Yossi Klein Halevi: The Return of Israel’s Existential Dread – WSJ.com.

In tabloid cartoons and dinner conversations, Israelis brace themselves for war with Iran.

By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

Jerusalem

The postcard from the Home Front Command that recently arrived in my mailbox looks like an ad from the Ministry of Tourism. A map of Israel is divided by color into six regions, each symbolized by an upbeat drawing: a smiling camel in the Negev desert, a skier in the Golan Heights. In fact, each region signifies the amount of time residents will have to seek shelter from an impending missile attack. If you live along the Gaza border, you have 15 seconds after the siren sounds. Jerusalemites get a full three minutes. But as the regions move farther north, the time drops again, until finally, along the Lebanese and Syrian borders, the color red designates “immediate entry into a shelter.” In other words, if you’re not already inside a shelter don’t bother looking for one.

The invisible but all-pervasive presence on that cheerful map of existential dread is Iran. If Israel were to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, Tehran’s two terrorist allies on our borders—Hezbollah and Hamas—would almost certainly renew attacks against the Israeli home front. And Tel Aviv would be hit by Iranian long-range missiles.

View Full Image

David Gothard

On the other hand, if Israel refrains from attacking Iran and international efforts to stop its nuclearization fail, the results along our border would likely be even more catastrophic. Hezbollah and Hamas would be emboldened politically and psychologically. The threat of a nuclear attack on Tel Aviv would become a permanent part of Israeli reality. This would do incalculable damage to Israel’s sense of security.

Given these dreadful options, one might assume that the Israeli public would respond with relief to reports that Iran is now considering the International Atomic Energy Agency’s proposal to transfer 70% of its known, low-enriched uranium to Russia for treatment that would seriously reduce its potential for military application. In fact, Israelis from the right and the left have reacted with heightened anxiety. “Kosher Uranium,” read the mocking headline of Israel’s largest daily, Yediot Aharonot. Media commentators noted that easing world pressure on Iran will simply enable it to cheat more easily. If Iranian leaders are prepared to sign an agreement, Israelis argue, that’s because they know something the rest of us don’t.

In the last few years, Israelis have been asking themselves two questions with increasing urgency: Should we attack Iran if all other options fail? And can we inflict sufficient damage to justify the consequences?

As sanctions efforts faltered, most Israelis came to answer the first question affirmatively. A key moment in coalescing that resolve occurred in December 2006, when the Iranian regime sponsored an “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust,” a two day meeting of Holocaust deniers. For Israelis, that event ended the debate over whether a nuclear Iran could be deterred by the threat of counter-force. A regime that assembles the world’s crackpots to deny the most documented atrocity in history—at the very moment it is trying to fend off sanctions and convince the international community of its sanity—may well be immune to rational self-interest.

Opinion here has been divided about the ability of an Israeli strike to significantly delay Iran’s nuclear program. But Israelis have dealt with their doubts by resurrecting a phrase from the country’s early years: Ein breira, there’s no choice. Besides, as one leading Israeli security official who has been involved in the Iranian issue for many years put it to me, “Technical problems have technical solutions.” Israelis tend to trust their strategic planners to find those solutions.

In the past few months, Israelis have begun asking themselves a new question: Has the Obama administration’s engagement with Iran effectively ended the possibility of a military strike?

Few Israelis took seriously the recent call by former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to shoot down Israeli planes if they take off for Iran. But American attempts to reassure the Israeli public of its commitment to Israel’s security have largely backfired. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent threat to “obliterate” Iran if it launched a nuclear attack against Israel only reinforced Israeli fears that the U.S. would prefer to contain a nuclear Iran rather than pre-empt it militarily.

On the face of it, this is not May 1967. There is not the same sense of impending catastrophe that held the Israeli public in the weeks before the Six Day War. Israelis are preoccupied with the fate of Gilad Shalit (the kidnapped Israeli soldier held by Hamas), with the country’s faltering relations with Turkey, with the U.N.’s denial of Israel’s right to defend itself, and with an unprecedented rise in violent crime.

But the Iranian threat has seeped into daily life as a constant, if barely conscious anxiety. It emerges at unexpected moments, as black humor or an incongruous aside in casual conversation. “I think we’re going to attack soon,” a friend said to me over Sabbath dinner, as we talked about our children going off to the army and to India.

