Iran's Virtual Nukes

I've previously detailed this Administration's unwillingness and inability to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions via uranium enrichment. Last week, Iran announced a surprising deal to send part of its stockpile to Turkey "for safekeeping" in exchange for uranium fuel rods for Iran's existing reactor. The problem is that Iran both will retain enough nuclear material for at least one bomb, and vowed to continue to enrich uranium.

So, a skeptical U.S. and Europe will continue to press for United Nations sanctions. Which have been severely watered-down and required concessions to veto powers that otherwise imperil national security. The country most directly threatened by nuclear Mullahs, Israel, "has grown increasingly impatient in recent weeks with the approach and concerned that whatever is agreed to now at the U.N. Security Council will only allow Iran more time to advance its program."

For the most part, the view of columnist Christopher Hitchens is right:

When the day comes that Tehran can announce its nuclear capability, every shred of international law will have been discarded. The mullahs have publicly sworn--to the United Nations and the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency--that they are not cheating. As they unmask their batteries, they will be jeering at the very idea of an "international community." How strange it is that those who usually fetishize the United Nations and its inspectors do not feel this shame more keenly. In the meantime, the very force in Iran that holds the keys to the secret nuclear sites is also the force that rapes its prisoners, humiliates its womenfolk, represses its "voters," empties its universities, and murders its national minorities. The urgent task of statecraft is to evolve a policy that can synchronize the disarmament demand with the idea that all Iranians, Kurdish and Azeri as well as Persian and Armenian and Jewish, can have a say in their own "internal affairs." No sign of any such statecraft exists. Welcome, then, to a world in which we will have to be fawningly polite to men like Ayatollah Kharrazi.

But Hitchens also downplays the real-world possibility Iran will use its bomb on Israel:

It will not be possible for the Iranian mullahs to devise a weapon of mass destruction that kills only Jews but that spares, for example, the Al-Aqsa mosque. . . Conclusion: The sooner there is a Palestinian state with a share of Jerusalem as its capital, the safer Israel will be.

I don't propose here to address the pros and cons of Israel's claim to East Jerusalem. Rather, my point is that Hitchens wants the Israelis to give up East Jerusalem precisely so that Iran can't (or won't) nuke them. In other words, he thinks Iran's future nuke potential is enough to warrant concessions today.

The implications are obvious: 1) Iran already is engaged in nuclear blackmail; and 2) capitulation is Israel's sole defense. There could be no more clear demonstration of the threat posed by the Iranian regime and Obama's feckless response. Imagine how much worse it could be when they actually build the bomb:




source: May 24th Dry Bones