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Iran Deleted From the World's Banking Computers
dtjohnson writes "Iran is being deleted from the world banking system Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) computers as of Saturday at 1600 UTC. Once the SWIFT codes for Iranian banks are deleted, Iranian banks will no longer be able to transfer funds to and from other worldwide banks, turning Iranian international commerce into a barter operation. SWIFT is taking the action at the request of EU
members to comply with international sanctions against Iran due to its program to develop nuclear weapons. The effect will be to drastically hinder Iran's ability to execute international business transactions."
The whole reason that Iran and North Korea even began pursuing nuclear weapons is because of that incredibly stupid "Axis of Evil" speech that George Bush made in 2003. When the largest military power in the world labels you as one of three "Axis of Evil" members, then proceeds to invade one of the other two, it tends to make you a bit twitchy. And, both Iran and NK know that the only way to really protect yourself from U.S. invasion is with nuclear weapons.
Due mainly to Israeli and U.S. propaganda, a lot of people seem to think that Iran is building nukes to attack Israel. But the fact is that Iran has never shown itself to be a particularly hostile or irrational nation in any military sense. And even despite the anti-U.S. rhetoric that followed the revolution that overthrew the U.S. puppet shah and the U.S. helping Saddam Hussein during the Iraq/Iran war, Iranians have been surprisingly open to U.S. diplomacy in the past. They were even one of the first countries to offer the U.S. condolences after the 9-11 attacks, and in the pre-Bush years maintained a stable, if sometimes tense, relationship with the U.S. They're a country that seems to want to be liked on the world stage. But they're also a country that wants to send a message to the U.S. that they're not going to stand by and be invaded on some U.S. oil grab.
So we cut off their banks and hit them with sanctions. Fine. A lot of Iranian people will suffer. And maybe this will lead them to negotiate, maybe not.
But you know what I bet would ABSOLUTELY lead them to negotiate and drop their nuke program?
1) Offer a few public goodwill gestures to make it clear that the U.S. is *not* going to invade them or attack them
2) Tell Mossad to stop assassinating their scientists, or face sanctions of their own.
3) Reign in Israel and make it clear to them that attacking Iran will NOT be tolerated, and will cost them the friendship of the U.S.
4) Normalizing relations with Iran.
You do those four things, and you won't need to cut off their banks to get them to the table. They'll be *running* to get to the table.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's about dollar-backed oil.
Cutting iran off SWIFT may lead to development of new messaging system between Iran, Russia, China etc. This would make banks of those countries less dependent on western entities.
"...wait for March 20, when the Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in other currencies apart from the US dollar..."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB17Ak04.html
(No, I haven't read the full article, it was linked on wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_oil_bourse#Opening )
Israel on the other hand, with all the nukes they have, gets a free SWIFT pass.
Even if Iran owned a nuclear weapon, they wouldn't want to nuke Israel. The mosque in Jerusalem is the second holiest in the Muslim world, after Mecca. Nuking Israel would mean the destruction of a holy Muslim city.
So... just use Paypal?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
SWIFT is a co-operative society under Belgian law, which its shareholders own and control
Just in case you didn't think global capitalism and corporations were significant, here's a good reminder.
It backs terrorist groups in Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey,etc,etc. Then again we made nice with Qaddafi before we starting shooting his own people and he blew up a US airliner and bombed a cafe full of US soldiers.
If you really want to get an idea of bizarre US policy look at Cuba. Cuba hasnt sponsored Terrorism in 40 years and is still embargoed while we did business with Qaddafi and Iran. Americans can visit North Korea a country we are still technically at war with but they cant visit Cuba a country we were never at war with and we are one of their largest trading partners.
Actually, he isn't a dictator. The Supreme Leader is the one actually in charge.
