I saw the Indian hit movie 3 Idiots recently in an unusual location: a cineplex in Hong Kong. Very rarely do Bollywood flicks make the city’s commercial circuit — the conventional wisdom holds that they do not appeal to local audiences. Yet my Sunday morning matinee was 80% filled, mostly with Chinese of all ages. Some took the movie at face value: the zany antics of Indian college kids. But the majority of viewers, it seemed to me, got the universal moral about breaking free from social straitjackets. They laughed when they were meant to, and didn’t when they weren’t. While the foreign 3 Idiots was a box-office monster, 1911, a China-backed war docudrama starring hometown celebrity Jackie Chan, bombed. Go figure: India 1, China 0.

Introducing India’s 3 Idiots to a Chinese audience won’t make the cut of epic attempts to break down barriers between cultures. But it does tap into a spreading consciousness that China and India and their people share a special place among today’s nations — a tandem locomotive pulling the global economy while much of the rest of the world is a train wreck. You’ve heard the drumbeat: stupendous growth rates; ever richer consumers; geopolitical clout — a new order trumpeted by mega-events and extravagant slogans like the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and “Incredible India” at Davos. “The rise of India and China,” writes Robyn Meredith in her seminal book, The Elephant and the Dragon, “has caused the entire earth’s economic and political landscape to shift before our eyes.” Indian politician Jairam Ramesh sums up the phenomenon in a neologism: Chindia.

With Western economies reeling, the world is looking especially to China and India as saviors — whether it’s buying Italian bonds or Italian bags. The E.U. is even begging Beijing to help bail out its euro-zone bailout fund. But that’s only one side of the coin. There’s a duality to China and India, a blend of reality and myth, internally as well as between them. China and India have an arabesque relationship. These two giants on the cusp of superpower-hood are more rivals than partners. Despite their achievements, they face enormous challenges. And though they add up to nearly 40% of the world’s 7 billion population, they still live pretty much in parallel universes. Chinese and Indians, writes Indian journalist Pallavi Aiyar in her perceptive book, Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, are “largely culturally untranslatable to each other.”

Rivals or Allies?
As a Gujarati born, raised and living in overwhelmingly Cantonese Hong Kong — both tribes are brash and materialistic — I have long been privy to what local Chinese and Indians think of the other. It used to be downright ugly. Perceptions and attitudes, liberally spiced with racial epithets, went broadly like this: to the Chinese, the Indians were poor, superstitious and dirty; to the Indians, the Chinese were crass, godless — and dirty. Hong Kong is no microcosm of Chindia, but it reflects how, just as China and India have changed, so have the stereotypes. If before I were assumed by the Chinese to be someone’s chauffeur, now I am a tech entrepreneur or investment banker. Local Indians see China afresh too, but often in just two superficial dimensions: wealth and might. My 17-year-old son’s peers are only half-joking when they tell him that, because he is half Chinese, half Indian, he has it made. (See photos of the making of modern India.)

If only it were that simple. In her book, Meredith quotes Indian tycoon Ratan Tata saying, “China is the factory of the world; India can be the knowledge center of this region … If we orient ourselves to working together, we could be a formidable force of two nations.” That’s ambitious — and perhaps unrealistic. China and India were once soul mates — through the migration of Buddhism some 2,000 years ago. Later, the Indian monk Bodhidharma traveled to China to spread the message of Zen. Prominent Chinese went the other way: the devout pilgrim Xuanzang, later immortalized in the classic Ming novel Journey to the West, and the great explorer Admiral Zheng He. It was a time of mutual discovery. By the 17th century, the Middle Kingdom and the subcontinent were the planet’s trading powers. They then got caught up in their own worlds of feudalism and colonialism — a decaying dynasty in China, the British Raj in India — followed by decades of serial revolution and fervent socialism. Modern relations between the two countries were marked mostly by suspicion — and the occasional border war.

