Gary Sick writes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not a subtle man. When he has an objective in mind, he is not above resorting to hyperbole, exaggeration, or apocalyptic scenarios to make his point. He has been crying wolf nearly as long as he has been in politics. For a very good reason: It works. And it works. And it works.

Unlike the boy in the story who lost credibility when he sounded the alarm one time too many, each new iteration by Mr. Netanyahu is greeted with nods of grave concern. The latest edition of this long-running show was his appearance on “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

More than 20 years ago, Mr. Netanyahu solemnly informed us that, unless someone intervened, Iran would have a nuclear weapon within five years. That was one of the origins of the “three to five year” mantra. Almost every year since the early 1990s, senior political figures, intelligence specialists and respected commentators have assured us that Iran would surely have a nuclear weapon in three to five years, sometimes less, unless Iran were forced to stop its mad dash for the bomb.

It is not hard to understand the logic of this assertion. Israel itself managed to develop a nuclear weapons capability in absolute secrecy in only a few years. It was not alone. South Africa, India, even poor Pakistan with virtually no heavy industrial base, managed to develop nuclear weapons in secret within a decade or so of the decision to launch a determined program. By most accounts, Iran decided to restart its nuclear program — started under the shah and interrupted by the Iranian revolution — in the mid-1980s, nearly 30 years ago. [Continue reading…]

Laura Rozen reports: Some 118 House members have signed onto a bipartisan letter calling on President Obama to try to advance opportunities for a diplomatic resolution with Iran in the wake of the election of Hassan Rouhani last month.

The letter, being circulated by Representatives David Price (D-North Carolina) and Charles Dent (R-Pennsylvania), is the biggest ever pro-Iran diplomacy letter from the Hill, those supporting the initiative said.

A spokesperson for Rep. Price’s office said the letter would close for signatures Thursday night and he expected it to be sent to the White House on Friday. It had 118 signatures as of Thursday afternoon, he said, 14 of them Republican.

The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ramped up pressure on the White House on Sunday to put the buildup of Iran’s nuclear program ahead of other crises in the Middle East, complaining of a lack of urgency on the issue and saying that the Obama administration must demonstrate “by action” to Iran’s newly elected president that “the military option which is on the table is truly on the table.”

Speaking via satellite on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Mr. Netanyahu expressed concern that Iran was pursuing “alternate routes” to a nuclear weapons capability, including a plutonium bomb, even while stopping just short of the specific enriched-uranium levels he had set in a speech at the United Nations last year as a “red line” for military action.

He also reiterated his familiar demands that Iran must be forced to stop all enrichment of nuclear material, ship its current stockpile out of the country and shut down a deep underground enrichment site, called Fordo, that Israeli military officials acknowledge they probably do not have the ability to destroy.

Mr. Netanyahu said those demands “should be backed up with ratcheted sanctions,” adding, “They have to know you’ll be prepared to take military action; that’s the only thing that will get their attention.” [Continue reading…]

Trita Parsi writes: America finds itself exactly where Iran was four years ago. Back then, America had just elected a new, articulate president who offered hope and promised a new approach to the world and Iran. His election was a direct rejection of the foreign policy of his predecessor, President George W. Bush, whose favorite tools of statecraft appeared to be military force and confrontational rhetoric.

The question Iran grappled with in 2009 was whether this new president — Barack Obama — really represented change or if it was merely an act of electoral deception.

Today, the roles are reversed. Iranians have elected a new, articulate president who is promising both the Iranian people and the world community hope and a new approach. His election is seen as a direct rejection of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s confrontational policies and rhetoric. Iranians wanted hope and change and they went to the ballot boxes to obtain it.

But four years ago, the Iranian leadership couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the new U.S. president could be a sign of change. Was Obama really intent on shifting Washington’s Iran policy or was it all just talk? Even if his intentions were good, did he have the power to change long-standing policies?

Archconservatives expressed disbelief that Obama could even win. In their cynical view of the U.S. political system, perhaps reflective of their own political conduct, they never thought that Obama could get elected — in spite of his strong popular support. Rather, he won because “those behind the scenes who make presidents and make policies — the puppeteers — decided, and only changed their puppet.”

Similarly today, conventional wisdom in Washington first dismissed as fantasy the idea that Hassan Rohani could win the Iranian presidential elections and later wondered why Iran’s supreme leader had “permitted” this impossible outcome. [Continue reading…]

The Independent reports: The Israeli government greeted the election of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, with a mixture of scepticism and cynicism today, as senior politicians said that the threat posed by Tehran’s nuclear programme had not diminished.

