A Date With A Brainiac

A really smart woman discusses the pleasures and pitfalls of high IQ dating.

Many people equate high IQ with “high achieving”, but they are two distinct things. Women with an above-average intelligence (IQ range of 110-130) are likely to be professionals: lawyers, nurses, dentists, mid-level civil servants, journalists, managers, teachers, pharmacists, librarians, or the like. High IQ women (those with an IQ>130) will tend toward more creative or “typically masculine” pursuits: surgery, engineering, research science, politics, philosophy, authorship, mathematics, music, art, architecture, high-level civil service, military office, or entrepreneurship. A woman would normally have to have unusually high visual-spatial scores in order to reach 130, which is why men outnumber women in that range and in those occupations.

Which is why intelligent women are so much in demand. They are rare birds compared to the number of high IQ men.

I have checked out the comments too and the vast majority are excellent. Also the blog hostess Alte chimes in frequently in the comments.

Posted by Alte on May 27, 2011 at 8:41 am

As to Chris’ comment, I thought it was relevant because of his assumption that having an “advanced degree” means that the women are high-IQ, but the majority of advanced degree holders are not high IQ. This is proven with simple statistics — there are way more advanced degree holders (6% of the adult population) than people of high IQ (2% of the adult population).

Add in the fact that most (58%) of those advanced degree holders are women but women are in the minority among those with high IQ, and that many people of high IQ don’t have advanced degrees, and it is just more proof of the fact that there is little direct correlation between advanced degrees and IQ>130. In other words, although someone of high IQ is more likely to have an advanced degree than someone chosen randomly from the general population, most people with advanced degrees are not high IQ — even those with prestigious degrees (technical schools like MIT or CalTech being the exception, as they select candidates with high v-s abilities).

You have to remember that high IQ is associated with DOE (over-excitability), which makes standardized education (i.e. college) very difficult for many of them. The women are also more likely to have highly fluctuating hormone levels, heavy and painful periods, and children with behavioral problems. All of those things mean that high IQ women who marry often fall out of the high-achievement pool rather quickly, which is one reason why homemaking is so prevalent at the very top of the income scales.

I had that problem with college sort of. I found women. Woo hoo! And I found them more exciting than the school work. Not to worry. I worked my way up to aerospace engineer completely bypassing the whole college thing.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Prejudice Against Breast Feeding Women?

Yeah the video was gratuitous. And there are more of them here. I especially liked the cradle hold. A very instructive video. Uh. Where was I? Oh. yeah. Prejudice.

Is there prejudice against breast feeders?

Asked to rate the woman as a job candidate, the students (men and women alike) gave the lowest rating to the breastfeeding woman, with second-lowest rank going to the strapless-bra lady. But the woman going home to bathe her baby did roughly as well as the one who received the neutral message. In other words, signs of parenting didn't trigger perceptions that the hypothetical woman was less capable. Rather, that result appeared after people were primed to think about the woman's breasts. It didn't matter much if they were being invoked as a source of food or as a source of pleasure.

So thinking about breasts makes people think that the big breasted are not so smart? Or is it that just thinking about breasts makes people stupid? I think this topic will require further research. Preferably hands on.

Some good research materials can be found here:

Breasts

This looks especially promising:

The Big Book of Breasts in 3-D

This could also be helpful:

The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History

from a review:

Using over 600 illustrations and photographs, BREASTS is about changing social mores and attitudes, from classical Greek statuary to the Victorian corset to Twiggy to Pamela Lee. BREASTS is about envy and etiquette, differences-why 90 percent of French women do not breastfeed, for example-and adornment, including make-up, tattooing, nipple rings, and more. BREASTS is about politics, art, religion, kitsch, and burning the bra. About perceptions-90 percent of men prefer a size C over a D. About high art-whether the humanist breast in Renaissance painting or its feminist send-up by photographer Cindy Sherman-and pop art, from Vargas girls to World War II bomber mascots to Madonna. BREASTS is about getting them right-falsies, bust improvers, gadgets, pumps, and creams-and showing them off, like Jayne Mansfield's, immortalized in cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater.

And don't forget they provide brain food for infants and an obsession for post pubescent men (a different kind of brain food).

And a bit of advice: what ever the size of your female partner's breasts, they are the perfect size and the size you prefer over all others. That is my story and I'm sticking to it. Fortunately it is true for me. My mate cross checks. She watches to see who (or what) I'm ogling. So be careful out there.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Does Liking Rap Music Make You Stupid?

Does liking rap music dull your intelligence? No. But it may indicate that your intelligence is already dull.

Like the Americans, the British teens who scored high marks for intelligence were more likely than their peers to prefer instrumental music, but no more likely to enjoy vocal selections.

Now, Beethoven symphonies are far more complex than pop songs, so an obvious explanation for these findings is that smarter people crave more complicated music. But Kanazawa doesn’t think that’s right. His crunching of the data suggests that preference for big-band music “is even more positively correlated” with high intelligence than classical compositions.

“It would be difficult to make the case that big-band music is more cognitively complex than classical music,” he writes. “On the other extreme, as suspected, preference for rap music is significantly negatively correlated with intelligence. However, preference for gospel music is even more strongly negatively correlated with it.

So what is the point of this post? I'm hoping that brain power snobbery will kill off rap. I hate that crap.

And for you gospel music lovers? What can I say? Anyway here is some brain music.





Cross Posted at Classical Values

Marijuana Makes Some People Smarter

Does pot make some people smarter? I have no studies proving that. I do have an anecdote.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The late astronomer and author, Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996) was a secret but avid marijuana smoker, crediting it with inspiring essays and scientific insight, according to Sagan's biographer.

Using the pseudonym "Mr. X'', Sagan wrote about his pot smoking in an essay published in the 1971 book "Marijuana Reconsidered.'' The book's editor, Lester Grinspoon, recently disclosed the secret to Sagan's biographer, Keay Davidson.