The contemporary period is friendlier, yet tensions are never far from the surface. Even as both governments speak of peace and prosperity, China is establishing a “string of pearls” in the Indian Ocean, unsettling New Delhi, and India is talking oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, angering Beijing. More to the point, the close economic ties between nations that often prevent conflict do not sufficiently exist between China and India. Chinese investment in India is about 0.05% of its worldwide total, while Indian FDI in China is so low that it does not appear on many charts. Bilateral trade is growing (especially Chinese exports to India), but it’s still a small proportion of their global total. Given their size and footprint, the two are nowhere as connected as they should be. Astonishingly, just a few of the two countries’ cities have direct flights.

Houses in Order
Before they rescue the world, china and India need to fix their own economies and societies. They are beset by some grim news. Growth is slowing, though in China’s case that helps cool an overheated economy. In both countries, exports are sliding, inflation is at painful levels, income inequality is reaching chasm proportions, and injustices like land grabs are sparking widespread protests. Cronyism is a scourge. The two have lifted countless millions out of poverty (though China has done a better job), but countless other millions — youths, workers, farmers — remain marginalized and desperate for decent livelihoods. While China doesn’t follow the rules, India has too many rules to follow. China is, if not at a tipping point, certainly at an inflection, struggling to contain asset bubbles and bad loans and to rebalance its economy away from state-directed investment to consumer-led growth. India’s reputation, meanwhile, has been so dented by corruption that the country’s top corporations have hired U.S. consultancy Bain to craft a “Credible India” campaign. Good luck.

Perception vs. Reality
At least India can count on a better image worldwide than China. Westerners in particular see the pair through a romantic and ideological prism. India is Gandhi, yoga, eat-pray-love. A gentle elephant; an exporter not of unfairly underpriced goods but articulate and urbane CEOs as at home in New York City as in Mumbai. China is “gutter oil”; the country you love to hate. Fiery dragon rather than cuddly panda. Mercantilist, rapacious, threatening; resented even as it is wooed.

There are two reasons for this dichotomy: Beijing’s profile and swagger are bigger than New Delhi’s, allowing India to escape the same scrutiny; and India is a democracy while China is an authoritarian state. All year, Beijing’s leaders have systematically cracked down on political dissent and cyberspace activity; they would not have tolerated, for example, the Indian summer of anticorruption protests in New Delhi. (Remember Tiananmen?) Yet the hard truth is that India is not as free as it’s made out to be. Democracy does not necessarily result in good governance. India’s institutions are weak, human-rights abuses are not unknown, and money and power often buy impunity. “India’s poor [have] a vote,” writes author Aiyar, “but this [does] not always equal a voice.” India even has its own Tibet: I don’t mean Dharamsala but Kashmir.

Whose economic path, China’s or India’s — essentially, state capitalism vs. private enterprise — is sustainable? Which society is more durable? Which nation has a stronger sense of destiny? The entire planet wants and needs to know. In the following pages, TIME’s Bill Powell and Michael Schuman face off to argue the case, respectively, for China and India as to whose template of change will prevail. It’s not easy to pinpoint the killer app. But given a year of restless populaces worldwide, the winner may be the one providing the greater justice and dignity to the most people. On that score, it’s still China 0, India 0.

With the IAEA discussing a dramatic new report from its nuclear inspectors in Iran, are some – such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – exaggerating the imminence of a nuclear-armed Iran? Or is the U.S. government hopelessly misleading us that the threat is manageable through sanctions and tough talk?

A series of extraordinary leaks in the Israeli press last week revealed an internal debate within Israel’s inner security cabinet over the need to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons sites.

According to these reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak favored the strikes; Vice prime minister and strategic affairs minister Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon reportedly was opposed. The leaks came on the heels of the third test-launch of a Jericho 3 nuclear-capable strategic missile, and what Israel claimed were long-planned air force exercises over Sardinia to simulate an attack on Iran.

