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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."
Oh sorry, what I meant to say was F1RST POST!!!!!!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I guess you don't remember Jimmy Carter negotiating a treaty with North Korea back in 1994 almost exactly along the lines you state. Or them cheating on it by continuing to develop nuclear weapons and being called on it even before Bush was elected and well before the Axis of Evil speech.
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.
If the people allow their government to do evil things, they deserve to suffer.
You do realise that's exactly the same rationale that the Islamic extremist groups use to justify their attacks on civilian targets, right?
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.
It's "incredibly stupid" to think that a Bush speech in 2003 caused all this. The USA's relationship with Iran has been shitty since 1979 and Ayatollah Khomeini's return from exile. To claim otherwise is in flagrant denial of reality and you only oust yourself as some anti-Zionist nutcase.
So... just use Paypal?
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The people of Iran once had a democratically elected leader. The CIA didn't like that and installed a puppet regime, everything went to hell after that.
Although, still Iran do have a quite high standard of living. They only lack several human rights(and the west is trying to catch up in reaching the same limitations) and no democratic elections, despite these flaws, it's a quite stable nation. People may be discontent, but starting a civil war to remove the powers that be requires a fair bit more than discontent. Thus, the people of iran don't really have much of a choice. And with the recent polarization of iran vs the west that is going on, this situation is damn sure to not improve in any progressive and positive manner.
And this is not just about iran and the US and israel. Russia and china are on the sidelines too.
A good recepie for shitstorm reads like this: Increasing geopolitical tensions in the middle of a economic fucking crisis. The more i see this shit play out, the more the picture looks like the US being a powertripping neoimperialistic Rome 2.0 in the decline stage.
I guess you don't remember Jimmy Carter negotiating a treaty with North Korea back in 1994 almost exactly along the lines you state. Or them cheating on it by continuing to develop nuclear weapons and being called on it even before Bush was elected and well before the Axis of Evil speech.
Remembering that information would conflict with the "Everything that is wrong or has gone wrong in the last 10 - 15 years is George W Bush's fault" pillar. Thus, down the memory hole with that.
The OP also failed to mention Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" speech along with all the various speeches from him and others in their government saying Israel has no right to exist. I've never really supported the seeming "Israel First" politics of the US government over the last few decades, but to say that Iran only wants to get along with its neighbors and be good little world citizens is a bit off. Again, we can't mention any of that though as it conflicts with the central pillars of "GWB blame" and "USA blame".
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
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.
It's not hard to get them at the table. Iran has been negotiating, and the Egyptians even got an agreement out of them, but Obama chose to go forward with sanctions instead of accepting a deal that would have accomplished what the sanctions were intended to accomplish. Check out the March 8th Daily Show with Trita Parsi for details.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's incredibly stupid to not realize that the US meddled with Iran before that and overthrew their democratically elected government because Iran nationalized their oil industry. Feel free to wake up to cause and effect!
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.
The USA's relationship with Iran has been shitty since 1979 and Ayatollah Khomeini's return from exile. To claim otherwise is in flagrant denial of reality and you only oust yourself as some anti-Zionist nutcase.
1953 wasn't exactly a good year for the relationship between the US and the people of Iran. You know, when the US and Britain overthrew their democratically elected government and converted the Shah from a figurehead to a dictator. The population might have gotten a bit peeved at that.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
They only lack several human rights
Are you joking? Stoning? Torture? Widespread censorship? Get off Slashdot and go read Amnesty International.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Islamic_Republic_of_Iran
What evil things?
Look. The US and EU claim to believe in and promote democracy. There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
This clearly has not happened, perhaps because 90% of the people don't give a shit about Iran. Faced with overwhelming democratically proven apathy the "powers that be" have decided to force their citizens hand with decisions that cannot be voted on, or overridden. This is the opposite of democracy, and the kind of blatant hypocrisy that makes people jaded and cynical.
You know what? When the war comes I'll be rooting for Iran. I don't sign on to this perpetual war bullshit but was never asked, won't BE asked, and thanks to our wonderfully centralized financial system won't be able to do anything about it independently either.
And please STFU about Iran being a religious theocracy. Last time I checked every remaining candidate for the Republican nomination is competing on how much they love Jesus and how much they'd oppress people who don't follow their own stone age religious views. American is going to end up in the same place soon enough.
