Iran And The Bomb: What Are We Going To Do?

Remember that National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program five years ago? A December 2007 Washington Post article cast it this way:

A major U.S. intelligence review has concluded that Iran stopped work on a suspected nuclear weapons program more than four years ago, a stark reversal of previous intelligence assessments that Iran was actively moving toward a bomb.

The new findings, drawn from a consensus National Intelligence Estimate, reflected a surprising shift in the midst of the Bush administration’s continuing political and diplomatic campaign to depict Tehran’s nuclear development as a grave threat. The report was drafted after an extended internal debate over the reliability of communications intercepts of Iranian conversations this past summer that suggested the program had been suspended.

If Iran ever truly did in fact suspend its nuclear weapons program, it did so immediately after – and obviously as a direct result of – the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Understandably Iran didn’t want to be the next country to face the consequences for illegal weapons programs.

When the story came out that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program (the one Iran claimed it never had in the first place), Democrats and liberals immediately pounced all over President Bush’s claim that Iran continued to represent a nuclear weapons threat. President Bush was called a liar, he was called a warmonger, for continuing to describe Iran as a threat. The left openly mocked conservatives for calling for a tough stance against Iran. We didn’t need to worry about Iran, they said.

The Washington Post claimed that Iran was actually ten years from developing the bomb.

Given these reports, liberals made the argument that any “threat” from Iran was theoretical or academic. And President Bush was merely proving that he was the paranoid neo-con that they had been casting him as all along.

When Barack Obama initially said that Iran did not represent a threat, he was merely assuming the longstanding standard doctrinaire liberal mentality. It was only when he began to be presented with the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that he “refined” his remarks to acknowledge that Iran was in fact a threat.

In any event, as the United States began to succomb to increasing internal division over the war in Iraq, and as the United States began to bog down, the facts now overwhelmingly reveal that Iran clearly decided to restart its nuclear weapons program.

How long until Iran develops enough nuclear material to build a bomb? Ten years, like the elite media says?

Try six months to one year. That abstract academic threat is getting real concrete and very, very real.

Israel has been warning for some time now that Iran could have the bomb far more quickly than many Western experts were willing to acknowledge. They’ve been claiming that Iran could have enough material to build a bomb far earlier than most estimates stated. But they were ignored. After all, in the leftist view of the world, Israel is the biggest and most paranoid warmonger of all (or at least a very close second to the United States).

But now someone else is affirming that President Bush and the state of Israel were right all along.

And it’s not some neo-con warmonger saying this but none other than the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei:

Mohamed ElBaradei: “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT, expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least… Considering the number of centrifuges and the quantity of uranium Iran has…”

Interviewer: “How much time would it need?”

ElBaradei: “It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up one morning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

Interviewer: “Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months…”

ElBaradei: “Or one year, at least…”

Interviewer: “… to produce [nuclear] weapons?”

ElBaradei: “It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon.”

Sadly, ElBaradei – in the words of one writer – “seems to be more obsessed with politics than with doing his job. His job is to monitor the nuclear developments of countries, such as Iran, and to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons. That’s what he should be concerned about. Instead, he’s concerned with what countries may do when other countries ignore the UN and develop nuclear weapons regardless of world opinion.” Mohamed ElBaradei has claimed that any attack on Iran would be “unnecessary” and that he would resign if such an attack were to occur. That’s a pretty political statement from a supposedly apolitical weapons inspector.

And meanwhile Iran is getting closer and closer to the bomb with each passing day.

What would happen if Iran actually got the bomb? Many pooh pooh the possibility that Iran would start World War III by attacking an also nuclear-armed Israel. But only a fool would ignore the numerous “death to Israel” statements from both Iran’s president and its Ayatollah. What is particular frightening is that these Iranian rulers hold to an apocalyptic interpretation of Islam which holds to the doctrine that the last Imam will return during a period of crisis.

But Iran doesn’t actually have to use its nuclear weapons to make use of them. Ask yourself: would the United States dare attack a nuclear Iran? Even if Iran – through its terrorists surrogates – carried out another 9/11 attack against it?

Will they share nuclear technology and materials with terrorist organizations, and attempt to carry out nuclear attacks by proxy?

Iran is and has been the leading source of terrorism around the world. If they obtain a nuclear weapons capability, you can only expect them to be more emboldened and feel more invulnerable to meaningful retaliation than they have ever felt before. President Ahmadinejad has said, “I Have a Connection With God, Since God Said That the Infidels Will Have No Way to Harm the Believers”; “We Have [Only] One Step Remaining Before We Attain the Summit of Nuclear Technology”; The West “Will Not Dare To Attack Us.”

