A Nuclear Iran

The latest IAEA announcement has me worried, though I can’t say I am surprised. The IAEA is one of the richest examples of feckless international organizations consistently avoiding confrontations with the sovereignty of aggressive states because, they’re well, aggressive. Further, the agency is not exactly known for its up-to-date intelligence assessments – if they have the political courage to announce anything at all. If the IAEA reports that your daughter is dating the punk kid who took her to the dance last year, chances are you should scramble to review safe sex with your princess yesterday, or prepare to be early grandparents. So when the IAEA reported last week that Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make at least one atomic bomb, my first reaction was, ok, how long ago did we actually reach this point, and how many bombs is it safe to assume the Iranians already have enough material for?

US intelligence estimates predict that Iran will have enough uranium to make approximately three bombs by the end of 2009. This from the weapons program the all-knowing US Security council assured us was abandoned in 2003. So it’s probably a good idea to take these numbers and dates with a nice margin of error, say to the tune of six months and two bombs…that sounds fair.

But again, none of this comes as a surprise to anyone remotely aware of the last decade worth of farcical efforts to dissuade Iran from passing the dreaded point of no return by endlessly repeating the mantra that, “all options are on the table.” This point, which probably arrived as far back as a year ago, has been coming for a long while. Sober spectators of this slow motion decent into the unnecessary dread of a nuclear Iran have already begun considering what post game options remain “on the table.”

Bluntly, the ball is in the Islamic Imperial court. We’ve been vying for control ever since 9/11 (and truthfully before), and had been doing a “great” job reacting to the Islamic Imperialist’s attempts to run a play or two. But with Iran’s nuclear victory, the ball is definitely in their court. Time is on their side in every arena of competition – nowhere are things going our way, except possibly in Iraq; and the situation there is so far from stable, and so ripe for a silent Iranian take over along the Syrian Lebanon model, that the only question that truly remains on the table is: ok if we were them, what would we do?