The pinstripe set is going gaga at the opportunities inherent to diplomatic engagement with Iran over shared interests in Afghanistan:
The Russian initiative brought together Patrick Moon, the US diplomat in charge of south and central Asia, and Mehdi Akhundzadeh, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, as well as a British diplomat who has been acting as a mediator.
“We’ve turned a page to have Iranians and Americans at the same table all discussing Afghanistan,” Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told delegates.
A western official who attended the talks said: “For the first time in two years I’m optimistic about Afghanistan.”
It followed Nato’s first official contact with Iran two weeks ago, when the Iranian ambassador visited Nato’s assistant secretary-general to discuss drugs and refugees.
Friday’s meeting was held under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a six-member regional security group including Russia, China and central Asian states, to discuss combating terrorism and drug trafficking in Afghanistan.
Skeptics who believe that Russian-facilitated talks with its Iranian client might have motives antithetical to our own will please be silent: Only think of the travel opportunities, the endless coffee table huddles, the inevitable stultifying “resolution” recalling, reaffirming, expressing, endorsing, underlining, acting, deploring, condemning, demanding, deciding, welcoming and encouraging, calling and affirming – it could keep a man in work for decades!
You could make a career out of it.
Missile experts from Iran are in North Korea to help Pyongyang prepare for a rocket launch, according to reports.
Amid increasing global concern over the launch, which the US and its allies consider to be illegal, Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper claimed today that a 15-strong delegation from Tehran has been in the country advising the North Koreans since the beginning of March.
The experts include senior officials from the Iranian rocket and satellite producer Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, the newspaper said.
The Iranians brought a letter from President Ahmadinejad to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il stressing the importance of co-operating on space technology, it added.
Iranian co-operation: It’s breaking out everywhere.
“Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview broadcast Sunday he thinks North Korea will launch a missile soon and there’s not much the U.S. can do to stop it.”
“I would say we’re not prepared to do anything about it,” Gates told “Fox News Sunday.”
Wonder who the “we” is that he refers to in that quote? Bet USS McCain is “prepared”. Hopefully -maybe – under another President probably – we’ve given JMSDF the green light – plausible deniability and all.
So we got Iran in Lebanon, Iran in Iraq, Iran in N Korea, and now Iran in AfPak. I think the House of Saud/Sunnis needs to be “concerned”. The cranial-spasmectomy that some of our diplomats show is depressingly humorous. Probably the same type that believe a hungry tiger respects the difference between your hand and the hunk of goat you’re holding.
The mark of the
imPOTUS
Most excellent observation and labeling!
Lex, shouldn’t this be Tagged under buffoonery?
General or specific?
This should all be tagged ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘WTF’.
The past month and a half I’ve listened to the international ‘community’ and NPR bash away at the pope for rescinding the excommunication of a holocaust denying loon of a priest. An event so significant, evidently, that German Chancellor Merkel lashed out at the pope – absurdly demanding he reject holocaust denial (absurd because he and the Catholic church have done so repeatedly).
Meanwhile, everyone is applauding the new administration reaching out to an Iranian president who convened and gave the keynote address at the holocaust denial conference in Tehran in 2006 – attended by such luminaries as David Duke.
Maybe if the Vatican had nukes, actively supported terrorism, and proliferated missile technology people wouldn’t mind so much.
I so hate to say this but…
If the NoKos launch a missle and no one; Japan or the U.S. blows it out, I think the game will have changed…
How could Obama possibly ignore this, especially if it splashes around Alaska?
I am somewhat of a defeatist. The American public is so asleep that it will take another absurd attack against us to wake them again.