How do you track when someone swaps 100 tons of wheat or 100 bars of gold for some barrels of oil? You can't. If you "let" them use the international monetary system, you have a means of tracking all their activites. Follow the money and you find the bad guys. Giving them a pass on that lets them trade with whomever they want without any trace.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
A large number of them are European/American that moved back there in the last two or three generations. Both sides probably hate this- but the current Palestinians are probably more genetically related to the people that the Romans once ruled there. Nonetheless- you can't tell the people descended from those that moved there from Europe and America to "go-back" that is impractical.
What would make much more sense is if they all just got-along and learned to live nicely with each other. Yeah, I know- not going to happen.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Obama already reached out to Iran. He began his presidency apologetically acknowledging U.S. involvement in a coup that happened more than 50 years ago. He then offered bilateral negotiations that, predictably, failed miserably (that was the whole plan of two-party talks, to blame the mean Americans and walk out). And, of course, Obama didn't support the 2009 uprising (when protesters were yelling, "where are you Obama?"), and has continued the blacklisting of Mujahedin-e Khalq (or MEK), the Iranian dissident movement as a terror organization, so as not to upset the Mullahs.
And what did Obama get for his "goodwill" as you put it?
Continued lethal Iranian assistance to guerrillas killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan; a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a Washington restaurant; the announcement by a member of parliament of Iranian naval exercises to shut down the Strait of Hormuz; undoubted Chinese and Russian access to a captured U.S. drone for the copying and countering of its high-tech secrets.
It's worked great! Let's try appeasement again. Because this time will be different.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
The SWIFT system was constructed by the west to manage bank transfers. You can be sure that Iran will alternatives to it - just as Iran has found alternatives to every other sanction the US has imposed ove more that 30 years. So what the west is actually doing is facilitating the deconstruction of a once universal system, and facilitating the construction of an alternative that the west does not control.
A US aircraft carrier can keep more planes in the air than most countries entire air force. If that doesn't count as a military base then I don't know what does.
Iran, after just yesterday celebrating the aniversary of being 'very extremely close to building the bomb now' for 20 years, now announced that the Iranian gouvernment has ordered to cease all of the countries nuclear operations and research and inmediately focus all resources in building a rating agency.
The rating agency is being constructed in downtown Teheran as we speak and is due to be finished in 8 weeks, when offices will be furnished and the first analysist - fresh graduates from the Abda-alla-hap Business School - will move in. Stockmarkets throughout the western hemisphere plumeted as the news struck and the UN has summoned an emergency security concil meeting for tomorrow morning.
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinedschad, in a speech this morning, threatened western powers with saying 'we will rate all infidels with B- or lower'. His word could hardly be heard through thousands and thousands of bearded and veiled muslim ultrafanatics cheering in the streets and in parliament. Israeli gouvernment and military officials have declared Defcon 3.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Cuba wasn't embargoed because it was sponsoring terrorists. It was embargoed because they were in bed with the USSR, a fully communist devoted country at the time. Having the USSR try to place strategic nuclear weapons 90 miles off the coast of the US didn't help. Cuba was a proxy for disagreements between the USA and USSR.
That you think it has anything to do with terrorists is laughable. The policy is only bizarre to you because you clearly have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Khatami(the closest thing Iran has had to a moderate and the only honestly elected president Iran in the last 40 years) wanted to normalize relations with the US in 2003. Iran hated Al Queda who they view as an enemy and a rival for power. In 2003 iran was willing to do everything the US wanted(including fighting al queda,stopping support of hamas, full cooperation with the IAEA) in exchange for normalized relations and "mutual respect". A detente with the US would have likely strengthened Khatami's power base in Iran.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/documents/us_iran_1roadmap.pdf
Bush wanted iran to capitulate to all US demands first instead of "mutual respect"
If the US and UK hadn't intervened and overthrown the democratically elected government of Iran just because said government decided it was going to kick out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (one of the ancestors of the modern BP oil company) and take full control over Iranian oil, its likely that Iran would have continued as a democratic constitutional monarchy instead of becoming the strict Muslim state it is today.
