【clover】组外跟帖 ECO DEBATE by 环游世界

环游世界UID: 2743584

http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/161


Outline:
1# about the debates & 介绍
2# background reading
3# opening statements
4# rebuttal statements
5# guest
6# guest
7# closing statements
8# decision
9# comments
10# comments

环游世界UID: 2743584

About this debate
Some time this year, it is safe to assume, Iran will become a threshold nuclear power: it will gain (if it does not already have) the wherewithal(必要的资金和设备) to become the tenth member of the world's current nuclear club. When and how it might build an atomic bomb is a matter of intense debate. Will it tinker away in secret facilities? Will it throw out inspectors and make a dash for a bomb? Or will it be happy to stay a screwdriver's turn away from an actual nuclear device?最后一句很形象啊，stay a (adj) turn away from…
America, Israel and many others say that a nuclear Iran would be unacceptable, not least because it is one of the world's biggest state sponsors of terrorism. Iran says it is developing uranium(铀) enrichment technology（铀浓缩技术） to make fuel for power stations, but the same machines can be tweaked（稍稍调整） to spin up highly enriched uranium for bombs. Iran already has one bomb's worth of the low-enriched stuff, and will soon have two bombs' worth. International nuclear inspectors reckon it has learnt how to turn it into workable bombs.
What should be done? Years of diplomatic efforts, condemnations and limited sanctions（受限制裁） have failed to stop Iran's uranium enrichment programme. Last September Iran admitted it was building a new and hitherto secret plant under a mountain near Qom. For the past year President Barack Obama has tried to open a direct dialogue with the regime in Iran, which is under growing pressure from the "green" protest movement at home, so far to no avail. So this year the world may have to choose how to answer the question laid out in 2007 by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy: an Iranian nuclear bomb, or the bombing of Iran?（这种修饰不错，AB OR BA）

环游世界UID: 2743584

BACKGROUND READING
A
Israel and Iran

The gathering storm
As Israel pushes for sanctions against Iran, it also mulls options for war
Jan 7th 2010 | JERUSALEM AND TEL AVIV | From The Economist print edition

SHORTLY after four in the afternoon on June 7th 1981, the late King Hussein of Jordan looked up from his yacht(快艇) off the port of Aqaba(亚喀巴，约旦西南部港口城市) and saw eight Israeli F-16 jets, laden with weapons and external fuel tanks, streaking eastward. He called his military staff, but could not find out what was going on. An hour or so later, the answer became clear. After a ground-hugging infiltration through Saudi Arabia, the jets climbed up near Baghdad and bombed Saddam Hussein’s Osiraq nuclear reactor.

Zeev Raz, the squadron’s leader (pictured bottom right), still recalls every phase of “Operation Opera”: his constant worries about running out of fuel; the risky move to jettison tanks, while the bombs were still attached to the wings, to reduce drag; and the loss of a key navigational marker. He overshot his target and had to loop back. He later discovered that his deputy, Amos Yadlin (now Israel’s military-intelligence chief), had slipped ahead and, annoyingly, dropped the first bombs. Somehow the Iraqis were surprised. King Hussein’s tip had not been passed on. And even though Iraq was then at war with Iran, there were no air patrols or active surface-to-air missile batteries（导弹炮组）. The Israelis encountered only brief anti-aircraft fire. In the cockpit video of the last and most exposed plane, Ilan Ramon (top left), who later died in the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, is heard grunting nervously. Their mission completed, the jets flew home brazenly on the direct route over Jordan.

The Osiraq raid, condemned at the time, is often seen these days as the model for “preventive” military action against nuclear threats. It set back Iraq’s nuclear programme and, after America’s two wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Saddam never built nuclear weapons. Such methods were repeated in September 2007, when Israeli jets destroyed a suspected nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. Now that Iran is moving inexorably closer to an atomic bomb, will the Israeli air force be sent to destroy its nuclear sites?

