Right Wing Nut House

The radioactive Mullahs in Iran have apparently rejected the latest offer from the EU 3 of Germany, France, and Great Britain to halt their uranium conversion efforts:

Iran announced Saturday that it would reject a proposal by three European countries aimed at ending the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program.

A Foreign Ministry statement announcing the decision came as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as Iran’s new president.

President Ahmadinejad’s new government now faces a decision about whether to proceed with Iran’s announced plan to continue with a uranium conversion process that Tehran suspended a year ago, a step that the West has said may lead to it seeking sanctions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council.

Newly minted President Ahmadinejad appears to be having a problem focusing on reality. This from his innauguration speech:

“We want peace and justice for all and they are the integral part of our foreign policy,” he said, addressing senior Iranian officials and foreign ambassadors at the ceremony. “I stress on these two principles so that countries which use the instrument of threat against our nation know that our people will never give up its right to justice.”

“I don’t know why some countries do not want to understand that the Iranian people will never give in to pressure,” he added. “When people see such attitude, resistance grows in them and achieving a national right becomes an ideal.”

John F. Kennedy, he’s not.

It would be interesting if some enterprising reporter would ask the terrorist what his definition of “justice” is? As a member of the elite Qods or “Jerusalem Force,” a brigade of the feared Revolutionary Guards based in western Iran that specialized in assasinating “enemies of the revolution” who lived overseas, Iran’s new President may have a little different take on what “justice” really means.

Couple these statements with the bizzare press conference last week featuring this exchange between reporters and Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi about Iran starting up their uranium enrichment (UCF) processes:

Reporter: What will the scope of the (UCF) activity in Esfahan be at the beginning? Will it have full or partial capacity?

Asefi: No. I know it is of no interest to you.

What is going on?

I’ve already speculated here that given all we know about Iran’s new President, it’s possible that the Guardian Council has determined that confrontation with the west is inevitable and as a result, is becoming much more insular in its outlook. Without much coverage in the western press, the Revolutionary Guards (who are under the direct control of Guardian Council leader Ayatollah Khamenei) have been on a rampage since Ahmadinejad’s election, rounding up dissidents, cracking down on freedom of the press and assembly, and supressing any hint of protest against the regime. Some of the reformist elements have responded by becoming violent themselves. A recent outbreak of anti-government protests in the western part of Iran recently was ruthlessly put down by 100,000 troops.

Iran is going to go ahead with its uranium enrichment programs because it sees no other choice. The regime is in trouble at home and will now seek to build an atomic bomb to rally support to the government. It worked for Musharaf in Pakistan as the dictator almost bankrupted the country to build the bomb. The Mullahs may see a rekindling of nationalistic pride as the only alternative to being booted out.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Reading today’s story in the Washington Post by Dafna Linzer about a National Intelligence Estimate for Iran detailing the mad Mullah’s progress toward achieving a nuclear weapon, one could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve been down this road before. The leaking of classified information is, after all, a felony. That doesn’t seem to stop some employees at the CIA from assuming the job of policy makers by leaking information that buttresses their opinion that Iran is not an immediate threat to the United States and that the Administration is once again lying about a potential adversary’s intentions.

The problem is that, as the article points out, only selected portions of the NIE were relayed to the reporter, Ms. Linzer. Is it an accident that those portions that were leaked are at odds with the Administration’s oft stated claims that Iran, if left to its own devices, would be nuclear capable in a matter of a year or two?

In fact, the report predicts that Iran would be unable to build a weapon for ten years, something that would come as a huge surprise to the state of Israel. In an article written by Peter Hirschberg for Ha’aretz, the author quotes an Israeli military official giving a quite different analysis of the threat from Iran:

Israeli intelligence officials estimate that Iran could be capable of producing enriched uranium within six months and have nuclear weapons within two years. Earlier this month, head of Israeli military intelligence Maj. Gen. Aharon Ze’evi said that while Iran was not currently capable of enriching uranium to build a nuclear bomb, “it is only half a year away from achieving such independent capability – if it is not stopped by the West.”