Speaking before Israel’s weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made Iran his priority since being returned to office in January, warned that the election was unlikely to bring any change.

“Regarding the results of the elections in Iran let us not delude ourselves,” he said. “The international community must not become caught up in wishes and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear [programme]. It must be remembered that the Iranian ruler, at the outset, disqualified candidates who did not fit his extremist outlook and from among those whose candidacies he allowed was elected the candidate who was seen as less identified with the regime, who still defines the State of Israel as ‘the great Zionist Satan’.”

The minister with responsibility for Iranian issues, the hawkish Yuval Steinitz, who has in the past called on Western governments to present the Islamic Republic with a “credible military threat,” echoed Mr Netanyahu’s statement, saying that despite the departure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the real power in Iran – Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – would continue to dictate foreign policy.

“Kudos to the Iranian people for electing a moderate statesman, but I doubt the real authority Khamenei will change his tune on military and nuclear affairs without being strongly motivated to do so by increased international economic sanctions,” he told Israeli Army Radio. [Continue reading…]

Paul Pillar writes: Many who offer opinions on policy toward Iran, and particularly on how to handle negotiations over its nuclear program, implicitly claim an unusual ability to read the minds of Iranian decision-makers. Assertions are made with apparent confidence about what the Iranians want, fear or believe, even without any particular evidence in support. Several possible explanations can account for the misplaced confidence.

One is that we are seeing common psychological mechanisms in action. A well-established human tendency is, for example, to interpret cooperative behavior on another person’s part as a response to one’s own behavior, while ascribing uncooperative conduct to innate orneriness on the part of the other person. Thus there is a failure to understand how firmness in Iran’s negotiating position is a response to firmness on the Western side, and there is an accompanying tendency to interpret a lack of Iranian concessions as indicating an Iranian desire to stall and drag out negotiations.

Another explanation is that a particular frame of mind is imputed to the Iranians because it implies a U.S. policy that is politically popular for other reasons. Loading ever more onerous sanctions on Iran is a popular political sport, especially on Capitol Hill, to show toughness or love for Israel. The politicians who play that sport therefore favor a view of the Iranian mindset according to which the Iranians are simply not hurting enough and need to hurt some more, after which they will cry uncle. [Continue reading…]

Alireza Nader writes: It’s as clear as day that the Islamic Republic pursues goals in the Middle East that put it on a collision course with the United States. Iran is opposed to Israel as a Jewish state, for instance, and competes for regional influence with the conservative Gulf Arab monarchies. But that doesn’t mean it is irrational: On the contrary, its top leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is deliberative and calculating. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s antics and often wild rhetoric shouldn’t obscure the fact that the Islamic Republic is interested in its own survival above all else. When contemplating the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, we should all be grateful that notions of martyrdom and apocalyptic beliefs don’t have a significant pull on Iranian decision-making.

Iran’s possible pursuit of nuclear weapons capability is motivated by deterrence, not some messianic effort to bring about the end times. The Islamic Republic has a relatively weak conventional military that is no match for U.S. and most Western forces — most of its regular naval and ground forces operate equipment from the 1960s and 1970s. It has tried to make up for this through a doctrine of asymmetry: It has supported terrorist and insurgent groups across the Middle East and created a “guerrilla” navy, which — at best — might be able to swarm U.S. ships and interrupt shipping in the Persian Gulf. This is all meant to prevent U.S.-driven regime change.

Nukes could provide the ultimate deterrent for an insecure regime. And Iran has a lot to be insecure about: It is a Shia and Persian-majority theocracy surrounded by hostile Sunni Arabs, which has recently watched the United States overrun unfriendly regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq with relative ease. The regime perceives both conflicts as having damaged U.S. credibility and power — but knows this is no guarantee it can protect itself in a future conflict against the vastly superior American military without a nuclear bomb.

As dangerous as it is, Iran’s possible pursuit of nuclear weapons makes logical sense. And it isn’t an effort that is unique to the Islamic Republic: Any Iranian political system, whether imperial, theocratic, or democratic, would at least consider a nuclear weapons capability. Although a nuclear-armed Iran would be a dangerous development, a closer look demonstrates that it could well be a containable challenge for the United States and its allies. [Continue reading…]

Roger Cohen writes: Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are unusual among former staffers of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council in their deep affection for the Islamic Republic of Iran. This attraction, which knows few bounds, finds its apotheosis in Going to Tehran. Their stated goal is “the most objective analysis of Iranian politics.” Yet they find that Iran embraces, “more fully and openly than Turkey, the project of building a state that is simultaneously Islamic and democratic.” (The greater openness of Tehran than Istanbul should, they seem to think, be apparent to any objective analyst.) Iran’s government “of the Shi’a, by the Shi’a, and for the Shi’a,” they suggest, may well produce “a wider range of choice for Iranian voters than the United States’ two-party system offers American voters.”

