So says John Bolton, late of the UN, and so does Alan Dershowitz. They are calling on The Hague to hear their charges against Iran.
Mr Bolton will be joined in tomorrow’s launch of the legal action against Mr Ahmadinejad by a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, and the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, together with experts from the US, Canada and Israel. A suit will be lodged with the international court of justice at The Hague, which will decide whether to hear the action. The panel said the Iranian president was guilty of inciting genocide “by making numerous threats against the United States, calling for the destruction of Israel and instigating discrimination against Christians and Jews”. His words violate a 1948 UN genocide convention, to which Iran is a signatory, they said.
Does this have anything to do with Kofi Annan’s departure from the scene? Does his exit open the way to pull in the reins on Iran?
The best that Iran could pull off in the way of famous guests is David Duke. This would be a joke were it not part of a larger strategy by Iran to wear down world resistance by repeating its mantra that Israel must “be wiped off the map.” It is not enough to destroy Israel, it must be obliterated, as though it never existed to begin with.
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However, this “conference” seems to have awakened the sleeping heads of state. Tony Blair and Germany’s chancellor have both issued strong statements that Iran’s revisionist “history” will not be allowed to stand. Neither said what they were willing to do about it, however. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad bloviates on, certain that his Chinese water torture repetition will erode support for Israel:
Thanks to people’s wishes and God’s will, the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want,” he said.
Israel is living proof that what does not kill me makes me stronger.
Iran is on the way to becoming another provocative Iraq, hoping to cause more global conflict, sucking in other players, and thereby bringing that much closer Ahmadinejad’s retro fantasy of a Judenrein world.
Mr. Bolton’s remarks will come tomorrow, according to the Guardian.
Barely a week after he announced his resignation from the UN post, Mr Bolton will appear tomorrow among a panel of diplomats and lawyers calling for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be prosecuted. The panel has been convened by a Jewish umbrella group in the US, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.
With what we know of Mr. Bolton’s penchant for blunt, direct talk, this should be quite a speech.
I look forward to tomorrow morning.
16 comments:
Its unfortunate that discussions about an historical episode almost gone from living memory evoke harsher criticism and generate more excitement than the fact that the host nation is about to acquire nuclear weapons. What an odd world we live in.
Dymphna, I believe you have misprepresented Mr Bolton with the ".. Holocaust Denial is Genocide" headline.
Article 3
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Mad Jad's tirades quite clearly are in breach of the Geneva 1948 convention para 3 subpara c. That is in line with what the article reports. The article does not indicate that the denial conference itself is part of the charges against Iran, which were announced to coincide with the offending conference.
Sorry, but this post has a misleading and sensational headline worthy of the BBC.
As scott points out, Mad Jad's present threats should be far far more important than amateur revisionists picking over old history, the two should be confused.
that is not be confused.
I tried to make the title short whilst still getting in the genocide aspect of the charges being brought against Ahmadinejad.
You're right, the title was misleading...I ought to have said "inciting genocide." That would have been accurate, though longer.
At any rate, I'm glad there is some attempt to rein in this madman. Not that the Hague is going to take away his toys, or restore his sanity. But perhaps the charges will get his attention...
...or perhaps they will cause him to move faster. Especially if the political scene in Iraq changes and he becomes less certain of the future.
In the interim, I shall be most interested to see what Bolton and Dershowitz have to say. That's quite a combination.
scott sa --
I alluded to that, or thought I did, with the mention of the apocalyptic 12th Imam belief. This may not drive Iranian policy, but it drives their President, whose stability is questionable.
Again, I'm looking forward to what Bolton will say about the nuclear weapons, and what Dershowitz will say about the legal counter-attack on Iran. I think it's a brilliant plan on a number of levels, but mainly because it pulls others in and leaves Israel less stranded.
Anyway, in the end, all those M.E. theocracies are going to have nuclear weapons. It's not if, but when.
Dymph, I agree that the ME is going to end up armed, and that just means the coming war will be much longer and much worse than it could have been if we settled it now.
It also means that we'll be fighting a two-front war, one there and one at home.
That's in part why I am so appalled at the idea of forging alliances with Muslims...because although we can be damned sure our enemy will not equivocate with their principles, we will HAVE to equivocate ours in order to make an alliance, however temporary it may be.
There is no 'maybe the west is not all bad' in the minds of our enemies. We are, individually and collectively, components of the Great Satan in their eyes, period. We simply can't afford to start down the 'maybe Islam isn't all bad' road or we are sunk.
That's the progressive trap the allies fell into in the 30s..."well, Hitler is a madman, but he has no power"; "Hitler has power but maybe he's not a madman"; "Hitler is a madman and has power, but maybe he won't occupy the Rhineland, conduct an Anchluss with Austria, take over the Sudetenland"; "Hitler is a madman with power and has done all the things he promised not to do, but after all, he DID promise not to invade Poland, so lets give him another chance...".
Oh my God...the shear brilliance, the irony and, of course, the humor.
Prepare yourselves, we are set to journey through hell. Act IV, War IV - front and centre.
I wonder if racist quasi-Christians, like David Duke, have ever figured out that, under any other circumstances that didn't involve denouncing the Jews and Israel, people like Ahmedinejad would be calling for his destruction.
(The same could also be said for people like Hugo Chavez and other pro-extreme Islam leftists.)
I don't think that the muslim and brown Ahmedinajad would ever be invited to join the KKK anytime. If he wasn't lynched first.
I guess when it comes to the enemy-of-my-enemy mindset of antisemitism or antiamericanism, nothing is required to make any sense.
