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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.
"...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?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.