Now, with the possibility of a deal with Iran, Israelis realize that a military confrontation will almost certainly be deferred. Still, the threat remains.

A recent cartoon in the newspaper Ma’ariv showed a drawing of a sukkah, the booth covered with palm branches that Jews build for the autumn festival of Tabernacles. A voice from inside the booth asked, “Will these palm branches protect us from Iranian missiles?”

Israelis still believe in their ability to protect themselves—and many believe too in the divine protection that is said to hover over the fragile booths. Both are expressions of faith from a people that fear they may once again face the unthinkable alone.

Mr. Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and a contributing editor to the New Republic.

Iran Rejects Deal to Ship Out Uranium, Officials Report – NYTimes.com.

This article is by David E. Sanger, Steven Erlanger and Robert F. Worth.

WASHINGTON — Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Thursday that it would not accept a plan its negotiators agreed to last week to send its stockpile of uranium out of the country, according to diplomats in Europe and American officials briefed on Iran’s response.

The apparent rejection of the deal could unwind President Obama’s effort to buy time to resolve the nuclear standoff.

In public, neither the Iranians nor the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, revealed the details of Iran’s objections, which came only hours after Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insisted that “we are ready to cooperate” with the West.

But the European and American officials said that Iranian officials had refused to go along with the central feature of the draft agreement reached on Oct. 21 in Vienna: a provision that would have required the country to send about three-quarters of its current known stockpile of low-enriched uranium to Russia to be processed and returned for use in a reactor in Tehran used to make medical isotopes.

If Iran’s stated estimate of its stockpile of nuclear fuel is accurate, the deal that was negotiated in Vienna would leave the country with too little fuel to manufacture a weapon until the stockpile was replenished with additional fuel, which Iran is producing in violation of United Nations Security Council mandates.

American officials said they thought that the accord would give them a year or so to seek a broader nuclear agreement with Iran while defusing the possibility that Israel might try to attack Iran’s nuclear installations before Iran gained more fuel and expertise.

The Obama administration was anticipating that Iran would seek to back out of the deal, and in recent days the head of the nuclear agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, traveled secretly to Washington to talk about what to do if that happened, according to several American officials. Last weekend, President Obama called President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in an effort to maintain a unified front in dealing with Tehran’s leadership.

A senior European official characterized the Iranian response as “basically a refusal.” The Iranians, he said, want to keep all of their lightly enriched uranium in the country until receiving fuel bought from the West for the reactor in Tehran.

“The key issue is that Iran does not agree to export its lightly enriched uranium,” the official said. “That’s not a minor detail. That’s the whole point of the deal.”

American officials said it was unclear whether Iran’s declaration to Dr. ElBaradei was its final position, or whether it was seeking to renegotiate the deal — a step the Americans said they would not take.

Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that “we await clarification of Iran’s response,” but that the United States was “unified with our Russian and French partners” in support of the agreement reached in Vienna. That agreement explicitly called for Iran to ship 2,600 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Russia by Jan. 15, according to officials who have seen the document, which has never been made public.

News of the accord led to a political uproar in Iran, with some leading politicians arguing that the West could not be trusted to return Iran’s uranium, produced at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. Clearly, however, the Iranian government does not want to appear to be rejecting the agreement. Mr. Ahmadinejad, in a speech in the northeastern city of Mashhad that was broadcast live on state television on Thursday, said, “We welcome cooperation on nuclear fuel, power plants and technology, and we are ready to cooperate.”

He did not address Iran’s efforts to change the deal, but cast it as a victory for Iranian steadfastness against the West. “A few years ago, they said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Now, look where we are today. Now, they want nuclear cooperation with the Iranian nation.”

In fact, the Iranians found something to like in the Vienna deal. It essentially acknowledged their right to use low-enriched uranium that Iran produced in violation of three Security Council agreements. The Obama administration and its allies were willing to create that precedent because the material would be returned to Iran in the form of fuel rods, usable in a civilian nuclear plant but very difficult to convert to weapons use.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks seemed to extend Iran’s two-track public position on the nuclear dispute, offering a degree of compliance while also insisting that there were limits to its readiness for cooperation.