By Israel’s reckoning, Iran will have the know-how to make nuclear weapons within months and, thereafter, could build atomic bombs within a year. Even if Iran does not seek to realise its dreams of wiping out the Jewish state, Israeli officials say a nuclear-armed Iran would lead to “cataclysmic” changes in the Middle East. America would be weakened and Iran become dominant; pro-Western regimes would become embattled, and radical（激进派的） armed groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza would feel emboldened.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others could, in turn, seek their own nuclear arms. In a multi-nuclear Middle East, Israel’s nuclear arms may not ensure a stabilising, cold-war-style deterrent. “If Iran gets nuclear weapons, the Middle East will look like hell,” says one senior Israeli official. “I cannot imagine that we can live with a nuclear Iran.” For Israel, 2010 is the year of decision. Yet its ability to destroy the nuclear sites is questionable, and such a strike may precipitate a regional war, or worse.

Mr Raz, for one, thinks Israel cannot repeat the Osiraq feat. Iran’s nuclear sites are farther away; they are dispersed, and many are buried. The disclosure last year of a secret enrichment facility being dug into a mountain near Qom suggests that there are others undiscovered. “The Iranians are clever. They learnt well from Osiraq,” says Mr Raz. “There is no single target that you can bomb with eight aircraft.”

For Mr Raz, Israeli air power could, at most, set the Iranian nuclear programme back by a year or two—not enough to be worth the inevitable Iranian retaliation, which might include rockets fired at Israeli cities by Iran and its allies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. A more thorough action would require ground troops in Iran, but nobody is contemplating that.

Though he now works for a defence-electronics contractor and lives comfortably in a flat with a commanding view over Israel’s narrow coastal plain, Mr Raz exudes gloom. His four children, all adults, are applying for foreign passports—German ones, of all things. His eldest daughter, a mother of two, “does not think Israel is safe any more”—not just because of the prospect of a nuclear Iran, but because years of suicide-bombings and rockets have sapped belief in peace. Her siblings, he says, were persuaded to apply too.

This is a surprising admission, particularly from a kibbutz-bred former fighter pilot. Most Israelis still believe in the mystique of their air force. And for much of the past year Israel has been unusually calm. Palestinian suicide-bombings are very rare, and the morale-sapping showers of rockets have all but stopped (see chart above).

In Israel’s view this is thanks to the tough security measures it has taken, among them the contentious security barrier in the West Bank, and its willingness to go to war against Hizbullah（真主党） in 2006 and against Hamas（哈马斯） a year ago. “Deterrence（威慑） is working wonderfully,” says one defence official. But both militias are rearming, partly thanks to help from Iran, with missiles of even greater range that could reach the crowded Tel Aviv（特拉维夫） region from either Gaza（加沙）or Lebanon(黎巴嫩). And the lull has been bought at a serious cost to Israel’s diplomatic standing. An inquiry commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by a South African judge, Richard Goldstone, found that Israel (and to a lesser extent Hamas) may be guilty of war crimes in Gaza. Europe is regarded as increasingly hostile, a region where Israeli government and military officials travel warily to avoid war-crimes lawsuits.

There are doubts even about Israel’s great ally, America, after a spat over Jewish settlements in the West Bank. President Barack Obama may be clever, Israelis say, but he lacks the empathy with Israel shown by his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George Bush. One minister, Limor Livnat, recently said that Israel had “fallen into the hands of a horrible American administration”.落在某个人的手中，很生动！

Israel thus finds itself in a paradoxical state: more secure for now, but acutely anxious about the future; closer than ever to some Arab regimes because of a perceived common threat from Iran and its radical allies, yet more demonised by its Western friends. Israelis see a global campaign of “delegitimisation” （非法化）akin to（与..类似） efforts to isolate white-ruled South Africa. “I’m sure the Afrikaners felt like we feel now,” says Mr Raz.

For many Israeli strategists, the decision over whether to bomb Iran is the most important in decades—some say since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu—the son of a staunchly nationalist professor of Jewish history, and the younger brother of Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, who died leading the famed rescue of hostages from Entebbe in 1976—is said to feel the weight of history. His office is adorned with portraits of two of his political idols. One is Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism（犹太主义）. But the other, Winston Churchill, is unusual in a country that regards Britain as having betrayed the Zionist cause when it ruled Palestine.

