Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Is the game up in Iran?

Sure sounds like it, if this report by Reza Kahlili is true:

According to Mehr News Agency, sources within Iran revealed that there will be an announcement in a few days that the previously secret nuclear site, the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, is now fully operational and enriching uranium at a 20% level.
[...]
The Iranian leaders had intended to transfer much of their low-enriched uranium stock from Natanz to Fordow and to start the process of enrichment at a much higher level with protection against any attack.
It is reported that the site cannot be destroyed even with the current bunker-buster bombs kept in the U.S. military’s arsenal.
It should be noted that the Fordow facility can only house 3,000 centrifuges, and is therefore useless for providing fuel for a nuclear power plant. The only purpose is for clandestine use or for making a nuclear bomb. It is also important to note that enriching uranium to the 20% level is 9/10 of the way to weaponization.
Iran currently has enough enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs and continues its illicit nuclear activities despite four different sets of UN sanctions already in place.

On Saturday, marking the anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised to announce important news within days on the Iranian nuclear program. At the same time, the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, stated that Iran is ready for the worst-case scenario in its confrontation with the West over its nuclear program.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, during his recent Friday prayer sermon, called Israel “a cancerous tumor that should and will be cut,” and warned the U.S. that any aggression will result in a response ten times greater on America.
As reported recently, the Iranians not only have received intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology from China and are working with North Korea on assembling the missiles, but they also have succeeded in completing the component for a nuclear bomb trigger, overcoming a major obstacle in obtaining the bomb.
If this is true, it represents a catastrophic failure of U.S. foreign policy, especially that of Barack Obama but to a lesser extent also that of George W. Bush.  Bush's hands were tied on Iran in part due to a farcical and politically-motivated National Intelligence Estimate by the CIA in late 2007 that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.  But if Bush's hands were tied by a CIA determined to undercut any cause for military or covert action against the Iranian mullahs, then it also highlights his failure to reign in a rogue CIA that had become a hindrance to US foreign policy, as exemplified by Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.

But Barack Obama has no such excuse.  He apparently bet everything, including all of our lives, on diplomacy and negotiation with the Iranian mullahs to give up their nuclear program, when it should have been obvious to anyone with more than three living brain cells that they were not interested in doing so and would have to be forced to give it up.  The Iranian mullahs have been at war with us since 1979, and no one in our government -- no one, not even Ronald Reagan -- has been willing to acknowledge that fact. 

Let me be clear: Iran having nukes is not the problem; the Iranian mullahs having nukes is.  And we had a chance to get rid of the mullahs back in 2009, with the Green movement protests after the fraudulent Iranian elections.  But Obama instead did nothing, not even paying the internal Iranian opposition lip service, apparently seeing nothing wrong with a regime that has declared its goal is the elimination of Israel and the United States, has fomented Islamism throughout the globe, and has attacked our troops in Iraq.  Instead, Obama seems to see the mullahs' nuclear aspirations as somehow legitimate.

They aren't.  And even of they are, so what? It's not in the interests of the US, or really in the interests of anyone civilized, to allow theocratic, medieval murderous thugs access to weapons that they can use to blackmail everyone to their will, especially since, as evinced by the apocalyptic statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  They must be stopped, at all costs.

But now it may be too late.

Nice going, jerk!

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