Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (11520)	11/15/2006 8:44:19 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218140

Apparently they are already in charge, according to Stratfor, and will be soon hit by the Israelis Geopolitical Diary: Iran's Good-Faith Kidnapping Dozens of hostages were seized on Tuesday at Baghdad's Higher Education Ministry building, and many were later released by security forces in Baghdad. Around 9:30 a.m. local time, about 80 Iraqi gunmen dressed in police uniforms arrived in some 20 pickup trucks at a research facility in the Ministry of Higher Education in Baghdad. The gunmen proceeded to separate Shia from Sunnis by checking identity cards and then drove off with as many as 100 mostly Sunni men, according to eyewitness reports. Security forces in the area reportedly did not intervene and allowed the mass kidnapping to take place -- suggesting that they had received orders from their superiors to stand down. The abduction sparked fears in the capital that hundreds of bodies would soon show up and set off a fresh wave of sectarian violence. The quick release of the hostages is not likely a simple stroke of good luck, however. It appears as though this well-orchestrated kidnapping was a show of good faith by Iran to give a sample of what can happen if the United States plays nice with Iran over the Iraq negotiations. After all, the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry has regularly employed death squads to stage such kidnappings (though never before on this scale), and it was a spokesman from the Interior Ministry who announced the release of the hostages. With Iran aggressively pushing forward its nuclear program -- announcing Tuesday it has nearly completed the nuclear fuel cycle -- the Iranians are carefully setting the stage for the United States to come to the negotiating table on their terms. For Washington to take the bait, Iran needs to demonstrate that it wields enough influence among the Shiite militias and political leaders to bring the level of sectarian violence under control. Tuesday's peculiar kidnapping seems to fall in line with this strategy -- to cooperate under some circumstances on the Iraq issue, while getting away with as much as possible on the nuclear front without facing any major penalty. Israel, meanwhile, will fail to be impressed. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is currently on a five-day visit to the United States and the one thing on his mind is a nuclear Iran. An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report released Tuesday said that Iran is still not cooperating with the IAEA probe into its nuclear program, and claimed traces of plutonium and enriched uranium were found at a waste site. Iranian scientists and engineers have been making considerable progress in their prized nuclear project while the country's politicians and diplomats have been busy keeping the West entangled in endless nuclear negotiations. Any time Iran announces a particular milestone, as it is preparing to do over the next few days, it does so only under favorable political circumstances, and purely for public consumption. In April, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Iran had enriched uranium at an experimental level to almost 5 percent purity using 164 operational centrifuges, still well below the 90 percent enrichment benchmark needed to make a nuclear bomb. Less than seven months later, the Iranians are now saying they have made further advances perhaps involving 3,000 centrifuges and will be able to take it to 60,000 centrifuges in the near future, bringing it much closer to weapons capability. While the real work on the nuclear program is done at Iran's underground sites, Iran is slowly informing the world that it is on its way to mastering the technology, and that the costs of forcibly stopping the Iranian government from pursuing its program would be all too costly for the United States, Israel and the neighboring Gulf states. Israel is increasingly losing confidence in the ability of the United States to contain the Iranian nuclear threat through negotiations. Once the Iranians reach a point of no return, the Israelis will feel compelled to act, creating a need for a compromise back-up solution between Olmert and U.S. President George W. Bush. Such a compromise could involve covert activity inside Iran to hit the regime where it will hurt -- its petrochemical and gas storage facilities. But any such contingency plan is still on the back burner while back-channel negotiations continue to play themselves out.