The editors of the Washington Post articulate a position similar to the one that I took yesterday:

The Obama administration and European governments have set the end of the year as a deadline for the transfer of the uranium out of Iran and for progress in the overall negotiations. But the administration must consider whether it makes sense to grant the regime two more months of grace. On Tuesday, after all, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly rejected the overtures he said he had received from President Obama, declaring that negotiating with the United States was “naive and perverted.” On Wednesday, the opposition protesters chanted: “Obama, Obama — either you’re with them, or with us.” Sooner rather than later, Mr. Obama ought to respond to those messages.

Sometimes “No” is, in fact, the answer and it certainly seems to me that it’s the answer that the Iranian regime has given to President Obama’s overtures.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the seizing of the U. S. embassy in Tehran by factions of the revolution that overthrew the shah. President Obama has issued a statement on the occasion which I will reproduce in full here:

Thirty years ago today, the American Embassy in Tehran was seized. The 444 days that began on November 4, 1979 deeply affected the lives of courageous Americans who were unjustly held hostage, and we owe these Americans and their families our gratitude for their extraordinary service and sacrifice.

This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust, and confrontation. I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power. We have demonstrated our willingness to take confidence-building steps along with others in the international community. We have accepted a proposal by the International Atomic Energy Agency to meet Iran’s request for assistance in meeting the medical needs of its people. We have made clear that if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.

Iran must choose. We have heard for thirty years what the Iranian government is against; the question, now, is what kind of future it is for. The American people have great respect for the people of Iran and their rich history. The world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice, and their courageous pursuit of universal rights. It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.

I find the statement strangely detached. In every action and statement, including its non-responsive retort this very week to the offer to end its nuclear enrichment program made by the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, the leaders of the Iranian government have demonstrated that they have already made their choice. Ray Tayekh of the Council on Foreign Relations states the situation quite plainly:

Dealing with Iran has always been a complicated enterprise with moral hazards. The persistent mistake that the West has made is to place the nuclear issue above all other concerns. The Iran problem is not limited to illicit nuclear activities, and it is somewhat incomprehensible that the United States and other nations can contemplate nuclear transactions with a regime that maintains links to a range of terrorist organizations and engages in brutal domestic repression. Western officials would be smart to disabuse Iran of the notion that its nuclear infractions are the only source of disagreement. Iran’s hard-liners need to know that should they launch their much-advertised crackdown, the price for such conduct may be termination of any dialogue with the West. Only through such a policy can the United States advance its strategic objectives while standing up for its moral values.

Iran’s support for terrorist organizations and domestic repression are manifest this very day. Its leaders have made their choice and the time for counter-offers is over while the time for consequences has arrived.

We should implement consequences for Iran as stern as we can make them, non-violent in nature but punitive in quality. We should muster all of the permanent members of the Security Council to participate in these measures but be prepared to proceed without them. A peaceful, prosperous, and just Iran is in Russian and Chinese interests as it is in ours and, if they elect to support tyranny in Iran, Russia and China should be made aware that this latest tyranny in Iran will eventually end and the Iranian people will know who supported the tyrants and who opposed them.

In her address yesterday to a joint session of Congress German Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her country’s insistence that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program in compliance with multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions:

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, yesterday delivered a stern warning to Iran’s hard-line leader amid signs that the west’s patience with Tehran’s prevarication on its nuclear programme was running out.

In a speech to the joint houses of the US Congress, the first by a German chancellor in more than half a century, Mrs Merkel aligned Germany closely with the US drive to tackle a range of threats such as global warming, international terrorism and climate change.

Her comments on Iran signalled Germany’s determination to press ahead with a new raft of sanctions against the Tehran regime if, as is now expected, it fails to enter into negotiations on its nuclear programme.

“Zero tolerance needs to be shown when there is a risk of weapons of mass destruction falling, for example, into the hands of Iran and threatening our security,” Mrs Merkel told Congress. “Iran needs to be aware of this, Iran knows our offer but Iran also knows where we draw a line.”

The editors of the Chicago Tribune have encouraged the United States government to support a new round of sanctions against Iran, especially a ban on exporting gasoline to Iran:

The U.S. is reported to be forming a set of much harsher sanctions against Iran, targeting the country’s energy, transportation and financial industries. Good. But Iran is already under several sets of sanctions by the U.S. and U.N. Security Council. These have pinched, but not enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

The best option now is a ban on gasoline imports. Even though it produces crude oil, Iran must buy about 40 percent of its gasoline. Any jolt to that supply would have an immediate effect on the streets of Tehran and on every Iranian motorist.