How about those Hasidic Jews who are so anti-zionist that they are attending this damnable conference? There can't be many of them, but they show up in almost every news photo. Sick and sad.
Wally==
I've met some of those suicidal Jews. One had even been a Zionist in his youth and moved to Israel for a couple of years. Now he's as fervently anti-Israel as he was so devoutly a Zionist when he was young.
The irony is he's a Holocaust survivor...
Now there's some convoluted reasoning if I ever saw it.
In fact, now thatI think of it, my friend has the same blindness that Stephen Renico mentions re David Duke and the other useful idiots.
bohica, no I don't think that it means a shorter war. There is a difference between a nuclear arms race that Iran could never win, and umbrella deterence, which it will have with its first operational warhead.
I know the rhetoric is that Madjab and the Mullahs will fire off their nukes willy nilly at Israel at the first opportunity and then sit back to await an answering volley and the 12th Imam, but that is in large part rhetoric sponsored by the folks who don't want Iran to get nukes. Its a propaganda technique aimed at making the Iranian threat immediate and dire.
A much more likely and equally dire but less immediate scenario is Madjab and the Mullahs using the existence of a nuclear arsenal as umbrella deterence. And here's why it'll work:
The policy of nuclear deterence in the west evolved from the immediate postwar doctrine of 'massive response' to an elaborate set of dance moves embodied by the docrine of MAD. Deterence theory even took a few tentative steps toward subtheories called the 'escalation ladder' and 'limited war', just before the collapse of the USSR.
The later theoretical stages of deterence theory were far more elaborate than simply a mutual clubbing over the head that the term MAD implies...whole classrooms full of academics were granted doctorates solely in the field of deterence theory, and forests full of trees have been felled for paper to explore the concept.
The point I'm making is that the USSR and the US spent three to four decades working out the logistics of stability, and we were STILL all waiting to go up in smoke at any moment.
The core of that stability is this:
Nuclear weapons are more coercive when they are threatened than they are in actual use.
This is especially true in the case of a lopsided deterence like the one between the west and Iran. If, for instance, Iran let fly all its nukes at Israel and then leapt on its tanks and trundled into Iraq, Tehran would be flattened in an instance and its outdated T72s blown to kingdom come...errrr...as it were.
But what would happen if Iran merely threatened to launch at Israel if it were opposed in its trek to Baghdad? What then?
Iran can do very little actual damage by flinging a few Fat Men bombs at its foes, but it can do an incredible amount of damage if it merely threatens to. Uncertainty is far more threatening than actual use.
So what I see happening is Iran with the ability to do any number of things using conventional weaponry, because it will be operating under a nuclear umbrella. Iran knows that no one is going to launch a pre-emptive first strike against it, and it knows that all it has to do is threaten to pull the pin on the grenade and everyone will run from the room.
So once Iran has the bomb, I suspect it'll be a very long war.
Here are some unsettling potential uses for Iran's nukes that don't allow for missle deterrance (hat tip Eggplant at the Belmont Club).
I agree that a one-kiloton nuke would cause damage roughly equivalent to what 9/11 caused (which was obviously not enough to get the US fully mobilized). However the Islamic fascist enemy will not use a one-kiloton nuke (those sorts of weapons are actually quite sophisticated). As Pierre Legrand correctly said, a simple gun-type nuke (like the Hiroshima little boy) is relatively low-tech and yields about 15 kilotons. As is well known, the technological challenge is in acquiring the U-235 bomb pit. The bomb pit would have to be of ex-Soviet origin or manufactured in China, North Korea, Pakistan or Iran. The bomb pit could be smuggled into the US in multiple pieces. The rest of the weapon would be constructed here using local materials.
Truth to tell, the worst thing the enemy could do is use an ocean freighter as a giant version of a truck bomb. They could convert a ballast tank in the freighter to hold the weapon. The water in the tank would provide radiation shielding against remote detection. The weapon itself could be something really huge like the Tsar Bomba, refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html
http://www.atomicforum.org/russia/tsarbomba.html
By definition the people doing this would be savage monsters (Al Qaeda or radical Shiite fanatics). Most likely they would replace the lead tamp on the original Tsar Bomba design with a U-238 tamp thus bumping the yield up to 100 megatons (lots of fallout). To make it extra nasty they could wrap it with cobalt. Now you have the Al Qaeda variation of the USMC sniper slogan of "one bullet - one kill", i.e. "one bomb - one nation".
Again the islamic fascist enemy would not hesitate to use this weapon if they could get their hands on it (they hate us more than they love their own children). I believe most experts would agree that the enemy will have their hands on one within 10 years.
Truth to tell, I think the only way that we will avoid this fate is if the enemy attacks Israel first thus providing the Casus belli to wipe out the fascist threat. I don't envy the Israelis. They are definitely the "canary in a coal mine".
I can't be the only one to appreciate Bolton's irony and death-bed type humor of presenting a case - which again tests the legitamacy of the Un - to 'The International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has its seat in The Hague, is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.'
Boy is this a rotten day.
Bordergal: The biggest one the sovs ever managed was a 50 megaton thermonuke. Thermonukes are way outside the capabilities of anyone but the US, parts of western Europe and Russia. To have something like 100 megatons to sling around would require the backing of a major state player.
Dan: The US doesn't recognize the ICJ, so it can't very well refer folks to it.
That's not to say you're wrong in pointing out a determination within the current admin not to move against Iran, it just explains why the US has no dealings with the ICJ, and why Bolton can only do so out of his official capacity.
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