Davidson, a writer for the San Francisco Examiner, revealed the marijuana use in an article published in the newspaper's magazine Sunday. "Carl Sagan: A Life'' is due out in October.

"I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high ... in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater,'' wrote Sagan, who authored popular science books such as "Cosmos,'' "Contact,'' and "The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.''

In the essay, Sagan said marijuana inspired some of his intellectual work.

"I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves,'' wrote the former Cornell University professor. "I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down.

Of course it could have been showering with his wife that did it.

Lester Grinspoon has another book of interest.

Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine

And this one not by Grinspoon got five stars from all twenty reviewers.

Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Smart Drugs

Boy is this going to piss off a LOT of people. Odds are
the more recreational drugs you consume the smarter you are. Counter intuitive huh?

According to Psychology Today, people who use more drugs are more intelligent. "Intelligent people don't always do the right thing," they write, "only the evolutionarily novel thing."

According to a study conducted by National Child Development, "more intelligent children in the United Kingdom are more likely to grow up to consume psychoactive drugs than less intelligent children." These drugs include marijuana, cocaine, heroin, alcohol and tobacco.

The chart on the left shows the findings of the study. It depicts the latent factor for the consumption of 13 different kinds of psychoactive drugs, (cannabis, ecstasy, amphetamines, LSD, amyl nitrate, magic mushrooms, cocaine, temazepan, semeron, ketamine, crack, heroin, and methadone). There is a clear association between childhood general intelligence and adult drug consumption.

My theory is a little different. The brain conditions that give a propensity to drug use also give a propensity to intelligence.

In any case this is so totally hilarious and unexpected that it is going to blow minds. The stereotype of the stupid drug user is just plain wrong. Why might that be? Let us think: only the stupid drug users get caught. The smart ones are getting away with it and the smart ones predominate.

The stupid shits are the ones supporting drug prohibition. This is just funny as hell. It reminds me of the old joke "Drugs make people stupid. Especially the people who don't use them."

So was this true in the US?

"Very bright individuals (with IQs above 125) are roughly three-tenths of a standard deviation more likely to consume psychoactive drugs than very dull individuals," says Psychology Today. They ran the same study in the U.S. and found similar results.

I can see an explosion of illegal drug use coming if the word on this gets out as everyone tries to prove they are smarter than average.

This may explain why Drug Testing Lowers High Tech Productivity.

It is true beyond a doubt that stupid people are running the drug war and smart people are against it. Why stupid? We in the US pay $70 billion a year (according to this video) to make criminals richer and to make it easier for kids to get an illegal drug than a legal beer. How stupid do you have to be to support that? Dumber than a box of rocks.

The smarter police are catching on. Check these guys out:

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Citizens Opposing Prohibition

Here is a video by some really smart guys about the drug war.

American Drug War: The Last White Hope

Here is the trailer:



My advice to anyone who wants to try this at home? Be careful out there. Because if you are not smart enough you are likely to get caught.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Wilderness Of Mirrors

David Freddoso at The Examiner thinks that a story claiming that Wikileaks is a government plot is a tin foil hat theory. I'm not so sure.

Document dumps with lots of verifiable facts plus a few ringers is a standard and very old way to plant false information where it will do some good (the intel folks hope).

Is that what happened in this case? Who knows?

But in tin foil hat territory it is not.

Of course if you are working with the intel folks calling such a theory "tin foil hat" territory is a very good move.

Which just gets you into a Wilderness of Mirrors. There is a book by that name that I highly recommend:

Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents

Another very good book on the subject dealing with intelligence and counter intelligence in WW2 that I can also highly recommend is:

Bodyguard of Lies

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Getting The Finger

Getting this kind of finger is a good thing.

The results of numeracy and literacy tests for seven-year-old children can be predicted by measuring the length of their fingers, shows new research.

In a study to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, scientists compared the finger lengths of 75 children with their Standardised Assessment Test (SAT) scores.

They found a clear link between a child's performance in numeracy and literacy tests and the relative lengths of their index (pointing) and ring fingers.

Scientists believe that the link is caused by different levels of the hormones testosterone and oestrogen in the womb and the effect they have on both brain development and finger length.

"Testosterone has been argued to promote development of the areas of the brain which are often associated with spatial and mathematical skills," said Dr Mark Brosnan, Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath, who led the study.

"Oestrogen is thought to do the same in the areas of the brain which are often associated with verbal ability.

"Interestingly, these hormones are also thought have a say in the relative lengths of our index and ring fingers.

"We can use measurements of these fingers as a way of gauging the relative exposure to these two hormones in the womb and as we have shown through this study, we can also use them to predict ability in the key areas of numeracy and literacy."

I had first heard about this some years back and when I told my daughter about it she immediately checked out her fingers. She definitely had "math fingers". It made her happy to hear that. Currently she is a second year student in chemical engineering. So maybe there is something to the finger thing.

But fingers don't tell the whole story - just the relative strength of the influences. You can do well at language and math. It is how you get an 1600 on the SATs. Some people do it. Me? I have "math fingers" but did better on my verbal SAT than on the math/science part (not by much). I wound up being an engineer. I can assure you my reports are well written.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

SIGINT

I just happened across an interesting page on signals intelligence. Signals intelligence is about finding out what the enemy is doing by intercepting radio and other electromagnetic signals. There is a lot of information at the link but let me focus on one small part to give you a flavor of the page.

Monitoring friendly communications

More a part of communications security than true intelligence collection, SIGINT units still may have the responsibility of monitoring one's own communications or other electronic emissions, to avoid providing intelligence to the enemy. For example, a security monitor may hear an individual transmitting inappropriate information over an unencrypted radio network, or simply one that is not authorized for the type of information being given. If immediately calling attention to the violation would not create an even greater security risk, the monitor will call out one of the BEADWINDOW codes[9] used by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other nations working under their procedures. Standard BEADWINDOW codes (e.g., "BEADWINDOW 2") include:

I'm just going to give a couple of the BREADWINDOW codes and an example of how they can lead to an adverse impact during war time.

