From Yemen To Pakistan Iran's Prints All Over The Room

Yemen has seized a vessel carrying weapons believed to be destined for Shi'ite rebels in the north of the country and detained its Iranian crew, a provincial Yemeni official told Reuters on Monday.

"The five crew members are being questioned. They are Iranians," said the official in Haja province, which borders Saada province, site of most of the fighting between government forces and the rebels.

Elsewhere, Pakistani forces shortly held 11 security officers on Monday for crossing into the country before releasing them. The detention came days after an Iranian commander was reported saying his men should be allowed to confront terrorists in Pakistan, officials said.

Earlier, Pakistani officials had said they were members of the elite Revolutionary Guards force, but later reports made no reference to this.

The Iranians were arrested in the Mashkhel area on the border with Iran eight days after a suicide bomber killed 42 people, including six Revolutionary Guard commanders, in Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province.

A Sunni Muslim group Jundollah (God's soldiers), which Iran says they operates from across the border in Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the blast.

With 18 Months For The Nuclrae Mullahs Israel Is Up To Strike

Several Western diplomats told Reuters that the top spy agencies, of the U.S. CIA, UK's MI6, Israel's Mossad, their French and German counterparts, generally agreed that Tehran would need at least 18 months to produce a nuclear bomb, if it decided to make one.
This assessment, was described as the "worst-case scenario," rather than the most likely one.
Meanwhile, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner underscored the risk of a pre-emptive strike by Israel.
The minister told The Daily Telegraph that time was running out.

They [the Israelis] will not tolerate an Iranian bomb. We know that, all of us. So that is an additional risk and that is why we must decrease the tension and solve the problem. Hopefully we are going to stop this race to a confrontation.
There is the time that Israel will offer us before reacting, because Israel will react as soon as they know clearly that there is a threat.

Will Obama Escape the Charlie Brown Syndrom?

Iran goes by its own book. Negotiate at length then ask for more time while confusing the very basis of the negotiations.

Is it the IAEI proposal to ship 75% of Iran's LEU stockpile that we are waiting an answer to, or the mullah's proposal, vaguely floated through media, to "buy" a significantly higher LEU from outside while keeping whatever domestic LEU Iran possesses, home safe??

Iran rendered the heart of the talks unclear.

If anything, it is applying the centrifuges enrichment "spinning" phenomena to negotiations. Keep rotating around proposals at a high speed till you convert constraints into allowances.
Engagement has simply legitimized Iran's uranium enrichment to the purity level of %5 in clear defiance to 3 UN Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspends its enrichment activities.

Now, unless it is an addictive hobby, one should quit searching for evidence to the military nature of Iran's nuclear program.

Even US president Barak Obama's administration is rethinking previous assessment, which concluded back in 2007 that any secret uranium-processing activities "probably were halted" in 2003 and had not been restarted and that Iran has suspended research on nuclear-warhead design. Washington's change of heart was triggered by the revelation of the Qom facility one month ago according to what two former senior U.S. officials involved in high-level discussions about Iran told the Washington Post.
Careful intelligence gathering, the paper reported, produced a clearer image of the military nature of the Iranian nuclear program.

Intercepted communications revealed a key piece of data: Iranian plans to place only 3,000 centrifuge machines in the plant. That number is too small to furnish fuel for a civilian power plant, but just big enough to supply Iran annually with up to three bombs' worth of weapons-grade fuel, the former officials said.
(...) Intelligence analysts calculated that it would take Qom's high-end centrifuges at least 20 years to produce enough low-enriched uranium to meet the needs of a typical 1,000 megawatt nuclear power reactor for a year.

It is still too early, however, to cheer.

There is always a critical delay before a change of heart is adopted as a policy, given in this case, Iran's bluffing proficiency and Obama's lack of immunity to the self-deceiving power of the strategy of hope. And in this sense Obama is about to outdo the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, as per Tom Bevan corollary. Watch the video:



It is worth noting, in the meantime, that Iranian nuclear scientists are not politely standing in line waiting the cue from Vienna, Geneva or elsewhere to proceed on the terms of a final deal.
Thousands of centrifuges are spinning in known, and most probably unknown, sites in Iran feeding Iran LEU stock with at least 4.5 Kg per day.

Iran Israel Reported Talks Still Rolling

It was first reported by The Age newspaper, then picked up by Haartez which made public the names of the representatives of the two foes.
The story that Israeli and Iranian officials sahred, not only the same conference but rather, the same room and pannel in Cairo is still making headlines.
I pushed several Iranian commentators on the story, however they all denied the very possibility that such an event could have taken place.
In a previous post I provided some track record of the Israeli Iranian communications.
John Lyons, The Australian Middle East correspondent is latest to report on the story.

NUCLEAR negotiators from around the world must have known they were about to witness something extraordinary when they walked through the foyer of the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo on September 29. They all knew bitter enemies were about to sit at the same table for the first time in years.
The representatives of Israel and Iran arrived for the meeting brokered by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans. It was a meeting of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, a group established by the Rudd government.
For the next two days, an Israeli woman and an Iranian man sat at the same table. At no time did they shake hands - while other delegates greeted each other at the beginning and end of the meeting and during coffee breaks, the Israeli and the Iranian kept their distance.
However, the significance was that both governments allowed their representatives to attend the meeting knowing the other would be there.
Israel's Merav Zafary-Odiz and Iran's Ali Ashgar Soltanieh joined other atomic energy negotiators to discuss the nuclear threat in the Middle East.
According to a person who sat through the meeting and spoke to The Weekend Australian, it started slowly between the Israeli and Iranian - each put their country's position, which the other normally only saw reported in the media.
Mr Soltanieh peppered his presentation with quotations from the Koran and Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamanei, saying Iran was committed to a peaceful nuclear program. Iran's program was within the guidelines of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, he insisted.
Then Ms Zafary-Odiz had her turn. If Israel's security could be guaranteed, it would support a nuclear-free Middle East, she said. An official in the room summed her up as reflecting the 1995 declaration of President Shimon Peres: "Give me peace and I'll give you the bomb."
While these presentations were directed at the group, finally it became too much and the Iranian directly addressed his Israeli counterpart. According to the newspaper Haaretz, Mr Soltanieh asked: "Do you or do you not have nuclear weapons?"
He would have known no Israeli official would confirm what is widely accepted as fact - that Israel has its own nuclear arsenal. In response, Ms Zafary-Odiz is reported to have smiled.
The source who sat through the meetings told The Weekend Australian Mr Evans's chairmanship was "masterful". He allowed the Israeli and Iranian to state their positions and directly address each other but ensured it did not become acrimonious. This was a regional meeting, and Mr Evans's aim was to ensure that in front of their neighbours and each other Israel and Iran could outline their positions.
The second exchange between the two, according to another source, came in the corridors. As they tried to pass, they greeted each other and said "excuse me", but did not shake hands.
The commission was an initiative of Kevin Rudd. The Prime Minister suggested setting it up on a visit to Kyoto in June last year, and it became a joint project of Australia and Japan.
Mr Rudd pushed for Mr Evans to be chairman, and the Japanese agreed as long as he shared the post with their former foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi.
The secretariat is based in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra, and with the energy of Mr Evans, fresh from running the International Crisis Group, it is seen as an Australian body.
When the Cairo meeting was suggested to Israeli officials they were interested. They know the UN nuclear weapons organisations well, and are suspicious of them, but were not familiar with this new body. Their interest turned to intrigue when they looked at the list of invitees: the US, several European countries, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Turkey - and Iran.
Israeli officials sounded out Australian officials about whether Canberra was committed to the new body.
Since the fall of the shah in 1979, Israel has shunned meetings attended by Iran. It's not known whether the plan for these talks went to the level of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but one Israeli official said it certainly went close. "This was not mundane," the official said. "A representative of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission doesn't travel light-heartedly to a meeting attended by an Iranian official."
Despite Israel, Egypt and others confirming the presence of the Iranian official, the Iranian media denied he had attended - a move seen as aimed at a domestic audience.
For an Iranian official to be sitting at the same table as an Israeli, or exchanging polite excuse-me's in the corridor, is still a bridge too far for some in the Iranian regime.