The Iranian people may blame their government. Or they may blame the U.S. and its allies. Either way, Iran’s leaders, already loathed at home, will come under immense new pressure to yield on their nuclear ambitions.

The U.S. and its European allies can’t make a gas embargo stick without help from Russia and China. They’re reluctant. But now’s the time to make the case that an embargo is a better strategy than a military strike on Tehran.

Most of all the members of the Security Council must decide whether their resolutions are proposals in a negotiation or not. If they are not, Iran should not be allowed to to turn them into a negotiation. If they are, clearly the UNSC will need to up the ante.

If it were me, in exchange for 10% of Iran’s enriched uranium I would lift 10% of the sanctions I’d impose on Iran which would include a ban on gasoline exports and a ban on Iranian financial transactions in international banks, in exchange for 20% of Iran’s enriched uranium, I’d lift 20%, and so on. But that’s just me.

However, we need to ask the Russians and the Chinese the question outright: are the resolutions for which they’ve voted merely bargaining points in a negotiation or not?

There’s a fascinating article in Spiegel Online (in English) on “Operation Orchard”, the operation in September 2007 in Syria in which the Israeli air force destroyed what many have termed a “nuclear plant”, what the article calls “Syria’s Al Kibar nuclear reactor”, and the Syrians have characterized as a conventional military facility. Spiegel has interviewed Syrian, Israeli, and American leaders as well as confidential Syrian and Israeli sources to compile a mosaic of espionage, intrigue, assassination, and general international shenanigans.

Was it a nuclear plant, in which scientists were on the verge of completing the bomb? Were North Korean, perhaps even Iranian experts, also working in this secret Syrian facility? When and how did the Israelis learn about the project, and why did they take such a great risk to conduct their clandestine operation? Was the destruction of the Al Kibar complex meant as a final warning to the Iranians, a trial run of sorts intended to show them what the Israelis plan to do if Tehran continues with its suspected nuclear weapons program?

In recent months, SPIEGEL has spoken with key politicians and experts about the mysterious incident in the Syrian desert, including Syrian President Bashar Assad, leading Israeli intelligence expert Ronen Bergman, International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed ElBaradei and influential American nuclear expert David Albright. SPIEGEL has also talked with individuals involved in the operation, who have only now agreed to reveal, under conditions of anonymity, what they know.

These efforts have led to an account that, while not solving the mystery in its entirety, at least delivers many pieces of the puzzle. It also offers an assessment of an operation that changed the Middle East and generated shock waves that are still being felt today.

The article has enough suggestions, claims, and innuendos to give nearly anyone food for thought at the very least.

The picture above is a satellite image of the facility that was destroyed.

Pay particular attention to Joseph Cirincione’s op-ed in the Washington Post, characterized as “Five Myths About Iran’s Nuclear Program”. I think a better word than “myth” would be “misconception”. In the op-ed Mr. Cirincione lays out five misconceptions about Iran’s nuclear program and explains why they’re misconceptions. Here they are:

1. Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.
2. A military strike would knock out Iran’s program.
3. We can cripple Iran with sanctions.
4. A new government in Iran would abandon the nuclear program.
5. Iran is the main nuclear threat in the Middle East.

His last two interconnected points are very important. A nuclear race is now on in the Middle East and in all likelihood it will continue regardless of what we do. The challenge we should be entertaining is how to manage a nuclear-armed Middle East and mitigate its effects.

Rather than debating items 1-3, just for the sake of argument let’s assume that Mr. Cirincione’s assertions are all correct, namely that Iran’s nuclear weapon (if it, indeed, is producing one) is one to three years away, that the most we can achieve via military strikes is delaying Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and that, even if an enhanced sanctions regime could be put in place against Iran, it wouldn’t prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Under those circumstances what is our most prudent course of action?

The Obama Administration is preparing a package of sanctions against Iran just in case:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Obama administration is working on a substantial sanctions package against Iran in case current diplomatic efforts to curb its nuclear program fail, top officials told Congress on Tuesday.

