Iran: Attack or Not?

What is going on with Iran? The mainstream press is pounding a steady beat towards war with Iran. Israel has pulled out all stops to persuade the world that Iran must be dealt with NOW.
Los Angeles Times

Israeli leaders rarely invoke the Holocaust in the face of enemies. The Jewish homeland founded after Adolf Hitler's genocide has, for the last generation, felt secure enough to fight its many battles with little or no help.


But the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran has rattled Israel's self-confidence. Its politicians and generals warn of a "second Holocaust" if, as in the 1930s, the world stands by while a heavily armed nation declares war against the Jews.


Spelling out that scenario, Israeli officials have begun an unusually open campaign to muster international political and economic pressures against Iran. They warn that time is growing short and hint that they will resort to force if those pressures fail to prevent Iran's development of an atomic weapon.


Israeli leaders fear that an Iranian bomb would undermine their nation's security even if Tehran never detonated it. That Israel has its own nuclear arsenal would not counteract the psychological and strategic blow, they believe.


Israel began secretly preparing in the early 1990s for a possible air raid on Iran's then-nascent nuclear facilities and has been making oblique public statements about such planning for three years.


What is new is Israel's abandonment of quiet diplomacy to rally others to its side. Until a few months ago, Israeli leaders worried that high-profile lobbying would backfire and provoke accusations that they were trying to drag the United States and its allies into a war.


Israel's new activism coincides with a recent drumbeat of U.S. threats against Iran, including President Bush's vow to "seek out and destroy" Iranian and Syrian networks he said were arming and training anti-American forces in Iraq, and his dispatch of a second aircraft carrier group to the Persian Gulf.


Several factors have contributed to Israel's more assertive campaign, Israeli officials and defense analysts said.


Israel's war against Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon last summer brought Tehran's hostility alarmingly close to home. At the same time, the war made relatively moderate Sunni-dominated Arab nations more wary of Shiite Iran, easing Israel's isolation and creating a de facto anti-Iran coalition.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. And while denying any plan to build an atomic weapon, Iran has continued to enrich uranium and acquire long-range missiles.

However, it looks more and more like some of the evidence provided by US intelligence to provide Iran's intent were fabricated. In particular, the laptop that allegedly contains bomb plans was in all English. Wouldn't at least some of the information on the laptop be in the owners native language?
Now, Los Angeles Times comes out with an article that seems to be exaggerate the imminence of the threat.

Iran has accelerated its program to enrich uranium and defied a United Nations Security Council deadline to suspend nuclear activities, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said here Thursday.


The report by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Iran recently began installing the first of 3,000 gas centrifuges in a heavily fortified, underground chamber at its Natanz plant and that it planned to "bring them gradually into operation by May 2007."


A facility that large, if it functions properly, could produce enough highly enriched uranium in a year to build a nuclear warhead. A senior U.N. diplomat here cautioned that the Iranian schedule was "fairly optimistic" and said that the highly sensitive linked centrifuges, called cascades, may not be operational before the fall.


[..]During an IAEA team's visit to the underground site Feb. 17, Iranian officials informed the group that they had installed two cascades of 164 centrifuges each and that another two cascades were in the "final stages of installation." The Iranians said they would begin introducing uranium hexafluoride gas into the system to start enrichment by the end of the month.


Officials at IAEA headquarters in Vienna said that Iranian scientists had mastered centrifuge technology in recent months. One agency official described as "wishful thinking" reports that the centrifuges tested at Natanz were prone to breakage. He said the Iranians had run engineering tests "to the breaking point" to measure the weakness in the system. "They know how to enrich," he added. "They know how to spin centrifuges."

Fortunately, there are alternative news sources in the Internet to balence the imbalence in mainstream press.
WIRED Blogs

First, Iran has only enriched uranium up to 4.2% U-235, just about the level required to fuel a proliferation-resistant light-water reactor. This is still far below the threshold required to make nuclear weapons (20% U-235 is the minimum required to make a weapon, but most use about 90%). Unfortunately, just because Iran hasn’t enriched further doesn’t mean they can’t; the report says nothing about possible technical problems.


Second, the IAEA’s inventory of nuclear material at the Natanz pilot plant is “consistent with” the inventory supplied by the Iranians themselves. This gives some assurance that nuclear material is not being diverted to secret facilities. However, the main (underground) enrichment facility is not mentioned.


Third, while Iran has “declined to agree at this stage” to the use of remote monitoring, in the interim it has allowed “frequent inspector access” to the main underground enrichment plant at Natanz – the IAEA has eyes there, occasionally at least. This agreement will satisfy the IAEA only until the number of centrifuges reaches 500.