Bibi as Winston
Mr Netanyahu（传说中的内塔尼亚胡，高中时总听到这个名字） draws inspiration from the British wartime leader for reasons both tactical and strategic. Political courage in Israel is often deemed to mean willingness to surrender, after decades of colonisation, the territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; to act like Charles de Gaulle（又一位名人，夏尔戴高乐）, who gave up Algeria. By holding up Churchill, Mr Netanyahu is saying that courage consists of holding tenaciously to one’s beliefs, regardless of popularity.（内塔尼亚胡说，勇气是仅仅握住自己的信念，不考虑迎合别人）

This model carried special force on the question of Iran. As opposition leader, Mr Netanyahu recalled Churchill’s efforts to awaken the world to the danger of Nazi Germany. “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” he said in 2006. Now that he is in power, pundits ask, might Bibi see himself as the Churchill of the Battle of Britain, fighting alone against Hitler and desperately trying to draw America into the war?

Iran is central to Mr Netanyahu’s thinking. It helps explain his surprisingly strong partnership with Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labour Party (and a former army chief of staff and prime minister), trusted as the only man able to handle the big security issues. It helps that he served in Sayeret Matkal（总参谋部直属侦察营）, the elite commando unit once led by Mr Barak—and by brother Yoni.

Iran affects Mr Netanyahu’s calculations on the Palestinian issue too. He came to office convinced that tackling Iran was a bigger priority than peacemaking with Palestinians. This may have been a convenient argument for a sceptic of the “peace process”. In truth, a peace deal has been difficult ever since the Palestinian movement split violently in 2007 between the Islamists of Hamas who seized Gaza, and the more secular Fatah faction that clings on to bits of the West Bank (with Israeli and American help) under President Mahmoud Abbas. Mr Netanyahu argued that even if a deal were possible, a nuclear-armed Iran would unravel any agreements. But in the view of prominent Palestinians such as Ghassan Khatib, a former planning minister, peacefully resolving the nuclear stand-off would help push Hamas into more moderate positions.

Under pressure from Mr Obama, who argued that progress on the Palestinian issue would help galvanise an Arab coalition to confront Iran, Mr Netanyahu has since adjusted his positions. He belatedly accepted the idea of a Palestinian “state”, albeit a demilitarised one. And having upset the Obama administration by rejecting its demand for a complete halt to settlement-building, he later announced a unilateral, partial, ten-month suspension.

Something is now stirring. During a recent trip to Cairo开罗, Mr Netanyahu seems to have offered enough to win praise from Egypt and start a new flurry of diplomacy that may yet lead to new peace talks. Mr Netanyahu’s aides（aid+es） now speak in Labour-like aphorisms: “We must make progress with Palestinians as if there is no Iran, and confront Iran as if there is no Palestinian issue,” says one. Perhaps there is a bit of de Gaulle in Mr Netanyahu after all. Or perhaps, as one Haaretz(国土报) columnist, Aluf Benn, noted, the parallel is that Churchill brought America into the war, but lost the empire.

Mr Netanyahu has gone along with the Obama administration’s decision to talk directly to Iran. In contrast with the threats issued by the government of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, his cabinet has been told to keep quiet about military planning, saying only: “All options are on the table”. As one aide puts it: “Those who know will not speak; and those who speak do not know.”

Clues in the wind
The few public signals seem contradictory. Mr Netanyahu has boosted the defence budget, and the army is planning to distribute gas masks to all citizens next month. Joint missile-defence exercises（联合导弹防御演习） were held with America in October, and a simulated biological attack is to be rehearsed this month. Despite all this, Mr Barak seemed to recognise the difficulty of curbing Iran’s nuclear programme last month when he told a closed meeting with members of parliament that the Qom（库姆，伊朗西北部城市） site “cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack”.

Two war games run recently by academics add to the despondency. In one, played out at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, America was ready to live with a nuclear Iran through containment and nuclear deterrence, and exerted strong pressure on Israel not to take military action. In another war game, held at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies and designed to explore diplomatic options, Iran continued to build up its stock of enriched uranium—even after a simulated Israeli commando raid on one facility under construction.

