The media is on a campaign to whitewash the Iranian nuclear program. Jonathan Landay of the McClatchy newspapers reports Experts: No evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons program. The headline says one thing, but the article says something else. There are some experts who do claim that Iran has been working on a nuclear weapons program. For example:
Iran asserts that it’s working only with the P1, an older centrifuge that it admitted buying in 1987 from an international black-market network headed by A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. But IAEA inspectors determined that Iran failed to reveal that it had obtained blueprints for the P2, a centrifuge twice as efficient as the P1, from the Khan network in 1995. Iranian officials say they did nothing with the blueprints until 2002, when they were given to a private firm that produced and tested seven modified P2 parts, then abandoned the effort. IAEA inspectors, however, discovered that Iran sought to buy thousands of specialized magnets for P2s from European suppliers, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last year that research on the centrifuges continued. The IAEA has been stymied in trying to discover the project’s scope, fueling suspicions that the Iranian military may be secretly running a P2 development program parallel to the civilian-run P1 program at Natanz.
The Washington Post reports Strike on Iran Would Roil Oil Markets, Experts Say There are those experts again. Unfortunately the article doesn’t provide any speculation of what would happen if Iran successfully developed a nuclear weapon. Jim Hoagland, though, in How to Rein in Iran without War has sifted through a lot of information and he does believe that Iran is working on a nuclear program, even if it isn’t all that advanced. (The McClatchy article really supports that conclusion too.)
This is one basic that Bush critics frequently overlook — in part because it gets lost in the overheated “World War III” rhetoric of the president: The IAEA and the U.N. Security Council have determined that Iran has lied about its nuclear activities and has therefore at least temporarily forfeited its right to enrichment for peaceful purposes. That Iran has gone to great, secretive lengths to create and push forward a bomb-building capability is not a Bush delusion. But neither is it fantasy to say, as do Russia and China, that the Iranians have had great difficulty in getting their system of 2,952 centrifuges at Natanz, south of Tehran, to work effectively. The scenarios provided to Bush by U.S. and Israeli intelligence some years ago on what date Iran would get the bomb have not been validated. Bush does not face the pressure that he once anticipated for a binary, strike or no-strike, decision before he leaves office.
So even if Iran isn’t as far along as intelligence reports have claimed in the past neither is the program dormant. Hoagland concludes
The administration has too often pitched the confrontation with Iran as one that Bush alone will decide. Russia, China and Europe should do everything they can to prevent this from becoming necessary. Not backing the new U.N. sanctions brings it a scary step closer.
His criticism of the Bush administration, here, is misplaced, if his final sentences are correct. The reason the Bush administration has been touting its role in preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is because much of the rest of the world is not serious about helping. Hoagland’s colleage Jackson Diehl comes a bit late to the story of the Syrian building bombed by Israel in September.
Outside Jerusalem and the State Department, however, pressure for an official account of the raid — or more important, for the intelligence that prompted it — is growing. The International Atomic Energy Agency and its freelancing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, want to investigate the alleged reactor site. The agency’s experts have been studying aerial photographs and asking U.S. officials for information. In theory, at least, an IAEA probe could compound the blow suffered by Assad by forcing him to explain — on pain of possible sanctions by the U.N. Security Council — whether and how Syria violated its commitments under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Well we knew that IAEA experts were examining photos of the site for several weeks now.
In the meantime other experts have concluded that the Israeli target was to be a reactor. So far the Bush administration has refused to cooperate with ElBaradei, who has all but openly sided with Iran in its attempt to deflect U.N. orders to freeze its uranium enrichment. Having debunked U.S. claims about a reborn Iraqi nuclear program in early 2003, ElBaradei would be certain to seize on any ambiguities in the Israeli and U.S. evidence about the Syrian reactor. If he raised doubts that the project was intended to produce plutonium, both Olmert and the Bush administration would be damaged.
ElBaradei has shown himself to be highly partisan and has been willing to shield Iran and Syria from scrutiny. If he raised doubts about American and Israeli charges, I would take it as confirmation that the charges were correct.
There is, however, a petitioner much tougher to resist than the IAEA director: Republican representatives who are demanding that “every member of Congress be briefed on this incident, and as soon as possible,” as Reps. Peter Hoekstra and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen put it in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. The two House members were already briefed because of their positions as ranking minority members on the intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees; what they heard evidently convinced them that possible covert collaboration between Syria and North Korea needs to be fully aired and debated before the United States proceeds with negotiations to end North Korea’s bomb program.
It’s interesting that Hoekstra and Ros-Lehtinen are asking for fuller disclosure of what was bombed in Syria and the connection between North Korea and Syria. Apparently the secret information they’ve heard has been convincing. (Presumably, whoever briefed them was convincing and was convinced too.) Yet for whatever remains unanswered about Iranian, Syrian and North Korean nuclear adventures, it appears that there are many who are alarmingly incurious about those efforts. While a military strike might not be advisable, it’s even less advisable to wait until these rogue regimes finally develop nuclear devices.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