Are you ready for that? Are you ready for the kind of hell that a rogue, terrorist, totalitarian, jihadist, and Armageddonist state could unleash upon the world given the impunity of being protected by nuclear weapons?

What are you willing to do to prevent that nightmarish scenario from occuring?

One thing is certain: we absolutely cannot count on diplomacy to prevent this catastrophic threat to world stability and security.

Russia and China – both veto-wielding permanent United Nations security council members – have both repeatedly disallowed any meaningful sanctions against Iran. I write about this in detail in an article.

There’s all kinds of evidence of their refusal to all for any sanctions that would have any chance of forcing Iran to comply.

From August 5, 2008:

The United States, Britain and France warned Monday — two days after the deadline expired — that they would press for additional sanctions against Iran if it did not respond positively and unambiguously to the offer. The six powers will hold a conference call Wednesday to consider their response to the statement. But they remain divided, with China and Russia reluctant to support tough sanctions.

“I don’t see any reason to believe that the Russians and the Chinese are any more willing today to support really tougher sanctions against Iran,” said Flynt Leverett, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and former Bush National Security Council staffer.

Iran is clearly more interested in becoming a nuclear power than it is in taking any of our carrots. And with the stick being removed from the proceedings, diplomacy simply has no chance of succeeding.

And we’ve seen all this before. I have written a three part series titled, “Iraq War Justified” that points to the fact the United States was placed in this exact same situation prior to 2003 (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3). A pitifully pathetic and corrupt United Nations was absolutely incapable of doing anything. The United States had good reasons to believe that Iraq was engaging in the illegal production of weapons of mass destruction, and inspectors were blocked from carrying out any meaningful inspection program. Iraq was able to use its abundant oil – and even the United Nations’ own oil for food program – to buy allies who would prevent the implementation of tough UN sanctions. And an attitude of anti-Americanism and a view that American influence should be siphoned away in favor of “a multi-polar world” (which is really just a cosmopolitan way of being anti-American) all combined to make it impossible for diplomacy to work in forcing Iraq to open itself up to inspections.

The United States was forced to attack Iraq because every other available option had failed, and we were not willing to allow the possibility of an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction.

When we attacked Iraq in the Gulf War, it was learned that Iraq was FAR closer to developing nuclear weapons than had ever previously been believed by Western “experts.” It was also realized that this threat – stopped in 1990 – carried through into the future:

In summary, the IAEA report says that following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq launched a “crash program” to develop a nuclear weapon quickly by extracting weapons grade material from safe-guarded research reactor fuel. This project, if it had continued uninterrupted by the war, might have succeeded in producing a deliverable weapon by the end of 1992. [PBS source: Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, a Guide in Maps and Charts, 1998, Rodney W. Jones and Mark G. NcDonough, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (1998). p. 191] …

Nuclear physicist and Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza agrees. He told FRONTLINE that Iraq did not relinquish certain critical components of the nuclear program to the inspectors, and that it retains the expertise necessary to build a nuclear weapon. He believes that Iraq may have one completed within the next couple of years.

Even now, the United Nations is questioning the intelligence pointing to Iran developing the bomb. How are we ever going to attain the “consensus” that liberals demand we have in this sort of perennially hazy political environment?

How can one condemn the Iraq attack and then sanction an Iran attack given all the similarities? On just what logical or moral basis?

It’s the exact same thing happening all over again, and Israel and the United States will be faced with the same choice: Are we willing to allow an Iran with doomsday capability? Are we willing to carry out an attack alone given a pathologically weak, corrupt, and frankly both pathetic and apathetic world?

This is the question that will effect – and possibly haunt – American foreign policy for generations to come.

If we elect Barack Obama, we are tacitly choosing to allow Iran to develop the bomb. Any of his tough-sounding rhetoric aside, you need to realize that Barack Obama has already repeatedly philosophically condemned the very same sort of preemptive attack that would be necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And he continues to do so even today. Just how was a preemptive attack on Iraq wrong if a preemptive attack on Iran is right? If Barack Obama believes that our intelligence will be flawless regarding Iran’s nuclear program when it was so flawed regarding Iraq’s program, then he is a genuine fool of the very worst kind. And if he refuses to attack until the evidence against Iran is certain, he is an even greater fool. For Iran would greet our attacking soldiers with mushroom clouds.

Israel is clearly doing far more than threatening to attack Iran in order to prevent this patently anti-Semitic and defiantly evil regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. It is clearly merely a matter of time, with many thinking that Israel might even attack prior to the change in American administrations. If and when they do, we will see just how vulnerable the Democrats have made us over the past thirty years in refusing to allow America to develop its own source of domestic oil as the price of oil goes up to over $300 a barrel and over $12 a gallon for gasoline.

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