To say the Leveretts are contrarians would be a gross understatement. The brutal crackdown on millions of protesters who took to the streets after the 2009 presidential election was, they argue, “relatively restrained” — despite the beatings, killings, mass arrests, and institutionalized sodomy that characterized it. I witnessed a good deal of this brutality. (The Leveretts do allow that the government’s response included “criminal acts.”) As for the uprising, it was in their view no more than the self-indulgent acts of pampered younger people from affluent north Tehran homes, a pretext for more “analysis by wishful thinking” — a favorite phrase — of deluded Westerners who inflated the Green Movement’s significance. The authors, who were not in Iran at the time of the post-election upheaval, seem perturbed that the world press covered these momentous events at all: “Notwithstanding their relatively narrow social base, the initial demonstrations received worldwide media coverage.”

This dogged pair of investigators prefers to point out that the Islamic Republic has the “largest stock of industrial robots in West Asia.” Even the much-mocked Iranian auto industry — known to locals for its cars’ failing brakes, galloping pollution, and boxy (and discontinued) Paykan line — earns the authors’ admiration. [Continue reading…]

IPS reports: A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.

Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran of nuclear weapons would above all be intended to deter an attack by hostile powers, presumably including Israel and the United States, rather than for aggressive purposes.

And while its acquisition may indeed lead to greater tension between Iran and its Sunni-led neighbours, the 50-page report concludes that Tehran would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against other Muslim countries. Nor would it be able to halt its diminishing influence in the region resulting from the Arab Spring and its support for the Syrian government, according to the author, Alireza Nader.

“Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will enhance its ability to deter an external attack, but it will not enable it to change the Middle East’s geopolitical order in its own favour,” Nader, an international policy analyst at RAND, told IPS. “The Islamic Republic’s challenge to the region is constrained by its declining popularity, a weak economy, and a limited conventional military capability. An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power.”

Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi write: As EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iran’s lead envoy Saeed Jalili meet in Istanbul on May 15, the six global powers negotiating with Tehran face an increasingly inconvenient truth: while sanctions are having a devastating effect on Iran’s economy, they have not changed Tehran’s nuclear calculus. Although some policymakers and pundits privately concede this point, there is no consensus as to why. Hardliners tend to argue that sanctions are not tough enough and must be intensified. Elements on the left argue that sanctions must be given time to make an impact.

In reality, both sides miss the real reasons that have rendered sanctions unsuccessful – by failing to offer a credible exit from the sanctions pain, neither the Iranian government nor stakeholders in the Iranian system believe that a change in nuclear policy will lead to the alleviation of their economic suffering.

The current sanctions policy is based on a shaky assumption – the belief that economic pain and dissatisfaction among political elites automatically will result in pressure on the Iranian regime to change its nuclear course. This assumption does not hold. The economic pain imposed on Iran is intense – but directionless.

Instead, stakeholders in the Iranian system favouring a change are stuck between a dominant narrative that portrays the West as a brutal group out to “get” Iran and keep it dependent on foreign powers, and Western pressure that has failed to offer a convincing exit from the sanctions pain. The two have proven mutually reinforcing and have weakened those elements that the West hoped would push for a nuclear course correction. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Pentagon has redesigned its biggest “bunker buster” bomb with more advanced features intended to enable it to destroy Iran’s most heavily fortified and defended nuclear site.

U.S. officials see development of the weapon as critical to convincing Israel that the U.S. has the ability to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb if diplomacy fails, and also that Israel’s military can’t do that on its own.

Several times in recent weeks, American officials, seeking to demonstrate U.S. capabilities, showed Israeli military and civilian leaders secret Air Force video of an earlier version of the bomb hitting its target in high-altitude testing, and explained what had been done to improve it, according to diplomats who were present.

In the video, the weapon can be seen penetrating the ground within inches of its target, followed by a large underground detonation, according to people who have seen the footage.

