Laughing all the way to the Bank. High oil prices? Great....
President George W. Bush, trying desperately to keep some pressure on Iran, called on Teheran Wednesday to "come clean" about the scope of its nuclear activities or else face diplomatic isolation. But his detractors were laughing in his face.
Bush, the ground cut out from under him by a report he had to have seen weeks if not months ago, demanded that Teheran detail its previous program to develop nuclear weapons. That program was reportedly stopped in 2003, a fact which US intelligence agencies apparently just "discovered" recently. Israel insists that in 2006 the nuclear weapons programs were resumed, a claim that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran rejects with a "moderate" level of certainty.
That phrase has become something of a black joke in Israel, since that "moderate" difference could mean the difference between life and death for the Jewish State. Israeli analysts and officials bluntly concluded that the "spin" of saying the program was probably not restarted reeked of political intervention, since the Israeli intelligence estimate is highly certain that the weapons program is proceeding at a rapid pace.
Bush, still, was trying to salvage some leverage, but failing to make much of a dent in the widespread impression that the military option was off the table for the forseeable future. "The Iranians have a strategic choice to make," he said. "They can come clean with the international community about the scope of their nuclear activities, and fully accept the long-standing offer to suspend their enrichment program and come to the table and negotiate, or they can continue on a path of isolation."
Western allies of the US like Britain, Germany, and France were also stressing their determination to press on. "These countries understand that the Iranian nuclear issue is a problem, and continues to be a problem and must be addressed," Bush said.
The British Foreign Secretary said Iran continued to defy international demands to end uranium enrichment and should be confronted with a third UN resolution over its nuclear program. "The origins of that sanctions resolution are in the defiance by Iran of the international community in respect of uranium enrichment," Miliband said in a statement. "That defiance remains the case today."
But Russia seemed to jump off the sanctions train. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday there was no proof that Iran has ever run a nuclear weapons program, and praised Teheran for its readiness to cooperate with the United Nations nuclear watchdog. "Data that we have seen don't allow to say with certainty that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program," he said.
International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Mohamed ElBaradei could not contain his smug satisfaction. He said that Iran had been "somewhat vindicated" by the new intelligence review, called the report a "sigh of relief" and said its conclusions were consistent with his own agency's findings. "Iran obviously has been somewhat vindicated in saying they have not been working on a weapons program, at least for the last few years," ElBaradei told reporters in Brazil's capital.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the report a "declaration of victory" for Iran's nuclear program, and mocked the United States for its diplomatic debacle. "Today, the Iranian nation is victorious but you (the US) came out empty handed?. The report declares the victory of the Iranian nation on the nuclear issue over the international community."
Meanwhile, official Israel was still reeling with a sense of betrayal and deep disappointment that the United States seemed be having a failure of either intelligence or nerve or, the most disturbing scenario for policymakers here: that the Israelis were being hung out to dry by their once staunch ally, left alone to confront the Iranian threat.
After a day in which Defense Minister Barak came close to directly contradicting the American findings, there seemed to be a freeze-from-above on comments on the subject, with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni saying only that more effective sanctions are required to stop Iran's uranium enrichment: "There is a need to continue, and to make more broad, more effective sanctions (against Iran) without any kind of hesitation," Livni told reporters during a visit to Slovenia.
"Any kind of hesitation will be ... perceived as a weakness of the international community," she said, adding that Iran's continued enrichment of uranium is a clear threat to the region. Iran with a nuclear weapon is something that the world cannot afford," Livni said.
Israeli President Shimon Peres was even more fatalistic. He warned that it was impossible for any intelligence agency to know the exact nature and scope of the technological knowledge purchased from North Korea and Russia at high prices. "We are likely to wake up one morning and discover that comprehensive nuclear technology was passed on without interruption and is close to implementation," he said.
Only UN Ambassador Danny Gillerman, speaking on FoxNews (above), seems to be already awake, asking why Iran -- one of the richest sources of energy in the world -- would be investing so much in its nuclear program if it didn't have a military purpose. "Don't listen to us, don't even listen to the President (Bush). Listen to Ahmadinejad. Hear what he says, and take what he says at face value." He quipped that champagne corks would have been popping in Teheran -- if the Iranians were drinkers -- and predicted that Ahmadinejad was hell-bend on reaching a nuclear capability.
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