“As long as this government is in power, it will not retreat one iota on the undeniable rights of the Iranian nation,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Fortunately, the conditions for international nuclear cooperation have been met. We are currently moving in the right direction and we have no fear of legal cooperation, under which all of Iran’s national rights will be preserved, and we will continue our work.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad also suggested that Iran expected Western countries to honor payments for nuclear assistance it made before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran paid more than $1 billion to help build a French reactor in return for access to that reactor’s fuel. After the revolution, France reneged on the contract.

“We have nuclear contracts,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “It has been 30 years, we have paid for them. Such agreements must be fulfilled.”

Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, arrived in Vienna on Wednesday night to deliver Iran’s response to the plan. On Thursday he told the ISNA news service that Tehran held a “positive view” of the Vienna talks.

An atomic energy agency team returned to the headquarters in Vienna on Thursday after inspecting a second nuclear enrichment plant, at Fordo, near the city of Qum, the state-run Press TV reported on its Web site.

Iran had kept the plant a state secret until a few days before the United States and other Western powers disclosed its existence last month.

In Washington on Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee unanimously approved a measure that would let the White House impose stronger sanctions on Iran. The Senate bill, passed a day after the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a similar measure, would authorize sanctions against companies that provide Iran with refined petroleum products and would ban most trade between the countries, exempting food and medicine.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, Steven Erlanger from Paris, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon.

EDITORIAL: Getting ready for the Islamic bomb – Washington Times.

The White House believes there is an Islamic bomb in your future. Associated Press reported Tuesday that the Obama administration is “quietly laying the groundwork for long-range strategy that could be used to contain a nuclear-equipped Iran and deter its leaders from using atomic weapons.” Granted this could be routine contingency planning, but it’s believable that President Obama is pursuing an acquiescent policy given his foundering efforts to dissuade Iran from developing a nuclear capability.

American planners are pondering whether Iran can be deterred from using nuclear weapons. This is the wrong question. They should instead examine how the United States will be deterred should Iran go nuclear.

Even under the current equation (the United States has nuclear weapons and Iran does not), Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorists, supplies Hamas and Hezbollah with rockets and conventional weapons, and gives materiel, training and intelligence support to extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iran is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of more American military personnel than any other country since the Vietnam War. Tehran does not lack the will to stand up to the United States even without nuclear weapons. It’s chilling to consider how much more bold Iran will be with an atomic arsenal.

A nuclear Iran would not immediately launch a full-scale war. At the very least, Tehran would need time to enlarge its nuclear stockpile. But testing a nuclear weapon would give the Islamic Republic an instant insurance policy against regime change. They know that the United States would not respond to their new capability with vigor, so Iran will use nuclear leverage to pursue conflict at the lower ends of the conflict scale.

This is the most important lesson of Cold War-style nuclear deterrence: preventing warfare at the nuclear level encouraged conflict by other means. This was demonstrated by the explosion of unconventional wars from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The United States maintains that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be “unacceptable,” but this is empty rhetoric. Witness the case of North Korea. On Oct. 21, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told an audience in Seoul, “We do not today – nor will we ever – accept a North Korea with nuclear weapons.” News flash to Mr. Gates: The United States has accepted a nuclear-armed North Korea since Pyongyang tested an atomic bomb in 2006. The U.S. government took no concerted action to back up its “no North Korean nukes” policy.

Saying a course of action is unacceptable and not imposing serious consequences once the line is crossed is irresponsible and encourages other countries to test the same limits. Hence, when the United States declares that Iran “will not be permitted” to achieve nuclear-weapons capability, Tehran’s response is: Says who?

The United States should be planning for the more probable contingency of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program. When Israel says something is unacceptable, it means it, and Israel is not afraid to back up its statements with force.

Israel has consistently taken military action against nuclear threats from their hostile neighbors. An Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program will have significant consequences for the region, and Washington will be required to demonstrate strong leadership.

The coming conflict will require more than another goodwill tour of the Middle East by Mr. Obama or a tart comment from the secretary of state. A war is brewing, and the United States should get serious about which side it wants to be on.

To nuke, or not to nuke, Iran? | Al Jazeera Blogs.

October 26th, 2009.

Photo by Getty Images

I would guess that, for most people, the use of nuclear weapons is not even a matter for debate. Indeed, since the last actively deployed nuclear weapon showed its true colours 64 years ago, even the most belligerent of world leaders have yielded to a saner instinct and kept their fingers off the button, to few complaints.

But there’s another opinion. Its current champion, in the media at least, is John Bolton, George W. Bush’s one-time pick as Ambassador to the United Nations. In a conference ironically entitled “Ensuring Peace”, Bolton argued that the only sure way to stopping a nuclear first strike is – to initiate a nuclear first strike.

“So we’re at a very unhappy point — a very unhappy point — where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.”

In Bolton’s mind, then, the issue here is not to question the strategic value of nuclear weapons or the impact that using them would have on humanity; the only important question is – “who should use them first?” If it’s “us”, that’s ok. If it’s “them”, not so good.

If you are a casual user of media you would probably conclude that he’s not alone in that opinion. Even as President Barack Obama attempts to steer the nuclear bandwagon onto a path towards fewer weapons, the louder voices (or those most often quoted) are warning of proliferation and impending nuclear destruction at the hands of crazed foreign leaders.

But weighing into the debate recently, in an article in Foreign Policy magazine, Professor John Mueller frames the issue in a different perspective. In reality, he says, the nuclear trend is encouraging, because even though a few countries do still feel the need to arm themselves with the ultimate weapon, they are the minority.

“a major reason so few technologically capable countries have actually sought to build the weapons, contrary to decades of hand-wringing prognostication, is that most have found them, on examination, to be a substantial and even ridiculous misdirection of funds, effort, and scientific talent.”

History, he argues, makes it abundantly clear that, even in the most incendiary moments in international politics, even without the constraint of “mutually assured destruction”,  the world’s stockpile of nukes has achieved little but gather dust.

“…possessors of the weapons [have not] really been able to find much military use for them in actual armed conflicts. They were of no help to the United States in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq; to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; to France in Algeria; to Britain in the Falklands; to Israel in Lebanon and Gaza; or to China in dealing with its once-impudent neighbor Vietnam.

But even if Bolton’s argument is accepted over Mueller’s, one question remains unanswered: if Iran does indeed have a hidden network of undeclared bomb-making factories… where exactly should Israel drop that nuke?

DEBKAfile – Obama’s NSA on Iran: “Nothing is off the table”.

October 28, 2009, 8:27 AM (GMT+02:00)

NSA James Jones

The US president’s national security adviser James Jones said early Wednesday, Oct. 28: The United States will be ready to respond if Iran fails to take tangible steps soon to meet its commitments over its nuclear program. “Nothing is off the table,” he warned.

Jones delivered the keynote address as the founding conference of the new J Street Jewish lobby, which advocates US pressure on Israel for concessions in peace talks and diplomatic engagement with Iran and the extremist Hamas.

Iran has said it will reply – with changes – by Thursday, Oct. 29 or the next day

to the IAEA compromise proposal for the further processing of its 75 pc of enriched uranium in Russia and France. “We will see in a short amount of time if engagement is able to produce the concrete results that we need and will be prepared if it does not,” Jones said.

“If implemented, this arrangement would set back the clock on Iran’s breakout capability as it would reduce Iran’s stockpile far below the amount needed in order to produce a weapon, and it would take time to reconstitute the amount needed for a breakout,” he said.

DEBKAfile‘s military sources report that the proposal calls for Iran to send overseas 900 kg of its 1,200-kg stock of enriched uranium. Replacing that amount at its Natanz plant would take 240 days of processing at the estimated pace of 3.75 kg per day. All the US administration can hope to gain therefore from the IAEA proposal is less than a year for negotiations with Iran before the situation is back where it started before engagement. For Iran, this is a pretty good deal.

// Buzz up!on Yahoo!

// <![CDATA[
document.write ("“)
]]> // <![CDATA[
document.write ("“)
]]>

SAVE AS FAVORITE

VIEW FAVORITES

By Paul Craig Roberts (about the author)     Page 1 of 1 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink

For OpEdNews: Paul Craig Roberts – Writer

U.S. set to respond if Iran defiant: Obama aide | U.S. | Reuters.

By Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States will be ready to respond if Iran fails to take tangible steps soon to meet its commitments over its nuclear program, President Barack Obama‘s national security adviser warned on Tuesday.

“Nothing is off the table,” General James Jones said, referring to Washington’s options in dealing with Iran if it continues defying international demands.

He spoke after Iran‘s state media said Tehran wanted major amendments in the framework of a U.N. nuclear fuel deal that it broadly accepts.

The diplomatic snag threatened to unravel the plan and expose Tehran to the threat of harsher sanctions.

“Iran now needs to follow through on its commitments,” Jones said in a speech in Washington to J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief said earlier on Tuesday there was no need to rework the U.N. draft, and he and France’s foreign minister suggested Tehran would rekindle demands for tougher sanctions if it tried to undo the plan.

Among the central planks of the plan opposed by Iran — but requested by the West to cut the risk of an Iranian atom bomb — was for it to send most of its low-enriched uranium reserve abroad for processing all in one go, state television said.

The draft deal emerged from Iran‘s recent talks in Vienna with the United States and other world powers.

Iran‘s pledges have won a reprieve from sanctions targeting its oil sector but Obama and other leaders have stressed they will not wait indefinitely for Tehran to follow through.

“We will see in a short amount of time if engagement is able to produce the concrete results that we need and will be prepared if it does not,” Jones said.

Since taking office in January, Obama has sought to engage Iran diplomatically, taking a less-confrontational approach than his predecessor George W. Bush.

Iran says it is enriching uranium only for power plant fuel. But its history of nuclear secrecy has raised Western suspicions Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons capability.

Jones said Iran‘s agreement to export low-enriched uranium to other countries would be a good first step toward reducing Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon in the short term.

“If implemented, this arrangement would set back the clock on Iran‘s breakout capability as it would reduce Iran’s stockpile far below the amount needed in order to produce a weapon, and it would take time to reconstitute the amount needed for a breakout,” he said.

Jones said the administration had consulted Israel and other U.S. allies in the Middle East and Europe plus Russia and China and the consensus was “moving toward our direction” over Iran.

(Editing by Xavier Briand)

DEBKAfile – UN team unwelcome in Tehran, Mottaki whittles down overseas enrichment plan.

October 26, 2009, 5:48 PM (GMT+02:00)

Just arrived, ordered to leave?

Senior Iranian MP Alaeddin Boroujerd said Monday afternoon, Oct. 26 that the UN inspectors had carried out their mission to visit a newly-disclosed uranium enrichment plant and may leave Iran later in the day. DEBKAfile‘s Iranian sources report that the nuclear watchdog team were supposed to have paid a second visit to the Fordu plant near Qom in the next two days after their first trip on Sunday. So either the Iranians cut the inspectors’ mission short or they were denied access to the suspected facility and aborted.

Earlier, as world powers waited on tenterhooks for Tehran’s reply to the IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei’s overseas enrichment proposal, Iran’s foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki came up with a new offer: “There are two options on the table… either to buy it or give part of our fuel for further processing abroad.”

He said a final Iranian reply would come within days.

DEBKAfile‘s Iranian sources report: The idea Mottaki threw out was aimed at seeing how far the Islamic Republic could whittle down the original proposal to send 75 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for conversion into unweaponizable fuel for a research reactor, without giving up its “inalienable right” to enrich its own nuclear material.

Iran was let off the hook of the Friday Oct. 23 deadline for its reply, although the US, France, Russia approved the deal on time. Mottaki took up the slack to try and push the powers and ElBaradei a bit further into accepting the reduction of overseas shipments and licensing Iran to import some more, a suggestion not included in the Elbaradei plan because it would violate UN Security Council Resolutions. In this way, Tehran hoped to let go of only a (negotiable) part of its enriched uranium – and so invalidate President Barack Obama’s plan to lose control of most of the enriched uranium it held in stock that could be used for making a nuclear device.

This new Iranian proposal boils down to a deal to break that stock down into consignments of, say, 100-200 kgs, each to be posted overseas over a period of months or even years.

This was confirmed by MP Boroujerd, the head of parliament’s foreign policy commission, who said: “Because the West has repeatedly violated agreements in the past, Iran should send its low enriched uranium abroad for further processing gradually and in several phases and necessary guarantees should be taken.”

He said this to Iran’s Arabic language al Alam television Monday.

Since Iran is known to produce 3,175 kgs of enriched uranium a day at its overt plant in Natanz, it would need 77 days to produce the 200 kg taken out of stock for shipping to Russia and France. This is the quantity Tehran proposes to purchase to keep its stock level, refusing under any circumstances to be deprived of a sufficiency of material for producing a nuclear weapon.

