Iran’s weapons pose little threat but are a political boon, experts say

Hannah Allam,… Iran’s weapons pose little threat but are a political boon, experts say

Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder Newspapers

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran probably couldn’t mount much of a defense against a U.S. air attack on its nuclear sites, but such action would likely rally moderate Iranians around their ultra-conservative leaders and strengthen Iranian resolve to resist efforts to make it give up its nuclear program, Iranian and Western analysts here believe.

Iran trumpeted the debut of new missiles during war games it conducted last week in the Persian Gulf as evidence that it’s updated its military and that American attackers would face difficult odds if they were to try to bomb research centers.

U.S. President George W. Bush and European leaders worried by Iran’s pursuit of the ability to enrich uranium — a process that can produce both fuel for power plants and material for building bombs — have said they want to resolve the conflict diplomatically. However, an article in this week’s New Yorker quotes unnamed sources as saying that the Pentagon this winter presented Bush with the option of using bunker-buster nuclear bombs against Iran’s underground nuclear sites.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, branded the idea “completely nuts,” in an appearance Sunday on BBC1’s “Sunday AM Programme.” He called military action against Iran “inconceivable,” adding that “it isn’t on the agenda” of the Bush administration.

Military utility aside, the value of Iran’s new weapons lies largely in what they might do for Iranian national morale. Military analysts here, as well as in Washington and Moscow, say Tehran’s new hardware is unreliable and ineffective. In addition, the Iranian air force is threadbare and its anti-air defenses are limited and antique. Its navy, even with a new torpedo unveiled last week that supposedly travels at speeds in excess of 200 mph underwater, would be no match for the 27 U.S. warships based in and around the Persian Gulf.

The Canadian dream proves an alluring call

Alfredo Corchado, The Dallas Morning News

SAN MARCOS DE ABAJO, Mexico — He’ll miss Dallas — a place he once worked — but not enough to return anytime soon. Migrant worker Reyes Suaste has discovered Canada.

This year he’ll head way north to pick chili and cucumbers. Dallas is much closer to his home in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, but there are other aspects of the U.S. immigrant experience he is happy to do without: “I won’t miss being treated like a criminal and not knowing when I can return home,” he said.

Suaste, 27, his brothers, Alejandro, 30, and Eusebio, 25, and more than a dozen other men from Guanajuato are heading to Quebec — not with the help of ruthless, pricey smugglers known as coyotes, but on airplanes with assigned seating and iced drinks. The men will join more than 13,000 other Mexicans in Canada as part of a guest worker program for agricultural workers.

Proposals for a guest worker program have drawn fierce opposition in the U.S., but proponents say the Canadian program offers some big advantages: workers are treated better, and they return home at the end of their assigned stay.

Mexican authorities say their 32-year-old pact with Canada could serve as a model for a similar program with the United States.

“This program is about meeting supply and demand,” said Miguel Gutierrez Tinoco of Mexico’s Foreign Ministry, which helps oversee the program with Canada. In 32 years, Tinoco said, “I know of no one who has violated the agreement and stayed behind. We can do the same thing at a larger scale with the United States.”

Others disagree, saying it is unrealistic to view the Canada-Mexico agricultural program as a possible model because of vastly different situations. While the Canadian agricultural worker program takes in a few thousand workers a year, the U.S. has as many as 6 million Mexican illegal immigrants.

Bruce Goldstein, executive director of the Washington-based Farmworker Justice Fund, a farmworker advocacy group, said that any agreement between the United States and Mexico must “include an overall comprehensive component,” referring to proposed legislation that would offer workers a path toward legal status. “We’re a nation of immigrants, not a nation of guest workers,” he said.

Media reporting bad news from Iraq because that’s the reality

Dick Polman, Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA — As conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate, and as President Bush’s popularity at home continues to wane, administration leaders and their conservative followers have been busy honing a provocative message:

It’s the media’s fault.

Their argument is that media coverage of the war, focusing on bad news while ignoring the good, is sapping the will of the American people. Maybe it’s coincidence, but Bush’s March 20 complaint — “people resuming their normal lives will never be as dramatic as the footage of an IED explosion” — is being increasingly echoed by his allies in the conservative punditocracy.

It’s not unusual for journalists to be assailed during wartime — President John F. Kennedy tried to get New York Times correspondent David Halberstam ejected from Vietnam because of his downbeat dispatches; Vice President Spiro Agnew later skewered Vietnam-era reporters as “nattering nabobs of negativism” — but the attacks on the Iraq coverage may set new standards for both fervor and frequency.

Fox News host Sean Hannity condemned what he called “a total and almost complete focus on all the negative aspects of the war.” Bill O’Reilly said that “there is a segment of the media trying to undermine the policy in Iraq for their own ideological purposes.” Frequent Fox guest Laura Ingraham said that many members of the media “are invested in America’s defeat.”

But these attacks are proof that the war itself is going badly; there would be no need to point fingers if it were going well. And many nonpartisan observers dismiss the conservatives’ media-bashing as an attempt to pin blame to the wrong people — while exonerating Bush, whose handling of Iraq draws support from only 35 percent of the citizenry, a record low, according to the new Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution analyst who follows the reconstruction effort and opposes U.S. troop withdrawal, said the other day: “The media has it about right, and public opinion has it about right. It’s Bush and Donald Rumsfeld who won’t admit they are not handling the war effectively, and that it has gone badly. Vice President (Dick) Cheney, in particular, is living in positive-spin dreamland.”