The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #98182   Message #1948798
Posted By: GUEST,petr
26-Jan-07 - 12:27 PM
Thread Name: BS: Western Democracy's Achilles Heel
Subject: RE: BS: Western Democracy's Achilles Heel
hey dickey guess who helped Iran with its nuclear programme in the first place, (Im all for stopping nuclear proliferation myself- but lets put it into perspective)
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Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported Irans nuclear programme. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.

Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals". Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."

In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Teheran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium — the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
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