5. Friendly or enemy key personnel: "Movement or identity of friendly or enemy officers, visitors, commanders; movement of key maintenance personnel indicating equipment limitations."

and

7. Wrong circuit: "Inappropriate transmission. Information requested, transmitted or about to be transmitted which should not be passed on the subject circuit because it either requires greater security protection or it is not appropriate to the purpose for which the circuit is provided."

Leading to:

In WWII, for example, the Japanese Navy made possible the interception and death of the Combined Fleet commander, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, by BEADWINDOW 5 and 7 violations. They identified a key person's movement over a low-security cryptosystem.

The study of crypto and communications intelligence is one of my hobbies. If it interests you the link is provided.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Romantic Intellectualism

The New Criterion has an article on romaticism in the public schools. It is not about the study of a literary genre but a look at how bad ideas coupled with good intentions are ruining our schools for all children. The children with limited abilities. Those in the middle and those at the top. It is a very long piece (well worth reading in its entirety) so I'm going to pick out some high points that illustrate where we are, why we are where we are, and where we should go from here.

Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.

In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren’t smart enough.

Then comes a discussion of No Child Left Behind where by the government intends to make us all above average. Or at least 70% of us. You can pass a law and do that? Who knew?

No one disputes the empirical predictiveness of tests of intellectual ability—IQ tests—for large groups. If a classroom of first-graders is given a full-scale IQ test that requires no literacy and no mathematics, the correlation of those scores with scores on reading and math tests at age seventeen is going to be high. Such correlations will be equally high whether the class consists of rich children or poor, black or white, male or female. They will be high no matter how hard the teachers have worked. Scores on tests of reading and math track with intellectual ability, no matter what.

That brings us to an indispensable tenet of educational romanticism: The public schools are so bad that large gains in student performance are possible even within the constraints of intellectual ability. A large and unrefuted body of evidence says that this indispensable tenet is incorrect. Differences among schools do not have much effect on test scores in reading and mathematics.

Pretty much true. Smart kids want to learn and you can't stop them. Kids who aren't smart don't want to learn (it is very hard for them) and you can't make them.

Excellent schools with excellent teachers will augment their learning, and are a better experience for children in many other ways as well. But an excellent school’s effects on mean test scores for the student body as a whole will not be dramatic. Readers who attended normally bad K-12 schools and then went to selective colleges are likely to understand why: Your classmates who had gone to Phillips Exeter had taken much better courses than your school offered, and you may have envied their good luck, but you had read a lot on your own, you weren’t that far behind, and you caught up quickly.

To sum up, a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement. To put it another way, we have every reason to think—and already did when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed—that the notion of making all children proficient in math and reading is ridiculous. Such a feat is not possible even for an experimental school with unlimited funding, let alone for public schools operating in the real world. By NAEP’s (National Assessment of Educational Progress) definition of proficiency, we probably cannot make even half of the students proficient.

After a bit more discussion of what the various tests and studies show we come to how we got here. It deals with the Progressive Movement (are you listening Obama?) and how it ruined education. In other words a short history lesson.

The first strand in explaining educational romanticism is a mythic image of the good old days when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three R’s. You have probably run across tokens of it in occasional editorials that quote examination questions once asked of public schools students. Here is an example that The Wall Street Journal gave from the admissions test to Jersey City High School in 1885: “Write a sentence containing a noun as an attribute, a verb in the perfect tense potential mood, and a proper adjective.” Or consider the McGuffey Readers that were standard textbooks in the nineteenth century, filled with literary selections far more difficult than the ones given to today’s students at equivalent ages. That’s the kind of material all children routinely learned, right?

Wrong. American schools have never been able to teach everyone how to read, write, and do arithmetic. The myth that they could has arisen because schools a hundred years ago did not have to educate the least able. When the twentieth century began, about a quarter of all adults had not reached fifth grade and half had not reached eighth grade. The relationship between school dropout and intellectual ability was not perfect, but it was strong. Today’s elementary and middle schools are dealing with 99 percent of all children in the eligible age groups. Let today’s schools not report the test results for the children that schools in 1900 did not have to teach, and NAEP scores would go through the roof.

The author goes on to give a short history of fads in education and how their effect - if any - is small or very often zero.

The roots of educational romanticism go back to the beginnings of the Progressive Education movement early in the twentieth century. Its flowering in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a zeitgeist that nurtured wishful thinking of all sorts. But I think we need to come to grips with another important historical force that made educational romanticism dominant. The effects of the triumphant Civil Rights Movement gave a special reason for white elites in the 1960s to start ignoring the implications of intellectual limitations.

It is difficult to convey to readers who came of age in the 1970s or thereafter the emotional power of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. The ambiguities associated with affirmative action and the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws were still in the future. The Civil Rights Movement prior to 1964 created a change in the consciousness of white elites that was felt viscerally, and it included an embarrassing awareness of just how unremittingly whites had violated every American ideal when it came to blacks. With that awareness came elite white guilt —honest, deeply felt, and warranted.

Elite white guilt explains much about all kinds of social policy from the last half of the 1960s onward, but especially about education. Until the 1960s, white educators and politicians could look at a class of white children in which a number of students were doing poorly and shrug. The schools try to teach everyone, but some kids can’t handle the material. That’s just the way the things are; it is not a problem that can be fixed. But when the class consisted of black students who were doing poorly, that reaction was not acceptable. These were children growing up in a society where all the odds had been stacked against them, and their failings couldn’t be passed off as “just the way things are.” Elite white guilt made it impossible to say that a lot of black children were going to continue to fail in school and there’s nothing anybody could do about it. Once it could not be said of black children, neither could it be said of white children. In that context, educational romanticism did not just become fashionable during the 1960s. It became emotionally mandatory.