... and, to top it all off, sanctions don't work. This has been clearly demonstrated before with India and Pakistan. Both had clandestine nuclear programs that produced full Teller-Ulam designs and we didn't know about either until it was too late. A few years after sanctions were started, we dropped them.
Fundamentally, nuclear weapons come down to digging rocks out of the ground. Theoretically you don't even need to enrich the uranium; you can use heavy water as a moderator if you have access to an ocean. Which Iran does. So they could produce plutonium entirely from natural uranium. And there is a great deal of natural uranium.
I also don't agree with the notion Iran is going to make weapons from uranium. India and Pakistan didn't. It's a complete waste of uranium. They are better off transmuting uranium into plutonium.
Then again, I never really agreed with the idea of dictating a sovereign nation-state's technological development in the first place. It always has failed, and always will, and just serves to piss a country off and unite its people against you. You reinforce every reason and argument to develop nuclear weapons in the first place, and remove any internal opposition to it.
Nuclear technology cannot be stopped -- it is just too abundant in nature. You might as well try to stop nature itself. We are delusional to think otherwise when we have always failed in the past.
Remembering that information would conflict with the "Everything that is wrong or has gone wrong in the last 10 - 15 years is George W Bush's fault" pillar. Thus, down the memory hole with that.
The OP also failed to mention Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" speech along with all the various speeches from him and others in their government saying Israel has no right to exist. I've never really supported the seeming "Israel First" politics of the US government over the last few decades, but to say that Iran only wants to get along with its neighbors and be good little world citizens is a bit off. Again, we can't mention any of that though as it conflicts with the central pillars of "GWB blame" and "USA blame".
Iran has elections, just like the US. (And both seem to be about selecting one of two equally bad choices)
Do you really want to base foreign policy on shit that politicians say to win elections? In that case the US looks like the 3rd Reich reborn.
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
Terrible economic crisis. Yeah, must be hard for you, in your country with free benefit payments, etc. when you lose the 4-bedroom house and have to cash in the SUV. How awful for you.
I'm English, and we had the same - if not worse - impact as you did. You know what? I'd be embarrassed to refer to it as a crisis. Petrol (gas) went up a few pence, a few tens of thousands lost their jobs (while job vacancies are now at an all-time high, and you get guaranteed minimum wage, guaranteed human rights, and the actual *PERCENTAGE* unemployed stayed the same all that time "Unemployment has not been higher since 1995" - so, like, 20 years ago, before all the "economic crisis") and we just had to throw 1/3rd off long-term disability benefits because they were actually able to work all along.
The US started their wars, we'd like to point out, and prolonged them about 10 years longer than necessary and STILL can't recognise basic human rights for non-Americans. Who did that? The guy you chose because he said he wouldn't do that. What are you more concerned with? Could he be non-American and how dare he try to get people into medical treatment if they have no money?
When you elect someone that actually stops your country obliterating citizens in other countries and denying them their basic human rights that almost every other country in the world has signed up to, then you can take the moral high ground. In the meantime, you've elected a warlord who you keep in power because he tries to keep petrol cheap.
Yes it's a lack of several human rights.
Sortof how iraq was under Saddam.
Now they have several human rights, but no one around to enforce them. So the place is a different flavour of hellhole.
The US is also lacking several human rights, but i'm not seeing you picking up any guns to change things. As for voting? They can do that in Iran too. Doesn't help much though, same as in the US, where the media could paint a rainbow picture of hitler and get him elected. Provided he have the money and friends in high places.
you should ask yourself what countries Iran has invaded in modern history
Does Hezbollah count? Or are we only counting official military activity. Because if that's the case, the CIA's help to the Shah shouldn't count either.
Iran has done at least as much harm to stability in the mideast as the US, they just don't do it with "shock and awe". Israel is a major irritant to mideast stability, and Iran is one of the biggest reasons.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Er, there's a bit wrong with your statement here. Most obviously, the axis of evil speech occurred in January of 2002, not 2003. That helps your case a bit, because a lot of the more serious failures of cooperation by Iran and North Korea occurred towards the end of 2002.. However, in both cases, there were serious failures to cooperate with international inspections before the speech. The entire James Kelly visit to North Korea was over evidence of non-cooperation that had been building up since the late Clinton years. Similarly, in the case of Iran, Iran had likely begun building new nuclear sites since before the speech http://guests.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/517/exiles-and-iran-intel. You can make an argument that Iran and North Korea may have accelerated their programs due to the Axis of Evil speech, and that's a more nuanced and viable argument, but that's a much weaker statement.