And yet, the Washington Post story says that the consensus estimate of our intelligence community is that Iran would not be capable of producing a bomb for a decade:

The new estimate extends the timeline, judging that Iran will be unlikely to produce a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for an atomic weapon, before “early to mid-next decade,” according to four sources familiar with that finding. The sources said the shift, based on a better understanding of Iran’s technical limitations, puts the timeline closer to 2015 and in line with recently revised British and Israeli figures.

The estimate is for acquisition of fissile material, but there is no firm view expressed on whether Iran would be ready by then with an implosion device, sources said.

The problem with Iran’s “technical limitations” is that the production of Highly Enriched (HE) uranium is not a huge technical problem to overcome. Hiding the process from prying eyes is the real dilemma. The two practical ways to separate U-235 (bomb material) from U-238 (uranium hexafluoride or “hex”) are gaseous diffusion and centrifuges. A gaseous diffusion plant would be impossible to hide given how big the works would have to be to efficiently separate the uranium. The centrifuge method is much easier to conceal but a bigger technical challenge given the engineering tolerances necessary to spin the centrifuge at the enormous speeds in order to separate the isotopes.

There is a third way and would in fact be a shortcut to a nuclear weapon; acquire the material from a third party. The article doesn’t say whether or not the NIE deals with that possibility.

As for constructing an “implosion” device, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was constructed using the so called “gun design” where a sphere of U-235 sits at one end of a barrel and a smaller pellet of the material is fired into it thus achieving critical mass and detonating the bomb. This is less efficient than an implosion device but still packs a huge wallop.

The point I’m trying to make is that given the piecemeal release of parts of the NIE, the leaker has succeeded in spinning the Iran nuclear story toward a conclusion at odds with what the Administration has been saying since at least 2002 - that Iran must be prevented from enriching uranium because of how close they are to constructing a nuclear device.

Evidently, part of the Administration’s concern was that the Iranian military had its own nuclear program separate from the civilian government:

Sources said the new timeline also reflects a fading of suspicions that Iran’s military has been running its own separate and covert enrichment effort. But there is evidence of clandestine military work on missiles and centrifuge research and development that could be linked to a nuclear program, four sources said.

Suspicions are “fading” but there is “evidence” of clandestine military work on centrifuges? It appears that either we have someone wanting to cover all bases at the same time or we have no consensus in our intelligence community on the issue. If this is the case, how can the estimate of Iranian capabilities be taken seriously? Is there another estimate at odds with the conclusion leaked in the article?

We don’t know which is why the leaking of this NIE should be seen in the context of the continuing war being waged by a faction at the CIA on the White House. Is it an accident that much of the information leaked confirms what one former CIA agent has been saying about Iran since at least March?

Ray McGovern is on the steering committee for the radical group of ex-CIA agents at war with the White House known as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Here’s what Mr. McGovern had to say in an article for Tom Paine, an on-line leftist magazine:

Let’s look briefly at the scariest rationale-If Iran is allowed to produce fissile material, it may transfer it to terrorists bent on exploding a nuclear device in an American city.

This seems to be the main boogeyman, whether real or contrived, in U.S. policymaking councils. Its unexamined premise-the flimsily supported but strongly held view that Iran’s leaders would give terrorists a nuclear device or the wherewithal to make one-is being promoted as revealed truth. Serious analysts who voice skepticism about this and who list the strong disincentives to such a step by Iran are regarded as apostates.

For those of you with a sense of deja vu, we have indeed been here before-just a few years ago. And the experience should have been instructive. In the case of Iraq, CIA and other analysts strongly resisted the notion that Saddam Hussein would risk providing nuclear, chemical, or biological materials to al-Qaeda or other terrorists-except as a desperate gesture if and when he had his back to the wall. Similarly, it strains credulity beyond the breaking point to posit that the Iranian leaders would give up control of such material to terrorists.