So we are now paying for our evil with overcompensation. We want to believe that our evil if only expunged can make everything right. Only it can't. It can only make some things right. And those things are severely limited. In fact they are limited to the evil itself. But we want expatiation. So we overcompensate. And with that overcompensation comes the creation of new evils. We don't know how to make oaks grow in a desert. We can't feed men with sand. And yet our guilt makes us try and try harder when we fail.

And so, beginning with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal government embarked on a series of major efforts to improve education for disadvantaged children that culminated in 2002 with the No Child Left Behind Act. Surveying that history, an analogy occurred to me that I offer as a speculative proposition: America’s federal education policy as of 2008 is at about the same place that the Soviet Union’s economic policy was in 1990.

The parallels between the trajectory of the Soviet Union’s attempt to reform its economy and the trajectory of the federal government’s attempts to reform the public education system are striking. By the mid-1980s, Soviet leaders knew that they had to introduce supply and demand into the economy, but they couldn’t bring themselves to try honest-to-God capitalism, so they tried to decentralize decision-making and permit some elements of a market economy while retaining central price controls and government ownership of the means of production. The reforms were based on premises about human nature that were patently wrong. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the educational romantics—and George W. Bush is the Percy Bysshe Shelley of educational romantics—knew that public school systems everywhere had become bureaucratically top-heavy and that many inner-city schools were no longer functional. They knew that the billions of federal money spent on upgrading education for disadvantaged children had produced no demonstrable improvements. But they thought they could fix the system. Bush’s glasnost was to implement accountability through measurement of results by test scores. Bush’s perestroika was a mishmash of performance standards and fragments of a market economy in schools, while retaining public funding of the schools and government control over the enforcement of the new standards. The reforms were based on premises about intellectual ability that were patently wrong.

Unlike the Soviet economy, American public schools are still in business, but scholarly analyses of the administration of No Child Left Behind are documenting a monumental mess.

We are now coming to an end of an era. The results are in and denial is not working. Every one knows that the crap is backed up in the pipes and is overflowing on the floor and it stinks. To high heaven.

Contemplate these results for a moment. A law is passed that, at least in the first few years, convulses educational practice throughout the nation. It is a law explicitly designed to raise test scores, if only because it produces intense drilling on how to take tests. And it produces trivial increases in NAEP’s math scores and no increases in its reading scores. No Child Left Behind has been not just a failure for educational romanticism, but its repudiation.

The good news is that educational romanticism is surely teetering on the edge of collapse. I am optimistic for three reasons. First, the data keep piling up. It takes a while for empiricism to discredit cherished beliefs, but No Child Left Behind may prove to have done us a favor by putting so much emphasis on test scores and thereby focusing attention on how hard it is to budge those scores. Second, we no longer live in a romantic age. Educational romanticism was born of forces that have lost most of their power, and façades collapse when the motives for maintaining those façades weaken. Third, hardly anybody really believes in educational romanticism even now. No one but the most starry-eyed denies in private the reality of differences in intellectual ability that we are powerless to change with K-12 education. People are unwilling to talk about those differences in public, but it is a classic emperor’s-clothes scenario waiting for someone to point out the obvious.

So what do we need to do?

For the good of our children, educational romanticism needs to collapse, and quickly. Its effects play out in the lives of young people in devastating ways. The fourth-grader who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading A Tale of Two Cities for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears. The eighth-grader who cannot make sense of algebra but has an almost mystical knack with machines is told to stick with the college prep track, because to be a success in life he must go to college and get a B.A. The senior with terrific SAT scores gets away with turning in rubbish on his term papers because to make special demands on the gifted would be elitist. They are all products of an educational system that cannot make itself talk openly about the implications of diverse educational limits.

There is much more to be said about these harms (and I have said it, in a book that will appear in a few months). For now, it is enough to recognize that educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top. It short-changes all of them.

Here is a bit I really liked out of the above paragraphs: The eighth-grader who cannot make sense of algebra but has an almost mystical knack with machines is told to stick with the college prep track, because to be a success in life he must go to college and get a B.A. And yet plumbers can make more money than most liberal arts graduates and their jobs can't be outsourced.

I have said this often but it bears repeating:

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

In other words not every man has equal intelligence. All have equal dignity if they comport themselves in a dignified manner. We owe the maintenance of our civilization (and it takes a lot of maintaining) to our plumbers and garbage men. We owe the advances to our scientists and engineers. What we must never forget is that we are all in this together. The man/woman who is respectful and contributes deserves our respect without qualification. The financial trader or the clerk at the grocery store.

Let me add one final point that the article didn't make that I think is vitally important and not well addressed in many communities. Hard work can make up to a 15 IQ point difference in outcomes (sorry no link). That is one standard deviation. It is not a lot. It is, however, significant. You can make up for some lack of anything with extra effort. How many times do we hear of the ball player with less than stellar abilities make up for his lack by devoting more time to practice than his team mates? What works in baseball also works in school. You can punch above your weight if you work at it.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Doubled Or Tripled?

This is not about baseball. It is about the recent defection of an Iranian General. This latest report makes me even more sceptical about his defection.

AN Iranian general who defected to the West last month had been spying on Iran since 2003 when he was recruited on an overseas business trip, according to Iranian sources.

This weekend Brigadier General Ali Reza Asgari, 63, the former deputy defence minister, is understood to be undergoing debriefing at a Nato base in Germany after he escaped from Iran, followed by his family.

A daring getaway via Damascus was organised by western intelligence agencies after it became clear that his cover was about to be blown. Iran’s notorious secret service, the Vavak, is believed to have suspected that he was a high-level mole.

According to the Iranian sources, the escape took several months to arrange. At least 10 close members of his family had to flee the country. Asgari has two sons, a daughter and several grandchildren and it is believed that all, including his daughters-in-law, are now out of Iran. Their final destination is unknown.

If he was suspect why would Iran allow his family to escape? That makes no sense. Unless his job is to feed misinformation to whoever he is currently talking to. In other words I don't think he has just been doubled. I suspect he has been tripled.

