Iran Breaks UN Seals on Nuke Plant

Yesterday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran had removed the seals from its Natanz research site, re-embarking on a nuclear program that theoretically could result in an Iranian nuclear weapon. The bad news is that this has happened. The good news is non-existent.

As this journal has noted repeatedly, Iran, geologically a bunch of dirt floating on a sea of oil, doesn’t need nuclear power. While certain energy poor states like Japan can make a case for fission reactors (and Japan for historical reasons, doesn’t make it very often), Iran has roughly enough oil for its own uses to last to the end of time. It has the second largest reserves after Saudi Arabia, at about 95 billion barrels, and with a population of 70 million or so, this will go along way.

Iran or Persia, however, has had delusions of grandeur since the days of Darius III (whom Alexander thrashed at Gaugamela in 331 BC), and the current theocratic rulers believe that they are the forces of light and goodness locked in a life and death struggle with the Great Satan (the USA). The Busheviks have cooperated in this farce by labeling Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” along with the Saddamite regime of Iraq and the sociopathocracy of North Korea. The lesson the mullahs have learned is that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, North Korea does – the Americans didn’t attack North Korea. In other words, deterrence does really work.

The conniptions that the West is having over the re-institution of the Iranian nuclear program are more than a bit disingenuous. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, non-nuclear states that signed up (and Iran under the Shah did) agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons and to accept safeguards to prevent “diversion” of nuclear fuel to weapons. Iran, in other words, is not violating any agreements and is perfectly entitled to do what it is doing. The seals placed on its equipment were put there by the IAEA inspectors with Iran’s permission and were removed with IAEA inspectors watching.

So, Iran is legally working toward a nuclear weapon and hasn’t yet crossed the “red line for the international community” of using nuclear fuel in its research. The West has warned it time and again not to do this, but there is no recourse beyond the UN Security Council, where Russia and China hold vetoes. An invasion is out of the question as the US military is breaking in Iraq, a much less populous country where some actually like the Busheviks. Playing for time is the only policy option. The West must hope that the knuckle-dragging, hyper-reactionary president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, falls from power and the mullahs all go to paradise quickly. When the only option is a bad one, the policymakers have screwed up. Three jeers for Washington, London, Paris and Berlin.


© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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