Flirting with disaster

Does Barack Obama really want to be the president who let Iran get the nuclear bomb?

Outside the White House bubble, signs keep multiplying that this could be the year. Iran continues to defy U.S. and United Nations sanctions, buy time with on-again off-again haggling over its growing hoard of enriched uranium, and hone its missile delivery systems–firing off yet another rocket test just this week.

Meanwhile, the voices of the Obama administration sound like the White Queen lecturing Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday–but never jam today." Except instead of jam, think Iranian nuclear projects. In the looking glass world of current U.S. foreign policy, the received wisdom is that Iran might have bombs tomorrow, and was working toward them yesterday–but in the eternal sunshine of the present moment, it is never quite clear to the White House that Iran is actually building the bomb.

The latest sample of such thinking came Tuesday from the director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, presenting his annual threat assessment to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The neon headline that came out of Blair’s testimony was his prediction that al-Qaida will try to attack America again within the next six months. But the section of Blair’s written testimony on "Iranian WMD and Missile Program" deserves a spotlight all its own–both for what Blair said and what he tried to un-say.

Blair noted that since late 2007 Iran has more than doubled the number of centrifuges at its Natanz uranium enrichment plant, to more than 8,000 from 3,000. But that’s more or less OK, it seems, because only about half these centrifuges are operating. Translation: uranium enrichment continues apace.

Blair went on to note the discovery last year of a secret, second uranium enrichment plant "deep under a mountain near the city of Qom" (and on a military base of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps–though Blair did not spell that out). Speaking of this plant in the Teflon lingo of Washington officialdom, Blair informed the senators that "some of its design features raise our concerns." Namely, it is too small to produce a regular fuel supply for civilian nuclear power plants but big enough for producing weapons, at least–and here comes the weird Washington qualifier–"if Iran opts" to do so.

If Iran opts?

Blair went on: "The small size of the facility and the security afforded the site by its construction under a mountain fit nicely with the strategy of keeping the option open to build a nuclear weapon at some future date, if Tehran ever decides to do so."

If Tehran ever decides to do so?

Blair further assessed that Iran would likely use missiles to deliver nuclear weapons. Why? Because "Iran already has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East," and continues to "expand the scale, reach and sophistication" of these missiles, many of them "inherently capable of carrying a nuclear payload."

According to Blair, the big question is not whether Iran can bring all this to the fruition of a full, deliverable nuclear arsenal, but whether Iran’s rulers have the "political will to do so."

That’s backward. Iran’s rulers have displayed a driving will to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. The real question is whether the U.S. has the will to stop them. On that score, Blair laid out the tired approach in which Iran’s messianic and tyrannical ruling clique–soaked in the blood of its own people and wrapped in visions of a grand caliphate–is treated like the corner grocer calculating his next cabbage order. "We continue to judge that Iran’s nuclear decision-making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Iran."

That has been tried for years. It is not working. In the cost-benefit calculus, Iran’s rulers have already judged it worth building the secret enrichment plant near Qom, worth doing sanctions-busting arms deals with nuclear-testing North Korea and worth continuing to support and train terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran’s regime has judged it worth having a defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, who is on Interpol’s "wanted" list in connection with the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina.

Iran’s tyrants have judged it worth backing terrorist carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan; worth exploiting major international banks to get around U.S. sanctions; and worth threatening repeatedly to wipe Israel off the map. Just last month, as can be seen in a video clip translated by the MEMRI Foundation, senior Iranian official Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, who serves Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, declared on Hezbollah’s terrorist TV station, Al Manar, "We have manufactured missiles that allow us, when necessary, to replace Israel in its entirety with a big holocaust."

For Americans to leave this threat to Israel, a beleaguered democracy of 7 million, is a feckless non-policy. It signals that America will not defend its allies and flashes a green light to the world’s would-be proliferators.

If the deus ex machina is to be regime change in Iran, it is time for America to go all out to speed that along. There need not be either-or choices among preparing for U.S. military action, supporting Iranian dissidents, imposing yet more targeted sanctions and broadly imposing sanctions on Iran’s gasoline imports. Congress has given broad bipartisan support to gas sanctions. Obama should be calling in chits and twisting arms in all possible directions, beefing up U.S. penalties on those who help Iran’s regime, and urgently rallying a coalition to do the same.

While Obama dithers, let us consider the effects of a nuclear detonation in downtown Washington. A bomb about the size of that dropped 65 years ago on Hiroshima would eradicate the White House and Treasury, and reduce the Capitol and congressional office buildings to radioactive rubble. Damage would extend into Virginia, out beyond National airport. Transpose that to whatever location you most care about. Should the ayatollahs of Iran be allowed anywhere near that option?

Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.