Secret Talks Between Washington and Tehran

Officials in US President Barak Obama's Administration told Time magazine that the president was involved in a secret "multiparty" negotiation with the Iranians "over the last four months".

The backroom talks began in June, when Iranian officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency their country was running out of fuel for an aging research reactor built for the Shah in 1967 by American technicians. Iran sought the IAEA's help in buying more of the specially manufactured plates of enriched uranium used in the reactor to produce isotopes for cancer treatment, X-rays and insecticides. The IAEA, in turn, discussed the request with the U.S. "We very quickly saw an opening here," says a senior Administration official involved in the multiparty negotiations that ensued, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Today, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said resumed talks between France, Russia and the United States, and Iran have got off to a 'good start'.
In the meantime Tehran is staying the course of sending mixed messages to the international community.
Iran's state-run Press TV cited unnamed officials in Tehran as saying the Islamic Republic was looking to hold on to its low-enriched uranium and buying what it needed for the Tehran reactor abroad.
Asked to comment on Iranian media reports claiming that Tehran may be reluctant to ship out its fuel, The head of the Iranian delegation, Ali Asghar Soltanieh refused to comment.

Revolutionary Guard commanders killed in Iran bomb

A man wearing an explosives-laden belt blew himself up during a conference between Shia and Sunni groups in southeastern Iran on Sunday killing around a half dozen of senior commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guard and at least 26 others.

The official IRNA news agency said the dead included the deputy commander of the Guard's ground force, Gen. Noor Ali Shooshtari (the photo), as well as a chief provincial Guard commander for the area, Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh. The other dead were Guard members or local tribal leaders. More than two dozen others were wounded, state radio reported.

Iranian state television said "Rigi's terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack," referring to Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of the Sunni millitant group Jundollah (God's soldiers).

The commanders were inside a car on their way to a meeting with local tribal leaders in the Pishin district near Iran's border with Pakistan when an attacker with explosives blew himself up, IRNA said.

The region in Iran's southeast has been the focus of violent attacks by Jundallah, who are engaged in a vicious circle of violence with the Revolutionary Guards.

Tension between the two has in recent months escalated following the arrest and death sentence of Abdol-Hamid Rigi, a brother of the Jundullah leader. Rigi was due to be executed in July, but for unknown reasons the this has been delayed.

Iran's state-owned English language TV channel, Press TV, said there were two simultaneous explosions: one at the meeting and another targeting an additional convoy of Guards on their way to the gathering.

Jundallah accuses Iran's Shiite-dominated government of persecution and has carried out attacks against the Revolutionary Guard and Shiite targets in the southeast.

That campaign is one of several ethnic and religious small-scale insurgencies in Iran that have fueled sporadic and sometimes deadly attacks in recent years — though none have amounted to a serious threat to the government.

The Revolutionary Guard blamed Sunday's attack on what it called the "global arrogance," a reference to the United States.

"The global arrogance, with the provocation of its local mercenaries, targeted the meeting of the Guard with local tribal leaders," said a Guard statement read out on state TV.

Iranian officials have often raised concerns that Washington might try to incite members of Iran's many ethnic and religious minorities against the Shiite-led government, which is dominated by ethnic Persians.

The Guard commanders targeted Sunday were heading to a meeting with local tribal leaders to promote unity between the Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.

In April, Iran increased security in Sistan-Baluchistan Province, at the center of the tension, by placing it under the command of the Guard, which took over from local police forces.

The 120,000-strong Revolutionary Guard controls Iran's missile program and has its own ground, naval and air units.

Iran's parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, condemned the assassination of the Guard commanders, saying the bombing was aimed at disrupting security in southeastern Iran.

"We express our condolences for their martyrdom. ... The intention of the terrorists was definitely to disrupt security in Sistan-Baluchistan Province," Larijani told an open session of the parliament broadcast live on state radio.

In May, Jundallah took credit for a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque that killed 25 people in Zahedan, the capital of Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan province, which has witnessed some of Jundallah's worst attacks. Thirteen members of the faction were convicted in the attack and hanged in July.

Jundallah is made up of Sunnis from the Baluchi ethnic minority, which can also be found in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The group has carried out bombings, kidnappings and other attacks against Iranian soldiers and other forces in recent years, including a car bombing in February 2007 that killed 11 members of the Revolutionary Guard near Zahedan.

Jundallah also claimed responsibility for the December 2006 kidnapping of seven Iranian soldiers in the Zahedan area. It threatened to kill them unless members of the group in Iranian prisons were released. The seven were released a month later, apparently after negotiations through tribal mediators.

Iran's nuclear disclosures: why they matter

The Christian Science Monitor

By Peter Grier / staff writer

Gas centrifuges are an amazing technology. They're thin metal tubes that stand upright, about as tall as a fifth-grader, and spin on magnetic bearings that are virtually frictionless. They revolve so fast that when they're filled with uranium hexafluoride gas, the compound separates into isotopes of different atomic weights, with the heavier isotope pushed to the outside by centrifugal force.

They're hard to get running right. Vibration can be a problem, so they must be tuned, a little like guitars. But once an array of centrifuges is humming along, it needs little maintenance. They are a great way to enrich uranium to the point it can be used in a nuclear reactor – or a nuclear bomb.

All this is by way of explanation as to why recent revelations about Iran's hidden centrifuge plant at Qom are so important to the future balance of power in perhaps the most volatile region in the world.

News about Iran's nuclear program has abounded in recent weeks. There was Qom, then allegations that Iran has a secret bomb-design program called "Project 110," and Tehran's surprise offer to perhaps send low-enriched uranium abroad to be turned into reactor fuel.

These and other recent events hint that the pace and complexity of Iran's nuclear program may have increased. Now, Iranian leaders may – or may not – want the bomb. But it seems clear that Tehran wants to develop into a regional power, meaning that time could be short for the United States and its allies to engage with a rising threat in an area crucial to both global energy production and the future of Islam.

"Iran presents the most serious single security challenge in the Middle East," writes Anthony Cor­des­man, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in a just-published book on the implications of Iran's weapons programs.

US had been looking for a covert facility

Seen in satellite photos, the newly revealed Iranian facility near Qom looks as if it could be a Wal-Mart, a school, or a factory. But it's intended to house about 3,000 gas centrifuges, according to both Iranian and US officials. In terms of uranium-enrichment capability, that would make it a modest plant.

But to many US proliferation experts, Qom represents the danger of a second fuel cycle foretold. That's because Iran already has a large centrifuge farm, near Natanz. There, it has 8,300 installed centrifuges, though only about half are actually enriching uranium. It is big enough to house 54,000, according to the US.

Natanz itself was revealed to the world by an Iranian dissident group in 2002. Iran says the facility is intended to produce low-enriched uranium (LEU) for use in nuclear power reactors. Today it is under scrutiny by Western intelligence services and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, and many experts say it would be difficult for Iran to divert enough LEU from the Natanz production line to produce bomb-grade uranium elsewhere.

That has led many experts outside Iran to this conclusion: If the Iranians want to produce fissile material for weapons, they would be likely to do so at a hidden site. Natanz represents their first fuel cycle. This hidden site, or sites, would constitute the second.

The US intelligence community has predicted this. Two years ago, in their 2007 National Intelligence Estimate of Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, US analysts said: "We assess with moderate confidence that Iran probably would use covert facilities – rather than its declared nuclear sites – for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon."