In 1997 he was appointed deputy defence minister in charge of internal investigations. He uncovered several cases of embezzlement in the Republican Guard that made him unpopular. He was pushed aside after President Mahmoud Ahmadine-jad came to power in 2006. The two had been rivals for many years and Asgari realised that his days were numbered.

During an overseas business trip in 2003 he is said to have met a new business partner, who turned out to be a foreign intelligence officer. “Ali Reza was a wealthy man even before 2003,” said an Iranian source. “Since 2003 he has become a very wealthy man.”

Yet he would have to leave much of his wealth behind. I'm sure the west would be in a position to make up for at least some of his losses. If the regime falls he might consider Beverly Hills for his place of residence. They have an Iranian Mayor.

H/T Captain's Quarters

Missing Iranian Rumors

A few days ago I posted something on a missing Iranian General who was deeply involed in the Iranian intellegance community and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

A bit of speculation (disguised as news) has come my way.

Haaretz says Missing Iranian former defense official has 'fled to U.S.'. Which would imply voluntary travel.

The Iranian former deputy defense minister who disappeared in neighboring Turkey last month is said to have sought asylum in the United States. Tehran said was Ali Reza Asghari went missing while on a private trip to Turkey.

The pan-Arab newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat on Tuesday quoted high-profile sources as saying that Asghari left for the U.S. shortly after arriving in the Turkish capital.

Earlier Tuesday, Iran's top police chief accused Western intelligence services of possibly abducting Asghari, who is also a retired general in the elite Revolutionary Guards.

Certainly the man has relatives in Iran. He must know that they would be at risk. If the US has him how can they protect his family? A lot of questions here.

Asghari had arrived in Turkey on a private visit from Damascus, Syria, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Tuesday.

Iran's top police chief, General Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam, said Iran was investigating Asghari's fate with the cooperation of the Turkish police.

"It is likely that Asghari has been abducted by the Western intelligence services," IRNA quoted the Iranian police general as saying. The general did not elaborate.

If that is the line Iran is taking then his family (except for questioning) is safe for the time being. They will be surrounded by minders, however.

According to a British Daily Telegraph report, Iranian intelligence official Asghari is also likely to have intimate knowledge of Iran's defense establishment and nuclear development program.

Although Asghari's disappearance in Turkey sparked allegations of a Mossad and CIA-linked kidnapping, Haaretz has learned that he may have defected.

Asghari served in the senior defense post under former defense minister General Ali Samahani. Israeli media have said that for many years, Asghari was the most senior Iranian intelligence official in Lebanon, with responsibility for Iran's ties with Hezbollah.

High level defections (if it is a defection and not a snatch or counter-intel operation) would indicate a regime on its last legs. An intel officer would be aware of the real situation and make his calculations accordingly.

This case of Soviet defection deception might help shed some light on the current case. Or it might just muddy the waters. Intelligence operations are like that. Our own counter intel guy James Jesus Angleton gives us a look at the wilderness of mirrors, where nothing is as it seems and paranoia can strike deep. Occupational hazard.

Update: 08 Mar'07 0521z

The Washington Post feeds a few more rumors into the wilderness of mirrors.

A former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guard has left his country and is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, providing information on Hezbollah and Iran's ties to the organization, according to a senior U.S. official.

Ali Rez Asgari disappeared last month during a visit to Turkey. Iranian officials suggested yesterday that he may have been kidnapped by Israel or the United States. The U.S. official said Asgari is willingly cooperating. He did not divulge Asgari's whereabouts or specify who is questioning him, but made clear that the information Asgari is offering is fully available to U.S. intelligence.

That would tend to support the fact that the Israelis have him and are wringing him dry. By any means necessary. Including being nice. Since the Israeli public is convinced of Iranian ill intent, there would be few repercussions from "excessive pressure" on the General.

Note that ties between Israeli and American intelligence go back to Angleton.

It is wise to also note that the Washington Post rumors are unsourced.

Iran's official news agency, IRNA, quoted the country's top police chief, Brig. Gen. Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqaddam, as saying that Asgari was probably kidnapped by agents working for Western intelligence agencies. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Asgari was in the United States. Another U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, denied that report and suggested that Asgari's disappearance was voluntary and orchestrated by the Israelis. A spokesman for President Bush's National Security Council did not return a call for comment.

The Israeli government denied any connection to Asgari. "To my knowledge, Israel is not involved in any way in this disappearance," said Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry.

So he disappeared without Israeli help. OK. Maybe the Americans got him and then gave him to the Israelis.

The waters are definitely getting muddy. It becomes hard to tell what is true, what is false, and what is so out there that you can't even believe the opposite.

An Iranian official, who agreed to discuss Asgari on the condition of anonymity, said that Iranian intelligence is unsure of Asgari's whereabouts but that he may have been offered money, probably by Israel, to leave the country. The Iranian official said Asgari was thought to be in Europe. "He has been out of the loop for four or five years now," the official said.

His last known travel arrangements were from Damascus, Syria to Istanbul, Turkey. So maybe he was not so out of the loop and the Iranian official is trying to do damage control by discrediting the General's information.

Former Mossad director Danny Yatom, who is now a member of Israel's parliament, said he believes Asgari defected to the West. "He is very high-caliber," Yatom said. "He held a very, very senior position for many long years in Lebanon. He was in effect commander of the Revolutionary Guards" there.

Ram Igra, a former Mossad officer, said Asgari spent much of the 1980s and 1990s overseeing Iran's efforts to support, finance, arm and train Hezbollah. The State Department lists the Shiite Lebanese group as a terrorist organization.

"He lived in Lebanon and, in effect, was the man who built, promoted and founded Hezbollah in those years," Igra told Israeli state radio. "If he has something to give the West, it is in this context of terrorism and Hezbollah's network in Lebanon."

This is very likely. It is also possible that the General was priviy to the usual scuttlebutt inside his organization. If he was a counter intelligence officer he would be very valuable indeed. Willing or otherwise.

