WarSclerotic

Report: Iran held nuclear test in N. Korea – Israel News, Ynetnews.

(Note: I scooped Ynet on this by a full day – JW)

German press says Tehran, Pyongyang collaborated on possibly more than one nuclear test in early 2010

Ynet

Germany’s Die Welt newspaper reported Sunday that Iranheld at least one nuclear weapons test in North Korea in 2010.

The paper’s report is based on “Western intelligence agencies sources,” and says that the test, in fact, refutes US intelligence assessments suggesting there is no “hard evidence” that Iran is building nuclear weapons.

“The types and ratios of isotopes detected… suggest that North Korea was testing materials and techniques intended to boost the yield of its weapons,” the report said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has recently declared that its nuclear negotiations with Iran have failed.

The statement followed Tehran’s decision the bar IAEA inspectors from what is believed to be key military sitesin the Islamic Republic.

Iran vehemently claims that its nuclear program is meant to serve civil, peaceful purposes only.

The Die Welt noted that evidence of the 2010 nuclear tests in North Korea was published in early February in Nature Magazine.

According to the report, Swedish nuclear physicist Lars-Erik de Geer analyzed data “showing the presence of radioisotopes that betrayed a uraniumbomb explosion.”

“After a year of work, (de Geer) concluded that North Korea carried out two small nuclear tests in April and May 2010 that caused explosions in the range of 50–200 tons of TNT equivalent.

David Frum: Will Obama Agree to Strike Iran?.

Will Barack Obama strike Iran — or agree to an Israeli strike — to stop the Iranian nuclear program?

This week, the U.S. president offered his most detailed answer to date, via an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly. The piece is headlined: “As President of the United States, I Don’t Bluff.” He insists again that he has taken nothing off the table, and talks about his readiness to fight if he must. But the real news in the piece (or so it seems to me) occurs deeper in the body of the text.

Obama:

“Our argument [to Israel] is going to be that it is important for us to see if we can solve this thing permanently, as opposed to temporarily. And the only way, historically, that a country has ultimately decided not to get nuclear weapons without constant military intervention has been when they themselves take [nuclear weapons] off the table. That’s what happened in Libya, that’s what happened in South Africa. And we think that, without in any way being under an illusion about Iranian intentions, without in any way being naive about the nature of that regime, they are self-interested. They recognize that they are in a bad, bad place right now. It is possible for them to make a strategic calculation that, at minimum, pushes much further to the right whatever potential breakout capacity they may have, and that may turn out to be the best decision for Israel’s security.”

Let’s decode those words. The president is conveying five ideas here:

1. He believes that any military strike against Iran will be merely a temporary solution. He not only states that belief explicitly in the first quoted sentence, but he goes on to imply that a strike will open the way to “constant military intervention.” That strongly suggests that the answer to the question at the top of this column is “no.”
2. The president is claiming that the “only way” — not the cheapest way, nor the fastest way, but literally the “only” way — to reach a permanent solution is for Iran to abjure weapons “themselves.” Which again suggests that the answer to the question at the top of the column is “no.”
3. To persuade Iran to abjure weapons, the United States will have to make some kind of deal. “It is possible for them to make a strategic calculation that, at minimum, pushes much further to the right whatever potential breakout capacity they may have.”
4. The president believes persuasion of Iran to be feasible because the Iranian leaders are at bottom rational actors: “Without in any way being naive about the nature of that regime, they are self-interested.”
5. But even if the deal does occur, the best case scenario is not very good. Iran will be stopped just short of “breakout” — i.e., the actual ability to manufacture a weapon. Nor will Iran exactly be stopped. It will more be “paused” — its breakout capacity pushed “to the right,” i.e., into the future.

You may wonder: Doesn’t the mention of Libya give the game away? Eight years after Muammar Gaddafi struck a deal with the United States to end his nuclear program, Washington supported an insurrection against the Gaddafi regime. Aren’t the Iranians likely to draw the lesson: Deals with the Americans cannot be trusted, and so we will never voluntarily relinquish our bomb program?

From an Israeli point of view, too, the president’s words are not overwhelmingly reassuring. Those words make an especially poignant contrast to the op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times by one of the Israeli pilots involved with the country’s 1981 destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear facility:

“When we were briefed before the Osirak raid, we were told that a successful mission would delay the Iraqi nuclear program for only three to five years. But history told a different story.”After the Osirak attack and the destruction of the Syrian reactor in 2007, the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs were never fully resumed. This could be the outcome in Iran, too, if military action is followed by tough sanctions, stricter international inspections and an embargo on the sale of nuclear components to Tehran. Iran, like Iraq and Syria before it, will have to recognize that the precedent for military action has been set, and can be repeated.”

But that’s not the direction in which President Obama’s thought is trending. He’s trending in a very different direction: Toward negotiations, inducements and a very limited definition of success.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Bennett on Obama’s Speech: Need Action, not Words – Middle East – News – Israel National News.

Naftali Bennett, former Chief of Staff for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, was not too impressed by President Barack Obama’s speech to the AIPAC Policy Conference on Sunday.

Speaking to Fox News after the speech, Bennett said that Obama should act more and talk less.

“Obama’s words are very tough but his actions aren’t,” said Bennett. “As we speak right now, the current sanctions are too slow and too soft to actually stop Iran.

“Iran is racing towards acquiring a nuclear weapon,” Bennett added. “They’ve recently tripled the pace of their uranium enrichment program. They’ve got over 100 kilograms of highly-graded uranium. They’re in the process of transferring their facilities underground and the sanctions are going to play in only in June. Why are we waiting till June?”

