Maine Owl

When I saw THIS story yesterday, "Iran ready to build nuclear weapon, analysts say," with what is written to be "enough low-enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon," I had exactly the same reaction Juan Cole had,

Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%. It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. So all the silly articles on Friday about how Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb are just illiterate. Moreover, the report in question actually says that Iran is slowing its enrichment activities.

The whole framing of Mideast conflict around the one highly speculative issue of Iran maybe one day building a nuclear weapon both the Iranians themselves and U.S. intelligence steadfastly have stated they are not doing, is completely silly.

Iran definitely occupies a strong strategic position that is under the skin of both Israel and the United States. But let's compare--Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed at Iran in full-blown triad delivery configuration. God knows how many nukes the U.S. has available in the Middle East. Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and, according to U.S. intelligence agencies in the National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) made public in December 2007, "Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Both Israel and the U.S. have been on a rampage of invasions and military actions in the region throughout the last decade. Just last week it was revealed by the very conservative U.K. Daily Telegraph that "Israel has launched a covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran's nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed... The most dramatic element of the 'decapitation' programme is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran's atomic operations."

Good grief! Just who is pursuing the more dangerous policies, Iran or U.S./Israel? If it was we who faced the types of threats closing in on Iran, what would we do? I'll leave that to readers' imaginations.

Last point. It's not too difficult to agree with Juan Cole's prediction that the incoming Likud government under Netanyahu will spray "inflammatory propaganda about how dangerous Iran is." A look at reality, by contrast, shows that Likud (or the U.S. for that matter) "never met a war of aggression they did not like."