So, is Qom this covert facility?

Iran says that it is not and that, like Natanz, it is for civilian uses.

If it were intended to be a secret site, then it is likely that somewhere is also a hidden facility for producing uranium hexafluoride, the centrifuges' feedstock. In fact, some proliferation experts suggest that Iran may have a network of such sites. Or, if it does not already have such a network, Tehran may now start building one, because Qom has been discovered.

That would make keeping tabs on Iran's program something like a high-stakes game of Whac-A-Mole. Miss, and perhaps Tehran gets a nuclear arsenal.

"They hid Qom, and our intelligence agencies found it in the nick of time," says David Albright, a former weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "We can't count on that next time."

Conflicting intelligence reports

Obtaining fissile material, such as plutonium or highly enriched uranium, is the hardest step in producing the bomb. But it is not the only step. Nuclear weapons are complex devices that require high-voltage firing systems and associated detonators. Pieces must be machined to incredibly precise tolerances if they are to fit together and work.

Handing someone the blueprint of a bomb is not tantamount to giving him nuclear capability. Producing the stuff from that blueprint is a difficult art.

According to US intelligence, Iran has worked on such components in a weaponization process. But US agencies also conclude that Tehran stopped that work in 2003.

Intelligence analysts in some other countries, such as Germany, disagree – and insist Iran is still busy with weaponization work. Apparently that is also the view of some officials at the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

An IAEA report leaked to the press in early October alleges that Iran's Project 110 is continuing its clandestine effort to produce a nuclear warhead small enough to sit atop a missile. "Project 111" is corresponding work aimed at reshaping space inside the nose cone of a Shahab 3 missile so that the warhead will fit.

The IAEA report concludes that Iran has "sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device." But the paper has fierce detractors within the agency, who contend that some of the intelligence behind this conclusion could be forged.

Some outside experts, moreover, note that the parts of the report made public so far don't have many dates associated with Iran's alleged activities. That means it is possible that Iran had a Project 110 at one time, but has since scrapped it, as US intelligence continues to insist.

"I'm suspicious of 'spinning' on both sides of this issue," says Greg Thielmann, a former US intelligence official who is now a fellow at the Arms Control Association.

As to the pace of Iran's progress, it is conceivable that Tehran could build its own nuclear device as early as this year, according to Mr. Cordesman of CSIS.

But it is more likely that the time frame for deployment of actual weapons, on top of missiles, would be 2011 to 2015, he writes in his new book.

"Iran seems to be developing all of the capabilities necessary to deploy a significant number of nuclear weapons no later than 2020 and to mount them on missile systems capable of striking at targets throughout the region and beyond," Cordesman writes.

Hope for real nuclear negotiations: slim, but present

So, that's it then? It's inevitable that Iran is going to join the nuclear club?

That's not necessarily true, say other experts. There are some hopeful signs that Iranian leaders remain open to real nuclear negotiations.

For instance, on Oct. 1 Iran agreed in principle to send most of its openly declared LEU out of the country, probably to Russia. There, it would be turned into fuel for a small Iranian reactor that produces medical isotopes.

If this shipment comes to pass – and that is a big "if," considering Iran's past behavior – it would be a positive step. No longer would Tehran have at its disposal a pile of material it could easily enrich into bomb fuel.

The key is the intentions of Iran's leaders. Those are unknown to the US and its partners in negotiations.

If Iran is determined to get a nuclear bomb – and if a consensus exists in Iran's government behind that objective – there may be no stopping it. No negotiations or agreement with the US and other nations would help, according to Matthew Bunn, a principal investigator at the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

"They would either reject or violate measures that would seriously constrain their program," said Dr. Bunn during a recent presentation on how to deal with Iran's program.

However, if views differ within Iran's hierarchy about how close to get to nuclear weapons capability, then a negotiated deal could have an effect on the program's future.

By proffering incentives for Iran to change its behavior, the West could strengthen the hand of any Iranians in favor of a less confrontational approach, said Bunn.

But time and flexibility are needed to strike such a bargain. After decades of intense hostility, neither the US nor Iran trusts the other.

"Ultimately, to get Iran to address [the concerns of the US and its allies], the [US and its allies] must address Iran's concerns," said Bunn. "A deal not seen as serving Iran's interests, as well as ours, will be rejected or will fail."

Are Iran and Israel Talking Again?

Russia's FM Sergei Lavrov urged, in an interview with RIA Novosti, Iran and Israel to restore relations. "There is nothing impossible in that," he said, adding that "no one needs war".

Russia's interesting position coincided with emerging news that representatives from the two rivals had already met in Egypt under Australian sponsorship.
Australian paper The Age, reported that a meeting took place in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, last month as part of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, an expert panel assembled by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to help rid the world of nuclear arms.

Iran's senior envoy to the meeting was its ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh.

Israel sent the director of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, Merav Zafary-Odiz. Israel's former foreign affairs minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, was also at the meeting in a non-official role.

In fact any contacts between Israel and Iran should come as no surprise. The two countries have a track record of relations and communications that goes even beyond the Islamic revolution era.
Trita Parsi’s excellent book "Treacherous Alliance", details the fascinating complex relationship between the US, Iran, and Israel.

Consider this piece of information he provides about the Israeli Iranian communications in the post-Khomeini era:

In early 1980s, only months after the eruption of the hostage crisis, Ahmed Kashani, the youngest son of Grand Ayatollah Abol Qassem Kashani, who had played a key role in the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in 1951, visited Israel – most likely the first Iranian to do so after the revolution – to discuss arms sales and military cooperation against Iraq’s nuclear program at Osirak.

While there is a tendency to limit the contacts between Israel and Iran to the well known "Iran Contra", in which Tel Aviv played a crucial role in facilitating arms shipments to Tehran from the US, Parsi uncovers the multi-folded communications between the two countries in this respect.
Parsi quotes the Jaffee Institute for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University as saying that arms sales to Iran totaled an estimated $500 million from 1980 to 1983, most of it was paid for by Iranian oil delivered to Israel.

Parsi brilliantly puts the Israeli Iranian relations in the perspective of Bin Gurion's "Periphery Doctrine", according to which Israel, for a long period of time, pursued alliances with the belt states around the Arab World, which are Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia under the former Haile Selassie emperors. Below is a soundbite from the book on the DNA of such a relation.

In May 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told NBC that Tel Aviv had supplied Iran with arms and ammunition because it viewed Iraq as "being dangerous to the peace process in the Middle East". Sharon added that Israel provided the arms to Iran because it felt it was important to "leave a small window open" to the possibility of good relations with Iran in the future.

Nevertheless, it is not a relation limited to politics or strategic interests. Every Jewish pupil learns in his/her early years how, back in 536 BC, the king of Persia freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity.

It is definitely too early to jump into final conclusions concerning the prospects of the Iranian-Israeli relations. However, the fact the Lavrov's statement and The Age report come at a time of growing tension between Turkey -one of the 4 pillars of the periphery doctrine- and Israel, a growing irritation between Turkey and Iran given the latest Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and finally Iran's need (willingness is still to be determined) to end the standoff over its nuclear program, all might constitute elements for a renewed kick off in the relations between Iran and Israel.

Confusion Rules Over Iran

Iran is about to get hold of the dirty bomb; Iran is way far from that. Iran possesses all the know how capacity to fabricate a deployable bomb; Iran is unable to ensure the very basic clean uranium enrichment process. Now, choose your position and dig into a long list of contradictory evidences to support your claim.
In the end no one is dead sure of the final conclusion.
David Kay, screams "Striking Iran" is the option that Washington might, exclusively, find at its disposal if the Mullahs regime stayed the course it seems to be pursuing.

