Re: More likely it's "To HELL with them! Let's nuke them. Get rid of them for once and for all."
Whew... Americans and Europeans start backpedalling on the Iranian issue --but how will the Israeli wildcard react?
News Analysis: Iran and the bomb - A strategy of delay
By David E. Sanger The New York Times
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2006
WASHINGTON Hours after the United States and Europe prevailed in a contest over finally turning the Iranian history of clandestine nuclear activity over to the UN Security Council, President George W. Bush issued a statement from his ranch saying that the overwhelming vote showed that "the world will not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons."
But even some of Bush's own advisers say that may prove an overstatement.
Behind the diplomatic maneuvering, many of the diplomats and nuclear experts involved in the Western effort acknowledge that a more realistic goal is to delay the day that Iran joins the nuclear club. Stopping the program cold, they say, is highly unlikely, and probably impossible.
"Look, the Pakistanis and the North Koreans got there, and they didn't have Iran's money or the engineering expertise," said a senior official who is instrumental in putting together U.S. strategy.
"Sooner or later, it's going to happen. Our job is to make sure it's later," he added, in hopes that by that time, a changed or different government is in power in Tehran.
Partly, that is the newfound realism of an administration that has learned some hard lessons in Iraq, and is no longer quite so eager to talk about pre-empting looming threats.
But it also rises from a growing understanding of the damage wrought by the clandestine nuclear network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former Pakistani nuclear chief who, operating beneath the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies, began supplying the Iranians with designs, prototypes and equipment in the late 1980s.
By the time Khan and the Iranians split in the mid-1990s, apparently in a dispute over money and advanced technology, Iran was already well along the learning curve.
And the evidence assembled by UN inspectors in the past two years - in inspections that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says will now end - indicates that the country has assembled an impressive network of new suppliers, built the basic facilities it needs, and identified the critical technologies it must master.
Yet by virtually all estimates, that has not been enough. The Iranians still have several years of work ahead of them, a judgment restated last week by John Negroponte, the U.S. director of national intelligence.
The painstaking process of actually manufacturing the material to make weapon-usable fuel - by enriching uranium or reprocessing spent plutonium from power reactors - is a lot harder than it looks in the movies.
There is some evidence the Iranians have run into technological roadblocks, but it is hard to say for how long they will delay it.
"The obstacles give us some time, and you have to hope that we use it well, so that the current domestic consensus in favor of the nuclear program in Iran will break," said Robert Einhorn, who served as a nonproliferation official in the Clinton administration and the early days of the Bush administration.
"The vote yesterday was impressive," he said, referring to the vote Saturday by the International Atomic Energy Agency board, to report Iran to the Council, "and now it is about making Iran realize that none of this is cost-free - and that the result will be a change in the character of the regime, or at least a conclusion that this is a losing proposition for them."
But the concern among some officials inside the White House, the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies is that the Iranian leadership's reaction to the vote will be to speed ahead.
The Bush administration knows that after the debacle over the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, someone else will have to take the lead in assessing how close Iran is getting to a weapon. In a revealing comment, Bush acknowledged as much at a news conference on Dec. 19.
"Where it is going to be most difficult to make the case is in the public arena," Bush said. "People will say, if we're trying to make the case on Iran, well, the intelligence failed in Iraq, therefore, how can we trust the intelligence in Iran?"
He added later that "the best place to make the case now is still in the councils of government."
What really changed in the past few days were the declarations by the atomic agency, including officials who were openly skeptical about Bush's case against Iraq three years ago.
For years, the agency and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, stayed publicly neutral on the question of whether the Iranian program was peaceful, as Tehran insisted, or intended to build a weapon.
ElBaradei, whom the Bush administration tried to remove from his job only a year ago, circulated a report that pointed to links between the ostensibly civilian Iranian nuclear program and its military.
The report characterized designs that inspectors found in Iran, supplied by Khan's network, as clearly "related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components." Those designs sketched out how to perfect uranium spheres, a tell-tale shape that can be imploded to trigger a nuclear explosion.
Those discoveries were so helpful in bolstering the case that Russia and China, along with Egypt, India and Yemen, among others, voted against Iran.
But the evidence also underscores the degree to which this has become a race against time.
Also, few see that Washington has many options.
"Can you delay the onset of the Iranian bomb? Maybe," said Charles Ferguson, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
But even taking military action against known Iranian nuclear sites, he said, could "stimulate them to cross the nuclear Rubicon because you've showed your hand, you've showed that you're willing to use military force to try to damage their nuclear program."
That may be where the debate is headed.
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