Pen/Insular_Notes

I have a feeling that we’re all going to need to know a bit more about Iran before long. So here’s some recent writing on the subject that has caught my eye:

++ As usual Lenin’s Tomb has been on the case already.

++ Subject Barred provides a fantastic post on the ‘Return of the MacGuffin‘. There is no doubt that the Iranian nuclear weapons are a classic MacGuffin and if you don’t know what that is you have one more reason to read the article.

++ Gary Leupp has some observations in the second half of this article at Counterpunch.

++ Another article in Counterpunch argues that the US could be falling further into what the author describes as Al Qaeda’s gambit, designed to draw the superpower into a massive conflict it cannot win.

++ Meanwhile, Mike Whitney pulls apart some of the lies and scaremongering that are currently doing the rounds in the media.

++ The usual good analysis from Alex Callinicos in Socialist Worker.

++ And finally some interesting letters to the Guardian yesterday.

One of the aspects of this affair that is interesting me most at the moment is the changing attitude of ‘my own’ government in the UK. A few years ago it was all about engagement and the foreign secretary Jack Straw was leading the way in flying off to Tehran to have talks and make soothing noises. Now the government is going around warning everyone not to trust Iran and sounding for all the world like the right hand of the US government’s propaganda operation. It’s hard to fathom why a government, whose advisers and perhaps ministers too surely still believe in engagement, is going around publicly eschewing this path.

Another observation: it is slightly amusing that the US is categorically rejecting an offer of talks from a country that does not have nuclear weapons and says it has no intention of getting them while at the same time pursuing the (albeit currently stalled) six-party talks with Another Country that quite possibly does have nukes or at least has intentions of getting them post-haste.