Iran has achieved the effective status of a nuclear-weapons-capable state. No matter what American policy makers want to believe, Iran has built a uranium-enrichment establishment, procured a workable design for a weapon, carried out work to enhance and validate that design, and developed longer-range missile-delivery systems.
(...) The fact is, Iran’s nuclear program has progressed considerably beyond where it was when President Bush first uttered what would become a useless policy prescription, and is now at a point where only a severely intrusive on-the-ground inspection regime—at least as tough as the one we carried out from 1991–95 in Iraq—could have any hope of verifying that Iran’s nuclear program has stopped.
(...) If the latest round of talks allow Tehran to drag out discussions—while further enhancing its nuclear capabilities, and any meaningful sanctions continued to be postponed to avoid “poisoning the negotiations” (...) The danger ahead is that Tehran(...) will push its nuclear program further and faster than it otherwise would have, and enter the dangerous arena of actually deploying nuclear weapons.

David Kay is an authority on nuclear issues. He led the UN inspection after the first Gulf War that uncovered the previously unknown Iraqi nuclear program and, after the most recent Gulf War, led the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group that determined that there had been no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at the time of the war. Hence, what he offers should be insightful.

Well, it is, till you continue reading.

David Ignatius summarizes an articled that appeared in Oct. 8 issue of Nucleonics Week in which the author, Mark Hibbs, reports that Iran's supply of low-enriched uranium suffers from certain "impurities" that "could cause centrifuges to fail" if the Iranians try to boost it to weapons grade.
Ignatius, not less than how confused you might be, sites some contrary assessments.

there's some uncertainty among experts about how serious the contamination problem is

Elsewhere, confusion rules within the intelligence community.
U.S. spy agencies are considering whether to rewrite a controversial 2007 intelligence report that asserted, with "high confidence", Tehran halted its efforts to build nuclear weapons in 2003, current and former U.S. intelligence officials told WSJ.
The American assessment contradicts the findings of at least the 3 main European allies, Germany, France and UK.

If undertaken, a new NIE likely wouldn't be available for months. The U.S. and its allies have imposed an informal December deadline for Iran to comply with Western demands that it cease enriching uranium or face fresh economic sanctions.

A shift in the U.S. intelligence community's official stance -- concluding Iran restarted its nuclear weapons work or that Iran's ambitions have ramped up -- could significantly affect President Barack Obama's efforts to use diplomacy to contain Tehran's capabilities.

Any timeline for negotiations could be shortened if a new NIE concludes Tehran has restarted its atomic-weapons work, said officials involved in the diplomacy. But the White House could also use the new report to galvanize wider international support for sanctions against Tehran.

Assafir and Tarfelsay's Garage Door

For those who instinctively jump into devilish conclusions based on Israeli fed information on every issue related to Hezbollah, a must read investigative report waits for them on today’s Assafir front page.

The Israeli distributed video, in which the army claims that rockets were being moved from an explosion site in the Lebanese southern village Tarfelsay, is a propaganda production which aims at establishing a pretext for an Israeli aggression on Lebanon.

Assafir nails down the misinformation.

The 4 meters “body” which appears in the Israeli video is the garage door where the explosion took place, Assafir quotes a so called “official narration”.

“After the explosion, 7 to 8 guys from the neighborhood started to collect the leftovers, among them the garage door which was wrapped in a white blanket, and transported them in a small truck, to a moor (boura) in the neighboring Deir Qanoon Alnahr” says Assafir.

The paper might have not heard of You Tube, where one could retrieve the video, which Hezbollah didn’t deny its authenticity but rather its interpretation, and count around 2 dozens of human beings in the explosion site hurriedly moving stuff into at least 2 trucks while many other vehicles could be spotted.

Anyway this is a ridiculous detail missed by the paper that is well known for it’s “A class” investigative reporting.

For example, a couple of weeks ago Assafir broke the news with a front page story on a US military base being established in Lebanon, before the Lebanese Army corrects that this is a base of his and has no attachment, whatsoever, to any American entity. Or when the paper, unequivocally, kept reminding its readers of the marginal position the Lebanese issue enjoyed on the Saudi Syria summit in Damascus, before Assad himself testified to the contrary in a phone call he placed to the Lebanese President.

Now Back to Tarfelsay!!

Reading the well sourced investigative front page piece in Assafir today, one could draw the following conclusions.

• There is no moor (boura) in Tarfelsay. The villagers had to hurriedly transform the fire leftovers and the garage door to a moor in a neighboring village.
• Tarfelsay inhabitants, not known for any cotton related business, give no damn about their white blankets. They even use them to wrap black smoked garage doors ripped by minor explosions that are caused by the marriage of electrical contact and flammable material. (Assafir doesn’t bother to qualify the fact that a minor explosion shouldn’t have ripped the garage door from its frame).

But why did the villagers feel the urge to transform the garage door to another village on the spot and didn’t wait till the morning?

Are you insane?? Would be an expected answer from Assafir reporter.

Who would, in his/her straight mind, leave a garage door in a village with no moor? Would you sleep in a house knowing that a garage door is left outside till the next morning?

Hell no!! So why do you expect Tarfelsay villagers to act differently you discriminating son of the bitches….

I bet you find me one similar incident in any village, all over the World, not followed by inhabitants moving the leftovers to another village, especially if among these a garage door!!!

Assafir would have reported that the Titanic docked safely.

Cripple Iran to save it -- latimes.com

Cripple Iran to save it -- latimes.com

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Iran's Difficult Choises

Meir Javedanfar penned a nice piece in The Guardian in which he casts pessimism over the results expected from the World powers talks with Iran.
He asks if Iran could afford a nuclear U-turn.

This is now an even more difficult decision for the Iranian leadership to take, as they have already sold their "victory" to the Iranian public. To comply would mean an embarrassing U-turn. After the recent disturbances at home, this could damage the conservatives' position. However, if they don't agree to it, crippling sanctions, or even war, could follow

US wants bunker-buster fast, denies Iran is reason

This undated artist's rendering provided by Boeing Co. shows a "massive ordinance penetrator" or MOP bomb made by Boeing Co. is undergoing testing and is slated to come on line by mid-2010, to become the largest conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal. The bomb is approximately 20.5 feet long, has a 31.5-inch diameter and a total weight of slightly less than 30,000 pounds. The weapon will carry over 5,300 pounds of explosive material and will deliver more than 10 times the explosive power of its predecessor, the BLU-109. Guided by global positioning system navigation, the MOP will be carried aboard Air Force B-2 bombers. (AP Photo/Boeing Co.)

By ANNE GEARAN (AP)

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is speeding up delivery of a colossal bomb designed to destroy hidden weapons bunkers buried underground and shielded by 10,000 pounds of reinforced concrete.

Call it Plan B for dealing with Iran, which recently revealed a long-suspected nuclear site deep inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom.

The 15-ton behemoth — called the "massive ordnance penetrator," or MOP — will be the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal and will carry 5,300 pounds of explosives. The bomb is about 10 times more powerful than the weapon it is designed to replace.

The Pentagon has awarded a nearly $52 million contract to speed up placement of the bomb aboard the B-2 Stealth bomber, and officials say the bomb could be fielded as soon as next summer.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that the new bomb is intended to blow up fortified sites like those used by Iran and North Korea for their nuclear programs, but they deny there is a specific target in mind.

"I don't think anybody can divine potential targets," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said. "This is just a capability that we think is necessary given the world we live in."

The Obama administration has struggled to counter suspicions lingering from George W. Bush's presidency that the United States is either planning to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities itself or would look the other way if Israel did the same.

The administration has been careful not to take military action off the table even as it reaches out to Iran with historic talks this month. Tougher sanctions are the immediate backup if diplomacy fails to stop what the West fears is a drive for a nuclear weapon.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities would probably only buy time. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen has called a strike an option he doesn't want to use.

