismiss this as a matter of squabbling professors to realize the truth. If ethanol really did require more energy to make than it yields, nobody could make money selling it. Yes, it’s subsidized in the US, but that’s to prop prices UP to keep out cheap foreign ethanol, and the subsidy is less than 60 cents a gallon. If it took more energy to make than it yields the subsidy would need to be far more than the retail price. Claiming ethanol needs more fuel to make than it yields is thus a failure of basic numeracy, or honesty, or a result of being fooled by such failure.
Yes, gasoline yields more miles per unit of volume than alcohol, but that is its ONLY advantage. If we tore down our stupid tariff walls, and made methanol part of the standard as well, alcohol fuel would give consumers far more miles per DOLLAR. The inconvenience of refueling 3 or 4 times a month in place of 2 is not crippling and is worth it compared to the relief to our economy from the threat of more wild swings in oil prices according to OPEC’s whims, not to mention another strike from terrorists radicalized by oil-funded propaganda, trained by oil-funded camps, and armed with oil-funded weapons. And if you’re really going to whine about MPGs, which are basically irrelevant when a fuel is renewable, permanently affordable, clean-burning, and non enemy funding, we can always make the fuel tanks in our cars a little bigger (did I mention alcohol is safer, less likely to explode in crashes)?