According to former CIA case officer turned novelist Chet Nagle​, the Jericho 3 test may have been designed by Israel to send quite a different message than the one being played up in the press.

Any Israeli attack on Iran is sure to make of Israel an international pariah, Nagle argues. Plus, the likelihood of success – that is, in destroying or disabling all of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities so they have nothing to launch on the morning after the attack – is low.

“If you’re going to go to all that trouble and be a pariah, why not take one of those Jericho missiles, and detonate it 300 miles above the surface and deliver an EMP strike on Iran?” Nagel says. “That would stop their clock – if it’s electric – as well as all those centrifuges and everything else. Then the Greens can take over the country and we can go back in and rebuild the grid.”

Nagel was speaking with me and other analysts last week at a briefing organized by EMPact America for Congressional staff. His comments, while purely suggestive in nature, hint at a much larger strategic truth: if Israel is going to attack Iran, they have to make sure they totally disable Iran’s ability to launch a nuclear weapon.

How better to achieve that goal than a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse strike that would take down Iran’s power grid – and with it, even secret nuclear weapons plants Israel might fail to hit otherwise?

EMP or not, Israel was certainly making a show of force in an effort to convince Iran to back off its nuclear plans. On that score, from what we see in public at least, Israel had little success.

According to Iranian press reports cited on Sunday by the Debkafile, top Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps​ (IRGC) commanders in Iran were shaking their fists.

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Connecting the Nuclear Dots on Iran

Posted by Kenneth R. Timmerman Bio ↓ on Nov 10th, 2011
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With the IAEA discussing a dramatic new report from its nuclear inspectors in Iran, are some – such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – exaggerating the imminence of a nuclear-armed Iran? Or is the U.S. government hopelessly misleading us that the threat is manageable through sanctions and tough talk?

A series of extraordinary leaks in the Israeli press last week revealed an internal debate within Israel’s inner security cabinet over the need to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons sites.

According to these reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak favored the strikes; Vice prime minister and strategic affairs minister Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon reportedly was opposed. The leaks came on the heels of the third test-launch of a Jericho 3 nuclear-capable strategic missile, and what Israel claimed were long-planned air force exercises over Sardinia to simulate an attack on Iran.

According to former CIA case officer turned novelist Chet Nagle​, the Jericho 3 test may have been designed by Israel to send quite a different message than the one being played up in the press.

Any Israeli attack on Iran is sure to make of Israel an international pariah, Nagle argues. Plus, the likelihood of success – that is, in destroying or disabling all of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities so they have nothing to launch on the morning after the attack – is low.

“If you’re going to go to all that trouble and be a pariah, why not take one of those Jericho missiles, and detonate it 300 miles above the surface and deliver an EMP strike on Iran?” Nagel says. “That would stop their clock – if it’s electric – as well as all those centrifuges and everything else. Then the Greens can take over the country and we can go back in and rebuild the grid.”

Nagel was speaking with me and other analysts last week at a briefing organized by EMPact America for Congressional staff. His comments, while purely suggestive in nature, hint at a much larger strategic truth: if Israel is going to attack Iran, they have to make sure they totally disable Iran’s ability to launch a nuclear weapon.

How better to achieve that goal than a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse strike that would take down Iran’s power grid – and with it, even secret nuclear weapons plants Israel might fail to hit otherwise?

EMP or not, Israel was certainly making a show of force in an effort to convince Iran to back off its nuclear plans. On that score, from what we see in public at least, Israel had little success.

According to Iranian press reports cited on Sunday by the Debkafile, top Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps​ (IRGC) commanders in Iran were shaking their fists.

In one unsigned editorial from the IRGC’s Fars news agency, the Guards threatened to utterly destroy Israel with just four missiles if Israel dared to launch any kind of attack on Iran.

Which brings us to the question, what if Iran already had the bomb?