Bennett said that what is needed now is not “crippling sanctions” against Iran, as Obama had said in his speech, but “paralyzing sanctions that will bring Iran’s economy to the brink of collapse. We’re nowhere near that right now.

“Essentially,” said Bennett, “President Obama is asking Israel to outsource its own security to his hands. In half a year from now, after the Iranians move their facilities underground, Israel will no longer we able to take them out and we’ll be in Obama’s hands.

“The one thing that could prevent the need of Israel to take out Iran is if President Obama, and indeed the West all together, will immediately apply paralyzing sanctions on Iran. Now. Not in June, right now,” he added.

He acknowledged that Obama’s speech showed progress in his stance on Iran but added that “it has to be coupled and followed by decisive actions of the United States of America.”

Obama’s speech / Speaking American between the lines – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

To anyone who knows Washington, the subtext of Obama’s address to AIPAC Sunday was clear – the U.S. president will not capitulate to Netanyahu.

By Amir Oren

Two Israeli businessmen – one a relative of Yitzhak Rabin’s, and the other a former aide to the murdered prime minister – once visited Bill Clinton’s office, at their own request, to try to interest him in some venture. The former U.S. president listened with demonstrative courtesy, went out with them to the lobby and loudly told his staff to please let him know how the two young men were progressing. He then put an arm around the shoulders of one, shook the hand of the other and escorted them to the door with great affection.

“Hurrah!” crowed the former aide as they walked to the elevator. “Clinton will help us!”

	U.S. President Barack Obama addressing AIPAC on Sunday.
	Photo by: Reuters

“You didn’t understand him,” sighed his partner, more experienced in the ways of America. “He told us, ‘Get out of my sight and don’t waste my time.'”

U.S. President Barack Obama, no great friend of Clinton’s, adopted a similar mode of address in his speech to the AIPAC conference on Sunday: He spoke American. To translate it into Hebrew would do it an injustice. No one who knows Washington and its ways could mistake the subtext of his words. A strong commitment to Israel? Assuredly. Capitulation to the dictates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Not a chance.

After a speech like that, his meeting with Netanyahu on Monday is almost superfluous: It already seems clear that Obama is determined not to grant him anything.

Obama sent a complex, multifaceted message. He is a loyal friend of Israel, as evidenced by both the record of his actions over the last three years and the testimony of an eminent witness, President Shimon Peres. He is absolutely and unequivocally opposed to Iran having nuclear weapons. But he is first and foremost the U.S. president, whose commitment to do everything possible to thwart Iran’s nuclear program has properly been given to the citizens of his own country – the ones who will pay the price of any war with their lives and their wallets – rather than to the impudent leader of a foreign country.

In the 1980s, Peres watched with growing frustration as the unity government he established together with Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir bumped into the sharp right-wing leanings of AIPAC activists, who preferred the Shamir half of the government and embraced U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration. Peres, in an impulsive gesture, waived the appointment of his own candidate for UN ambassador, Elyakim Rubinstein, in favor of Likud’s candidate, Netanyahu. And that is how, with his own two hands, he created the public and media reputation of the man who would defeat him in the prime ministerial race a decade later.

Obama’s Democratic administration is not facing an Israeli unity government. But the unique status enjoyed by Peres, to whom Obama is ideologically akin, enables him to serve as a counterweight to Netanyahu.

Unlike the Israeli prime minister, who demonstratively surrounds himself with a screen of security guards provided by the Shin Bet security service, Obama looks like the supremely confident leader of a confident superpower. The cameras don’t show a single security guard in his vicinity, though America has had no lack of assassinated presidents, from Lincoln to Kennedy.

Obama made do with the cover provided by one single but noteworthy guard: Peres. The praise Peres showered on Obama was a preemptive strike at Netanyahu, lest he entertain the notion of accusing Obama of indifference to Israel’s fate. And Obama repaid the gesture by giving Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom and 250 warm words. Netanyahu received only a mention of their meeting on Monday and perhaps two or three words more. And his wife, Sara, got nary a word.

This is a campaign year, as Obama noted, and he came to speak to his supporters, donors and voters. In the acronym AIPAC, which stands for American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “American” precedes “Israel.” The president is the commander in chief when it comes to the Iranian issue, but the head of his party when it comes to elections.

Therefore, he opened his speech by welcoming the delegates from his hometown of Chicago (where he will also host the NATO summit in another two months ), and especially his party chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Translation: Netanyahu is the ally of the Republicans – those who, in Obama’s words, “question my administration’s support for Israel” – and Netanyahu’s patron, American Jewish businessman Sheldon Adelson, seeks to anoint a Republican in my place. But I, too, understand a bit about politics.

But the game being played by Netanyahu, who openly hopes for Obama’s defeat, is dangerous for Israel. It blurs the boundaries between the grand statesmanship of national security considerations and the petty politics of meddling in someone else’s elections. That is what lies behind Obama’s clarification of the time frame for his policy: He believes that months still remain in which to exhaust the policy of pressuring the regime in Tehran, which is the only one that can decide to abandon the nuclear weapons option. In other words, right now it would be premature and rash to make good on his promise to use military force against Iran as a last resort – especially since its rulers may well insist on rebuilding the facilities destroyed in the operation.

The news in Obama’s speech was that it deliberately didn’t include any news. Everything he said last night has been said in the past, by him and by other senior administration officials. There’s no point in trying to bargain for just a bit more (“Give me something – at least free Jonathan Pollard, so I don’t go home empty-handed” ). In American, this was a message whose meaning is unmistakeable.