TruthNews - French Announce Plans To Beef Up Security For Middle East Allies

French Announce Plans To Beef Up Security For Middle East Allies

International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, 26 Aug 2010

French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a meeting of the French diplomatic corps that France would keep its troops in Afghanistan as long as necessary and would also defend its friends and allies in the Middle East from the threat posed by an aggressive Iran.

"We'll have to organize ourselves to protect states which feel threatened," he warned, adding that Iran’s neighbors should be consulted on any deal between the Islamic Republic and the international community in the ongoing dispute over Iran’s renegade nuclear program.

Last year France stationed a squadron of fighter jets in the United Arab Emirates and has extended other defense cooperation and assistance to other countries in the Persian Gulf as well as Israel.

Iran gave another clear signal of its nuclear ambitions on Wednesday when the official ISNA news agency announced that there are plans in Iran to actively explore the possibility of extracting uranium ore.

"After the Bushehr Power Plant, exploration and exploitation of uranium is on the agenda," proclaimed Vice President and chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi said. "We are now working on the discovery and extraction of uranium and the project is advancing."

Most of the deals proposed to Iran involve a nuclear power supplying fuel for research or medical purposes in return for guarantees that Iran will not seek to build atomic weapons, but a domestic supply of Uranium, coupled with a domestic enrichment process, would remove Iran’s theoretical need for a foreign source of fuel.

In related news, Radio Free Europe reported on Wednesday that former Iranian nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian, currently a visiting fellow at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has once again been accused of espionage against the Islamic Republic.

This is the second time the Iranian Intelligence Ministry has accused him of being a spy after a 2007 case was dismissed amid speculation that his arrest at the time was politically motivated. This time around there is also rampant speculation that Mousavian is merely being used as a pawn in a much bigger political game within the hierarchy of the Islamic Republic since Mousavian is a close ally of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rival, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

"One of the most important aspects of this struggle is the cutting of ties of the moderate and technocratic forces of the Iranian establishment with the outside world and the diminishing of their power and influence in internal politics," said journalist Mehdi Mahdavi Azad.

Finally, in response to Iran’s nuclear posturing several Arab states have begun to build their own domestic nuclear programs. On Wednesday Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced that his country will build its first nuclear plant on the Mediterranean coast near the city of el-Dabaa. Mubarak insists that Egypt will work under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency and will not seek to build nuclear weapons.