The Australian has a report about the General's involvement in the Iranian nuclear program.

If General Asghari has gone over to the West, or been abducted, he would be a major source of information on Iran's nuclear program and a host of other security matters. Before serving as deputy defence minister he had been a general with the elite Revolutionary Guard.

Apart from strategic matters, General Asghari is reportedly privy to information about two affairs, one of great interest to Israel and the other to the US.

Debkafile, an Israeli website dealing with intelligence matters, reported this week that the CIA was interested in General Asghari because he was allegedly involved in the abduction two months ago of five US soldiers from a compound in Karbala, Iraq. The five were subsequently executed.

If this is true, we are already at war with Iran, which I noted in An Act Of War, where I detailed the abduction of Iranian "diplomats" by American troops. The abduction of the American soldiers was supposedly in retaliation for the American abduction of the Iranian "diplomats".

Some one is working to bring things to a boil. Possibly both sides. Or all sides. Depending on how you figure it.

A Newsmax report quotes some Iranian exiles.

A former high-ranking Iranian government official, Brig. Gen. Alireza Asghari, 63, has defected to the United States, Iranian exiles and other sources told Newsmax today.

Asghari had access to highly-classified intelligence information and "defected to the Americans with lots of secrets," respected Iranian journalist Alireza Nourizadeh told Newsmax from London.

The disappearance of the former Revolutionary Guards General has created a panic in Tehran.

Gen. Asghari left Iran on an officially-sanctioned trip to Damascus, Syria, then went missing during a stop-over in Istanbul, Turkey on February 7, according to statements by Iranian government officials in Tehran.

Nourizadeh believes he had been sent to Damascus to supervise an arms deal between Iran and Syria that was signed last June during a trip to Tehran by Syria's defense minister.

"It is possible that former deputy defense minister Asghari was kidnapped by Western intelligence services because of his Defense Ministry background," the head of Iran's national police, Gen. Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, said in Tehran yesterday.

But Newsmax has learned from Iranian sources that Gen. Asghari's family also managed to leave Iran just before he went missing, and that he sold his house in the Narmak area of Tehran in December.

That would tend to indicate defection. However, the selling of the house is an argument against defection. The last thing you want to do in a paranoid regime is to make them think you aren't coming back.

Maybe the Iranians have oversold the dummy. Even false information is useful. Provided you know it is false.

Gen. Asghari's 10-day trip to Syria was approved by the military judicial authorities, sources inside Iran told Newsmax. Two days after he arrived in Damascus, his family managed to leave Iran, the sources said.

The main impediment to defections by high-ranking Iranian officials is fear that any family members left behind will be arrested, tortured, and possibly killed.

Very odd. Of course as with any such story rumors often outrun reality.

Alireza Nourizadeh, the Iranian journalist based in London, tells Newsmax that Gen. Asghari planned his defection carefully.

"While he was in Damascus, he sent a fax or an email to Tehran saying that one of his contacts, who was an arms dealer, was in Turkey and wanted to meet him," he told Newsmax. "So they gave him permission to go to Turkey, where he defected."

The Iranian military attaché in Istanbul had reserved a room for Gen. Asghari at the Continental hotel, Nourizadeh said, but Asghari complained that it was not safe. Instead, he booked three rooms at the Gilan Hotel, in the Tacsim district which is popular among Iranians. "After calling a relative in Tehran, he left the hotel at 6:30 PM and disappeared," he said.

The arms dealer has to be a suspect in the plot. If he was a Western asset his cover is now blown.

There are a lot of threads to untangle. Even if this is a false defection the Iranians are going to have to blow the covers on some of their agents to give the General credibility. If it was a real defection the Western agencies may have been willing to blow the covers of some of their operatives to get the General.

All we can take from this so far is that nothing is what it seems.

The Missing Iranian

A fomer member of the Iranian Defence Ministry has gone missing in Turkey.

Ankara's diplomatic and political circles are currently filled with gossip over a missing Iranian, thought by some to be a spy.

Iranian citizen Ali Rızari Asqhari, 63, who recently retired from the Iranian Defense Ministry, disappeared in Istanbul on Feb. 7, daily Hürriyet reported on Monday. Iran has made a diplomatic move, yesterday sending a delegation to Turkey to obtain more information on the missing man.

There are hints of Israeli involvement. Or American involvement.

A senior Iranian general, Ali-Raza Asgari, went missing nearly a month ago in Istanbul and Iranian officials claim that Israel and the United States may have had a hand in his disappearance.

Several days ago, Iranian website Baztab, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, reported that during the 1980s Asgari held a senior position in the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon , and that following his return to Iran he was appointed deputy defense minister.

No official source in Iran has commented on the report about the disappearance, but a top official told Baztab that "some of the claims in the report are unequivocally incorrect."

The general's disappearance was first reported at the end of February in the Saudi newspaper al-Watan. The paper said that at the beginning of February Asgari visited Damascus and later flew o Istanbul in Turkey, where he checked into a hotel.

"Several Turkish citizens reserved a room for Asgari at the Gilan Hotel in Istanbul and paid for it, but haven't heard from him since," the paper stated.

So some claims are wrong. That leaves the option that others are correct. Maybe they got the hotel wrong and everything else is correct. Or perhaps it is a disinformation project. An Iranian delegation went to Turkey to check up on Asqhari so maybe he is important. Or maybe he is Iranian bait with nothing useful to tell. We probably will never know the truth.

The Jerusalem Post has an interesting biographical detail.

Askari is a former general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and served in the cabinet of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

H/T Michael Ledeen

An Act Of War

It was reported on Janurary 12th that the US attacked an Iranian Embassy in Iraq and detained five "diplomats".

BAGHDAD: U.S. troops in Iraq raided an Iranian consulate in the Kurdish city of Arbil in northern Iraq and captured six staff members early Thursday, according to Iraqi state television reports.

Later Iran's official news agency IRNA confirmed the development and explained that the troops disarmed the guards manning the gates of the consulate and entered the office building and took the six staff members into custody.