Moving on from there, there are other factual problems with your remarks. You claimed that
Iran has never shown itself to be a particularly hostile or irrational nation in any military sense
Right, so funding Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad isn't at all evidence of a "particularly hostile" or "irrational" attitude. http://www.cfr.org/iran/state-sponsors-iran/p9362. Iran doesn't even share a direct border with Israel but they are one of the largest supporters of attacks on Israel. That doesn't exactly scream peaceful to me.
There are enough factual problems as pointed out above, that your four point proposal simply doesn't make sense.
Of all the people living in countries with "free" elections, as a US citizen you should know best what it's like to have only the choice between a giant douche and a turd sammich, and how electing either is as good as electing neither.
They have the same effin' choice there. Well, even worse, actually, because the only choice they have BY LAW is to vote for an Islamist government. With the only alternative to start a rebellion. Which is, again, something you should know best about. From BOTH, your own country AND the Iran, the rebellion of 1979 was quite intimately tied to the US. You might remember, or at least notice, that it takes a DAMN LOT to get enough people pissed enough to get anything like that off the ground.
Besides, you know what the real reason was for them to be kicked out of the international banking system? I mean, let's be honest, if it was for their actions, how about sanctions? Or how about trade embargos? Or maybe just parking an aircraft carrier in the Strait of Hormuz? Allow me to let you in on a secret: Come 20th of March, Iran will sell its oil for any currency. Yep. No longer they will require you to pay in Dollars. Euros, Rubels, Rupies, it's all good. Does this very specific move make, i.e. to make trading with them more difficult, a lot more sense now? Hmm? Maybe?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I think it is very important to clarify the motivations of Iran when dealing with Israel. I think many would assume it's antisemitism, but I would wager it is mostly predicated on self-defense and geopolitics. Remember that Iran has a Jewish population of around 30,000, which is the second largest in the Middle East aside from Israel. If Iran were really on a crusade of killing Jews(which I think many often mistakenly allege), would they not just start with their own people?
Iran views Israel as a projection of USA dominance. So to be honest, I think the most wise policy is to heed the suggestions of George Washington and drop our entangling alliances and stop meddling in the foreign affairs of nations. If Israel wants to nuke Iran, let them. Just don't expect us to be behind them.
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
The OP also failed to mention Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" speech
The mistranslation of the speech that the person in (IIRC) 14th place in the chain of command made? I can't think why the OP didn't think that was worth mentioning.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Well no shit! When nations sneak around covert programs that are by and large frowned upon by the international community, it only startles them to hasten the speed by which they develop them. Let me make it crystal clear. The "Axis of Evil" speech did *not* cause them to develop weapons. That's been going on longer than when Clinton was in office. No, it simply pointed out the level of BS going on by these two counties and others (NKorea and Iran). Publicly speaking out about it is equivalent to shining a spotlight on a thief at night. It causes them to either work faster or run away in fear.
GWB speech changed the dynamics. He thought maintaining the current status status quo was unacceptable. Their are arguments to be made that taking a divisive was either the right or wrong course of action.
Life is not for the lazy.
The keys of your first and second post were so close together... Could have happened to anyone...
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
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"
Hey, you're right! We (unwittingly) elected a Muslim to President!
...So?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Don't forget Gaza and Iraq. There are supertankers full of Palestinian and Iraqi blood on Iranian hands.
You do realise that's exactly the same rationale that the Islamic extremist groups use to justify their attacks on civilian targets, right?
Perhaps you do not realise how naive you are being, but please understand that economic sanctions are a war against civilian targets that in the past have typically caused far more civilian casualties than the physical warfare does. It's just a measurable flaw in our evolved sense of morality that allows us to far more readily accept collateral death but call out direct violence as immeasurably more evil. Arguably our governments are massively more evil than the terrorist regimes who blow themselves up in crowded places as the death toll against civilians caused by sanctions alone is exponentially larger.
wiki article about Iraq sanctions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq
paper on A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justication: http://www.cdnresearch.net/pubs/others/Hauser_MindLang.pdf
.
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
The elected leadership of Iran is a figurehead with no real power. and the last election was very clearly rigged the last time so that the Supreme Clerical Council would not have to invest effort in grooming a new pawn.
