A TWOFER FROM MELANIE PHILLIPS
Read his lips. Why do so few do so?
Excellent, if utterly chilling, analysis by the excellent Greg Sheridan in the Australian of the way in which the world is sitting on its hands while Iran proceeds to acquire nuclear weapons in order to realise its openly declared aim of destroying the west. His point is that not only will even more stringent sanctions not work, but that even if Israel bombs Iran’s nuclear facilities it can at best only delay Iran going nuclear. And the one country that could stop it will not:
The US could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities far more effectively than Israel could, but to do so would be foreign to every instinct of the Obama administration. It would also be hugely risky. But the risks of not acting are even greater. Nonetheless, the portents are strong that the Obama administration will dither.
… Most Western analysts refuse to take Islamic religion seriously as a factor in geopolitics, assuming there must always be a rational national-interest explanation for any state’s behaviour. The truth is that history is littered with states behaving irrationally and pursuing irrational ends, and doing so in often self-destructive ways… It is intensely ahistorical to believe political regimes will always act according to Western conceptions of enlightened self-interest.
It is striking, to this British observer at least, how very unlikely it would be to encounter anywhere in the British media such a well-informed, realistic and intelligent analysis of the Iranian crisis and the paralysis of the west.
AND: WHERE IS JUDGE GALLSTONE?
Yet another amazing surprise
The BBC reports:
Taliban militants are increasingly using civilians as ‘human shields’ as they battle against a joint Afghan-Nato offensive, an Afghan general has said. Gen Mohiudin Ghori said his soldiers had seen Taliban fighters placing women and children on the roofs of buildings and firing from behind them.
… Gen Ghori, the senior commander for Afghan troops in the area, accused the Taliban of taking civilians hostage in Marjah and putting them in the line of fire. ‘Especially in the south of Marjah, the enemy is fighting from compounds where soldiers can very clearly see women or children on the roof or in a second-floor or third-floor window,’ he is quoted by Associated Press as saying. ‘They are trying to get us to fire on them and kill the civilians.’
As a result, his forces were having to make the choice either not to return fire, he said, or to advance much more slowly in order to distinguish militants from civilians.
Where’s the UN Human Rights Council? Where’s Judge Goldstone?
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