Rattlesnake Ridge 
BFF
“Like the United States, they voiced particular alarm at Iran’s decision to move higher-grade uranium enrichment to an underground bunker — heightening their suspicions of its aims. “The absence of a plausible economic or commercial rationale for so many of the nuclear activities now being carried out in Iran, and the growing body of evidence of a military dimension to these activities give grounds for grave concern about Iran’s intentions,” British Ambassador Simon Smith said on behalf of London, Berlin and Paris. Davies said current IAEA monitoring of Iranian nuclear sites might provide some warning should Iran decide to “break out” and use its enriched uranium stockpile to develop nuclear bomb capability, but “that will come too late.”…………..”
Now it is: the plausibility, stupid! So, I had to go back to the earlier case: remember Iraq and Saddam and the smoking gun and the famous mushroom cloud? Here are some memorable quotes from the halcyon days of 2002-2003:
- “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” –National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (2002)
- “It’s a slam-dunk case!” –CIA Director George Tenet, discussing WMD and the case for war during a meeting in the Oval Office, Dec. 21, 2002
- “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” –Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (2003)
- “We know he’s been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” –Vice President Dick Cheney(2003)
- WEF?—-> “I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” –White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, July 9, 2003
- “British intelligence has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” –President Bush, 2003
- “King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly exhorted the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” by launching military strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables….” Reuters (2010)
- “The release of the BPC report in late June, and the Post op-ed today, coincide roughly with a revealing and important diatribe from the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al-Otaiba, who said this week that the UAE wouldn’t be unhappy at all if the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear program. “I think it’s a cost-benefit analysis,” said Otaiba, the representative of a notorious kleptocracy in Abu Dhabi…..” The Nation
Yada, yada, yada. Which in itself does not mean that the Iranians are not interested in nuclear weapons. It does mean, however, that Western intelligence can be totally stupid and can totally fuck up just a they did in Iraq. It does mean that some Iranian exile groups can also be self-serving in pushing the “nuclear bomb” issue, given that their intelligence sources are unreliable at best. There is a lot of fog around the Iranian nuclear program, some of it created deliberately by the Iranian regime itself and some of it, I suspect, by Western governments and their intelligence sources. Some of this fog is a result of ignorance and some of it is deliberate, on both sides.
Cheers
mhg
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