Rob Edwards | HeraldScotland.com

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran Dan Plesch, director, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy,” University of London

Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.

Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities. There has long been speculation that the US military is preparing for such an attack, should diplomacy fail to persuade Iran not to make nuclear weapons.

Although Diego Garcia is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, it is used by the US as a military base under an agreement made in 1971. The agreement led to 2,000 native islanders being forcibly evicted to the Seychelles and Mauritius.

The Sunday Herald reported in 2007 that stealth bomber hangers on the island were being equipped to take bunker-buster bombs.

Although the story was not confirmed at the time, the new evidence suggests that it was accurate.

Contract details for the shipment to Diego Garcia were posted on an international tenders’ website by the US navy.

A shipping company based in Florida, Superior Maritime Services, will be paid $699,500 to carry many thousands of military items from Concord, California, to Diego Garcia.

Crucially, the cargo includes 195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 massive 2000lb Blu-117 bombs.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” said Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran. “US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he added.
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Helen Thomas | CommonDreams.org 

President Barack Obama does have a foreign policy. It’s called war.

The President has not defined any real difference between his hawkish approach to international issues and that of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush.

Where’s the change we can believe in?

Bush left a legacy of two wars, neither of which was ever fully explained or justified. Obama has merely picked up the sword that Bush left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the struggle against terrorism, one might say, “Who cares?”

One group that cares consists of Americans who follow the rules and think we should honor all the treaties we have promoted and signed over the years.

The President gave short shrift to foreign policy in his State of the Union address, mentioning neither the lives lost nor the cost of the global hostilities that the U.S. has involved itself in. He also didn’t mention U.S. policies in the Middle East, though those are the root cause of many of our problems.

While U.S. special envoy George Mitchell has a hopeful outlook for the resumption of the stalemated talks between the Israelis and Palestinians after a year of trying, Obama seems to have temporarily thrown in the towel.

Obama said he was keeping his promise to leave Iraq by the end of August.

Meanwhile, frequent suicide bombings continue in that beleaguered country.

Afghanistan is a different story. U.S. forces there are involved in manhunts of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders. But the cost in civilian life is heavy when drones are used and whole families have been wiped out to get one suspected leader.

The U.S. seems to have convinced the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan that it’s their war too. The Washington Post said the loss of Hakimullah Mehsud has dealt a fatal blow to his followers.

The U.S. military web has spread to Yemen, where American intelligence teams have joined Yemeni troops in planning missions against al-Qaida elements. Scores have been killed there.

Then there’s the ramped-up U.S. saber-rattling toward Iran.

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Jason Ditz | AntiWar.com

Though officials in the Obama Administration have been publicly neutral about the new round of sanctions against Iran moving its may through the House and Senate, the administration is quietly supporting the efforts, despite the deleterious affect they may have on negotiations.

Iran is in the process of negotiating with the P5+1 on a draft deal for third party enrichment of its uranium for medical isotopes. The House and Senate measures would punish corporations that import refined petroleum to Iran in an effort to punish Iran for refusing US demands to abandon its program entirely.

But while there seems to be very little resistance within the US to moving forward with more unilateral sanctions against Iran, the ability to push forward more sanctions in the UN Security Council is very much in doubt, and Russia says such moves are virtually impossible, at least for the time being.

Though America’s own National Intelligence Estimate confirms that this is not the case, the Obama Administration has repeatedly accused Iran of having an active nuclear weapons program, and Congress is eager to act against the illusory threat.

The lying game: how we are prepared for another war of aggression

JohnPilger.com

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger compares the current drum-beating for war against Iran, based on a fake “nuclear threat”, with the manufacture of a sense of false crisis that led to invasion of Iraq and the deaths of 1.3 million people.

In 2001, the Observer in London published a series of reports that claimed an “Iraqi connection” to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths.

