War: Avoided!

There is a breaking new development in the Iran debacle:

In a move that will likely drive a stake into the heart of the near-term prospects for the US-backed “crippling sanctions” against Iran, Turkey and Brazil have managed to come up with a compromise deal that provides everything the Western nations claimed to have wanted from the third-party enrichment deal in the first place.

Whether or not the US and other western allies decides to tone down their rhetoric on another round of sanctions on Iran is still up in the air. Hopefully Turkey will help to put out the warmongering flame with their key "intermediary" position:

Turkey on the other hand is an incredibly inconvenient intermediary for the war party, because they are simultaneously a key US-NATO ally in good standing and have trustworthy relations with Iran. Turkey would be obligated to return Iran’s uranium if the West fails to provide the fuel rods, and could likely be trusted to do so.

As Iran has now accepted the deal, President Obama will struggle to back out of it without doing serious damage both to his international reputation and to US-Turkey relations.

As for now, it looks like war will be avoided. However, there is still the recent shipment of bunker busters to the strategic base on Diego Garcia that has many worried. 

An Interesting Perspective on Pakistani-American Relations

Nathan Fox-Helser, who is both a member of Wake Forest Young Americans for Liberty and a new author at the left-libertarian blog Rethinking the State, wrote a paper on American foreign policy in Pakistan for a political science class he took this semester.  I've been working on building the Wake Forest YAL Wiki recently as a tool to be used by future chapters, and I got Nathan to send me the paper, which I converted into a wiki article.  The paper contains an interesting analysis of the past and current situation in Pakistan, as well as several conclusions that are reached based on this analysis.  Nathan's thesis statement is as follows:

Understanding the causes of these discontinuities in interest and conflicts in views demonstrates that America needs to act skeptically, think innovatively, remember the costs of policies and deflate its policy, and, all the while, avoid international abandonment.

The Empire's Scribes

As I will be attending the University of Richmond in the fall as a freshman, I decided to look at the school newspaper, The Collegian.  I was hoping to see more about politics and economics, but the paper is largely dedicated to the current happenings of the school. One article that stood out to me, however, was "Iran Threatens World Peace.” For a second, I thought I was on the Fox News or MSNBC website, but I was wrong. And just as those two mainstream media establishments are full of errors and exaggerated claims, so is this one.

Daniel Letovsky, a senior, opens the article with an exaggerated and outright false claim: “The Islamic Republic of Iran is racing down the home stretch towards acquiring the nuclear weapons with which they wish to dominate the Middle East.”

This stands in direct contradiction to a report issued to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence. The report says, “We continue to asses Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons though we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons.”

Brian Beyer: Peacemonger and Libertarian to the Hilt

Good on you for posting the "politically incorrect" video from the heroic Wikileaks website, in addition to your other commentary, Brian. Speaking the unadulterated truth -- rather than implicitly kowtowing to the state by attaching wussy disclaimers about how the infallible military is always on the "side of the Angels" to supposedly "antiwar" sentiment -- is the way to change things. Let us distinguish libertarianism from Republicratism, by speaking logically, consistently, and truthfully, while refusing to steer clear of touchy topics.

Glenn Greenwald, who has been shedding light on this supposedly off-limits slaughter for weeks, also wrote a great piece on this important issue:

A week ago, I wrote about the war being waged on WikiLeaks by the Pentagon and other governments and corporations around the world, and noted at the time -- as a result of my interview with editor Julian Assange -- that WikiLeaks had obtained classified videos that were highly incriminating of the Pentagon and was planning on releasing them shortly.