Representative of Supreme Leader to the IRGC, Hojjat al-Eslam Ali Saidi addressed the coming of the Mahdi [12th Shia Imam]:The Washington Post describes some of this possible upheaval to fulfill the crazed imams' messianic dreams:
"The fourth way [of bringing about the arrival of the Mahdi] is by preparing upheaval in the Middle East and so long as there is not total upheaval in Middle East then the Imam of the Era [Mahdi] will not arrive."
"Before the arrival of [the Mahdi] we needed a Mahdi government, and the Iranian Islamic Revolution was along the path of the arrival of Imam of the Era."
In a defiant move ahead of nuclear talks, Iran has announced plans to vastly increase its pace of uranium enrichment, which can make both reactor fuel and the fissile core of warheads. Eager to avoid scuttling those negotiations, world powers are keeping their response low-key.But, hey, the West is really, really pushing Iran - to talk:
The brief note quoted Iran as saying new-generation IR2m “centrifuge machines ...will be used” to populate a new “unit” — a technical term for an assembly that can consist of as many as 3,132 centrifuges.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a non-proliferation expert and former senior official at the U.S. State Department, described the planned upgrade as a potential “game-changer.”
“If thousands of the more efficient machines are introduced, the timeline for being able to produce a weapon’s worth of fissile material will significantly shorten,” said Fitzpatrick, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“This won’t change the several months it would take to make actual weapons out of the fissile material or the two years or more that it would take to be able to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile, so there is no need to start beating the war drums,” he said. “But it will certainly escalate concerns.”
The British Foreign Office confirmed that Iran had informed the International Atomic Energy Agency of its plan, and described it as “a cause for concern,” noting it breached both U.N. Security Council and IAEA board resolutions urging Iran to curb enrichment.Talks have been so effective over the past decade in curbing Iran's nuclear program, haven't they?
But it avoided linking the move to the next round of talks. Instead the statement expressed hope that Iran would soon respond to the six powers on a time and place for a meeting, adding: “We hope that Iran will agree to talks quickly and come to the table ready to engage and negotiate seriously.”
The European Union’s top foreign policy official, Catherine Ashton, said she is confident negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program will resume soon.
(h/t Washington Guardian Geopolitics Playbook)