Some sane voices speaking up in the region...

In Iran, one of the highest-ranking Shi'a clerics openly spoke against Khamenei's drive to attain nuclear weapons. Of course, if you asked Khamenei, he would tell you that Iran is only interested in nuclear energy. Moreover, whoever said that the highest ranking clerics were the most influential decision makers? I wonder how Iraq would have turned out, for example, if Sistani actually had real power. Anyways, the AFP reports,

The development of nuclear weapons goes against the teachings of the Islamic faith, a senior Iranian cleric said Friday in an interview with Portugal's Lusa news agency.

"The nuclear bomb goes against Islam. Including producing and storing it. To use it would be much worse," Grand Ayatollah Yusuf Saanei, 79, told the agency at his seminary at Qom, Iran's clerical capital just south of Tehran.

"If the government wants to produce this type of weapons it is going against Islam," he added.

Iran failed to meet an August 31 deadline set out by the United Nations Security Council to stop enriching uranium, which Washington says is aimed at producing nuclear weapons but which Tehran says is to fulfill civilian energy needs.

Saanei, one of five senior clerics in Qom, Iran's spiritual nerve center, is known for his pro-reform positions. He has called for dialogue with the West and has issued rulings banning workplace discrimination against women.

On another front, King Abdullah of Jordan is beginning to make some noise with regards to peace in the region. He was interviewed by TIME magazine, and in essense, said that peace-makers of the region have been sidelined for the past several years. He offered an ominous warning to hawks in both the US and Israel. Reuters reports,

The world will be "doomed" to years of violence in the Middle East if there is no major effort by 2007 to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jordan's King Abdullah warned in an interview published on Thursday.

"I believe the Lebanese war dramatically opened all our eyes to the fact that if we don't solve the Palestinian issue, the future looks pretty bleak for the Middle East," the monarch told Time magazine.

Blair is nothing more than a lame duck. Olmert is heading in that direction. However, they both seem to agree with the king of Jordan, and appear to be taking the necessary steps to ameliorate the problem. The AP reports,

Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said Friday that although the agenda for Blair's meeting with Olmert had yet to be set, the two men were likely to discuss options for resuming peace efforts with the Palestinians.

And finally, I wish to point out a development that is more insane than sane: It appears that Morocco is a new runner-up to developing "nuclear energy" capabilities. Frankly, and politics aside, this new global interest in nuclear energy is scaring me. Forget nuclear weapons. Just the fact that people have no clue of what to do with the waste generated by nuclear power plants should give people enough reason to think twice. Anyways, read and weep!

Russia's state-owned nuclear power company said on Thursday that it would bid to build Morocco's first nuclear plant, while Russian President Vladimir Putin signed co-operation deals with the Moroccan king as part of an economic mission to expand Russia's African reach.