The newest version of what is the Pentagon’s largest conventional bomb, the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, has adjusted fuses to maximize its burrowing power, upgraded guidance systems to improve its precision and high-tech equipment intended to allow it to evade Iranian air defenses in order to reach and destroy the Fordow nuclear enrichment complex, which is buried under a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom. The upgraded MOP designed for Fordow hasn’t been dropped from a plane yet.

The improvements are meant to address U.S. and Israeli concerns that Fordow couldn’t be destroyed from the air. Overcoming that obstacle could also give the West more leverage in diplomatic efforts to convince Iran to curtail its nuclear program. [Continue reading…]

For Reuters, Crispian Balmer and Dan Williams write: Israel risks a loss of credibility over both its “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program and its threat of military action, and its room for unilateral maneuver is shrinking.

After years of veiled warnings that Israel might strike the Islamic Republic, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out an ultimatum at the United Nations last September.

Iran, he said, must not amass enough uranium at 20 percent fissile purity to fuel one bomb if enriched further. To ram the point home, he drew a red line across a cartoon bomb, guaranteeing him front page headlines around the world.

However, a respected Israeli ex-spymaster says Iran has skillfully circumvented the challenge. Other influential voices say the time has passed when Israel can hit out at Iran alone, leaving it dependent on U.S. decision-makers.

“If there was a good window of opportunity to attack, it was six months ago – not necessarily today,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser. Pressure from Washington, he said, had forced Israel to drop its strike plan.

Israel has long insisted on the need for a convincing military threat and setting clear lines beyond which Iran’s nuclear activity should not advance, calling this the only way to persuade Iran that it must bow to international pressure.

Serving officials argue that Netanyahu’s repeated warnings of the menace posed by Iran’s nuclear project have pushed the issue to the top of the global agenda and helped generate some of the toughest economic sanctions ever imposed on a nation.

But some officials have also questioned the wisdom of his red line, arguing that such brinkmanship can generate unwelcome ambiguity – as the United States has discovered with its contested stance on the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Amos Yadlin, a former military intelligence chief who runs a Tel Aviv think-tank, suggested last week that Israel had also got itself into a tangle, saying Iran had expanded its nuclear capacity beyond the Israeli limit, without triggering alarms.

“Today it can be said that the Iranians have crossed the red line set by Netanyahu at the U.N. assembly,” Yadlin told a conference at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which he heads. [Continue reading…]

Kingston Reif writes: On September 4, 1962, President John F. Kennedy released a statement in response to intelligence reports of a Soviet arms buildup in Cuba. Kennedy said the United States did not have evidence “of the presence of offensive ground-to-ground missiles; or of other significant offensive capability either in Cuban hands or under Soviet direction and guidance.” However, he warned, “Were it to be otherwise, the gravest issues would arise.”

Of course, the next month Kennedy found out that the Soviet Union was in fact deploying offensive missiles and nuclear warheads in Cuba, prompting a deep crisis that brought the planet within a hair’s breadth of nuclear catastrophe. Historian Michael Dobbs writes that Kennedy later regretted making his September statement, as “[h]e was compelled to take action, not because Soviet missiles on Cuba appreciably changed the balance of military power, but because he feared looking weak.”

Fast forward 50 years to March 4, 2012. In a high-profile speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), President Obama declared: “Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Obama reiterated this position last month to Israeli students in Jerusalem: “Iran must not get a nuclear weapon. This is not a danger that can be contained, and as President, I’ve said all options are on the table for achieving our objectives.”

Might Obama, like Kennedy, later regret issuing such an ultimatum? [Continue reading…]

Laura Rozen reports: Iran and six world powers remained far apart at the conclusion of two days of talks here without agreeing to meet again, but American and European diplomats said the Iranians had engaged more deeply than ever before on the details of a potential nuclear compromise.

“Two days of talks just concluded that were indeed quite substantive,” a senior US official, speaking not for attribution, told journalists at the conclusion of talks Saturday. “Each session involved a robust discussion….[that were] more natural and free-flowing than past talks.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” the US diplomat said. “There was intensive dialogue on key issues at the core of [the proposed confidence building measure.]. Both sides came away with better understanding of each others’ positions.” [Continue reading…]

Derek Leebaert writes: There have been rumors since the late 1970s of Israeli cooperation in South Africa’s effort to become a nuclear power. A double flash over the Indian Ocean detected by a U.S. satellite in 1979, for example, was suspected (but never confirmed) to be a joint, low-yield Israeli-South African nuclear test.

