The disclosure last month that Iran had a secret uranium enrichment plant was not a surprise to the CIA; it had known about the plant for three years, CIA director Leon Panetta told Time magazine. The CIA had worked with British and French intelligence services to gain information about the secret plant. And in an interesting reversal of roles, the Europeans pushed for the plant to be outed at once, while the Bush administration was more cautious.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is an architect of one of the better tools available to pressure Iran about its nuclear program. On “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., noted that he and Brownback have a bill to “allow pension fund entities around the country to divest pension fund assets out of companies that are doing business with Iran’s energy sector, up to a $20 million level.” When the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act was introduced in May, Brownback said: “We must take every possible step to pressure the Iranian regime to abandon its illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons, its global sponsorship of terrorism and its brutal oppression of the Iranian people. Divestment can and should play a key role in this effort.”
Republicans want President Obama to spell out the punishments if the Iranian regime doesn’t change its ways. But in declining to rattle the saber, the president shows admirable restraint. The fact is that the slightest inflection in Obama’s voice will be used by the regime in Iran to brand its opposition as American puppets, as agents of the Great Satan, and give them the cover needed to continue clubbing the dissenters to the ground. Complicating all this is that Israel might attack, to knock down the growing Iranian nuclear capacity that threatens Israel. Such an attack might destabilize the Iranian regime, but it would certainly provide another anti-American rallying cry for radical Islamists throughout the world, at a time when Obama is reaching out to Muslim nations. Saber-rattling won’t serve American interests now. What’s required is restraint and clear-headedness. And that’s what Obama is delivering. — John Kass, Chicago Tribune
In his press conference Tuesday, the president finally condemned the outrages in Iran. But he also kept alive the idea that the current Iranian regime could be a fruitful negotiation partner, despite what has already happened in that country. He wouldn’t even cancel plans to invite Iranian officials to Fourth of July barbecues at American embassies. That amounts to tacit approval of the bloodshed and fraud that we’ve already seen and acceptance of the ultimate triumph of the regime. And it won’t work. For years, conservatives or, if you prefer, neoconservatives have said that the Iranian regime can’t be negotiated with. None of the evidence was sufficient for Obama, in part because anything associated with President Bush’s freedom agenda was deemed absurd and ideologically rigid. Well, Bush is gone. Obama has extended his hand. And the regime is supplying fresh evidence of the absurdity of his approach. All that’s left for Obama now is to abandon his own ideological rigidity and start over. — Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Media Services
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered a probe of Friday’s presidential election results, and many U.S. analysts are assuming that there was widespread fraud. But pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty caution that the results “may reflect the will of the Iranian people.” Nationwide polling they did three weeks before the vote showed incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leading with a more than 2-1 majority.
Even if Ahmadinejad really did win, Iran shouldn’t be surprised by the skepticism. As a Washington Post editorial noted: “When a regime peremptorily chooses which candidates can run; shutters newspapers, Web sites and television bureaus; silences text messaging; and throws critics into prison — such a regime should not expect its pronouncements on election results to garner any respect.”
Congressional leaders late last year secretly agreed to fund and expand a Bush administration push for covert operations against Iran, according to a new investigative piece by Seymour Hersch in the New Yorker.
Considering the administration’s track record in Iraq, one must ask: Why?
The White House objective, according to Hersch’s inside sources, is to destabilize Iran’s religious leadership, foment regime change, and lay the groundwork for a possible U.S. military strike before President Bush leaves office. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other Pentagon leaders are said to have strongly opposed a military strike.
It’s startling that Democratic congressional leadership would sign off on such an operation, given a National Intelligence Estimate in December that concluded Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. One source is quoted as saying that the oversight process had been “co-opted” by the White House: “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
Hersch’s piece portrays a president who remains committed to regime change in the Middle East and isn’t going to go quietly from office.
Vice President Dick Cheney is busy these days “casting the Iranian leadership as apocalyptic zealots who yearn for a nuclear conflagration,” Dan Froomkin wrote for the Washington Post. Froomkin noted how Cheney’s claims ignore the last National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. And he said that the prophecies about “the 12th Imam” marked Cheney’s “revival of an old neocon chestnut.”Â
It’s not reassuring that World War III could have been caused by a ham radio prankster.
The tense incident on Jan. 6 involving Iranian speedboats buzzing U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz almost erupted into armed conflict when a radio transmission, allegedly from the Iranians, said in English, “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes.â€
Navy gunners came within seconds of firing on the boats. Now the Navy says the strange message likely was the work of the longtime high-seas prankster known as the “Filipino Monkey,†who has been harassing ships for years with radio abuse.
It’s a reminder of the dangers of hair-trigger tensions between nations. This could have been an international incident had not cooler heads prevailed.