Since Mr. McGovern wrote that article in March, Iran’s ruling Guardian Council has by most accounts rigged an election so that a hard line militarist with close ties to terrorist groups was elected President. Even before President elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken office, a crackdown on dissidents as well as an ideological purge of key government and civil institutions has been underway in Iran. And President elect Ahmadinejad has made it clear that he sees the Islamic revolution as a worldwide phenomena that will conquer “every mountaintop.”

Now, we can choose to believe what we read and what we see or we can listen to the very same people were saying in July of 2001 that al Qaeda was not a threat. And let’s not forget most of these same analysts concurred in the estimates regarding Iraqi WMD.

The point is that regardless of recent steps to reform our intelligence capability, it appears that we’re still working with a dysfunctional system where agency personnel feel perfectly comfortable with leaking classified information in a bid to influence both Administration policy and the political process. No one expects everybody to agree on everything. But the American people have a right to expect that the unelected bureaucrats who work at the CIA allow policy making to reside with those we have entrusted for the task - the elected representatives of the people.

UPDATE

Wizbang has a “Shut your Piehole” edition of the 10 Spot. I can’t think of any better candidate than the idiots at the CIA who keep blabbing our national security secrets.

When Adolph Hitler was getting ready to invade Poland in August of 1939, he faced something of a dilemma. While he realized that both France and England would probably be forced to declare war on Germany for the violation of Poland’s sovereignty he was planning, his real concern was the reaction of the Soviet Union who had also given some security guarantees to the Polish state.

Hitler did not want to repeat what he saw as the Kaiser’s biggest mistake - Germany having to fight a two front war. And while he was fully prepared to invade Poland at any cost, he thought he saw an opening in late August to peel the Soviets away from the Anglo-French alliance. He sent his Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop to Moscow for what has to be considered the most cynical diplomatic move of the 20th century. Within a few days, Ribbentrop had negotiated a trade agreement on the most favorable terms to Germany along with a Non-Agression pact between the two tyrants. In addition, there was a secret protocol to the treaty that gave Hitler carte blanche to attack in the west and allowed Stalin a free hand in the Baltic. Hitler even threw in a large slice of Poland to sweeten the pot for Stalin.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed on August 29 in Moscow. Less than 72 hours later, Hitler invaded Poland.

The non-agression treaty didn’t save Stalin, of course, as Hitler planned to break the pact just as soon as the military situation in the west was settled. After occupying most of Europe by defeating the French and bringing Great Britain to its knees, he ended up invading the Soviet Union in June of 1941.

Hitler used the non-agression pact with Stalin as a ruse to improve his military prospects in the west and allow him time for the strategic situation to ripen in the east.

And now both Iran and North Korea, the remaining members of the “Axis of Evil”, are saying they’ll give the United States what we want from them - no nukes - in exchange for security guarantees.

Does anyone else get the feeling that history may be repeating itself?

Both countries would be tough nuts to crack in a military sense. Both have large modern armies that would make invasion extremely costly. Only a coalition of Europeans and friendly Arab states would be able to take down Iran. And some similar coalition would be needed to overrun North Korea.

And yet the danger of either one of those nations getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction is so great that there is a sense of urgency in preventing them from achieving their goal. In the case of Iran, we’ve allowed the so-called EU3 composed of Great Britain, France, and Germany to negotiate with the radiocative Mullahs in Iran to stop their uranium enrichment program. Iran has continously refused to do this despite attractive trade concessions offered by the EU. Now apparently, the Iranians may be willing to forgo their enrichment program in exchange for certain “guarantees:”

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator said his European counterparts have proposed a guarantee that Iran will not be invaded if Tehran agrees to permanently halt uranium enrichment, the state-run news agency said Sunday.

