Daily Dose of War-with-Iran Links

Not in a very snappy-title mood tonight...

Via roboteconomist, a note on Iranian energy policy, put together for the National Academy of Sciences.

Roboeconomist's summary:

His thesis is that the declining productivity of Iran's state-controlled oil industry and the exploding costs of domestic energy subsidies will cause its oil exports to completely evaporate somewhere between 2012 and 2022. Iran, therefore, does has a significant interest in pursuing nuclear energy to stave off this inevitable economic crisis in Tehran. The report is short, but pretty wonky. Stern's math is pretty solid and his case is fairly convincing given how badly the Ahmadinejad administration has bungled oil politics in Tehran over the past year and a half. The article's only weakness is that it assumes that the Iranian government won't make the difficult choice of cutting domestic fuel subsidies when push comes to shove on the budget.

Bob Geiger reports on a blogger conference call with Harry Reid. Money quote:

And perhaps the most chilling thing said by Senator Reid was on his gut feel for what's happening at the White House when it comes to Iran.

"I'm getting a lot of the same vibes from this administration that I got prior to Iraq," said the Majority Leader...

Josh Marshall asks: what will the Iran provocation incident look like when it comes? For those of you who don't know TPM--Josh Marshall is serious as a heart attack. (He is widely credited with spearheading the campaign to save Social Security in 2005.) When he starts asking questions like that, I start worrying again. At the end of the article he makes some notes about the incident-of-the-day today. His take:

1. Despite being fake, the incident must seem reasonably credible.

2. It must appear serious enough that discounting its importance or questioning its veracity appears the height of unseriousness.

3. It must place the majority of us in the odd and unexpected position of granting to President Bush the unfettered discretion to launch a war against Iran at the time and place of his choosing, despite our desire that he start it right now.

Any other requirements?

Late Update: TPM Reader TB adds some key requirements ...

The incident can't be quickly falsifiable.

There's a rumor out there that Iran and North Korea are teaming up. ACW tells why yes, your intuition is right, this is complete nonsense. And I quote: "Is anything cooler than super-villains teaming up, like when Doctor Doom and Sub-Mariner settled into an uneasy alliance?" I think you can tell where he's going with this...

The statement from William Odom to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee vis-a-vis Iran.

Totalwonkerr asks, what could Iran (which is enriching uranium) learn from a plutonium implosion test, anyway? There are some excellent comments there as well. One of them digs up a fascinating (to science-nerd types) link to a Livermore magazine issue devoted entirely to the science of plutonium.


Also from Totalwonkerr: there is apparently a group called the "Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group". Imagine my surprise to read where it is based:

Sources close to the administration’s Iran policy say the primary vehicle for U.S. government planning on Iran is the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group, an inter-agency body created in early 2006 that includes representatives and Iran specialists from the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and other agencies.

Since we're talking about the Office of Special Plans (2.0), there was recently a nice DKos diary about version 0.5, called, in the mid 1970's, "Team B". And look who we have here...

Ford administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were among those challenging as too soft the CIA's estimate of Moscow's military power . . . Cheney, as White House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld, as secretary of Defense, championed Team B, whose members included the young defense strategist Paul Wolfowitz

And the result?

"In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence [in 2002]. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."

I'm shocked, shocked, to find gambling in this establishment.