Israel Matzav

Iran building ten new nuclear enrichment plants

Iran gave its response to President Obumbler's pleas for 'engagement' on Sunday and it was not what the President expected.

The atomic body has been ordered to begin building at five new sites earmarked for uranium enrichment plants, state television IRIB reported on its website.

The government also ordered the Iranian body to locate sites for another five over the next two months, the media organisation said.

The new enrichment plants are to be the same size as its main enrichment complex at Natanz.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reported to have said he will not allow an inch of Iranian rights to be wasted.

The cabinet is meeting on Wednesday to discuss plans to enrich uranium up to 20% purity, the president is quoted as saying on the website.

Mr Ahmadinejad said Iran should be producing 250-300 tonnes of nuclear fuel per year, according to IRIB.

The development is likely to add further strain to relations between Iran and Western powers.

John Podhoretz comments:

It would seem logical to assume the purpose of these multiple sites is to make a successful military strike to downgrade or destroy Iran’s nuclear-bomb-making capacity difficult to the point of impossibility. It would be hard enough for Israel or the United States to stage a complex series of simultaneous surprise aerial bombings against four locations; from four to 14 would certainly be beyond Israel’s capacity and would significantly strain our own.

Remember when everybody was saying, including in the Democratic primary for president, that it would be unacceptable for Iran to get the bomb? Remember when President Bush said those who allowed Iran to get the bomb would enjoy the same reputation in the annals of history as the Western leaders at Munich?

Yeah, they're calling him Neville Obama.

Seriously though, this development may speed up the timetable for an Israeli strike. If there are really only four facilities right now, it will be much easier to hit four than fourteen.

UPDATE MONDAY 12:34 AM

Max Boot adds:

Now after almost a year in office we see where Obama’s outreach has gotten us: nowhere. Actually that’s not quite accurate. The administration has made an impact: if the latest pronouncements from Tehran are to be believed, Obama’s policies are making the problem worse, not better, because they are leading to an expansion of the Iranian nuclear program. This should hardly be a surprise. Toothless as the Bush policy was toward Iran, at least there was an element of deterrence as long as George W. Bush himself was in the White House. The mullahs could always sweat a little as they imagined that they might be next in line to feel American military power after Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, there was evidence that they temporarily suspended parts of their nuclear program after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There is no such concern now. The odds of U.S. military action against the Iranian nuclear program — probably the only thing that could serve as serious deterrent — have gone from remote to nonexistent. Obama’s efforts at glad-handing have been interpreted, correctly, as evidence of American weakness and a further spur to nuclear development. Khameini and Ahmadinejad & Co. aren’t even bothering to be polite as they brush aside offers, such as the one to export their uranium for enrichment abroad. They wear their contempt for the West quite openly because they are not afraid of suffering any repercussions.

It is just possible that the Iranians have overplayed their hand. Perhaps the latest Iranian outrages will prompt a rethink in the White House as occurred during the Carter administration when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shocked another naive president into realizing that his own goodwill would not be enough to overcome determined adversaries. But at the moment, that is a faint hope. The best we can expect in the short term is more toothless Security Council resolutions with sanctions that will do nothing to slow down the Iranian march toward its nuclear dreams. That, in turn, means that an Israeli strike against Iran is getting more likely, even though Israel probably does not have the capability to disrupt the Iranian program for more than a limited period. In sum: through his determination to avoid a conflict with Iran, Obama is making war more likely.

Indeed.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:30 PM