All this suggests that Israel is drawing up military options to attack Iran, but none of them is very appealing. This may explain Israel’s enthusiasm for sanctions. The emergence of an Iranian protest movement raises hopes that the regime could be restrained, perhaps even toppled, by stoking（火猛烈的） internal pressure.

America is rethinking the wisdom of targeting Iran’s most obvious vulnerability: its dependence, because of inefficient refining capacity, on imports of petrol and other fuels. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, now says America will seek to impose penalties on the increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guard（革命卫队）, “without contributing to the suffering of the ordinary [Iranians], who deserve better than what they currently are receiving.”

Mr Netanyahu’s lieutenants（陆军中尉） seem inclined the other way.（倾向于另一种说法） They say ordinary Iranians will blame their government, not the outside world, for any sanctions; so the embargo should be as crushing as possible. Domestic instability should be encouraged. Only a direct threat to the survival of the regime, they believe, will make it think again about seeking nuclear weapons. It is a harsh view, but for Israel the alternatives are even worse.

环游世界UID: 2743584

BACKGROUND READING
B

Iran
Time for tougher sanctions
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has had his last chance
Jan 7th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THE six countries trying to talk Iran out of its dangerous nuclear ambitions—America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—face an unappetising choice. Iran continues to produce stocks of enriched uranium that(定语从句)it claims are intended for a civilian nuclear programme (although it has no nuclear-powered reactor that could use the stuff), but which could make a bomb.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was offered a deal by which Russia and France would have taken much of his stock of low-enriched uranium and turned it—safely outside the country—into special higher-enriched fuel for a Tehran-based（德黑兰） research reactor. By diminishing Iran’s stockpile, if only for a few months, the deal could have opened the door a crack to confidence-building talks with the six. But the deadline for taking up that offer was the end of 2009, and the hand that Barack Obama has extended to the regime has therefore been spurned.

The stakes are all the higher because this issue is a severe test of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).(核不扩散条约) That grand bargain enables countries to make electricity, but not weapons, with nuclear fission. It is up for review this year. If the months tick by with Iran demonstrating to all the world just how easy it is to break the treaty’s rules with impunity, the NPT will finally be done for. （好晕！！！！！！）The time has therefore come for harsher measures. There are only two options for the six countries: tougher sanctions or military action.


If the months tick by with Iran demonstrating to all the world just how easy it is to break the treaty’s rules with impunity, the NPT will finally be done for.
主要是the months tick by的含义不好理解（个人感觉），这里tick是vi，tick by：时间流逝。With 后，逗号前是状语。最后的be done for是没用了，完蛋了。整句翻译：如果等着伊朗向世界证明打破NPT而不受到惩罚是这么容易，那么NPT就没啥意义了。
。。。。意群训练：。。。。。。看原句。
No government—not even that in Israel, whose security is most directly threatened by Mr Ahmadinejad—wants to use force (see article). Military strikes could interrupt Iran’s nuclear effort, but the gains are as uncertain as the costs. They might take out officially declared sites, but intelligence agencies know that there are others too, like the weapons-sized uranium-enrichment plant being built secretly in a mountainside on a well-guarded compound near Qom whose existence was revealed only four months ago. And even if an attack succeeded in penetrating all of Iran’s underground sites—a big if—it could do no more than set back（仅仅是） Iran’s ambitions temporarily. After Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, Saddam Hussein redoubled his efforts to get a bomb. Military strikes would also risk provoking a wider conflict in a region that is already worryingly unstable.

More painful sanctions, then, are the only sensible alternative to leaving Iran to enrich its way to the dangerous point where it can declare it has a bomb. But Russia and China—especially China, which has piled money into Iran’s oil and gas industries as Western companies have withdrawn—are reluctant to get tough.

Self-interest is not the only reason to oppose sanctions. Those who favour military strikes and those who would do nothing both complain that sanctions won’t work. Others believe that they would work, but would do more harm than good by encouraging Iranians to rally around the government at a time when the protest movement looks as though it might just bring about change.

