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ASIA TIMES


January 24, 2010


Re A sliver of hope in the Middle East, January 18, 2011] If you put aside all the white noise, common sense would tell a right-thinking person that the greatest damage done to US national security in the last eight years is the destruction of America's economic strength at home. How? By making America fiscally pitiful and broke, with policies or lack of them, that doubled the national debt, ie, fighting two wars, a tax cut, and a Medicare fix, none of which were paid for.

Further damage was done by the captains of industry, aided and abetted by their counterparts on Wall Street, not only by sending America's jobs overseas in the name of globalization, but by their greed, looting and destroying the savings and investments of millions of Americans. President Obama, having inherited all of this, much to his credit, understood that without a strong, vibrant economy at home, the national security of the US is at risk and is acting accordingly, to bring about the much-needed changes.

To correct the record, Meir Dagan, the retiring Israeli intelligence chief, first made his remark, now making headlines, over a year and a half ago, on June 23, 2009, to Israel's Parliament Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He is repeating now what the media, evidently given all the hype, missed then, that if Iran did everything right, it could produce one nuclear bomb by 2015. This has to be seen in the light of comments from Israeli political leaders, starting in the 1990s, that Iran would have a nuclear weapon operational in one year. They have repeated those remarks every year for the last 20 years.

There is not one scintilla of evidence that Iran's nuclear enrichment program is a weapon's program. Yet, those who know better, and the media, for their own design, constantly portray the nuclear enrichment program as a nuclear weapons program.

Fariborz S Fatemi

United States (Jan 24, '11)