A US aircraft carrier can keep more planes in the air than most countries entire air force. If that doesn't count as a military base then I don't know what does.
That's not all, a US aircraft carrier group is bigger than most countries entire navies as well and if you thrown in a couple of marine divisions and some landing craft they'd probably give most standing armies on earth as a run for their money as well.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Which is why it's so silly to think of Iran as a rational actor as some have unfortunately claimed. No rational nation would decide to build nuclear weapons in this day and age. Developing them just makes everyone nervous and want to build their own. Having them just increases your responsibilities. Using them just assures your own annihilation.
Yes, there's the theory that by having them you prevent anyone from ever wanting to invade you. But that's only a reason to already have them, not to get everyone's ire by trying to get them. If you want to join the nuclear club, you do it in absolute secrecy, then make a big announcement after you're already armed. But once the secret's already out about your development efforts, it's time to apologize, state your clear intentions not to keep going all the way, and quickly dismantle whatever you've done.
Okay, so they're worried about us maybe invading them someday, but why would we do that? Because we seem eager to get into wars in the region? Well, not really, not really. We went into Afghanistan because we got attacked. We went into Iraq because we thought they were making WMDs. The lesson here is not that we are jumping at the chance to invade countries all over the middle east, but that we will only do so if you attack us or threaten mushroom clouds. Granted the Iraqi WMD thing turned out to not be quite as big a deal as we may have once thought, but clearly the solution to not being next is not brazenly building nukes right next door.
Let's face it, Iran is already plenty powerful and influential in the region. We saw to that by bumping off their biggest rival, Iraq. They don't need a bomb, now, nor should they want a bomb. They seem to be trying to get one anyway. If they're this reckless about acquiring nuclear weapons, how reckless will they be once they have them? Scary stuff.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Except there's a problem with your statement--there is zero evidence that Iran is actively developing nuclear weapons. Even the US Director of National Intelligence has acknowledged this fact in his testimony before Congress. The "crazy" and "irrational" hyperbole that keeps creeping up in anti-Iran rhetoric only serves the interests of the hawks who want war.
Most of the estimates I've read suggest that any attempt by Iran to close the Strait would pretty much lead to the obliteration of their navy, airforce and anti-aircraft capabilities in about a week. Libya's airforce and anti-aircraft capabilities was quickly dispatched, and most of the campaign was spent offering air support to the rebels.
Yes, Iran has lots of theoretical soldiers, mainly poorly equipped Basij, but what good does a fanatic with a rifle do against a bomber or an aircraft carrier a hundred miles off the coast. If the objective is to limit or eliminate Iran's capability of projecting its force into the Strait or the Gulf in general, and not having to actually invade or support any kind of hostilities on the ground, it would be very easy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Err... there is no credible evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, despite all the inspections. As signers of the non-proliferation treaty, Iran is entitled to the assistance of all other signatories in developing the full nuclear cycle, including enrichment and reactors. The US is not meeting its obligations under the treaty, to say the least. There is quite literally nothing Iran could do that would satisfy the US government, let alone Israel, so they might as well carry on.
The rest of your post is also wrong. If we invaded Afghanistan because "they attacked us", then how come Pakistan ans Saudi Arabia weren't given the same treatment, though they has as much or more to do with the attacks as the government of Afghanistan? How come we refused to give any evidence of OBL's crimes to the Afghans when they offered to put him on trial, prior to the invasion? How come the forces for the invasion were already in place on 9/11? Sure looks like a convenient excuse for what was already in the works. And is it really a coincidence that opium production went from near-zero to 90% of the world market immediately after the invasion, with our buds the Northern Alliance producing the lion's share?
As for Iraq, we know that the intelligence was deliberately falsified by those at the very top, who literally would not listen to anything that didn't confirm their preconceptions. They may have believed that there were WMDs, but they had no factual reason to believe that. More likely they were deliberately lying to the public for their own greedy, corrupt reasons.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry