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Editorial: Obama must outline plan to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions | detnews.com | The Detroit News.

The Detroit News

President Barack Obama will outline tonight his strategy for a troop surge in Afghanistan that hopefully will curtail the violence and allow for the building of a sustainable political infrastructure. Meanwhile, there’s still Iran.

Developing an effective response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions is as important as stabilizing Afghanistan and keeping Iraq moving toward self-government.

The Iranians have proved impervious to international pressure to suspend their uranium enrichment work. Iran demonstrated its defiance again this week by revealing plans to build 10 more centrifuges to produce the material necessary for a nuclear weapon.

On Iran, the Obama administration seems torn between moving forcefully to deny it nuclear capability and developing a strategy to contain the nuclear threat if it manages to build a weapon.

At this point, the United States must be prepared to do both.

Time is running short to impose an effective, iron-clad sanctions program punishing enough to discourage Iran from pursuing its nuclear goals. The Obama administration must push for a stronger commitment from China and Russia to participate in sanctions.

The sanctions must be tightened soon. Iran has demonstrated its intent to rapidly accelerate its uranium enrichment efforts. Once all of the centrifuges are built, a bomb won’t be far behind.

The other option, of course, is a military strike. But neither the United States nor its allies, except possibly for Israel, seem to have an appetite for bombing Iran. And the effectiveness of stopping the Iranians through a military attack is questionable.

So the administration must demonstrate that it is prepared to counter and deter the Iranians if they do develop a nuclear weapon.

This starts with building a stronger defensive shield around Israel and other potential targets. It also involves developing and deploying new weapons of our own specifically designed to deal with Iran’s nuclear program — including the so-called bunker-busting bomb that the Pentagon says will be ready in months and will be capable of destroying Iran’s underground nuclear sites.

Iran must be persuaded that we are prepared to stop it by any means necessary from wielding its nuclear program as a club over the civilized world.

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs.

Dec 2, 2009 Beware the winds of December By Alastair Crooke While America has been absorbed by the Afghan election imbroglio, a less-noticed event slid into place in the Middle East. It is less dramatic than President Hamid Karzai’s near removal; but this event tilts the strategic balance: Turkey finally shrugged off its United States straight-jacket; stared-past any beckoning European Union membership; and has fixed its eyes toward its former Ottoman Asian and Middle Eastern neighbors. Turkey did not make this shift merely to snub the West; but it does reflect Turkey’s discomfort and frustration with US and EU policy – as well as resonate more closely with the Islamic renaissance that has been taking place within Turkey. This “release” of Turkish policy towards a new direction – if successful – can be as significant as the destruction of Iraq and the implosion of Soviet power was, 20 years ago, in “releasing” Iran to emerge as one of the pre-eminent powers in the region. In the past months, a spate of new agreements have been signed by Turkey with Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia, which suggest not just a nascent commonality of political vision with Iraq, Iran and Syria, but more importantly, it reflects a joint economic interest – the northern tier of Middle East states are in line to become the principal suppliers of natural gas to Europe – thus displacing Russia as the dominant purveyor of gas to central Europe. In short, the prospective Nabucco gas pipeline to central Europe may gradually eclipse the energy primacy of Saudi oil. What is mainly symbolic in the prospective passing of the baton of energy “kingpin” – at least for Europe – from Saudi Arabia to the “northern tier”, however, is given substance, rather than symbolic form, in the simultaneous weakening of the “southern tier” – Saudi Arabia and Egypt – both of which have become partially incapacitated by their respective succession crises and domestic preoccupations. The weakening of the “southern tier” comes at a sensitive time. The region sees the drift of power from erstwhile US allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia towards the northern tier, and, as is the way in the Middle East, is starting to readjust to the new power reality. This can be most clearly seen in Lebanon today, in the growing procession of former US allies and critics of the Syrian government, making their pilgrimage to Damascus. The message is not lost on others in the region either. The US administration sees these changes too. It additionally knows – as writers on the elsewhere have made clear – that any sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program ultimately will fail. They will fail not only because Russia and China will not play ball but precisely because the much touted “moderate alliance of pro-Western Arab states” is looking increasingly to be a paper tiger: the “moderates” are not seriously going to confront Iran and its allies. Hopes by those, such as John Hannah, writing on foreignpolicy.com, that the Saudi bombing of the Houthi rebels in Yemen would mobilize a sectarian Sunni hostility towards Shi’ite Iran have not been realized. On the contrary, the Saudis’ action has been clearly seen in the region for what it is – a partisan and tribal intervention in another state’s internal conflict. But if sanctions on Iran are widely acknowledged – at least in private within the US administration – as destined to fail, this must be provoking some interesting self-questioning within the White House: The US is in the process now of withdrawal from Iraq, it is looking for the exit in Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is getting messier. None of these events seems likely to become particularly glorious episodes for the administration. It is not hard to imagine White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel and White House senior adviser David Axelrod asking themselves, “why the president should want to risk another perceived failure” – as sanctions on Iran surely will be. “Why”, they may ask, “do sanctions and open ourselves to persistent Republican jeering at their inevitable failure and then ultimately force us to have to ask … well, what do we do next, Mr President”? “Worse, will we,” they may ask, “be going into mid-term congressional elections with the Republicans raising that old Vietnam taunt that the ‘US Army did not lose in Vietnam – it was the politicians who stabbed the military in the back’ but with that same mantra now being used by our political enemies to depict Iraq and Afghanistan as failures of political nerve? Do we want to go into the midterm elections with failing Iran sanctions hanging like an albatross around our necks too?” No doubt in this discussion one of the White House staffers will point out that, in the case of Iraq, sanctions were indeed pursued, despite the likelihood of their failure, but for one reason only: to entice the Europeans on board; to go through the diplomatic motions – so that the Europeans would have no choice but to accept the consequences of their failure. But this does not apply in the case of Iran, the officials might point out: Britain and France, and to a lesser extent Germany, are, on this issue, more committed to “imploding” the Iranian state – by “soft” war, if not by “hot” war – than is Washington – so what would be the purpose of sanctions now? We do not know the outcome to this hypothetical debate. We do not yet know that negotiations with Iran will fail; although it seems that the debate within the administration seems to be hardening against the idea of Iran retaining any enrichment capacity. If this does become the administration’s position, then failure of negotiations is assured. Iran will not abjure its right to a nuclear fuel cycle for power generation – even at the risk of war. This is the essence of the dilemma: if sanctions seem likely to lead to nothing more than Republican sniping and taunts of weakness, how does the president display “toughness” on Iran – against the backdrop of withdrawal from Iraq, Afghanistan and abstention on the Israeli-Palestinian political process? It is clear that Israel must be reading the region in the same fashion. Israelis are acutely sensitive to US politics, and the Israeli media already express understanding for the acute dilemma that will face the US president if sanctions do not succeed in persuading Iran to abandon all enrichment (the Israeli objective). How might Israel see the way to help President Barack Obama resolve this dilemma – given the improbability that Israel will be given any “green light” to attack Iran directly, with all the consequences that such military action might entail for US interests in the region? A recent article by the veteran and well-connected Israeli columnist, Alex Fishman, in the Hebrew language newspaper, Yediot Ahronoth, perhaps offers some insights into how Israelis may be speculating about such issues when he warns about “the approaching December winds”. These winds, Fishman tells us, will bring more and new revelations – not about Iran’s nuclear ambitions – but about Syria’s nuclear projects: the departure of Mohamed ElBaradei from the chair at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he states, will open the door to new IAEA demands to inspect two suspected nuclear sites in Syria. Fishman notes that, following the surfacing last month in Germany of stories that Israeli special forces had been on the ground covertly in Syria, no one should be surprised if more evidence and photographs of the nuclear reactor, destroyed by Israeli air attack in September 2007, come to dominate the headlines in the Western press this December. The “star” turn in this prospective public relations campaign is to be evidence proving a direct Iranian nuclear connection and finance for Syria’s alleged nuclear project. Fishman suggests that it suits “Israel’s internal as well as foreign PR efforts” for the time being to play along with talk of peace between Israel and Syria; but that both the December campaign against Syria’s alleged Iranian nuclear cooperation in the Western press, and the playing along with the Syrian peace track “are directly linked to negotiations” that the US is conducting with Iran. Fishman concludes that these could end in confrontation with Iran – “and also lead to a military strike”, in which case, “whomsoever is in the Iranian camp will also get a pounding” – a reference to Syria. Does this piece truly reflect Israeli thinking? We do not know; but Fishman certainly is well connected. Does the Israeli security establishment really conceive that the road to military action against Iran passes through Damascus? For those who recall the tacit support given by Europe and the US to Israel’s 2007 surprise military attack on Syria, Fishman’s scenario is not as unlikely as it may seem. That earlier episode could easily have escalated to a wider war. More likely is that this is but one of a number of “game changing” scenarios that Israel is considering, but which ultimately all have Iran as the “end game”. In the past, Israel’s political parties of the right had a reputation for conceiving unconventional military actions, which sought to transform and invert the political paradigm of that time. Such actions did not always wait on, or seek, a US “green light”. There was not direct collusion with the US. Israeli leaders looked more to the direction of the political wind in Washington. It was viewed by Israelis historically as finding a creative way to help a US president “get to yes” – to borrow Obama’s own phraseology – by creating the public support and momentum to let a US president feel pulled forward by sentiment from a need to “hold Israel back”. Is a new scandal of Iranian nuclear malfeasance and proliferation into Syria to serve as the pretext? Will a repeat of the 2007 air strikes on Syria lead to a wider conflict? Does the Israeli leadership think to ease Obama out of his Iran dilemma, by using the supposed “provocation” of a “Syrian-Iranian nuclear partnership” for a widening conflict? Perhaps we should we should beware these December “winds”?

Wake up: we cannot wish away Iran’s bomb | David Aaronovitch – Times Online.

David Aaronovitch

The Iranian bomb is beginning to feel like one of those horrible things you saw coming all along, but never felt quite able to stop. It reminds me of the fall of Zimbabwe into its late Mugabe phase — all the elements were there, but you kept hoping that he would see sense, or be deposed or something. In three years or five, maybe there will be pictures of Iran’s Supreme Leader reviewing a march-past of his nuclear rocketry, while we wonder how it all happened.

We will get to this place, first, via the “wasn’t”, as in the Iranian regime probably “wasn’t” developing a nuclear weapon, or there “wasn’t” any utterly conclusive evidence that they were. Readers with long memories will recall the relief that greeted the reporting of the publication in 2007 of the US National Intelligence Estimate. The NIE, we were told, seemed to suggest that the Iranians had shut down their nuclear weapons programme in 2003-04 but had been reluctant to prove it to anyone for capricious reasons of their own. Almost all the people who had originally disbelieved the intelligence suggesting the existence of WMD in Iran and Iraq now firmly believed the spooks. And most of those who had trusted their every warning before were now pretty sceptical.

Whatever the truth about the weapons’ existence, it was argued that Iran didn’t have a “weaponisable capability”, so that even if a warhead could be produced out of all this newly and unnecessarily enriched uranium, the mullocracy wouldn’t actually be able — ceteris paribus — to attach a firework to a stick and send it fizzing towards the enemies of the Islamic Republic.

I sense this confidence has taken a knock. Once you have the rider, most experts seem to agree, training the steed is mostly a matter of time. So it was with just about all the other nuclear nations, and now there are suggestions from different sources that Iran is indeed researching a weapons capability. Far more convincing than mere spookery was the forced admission by the Iranians in September of a hidden 3,000 centrifuge mountain plant near Qom. That was followed by their more brazen announcement this week of building plans for another ten enrichment plants. Since Iran has huge natural energy resources and also the promise of Russian nuclear fuel for any nuclear energy plants, this capacity makes little sense, unless it is either for bombmaking, or to make people think that it is for bombmaking.

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This brings us, puffing, into the next station along the way, which is “doesn’t” — as in it “doesn’t” really matter that much if Iran gets a bomb. A rhetorical — but irrelevant — companion to this argument is that it is hypocritical to complain about an Iranian bomb when the French and Brits (not to mention the Israelis) have bombs of their own. To which one can only admit that, yes it is a bit, but that
(a) there are historical reasons for this that would take some unpicking and

(b) the solution, as suggested in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, would be to lose nuclear weapon capacity rather than to spread it to every nation that feels inclined to own H-bombs of its very own.

More relevant is the view that the risk from a mullah missile is much less than the risk of trying to prevent it. This argument tends to emphasise the sophisticated — no, exquisite — system of checks and balances imagined to exist within Iran, which might prevent any wild-eyed fundamentalist getting his millennarian hands on the ultimate millennarian weapon.

According to this view President Ahmadinejad and his ilk are either far more pragmatic than his map-wiping rhetoric might suggest, or else are constrained by much wiser, almost invisible forces inhabiting the bodies of unseen grey-bearded clerics.

Like many people, even if I can’t buy “wasn’t”, then I have a desire to go along with “doesn’t”. The feeling of mission fatigue in this country and in the US is palpable. We almost lack the spare mental capacity to consider how to deal with the difficult “other”. We have intervened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Sierra Leone. We have agonised over Gaza and Lebanon. We have debated Darfur and Zimbabwe.

It is all so difficult, so intractable, that the easiest answer seems to be to withdraw, to let things alone, to hope that they will go away. The hope can direct us towards the preferred answer; it is more comfortable to believe that it won’t matter that much if Iran does get nuclear weapons. No one, after all, has dropped a bomb since Nagasaki.

I could share this feeling but for two things.

The first is that there was very nearly a nuclear exchange betwen Pakistan and India on May 27, 1998, and I am far from convinced that we won’t come to regret the South Asian bomb.

The second is that the future of Iran is far from clear. Take this straw in the wind: last week the Canadian-Iranian film-maker, Maziar Bahari, who was arrested and imprisoned for 118 days after last June’s protests in Iran, gave an account of his treatment at the hands of the regime.

Already we know that “Green” protesters were tortured, raped, made to sign false confessions and to take part in show trials facing concocted charges. What Bahari told us was that his interrogators were not working for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence but for the intelligence division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

The significance of this was that it constituted new evidence that the Revolutionary Guard have become a parallel security state within Iran, their physical pre-eminence compensating for the political weakening of Mr Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khamenei. Do our calculations about the Iranian bomb survive its effective possession by the Revolutionary Guard?

There is no grand military option in Iran, only the near-fantasy of the “surgical strike” in which the uranium enrichment programme is destroyed and, along with it, almost certainly, the Iranian democratic movement.

But there is still one possibility that could rule out both military action and the spectre of the Guard Bomb. That one possibility is united international action to impose targeted sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard and their political backers, and on the nuclear programme.

It would mean agreement by the Russians, the Chinese, the Germans, the French, the Americans and us to occupy a single position.

Otherwise we could find ourselves facing some great terrible future Chilcot inquiry in which we seek to answer how it was that we failed to stop the last, worst Middle East war.

Iran’s Defiance – by Stephen Brown | FrontPage Magazine.

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The decade-long attempt to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons may have entered the final round on Sunday when Iran announced to the world it intended to build ten new uranium enrichment sites.

“This is really a statement of defiance,” a former senior Israeli atomic official told The Wall Street Journal, “telling the world we are going to go ahead with our nuclear program.”

The Iranian government’s statement came only two days after the world’s major powers condemned Iran’s nuclear program, which, despite Iranian denials, is believed to be producing nuclear weapons. China and Russia joined the United States, France, Britain and Germany to support an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution ordering Iran to stop construction on the uranium enrichment plant near Qom, a secret facility whose existence President Obama revealed last September.

Due to the international criticism, Iranians are now threatening to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reduce cooperation with the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. North Korea is the only other country ever to have pulled out of the treaty.