Something similar is happening over Iran: the same syncopation of government and media “revelations”, the same manufacture of a sense of crisis. “Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant”, declared the Guardian on 26 September. “Showdown” is the theme. High noon. The clock ticking. Good versus evil. Add a smooth new US president who has “put paid to the Bush years”. An immediate echo is the notorious Guardian front page of 22 May 2007: “Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq”. Based on unsubstantiated claims by the Pentagon, the writer Simon Tisdall presented as fact an Iranian “plan” to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq by September of that year – a demonstrable falsehood for which there has been no retraction.

The official jargon for this kind of propaganda is “psy-ops”, the military term for psychological operations. In the Pentagon and Whitehall, it has become a critical component of a diplomatic and military campaign to blockade, isolate and weaken Iran by hyping its “nuclear threat”: a phrase now used incessantly by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, and parroted by the BBC and other broadcasters as objective news. And it is fake.
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 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew the wrath of Israel’s most influential newspapers on Thursday over what they described as lies issued by his office about a secret flight to Russia.

Netanyahu’s first major media fiasco since taking office six months ago began with a simple question many Israelis, using their leader’s nickname, asked on Monday: Where’s Bibi?

Explaining why he had disappeared from public view for a day, a statement issued on Monday by the prime minister’s office quoted his military attache as saying that Netanyahu had visited a security installation in Israel.

Israeli media reported he had toured a facility belonging to the Mossad intelligence agency.

But on Wednesday, Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Netanyahu had, in fact, flown secretly to Moscow to voice concern over the possible sale of Russian anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.

Keeping sensitive matters under wraps, newspaper commentators said, could be acceptable on grounds of national security.

But a false cover story? Israeli media, which have long abided by military censorship rules that force them to sit on security-related news, were outraged.

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Prof. Peter Dale Scott | GlobalResearch.ca 

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Dwight David Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1961,[1]

“My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington.” Former SAIC manager, quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007[2]

“We make American military doctrine” Ed Soyster, MPRI[3]

The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur

	The post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power

In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence.

The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing “the Great Game,” and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan.

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Justin Raimondo | AntiWar.com 

Only Richard Nixon, whose political career was launched and sustained by an ostensibly militant anti-communism, could have traveled to China, and – with conservative support — effected a de facto strategic alliance with a country long considered an implacable enemy. This Nixon-to-China meme is regularly invoked as aphoristic evidence that we must expect the unexpected, and it comes to mind when considering the prospects of an impending military conflict with Iran: it occurs to me that only Barack Obama, who won the White House in large part due to his opposition to the Iraq war, could take us to war with Iran, and rally liberals and much of the left behind it.

Oh, I can hear the outraged howls of protest from the Obama cult, but consider:

The president has already set a September deadline for Iran to respond to our as-yet-informal proposal to negotiate over the completely phony nuclear issue – an oddly confrontational approach to opening the first on-the-record high level talks with the Islamic Republic since the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

The nuke issue is phony because our own intelligence community, speaking through the CIA, determined “with high confidence” the Iranians gave up their nuclear weapons program in 2003. Yet Obama has repeatedly said Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons. The great sigh of relief we all breathed when the CIA assessment was made public last year – effectively blocking any last-minute attempt by the Bushies to strike Iran in the waning days  of Dubya’s reign – gives way to new anxieties.

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Jason Ditz | AntiWar.com 

In an interview today on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulus,” Vice President Joe Biden said it was up to the Israeli government to decide if Iran constituted an existential threat and that the nation was “entitled” to launch a military strike against the nation if they wanted to.

Biden said the United States would make no effort to dissuade the Israeli government from launching an attack on Iran, but was deliberately evasive on the question of whether the US would provide Israel with access to Iraqi airspace for the strike, saying he didn’t want to “speculate.”

Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran over the past several years, and the right-wing coalition government elected earlier this year won largely on a platform of taking an even more hawkish position toward Iran than previous administraitons had.

At issue is Iran’s civilian nuclear program, which despite a lack of evidence Israel claims is being used to construct a nuclear weapon in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel is itself not a signatory of the NPT, and has a large, undeclared nuclear arsenal.