The new U.S. bomb would be the culmination of planning begun in the Bush years. The Obama administration's plans to bring the bomb on line more quickly indicate that the weapon is still part of the long-range backup plan.

"Without going into any intelligence, there are countries that have used technology to go further underground and to take those facilities and make them hardened," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. "This is not a new phenomenon, but it is a growing one."

After testing began in 2007, development of the bomb was slowed by about two years because of budgetary issues, Whitman said, and the administration moved last summer to return to the previous schedule.

North Korea, led by Kim Jong Il, is a known nuclear weapons state and has exploded working devices underground. The United States and other countries have offered to buy out the country's weapons program. The Obama administration is trying to lure Pyongyang back to the bargaining table after a walkout last year.

Iran is a more complex case, for both diplomatic and technical reasons. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claims its nuclear program is peaceful and meant only to produce energy, but the West suspects a covert bomb program that may be only a year or so away from fruition.

"I don't really see it as a near-term indication of anything being planned. I think certainly down the road it has a certain deterrent factor," said Kenneth Katzman, a specialist on Iran and the Middle East at the Congressional Research Service. "It adds to the calculus, let's say, of Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il."

Details about Iran's once-secret program have come out slowly and often under duress, as with last month's surprise confirmation of the hidden underground development site near Qom.

That revelation came a month after the Pentagon had asked Congress to shift money to speed up the MOP program, although U.S. and other intelligence agencies had suspected for years that Iran was still hiding at least one nuclear development site.

The MOP could, in theory, take out bunkers such as those Saddam Hussein had begun to construct for weapons programs in Iraq, or flatten the kind of cave and tunnel networks that allowed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to escape U.S. assault in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The precision-guided bomb is designed to drill through earth and almost any underground encasement to reach weapons depots, labs or hideouts.

Iran marches toward the bomb

Here is my latest op-ed on Iran.

The Geneva meeting with Iran, which was eagerly described as “constructive” by Washington, left the most important question unanswered: What Middle East would these talks “construct”?

The answer depends much on what we draw from the talks between Iran and the international community, and as things stand at the moment, Iran is marching towards developing its own nuclear bomb.

Uranium enrichment is no longer a red line for Iran and discussion have gently shifted to the level of uranium purity Iran is allowed to process for domestic use and what will be done with the surplus. Hence, Tehran can comfortably announce plans to install a “new generation of centrifuges” at the country’s newly-revealed nuclear facility near the Shi’ite holy city of Qom, and at other sites, yet to be revealed. This was the hope as outlined by Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, during a CNN/George Washington University forum which was hosted by him and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the meantime, a report prepared by IAEA experts and made public by ISIS said that Iran has successfully tested Shahab-3 missiles which have a range of 2,000 kilometers, and is working to develop a nuclear payload that can be delivered by them. The report concludes that Tehran already has the technical knowledge to build a nuclear bomb.

Israeli media is already addressing the possibility of living with a nuclear Iran, while Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak “conceded” that an Iranian nuclear bomb does not pose an existential threat to Israel.

This possibility is sending shivers down some spines in several Arab capitals.

In the last week, the UAE has adopted a civilian nuclear energy law that will pave the way for huge nuclear power program worth $41 billion. Although civilian in nature, the program hints at the region’s preparedness to start a nuclear arms race should Iran get there. UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al-Nayah openly expressed his country’s (and the GCC’s) concerns to Clinton in Sharm Il-Sheikh in March that the U.S. would reach an agreement with Iran on key strategic issues without Washington consulting its Arab allies.

Saudi Arabia is close to spending billions to buy a Russian S-400 advanced missile defense system, to protect against a potentially nuclear Iran, Gulf analysts and diplomats told AFP recently.

Elsewhere, Washington is sabre-rattling against Tehran with a semi-official, plan B focused around assurances, bribes and containment, and which involves the U.S. nuclear umbrella over America’s Middle East allies, if Iran develops its bomb. It is an option that dovetails with the line of thinking of many officials around the Obama administration, and some of which was expressed openly their boss took office.

Take Ashton B. Carter, who wrote, before being assigned the job of Defense Undersecretary, that “containment and punishment” is the post-diplomacy-failure policy. Meanwhile, Gary Samore, head of non-proliferation at the National Security Council, preached of a responsible nuclear Iran, a country, he suggests, “would probably act like other nuclear-armed states and was not likely to give terrorists the bomb.”

Then consider the mounting opposition coming from some hawks in the “bomb Iraq camp.” Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack (whose book The Threatening Storm influenced many liberals to back the Iraq war) agreed during a joint panel prepared by AEI and Brookings the same day of Geneva talks, that containment, not military action, is the best policy on Iran.

Feeling that assurances and containment could fail to convince Israel, the Obama administration is considering bribery. The Washington Times quoted unnamed US officials as saying that President Obama will not pressure Israel to publicly disclose its suspected nuclear weapons program, nor will he pressure the Jewish state to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. It is the same president who, days earlier, was lecturing the world at the UN General Assembly on nuclear nonproliferation and who was the driving force behind the UN resolution which aims at ridding the planet of nuclear weapons.

So, on preventing a nuclear Iran, we are invited to shift gears from “yes we can” to “what can we do?”, before we gamble on there being a regional balance of nuclear power while at the same time striving for a long term goal of a nuclear-weapons-free planet.

In the meantime, those who disagree ought to, according to Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, “shut up”.

Why A Deal With Iran Could Mean Nothing?

Washington Post's Glenn Kessler detailed the birth story of the pending deal between Iran and the P5+1 over its nuclear program.

The general parameter of the deal, which was agreed upon "in priniciple", is Iran's acceptance to further enrich its stockpile of low enriched uranium through a third party.

However, some Iranian official offered confusing statements on the deal in the aftermath of the Geneva talks.

Iran's ambassadot to UK, who participated in the Geneva talks, denied, in an interview with the AP, the fact that such a deal had been discussed. Iran' top nuclear negotiator Said Jalili made a clear distinction between Iran's willingness to buy enriched uranium to the purity level of %19.75 from a third party, and its unwillingness to hand over the one-bomb worth of uranium it already posses.

Nevertheless, even if Iran reached an agreement with the P5+1 to trade its posession of enriched uranium, of %3.5 purity level, for another amout of uranium, yet, of higher enrichment (%19.75), and was able to run its medical nuclear reactor, it is still not clear whether or not Iran could abuse the final aquired product for millitary purposes. It is equally unclear, if Iran would be provided directly with enriched uranium of %19.75 purity level or by fuel rods derived from this relatively high enriched uranium.

It was reported that Russia will process the extra enrichment and France will take over to produce fuel rods which Tehran needs for its waining medical nuclear reactor. This is still to be determined in the coming meeting between representatives from France, Russia, US, IAEI and Iran.

In the meantime, experts suggest that despite the deal, Iran could still have a leeway for weaponizing the nuclear material it is about to get.

John Bolton touched on this point in his WSJ op-ed:

After Geneva, the administration misleadingly stated that once fashioned into fuel rods, the uranium involved could not be enriched further. This is flatly untrue. The 19.75% enriched uranium could be reconverted into uranium hexafluoride gas and quickly enriched to 90%. Iran could also "burn" its uranium fuel (including the Russian LEU available for the Bushehr reactor) and then chemically extract plutonium from the spent fuel to produce nuclear weapons.

Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, provided similar conclusion to the Post:

Iran to extract the more highly enriched uranium for weapons. He noted that Argentina published the process online.