Under Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Levy, who developed some of the existing financial sanctions against Iran under the Bush administration, said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that the “comprehensive” plan would target “key vulnerabilities and fissures” in Iran to show Tehran that it would face “serious costs” for thwarting international demands.

“It takes into account that no single sanction is a ’silver bullet’; we will need to impose measures simultaneously in many different forms in order to be effective,” Levy said.

He stressed, however, that the United States would be mindful of actions that would harm the Iranian people or undercut the opposition battling the Iranian government.

At this point I’m pretty skeptical that any package of inducements (the approach favored by the Russians), sanctions regime, or even military action at a scale that’s politically acceptable in the United States will prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, an eventuality that both Presidents Bush and Obama have characterized as “unacceptable”. I’ll confess that I haven’t posted as much about this as the situation warrants, in all likelihood because I’m suffering from Iran fatigue—I’ve posted so much about Iran over the period of the last five years that I just don’t have the heart to post.

So, I’ll throw the question open to the OTB commentariat. What should we do about Iran? Please state what you see as the desired outcome, the approach you would advocate to produce that outcome, and how political support for your desired approach can be built.

If true this:

INTELLIGENCE chief Sir John Scarlett has been told that Saudi Arabia is ready to allow Israel to bomb Iran’s new nuclear site.

The head of MI6 discussed the issue in London with Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Saudi officials after British intelligence officers helped to uncover the plant, in the side of a mountain near the ancient city of Qom.

would deal with a major problem in the logistics of an attack by Israel on Iran, something I’ve been pointing out for the last four or five years. It still wouldn’t necessarily get the U. S. off the hook since the Israelis would still need to fly through airspace controlled by the U. S. but it would certainly make things easier.

An attack by Israel against Iran would be terribly risk and possibly even counter-productive. However, the combination of Israel’s terrible vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction, Iran’s continuing lies and misdirections, Ahmadinejad’s foolhardy rhetoric, and the international community’s manifest inability to deal with the situation brings us nearer to the brink seemingly with each passing day.

As I noted yesterday, based on what I’d seen of Russian Federation President Medvedev’s comments in reaction to the revelation that Iran was covertly building an additional uranium enrichment plant, I was a bit skeptical that Russia would change course and support a new sanctions regime against Iran despite the hints in that direction I was reading in the Western press. Therefore, I decided to take a glance at the Russian language press to see if I could get a clearer picture of official Russian reactions there.

Most of the accounts differed little from what I was reading in the New York Times or the Washington Post. However, this quote on Novosti from President Medvedev caught my eye:

“The construction of a new plant was not expected by any country. It was a secret construction and, consequently, it’s even more troubling in this case.”

[…]

“We should create circumstances that are comfortable for Iran so that it may begin to comply, create a system of incentives; if the incentives do not work and cooperation is not forthcoming, then other mechanisms can be undertaken.”

That’s my not completely literal translation of President Medvedev’s remarks. I don’t think I can construe that in such a way that it means that Russia will support either more stringent economic sanctions against Iran not to mention the use of force in the foreseeable future, if ever.

Presumably in anticipation of the announcement by the United States, France, the United Kingdom, or Israel of the existence of their previously-undisclosed uranium enrichment plant, the Iranian government has admitted that they have a second, secret plant:

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 25 — President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain on Friday blasted Iran’s construction of a previously unknown uranium enrichment facility and demanded that Tehran immediately fulfill its obligations under international law or risk the imposition of harsh new sanctions.

“Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow,” Obama said, detailing how the facility at Qom had been under construction for years without being disclosed, as required, to the International Atomic Energy Association. “International law is not an empty promise.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown accused Iran of “serial deception” that he said “will shock and anger the whole international community, and it will harden our resolve.”

“We will not let this matter rest,” Brown said. ” . . . Iran must abandon any military ambitions for its nuclear programs.”

One of the criticisms that has long been laid at the feet of the process that the international community has been going through with respect to Iran is that pretty much by definition the IAEA’s certification efforts are limited to the facilities that Iran has disclosed. How can we be confident about what is or isn’t going on in facilities the Iranians have refused to disclose? This latest revelation can’t help but cast more doubt on the Iranians’ continued protestations that their nuclear development is strictly for peaceful purposes under the principle of “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”. If their intent was peaceful, why not disclose this second plant before events forced them to?