Well a question came up. Are the "diplomats" diplomats?

The answer. Some are not.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 18 — Iraq is carrying out an extensive review of its diplomatic protocols with Iran and may place new restrictions on them, the Iraqi foreign minister said in an interview on Thursday, after Iranian military officials and diplomats were picked up in three separate American actions here.

The raids have deeply embarrassed Iraqi officials, who say that the United States did not consult with them before it detained the Iranians, who were properly accredited visitors to this country. At the same time, Iraqi officials have been put in an awkward position by their neighbor, as the Iraqis concede that at least some of the Iranians appear to have been working with Shiite militias, just as the Americans claimed.

As a result, Iraq has decided to tighten diplomatic controls on Iranian officials, insisting on detailed itineraries for their missions here, closer coordination with Baghdad and pledges that the officials will not work with armed groups outside the government, said Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister.

The Iraqis seem strained over this. Which is good. We are operating on American time now.

The US Command has a few things to say on the subject.

The U.S. military insists the Iranians in its custody are not diplomats. Earlier in the week Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, told a news conference there was no doubt about that.

"We have statements made by people in detention and we have records that give us great confidence that these are in fact intelligence operatives," Casey said.

Here is a another report of what the "diplomats" were up to.

One of the six was released and U.S. officials said the five still in custody were linked to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents and militias in Iraq.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari was not available for comment, his office said.

Tehran denied the five detained Iranians had been involved in financing and arming insurgents in Iraq.

"The capture of Iranian diplomats is an insult to the Iraqi government and people," ambassador Hassan Kazimi Qomi said in a news conference at the Iranian embassy in Baghdad. Iraqi "Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told me that they will be released within days."

Asked why he believed the Americans carried the raid, Qomi said through a translator from Farsi to Arabic that "they want to destabilize relations between Iraq and Iran."

An insult to Iran? Actually under the Geneva Conventions it is an Act of War.

However, it looks like America has been getting ready to go after Iran for some time. First off there was a report of an aircraft carrier battle group heading for the area around 8 Jan.

The following other capital ships are in the area or near by as of 23 Jan. '07 - 0629z.

Boxer Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG):
USS Boxer (LHD 4) - Persian Gulf
USS Dubuque (LPD 8) - Persian Gulf
USS Comstock (LSD 45) - Gulf of Oman

Bataan Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG):
USS Bataan (LHD 5) - Mediterranean Sea
USS Shreveport (LPD 12) - Mediterranean Sea
USS Oak Hill (LSD 51) - Mediterranean Sea

Amphibious Warfare Ships:
USS Nassau (LHA 4) - Atlantic Ocean
USS Carter Hall (LSD 50) - Atlantic Ocean
USS Ashland (LSD 48) - Indian Ocean

In addition A Brigade of the 82nd Airborne heads to Iraq.

It looks like a squadron of F-117 Stealth Fighters are headed to North Korea to keep them from making trouble while we are busy with Iran.

The Pieces Are Being Put in Place
Col. Sam Gardiner

[Sam Gardiner is a retired colonel of the US Air Force. He has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College.]

The pieces are moving. They'll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.

The second carrier strike group leaves the U.S. West Coast on January 16. It will be joined by naval mine clearing assets from both the United States and the UK. Patriot missile defense systems have also been ordered to deploy to the Gulf.

Maybe as a guard against North Korea seeing operations focused on Iran as a chance to be aggressive, a squadron of F-117 stealth fighters has just been deployed to Korea.

This has to be called escalation. We have to remind ourselves, just as Iran is supporting groups inside Iraq, the United States is supporting groups inside Iran. Just as Iran has special operations troops operating inside Iraq, we've read the United States has special operations troops operating inside Iran.

Just as Iran is supporting Hamas, two weeks ago we found out the United States is supporting arms for Abbas. Just as Iran and Syria are supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon were now learning the White House has approved a finding to allow the CIA to support opposition groups inside Lebanon. Just as Iran is supporting Syria, we've learned recently that the United States is going to fund Syrian opposition groups.

We learned this week the President authorized an attack on the Iranian liaison office in Irbil.

The White House keeps saying there are no plans to attack Iran. Obviously, the facts suggest otherwise. Equally as clear, the Iranians will read what the Administrations is doing not what it is saying.

Another carrier is headed for the Pacific.

SAN DIEGO – Barely six months after returning from its maiden deployment, the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan will leave its Coronado pier within weeks for a cruise in the western Pacific Ocean.

Two Navy spokesmen said the Reagan probably will spend several months filling in for the Kitty Hawk, the Japan-based carrier that is unavailable because it's undergoing routine maintenance. The sources requested anonymity because Pentagon policy forbids them from providing such information before an official announcement.

The Reagan's unexpected deployment is an indirect result of President Bush's new decision to station a second carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf, the spokesmen said.

The Reagan will fulfill patrol duties in the western Pacific in place of the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group, which Bush sent to the Persian Gulf as added muscle to supplement the strike group of the Virginia-based carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The Stennis strike group – which includes three aviation squadrons from San Diego as well as the San Diego-based cruiser Antietam, destroyer Preble and frigate Rentz – was scheduled for a routine cruise in the western Pacific.

The date of the Reagan's departure hasn't been set, but its crew is expected to receive deployment orders within a week, the spokesmen said. The tour is expected to last a few months.

The ship likely will deploy without its carrier air wing or escort ships, relying for support instead on vessels and aircraft already stationed in Japan.

The Reagan, commissioned in 2003, arrived in San Diego the following year and completed its maiden deployment in July.

It is really unusual for a carrier to travel without its task group and air wing. Very unusual.

However it does allow for the ships and air group to be a reserve to make up for losses in any attack on Iran. It also allows the carrier to deploy at flank speed. Something difficult to do when oil burners have to keep up with a nuke carrier.

There appears to be Naval support for operations off Somalia. Which is not too far from Iran. As the carrier cruises.