South African documents that appeared to show Israel offering to sell nuclear weapons were refuted by Israeli President Shimon Peres, in 2010, as “selective interpretation.” Here we show what really occurred — and how.

According to new CIA evidence, Israel proved “absolutely vital” to South Africa’s apartheid regime 30 years ago in building six Hiroshima-size bombs. New details about this collaboration arose in a series of interviews I conducted with Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of CIA covert operations in Europe and, at the time of the events described here, a clandestine officer serving in Pretoria, South Africa. The interviews were conducted in Washington, D.C., in 2010.

Drumheller is an unusually credible and outspoken man. In his book, On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence and in interviews with the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” he was the most senior of former CIA officials to tell the truth about faulty intelligence in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He showed how the Bush-Cheney White House had promoted intelligence it liked on Iraq — and specifically on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction — while ignoring intelligence it didn’t like.

Having begun his career in the unusually risky role of “NOC” (non-official cover) in Asia, Drumheller’s operational abilities remain legendary within the CIA’s Clandestine Service.

During our interviews, he reflected on earlier experiences in his career. In 1980, “we had 11 case officers in South Africa, four of them with deep cover.” They had penetrated the apartheid regime’s “Project Circle,” which was already within reach of perfecting a usable, deliverable atomic bomb.

“We were regularly able to obtain swipe samples from its enrichment facilities. We could monitor progress,” Drumheller told me.

They also monitored the deep cover “black station” of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. Drumheller said this was a front company called TamCo. The Israelis had no idea they were under such close U.S. scrutiny.

Washington had tried to impede Pretoria’s effort by embargoing the shipment of a VAX computer from Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corporation. “Project Circle needed that VAX” to complete the project, Drumheller said.

The CIA station in Pretoria learned that South Africa was able to get around the embargo by having the computer — the same powerful VAX model — transshipped from the United States. “It came via the Israelis and TamCo,” Drumheller said.

Israel contributed another vital piece to Project Circle’s success by supplying the tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that is manufactured in nuclear reactors, for the bombs’ triggering mechanisms. In addition, Israel provided Pretoria with an essential avionics package that would allow the bombs to be dropped by South African Air Force jets.

The CIA was able to obtain these and other details about the Israeli-South African collusion, Drumheller explained, from a stellar agent that the CIA had placed within Project Circle.

The CIA station in Pretoria was tracking full-scale government-to-government collaboration that was taking place despite a UN Security Council resolution that had imposed a mandatory arms embargo against the white supremacist state in 1977.

Washington, meanwhile, had enough on its hands with Israel during this period. Strains in relations included Israel’s 1982 Operation Peace for Galilee invasion of Lebanon. The extent of the invasion’s civilian carnage led President Ronald Reagan (choosing his words carefully, as is known from his diary) to denounce the bombing and shelling of civilians to Israel’s prime minister as “a holocaust.”

In any event, Pretoria finally took it upon itself to dismantle its jointly developed bombs in 1989, two years before signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. All of this happened in the apartheid regime’s dying days, before its complete collapse in 1994.

Are these collusions historical bygones? Too long ago to matter today? Certainly not, given what’s now underway with regard to U.S policy on Iran.

The key question now is how Washington will act, or react, regarding the Iranian nuclear challenge. To judge from comments by figures in leading U.S. foreign policy circles outside the government, no one in Washington has a clue as to what Tehran intends to do with its nuclear program.

What is apparent, however, is the influence of Israeli fears, or bluster: If Washington doesn’t prevent Iran from getting the bomb, it is assumed, then Israel will.

Even so, Israel’s own nuclear capabilities are almost never discussed. And, quite conveniently, Israel’s record of proliferation is barely known or, rather, swept under the carpet. [Continue reading…]

Ali Vaez writes: Something changed in the nuclear talks between Iran and world powers last month in Almaty, Kazakhstan. For the first time, the two sides negotiated in earnest.

Gone were the preconditions and meandering lectures of the past. Instead of maximalist upfront demands in return for nebulous future rewards, the envoys discussed explicit quid-pro-quo options. Both sides described the meetings with adjectives ranging from “useful” to “pivotal”.

Yet the follow-up 13.5-hour meeting in Istanbul between the parties’ arms control officials revealed that a great gulf remains in expectations. It was a sobering reminder that the diplomatic process is as fragile as the prospect of an agreement is elusive. Misperception and brinkmanship might yet make this opening another instance of what historian G.M. Tevelyan called “the turning point at which history fails to turn.”