But Iran’s protest movement is too little understood to place much weight on such judgments. There is virtually no independent reporting of what is happening inside the country, the demonstrators have no obvious leader and the movement’s fate will greatly depend on splits inside a closed clerical elite. Nor, in places where the facts are clearer, have the consequences of sanctions been predictable. Against Saddam’s government in Iraq, they encouraged the regime to dig in（瓦解）. Against apartheid in South Africa and an embryonic nuclear programme in Libya, they seem to have encouraged change.
they指代the consequences
If sanctions were used only when their consequences were certain, then they would never be used at all; and uncertainty is no excuse for doing nothing, because that could be just as dangerous.

Damned if you do? Damned if you don’t
Hence the case for policies that punish the regime and spare the people. （省略is????）Existing sanctions have frustrated some illicit imports for its nuclear and missile programmes. Routine searches of Iranian ships and planes at foreign ports and airfields would catch more—and sting too. Banking restrictions have earned the president the ire of merchants and MPs. These can be tightened and extended. America’s Congress favours slapping a ban on gasoline imports which, given Iran’s shortage of refining capacity, could bring the economy to its knees. But that would allow Mr Ahmadinejad to blame outsiders just as he is about to incur the people’s wrath by cutting petrol subsidies. A bar on investment in the oil and gas industry and on weapons imports would be smarter.

Getting agreement for such sanctions will be hard, and not just because of China and Russia. Some officials in Mr Obama’s team have hinted that further patience could yet be wise. Keeping the door open to talks, should Mr Ahmadinejad have a change of heart, is a good idea. But putting off harsher measures will only encourage him to press on. Despite the uncertainty of action, the price for inaction is higher.

环游世界UID: 2743584

BACKGROUND READING
C

Iran's nuclear programme

A thousand and one excuses
But they are running out
Dec 17th 2009 | From The Economist print edition

IS IRAN trying to build a bomb, or is its nuclear work aimed merely at keeping the lights on? Gathering evidence, and Iran’s refusal to heed a string of UN Security Council resolutions and stop its suspect activities, make the question seem quaint.(charmingly odd)

Few believe the tales Iranian officials have spun since the first news, in 2002, of their covert efforts to enrich uranium—usable for civilian nuclear reactors, but abusable at high enrichment for making weapons. Yet even the recent discovery of another hitherto secret enrichment plant being built deep in a mountainside on a heavily guarded military compound near the city of Qom had a ready explanation: to keep “civilian” enrichment going if other nuclear sites were attacked.

A steady leak of documents in recent months appears to tell a compelling story at odds with Iran’s version. A memo published in Britain by the Times, if authentic, shows Iran in 2007 about to embark on a four-year set of experiments, picking up on related past work, to develop a neutron initiator, or bomb trigger, containing uranium deuteride, or UD3 (a compound used by Pakistan in its bombs). The actual tests, however, would be done with substances less likely to be detected by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear guardian.

Some, like Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, have hitherto complained that, for all Iran’s odd behaviour, there is no hard evidence it is after a bomb. The experiments reported in the Times have no other purpose. Iranian officials dismiss these and other documents as forgeries(forgery,伪造物), yet refuse inspectors access to scientists in Iran who could answer their questions.

Publicly, IAEA inspectors say they cannot confirm that Iran’s nuclear programme is entirely peaceful. Behind closed doors, they reportedly judge it has mastered the skills it would need to build a nuclear weapon. They have had the report about neutron initiators for some time, part of a trove of documents collected from different governments. These describe weapons-related design work and other experiments, as well as the organisational structure of Iran’s military effort.

The IAEA says much of this material is credible and consistent. Critics, however, hark（重提） back to a controversial 2007 American National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran had indeed had a warhead-building programme but ended it in 2003. The British, French and German intelligence services soon let it be known they thought work had resumed; Israel’s spies say it never stopped. It may have started again by late 2005, after Iran’s fiery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took office.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium. After months of intensified efforts to coax it into talks, diplomats from America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China look like starting 2010 in discussions about tougher sanctions instead. And Iran’s evasive tactics, combined with the threats issued periodically by Mr Ahmadinejad and Iran’s latest test of its 2,000km Sejjil missile on December 16th, will ensure that Israel in particular keeps “all options” on the table for dealing with Iran’s defiance.