According to news reports, the Iranian decision to thumb their nose at the U.N. and world opinion and construct new nuclear fuel refinement facilities was made Sunday evening at a cabinet meeting chaired by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad. The Iranians will start work on five of the new sites within two months and at an unspecified future time on the remaining five.

It is believed the reason for the extra facilities is to allow Iran to build more nuclear bombs. One military analyst says U.N. weapons inspectors and the U.S. Department of Defense are of the opinion Iran currently has enough enriched fuel for one nuclear weapon. Iran would like to have several more in order to present itself as a “credible threat.”

The Iranian announcement signals a defeat for President Obama’s ‘soft’ approach towards the Islamic Republic’s leadership. In an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television network last January, Obama said Iran’s leaders would find the extended hand of diplomacy if they “unclenched” their fists.

“As I said in my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” Obama said.

But as early as March there were already signs that Iran was in no mood to unclench and drop the rock it was holding in the form of its nuclear weapons program. That month, President Obama released a video, wishing the Iranians a happy New Year, which, in Iran, falls on the first day of spring. In return for his friendly overture, the American president received from the Iranian government nothing but a demand for apologies for America’s past transgressions, real or imagined, against Iran.

Sunday’s statement simply proves what most have suspected all along: One cannot talk to the Iranian leaders and that they are simply stringing out negotiations to complete their nuclear arms program. And the fact the Iranians still celebrate the 1979 American embassy seizure every November, a flagrant and criminal breach of international law, shows they do not want to talk to the United States in particular and are still willing to flout international norms.

Essentially, Iran’s leaders are religious fanatics who believe they have been chosen by God to establish a Shiite hegemony over the majority Sunni Islamic world and then, hopefully, over the whole planet. Of the world’s one billion Muslims, about 220 million are minority Shiites, of whom the largest number, about 62 million, live in Iran. Pakistan contains the next largest community of Shiites at 33 million, while India is third with 30 million and Iraq fourth with 18 million.

Iran’s mullah regime sees possessing nuclear weapons as instrumental to its plans for world domination. Nuclear arms would also add significant muscle to Iran’s security in a part of the world where any sign of weakness or vulnerability could be dangerous. Iranians have not forgotten how Iraq took advantage of Iran’s revolutionary turmoil to launch a devastating eight-year war against it in 1980. And like Russia with its former Eastern European satellites, Iran would also use nuclear weapons to intimidate weaker neighbors.

The Asia Times columnist, Spengler (a literary pseudonym), gives another reason why Iran is not afraid to seek confrontation over its nuclear weapons program. Iranian demographics have sunk to West German levels of about 1.6 children per woman, which would make waging a war in 20 years impossible. Iran currently has enough young men to embark on a military adventure, whether internally for nuclear weapons acquisition or externally against the Sunni world, while in twenty years it won’t.

Iran’s heavily-subsidized economy is also imploding. Like Argentina with its 1982 Falkland Islands’ invasion and Germany in 1939, economically it is now or never for Iran to make a grab for the ring. In a year’s time it may be too late, especially if oil prices drop dramatically again. Besides, again like Argentina, a military adventure would probably cause those Iranian people actively opposed to the regime to put aside their economic and political grievances and rally around the country’s leadership in nationalistic pride.

But if Iran wants a fight, it will most likely get one. The Islamic regime’s Holocaust-denying leadership has openly stated it wants to erase Israel from the map. Facing such a naked threat to their country’s existence, one military publication states the Israelis are now openly discussing using a missile attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While Israel’s Jericho missiles can carry nuclear warheads, they also can be equipped with a conventional warhead. An attack by Israeli warplanes is also a possibility.

The Israelis already have American backing for such a strike if negotiations fail, as they appear to have. American Vice-President Joe Biden said in an ABC interview last July America would not prevent an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And since the only other option would be a nuclear-armed Iran, the Israelis will now likely ensure this last round ends in a knockout.

Saudi Gazette – Iran’s new nuclear plans magnet for sanctions.