As negotiators prepare for the next meeting in Kazakhstan on April 5-6, their focus should be on what is politically as well as logistically achievable at this stage. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The twin nuclear crises the Obama administration faces in Asia and the Middle East underline a harsh reality for U.S. strategists: North Korea’s weapons capabilities are far more advanced than Iran’s.

Pyongyang, as a result of decades of covert atomic work, is close to mastering the technology to mount one of its estimated dozen nuclear warheads atop medium-range missiles that are capable of striking U.S. allies South Korea and Japan, American officials and international nuclear experts believe.

Iran, by comparison, has no atomic bombs in its military arsenal, nor the ability to deliver them, say U.S. and United Nations experts. Iran says its nuclear program is strictly for civilian purposes, although the Obama administration has charged Tehran with trying to develop nuclear weapons.

“By many estimates, North Korea will have the ability to deliver nuclear weapons using long-range ballistic missiles to distant targets within four to five years,” said Evans Revere, a former senior State Department official who follows Korean affairs at the Brookings Institution. “This will drastically change the security environment in Asia.”

North Korea also is able to produce dozens more nuclear bombs by employing two separate programs to create weapons-grade fuel—plutonium and highly enriched uranium, said U.S. and U.N. officials.

Iran has so far only developed uranium-enrichment technology. The U.N. is concerned, though, that Tehran could begin separating plutonium from spent fuel produced by a nuclear reactor Iran is building in Arak.

This gap between North Korea and Iran, which is widely recognized in Washington, is exposing what many Western diplomats and security analysts believe has been the U.S.’s muted response to Pyongyang’s nuclear advances in recent years, as compared with Iran’s.

The Obama administration has been reluctant to engage diplomatically with North Korea because Pyongyang has backed out of previous disarmament deals and because it wants to avoid a direct confrontation with North Korean ally China, officials say. Congress has also been more aggressive against Iran, partly in response to Israel’s concerns.

But these officials said the U.S. position risked signaling to Tehran that Washington will take a tougher line on countries that are developing nuclear weapons capabilities, rather than those that have actually acquired them. [Continue reading…]

Falguni A. Sheth writes: Iran has no intentions of attacking Israel. One obvious reason is that Iran has no plausible ability to attack Israel. As the erudite journalist and political analyst Nima Shirazi has documented carefully and exhaustively here, here, here, here, and perhaps crystallized most clearly here, Iran presents no threat, nuclear or otherwise, to Israel. None. Zilch. Nada. President Obama knows this. Shimon Peres knows this. Bibi knows this. As Shirazi writes:

Netanyahu deliberately ignored the fact that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium remains far from weapons-grade and that Iran has, for over a year now, been systematically converting much of its 19.75% enriched stock to fuel plates that precludes the possibility of being diverted to military purposes.

Of course, the fact that Iran has an inalienable legal right to a fully-functioning nuclear energy program – including the indigenous mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle – was not addressed at all. For Netanyahu and his acolytes, any Iranian nuclear program is synonymous with a weapons program – and not only that, but a weapons program designed to “exterminate” Israel’s “Jewish people.” Facts remain irrelevant.

Hans Blix, the UN Inspector who repeatedly declared in 2002 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, knows this (a fact that our liberal pundit class has only now come to acknowledge. See Beinart et al. above). He has again affirmed there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iran. As reported by an Australian news site, Blix insists:

“Memories of the failure and tragic mistakes in Iraq are not taken sufficiently seriously.”

“In the case of Iraq, there was an attempt made by some states to eradicate weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and today there is talk of going on Iran to eradicate intentions that may not exist. I hope that will not happen.”

Today, Mr Blix believes that the international community has even less evidence of the existence of atomic weapons in Iran, which is facing international pressures over its controversial nuclear program.

Moreover, even senior Israeli officials with close ties to the intelligence community are unconvinced of Iran’s danger to the United States or to Israel:

Beyond being obvious that Iran poses literally no threat to the United States, numerous Israeli military and intelligence officials openly reject the notion that a nuclear-armed Iran would “present an existential threat to Israel.” Former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy recently told the UK Zionist Federation that Israel’s existence “is not in danger and shouldn’t be questioned.”

(ThinkProgress.org lists Israeli officials who are not concerned about Iran’s threat to Israel here.)

In essence, the increasingly menacing public posture of U.S. officials toward Iran — coming in the same month as the 10-year anniversary of the jingoistic, imperially smug, and devastatingly destructive invasion of Iraq — cannot but remind us of the spurious calls for war made back in 2002.