While others counter such assessments, Iran is extravagantly showing off its nuclear capabilities. Consider this soundbite by Iran's atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi:

We can enrich uranium, we can process uranium, we can produce fuel rods, we can mine uranium, we can deal with spent fuel, which proves we have a full fuel cycle

Neda: Washington Post's Nobel Laureate

In its editorial on Us President Barak Obama winning Nobel Prize for Peace, The Washington Post says that Neda Agha-Soltan, the Iranian young woman whose death from a Baseej sniper bullet to her heart moved the World in the aftermath of Iran's rigged presidential election, was a better alternative.
In fact Obama, in his speech of acceptance, made a careful reference to Neda and her mates:

And that's why this award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity—for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard even in the face of beatings and bullets (...)

Mottaki said the appropriate time for giving this award is when Palestinian rights are respected d and occupation forces fully withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.



Iran considered the prize to be hastily designated. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said:

This decision was made in haste and the prize was awarded prematurely (...) However, we will support and welcome the move if it helps promote peace and harmony in war-wary countries.

A Strike Or No Strike: That Is The Question

For a country struggling to smoothly quit a war in Iraq, and distortedly debating the management of another in Afghanistan, it would be quite surprising to fall on a cheering audience for a new third war on Iran.
However, a recent poll conducted by The Pew Research Center finds that to about two thirds of the Americans it's "more important" to stop Iran from developing nukes, even if that means "military action," than it is to "avoid military conflict."
It is a reflective public mood of the conflicting trends at the Hill. Top Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) went on national television on Sunday, Oct. 3, saying that the U.S. military should not only bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but should launch an “all-or-nothing” war against the Persian country with the goal of obliterating it.

On a more practical note, the Pentagon is speeding up production plans of a 30,000-pound massive ordnance penetrator (MOP). The gargantuan "bunker buster" bomb is expected to be ready in months.

Highlighting the urgency of the project, Congress has approved a previous Pentagon request to shift funds to it. The bomb, able to hit targets buried 200 feet below ground, is designed "to defeat hardened facilities used by hostile states to protect weapons of mass destruction," press secretary Geoff Morrell said.
The Pentagon announced Friday it awarded McDonnell Douglas Corporation a 51.9-million-dollar contract to enable B-2 aircraft to carry the enormous MOP.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration, chiefly among which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have unwaveringly shrunk the possibility of nuking Iran.
Gates said last month that a military strike against Iran would only "buy time" and delay a nuclear weapons program by about one to three years.

It is quite possible that the Administration is undertaking precaution measures had the Israelis decided to unilaterally seek neutralizing the Iranian nuclear program, hence dragging so many players into a “World War” scale confrontation.

Iran's Big Victory in Geneva

In a previous post I highlighted two pieces, one of which considers Iran to be the winner of Geneva talks and the other expects a coming failure in US president Barak Obama's startegy of engagement with Iran to resolve dispute over its nuclear program.
Today in the WSJ, John Bolton, the well known hawkish former US ambassador to the UN, takes a similar ride talking about Iran's "big" victory in Geneva and concluding that Washington is now further from eliminating Tehran's threat.

The most widely touted outcome of last week's Geneva talks with Iran was the "agreement in principle" to send approximately one nuclear-weapon's worth of Iran's low enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for enrichment to 19.75% and fabrication into fuel rods for Tehran's research reactor. President Barack Obama says the deal represents progress, a significant confidence-building measure.

In fact, the agreement constitutes another in the long string of Iranian negotiating victories over the West. Any momentum toward stricter sanctions has been dissipated, and Iran's fraudulent, repressive regime again hobnobs with the U.N. Security Council's permanent members. Consider the following problems:

• Is there a deal or isn't there? Diplomacy's three slipperiest words are "agreement in principle." Iran's Ambassador to Britain exclaimed after the talks in Geneva, "No, no!" when asked if his country had agreed to ship LEU to Russia; it had "not been discussed yet." An unnamed Iranian official said that the Geneva deal "is just based on principles. We have not agreed on any amount or any numbers." Bargaining over the deal's specifics could stretch out indefinitely.

Other issues include whether Iran will have "observers" at Russian enrichment facilities. If so, what new technologies might those observers glean? And, since Tehran's reactor is purportedly for medical purposes, will Mr. Obama deny what Iran pretends to need to refuel it in 2010?

• The "agreement" undercuts Security Council resolutions forbidding Iranian uranium enrichment. No U.S. president has been more enamored of international law and the Security Council than Mr. Obama. Yet here he is undermining the foundation of the multilateral campaign against Tehran's nuclear weapons program. In Resolution 1696, adopted July 31, 2006, the Security Council required Iran to "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development." Uranium enriched thereafter—the overwhelming bulk of Iran's admitted LEU—thus violates 1696 and later sanctions resolutions. Moreover, considering Iran's utter lack of credibility, we have no idea whether its declared LEU constitutes anything near its entire stockpile.

By endorsing Iran's use of its illegitimately enriched uranium, Mr. Obama weakens his argument that Iran must comply with its "international obligations." Indeed, the Geneva deal undercuts Mr. Obama's proposal to withhold more sanctions if Iran does not enhance its nuclear program by allowing Iran to argue that continued enrichment for all peaceful purposes should be permissible. Now Iran will oppose new sanctions and argue for repealing existing restrictions. Every other aspiring proliferator is watching how violating Security Council resolutions not only carries no penalty but provides a shortcut to international redemption.

• Raising Iran's LEU to higher enrichment levels is a step backwards. Two-thirds of the work to get 90% enriched uranium, the most efficient weapons grade, is accomplished when U235 isotope levels in natural uranium are enriched to Iran's current level of approximately 3%-5%. Further enrichment of Iran's LEU to 19.75% is a significant step in the wrong direction. This is barely under the 20% definition of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU). Ironically, Resolution 1887, adopted while Mr. Obama presided over the Security Council last week, calls for converting HEU-based reactors like Iran's to LEU fuel precisely to lower such proliferation risks. We should be converting the Tehran reactor, not refueling it at 19.75% enrichment.

After Geneva, the administration misleadingly stated that once fashioned into fuel rods, the uranium involved could not be enriched further. This is flatly untrue. The 19.75% enriched uranium could be reconverted into uranium hexafluoride gas and quickly enriched to 90%. Iran could also "burn" its uranium fuel (including the Russian LEU available for the Bushehr reactor) and then chemically extract plutonium from the spent fuel to produce nuclear weapons.

The more sophisticated Iran's nuclear skills become, the more paths it has to manufacture nuclear weapons. The research-reactor bait-and-switch demonstrates convincingly why it cannot be trusted with fissile material under any peaceful guise. Proceeding otherwise would be winking at two decades of Iranian deception, which, unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems perfectly prepared to do.

The president also said last week that international access to the Qom nuclear site must occur within two weeks, but an administration spokesman retreated the next day, saying there was no "hard and fast deadline," and "we don't have like a drop-dead date." Of course, neither does Iran. Once again, Washington has entered the morass of negotiations with Tehran, giving Iran precious time to refine and expand its nuclear program. We are now even further from eliminating Iran's threat than before Geneva.

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

The coming war with Iran - Washington Times

The coming war with Iran - Washington Times

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The military option: Could they do it?

Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes
Washington Bureau

October 3, 2009

The revelation that Iran is nearing completion of a new underground nuclear complex has compounded the urgency of diplomatic talks that began last week [THURS] by underscoring how difficult it would be for U.S. or Israeli air strikes to halt the Islamic country's expanding push for atomic power, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Everything about the new site seems designed to put the regime's nuclear program out of U.S. or Israeli reach. It is built on an elite military base, fortified with steel and concrete, and buried under a mountain near the holy city of Qom.

But those characteristics are just one reason the Obama administration has steadfastly downplayed the possibility of an attack. U.S. officials also are worried about the possibility of Iranian retaliation and attacks on American targets and troops around the world; the irrevocable loss of dialogue with moderate factions in Tehran; and the military's ability to fight another war while still deeply committed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. military is developing technologies, including a new generation of "bunker-busting" bombs, that could destroy facilities like the one near Qom.

