Here is the Washington Post's Friday front-pager on Iran's revelation that it has a previously undisclosed second uranium-enrichment plant. A second WP report summarized initial Western responses to the disclosure. A Saturday NY Times piece recounted details of closed-door diplomacy last week between the Security Council powers. The Independent reports that with 3,000 centrifuges the facility can make a bomb or two per year. AP report that Iran will help Venezuela search for uranium deposits--anyone think Chavez wants to make luminous dial watches?
Iran decided to disclose the plant, located at Qom (the religious capital of the Shia clergy) upon becoming aware that the secret was out--the US knew of the facility but had decided to wait until proof positive of its purpose could be shown. The article also details how ambiguities in interpreting the Nonproliferation Treaty enable Iran to argue its concealment was technically lawful.
Washington Post pundit David Ignatius adopts nuclear expert Graham Allison's description of the Iran nuclear challenge as "a Cuban Missile Crisis in slow-motion". The WP editors state that discovery of the second uranium enrichment plant "changes the calculus" re Iran, and means severe sanctions must be adopted; perhaps more significantly, the WP editors call re a re-assessment of US intelligence on Iran. A Saturday WP front-pager adds two key points re Team Obama's Iran views: (1) Sanctions must not be seen as America alone--which effectively gives Russia & China the high cards in the 5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China & Germany)negotiations with Iran; (2) SecDef Robert Gates saying a week ago that "there is no military option" because a strike could only delay Iran's nuclear accession, and also because there likely are other secret facilities. Fox News pundit Stephen Hayes notes that Iran has been caught lying thrice in the past decade, and yet Obama says "the offer stands" for a path to peace. Such fecklessness can only earn the contempt of the mullahs yet again. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, calls for stopping Iran now. First HB wants negotiations through year-end, then if unsuccessful (as will be the case) imposing "crippling sanctions" by passing the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (H.R 2194), now pending in Congress.
At NRO, Michael Ledeen notes (sadly, he is right) that Obama, Brown & Sarkozy knew about this, and kept silent until they no longer could, and thus their outrage is mere posturing, with the talks deadline now pushed back to December despite Iran's latest duplicity. Victor Davis Hanson offers additional evidence of the feckless western non-responses to Iran's nuclear quest.
Heritage Foundation scholar Peter Brookes notes that the reactor is located on a military base--a rather odd spot for a civilian reactor. National security maven Cliff May calls for immediate imposition of harsh sanctions. But the Financial Times reports that Chinese state companies are now supplying petrol to Iran, to the tune of 30,000 - 40,000 barrels per day, making up for other companies who cut back shipments. Iran imports 120,000 mbd via oil trading intermediaries, representing 0 percent of its refined oil needs.
Claudia Rosett sees a UN at odds with President Obama's view of common interests in human progress:
But also out of that alliance, the U.N. was created crooked from the start. It is a grand collective, immune to law, reporting to itself, largely unaccountable and most easily exploited and corrupted by its least principled members. If it is to be used at all, it is a vehicle best used sparingly and with great caution.
Outside the walls, barricades, motorcades and security nets cocooning the U.N. this week, there have been thousands of protesters from some of the countries with dignitaries speaking within. To name a few, I have come across demonstrators from Libya, Burma, China, Cameroon, and, in large numbers, coming in some cases from hundreds or even thousands of miles away, Iran. Most of them are calling for the same things: democracy, justice, freedom. As Obama's presidency unfolds, there are almost surely moments ahead in which, whatever the yen to define away differences and dismiss divides, Obama--and America--will have to choose: The tyrant on the U.N. stage, or those little folks across the street.
Michael Barone sees Obama clinging to a 1960s worldview of America as "the bad guy" in world affairs, and thus 44 is inclined to ditch allies in favor of appeasing enemies in diplomatic intercourse & geostrategy. The Wall Street Journal editors see the "disarmament illusion" in Team Obama's attempt to get Iran to give away the bomb at the negotiating table.\:
The Iranians have heard it all before, waltzing along in talks with the "E-3" and now the "P-5-plus-1" (the Security Council permanent members and Germany), all the while ignoring Security Council resolutions and its commitments as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Let's also not forget the boost Iran got in late 2007, when a U.S. national intelligence estimate concluded that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and kept it frozen. The U.S. spy agencies reached this dubious conclusion while apparently knowing about the site near Qom. The intelligence finding stole whatever urgency existed for the Bush Administration to act against Iran, militarily or otherwise, which perhaps was the intended goal. The Iranians got more time and cover.
In an interview with Time magazine this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't sound overly concerned, saying that if the U.S. mentioned the previously secret facility, it "simply adds to the list of issues to which the United States owes the Iranian nation an apology over." Following the violent protests this summer in response to Iran's fraudulent presidential elections, Mr. Ahmadinejad has kept power but looks both weaker and more ruthless. He makes explicit threats against Israel and he engaged in more Holocaust denial at the U.N. this week.
Meantime, the U.S. and its allies dream. Mr. Obama used his global forum this week not to rally the world to stop today's nuclear rogues but to offer lovely visions of disarmament in some distant future. In the bitter decades of the Cold War, we learned the hard way that the only countries that abide by disarmament treaties are those that want to be disarmed. It's becoming increasingly, and dangerously, obvious that Mr. Obama wasn't paying attention.
Ralph Peters sees this mess headed for (a) a US default and (b) a partially successful Israeli strike that leads Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz and thus push oil sky-high.
Bottom Line. Iran's latest announcement brings to mind once again a quotation LFTC has oft offered: the late Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's warning, delivered in his 1978 Harvard address, that the West's illusions about Moscow would be "broken by the pitiless crowbar of events." Then the shock was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The next shock increasingly looks like it will be a WMD shock.
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