IRAN - THE TICKING CLOCK

Posted at 8:18 a.m. ET:

With all the "negotiations" talk filling the air, and soaking up space in the in-the-tank-for-Obama press, you'd never know there's a real world out there.  My friend Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi alerts us to a Wall Street Journal editorial that reminds us that the Iranian clock is always moving forward, never back, with grave implications for those who don't notice:

Mr. Obama is already trying to lure Russian help on Iran by offering to trade away hard-earned missile defense sites in Eastern Europe. Russia's President claims to be unimpressed. And now it turns out that the rate at which Iran's nuclear programs are advancing may render even negotiations moot.

Oh, but negotiations are never moot.  Even the League of Nations stayed in business during World War II.  Those were the days.

That's a fair conclusion from the latest report by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency. Among other disclosures, the IAEA found that Iran has produced more than 1,000 kilograms of low enriched uranium (LEU), enough for a single bomb's worth of uranium after further enrichment. The IAEA also found that Iran had underreported its stock of LEU by about 200 kilograms, which took the agency by surprise partly because it only checks Iran's stockpile once a year. This is the basis for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen's weekend acknowledgment that the U.S. believes Iran has enough fissile material to make a bomb.

Not too many people seem overly concerned. 

That's not all. The IAEA says its inspectors have been denied access to a heavy water reactor in Arak, and that Iran has put a roof over the site "rendering impossible the continued use of satellite imagery to monitor further construction inside the reactor building." Most proliferation experts agree that the Arak reactor, scheduled for completion in 2011, can have no purpose other than to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

We're sure there's a mistake here.  They just wanted indoor tennis courts.

The report contains much more of this. It is the latest in a long line of reports that should have sounded alarms but instead have accustomed the world to conclude that a nuclear Iran is something we'll just have to live with.

Well, dearies, our Middle East Studies departments aren't expressing worry.  Why should we?

Well, not the entire world: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned last week that "time is slipping through our fingers" when it comes to stopping Tehran. "What is needed," he added, "is a two-pronged course of action which includes ironclad, strenuous sanctions . . . and a readiness to consider options in the event that these sanctions do not succeed."

Those alarmist Israelis again.

Nobody -- Mr. Obama least of all -- can doubt what Mr. Barak means by "options." Nor should the Administration doubt that an Israeli strike, however necessary and justified, could put the U.S. in the middle of a broader Middle East war. If Mr. Obama wants to avoid a security crisis in the first year of his watch, he will have to get serious about Iran now.

Well, let future generations take care of it, while they're paying off the debts we're handing them now.  What's one more problem?

March 4, 2009.