But there are doubts about the effectiveness of those weapons, prompting current and former U.S. officials to say that a military effort aimed at crippling Iran's nuclear program would require dozens of missile strikes and possibly even the insertion of U.S. troops.

"If you're going to have an effective campaign to go in and throw [Iran's nuclear program] back years, you're talking about a massive, massive effort," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who was involved in examining such scenarios.

"This is not an Iraqi reactor or a Syrian reactor," the official said, referring to Israel's strikes in 1981 and 2007, respectively, on above-ground nuclear facilities in those countries. "This is a different game."

The official and others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing millitary planning.

President Obama said shortly after taking office that he was prepared to use "all elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon." Last week, he reiterated that he would not "rule out any options when it comes to U.S. security interests."

The increasingly difficult nature of upholding that pledge through military strikes, however, became clearer last week when U.S. officials described the newest Iranian site, believed to be a uranium enrichment which plant which could furnish fissile material for a bomb.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said earlier this week that any attack could at best delay construction of a bomb, if Iran intends to build one.

Obama has long favored talks, and international negotiators met Thursday with Iran, reporting progress in several areas and calming for now any talk of tough sanctions or military action.

The administration has never spelled out what might prompt a U.S. strike, deliberately leaving diplomatic maneuvering room. Nevertheless, former U.S. officials and experts said that there are several thresholds that could trigger a U.S. military response.

Leonard Spector, director of the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Washington, said the U.S. would almost certainly react "if we observe that they are producing highly enriched uranium, or…were returning to the design and manufacture of actual weapons."

Although Iran is already enriching uranium at Natanz, the facility is not configured to deliver bomb-grade material. And U.S. spy agencies believe Iran's work on designing a nuclear warhead was suspended in 2003, although Israeli and British intelligence officials believe work has either resumed or continued.

In a more extreme scenario, some experts believe the United States might choose to hold off any attack until Iran actually detonated a nuclear device in a test, as North Korea did earlier this year.

The main components of Iran's nuclear program, and hence the most likely targets of any strike, include an enrichment plant at Natanz, a heavy water reactor at Arak, a uranium conversion plant at Esfahan, and the newly identified site near Qom.

In one scenario, the United States could carry out a single missile strike on the Qom facility alone – a step that might be easier to defend internationally, but would do little to slow Iran's nuclear work.

Crippling Iran's nuclear program would require waves of strikes, officials said, not only on the major nuclear facilities, but also on research installations and locations where centrifuges and other equipment are manufactured and stored.

U.S. intelligence officials have tracked the excavation work at Qom for several years. Officials said many other sites have also been monitored, with no proof of nuclear activity so far.

In the past, U.S. spy agencies have struggled in assessments of other nations' nuclear programs. In Iraq, the United States learned after the 1991 Persian Gulf war that it had missed major signs that Baghdad was pursuing the bomb. Twelve years later, the United States erroneously concluded that the work had resumed, only to discover after the 2003 U.S. invasion that those assessments were wrong.

Because of the difficulties, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned this week that rooting out Iran's the entire nuclear program could require inserting U.S. troops.

"The facilities are in several different places. Some are hardened, underground, in tunnels," Feinstein said in an interview on Fox television. "You'd have to have a ground operation as well as a military operation, and that's very difficult to do."

If strikes are ordered, the U.S. has a major military advantage. Iran's air defenses are regarded as rudimentary. Still, the United States likely would use stealth aircraft and employ electronic measures to shut-down Iranian radar and surface to air missiles.

When Israel attacked a nuclear facility being built in Syria, the nation's radar was fed false information, preventing Damascus from learning it was under attack until the first bomb fell.

John Wheeler, a former Air Force official, said the U.S. could use cyber warfare capabilities to weaken Iranian defenses, disabling the electrical grid and disrupting radio signals and cell phone towers. With the air-defenses taken down, U.S. bombers would be able to fly in relatively safety.

One former defense official said putting teams of special operations forces, known as SOF, on the ground would increase the precision of the bombs, and make placing munitions inside the entrances to hidden bunkers easier.

"The SOF guys would be safe for a while," said the official. "They could assure accurate target acquisition."

U.S. officials are developing an array of warheads for what are called "hard and deeply buried targets," projectiles that are designed to plunge into the earth and penetrate layers of concrete before being detonated by a delayed-action fuse.

The largest penetrator in the mililtary's inventory is the 5,000-pound GBU-28. But much larger munitions, including the 30,000-pound "massive ordnance penetrator," are in development, although experts said early versions might seretly be available for use.

The Air Force also has a weapon known as the GBU-43B, known as the "massive ordnance air bomb." At 30-feet long and more than 21,000 pounds, it also has been dubbed the "mother of all bombs."

Although not a penetrating bomb, the massive ordnance air bomb could destroy exterior features, such as entrances, and severely damage a structure's interior.

Strikes employing such munitions likely would be successive, with the initial launches focused on entrances and outer defenses, followed by missiles meant efforts to drill deeper into the center of the target.

Locating that center would be one of the most difficult tasks. For instance, satellite images of the Qom compound show tunnel entrances and vents scattered across a mountaintop, but reveal little of the layout underneath.

"Unless you have good human intelligence, you probably don't have a good idea where inside the mountain the key target is," said a former senior U.S. military intelligence official. Partly for that reason, the official said, "It is possible to construct a facility that is simply beyond reach."

Nuclear warheads could destroy even a deeply buried structure, but remain an unthinkable option.

Israel has threatened to strike Iran's nuclear sites, but experts have questioned whether Israel's potent but still limited arsenal would be capable of destroying Iran's program.

Beyond the obvious diplomatic fallout, military options also carry many other risks.

An attack that left even remnants of the program intact likely would harden Iran's resolve to acquire the bomb, and push the program deeper underground. U.S. spy agencies have warned that Tehran may retaliate by launching missiles toward Israel, striking U.S. installations in Iraq and Afghanistan, closing off the vital Strait of Hormuz, and carrying out terrorist attacks on other continents through the militant group Hezbollah, which it supports.

"The assumption is that they would strike out, unleashing their terrorist clients and using whatever military capabilities they've got," said a senior former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with classified assessments. "I don't think anybody seriously contemplates that they would say, 'Game over.'


Copyright © 2009, Tribune Interactive

NY Times: Report Says Iran Has Data to Make a Nuclear Bomb

Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.

The report by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency stresses in its introduction that its conclusions are tentative and subject to further confirmation of the evidence, which it says came from intelligence agencies and its own investigations.

But the report’s conclusions, described by senior European officials, go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United States.

Two years ago, American intelligence agencies published a detailed report concluding that Tehran halted its efforts to design a nuclear weapon in 2003. But in recent months, Britain has joined France, Germany and Israel in disputing that conclusion, saying the work has been resumed.

A senior American official said last week that the United States was now re-evaluating its 2007 conclusions.

The atomic agency’s report also presents evidence that beyond improving upon bomb-making information gathered from rogue nuclear experts around the world, Iran has done extensive research and testing on how to fashion the components of a weapon. It does not say how far that work has progressed.

The report, titled “Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s Nuclear Program,” was produced in consultation with a range of nuclear weapons experts inside and outside the agency. It draws a picture of a complex program, run by Iran’s Ministry of Defense, “aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system,” Iran’s medium-range missile, which can strike the Middle East and parts of Europe. The program, according to the report, apparently began in early 2002.

If Iran is designing a warhead, that would represent only part of the complex process of making nuclear arms. Engineering studies would have to turn ideas into hardware. Finally, the hardest part would be enriching the uranium that could be used as nuclear fuel — though experts say Iran has already mastered that task.

While the analysis represents the judgment of the nuclear agency’s senior staff, a struggle has erupted in recent months over whether to make it public. The dispute pits the agency’s departing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, against his own staff and against foreign governments eager to intensify pressure on Iran.

