Iran & Nukes

The Iranian A-Bomb [Jay Nordlinger]

John Bolton’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today is entitled “Get Ready for a Nuclear Iran.” I’ll tell you when I first became resigned — pretty much resigned — to the Iranian A-bomb. Early last year, I was interviewing John Negroponte, the veteran diplomat who had recently been director of national intelligence — in other words, the top intelligence official in the country. He knows more than we do, simply put. A lot more.

I said, “What about Iran and the bomb?” He answered, “I think that’s what they want, I think that’s what they’re headed towards, I think that’s what they’re going to get.” That made me swallow a little, considering the source.

He said that, after he became DNI in 2005, his office estimated that Iran would have a weapon sometime between 2010 and 2015. And “I don’t believe that that assessment has essentially changed.”

“But what about stopping them?” I asked. He answered, “I think we can delay them — through sanctions, through import restrictions, through working with other countries. But definitively stop them? Even if you used coercive means, I think it would be quite difficult by now.”

Above, I said I was “pretty much resigned” to the Iranian bomb. Why not completely so? I bear in mind a conversation — an interview — I had with Dr. Ephraim Sneh, the Israeli politician. He is no righty, though he’s more or less a security hawk. He is known as one of the most pro-Palestinian politicians in Israel, and he is practically best friends with Saeb Erekat, the PLO spokesman and negotiator. Sneh told me that no Israeli government — left, right, or center — would allow Iran to acquire the bomb. It was simply a matter of survival. Israel is absolutely unanimous on this. It has nothing to do with politics — Likud, Labor, etc. According to Sneh, the united Israeli stance is, No Iranian bomb, period.

I can just hear the firmness in his voice when he talked about all this. Anyway . . . guess we’ll see. And wouldn’t it be kind of a shame if the United States — the world’s superpower — let tiny, ostracized Israeli do the work that the whole world needs?


Iran: America’s Choices [Linda Bridges]

As the Iranian nuclear program steams along, America and her allies have basically three choices: military action, sanctions, or containment. Containment is the favored option in Washington, D.C., these days, and yet it has considerable costs and risks. On the homepage today, Michael Anton writes:

It is simply taken for granted in the foreign-policy establishment that Iran would never, ever pass along nuclear weapons or materials to a terrorist group. This may or may not be true. All we can say with confidence right now is that Tehran doesn’t yet have the option. If the West resigns itself to containment and accepts an Iranian bomb, it soon will.

Read the rest here.