Investor's Business Daily, October 1st, 2007
Nuclear Terrorism: A statement by Tehran's top nuclear official suggests the terrorist state's uranium enrichment program is past the point 15f no return. Could even a full shutdown reverse Iran's ability to devise a bomb?
The Iraqi-born Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and one of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representatives to the council, stated that the United Nations' demand that uranium enrichment be halted is futile.
"From a technical point 15f view, we have reached a stage that no one can take away what we've achieved," Larijani told London's Financial Times on Sunday. "I'm surprised to hear suspension is still being talked about."
The same day Larijani delivered his ominous statement, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, in some of his most candid language ever, told delegates of Britain's Conservative Party that a military strike and regime change should now be under consideration.
"I don't think the use of military force is an attractive option," Bolton said, "but I would tell you I don't know what the alternative is."
According to Bolton, "a limited strike against their nuclear facilities" should be considered, followed by efforts to get rid of what he called the "source of the problem" -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's Islamofascist president.
And in obvious frustration at Congress' declawing of America's spy agencies, he lamented that "the U.S. once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."
While he was at it, Bolton declared his former workplace, the U.N., which has been so slow in taking real action against Iran, "fundamentally irrelevant." The head of the U.N.'s so-called "atomic watchdog," Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, proved that yet again when he recently said, "I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons."
That figure, of course, is a fanciful overestimate of the true number of casualties in the Iraq War. Moreover, the real lesson of Iraq as it pertains to Iran is that if the world had gotten serious about economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein, war would have been unnecessary. The world could have crippled Iran's regime years ago without firing a shot, perhaps even causing a popular overthrow.
Yet we see ElBaradei delaying further UN sanctions until late November by making a deal with the terrorist regime in hopes of cajoling Ahmadinejad to reveal past nuclear behavior. Russia recently took advantage by declaring that "sanctions would undermine" ElBaradei's efforts to get Iran to cooperate.
There is no shortage of villains here. We should all be angry at Russia and China for profiting from facilitating Iran's nuclear program; angry at ElBaradei for making a deal with the devil; angry at too many free countries letting ElBaradei give Tehran more time to build a nuke.
New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh reports that the U.S. has let our allies have a peak at a detailed plan to bomb Iran. As Bolton worries, that increasingly seems to be our only choice.