Tehran will accept the world powers-IAEA deal only if it can be finagled to meet this fundamental principle – a process Mottaki has kicked off.

How far are the US, Russia and France coordinated on standing up to Tehran’s dickering? Speaking after the Iranian foreign minister, a senior Russian official Sergei Ryabkov urged the exercise of patience with the Islamic Republic: “We should not give the impression that everything has stayed as it was. On the contrary, we need to give the Iranians positive stimuli.”

DEBKAfile – The Qom enrichment facility is not Iran’s only hidden nuclear plant.

October 24, 2009, 8:34 PM (GMT+02:00)

Site of Qom tunnel enrichment plant

Four International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors were due in Tehran Sunday, Oct. 25 for their prearranged visit to the newly-discovered uranium enrichment facility near Qom. Aside from that inspection, not much else is left of the Obama administration’s pursuit of engagement on Iran’s nuclear program. Saturday, Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani threw out IAEA Director Mohamad ElBaradei’s overseas enrichment plan the day after it was hailed by the big powers.

Soon after Larijani’s rejection, President Obama put in hurried calls to the Russian and French presidents on the new crisis.

DEBKAfile‘s military sources point out that even the UN watchdog visits may lead nowhere, depending on how much access they are allowed to the facilities tunneled deep in a mountain near Qom and how much incriminating evidence was removed in the two weeks since Tehran approved the visit. Some sources in Washington take the existence of this hidden plant as evidence that Iran has got several more secret facilities running – and not just for enrichment but possibly even for covertly constructing nuclear bombs and warheads. Reporting from US sources on Iran’s nuclear program tends to be conflicting, fashioned to fit the policy of the moment. For instance, the Qom tunnel hiding place which the US president “first revealed” in Pittsburgh on Sept. 26 was in fact known to intelligence services, including the CIA, as far back as 2004.

In December 2005, the National Council of Resistance of Iran called a news conference to expose details of “an installation under construction in deep tunnels near Qom.”

Yet in 2007, a US National Intelligence Estimate stated that Iran had halted its military nuclear program in 2003! DEBKAfile‘s intelligence and Washington sources believe that story was fabricated at the time by US undercover agencies to hold George W. Bush and Israel back from a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A similar mechanism was at work Friday, Oct. 23. After Moscow, Paris and Washington approved the ElBaradei plan proposing that Iran send its partially enriched uranium to Russia and France for further enrichment – there was a thunderous silence from Tehran. Despite initial negative signals, sources in the Washington and Vienna quoted Iranian officials as favoring the plan but seeking only a few days until the middle of next week for its final answer.

It was Larijani’s task to dispel this piece of wishful thinking. He said the West insists on pursuing “chicanery” or “imposing some of its demands” on Iran. “They say we will provide you with 20 pc enriched nuclear fuel when you hand over to us your enriched material, whereas we see no relation between these two issues.”

His deputy Alaeddin Boroujerdi repeated an earlier Iranian state television report asserting that Tehran wanted to buy enriched uranium not send it overseas.

The IAEA inspectors’ visit to Qom goes well, it may establish four key facts:

1. Iran’s nuclear program is military – not just peaceful as Teheran insists;

2. The hidden plant, built to house 3,000 fast centrifuges of the new IR-4 mark, is designed to produce 90 pc (weapons-grade) enriched uranium in an amount sufficient for two to three bombs a year.

3. The US 2007 NSI was made of whole cloth.

4. The most intriguing question which the nuclear watchdog inspectors need to go after now is the provenance of the uranium hexafluoride (UF6) destined for further enrichment at Qom. The Natanz enrichment facility is too closely monitored by the IAEA to be able to able to ship this material out undetected. This means that one or more secret enrichment facilities, still unknown to Western intelligence, are turning out enriched uranium somewhere in Iran in the service of its covert weapons program and remain to be discovered.

Diplomatic engagement with Tehran has not even begun to plumb the depths of Iran’s deceptions.

Print

Facebook

E-Mail

DEBKAfile – US “mildly disappointed” with Iran for withholding reply on overseas enrichment.

October 23, 2009, 11:33 PM (GMT+02:00)

Foreign role in enrichment – rejected

After France, Russia and US accepted the IAEA director’s compromise plan for Iran to export three-quarters of its low-enriched uranium overseas for reprocessing as fuel Friday Oct. 23, Iranian state TV first announced Tehran had opted to purchase enriched uranium overseas and not send it out for further enrichment.