Hasan Rowhani said the proposal is being discussed by Europeans and includes several important points such as “guarantees about Iran’s integrity, independence, national sovereignty” and “nonaggression toward Iran,” the Islamic Republic News Agency said Sunday.

“If Europe enjoys a serious political will about Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle, there will be the possibility of understanding,” the agency quoted Rowhani as saying in a letter to outgoing Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

Does this mean that Iran would halt their drive to produce weapons grade atomic material? Not exactly:

Meanwhile, Iran’s top officials were to meet Sunday evening for a final decision on when to resume work at a reprocessing center in Isfahan, said Ali Agha Mohammadi, spokesman for Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council.

“Europe has only a few hours, up to when the council meets, for the proposal. If it does not arrive by that time, the council will discuss breaking the ice” on Iran’s stalled nuclear program, Agha Mohammadi told state-run radio.

Of course, the Iranians will be guided by the principals of non proliferation - for a while anyway:

“Today or tomorrow we will send a letter to the IAEA about resumption of activity in the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi. “We would like to unseal the equipment and carry on the activity under the IAEA.”

Asefi said IAEA inspectors already were in Tehran, which means a short flight to the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

“Since our nuclear policy is transparent and legal, we will start activity upon delivering the letter to the IAEA, with the inspectors in attendance,” Asefi said.

Later Sunday, Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Vienna, Austria-based IAEA, told the AP the agency had not received any official notification from Iran about resumption of activity at the Isfahan facility.

Given the cluelessness of the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) in the past regarding Kim Jung Il’s “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t” nuclear weapons program, is it any wonder we don’t have much faith in the Iranian statements regarding how benign their enrichment program is?

And speaking of the North Koreans, while the 6 party talks have resumed, Kim has already made it clear that the way to a nuclear free Korean penninsula is a guarantee by the United States not to invade:

Striking a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the 1950-1953 Korean War would resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula, a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

The comments, carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency, came before a meeting of regional powers in Beijing on Tuesday for talks aimed at dismantling Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programmes in exchange for security guarantees and economic assistance.

“Replacing the ceasefire mechanism by a peace mechanism on the Korean peninsula would lead to putting an end to the U.S. hostile policy toward the DPRK, which spawned the nuclear issue and the former’s nuclear threat,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in the report carried by KCNA.

According to this very interesting analysis via the Army War College, the North Korean regime is building nukes to ensure its survival but also to prove itself a serious, grown up country that deserves more respect than it’s getting. As soon as they stop saying that Kim wasn’t born but that he “fell from heaven” then I’ll start taking them seriously.

That said, it’s obvious that North Korea too wishes that the United States military not invade. In exchange, they’re willing to forgo building nuclear weapons, sign a peace treaty, and generally act like good little members of the international community.

Or, they plan on lulling the United States and the rest of the world to sleep while they continue to evade the weak efforts of the IAEA to keep the lid on their nuclear program, something they have a lot of experience in doing.

The point here is that both Iran and North Korea have no incentive whatsoever to stop building nukes as long as the rest of the world goes along with their “non-agression” plans. Once the world community turns their backs on Kim and the mad Mullahs, I have no doubt that they plan to resume their weapons programs. In the meantime, the rest of the world gives itself a stiff neck by trying hard to pat itself on the back for it’s work in stopping the “Axis of Evil” from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as well as the ruling Guardian Council by all reports have just fixed a Presidential election so that a handpicked hard line terrorist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be elected. Recent statements from the President-elect include a promise to carry the Islamic revolution to “every mountaintop” as well as his almost unnoticed campaign to militarize and radicalize the country by placing hard line allies in key positions.

Iran is preparing for a war and wants a treaty of “non-agression?”

The news that Iran will continue with its enrichment program will not sit well with the Israelis who have made it very clear that a nation that has consistently called for its destruction will not be allowed to build an atomic weapon. Nor can we in the United States afford the luxury of allowing a state that openly supports terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizbollah not to mention their demonstrated affection for al Qaeda to build a nuclear weapon that could end up in the hands of terrorists who wouldn’t hesitate using it against us.