Following the revelation there will, no doubt, be heightened calls for tighter enforcement of existing economic sanctions, new economic sanctions, even military action. I think there’s no prospect whatever that the United Nations Security Council will vote for military action against Iran, indeed, I’d be very surprised if even with this disclosure the Council voted to impose additional economic sanctions on Iran.

As NATO members debate whether they should remove their forces from Afghanistan and, considering the close relationship between Germany, in particular, and Iran I would be very surprised if military action against Iran would be contemplated as a NATO mission.

Frankly, I think that there are no additional punitive actions, military or otherwise, that will be imposed on Iran.

Geoffrey Forden of Arms Control Wonk urges that we seize this opportunity to impose additional, more stringent inspection regimes:

This revelation of a covert facility might be just the bargaining chip the West needs to force the measures necessary to build up confidence Iran is not establishing other secret plants. We need assurances about the people who Iran needs to establish a new plant. That level of confidence can only be achieved by the most intrusive inspections imaginable: working side-by-side with the Iranian scientists and engineers involved in enrichment. Under an agreement for a multinational enrichment center, Westerns would start working in the existing Iranian facilities the day after an agreement is signed. Of course, it is vital that we not give Iran any more time to establish other covert plants while we are not watching their people. It is time to realize that a multinational enrichment facility is the best way to prevent Iran from getting a bomb and, in fact, to roll back their indigenous enrichment capabilities.

I’m afraid this is overly sanguine about the world’s willingness to speak with a single voice in opposition to Iran’s project, whatever it may be.

UPDATE

Andrea Mitchell helpfully provides some evidentiary support for my skepticism about the likelihood of additional sanctions against Iran in the form of a quote from Russian President Medvedev:

I do not believe sanctions are the best way to achieve results. Sanctions were used on a number of occasions against Iran but we have doubts about the results. Nevertheless when all instruments have been used and failed, one can use international legal sanctions. That is common…I think we should continue to promote positive incentives for Iran and at the same time push it to make all its programs transparent and open. Should we fail in that case, we’ll consider other options.

By that time we’d no doubt be dealing with a fait accompli. As a permanent member of the Security Council, Russia’s veto will render additional sanctions impossible and as long as Russia’s veto is assured the Chinese can abstain, confident that no new sanctions will be imposed.

I’ve been critical of the optics of President Obama’s decision to abandon missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic on the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland. But I disagree with Jim Geraghty’s assertion that it also represents breaking a promise made in April. Here’s what he said in Prague:

So let me be clear: Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. [emphasis mine]

He can quite reasonably argue that he’s done precisely that in dropping an expensive and unproven land-based system for a cheaper and proven (albeit  less comprehensive) ship-based system.  While the Poles and Czechs — or, at least, their governments — are far from thrilled (more on that later) Obama may will have been intentionally signaling yesterday’s move in April.

Nathan Hodge has a good backgrounder on the technology.

Dick Cheney is breaking the mold on how recently-departed vice presidents act. First, he immediately went into attack mode against President Obama. Now, he’s going after President Bush, too. Bart Gelman for WaPo:

Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

Gawker’s The Cajun Boy is quite amused:

Now, only Dick Cheney could ever possibly reflect on the “stay the course” presidency of George W. Bush and somehow come to the mangled conclusion that it was conciliatory in just about anything that it did. If there’s one thing that objective people can probably agree almost universally on when assessing Bush as a president, it’s that he and his administration were hopelessly, tragically stubborn.

But Cheney’s actually quite right here. As I’ve been arguing for months, Bush’s foreign policy returned to the Realist roots he campaigned on over time. Wolfowitz, Feith, and the gang were gone in 2005 and Rumsfeld followed them in late 2006. Gelman:

Cheney’s imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for “regime change.”

This apparently not only hurt his feelings but, more importantly, a shift away from a national strategy Cheney legitimately thought necessary to protect his country. As Kevin Drum intimates, it’s amazing that he thought we were on the right course.

But Cheney himself seems to have changed his mind on a matter of honor. He’s now working diligently on a tell-all book to set the record straight.

Some old associates see Cheney’s newfound openness as a breach of principle. For decades, he expressed contempt for departing officials who wrote insider accounts, arguing that candid internal debate was impossible if the president and his advisers could not count on secrecy. As far back as 1979, one of the heroes in Lynne Cheney’s novel “Executive Privilege” resolved never to write a memoir because “a president deserved at least one person around him whose silence he could depend on.” Cheney lived that vow for the next 30 years.