US defense officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have warned that a military attack on Iran, whether by the US or Israel, would be blamed on the US and would create a “disastrous backlash.”

Chen Aizhu | Guardian.co.uk 

Iran overtook Saudi Arabia in May as China’s top crude supplier, Chinese customs data showed on Monday, but traders said it was partly due to a supply cut from the Saudis.

Beijing-based trading officials cautioned against reading too much into one month’s figures, which they said may have been skewed due to technical problems such as port congestion that pushed back or forth imported cargoes for customs clearance.

Iran, the world’s fifth-largest crude exporter, shipped into China 3.088 million tonnes of crude, or 727,000 barrels per day last month, a rise of 88 percent from a year ago.

Exports from the world’s top exporter, Saudi Arabia, however, slipped 15.5 percent on year to 2.76 million tonnes, or 650,000 bpd, official data from the General Administration of Customs showed.

“Saudis can’t supply the amount of heavy grades Chinese refineries asked for, as most of the OPEC-agreed cuts are on these heavy grades,” said one trader close to state-run Saudi Aramco.

“Chinese may have sorted it out by taking more such grades from Iran.”

But the trader said cuts on heavier grades to China — Arab Medium and Arab Heavy

– started at the beginning of the year, suggesting the sudden fall in May could be just a blip.

An official with the National Iranian Oil Co said he was not aware of any additional sales that Iran had made above its contractual volumes.

Chinese refiner Sinopec Corp and PetroChina, with many of their plants upgraded in recent years to process more heavy, sour and thus cheaper crude, have become increasingly picky in crude slates, motivated by a new fuel pricing mechanism since January 2009 that more or less guarantees a fixed margin.

Iran’s oil output and exports were not affected by protests after the June 12 presidential election, Iran’s OPEC governor said last week.

 Ken Dilanian | GlobalResearch.ca

Global Research Editor’s Note

This report published in USA Today confirms unequivocally that Washington has directly financed dissident groups in Iran. 

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is moving forward with plans to fund groups that support Iranian dissidents, records and interviews show, continuing a program that became controversial when it was expanded by President Bush.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which reports to the secretary of state, has for the last year been soliciting applications for $20 million in grants to “promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Iran,” according to documents on the agency’s website. The final deadline for grant applications is June 30.

MORE: USAID report on support to Iranian dissidents

U.S. efforts to support Iranian opposition groups have been criticized in recent years as veiled attempts to promote “regime change,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, the largest Iranian-American advocacy group. The grants enable Iran’s rulers to paint opponents as tools of the United States, he said.

Although the Obama administration has not sought to continue the Iran-specific grants in its 2010 budget, it wants a $15 million boost for the Near Eastern Regional Democracy Initiative, which has similar aims but does not specify the nations involved. Some of that money will be targeted at Iran, said David Carle, a spokesman for the appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign affairs.

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Jeff Stein | CQPolitics.com 

He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
 
Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched him to Damascus as Iran’s ambassador, according to former CIA and military officials.

The ambassador in turn hosted several meetings of the cell that would carry out the Beirut attacks, which were overheard by the National Security Agency.

“We had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Syria,” retired Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons related by telephone Monday. In 1983 Lyons was deputy chief of Naval Operations, and deeply involved in the events in Lebanon.

“The Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target U.S. personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a ’spectacular action’ against the Marines,” said Lyons.

“He was prime minister,” Lyons said of Mousavi, “so he didn’t get down to the details at the lowest levels. “But he was in a principal position and had to be aware of what was going on.”

Lyons, sometimes called “the father” of the Navy SEALs’ Red Cell counter-terror unit, also fingered Mousavi for the 1988 truck bombing of the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Center in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons, including the first Navy woman to die in a terrorist attack.   

Bob Baer agrees that Mousawi, who has been celebrated in the West for sparking street demonstrations against the Teheran regime since he lost the elections, was directing the overall 1980s terror campaign.