The actions taken by Iran in the last few months would seem to indicate that any “non agression” treaty with them would ring as hollow as Hitler’s non agression pact with Russia. The same hold’s true with North Korea. The fact is, neither can be trusted. This is especially true if we’re forced to rely on international organizations like the IAEA to make sure those two nations are keeping their end of any bargain.

Will we delude ourselves about Iran and North Korea the same way that Stalin deluded himself about Hitler’s Germany?

With the radioactive mullahs digging in their heels by refusing to abandon their uranium enrichment program - a program that could yield enough fissionable material to make 3-5 nuclear weapons in a matter of months - the likelihood of conflict with Israel and by extension the United States grows daily.

At bottom, the reason is simple, as simple as anything can get in international relations. The Iranian theocracy has pledged itself to wipe the State of Israel off the face of the planet. They see the Jewish state as an abomination before God. This isn’t bombast. It isn’t “rhetoric for domestic consumption” as some in the west would have you believe. For the Iranian theocrats, the goal of destroying Israel is its raison d’etre , its reason for being. They also see Israel as a military threat. And when you combine the real-world strategic calculation of threat with a theological justification for war, you have an extraordinarily explosive and dangerous mixture.

Their view of the United States seems to have come full circle since the mullahs seized power in 1980 from less radical, more nationalistic elements of the revolution. At that time, they viewed us as “The Great Satan” who manipulated Israel as a client state to do our bidding in the middle east. Now that view has changed in that they now see Israel controlling American politics for their own ends. Either way, an Iranian nuclear weapons program threatens Israel with an immediacy that the Jewish state cannot ignore.

WHO ARE THESE GUYS?

The radioactive mullahs who will make the decision for war or peace are not pragmatists or reformers. They are control freaks. From the “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei who heads up the shadowy group of clerics that dictate policy and have virtually unlimited veto power over the legislative and executive branches of government to the equally clandestine network of intelligence and security people that include bully boys from Hezballah and the enforcers who make up the Revolutionary Guards, the Iranian government seeks to coerce its citizens through intimidation and outright terror. Woe betide the luckless Iranian who gets caught in this nexus of brutality.

It’s impossible to estimate the number of regime opponents who’ve been executed in the last 25 years. Most human rights groups put the number at “tens of thousands.” In addition to the executions and outright murders committed by Revolutionary Guards, additional thousands have been assassinated abroad for speaking out against the regime. Certainly the number is approaching 100,000. Iranian bloggers have recently reported the cold blooded murder of the leaders of student protests against the government which means that far from reforming, the bloodthirsty security services will act quickly and ruthlessly to put down any opposition to the cleric’s rule.

Here are some of the key players we’ll be hearing a lot of in the coming months as the showdown with Iran approaches its climax:

Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei

Supreme Leader and Chief of State, Khamenei was appointed for life in 1989 to head up the small group of clerics known as the “Assembly of Experts” who control Iran. Born in 1939, Khamenei was a close associate of the patron saint of the Revolution Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1977, he helped found the Islamic Republic Party which is the major political party that now heads up the coalition of ruling parties that have governed Iran since the revolution. In 1980 as the Iranian students held our diplomats hostage, Khomeini gave Khamenei the position of leader of Friday Congregational Prayers in Tehran. Using this influential position, he rallied the students every week to go into the streets and protest against “The Great Satan.” Perhaps more than any other cleric, Khamenei was responsible for keeping the spirit of anti-Americanism among the students at a fever pitch.

In 1981 he gave a speech denouncing President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who after being summarily dismissed was then executed. From 1981 to 1989, he was President of Iran, garnering 95% of the vote in both his elections and heading up various security committees including being named Commander of the Revolutionary Guards.