Actually, yes we do. We have been electing people from the stupid party and the evil party for decades without throwing them out or demanding real systemic fixes. We have the ability to turn them out or force the changes, but have not done so. Therefore we deserve the consequences of our leadership's policies. If those consequences include suffering, then we deserve the suffering.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
You don't find it strange that the US is still embargoing Cuba 20 years after the Soviet Union dissolved, or that the US has better relations with all the former USSR countries or even Vietnam?
The dynamic at work is that every time the US has managed to make progress in negotiations with North Korea, the US has then prompty reneged on its side of the deal. Usually it's been the case that after the agreement was signed between the two countries, there has subsequently been a change in the US administration, and the new administration decides that they want to cancel all the treaties signed by the previous administration.
Generally, the agreements have been of the nature "The US agrees to build and supply modern large-scale nuclear power plants in North Korea, and North Korea agrees not to produce nuclear weapons." What North Korea really wants is huge amounts of electricity and agricultural aid (which is why it always signs such agreements, and is usually interested in negotiations).
Then, North Korea, seeing the actions of the US (such as building most of a nuclear power plant, then abandoning construction before completion because the new administration wants to be seen as "hard-line") as bad faith and breach of contract (and rightly so), resumes the activities that it had agreed to cease, because that seems to be the only way to get the US back to the negotiating table.
Repeat ad nauseum.
Incidentally, the issue regarding Iran is not that they are building nuclear weapons, or even trying to. The issue is that they are aiming to achieve complete mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, and thus nuclear energy self-sufficiency. This would achieve several things: first, all of the oil currently going to domestic energy needs in Iran could then be exported. Secondly, Iran could massively improve and expand infrastructure and industry, given a vast and self-sufficient supply of nuclear energy. Third, they would be able to export low-enriched nuclear fuel assemblies to other countries who want to have nuclear energy.
It's that third point that is really irking countries such as the US; currently, there is an exclusive cartel which enriches nuclear fuel and sells nuclear fuel assemblies. Thus, prices are fixed, and very high. An independent vendor outside the cartel would upset that monopoly and its price structure, not to mention that it might consider selling nuclear fuel assemblies (or even complete reactors) to poor countries populated by brown people, thus enabling those countries to improve their infrastructure and standard of living in turn. Something the US (and France, and the energy corporations therein, etc.) very much do not want.
It's never been about nuclear weapons. Look at the wording of the official statements on both sides; the complaints against Iran are always taking issue with the fact that Iran is continuing "enrichment activities" and its "nuclear program". There has never been any mention of even "high enrichment" or a "nuclear weapons program" in official documents; the complaint is that Iran is enriching uranium at all, under a "nuclear energy program", however the wording "nuclear program" is used to allow ignorant people to unconsciously insert the word "weapons" in between by themselves, because that's what most people think of first when they hear "nuclear program" or even "nuclear". Wake up.
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
Yes, and while D) is perfectly reasonable, C) seems like quite a valid cause for concern for other nations: we're talking about a theocratic government whose religion requires that its adherents (eventually) conquer the world, which government appears to take a particularly fundamentalist, literal view of the "conquer" aspect of that, and which is pursuing nuclear weapons.
Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech was an observation of this, not the cause of it. Iran and N Korea were off the reservation for decades before he made that speech, and have continued to be "rogue nations" regardless of diplomacy. Saying we should normalize relations is all well and good, except that it neglects the fact that these nations are not approaching issues from a common worldview. It's not that they're irrational: it's that their philosophy, beliefs, and goals are so radically different from our own that we don't have a common premise from which to work.
That's not to say that I think invading them is the right course of action here (I don't), but in many ways, diplomacy is destined to fail, if it is based on the assumption that they just want to get along. "Diplomatic bribery" of a sort could still work: that is, don't assume they want what we want, but figure out something they actually do want, and use that carrot to convince them to give up the nuclear ambitions. The stick of economic isolation has the potential to be pretty effective if we pair it with the right carrot.
I have to laugh at the people who whine about Cuba's embargo. Cuba is free to trade with every other country on earth.
The US just stopped a Danish national from importing Cuban cigars, from Germany, to Denmark.
“It’s a clear example of the US abusing rules which were implemented to fight terrorism. That the American authorities can stop a completely legal financial transaction between two European countries is an abuse of EU citizens’ rights.”
http://cphpost.dk/news/international/us-snubs-out-legal-cigar-transaction
Did this fact change your mind about anything? Why not?
it's in my head