As vice president, according to one witness, Cheney “was livid” when the memoir of L. Paul Bremer, who led the occupation of Iraq, made the less-than-stunning disclosure that Cheney shared Bremer’s concern about U.S. military strategy. A Cabinet-level Bush appointee recalled that Cheney likewise described revelations by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill and former White House spokesman Scott McClellan as “beyond the pale.”

“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets. “When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”

I’m generally with Old Dick Cheney on this one. Unless one resigns in protest, one owes a certainly loyalty to those whom one serves. Cheney is one of the more controversial and important figures in recent American political history, though, and getting his considered reflections on why things unfolded as they did should be fascinating.

UPDATE: I appeared on Russia Today to talk about this issue.

If you only read one thing today, read the for-the-record answers from the Director of National Intelligence to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009. At the very least read the tickler summary from the blog of the Federation of American Scientists, which has done a genuine service in obtaining this document under the Freedom of Information Act and is hosting it on its site (hat tip: Washington Post).

There is something to rain on practically every parade in these answers. The number of “security personnel” required for COIN in Afghanistan? 818,000. When will Iran produce highly-enriched (weapons-grade) uranium? 2013. Russia doesn’t have the ability to project a lot of military force beyond its borders.

This last comes as no surprise to me. Something we should always keep in mind: without nuclear weapons Russia is a regional power.

There’s tons more. Al Qaeda’s resilience and capabilities. The KSA’s terrorist rehab program. The KSA’s relationship with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda in Africa. Iran’s role in supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. How effective is the Pakistani army in dealing with the insurgency in the FATA? Pakistan’s stability. The relationship among the Iranian regime, HAMAS, and Hizbollah.

Here’s the statement on the status of Iraq’s ISF:

The capabilities of the ISF have continued to improve. The ISF’s increasing professionalism and improvements in war-fighting skills have allowed it to assume more responsibility for Iraq’s internal security, as demonstrated by the successful operations against Shia militants in Al Basrah, Sadr City, and Al Amarah, and against Sunni extremists in Diyala and Mosul. Despite these improvements, the ISF remains dependent on the U. S. for enabling capabilities such as logistics, fire support, and intelligence and will continue to require Coalition assistance during the next three years.

Short version: our military still has its work cut out for it in Iraq.

The provincial elections in Iraq. HAMAS capabilities. Hizbollah capabilities. Cyber-warfare by the Chinese government. Russia’s energy war. GITMO. The global economic crisis.

It’s truly a remarkable document. If nothing else it provides a keyhole view into the thinking of our intelligence community on a wide range of security issues. I’m still digesting it.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, re-published at The New Atlanticist General Chuck Wald makes a good case that an attack against Iran would be technically feasible:

An attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would mostly involve air assets, primarily Air Force and Navy, that are not strained by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, the presence of U.S. forces in countries that border Iran offers distinct advantages. Special Forces and intelligence personnel already in the region can easily move to protect key assets or perform clandestine operations. It would be prudent to emplace additional missile-defense capabilities in the region, upgrade both regional facilities and allied militaries, and expand strategic partnerships with countries such as Azerbaijan and Georgia to pressure Iran from all directions.

Conflict may reveal previously undetected Iranian facilities as Iranian forces move to protect them. Moreover, nuclear sites buried underground may survive sustained bombing, but their entrances and exits will not.

while making an even better case that it would be risky:

Of course, there are huge risks to military action: U.S. and allied casualties; rallying Iranians around an unstable and oppressive regime; Iranian reprisals be they direct or by proxy against us and our allies; and Iranian-instigated unrest in the Persian Gulf states, first and foremost in Iraq.

Furthermore, while a successful bombing campaign would set back Iranian nuclear development, Iran would undoubtedly retain its nuclear knowhow. An attack would also necessitate years of continued vigilance, both to retain the ability to strike previously undiscovered sites and to ensure that Iran does not revive its nuclear program.

There are additional reasons, unmentioned by Gen. Wald, that an attack against Iran in the absence of specific information about the scope and location of its nuclear weapons development, would be a serious error.

First, as I’ve mentioned in the past, most of Iran’s known nuclear development facilities are located in or near large, urban areas. Any attack substantial enough to cause serious damage to hardened nuclear weapons development facilities would be likely to cause substantial civilian casualties, too.

