Monday, June 13, 2011

Roger Cohen's "Iran Without Nukes": He's Back!

He's back! Not Freddy Kreuger, but Roger ("Iran is not totalitarian") Cohen, again foisting his own special brand of inanity upon us with respect to Iran. In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Iran Without Nukes" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/opinion/14iht-edcohen14.html), Cohen begins by inquiring:

"Remember Iran?"

How could we possibly forget? During the first six months of 2009, Cohen, a man on a mission, sought to have us believe that Iran was not a tyrannical Axis of Evil charter member, as professed by the Bush administration, but merely misunderstood. All but ignoring Iran's savage persecution of its Baha'i, Kurdish and Sunni minorities in multiple op-eds from Teheran, Cohen supported Obama's outreach to the Islamic Republic of Iran, but was ultimately mugged by the reality of the tainted June elections, which were followed by violent suppression of dissidents and the Green Movement.

Any other mortal would acknowledge that he was wrong all along, and shy away from further pronouncements, but not Cohen. Cohen now tells us that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and that it is once again time to pursue a relationship with Tehran:

". . . Seymour Hersh concludes in a New Yorker article this month that, as he put it in one interview, 'There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make a nuclear weapon.'

His reporting reveals that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) of 2007 — which concluded 'with high confidence' that Iran had halted a nuclear-weapons program in 2003 — still pertains in the classified N.I.E. of 2011. As a retired senior intelligence official put it to Hersh, there’s nothing 'substantially new' that 'leads to a bomb.'

. . . .

The nuclear bogeyman obsession has been a distraction from the need to try to tease out a relationship with Tehran, see Iran as it is. Only the most flimsy efforts have been made, insufficient to test the waters."

I suppose Roger didn't read the editorial published by his newspaper earlier today, entitled "What the Inspectors Say" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/opinion/13mon1.html?hp):

"Iran continues to stonewall about its illicit nuclear activities. The International Atomic Energy Agency isn’t falling for it. Nobody should.

The agency’s latest report is chilling. While Tehran claims that its program has solely peaceful ends, it lists seven activities with potential 'military dimensions.' That includes 'activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile'; new evidence that Iran has worked on a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology; and research on missile warhead designs — namely 'studies involving the removal of the conventional high explosive payload from the warhead of the Shahab 3 missile and replacing it with a spherical nuclear payload.'”

Concerning the nuclear triggering technology to which the I.A.E.A. makes reference, Cohen's own newspaper also had this to say in a May 24, 2011 article entitled "Watchdog Finds Evidence That Iran Worked on Nuclear Triggers" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/middleeast/25iran.html?pagewanted=2):

"The [I.A.E.A.] report said it had asked Iran about evidence of 'experiments involving the explosive compression of uranium deuteride to produce a short burst of neutrons' — the speeding particles that split atoms in two in a surge of nuclear energy. In a bomb, an initial burst of neutrons is needed to help initiate a rapid chain reaction.

Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, said the compression of uranium deuteride suggested work on an atomic trigger.

'I don’t know of any peaceful uses,' he said in an interview."

So whom do you believe: Roger, Seymour and some anonymous retired intelligence official or the I.A.E.A.?

Sorry, Roger, but keep up the good work. Even a broken clock is right twice each day, and you could still get lucky.

[This blog entry, submitted as an online comment in response to Cohen's op-ed, was censored by The New York Times.]

3 comments:

  1. Cohen's idea of reporting is to quote another reporter.

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  2. Interesting book entitled "The G.I.P.---The Grossly Inappropriate Personality" by Dr. Leonard Olinger would help to diagnose Roger Cohen. One of the hallmarks of the G.I.P is his inability to learn, despite glaring evidence to the contrary. Seems to be a condition that is proliferating.

    The GIP is the guy who borrows your car and returns it with an empty tank. Cohen borrows your brain and returns it devoid of any rational analysis. And then he can't understand why no one is willing to lend him a car.

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  3. One is irresistibly drawn to the conclusion may simply be the NT Times's employs Roger Cohen as a liberal lame duck in residence. And like most ducks he quacks and does little else ... perhaps he also swims in circles swallowing the undigested weed of irrelevant secondary sources. Thus it is that the New York Times sinks to the level of a parochial pond.

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