Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Wednesday called on Iran to halt enrichment of its uranium.

Harper said the move would bring Iran “considerably closer” to possessing weapons-grade material.
Utter nonsense! 20% enriched uranium isn’t even close to weapons grade.

“It is time for Iran to end its defiance of the international community,

What ‘defiance’? They are perfectly within their legal rights.

suspend its enrichment activity and take immediate steps toward transparency and compliance

Iran has been in full compliance with the IAEA

by halting the construction of new enrichment sites,
and fully co-operating with the International Atomic Energy Agency,”
Iran have co-operated, consistently with the IAEA knowing full well that many of the so-called inspectors in the IAEA’s teams were CIA agents

Iran has agreed to ship out it’s 3% to Russia or France, IF, they can be guaranteed that the upgraded material will be returned to them.
Feb 9, 2010 The Star

Harper said in a statement.
…
“Canada will continue to work with our allies to find strong and viable solutions, including sanctions, to hold Iran to account,…”

Now he’s threatening Iran! Hasn’t he heard of diplomacy???

Remember when Harper warned us about Saddam, and said that attacking Iraq was necessary … ?

“These allies did not seek a military conflict today any more than they sought it 12 years ago. The world has tried other means for years but to no avail. We cannot walk away from the threat that Iraq’s continued possession of weapons of mass destruction constitutes to its region and to the wider world.” Stephen Harper, 2003
He was wrong then, and he’s wrong now

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/02/10/iran-stephen-harper-uranium-nuclear.html#socialcomments#ixzz0fLgQcJBu

From a March 2003 speech by Harper

The full report of Harpers statements are here

By Gareth Porter, Oct 27, 2009
…
The Iranian decision to withdraw from the earlier agreement with the IAEA was prompted, moreover, by the campaign of threats to Iran’s nuclear facilities mounted by the George W Bush administration in early 2007, as a reconstruction of the sequence of events shows.

Read the sequence of events, click here

Substantially different from what the major newspapers reported.

Quoted from an article by Jack Smith in the Asia Times.

While the US mass media depict Ahmadinejad as being under virtual siege from the majority of Iranians, other information shows this is exaggerated. Inter Press Service reported the following in an article by Jim Lobe on September 19 headlined, "New Poll Finds Strong Domestic Support for Iran Regime”:

A new survey of Iranian public opinion released here suggests majority domestic support for both him [Ahmadinejad] and the country’s basic governing institutions. Four out of five of the 1,003 Iranian respondents interviewed in the survey released by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project of the highly respected Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland, said they considered Ahmadinejad to be the legitimate president of Iran.

Sixty-two percent of respondents said they had "a lot of confidence" in the declared election results, which gave Ahmadinejad 62.6% of the vote within hours of the polls’ closing June 12 and which were swiftly endorsed by the Islamic Republic’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Three of four respondents said Khamenei had reacted correctly in his endorsement.

Read the full article, click here

World Public Opinion  Polls from around the world

The recent announcements by President Obama, Prime Minister Brown and President Sarkozy at the G20 meeting was well staged and choreographed.  As there was nothing new to any of them in this announcement, why did they make such a big thing of it now?

From the Asia Times:

Quote …

As intended, the hyped disclosure created headlines around the world. It probably convinced many Americans, already primed to detest Iran, that Tehran is building nuclear bombs to obliterate the US and Israel. This is not an unlikely conclusion for many people to accept after 30 years of Washington’s incessant campaign to demonize the government that overthrew and replaced America’s puppet, the dreaded shah of Iran. The US broke diplomatic relations with Iran after this act of lese majeste and the subsequent "hostage crisis", and has nourished a grudge to this day.

…

What are we to make of this? First it must be understood there is a dispute over the IAEA’s safeguard provisions governing the NPT.
Iran considers itself to be in total compliance with the NPT, and this appears to be true. Inter Press Service reporter Jim Lobe wrote on September 25 that "Under the basic Safeguards Agreement of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory, member states are required to declare their nuclear facilities and designs at least 180 days before introducing nuclear materials there". (See Plenty to talk about Asia Times Online, September 29, 2009.)

Read the entire article, click here