Second, whether or not Iran is developing nuclear weapons now, such an attack would give the Iranians every reason in the world to develop them in the future and use them.

Both of those factors should be weighed in any calculation of the costs and benefits of military actions against Iran. My view remains as it has been for some time: in the absence of solid intelligence on the existence, scope, and location of an Iranian nuclear weapons development program, an attack against Iran to eliminate or slow such a program would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about apparently the Burmese have built a secret nuclear reactor:

Two of Asia’s most oppressive regimes may have joined forces to develop a nuclear arsenal, according to strategic experts who have analysed information supplied by a pair of Burmese defectors.

The men, who played key roles in helping the isolated military junta before defecting to Thailand, have provided evidence which suggests Burma has enlisted North Korean help to build its own nuclear bomb within the next five years.

Details supplied by the pair, who were extensively interviewed over the past two years by Professor Desmond Ball of the Australian National University and Thai-based Irish-Australian journalist Phil Thornton, points to Burma building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facility with the assistance of North Korea.

It’s for peaceful purposes, of course. Not to mention the prestige and being able to extend the North Korean and, presumably, Iranian nuclear programs far beyond their borders and away from the prying eyes of pesky IAEA inspectors.

This is the real threat of the sort of nuclear proliferation we’ve been seeing over the period of the last twenty years, first from Pakistan through North Korea and Iran and now Burma. I’m concerned about a sort of nuclear assembly line with the stages separated far enough that no single stage looks like an appreciable threat but the aggregate result is nuclear weapons everywhere.

The Times of London is reporting that Iranian scientists are only waiting for the order to go before building a nuclear weapon:

Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb, Western intelligence sources have told The Times.

The sources said that Iran completed a research programme to create weaponised uranium in the summer of 2003 and that it could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order from its Supreme Leader.

A US National Intelligence Estimate two years ago concluded that Iran had ended its nuclear arms research programme in 2003 because of the threat from the American invasion of Iraq. But intelligence sources have told The Times that Tehran had halted the research because it had achieved its aim — to find a way of detonating a warhead that could be launched on its long-range Shehab-3 missiles.

They said that, should Ayatollah Khamenei approve the building of a nuclear device, it would take six months to enrich enough uranium and another six months to assemble the warhead. The Iranian Defence Ministry has been running a covert nuclear research department for years, employing hundreds of scientists, researchers and metallurgists in a multibillion-dollar programme to develop nuclear technology alongside the civilian nuclear programme.

I honestly don’t know what to make of this story. It reminds me of nothing so much as the old wisecrack “If I had some cheese, I could make a ham and cheese sandwich. If I had some ham.”

Of course Iran could build a nuclear weapon if it had the material and the will to do it. So could Andorra if it comes to that. The theoretical knowledge to build a nuclear weapon has been widely available for decades. There are two obstacles: the availability of fissile material and the engineering. To prove the engineering you’ve got to build a bomb.

I’m not going to bother to dredge up the fatwas against nuclear weapons that have been issued by Iranian clerics (Khamenei wrote such a fatwa in 2005). I’m sure Steve Hynd over at Newshoggers will be all over this story and will do it for me. I also don’t put a lot of truck in them. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

I have little doubt that Iran at the very least wants to be able to build a nuclear weapon and I’d be flabbergasted if the Iranians didn’t have a covert program to exactly that effect. However, it also appears that they’ve run into a lot more difficulties in their enrichment program than they expected. I have no idea when they could produce enough HEU to produce a weapon and I doubt that anybody else does, either.

I think it may well be that what this particular article is actually about, rather than gauging the capabilities or frame of mind of the Iranians is an attempt to gauge the capabilities and frame of mind of the Israelis

Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, last week reiterated that a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was still an option, should the talks fail. Israeli officials estimate that a raid on Natanz and a nuclear facility at Arak, in central Iran, would set Iran’s nuclear programme back by two to three years.

I think that any limited attack on the Iranians, either by the Israelis or by us, would be a great error, advancing what it presumably sought to retard and an unlimited attack, either by the Israelis or us, in the absence of significantly more information than anybody seems to have in hand would be both immoral and politically foolhardy.

As Joseph Fouché put it more than 200 years ago, it would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake.

UPDATE

As I expected Steve has posted on this report, too. His reaction is much the same as mine: this is old news.