Fourth, there seem to be only about 500 fully installed centrifuges at Natanz – if all of them were running at full speed it would take about six years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb. However, Iran claims it has roughly 350 more “in final stages of installation;” this seems to be happening sooner than many experts expected.


Fifth, the IAEA has found no indications that spent fuel is being reprocessed for plutonium, at any of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. However, construction continues at Iran’s planned heavy-water reactor, which could produce fuel for nuclear weapons. These are some pretty dim glimmers of hope, but they do indicate that some time remains before Iran will even have enough material to build a nuclear weapon. Given some hints that sanctions and financial pressure might be starting to work, who knows -- there might even be enough time to reach some sort of agreement.

There is good evidence that Bush is attempting to trigger an "accidental conflict," as a pretext to justify "limited strikes". The Raw Story has published a "Build Up To Iran Timeline" that documents all the moves on the chessboard.
Meanwhile, as I've been warning since January of 2005, US Special Forces have been operating within Iran since at least 2004. Unlike US news sources, the world has better information about what is going on in Iran.
India Times: Economic Times

Bomb blasts struck Iranian government buildings in the capital of an oil-rich border province, followed within hours by two other bombs in central Tehran, killing nine people, days before presidential elections.


Iran’s security service blamed the bombings on Sunday — the deadliest in Iran in more than a decade — on supporters of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. State-run TV quoted hospital officials as saying at least eight people were killed and 86 injured in four explosions in Ahvaz, the capital of the southwestern Khuzestan province bordering Iraq.


Hours later, two small bombs exploded in central Tehran, killing one person and wounding four. Police said one suspect was taken into custody. A spokesman for the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top security decision-making body, blamed groups affiliated to Saddam’s former Baathist regime in Iraq. State TV quoted spokesman Ali Agha Mohammadi as saying the perpetrators of the Ahvaz bombings had infiltrated into Iran from Basra in southern Iraq.

There have long been reports that the US has enlisted Sadaam's Iranian terrorist organization, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) to carry out US policy. The Raw Story reports on the not so secret Cheney/Rumsfeld order outsourcing special ops and intelligence to MEK.

According to all three intelligence sources, military and intelligence officials alike were alarmed that instead of securing a known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world – including US civilian and military casualties – Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran strike.


“They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all,” one intelligence source said.


Indeed, Saddam Hussein himself had used the MEK for acts of terror against non-Sunni Muslims and had assigned domestic security detail to the MEK as a way of policing dissent among his own people. It was under the guidance of MEK ‘policing’ that Iraqi citizens who were not Sunni were routinely tortured, attacked and arrested.
Although the specifics of what the MEK is being used for remain unclear, a UN official close to the Security Council explained that the newly renamed MEK soldiers are being run instead of military advance teams, committing acts of violence in hopes of staging an insurgency of the Iranian Sunni population.


“We are already at war,” the UN official told RAW STORY.


Asked how long the MEK agents have been active in the region under the guidance of the US military civilian leadership, the UN official explained that the clandestine war had been going on for roughly a year and included unmanned drones run jointly by several agencies.

One of my favorite alternate news sources AlterNet points out the obvious logical and moral hypocracy in US sponsored terrorism in Iran.

I believed that the attacks by MEK had been halted in March of last year. If this attack is shown to be tied to MEK terrorists or any other "group" we are funding, arming, and training in the region, then the US will be implicated - even if we had nothing to do with the bombing directly.


Let's use Al Qaeda and the US as an example to illustrate how the MEK-US relationship might look to Iranians:


Imagine that this morning you woke up to find that 18 US national guardsmen were assassinated on US soil via a car bomb on their way to a work facility. Now imagine that it was determined that Al Qaeda was behind the attack and that Syrian government officials were behind the funding, training, and harboring of this Al Qaeda cell. How would you react? Would you not see this as a declaration of war against our country? How then would this look to Iranian citizens if it turns out MEK or any other organization being run by Israel and the US is behind this attack?
We can only hope that the US backed groups had nothing to do with this bombing, but I fear given what we already know, the case against us is looking very strong.

Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1st using unusually blunt predictions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Finally, the nations leaders have the real cards laid on the table. But will they resist the Israeli pressure to act? Iran does not present a threat to the US. It may threaten Israel, depending on who you listen to, the risk is 5 to 10 years away. In more than 10 years, it may threaten Europe. It seems we have plenty of time to deal with this situation without going to war.