That 3:00 AM Call might be Coming

It was a stark image. The phone ringing early in the morning at the White House alerting the President to an international crisis. And, the question, “Who do you want answering the call?”

Hillary Clinton raised that question during her ill-fated 2008 presidential primary campaign. Now she plays a subservient roll to the campaign victor, Barack Obama.

In his inaugural address, Obama boldly proclaimed “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist;”a reference to his desire for diplomacy and negotiation to resolve differences with our most difficult adversaries like the Iranians.

Eleven months into his first term, with strange irony, it was Hillary Clinton, now Obama’s Secretary of State who confessed on Monday, December 14 that, “I don’t think that anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of a positive response from the Iranians.” That declaration was more than just an “I told you so” moment from a one-time political adversary.

Also on Monday, the Times of London broke the bombshell story of a secret Iranian “four year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion.” According to the Times, the “confidential intelligence documents” that they had obtained describe “the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride” which has “no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon.” It is the same material used in Pakistan’s bomb which is where Iran obtained their technology.

“The only realistic use of this is in a nuclear weapon,” according to David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington who reviewed the document for the Times prior to the release of their published report. “It shows that either Iran is developing the capability [to build nuclear weapons] or it is moving to implement a bomb program – and either one is bad,” Albright said according to CNN.

As if any further evidence was needed, this document completely refutes the Iranians’ repeated protests that their interest in nuclear technology is purely for peaceful energy production purposes. Just two weeks ago, a defiant Iran vowed to build 10 more nuclear plants as an angry retaliation for a UN demand to halt work at the once-secret facility in Qom.

On Tuesday, December 15, the day after the Times revelation about Iran’s apparent nuclear trigger program, the United States House of Representative voted 412-12 to impose heavy gasoline import sanctions against Iran. The House apparently agrees with Sec. Clinton that talking to the Iranians has yielded nothing and the time has come to shift strategies. Due to deficient refinery capacity, Iran must import 40% of its gasoline, so such a sanction would seem to be crippling.

Also on Tuesday, Bret Stephens writing in the Wall Street Journal exposed alarming details about a Venezuela-Iran cooperative mining project. Although publicly a “supposed gold mine,” Stephens explains that a Canadian company operating in the same basin in nearby Guyana says it has found the “geological look-alike” to Canada’s Athabasca Basin, which “is the world’s largest resource of uranium.”

This information further illuminates what exactly Venezuelan Minister of Basic Industries, Roldolfo Sanz, meant last September when he acknowledged that “Iran is helping us with geophysical aerial probes and geochemical analyses” in its search for uranium.

Which brings us to today, Wednesday, December 16 and news that Iran “successfully test-fired a long-range, upgraded Sejil 2 missile.” Previous claims by Iran purport a range of 1250 miles for this missile which puts both U.S. military bases and Israel, whom Iran has pledged to destroy, within reach.

Also this week, Danielle Pletka, vice-president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, had a guest editorial in The Washington Post, “Why Iran can’t be contained.” Pletka acknowledges that other than “a few dogged holdouts,” the Obama administration has come to “accept the reality” that Iran is “proceeding with an aggressive nuclear weapons program.”

Given the reality, one school of thought that apparently is subscribed to within the White House is to adopt the old cold war “containment” strategy that argues walling off the great offender in a belief that somehow they would never really deploy the nuclear weapon they possess. But, Pletka says “these arguments are either false or misleading.”

Iran, Pletka argues, “probably sees itself more in the mold of India, a great power whose nuclear weapons are acknowledged and now accepted, than of North Korea, a lunocracy without serious global aspirations or influence.” She also points out the all too obvious, that for all the blustering from the international community, the nations of the world have “meted out little punishment to nuclear transgressors.”

Iranian containment supporters posit that the transgressor will be surrounded by a strong group of nations that will impose such pressure on Iran that “the costs of adventurism,” as Pletka calls it, would be great enough to keep Iran under control. But, Pletka dismisses this premise by noting that, “This absurd notion rests on weak reeds in Europe and Arabs deeply hesitant to act.”

In the age of containment with the Soviet Union, the appalling strategy of “mutually assured destruction” rested a tenuous belief that “they” would never risk total destruction by pushing the button, and a very clear understanding that if pushed, America most certainly would strike back immediately and relentlessly.