East Versus West: the Media Wars

"No one has the right to insult the president, and they did it. And this is a crime. The person who insulted the president should be punished, and the punishment is jail. ... Such insults and accusations against the government are a return to Hitler's methods, to repeat lies and accusations ... until everyone believes those lies."

Reuters quotes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking to supporters outside Tehran's Sharif University.

I think this is interesting, and not just because the Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad is using Hitler as an example of wrong. I think it's interesting because Ahmadinejad makes certain inescapable points about the Western media's coverage of the riots in Iran. And that is, they are biased. They are biased towards our Western ideals of basic universal human rights such as the freedom of expression.

It is a fact that journalists from the West, including CNN and all the cable news media, have made it a habit now to broadcast unconfirmed rumors and opinions from blogs that may or may not be located in Tehran. I mean, you can't trust Twitter users at all, and yet the media (having no other choice than to report from their outposts in foreign countries) has reported unconfirmed reports straight off the internet as fact, simply because they fit in with our Western perception of Iran. The Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad always make this diatribe about the biased coverage of the Western media, but they're completely right. I mean, the western media is going to sniff out anything that seems revolutionary. They interview so-called experts who talk about the people's desire for reform of the system even though these experts often are Iranian ex-pats teaching at American Universities, which is a demographic that obviously favors reform. The media always emphasizes the oppressed over the oppressors in Iran, especially women, but of course we base our definition of oppression as curtailing freedom of expression (speech, dress), which is an individual freedom that we in the West recognize instantly when it is taken away by the government.

Okay, having said that, of course no nation in the West is going to kick out all foreign journalists, imprison peaceable dissidents, and use the chant "DEATH TO IRAN" as an official state policy. Iran is run by oppressors who mask their tyranny of human rights behind a shroud of oppressive religious dogma. But you know, for having two weeks of riots in a country whose leaders are reportedly without scrupules, there have been shockingly few deaths, as in, maybe only in the dozens. A couple of orders of magnitude less than the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. So far.

Why George W. Bush Shouldn't Disown the NIE Report

One of the few things about which I agree with both President Bush and my father: despite December's NIE report which stated with high confidence that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, Iran remains a threat. According to a Newsweek article, President Bush told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the NIE's conclusions don't reflect his own views, but I think that there is plenty of evidence in the NIE report to support Bush's view that Iran is still a persistent threat.

The first sentence of the Key Judgments section of the NIE report reads as follows: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons." Everything before that semicolon is what we've all heard from the press; everything after the semicolon is what we hear from President Bush. In reality the President's assertion that Iran is still a threat despite halting a nuclear weapons program in 2003 is clearly laid out by the very document that Bush has "all but disowned".

Iran's actions prove that they have every intent on continuing to enrich fissile material. Iran continues to thwart the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and the United Nations by continuing to enrich uranium. They have opened at least one new enrichment facility in the past year, and they continue installing centrifuges at their facilities. Iran claims that the enrichment of uranium is only for peaceful nuclear power. This may be true or it may not be, but it certainly shouldn't matter to us. The difference between civilian-use enriched uranium and weapons-grade enriched uranium can be made up with a few more spins around the old centrifuge. Plus, also according to the NIE report, "Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so."

So the only reason why Iran can't develop a nuclear weapon right now is because it takes a really long time to separate out enough U-235 from the uranium ore to make enough fissile material to go to critical mass. There is a miniscule ratio of naturally occurring U-235 to U-238, and the weight difference is also miniscule, so it takes many chains of centrifuges and many years of spinning in order to get a small amount of the stuff. During WWII, the United States worked non-stop day-and-night from 1942 to 1945 on developing enough U-235 to create one bomb. After dropping our one uranium bomb and our one plutonium bomb on Japan, the threat was something like, "Surrender now, or there's more where those came from!" Complete bullshit of course, as it would have taken another couple of years just to get enough fissile material, but the threat worked and Japan finally surrendered. My point is that it's not a lack of technological knowledge that's keeping Iran from having a bomb right now, it's a lack of materials. And the soonest Iran could get enough U-235 would be about 2010, and the soonest Iran could get enough plutonium would be about 2015, according to the NIE report.

In addition to saying that the uranium enrichment is for civilian power facilities only, Iran has also declared that they never had a nuclear weapons program, which of course the NIE refutes. So, Iran tells the truth only when it wants to and closes its doors to the West. Even if Iran is telling the truth about their civilian enrichment program, there's no reason to believe them.