On July 19, Western officials made Iran an offer: They would hold off on imposing more UN economic sanctions if Iran would stop expanding its nuclear program.

The deal included an offer of civilian nuclear power plants, economic aid, new airplanes, agricultural assistance and high-tech transfers. All this in exchange for a promise from Iran not to increase its current enrichment activities.

This was an extraordinary offer, for it amounted to an acceptance by the Western world of a nuclear Iran.

As we brought out in a recent column, Iran’s current level of enrichment is believed to be enough to produce a nuclear weapon by next year.

Yesterday was the deadline these nations—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—gave to Iran to respond. And respond it did.

While hosting Syrian President Bashar Assad on a visit to Tehran over the weekend, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defiantly announced that Iran won’t back down “one iota” in its tussle with the West over its nuclear program. He said,

In whichever negotiation we take part … it is unequivocally with the view to the realization of Iran’s nuclear right and the Iranian nation would not retreat one iota from its rights. …We will take part in any negotiations and talk about any issue which consolidates our nuclear rights. …Iran will not give an inch on its nuclear rights.

By Ahmadinejad’s own criterion, the July 19 deal should have been acceptable negotiation, since it certainly would have consolidated Iran’s nuclear rights. But it is unwilling to even slow the growth of its program, let alone stop it.

All the efforts to negotiate Iran into giving up its nuclear activities, even to punish it with economic sanctions until it gives them up, have led precisely nowhere.

Syria: We Stand by Iran

You read that right: Bashar Assad was in Tehran over the weekend.

Interesting timing. Talk of a peace deal between Israel and Syria hinges on an apparent rift developing between Syria and Iran that Israel would like to exploit, as well as Syria’s supposed (actually fictional) ability to rein in Hezbollah in Lebanon.

One wonders, then, whether Israeli policymakers will accept at face value a statement Assad made during his visit yesterday, as Ahmadinejad was defying the West over his nuclear program:

Syria strongly stands by Iran and will not change its stance.

Biblical prophecy indicates there could be some division between these two nations, though just how much remains sketchy. Nevertheless, for Israel to pin its security hopes on a terrorist-sponsoring nation that is still actively doing business with Iran reveals its remarkable desperation.

Hezbollah: Stronger Than Ever, Ready to Strike

The idea that Syria could help contain Hezbollah vastly overestimates that nation’s power, and underestimates Iran’s. It also sells short the political gains Hezbollah has just secured in the Lebanese government.

To underscore those gains—and to highlight just how dangerous the situation truly has become for Israel—a senior Hezbollah commander says his organization is ready for war. Yesterday the Telegraph reported,

The political and military group’s senior commander in southern Lebanon said in a rare interview that Hizbollah was far stronger now than when it fought the Israeli army in a conflict in 2006.Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, who leads Hizbollah’s forces on Lebanon’s border with Israel - the crucial battlefront of any future war, was speaking in the port city of Tyre. “The resistance is now stronger than before and this keeps the option of war awake. If we were weak, Israel would not hesitate to start another war,” he said. “We are stronger than before and when Hizbollah is strong, our strength stops Israel from starting a new war… We don’t seek war, but we must be ready.” …Other sources say Hizbollah has trebled its arsenal in the last two years – from 10,000 missiles to about 30,000. These new weapons have longer ranges and heavier warheads. They include the Zelzal missile, which could strike as far south as Tel Aviv, and the C802 anti-shipping missile, capable of sinking Israeli warships.

Bad News Out of Pakistan

After Pakistani elections on February 18 took power away from Pervez Musharraf and awarded it to a collection of opposition parties, we said this effectively marked the end of the U.S.-Pakistan alliance in the war on terror.

Further proof of the accuracy of this forecast appeared in the New York Times on Friday.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

This is not a pleasant development in light of how Afghanistan is slipping further and further from U.S. control. As editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in our January issue, “Pakistan also has the nuclear bomb and could be taken over by radical Islam, with plenty of help from Iran. That means it could become a proxy of the Iranian mullahs. This would be the worst possible disaster!”