2007/1/9 DUBAI, United Arab Emirates

(AP)In a further escalation of American involvement in Somalia, the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived off the war-ravaged country's coast and its aircraft have begun flying intelligence-gathering missions over Somalia, the U.S. military said Tuesday.

The U.S. Central Command re-tasked the USS Eisenhower to Somalia last week from its mission supporting NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, said U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown in Bahrain, where the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet is based.

The announcement comes a day after at least one U.S. Special Forces AC-130 gunship launched a deadly strike against several suspected members of al-Qaida in Somalia. Brown said the Navy had no supporting role in U.S. attacks in Somalia.

The U.S. launched at least two more airstrikes against terror targets in Somalia on Tuesday, a Somali official and witnesses said.

The carrier joins three other U.S. warships _ two guided-missile cruisers and an amphibious landing ship _ already conducting anti-terror operations off the Somali coast, the Navy said.

Brown said he did not know how long the Eisenhower's redeployment would last. "We'll be there as long as required," he told The Associated Press.

On top of all that it appears that NATO is taking an interest.

NATO has begun taking a major interest in intelligence information about Iran's nuclear program, according to Israeli defense officials who recently held talks with senior officers in the Western military alliance.

NATO's interest stems from growing concern that diplomacy will ultimately fail, the Israeli officials told The Jerusalem Post this week, and that military action will be necessary to stop Iran's race to obtain nuclear weapons.

There is growing criticism of Ahmadinejad in Iran.

TEHRAN, Jan 16, 2007 (UPI via COMTEX) -- There is growing criticism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, including a parliamentary drive to summon him to answer questions, a report says.

Even previously friendly hard-line newspapers have taken him to task for being too hostile towards the West since the passage of a U.N. sanctions resolution, the BBC said.

Carrier battle groups start showing up unexpectedly in the neighborhood and people get nerveous.

Despite all that Iran is keeping out 38 IAEA nuclear inspectors because they are upset at UN resolutions pertaining to their nuclear program. Makes sense.

Say. Didn't Saddam go down that road? Those boys better be careful.

Nasser Karimi, The Associated Press
Published: Monday, January 22, 2007

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran has barred 38 nuclear inspectors on a United Nations list from entering the country, the foreign minister said Monday in what appeared to be retaliation for the UN sanctions imposed last month.

The rejected officials are on a list of potential inspectors drawn up by the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit and monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“The act of rejecting some inspectors is legal and in accordance with the agency’s regulations,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the official Islamic Republic News Agency. He said others on the UN nuclear watchdog’s list remain eligible, but did not explain how Iran decided which inspectors to bar.

The IAEA “submits a long list of inspectors to member countries and the countries have the right to oppose the visit by some inspectors,” Mottaki said.

Last month, the UN Security Council imposed limited trade sanctions on Iran over its refusal to cease uranium enrichment, a process that can produce the material for nuclear energy or bombs.

It looks like Iran is preparing for war. I expect with all this going on one side or the other will instigate some provocation the other can't resist. My guess would be US Special Forces in Iran doing some kind of mischief that Iran would have to respond to. After all we have already tried the diplomatic route.

The drum-beating suggested Iran does not intend to back down in its standoff with the West. It could also aim to rally the public behind the government and silence increasingly bold criticism at home of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's antagonism toward the United States.

Iran's leaders have touted the possibility of a U.S. attack since President Bush announced on Jan. 9 the deployment of a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf region, a move U.S. officials have said is a show of strength directed at Iran.

Last month, the Security Council imposed limited trade sanctions on Iran over its refusal to cease uranium enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for nuclear energy or bombs.

The Iranian military on Monday began five days of maneuvers near the northern city of Garmsar, about 60 miles southeast of Tehran, state television reported. The military tested its Zalzal-1 and Fajr-5 missiles, the report said.

The Zalzal-1, able to carry a 1,200-pound payload, has a range of 200 miles. That would put Iraq, U.S. bases in the Gulf, and eastern Saudi Arabia in its range. The Fajr-5, with a 1,800-pound payload, has a range of 35 miles.

Neither could reach Israel, but Iran has other missiles that can. It was not known whether the missiles tested are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

The Iranian show of strength came as the American aircraft carrier USS Stennis was heading toward the Gulf, joining the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in a beefed-up American military presence. The Stennis is expected to arrive in late February.

The U.S. is also deploying Patriot missiles and nuclear submarines to the Persian Gulf and F-16 fighter planes to the Incirlik base in neighboring Turkey.

With all the cross confimation you have to know that something is afoot.

With the American logistics on the move the opening shots could come at any time. As always the key to any war is logistics. It does no good to have forces if they are not sufficiently close to the scene of action.

Update: 23 Jan '07 0333z

A strong explosion jolted Mashhad.

...a strong explosion at the high-voltage sub-station of Mashhad rocked a large part of the city and frightened residents in this provincial capital.

Hmmm.

Israel urgently needed in NATO?

In an effort to establish more effective deterrence in the face of Iran's race to obtain nuclear weapons, government ministries are, for the first time, working on drafting a position paper that will include guidelines and a strategy for turning Israel into a full-fledged member of NATO, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The paper is being drafted by an interministerial committee made up of representatives from the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry and headed by the National Security Council. The committee plans to complete the paper by the end of February and present it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for approval.

Meanwhile Monday, in an exclusive interview, former Spanish prime minister Jos Mar a Aznar told the Post that "Israel needs to join NATO as soon as possible."

According to Aznar, the Iranian threat serves as "an excellent occasion to enforce [Israeli] deterrence by making Israel a member of NATO."

The former Spanish leader and current president of the FAES Spanish think tank said that if Israel became a member of NATO, "the perception in Iran would change, knowing that it's not only Israel [they are dealing with], but all of NATO."

Aznar said that NATO needed to change its focus to counter the growing threat of global terrorism.

Interesting. Things are moving right along.

Cross Posted at Classical Values