But Baer, a former CIA Middle East field officer whose exploits were dramatized in the George Clooney movie “Syriana,”  places Mousavi even closer to the Beirut bombings.

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01/19/09

Mehr News Agency | Payvand.com 

Iran has broken up a CIA-backed network that sought to carry out a “soft revolution” in Iran through people-to-people contacts. The “soft revolution” plan is based in Dubai and is similar to a U.S. plan that targeted the Soviet Union in 1959, the director of the counterespionage department of the Intelligence Ministry told reporters at a press conference here on Monday.

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Paul Craig Roberts | InfoWars.com

A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the release of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.

As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei. Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.

There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs’ lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad’s attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.
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The cowardly Democrats who checked their spines at the door to Congress when they voted Tuesday try to defend their flip-flop on war funding. Frankly, it is embarrassing.

By Jeremy Scahill | RebelReports.com

Over the past few days, we reported on how the White House and Democratic Congressional Leadership waged a dirty campaign to scare up votes to support another $106 billion in funds for their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, several of the so-called anti-war Democrats who left their principles at the House coat check on their way in to vote Tuesday are trying to explain away their hypocritical votes.

New York Democrat Anthony Weiner, who voted against the war funding in May—when it didn’t matter—only to vote Tuesday with the pro-war Dems, sounded like an imbecile when he made this statement after the vote: “We are in the process of wrapping up the wars. The president needed our support.” What planet is Weiner living on? “Wrapping up the wars?” Last time I checked, there are 21,000 more US troops heading to Afghanistan alongside a surge in contractors there, including a 29% increase in armed contractors. Does Weiner think the $106 billion in war funding he voted for is going to pay for one way tickets home for the troops? What he voted for was certainly not the “Demolition of the 80 Football-field-size US Embassy in Baghdad Act of 2009.” To cap off this idiocy, Weiner basically admitted he is a fraud when he said the bill he voted in favor of “still sucks.”

Jan Schakowsky, who has done some incredibly important work on Blackwater and the privatized war machine, also voted against the supplemental in May, but switched her vote on Tuesday. “I do believe my president is a peacemaker,” Schakowsky said. “I’m going to give him what he wants.” A peacemaker who is expanding war? Moreover, what happened to the system of “checks and balances?” If Congressmembers, especially anti-war ones like Schakowsky, start just giving the president “what he wants,” then where is the peoples’ voice?

How are these people sleeping at night?

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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

The BBC has again been caught engaging in mass public deception by using photographs of pro-Ahmadinejad rallies in Iran and claiming they represent anti-government protests in favor of Hossein Mousavi.

An image used by the L.A. Times on the front page of its website Tuesday showed Iranian President Ahmadinejad waving to a crowd of supporters at a public event.

In a story covering the election protests yesterday, the BBC News website used a closer shot of the same scene, but with Ahmadinejad cut out of the frame. The caption under the photograph read, ‘Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests’.

The BBC photograph is clearly a similar shot of the same pro-Ahmadinejad rally featured in the L.A. Times image, yet the caption erroneously claims it represents anti-Ahmadinejad protesters.

See the screenshots below (click to enlarge).

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During a discussion with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last Friday, Trilateral Commission co-founder and top Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke of those who question the official version of events on 9/11 in the same context as those who deny the holocaust.

The two were analyzing Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, and in particular, his tacit warning regarding 9/11 Truth.

During the speech Obama said “I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11,” suggesting that anyone who asks questions about the attacks also somehow justifies them.

“But let us be clear: al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day …These are not opinions to be debated, these are facts to be dealt with.” Obama asserted.

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AFP | RawStory.com

US President Barack Obama made a major gesture of conciliation to Iran on Thursday when he admitted US involvement in the 1953 coup which overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

“In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,” Obama said during his keynote speech to the Muslim world in Cairo.

It is the first time a serving US president has publicly admitted American involvement in the coup.

The CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry, run until then in by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests.

Obama also said: “For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us.

“Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known.

“Rather than remain trapped in the past, I’ve made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question now is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build.”

