The IAEA reports, to nobody's surprise, that Iran shows no signs of complying with an order to halt enrichment, quite the contrary.
Iran failed to suspend uranium enrichment activity by February 21, ignoring a U.N. Security Council deadline to halt work the West fears could give Tehran an atomic weapon, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog said on Thursday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency also said in a report that Iran had installed two cascades, or networks, of 164 centrifuges in its underground Natanz enrichment plant with another two cascades close to completion.
This represented efforts to expand research-level enrichment of nuclear fuel into "industrial scale" production.
We are more worried about the military scale.
PS: For what it's worth, here is what some anonymous Iranian official told CNN news superstar Christiane Amanpour:
As I sat down recently with a senior Iranian government official, he urgently waved a column by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in my face, one about how the United States and Iran need to engage each other.
''Natural allies,'' this official said.
It was a surprising choice of words considering the barbs Washington and Tehran have been trading of late.
"We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we don't know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action -- war."
He confided that what he was telling me was not shared by all in the Iranian government, but it was endorsed so high up in the religious leadership that he felt confident spelling out the rationale. [...]
That despite disagreement over Iran's nuclear program, despite accusations that Iran is supporting anti-American killers in Iraq, despite even the 1979 hostage crisis, Iran and America are "natural allies" and the time has come to restore relations.
"We are natural allies. Why?" he said. "Because now the major threat for both Iran and the U.S.A. is al Qaeda."
He said al Qaeda had attacked the "symbol of our faith" when it struck the Golden Dome mosque -- the Al-Askariya Mosque -- in the Iraqi city of Samarra last February, setting off much of the sectarian violence that has plagued the war-torn nation over the last year. Similarly, he said, al Qaeda struck the "symbols of American power" on 9/11.
It's very easy to evaluate whether this is true. What are Iran's strategic objectives? Obviously the mullah-regime wants to secure itself, and it certainly appears to want to dominate the Middle East, not to mention wage war against Israel. I have a hard time seeing how the US is a natural ally to Iran's current regime.
I don't think the Iranian leadership is really that worried about the threat from al-Qaeda. Maybe from Sunni Salafists generally, certainly Saudi Wahabbism, but I think Iran would be more interested in a truce with the Salafists to take on the west than the other way around. There are, of course, different opinions in the Iranian government, but I'm very unconvinced Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is really behind a sincere move to reach an understanding with the US.
5:19:51 PM 
|