Former IRGC officer and undercover CIA spy, Reza Kahlili, believes Iran acquired nuclear warheads from a former Soviet republic at the end of the Cold War​, and has designed its own nuclear warhead with the help of Ukrainian scientists.

As I reported in my 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, IRGC commander Gen. Mohsen Rezai traveled to North Korea in January 1993, seeking assistance in arming those warheads. My informant, a top advisor to Gen. Rezai who later defected (and who spoke with me), said the North Koreans agreed to provide that help.

From that day forward, Iran believed it had a nuclear deterrent – not a strike force, but at least a deterrent – and its behavior changed. The IRGC believed they could carry out aggressive acts against the United States, including a terror alliance with Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, and the U.S. would never strike back with any consequence, and certainly would not strike the Iranian homeland.

This week’s IAEA report is only the latest in a series of revelations from the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna that has documented Iran’s long march toward nuclear weapons.

Despite these reports, nuclear skeptics continue to claim that Iran is hopelessly disorganized, incompetent, incapable, and lacking the will to defy the international community and deploy nuclear weapons.

Just three weeks ago, the same nuclear analyst quoted this week by the Washington Post to sound the alarm about the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear weapons progress, David Albright​, was telling folks how the Stuxnet virus had crippled Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.

As they say, what a difference a week makes.

We’ve had Indicators and Warnings of Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions going back twenty-five years.

In late 1986, the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency publicly announced it was signing a “consulting” agreement with a Pakistani metallurgist named AQ Khan​. I wrote about this agreement at the time – and continued writing about these Indicators and Warnings as they became known.

In 1992, the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked me to compile this information into a monograph called Weapons of Mass Destruction: the cases Iran, Syria, and Libya. At that time, I was looking at patterns emerging from Iran’s procurement of certain dual-use technologies that were needed for a centrifuge enrichment program.

It was clear to me then, as it was to many others, that Iran had a uranium enrichment program. But the U.S. intelligence community failed to connect the dots. Even in 2005 when I wrote a narrative version of Iran’s nuclear weapons development program in Countdown to Crisis, noteworthy scholars dismissed my information as “sensational” and based on “faulty sources.”

This week’s IAEA report shows beyond a doubt that Iran has cold-tested all the components of a workable nuclear weapon design, as I reported in June. It also shows Iran had significant assistance from a Russian nuclear weapons scientists, who for five years helped Iran to design a nuclear weapons trigger.

Rather than a haphazard effort, Iran’s nuclear weapons research was “managed through a program structure, assisted by advisory bodies, and that, owing to the importance of these efforts, senior Iranian figures featured within this command structure,” the IAEA report found.

The program was run out of a “Scientific Committee” under the auspices of the Defense Ministry’s Education Research Institute, the IAEA found.

The IAEA report also shoots down – yet again – the National Intelligence Council’s fatally flawed 2007 National Intelligence on Iran, which stated at the outset that Iran had stopped nuclear weapons research in 2003. The IAEA found that the research continued, underground and unreported.

And yet, in a recent talk to intelligence community retirees and other guests, the Director of National Intelligence, Lt. Gen. James Clapper​, said his fingerprints were “all over” the 2007 NIE and that he stood by it one hundred percent.

How much more information do we need to understand that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening to use them against Israel and the United States? How many more dots do we need before our intelligence community and our political leaders connect them to read the words IMMINENT THREAT spelled out just like that, in capital letters?

Iran’s leaders believe the “end of days” is come, and that by annhiliating Israel with a nuclear weapon they can “hasten the return” of the 12th imam, the Imam Mahdi of Shiite Muslim eschatology.

But in response to Iran’s latest efforts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the State Department would open a “virtual embassy” to Iran, and gave an interview to the BBC Persian service where she claimed the Obama Administration failed to respond to the June 2009 protests in Iran because their Iran advisors counseled them against it.

Here’s a novel thought: if our intelligence analysts, including those right at the top, fail to connect the dots, why don’t we just fire them?

Stay tuned.