Pretty easy to win when voting for your opponent would get you arrested.

Mohammad Khatami

When Khatami was elected President in 1997 with 70% of the vote, high hopes for reforming the theocracy were expressed by both western analysts and Iranian democracy advocates. Alas, such was not the case. Khatami has proven to be a straw man for the clerics. His “reformist” agenda has been stymied at every turn by the mullahs with most of his supporters who dared take his reformist ideas seriously either dead or in jail.

Born in 1943, his father was a good friend of Ayatollah Khomeini. Holding a minor position in the cabinet of his predecessor Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khatami ran a western style Presidential campaign, coming off as a man of the people and a reasonable theocrat. But despite some minor press reforms (since rolled back as the mullahs have cracked down on free speech in the last year) and the election of a pro-reform legislature, Khatami has failed to make a dent in the power wielded by the clerics behind Supreme Leader Khamenei. This is because he has no control over appointments to either the judiciary or the security services. In short, Khatami has a very short leash and has become very adept at not angering the mullahs. His term is up in August which could be right around the time the crisis between Iran and the US/Israel comes to a head.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Elections for President are scheduled for June 17, 2005 at which time it’s believed that Rafsanjani, who already served as President from 1989 to 1997, may once again hold that office. Elected with 95% of the vote (that same brave 5% keeps voting against these guys), Rafsanjani is an enigma.

A free market capitalist who sought to revive Iran’s ruined economy during his term in office, he was widely credited at the time with reopening Iran to investment, especially from Russia and Western Europe. A conservative, it appears that this time, he’ll be running on both a reformist and conservative ticket. Here’s how Forbes described him in an article from 2003:

Ironically, the man most adept at manipulating this hidden power structure is one of Iran’s best-known characters–Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has been named an ayatollah, or religious leader. He was the speaker of parliament and Khomeini’s right-hand man in the 1980s, president of Iran from 1989 to 1997 and is now chairman of the powerful Expediency Council, which resolves disputes between the clerical establishment and parliament. Rafsanjani has more or less run the Islamic Republic for the past 24 years.

He played it smart, aligning himself in the 1960s with factions led by Ayatollah Khomeini, then becoming the go-to guy after the revolution. A hard-liner ideologically, Rafsanjani nonetheless has a pragmatic streak. He convinced Khomeini to end the Iran-Iraq war and broke Iran’s international isolation by establishing trade relations with the Soviet Union, China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In the 1990s he restarted Iran’s nuclear program. He is also the father of Iran’s “privatization” program. During his presidency the stock market was revived, some government companies were sold to insiders, foreign trade was liberalized and the oil sector was opened up to private companies. Most of the good properties and contracts, say dissident members of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, ended up in the hands of mullahs, their associates and, not least, Rafsanjani’s own family, who rose from modest origins as small-scale pistachio farmers.

Is Rafsanjani enough of a pragmatist to avoid the coming conflict? That depends on how well he can manipulate events in Iran. If he has the confidence of the mullahs (he’s not their first choice at this point) he may be able to convince them that the isolation that Iran will experience if it continues its enriched urnanium program will be ruinous to the economy and set the Revolution back. It would help if, when we go to the United Nations and ask for sanctions (which we will surely do before any military action), that our ostensible allies in Europe and around the world support us in the effort. Unfortunately, at this point it looks as if Russia would veto any sanctions resolution as would the French.

Rafsanjani, who began the Iranian nuclear program in 1990 when he was President, will be reluctant to abandon bomb making unless he thinks the survival of the regime is at stake. Since the only credible threat to the regime comes from the United States military, its up to us to make it clear to Rafsanjani that a nuclear weapon in the hands of radical islamists is unacceptable. Only then will he and the radioactive mullahs consider withdrawing from the brink of catastrophe which would be the certain outcome of any military action taken by the US or Israel against Iran.

Cross Posted at Cao’s Blog and Blogger News Network