Dr. ElBaradei has long been reluctant to adopt a confrontational strategy on Iran, an approach he sees as counterproductive. Responding to calls for the report’s release, he has raised doubts about its completeness and reliability.

Last month, the agency issued an unusual statement cautioning it “has no concrete proof” that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead. On Saturday in India, Dr. ElBaradei was quoted as saying that “a major question” about the authenticity of the evidence kept his agency from “making any judgment at all” on whether Iran had ever sought to design a nuclear warhead.

Even so, the emerging sense in the intelligence world that Iran has solved the major nuclear design problems poses a new diplomatic challenge for President Obama and his allies.

American officials say that in the direct negotiations with Iran that began last week, it will be vital to get the country to open all of its suspected sites to international inspectors. That is a long list, topped by the underground nuclear enrichment center under construction near Qum, that was revealed 10 days ago.

Iran has acknowledged that the underground facility is intended as a nuclear enrichment center, but says the fuel it makes will be used solely to produce nuclear power and medical isotopes. It was kept heavily protected, Iranian officials said, to ward off potential attacks.

Iran said last week that it would allow inspectors to visit the site this month. In the past three years, amid mounting evidence of a possible military dimension to its nuclear program, Iran has denied the agency wide access to installations, documents and personnel.

In recent weeks, there have been leaks about the internal report, perhaps intended to press Dr. ElBaradei into releasing it.

The report’s existence has been rumored for months, and The Associated Press, saying it had seen a copy, reported fragments of it in September. On Friday, more detailed excerpts appeared on the Web site of the Institute for Science and International Security, run by David Albright, a nuclear expert.

In recent interviews, a senior European official familiar with the contents of the full report described it to The New York Times. He confirmed that Mr. Albright’s excerpts were authentic. The excerpts were drawn from a 67-page version of the report written earlier this year and since revised and lengthened, the official said; its main conclusions remain unchanged.

“This is a running summary of where we are,” the official said.

“But there is some loose language,” he added, and it was “not ready for publication as an official document.”

Most dramatically, the report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device” based on highly enriched uranium.

Weapons based on the principle of implosion are considered advanced models compared with the simple gun-type bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. They use a blast wave from a sphere of conventional explosives to compress a ball of bomb fuel into a supercritical mass, starting the atomic chain reaction and progressing to the fiery blast. Implosion designs, compact by nature, are considered necessary for making nuclear warheads small and powerful enough to fit atop a missile.

The excerpts also suggest that Iran has done much research and testing to perfect nuclear arms, like making high-voltage detonators, firing test explosives and designing warheads.

The evidence underlying these conclusions is not new: Some of it was reported in a confidential presentation to many nations in early 2008 by the agency’s chief inspector, Ollie Heinonen.

Iran maintains that its scientists have never conducted research on how to make a warhead and that any documents to the contrary are fraudulent.

But in August, a public report to the board of the I.A.E.A. by its staff concluded that the evidence of Iran’s alleged military activity was probably genuine.

It said “the information contained in that documentation appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran with a view to removing the doubts” about the nature of its nuclear program.

The agency’s tentative analysis also says that Iran “most likely” obtained the needed information for designing and building an implosion bomb “from external sources” and then adapted the information to its own needs.

It said nothing specific about the “external sources,” but many intelligence agencies assume that Iran obtained a bomb design from A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani black marketer who sold it machines to enrich uranium. That information may have been supplemented by a Russian nuclear weapons scientist who visited Iran often, investigators say.

The I.A.E.A.’s internal report concluded that the staff believed “that non-nuclear experiments conducted in Iran would give confidence that the implosion system would function correctly.”

Obama's Strategy and Iran's tactics

The big question for US President Barak Obama to answer now, is whether Iran is playing for time or serious on deal?
Despite the fact that the P5+1 representatives are under the impression of agreeing with Iran that most of its openly declared enriched uranium would be sent outside to be turned into fuel and then exported back to Iran, some of the latter's officials statements raised suspicion.
Asked about such a deal, Iran's ambassador to Britain, who participated in the talks, told the Associated Press that the issue had "not been discussed yet." And when asked if Iran had agreed to Russia taking the uranium, the ambassador replied with an emphatic, "No, no!"
CNN's Elise Labott thinks that the real winner in Thursday's talks is Iran.

[T]he real winner in Thursday's round of talks is Iran, which has largely neutralized international efforts to impose new sanctions against Tehran. (...) All in all, Iran's demonstration of flexibility this week gave it a welcome reprieve without really changing the fundamentals of its nuclear program.

Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Post, writes about the coming failure on Iran:

In the meantime, talks about the details of inspections and the uranium shipments could easily become protracted, buying the regime valuable time. (...) Meanwhile, Tehran's tactical retreat has provided Russia and China with an excuse to veto new sanctions -- something they would have been hard-pressed to do had Iran struck an entirely defiant tone in Geneva.

Reporting from Dubai, The Guardian's Richrad Spencer says that that Iran managed to escape sanctions until 2010.

No Nixon-to-China Moment Here | Foreign Policy

No Nixon-to-China Moment Here | Foreign Policy

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US Right On Obama

John P. Hanna is afraid that unless an ultimatum-based approach with clear deadlines and real consequences is applied as a negotiating strategy with Iran over its nuclear program, the regime in Tehran will likely be strengthened, having shown its own people and the rest of the world that it is again succeeding in its old strategy of using long, useless talks to toy with and humiliate the West by highlighting the international community's impotence.
In the same vein, Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that he is unimpressed.

It’s in Iran’s interest to have negotiations. It buys them time, legitimacy, and reduces the possibility of sanctions. We have been through this pattern repeatedly with Iran. When some information Iran has tried to conceal comes out, it causes another round of negotiations, but no real halt to their nuclear-weapons program. It’s just Groundhog Day, over and over again.”

By agreeing today to another meeting, that’s a huge step forward for Iran. It buys them time with the IAEA, and lets them say to the world that ‘we’re open for inspections,’ even though they now have time to remove anything that they want to conceal.”

“In President Obama’s mind, these talks are his proof that his open-hand philosophy is working. As I say in my National Review cover story this week, you’re never going to chit-chat Iran out of their nuclear-weapons program. Negotiations work in Iran’s favor.

US President came under fire from Charles Krauthammer in the WP today. He accuses Obama of "Confusing ends and means" and striving "mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran's nuclear program -- whereas the real objective is stopping that program".
Krauthammer quotes French President Nicolas Sarkozy as saying on Sep. 24: "President Obama, I support the Americans' outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing." He then concludes:

When France chides you for appeasement, you know you're scraping bottom.

Talking to Iran

President Obama said today that talks with Iran in Geneva represented a "constructive beginning" but that "it must be followed with constructive action by the Iranian government."


The Geneva talks resulted in three announced decisions:

• Iran would open up the Qom enrichment site, still under construction, to international inspection.
  
• The P5+1 group and Iran would meet again within the month.
• Iran would coordinate with the IAEA the transfer of low enriched uranium from a research nuclear facility to a third country.

On the other hand, Politico quotes a senior U.S. official saying that four themes emerged in today’s P5+1 talks with Iran:

• The unity of the 5+1 group.
• The focus on the nuclear issue.
• The urgency of this intensive or what we hope will be an intensive diplomatic process.
• The need for Iran to take practical steps.

In the mean time, while it is notable that Israel's government toned down warnings of strike on Iran, several among the Israeli intelligentsia argue that there are mounting evidence which leaves no doubt about Iran’s nuclear intentions.

U.S. Won't Push for Sanctions in Nuke Talks With Iran - Political News - FOXNews.com

U.S. Won't Push for Sanctions in Nuke Talks With Iran - Political News - FOXNews.com

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