Racial Tension: Moving From Simmer to Boil

This morning’s Los Angeles Times, riffing off a couple of testy race-related remarks made on the campaign trail this week, discusses the combustible nature of the race issue in America:

Both candidates stand to gain — and lose — from the testy back-and-forth, underscoring just how incendiary, and complex, racial politics remain more than 200 years after vexing the first set of American politicians. …What set off the tiff was Barack Obama, speaking before a crowd in Missouri, “predicting Republicans would question his patriotism and highlight his unusual name and the fact that he doesn’t ‘look like all those other presidents on those dollars.’”The statement was similar to comments Obama has made before. But this time the McCain campaign responded sharply. “Barack Obama has played the race card . . . from the bottom of the deck,” campaign manager Rick Davis said in a written statement, which McCain subsequently endorsed. …”Race plays a role in American politics in a lot of different ways. It’s not just Ku Klux Klan-style racism,” said Vincent Hutchings, a University of Michigan specialist on the intersection of race and politics. “When a large number of African Americans decide to support Barack Obama on the assumption he’d be a better vehicle for pursuing their interests, that’s taking race into consideration.”

Having a mixed-race man running for president has certainly brought the race issue front and center—and raised tensions from simmer to boil. We continue to watch for signs of prophecies to be fulfilled regarding a violent racial explosion. Read Robert Morley’s column from this past week for more on this issue.

Why So Many Jellyfish?

An article in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune talks about how rising numbers of jellyfish could be a signal the ocean’s health is deteriorating. Although there are no global databases on jellyfish populations, the number of people seeking treatment for stings has doubled since 2005 in Australia. In Barcelona, during just a couple of hours last week, 300 people were treated for stings, and 11 were taken to hospital after a beach became inundated with the stinging creatures.

Scientists say the most likely causes of the apparent explosion in the number of jellyfish populations, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

Jellyfish are known for their ability to thrive in damaged environments, and that is just what they are doing.

That’s good news for the jellyfish, but bad news for the rest of us. Actually it is a sign that God is trying to get our attention. You can read about it in the article “Where Have All the Fish Gone?” from the August 2008 Trumpet.

Evidence of the deteriorating quality of the oceans is becoming commonplace. The Washington Post reports:

The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area on the seabed with too little oxygen to support fish, shrimp, crabs and other forms of marine life, is nearly the largest on record this year, about 8,000 square miles, researchers said this week. Only the churning effects of Hurricane Dolly last week, they said, prevented the dead zone from being the largest ever.

More evidence is apparent in the deteriorating condition of the world’s coral reefs. The Philippine Sun Starnoted that

20 percent of the world’s coral reefs have already been destroyed, and another 24 percent may be lost within our lifetimes if human impacts on corals are not reduced. … [C]oral reefs have been slowly dying over the past 30 years. … 97 percent of reefs in the Philippines are under threat from destructive fishing techniques, including cyanide poisoning, over-fishing, or from deforestation and urbanization that result in harmful sediment spilling into the sea.

But perhaps some of the most compelling confirmation of just how much our oceans are being destroyed comes from this Mercury News article, which laments the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” One such garbage patch of plastic, located north of Hawaii, covers an area approximately twice the size of Texas. Unfortunately, most of the oceans are international waters, which means that no country is responsible for keeping them clean, and to this point no one seems interested in tackling the problem. So the oceans will continue to get more polluted.

Plastic does not biodegrade. It undergoes a solar-driven process called photodegradation. The sun breaks down the plastic into smaller pieces called nurdles, which retain the plastic’s polymer structure. So, much of the millions of tons of pollution in these garbage patches consist of ubiquitous nurdles in a watery soup. In the North Pacific … plastics outnumber surface plankton six-to-one ….

It is getting pretty bad when there is more plastic than plankton in a given area of the ocean. This nine-minute video, “Synthetic Sea—Plastic in the Open Ocean,” is well worth the watch.

Elsewhere on the Web

Today’s Times reports that Britain’s second-largest bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, is about to announce “the biggest loss in UK banking history,” a pre-tax loss of at least £1 billion for the first six months of 2008. “The loss would be roughly five times higher than the deficit racked up by Barclays in 1992 at the height of the last recession,” the Times says.

Senior bishops of the Church of England have petitioned Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to declare a split in the Anglican Communion. The Telegraph reports, “[T]hey called on Dr Williams to acknowledge that there were now two distinct Churches and negotiate an ‘orderly separation’ to preserve a traditional identity for Anglicanism.” Liberals who are pushing for the ordination of homosexual priests say this could lead to civil war in the church. In the end, we expect the rift to lead to a swelling of the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church.