Shortly after Obama’s inauguration on January 20, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanded apologies for “crimes” he said the United States had committed against Iran, starting with the 1953 coup.

PressTV.ir

As Washington gets updates on Israeli plans to strike Iran, US President Barack Obama orders the Pentagon to rejuvenate contingency plans for the use of military in Iran.

Despite the prospects of diplomatic engagement with Tehran over its nuclear program, Defense Secretary and Pentagon chief Robert Gates said Friday that the White House has not ruled out the possibility of a military strike if diplomacy was to fail.

“Presidents always ask their military to have a range of contingency plans available to them,” Gates told NBC television. “And all I would say is that, as a result of our dialogue with the president, we’ve refreshed our plans and all options are on the table.”

In a turnabout from the policies of the Bush administration, President Obama says he seeks to diplomatically engage Iran over its disputed nuclear program.

Iran, which favors diplomacy to resolve the nuclear differences with the West, says the program is directed at the civilian applications of the technology.

The US and Israel, however, accuse the country of seeking military objectives in its pursuit.

The defense secretary’s remarks come shortly after a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington.

Netanyahu’s visit exposed deep differences between the two administrations over issues such as the stalled peace talks with the Palestinians and the US approach to deal with Iran.

According to the Israeli Radio, Netanyahu told Obama that Israel reserves the right to take unilateral military action against Iran, refusing to make a promise to follow the US lead.

The nuclear issue aside, President Obama’s decision to engage Tehran in direct talks has raised concern in Israel that rapprochement between the two rivals — which have not had diplomatic ties for nearly three decades — would ultimately cool Tel Aviv’s relations with its main ally.

Netanyahu’s visit to the US has raised fears that the US president may have failed to avert an impending war in the volatile Middle East.

Israel, the possessor of Middle East’s sole nuclear arsenal, has long strived to portray Iran as a regime hell-bent on an imminent nuclear war.

Iran says it has no plans to attack any country but continues to beef up its military capabilities to deter threats such as those originating from Israel.

The United States is planning to escalate aerial bombing raids on Pakistan’s tribal areas in tandem with efforts to force moderate elements of the Taliban to the negotiating table, the Telegraph has learned.

Dean Nelson & Ben Farmer | Telegraph.co.uk

Officials in contact with the State Department said on Sunday that a new offensive would see a dramatic increase in Predator drone attacks on Taliban targets in defiance of Pakistani objections to cross-border attacks.

President Barack Obama on Sunday admitted that the US military was pushing for talks with the Taliban, but officials consulted on the plans said the military conflict would be raised to new levels of intensity before talks could begin. “There will be talks but the Taliban are going to experience a lot of pain first, on both sides of the border,” said one senior Western diplomat.

There are hopes of establishing a “hammer and anvil” encirclement of the Taliban with the Pakistan Army expected to extend its bombardment of terrorist safe havens within the Tribal Area’s Bajaur agency.

President Obama told the New York Times that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan as he hinted at the possibility of talks with the Taliban insurgents. The US leader said General David Petraeus, one of the key strategists in the war on al-Qaeda and its allies, believed “part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists.

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The US has reportedly offered to shelve its missile defense shield in Europe if Russia withdraws its support for Iran’s nuclear program.

PressTV.ir

Russian daily Kommersant cited White House sources as saying on Monday that President Barack Obama has made a proposal to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev asking to change position on Iran in exchange for a halt to the US missile shield plan.

The report comes as plans for the installation of anti ballistic missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic have contributed to the deterioration of White House-Kremlin relations over the past few years.

The missile shield plan has rankled Moscow, as it sees the system as a threat to its national security. President Obama has addressed the Russian concern by saying that he wants to press the “reset button” and build better relations with Moscow.

According to Kommersant, since President Obama has been sworn into office in January the American and Russian presidents have only exchanged letters and had one telephone conversation.

The controversial defense shield is expected to be discussed when President Obama and Medvedev meet on April 2 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in London.
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