Persian Provocations

The Islamic Republic of Iran declared war upon the United States of America in 1978 when jihadi "students," led in part by their current "president," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, invaded the American embassy in Tehran and took hostage over sixty U.S. nationals, holding fifty-three of them for over a year. From that moment, through the proxy attacks on the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, to the hostage takings there in the mid-eighties, to this very day they have been at war with us. And the warning signs of drastic, even catastrophic, escalation of that conflict are proliferating exponentially.

Here is a sample from just the past couple of months.

APRIL 11:

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threw a party in Teheran today, complete with tribal dancers, musicians, and party streamers to announce that Iranian researchers had succeeded in enriching uranium - the first step towards nuclear energy and nuclear weapons...The Iranians announced their defiance of the UN Security Council, which demanded a halt to all enrichment activities within thirty days of the delivery of the resolution to Iranian diplomats at Turtle Bay. Two weeks later, Ahmadinejad televised his triumphal announcement, thumbing his nose at the UN and at the EU-3, the trio of nations that insisted it could negotiate an end to Iran's nuclear program.

Experts tried to soothe Western worries about a nuclear-armed mullahcracy, assuring reporters that the 164-centrifuge cascade used by the Iranians was insufficient to develop weapons-grade fissile material. In answer to that, Iran's Atomic Energy Organization chief Gholamreza Aghazadeh announced that the nation would roll out a 3,000-centrifuge system within the next year. In a system that large, it would take about a year to develop enough material to make a weapon, meaning that we can expect Iran to go nuclear in the spring of 2008 - assuming that Ahmadinejad is telling the truth now. [emphasis added]

APRIL 14:

The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated.....

"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation," Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."

APRIL 17:

Of all the claims that Iran made last week about its nuclear program, a one-sentence assertion by its president has provoked such surprise and concern among international nuclear inspectors they are planning to confront Tehran about it this week.

The assertion involves Iran's claim that even while it begins to enrich small amounts of uranium, it is pursuing a far more sophisticated way of making atomic fuel that American officials and inspectors say could speed Iran's path to developing a nuclear weapon.

Iran has consistently maintained that it abandoned work on this advanced technology, called the P-2 centrifuge, three years ago. Western analysts long suspected that Iran had a second, secret program — based on the black market offerings of the renegade Pakistani nuclear engineer Abdul Qadeer Khan — separate from the activity at its main nuclear facility at Natanz. But they had no proof.

Then on Thursday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Tehran was "presently conducting research" on the P-2 centrifuge, boasting that it would quadruple Iran's enrichment powers. The centrifuges are tall, thin machines that spin very fast to enrich, or concentrate, uranium's rare component, uranium 235, which can fuel nuclear reactors or atom bombs. ...

"This is a much better machine," a European diplomat said of the advanced centrifuge, which was a centerpiece of Pakistan's efforts to build its nuclear weapons and was found in 2004 in Libya, when that country gave up its nuclear program. The diplomat added that the Iranians, among other questions, will now have to explain whether Mr. Ahmadinejad was right, and if so, whether they recently restarted the abandoned program or have been pursuing it in secret for years.

If Iran moved beyond research and actually began running the machines, it could force American intelligence agencies to revise [drastically downward] their estimates of how long it would take for Iran to build an atom bomb — an event they now put somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

APRIL 20:

The Basiji's cult of self-destruction would be chilling in any country. In the context of the Iranian nuclear program, however, its obsession with martyrdom amounts to a lit fuse. Nowadays, Basiji are sent not into the desert, but rather into the laboratory. Basij students are encouraged to enroll in technical and scientific disciplines. According to a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Guard, the aim is to use the "technical factor" in order to augment "national security."

What exactly does that mean? Consider that, in December 2001, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything." On the other hand, if Israel responded with its own nuclear weapons, it "will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." Rafsanjani thus spelled out a macabre cost-benefit analysis. It might not be possible to destroy Israel without suffering retaliation. But, for Islam, the level of damage Israel could inflict is bearable - only 100,000 or so additional martyrs for Islam.

And Rafsanjani is a member of the moderate, pragmatic wing of the Iranian Revolution; he believes that any conflict ought to have a "worthwhile" outcome. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is predisposed toward apocalyptic thinking. [emphasis added]

APRIL 27:

Iran has received its first batch of North Korean-made surface-to-surface missiles that put European countries within firing range, Israel's military intelligence chief said in an interview published Thursday.

The BM-25 missiles have a range of 1,550 miles and are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the Haaretz daily reported.

APRIL 30:

Iran sent troops across the Iraqi border three miles towards Haj Oman nine days ago, where Kurdish opposition bases itself for its efforts to unseat the mullahcracy
in Teheran.

MAY 1:

A multi-charged roadside bomb, developed by Hizbollah in Lebanon, is being used against British and American soldiers by Iraqi insurgents linked to Iran, according to military intelligence sources....

[L]et’s be clear: There is much American blood on Tehran’s hands, in Iraq and elsewhere. The public debate over what to do about Iran should start with that fact.

MAY 2:

Iran has discovered new deposits of uranium and was continuing its nuclear enrichment program despite international protests, a top Iranian nuclear official said Tuesday.

MAY 7:

Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz conducts an interesting interview with "a longtime Iranian-born opposition activist who, among other efforts, is a member of the National Union for Democracy in Iran, a three-year-old, US-based opposition group..."

How worried should the West be by the nuclear drive and horrible rhetoric?

Extremely worried. They should not be sleeping at night. If they are sleeping at night they are fools. They should take Ahmadinejad at face value. This is no rhetoric for political consumption, or domestic consumption, or international consumption. He means what he says and says what he means. And when I say "he" I mean "they" - the regime.

If they had a nuclear capability would they use it?

I would say so, yes.

Unprovoked?

They would make good use of it, in their aim to defeat the West.

MAY 12:

The IAEA announced preliminary results of tests made on residue found at an Iranian military site that indicates Iran [already] has weapons-grade enriched uranium (also here), not just the low-level enrichment they announced earlier. The report undermines the explanation given earlier by Iran when similar residue was found at a "civilian" facility.

MAY 15:

Iran arming al Qaeda in Iraq via Hezbollah? That's what a report in the Iraqi newspaper Azzaman says. [Aren't we at war with al Qaeda?]

MAY 29:

In addition to uranium enrichment, Iran is also on the route toward producing weapons-grade plutonium. This brief (.pdf) from the Institute for Science and International Security shows, with satellite imagery, that construction is continuing steadily on a heavy water reactor in Arak. If it stays on schedule, this reactor could be fully operational by 2009.

MAY 30:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made it clear that he sees European opposition to his nuclear program a threat, and returned one in kind. Speaking to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Iranian president warned Europe that they will "suffer
the consequences" if they d[o] not capitulate.

Infuriated? Alarmed? You should be. And this is just the prelude to what's coming between now and the fall. Gives a sinister twist to the expression "long, hot summer."