Articles Index Iran sanctions; is it too little too late?
According to a Reuters report Wednesday China will agree to sanctions against Iran, the other countries, which all reached the agreement by conference call, are the United States, Russia, Britain, Germany and France, Reuters did report that according to Diplomats China will agree only to relatively weak sanctions.
The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, stated on FOX News yesterday “that President Obama would like to have sanctions in place within a few weeks”, however, Security Council deliberations could drag on until June or even later.
Initially, Israel had hoped that the sanctions would have been in place by the beginning of this year, now the question is will it really matter at this point? A recently released CIA report found that Iran is very close to becoming a nuclear power, this is a complete 180 in the thinking of the American intelligence community since late 2007, when a prior report stated there was no proof Iran was renewing its work towards developing a military-grade nuclear weapon after it was supposedly halted in 2003.
According to another report released this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also is under the belief that Iran is building another uranium enrichment facility. What a shocker! Israel has been screaming to the world that they believe that Iran may have upwards of a dozen such sites.
Iran has been playing a game of cat and mouse with the whole world, the problem is that the mouse in this case has been avoiding any real sanctions or consequences for years while developing secret underground uranium-enrichment facilities in both Natanz and Qom and possibly other sites that have yet to be uncovered. The Bushehr site has a nuclear power station. The Isfahan site is a Uranium conversion plant. The Arak site is a Heavy water plant. These are all the ingredients needed to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The Natanz site now has 5,000 centrifuge machines, and a stockpile of 1,400 kilograms of low enriched uranium, according to U.S. intelligence, and as far as the Qom site is concerned it is still anyone’s guess if the plant is operational. It is believed to have a facility for 3,000 centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium.
The recent dispute between the U.S. and Israel may actually push Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in to taking military action against Iran in order to appease those hardline constituents in Israel who elected him, the problem is that any such action against Iran by Israel without the cooperation of the U.S. would be difficult to say the least.
My sources in Israel have said that behind closed doors both American and European officials are already looking into the “day after” scenario of how to deal with Iran if and when they have a nuclear weapon.
It is really sad that we as a country, not to mention the rest of the world, have let this drag on to this point. Why does it seem lately that the whole world would rather be reactive rather than proactive when it comes to such matters? Do our elected officials honestly believe that to ignore someone such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would just make him go away? Wasn’t there someone else not that long ago who spewed the same rhetoric as him and the world just sat back and ignored him until it was too late?
What concerns me about the so called “day after” scenario is that Ahmadinejad would take the same stance as North Korea. Last month in Moscow at an international conference on nuclear proliferation a senior representative from Pyongyang was asked what assurances his country needed for its security, he stated "We do not have to talk. We have nuclear weapons."