Next, an Iranian official said the reply had not yet been written and Tehran would report on progress next week.

In Washington, the State Department said it was unhappy that Iran was not ready to embrace the plan. It was floated by IAEA director Mohammed ElBaradei Wednesday Oct. 21 as a compromise for safeguarding the enriched uranium against its use by Iran in nuclear weapons production. The proposal saved the talks between the three powers and Iran from stalemate.

All four were given two days to respond. Tehran waited for France, Russia and the US to approve the arrangement by the Friday deadline; then, when all eyes had switched to Iran, shot the ball back at them in a typical maneuver by a state television announcement:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran is waiting for a constructive and confidence building response to the clear proposal of buying fuel for the Tehran research reactor,

An unnamed member of Iran’s negotiating team urged world powers Friday to ‘refrain from past mistakes in violating agreements and make efforts to win the trust of the Iranian nation.’

DEBKA-Net-Weekly 418 , just out Friday, examined the proposal from Iran’s perspective:

On past form, Tehran’s typical response would not be a straight negative but a “Yes, but…” opening the way to interminable and futile palaver.

Even if Iran’s leaders decided to accept the ElBaradei proposal, they would need more than a couple of days to prepare the public for this compromise after Revolutionary Guards chief Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari bluntly threatened the US with a “crushing response” for its alleged complicity in a terrorist attack just six days earlier in Baluchistan. The deputy commander of al Qods and six lieutenants were among the 42 killed.

Powerful hard-line opposition inside the regime would also have to be overcome, notably on the part of Jafari himself, Iran’s senior nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and the high-ranking clerics Ayatollahs Hossein Nuri and Mesbah Yazdi.

They all subscribe to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s doctrine which holds that since America is a paper tiger, Tehran has nothing to fear from a US or Israel attack or sanctions, and must not be drawn into compromising on its nuclear-weapons program, which offers Iran the best guarantee for its present and future role as the leading Muslim power in Asia and the Middle East.

After France, Russia and US accepted the IAEA director’s compromise plan for Iran to export three-quarters of its low-enriched uranium overseas for reprocessing as fuel Friday Oct. 23, Iranian state TV announced Tehran had opted to purchase enriched uranium overseas and not send it out for further enrichment. Tehran avoided either accepting or rejecting the plan to have its uranium reprocessed in Russia and France. The plan was floated by IAEA director Mohammed ElBaradei Wednesday Oct. 21 as a compromise for safeguarding the enriched uranium against its use by Iran in nuclear weapons production. The proposal saved the talks between the three powers and Iran from stalemate.

The three powers and Iran were given two days to respond. Tehran waited for France, Russia and the US to approve the arrangement by the Friday deadline; then, when all eyes had switched to Iran, shot the ball back at them in a typical maneuver by a state television announcement:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran is waiting for a constructive and confidence building response to the clear proposal of buying fuel for the Tehran research reactor,

An unnamed member of Iran’s negotiating team urged world powers Friday to ‘refrain from past mistakes in violating agreements and make efforts to win the trust of the Iranian nation.’

DEBKA-Net-Weekly 418 , just out Friday, examined the proposal from Iran’s perspective:

On past form, Tehran’s typical response would not be a straight negative but a “Yes, but…” opening the way to interminable and futile palaver.

Even if Iran’s leaders decided to accept the ElBaradei proposal, they would need more than a couple of days to prepare the public for this compromise after Revolutionary Guards chief Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari bluntly threatened the US with a “crushing response” for its alleged complicity in a terrorist attack just six days earlier in Baluchistan. The deputy commander of al Qods and six lieutenants were among the 42 killed.

Powerful hard-line opposition inside the regime would also have to be overcome, notably on the part of Jafari himself, Iran’s senior nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and the high-ranking clerics Ayatollahs Hossein Nuri and Mesbah Yazdi.

They all subscribe to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s doctrine which holds that since America is a paper tiger, Tehran has nothing to fear from a US or Israel attack or sanctions, and must not be drawn into compromising on its nuclear-weapons program, which offers Iran the best guarantee for its present and future role as the leading Muslim power in Asia and the Middle East.